The Soviet Farm Complex : industrial agriculture in a Socialist context, 1945-1965

"The Soviet Farm Complex" is a history of food, farming and the environment in the postwar Soviet Union. It tells the story of how different technical and institutional authorities created an industrial Soviet countryside in the generation after World War II. Beyond the leadership of the Soviet state, international trade relationships, new technologies, unusual scientific cultures, stubborn environmental realities and human shortcomings played important roles in shaping the progress of agricultural change. Four historical fields inform this project: the history of technology, agricultural history, Soviet history and environmental history. Each of the five chapters addresses a different time, place and theme in the history of the Soviet countryside, providing a close-up view of the most important aspects of postwar rural change. Soviet agricultural reform has often been interpreted as a failure: a textbook case of poor central planning and destructive, high-modernist logic on the part of the Soviet state. In fact, this study shows that the collective farming system as a whole was not particularly dysfunctional, nor was it doomed to failure simply by virtue of being centrally planned.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Smith, Jenny Leigh

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deborah K. Fitzgerald.

• Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40394

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40394