The situation in agriculture was far worse. Under Brezhnev, it took four Soviet agricultural workers to get the same results as one American farmer. Soviet agriculture had still not yet recovered from the forced collectivisation of the early 1930s, when peasants destroyed crops and slaughtered livestock. The number of horses and pigs fell by 55 per cent, sheep by 66 per cent and so on. Between 1930 and 1955, per head of population, agricultural production (excluding technical crops) and the number of farm animals (for pigs this applies only to 1953) were lower than in 1916, and for horned cattle and cows the figure had not reached the level of 1913 nor that of 1928. The productivity on the land remained very low. In 1982 it was reported that one agricultural worker fed six people in the USSR compared to 40 in the USA. Despite all the investment and resources, the Soviet economy was unable to take advantage of these factors. Nor was Brezhnev able to solve the problems of Soviet agriculture. On the contrary, they got steadily worse. Agriculture remained the Achilles’ heel.
This had a direct bearing on living standards. The following figures for diet illustrate the difference in living standards between USA and the Soviet Union. In the USSR 48 per cent of calories were derived from grain (mainly bread), as opposed to 22 per cent in USA. On the other hand, only 8 per cent were derived from meat and fish, against 20 per cent in the USA. Soviet citizens consumed one half the meat eaten in the United States, and less than in Poland. Even on this elementary plane, Russia lagged behind. The USSR had to import grain. This cost $6.5 billion in 1984 alone. Yet potentially Russian agriculture could feed the world. Why?
Agriculture is a more complicated question than industry because here one is dealing with the elements – both natural and human. There are only two ways of securing a lasting improvement in productivity in agriculture – either by the general application of better techniques and machinery, or by securing a greater motivation of the workforce. In fact, the two things go together. Even if modern machinery is made available, unless the rural workers are motivated to work properly and get the best out of the instruments in their hands, it will not be possible to get the desired results. Such human motivation can only be secured in one of two ways – either if the peasant or rural proletarian is morally inspired and convinced of the need for socialism, or else by material incentives. The Russian bureaucracy was unable to do either. On a socialist basis, the problem could easily be solved. But the task of introducing a different consciousness into the peasant means changing his relation to society, contact with other producers, participation in the life of society, democratic decision-making, co-operatives and so on. This is impossible on the basis of a bureaucratic system.
In the extreme conditions of War Communism, the Bolsheviks were compelled to resort to the forced delivery of grain in order to feed the starving workers in the cities, at a time when the collapse of industry meant that it was impossible to provide the peasants with goods in exchange for their products. But this was never seen as anything but a temporary measure forced upon the workers’ state in an exceptional situation when the existence of the revolution was in danger. The policy was soon abandoned in favour of a free market in grain and the New Economic Policy. Lenin and Trotsky were in favour of gradual collectivisation by example, and, in the meantime, encouraged co-operatives. But they never considered the possibility of forcing the peasants into collectives at gunpoint, as Stalin did in the 1930s. This monstrous policy led to the collapse of Soviet agriculture, a terrible famine and the deaths of millions of people. Soviet agriculture never recovered from this insane and criminal policy of Stalin.
Nowhere was the dead hand of bureaucracy clearer than here. They tried to blame the weather. True, the Russian winter poses problems unknown in more benign climes, but with modern technology it would have been possible to overcome this to a large extent. The problem was not the weather but the disaffected attitude of the rural population. Even where silos were built, the harvested grain was often left out in the rain to rot on the ground. A tractor driver was paid in terms of the area that was ploughed, so more would be gained the greater the shallow ploughing. All the evils of a bureaucratic system were here multiplied a hundred-fold – mismanagement, swindling, chaotic conditions of transport – combined with the still backward conditions of the Russian countryside – all combined to produce sabotage on a vast scale.
In the past, agriculture had been neglected, but this was no longer true. The problem was not now lack of investment. The bureaucracy was investing vast sums in agriculture, which now amounted to one-third of the total civilian investment. Yet they could not get the desired results. The USA, for example, spent only 5 per cent of Gross National Income on agriculture but obtained much better results. Despite large-scale investment and tractor production on the collective farms, agricultural productivity of labour was officially about a quarter – actually it was much less – than the USA. With almost one-third of the population (27 million) still working on the land – six times the American figure – the Soviet Union had 20 times as many agricultural workers per tractor as the US. The average income of a Russian collective farmer was half of an industrial worker. Youth were leaving the villages at the rate of two million a year. There was a huge subsidy to agriculture, which received 27 per cent of total investment.
The USSR was the biggest producer of tractors in the world. Its harvested area was two thirds bigger than that of the USA. However, owing to poor quality and inefficient repairs, the average life of a Soviet tractor was only five or six years. This meant that about 300,000 tractors had to be replaced every year. Despite the increased number of tractors, the annual yield per tractor on collective farms in the 1960s, far from rising, actually went down – in the period 1960-67, by 17 per cent. The Soviet Union was a vast subcontinent. Yet only a third as many trucks were used in agriculture as in the United States. Medvedev wrote in 1972:
At the present time, an agricultural worker in the United States is in effect as well equipped with the means of production as an industrial worker and, in some respects, is even ahead of him. In 1960, each American agricultural worker had 39 horsepower at his disposal, compared with a mere 5.4 for his Soviet opposite number. By 1967 the supply of power to an agricultural worker in the United States had increased to 78 hp – it had exactly doubled. The equivalent figure in the USSR for the same period was only 8.8 hp, an increase of about 65 per cent. (Roy Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy, p. 12.)
Between 1966 and 1970, 1.5 million tractors were delivered to the collective farms, but 1,150,000 were written off from existing stock. Half a million combine harvesters were also delivered, but more than 350,000 were written off. This explains the worried tone of Brezhnev’s speech at the 23rd Party Congress in 1966:
The Central Committee considers it necessary to draw attention to yet another problem, that of utilising machinery at collective and state farms. The countryside is steadily receiving and increasing the number of tractors, lorries, harvester-combines and other machines. Labour there is acquiring the features of industrial work. Yet, in recent years, there has been a drop in many key indicators of the utilisation of the fleet of machines and tractors. Machine operators tend to leave their jobs, causing fluidity in the labour force. All this creates difficulties. Facilities for repairing farm machinery must be enlarged to the utmost, the Selkhoztehnika enterprises and the collective and state farms supplied with modern equipment, and machine operators given better training and bigger material incentives. (Report of the 23rd Congress CPSU, pp. 89-90.)
Reading between the lines of this report, we get a picture of collective farms equipped with old, out of date machinery, or machines of poor quality which continually break down, and an ill-prepared workforce with no motivation, which does not look after or repair this machinery, and which has to be bribed with more material incentives in order to perform the most basic tasks. The picture had changed little since Trotsky wrote:
The tractor is the pride of Soviet industry. But the coefficient of effective use of the tractors is very low. During the last industrial year, it was necessary to subject 81 per cent of the tractors to capital repairs. A considerable number of them, moreover, got out of order again at the very height of the tilling season. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 12.)
In the 1950s, as a result of Khrushchev’s reforms, agricultural output improved. But under Brezhnev, the position worsened again. In the 1950s, the annual growth rate of agricultural production was 4.9 per cent. In the 1960s, it fell back to 3 per cent, and later to a miserable 2 per cent. And in the 1970s there was actually a decline in agricultural productivity. Yet investment in agriculture had enormously expanded. Agriculture absorbed 20 per cent of total national investment – twice the pre-war level. The production of fertiliser increased greatly. Yet the value of net farm output was four-fifths less than that of the USA. Productivity of labour in agriculture remained stubbornly low. This was partly connected to the outflow of youth from the villages, and the resulting manpower shortage. By 1980 only 20 per cent worked on the land, and they were mainly old people. But this cannot explain everything. In Western Europe, there was an even bigger shift from country to town yet the productivity of labour in agriculture enormously increased.
The real root cause was the passive resistance and sabotage of an alienated agricultural workforce, plus the colossal waste, mismanagement, inefficiency and corruption of the bureaucratic system. Brezhnev attempted to increase the motivation of the rural workforce by allowing small private plots in the kolkhozy. He actually included this in article 13 of the new constitution. Such a measure was not incorrect, given the situation. Until such time as the development of the means of production is sufficient to guarantee the rural population a decent standard of life, until the collective farms, properly equipped with modern machinery, have demonstrated in practice their superiority over small-scale individual production, it is necessary to make concessions to small businesses in both the town and, especially, in the countryside. Under Brezhnev, small private plots accounted for only 3 per cent of the total, but produced one-third of meat, milk and vegetables, more than one-third of eggs, and, surprisingly, almost one-fifth of the wool.
The authorities were concerned at the serious problems in the countryside because there is a direct link between agriculture and the production of consumer goods, and therefore the standard of living. In his economic report to the 1966 Party Congress, Alexei Kosygin pointed to the slowdown in the growth rate of real incomes, which he linked, in part, to the low productivity of labour, but also to agriculture:
As a result of the lag in agriculture, the food and light industries fell short of their targets and this could not help but slow down the growth of the national income and of the nation’s prosperity. (Report of the 23rd Congress CPSU, p. 175.)
A series of bad harvests culminated in the disaster of 1972. In March 1974, the regime then hailed a big turnaround when 225 million tons had been produced. However, there was a shortage of storage facilities and only 180 million tons were saved. This catastrophe was directly linked to bureaucratic mismanagement, the scourge of Soviet agriculture. Grain was left to rot on the ground for lack of silos, transport dislocation or simple bungling. Later Soviet leaders attempted to overcome the problems of agriculture but to no avail. The problem was inherent in the bureaucratic regime itself.