ECONOMIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN RURAL AREAS IN 1953–1964: THE COURSE AND MAIN RESULTS (BASED ON MATERIALS OF MARI, MORDOVIAN AND CHUVASH ASSRs) 

Bikeykin Evgeny Nikolayevich, Candidate of philosophy, associate professor, principal researcher – head of sub-department of history, Research Institute of Humanities under the Government of the Republic of Mordovia (3 L. Tolstogo street, Saransk, Russia), otdel_istorii@mail.ru

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10.21685/2072-3024-2016-4-4

Background. In the context of urgent problems of modernization of the national economy at the present time, raising the productivity and competitiveness of agriculture of the Russian Federation, as well as creation of conditions for its food security, an attempt to study large-scale agrarian reforms of the Soviet period is a relevant task. The purpose of the paper is to analyze economic and administrative reforming of 1953–1964 in agriculture on the basis of materials the Mari, Mordovian and Chuvash republics, to reveal the results of reforms and to evaluate them.
Materials and methods. The tasks were achieved by means of the analysis of documents extracted from the funds of the Central State Archive of the Republic of Mordovia, the State Archive of the Republic of Mari El and the State Historical Archive of the Chuvash Republic. An essential addition to the archival sources was information from statistical yearbooks. The main method of study was the comparative and historical method that made it possible to compare the course of reforms in the republics under consideration and to reveal their specificity at the same time. In order to make a more impartial evaluation of the results of the reorganization of collective farms and MTS the author used the statistical method.
Results. The process of consolidation of collective farms and their subsequent transformation into state farms in the three regions under study resulted not only in the organization of a small number of individual profitable farms, but also in the fall of rural population as a consequence of insufficient attention to a large number of small settlements. The following effects of the liquidation of MTS have been revealed: improvement of material and technical basis of collective farms on the one hand and the lack of qualified personnel and proper infrastructure on farms on the other. One of the negative manifestations of the reorganization of organs of agricultural production control was intensification of administrative and command methods of agriculture management and curtailing of reforms.
Conclusions. As a result of the author’s study, another step towards the formation of a historically objective picture of development and modernization of the agricultural sector of the country and its regions during the Soviet period has been made. The turn to specific practical transformations of the agrarian reform of 1953–1964, the disclosure of their positive and negative sides made it possible to evaluate impartially the effectiveness of reforms and to cover new ways of studying the subject.

reform, collective farms, state farms, MTS, reorganization of the system of agricultural production managemen

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