Dissertation Research: Support for Jennifer Leigh Smith: The Soviet Farm Complex: Socialist Agriculture in an International Context, 1946-1965

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This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant will provide funding to a Ph.D. thesis level student at MIT to complete research on a dissertation, entitled .The Soviet Farm Complex: Socialist Agriculture in an International Context, 1946-1965. The project is a history of agricultural reform and industrialization in the Soviet Union in the generation after World War II. NSF funds will support travel to domestic and international archives and libraries, and allow the student to conduct interviews in Russia and the Ukraine. The approach to the topic of postwar Soviet agriculture combines four disciplines: the history of technology, agricultural history, Soviet history and environmental history. Rather than attributing agricultural change to a single political or scientific hero or anti-hero, the project assumes that agricultural reforms were the result of a variety of rural authorities, international relationships, new technologies, unusual scientific cultures, and stubborn biological and social realities. The dissertation analyzes the history of Soviet agriculture by describing the details of six representative historical case studies that range across the country and around the world from a potato field in Kharkov Oblast to a kolkhoz of professional hunters in Irkutsk Oblast to a small dairy in northern Ghana. Throughout the dissertation, these case studies are related back to three broader themes: first, that when Soviet agricultural reform failed it was often because the state failed to comprehend the cultural and environmental context of reform. Reforms that succeeded were those that adapted over time to meet local circumstances. Second, even at the isolationist peak of the Cold War, the Soviet state was continuously engaged in a vast exchange of agricultural ideas and materials with dozens of nations. Agricultural industrialization is an inherently global pursuit. The third and last point is that this postwar generation was the crucial era of rural industrialization for the Soviet Union. During the 1950s, the Soviet state created a system of socialist industrialized agriculture that worked at least in the short-term. Although the Soviet Union fell chronically short of its own optimistic goals, the twenty years following World War II were a time of substantial change and improvement in the Soviet countryside. The intellectual merit of the project lies in the fact that the recent history of Soviet agriculture is not well understood because it has principally been written by historians seeking to praise or condemn the political system that created it. A project that critiques but refrains from condemning the recent history of agriculture in the Soviet Union will fill a significant gap in the current literature. In terms of a broader impact, this project will contribute to our understanding of the historical strengths and weaknesses of a system of industrial agriculture that is still producing food for the people of the former Soviet Union as well as the world at large.