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

论文研究：支持詹妮弗·李·史密斯：苏联农场综合体：国际背景下的社会主义农业，1946-1965

• 批准号: 0449767
• 负责人: Deborah Fitzgerald
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-01-01 至 2006-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0449767&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Dissertation; Research; Support; Jennifer; Leigh

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.

这项科学与技术研究论文改进的赠款将为博士提供资金。麻省理工学院的论文级学生旨在完成论文的研究。该项目是第二次世界大战后苏联的农业改革和工业化历史。 NSF资金将支持前往国内和国际档案馆和图书馆的旅行，并允许学生在俄罗斯和乌克兰进行采访。战后苏联农业主题的方法结合了四个学科：技术历史，农业历史，苏联历史和环境历史。该项目并没有将农业变革归因于单一的政治或科学英雄或反英雄，而是假设农业改革是各种农村当局，国际关系，新技术，异常科学文化以及顽固的生物学和社会现实的结果。论文通过描述六个代表性的历史案例研究的细节来分析苏联农业的历史，这些案例遍布全国各地，从哈尔科夫的一个马铃薯田到伊尔库茨克的一群专业猎人，到北加纳北部的小乳制品。 在整个论文期间，这些案例研究与三个更广泛的主题有关：首先，当苏联农业改革失败时，通常是因为国家未能理解改革的文化和环境环境。成功的改革是那些随着时间的推移适应当地情况的改革。其次，即使在冷战的孤立主义峰值上，苏联国家也不断与数十个国家进行大量的农业思想和材料交流。农业工业化是固有的全球追求。第三点也是最后一点是，战后的一代是苏联农村工业化的关键时代。在1950年代，苏联国家创建了一种社会主义工业化农业系统，至少在短期内起作用。尽管苏联在长期以来一直没有自己的乐观目标，但第二次世界大战后的二十年是苏联乡村的重大变化和改善的时期。该项目的智力优点在于一个事实，即苏联农业的近期历史尚未得到充分理解，因为它主要是由试图赞扬或谴责创造政治制度的历史学家撰写的。一个批评但避免谴责苏联最近农业历史的项目将填补当前文献的显着空白。就更广泛的影响而言，该项目将有助于我们对工业农业体系的历史优势和劣势的理解，该系统仍在为前苏联和整个世界生产粮食。