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

这笔科学和技术研究论文改进补助金将资助麻省理工学院的一名博士论文水平的学生完成一篇论文的研究，题为《苏联农场联合体：1946-1965年国际背景下的社会主义农业》。该项目是二战后苏联农业改革和工业化的历史。NSF基金将支持前往国内和国际档案馆和图书馆旅行，并允许学生在俄罗斯和乌克兰进行采访。对战后苏联农业主题的探讨结合了四个学科：技术史、农业史、苏联史和环境史。该项目没有将农业变革归因于某个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、不同寻常的科学文化以及顽固的生物和社会现实的结果。本文通过描述六个具有代表性的历史案例的细节来分析苏联农业的历史，这些案例涵盖了全国和世界各地，从哈尔科夫的土豆田到伊尔库茨克的专业猎人的科尔霍兹，再到加纳北部的一个小奶牛场。在整篇论文中，这些案例研究涉及三个更广泛的主题：第一，苏联农业改革失败往往是因为国家未能理解改革的文化和环境背景。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高峰期，苏联国家也在不断地与数十个国家进行农业思想和材料的广泛交流。农业产业化是一种内在的全球性追求。第三点也是最后一点是，战后这一代人是苏联农村工业化的关键时代。在20世纪50年代，苏联创建了一种社会主义工业化农业体系，至少在短期内有效。尽管苏联长期达不到自己的乐观目标，但第二次世界大战后的二十年是苏联农村发生重大变化和改善的时期。该项目的学术价值在于，人们没有很好地理解苏联农业的近代史，因为它主要是由历史学家撰写的，他们试图赞扬或谴责创造了苏联农业的政治制度。一个批评但避免谴责苏联近代农业历史的项目，将填补当前文献中的一个重大空白。就更广泛的影响而言，该项目将有助于我们了解仍在为前苏联人民以及全世界人民生产粮食的工业化农业制度的历史长处和短处。

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.