James Heinzen sets out to fill an important void in the current literature by analyzing the role that the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem) played in “inventing a Soviet countryside” from 1917 to 1929. The invention that Heinzen discusses is the Bolshevik Party’s attempts to transform rural Russia – both ideologically and practically. However, in his work, the word “invention” looks implicitly ironic: it represented a Soviet countryside where rural reality was divorced from Moscow’s invented view of it. Heinzen’s particular focus for this investigation is the role that Narkomzem played in promoting agricultural production in the post-World War I period, which was wracked by famine, and the role that agriculture played in fuelling the new industries of the New Economic Policy. The emphasis of the work is more on the political struggles and policy formation processes within the Bolshevik elite than on analysis of competing ideas and personalities within Narkomzem itself. So while the book reads like an institutional history of Narkomzem, this history is largely informed by the (agreeably fascinating) personalities of the directors of Narkomzem, especially Aleksandr Petrovich Smirnov.
The People’s Commissariat of Agriculture was established in 1917 by the Bolshevik regime to confront two key challenges: overcoming rural backwardness and building rural socialism. The thesis of this book is that the Bolshevik elite, increasingly toward the end of the 1920s, began to see these two goals as inseparable, whereas Narkomzem, recognizing the depth and persistence of the challenges in rural Russia, favored a gradualist approach to reform based upon encouraging entrepreneurial farmers. This disagreement on policy grew during the 1920s to become an ideologically charged debate, with the majority of the party arguing for an immediate solution, while Narkomzem continued to favor gradualism. By adopting the increasingly unpopular gradualist policy, Narkomzem was left open to attacks from the Right as “pro-kulak” in policy and “bourgeois” in staffing.
As an institution, Narkomzem was largely inherited from the old tsarist Ministry of Agriculture, which had been working for some time to confront agricultural underproduction. The failure of Russian agriculture to “modernize” along the lines of other European countries was a problem not only for the new Bolshevik regime, but one that the Tsarist regime had also faced. Antiquated practices such as the three-field and strip systems that European farmers had abandoned centuries ago were exacerbated by a lack of modern ploughs, draft animals, and machinery. Likewise, the prevalence of the traditional commune (mir) was seen by the elites of the pre- and post revolutionary period as a hindrance to modernization. Moreover, seven years of war on Russian territory, first in World War I and then the Civil War, left rural Russia starved of resources. These problems culminated in the great famine in 1921-1923, which is argued in the book as a defining moment for Narkomzem as an institution.
Heinzen charts the institutional history of Narkomzem through six stages, each of which is afforded a chapter in the book. First, he introduces the beginnings of Narkomzem from 1917-1920, detailing early work as well as the degree to which this new institution was modeled on and staffed by specialists from the Tsarist era – an issue of considerable importance later on. Secondly, Heinzen captures the complexity of policy debates and personality politics during the transition to the New Economic Policy in 1921-1923, advancing his thesis that the Bolshevik elite should be considered a heterogeneous group. This is developed further when he discusses the high point of Narkomzem’s institutional history in 1923-1926, a period when Lenin acknowledged that “too many comrades misunderstand the countryside,” to use the exact chapter title. Chapter Four tells the story of the consolidation of Narkomzem’s power that occurred during this same period (1923-1926), providing details on improving grain production figures^[1] and land reform. This is followed by an exploration of the role of local agricultural specialists in 1927-1929, especially the class origins of these specialists and the problems that this created for Narkomzem. Finally Heinzen gives a brief history of the demise of this administrative agricultural institution, with forced collectivization countering its gradualist approach and purges eliminating many of its staff.
Heinzen depicts very well the institutional impact of the increase in resources and the subsequent search for solutions to the rural question that accompanied Narkomzem’s rise from 1923-1926. He tells us a great deal about the Narkomzem’s policies, which included changing incentive systems for farmers, especially scrapping the harmful forced grain procurements of the war period, which was seen as a major cause of the great famine. The gradual reform approach was characterized by working with entrepreneurial farmers as agents of rural reform. Narkomzem’s view was that rural reform should be voluntary and that this would best be led by those farmers who already demonstrated innovative ability – in short, zazhitochnye (well-off peasants) and kulaks. This contrasted with the dominant voice in the party, led in part by Stalin, that farming should be large scale and modern, and that this should occur quickly, in order to “catch up and overtake” the West. In this respect, Heinzen fulfils his claim that “the Commissariat of Agriculture provides a revealing case study of the tribulations of an agency advocating for the economic interests of the petty bourgeoisie in a Marxist regime” (p. 6).
Another interesting aspect of the book is Heinzen’s treatment of the rise of the agronomist. In this aspect, Soviet administrators, especially those within Narkomzem, searched European history for an example of a country recovering from serious backwardness in the countryside, exacerbated by a catastrophic war and a series of crop failures. They found it, as he claims, in the history of Germany: “the most catastrophic European conflagration before the Great war, the Thirty Years War (1613 – 1648) [which] reduced the population of German states by 40 percent and caused untold losses in agricultural land, livestock and commerce… the heroes who would pull the rural economy from the abyss were agronomists practicing their new science in the German countryside. With their help German agriculture was transformed. The disappearance of famine in the German states (and in most of Europe) was coterminous with the appearance and application of the agronomic sciences” (p. 64).
In light of the series of devastating crop failures, the destruction of the Great War, followed by the revolutionary turmoil inside Russia, as well as the indeterminable ambition and optimism of the Bolsheviks, the German example was beguiling. It became official policy to place agronomists at the center of farmer education and training programs. These education campaigns were reinforced by state policies to promote growth, especially agrarian reform that met the needs of industrialization and the NEP. Sadly, this is where Heinzen’s analysis becomes weak. He fails to adequately analyze the effectiveness of these agronomists and of their educational campaigns. There is little discussion of how the agronomists worked in practice, of how their education and agitprop campaigns were received by the rural population, or even of the technical adequacy of the new methods. Instead, Heinzen resorts to citing examples from the archives of drunkenness and misbehavior by agronomists. As interesting as these examples are, these cases must be read as deviant ones rather than as the norm. So while we learn a great deal about the so-called gradualist approach as it appears in Moscow archives, the reader is left wanting in terms of how this policy was practiced on the ground. Also, given the importance of these specialists in the institutional history of Narkomzem, it would be informative to know more about the vast majority of the officials who worked away from Moscow.
To balance this relative weakness, Heinzen does provide a fascinating account of the role that Narkomzem played in protecting the technocrats within its ranks. Because so many of the staff of the institution were well educated and had previously been employed in the Tsarist Ministry, there were serious challenges to the class credentials of many specialists. This must be read in light of the primacy that the Bolsheviks placed on building popular support for the regime by promoting peasants into the ranks of the bureaucracy, as part of the smychka policy. It is here that Heinzen provides a useful contribution to the literature, in documenting the mechanisms through which Narkomzem as an institution protected and promoted technocrats from the old regime, while appeasing the demands for “socially promoted cadres.” He shows, using a series of biographic sketches and archival sources, how fluid class definitions were manipulated to promote and protect specialists, more on their technical ability than on their social credentials. Examples given of how “peasants of the plough” were co-opted to suit the interests of Narkomzem are instructive. The cases cited of “professors of the plough” are telling examples of how the discourse of the time was adopted and adapted to suit the needs of the institution. In this regard Heinzen makes a genuinely unique and interesting historiographical contribution.
In choosing to write an institutional history of Narkomzem, Heinzen is part of a historiographical movement to see the early Soviet state as a heterogeneous body. In some crucial aspects, Heinzen attributes this historiographical movement to Daniel Orlovsky, who first discussed the role that lower level officials played in forming state policy.^[2] Later works, such as Russia in the Era of NEP, only emphasized this “institutionalist” trend in historiography.^[3] It also builds upon the peasant resistance approach to understanding the bargained consensus in rural Russia, advocated by the likes of Sheila Fitzpatrick^[4] and Lynne Viola.^[5] However, Heinzen’s unique contribution is in marrying the two historiographical movements – of rural resistance as well as institutional dynamics within the Bolshevik party – into one cohesive argument. In this regard, he makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the peculiarities of policy formation during the post-Civil War period in the Soviet Union.
By acknowledging the role that different institutions played in this policy during the 1920s, Heinzen is breaking new ground, with his excellent analysis of the role of Narkomzem as an actor within the state. His analysis of power relationships within the Bolshevik elite group is well done; likewise, the conclusion that ultimately Narkomzem lost out to more powerful voices calling for a rapid transformation of rural Russia is indeed polished. However, in much of Heinzen’s representation, Narkomzem itself is treated as a homogenous body, with the same homogenous “transmission belts” (i.e., modes of transferring opinions from the top down) between the leaders, Moscow bureaucrats, and regional officials; ironically, it is precisely the point that the author himself criticizes as inadequate in the previously established historiographical approaches. Regrettably, the reader of Neinzen’s monograph is left asking questions about policy formation and professional promotion within Narkomzem – despite the excellent treatment of Narkomzem’s attachment to the Party.
In general, Inventing the Soviet Countryside provides rich detail on two fascinating topics of largely unexplored early Soviet history. First, viewed from the ideological angle, it is an institutional history of Narkomzem as an organ of Soviet power, which adopted a different approach to rural transformation and in doing so ultimately fell victim to dominant voices from the Right. Secondly, from the perspective of social history, it is quite a thorough analysis of how Narkomzem was adeptly able to promote and protect technocrats from the Tsarist era, while simultaneously appeasing ideological calls for peasant cadres and the new administrative elite. Even with just two aforementioned aspects elucidated, the whole story seems to be incomplete without further investigation of the policy formation process within Narkomzem as an institution and without further exploration of the role of specialists working outside of Moscow.