permaculture

[<dwoodard@becon.org>]

Lawrence, the "kulaks" of Tsarist times in Russia were a small minority 
of relatively rich peasant farmers. The word means "fist." Some were 
into moneylending, partly it seems due to the difficulty of acquiring 
land when most of it was held by repartitional communes or nobles.

Much of the pejorative use of the word in Soviet times was due to the 
attempt of the Bolsheviks to foster a class war in the countryside, 
something which the peasants did not take to naturally. Actually, kulaks 
seem to have been accepted as leaders in the countryside. (See "Stalin's 
Peasants..." by Sheila Fitzpatrick)

The economist Alexander Chayanov suggested that the prosperity of the 
peasant household was often cyclic; households with many older 
productive children would be relatively rich; old couples living alone 
or young couples with small children would be relatively poor.

Russian farming in Tsarist times was much less productive than in 
Western Europe, and this continues today. Some statistics in
"The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia"
by Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova, and Ilya Zaslavsky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006:

Wheat yields in hectolitres per hectare, 1870

UK...........23.5
Sweden.......19.7
Russia........7.5


Wheat yields in hectolitres per hectare, 2003

UK...........77.8
Sweden.......55.5
Russia.......17.1


Milk yields per cow in litres per year, 1870s

Tyrol (Austria...............1780
Seine watershed (France).....2630
Russia, Baltic provinces......587
Central Russia................364


Milk yields per cow in litres per year, 2003

France........6045
U.K...........6844
Estonia.......5074
Russia........2733


Low farming productivity in Russia in Tsarist times was due to factors 
such as climate including cyclical droughts, medieval technology, the 
organization of farming on the communes including strip cropping, the 
difficulty of innovation on the commune, illiteracy and ignorance, and 
poverty making investment in equipment difficult.

Nevertheless Russian peasants of those times seem to have often been 
better fed than those of western Europe.

Collectivization seems to have been a social as well as an economic 
disaster, leaving a legacy of apathy and rampant alcoholism.

As of eight or ten years ago, apparently much small farming was 
conducted in a peculiar symbiosis with
unprofitable "collective" farms, so one should be cautious about 
drawing conclusions from the statistics of small farms.

I have the impression that the dacha horticulture/farming phenomenon is 
to a large extent an urban based middle class affair.

Ioffe, Nefedova and Zaslavsky quote Vladimir Kagansky in a Russian 
magazine article of 2003: "In Bashkiriya [Bashkortostan, a Muslim Tatar 
area east of the Volga near Kazan], the traditional countryside is 
alive, a true village is still around....In rural Bashkiriya, they work 
a great deal, build a lot, and drink rarely - this alone makes the rural 
Bashkirian hinterland amazing beyond belief."

They go on to comment "Large families, widespread mutual assistance and 
coordination between rural households, and incomparably less heavy 
drinking (or no drinking at all) distinguish rural communities in Muslim 
republics."

Douglas Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada



On Thu, 16 May 2013 21:53:33 -0400, Lawrence London 
<lfljvenaura@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> Russia has some of the best farmland in the world.
> Russia HAD some of the best farmers in the world and they knew how to 
> work
> that prime farmland. Soviet Stalinism changed the face of traditional
> Russian farming.
> They converted all farming operations to collective farms generating 
> food
> to ship to the party elite well away from where that food was grown,
> leaving farmers, their families and relatives,
> communities and villlages living and working in a state of near 
> poverty or
> thereabouts, otherwise not fairly compensated for their labors. The 
> Russian
> farmers of old, called Kulaks (as far as I know) were the experts 
> carrying
> forward the best traditions of Russian agriculture. The Kulaks were 
> not
> happy with the changeover. Their displeasure did not go unnoticed in 
> the
> ceners of political control so they were either exiled to Siberia or
> exterminated. Russia was left with no new generation who know how to 
> work
> those magnificent lands (Black Earth Region stretching from Ukraine 
> to
> Siberia). That's what you have now so no new national agricultural
> infrastructure serving the Russian people at large. Just oligarchs 
> and
> their schemes one of which is to sell or lease some of that Black 
> Earth
> region.  But you have the Dacha Gardeners and community and village 
> gardens
> as well most probably with larger farms distributing food throughout 
> their
> regions. You will like this: I met a Krishna follower in Whole Foods 
> one
> evening years ago and struck up a conversation asking him about 
> organic
> agriculture there. He replied that after the Soviets left their 
> traditional
> farming resumed without missing a beat. Most of their farms were 
> small
> family units with some medium large with all food sold locally or
> distributed within the immediate region if they were one of the few 
> larger
> commercial operations. It was an assumed fact that the food sold at 
> markets
> was organically grown. If a grower tried to sell food
> produced using methods involving pesticides, it became known rapidly 
> and
> that vendor was shut out of the marketplace.

> LL

http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-dacha.htm

http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/en/figures/agriculture/