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  • From: <dwoodard@becon.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Dacha gardeners feeding the Russian nation | In 2011 the dacha gardens of Russia produced 40% of the nation's food.
  • Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 03:34:05 -0400

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/





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