The Establishment of Official Rural Policy

Abstract

The comprehensive programme of rural transformation that emerged from the mid-1950s marked a fundamentally new stage in official policy towards the Russian countryside. Until then there had been little in the way of a systematic planned approach to rural areas, other than, that is, collectivisation itself.¹ The latter policy had brought important economic change in the organisation of agricultural distribution and production and a greater degree of political intrusion through administrative controls. The objectives of this policy were, however, essentially narrow: the rural sector was to be harnessed to the goal of rapid, state-led industrialisation.² As a result, the character of the Soviet regime’s relationship towards agriculture was primarily an extractive one. The most obvious spatial expression of this relationship was the accelerated development of Soviet towns and cities while villages languished in terms of investment.³