Another Revenant from Soviet Past – Private Plots Provide Half the Potatoes Russian Eat

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – In Soviet times, much of the food Russians consumed was grown not in the fields of state and collective farms but on the small private plots that rural residents were allowed nominally for personal use but in fact to feed not only the rural population but to keep urban residents from starving.

            At that time, this was a source of shame in the Soviet Union; but it was regularly pointed to by commentators in the West as a sign that the collectivist approach to agriculture didn’t work and that capitalism would lead to expanded production and a better life for those who raised this food and those who consumed it.

            But today, despite the spread of capitalism throughout rural Russia, it is not the enormous farms controlled by large corporations but the small private plots that farmers and dacha owners maintain that is delivering a disproportionate share of food for residents of the Russian Federation.

            According to new research by the To Be Precise portal, a large share of the foods Russians consume comes not from the big farms but from private plots owned either by those with dachas or who work for the big agricultural firms (tochno.st/materials/bolse-poloviny-kartofelia-v-strane-vyrashhivaiut-na-licnyx-ucastkax-razbiraemsia-kak-ustroeny-ogorody-v-rossii).

            It reported that “more than half of the potatoes, about half of the vegetables and most of the berries in the country are now being produced not by agricultural holdings but by people on their personal plots” as private plots are now known. These figures are in fact less than they were in the 1990s when the private plots were responsible for up to 90 percent of such production.

            In some federal subjects – Dagestan, the Altai Republic, Karelia, and Kirov Oblast – more than 90 percent of all vegetables are produced on such plots, while in others the figures are much smaller. There and elsewhere, some of the private plot production comes from small farms; but most of it comes instead from dacha lands or gardens of agricultural workers.

            This pattern reflects the fact that large but now private farms produce mostly for export and the kind of output that Russians actually consumes requires the personal involvement and commitment of farmers rather than just a change in the formal ownership of the property that so many have claimed will give rise to more food production by itself.