Brigade (Soviet collective farm)

The brigade was a labor division within the Soviet collective farm ("kolkhoz").

The 1930s

The mass collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s pushed the peasantry from individual household production into an archepeligo of collective farms. The question of internal organization was important in the new kolkhozes. The most basic measure was to divide the workforce into a number of groups, generally known as brigades, for working purposes. `By July 1929 it was already normal practice for the large kolkhoz of 200-400 households to be divided into temporary or permanent work units of 15-30 households.' [R W Davies, "The Soviet Collective Farm 1929-1930" (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), p.59.]

The authorities gradually came down in favour of the fixed, combined brigade, that is the brigade with its personnel, land, equipment and draught horses fixed to it for the whole period of agricultural operations, and taking responsibility for all relevant tasks during that period.

The brigade was headed by a brigade leader ("brigadir"). He was usually a local man (few were women).

Land allotment

The authorities resolved that each brigade was to have a fixed plot in every field of the crop rotation. A Communist Party resolution of 4 February 1932 said the brigade's land should be fixed for the agricultural year, but some kolkhozes found that it helped forward planning to fix it for the whole period of the crop-rotation, and this practice was formally adopted in the kolkhoz Model Statute of 1935. [V. P. Sherstobitov, ed., "Istoriya krest'yanstva SSSR: istoriya sovetskogo krest'yanstva", vol. 2, ...*; `In 1933 the session of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR proposed that plots be assigned to brigades for the entire period of crop rotation.' CXIV International Conference of Agricultural Economists (Minsk, 1970), "Agriculture in the Soviet Union" (trans.), ed. L. Kolesnikov, p.164.] In the central Asian cotton-growing kolkhozes, each brigade might hold its land as an integral unit, its members living within this unit. [Naum Jasny, "The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR" (Stanford University Press, California, 1949), pp.335-6; Sherstobitov, ed., "Istoriya krest'yanstva SSSR", vol.2, pp.304-5.]

The kolkhoz "Krashcha Dolya" as an example

"Krashcha Dolya" was based on the village of Yurchenkovo (Kharkov oblast, Ukraine). It was a sugar-beet producer, and grew a variety of other crops (grains, pulses etc). The district's Machine Tractor Station was on the kolkhoz's land. Krashcha Dolya was cited as a kolkhoz learning from its errors, and an example for others to learn from. Up to 1933 it had had no crop-rotation. It was then decided to introduce a seven-year one. The kolkhoz's personnel were divided into seven brigades, and its land area into seven fields. The brigades were to receive equal ratios of the cultures grown in the kolkhoz, and to maintain these ratios for the period of the crop-rotation. If this were not the case the brigades' labour requirements (greatly different for grain and beet), and hence their membership and equipment, would fluctuate greatly from year to year. A careful distribution of cultures in the fields and laying-out of brigade plots was required to achieve harmony.

After some experimentation, the kolkhoz board decided to `take its marching orders' from the layout of sugar-beet. Beet was (to be) grown in a single field, a different one each year, and would occupy most of this field. Winter grain was grown on one side of this field. (Winter grain was also grown in some of the other fields.) Each field was divided into seven equal and parallel strips, running so that each would cut across the areas of beet and grain and have the same ratio of these crops. Each brigade was allotted one strip in every field, to hold for the duration of the crop-rotation. Three hundred and thirty hectares of beet were grown in the kolkhoz, and so with this arrangement every brigade would receive an equal 47 hectares. Each brigade had a beet-sowing machine, which could plant 6 hectares a day. Thus the brigades could carry out beet sowing simultaneously and finish it within 8 days. (Before this there had been 11 brigades, who could not then all work simultaneously with the kolkhoz's lesser number of beet-sowing machines.) The crops in the other fields were presumably so arranged that the brigades would receive equal ratios of them too. [This section is drawn from S. M. Kladchikov, `Vyyavit' i ustranit' nedostatki v organizatsii kolkhozakh brigad (na primere kolkhoza "Krashcha Dolya")', "Sotsialisticheskaya rekonstruktsiya sel'skogo khozyaistva", 1933, 4/5, pp.106-13.]

Extent

Almost two-thirds of kolkhozes (65.1%) had two or more field brigades in 1937. (Presumably it was the smaller kolkhozes, in northern Russia and elsewhere, that were not divided into brigades.) Brigades varied in size from 20ij0 workers in the north, north-west and parts of the non-black-earth centre, to about 100 in the Lower and Middle Volga. The average, in 1937, was 62 people. A brigade in the black-earth had about 10 hectares of land per member; thus a brigade of 50, for example, had 500 hectares. [Jasny, "Socialized Agriculture", pp.335-6; V P Sherstobitov, ed., "Istoriya krest'yanstva SSSR: istoriya sovetskogo krest'yanstva", vol. 2, pp.304-5.]

The kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950

After the kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950 the territorial successor of the old village kolkhoz was the "complex brigade" (brigade of brigades), a sub-unit of the new enlarged kolkhoz.

ee also

*Zveno (Soviet collective farming)

Notes