Kolkhoz and Sovkhoz

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Why would Stalin want to have Kolkhoz, and not just sovkhoz?

[Die Neue Zeit]

He was a sellout on the agriculture question, really, and that sellout actually led to the famines.

[ComradeOm]

Because kolkhozy were cheaper and easier to exploit for grain. In Sovkhozy the costs of production were borne by the state, their members being wage labourers who had to be paid regardless of the harvest. In kolkhozy however the costs were carried by the peasantry who lived off their produce and were not state employees

In practice this meant that the state took its quotas and the peasants made do with the remainder. If the harvest was poor, or the quotas high, then it was the peasant producers who were squeezed as a result

[Die Neue Zeit]

Because kolkhozy were cheaper and easier to exploit for grain. In Sovkhozy the costs of production were borne by the state, their members being wage labourers who had to be paid regardless of the harvest. In kolkhozy however the costs were carried by the peasantry who lived off their produce and were not state employees

In practice this meant that the state took its quotas and the peasants made do with the remainder. If the harvest was poor, or the quotas high, then it was the peasant producers who were squeezed as a result

The bottom line, though, is that the kolkhozy were less productive than the state-absorbs-the-business-risk sovkhozy.

Now, as for "paid regardless of the harvest": that's not entirely true. Leaving aside our mutual opposition to piecework, didn't Stalin and co. introduce "socialist piecework" garbage in the countryside as well as in the factories? That shifts business risk back onto the immediate producer.

For all the barbarity, sovkhozy plus "socialist piecework" would have been a far better alternative to the kolkhozy bumblings.