Methods and results of agricultural management in the Khrushchev period - the experience of reconstructing everyday life (50-60s of the 20th century, based on materials from Western Siberia)
Authors: Fedorova M. I. , Manchenko K. A. 
Published: October 2024

The purpose of the study is to analyze the methods and results of transformations in the agrarian sector of the West Siberian region during the period of renewal of the command-аdministrative system on a democratic basis during the reign of N.S. Khrushchev. The task is to identify the ideological and economic attitudes and decisions of the central and local government bodies in the period of the 50-60s of the 20th century in agriculture. As well as the results of large-scale transformations through the prismof everyday life unfolding through the labor activity of the peasantry and the leadership. The interrelated contradictory processes are considered: the declaration of democratic principles of leadership and their practical implementation in the context of the adoption of large-scale voluntaristic projects and decisions. The analysis of archival sources associated with this period is carried out, which allows us to state both the positive results of management activities and the unrealizability of many undertakings. It also concludes that the village workers themselves were more susceptible to change than the leadership. Soviet historiography of post-Stalinist modernization focused on the phenomenon of transformations, party leadership, and the negative results of the changes that took place. At the turn of the 80-90s of the 20th century there was a turn in the historiographic process, primary attention was paid to the human factor, the everyday life of the historical process. The authors localized their attention to studying the content of the interaction between theory and practice, will and objective conditions, the influence on the course of events in the agricultural sector of an ordinary worker in the collective and state farm period. On the basis of archival sources, periodicals, memoirs and historiographic analysis, an assessment of the methods of state and economic management of agriculture as humanistic, including, is given, while the inconsistency of the methods is not questioned. The importance of this approach is associated with the need to comprehend modernization processes not only as reforms "from above", but also as the need for the participation of the population itself in these processes. Another thing is that this participation had a corrective influence: both visible: positive and negative, which became the subject of this work, and hidden, which may be the topic of the next article. The contradictory nature of the Khrushchev era (the interweaving of democratic and conservative traditions in the management system) did not exclude the interest of the direct workers of the village in a motivated contribution, both collective and personal, to the development of agriculture at the local level when solving socially significant problems of village life. The voluntaristic decisions favorably perceived by the population could not be objectively resolved in full; they were lowered to the local level, subjectively corrected by those who directly implemented them: the workers themselves and regional managers.