THE POLICY OF THE STATEAND THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN RELATIONTO THE PERSONAL HOUSE FARMING IN 1946—1991(the case of the collective farm «novaya zhizn», pravdinsky district,Kaliningrad Oblast)

Based on unpublished archival materials and employing a microhistorical approach, this article examines postwar party and state policies toward the personal house farming (PHFs) of collective farmers, using the agricultural enterprise Novaya Zhizn in Pravdinsky District of Kaliningrad Oblast as a case study. The aim is to identify the specific features of policy implementation at the level of an individual collective farm and to analyze the attitudes of the collective farmers themselves toward this policy. The article presents an analysis of party and government decrees concerning personal farms, as well as the forms in which these policies were implemented by district and kolkhoz leadership. It explores the changing significance of PHFs for collective farmers from 1946 to 1991. The study concludes that over the course of the period in question, the Soviet leadership’s position on PHFs underwent a transformation: while the late Stalinist era and Khrushchev’s Thaw were marked by a nearly continuous offensive against subsidiary farming, from the Brezhnev era onward, such farms came to be viewed as “allies” of collective production, with certain measures introduced to support them. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of collective farmers abandoned their PHFs, driven in part by the perceived possibility of a renewed repressive policy.