Agrarian Policy of the USSR in 1953–1985: From Khrushchev’s Reforms to the Food Programme

The article studies the evolution of Soviet agrarian policy from the death of Stalin to the mid-1980s. After 1953 the leadership repeatedly tried to reform agriculture: it raised procurement prices, enlarged collective farms, developed the Virgin Lands, promoted maize, set up the councils of national economy, carried out the 1965 reform, adopted the land reclamation programme and, in 1982, the Food Programme. The author analyses the reasons for the limited results of these measures: the extensive model of growth, excessive centralisation of planning, political interference in science and the lack of real material incentives for producers. Particular attention is paid to the grain crisis of 1963, problems of land reclamation and the formation of the agro-industrial complex. It is concluded that the reforms did not change the essence of the administrative-command system, and accumulated contradictions led to a crisis of the agrarian sector by the end of the USSR.