Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article objective is to reveal the features of functioning agriculture in Siberia during the Great Patriotic War to give more objective assessment of the Soviet agrarian system’s effectiveness. The study task is to reconstruct dynamics of changes in main branches of agricultural production and different categories of farms. Authors analyze trends in agricultural production development in Siberia at different stages of the War, changes in its material, technical and personnel bases, evolution of the state tax policy, dynamics of the basic branches of agriculture (plant growing and animal husbandry), functioning of collective farms, state farms and private household plots of population, contribution of Siberian agriculture to the victory, the War’s impact on agriculture. For the first time in historiography, authors provide data on the size of the sown area of main agricultural crops, and the gross grain yield in farms of all categories in Siberia for each year of the War. Data on the total number of livestock in regional collective and state farms and various categories of personal subsidiary farms are introduced into scientific use. The study established that 1943 was the most difficult year for Siberian agriculture. Reducing the labor and technical resources reached a critical level. Due to the inadequate mechanization of work, simplified methods of land cultivation were used everywhere. Drought, poor quality of seeds, poor maintenance of crops led to the yield’s sharp drop. The situation aggravated in the livestock breeding in collective and state farms due to livestock’s surrender to the state in exchange for seeds and at the expense of grain procurement, lack of forage due to crops’ poor harvest. In 1944 and 1945 situation in the Siberian agriculture remained difficult despite some signs of stabilization. The War brought agrarian sector of the regional economy into a deep crisis manifested in a significant decline of quantitative and qualitative indicators.