Household Plot - History

History

In Czarist Russia, the plot (usad'ba) was usually adjacent to the peasant's house. Here the peasants traditionally grew vegetables, hemp (a source of oil and livestock feed) and a little fruit. Gardens varied in size; they could be as much as a hectare, but most were smaller. The plot was normally in the hereditary tenure of the household, and not subject to repartition (unlike the peasants' holdings in the open fields).

In the later 19th century the growth of towns and cities in central Russia encouraged the development of market gardening and truck farming in this region. By the eve of the Revolution the garden economy was developing quickly. A further stimulus was provided in the first years of the Revolution by the Bolshevik policy of requisitioning peasant produce. Fruit and vegetables were exempt from this policy, and this resulted in a strong swing from grain farming to kitchen and market gardening. In the grain-producing regions (Black-Earth belt and North Caucasia) the garden economy increased its share of peasant commodity production from 3.3% in 1913 to 12.2% in 1920ı, while the field economy declined from 62.6% to 39.3% in the same period. Market gardening continued to develop during the 1920s.

The mass collectivization decree of January 1930 made no mention of garden plots, and in many areas the local Communist authorities abolished them. But in March 1930, after the chaos and peasant resistance engendered by the all-out drive, the right of the peasant to have a personal plot was recognised. No maximum size was agreed at this stage, however, and the garden plot remained in a legislative limbo until the kolkhoz model charter of February 1935.

This charter specified that plots could vary from one-quarter to one-half hectare, and up to 1 hectare in special districts. The legislation regarded individual peasants as the holders but in practice plots were still in household tenure. The private plots were responsible for a significant fraction of agricultural production, and provided the peasants with a large part of their food and income. In 1938 they accounted for 21.5% of agricultural produce. The average peasant household earned about twice as much from marketings from the private plot as from its work on collective land.

By the late 1930s market gardening, with the private plot as its base, was perhaps becoming the dominant part of agriculture in the Black-Sea hinterland and the truck-gardening areas around big cities like Moscow and Leningrad. The government, alarmed by this `resurgence of private capitalism', passed legislation to contain it in 1939, but it continued to play an important role in agriculture.