Kolkhoz As A Pseudo-cooperative
As a collective farm, a kolkhoz was legally organized as a production cooperative. The Standard Charter of a kolkhoz, which since the early 1930s had the force of law in the USSR, is a model of cooperative principles in print. It speaks of the kolkhoz as a “form of agricultural production cooperative of peasants that voluntarily unite for the purpose of joint agricultural production based on ... collective labor.” It asserts that “the kolkhoz is managed according to the principles of socialist self-management, democracy, and openness, with active participation of the members in decisions concerning all aspects of internal life”.
In practice, the collective farm that emerged after Stalin’s collectivization campaign did not have many characteristics of a true cooperative, except joint ownership of non-land assets by the members (the land in the Soviet Union was nationalized in 1917) and remuneration in proportion to labor and not capital from residual profits. The basic principle of voluntary membership was violated by the process of forced collectivization; members did not retain a right of free exit, and those who managed to leave could not take their share of land and assets with them (neither in kind nor in cash-equivalent form). The role of the “sovereign” general assembly and the “democratically elected” management was in practice reduced to rubber-stamping the plans, targets, and decisions made by the district and provincial authorities.
They imposed detailed work programs and nominated their preferred managerial candidates. The kolkhozy rapidly metamorphosed from cooperatives to an offshoot of the state sector (although notionally they continued to be owned by their members). Since the mid-1930s, numerous kolkhozy changed their status to sovkhozy or vice versa, depending on current taxation policies and other discriminatory practices applicable to workers in the two categories of farms. The faint dividing lines between collective and state farms were obliterated almost totally in the late 1960s, when Khrushchev’s administration authorized a guaranteed wage to kolkhoz members, similarly to sovkhoz employees. Essentially, his administration recognized their status as hired hands rather than authentic cooperative members. The guaranteed wage provision was incorporated in the 1969 version of the Standard Charter.
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