Have you ever wondered why there are so many lost, forgotten and completely disappeared distant villages in the Non-Black Earth Zone of Russia? For many comrades, the tract of a village or farm that disappeared during Soviet times is just a good and promising place for a successful cop. However, I very often see photographs of lost tracts in the feeds of not only top bloggers, but also ordinary diggers. Dilapidated houses that were once filled with life, laughter and everyday amenities. Where they once made plans for the future, built these houses and raised children. And now there is only wilderness, desolation and complete despondency of hopelessness. And it happens that you go into an abandoned house where two walls and part of the roof are still standing, and from the wall a portrait of the former owner looks at you reproachfully. And the person in the photo is no older than you. There are some things and more photographs on the floor. So, even rare visits to the cemetery do not evoke such strong thoughts about the frailty of existence.
But this is all lyrics, but in fact, I think that all the comrades who have at least once compared maps of the post-war period and modern Google or Yandex are well aware that in the non-black earth part of Russia more than half of the villages ceased to exist precisely in the period from 1960 -90s. In some regions this figure reaches 70% of the total number of villages. Why this happened, what were the reasons, the root causes, and what caused exactly these consequences, I will try to tell you in this note. So let’s begin.
In general, for the first time I heard the story that villagers were being moved from villages to villages or towns against their will from a tractor driver who was plowing that very field. He himself was not a witness to the story of how in the 60s the last grandmother was taken out of the village on the site of this field. But he remembered well how someone colorfully told him about it. They say, the last grandmother left, she should go to the neighboring village anyway. But she doesn’t want it, they promise a room in a communal apartment instead of a house. Why does she need this? But if her house burns down by accident, then by law they must give her the whole apartment. Whether it was true or not, it was possible.
For the first time, the term “unpromising villages” was used in recommendations for the design of rural settlements prepared in 1960 by the USSR Academy of Construction and Architecture. And from this moment on, just hellish trash begins in the Yandex search results. The headlines of the articles are one brighter than the other and more poisonous than the third. It all boils down to the fact that the program for resettling unpromising villages was conceived as the final malicious destruction of the Russian village. Everyone from Khrushchev to the chairman of an unknown collective farm was listed as the culprits of this process, the main thing being that they personified Soviet power. Such a one-sided view of any problem is not my style, but we’ll figure it out together.
I believe that the decision to carry out large-scale economic and organizational reforms in the field of agriculture was based on statistical results. As we understand, our intelligence officers stole (took for study) not only nuclear secrets from the Americans, but also general statistical data on various sectors of the economy. And already in the mid-50s, the country’s very competent and effective leaders began to understand that the existing model of agriculture was significantly inferior to the capitalist model. According to official data, which was subsequently voiced by Khrushchev, labor productivity in the Soviet agricultural sector is 3.5 times lower than that of the Americans. And this is in terms of crop production indicators, while in livestock production the difference was almost 6 times not in our favor.
The reason for this lag was the collective farm production model itself. The state’s attitude towards collective farmers was based on the principle of modern minibus drivers. There is a plan, everything that was produced above the plan can be sold for your needs. It should be important to understand that collective farmers were not paid wages for their work and even pensioners were not paid pensions. We worked according to the work plan. Fulfilled the set plan for the day. You mowed, plowed, sowed, which means that on the payroll you are given a workday. If the plan is exceeded, then the bonus is an additional day off. People lived in the countryside and villages on what they grew in their own gardens and kept their livestock. They also paid taxes for this cattle and for the trees in the garden and for the land. Taxes were paid in butter or eggs. Let me clarify once again, people were not paid wages for their work; the work was based on all the principles of feudal society.
Therefore, people from villages and other populated areas of the rural hinterland began to migrate en masse to the cities. At first, this process was significantly slowed down by the lack of passports among the villagers, remember about serfdom. But we learned to get around this. The guys did not return home after finishing their military service, having a military ID in their hands as a document. Therefore, before sending many guys into the army, collective farm chairmen tried to get married so that they would definitely return. And the girls left to study and were in a hurry to marry a city guy in order to receive their first passport at their new place of residence. The high rate of youth flight from villages and villages has led to a significant imbalance in the labor force. On the one hand, the population in rural areas began to age; on the other hand, additional jobs had to be created in cities, which led to cheaper labor and a decrease in labor productivity. In the USSR, the constitution guaranteed citizens the right to work, and therefore if one hundred workers came to the city, but there was no work for them, then the city authorities were obliged to create new jobs. So we agreed with the plant managers that we needed to hire a second mechanic or a third welder. Whereas, the first specialist was not very busy with work. And this factor was not taken into account by anyone then. After all, we understand that if a migrant worker would not be able to find a job in the city with a decent salary, housing and an acceptable level of comfort. This same hard-working migrant would, after a short time, pack his bags and go back to the calves to wag their tails. And modern researchers pass it by.
But let’s return to the villages and villages. An entire scientific institute was created to study the problem of mass migration of the rural population. Research Institute of Rural and Collective Farm Construction. I was unable to find information on the topic, who and when conducted research on the problem of outflow of the rural population. But, apparently, this phenomenon was somehow studied, because action plans had to be drawn up on the basis of something. In general, it was found that the main reason for the outflow (flight) of rural youth to cities was the difference in living standards. Accordingly, if this level is raised in rural areas, then young specialists will have no desire to leave. Of course, I greatly simplified the formula, but it looked something like this. Because this is how the action program was easier to convey to senior management. The slogan about erasing the boundaries between city and village has again become relevant, as in the 30s.
However, when we roughly calculated how much this very erasing of borders would cost, it became clear that it would not be possible to erase borders for everyone. This includes the construction of roads, the construction of schools and medical institutions, the supply of electricity, and the supply of stores. And according to the program for educating the Soviet man of the future, in each locality there should have been a cultural center with a cinema hall and 2.5 mine units, a director of a cultural center, an accordionist and a part-time cleaner. For all this it was necessary to find money. Then it was decided to introduce such a term as “Unpromising villages”. In particular, according to the established definition, villages with a population of less than 1,000 people located far from transport communications were considered unpromising. You need to understand that there were no specific instructions and regulations on what grounds to recognize some villages as unpromising and others not. Local authorities should and could determine this themselves. And this was done solely on the basis of economic considerations.
It’s simple that a particular district has a budget for social needs. Roads, clinics, schools, etc. And based on the budget, the local authorities understood how many villages and villages they would support and how many they would not. The cessation of funding for socially significant facilities, repairs and modernization was stopped precisely under the pretext that the village was not promising. Electricity was not provided to these villages and repairs and maintenance of even dirt roads were stopped. Many people at that time and researchers now believe that this was done maliciously solely to force people to leave their homes. But at the same time, calculations of simple rational economic feasibility are somehow not taken into account.
And in fact, residents of unpromising villages were not just offered to move somewhere there, but an entire financial support program was developed. Firstly, land plots with communications were allocated. Secondly, very interesting lines of credit were offered for displaced persons for the construction of new housing. Migrants from unpromising villages to central collective farm estates were given a loan of up to 3,500 rubles for 35 years, while the state repaid 35% of the loan for the resettler. What is the interest rate on the loan? A question arises. But he was not there. Considering that at that time a spacious brick house could be built for 2,000 rubles, then the conditions seem very tempting. And the fact that in the first year of lending the money budgeted according to the plan was not enough suggests that many citizens took advantage of the conditions.
So what went wrong? And everything went wrong at once. In principle, everything was conceived and planned relatively competently. The main goal of relocating people from unpromising villages is to reduce overhead costs in agriculture, increase labor productivity, and achieve self-sufficiency. The last indicator was very relevant. Since in the 1960-70s, up to 60% of collective farms and state farms in the Non-Black Earth Zone were unprofitable. Moreover, losses amounted to up to 50% of overall economic indicators. Therefore, according to the second resettlement plan from 1970 to 1980, a total resettlement of more than 170 thousand households from farmsteads and remote villages was planned.
However, even without this, the difficult situation with demographics in rural areas became critical with the second wave of resettlement. Young people did not want to stay in rural areas and moved to cities whenever possible. So in the Novgorod region, by the mid-70s, 70% of state farms had more tractors than machine operators. And in the collective farms of the Pskov region, per hundred people of the working population, 96 people were older people. Conducted research has shown that young people leave for the city for a number of reasons. First of all, this is the standard of living and the opportunity for cultural leisure. Therefore, standards for cultural centers, cinemas, kindergartens and schools were introduced into resettlement planning.
But in reality everything turned out to be more complicated than the plans on paper. Thus, for the above loans for the construction of houses, the state was able to provide only 40% of the population’s requests with real money. For the construction of infrastructure facilities and connecting communications to the allocated areas, only 30% were able to fulfill plans for the first five-year plan; in some areas, 10-15%. The main reason for the failure of construction plans was the banal lack of building materials and qualified construction crews. A way out of this situation could be a system of housing cooperatives. When settlers united in cooperatives and, receiving government money, jointly built an apartment building. But this practice did not take root in the territories of the Non-Chernozem Zone. Although in the Baltic republics it was housing cooperation that made it possible to fulfill almost all plans for relocating people from remote farms. Thus, in the Lithuanian SSR alone, housing construction cooperatives were provided with 27.5 million rubles in loans. And this turned out to be 5 times more than throughout the entire RSFSR (Russia).
A separate problem of that period was simply a catastrophic decline in the productivity of rural workers. Despite the widespread introduction of mechanization, and the replacement of horse-drawn transport with cars, the introduction of new methods of treating the land with fertilizers, and the automation of the milking process. Despite all this, productivity fell steadily. Motivation systems in the form of socialist competitions, vouchers to a sanatorium, challenge pennants and raising the consciousness of collective farmers, all this worked relatively. However, it was noticed that rural residents work much better on their own personal plots than on a collective farm field. And in general, own farming began to take more time and effort than the main work on collective and state farms. Therefore, a separate program planned for the reduction of territories or the complete alienation of settlers from their own household plots. Which further alienated people from the land and agricultural work.
As a result, in 1990, the program to resettle people from unpromising villages in the non-chernozem zone was declared a failure, all activities for its further implementation were suspended, and funding was blocked. And the government of the USSR could only state “An extremely difficult situation with the supply of labor has developed in the Central and North-Western region of the RSFSR”