Authors

Donald Morard III¹;  ¹ McGill University, Canada

Discussion

Historians and social scientists often see the Soviet food system as distinct from the development of late twentieth-century agribusiness due to state socialism’s collectivized farms and use of quotas. However, the agribusiness vision of all food-related sectors from farming to food processing being jointly managed under one structure was a vision shared by Soviet reformers hoping to solve the issue of shortages during late socialism. Conceptualized as the agro-industrial complex (AIC), this idea of the food economy was in many ways similar to agribusiness in its focus on jointly managing farms, food processing industries, and auxiliary industries such as chemical fertilizer production. Advocates of the AIC argued that this was not simply agribusiness repackaged: rather, the AIC maintained socialism’s social focus on a more just method of managing the economy. However, the concept disrupted the traditional divide between urban and rural labor within the Soviet political economy and often entailed taking power away from key central institutions like Gosplan or Gosbank. As such, early experiments with agro-industrial methods were carried out in the periphery away from the eyes of Moscow, with experiments in Soviet Estonia proving most influential towards shaping all-union agro-industrial policy when Gorbachev came to power. 

This paper discusses how reform-minded economists and local party members in occupied Estonia aimed to transform the Soviet food system by developing the AIC, first at a local level before failing to scale up the reforms from 1970 to 1989. First, this research will highlight how Soviet conceptions of the AIC were entangled with global food system transformation during the twentieth century. From here, the paper will focus on the case of Soviet Estonia, with the Viljandi and Pärnu agro-industrial associations being established in 1975 and 1979, respectively. These two examples, and the later establishment of the Estonian Agro-Industrial Committee, would serve as a model for both Leonid Brezhnev’s 1982 Food Program and later Mikhail Gorbachev’s project of perestroika in the countryside. Many of the academics and communist party members who were early proponents of agro-industrial associations in Viljandi and Pärnu, such as Valter Udam and Mikhail Bronstein, served important roles in developing later all-union implementations of these reforms. While the Soviet implementation of the AIC failed to solve the issue of increasing food shortages, the concept remains popular within much of the former Soviet Union. Furthermore, the concept of agro-industrial associations was important for Estonian advocates for political sovereignty. Beyond filling gaps in the historiography of Estonia and the Soviet Union, this project aims to shift the focus of the state socialist food economy away from the history of agriculture and to the history of complex food systems.