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Land reform played an integral role in the overall agrarian reforms in all Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). This reform began during the early 1990s and it served as a crucial precondition for the restructuring of both the collective and state farms. Land property rights were transferred either from collective farms or from the state to private agents as part of many land reform measures. This happened despite the fact that land ownership remained prohibited in some areas. Although the reforms across all CEECs resulted in a greater number of individual tenures, there were significant discrepancies in the extent of the shift as observed throughout the different farming specializations and the regions in the CEECs. This chapter gives a comparative analysis of land reform and the implications of the shift from collective to individual tenures within the CEECs.

When the Czech Republic was still under the Communism regime, agriculture was still organized in collective farms and in large-scale states. By 1989, the last year of Communist rule, 174 state farms accounted for 29.2% of the total agricultural land (TAL) while 1,024 collective farms covered the remaining 70.4%. Private agriculture, which was mostly operated on a part-time basis, proved to be marginal since it only made up 0.4% of TAL. The ownership of various farm assets could be divided into three categories which involve state-owned assets, privately-owned assets, and non-land assets that were collectively owned by the members of collective farms. As such, post-Communist agricultural reform included the following: restitution, transformation, and privatization. This chapter focuses on the legislative framework passed by the Czech parliament which encompasses land tenure and land access as a result of the laws.

This chapter looks at “persuasion work,” explaining aspects of village social organization upon which it hinged and arguing that unpersuasive cadres secured not commitment to the collective project but the performance of consent. Persuasion work began with “plans of action” developed in Party meetings at each level—region, district, commune—and applied to people at every level as well. Higher-level cadres would do persuasion work with lower-level ones: to enlighten them was at least as important as enlightening the peasantry, if they were to do their job. Persuasion was used toward a number of different goals—making peasants hand over their quotas, pay taxes, bring in bigger harvests, and so on—but for the villagers, it came to mean especially the attempt to get them into the associations (TOZs) or collective farms.

Since agriculture accounts for a significant portion in Albania's total GDP and because of its large farming population, agrarian reform has played no small part in the economic reforms imposed there. Because of this reform, land and other such assets were distributed to farm workers, which furthered the decollectivization of collective farms and the transition to the adoption of private land ownership. As such, the individual family farm became the fundamental farm organization. The effects on Albania of these reforms are found to be different from the effects experienced by other Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). This is because land in large-scale farming in the other CEECs still accounts for a sizeable share of the total land and land was mostly restituted to its former owners. Improved resource allocation and labour incentives initiated growth in agricultural output after the reform. This chapter identifies the determinants of agricultural privatization policies and land reform, particularly in the case of Albania.

This section starts with the description of testing theories for compensation packages in collective farm settings from the Dahe community. When population offsets the amount of available resources, it would be impossible for individuals to move back to the optimal level of standard of living without losing a job, unless alternative employment opportunities are found. In cases where revenue is distributed “according to needs,” agricultural establishments will be able to heighten income distribution equality, attain optimal performance benefits, and allow full employment in an overpopulated rural industry where additional outputs are rewarded with minimum wage. However, there are opportunist political leaders who are more particular with farm production rather than their peasants’ welfare, where excess incentive schemes are only given with maximum labor delivered by cooperative members.

This chapter discusses the lead up to and the implementation of wholesale collectivization. It presents letters written by the peasantry expressing their views about the grain procurement campaigns of 1928 and 1929, collective farms, dekulakization, and resistance to collectivization.

This chapter considers the international dimensions of early industrial agriculture. Ideas and techniques developed in America were used in establishing the collective farms in the Soviet Union. From 1927 to 1932, between 1,000 and 2,000 American technical experts went to the Soviet Union as advisers to the Soviet government. Many were sent there to assemble and service machinery, set up factories, or instruct Soviet workers in engineering. Companies such as General Electric, Ford, and Caterpillar sent mechanics, engineers, and executives for a few months or even a few years. The chapter reveals that in spite of the brief amount of time these agriculturalists spent in the Soviet Union and despite their collective lack of influence in world affairs, their experiences had a powerful effect on American agriculture in the 1930s.

This chapter examines the entry of rural Chinese women into full-time collective farming and the implications for individual women, families, and rural collectives. It explains that the new organization of work brought a mixed experience for women including pleasurable sociality, economic, and physical pressure and a decline in the valuation of their spinning and weaving, which had been a crucial contribution to household welfare. It suggests that conflicts over how women should be remunerated and women's remembered characterizations of what was fair and what was not, illuminate the persistence of a gendered division of labor even as the content of women's work changed.

Projects aimed at improving agriculture in the Soviet Union during the post-war period focused particularly on the Ukraine, the Black Earth Region south of Moscow, and central Russia. This chapter focuses on how agricultural reforms were able to be instituted in a place where agriculture was a secondary consideration, such as in this case Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia. It examines the history of agriculture and collective farms in Irkutsk Oblast. The chapter observes that the Soviet government had limited options in terms of enhancing the productive efficiency or capacity of that area. The chapter also tells how the Ministry of Agriculture promoted hunting programs, and how this enabled the Soviet state to successfully redefine its political and economic control over Irkutsk Oblast.

This chapter discusses how the life of the folk was proceeding under the Soviet rule. Based on life stories collected by the Estonian archives and Latvian oral history projects, this chapter is about deportations to Siberia and the making of collective farms and changing of peoples’ lives altogether. It is also about the context in which folklorists worked.

This chapter describes the mass political campaigns and political pressures during Mao’s reign. In fall 1957, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, which brought further collectivization initiatives to the countryside and caused existing farming collectives to merge into gigantic People’s Communes. By 1958, as crop failures and widespread famine came more and more into conflict with Mao’s vision of abundance, he began to put pressure on the local cadres. To meet ever increasing production quotas, local cadres forced already enfeebled peasants not only to hand over their very last kernels of grain but also to work day and night on empty stomachs. Famine worsened in the countryside, and eventually took more than 40 million lives.

In June 1940 the legal status of Soviet workers changed dramatically. Absenteeism and unauthorized job-changing became criminal offenses. Six months after the German invasion, the severity of the penalties escalated: workers in defense sectors who left their jobs were branded “labor deserters” and subject to long prison terms. More than seven million workers were convicted for absenteeism or illegal quitting. Yet coercion had its limits. Despite the draconian penalties, millions of vocational trainees and workers defied the law and fled, prompted by painful working and living conditions. Authorities showed themselves either unable or unwilling to enforce the law, thus weakening the threat of punishment. Barely half of those who fled were convicted, and of these only 40 percent were ever found and made to serve a sentence. Collective farms welcomed the return of mobilized workers. Coercion proved ineffective in practice.

By 1943, the labor system was in crisis. The state switched its focus from the cities to the countryside, mobilizing people to work far from home. Hundreds of thousands of Central Asian peasants were sent to eastern towns. Factories, mines, and timber operations became multinational sites combining workers from more than fifty national and ethnic groups. By 1945, 70 percent of Russian women were engaged in waged labor. As the Red Army began liberating the occupied territories, more workers were needed to rebuild devastated towns and industries. Local soviets, collective farms, and industry fought fiercely over labor. Leaders of the Central Asian republics demanded the return of their citizens. The Committee to Enumerate and Distribute the Labor Force failed to meet the demands of industry, and vast backlogs undermined all semblance of planning. Hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized workers fled back home; others sickened and died from illness and starvation. The labor system, initially a powerful weapon in the struggle for defense production, reached an impasse.

The nationalised DEFA (Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft) was East Germany's only film company. As in other areas of industrial production in the GDR, the annual output of films was planned many years in advance by the DEFA management, the aim being to produce a balanced package covering a variety of genres including musicals and comedies. This chapter focuses on how the communist authorities in East Germany attempted to compete with Western popular culture by producing socialist musicals that celebrated factory life and farm collectives in the period between 1958 and 1968. Interestingly, as the chapter points out, the conventions of escapism and fun remained central to these films, although Western ‘decadence’ was rejected in favour of a strong emphasis on women's emancipation, especially the right to work. This chapter looks at two film musicals directed by two East German filmmakers who specialised in entertainment films – Gottfried Kolditz's Revue um Mitternacht (Midnight Revue, 1962) and Joachim Hasler's Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968) – both of which were domestic box office hits.

This chapter examines the stabilization of hierarchies and the changing balance between co-optation and political exclusion after the war. It looks into the subsidence of the Bolsheviks' fixation on the class struggle and former practices of class discrimination that were progressively dismantled when Joseph Stalin declared the ceasing of class exploitation and the inclusion of “nonantagonistic” classes in the population by mid-1930s. It also describes the Soviet regional party cadres in the late 1940s that still inhabited a resolutely ideological world. The chapter investigates the state of affairs in Russia that reflected an increasingly bitter ideological conflict with the West. It also talks about the massive campaign against “theft of socialist property,” campaigns against “speculation,” and against the enlargement of private plots on collective farms.