WI: USSR achieves food autarky in 1950s?

[GlobalHumanism]

Presumably, with some somewhat simple PODs, most of which would have do with ignoring Lysenko's nonsense, the Soviet Union could achieve agricultural production levels that could feed it's domestic populace without the need to import by the late 50s.

The question I have is if this did happen, what effect would this have on the Soviet economy long term?
If it could become a net-exporter of foodstuffs, what effect would this have on western economies?

 

[GlobalHumanism]

No one want to take a stab at it?

 

[Earth Judicar]

Well the Soviet Union could itself export foodstuffs especially to its client states and Western Europe. Though America wouldn't be happy about that.

It would make the USSR far less vulnerable to sanctions and blockades and would increase its soft power. As well as population.

I could see other states attempting to emulate this with mixed results.

I'm sure the US's reaction would be hostile but well within the way the US reacted to Soviet advances in the era.

The affects long term I'm not sure-it may help the USSR but at the same time probably won't win it the Cold War.

It will have an impact especially in the 1970s and 80s though what is something I can guess at.

 

[marathag]

If they make more farm machinery in the '30s, their military would have fewer tanks by 1941.
That's what happens when 'Butter' edges out 'Guns'

 

[Earth Judicar]

If they make more farm machinery in the '30s, their military would have fewer tanks by 1941.
That's what happens when 'Butter' edges out 'Guns'

I think he is talking about the late 40s and fifties. Presumably post war.

 

[QueerSpear]

If they make more farm machinery in the '30s, their military would have fewer tanks by 1941.
That's what happens when 'Butter' edges out 'Guns'

With the vast natural resources that the Soviets have at their disposal, they can produce both farm machinery and tanks at very high rates.

Avoiding forced collectivization or do collectivization in an incremental and intelligent way would be the only way to achieve that. It was the Soviet class war with wealthy farm owners and not industrial capacity that forever crippled Soviet agriculture.

 

[marathag]

I think he is talking about the late 40s and fifties. Presumably post war.

But the damage was done in the '30s. You need to change the mindset then so the minor OTL crop failures do not get magnified to the Holodomor from the CP need to find wreckers and traitors that killed many of the best farmers.

 

[marathag]

With the vast natural resources that the Soviets have at their disposal, they can produce both farm machinery and tanks at very high rates.

There are a finite number of workers. It's very hard to expand all areas: something must suffer if the spotlight is on other sectors of the economy. There are costs that even Stalin could not ignore.

There are trades offs, like not having the Worlds largest air and armored forces while Ukrainian Kulaks were being systematically starved to death.

The had leading edge tanks while they had few tractors inspired by Fordson Tractors that were obsolete when the first ones were being produced in Leningrad.

 

[Obergruppenführer Smith]

For starters, avoiding Lysenkoism would definitely help.

 

[BootOnFace]

You need to avoid collectivizing the farms. Soviet agricultural production never recovered. Even now, Russian agricultural production is around that of France, with almost twice the population to support. Russia had been behind in agriculture since the 1700s. What is needed is a full-blown Deng style agricultural reform. You need agricultural advisors to go to the villages, you need local agriculture investment banks, you need agricultural schools in every mid-sized city and agricultural societies like Grange societies and 4-H in America. You even need an All-Union land management bureau to prevent dust bowls from overuse of soil. You also need to let peasants grow what they want and assign land to each family, not each commune. You should also allow families to purchase the allotments of other families. Then let them sell the goods on an open market. This incentivises investing into the land and equipment, increasing productivity by leaps and bounds. It might not work as well as it did in China, but it's a hell of a lot better than the Tsarist or Soviet systems.

This requires a lot of funding and political capital. A Stalin that just came into power on the promise of collectivizing agriculture won't be able to do it without keeping his promise on the NEP, which was extending it. Luckily, if he switched promises broken, we'd see a far more economically stable USSR. The lack of state investment in heavy industry will almost certainly be offset by a lack of deaths(and population growth) from famine and actually being able to fund selling grain without killing people. I believe that the lack of industry caused by an extension of the NEP will be more than made up by the greater amount of Lend-Lease the USSR could afford and the millions of extra people who don't die from famine and children that are born creating economic growth, especially since the glut of agricultural goods will cause many young men and women to move to the cities. Where factories are.

The best POD for this is Stalin handling the Crisis of 1928 completely differently. Instead of initiating the collectivization of agriculture, Stalin reframes this as a failure of living up to the Land, Bread, Peace program of Lenin caused by the treacherous Left Opposition. He initiates agricultural reforms to distribute land to individual families of peasants instead of communes and breaks up the farms of the kulaks and gives their land to their employees. He lets the prices of agricultural goods raise, so the peasants have incentive to sell their goods, and they have the income to buy manufactured goods and machinery. Since the price of grains rose, the taxes collected on grain also rose, providing the state with more money while the cities were starting to be strangled by high food prices. Stalin's response was a Back to the Fields drive, where educated urban workers and members of the Communist Party were educated on how agricultural business worked and sent to establish Agriculture Investment Banks/Communist Party headquarters in the countryside. This infuriates the Left Opposition, but due to bank policies favoring CPSU members, rural membership of the party skyrockets, anchoring Stalin and the Right's support in the countryside.

With agricultural production increasing and the purchase of consumer goods and machinery in the countryside growing alongside it, the Soviet grain crisis passes without the disaster the Left predicted, further discrediting the Left and cementing Stalin and the Right's power. The Soviet Union comes across another Scissor's Crisis in 1935, with overproduction of agricultural goods dropping prices so low that farmers let fields lay fallow and triggering a crisis in rural communities. Luckily, Stalin has a successful policy to imitate and that is the Agricultural Adjustment Act in the United States. Following the example of Roosevelt, Stalin uses state funds to pay farmers to not grow crops and to subsidize the growing of crops essential to state interest. The project is as successful in the Soviet Union as it was in the US, giving Stalin the political capital to go after his enemies that he blamed for sabotaging the agriculture prices in an effort to destroy support for the Communist Party in rural areas. The drop in ag prices also triggered a mass exodus to the cities, where new factories funded by the successfully growing food exports are being built. Although by 1941, the Soviet Union has fewer tanks and artillery pieces, increased support among rural Soviets allows the war to go fairly historically, with Stalin bringing back War Communism in an effort to increase arms production and thanks to a much larger supply of available workers, production is at historical levels by 1945. Better trade relations with the UK and USA due to the extended NEP also allow for a much greater Lend Lease to the Soviet Union to make up for a lack of production in the early war.

By 1951, the Soviet Union is deliberately sabotaging agriculture in Eastern Europe to keep the Warsaw Pact dependent on Soviet grain. Who knows where it will go after Stalin dies? Maybe someone else can continue this idea.

 

[marathag]

A note on Tractor Technology

Fordson of 1920

Not much change to be the Fordzon-Putilovets, made till 1932

Or the McCormick-Deering 15-30 of 1921

aka SKhTZ-15/30, made at the Stalingrad Factory till 1941


Soviet tractors tended to be slower, and most were tracked, that couldn’t be used the same way as the newer wheeled Row Crop Tractors with the front wheels tilted close together, that was introduced by Oliver in 1930.

Rubber tires were introduced by B. F. Goodrich in 1931 and popularized by Firestone

14 percent of wheel tractors were sold on rubber in 1935, 31 percent in 1936, 43 percent in 1937, 95 percent in 1940

Nebraska Tractor Test No. 223, begun in May, 1934. This was the first official test of a rubber pneumatic tired tractor and with a Allis-Chalmers WC. Tests were made using the same tractor, first equipped with rubber tires and then with steel wheels. 5.62 horsepower hours per gallon of fuel was noted with steel wheels and then 8.18 on rubber tires. The average horsepower hours per gallon of fuel by all 46 wheel-tractors tested during the 1930 Nebraska Tractor Test of 5.59
Tracks gave better traction and less soil compaction than the earlier steel wheels, but pneumatic tires had far higher operating speeds and operator comfort, for nearly the same traction

Row Crop wheel setup allowed the tractor to both plow and cultivate, and the older wide front end became rare in the US for decades, till the size of tractors greatly increased in the late ‘60s.

The US tried row crop adaptations for crawlers, but were not successful

Speed was important as there were fewer trucks. Tractors were used for bringing the crops in where the US used trucks almost exclusively. Tracks made those trips even slower, as few had speeds higher than 5mph.

Most all Soviet tractors had lower horsepower ratings than US makes.

Electric start introduced in 1936 with the Minneapolis-Moline, and all Cleveland Tractor Company, Cletrac, had their whole line equipped with electric starters and lighting.

The last US advantages was the adoption of the three point hitch, that allowed fast hooking up of implements, and the raising of the tooling from the drivers seat, and a rear PTO, allowing powered implements rather than belt drive, where they both had to be stationary

This greatly increased the speed where a farmer could plow a row, lift the tooling and then start a new row after the turn, rather than stopping, getting off the seat and adjusting the implement

In the space of a decade, all while the Deprssion was ongoing, US Tractors left the Soviet Fordsons and crawlers in the Dust, so to speak, in overall ability and productivity

 

[Perkeo]

Frankly, I am puzzled how a nation with the USSR's incredible natural ressources and a very low population density can fail to feed its people in the first place.

 

[TonyA]

Frankly, I am puzzled how a nation with the USSR's incredible natural ressources and a very low population density can fail to feed its people in the first place.

Never struck me that they were really trying; always more interested in what was going on outside their borders than inside, more trouble makers than problem solvers. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, the Russians are their own worst enemy...

 

[DrakonFin]

Never struck me that they were really trying; always more interested in what was going on outside their borders than inside, more trouble makers than problem solvers. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, the Russians are their own worst enemy...

Quite so. It seems to me that Russia has for long been a nation that with huge effort, great heroism and massive human cost time and time again manages to overcome such almost insurmountable challenges and adversities most major nations avoid in advance simply by not continually and consistently shooting themselves in the foot.

I really admire the Russian people for their strength, resilience and tenacity, a seemingly nearly superhuman ability to endure the kind of leadership the nation keeps getting saddled with.

 

[GlobalHumanism]

By 1951, the Soviet Union is deliberately sabotaging agriculture in Eastern Europe to keep the Warsaw Pact dependent on Soviet grain. Who knows where it will go after Stalin dies? Maybe someone else can continue this idea.

I think what's most interesting, regardless of the methodology used to get there, would be the "what if" of Soviet-branded grain, corn, bread, canned produce, etc existing on western grocery shelves.
Would people buy it, especially in Western Europe, to spite the ubiquitous dominance of US produced goods?
What sort of effect would this have on the soft power of the USSR during the cold war?

 

[RamscoopRaider]

I think what's most interesting, regardless of the methodology used to get there, would be the "what if" of Soviet-branded grain, corn, bread, canned produce, etc existing on western grocery shelves.
Would people buy it, especially in Western Europe, to spite the ubiquitous dominance of US produced goods?
What sort of effect would this have on the soft power of the USSR during the cold war?

That is more difficult than just giving them food surpluses, now you have to also give them the QC to let it get through Western Food Safety standards. From what I have heard, I'm not sure they could manage that reliably

 

[marathag]

Soviets having decent QC practices is a huge PoD by itself

 

[chankljp]

I think what's most interesting, regardless of the methodology used to get there, would be the "what if" of Soviet-branded grain, corn, bread, canned produce, etc existing on western grocery shelves.
Would people buy it, especially in Western Europe, to spite the ubiquitous dominance of US produced goods?
What sort of effect would this have on the soft power of the USSR during the cold war?

As fascinating as the idea of Soviet branded products being on the shelves of western grocery stores and supermarkets might be, I think the Soviets would have been far more likely to just sell their surplus foodstuff to western food companies as raw materials, and let them do all the processing and marketing on their end.

 

[Alexander the Average]

As fascinating as the idea of Soviet branded products being on the shelves of western grocery stores and supermarkets might be, I think the Soviets would have been far more likely to just sell their surplus foodstuff to western food companies as raw materials, and let them do all the processing and marketing on their end.

I could imagine right-wing anticommunists campaigning for labelling products with Soviet produce in them.

 

[DrakonFin]

As fascinating as the idea of Soviet branded products being on the shelves of western grocery stores and supermarkets might be, I think the Soviets would have been far more likely to just sell their surplus foodstuff to western food companies as raw materials, and let them do all the processing and marketing on their end.

I agree, it is in so many ways much less of a hassle to go about it this way than trying to develop, market and deliver actual Soviet consumer products for the Western markets.