The brigade (Russian: brigada) was a labor force division within the Soviet collective farm (kolkhoz).
The mass collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s pushed the peasantry from individual household production into an archipelago of collective farms.
The most basic measure was to divide the workforce into a number of groups, generally known as brigades, for working purposes.
A Communist Party resolution of 4 February 1932 said the brigade's land should be fixed for the agricultural year, but some kolkhozes found that it helped forward planning to fix it for the whole period of the crop-rotation, and this practice was formally adopted in the kolkhoz Model Statute of 1935.
Brigades varied in size from 200 workers in the north, north-west and parts of the non-black-earth centre, to about 100 in the Lower and Middle Volga.