Kolkhoz

This gradual shift to collective farming in the first 11 years after the October Revolution was turned into a "violent stampede" during the forced collectivization campaign that began in 1928.

It asserts that "the kolkhoz is managed according to the principles of socialist self-management, democracy, and openness, with active participation of the members in decisions concerning all aspects of internal life".

[3] In practice, the collective farm that emerged after Stalin’s collectivization campaign did not have many characteristics of a true cooperative, except for nominal joint ownership of non-land assets by the members (the land in the Soviet Union was nationalized in 1917).

Even the basic principle of voluntary membership was violated by the process of forced collectivization; members did not retain a right of free exit, and those who managed to leave could not take their share of assets with them (neither in kind nor in cash-equivalent form).

Nevertheless, in locations with particularly good land or if it happened to have capable management, some kolkhozes accumulated substantial sums of money in their bank accounts.

In the late 1960s, Khrushchev's administration authorized a guaranteed wage to kolkhoz members, similarly to sovkhoz employees; this reduced the already minor distinction between state and collective farms.

This profit was used to fund the purchase of foreign machinery to accelerate the industrialisation of the Soviet Union, which Stalin and the AUCP believed was necessary to modernise the USSR and its population to avoid military disasters like those suffered in WW1 and the Russo-Japanese War.

Prices paid by the Soviet government hardly changed at all between 1929 and 1953, meaning that the State came to pay less than one half or even one third of the cost of production.

[14] Specific tasks on kolkhozes were assigned a particular number of labor days, with the rates determined in advance by state authorities.

Still, field surveys conducted in CIS countries in the 1990s generally indicated that, in the opinion of the members and the managers, many of the new corporate farms behaved and functioned for all practical reasons like the old kolkhozes.

Thus, in Turkmenistan, a presidential decree of June 1995 summarily "reorganized" all kolkhozes into "peasant associations" (Turkmen: daikhan berleshik).

These collective dehkan farms are often referred to as "kolkhozy" in the vernacular, although legally they are a different organizational form and the number of "true" kolkhozes in Tajikistan today[when?]

Similarly in Uzbekistan the 1998 Land Code renamed all kolkhozes and sovkhozes shirkats (Uzbek for agricultural cooperatives) and just five years later, in October 2003, the government's new strategy for land reform prescribed a sweeping reorientation from shirkats to peasant farms, which since then have virtually replaced all corporate farms.

In Belarus, kolkhozes survived,[18][19] although it is no longer an official classification: in 2014 Lukashenka ordered to formally reorganize them into the enterprises of types "хозяйственное общество" and "коммунальное унитарное предприятие".