N. S. Khrushchev's Food Policy: Approaches and Contradictions

The subject of this article is the development of the USSR food supply system in the context of communist ideology and the economic efficiency of the agricultural sector. The subject of state regulation is the production relations that have developed between collective farms, state farms, personal subsidiary farms, suppliers, market and state sales agents on the issue of bringing food from producers to consumers. The purpose of this work is to determine the role of ideology in the organization and functioning of the food distribution system. In this regard, much attention is paid to the analysis of the relationship between specific economic measures (the development of virgin lands, the consolidation of collective farms and their transformation into state farms, the policy of curtailing private farms) and the general course of the party towards building communist relations in the countryside. The chronological framework covers the period 1953-1958. Methodologically, the work is based on the Marxist conceptual framework, which implies an appeal to the laws of conformity of industrial relations with the level of development of productive forces, cost, and productivity growth. When characterizing the influence of these categories on distribution relations, historical and comparative analysis of statistics and records was used, which revealed significant deformations in the system under consideration. A conclusion was drawn about the curtailment of the existing distribution mechanisms, for the organization of which the leadership of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, who had been removed from power, was responsible. The complex system of offsetting enterprises, the significant contribution of advanced farms to procurement, and the large role of collective farms and private farms in supplying food to the market were eliminated as not conforming to the course of the party in the countryside. In their place came measures of state paternalism, which were supposed to potentially equalize all producers in their development. These actions involved helping lagging collective farms through subsidies, mergers with advanced artels, and the transformation of these farms into communist-type state farms. Due to the size of the enterprises being created, the lack of storage and processing facilities, and the lack of control over distribution by the special services, the processes of food withdrawal from accounting began to gain momentum. These trends caused the growth of the shadow market and the spread of informal relations. The novelty of the research lies in the attempt to link the factor of party ideology with changes in industrial relations, a detailed analysis of the ways of distribution of finished products in the agricultural sector of the Khrushchev era.