Agrarian development’s issues of Penza region during the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

Background. The relevance of the chosen topic is determined by the need to comprehend the historical experience of the formation and implementation of agrarian poli-cy in the USSR. The purpose of the study is to analyze the effectiveness of the collective farm system in the context of a military conflict, to study the arsenal of means and methods of regional, district and rural levels of government and the mobilization resources of the Soviet countryside. Materials and methods. The main issues of the agricultural develop-ment of Penza region during the Great Patriotic War analyzes in this article. The basis of the corpus of sources was formed by the office work documentation of the party admi-nistration, presented in the regional (State Archives of Penza region) and central archives (the Russian State Archives of Economics, the Russian State Archives of Social-Political History). The research methodology is based on the principles of a systematic approach to the consideration of issues of the history of Soviet society. At the same time, the explora-tion of the collective farm countryside as an open system capable of self-development and self-organization, but exchanging resources, energy, information with external systems and adapting to emerging threats is of fundamental importance. Results. The factors of agra-rian development of Penza region during the Great Patriotic War were revealed. The practi-ces of social-political interaction in the conditions of the economic collapse of the first war years are described. The ways and mechanisms of management, sources and resources of adaptation of the collective farm countryside to the challenges of the time are determined. Conclusions. The Soviet peasantry is regarded as the main resource of the war and the source of victory in the Great Patriotic War. There was a sharp reduction in the power sup-ply and mechanization of agricultural production in the period 1941–1943 as a result of mobilization. The stabilizing factor was the total involvement of the collective farm pea-santry in the system of mobilization planning, which was based on the mechanisms of coer-cion and agitation and propaganda activities of the party authorities. Nevertheless, the main source of increasing the volume of food supplies was the reduction of seed funds and con-sumption funds, structural and functional restructuring of personal subsidiary plots.

Keywords

• penza region
• the great patriotic war
• agrarian policy
• party and state authori-ties
• tools and methods of management
• rural population
• production daily