Corn Crusade by Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell

Author:Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7American Technology, Soviet Practice

Seeing his ambitions for corn and industrial agriculture hindered, Nikita Khrushchev developed policies confronting the bureaucracy, whom he denounced in speeches amplified by press campaigns. This antibureaucracy rhetoric employed epithets that shed light on existing practices and officials’ unease at losing their position. Beginning early in the decade, public and secret documents alike utilized po shablonu (a shablon is a template) to denounce administration by formula with little thought for outcomes. At intervals, they condemned formalizm (concern for bureaucratic form rather than results), ochkovtiratelstvo (duplicity, deceit), pripiski (adding fictional production to reports or forging work orders), obman gosudarstva (cheating the government), biurokratizm (runaway bureaucracy), and the related volokita (red tape). Although it is not exhaustive, this list does not include bribery, a practice that seems to have been prevalent, but which did not number among these antibureaucracy slogans.

Khrushchev, the Central Committee Presidium, and the USSR Council of Ministers established formal policies, but the formidable administrative apparatus did not automatically transform policy into action. Inherited from Iosif Stalin, the apparently rigid and self-serving bureaucracies impeded Khrushchev’s efforts to transform ambitions into agricultural commodities.1 The leader mandated technological innovations to facilitate the rapid growth of corn plantings, but these failed to ensure that officials responsible for construction, manufacturing, and procurements executed these policies.

Khrushchev struggled to discipline administrative organizations into a functional management apparatus. Launching the full-scale crusade for corn in 1955, Khrushchev ordered factories to build specialized harvesters, planters, and cultivators, but the answerable ministries delivered slowly. In early 1957, Khrushchev and his rivals together initiated a reform to break up vertically integrated economic ministries, an effort to transform the bureaucracies into responsive tools for implementing policy.2 In subsequent years, the government made an investment in hybrid corn seed by importing American technologies and methods. Achieving partial successes, these programs shed light on how economic management functioned. Moreover, the seeds challenged orthodoxies about genetics associated with Trofim Lysenko. Winning a battle, proponents of hybrid corn secured official backing to ensure that, by 1960, the country had made substantial advances in seed technology in spite of Lysenko. Over the course of a decade, Khrushchev proved able to maintain a corn crusade of such scope and intensity because he inherited a model of top-down authority from Stalin. Unwilling to threaten violent repression, Khrushchev and his ambitions collided with the functionaries whose practices encumbered efforts to implement policy.

Particularly in their archival records, bureaucracies portray themselves as orderly hierarchies. The Soviet Union’s government and the Communist Party were no different, but behind that façade, a mishmash of formal procedures, unofficial practices, personal relationships, stopgap measures, and outright falsehoods permitted the system to function while constraining its capacity for disciplined and effective action. Studies of informal relationships in the Soviet Union have concluded that practices were often “self-subversive,” meaning that they permitted individuals to achieve ends but, in greasing the wheels, undermined formal procedures and rendered systematic operation impossible.3 From ministries in Moscow to enterprises far from the capital, officials impaired policies through inertia and subterfuge.

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