Erosion work ethic of the soviet peasantry in the postwar decades (on materials of the Ulyanovsk Region)

Modern problems in the agricultural sector are rooted in the fact that for decades the state agricultural policy was characterized by neglect of the interests of the main producer, non-economic coercion to labour, alienation from the land and produced goods, infringement of social rights of the peasantry which inevitably led to urbanization, population migration from villages. On the basis of the study of the scientific literature and archival documents which have been analysed for the first time, the complex process of destruction of the collective farmers’s attitude to work in the public sector is explored. According to the author, the material difficulties of rural society in the war years led to the recovery in the agricultural society of previous forms of economic activity, namely the one-man operation in its stead. The victorious conclusion of the war led to the restoration of the pre-war state policy in the field of agriculture, but farmers continued to ignore social work. The author believes that public campaigns aimed at the restoration of collective farmers’s labor discipline were unsuccessful because in the absence of material incentives the collective farmers were not ready for selfless labor in social production.