238 



Van Atta 4 



century. But collectivization achieved its immediate goal of subduing the 

 countryside. 



Because they were political devices forcibly imposed, the collective farms 

 were designed and intended to be run on command from above. To this day 

 sowing, harvesting and the other operations of farm life are camed out by 

 directives "sent down" from local, regional, and ultimately national authorities. 

 Managerial initiative has often been harshly punished. Vasilii Starodubtsev. the 

 chairman of a model kolkhoz in the Tula oblast' which some of you may have 

 visited and who is now better remembered for his part in the August 1991 coup, 

 was very nearly jailed under Brezhnev for corruption because he did what he 

 had to do to make his farm operate well. Vasilii's brother Dmitrii actually did go 

 to jail in the 1970s for similar "offenses." 



Within the farms, the managers tend to treat their wori<ers the way higher 

 authorities have treated them: as automatons to be ordered about. Most good 

 farm managers have an authoritarian management style which would have 

 been congenial— if pertiaps harsh-seeming— to Henry Ford. Such paternalism, 

 of course, has advantages for many of the woricers. They do not have to woric 

 very hard and their needs will be taken care of by the boss. The ties of 

 dependence on the management— not just for work, but for housing, medical 

 care, education, stores, transportation, recreation, and for every other daily 

 necessity— make these farms what the sociologist En/ing Goffman called "total 

 institutions." akin to military units or prisons in the degree of control they 

 exercise over their subjects' lives. Like long-term prisoners or career military 

 personnel, or indeed anyone else with long service in a particular social 

 context, the farm wori<ers have grown used to these conditions and find it 

 difficult to imagine how they could live otherwise. Thus they are very often 

 willing "prisoners" of their managers. Like supporters of any good political 



