Collective farms

Further, the authors have carefully examined and documented the public health and environmental impacts of pesticide use in the USSR. The USSR was the largest country by territory in the world and the use of pesticide here was enormous. As the authors have shown, this happened mostly because the USSR s Communistic rulers decided at the end of the 1960 s — to turn all chemical weaponry plants (constructed in the beginning of the cold war) to pesticide production. With rich government subsidies, pesticides were distributed through all collective farms The Soviet official policy, the chemicalisation of agriculture, was an attempt to overcome its prominent ineffectiveness in crop production. 

On May 14, 1971, 154 female collective farm workers from the Ilyich Collective Farm in the Krivoozersk Region started work in a beet field one hour after treatment with polychlorpinen. Acute poisoning took place immediately. 

In the summer of 1972 in the Kuybyshev Collective Farm in the Krivoozersk Region, a field was fertilized with ammonia solution 14 days after treatment with polychlorpinen. Twenty-seven female collective farm workers went into the field on the following day (the 15th after treatment with polychlorpinen), and were immediately poisoned. Seven days later they were sent again to the same field, with the same result. 

On April 25, 1972, a field from the Banner of Communism Collective Farm in the Bratsk Region was treated with polychlorpinen. Thirty-three female collective farm workers, working in this field from May 5-21, did not complain about conditions. On May 22, two to three hours after a wind carried over amino salt 2,4-D from a neighboring field that had been sprayed at the time, all 33 displayed symptoms of acute poisoning (the concentration of polychlorpinen in the air over the field was only 0.03-0.001 mg/m3 two days after the poisoning). 

On May 1-2, 1974, a field from the Zhdanov Collective Farm in the Krivoozersk Region was treated with polychlorpinen. On May 15-25, 57 female collective farm workers worked in this field with no complaints. From May 30-June 6 the field was fertilized with ammonium nitrate, and on June 8 it rained. When, on June 11, the same 57 women worked in this field again, by 2pm all developed acute gas poisoning (the concentration of polychlorpinen in the air over the field three days later was only 0.04 mg/m3). 

Kiev Oblast ( Ukraine Collective Farm, Mironov Region) [81]... 

Female collective farm workers suffered acute poisoning 2.5 hours after the last polychlorpinen treatment of the field. 

A mass poisoning of female collective farm workers while weeding the sugar beet field took place eight days after the last polychlorpinen treatment (with high soil humidity). 

One more example of acute polychlorpinen poisoning occurred in the Ukraine around 1969-70, when 27 women aged 26-49 were sent out to sow collective farm fields three days after the fields had been treated with polychlorpinen. A warm rain washed the pesticide from the soil, and the pesticide evaporated intensively. All the women showed symptoms of acute poisoning 20-40 minutes later eight lost consciousness, and nine had fits. The poisoned women spent from 3-25 days in the regional hospital, after which they all went to the VNIIGINTOKS clinic with disruptions of the neural and cardio-vascular systems, as well as of the digestive tract over the next 9-13 months [43]. 

Working conditions were studied in one of the collective farms in Tajikistan where vamidothion was used to fight spider mites in cotton [A52]. The vamidothion concentration in work zone air when it was sprayed from airplanes and tractors reached 0.9 mg/m3, according to underreported data (the public health standard was 0.1 mg/m3) ]. In 1978, vamidothion was banned however, the 1997 Official Handbook of the Health and Epidemiological Service of Russia [10] still lists this pesticide, with no mention of the ban ... 

Pesticide poisoning incidents from 1959-68 in Uzbekistan were analyzed. The acute poisoning analysis permitted us to divide sufferers into three groups the first indudes workers who have direct contact with pestiddes the second includes collective farm workers who worked in the fields shortly after the crops were treated and the third includes people who suffered the effects of pestiddes introduced into their bodies through water, food, and inhalation. 

Although economists may think of their so-called economic welfare analysis as being rooted in individual preferences, in its appHcation the benefit-cost analysis based on that welfare theory is inherently coUectivist, evoking the image of a collective farm presided over by a benevolent dictator who seeks to practice the welfare calculus of Benthamite utilitarianism. In this connection, see Reinhardt (2001). 

Anpilov LI, Prokudin AA (1984) Preventive effectiveness of dried polyvalent Shigella bacteriophage in organized collective farms. Voenno-Meditsinskii Zhumal (Russian MUitary-Med J ) 5 39-40... 

A recent New York Times article reported that Russia s collective farms have emerged as the latest investment target for large agribusinesses (Kramer 2008). 

In her book on homelessness in Russia, Svetlana Stephenson (2,006 83) writes that collective farms were often dumping grounds for social waste —i.e., homeless persons, the unemployed, and other undesirables—during the Soviet period and continuing into the post-Soviet period. 

Kramer, Andrew E. 2008. Russia s Lazy Collective Farms Are a Hot Capitalist Property. New York Times, August 31. 

How did the hard-pressed state find its way in this labyrinth Where possible, the Bolsheviks did try to establish large state farms or collective farms. Many of these were Potemkin collectives designed merely to give cover of legitimacy to existing practices. But where they were not a sham, they revealed the political and administrative attractiveness of a radical simplification of the landholding and tax-... 

One purpose of collectivization was to destroy these economic and social units, which were hostile to state control, and to force the peasantry into an institutional straitjacket of the state s devising. The new institutional order of collective farms would now be compatible with the state s purposes of appropriation and directed development. Given the quasi-civil war conditions of the countryside, the solution was as much a product of military occupation and pacification as of "socialist transformation. ... 

Property Open commons, communal Collective farms... 

The next step was regulated, communal production. This form of cultivation was anticipated in the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act (1975), which established "village collective farms" and required village authorities to draw up annual work plans and production targets. 

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