Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

"Hey, Director Nian, why don't we get a better car? This suspension is terrible!" Slava's buttocks and lower back felt like they had been scrubbed with a washboard.

"Would you dare use a car issued by the KGB?" Director Nian sat in the passenger seat, one arm resting on the door as he looked out the window.

Indeed, no one dares to get on a KGB vehicle; they might never return.

“I’m not talking about KGB cars. Aren’t we from Moscow? Theoretically, we could get cars that are better than what we’re qualified for with our current official positions—either a Seagull or a ZIM would be fine! The Seagull’s air conditioning is really great, so much better than this crappy car!” Slava complained.

"Alright, we're here to investigate, not to enjoy ourselves. This is a good opportunity to 'pour cold water' on you and teach you a lesson, so bear with it," Director Nian replied.

A few hours later, they arrived at their first destination—a collective farm in the Swobodne district.

"Is this still the Soviet Union? What am I doing here? Ouch, my back!"

Slava rolled off the car more than he walked off, and Director Nian, trying not to laugh, helped him up.

The Amur Oblast is the size of four Netherlands countries combined, but has a population of just over one million, and its total paved road length is roughly the same as that of the streets in Moscow.

The lines that connect the towns you see on the map are, in reality, half of them are gravel roads, a quarter are dirt roads, and the remaining quarter will turn into a shallow river when the snow melts in spring.

UAZ's four-wheel drive can save lives on this kind of road, but it can't save a person's spine.

“If there were a highway here,” Slava said, standing by the muddy roadside, stretching his legs which had gone numb from the bumpy ride, looking at the vast, unsettling plains around him and the narrow silhouette of a birch forest on the distant horizon, “he could grow anything.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” Director Nian said, closing the car door and dusting off his hands. “You can grow anything here, but you can’t get the produce out.”

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

For the first two weeks, the two did not hold any meetings, declined all invitations to banquets, and traveled all over the Amur region.

In 14 days, the two of them quickly visited 14 collective farms and 3 state farms in 6 major agricultural areas of the Amur Region, spending most of the day wandering around the fields in each place.

Although it's not yet planting season in the Far East in early April, and most farmland is still a muddy mess after the thaw, you can still glean a lot from the soil's color, texture, drainage, and the crop residue from last year—

The prerequisite is that you need to know how to pronounce it.

Koslava knew very well that he didn't know how to read it.

He was a programmer who transmigrated from another world. His knowledge of agriculture was limited to the elementary school level of understanding that "seeds are planted in the soil, watered, fertilized, and then crops grow." As for things like soil pH, accumulated temperature zone distribution, the crop rotation cycle of soybeans and wheat, and the frost calendar of the Heilongjiang River basin, he couldn't even pronounce all the terms.

"Did you understand anything?" Director Nian, wearing sunglasses, stood by the roadside, watching Slava squatting on the ridge of the field, fiddling with the grass.

“...This place is really something.” Slava smacked his lips.

This is what happens when you have nothing to offer; you end up making a fool of yourself here.

"So you went to the fields without knowing anything?"

"You understand?"

"I'm the system, of course I understand!"

"Come on, tell me what you know?"

"Seeds must be planted in the ground!" Director Nian said, hands on his hips.

"..."

"We need to fertilize, water, and loosen the soil regularly, and also spray pesticides!" Director Nian continued, hands on his hips.

"..."

"What you grow must be stored properly!"

“...You’re amazing.” Slava got up and walked towards the collective farm. “Let’s go ask the chairman of the collective farm.”

While wandering around the fields, the two were basically in a state where "everything seemed interesting, but nothing was truly understandable."

The collective farm chairmen accompanying them probably realized that the newly arrived prefectural party secretary knew nothing about agriculture, but due to the deeply ingrained instinct of "serving superiors" in the Soviet cadre system, no one pointed this out. Instead, they competed to fill his ears with some seemingly professional terms and data, after all, this was how they had always fooled their superiors.

"This year's planting area plan is to increase by 3%." "Our farm's soybean yield has met the target for two consecutive years." "The national delivery target has been achieved at 102%."...

Now I understand.

If they understand, that's bad news, because Slava has already seen this move used in Uzbekistan.

"Comrade Chairman, you've been talking to me about the completion rate for so long, but you haven't told me one thing—what is your per capita income? How many rubles have you actually received?"

The chairman of the collective farm's expression froze for a moment, as if a phonograph playing according to a preset program had its needle suddenly moved to a tune it had never prepared for.

He paused for a moment, then began to recite a string of standard phrases that Slava later discovered he heard in all collective farms:

"Basic salary plus work points, plus in-kind subsidies and holiday bonuses—it adds up to about 140 to 160 rubles per month."

"What about the workers in the city? How much do factory workers in Blagoveshchensk earn per month?"

"Probably two hundred to two hundred and fifty rubles, but I'm not sure of the exact amount."

"Row."

Slava wrote the two figures down in his notebook, and drew a line next to them connecting them to another set of data he had obtained from the state statistics bureau:

In 1982, the average monthly consumption expenditure per capita in the Amur region was about 180 rubles for urban residents and about 120 rubles for rural residents. That is to say, a member of a collective farm earned 140 or 150 rubles a month, and after deducting basic expenses, he was left with 20 or 30 rubles—not even counting the things they wanted to buy but which were always out of stock in state-run stores.

What does this income level mean? It means that an agricultural worker who toils hard all year on the black soil of the Far East lives a lower standard of living than a second-level technician who slacks off in a factory in the city.

Then why do you expect him to be motivated to farm properly?

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

However, the situation in the alliance regarding farm plots is different from that of Old Zhong next door.

If it weren't for the guide's initiative to remind him, Slava wouldn't have even realized that the collective farm also had "private ownership".

At that time, she noticed the small vegetable plots behind the houses while strolling around the dormitory area of ​​a collective farm. Although it was not yet the planting season, she could see that the soil in the plots was much finer and the furrows were much neater than those in the collective fields. Some families even had plastic sheds built at the edge of their plots to raise seedlings in advance.

“Go ask them how much they harvested from their private plots,” Director Nian told Slava when he returned. “Those vegetable plots look much more carefully tended than the fields outside.”

Slava went the next day. He talked to an old farmhand named Vasily for almost an hour—Vasily was in his early sixties and had worked on the collective farm his whole life; he always had a piece of candy in his mouth when he spoke. Slava later learned that it was because his blood sugar was not good, but he couldn't bear to spend money on medicine.

Vasily's private plot was 0.3 hectares, or about two acres.

On these two acres of land, he planted potatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions, several rows of tomatoes, and also raised two pigs and more than a dozen chickens.

Last year, besides what he ate himself, he sold the leftover vegetables and eggs at the collective farm market in Blagoveshchensk for about 1,200 rubles, and two pigs for 800 rubles. Adding the income of over 1,600 rubles from working at the collective farm, Vasily's family of four earned a total of about 3,600 rubles last year.

This looks pretty good!

Vasily earned 1,600 rubles a year working on hundreds of hectares of farmland on the collective farm, and 2,000 rubles on two acres of land in his own backyard—a man who generated only 40 percent of the income from collective labor, but nearly 60 percent of the family income from his private plot of land, which was less than a fraction of the total area of ​​the collective farm.

This is the secret of private plots, and also an open gray secret in Soviet agriculture.

In 1982, private plots accounted for only about 3% of the total arable land in the Soviet Union, yet they contributed about 25% of the total agricultural output value—a figure known to everyone who has worked in the agricultural system, but no one dared to discuss its implications in public, because it was an ideological bomb:

If small, privately owned plots of land are so much more efficient than large, collectively owned fields, then what is the legitimacy of collectivization?

After recounting these figures, Vasily added, "It's not that I don't want to work hard in the village, Comrade Secretary—I also know that those lands belong to everyone, and the grain grown there is the nation's grain."

But think about it, whether I work one more day or one less day in the village, the work points I get at the end of the year won't differ much. Anyway, the tasks are distributed by village, not by number of people.

But if I plant one more row of vegetables in my own field, I can sell them for a few more rubles; anyone can figure that out.

Slava later learned that farm members had to complete the minimum number of workdays stipulated by the collective farm (the standard varied at different times, but was generally 100-150 workdays per year) before they could spend their time on their private plots.

Regarding poultry and livestock farming, the alliance did not have any regulations such as "raising three chickens is communism, raising four is capitalism." Do farming restrictions exist? Yes!

However, these restrictions mainly target large livestock such as cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep. Poultry and rabbits are managed very loosely in practice, and in many places, they are not properly counted at all.

Slava later called this practice “Soviet flexibility”: there was often a huge gray area between the written regulations and actual implementation.

In theory, if the limit is exceeded, the collective farm management committee has the right to require farm members to dispose of the excess livestock, impose fines, and in serious cases, reduce the area of ​​their private plots.

However, in practice, the enforcement of these regulations is often lax.

The chairman of the collective farm also has to meet the sales targets for meat, milk and eggs. Although the output of the private livestock of the farm members is considered their own, the farm members often sell or give a portion of the products to the farm to help the farm reach the required targets.

Under this tacit understanding, the chairman had no incentive to strictly count whether each household raised eight or twelve sheep. In some places, farms would even proactively sell or extend credit to their members to encourage them to raise more, because these products would eventually flow back into the collective economy's statistical records through various channels.

"Then why don't you raise more pigs?" Slava asked.

"There's no feed left. Large livestock need a lot of feed, and the production and distribution of feed are controlled by the collective farm."

Our plot of land is too small to grow enough forage crops. So we can only... uh...

Slava understood that Vasily could only rely on feed that "leaked" from the collective farm—sometimes officially allocated, sometimes through tacitly approved gray channels, and sometimes simply stolen.

Only then did he understand why the feed loss rate of the collective farm was so high; a considerable portion of it actually ended up in the private livestock sheds of the farm members.

Moreover, Director Nian is right; the level of infrastructure development does indeed limit the common prosperity of collective farms.

The alliance law stipulates that products from private plots can be sold at their own prices in the collective farm market, but transporting the products to the city market requires transportation and time. Due to infrastructure limitations, many farm members in remote areas can only consume locally or exchange within their own village.

Some farm members would secretly collaborate with "speculators"—the latter would buy products from multiple farm members and transport them to the black market in the city to resell at high prices.

This behavior is legally gray, but it has never been truly eradicated because the city's food supply system cannot function without this informal channel. Last year, even the city's leader bought ham on the black market.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

By the third week of the investigation, Slava was no longer satisfied with just walking around the fields and listening to reports; he started going to the university.

There aren't many higher education institutions in the Amur Oblast, but the Blagoveshchensk Agricultural Institute is quite good. For decades, it has been training agricultural technicians for the Far East, and several of its professors are renowned throughout the Soviet Union for their expertise in soybean breeding and soil and water conservation in the black soil region.

Slava contacted the dean of the agricultural college—an old professor named Kolossov—through the state committee's channels, and then talked with him for an entire afternoon in the college's small conference room.

Professor Kolossov provided Slava with much in agricultural theory that he could not find in any official reports.

他 说:

"The soybean planting potential of Amur Oblast is far from being realized. The fertility of the black soil here is not much worse than that of Ukraine, and the accumulated temperature and precipitation conditions can fully support higher yields!"

The problem lies in three places: First, there is variety degradation. Many of the soybean seeds used by the collective farms are old varieties bred in the 1970s or even the 1960s. The new varieties bred in the college have been promoted for ten years but have only covered less than 15 percent of the planting area in the whole state. This is because the promotion requires the cooperation of the seed station, which is under the management of another system, and the planned targets of the two sides do not match.

Secondly, the supply of fertilizers and pesticides was not keeping up. Fertilizers were transported from the Urals, thousands of kilometers away, to the Amur, often missing the optimal fertilization window. Pesticides were in long-term shortage because the Far East was the last priority in the allocation of pesticides in the entire Soviet Union.

Thirdly, post-harvest losses are staggering—soybeans need to be dried and stored as soon as possible after harvest, but the Amur region suffers from a severe shortage of grain drying facilities, resulting in 15% to 20% of soybeans becoming moldy and spoiled in warehouses each year because they cannot be dried in time.

Slava wrote down these figures in his notebook: "Okay, so our problem isn't just low yields in the fields, but that every link in the entire chain, from seed to planting to harvesting to storage and transportation, is leaking. In the end, consumers may only get 60 or 70% of what's produced in the fields."

"Correct."

Kolossov nodded, stood up from his chair, and walked to a map of the agricultural distribution in the Amur region hanging on the wall. He drew several circles and lines on the map with a piece of chalk—the seed station was here, the fertilizer warehouse was here, the grain drying plant was here, the railway loading station was here—and then stepped back to let Slava see the whole picture.

The distance between those circles and lines is so frustrating it's almost laughable.

The seed station is located at the northernmost point of the state, the fertilizer warehouse at the southernmost point, and the drying plant is next to the railway line but more than 100 kilometers away from the main production areas by gravel road. The railway loading station often has a waiting time of more than three weeks because the railway capacity in the Far East has been insufficient for a long time.

“I understand now. Solving any single link in isolation is meaningless, because the bottleneck will immediately shift to the next link. What if we increase soybean production? The capacity of the drying plant remains the same, and the excess soybeans will still rot in the warehouse. What if we expand the drying plant? The railway won't be able to accommodate enough wagons, and the dried soybeans still won't be able to be transported out.”

...

In the fourth week, Slava convened his first major meeting since taking office.

Normally, the meeting process should be "the leader speaks, the audience applauds, and then the meeting adjourns, nothing changes," but this time it was different. He set the meeting place in a large classroom at the Blagoveshchensk Agricultural College.

Those invited were divided into three groups.

The first group consisted of the heads of several major collective farms and state farms in the Amur region. These people possessed firsthand production data and operational experience. Although their reports were certainly embellished, at least they knew what was happening in the fields.

The second group consisted of professors and researchers from the Blagoveshchensk Agricultural Academy and the Amur Branch of the Far Eastern Academy of Sciences, including six or seven scholars, such as Kolossov, who specialized in soybean breeding, soil science, agricultural machinery, and hydraulic engineering.

The third group consisted of more than thirty ordinary collective farm members and farm workers, whom Slava invited by name through the KGB's grassroots network and by personally visiting several farms.

Slava separated the three groups and spoke with them separately over three half-days. The records of each conversation were only visible to him and the director and were not circulated to anyone else.

That morning, during his conversation with the farm manager, Slava heard the complete picture he had gradually pieced together during his three weeks of fieldwork:

Fertilizer is never enough and always arrives too late; the new varieties promoted by seed stations often don't match the varieties that farms actually need; it's common for repair parts for harvesting machinery to be ordered from the Ural Mountains thousands of kilometers away and wait for three months; and the grain drying capacity is severely insufficient, with enough soybeans rotting each year to feed tens of thousands of people.

But behind these specific problems, Slava discovered that when these officials discussed difficulties, almost none of them expressed, "I want autonomy to solve these problems." Without exception, their demands were directed at their superiors:

"If Moscow could give us more fertilizer quotas," "If the Ministry of Railways could prioritize our railcars," "If the Planning Commission could adjust our sowing quotas"...

In their mindset, the root of the problem lies in the fact that the higher-ups are not giving enough information or managing it in enough detail. The solution is to give more information and manage it in more detail from above—rather than giving those below more freedom to make their own decisions based on the actual situation.

This made Slava very uncomfortable, because he realized that after fifty years of operation, the collective farm system had not only changed the way agriculture was produced, but also the way people engaged in agriculture thought.

A person in charge who has worked in the collective farm system his whole life has become accustomed to waiting for instructions from above, asking for resources from above, and pushing responsibility upwards.

This is not a matter of his personal character, just as Slava believed that the workers who skipped work in the factory were not lazy by nature but because the incentive structure encouraged laziness.

The afternoon I spent talking with the professors was more fruitful, because the scholars—especially the older ones who were no longer concerned about their careers—spoke with far less restraint than the grassroots officials.

On that day, Kolossov proposed a concept that connected Slava's scattered observations over the past three weeks:

He said the problem with agriculture in Amur Oblast is the lack of a mechanism to integrate money, technology, and people.

Seeds were in research institutes, fertilizers were in warehouses, machinery was in repair shops, labor was in farms, and processing equipment was in food factories—everything was available, but they belonged to different administrative jurisdictions, and coordination between them depended entirely on the accuracy and efficiency of planning directives, which were precisely the scarcest resources in the Soviet system.

"If these processes were placed within a unified management framework within a state, and coordination between them were done directly locally instead of going through the planning committee in Moscow, how much do you think efficiency would improve?"