The last twenty years have seen a considerable amount of soul-searching and policy change concerning collectivized agriculture but nowhere more than in Hungary.
12 They first followed the Soviet "horizontal" pattern and after the 1956 revolution reorganized and tried it out again. What resulted was a decline or stagnation of agriculture and chronic shortages of food supplies (to which, before 1956, harsh repressions meted out to a resentful rural population should be added). Neither mechanization nor the deportation of "Kulaks" and the arrest of the "saboteurs," nor bureaucratic orders and campaigns solved the permanent agricultural crisis. Then the Hungarian leadeKship demonstrated the courage of retreat, made a clean sweep, and began in a totally new manner. Village-scale units were now combined with both multi-village and single family ones.
Those deported from their villages were permitted to come back and often to direct cooperative production. External controls declined, compulsory sales were abolished, and "vertical" chains of mutually profitable production arrangements were set up and facilitated (e.g., a small holder buying fodder at a price satisfactory to him from the large-scale collective enterprise of which he is a member, to produce within his family unit meat which is then sold on a "free market" or under a contract). The agricultural results were dramatic, moving the country rapidly to the top of the European league where increase in agricultural production and incomes are concerned, not only resolving the problems of supplies but establishing Hungary as an exporter of food. The case of Hungarian agriculture and many other experiments with Collectivization, positive and negative, in Europe as well as in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, acted as an important validation of Chayanov's suggestions for agricultural transformation, of his prognostication, and, up to a point, of his more general theoretical constructs and approaches. It was clearly not the issue of size or of collectivism or even of Collectivization per se but of the actual form of rural transformation and new organization of production as well as the way it combines with peasants-versus-bureaucrats relations, How of resources, and the substantive issues of farming (and its peculiarities as a branch of production). In the face of all these issues, Chayanov's and his friends' superb understanding of agriculture, combined with that of rural society, made them unique. This makes his major project—what he called Social Agronomy—pertinent still. It is not that, on the whole, those who succeeded or failed have studied him directly in Hungary or elsewhere.
13 Such lines are seldom clear. But they would (or will) benefit and could lessen some pains if they would (or will) do so. The fact that this part of Chayanov's intellectual heritage is seldom considered or admitted has to do not with its content but with the nature of current ideological constraints to which we shall return.
