Collective Farms?

[76mm]

I've got a question for you East Front grogs out there--what did a WWII collective farm look like? In particular, any idea about how big the wheat fields should be, and roughly how many buildings might be involved? The wheatfields in the randomly-generated maps look improbably small...

I tried looking at existing CMBB scenarios, but it wasn't obvious that any of them was set in a collective farm--if someone could point me to a scenario with a realistic depiction, I'll take a look.

Thanks,

TMR

[dieseltaylor]

Somewhere or other there are maps for Western Russia of the right period. A search under maps may find it. I did have a map of the southern Ukriane at about a mile perinch that I downloaded about 2mb.

Certainly showed individual buildings etc.

[dieseltaylor]

A snippet I just found. Might explain the Russian problems in performing.

">Don't ever, ever, try to navigate with a Soviet map or chart.

I probably can write a book about Soviet carthgraphy:) Here are just some highlights.

When I was a student (1970-s) in Western Ukraine we needed maps for our mountain hiking in Karpaty mntns. We had to use Polish maps of 1930-s (that is made before this area was annexed by the Soviet Union) Soviet maps either did not exist or were top secret.

It is a well known fact that in 1941, when the Germans invaded, Soviet field commanders (of low and medium level) did not have topographic maps of Soviet territory at all. There is a lot

of discussion of this fact in the historical literature, and I think further research is needed to see why exactly this happened.

Later in the was they used German maps taken from the Germans. I mean the German maps of Soviet territory.

One reason for this is that the Soviet authorities were crazy about secrecy. Any precise map, even a city plan, was considered a top state secret. And you could not board an airplane with a photocamera or binoculars.

Alex. "

Interesting huh!

[dieseltaylor]

A map revised 5 times since 1938 at 1:50000.

sample map at about1.5mb from berkeley

[76mm]

Very cool map, but it doesn't seem to have anything labelled as a collective farm on it, and there is no legend to help identify some of the terrain symbols. So it shows villages very well, but not really how big the various fields are around a kholkoz, etc.

This is not a big deal, but I was hoping that someone (somehow) would just know this stuff--the info people on this forum have never ceases to amaze me.

TMR

[Sergei]

Here's an excerpt from a Finnish wartime map which shows the cattle farm "Svetlana" some 6km north of Leningrad. The open area to north with the text 'Lentokenttä' is an airfield.

There were probably very different sized collective farms. What was in common was that the workers were concentrated into centralized locations, in the middle of the fields, and then in the morning they went out from their barracks as if they worked in a factory. If they had tractors available (state farms mostly), they were able to use more land per peasant than if they had to do with horse and manpower (as the majority of collective farms did). In that sense, those newer maps can be misleading - 20 years or 30 years later the degree of mechanization in the Soviet country side was many times greater. Before WW2 USSR produced 32.000 tractors per anno - in 1966, according to a (obviously unreliable) Soviet source from 1967 the figure was 382.000 new tractors pa.

[dieseltaylor]

The very lack of specific sizes makes me think that the size was a reflection of the current farmed area around a village. Given one would run into another than I do not think it makes much practical difference which field belongs to which collective.

State farms where much larger enterprises and set-up as industrial agriculture but I suspect they were rare showpieces before the war. In the open lands to the east the of the Urals I suspect plantations where more common earlier.

web page is interesting.

[MikeyD]

From previous discussions on this board, my impression was that collective farms pretty much tore down old family farm boundaries. Lots of VERY large field's and VERY long straight fences. I didn't get much of an impression about living arrangements in a collective from previous discussions, though.

[simovitch]

Originally posted by dieseltaylor:

It is a well known fact that in 1941, when the Germans invaded, Soviet field commanders (of low and medium level) did not have topographic maps of Soviet territory at all. There is a lot

of discussion of this fact in the historical literature, and I think further research is needed to see why exactly this happened.

Even more interesting is the fact that even though the Germans had some quality maps and good aerial coverage of Russia and the Baltic States, that they still insisted on continuing the deployment of armored formations through the swamps and forests toward Leningrad.

[MikeyD]

I recall seeing one map of a Russian coastal town from the the late 40s (cold war era). The town was placed on the north-east side of a small inlet, which was rather peculiar because the it was in fact situated on the SOUTH side of the inlet! Russian maps weren't just rare and bad - they were bad on purpose!

[Bigduke6]

I can take a crack at this question, seeing as I visited the real thing in my younger days, and walked by the remains of some of them as recently as last weekend.

It probably would help to understand what a collective farm was, and was not. The term "collective" is important - it means that under the official Soviet accounting, the agricultural enterprise supposedly is self-supporting, generating enough rubles with the sales of its produce to support its costs of operation. An important thing to remember is that collective farms at least by definition (and in theory) were not run by the state, but rather the agricultural workers themselves.

This was pretty much an ad hoc construct by the Soviets to figure out a way to force the Russian empire's peasants into some form of Socialist framework. At least in the beginning pretty much it was one kholhoz (collective farm) per village.

Before getting to details I'll add that as time went on the Soviets went more and more to a bigger operation, called a "Sovkhoz", which didn't have to cover its costs but was just a government company, effectively a factory making agricultural produce. Some of these operations were gigantic, as it wasn't like the free market was keeping the Soviets from experimenting with economies of scale.

Add into that mixture the RL fact that different agriculture requires different equipment, labour volumes, water supplies, etc., and one thing you are left with is that the variety is endless.

I'll stick with the basics, and I'll keep to "classic" Soviet late 1930s, i.e., this is sort of the movie ideal, and the further you get away from Moscow, the more the reality will get away from this ideal.

First, you have to have a two-story building for the chairman. This building is always by far the highest-quality building of the entire kholkhoz. Very frequently there will be evergreens planted nearby or in front, as this denotes importance. If there is any place at the kholkhoz with electricity and plumbing, it is here. Also, if paved roads are limited, then this is the place with the single concrete parking lot, also in front of the building.

The next thing you need is a connection with the rest of the world, be it road or rail. Almost never is the connection a highway, usually it's a dirt road or a single lane macadam. There is no drainage on either side of the road, usually. Bridges are infrequent and if the terrain is uneven there are no grades. Bear in mind that the main means of transportation is hoof or human foot.

The road will go to the place where the agricultural produce is stored or processed or manufactured. This could be a RR siding, grain silos, or even (rare!) refrigeration for something like meat or dairy products. There is a short distance between the headquarters and this production building, depending on the size of the kholkhoz between say 50 and 500 meters.

Along this connecting road there is the other adminstrative buildigns that makes the kholkhoz go. If it is an important khokhoz there will be tractor sheds, and if there are tractors then there will inevitably be places for the tractors to get fuel and maintenance. An absolute necessity in any Soviet rural enterprise is the warehouse, where all the deficit spare parts and stuff every one wants (light bulbs, toilet paper, car tires) are kept.

Other adminstrative buildings along this central road strip would include, but not necessarily be limited to, a medical point where the nurse/doctor is, a cafeteria and kitchen to feed the administrative staff, a vehicle dispatch office if there are lots of vehicles, a place for the workers to change clothes and take showers, and so on. Some kholkhozes have specific needs: a dairy or a horse farm would rate a veterinarian.

If the (human) housing is on the territory of the kholkhoz it RL could be anything you want: peasant cottages, an old aristocrat's manor divided up into apartments, or even private farmer homes renamed proletarian housing, but with the same family still in it. In the ideal classic kholkhoz the workers would live in (really nasty) 4-5 story apartment buildings - but that's really a post-war development.

Pre-war, Soviets were really poor in construction materials and they lived where they could. Log cabins in regions where there is lots of forest are an absolute possibility.

The other alternative on housing, especially if the kholkhoz was grafted onto a historical village, was that you would have worker housing next to the kholkhoz, where the younger generation would live, and their parents and grandparents would live in the "old" village houses just like always. Naturally, worker housing got electricity and plumbing first. The old village houses are separated by wooden fences (painted green, usually) and every inch of spare ground is tilled or planted with fruit trees.

There was pretty much a set plan for Soviet use of a pre-revoltionary village. 1/3 of the time the Soviets dynamited the church as pre-revolutionary. The church would remain standing about 2/3 of the time, and about half of that the church would get converted into something else - for instance a library or "museum". Some buildings would keep their function: the police station stayed the police station, even if it was a just a building with two desks and four cops. Sometimes the Soviets would raze an old building next to the police station and build something nicer: this was of course the KGB. The biggest building in the city, of course, would the local Communist party hq. The second-largest building would be the regional administration. Usually those two bureaucracies were kept separate.

The other thing you would expect somewhere on the premises - if the kholkhoz was big enough in the adminstrative cluster, and if not then in the "old" village, would be a kind of public building suitable for weddings, public meetings, and similar. This was usually as big as say the mayor's office, and was inevitably called "The House of Culture".

If it was an especially-favored kholkhoz there might even be a movie theater, although that would be really rare. If we are talking a model kholkhoz for showing to foreigners, there might even be a sports gymnasium and even a football (soccer) field.

Soviet animal housing is/was the same as Russian empire: long, usually white single-story buildings without windows.

Ok, around this administrative complex there is a wall, and unless the place is giant there is only one vehicle entrance. At this vehicle entrance there is always a guard shack, and if they can manage it some kind of bar or rope to keep the workers in and trespassers out. The wall most frequently is made of two-meter tall reinforced concrete panels stuck in the ground. It goes all the way around this administrative center, and in those corners where there would be less visits by the big bosses, there is inevitably trash.

Another point about the concrete fence: there always are gaps on the back side where pedestrians take short cuts. I am not kidding, I have yet to see a Soviet era military base without holes in the wall somewhere on the back side. Probably this was not the case for serious military installations.

Ok, now on to the fields. The Soviets basically practiced classic three-part crop rotation. There was little fencing and what little there was was wood. I'd say the very rough average size of a field under a given tillage would be 500m by 250m.

There would be foot paths and even roads, all dirt, connecting where people lived to the fields.

Second to final note, there needs to be a source of water, be it a river, creek, well, or even water tower.

Final note: The Soviets were nuts about planting trees and pretty much whereever they could they planted something. I would expect all major roads to be planted with trees along the side, and lots of minor roads as well. Any building inhabited by Soviets for more than five years will have trees all over the place, if they can manage it.

As to Soviet Cold War military maps they weren't all bad. Check this site out:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/x-ussr/ukraine.html

I have had opporunity to go across small portions of some of these Cold War maps, which mostly were surveyed post-war and updated in the 1980s. Where I have had the chance to compare, they were correct. They are quite accurate enough to fight a war, IMO.

[76mm]

Thanks a lot BigDuke6, that pretty much covers the ground!

76mm

[dieseltaylor]

Big Duke6

Really interesting information. Regarding maps I referenced Berkeley and in fact in Imperialist times the Russians considered themselves some of the leading cartographers. However that does not detract from the quoted statement that middle and junior officers were not issued with maps in the early war.

It may well have been that the Soviets took a view on who should have maps and also the possibility that following the war with the White Russians there was a dearth of maps anyway. If you are going to keep a lid on accurate maps then printing of them would be strictly controlled also.

Funnily enough even into the 90's the Turks were equally ferocious about detailed maps of Turkish territory. There was a newspaper report of a Harrier pilot arrested after exercises there for not returning his detailed map.

From the 1960's

" It turned out that the U.S. military had assisted in the production of the maps, which looked just like USGS topographic maps, but the military participation had led to their being classified. Prior to those maps, many maps of Turkey had had longitude and latitude slightly rotated, and other strange aberrations. This was done deliberately to make use by enemies difficult. Such was the logic of the military! "

[Bigduke6]

Dieseltaylor,

Clear enough, I was just trying to point out that when the Soviets have their act together they seem to have done just fine in the map department.

This is just speculation, but I would guess that the Red Army map shortages at the beginning of the war were just as much due to German panzers getting between the troops needing the maps and the actual map depots, as anything else. That and the security obscession: the system only wants to issue the minimum number of necessary maps, but to do that they need to know where the Red Army is and where it's going to fight pretty soon, and no one knew the answers to those questions during Barbarossa.

Later on in the war when offensives got down to a reliable drill the routine was there would be all sorts of training, but the regiments would only get maps 1-2 days before the assault kicked off, and the company officers might get their copy only hours before, if at all.

The classic attack mission for your basic T-34 platoon leader was "Advance your platoon on this general compass bearing until we tell you stop." This put a real premium on the T-34 platoon commander knowing where the heck his troopies were on the map, and of course made for all sorts of confusion, if the company CO got hit.

[Paul AU]

Very interestng, Bigduke, thanks. I too, had wondered about all that.

[MPK]

76mm, I have a QB map in my collection

(from the Scenario Depot RIP) called

'Ukrainian Collective Farm" (can't

recall offhand who made it, but can

look it up)...

I can email it to you for comparison

with your own thoughts, if you like...

[76mm]

Dear MPK:

Thanks for the offer. Please send it to me at the e-mail in my profile.

Thanks again!

76mm

[MPK]

Heya 76mm,

Maps dispatched.

Credit to: EasyCo

[Shmavis]

I'd recommend 'Kursk - Tigers on the Farm'. It involves fighting at the Oktyabrski collective farm. I could send you the file if you want.

[76mm]

Shmavis,

that would be good; please send it to my e-mail listed in my profile.

tanks a lot,

76mm

[Shmavis]

Sent! Tom Murphy is the scenario author, by the way.