Ilkka Alanen - Decollectivisation, Destruction and Disillusionment

The privatisation of Kanepi kolkhoz in the southeastern part of Estonia like the stories of many other collective farms, we presume turned out to be a much more dramatic series of events than our research team could have ever imagined. For us, it proved to have all the hallmarks of a drama, full of exciting incidents and unexpected turns. Nevertheless, despite occasional farcical elements, the overall workings of this drama have been profoundly tragic. It has revealed to us a fragment of real life that appears to have forced people to encounter conditions almost as insurmountable as the shipwreck of the passenger ferry Estonia, an event to which many of the interviewees compared the privatisation process.

Not only is the privatisation of the kolkhozes a dramatic series of events that has devastated peoples conditions of existence; it is also a challenging subject of interpretation on the level of social theory. What was real socialism really like that is to say, in the light of empirical research from the viewpoint of agriculture? How did this system finally come to a dead end, and how was it forced to give way to another system in a situation of economic collapse (and in Estonia also under pressure from the nationalist movement)? One should note, however, that the social system that replaced it was not anything new. In actual fact it was a system much older than the state socialist system, and it originated from a world that was economically and technologically at an entirely different level. Estonia regained its independence and was capable of reinstating capitalist social relations that bore a close resemblance to the social relations in the first Estonian republic (19181940). However, its attempts at restoring the old peasant society turned out to be a romanticised utopia. Our research shows the social relations of the Soviet era had a fundamental effect on the way the transition from the socialist system to the new capitalist system took place. For example, the fact that an agricultural education system of largely high standards produced specialists for large-scale farming, the fact that agricultural machinery and production buildings were geared to large scale production, and the concentration of the former agrarian population in larger population centres make the resurrection of the world as it stood in the past an unattainable goal. Yet, even if this impossible romanticised utopia cannot be replaced by any alternative strategy, the nostalgic ideology still exerts a strong influence over the way social relations are being restructured in the countryside.

Stripped of any comforting illusions, the birth of capitalism is in reality a dramatic process of ownership redistribution and wealth in general; it could never have been the idyll that many in Estonia might have hoped for. Nevertheless, the Estonian people would certainly have gained much if the social changes that took place during the Soviet era (such as the ones mentioned above) had been taken into account more carefully in the implementation of the agricultural reform.

I would like to thank my co-authors Jouko Nikula, Helvi Pder, Rein Ruutsoo and all the other persons involved in the preparation of this book. Without their co-operations this project would not have been possible.

I express my special thanks to Jouko Peltomki who translated three chapters and was largely responsible for the technical editing of the book. In addition to offering valuable editorial assistance he also helped in improving the language of the entire book and was responsible for liaison with the publisher, the language checkers, and our layout specialist.

This book was created as a result of a research project: The Privatisation of Agriculture, the Family Farm Ideology and Class Formation in the Newly Independent Baltic Republics. The project has received funding from the Academy of Finland.

Ilkka Alanen
Leader of the Research Project, General Editor