Often collective farm managers needed to temporarily enlarge their workforce in order to increase harvests or get construction work done, so they contracted with privately organized, semilegal groups of migrant "wildcatters" {sbabnslmiki). Because their income depended on the size of the harvest, shabashniks often worked longer and harder days than most kolkhozniks. These migrant workers often lived in abominable conditions, and even though many collective farms could not meet production quotas without the extra farmhands, authorities sometimes arbitrarily forced them to move on before the harvest season was over.
In the 1930s Soviet officials hounded traditional rural craftsmen as capitalists. Those who continued to practice their craft left the villages for towns and cities where they joined state-run artisan cooperatives or found some other way of making a living. Farmers who in pre-Soviet times made household necessities for themselves or to sell needed to devote most or all of their spare, non-kolkhoz labor time to tending their own gardens and livestock, working in town factories, or both in order to make ends meet. Authorities frowned on selling handmade artifacts in the marketplace, and kolkhoz craftsmen, no matter how skilled, were not credited with labor-days for such work. Given the extreme scarcity of factory-made consumer goods, country and city folk alike badly needed the artisans' expertise in making all kinds of everyday products from rope to lace to shovels. In the 1930s, millers, who were particularly persecuted as kulaks, were arrested or run out of villages, even though the newly founded kolkhozes could hardly do without their special knowledge. In the unofficial {illegal and semilegal) economy, however, artisans were well paid. A village stove maker, for example, could make about 10 times as much a month as a kolklioziiik, though he risked being arrested as a self-employed "parasite,"
There were, besides the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, a variety of public and private (or personal) farming operations. A few private farms were even left to exist here and there in isolated parts of Soviet Asia, though they were not allowed to employ hired workers and had little consequence for the whole economy. More important for food production was the massive but rather wasteful program of sending millions of city "volunteers" (e, g„ industrial workers, komsomol youth, pensioners) out to the farms to help at harvest time. Other programs provided factory workers and others with land for their own personal gardens. Most striking was the remarkable productivity of the small private plots of kolkhozniks and sovkhozniks. During the last decades of the Soviet Union, when, despite large investments in agriculture, the country had to import huge amounts of grain, these personal plots were producing most of the potatoes and a sizable portion of other vegetables as well as meat, milk, and eggs.’3
World History
