The Authorities and the Subordinate: Mobilization Management of the Collective Farm Village During the Great Patriotic War (Based on Materials from Novosibirsk Oblast)

The key question considered in this article is to what extent the vertical of agricultural management was in fact an uninterrupted instrument for mobilizing collective farm resources. The central government, trying to block deviations in the actions of local managers, demanded that they be conductors of exclusively state interests. The collective farm peasantry itself, in most cases, responded to the obviously inflated demands of the state with inaction. The passivity of the collective farms had to be compensated for by the hyperactivity of the management link. The main contradiction that regional and district leaders faced was that the policy of total mobilization of resources destabilized the socioeconomic situation at the local level. In this regard, the actions of the local authorities themselves became equally contradictory, having to find ways to at least partially compensate for the damage they themselves inflicted.