Pryor, Frederic L.

English

Works

Swarthmore College Works Economics Faculty Works Economics Spring 2000 Review Of "Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture" By M. Meurs Frederic L. Pryor Swarthmore College, fpryor1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in Economics Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-economics  Part of the Economics Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Frederic L. Pryor. (2000). "Review Of "Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture" By M. Meurs". Slavic Review. Volume 59, Issue 1. 192-193. DOI: 10.2307/2696917 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-economics/217  ReviewAuthor(s): Frederic L. PryorReview by: Frederic L. PryorSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 192-193Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2696917Accessed: 11-04-2016 13:54 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available athttp://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusteddigital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information aboutJSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic ReviewThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:54:08 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 192 Slavic Review expenditures in excess of revenues, and financing both import surpluses and government debts through foreign borrowing, the entire package being simply unsustainable in the face of high levels of foreign indebtedness from the outset. In an interesting discussion of corporate governance questions associated with bank debt portfolios, Stephan concludes, of course, that a German-type system of governance is the appropriate one for Hungary. PHILLIPJ. BRYSON Brigham Young University Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture. Ed. Mieke Meurs. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. vii, 249 pp. Notes. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $62.00, hard bound. This book contains case studies of collective farming in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Hungary, and Russia, plus introductory and concluding chapters. The focus is primarily on the coop- erative farm sector; only a few of the essays touch upon the state farm or private agricul- tural sectors. The approach is primarily historical, and the focus is on exploring the forces underlying the collectivization process and the changes that have occurred in these col- lective farm systems since theywere established. Among other things this means that the var- ious case studies do not address a common set of the management, economic, or social as- pects of the collective farm system. Since the papers were first delivered at a conference in 1991, we learn little about the problems encountered in the process of decollectivization. The chapter on Bulgaria by Mieke Meurs, Veska Kouzhouharova, and Rositsa Stoyanova tells the strange story of how a country with the most equal distribution of land in east Europe in the precollectivization era ended up with the most consolidated farm sector. Although the authors describe the various governmental policies along this path, the underlying political, economic, and social factors receive relatively little attention so that readers are left with what is primarily a historical description, rather than a causal analysis. Justin Lin's chapter on China presents an overall view of the Chinese agricultural sec- tor after the communist revolution. The author competently surveys the changing orga- nizational forms, the government's agricultural policies, and performance results. Given the wide rang topics covered, little that he presents is new. By way of contrast, the chapter on Cuba by Carman Diana Deere and Niurka Perez covers some fascinating and new research results. They analyze the semivoluntary collec- tivization process and carefully sort out the different incentives offered the farmers in var- ious years to persuade them to join the collectives. The authors also have a brief but in- teresting analysis of changing work incentives on the collective farms, a theme discussed by the editor in the introductory chapter as well. Imre Kovach's short chapter on Hungary focuses primarily on the changing organi- zational forms of the agricultural sector and on the relevant governmental policies. Un- fortunately, the reader gains little appreciation of the results of the radical decentraliza- tion of control over the farms, why their performance was disappointing, and the rich and varied system of subcontracting by which the Hungarian farms overcame some of the ini- tial shortcomings of the collectivization model. The chapter on Russia by Victor Danilov deals primarily with the state of prerevolu- tionary Russian agriculture and with the various steps in the collectivization process. We learn almost nothing about how these collectives work, the performance of these farms, or, indeed, what happened after 1935. The introductory and final chapters by Meurs, the editor, highlight the similarities and differences within the collective farm sector in the five countries. Meurs's major the- sis is that the experiences and lessons learned in these case studies apply to the develop- ment of a cooperative farm sector in other nations, including the capitalist west. Unfortu- nately, most of the case studies do little to advance this claim of policy relevance. Although I found many interesting ideas and materials in this collection, it is not a reader-friendly book. Since the authors do not follow a similar outline or address the same issues, the varied national experiences are difficult to compare. The reader is also referred to tables that do not exist, to numbers without units, to tables of five-year plans without theThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:54:08 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Book Reviews 193 dates of these plans, to mysterious acronyms defined only pages later, to columns of per- centages that do not add to 100 percent, and to numbers in the text that do not exactly correspond to the tables under discussion. The index is also quite inadequate for a book presenting such detailed information. FREDERIC L. PRYOR Swarthmore College Slazvische Buchillustration im 20. Jahrhundert: RuJ3land-Polen-Tschechien-Slowakei. Ed. Ulrich von Kritter with the assistance of Bodo Zelinsky. Literarische Bilderwelten: Internationale Buchgraphik in Europa und Ubersee, vol. 6. Cologne: B6hlau Verlag, 1998.237 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Plates. DM 298.00, hard bound. This handsomely presented and well-illustrated volume presents 91 examples of twentieth- century Slavic illustrated books from the Ulrich von Kritter Collection, a marvelously rich holding in books from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries that has been the subject of five other volumes in this series, as well as several other catalogues from the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbfittel of the 1980s. Scarcely known outside central Eu- rope, this material is fairly evenly distributed across sections on Russia (35 entries), Poland (27 entries), and the Czech and Slovak Republics (20 and 10 entries, respectively). The selection does not quite live up to the title, however, as only 11 of the imprints predate World War 11 (10 of them Russian from the 1910s and 1920s)-albeit several postwar imprints actually reproduce illustrations from much earlier (for example, nineteenth- century illustrations byJ. Przyluski for Ignacy Krasicki's Monachomachia czyli Wojna mnich6w [Monachomachia or the war of the monks, 11-4] and by Michal Elwiro Andriolli for Adam Mickiewicz's nationalistic Pan Tadeusz [11-8]). This disparity is probably due to von Kritter's claim in his introduction that "artistic significance from this period between the world wars is scarcely to be found in all of the eastern countries" (2). If in keeping generally with so fine a collection spanning several centuries, this conservative view ignores the revolu- tionary changes wrought by the Czech surrealists, Hungarian constructivists, and other avant-garde circles. Fortunately the short historical essays that accompany each country section are more comprehensive. Piotr Hordynsky, writing on Polish book illustrations of the twentieth century, insists that "a diversity of styles and techniques in book illustration is especially noticeable in the era between the wars. Traditional and modern tendencies develop next to each other" (80). Although progressive tendencies are occasionally found (Sergei Tschechonin's illustrations for his 1924 monograph by Abram Erfos and Nikolai Punin [1-18] or Natal'ia Goncharova's colorful iconic illustrations for a 1921 French edition of Aleksandr Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan and His Son Glorious and Powerful Prince Gvidon Saltanovich and His Beautiful Swan Princess [1-6]), the works chosen here are largely tradi- tional. Yet this leaves ample opportunity for inventiveness and imaginative fantasy, given texts from both world literature (Slovakian Gabriel Strba's nearly hallucinatory renderings using mixed intaglio techniques for a 1986 edition of Homer's Odyssey [IV-51]) and en- demic production (Aleksandr Kurkin's illustrations for a 1985 edition of folktales assembled by the nineteenth-century historian Aleksandr Afanas'ev, Trois royaumes, Contes populaires russes [1-8]). Delightful spontaneous sketches by Felix Topolski accompany a Polish Drinker: Dictionary and Bacchanalian Anthology from 1959 [11-18], while the traditional and power- fully progressive are made one in Grzegorz Dobieslaw Mazurck's linocut Madonna Strafed by Bullet Holes for an anthology of Polish Marian poetry, Pod Twojq obronf (Under your pro- tection [11-13]) from the end of martial law. Each entry is accompanied by representative illustrations (many in color) and a fulsome description of both text and images by the team of sixteen contributors, who helped with translation and a full array of research mat- ter including indexes by illustrator and author (with subdivision for titles) and brief but extremely useful biographical sketches for each of the illustrators. The essays accompany- ing the groupings of books begin to live up to the promise of the title of the volume. Natalia Borissowskaja considers twentieth-century Russian illustration from its Jugendstil begin- nings in the "Mir iskusstvo" (World of art) group through the constructivists (including El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko) to Vladimir Favorskii, whose renewal of the woodcutThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:54:08 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Review Of  Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture  By M. Meurs

Swarthmore College 
Works 
Economics Faculty Works Economics 
Spring 2000 
Review Of "Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective 
Agriculture" By M. Meurs 
Frederic L. Pryor 
Swarthmore College, fpryor1@swarthmore.edu 
Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-economics 
 Part of the Economics Commons 
Let us know how access to these works benefits you 
 
Recommended Citation 
Frederic L. Pryor. (2000). "Review Of "Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture" By M. 
Meurs". Slavic Review. Volume 59, Issue 1. 192-193. DOI: 10.2307/2696917 
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-economics/217 
This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
Economics Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact 
myworks@swarthmore.edu. 
 
Review
Author(s): Frederic L. Pryor
Review by: Frederic L. Pryor
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 192-193
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2696917
Accessed: 11-04-2016 13:54 UTC
 
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
 
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:54:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 192 Slavic Review
 expenditures in excess of revenues, and financing both import surpluses and government
 debts through foreign borrowing, the entire package being simply unsustainable in the
 face of high levels of foreign indebtedness from the outset. In an interesting discussion of
 corporate governance questions associated with bank debt portfolios, Stephan concludes,
 of course, that a German-type system of governance is the appropriate one for Hungary.
 PHILLIPJ. BRYSON
 Brigham Young University
 Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture. Ed. Mieke Meurs. Lanham, Md.:
 Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. vii, 249 pp. Notes. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $62.00,
 hard bound.
 This book contains case studies of collective farming in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Hungary,
 and Russia, plus introductory and concluding chapters. The focus is primarily on the coop-
 erative farm sector; only a few of the essays touch upon the state farm or private agricul-
 tural sectors. The approach is primarily historical, and the focus is on exploring the forces
 underlying the collectivization process and the changes that have occurred in these col-
 lective farm systems since theywere established. Among other things this means that the var-
 ious case studies do not address a common set of the management, economic, or social as-
 pects of the collective farm system. Since the papers were first delivered at a conference in
 1991, we learn little about the problems encountered in the process of decollectivization.
 The chapter on Bulgaria by Mieke Meurs, Veska Kouzhouharova, and Rositsa
 Stoyanova tells the strange story of how a country with the most equal distribution of land
 in east Europe in the precollectivization era ended up with the most consolidated farm
 sector. Although the authors describe the various governmental policies along this path, the
 underlying political, economic, and social factors receive relatively little attention so that
 readers are left with what is primarily a historical description, rather than a causal analysis.
 Justin Lin's chapter on China presents an overall view of the Chinese agricultural sec-
 tor after the communist revolution. The author competently surveys the changing orga-
 nizational forms, the government's agricultural policies, and performance results. Given
 the wide rang topics covered, little that he presents is new.
 By way of contrast, the chapter on Cuba by Carman Diana Deere and Niurka Perez
 covers some fascinating and new research results. They analyze the semivoluntary collec-
 tivization process and carefully sort out the different incentives offered the farmers in var-
 ious years to persuade them to join the collectives. The authors also have a brief but in-
 teresting analysis of changing work incentives on the collective farms, a theme discussed
 by the editor in the introductory chapter as well.
 Imre Kovach's short chapter on Hungary focuses primarily on the changing organi-
 zational forms of the agricultural sector and on the relevant governmental policies. Un-
 fortunately, the reader gains little appreciation of the results of the radical decentraliza-
 tion of control over the farms, why their performance was disappointing, and the rich and
 varied system of subcontracting by which the Hungarian farms overcame some of the ini-
 tial shortcomings of the collectivization model.
 The chapter on Russia by Victor Danilov deals primarily with the state of prerevolu-
 tionary Russian agriculture and with the various steps in the collectivization process. We
 learn almost nothing about how these collectives work, the performance of these farms,
 or, indeed, what happened after 1935.
 The introductory and final chapters by Meurs, the editor, highlight the similarities
 and differences within the collective farm sector in the five countries. Meurs's major the-
 sis is that the experiences and lessons learned in these case studies apply to the develop-
 ment of a cooperative farm sector in other nations, including the capitalist west. Unfortu-
 nately, most of the case studies do little to advance this claim of policy relevance.
 Although I found many interesting ideas and materials in this collection, it is not a
 reader-friendly book. Since the authors do not follow a similar outline or address the same
 issues, the varied national experiences are difficult to compare. The reader is also referred
 to tables that do not exist, to numbers without units, to tables of five-year plans without the
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:54:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews 193
 dates of these plans, to mysterious acronyms defined only pages later, to columns of per-
 centages that do not add to 100 percent, and to numbers in the text that do not exactly
 correspond to the tables under discussion. The index is also quite inadequate for a book
 presenting such detailed information.
 FREDERIC L. PRYOR
 Swarthmore College
 Slazvische Buchillustration im 20. Jahrhundert: RuJ3land-Polen-Tschechien-Slowakei. Ed.
 Ulrich von Kritter with the assistance of Bodo Zelinsky. Literarische Bilderwelten:
 Internationale Buchgraphik in Europa und Ubersee, vol. 6. Cologne: B6hlau Verlag,
 1998.237 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Plates. DM 298.00, hard bound.
 This handsomely presented and well-illustrated volume presents 91 examples of twentieth-
 century Slavic illustrated books from the Ulrich von Kritter Collection, a marvelously rich
 holding in books from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries that has been
 the subject of five other volumes in this series, as well as several other catalogues from the
 Herzog August Library in Wolfenbfittel of the 1980s. Scarcely known outside central Eu-
 rope, this material is fairly evenly distributed across sections on Russia (35 entries), Poland
 (27 entries), and the Czech and Slovak Republics (20 and 10 entries, respectively). The
 selection does not quite live up to the title, however, as only 11 of the imprints predate
 World War 11 (10 of them Russian from the 1910s and 1920s)-albeit several postwar
 imprints actually reproduce illustrations from much earlier (for example, nineteenth-
 century illustrations byJ. Przyluski for Ignacy Krasicki's Monachomachia czyli Wojna mnich6w
 [Monachomachia or the war of the monks, 11-4] and by Michal Elwiro Andriolli for Adam
 Mickiewicz's nationalistic Pan Tadeusz [11-8]). This disparity is probably due to von Kritter's
 claim in his introduction that "artistic significance from this period between the world
 wars is scarcely to be found in all of the eastern countries" (2). If in keeping generally with
 so fine a collection spanning several centuries, this conservative view ignores the revolu-
 tionary changes wrought by the Czech surrealists, Hungarian constructivists, and other
 avant-garde circles. Fortunately the short historical essays that accompany each country
 section are more comprehensive. Piotr Hordynsky, writing on Polish book illustrations of
 the twentieth century, insists that "a diversity of styles and techniques in book illustration
 is especially noticeable in the era between the wars. Traditional and modern tendencies
 develop next to each other" (80). Although progressive tendencies are occasionally found
 (Sergei Tschechonin's illustrations for his 1924 monograph by Abram Erfos and Nikolai
 Punin [1-18] or Natal'ia Goncharova's colorful iconic illustrations for a 1921 French edition
 of Aleksandr Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan and His Son Glorious and Powerful Prince Gvidon
 Saltanovich and His Beautiful Swan Princess [1-6]), the works chosen here are largely tradi-
 tional. Yet this leaves ample opportunity for inventiveness and imaginative fantasy, given
 texts from both world literature (Slovakian Gabriel Strba's nearly hallucinatory renderings
 using mixed intaglio techniques for a 1986 edition of Homer's Odyssey [IV-51]) and en-
 demic production (Aleksandr Kurkin's illustrations for a 1985 edition of folktales assembled
 by the nineteenth-century historian Aleksandr Afanas'ev, Trois royaumes, Contes populaires
 russes [1-8]). Delightful spontaneous sketches by Felix Topolski accompany a Polish Drinker:
 Dictionary and Bacchanalian Anthology from 1959 [11-18], while the traditional and power-
 fully progressive are made one in Grzegorz Dobieslaw Mazurck's linocut Madonna Strafed
 by Bullet Holes for an anthology of Polish Marian poetry, Pod Twojq obronf (Under your pro-
 tection [11-13]) from the end of martial law. Each entry is accompanied by representative
 illustrations (many in color) and a fulsome description of both text and images by the
 team of sixteen contributors, who helped with translation and a full array of research mat-
 ter including indexes by illustrator and author (with subdivision for titles) and brief but
 extremely useful biographical sketches for each of the illustrators. The essays accompany-
 ing the groupings of books begin to live up to the promise of the title of the volume. Natalia
 Borissowskaja considers twentieth-century Russian illustration from its Jugendstil begin-
 nings in the "Mir iskusstvo" (World of art) group through the constructivists (including El
 Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko) to Vladimir Favorskii, whose renewal of the woodcut
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:54:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms


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Review Of Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture By M. Meurs

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