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World War II destroyed Russia's livestock for a second time. It also loosened the Kremlin's iron grip on the Russian countryside. Peasant families nibbled at the state farms, decollectivized an estimated six million acres. They hoarded the grain and refused to give it up to the commissars. At first they got away with it. Fearful of massive famine in the wake of war, the Kremlin temporized with the muzhik's lust for land that he could call his own. The Council of Ministers agreed to let the state farms be worked by family groups or by ex-soldiers, banded together in "links" of eight to ten men apiece. Many of the "linkers," explained one of them who escaped, "were peasant soldiers who had fought together at the front, and who tried to stay together afterwards . . . Every former officer or colonel of a battalion tried to have his men with him . . . During the first postwar years, the Kremlin didn't bother to put obstacles in the way, and even backed [the links] . . . but afterwards, it became clear that the situation was becoming politically dangerous. The links were getting too independent of the center."
Agrogorods. First to realize this was Nikita Khrushchev. With Stalin's approval, he denounced the links as 1) "incapable of using heavy machinery"; 2) "standoffish"; 3) "a heresy." So Khrushchev himself took over.
First, he smashed the links by merging them into huge (80 to 150 men) agricultural brigades, bossed by the commissars. Pravda described one brigade at work on the Lenin's Memory kolkhoz: "The brigade women pick the potatoes dug up by machines driven by the men . . . They are followed by supervisors from the party cells who mark down the efficiency of each worker . . ."
"Transform the farms," was Khrushchev's next decree. His method reflected his own and the party's gigantomania. In 1950 alone, Khrushchev amalgamated 40,000 small kolkhozes into vast agrogorods, literally "farm cities." Workers in the agrogorods were promised "running water, large movie houses . . . apartment houses so planned as to have bathrooms and porches."
By dragooning the peasants into agrogorods, equipped with tractor fleets, Khrushchev was confident that he could mechanize Soviet farming. He also expected to mechanize the farmers. Soviet geneticists (e.g., Trofim Lysenko) have erected into Communist dogma the notion that man is mere animal, condemned by nature to acquire the characteristics of his environment. Khrushchev tested the theory in his agrogorods. Just as the Soviet factories had produced a "new Soviet man" (e.g., Khrushchev), so he believed that the agrogorod environment would develop a new agrarian robot divorced from the muzhik's "old village backwardness."