Soviet Agriculture Without WW2

An idle thought. In OTL, soviet agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s essentially stagnated and then began declining. In OTL, the Soviets lost about 25 million people during the Second World War; so that means plenty more mouths to feed.

Will the Soviet Union run into a wall in terms ofa griultural productivity earlier than OTL? And if so, how would it respond?
 
An idle thought. In OTL, soviet agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s essentially stagnated and then began declining. In OTL, the Soviets lost about 25 million people during the Second World War; so that means plenty more mouths to feed.

Will the Soviet Union run into a wall in terms ofa griultural productivity earlier than OTL? And if so, how would it respond?

there is so much more to factor in, such as the amount of villiages, industry and collective farms that were destroyed, the amount of production expended on military equiptment that could have gone on farm equiptment, etc etc...
 

MacCaulay

Banned
there is so much more to factor in, such as the amount of villiages, industry and collective farms that were destroyed, the amount of production expended on military equiptment that could have gone on farm equiptment, etc etc...

And the amount of mouths to feed lost to the Nazis, plus the amount of mouths those lost amount of mouths would've made, etc.

I actually know a guy who owns a Russian tractor, I forget the brand. They sell it in America. He says it's basically like buying a brand new American one that was made in the 50s, but you can fix it yourself because it's so simple. And apparently the transmission has two sticks on it which blows my freaking mind. Their jeeps do that, to. I don't know how the Soviets designed transmissions, but they were crazy with them.
 

Thande

Donor
I think the big problem was Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign. That could actually have been successful if they had tried to grow a balanced array of crops to keep the soil minerals straight instead of just growing corn (US: wheat) which rapidly resulted in a collapse of the harvest.

Which would also have led to even more Russian immigration to the steppe, which might have interesting consequences later on (the Kazakhs perhaps being a minority in their own country, for example).
 
A follow up question, assume an earlier food crisis, how would the Soviets react. Stalin it? Mao it with one child policy? Gorby it?
 
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