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« Tuna 1 / 2020

‘…they work on farms and conceal their actual wage labour relationship with the farm owners’. Farm Hands in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic

At the start of the era of Soviet rule, primarily peasant farmers – private owners – maintained Estonian agriculture until the full-scale formation of kolkhozes (collective farms) and the conversion of peasant farmers into the state’s farm hands in 1949. One of its general principles in the Soviet Union was the ‘liquidated exploitation of persons by other persons’, yet nevertheless there were paid employees on Estonian farms at that time – farm hands. The state authorities were not interested in farm hands during the first post-war years. In times of restoring the destruction of war and rebuilding work, the most important priority was the production of farms for feeding the cities, while at the same time there was a shortage of manpower in agriculture due to the human losses of the intervening years. Yet the ‘offensive against kulakism’ began in 1947 and among other things, the First Secretary of the Estonian Communist (Bolshevik) Party Nikolai Karotamm ordered the gathering of precise information on farm hands in the counties. Reports from four counties (number of farm hands, nationality, age, previous occupation/vocation, wages, and other such data) are published here.