The Size of the Kolkhoz

The mir was the basic unit of rural economic organisation in the USSR until the end of the 1920s (see vol. 1, p. 6) and was controlled by meetings of all adults in the village, under an elected elder. One or more rural settlements (seleniya) formed a mir, which was legally known as a ‘land society’, and one or more mirs together formed an administrative village (selo), the lowest unit in the hierarchy of soviets. In the USSR at the end of the 1920s there were approximately 600,000 rural settlements, 319,000 mirs and 72,000 village soviets, so there were on average 19 settlements per mir and 4.4 mirs per village soviet.1 The size of these units varied considerably from one part of the country to another. The basic difference was between the small settlement of Central Industrial, North—Western and Western Russia and Belorussia, with an average of 16–20 households, and the larger settlement of South-Eastern Russia and the Ukraine, with an average of 100–150 households. In the main grain-surplus regions the average settlement was relatively large ( 100 or more households); the settlements of the Ural and Siberian regions, although somewhat smaller, still contained more households than the grain-deficit areas.2 The village soviet was an official rather than an economic unit, and its boundaries were changed frequently during the 1920s.