Official encouragement of individual gardening continued in the late 1940s, when local ispolkoms were ordered to make land available and trade unions began to distribute allotments among their members. This policy was particularly marked in the wake of the catastrophic famine of 1946–47: the government was forced once again to recognize the expediency of devolving agricultural production to the urban population—of letting people feed themselves. Growers were exhorted to emulate the feats of heroic allotment cultivators such as the man who grew 2.5 tons of vegetables on a plot of 150 square meters.6 Factories negotiated with regional and local authorities and with collective farms to provide their workers with land; the bigger enterprises provided transport for their workers to visit their allotments on days off. Yet at the same time problems were acknowledged. Allotment collectives often had to fend for themselves, receiving little support from factories and trade union organizations; seeds and tools were in short supply; and the land people cultivated did not belong to them even de facto (let alone de jure), but rather was reallocated to them each year on a temporary basis.7
However slim the prospects for long-term ownership, allotments still offered the Soviet urbanite significant benefits. They guaranteed a supply of basic vegetables and provided the opportunity for limited side earnings, as surplus produce could be sold at the market: the immediate postwar period was marked by a relative tolerance of individual economic activity and private trade.8 Digging a potato patch was, moreover, a form of “active leisure,” and as such was encouraged in public discussions. It also enabled Soviet citizens to engage in a healthy form of “socialist competition”: to strive, in typical voluntarist fashion, for the maximum yield from their plot of a few dozen square meters. In 1949, allotment gardening was still common enough for one agricultural expert to observe with dismay that many trees on the outskirts of Moscow were dying because vegetables had been planted too close to them.9 The number of growers remained reasonably stable in the early 1950s. In 1952, for example, 903,000 families in Moscow were reported to have allotments, an increase of 56,000 families over the previous year; in 1953 the number fell back to the previous level, and in Leningrad (both city and oblast) there was a similar slight decline.10 Numbers also held up well outside the major cities: allotments were a truly national phenomenon, and progress reports poured in to the central trade union authorities from all corners of the Union.11
Cultivation of the land by factory workers had received further encouragement in the
form of a government decree of February 1949, which, besides reiterating official
support for allotments (
