Expert: Belarusian village in 1944 - dugouts, oxen instead of horses, labor heroism of women and teenagers

March 31, MINSK . Vyacheslav Selemenev, a leading researcher at the publications department of the National Archives of Belarus and a candidate of historical sciences who has studied thousands of documents from those years, told the Economy of Belarus magazine about how they sowed in the first post-war spring during an acute shortage of seeds, horses and tractors, and most importantly, men in the villages.

"On April 1, 1943, almost immediately after the defeat of the Nazi troops at Stalingrad, the USSR State Planning Committee held a meeting in the Soviet rear on the restoration of agriculture. Although even 9 months later, at the beginning of December 1943, out of 90 districts in five regions of the Byelorussian SSR that existed before the Great Patriotic War, 31 were completely liberated from German troops and 14 - partially in Mogilev, Vitebsk, Polesie and Gomel," the interlocutor cites the data.

Before the war, the BSSR had a population of 10 million, three quarters of which lived in villages. More than 9.5 thousand collective farms and 92 state farms have been given land for use in perpetuity. There are 341 machine and tractor stations, over 25 thousand cars, 9700 tractors and 1590 combines, not counting threshers, seeders and other useful mechanisms. And on average 57 horses for each agricultural collective.

More than 8 thousand best workers were approved for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in 1941, 15 Belarusian state farms have their own stands there. Among them, for example, the Krynki breeding state farm (Polesia region) for raising cattle , awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor of the exhibition , which in 1940 milked 4100 liters of MILK per forage cow, had an average daily weight gain of 988 g for young animals.  
What do we have after three years of occupation? The first attempt to assess the economic and demographic situation in the liberated Byelorussian SSR was made in August 1944. Under the "secret" heading, the HEAD of the Central Statistical Administration of the USSR V. Starovsky reported to the Chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee N. Voznesensky that in the surveyed areas with a pre-war population of 6.4 million people (1.5 million urban and 4.9 million rural), 3.8 million (59%) remained, less than a third were city dwellers, and 3.4 million (69%) were rural residents.
The technical equipment of collective farms and MTS was catastrophic - 9% of tractors and 4% of combines remained, less than a thousand machines, a third of horses, a quarter of cattle , 17% of sheep and goats, and 8% of pigs. Without proper veterinary care, foot-and-mouth disease, swine erysipelas, meningitis and equine scabies were rampant. Livestock breeding was ruined.

Read the full text in the journal "Economy of Belarus".