The system of local agricultural management bodies of the Byelorussian SSR: centralization - decentralization (1965-1991)

Agriculture has traditionally been the weak link of the Soviet model of economic development and has been the subject to constant managerial reorganizations. The article discusses the issues of changes in the system of agricultural management bodies of the Belarusian SSR within the framework of the dual opposition «centralization - decentralization». A variant of a simple inversion is traced as the leading one. In Soviet management practices, the principle of centralization manifested itself as a result of the transformation in the second half of the 1960s of the production collective farm and state farm departments into the agriculture departments of the executive committees of district councils, as well as in 1985 with the concentration in one super organ of the levels of management of all economic entities associated with the production, processing and storage of agricultural products. The principles, goals and objectives, and specific directions of the perestroika economic policy predetermined the turn in 1989 to the pole of decentralization and the elimination of local state administration of agriculture. Mediation is represented by the formation of a system of management bodies of the agro-industrial complex in 1982, which in this form proved unable to provide the desired integrated approach and overcome departmental priority in the functioning of business entities in rural areas. The highest party-soviet leadership of the BSSR did not openly show its position, different from the union center, until 1989. After 1987 it was possible to preserve the existing management models of the agro-industrial complex only either in the case of a direct rejection of the policy of full economic freedom of business entities, the transition to their voluntary, exclusively economic relations with state structures, or sabotaging the implementation of such a policy in practice. In the BSSR, they chose the second option, actually preserving the system of state management of the agro-industrial complex that existed since 1985, supplemented by the creation of agricultural firms and agricultural holdings.