Ministry of Agriculture and Food (Soviet Union)

The Soviet Ministry of Agriculture and Food was established in 1929 and known prior to 1946 as the People's Commissariat for Agriculture - Narkomzem).

History
Graph for the Soviet Union and Ukrainian SRR (share state grain procurement from 1930-1933 harvests. Figures derived from The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 5: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933[1]

The commissariat united all republican commissariats of the Soviet Union. It was formally known as the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Russian: Народный комиссариат земледелия - Narkomzem) was set up in Petrograd in October 1917. Vladimir Milyutin was appointed the first People's Commissar of Agriculture. He was a member of the Council of People's Commissars.

Despite having signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviet Union continued development and mass production of offensive biological weapons. These activities were conducted by the main directorate — "Biopreparat" — along with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and several other Soviet ministries and agencies (Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Health, USSR Academy of Sciences, the KGB, etc.).[2] In the 1980s, the Ministry of Agriculture successfully developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and psittacosis to kill chicken. These agents were prepared to be sprayed down from tanks attached to aeroplanes over hundreds of miles. The secret program was code-named "Ecology".[3]

The Ministry was abolished in November 1985 with the creation of the State Agro-Industrial Committee, which took over the functions of the Ministry for Agriculture, the Ministry for Fruit and Vegetable Production, the Ministry for the Meat and Dairy Industry, the Ministry of the Food Industry and the Ministry for Rural Construction.[4]

Offices
Narkomzem Building, Ministry Headquarters

It took over the Narkomzem offices located at Orlikov Pereulok, 1, Moscow, designed by Aleksey Shchusev in 1928. This building is currently occupied by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation.

List of Ministers

Source:[5][6]

People's Commissars for Agriculture

Ministers of Agriculture
  • Andrei Andrejev (19.3.1946 - 26.3.1946)
  • Ivan Benediktov (26.3.1946 - 6.3.1953)
  • Alexei Kozlov (6.3.1953 - 26.9.1953)
  • Ivan Benediktov (26.9.1953 - 18.10.1955)
  • Vladimir Matskevich (19.10.1955 - 29.12.1960)
  • Mikhail Olshanski (29.12.1960 - 24.4.1962)
  • Konstantin Pysin (25.4.1962 - 8.3.1963)
  • Ivan Volovtshenko (8.3.1963 - 18.2.1965)
  • Vladimir Matskevich (18.2.1965 - 2.2.1973)
  • Dmitry Polyansky (2.2.1973 - 16.3.1976)
  • Valentin Mesyats (16.3.1976 - 18.11.1985)

Ministers of Agriculture and Food
  • Vjatsheslav Chernoivanov (20.3.1991 - 24.8.1991)

See also

References
  1. "The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 5: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933 (9780230238558): R. W. Davies, Stephen G. Wheatcroft: Books". Amazon.com. 2010-03-02. Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  2. Ken Alibek and K Handelman (1999), Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World Trade From the Inside by the Man Who Ran It, New York, NY: Random House.
  3. Alibek, Ken (2008). Biohazard. Random House. pp. 37–38. ISBN 9781407010724.
  4. Dyker, David A. (2013). The Soviet Union Under Gorbachev (Routledge Revivals): Prospects for Reform. Routledge. ISBN 9781135018917.
  5. "Governments of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1917-1964". Archived from the original on 28 November 2017. Retrieved 28 November 2017.
  6. "Governments of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1964-1991". Archived from the original on 28 November 2017. Retrieved 28 November 2017.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.