The tragedy of Ivan Khudenko

Ivan Khudenko

In this article, I want to tell the tragic story of Ivan Khudenko (1917-1974), a Soviet citizen and agricultural economist.

I only learnt of his story a few weeks ago myself.

The story takes place in the late 1960s on a state farm in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Working with the farmworkers, Khudenko, the farm’s economist, found a better way to organise the work. Output rose markedly, and the workers began to earn higher wages as they shared in the gains from increased productivity. Then, despite these successful results, the farm was closed down. Khudenko tried to recover the wages owed to the workers, but was accused of attempting to embezzle public funds and sentenced to prison.

There was a time in Turkey when a story like this would have been called “Tam Aziz Nesinlik” - just the sort of absurdity the satirist Aziz Nesin might have written about. If only I had Nesin’s gift for writing, I could tell this story in a way that made readers laugh while also bringing home the pain of what happened to Khudenko and ensuring that his story stayed with them.

When you first hear this story, you think, “Come on! Surely that couldn’t have happened.” At least, that was my first reaction. But it did!

Khudenko had set out to change the inefficient ways of working that had become entrenched on state farms in Kazakhstan during the 1960s. He carried out a series of experiments, first at the Iliyskiy farm and then at Akchi. As you might expect, the experiment at Akchi was not undertaken without authorisation: the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR passed a resolution approving it, and the terms of the experiment were also discussed with the relevant Soviet authorities.[1]

The idea behind his approach was easy enough to understand: the central planning authorities would decide what the farm should produce and what resources it could use; the people who worked there would decide how to organise the work. Khudenko favoured forming small teams and tying wages to the results achieved rather than the number of tasks completed. In this way, he hoped to reduce the paperwork and the number of staff needed to supervise the work, while giving workers an incentive to produce more effectively.

The results were striking. According to a study of Akchi published in 1987, based on documents and interviews with those involved, productivity per worker at the farm was roughly six times that of ordinary state farms, while wages were three times as high. Akchi had only two managers: its director, Mikhail Li, and its agricultural economist, Khudenko. Decisions about the running of the farm were made by a council of representatives from the work teams, under whose authority the management operated.[1]

Workers at the Akchi state farm during a meeting. Ivan Khudenko is taking notes.

The workers at Akchi were not simply earning higher wages. According to a report citing a newspaper investigation published in 1970, almost all of the farm’s 60 employees were satisfied with their working conditions and took an active part in decision-making. Conflicts among the workers were also said to be rare. So we are talking here not just about higher productivity, but about a real change in working life.[2]

Even so, Khudenko’s method did not work without problems for everyone. In his earlier experiment at Iliyskiy, cuts to the workforce had provoked opposition from workers worried about losing their jobs.[3] Where the displaced workers would find employment, and on what terms, was undoubtedly a real problem. The fact that the workers at Akchi could participate, however modestly, in running their own farm did not mean they could solve that problem for society as a whole: the working class had no control over the political system in which they lived.

The experiment at Akchi was halted in 1970. As the farm was being closed down, Khudenko sought to recover the wages owed to its workers. The court he applied to ruled in favour of both Khudenko and the workers. Yet his efforts to secure payment later became the basis for a charge of attempted embezzlement of public property. Khudenko was sentenced to six years in prison in 1973. He died in a prison hospital on 12 November 1974, aged 57.[4]

All this raises an obvious question: how could the leaders of a country that was constantly struggling to increase agricultural output bring such an experiment to an abrupt halt?

The bureaucracy confronted Khudenko with criminal charges. Yet attempts to close Akchi had begun before he brought his claim for the workers’ unpaid wages. The hostility that the experiment’s results aroused among senior officials is plain from correspondence at the time and from a study published later.[1]

Of course, we should not conclude from this story that one or a handful of such “good managers” could have solved all the serious problems of Soviet agriculture within the confines of the Stalinist regime. Nor was Khudenko an outsider to the system. On the contrary, he had emerged from within it and was trying to breathe some life into it. He was undoubtedly a resourceful and enterprising man. The Stalinist bureaucratic order blocked the working class’s independent initiative and its attempts to take part in management. It also saw even limited initiatives of this kind from within its own ranks as a threat.

There were journalists, scholars and colleagues who defended Khudenko. But there was no independent, organised workers’ movement capable of standing up to the bureaucracy that crushed him - and the official trade unions, of course, do not count as such a movement. This is where the real political meaning of Khudenko’s tragedy lies. A system that claimed to organise production according to social needs dismantled an experiment on a farm that appeared to have produced successful results, instead of seriously examining and discussing it and drawing lessons from it. It then found a way to send the man who had tried to recover the workers’ unpaid wages to prison.

Khudenko’s story is striking in its own right. But it also reveals an important aspect of the failure of the Stalinist regime in the USSR. The bureaucracy denied the working class even the slightest say in how the country was run. At the same time, it could fabricate charges and ruthlessly crush those few members of its own ranks who tried to reduce the enormous waste and losses in productivity generated by the system.

What happened to Khudenko also jeopardised the future of the country’s agriculture. It served as a clear warning to anyone who might consider taking a similar initiative in the years ahead.

[1] V. Belkin and V. Perevedentsev, “Drama Akchi”, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1 April 1987. The authors state that they were members of a commission sent to Akchi by the newspaper in 1971. They examined extensive documentation and spoke to both supporters and opponents of the experiment. https://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/knigi/perevedencev/stati/010.pdf.

[2] FBIS Survey, 26 March 1970, p. 15. The report summarises the findings of an investigation published in Literaturnaya Gazeta. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp85t00875r000300020007-6.

[3] Belkin and Perevedentsev, “Drama Akchi”. The authors describe both the sharp reduction in the workforce at Iliyskiy and the opposition it provoked among workers worried about losing their jobs.

[4] “Biography of Ivan Khudenko”, A Chronicle of Current Events, no. 35, 31 May 1975. https://chronicle-of-current-events.com/2024/04/06/biographies-march-1975-35-14/. On 20 October 1989, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Kazakh SSR overturned the convictions of Khudenko and his colleagues, finding that their actions did not constitute a crime. For an account of this later decision, see https://pro3001.narod.ru/marx/xudenko.htm.