You've picked a really interesting period in the history of Soviet agricultural collectivization. I'm particularly interested in this topic and time period because of an interesting case that I'm writing up for future publication (if you'll permit the digression). In 1953 was the only known successful defection of an American citizen from Alaska across the Bering Strait. Leaving Little Diomede Island, this man rowed to the Soviet Union and ─ after sitting in jail for six months while facing a charge of illegally crossing the border ─ was given a residence in the Lenin Kolkhoz, located in the Tambov region. He stayed there for more than a decade, getting married and presumably working on the farm.
Before we get started, a note on terminology. Soviet farms tended to run in two primary forms. There was the sovkhoz (state farm) and the kolkhoz, or collective farm. The sovkhoz was owned and operated by the state. The kolkhoz, more common, tended to operate as a farmers' collective, and payments to it were set by the state, which also regulated its operations with rules. At the kolkhoz, each family was assigned a quota of days of labor on which it was required to contribute to the collective operations of the farm. In exchange, the family would receive a small private plot on which it could grow food for its own use. Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, these private plots proved to be ludicrously productive in comparison to the rest of the collective system. Since Soviet farmers were incentivized to work hard on those plots, at times they produced as much or more food than the collective plots, which received massive state assistance.
To a large degree, English-language scholarship on collective farms has focused on the early years of collectivization, when it was being implemented in the 1920s and 1930s. That era was particularly brutal, as private farms were rapidly consolidated into larger, structured affairs that lacked the mechanization or production incentives to work efficiently. Collectivization prompted food shortages and famine, even on the farms themselves.
In Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, Document 118 is an NKVD report documenting starvation and corruption in collective farms near Rostov-on-Don in the Black Sea region. Written by a senior lieutenant in Millerovo, it declares that 14 collective farms in the area need food assistance ─ they aren't growing enough to support themselves. Of these, the worst-off is Stavropol' Regiment Kolkhoz, which could only feed its farmers 700 grams of grain a day.
Stalinism as a Way of Life also contains a lot of great translated primary sources from farmers and farm chairmen. One set of letters, described in the book, comes from Dmitry Afanas'evich Khalatov, who joined the Labor Kolkhoz in the Orel region in 1929. At first, "we led a wealthy and fun-filled life, but since then we have had 11 chairmen, who have spelled disaster for the kolkhoz and kolkhoz farmers," he wrote.
An avid letter-writer, Khalatov was successful in fixing some problems through his messages. Unfortunately for him, those letters drew hostile attention from local administrators upset that he was exposing their corruption. In 1936, he left the kolkhoz to work on the railroad in Briansk. His continued letter-writing caused his family and two brothers to be kicked out of the kolkhoz as well.
Corruption was a big problem in the collective farm system. Kolkhozes were led by a chairman, who in the early years came from the village ranks or surrounding areas of the district. He (there were women occasionally in charge, as many as 8.6 of all kolkhozes in 1945) was often not fully educated, and as the position was often an elected one, there was a great deal of turnover. Jean Levesque's paper in A Dream Deferred: New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History is a really nice look at the problems with the chairman system under Stalin. It describes how bribery was used as an incentive and "grease" in the system for kolkhoznikii who wanted or needed extra privileges like cutting wood for personal use, or items like extra coal or a horse.
Simultaneously, chairmen were undermined by district officials who could drop by and abruptly order an action without understanding the full situation. There's a few stories of district officials dropping by to demand everyone drop everything and start sowing seed ─ it's spring, so naturally it must be planting season! ─ even though the ground was unsuitable or equipment needed to be maintained instead.
The kolkhoz was governed on the principle of the labor-day, the measuring stick by which agricultural output was measured. Of course, this was a completely ridiculous and useless tool. A person slouching off at work for 160 days, producing little, could get paid more than someone who did hard, productive work for 150 days. "Many collective farmers lived in 'mixed' households, in which some laboured for wages and others remained active on the kolkhoz," Donald Fitzer writes in his introduction to A Dream Deferred. "Family income depended on a mixture of wages, labour day payments by the kolkhoz, and the private plot."
Now, the situation under Stalin was grim, but Stalin died in 1953, and you're asking about 1955. That's Khrushchev and a whole different ballgame. Khrushchev was passionate about agriculture, having overseen the Ukraine during the disastrous 1946 famine there, and he understood farmers and farming in a way that Stalin never really did. From Day 1, he made it his mission to improve agriculture, including the collective farms. He said as much in the famous 1956 "Secret Speech":
"All those who interested themselves eve a little in the national situation saw the difficult situation in agriculture, but Stalin never even noted it. Did we tell Stalin about this? Yes, we told him, but he did not support us. Why? Because Stalin never traveled anywhere, did not meet city and collective farm workers; he did not know the actual situation in the provinces. He knew the country and agriculture only from films. And these films had dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture."
Even before Khrushchev fully took control, changes were afoot in the collective farm system. Under Malenkov, reforms were introduced to increase the prices the state paid for collective farm food, to reduce taxes on farming, and to encourage those productive private plots. Khrushchev briefly attempted to reverse the private plot plan, then backed off.
Khrushchev followed up on these notions with more of his own. He encouraged irrigation projects and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers. He accelerated the production and deployment of mechanized equipment, including tractors, by abolishing the Machine Tractor Stations, which had controlled that equipment instead of the farms themselves. He supported the growth of new (or higher-quality) foods such as beef ranching and corn. He consolidated farms into larger units for better management (a mostly unproductive move) and changed the "labor day" accounting system.
Most of all, he began the Virgin Lands Campaign, which opened tens of millions of acres of previously uncultivated land in Kazakhstan, Siberia and elsewhere. That program began in 1953 and recorded its first harvest in 1954, exceeding expectations. In 1955, the campaign was much less of a success, due to poor weather. The campaign continued until 1963, but it tapered off sharply after 1958 as its shortcomings became apparent.
One of Khrushchev's more successful programs was a reorganization of the chairmen system. Contemporary Soviet literature likes to portray WWII veterans coming back from the front to take charge and fix the chairman program. Levesque does a good job of defusing that and attributing the change to Krushchev's move to bring city-educated chairmen into the picture, replacing large numbers of the existing chairmen, and ensuring the new people stayed in office, something that gave the situation stability. There were 85,000 collective farms in 1955, and in that year alone, 23 percent of collective farm chairmen were changed. (See Robert Stuart's *The Collective Farm in Soviet Agriculture)
By 1955, the rising pace of goods production meant fewer problems like the ones written about in a typo-filled letter by a dairy herdsman at a collective farm near the Black Sea in 1936 (Stalinism as a Way of Life, Document 126):
"These are the shortcumings here on the part of the administrashin and the buro for rasing calves: there are no drinking bowls for cows, no towls, no cheescloth. There is no soap during milking [and] no kerosine. The milkmaids dont have overalls either. There never even were any handbasins. There are no troffs for the cows to drink fram at the storehouses. The above mentioned shortcumings may cause losses to our sovkhozes and the whole country too. Maybe I was wrong to write and made mistakes then dont pay attenshin because I cant read or write much."
The situation wasn't altogether good for collective farmers in 1955, but it was certainly improved from the 1930s, and it would continue to improve until the end of the Soviet Union.