Kolkhoz in the context of "Household plot"

Shalom Koboshvili (1876 – 1941) was a Georgian artist who specialised in drawings and paintings of Jewish life in Georgia. Born to a poor family of Jews in Akhaltsikhe, Koboshvili was originally intended for the Rabbinate, but quit religious training at an early age. His interest in art was discouraged by his family, and he was originally apprenticed as a printer. All his knowledge of art was effectively self-taught. After a varied career (in which around 1910 he is said to have met with the artist Niko Pirosmani) he eventually became in 1937 a watchman at the newly established Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Museum in Tbilisi. His work there apparently inspired him to devote himself to painting and all his surviving work dates from the period 1937–1941, the year of his death.

Koboshvili's work, which is all in a competent but naive style, is entirely devoted to scenes of Jewish life; sometimes painted in oils, sometimes in water colours on paper. There are scenes relating to Jewish marriages, to Jewish festivals (including Sukkot and Yom Kippur), and to scenes of Jewish life in Georgian villages and on Jewish kolkhozes.

The Soviet Union introduced collectivization (Russian: Коллективизация) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927. This problem became more severe as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.

In October 1929, approximately 7.5% of the peasant households were in collective farms, and by February 1930, 52.7% had been collectivised. The collectivization era saw several famines, as well as peasant resistance to collectivization. Resistance took the form of protests and armed resistance amongst peasants to the Soviet regime.

Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes (mainly prodrazverstka and prodnalog) were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against (vaguely defined) "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33 (most especially the Holodomor in Ukraine). A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, many reforms (such as Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign) were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their standard of living.

Despite immense land resources, extensive farm machinery and agrochemical industries, and a large rural workforce, Soviet agriculture was relatively unproductive. Output was hampered in many areas by the climate and poor worker productivity. However, Soviet farm performance was not uniformly bad. Organized on a large scale and relatively highly mechanized, its state and collective agriculture made the Soviet Union one of the world's leading producers of cereals, although bad harvests (as in 1972 and 1975) necessitated imports and slowed the economy. The 1976–1980 five-year plan shifted resources to agriculture, and 1978 saw a record harvest. Conditions were best in the temperate chernozem (black earth) belt stretching from Ukraine through southern Russia into the east, spanning the extreme southern portions of Siberia. In addition to cereals, cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, and flax were also major crops. Such performance showed that underlying potential was not lacking, which was not surprising as the agriculture in the Russian Empire was traditionally amongst the highest producing in the world, although rural social conditions since the October Revolution were hardly improved. Grains were mostly produced by the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, but vegetables and herbs often came from private plots.

A sovkhoz was a form of state-owned farm or agricultural enterprise in the Soviet Union.

It is usually contrasted with kolkhoz, which is a collective-owned farm. Just as the members of a kolkhoz were called "kolkhozniks", the workers of a sovkhoz were called "sovkhhozniks".

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking. The Newspeak language thus limits the person's ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will, which are thoughtcrimes, acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of Ingsoc collectivism.

In the appendix to the novel, "The Principles of Newspeak", Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractions of Newspeak – Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), Miniplenty (Ministry of Plenty) – are similar to Nazi and Soviet contractions in the 20th century, such as Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), politburo (Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Comintern (Communist International), kolkhoz (collective farm), and Komsomol (communist youth union). Newspeak contractions usually are syllabic abbreviations meant to conceal the speaker's ideology from the speaker and the listener.