The viability of collective farms in the Urals during the agrarian crises of the 1960s–1980s: synergetic interpretation of the objective and subjective

This article attempts to characterize the agricultural cycles inherent to collective farm production in the Urals from the second half of the 1960s to the first half of the 1980s using a heuristic synergetic framework. To elucidate the nature of these cyclical fluctuations, H.Ph. Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is also invoked. Based on a graphical method, it is shown that in the process of transition from hedge finance to speculative finance, and then to Ponzi finance, the collective farms of the Urals approached a bifurcation point, and the choice of a new attractor was determined by decisions of the CPSU and the government to write off credit debt and direct additional investments to capital investments and major repairs, etc. The best confirmation of the existence of agricultural cycles is the dynamics of profitability indicators of collective farm production, calculated in two versions — as the ratio of net income to the cost of sold products and as the ratio of net income to the value of fixed production assets and working capital.