“I WANTED TO DRAW THE SOCIETY’S ATTENTION TO AGRICULTURE”

Abstract

This interview with Gennady Stepanovich Lisichkin was taken on February 1, 1999 for the book Press in Society (1959-2000). Estimates of Journalists and Sociologists. Documents. We believe that the biography of this famous scholar and publicist, which is closely related to the development of agriculture in the USSR in the 1950-1970s, will be interesting to the readers of the Russian Peasant Studies. In 1953, after graduating from the MGIMO University and working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gennady Stepanovich voluntarily went to Kazakhstan and was the head of the collective farm for three years. Later he worked at the USSR Embassy in Yugoslavia, as an editor of the department in the Izvestia and as an economic observer in the Pravda. He was an involuntary initiator of the public discussion on the economic challenges of agricultural production in the central press in the 1960s (a selection of documents from the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History was published in the section “Beyond the Economic Discussion in the Press”).