Soviet collective farms were not an invention of top managers of the Bolshevik Party, who faced the problem of finding funds for accelerated national industrialization, for which the sale of grain abroad was supposed to be one of the main sources of investments. Large grain farms similar to collective farms existed in Germany since the mid-19th century. Lenin called this method of exploiting virtually landless peasants, turned into hired workers for a minimum wage, «the Prussian way of developing capitalism in agriculture» — Junker (landowner) land ownership (its antipode is a farm in the United States). Created on the model of the German Junker farms criticized by the leader of the world proletariat, collective farms served as suppliers of marketable bread, both for export and for providing food to the rapidly growing population of the industrial centres of the USSR. During the Patriotic War of 1941– 1945, the German administration in the occupied territories kept safe the Soviet collective forms of agricultural production that were indistinguishable from the Junker estates, reasonably considering them an ideal mechanism for withdrawing food for the German army. Israel is the only country where voluntary collective farms (kibbutzim) became a successfully functioning integral element of the agricultural landscape in the 2nd half of the 20th century, which is explained by a special historical and psychological background.
Similar agricultural structures were created by Japanese officials in the puppet state of Manchukuo, that occupied part of China from 1931 to 1945. It is difficult to say, whether they were a copy of the Junker farms in Germany or a product of intellectual labour of former members of the Japanese Communist Party, inspired by the Soviet experience, who worked under the control of the Kempeitai (the Japanese equivalent of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)) in the exciting Mantetsu Tyosabu Research Institute (Research Department of the South Manchurian Railway). In this article, we will look at Korean «collective villages» created in Manchuria by the Japanese occupation administration (19311945), both from local Koreans of whom there were about a million in Manchuria in 1931 and from Korean immigrants imported to this region of China from Korea.