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Q. Tell us a little about your background-did you grow up in a rural setting?
I grew up in San Bernardino, California, which at that time was surrounded by orange groves and mountain ranges. Many farms and orchards became subdivisions and malls, but California has always been a vast agricultural powerhouse, and farms were always around. Both my parents grew up in urban areas, and neither knew very much about agriculture.
Growing up I focused on sciences, the debate team, and classical guitar and piano. I began college at University of California-Santa Cruz as a physics major, but after one year transferred to University of California- Los Angeles to study music. I earned a BA and MA in music and then realized that I was becoming very narrowly focused, and I became interested in history as a way to expand my horizons. The UCLA History Department offered me a four-year fellowship. I had already begun studying Russian, my fifth language, and in the 1980s the USSR seemed to be the most important country to study. My advisor, the late Professor Hans Rogger, was an excellent mentor.
Q. What drew you to agricultural history?
My shift to agricultural history came at the beginning of Rogger's graduate seminar in which each student had to select a potential dissertation topic. I switched to history in part out of interest in economic development and backwardness and, because agriculture was important in those areas, I decided to study Soviet agriculture and collectivization.
That decision led to my dissertation "Commune to Kolkhoz" about the ways collectivization changed or perpetuated traditional Russian farming methods. In writing that study I encountered many issues or fashions in agrarian history: James Scott's "moral economy" and "everyday resistance," the economic backwardness debates, and issues of farm size, labor productivity, agricultural production statistics, agrarianism, and urban-rural relations.
I also found out about the problems of politicized research. My first article presented previously secret archival data from the collective farms, which showed that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s resulted from a serious crop failure. Most previous studies had accepted uncritically the Soviet "official" figures, which did not show a crop failure....