ABSTRACT
The fisheries collective ‘Kirov’, named after Sergei Mironovich Kirov (1886– 1934), came to be referred to as ‘the millionaire kolkhoz’. Situated along the Bay of Tallinn in Soviet Estonia, by the 1950s, the kolkhoz had been able to generate a considerable amount of wealth through its own activities and to share the profits among its 7000 members. Although this economic success did not quite make the individual kolkhoz members into millionaires, they were, nevertheless, envied by outsiders because they enjoyed a standard of living that was higher than the average Estonian. The Kirov kolkhoz proved that to become wealthy through one’s own entrepreneurial activity was possible even in the Soviet planned economy. By the 1950s, therefore, a collective farm can be considered as an economic actor that had a legal right to strive for profit.
