Agriculture continues to present the regimes of the Communist world with some of their most important economic and political problems even after the trials of collectivizing are past. There are constant pressures, on the one hand, to make the collective system much more productive by improving organizational efficiency and raising the level of technology. On the other hand, the official ideology commits these regimes to eventually abolishing the collective system itself by transforming the collective farms into institutions of state property. There are indications, moreover, that this commitment may not be postponed indefinitely. The issue of how to establish a viable, permanent, and uniform organization of agriculture with completely nationalized enterprises has recurrently arisen in the Soviet Union over the last decade: in Khrushchev's “agro-town” proposal of the early 1950's, for example, with its implicit aim of eliminating the private plots of collective farmers, and in the later fairly large-scale experiments with a system of fixed wages in collective farms and with direct conversions of collective into state farms.