Contemporary Rural Responses to Reform from Above

Abstract

Four times in the twentieth century Russia attempted significant agrarian reforms. The Stolypin reforms introduced a voluntary program of land individualization for land that previously was held communally. Reforms during the New Economic Policy moderated the antirural bias of War Communism by reducing controls over food production, wholesale trade, and allowing land leasing. Collectivization was an attempt to grapple with chronic food shortages and famine, as well as to establish political and economic control over the countryside. As is well known, it was a brutal campaign and implemented with violence and significant loss of life.' The contemporary agrarian transition in Russia was intended to replace collective agriculture with agrarian capitalism. Similar to past agrarian reforms, it was introduced from above, and was a mix of volunteerism and obligation.2 Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin introduced a course of institutional change that was intended to break sharply with the Soviet past. These changes included reorganization and privatization of state and collective farms, privatization of processing and agricultural enterprises, land privatization and the adoption of supportive legal institutions, the creation of an individual private farming stratum, and the development of a land market. In short, Yeltsin's agrarian reforms were intended to transform Russia's agricultural economy along market lines. The specific goals were to privatize farm land and property, to create the foundations for a rural class of independent and prosperous private farmers, to make food production more productive and efficient, to decrease the economic burden of food subsidies to the national budget, and to deregulate food trade.