Abstract
Of the three main food producers in Russia—large farms, private farms, and households—it is clear that large farms were most affected by state urban bias and the elements thereof. During the 1990s, large farms experienced significant and prolonged reductions in gross output, their contribution to the gross domestic product declined, farm debt increased, and the number of unprofitable farms skyrocketed.1 Given the unfavorable macroeconomic and political environment in which large farms operated during much of the 1990s, it would be very easy to conclude that there was little adaptation in the Russian countryside. Indeed, some Western analysts have concluded that this is exactly the case, arguing that Russia has experienced “false transformations” or pro forma institutional change.2 Unfortunately, with few exceptions, the issue of rural change has not been explored systematically. One reason for this oversight is the relative difficulty of conducting research in rural areas. Unlike urban areas, rural areas are quite primitive, they are difficult to get to, logistics are complicated, and permission from sel’sovets (rural administrations) to work in villages can be problematic. Thus, at best, we are often left without a comprehensive, coherent picture of rural reality.
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Notes
Maria Amelina, “False Transformations: From Stalin’s Peasants to Yeltsin’s Collective Farmers,” Paper presented at Workshop on Rural Russia, Woodrow Wilson Center, Kennan Institute, Washington, DC, May 4–6, 1999;
and Carol Scott Leonard, “Rational Resistance to Land Privatization: The Response of Rural Producers to Agrarian Reforms in Pre- and Post-Soviet Russia,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, vol. 41, no. 8 (November–December 2000), pp. 605–20.
On public urban support for privatization, see Lynn D. Nelson, Lilia V. Babaeva, and Rufat O. Babaev, “Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Privatization in Russia: Policy and Public Opinion,” Slavic Review, vol. 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992), pp. 271–86;
Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli, and William M. Reisinger, “Reassessing Mass Support for Political and Economic Change in the Former Soviet Union,” American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 2 (June 1994), pp. 399–411;
and Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), chap. 7.
Works that argue that privatization has little support include Jerry F. Hough, “The Russian Election of 1993: Public Attitudes Toward Economic Reform and Democratization,” Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 10, no. 1 (1994), pp. 1–37;
Jerry F. Hough, Evelyn Davidheiser, and Susan Goodrich Lehmann, The 1996 Russian Presidential Election (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1996);
and Joan Debardeleben, “Attitudes Towards Privatization in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 51, no. 3 (1999), pp. 447–65. This list is representative and not exhaustive.
See e.g., Stephen K. Wegren, “Yeltsin’s Decree on Land Relations: Implications for Agrarian Reform,” Post-Soviet Geography, vol. 35, no. 3 (March 1994), pp. 166–78;
Stephen K. Wegren, Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), chaps. 3 and 5;
Karen Brooks, et al., Agricultural Reform in Russia: A View from the Farm Level, World Bank Discussion Paper no. 327 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1994), chap. 2;
and Zvi Lerman and Karen Brooks, “Russia’s Legal Framework for Land Reform and Farm Restructuring,” Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 43, no. 6 (November–December 1996), pp. 48–58.
See Marie Lavigne, The Economics of Transition: From Socialist Economy to Market Economy, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), chap. 8.
Morris Bornstein, “Russia’s Mass Privatization Program,” Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, vol. 6, no. 4 (1994), pp. 419–57;
and Aslund Anders, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1995), chap. 7.
Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2001), pp. 68, 92.
Calculated from Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000), p. 372. “Technical crops” include flax, sugar beets, soy, and sunflowers.
See Stephen K. Wegren, Russia’s Food Policies and Globalization (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), chap. 1.
The decree was entitled “On Urgent Measures for the Implementation of Land Reform in the RSFSR,” Rossiiskiia gazeta, December 31, 1991, p. 3. For a description of the process for land distribution, see Stephen K. Wegren, “Political Institutions and Agrarian Reform in Russia,” in Don Van Atta, ed., The ‘Farmer Threat’: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 125.
Resolution 874 from July 27, 1994, “On Reorganization of Agricultural Enterprises Based on the Experience of Nizhniy Novgorod Province,” in International Finance Corporation, Land Privatization and Farm Reorganization in Russia: Annexes (Washington, DC: IFC, 1995), pp. 43–56.
For more on this institutional type of change, see Valeri V. Patsiorkovski, “Rural Household Behavior, 1991–2001,” in David J. O’Brien and Stephen K. Wegren, eds., Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), chap. 5.
Susan J. Linz and Gary Krueger, “Russia’s Managers in Transition: Pilferers or Paladins? Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, vol. 37, no. 7 (September 1996), pp. 397–425;
and Susan J. Linz, “Red Executives in Russia’s Transition Economy,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, vol. 37, no. 10 (December 1996), pp. 633–51.
Linda J. Cook and Vladimir E. Gimpelson, “Exit and Voice in Russian Managers’ Privatization Strategies,” Communist Economics and Economic Transformation, vol. 7, no. 4 (December 1995), pp. 465–83.
See Gavin Kitching, “The Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Russia 1991–97: Some Observations from Fieldwork,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 25, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 11–13.
Roy L. Prosterman, “Russian Agrarian Reform: A Status Report from the Field,” Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, vol. 7, no. 2 (June 1995), p. 185.
Andrew Barnes, “What’s the Difference? Industrial Privatization and Agricultural Land Reform in Russia, 1990–1996,” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 50, no. 5 (1998), p. 853.
See Cynthia S. Kaplan, The Party and Agricultural Crisis Management in the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
See International Finance Corporation (IFC), Monitoring Russian Reorganized Farms: An Integrated Analysis of Economic and Social Change in Nizhny Novgorod, Oryol, and Other Oblasts, Results of 1997 Studies (unpublished document, 1998).
For an excellent insight from personal experience into how farms operated, see Andrei Amalrik, Involuntary Journey to Siberia (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), esp. chaps. 12–15.
Peter Rutland, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Local Party Organs in Economic Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 144.
See Karl-Eugen Wadekin, “Agriculture,” in Martin McCauley, ed., The Soviet Union Under Gorbachev (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), chap. 6.
See Max Spoor and Oane Visser, “Restructuring Postponed? Large Russian Farm Enterprises ‘Coping with the Market,’” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 31, nos. 3–4 (April–July 2004), pp. 515–51.
Toshihiko Kawagoe, “Deregulation and Protectionism in Japanese Agriculture,” in Juro Terahishi and Yutaka Kosai, eds., The Japanese Experience of Economic Reforms (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 371–72.
S. Seshaiah, Land Reform and Social Change in a Japanese Village (Bangalore: Shiny Publications, 1980) pp. 104–05.
Sidney Klein, The Pattern of Land Tenure Reform in East Asia After World War II (New York: Bookman Associates 1958), p. 36.
R. P. Dore, Land Reform in Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 198.
Maria Amelina, “Rural Interactions in the Post-Soviet Era,” in L. Alexander Norsworthy, ed., Russian Views of the Transition in the Rural Sector: Structures, Policy Outcomes, and Adaptive Responses (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2000), p. 21.
Starting in 1993, large farms still had to sell certain percentages of output to federal and regional “food funds” at state-defined prices, but these deliveries were no longer termed “obligatory” and the quantity was reduced from previous levels. Nonetheless, it was clear that large farms were required to sign “contracts” for the delivery of food, so in essence contracts replaced state orders. See Stephen K. Wegren, “From Farm to Table: The Food System in Post-Communist Russia,” Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, vol. 8, no. 2 (1996), pp. 149–83.
See V. D. Smirnov, Fermerstvo v Rossii—chto eto takoe (Novosibirsk: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2003), p. 39.
See S. D. Valentei, ed., Problemy sel’skokhoziaistvennogo kredita (Moscow: Russian Academy of Science, Institute of Economics, 1998), pp. 52–62.
For an analysis of survival strategies of large farms, see David Epstein and Peter Tillack, “How Russian Agricultural Enterprises are Surviving,” Eastern European Economics, vol. 37, no. 5 (September–October 1999), pp. 52–91.
Interestingly, surveys in some parts of Russia have shown that financially stronger farms are more likely to try to protect farm workers and the weakest farms have shed the most labor. V. Ia. Uzun, ed., Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskii analiz rezul’tatov reorganizatsii sel’skokhoziaistvennykh predpriiatii (Moscow: Entsiklopediia rossiiskii dereven,’ 1999), pp. 61, 65;
and Zemfira I. Kalugina, “Survival Strategies of Enterprises and Families in the Contemporary Russian Countryside,” Paper presented at Workshop on Rural Russia, Woodrow Wilson Center, Kennan Institute, Washington, DC, May 4–6, 1999. This finding was supported by findings in other regions as well.
See Stephen K. Wegren, “Socioeconomic Transformation in Russia: Where is the Rural Elite?” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 2 (2000), pp. 237–71;
and V. Ia. Uzun, “Privatization of Land and Farm Restructuring: Ideas, Mechanisms, Results, Problems,” in Farm Profztability, Sustainability and Restructuring in Russia (Moscow: Institute for Economy in Transition Analytical Center, 1999), pp. 42–46. Such “paternal” protective behaviors have been observed in industry as well.
Cited in Stephen K. Wegren, “New Perspectives on Spatial Patterns of Agrarian Reform: A Comparison of Two Russian Oblasts,” Post-Soviet Geography, vol. 35, no. 8 (October 1994), p. 464.
On this point there is little disagreement among analysts. See Stephen K. Wegren, “Change in Russian Agrarian Reform, 1992–1998: The Case of Kostroma Oblast,” in Kurt Engleman, ed., Agricultural Development in Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Kitching, “The Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Russia 1991–97: Some Observations from Fieldwork”; Epstein and Tillack, “How Russian Agricultural Enterprises are Surviving”; and Sedik, Foster, and Liefert, “Economic Reforms and Agriculture, 1992–95.”
See Grigory Ioffe and Tatyana Nefedova, “Russian Agriculture and Food Processing: Vertical Cooperation and Spatial Dynamics,” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 53, no. 3 (2001), pp. 389–418. For more on processors searching for partnerships with farms in Novosibirsk, see also Sel’skaia zhizn’, December 21–27, 2000, p. 3.
The methodology and scope of the survey is described in Stephen K. Wegren, David J. O’Brien, and Valeri V. Patsiorkovski, “Winners and Losers in Russian Agrarian Reform,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (October 2002), pp. 1–29.
See R. V. Ryvkina and L. Ia. Kosals, eds., Sotsial’nye posledstviia rynochnykh reform v Rossii (Moscow: Institute for Socio-Economic Studies of the Population, 1997), p. 229.
The literature on this point is already vast, for examples see Richard Rose and Ellen Carnaghan, “Generational Effects on Attitudes to Communist Regimes: A Comparative Analysis,” Post-Soviet Afairs, vol. 11, no. 1 (1995), pp. 28–56;
Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000);
and Yitzhak M. Brudny, “Continuity or Change in Russia Electoral Patterns? The December 1999–March 2000 Election Cycle,” in Archie Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 154–78.
V. Ia. Uzun, ed., Reformirovanie sel’skokhoziaistvennykh predpriiatii: sotsial’noekonomicheskii analiz (1994–1997 gg.) (Moscow: Znak, 1998), p. 107.
See IFC, Land Privatization and Farm Reorganization in Russia (Washington, DC: IFC, 1995), in particular pp. 34–42.
N. M. Rimashevskaia, ed., Rossiia 1997: sotsial’no-demograficheskaia situatsiia (Moscow: Institute of Socio-economic Problems of the Population, 1998), pp. 232–33.
There may be an age bias in the sample, as the data also show that 16 percent of farm managers’ income on non-reorganized farms comes from pensions, which would in part also explain the higher percentage from private plots. Only 4% of farm managers’ income comes from pensions on reorganized farms according to the sample. See V. Ia. Uzun, ed., Sotsial’noekonomicheskie posledstviia privatizatsii zemli i reorganizatsii sel’skokhoziaistvennykh predpriiatii (1994–1996 gg.). (Moscow: Entsiklopediia rossiiskii dereven, 1997), p. 84.
It is interesting to note that when the Land Code was finally adopted in 2001, it left out provisions on the rural land market because disagreement continued. In 2002, a different law regulated rural land sales, and Russia did not end up with a free (unrestricted) land market. For an analysis of the 2002 law, see Stephen K. Wegren, “Observations on Russia’s New Agricultural Land Legislation,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 43, no. 8 (December 2002). pp. 651–60.
Stephen K. Wegren, “Why Rural Russians Participate in the Land Market: Socio-economic factors,” Post-CommunistEconomies, vol. 15, no. 4 (December 2003), pp. 483–501.
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Wegren, S.K. (2005). How Peasants Adapt: Large Farms and Farm Managers. In: The Moral Economy Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601130_3
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