ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the main institutional transformations in the Russian agricultural sector during the 1990s, evaluates their social and economic consequences, and seeks to explain some of their failures. Globalization and internationalization of production, structural changes in the world economy, and economic and financial crises in the world exercise an increasing influence over both the Russian economy as a whole and the development of its separate sectors. Changing market conditions and conditions of management have required changes in agrarian actors' economic and social strategies. The role of part-time farms in the process of the establishment of a private sector in the agricultural economy is not unequivocal. The dynamics of the development of the three segments of the agricultural economy clearly show the first paradox of agricultural reform, which is the expansion of small commodity production. Institutional transformations in the Russian agricultural sector have had incoherent results. The chapter concludes that blanket decollectivization would be rash.
