ABSTRACT
Our treatment of agriculture must differ fundamentally from that of industry, and this for two major reasons. First, Soviet agriculture is in crisis in a way that Soviet industry is not. While industrial policy makers may argue meaningfully about the relative merits of incrementalism and ‘radicalism’, their agricultural opposite numbers must often wonder whether there is any future in Soviet agriculture as presently organised at all. Secondly, Mikhail Gorbachev comes from a predominantly agricultural background. He worked on the land as a youth, and went back into the local politics of his native, largely agrarian, province as soon as he graduated from Moscow. To a considerable extent he built his political reputation on the relative agricultural success of Stavropol′ krai in the 1970s, and it was agriculture which brought him back to Moscow in 1978. As we shall see, Gorbachev was careful, during the Andropov and Chernenko periods, not to identify too closely with specific agricultural policies — wisely, one can only feel, in the light of the uniform lack of success attendant on these policies. But Gorbachev has been thinking about and acting on agricultural problems for 25 years. If we wish, therefore, to assess Soviet prospects for the future, we must look at Gorbachev’s Stavropol′ policies in the past. First, however, some facts and figures.
