ABSTRACT
Agriculture has occupied center stage in Russia’s crises over the past two centuries. In agriculture, the social, ideological, and political developments in turn provoked talk about the need for more fundamental reform, reaching beyond the Soviet-style models of agriculture. Worse, the partial privatization of agriculture has actually reinforced the state’s monopolistic positions vis-à-vis both individual farmers and former state and collective farms. The question of whether to grant individuals full private-property rights to agricultural land remains a matter of bitter contention and a major impediment to agricultural privatization. The real problem lies with the backwardness of the agricultural infrastructure and its ubiquitous waste. Like the image of New Economic Policy held by earlier proponents of agricultural reform, the image of the Stolypin reforms projected in the course of this debate was also excessively simplified. Limitations were finally lifted only in October 1993 when Boris Yeltsin issued a decree legalizing the unrestricted sale of agricultural land.
