Introduction

Since 1989, the countries of the former Soviet Union have undertaken a new rural revolution. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled a single, centralized, state when that transformation began. The political tensions exposed and heightened by the agrarian reforms greatly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet empire in August 1991. To make post-Soviet agriculture work more efficiently and provide a steady supply of the food and agricultural raw materials needed for further economic growth and development, individual farmers and farm workers must be given new incentives. The Soviet countryside was collectivized longer and more thoroughly than anywhere else. Financial aid is surely necessary. But without socio-economic changes that aid will be just as wasted as the vast sums the old USSR authorities appropriated for agriculture between 1965 and 1991.