ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to survey the overall failure of the “top-down” attempt at radical economic reform in 1992. Policy-makers paid relatively little explicit attention to agrarian reform in the overall reform debate, but that debate set the context for rural transformation and the activity of agrarian interest groups. The intention to privatize a substantial part of Russian state property was originally declared in the reform plan Yavlinskii drew up in the summer of 1990 that became the basis for the USSR’s “Shatalin Plan”. A political system based on coalitions of the real interests of voluntarily organized social groups in the long run will be a much “stronger” state than anything based on the gerontocratic, repressive “Chinese model” of reforming socialism. The chapter considers the effect of the most likely coalition of social forces on the future of the Russian countryside, especially the independent farmers.
