ABSTRACT
For the USSR agriculture has always been a major political problem. But the nature of the problem and the government’s attitude to it have changed significantly since Stalin’s time, and have been changing further in recent years. Stalin’s neglect and abuse of the economic interests of the peasantry were replaced by Khrushchev’s administrative reorganisations and then by Brezhnev’s economic indulgence, as capital investment and other expenditures on agriculture reached an unjustifiable level. Since the war and until the late 1970s the share of capital investment going to agriculture had consistently been increasing, despite the fact that the agricultural share in Soviet GNP had been consistently declining. Low consumer prices for food were only maintained through the use of a large and growing level of subsidies. Since 1972 the Soviet Union has also been relying increasingly on the importation of agricultural produce and agricultural raw materials (especially grain for livestock feed), in order to maintain even this decreasing share of GNP (see Table 7.1). Such a situation could not continue indefinitely.
