ABSTRACT
Collectivization emerged out of a conjuncture of internal political conflict and economic crisis confronting the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Chinese collectivization, most notably when carried to fundamentalist extremes during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, produced a program, an institutional matrix, and a development strategy that placed the Chinese Party-state and a collectivized rural population on a collision course. By the important measures of productivity and growth, China's agrarian performance was impressive, particularly when combined with industrial growth rates of 10 per cent per year between 1965 and 1980. Since the early 1980s China as well as Vietnam have embarked on far more profound agrarian transitions. Russia's collective-state farm complex remained supreme in accumulation, production and marketing and the twin problems of incentives and deficits continued to fester. In both Russia and China, collective farm producers enjoyed access to private plots and continually sought to market a portion of their crops.
