Gorbachev's appeal unleashed a storm of criticism that touched every aspect of Soviet life. Farm managers, agricultural specialists, teachers, writers, ordinary farmers and social scientists denounced the incidence of alcoholism, domestic abuse and disparities in health, housing, education and income between the rural populace and their urban counterparts. Playwrights portrayed heroic collective farmers who demanded the right to 'speak the Truth' to collective farm managers,[67] while a resolution ofthe Twenty-First Congress of the Uzbek Communist Party denounced corrupt officials who overstated the amount of raw cotton produced by hundreds of thousands of tons.[68] Farm managers, workers and intellectuals targeted the 'gigantomania' that repeatedly led policy makers to assume that an unlimited increase in inputs - in the form of supervisors, mechanisation, chemical fertiliser and the creation of ever-larger economic enterprises - automatically produced increased agricultural outputs.
Above all, rural critics rejected the notion - so deeply ingrained in the minds of Soviet (and pre-Soviet) policy makers - that agriculture and the rural inhabitants who made it work constituted 'the bottleneck of the country's development and the main reason for its backwardness'.73 Calls for the revital- isation of farming communities coexisted with demands for market socialism, greater opportunities to pursue long-term, enlightened self-interest, to acquire land of one's own, to be rewarded according to merit and to win respect and acknowledgement for local knowledge, experience and expertise.
In the 1990s, the fall of Gorbachev, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the accession to power of Boris Yeltsin marked an accelerated turn away from the precarious, socialist/capitalist 'balancing acts' of the previous decade. In its place, 'shock therapists' launched a revolutionary effort at social engineering that was to transform peasants into productive rural entrepreneurs. The first step in this process was to disentangle and sever property rights and economic activity from the reciprocal social obligations within which - from the peasantry's perspective - they had always been historically embedded. Convinced that the 'natural' desire to receive a piece of national wealth for free would serve as a powerful engine for agricultural land reform, Russia's neo-liberal reformers proposed a series of '500' and '1,000-day' schemes for the wholesale privatisation of the national economy. By 1994, the Union of Private Peasant Farmers (AKKOR) reported that there were 280,000 private farms in the Russian Federation alone.[69] However, among the former collective and state farmers (and urban dwellers with no previous farming experience) who became rural entrepreneurs, there was strikingly meagre enthusiasm for Western-style 'rugged individualism'.
In Nizhnii Novgorod, provincial governor Boris Nemtsov (later the first deputy prime minister of the Russian Republic) was hailed for his efforts to construct a fair, open and transparent exchange of land for shares,[70] but some observers raised doubts about the efficiency and productivity levels of these private farming ventures.[71] Even more troubling were reports that the successes in Nizhnii were due to extra-legal pressures from local authorities that recalled - in the words of economist Carol Leonard, 'something that is reminiscent of the tragic collectivisation campaigns of the 1930s'.[72] But in any event, few collective farms emulated the Nizhnii model during the i990s. Frequently, collectives 'privatised' by becoming joint-stock companies led by former collective farm managers who attempted to obtain for their members the welfare benefits previously provided in the Soviet workplace. On occasion, collective farm members voted to become individual peasant farmers in order to guarantee themselves secure individual ownership of lands that they continued to work and manage collectively. Although, legally, they had split up, their intention was to 'stay together'.[73] In the 1990s, insider trading and asset stripping by farm managers, their cronies and friends undermined both the aims and the legitimacy of efforts to establish a rural regime based on independent and private economic activity. The most successful entrepreneurs often turned out to be former farm managers whose networks and 'social capital' gave them decided advantages in the new market economy.[74]
In 1992, the price liberalisation policies introduced by Russia's shock therapists produced a devastating 2,600 per cent rise in consumer goods prices. By December i996, per capita monthly income in the Russian Republic stood at 47 per cent of its 1992 level.[75] In the cities and in the countryside, ablackmarket and systems of barter began to flourish - and even to eclipse more normal mechanisms of exchange. In this precarious context, many farm workers and pensioners decided to remain on their collective farms and to rely - as in the 1930s - on their private plots and communal traditions. By the mid-1990s, over 60 per cent of Russian households were producing a significant proportion of their own food needs on private rural and urban garden plots. Some 14 million were sited in the countryside, and depended on former collectives for the material prerequisites for farming - that is, seeds, machinery and fuel.81
Under these circumstances, the rage and despair of a rural populace in decline soon overshadowed the 1980s critiques of the Soviet era. As in other societies that experienced 'structural adjustment', rural women (and children) were the most hard hit; women were particularly threatenedby 'land for shares' programmes that failed to acknowledge their special claims and - given their childcare responsibilities - their disproportionate need for the social welfare supports of the Soviet era. It is also worth noting that although women had for years borne major responsibility for the productive private plots of the Soviet era, they were not targeted as potential entrepreneurs either by local officials, by aid agencies or by the rural population itself.[76] In the words of a seventy-two-year-old woman farm worker from Voronezh province in 1995:
'what do I think about restructuring? We've been restructured about once every five years for as long as I can remember. And every time things get worse instead of better. I don't see why it should be any different this time. Restructuring usually means that things get worse.'[77]
In important respects, farm women may have represented in its most extreme form the challenge that the rural populace posed to would-be reformers and tormentors throughout the twentieth century. Opposed to the single- minded privatisation measures of the Stolypin era and to the incomparably more brutal and single-minded collectivism of the 1930s, they were averse in the 1990s to the 'either/or' choices presented to them by the Russian government. Although they were no longer the illiterates of the pre-Soviet era, many farm women (and men) nevertheless continued to believe that labour legitimised claims to property. Like their forebears, they were suspicious of individuals who bought land but did not use it, or misused it, or purchased land only to sell it at a higher profit, denouncing them as 'speculators' (spekulanty) rather than 'true owners'.84
69
L. Perotta, 'Divergent Responses to Land Reform and Agricultural Restructuring in the Russian Federation', in Bridger and Pine,
70
Introduced in the i990s, this programme divided collective and state farm land into private shares that could be redeemedin exchange for plots ofland and other agricultural assets that permitted individuals to farm independently. Shares were to be apportioned by collective and state enterprises; individual claims were to be assessed in traditional, pre-i9i7 village fashion - in accordance with current and past investments of labour (i.e. with shares granted to both actively employed and retired workers). S. K. Wegren, 'Political Institutions and Agrarian Reform in Russia', in Van Atta,
72
C. S. Leonard, 'Rational Resistance to Land Privatisation: The Response of Rural Producers to Agrarian Reforms in Pre- and Post-Soviet Russia',
74
M. Lampland, 'The Advantages ofBeing Collectivised: Collective Farm Managers in the Postsocialist Economy', in C. M. Hann (ed.),
75
P. Caskie, 'Back to Basics: Household Food Production in Russia',
Ibid., p. 207. 82 Perotta, 'Divergent', p. 164. 83 Ibid., pp. 148-9.
76
84 Myriam Hivon, 'The Bullied Farmer: Social Pressure as a Survival Strategy', in Bridger