For their part, the Union of Private Landed Proprietors, understandably enraged by the destruction of harvests and burning of tractors carried out by collective farmers during the early 1990s, denounced the archaic 'traditions of egalitarianism' and the survival of the Soviet era's 'culture of envy'.[78] Frustrated enthusiasts like Boris Nemtsov complained that 'the primary hindrance to privatisation of land in Nizhnii Novgorod province is the lack of people who want to become owners'.[79] In the newly independent Baltic state of Estonia, reformers denounced the machinations of Soviet-era 'Red barons' who reclaimed former privileges at the expense of former employees.[80] In general, advocates of privatisation attributed the problems of agriculture to the irreconcilable contradiction between collectivism and private economic initiative.
For their part, collective and state farm workers argued that when private enterprise became the only legitimate and legally protected form of farm ownership, the state subsidised private farmers, granted them preferential credit arrangements and praised them for their achievements. In contrast, the state deprived collective farmers of their former advantages and then vilified them for laziness and incompetence.[81] Former collective and state farm managers were particularly prone to argue that small-scale family farms were incapable of meeting the food needs of the Russian Republic. In general, critics of privatisation attributed the inefficiency of collective enterprises to external causes and in particular to government policies that privileged some groups at the expense of others.[82]
There is plenty ofevidence to support arguments on both sides ofthis issue. Among both defenders and enemies of privatisation, peasants differed with each other and with the government over the acceptable costs of change, the services and benefits to which citizens should legitimately be able to lay claim, and the role of the state as either a promoter of social cohesion or a catalyst for an individualistic, almost Darwinian struggle for survival.
Post-Soviet rural life: prospects and dilemmas
In the Russian Republic, agricultural production was 36 per cent lower in 1997 than in 1990. Reasserting the economic priorities of the Stalin and pre-1917 years, Yeltsin-era investment in agriculture declined from 16 per cent of the total in 1992 to 2.5 per cent in 1997. By 2000, over 90 per cent of Russian grain still came from former collective and state farms; private farms had made only a very modest impact and did not perform appreciably better than the former public sector.90 Despite the brevity of the privatisation experiment and the rapid rates at which rural land has been bought and sold since 1991, there are few signs that privatisation has - as yet - positively affected agricultural productivity rates.[83]
Both the enduring and changing dilemmas of the post-Soviet era are evident in the case of Estonia - an outstanding success story of the 1990s. Newly privatised Estonian family farms have produced high agricultural yields (together with the stark economic divisions between the prosperous and the poor that recall the inter-war years of Estonian independence). Particularly troubling, however, are the late 1990s reports that both supporters and opponents of private farms believed that up to a third of the private farms in Estonia would fail due to shortages of machinery and materials, the absence of social services like health care and a scarcity of capital.[84] In the Russian Republic, among the approximately 30 million who still lived on the land and owned shares in former collective and state farms, the limited access to credit, poor infrastructure and high cost of social protections were bankrupting even the more efficient former Soviet farm enterprises. It was estimated in 1998 that only 20 per cent of the former collective farms/joint-stock companies in the Russian Republic were capable of surviving within a competitive and capital-scarce
environment.93
In 2003, many public opinion polls indicated that most former collective farmers - who still controlled three-quarters of Russia's arable land - were opposed to the private ownership of land. At the same time, new land laws have further undermined traditional links between labour claims and land use by permitting foreign investors to purchase landed property for capitalist agribusinesses. Such moves aroused opposition not only from labourers who still owned shares in former collective farms, but also from new private farmers who had leased collective farm fields and worked hard to improve them. Reflecting on the events of the past decade, the Agrarian Party's Iurii Savinok declared: 'Look what happened in the 90s - all Russia's industries and resources were grabbed by a few rich oligarchs . . . Does anyone doubt that the same will happen when land goes on the block? . . . Ordinary Russians will be dispossessed again.'94
From the perspective of the rural populace at the dawn of the twenty- first century, survival and success seem more dependent on the ability of individuals and households to mobilise a broad range of political and economic resources than on a talent for generating and reinvesting private profits. In the words of new private farmer A. I. Poprov in 2003, 'Ownership is an empty symbol. What's important is who possesses the land and how he uses it.'95
It has been suggested that a sustainable and productive Russian agriculture might well be compatible with an economic system that permits diverse farm sizes and ownership structures that range from large-scale to independent peasant farms to semi-subsistence household plots.96 Such a proposal would be quite consistent with the history of mixed economies that peasants created whenever there were choices available to them. But the adoption of such a strategy would require reformers to abandon their dichotomised 'either/or' approach to development for one that is far more sensitive to the social impact of economic change upon the rural populace. As we have seen, economic pluralism has rarely appealed either to Russian or Soviet governments. As a policy, it remains - at least so far - starkly at odds with those currently being deployed or contemplated in the Russian Republic.
95 Weir, 'This Land', In These Times. 96 Caskie, 'Back', p. 208.
Workers and industrialisation
LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM
'What is the contemporary factory worker in Russia', asked Mikhail Tugan- Baranovskii towards the end of the nineteenth-century, 'a peasant living on the land who makes up the deficiencies of his agricultural income by occasional factory work, or a proletarian bound closely to the factory who lives by selling his labour power?'[85] Tugan-Baranovskii, among Russia's foremost political economists, seemed unsure how to answer the question. Citing earlier studies showing a decline in seasonal employment among workers in Moscow province, he nevertheless had to acknowledge that 'the tie of the factory worker to the soil, although waning, is still very strong', that it was 'economically necessary and therefore is tenaciously maintained'. Yet, echoing an article of faith among Russian Marxists, he confidently predicted that 'a complete severance of this tie... is inevitable, and the sooner it takes place the better'.2
80
88 Myriam Hivon, 'Local Resistance to Privatization in Rural Russia',
82
Perotta, 'Divergent', p. 161.
Caskie, 'Back', pp. 200-1. 91 Ioffe and Nefedova,
85
M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii,