![collective farms collective farms](https://bk-investment.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Zhyvachiv-Collective-Farm.jpg)
To force the farmers into greater efficiency, Yeltsin’s decree will effectively halt the subsidies the unprofitable farms have received from the state in the future, their incomes will depend on the quantity and quality of their produce. Russians, moreover, had a tradition of collectivized agriculture even before the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. The biggest hindrance in breaking up the collectivized agriculture, however, has been the reluctance of individual farmers to strike out on their own, given the assured pay, benefits and easier life they have enjoyed on state-run farms.
![collective farms collective farms](http://gdj.graphicdesignjunction.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/print-media-ad-34.jpg)
With about a fifth of Russia’s labor force now engaged in farming and a fifth of its gross domestic product coming from agriculture, Yeltsin’s decree also has potentially historic and social as well as economic consequences in attempting to reconstitute the nation’s rural life.Īlthough Russia has had a land reform law for more than a year, local officials have blocked its implementation, either refusing to parcel out the collectively owned land or giving would-be private farmers barren or undeveloped plots. More than 10 million people are thought to have died in the campaign and the famine that followed. The campaign, which came to characterize Soviet socialism, was carried out with a ruthlessness that turned into terror through deportation, exile and execution on a scale never known in Russian history. Not only was the way that peasants had worked for centuries changed, but millions of families were uprooted in a vast effort at social engineering. Stalin’s four-year drive to collectivize agriculture changed an entire way of life. Gorbachev often talked about such a sweeping land reform but always balked at this degree of privatization, believing that most of the nation would rebel against such a fundamental change. Whether foreigners will be able to buy land under the decrees was unclear, but officials of Yeltsin’s government have spoken repeatedly of its intention to allow foreign investors to compete equally with Russian enterprises.įormer Soviet President Mikhail S. Yeltsin, moreover, authorized Russian banks to lend money to buy farmland and to grant mortgages to farmers wanting to raise working capital. The decrees, for the first time under recent land reform laws, also permit individuals to buy and sell land, letting farmers increase the size of their holdings and benefit from the improvements they make on it. How much of their land they retain will depend on the size of these new enterprises. Under Yeltsin’s decree, collective and state farms will have to reorganize themselves next year, incorporating as commercial enterprises whose shares are owned by the farmers or becoming privately owned ventures. Yeltsin, at the same time, is seeking to reverse the forced collectivization of agriculture carried out from 1929-1933 by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and to stimulate the regeneration of Russia’s strong rural roots. The order effectively repeals a 1918 decree by the Bolshevik revolutionaries declaring, “All private ownership of land, mines, waters, forests and natural resources within the boundaries of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic is abolished forever.” The move is intended to bring to an end the collectivized agriculture that was an essential element of Soviet socialism and, in an effort to feed an increasingly hungry nation, to encourage a return to individual farming. Yeltsin, pressing ahead with his program for radical economic reforms, on Saturday ordered the breakup of the country’s system of state-owned and collective farms and authorized the first private purchase and sale of land in more than 60 years.