Cambridge University Press.
The Agrarian Party of Russia (APR) was established on February 26, 1993, on the initiative of the parliamentary fraction Agrarian Union, the Agrarian Union of Russia, the profsoyuz (trade union) of workers of the agro-industrial complex, and the All-Russian Congress of Kolkhozes. Its chair was Mikhail Lapshin, elected a couple weeks earlier as the vice-chair of the restored Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In the 1993 elections, the APR list, headed by the leader of the Agrarian fraction Mikhail Lapshin, profsoyuz leader Alexander Davydov, and vice-premier Alexander Zaveryukha, received 4.3 million votes (8.0%, fifth place) and twenty-one mandates in the federal district; sixteen candidates won in single-mandate districts. In 1995 the Agrarians entered the elections with a similar makeup, but a significant portion of the left-wing electorate consolidated around the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and as a result, the Agrarians’ list only won 2.6 million votes (3.8%). In the single-mandate districts, the agrarians brought forth twenty candidates; this allowed them to form their own delegate group, with the addition of delegates from the CPRF dedicated to this task. In the 1999 elections, the APR leadership split over the issue of bloc formation. The majority, with chair Lapshin in the lead, joined the bloc Fatherland-All Russia (OVR); the others, including the leader of the parliamentary fraction Nikolai Kharintonov, went on the CPRF list. As a result of OVR’s low results, Lapshin’s supporters were unsuccessful in forming their group, and the communists with single-mandate candidates created the Agro-Industrial Group with Kharitonov at the head.
In the regional elections, the APR entered in coalition with the CPRF, and had several serious victories to its credit, including the election of APR leader Lapshin as head of the small Republic of Altai, and head of the Agrarian Union Vasily Staro-dubtsev as governor in the industrial Tula Oblast (twice).
At the time of registration in May 2002, the APR declared 42,000 members and fifty-five regional branches. While lacking potential as a self-sufficient entity, the APR was quite attractive to the Communist Party, and to the “ruling party,” by virtue of the provincial infrastructure, the popularity of the name, and the influence on the rural electorate, traditionally sympathetic toward the left.
On the threshold of the 2003 elections, a struggle for control of the APR arose between the leftist Kharitonovtsy (Kharitonov was the head of the Agro-Industrial Union) and the pro-government Gordeyevtsy (Alexei Gordeyev was the leader of the Russian Agrarian Movement, founded in 2002), both sides trying to put an end to Lapshin’s extended leadership. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
The concept of agrarian reform refers to changes implemented in the agricultural economy, changes designed broadly to improve agricultural performance and notably to contribute to the process of economic growth and economic development. The concept of reform implies changes to an existing system or policies, though the interpretation of change and the precise boundaries of the agricultural sector are general and broad. Thus characterized, agrarian reform has been a continuing and important component of the Russian economic experience. Moreover, the nature of agrarian reform has been closely associated with the differing stages of Russian economic development and with the role envisioned for the agrarian economy in the process of industrialization and modernization.
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Russia has been an agrarian economy since its beginnings. For this reason, changes in the agrarian economy have been central to any discussion of economic growth and economic development in Russia. Beginning in the era of serfdom and the existence of a premodern agriculture, the focus has been on the nature of agrarian reform necessary to contribute to modernization.
The nature of agrarian reform necessarily depends heavily on the time period considered. In the Russian case, a convenient turning point is 1861, the date of the Emancipation Act, the purpose of which was to eliminate serfdom. Prior to this date, the Russian rural economy was feudal in character, with serfs bound to their landlords, communal landholding, and periodic redistribution of land plots.
Although the Emancipation Act was judicial more than economic in character, it nevertheless introduced a long period of agrarian reform through the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During this period, there was gradual reallocation of land, although preservation of the village (mir) as a communal form of local decision making limited the extent to which the modernization of agriculture could take place. Peasant mobility was limited, a major reason for political instability in the early 1900s and the implementation of the Stolypin reforms, a series of changes designed to break the communal system, to change land usage, and to introduce individual peasant farming.
The agrarian reform, prior to the Bolshevik revolution, has been the subject of controversy. The traditional agrarian crisis view has supported a negative view of the Russian rural economy, while the revisionist view argues that output and structural changes during the late tsarist era were di-rectionally important for the ultimate development of a modern agricultural sector.
It is perhaps ironic that by the 1920s and the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the rural economy would again be at the forefront of attention. Specifically, the focus would be the potential role of agriculture in Soviet economic development. After extensive discussion and experimentation during the NEP, Stalin forcibly changed the institutional arrangements on Soviet agriculture beginning in 1928. The introduction of the collective farms (the kohlkoz), the state farms (the sovkhoz) and the private subsidiary sector fundamentally changed the manner in which agriculture was organized. Markets were replaced by state control. Although these changes remained in effect through the end of the Soviet era, there were important changes made in the rural economy during the Soviet years. In effect, there was a continuing search for optimal organizational arrangements. This search led to important changes in the mechanization of agriculture (especially the introduction of the Machine Tractor Stations), the nature of land use (amalgamation of farms seeking scale advantages and the conversion of collective to state farms) and the relations between the state and the farm units in terms of deliveries, financing, and the like. Most important, in the latter years of the Soviet era, the focus became agro-industrial integration, an effort to reap the benefits of Western “agribusiness” types of arrangements for production and marketing of agricultural products.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the era of socialist agriculture and socialist agricultural policies came to an end. Much less attention was paid to the rural economy; it was not central to the Russian approach to transition, and yet agrarian reform was once again on the agenda. Throughout the 1990s, the emphasis has been the creation of a corporate (share) structure in farms and the conversion of these farms to various forms of private equity arrangements. However, given the very slow emergence of land reform, and specifically the slow development of a land market in Russia, fundamental change in the Russian rural economy continues to be at best very slow. See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; FREE ECONOMIC SOCIETY; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY PEASANT ECONOMY; SERFDOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Agriculture is that sector of an economy concerned with the production of food and food products both for domestic use, in (industrial) production and (household) consumption, and for export to external markets. Although
