Whereas previous reforms facilitated Russia’s urbanization and economic development, the Yeltsin reforms, thrust upon post-Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, represented a new course of agrarian reform. Yeltsin’s agrarian transition was intended to introduce agrarian capitalism – similar to the Stolypin reforms of almost 100 years earlier – but from a different social, economic and political base. The Yeltsin reforms introduced a course of institutional change that broke sharply with the Soviet past and were intended to introduce capitalism to Russia, not as an evolution from feudalism, but rather after seven decades of communist rule. The Yeltsin agrarian transition included reorganization and privatization of state and collective farms, privatization of processing enterprises, land privatization and the adoption of supportive legal institutions, the creation of a private farming stratum, and the development of a land market. In short, Yeltsin’s agrarian reforms were intended to transform Russia’s agricultural economy along market lines.

As is well known, Bolsheviks maintained that capitalist relations were already present in rural Russia, and that consequently class relations polarized village society.² Populists denied this, and disagreed profoundly with the Bolsheviks, arguing that it was possible to construct an equitable rural social order on the basis of existing peasant institutions.³ The Bolshevik argument about the impact on the peasantry of capitalist development in Russia is equally well known. Once capitalism had penetrated the village, insisted Marxists, peasant economy would cease to be autochthonous, and its internal dynamic would henceforth no longer be local, demographic or subsistence oriented (as claimed by populists such as Chayanov). Its reproduction or dissolution would henceforth be dictated by the market, and be subject to strictly commercial considerations: that is to say, the survival of peasant cultivation would depend on whether or not the resources produced or reproduced by smallholders – output, labour – were of any use to an overarching capitalist system. It is this process of economic reckoning, in the combined form of privatization and globalization, that has resurfaced in post-1991 Russia, and once again confronts peasant economy. In this Russia is now no different from other countries in the so-called Third World, where global market forces similarly determine the economic fate of the peasantry. This is not to say, of course, that peasants accept this fate: that they do not, and struggle against this in a variety of different ways, is one of the dominant characteristics of contemporary rural mobilization worldwide.⁴

Despite, or perhaps because of, their support for the idea of private smallholding property in the context of a free market, populists were and are unable to oppose this development. Historically, Russian liberalism – of which populism was an offshoot – argued for an agriculture based on a laissez faire policy that recognized the legal right of every individual to own and dispose of his or her private property [Walkin, 1963; Fischer, 1969].⁵ It was this view that Russian populists mobilized so effectively, both against state intervention, and in defence of the right of peasant smallholders to own land, to cultivate it efficiently using family labour, and to sell their farm produce on the open market. The difficulty with this political philosophy is that today it is deployed as effectively by supporters of large agribusiness enterprises with a global reach, who invoke similar criteria (market primacy, private property, economic efficiency, minimal state intervention) to justify what amounts to a process of depeasantization. Having defended family farming on the grounds of liberal political theory, contemporary populism cannot object when peasants are dispossessed of their land (or choose to sell it) in keeping with these same philosophical tenets. Ironically, therefore, there are parallels between what has happened to the post-1991 Russian peasantry and developments in the agrarian sector elsewhere, in the Third World. For example, the decollectivization that occurred in post-1973 Chile [Murray, 2002], post-1976 China [Chossudovsky, 1988; Walker and Kueh, 1988; Ho et al., 2003] and Cuba during the 1980s [Deere et al., 1994].⁶

Because these early debates in Russia about the peasantry, agrarian reform, economic development and modernization were so important, they influenced all subsequent discussions concerning the significance of these same issues. Many of the questions raised by those addressing agrarian transformation in USSR/Russia over the past century fed directly and unsurprisingly into development debates that surfaced after the Second World War, with regard to the future of Eastern Europe as well as Asia, Africa and Latin America.⁷ Among the issues inherited from the Russian debates, therefore, were the respective merits of the state and the market in modernizing rural institutions, in generating economic growth and in guiding agricultural development through a macro-economic process of planning. These raised in turn other and related questions. For example, whether or not economic growth and modernization required the expropriation of a landlord class, followed by a redistribution of land thus acquired to new owners or tenants of the state. This in turn posed questions about the institutional shape, the economic objective and political control of the new structure. Among the more important issues were what kinds of new socio-economic unit (cooperatives, private farms, collectives) should an agrarian reform programme seek to establish in the countryside. Equally, who would be the beneficiaries of this programme (existing tenants, independent smallholders and/or agricultural labourers), how would the new units be governed, and by whom (peasants or the state)? Crucially, what contradictions would such a process entail? Of additional significance was the degree to which any such agrarian reform could be accomplished simply by the expropriation and reallocation of rural property, or whether to be successful a reform programme necessitated the additional provision of inputs (technical, financial, infrastructural) by the state.

In one way or another, all these issues were raised during the development decade of the 1960s. They informed national and international policy in Third World countries – particularly those in Asia and Latin America – aimed at ending agricultural stagnation, curbing inflation, increasing productivity and generating economic growth. Whereas agrarian reform programmes in Latin America emphasized the expropriation of a landlord class and the redistribution of land to small producers, those in India aimed to provide technical inputs to those peasant farmers already owning land as a result of the zamindari abolition (of large landholders) during the early 1950s.⁸ Indian governments since Independence have all stressed the importance of agricultural development, and food production has been at the centre of successive five-year plans and the Green Revolution, the showcase of agrarian capitalism in the Third World. In many ways, these same debates and the questions they raise about the direction of the reform process have come full circle. Having started out in pre-revolutionary Russia, many issues connected with the agrarian question have now returned there once more, to take their place at the centre of policy discussions about the direction of post-1991 Russian agriculture.⁹