204 



STATEMENT OF DON VAN ATTA, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, CEN- 

 TER ON EAST-WEST TRADE, INVESTMENT AND COMMUNICA- 

 TIONS, DUKE UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, NC 



Mr. Van Atta. My name is Don Van Atta. I am, as you said, a 

 research associate at Duke University. Let me begin by saying a 

 little bit about my background, since I think some of the things 

 that you've done in the last couple of days may make this relevant. 



I'm a political scientist who's been studying Soviet and now Rus- 

 sian agrarian policy for most of the last 20 years. At the moment, 

 while working at Duke, I also have a grant from the National 

 Council for Soviet and East European Research to study land and 

 agrarian reform in Russia. I'm doing that over a 2-year period as 

 a participant/observer. Because I happen to know the guy that's 

 the president of the organization, I'm doing it principally at the in- 

 vitation of the Association of Peasant Farms and Agricultural Co- 

 operatives of Russia, AKKOR. I'm also working with the Agrarian 

 Institute and some folks in the Ministry. 



In the last 9 months, I've spent about 3 months in Russia, and 

 I will be spending the entire summer and a good chunk of next 

 year there as well doing whatever I can to figure out what's going 

 on on the ground, as it is very useful to have somebody studying 

 policymaking £ind change as it's happening. 



As a political scientist, I have a somewhat, I think, different take 

 on most of these issues, and the one-line summary of the testimony 

 I'd like to give you is basically that this is not an issue of econom- 

 ics, it's £in issue of politics. Indeed, it is "the" issue of Russian poli- 

 tics. The events of the last couple of weeks are in fact generated 

 by the question of land ownership and a change in the Russian con- 

 stitution to allow land ownership, and the reason why everybody 

 is fighting so hard is because, ultimately, that question is at the 

 root of the issue of who is going to run Russia, who holds power, 

 and, of course, who benefits from that power. 



So the first thing to know about the issues you are dealing with 

 is that the collective farm system, Russian agriculture in general, 

 although it looks like and is, of course, concerned with an economic 

 activity, is ultimately about political power. The justification for it 

 is cast in economic terms, but the system was designed and oper- 

 ated to enforce central political power over the peasantry over the 

 countryside. Indeed, it was effectively a conquest of the countryside 

 in the first place. 



There are several consequences or conclusions, if you will, that 

 follow from that basic fact, and in the prepared statement I gave 

 you, I simply summarized those at the beginning. Let me run 

 through them quickly now. 



First of all, since the system is about power, and since in fact the 

 collective farm system is the bedrock on which this whole Stalinist 

 economic system was built, if you're going to change things, if 

 you're going to create a market economy, you must chainge Russian 

 agriculture. Agrarian reform means a great deal more than just 

 doing technical things differently. It means not only changing the 

 entire environment of agriculture upstream and downstream, it 

 also means fundamentally changing relationships within the farms. 

 That has to be done in order for there to be any kind of substantial 



