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reform. Land ownership and agrarian reform is the central pohtical 

 issue because the Russians understand that extraordinarily well. 



A second, £ind unfortunate, consequence of that is that there's 

 relatively little political constituency for reform. The collective and 

 state farms as they've been organized for the last 50 years are won- 

 derful welfare institutions. The/re what the sociologist Erving 

 Goffman once called total institutions. His examples in other con- 

 texts are prisons and military units — that is to say, places where 

 you work, play, and your life is determined by somebody else's 

 schedule. In 50 years many, many people have gotten very used to 

 that, just as long-serving prisoners or anybody who spends a long 

 time in any environment gets used to the rules and regulations and 

 learns how to get around the things they don't like. 



That means that a great many people in the countryside — and 

 I base this on interviews as well as a kind of sense of the system — 

 have no interest in any kind of agrarian reform. Why should they? 

 Why should they take risks when the state pays their salary based 

 on getting a loan from the bank that they know will be written off? 

 It's perfectly rational for the folks in the countryside to act as they 

 do, and that means that at the local level there's very little con- 

 stituency for agrarian reform. 



At the same time, at the top level, the system of agricultural 

 management was not designed to do the sorts of things that USDA 

 does. It was designed to tell farmers when to plant and when to 

 reap. Since this entire operation was designed to coerce the peas- 

 antry and control them, it follows that agricultural management in 

 Russia is about political control, and, therefore, there is no con- 

 stituency at the top either for reform, with the exception of Min- 

 ister Khlystun, who indeed in his own Ministry is isolated, who has 

 deputy ministers whom he did not appoint and basically cannot get 

 rid of, and who is now basically a lameduck. At the same time, he's 

 locked in a confrontation with Vice President Rutskoi, who has a 

 number of interesting, very wrong-headed notions about how to re- 

 form things, starting with a monopoly land bank that would have 

 the right to give all agricultural mortgages, sell all land, lay all 

 taxes, and issue all titles. Please note that as a child of farm chil- 

 dren, I don't like monopoly banks. 



So there is a major political controversy at the top. The good 

 news is it probably doesn't matter. The system is broken down to 

 the extent that what goes on inside Moscow probably doesn't make 

 any difference for the rest of the country. Things are working on 

 inertia, and, indeed, the land reform that was begun a couple of 

 years ago is succeeding and generating much of the pressure that 

 we have seen in the last couple of weeks. 



Thank you very much. 



[The prepared statement of Mr. Van Atta appears at the conclu- 

 sion of the hearing.] 



Mr. Penny. Thank you very much. 



Dr. Wegren. 



