209 



Mr. Penny. Through those. 



Mr. Wegren. An extremely small percentage. I don't know ex- 

 actly. I know it's less than 2 percent and may even be less than 

 1 percent of the grain last year, but extraordinarily small amounts. 

 It could be more this year, because last year you still had obliga- 

 tory deliveries. They were ignored. This year you're not supposed 

 to have obligatory deliveries, so I would assume maybe up to 5 per- 

 cent. 



But I think Don is exactly right when he talks about you have 

 to look at the controls that the state and collective farms still have 

 over the process. The point is they will go to the farmer and say, 

 "Look, you're free to sell your grain wherever you want to; however, 

 if you don't sign this contract, maybe we don't have enough fuel for 

 you. Maybe suddenly there will be a shortage of fertilizer." So there 

 is still an element of coercion there. 



Mr. Penny. How do the independent farmers fit into all of this? 

 Are they still under some obligation to sell primarily to the state 

 because they also receive, either through the Peasants' Union or 

 AKKOR or some other entity, support for inputs? 



Mr. Van Atta. First of all, the Peasants' Union is the creature 

 of the most conservative portion of the kolkhoz and sovkhoz elite, 

 which is why the former chairman of that organization is a man 

 named Vasilii Starodubtsev. I think some of you may have visited 

 his farm, but in any case, he's more famous recently because he 

 was a member of the coup committee. So the Peasants' Union dis- 

 tributes resources to the big farms, but won't give the time of day 

 to the real peasants, even though, given their name, we Americans 

 think they might. 



AKKOR is in charge of distributing the Government subsidy. It 

 operates as a parastatal organization on the model of the American 

 Farm Bureau of long ago to represent farmers' interests, and it dis- 

 tributes the Government subsidies, which, in the absence of a cred- 

 it system, are the only way a private farmer can get financed or 

 get resources. The banks are simply clearinghouses for accounting 

 money, and all they do is move numbers from one account to an- 

 other. Contrary to what Steve might have implied, they're not real 

 commercial banks, in our sense. Getting a loan doesn't mean get- 

 ting a loan. It means getting your share of the state credit. 



In any case, the private farmers were intended by those who de- 

 signed the land reform to provide competition for the big farms. No 

 serious Russian agriculturalists think that there should be or will 

 be immediate and complete farmerization, the creation of little 

 farms out of the big ones. It's not going to happen. The only people 

 who say it will are people who are opposed to any change at all 

 in the countryside. 



The individual farmers— there are now about 200,000 of them— 

 are constrained because the design for breaking up the farms relied 

 both on being voluntary and on giving everybody an equal share 

 and then allowing them to trade or sell the shares. So when farm- 

 ers begin, they, of course, do not get market-sized parcels of land 

 or amounts of equipment. Since a land market is illegal, since you 

 cannot in fact under the Russian Constitution trade your share, it 

 turns out that all the individual farmers wind up with little, mini 

 farms which are, by definition, not profitable. Then the opponents 



