235 



Prepared Testimony for the House Subcommittee 

 on Foreign Agriculture and Hunger 

 for delivery April 1. 1993 



Dr. Don Van Atta 



Research Associate 



Center on East-West Trade. Investment and Communications 



Duke University 



Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee. 



You asked me to address in particular political obstacles to reform in 

 agriculture. The major point to understand about those obstacles is that the 

 system of collective and state farms in Russia which has developed since Stalin 

 initiated forcible collectivization in 1929 is primarily a mechanism for exercising 

 political power.i This is so even though the farms obviously have an economic 

 function, and the original justification for collectivization was put in economic 

 terms. Five principal conclusions flow from this fact. 



First, since the collective farm system is the bedrock on which the 

 Stalinist system was built, agrarian reform is vital if Russia is to have a stable, 

 democratic future. Agrarian reform, of course, means both the creation of 



^ there were once legal differences between a collective farm (kolkhoz) 

 and a slate farm (sovkhoz). However, those differences were and are mostly 

 formal and quite unimportant for the argument I wish to make. Therefore I will 

 refer throughout this presentation to this entire system as the collective-farm or 

 kolkhoz system. For similar reasons I will refer to state-farm directors and 

 collective-farm chairmen simply as "farm managers.' 



