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competitive market structures upstream and downstream of the farms and 

 fundamental transformations within the farms themselves. 



Second, many collective and state farm leaders and members have little 

 or no interest in agrarian reform because it threatens the power and position of 

 the leaders and the secure, if poor, life of the workers. 



Third, because the old 'command-administrative* apparatus has been 

 destroyed but most people have not yet adjusted to the fact, most average 

 Russians have little concern with what goes on in Moscow. Nor can Moscow 

 really do a great deal to affect most people 'outside the beltway.' The ties 

 between central policy, actual policy as it is carried out (or. more often, fails to 

 be carried out), and what happens in day-to-day life are too obscure and 

 uncertain. Russia is well on its way towards breaking down into regional 

 satrapies, what Russians fearfully call 'appanage princedoms.' It is unlikely 

 there is much we can do to stop that process, even if we think we should (and I 

 am not sure I do). 



Fourth, land and agricultural reform are the most politicized issues in 

 Russia and the other Soviet successor states today. Attempts to change the 

 Russian constitutional prohibition on private sales of agricultural land- 

 essential for any real maricet economy as well as any credit system— led directly 

 to the constitutional crisis in Russia with wtiich we have all been so concerned 

 in the past two weeks. So aid to Russian agriculture cannot be treated as a 

 purely technical problem. Yet understanding that this is a political issue means 

 that the United States must decide what its own interests in Russian 

 development, stability, and democracy are. We must also be aware when 

 attempting to affect those ends through aid and diplomacy that our efforts might 

 very well fall, leaving the United States identified with the (for the time being) 

 losing side in a bitter internal political debate in Russia 



