237 



Van Atta 3 



Fifth, giving agricultural aid to the Russians is particularly difficult 

 because to be effective it must not simply be dumped off in fvloscow. Effective 

 aid can only be local assistance. But we have little real knowledge of conditions 

 or people outside of Moscow, and simply transfemng procedures developed to 

 help very different societies to the Russian context will not achieve their purpose 

 of helping the Russian people. Y et such attempts are certain to cause endless 

 scandals in the US and Russia and ultimately discredit the whole idea of aid to 

 the Newly Independent States. 



Let me now expand on the considerations which led me to those general 

 conclusions. I want first to examine the way Russian agriculture has been run 

 and how that created the conservative parliamentary "Agrarian Union" fraction, 

 then describe the on-going Russian agrarian reform. I conclude with some 

 further reflections on the need for agrarian transformation, and aid. "from 

 below." 



About 85% of Russians still lived in the countryside in 1929. Almost all of 

 them were peasants. As a result, the major share of the national income still 

 came from agriculture. Control over rural resources— capital, labor, and 

 especially food— was therefore absolutely essential if rapid industrialization 

 was to be achieved. Y et the Bolshevik Party had little or no presence in the 

 countryside. Stalin solved this difficulty by the rapid imposition of standafd 

 model collective farms throughout the entire country. The costs were enormous, 

 not only in lives but also because the collective system never generated the 

 kind of sharp increase in productivity which preceded the industrial revolution in 

 Westem Europe. The Soviet Union was permanently dependent on an each 

 year's uncertain harvest in a way no westem capitalist country has been for a 



CO /1/10 /~i 



