239 



Van Atta 5 



machine in the US a century ago. they are lilcely to give their political support to 

 their managers in return for what they perceive as real benefits. 



For Russia as a whole this farm organization system has become 

 increasingly dysfunctional because it does not reward anyone for initiative. 

 Leonid Brezhnev and his successors tried to fix this defect by throwing 

 increasing amounts of investment at the farms. Through the 1970s and 1980s 

 vast sums were pumped into agricultural development, only to be diverted to 

 other needs, lost to corruption, spent on mis-designed projects like the 

 enormous concrete cow bams which dot the countryside, or passed to 

 monopoly suppliers and processors as the prices they charged the farms rose. 

 By 1989 Yegor Ligachev was promising that food-supply problems could be 

 fixed by the big farms— if only the government would givaH state investment to 

 agriculture for the next five years.2 Happily, given the farms' previous track 

 record, his advice was not followed, but big-farm managers still believe that 

 their basic problem is one of inadequate state investment. They are perhaps 

 right, but the record of how past investment has been used suggests that they 

 will not use investment any more wisely until the basic organization of Russian 

 agriculture changes. 



The entire apparatus of agricultural administration extending from the 

 Agricultural f^inistry through provincial and district agricultural administrations 

 served as a transmission belt for central orders. Of course, those local and 

 regional agencies developed their own institutional interests and sought to 

 defend "their" farms. But as long as the Communist Party exercised control and 

 discipline this system was overwhelmingly one in which orders flowed down 

 and reports of success flowed back up. 



2 Speech to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies. December 1989. 



