246 



Van Atta 12 



made farmsteads would be leased out for twenty years, preferably to 

 demobilized military officers, who would pay for them with a part of their 

 produce. 



Rutskoi is locked in a bureaucratic battle with the Ministry of Agriculture 

 and the State Committee on Land Reform, which were charged with carrying 

 out the agrarian transformation in the 1990 and 1991 legislation. The Vice 

 President established his own institutional base, thrf^'ederal Center for L.and 

 and Agroindustrial Reform, a quasi-private for-profit institution, in mid-1992^^ 

 Former state farm directorVitalii Y ermolenko was appointed to head the 

 Center. 12 By the end of 1992. the Federal Center seemed to have wrested much 

 of agricultural policy-making authority from the Ministry of Agriculture and 

 Goskomzem. The latter agency was stripped of its reform functions, leaving it 

 only monitoring of land use and sun/eying. by an eariy October 199^ 

 presidential decree reorganizing the govemment. At the same time, the Ministry 

 of Agriculture's Main Administration for Land Reform was shut down. 



On October 30. 1992. Rutskoi issued a vice-presidential directive 

 ordering that all land taken from collective and state farms foiredistribution be 

 returned to them until such time as norms for land distribution should be 

 property worked out.i3 Read literally, this directive seemed to require that land 

 already deeded to private farmers be given back. Rutskoi's chief agricultural 



11 "Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Ob organizatsionnykh merakh 

 po provedeniiu zemel'noi i agropromyshlennoi reformy v Rossiiskoi Federatsii' 

 (June 27. 1992). Zemlia i liudi. No. 28 (July 10. 1992). p. 1. 



12 For an account of a meeting with Y ermolenko. see Jerry F. Hough. 

 'Agricultural Reorganization." The Politics of Post-Soviet Reform: Ag riculture. 

 No. 2 (November 1. 1992). pp. 1-3. 



13 A. Rutskoi. 'Rasporiazhenie vitse-prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii: O 

 merakh po ispolneniiu Ukaza Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 2marta 1992 

 g. No. 213 "O poriadke ustanovleniia normy besplatnoi peredachi zemel'nykh 

 uchastkov v sobstvennosf Qrazhdan." Sel skaia zhizn' (November 6. 1992). p. 

 1. 



