In a frontal assault on the last bastion of the old Communist system, President Boris Yeltsin has decreed that Russia's peasants can now buy and sell farmland.
The historic decree, which is triggering an uproar from Russia's left-wing opposition, symbolizes the death of the Soviet command economy. Agriculture was the last sector where capitalism had been kept at bay.For the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (peasants were briefly allowed to buy or sell farmland after serfdom was abolished in 1861), Russians can buy and sell their garden plots and agricultural workers can do the same with shares in collective farms. They can even mortgage their land, giving them access to bank loans for the first time.
"Land must have a master," Agriculture Minister Alexander Zaveryukha told a news conference this week. "That is the only way the problems in agriculture can be solved."
Still, there is no guarantee that local bureaucrats will enforce the decree, and it is expected to be years before a functioning market for farmland is created. Russia's Communist and Agrarian Party factions, which represent powerful rural forces that have battled capitalist reforms, are gearing up for a major battle against the measure.
For the past two years, they blocked a proposed land code that would have authorized private ownership of farmland. Instead, they made a proposal that would have severely restricted the right of private ownership. The code has been stalled in the Russian parliament since 1994, but the new decree bypasses the parliament, finally forcing action on the controversial issue.
"It's symbolically very significant," a Western economist said in an interview Tuesday. "It's a watershed in psychological and conceptual thinking. Agricultural reform has been the most retarded of any sector in the Russian economy. If this decree is implemented, it could unleash the tremendous agricultural potential of this country."
The decree affects 40 million Russians who hold garden plots and 12 million agricultural workers who hold shares in collective farms. In addition to selling or mortgaging their holdings, they will also be allowed to rent, exchange or bequeath them.
Russia's huge, inefficient collective farms - created by Joseph Stalin in a brutal campaign in the 1930s - have been sliding into bankruptcy and ruin. Last year's grain harvest was the worst in 30 years, forcing Russia to again turn to imports.
Russia's new constitution, approved in 1993, specified that land could be privately owned, but regional bureaucrats and collective-farm chairmen have blocked most reforms, allowing only a few tentative steps toward private ownership.
In some regions last year, peasants held mass meetings to oppose any talk of private land ownership. A plebiscite in the region of Bashkortostan found that 84 percent of residents were against the unlimited sale of farmland.
"The earth shouldn't be the subject of selling and buying," said Yevgeny Shershnev, an economics researcher at a Moscow institute. "It should be owned by the whole society."
Russia lacks the educated agricultural specialists needed for private farms, Shershnev added.
About 280,000 small private farms were created in 1992 and 1993, but they account for only 4 percent of Russia's farm output. More than 20,000 private farmers have abandoned their ventures. One of their biggest problems has been an inability to purchase new land so they could expand to an efficient size and use modern machinery.
"Reforms in the countryside were stalemated and had come to a practical standstill," Yuri Linin, vice president of an association of private farmers, told the ITAR-Tass news agency.
Yet even with these weaknesses, private farms are still much more productive than the collectives, according to studies in regions that have encouraged the breakup of collectives.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)