Gorbachev and stolypin soviet agrarian reform in historical perspective

Abstract

The history of Soviet agricultural policy presents the student of tsarist agricultural policy with a variety of interesting parallels and paradoxes. The tsarist government, however, somewhat like its Soviet counterpart, was ambivalent about developments and frequently took direct measures to limit their spread. In both tsarist and Soviet cases, it seems, the reformers assumed that rural workers and peasants would naturally be persuaded to take advantage of the reforms by the appeal of obtaining land in private property, or its effective equivalent. A related concern is the whole problem of equity and the widespread popular opposition that exists to social differentiation within Soviet, and especially Russian, society. When seeking to judge the success of any reform program, whether in tsarist Russia or the Soviet Union, one of the greatest difficulties is being able to penetrate the flurry of bureaucratic paper that such reforms generate and determine whether, in fact, real organizational changes have actually taken place.