Since the collapse of the USSR there has been a growing interest in the Stolypin Land Reform as a possible model for post-Communist agrarian development. Using recent theoretical and empirical advances in Anglo-American research, Dr Pallot examines how peasants throughout Russia received, interpreted, and acted upon the government's attempts to persuade them to quit the commune and set up independent farms. She shows how a majority of peasants failed to interpret the Reform in the way its authors had expected, with outcomes that varied both temporally and geographically. The result challenges existing texts which either concentrate on the policy side of the Reform or, if they engage with its results, use aggregated, official statistics which, this text argues, are unreliable indicators of the pre-revolutionary peasants reception of the Reform.

This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Stolypin reforms, the NEP, the Collectivization, Khrushchev reforms, and finally farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises - rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and their effectiveness in transforming institutions.

This ambitious work is the definitive account of Russia's land reform initiatives from the late 1980s to today. In Russia, a country controlling more land than any other nation, land ownership is central to structures of power, class division, and agricultural production. The aim of Russian land reform for the past thirty years--to undo the collectivization of the Soviet era and encourage public ownership--has been largely unsuccessful. To understand this failure, Stephen Wegren examines contemporary land reform policies in terms of legislation, institutional structure, and human behavior. Using extensive survey data, he analyzes household behaviors in regard to land ownership and usage based on socioeconomic status, family size, demographic distribution, and regional differences. Wegren's study is important and timely, as Russian land reform will have a profound effect on Russia's ability to compete in an era of globalization.

Focal point is the implementation of the Stolypin Land Reform, named after Peter Stolypin, prime minister of Imperial Russia, 1906-1911.

Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia reviews change in agricultural and rural life since 1990 through historical, political, sociological, and anthropological investigation. The contributors' interest is not so much in agriculture itself but in agrarian issues such as the relationship between rural interests and changing Russian institutions, the economic and social organization of rural households, and the quality of life in rural families and villages.

Land reform is a key factor in determining the political, economic and social future of the transitional states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This book represents the first major study in this area. Utilizing extensive field work, unpublished materials, statistical data and interviews with land reform officials, the contributors explore the key issues.

This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Stolypin reforms, the NEP, the Collectivization, Khrushchev reforms, and finally farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises - rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and their effectiveness in transforming institutions.

Winner, 1999 Edward A. Hewett Book Prize from AAASS A comprehensive, original, and innovative analysis of the social, economic, and political factors affecting contemporary Russian reform, the book is organized around the central question of the role of the state and its effect on the course of Russian agrarian reform. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, contemporary conventional wisdom holds the the Russian state is "weak." Stephen Wegren feels that the traditional approach to the weak/strong state suffers from measurement and circular logic problems, believing that the Russian state, thought weaker than in its Soviet past, is still relatively stronger than other actors. The state's strength allows it to intervene in the rural sector in ways that other power contender cannot.Specifically, as a measure of state intervention, Wegren analyzes how the state has influenced urban-rural relations, rural-rural relations, and the nonstate (private) agricultural sector. Several dilemmas arose that have complicated successful agrarian reform as a result of the nature of state interventions, how reform policies were defined, and the incentives rhar arose from state-sponsored policies. During contemporary Russian agrarian reform, urban-rural differences have widened, marked by a deterioration in rural standards of living and increased alienation of rural political groups from urban alliances. At the same time, within the rural sector, reform failed to reverse rural egalitarianism. In addition, the nature of state interventions has undermined attempts to create a vibrant, productive private rural sector based on private farming.Wegren's research is based upon extensive field work, interviews, archival documents, and published and unpublished source material conducted over a six-year period, and he demonstrates the link between agrarian reform and the success of overall reform in Russia. This learned and often controversial volume will interest political scientists, policy makers, and scholars and students of contemporary Russia.

This text analyses five major episodes of Russian land reform - from the emanicipation of the serfs in 1861 through the reform of the transition from communism in the 1990s. Historically, agrarian reforms tended to be delayed until a fiscal or financial crisis rationalized a change in distributional arrangements, but, in a vicious cycle, the worsening crisis conditions themselves, along with the partial nature of reforms, contributed to the persistence of the institutional regime. In contemporary Russia, agrarian reform was similarly partial and undertaken during a fiscal crisis, and it has yielded little immediate improvement in production - as a statistical study of the agricultural sector's performance makes clear. This book focuses on the recurrent dilemmas of reform and its conclusions point to the implications of past experience for present-day policymaking.