Battle for the Harvest

Surveying his small farm in a river valley to the south of Moscow, Roman Ogibenin exudes the palpable pride of an entrepreneur.

“I was successful because I knew what I wanted,” he said. “Before I start any undertaking, or decide what I’m going to grow this year, I think about how I’m going to sell it. I think everything through beforehand, unlike my collective farm neighbors. For God knows how many years they’ve been growing nothing but carrots and taking them to the market at the very time when there are already plenty there.”

For the second time this century, private farmers like Ogibenin are fighting to save Russian agriculture. They have a big task ahead of them.

Russia’s dismal agricultural statistics of the past 70 years are by now cliche. Collectivization, while it did mechanize a backward farming sector, wrought untold havoc on the land and brought on the death of millions of Soviet citizens from dekulakization and famine.

The repercussions are still being felt. Latest official projections estimate that Russia’s 1996 grain harvest will be between 73-77 tons. While this would be a 15-20% increase over last year’s abysmal harvest of 63.4 tons, it is still at least 15% below the 88 mn ton average of the early 1990s. It is expected that, to meet demand, Russia will have to import some 1.5 mn tons of grain this year.

Meanwhile, imports comprise some 40% of the food products currently available on the market (in Moscow the figure is estimated at 80%). And yet in Russia the space taken up by agricultural land is comparable only to that of the United States.

Low agricultural productivity has not always been the norm, though. Despite massive industrialization in the 1890s and early 1900s, Russia remained a predominantly agricultural country: according to the census of 1913, 66.7% of Russians were peasants, i.e. they fed both themselves and the rest of the population. The vast majority of this huge section of the population was illiterate, superstitious and conservative, and the methods used in farming at the beginning of the 20th century differed little from those of the 16th and 17th. The main tools used by peasants remained the hand-plough and sickle.

It wasn’t until 1861 that serfdom was abolished, after 800 years of existence — it had disappeared throughout Western Europe in the 17th century. Tsar Alexander II’s manifesto of that year gave personal freedoms to peasants who had until then been the property of landowners or the state.

Feudal tribulations

Serfs in pre-1861 Russia could be sold, pawned or even lost at cards (the last of these was surprisingly common). Of course these semi-slaves did not own land. Though the landlord would give them land for growing food necessary for their survival, the peasant’s first priority was working on the landowner’s land or paying him a quitrent in money or food products, with little left over from personal consumption.

This dependency meant that the destruction of crops, by frosts, droughts or torrential rain would cause severe  famine. For, without crops, the ordinary peasant had no money to buy food.

Famines were often accompanied by peasant revolts, which sometimes grew into major wars, with peasant forces opposed by the state army. These revolts were particularly frequent in the 16th-17th centuries.

“The patience of the peasant is great, but when it breaks, look out,” was an oft-quoted motto of wiser landowners. And it was generally the landowners who got the full force of the peasants’ fury. For example, during the Pugachov uprising of 1773-5, rebelling peasants killed around 200 noble families in the Volga valley.

Another period of peasant revolts came at the turn of this century. Despite the new freedoms, they continued to have very little land. Freed serfs had to buy the land which they had previously worked on from the landowners.

Moreover, the development of agriculture was impeded by the existence of peasant communes. For centuries peasants had been used to living in collectives or commonwealths with their own rules. These communes settled literally all important questions for the peasants — how much land each should have to work on, when to start that work and so on. The commune would help when anything bad happened to any of its members: for instance, if a peasant’s house burned down, all his neighbors would help him build a new one. At the same time, anyone wanting to leave the commune and run a farm independently had to get the consent of at least two thirds of its members, which was in fact virtually impossible.

It was not until 1906, under the leadership of Pyotr Stolypin, then Agricultural Minister, that land reforms were set in motion, allowing any peasant to leave his commune and demand the plots of land that were due to them. Stolypin also carried out a policy of resettlement of peasant families from the central provinces to Siberia, where there was plenty of free land. These reforms began to bear fruit: by 1914 Russia rose to become the world’s leading exporter of wheat. But then came the First World War.

Agriculture

and the Revolution

Wartime difficulties were inevitably exploited by the revolutionaries, particularly the Socialist Revolutionaries, who gained almost universal support among the rural population in the years up to 1917. However, the ‘SRs’ proved to be poorly organized and could not match their urban alter-egos, the Bolsheviks. The latter, with an ideology that was basically alien to the peasants, made their revolution in the cities.

After the hardship of Civil War brought on by the 1917 revolution, Russian peasants attained a measure of prosperity in the years of the New Economic Policy (1923-8). However, this only aroused the envy of the now established Bolshevik regime, which saw the enrichment of the kulaks (rich peasants) as a step back from revolution. Lenin began forced collectivization, confiscation of the property of rich peasants and their internal exile. Stalin completed the process, introduced trudodni, whereby for each working day the collective farm worker would receive not wages but a quantity of food, and took away passports, without which peasants could not leave their collective farms and move elsewhere.

While these administrative measures virtually returned the peasantry to serfdom, the collectivization campaign’s by-products of murder, deliberate starvation and deportation brought a death toll of some 14 million persons. The nomadic Kazakhs were forced to abandon their way of life for the collectives, and in Ukraine in 1932-3 starving peasants were purposely prevented from getting food that they themselves had produced, which then rotted in transit.

By 1935, the destruction wrought by collectivization meant that the Russian peasant was consuming just over half as much grain per year as he did in the 1890s. Meanwhile, miniscule private plots, which comprised less than 4% of cultivated land in the late 1930s, were responsible for over 20% of agricultural output.

Even twenty years later, in 1954, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev stated that grain production per capita in the USSR was less than in tsarist times, as was the number of head of cattle. He himself did little to help the situation, forcing farmers to sow corn in areas where it could not possibly grow.

Through the seventies and eighties, despite numerous campaigns and attempts to reform collectivized farming, the reality of Russian farming changed little. There was only stabilization, not significant improvement in the agricultural sector. Except, interestingly, in farming on private plots, which the state depended on in increasing proportions for the country’s meat, dairy and poultry products.

A new emancipation

Today, the absurdities of Soviet agriculture are in plain sight, and Russia is once again trying to give land to the peasants, or rather reinforce their legal rights. Just this year, President Yeltsin signed a decree guaranteeing the constitutional rights of citizens to land. This gives the owners of land the right to do what they want with it, without the consent of other former members of the collective farm (hearkening back to the Stolypin reforms).

This is important, because most landowners today are former collective farm workers who, since 1988, have been able to demand plots of land from the collective farm and start their own businesses. However, in order to sell, exchange or mortgage this plot they had to have the agreement of the local authorities, and this wasn’t always that easy to get.

Since 1991, some 40 million people have become landowners in Russia. Another 12 million have become landowners within new, agro-industrial associations and joint-stock societies which have replaced the old collective and state farms.

Needless to say, the life of a private farmer in the new Russia is desperately hard. In the wake of the decree on land ownership, many urban and rural inhabitants hastened to lease large plots in the countryside. But it turned out that there was a great difference between several hectares and the usual ‘six hundredths’ suburban plots behind the dacha (see Russian Life, July 1996). Apart from discovering that much greater strength and knowledge was needed to look after land on this scale,  novice farmers ran up against the hostility of collective and state farm bosses, who refused to give them equipment, feed or assistance.

But despite the difficulties, many who  want to work on the land are surviving. Valeriya and Roman Ogibenin are one such family. They leased eight hectares of land from a collective farm in the lower reaches of the Oka river. Former city people, today they are farmers, raising beef cattle and growing delicatessen tomatoes and mushrooms.

“I hope we can become that link in the chain between Russian villages and towns,” said Roman, “and create in real life a new image of farmers — educated people working with new technology,” said Roman.

Valeriya was buoyantly positive, perhaps prematurely optimistic about their future. “Our farm will soon start to bring in about $20,000 a year,” she added, “so then we can give our children everything they need – first toys and books, then a good education. They’ll grow up in the country free of stuffy city apartments and drunken gatherings in the stairwell.”

Interestingly, Roman is not afraid of possible competition, or the thugs that raid them every now and then, but those are not the only threats to their well-being.

“The only thing I fear is that nice little man from the regional commission on private farming who one fine day could say ‘You’re not doing too well with your harvests, my lad,’ and take away my land. He won’t be bothered about my problems with feed, greenhouses and fertilizer.”

People who take early retirement and go back to cultivating land at the peak of their intellectual and human capacities often succeed. This was the case with retired Major General Yuri Davydov from Noginsk, a small city in Moscow region. Davydov started a mushroom culture in an old bomb shelter which now turns a $3 mn yearly profit, making him enough money and mushrooms to feed an army.

“I had the entrepreneur’s spirit in my genes,” says Davydov. “My grandfather left for the Novosibirsk Province during the Stolypin reforms. The private farmers’ movement of 1991-2 attracted me because of the preferential state loans. At 8% interest, they seemed almost free. It was a win-win situation for the state — mushrooms bring 300% profits and you get a return on your investment in 3-4 months.”

Risk-takers like Davydov are still rare. So far he is the only major, private producer of mushrooms on this scale. There are just four mushroom state farms in the whole of Russia and national production is only 4 mn tons a year, despite the abundance of compost. In comparison, the Netherlands produces 350,000 tons and with enough left over to export to Russia. Even if Davydov’s production figures double every year, it will take more than just one ‘mushroom general’ to turn back the Dutch.

Fears of change:

the foreign scourge?

The Ogibenins and other private farmers were delighted by Yeltsin’s decree. Yet their joy is not shared by all. The heads of the reorganized collective and state farms — often called ‘red landowners’ — were once omnipotent bosses in their villages. Now they have to deal with competition from private farmers.

There are also those who fear the arrival of foreigners in Russian agriculture, among them Agrarian Party leader  Mikhail Lapshin. He often warns of foreign ‘fatcats’ buying up agricultural land and using it for other purposes, like building cottages or factories for producing cheap consumer goods.

Considering the poor state of Russian agriculture, the idea of new competitors on top of all the other woes of the Russian village is too monstrous for many to imagine. The Russian peasantry has always been cautious about reform. And 70 years of Soviet power took a huge toll on the will for personal initiative.

Perhaps that is why many peasants voted for pro-communist parties like the Agrarians. In both of the recent Duma and Presidential elections, agricultural regions voted mainly for Communist Gennady Zyuganov and nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The ‘red belt’ — a term used for the fertile but impoverished agricultural regions of central and southern Russia — was born.

Stepan Artamonov, chairman of the Lenin collective farm in ‘red-belt’ Voronezh Region is one of those who wants a return to subsidized farming.

“Our combine harvester fleet is obsolete and we can’t afford new ‘Dons’ [a new Russian make of harvester]. Just one would swallow up our entire income from this year’s harvest, but we need at least five more this year. If the state doesn’t intervene, we’ll go bankrupt — we’ve virtually no combines left to reap the harvest with.”

Artamonov does not think private farmers are the answer to Russia’s agricultural problems. “Farmers are helped by the state throughout the world. Only our reformers believe farmers can do okay on their own. Throughout history, Russian peasants have tended to stay together. That’s why very few people withdrew from our collective — they like things how they used to be.”

Yet, according to the State Statistics Committee, 71% of the rural population now works in the private sector. They too would seem unlikely to rejoice at a return to the past. But, while productivity remains low and foreign competition a potential threat, communist policies remain attractive to some. Yevgeny Savchenko, chairman of the Agricultural Committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament, believes Russia’s entire food product security is threatened, and proposes supporting Russian farmers by means of a complete ban on food imports.

Fortunately, this protectionist view is not widely held. Most citizens and politicians realize that, even with a total absence of foreign competition, Russian agriculture is in no state to guarantee food for the whole country. Indeed, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has stated that the disappearance of foreign food from the capital’s shops would cause a return to rationing comparable to that of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991, if not to famine.

An uphill struggle

Despite this year’s drought, agricultural production seems to be on the rise. Yet a persistent set of harvest-time problems plague Russian agriculture: shortages of fuel and spare parts for machinery and a lack of funds for transportation of harvested products. The old Soviet cliche of bitva za urozhai (battle for the harvest) seems more pertinent today, and more desperate, than ever.

The struggle is made all the more difficult by continued, considerable migration from rural areas to towns. Tens of millions of young and enterprising peasants have left their villages to apply their  skills in other areas of the economy.The reason is money. Russia’s rural population is the least affluent part of society, with average wages for agricultural workers at around 200,000 rubles a month ($40, vs. a Moscow, white collar worker’s average wage of 700,000 rubles). The result is a section of the population completely unable to purchase consumer goods. (According to a survey by the Research Center VTsIOM, 50% of rural inhabitants have not bought a television or refrigerator for the last 10 years.) This has led to a growing resentment towards townspeople, whom peasants believe are living at their expense.

For some, the answer to many of these problems is greater government intervention and subsidies. Through 1994, the agricultural sector had received 21 trillion rubles ($4.2 bn) in credits, credits that have no hope of being paid back in the next 10 years. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin promised to make these credits interest-free through 2005, and has offered agricultural producers another 13.1 trillion rubles from the budget this year. Tax concessions, a 50% tax break on capital and low-interest loans for agricultural construction are also in the offing. Chernomyrdin also stated that the government intended to acquire a controlling interest in Agroprombank, the main financial organization dealing with the settling of accounts between agricultural producers.

But private farmers like the Ogibenins are not anxious for so much state interference in agriculture. “...My greatest dream,” said Roman, “is to buy my farm and know for sure that I’m my own boss.”

His dream is surely shared by Russian’s tens of millions of private farmers. Realizing that dream, however, still depends on freedoms and opportunities given over  by the state.