In the final years of the USSR's existence, the question of land ownership and the future of the country's troubled collective and state farms became one of the central battles in political and economic policy. The decision to revitalise agriculture by fostering personal initiative inevitably clashed with the vested interests and ideological constraints which had characterised the decades of state planning. Even as late as 1990, as Russia's parliament developed its legislation on land and private farming, these forces were still very much in evidence. Defending continued restrictions on land sales, for example, Boris Yel'tsin was moved to comment, ‘The land is like a mother; you don't sell your mother.’ Within twelve months, however, with the demise of the USSR, the situation already appeared dramatically different. Not only was the establishment of new private farms to be heavily promoted, but the entire state and collective farm sector was to be completely reorganised.

Market reforms and agricultural reorganisation

In the autumn of 1991, the country had some 30,000 peasant farms. Their contribution to agriculture was, however, extremely modest: the farms occupied just over 1 per cent of agricultural land, accounted for less than 2 per cent of agricultural production and involved less than 1 per cent of the farming workforce. In the initial period of market reforms in Russia, the numbers increased rapidly, reaching 270,000 within two years. Since then, the development of private farming has continued to receive official backing; there has, in fact, been a marked slowing down of growth accompanied by bankruptcies and the abandonment of land by unsuccessful private farmers in the increasingly difficult economic climate.