Russian agriculture: a new business

Overview

Russian agriculture does not neatly reproduce the pattern of downfall and recovery seen in most other sectors of the country's economy since the Soviet collapse. The differences are not so much of degree as of kind. They stem from the murderous destruction of commercial peasant agriculture, and sustained deformation of the sector, which was an ideological flagship of the Soviet regime. Agriculture's grim history is reflected in the post-Soviet social degradation in rural areas, while...