Rational Resistance to Land Privatisation in Russia: Modelling the Behaviour of Rural Producers in Response to Agrarian Reforms, 1861-2000

This paper argues that rural opposition to land reform in transition Russia is a consequence of individually rational decisions by members of former state and collective farms about whether to support further land reform, or preserve the status quo, collective farming. Evidence from survey data shows that despite the government`s efforts to promote a land market and independent farming in the 1990s, preferences in 1996 still favoured the largely unreformed status quo. The observed retention of collective farming is so widespread as to block both the development of a land market and restructuring. The visible consequence of stalemated reform has been persistent agricultural output decline and widespread bankruptcy of large farm entities, without any significant rise of independent farming. This paper formalises a dynamic argument for rational opposition to land reform, given the existence of uncertainty about the costs that individual cultivators will incur. It turns out that the consequences of initial decisions could have decisive impact on rejection of reform later on. The paper discusses further, the relevance of the historical parallel during the post-Emancipation and Stolypin eras when peasant communes resisted enclosures and restructuring of rights to land. Opposition, seemingly irrational, recurred and lasted throughout the reform era. It can be seen that opposition to reform at that time, too, was individually rational, given incomplete property rights reform; the state also bears responsible in contemporary and historical times for policies that tended to help preserve the status-quo. The state failed to improve the unclear property rights which dampened reform incentives early on in the reform process both historically and in the rural transition environment.