Agrarian reform in Russia: the road from serfdom

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.