文档介绍：外文文献翻译译文
原文
Russian Agriculture in the Transition to a Market Economy*
I. Introduction
An abiding intellectual fascination with policy-induced disarray in world agriculture framed D. Gale Johnson’s professional career. Nowhere were the problems more evident than in the ideologically motivated constraints imposed on peasants and markets in the centrally planned economies. Johnson was an acute observer of the Soviet economy and its essors for half a century, starting at a time when few professional economists were interested in the country. His bibliography as of 1994 lists 32 items on the subject, in a steady stream over time from “A Study of the Growth of the New Economic Potential of Agriculture in the .” in 1955 to “Trade Effects of Dismantling the Socialized Agriculture of the Former Soviet Union” in 1993 (Antle and Sumner 1996). When the final breakdown of the collective farm system accelerated at the end of the 1980s, he sought to understand how the transition might unfold and how it could be shaped to achieve a more productive agriculture. In his final years he puzzled over why the sizable potential efficiency gains were slow to materialize.
In this article, we review the Soviet-era situation, events during the transition of the 1990s, and the likely further course of Russian agriculture. We will consider how and why the problems that arose in the transition differed from what many expected in the early 1990s.
II. Agriculture in the Soviet Union
The relevant history can be divided into four periods. The pre-Stalinist period from 1917 through 1928 was characterized by land reform, confiscation of output, subsequent famine, experimentation with incentives under the New Economic Policy (NEP), disenchantment with the results of the NEP, and finally the decision to collectivize. This period was pre-Stalinist, not because Stalin was absent, but because his agricultural policies were not yet formed or dominant. From 1928 until Stalin’s death in 1953, So