MODELS OF STATE REFORMS IN AGRICULTURE: PAST AND PRESENT

The article outlines social and economic consequences of collectivization to compare this state policy with the changes in agriculture in the 1990s, and to estimate chances of the Russian agriculture to overcome the current crisis. The article is based on archive data on collectivization and on the program developed by the Academy of High Ecotechnologies. The authors believe that at the time of collectivization, it was a way to optimize agriculture: largely due to collectivization, though with all its losses and ‘extremes’, the soviet agriculture was partially industrialized and provided the country with food in the hardest years of the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war period, thus ensuring the food security of the Soviet state. The ‘emergency’ model of the so-called ‘return to civilization’ that was adopted under the reforms of the 1990s aimed at turning the collective farmer into an individual farmer or a rural wageworker, but such a social ‘migration’ strategy imposed ‘from above’ deformed the rural social stratum and determined serious economic problems. Today the authors consider the neo-collective farms as a promising perspec-tive. They also support the program developed by the Academy of High Ecotechnologies for intensification of agricultural production on the basis of progressive domestic and foreign technologies, which will allow to increase the agricultural production in the next three to five years by several times. In particular, for more effective use of agricultural technologies and processing industries, the program suggests develop-ing the enlarged organizational-economic structures - ‘agropromkhozes’.