The Effect of the 1990s Reforms on Urban and Rural Residents

Since the beginning of the 1990s the state's agrarian policy has undergone a drastic change in direction. The revival of the peasantry by turning the peasant into an owner and entrepreneur, solutions to the socioeconomic problems of the countryside, development of the social infrastructure, and improvement of the country's food supply system all became official slogans of the reforms. The collective farms were declared to be the chief reason for the inefficiency of the agro-industrial complex, and the agrarian policy of the Soviet regime was declared to be fundamentally mistaken. Ten years is a sufficient length of time to tally up some of the results. V.I. Staroverov, the well-known agrarian sociologist, has suggested that the Russian countryside is reverting to the nineteenth century [1, p. 6]. We can find the opposite assessment—"through adversity to the stars"—in the works of economists of the Agrarian Institute of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences [2, p. 77]. Because the issue has been so politicized, we offer readers the right to draw their conclusions based on the findings of a survey,1 presented in this article

Demographic economics · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Political science · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Agricultural Development and Policies · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends