Capitalism sprouts on Russian farmland

For more than a decade, Anatoly Kibeka has been a peaceful counterrevolutionary. One of the first Russians to start a private family farm, in 1991, he has weathered controversy and harassment, but now his country's parliament has finally vindicated him.

"It's 10 years late, but it's a good beginning," says Mr. Kibeka of a new law passed in late June by the state Duma that, for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution, will permit the buying and selling of agricultural land.

A burly and jovial former professor of agricultural science, Mr. Kibeka says he doesn't take much interest in politics. He has his hands full combating an invasion of Colorado potato beetles, keeping his ancient machinery running, and fussing with 50 acres of cabbages he fears might perish in this summer's dry spell.

"All these [political] battles, reforming this and that, just keep people from doing productive work," he says. "I grow vegetables, which people need – that's my political statement."

Yet Kibeka has been at the center of one of Russia's toughest post-Soviet political struggles, and one which may be far from over. Polls show at least half of Russians oppose private ownership of land, and a majority of the 12 million people who belong to the moribund Soviet-era collective farms, which still control three-fourths of Russia's arable land, are mostly dead set against the idea.

The Communist Party has promised to force a national referendum to revoke the law, one that experts believe they could win. "Land is an emotional issue for most Russians; they don't think of it as a commodity but as the foundation of national power and wealth," says Ivan Klimov, a sociologist with the independent Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow." You can't reach them with practical arguments."

For Kibeka, the debate ended long ago. "Land is only as valuable as what it produces," he says. "And the current system of agriculture in this country is a mess."

In 1990 agriculture accounted for 16.4 percent of Soviet Russia's gross domestic product; in 2000, according to the World Bank, that figure had shrunk to just 7.5 percent. Many collective farms produce at only a subsistence level, and an estimated 10 percent of productive land routinely lies fallow because of the collective farms' inability to cultivate it.

After the USSR's collapse, Kibeka managed to acquire almost 7 1/2 acres from an academic institute near Podolsk, about 30 miles south of Moscow, to set up an experimental farm. He has since leased another 250 acres of state-owned land. These fields now produce three to four times as much as the collective farms that previously worked them.

"There's no simple explanation for the difference in productivity," Kibeka says, with a shrug. "Being a farmer is something between your ears."

It hasn't been easy for him, particularly when it comes to marketing. Local cooperatives won't work with private farmers. Kibeka made direct links with a company that provides food to kindergartens, hotels, and other institutions. He says he has had few difficulties with local officials, but the intense hostility of neighboring collective farmers has been a constant problem. "They simply fail to understand that this is my choice in life; it's nothing against them," he says. "I don't know, maybe they're envious, or just angry about the way things are in the country, but they certainly make everything harder for me." He declines to elaborate.

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