he general assessment in the west is that centralized planning and collective farming has been a failure, that Soviet farmers are clamoring for private holdings and less direction, and that agricultural reform is necessary to preclude a revolution in the countryside (Medvedev, 1986). While these opinions are widely expressed, however, there exists the nagging fear in the United States (US) and Canada that successful agricultural reform in the Soviet Union will deal a heavy blow to North American grain exports (Minard & Brimelow, 1986).
On perestroika's political side, the general assessment in the west appears to be that its domestic success will mark the end of the Communist system of government in the Soviet Union. Further, if perestroika can be successful without destroying the country's system of government, most western political writers and government leaders appear to have little interest in its ultimate success. In the international arena, Soviet initiatives in the perestroika period are most often met, by western political writers and government leaders, with suspicion, or are dismissed as empty gestures. There appears to be an attitude in the west that the only acceptable change on the part of the Soviet Union will be (1) a complete acquiescence to western policy, and (2) a public recognition that no western actions constitute a threat to the Soviet Union. Either most western political writers and government leaders are incredibly naive, or they, if fact, feel that it is necessary to maintain the concept of the Soviet threat, in order to continue to successfully sell their own policies in their own countries.
Comparisons of contemporary agricultural reform in the Soviet Union with those of the Khrushchev years (when such comparisons are made) are most often a part of an effort to justify a proposition that the current reforms are doomed to failure; that the apparatchik of the Communist establishment will n...