Rural Society and Agrarian Reform

The formation of agrarian reform's social base, that is, of those social groups that support reform and actively participate in it, is a key problem. The principal difficulty is that there was no specific social group in the countryside possessing major reform potential at the beginning of reform, although the peasantry's dissatisfaction with the old agrarian system was serious. This, along with the low economic efficiency of the agro-industrial complex, gave impetus to the reform. Sociological polls at the end of the 1980s showed that only 15-20 percent of agricultural workers were working at full capacity and that the potential of the others was unrealized. The social base of reform is made up of representatives of different categories of the population which, by virtue of the social qualities they had or have acquired in the course of the reform, support the government's reform efforts.