Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

“I haven’t read many books, so I’m not very familiar with your intellectual terminology. What’s that framework called?” Slava asked.

"I don't know what to call it. It can be called an agricultural-industrial consortium or a production-research consortium. The name is not important. What is important is that it has the right! The right to adjust the production plan according to the actual situation instead of rigidly adhering to the targets set by Moscow, and the right to coordinate the allocation of resources internally instead of requiring approval at every level for every fertilizer and every truckload of seeds."

A younger associate professor chimed in, “Ultimately, what we’re discussing is empowering a specific organization to make economic decisions based on local conditions rather than blindly following Moscow’s lead, but this goes beyond the realm of agriculture.”

The night he talked with the ordinary villagers was the most silent for Slava. He divided the thirty-odd people into five or six groups, with five or six people in each group sitting and talking in different corners of the classroom. He and Director Nian each took turns listening to several groups.

Among these people were an old tractor driver with gray hair who had worked on the collective farm for thirty years, a young man in his twenties who had just graduated from agricultural technical school and been assigned to a state-run farm, a woman who had raised pigs all her life, and a middle-aged man in charge of grain warehouse management.

Their words were more direct and more disheartening than those of the administrators and professors:

They felt bad that the grain was rotting in the fields, but there was nothing they could do because the drying plant only had a limited capacity and there was no way to get a turn.

They were indeed less concerned about the collective farmland than about their private plots, because the money earned from the private plots supported their families, while the work points earned from the collective farmland supported their quotas. The importance of these two things differed by several levels in their daily lives.

Young people want to leave the countryside to work in factories in the city because the wages are higher and there is heating, hot water and movie theaters. Farms can't retain people and the aging population is getting more and more serious. The situation in recent years is much worse than it was ten years ago.

A woman who raises pigs joked with a smile when talking about her private plot of land:

“Secretary Ivanov, it’s not that we don’t love the collective or socialism; we were born and raised in this system and we have feelings for it!”

But people need to eat, you know. You're telling me that the food and clothes I get from working in the village are comparable to what I earn working a season in my own fields—sigh, what am I supposed to say?

She didn't finish her sentence. She didn't need to, because everyone already knew the rest.

"I'll think of something else," Slava could only reply.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

After returning to his dormitory late that night, Slava sat at his desk for a long time, on which lay several reference materials about rural reforms in Lao Zhong that he had brought from Moscow.

He compared these materials with his investigation notes in the Amur region, and as he looked at them, he started writing in the blank spaces of the paper, writing and crossing out, crossing out and writing again, going back and forth for nearly an hour.

Finally, only one sentence remained on the paper:

"The Soviet Union was not China."

This was the first lesson he truly learned after arriving in the Amur Region.

Old Zhong's rural reforms in 1978 had a prerequisite that the Soviet Union neither possessed nor could replicate:

Old Zhong has more than 800 million farmers.

The labor force of these 800 million people has not been liberated at all. A simple relaxation of policies could unleash a huge increase in productivity. Moreover, China's rural collectivization history is only about 20 years old, and farmers still have vivid memories and the ability to cultivate their own land.

Of course, "liberating the workforce" is just a theoretical concept; we usually call it unemployment.

What about the Soviet Union? Its urbanization rate exceeded 65%, its agricultural population accounted for less than a quarter, and the collective farm system was thoroughly embedded in the planned economy's cycle.

From seeds to fertilizers to purchasing, transportation, and processing, every link is connected to other ministries and planning targets. Even if collective farms are dissolved and farmers are allowed to cultivate the land themselves, who will provide them with seeds? Who will supply them with fertilizers? Who will they sell their harvest to? What will happen to the national grain purchasing system? What will city dwellers eat?

A single move can affect the whole situation, and affecting the whole situation is the most dangerous thing, because once things go wrong, it will trigger a disintegration ending prematurely.

Looking back at himself now, Slava really wants to slap himself—he was indeed trying to apply Old Zhong's model to the reality of the Soviet Union.

Andropov's reasons for refusing him were entirely correct; it's just that he was too eager to sell his own proposal to listen to reason.

But where does the alliance's way out lie?

The inefficiency of collective farms is a real issue, as is the high efficiency of private plots. Farmers' negative attitudes and the systemic breakdown of the industrial chain are also real issues. Rejecting Lao Zhong's approach does not mean rejecting the necessity of reform; it simply means that the alliance needs to find its own path.

What is that road?

He turned to a new page in his notebook and started writing, but stopped after about two lines.

Because he found himself unsure of what to write.

So he went back to Professor Kolossov’s statement again: planting, production, processing, transportation, and sales—five links in a circle, with all the lines connected.

Perhaps the answer lies not in dismantling collective farms and letting farmers do their own thing, but in reconnecting the broken links surrounding agriculture and establishing an organization that can coordinate the entire chain from seed research to final sales at the local level. This organization would have sufficient autonomy to make decisions based on the actual conditions of the Amur region without having to consult Moscow, 6,000 kilometers away, on every matter.

This idea immediately hit the wall he had repeatedly encountered over the past three weeks:

These links are under the jurisdiction of different ministries. To integrate them, it is necessary to break down departmental barriers. Breaking down departmental barriers means taking away other people's interests, and taking away interests means political struggle. How can a Far Eastern regional party secretary who has only been there for a month compete with the ministers in Moscow?

"Damn it, it's hopeless, let the world just end already! Shock therapy was the right thing to do, Gorbachev, I miss you!" Slava slammed his pen on the table.

"Ugh...."

He looked out the window at the Blagoveshchensk night.

By the end of April, the Far East was already feeling the summer heat, with daytime temperatures occasionally climbing above ten degrees Celsius, but it was still cold enough to wear a sweater at night.

On the opposite bank, the lights of Heihe City cast a series of blurry dots on the wide surface of the Heilongjiang River, just like his future.

Is the problem with the collective farm system itself, or with the rigid bureaucratic planning system that surrounds it?

If we put collective farms in an environment with normal price signals, real market feedback, and sufficient autonomy, would they become as efficient as private plots?

Or is collectivization itself a dead end, where farmers, no matter how external conditions change, will never be able to unleash their full labor enthusiasm as long as they are within the collective framework?

He couldn't find the answer to this question that night, nor could he find it in many nights afterward. Perhaps collectivization and incentives could be reconciled through some clever institutional design. Perhaps what the Soviet Union needed was not the distribution of land to individual households, but a hybrid mechanism that introduced individual incentives within a collective framework.

He didn't know the specifics yet, but at least now he knew what he didn't know, and that was a significant improvement from when he left Moscow a month ago.

At that time, he thought he knew everything.

"Practice makes perfect..."

Chapter 31 Do you still dare to do it? Yes, you do!

Now that we have a preliminary plan, it's time to ask the central government for more authority.

The first draft was rejected by Slava himself; the original version would have been immediately labeled and sent to Siberia as soon as it was published.

The second draft was polished by his supervisor, who softened the wording considerably, but also removed his core viewpoints—turning the report into a bland analysis of the current state of agriculture and suggestions for improvement.

Any prefectural party secretary could write something like this, and at most, he'd get a "read" approval in return.

Slava glanced at it and said, "This is no different from farting."

Director Nian replied without any politeness, "Then do it yourself, I'm not going to serve you!"

The two spent several days working on the third draft, and the core idea was the same: to establish an agricultural research and development consortium in Amur Oblast, bringing all aspects from seed research and development to field planting, harvesting and processing to warehousing and transportation into a unified management framework, and granting the consortium a certain degree of autonomy in pricing, resource allocation, and profit retention within this framework.

This time he learned his lesson and strictly controlled all his statements within the official discourse system, trying his best to avoid being labeled a liberal.

The concept of a federation had already appeared in Brezhnev's later 1982 food program, so it's not a new thing.

The so-called corporate pricing autonomy has also been packaged as "allowing consortia to make limited negotiated pricing on excess output based on the state's purchase price."

Andropov did the same thing, and there were no problems.

Profit retention is described as "the consortium has the right to use a certain percentage of the excess income for internal development funds and workers' bonuses after completing the national plan targets".

This follows the same logic as the industrial enterprise empowerment experiment that Andropov himself is promoting, only it has been moved from factories to farmland.

In the final paragraph of his report, he even used President An's words as a shield:

"The above plan does not involve fundamental adjustments to the current agricultural system, but is merely an exploration of improving resource allocation efficiency through innovation within the existing institutional framework."

Its core principles are entirely consistent with the spirit of the 1982 Food Program, and it also references Comrade Andropov's instruction on "improving the economic management mechanism without undermining the basic system."

The report was sent out quickly, and Slava had expected to wait at least two or three weeks for a reply—the Moscow bureaucracy typically processes a report slower than a snail climbing the Kremlin wall. But this time, the reply came in just five days.

Five days later, Sherov called: "General An has read it. He told you to go all out, but be careful not to overdo it."

Slava paused for a moment, holding the microphone.

"What about Nagorbachev?"

“Mikhail Sergeyevich also agreed, and he instructed the Ministry of Agriculture to prioritize the allocation of agricultural resources to the Amur region—the quotas for fertilizer and seeds you requested will arrive next month.”

After hanging up the phone, Slava paced back and forth in the small living room of the dormitory several times, and her mood improved considerably.

He was prepared for the document to be rejected and require at least several revisions before it could be approved, but he didn't expect Andropov to approve it so readily.

Perhaps Andropov genuinely wanted to see what Slava could accomplish in practice, or perhaps he truly hoped for his success, as it would be a new milestone in Andropov's overall policy.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The First Secretary of Amur Region is Igor Petrovich Kuzmin, a veteran cadre who has worked in the Far East for twenty years.

During Slava's first month in office, Kuzmin treated him quite politely:

They greet you with a smile, serve you tea, and give you all the work reports they need, but they never offer any help or create any obstacles on their own initiative.

For this old bureaucrat, he needed to know whether this young man from Moscow was a visitor or a permanent resident, whether he was sent by Andropov to gain experience or to truly settle down in the Far East.

Once Andropov's reply reached the Amur region, Kuzmin immediately understood—

Slava is just a phoenix fallen from grace; given time, he will return to the heavens. It's better to offer help in times of need than to add flowers to brocade!

So the First Secretary of Amur immediately gave Slava the green light. Slava requested to use an office of the State Committee as a temporary residence for the preparatory group of the consortium—which was vacated that same day. Slava asked the State Agricultural Bureau to provide detailed operating data of all collective farms and state farms in the state—a whole box of documents was delivered to his desk the next day. Slava wanted to visit several remote farms that he had never been to before—a car and driver were arranged that afternoon.

The leader highly praised this type of cadre:

"You should make more use of cadres with flexible thinking like this. Right now, he's giving you the green light to do whatever you want. If you succeed, he can get a share of the credit. If you fail, the responsibility is on you, and he can say that he was just following orders from his superiors."

Look at them, they're playing both sides, neither gaining nor losing. This is typical practice for a local leader dealing with a parachuted-in official; you should learn from them.

...

Although the resistance from Moscow was much greater than that in the Amur region, it was not great enough to stop a plan with Andropov's signature.

Slava's proposal for an agricultural research and development consortium was submitted to the central government and then reviewed by several ministries: the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Planning Commission, the Ministry of Food Industry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences...

After all, within this planning system, every department can try to get a share. If this new system of Slava cannot share the benefits with these ministries, then it should be prepared to be rejected by everyone.

After some political maneuvering, the final version adopted was reduced by almost half from Bislava's original proposal:

The right to set prices independently is limited to a maximum increase of 15% on the state-set purchase price, and its application is limited to the excess output.

The profit retention ratio was cut from 30% to 15%.

The management authority of the consortium is clearly limited to the two stages of "planting and primary processing" and cannot be extended to transportation and end sales. Moreover, the entire pilot program is only valid for two years, after which a decision will be made on whether to extend it based on the effectiveness evaluation.

Slava knew very well that this was no longer the solution he wanted, but it at least left some room for maneuver.

Although the price fluctuations are small, it's better than nothing. The 15% profit margin may be small, but at least it lets workers see the possibility of earning more by working harder.

"To put it another way, before I traveled through time, which company would have been able to distribute 15% of its profits as an extra incentive to its employees?"

"I'm not even talking about extra incentives; 15% of the profit would be good enough as a basic salary," Slava commented.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

In mid-May, the Amur Region Agricultural Production and Research Consortium was officially established.

The unveiling ceremony was held at the entrance of the Blagoveshchensk Agricultural College. A newly made tin sign was nailed to the wall of the office building, with the full name written in red paint and a sickle and a wheat ear symbol drawn below it.

Slava and Professor Kolossov unveiled the plaque together, and the state newspaper took a few photos and published them in a corner of the third page, not a big deal.

The consortium's organizational structure, as designed by Slava, consists of three sections: the research section, led by the Agricultural Academy, is responsible for new variety breeding, cultivation technology research, and agrochemical services; the production section comprises four selected collective farms with a total cultivated land area of ​​approximately 20,000 hectares, of which 12,000 hectares are planted with soybeans, and the remainder with wheat and other grains; and the processing section integrates two primary grain processing plants and one oilseed processing plant around Blagoveshchensk.

On paper, it looks good—the three links of planting, production, and processing are finally put into a management framework that can be directly connected. But problems began to emerge from the very first day of its establishment.

The first problem is people. The alliance is extremely short of labor. Where can we find skilled workers?

Furthermore, the consortium needs a general manager to oversee daily operations; this person must be knowledgeable in agriculture, processing, and management.

Such cross-disciplinary talents are almost non-existent in the league's cadre system because everyone is cultivated within a narrow industry track.

What can we do then? We can only promote them on the spot and find some frontline cadres.

So Slava finally chose a man named Semyonov—a former deputy director of a state farm, in his early fifties, quick-witted, and knowledgeable about food processing. His first act upon taking office was to inspect the oil factory, and upon returning, he told Slava that everything was fine.

After some time, Slava realized that because this person didn't understand the technology, he quickly handed over the power to the technicians. He didn't care what the technicians said; he just wanted high output.

So how is this operation different from the leaders who set targets on a whim that Slava encountered before?

He's the one giving the orders now, and then the middle managers keep adding more and more pressure to please their superiors, and in the end, he still ends up like Uzbekistan!

The second issue is power.

Although the central government's approval document stated that the consortium had the right to coordinate and allocate resources within its jurisdiction, in practice, the leaders of the four collective farms did not really take the consortium seriously.

Their superior was the district committee, and the district committee's superior was the prefectural committee. In the Soviet Union's administrative chain, no one could say for sure where a newly established union would be ranked!

When the fertilizer arrives at the warehouse, should it be given to the four farms in the consortium first, or to the other farms first?

The local agricultural bureau chief habitually distributed the fertilizer according to the old rules—whoever had a good relationship with him got it first, and the cooperative's signboard wouldn't allow him to get an extra ton of fertilizer.

Slava had to go to Kuzmin and ask him to issue an internal notice from the state committee clarifying the priorities of the consortium in resource allocation.

As the saying goes, experience counts. Kuzmin, with his seniority, understood bureaucracy better than Slava, who was less experienced. He quickly came up with a compromise arrangement that no one was entirely satisfied with, but no one could find any major flaws in.

The third problem is the most critical—price.