This is a book about reform in Soviet politics and government. The reader may well ask, “What reform?” After fifteen years of a conservative, indeed virtually immobile regime under Brezhnev, what reforms can one talk about, other than those that shriveled in the bud or may await Brezhnev's departure to blossom? Yet the Brezhnev leadership committed a substantial share of its attention and energy to making one major change: It was the first Soviet government to address decisively, through a massive program of investment, the perennial blight of the Soviet economy, the problem of agriculture. The countryside consistently commanded the top civilian priority of the Brezhnev period, as the regime launched and sustained year after year a broad program of basic reconstruction and modernization. Here, then, is an exception to the overall immobility of the rest of the domestic scene. Its intrinsic importance aside, what does it tell us about the Soviet political system itself and about its capacity for reform? As Brezhnev's agricultural policy was apparently so different from that of his predecessors, does it reflect in any sense a deeper evolution? Does it contain any evidence of an underlying change in the relationship of knowledge to power in Soviet politics or in the instruments by which new policies are implemented? In short, if the Brezhnev agricultural policy is a reform, what does it imply for our understanding of the Soviet political system as a whole?