Much of what you say is true, except Putin is doing the opposite with farms and small businesses. He has brought back the “independent, family farm.” The difference should be in text books: Russia is now the world’s largest EXPORTER of grain; under Brezhnev, it was the world’s largest IMPORTER.
This was of particular interest to me. So, I looked up info:
https://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Europe/Russia-AGRICULTURE.html
“Primary agriculture in Russia continues to be dominated by inefficient, Soviet-type collective farms with outdated technologies and management skills and strong political connections, especially at the regional level.
Household plots and small private farms comprising only 3% of the agricultural land. The business infrastructure for the agriculture sector is especially underdeveloped including support services, transportation, distribution networks, and financial services. For agriculture in Russia to go through the transformation to a modern system, the key step will be establishing and enforcing farmers’ rights to use land.
The first step in this process is to develop an efficient system of issuing and protecting title to land rights. This will also require a more reliable and enforceable framework for secured financial transactions so that farmers can buy and sell their land or use the land as collateral for obtaining loans.
The economic reform that began in Russia in the early 1990s reduced Russia’s livestock sector. The down-sizing of the livestock sector ended the need for imports of feed grain, soybeans, and meal. At the same time, imports of meat and other high-value products such as processed foods, fruit, and beverages grew considerably.
During the 1998, the economic crisis reduced Russia’s ability to import food. After plunging to extremely low levels in late 1998, agricultural imports rebounded in 1999. Imports of most agricultural and food products grew to roughly 60% of the level of the pre-crisis period. Imports dropped because the crisis reduced consumer incomes, thereby decreasing demand for food in general, and the severe crisis-induced depreciation of the ruble made imported food more expensive compared to Russian domestic output.
THE LARGE FORMER STATE AND COLLECTIVE FARMS CONTROL MOST LAND.
Farm workers can branch off as private farmers by obtaining a grant of land from their parent farm, though they lack full ownership rights. The land code proposed by the Russian legislature (the Duma) DOES NOT CHANGE existing law—that is, it does not allow the free purchase and sale of land for agricultural use. Rather, it would ALLOW land to be BOUGHT and SOLD solely for economically insignificant purposes, such as building a summer cottage, a dacha.”
It is not quite so....
independent, family farms surely exist in Russia today.
but... efficient agriculture requires large farms. Russia always had this problem, and even the Russian empire suffered hunger years every few years!
So the reason why Russia now can export is — in a bizarre way — the forced collectivization of the 1930s by Stalin (intermediate result: yes, large farms, generally filled with people unpaid and unwilling to work) and allowing these farms to behave capitalist under Putin.