To study and compare the problem-solving processes of experts and non-experts, students and faculty were asked what they would do if they were head of the Ministry of Agriculture in the U.S.S.R. to increase the poor level of crop productivity found in recent years. Individual responses and analyses of these responses make up the bulk of this report. Participants included undergraduates just beginning to study Soviet domestic policy, faculty members whose field of study is the U.S.S.R., beginning and advanced graduate students whose field of interest is the Soviet Union, faculty members whose field of study is Latin America or American domestic policy, four chemistry professors, a career foreign service officer, and an Eastern European visiting scholar. The subjects were instructed to "think out loud" while generating their solutions. A tape recorder was used to collect the protocols. Results indicated that experts did not use a one-solution process. Rather, their processes differed with respect to problem decomposition into subproblems and in the way they chose to represent the problem statement. More experts used reasoning to support solutions they proposed. (RM)