NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES), founded by the great scholar of Russian peasantry Teodor Shanin.
2. Stefan Dorondel (2016) has coined the notion of disrupted landscapes.
3. See Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, “Russia Starts to Sow Seeds of ‘Wheat Diplomacy,’” Financial Times, September 2, 2021, www.ft.com/content/4d925bae-fa89-4e64-9063-0c01e3b5690c.
4. Ukaz Prezidenta RF ot 30.1.2010 N120. Ob utverzhdenii doktriny prodovol’stvennoi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii.
5. Putin’s rhetoric on the issue, too, has changed greatly since 2003, when he infamously stated that a northern country like Russia could benefit from a warming climate, “spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up” (Pearce 2003).
6. The agrarian change literature scrutinizes such processes and has described them as land grabs (Borras et al. 2011), exclusion (D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011), and dispossession of land (Levien 2018) or expulsion (Sassen 2014). While engaging with these debates, this study is cautious of the limits in applying them to the Russian case and puts forward the argument that rural dispossession in Russia requires contextualization.
7. See the interventions by Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2013; Oya 2013; Scoones et al. 2013; Vorbrugg 2019.
8. Notable monographs include those by Tania Li (2014a), Alice Beban (2021), Michael Dwyer (2022), Jo Guldi (2022), and Andrés León (2023).
9. For critiques, see Allina-Pisano 2008, Spoor 2012, and Varga 2023.
10. Arguably the last large-scale “land grab,” understood as a forced separation of rural populations from farmland they had previously controlled more directly, was the Stalinist collectivization in the 1930s (chapter 2).
11. Dispersion and accumulation are antonyms that, at a metaphorical level, point to the relationship between dispersed dispossession and capitalist accumulation. I think of such metaphorical connections as potentially generative of interesting questions to spur empirical investigation and conceptual reflection. They do not provide any useful insights before such inquiry is done.
12. For instance, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011, 4) speaks of uneventful “dispersed suffering”; Ann Stoler (2013, 12) of the “dispersed effects” of colonial histories; and Robert Nixon (2011, 2) characterizes “slow violence” as “dispersed across time and space.” Hannah Appel (2019, 5), drawing on Povinelli, conceptualizes liberal capitalism as a project that articulates in “dispersed and competing” experiments. Such uses are informed by traditions of thought that emphasize discontinuity and rupture the “micro-physics of power” (Foucault [1976] 1986) and multiplicities (Deleuze and Parnet 1987).
13. I thank Dace Dzenovska for her advice to think more systematically about this cluster of terms.
14. Razvalili (broke up) and razobrali (took apart) were the most common such terms I encountered in my fieldwork (see chapter 3). The common use of such terms has been observed and interpreted before (see, e.g., Paxson 2005; Rogers 2006).
15. This means that crisis dynamics here cannot be pinned down to a crisis of neoliberal accumulation (Harvey 2003), or the multiple crises of food prices, energy supply, ecology, finance, and investment, which have driven the global “land rush” (McMichael 2014). It is distinct from other crisis constellations often cited to explain rural dispossession. For different analyses of how intertwined crises of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods shaped the current Russian political economy more broadly, see the work of Andrew Barnes (2006), Ruslan Dzarasov (2014), Boris Kagarlicky (1992), and Alexei Yurchak (2006), among others.
16. Privatization in Russia has been described as a major case of shock therapy. While some authors with a global perspective emphasize the opportunities thereby created for Western businesses (Klein 2007; Harvey 2003), many with a country-specific focus also stress the role of and benefits for Russian elites (Dzarasov 2014; Matveev 2019b; McFaul 1995).
17. One finds variations of this theme in the literature on postsocialism (see, e.g., Ashwin 1995; Dzenovska 2020; Humphrey 2002).
18. While I do not use the notion of “the dispossessed,” I follow Humphrey’s (1996, 75) conceptualization of post-Soviet dispossession as far as I also emphasize the separation from basic societal functions and units.
19. In this respect, dispersed dispossession is inspired by notions of violence “built into structure” (Galtung 1969, 171) rather than manifesting through immediate action. This does not suspend questions of responsibility but rather extends their scope beyond a narrowly defined direct and intentional dispossessive action.
20. Felix Ringel (2018), borrowing from Jane Guyer, discusses a related phenomenon as enforced presentism.
21. Dzarasov (2014), among others, has argued this in detail. Recent examples include how swiftly “businesspeople” in Russia managed to acquire and capitalize on the highly undervalued assets left behind by Western companies that quit the Russian market because of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the international sanctions that followed. Ironically, of course, it had been the opportunity to acquire highly undervalued assets and exploit a political-economic crisis that drew many of these Western companies to invest in Russia in the late 1980s and 1990s.
22. Examples include reflections on “renewal” (Gunko et al. 2021) and “recombination” (Stark 1996). Similar ideas are expressed in concepts without the prefix re-, such as maintenance and endurance (Dzenovska 2018; Ringel 2018), quiet food sovereignty (Visser et al. 2015), and small deeds (Nikulin and Trotsuk 2022). I am grateful to Dace Dzenovska for pointing some of this out for me.
23. Examples from different theoretical traditions include Giddens’s (1984) duality of structure, actor-network theory (Latour 2005), or conceptualizations of infrastructure (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018; Berlant 2022). While differing greatly in terms of their theoretical basis and analytical aims, these approaches not only offer various ways of bridging the conceptual binary between structure and agency, they also offer important arguments for how agency matters for structures and how structures matter for agency.
CHAPTER 1. TRACES
1. Approaches of this kind are popular in anthropology, but also in human geography (see, e.g., Ouma 2015 and Verne 2012, among many others).
2. Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zavlavsky (2006) provide an encompassing overview of regional differences. For an overview of differing economic agricultural indicators, see Wegren, Nikulin and Trotsuk (2023).
3. I rarely refer to the characters in this study by their names and mostly refer to their roles instead. This is because of the large number of characters and the fact that some appear in different chapters. When I use names, they are anonymized, using the form in which I would have addressed people in reality: in Russian, you would address someone with first name and patronymic if you do not know them well, they are older than you, or have authority over you. You would address peers with their first name, and friends and family often with nicknames.
4. Todorova uses this German term in the original, which signifies ways of coping and dealing with the past, including redress or retribution.
CHAPTER 2. KOLKHOZ
1. Economic relations between state and enterprise were more immediate in state-owned farms, where wages were more strictly standardized and there was a “direct exchange” between state and farms in which the former provided inputs (such as fuel, fertilizer, infrastructures, money) and wages, and received the farm’s produce. Collective farms were bound to state-issued production plans, but they were part of more complex and hybrid webs of economic exchange.
2. Laying out the tasks of collective farms, the entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives roughly equal weight to agricultural production; tasks including the increase of production through mechanization and electrification; and social tasks. It states that collective farms, “under the leadership of the party organization, [are required] to work on the communist education of collective farmers, their involvement in public life, and the development of socialist competition; to more fully satisfy the growing material and cultural needs of the collective farmers, to improve the living conditions of their lives, and to gradually transform hamlets and villages into well-maintained settlements” (own translation, original available online at http://bse.sci-lib.com/article063068.html).
3. Stephen Collier (2011, 81) offers an insightful reflection on the parallels between the words khoziaistvo and economy: “The Russian word khoziaistvo—an essential term in many contexts—shares some of the semantic constellation of the English word ‘economy’ in its original usage. Comparison of the two terms is illuminating. ‘Economy,’ as is well known to economic anthropologists, for whom these distinctions were once crucial, originally referred to the nemein, or management, of the oikos—the household. But it could be used in other domains as well. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines this now basically obsolete range of uses, economy concerns ‘[t]he management or administration of the material resources of a community . . . or other organized body; the art or science of managing such resources.’ In Polanyi’s sense, these prior usages referred to forms of substantive economy—instituted mechanisms of need fulfillment— not to the formal understanding of economics that emerged with the rise of liberal political economy. Similarly, the Russian root khoz originally referred to the household, and is closely linked to problems of management: a khoziain is the head of a household or of some other substantive economy; the verb khoziaistvovat is the activity of managing and transforming a khoziaistvo. Khoziaistvo, as a noun, can refer to a farm, a household, or virtually any nexus of production and need fulfillment—that is, to almost any unit of substantive economy. But khoziaistvo cannot imply the formal meaning of ‘economic.’ Thus, while there was a ‘narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR’—in the standard translation, a national economy of the Soviet Union—it is somewhat discordant to call post-Soviet Russia’s market economy a ‘khoziaistvo.’“
4. Political relations between Bolsheviks and peasants at that time were tense. The former assumed that they had to fundamentally transform the agrarian economy—in the mainly agrarian society that the USSR at that time still was. In the medium term, the plans to instrumentalize peasants for industrialization and state-socialist development backfired politically and economically. Peasants slaughtered tens of millions of farm animals to avoid surrendering them to collective farms, and yields of most crops fell substantially. It is also reported that although power used in agriculture increased fourfold between 1913 and the late 1950s due to the employment of large machinery, agricultural productivity rose above prerevolutionary levels only in the 1960s (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 23–24).
5. Scientific figures range from about 2.2 million to 5 million victims in Ukraine, which at that time had a population of 29 million. These numbers are lower than those that have been claimed by some politicians. The remaining variation is due to both questions of categorization (if they count deaths by starvation or more complex numbers of excess deaths) and the availability of historical evidence. Some central questions around the historical responsibility remain contested not only between strongly differing Ukrainian and Russian official accounts, but also among historians and commentators. The interpretation of the great famine as genocide long counted as contested (Lewin 1975). However, that a plausible case of genocide can be made already speaks of the gravity of the consequences and political allegations and an increasing number of nations and researchers acknowledge this classification (for one useful overview, see “Holodomor,” University of Minnesota, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor).
6. From the late 1980s, the Gorbachev government passed pieces of legislation intended to stimulate the enhancement of economic freedoms and transfer of responsibilities to local actors: local administrations gained responsibilities; collective enterprises gained freedoms such as selling part of their produce independently; and rural dwellers were provided possibilities to organize production beyond the state and collective enterprises (Lindner 2008, 150–53).
7. Rural dwellers frequently describe how local and regional markets were easier to access and more lucrative for them in late Soviet times than in the third decade after market reforms began. The vanishing of local marketplaces, increased presence of supermarket chains, and stricter regulations and quality checks on produce sold to processing enterprises foreclosed options of direct sales and increased the dependence on middlemen.
8. Russia has witnessed four major land reforms over the twentieth century: the Stolypin reforms, which began in 1906 and allowed peasants to convert communal land into private property; the Bolshevik reforms in the 1920s, which expropriated landlords, the tsarist state, and the church; and Stalinist collectivization in the 1930s. The latter transferred land control from villages and small farms to state-controlled large farming enterprises. Hence the last of the great land reforms, which started during perestroika and was in process into the 2000s, can be understood as a means of decollectivization and abolishment of the (post-)Stalinist model of organizing agriculture (Wegren 2009, 12–13).
9. For details, see Allina-Pisano 2008, Lerman and Shagaida 2007, Shagaida 2010, and Wegren 2009.
10. Personal subsidiary farming was also part of the Soviet agro-industrial complex, not only a compromise with the peasantry’s demands for private production (Pallot and Nefedova 2007, 23), but also a necessity to compensate for industrialized agriculture’s failure to meet production targets (Lindner 2008, 87–93). It is estimated that in the mid-1960s, more than 60 percent of the total potato and egg production, and around 40 percent of vegetables, meat, and milk, were covered by private households—kolkhoz and sovkhoz workers and, to a lesser degree, urbanites—and not state farms (Lindner 2008, 90–93; Wädekin 1973).
11. Federal’nyj zakon No. 101. Ob oborote zemel’ sel’skokhoziaistvennogo naznachenia [Federal Law No. 101., On the turnover of agricultural land]. http://gov.cap.ru/SiteMap.aspx?gov_id=532&id=1312983.
12. This does not necessarily imply any hostility toward external investment per se. For instance, the mayor who played a central role in problematizing and politicizing the attempted takeover of farmland in Setovka arrives at an almost opposite conclusion when speaking about the effects of the same investment projects for the neighboring village: “At least some enterprise, that is, some kind of future for the village. If there is a producing enterprise, this means a future for the village. . . . This is an unmatched benefit for the village” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2010). She even praises the investor for the benefits he had brought to Setovka, the very village that saw itself put under threat by his expansionist aspirations. She describes how she expresses her gratitude to the investor “at all meetings and all levels” for bringing funds for a new road and gasification, which also benefited Setovka (Village mayor, Perm region 2010). The main actor in Setovka’s public mobilization did not oppose investment activity as a matter of principle. Where there is no running enterprise left, and if they do not endanger running structures, she appreciates such projects.
13. Assembly protocol 2007, lease contract 2001.
14. For urban contexts, see Gunko et al. 2021; Collier 2011; Crowley 2016.
15. Pallot and Nefedova (2007, 113), too, speak of mutual obligations and support between large farms and rural populations as a “social contract.”
16. A khoziain is a master, owner, or landlord, but also a head of a family or household. Directors upholding kolkhoz functions and taking an active part in them are often referred to by this term.
17. Khoziains of large farm enterprises have been portrayed similarly in other studies (see, e.g., Rogers 2006; Paxson 2005).
18. Assotsiatsia krest’ianskikh khoziaistv 1992–98, Tovaritshestvo na vere 1998–2008.
19. The farm director, for his part, explains that former co-owners left, one by one, during times of economic hardship and risk. He also depicts this sort of enterprise privatization as process driven and shaped by state policies. For instance, the way in which Russia’s WTO accession in 2012 was translated into state agricultural policies resulted not only in the overall cut in agricultural subsidies but introduced a new subsidy calculation scheme based on the area of formally owned farmland, which increased the pressure on enterprises to formalize land. Fully privatized enterprises also often find it easier to obtain bank credit than others such as cooperatives.
20. The assembly defined the physical location of land titles under formal enterprise control, which was fertile land in favorable sites. Other parts of the land bank in unfavorable locations were defined as ready for formalization by any other actors, private shareholders, or external enterprises—which is a common way for solving such issues (Allina-Pisano 2008; Lindner 2008;). A sequence from the protocol of an assembly in 2011 demonstrates that the strategy had the intended effect: “[Company lawyer]: I speak in the name of [the investing company in the neighboring village]. We made ourselves familiar with the land defined for immediate allotment. Our enterprise is not satisfied with these land plots, as they are the least fertile, most distanced. We would like to reconsider the [2007 assembly’s] decision. [Assembly chairperson]: The decision has not been disputed by anyone, the period [for doing so] has passed, and the fact that [your company] is not satisfied with the allotted land plots is no reason for a reconsideration of the former decision. [’Kolkhoz’ director]: I suggest taking the proposed new vote on land allotment off the agenda.” The only vote against the director’s proposal came from the investing company.
21. Assembly protocol 2007, from village administration archive.
22. The monetization in Setovka partly followed patterns that also could be observed in other places. Enterprises’ technical services and natural products may no longer match rural dwellers’ needs, for instance, when they give up household subsidiary production. When enterprises shift to producing mainly a single crop, they have less to offer for local use. When they employ ever larger machinery, it can become useless on tiny household plots, and monetary rents become much more practical. Many farm managers are ambivalent about the provision of services, even if they can be inexpensive for them and important for villages. But they also go along with additional organizational efforts. The demand for work- and skill-intensive services can increase with the modernization of village and household infrastructures, and enterprises have little spare capacity during periods of intensive work on the fields. Setovka’s enterprise director planned to get rid of service provision by outsourcing it to an individual entrepreneur or private enterprise (LFE director, Perm region, 2014).
1. Overgrown fields also became an unresolved problem with various material consequences for landowners, who can be fined for the degradation of farmland and choose to burn succession vegetation to avoid fines. They thereby have unintentionally caused many of Russia’s large forest fires over recent years (Glushkov et al. 2021).
2. Many agrarian economists, environmental historians, and others agree today that cultivating much of the now abandoned farmland was a rather bad idea from the start. The Soviet agrarian system was extremely expansive, and, not unlike prerevolutionary Russian agriculture, there was a preference for incorporating new lands over improving production on already cultivated land (P. R. Josephson et al. 2013). In effect, much of the land farmed in Soviet times was located in regions that are too cold or too dry to provide favorable conditions for agriculture, which is one of the reasons why taking such land back under cultivation would make little sense from an economic viewpoint (Shagaida et al. 2018; Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019). Recently, there have been attempts to reframe abandoned farmland as something much more positive, namely, potential forests with social, ecological, and economic benefits (Vorbrugg, Fatulaeva, and Dobrynin 2024).
3. Gerry, Nivorozhkin, and Rigg (2008) diagnose the “ruralization of poverty” in Russia on the basis of data that includes monetary wages but also noncash payments, consumed or sold home production, government or charitable benefits, and informal gifts.
4. Russian state statistics have been criticized as relatively unreliable for various reasons (Ioffe 2005; Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006). The numbers presented here hence may suggest an unrealistic level of accuracy. The broader tendencies have been confirmed by studies that draw on various sources and methods, however.
5. The fall among the urban population was comparable, while average rural life expectancy has been constantly one to two years below urban levels over the last three decades (Rosstat 2010, 101).
6. These trends coincide with Russia’s embargo on agricultural products from the United States, Canada, the Europena Union, Norway, and Australia, announced in summer 2014 in reaction to Western sanctions against Russia after the annexation of Crimea earlier that year. The embargo did have a stimulating effect on Russian agricultural production, most of all for pork and poultry producers (Wengle 2016). The production increases in field crops emphasized here are more strongly related to longer term developments in production, global demand, and prices.
7. Several monographs discuss economic and social aspects of the Soviet food system in detail (Humphrey 1999; Smith 2014; Wädekin 1973). Studies in agrarian and environmental history, land system sciences, and other fields cover environmental aspects (P. R. Josephson et al. 2013; Wengle 2022; Matasov et al. 2019).
8. Generalized claims about a depopulating countryside are not in line with state statistics on the issue, according to which the share of the rural population has been relatively constant over recent decades and only dropped from 38.9 million in 1990 to 37.6 million in 2018 (Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019, 478).
9. The historic roots and prevalence of such representations have been well documented (see, e.g., Ciută and Klinke 2010; Neumann 1999).
10. Such power-laden “regimes of truth” (Foucault 1977) constitute distinctions between true and false, which also means that there is no simple and straightforward way to answer the question about a stereotype’s “correctness.”
11. In the nineteenth century, the Slavophile and Narodniki movements, famous thinkers and writers such as Alexander Herzen and Leo Tolstoy, and a broad range of poets and painters cherished and arguably idealized village life. Part of this was the romanticization of the countryside as a place of tradition, nature, relative autarky, and collectivism—in contrast to crowded, more regulated, and dependent urban life. But the association was not strictly or exclusively traditionalistic or conservative; the village was also being imagined as a place of possibility that allowed for the realization of visions of a better and more ethical life. This spurred a variety of movements to the countryside and rural commune movements across different time periods.
12. Peasant village communities in Imperial Russia (see Bartlett 1990; Pallot 1999; Smirnova 2019).
13. I was probably the first representative of a German institution setting foot in some of these villages’ ground since the Wehrmacht had left the place or the nearby front line. This was how, in some instances, elderly people commented on my presence, which apparently triggered their memories of the war, which, in some of these places, killed people in almost each family and sometimes a quarter of the entire village population.
14. Relatedly, in the literature on post-Soviet restructuring, one finds numerous descriptions of how change becomes disorganized and caught up in repetition or regression, a future at times turning “backwards,” and a fracturing of the ground on which anticipation and expectation could be built (Ashwin 1995; Humphrey 1999; Petrovic 2010; Pine 2007; Verdery 1996).
15. In his “Birth of Biopolitics” lectures, Foucault suggests that Marx, in his conceptualization of labor as commodified, abstract, and alienated, to a certain degree perpetuated a theoretical flaw of classical (liberal) political economic theory, which tends to ignore the relevance of labor by reducing it to abstract categories. From the workers’ viewpoint, Foucault argues, labor will not appear as an abstract and alienated commodity, but rather as a form of capital providing the capacity to generate steady income (Foucault 2008, 224–26).
16. Recombination is understood as a productive strategy of actors maneuvering situations of uncertainty, characteristic for periods of systemic change. Strategically exploiting ambiguities in overlapping legitimating principles and orders of worth, they acquire agency and at the same time contribute to the emergence of new organizations and institutions (Stark 1996).
17. Correctives to such bias have been proposed under different labels, such as the notions of expulsion (Sassen 2014), displacement (Werner 2015), or disarticulation (Bair and Werner 2011).
1. It is thus that this concentration of agricultural assets and massive growth of large agricultural companies has been related to the global land-grab debate as one important case (Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2013; D. Hall 2013) or even a prototypical example of the large scale of land grabs more generally (Grain 2008; Sassen 2010). Studies with a more regional focus on Russia also framed such accumulation as “land grabbing” or a “land rush” (Atkin 2009; Visser and Spoor 2011; Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor 2012; Wengle 2018).
2. Companies such as BEF built their land control on legal constructs involving (sometimes great numbers of) daughter companies since foreign companies are not allowed to own land in the Russian Federation (Shagaida 2010). From a legal angle, their massive land banks always stood on somewhat shaky ground, firm under current regulations but prone to change.
3. Luyt and colleagues (2013, 22) summarize: “Initial assumptions of attractive operating returns were based partly on the notion that agriculture in most of the region was outdated and undercapitalized and that investment in modern management and equipment would result in a relatively rapid turnaround in productivity and profitability. This was further supported by the assumption of sustained higher agricultural commodity prices.”
4. Big promises, high expectations, and the image of pioneering but solid investment are not unique to Russian agriculture but characteristic for the new interest in the sector over recent years more generally. They combine scenarios of a growing demand for food, fodder, and agri-fuels (spurred by peak oil), and the limits to the availability of agricultural land (peak soil) and productivity increase, and turn this into claims of “naturally” profitable and secure investments (Fairbairn 2020; Ouma 2020).
5. The interview was conducted in 2011 and refers to a project based in Perm region, which is not among the country’s more favorable ones, and business interest in agriculture and farmland emerged late in comparison with some other regions.
6. Trigon Agri –50 percent, Alpcot Agro –63 percent, Blackearth Farming –76 percent (Luyt, Santos, and Carita 2013, xxvi).
7. By that time, to become bigger was no longer “an objective in itself” (Production manager Voronezh, 2012) for Western investment companies, and selling assets to pay off debts, selling nonprofitable or unstable farms became more frequent. Many companies did not work their entire land banks anyhow and thus could intensify production within existing boundaries; some would reshuffle, consolidate, and concentrate land banks, or even cut back the area of cultivated land to reduce expenditures, both by selling off land in less favorable (distant, less fertile, climatically risky) locations and by letting fields lie fallow.
8. Many of the largest agricultural producers today are Russian holding structures that started as food-processing or commodity-trading companies, deepened their vertical integration, and successively bought up their supply base, some of them before the turn of the century (Barnes 2006, 155–63). Other—often newer—players are vertically integrated holding companies that were designed to include a broad range of the production chain. Most companies controlling large land banks by the late 2010s had a strong base in processing (mostly sugar, dairy, meat, or vegetable oils), trade, and agricultural machinery (BEFL 2019). Few of these companies had significant shares of foreign investment capital (BEFL 2013, 2015b; Novirost 2013).
9. The ruble was devalued by the government and lost two-thirds of its value within less than a month.
10. Agricultural enterprises are relieved from paying taxes on profits, and thus formally shifting profits to the production side within one vertically integrated holding company by increasing sale prices would allow these holdings to save on taxes (Nefedova 2014, 95).
11. O finantsovom ozdorovlenii sel’skokhoziaistvennykh tovaroproizvoditelei; Federal Law N 83-F 3; July 9, 2002.
12. Significant portions of agricultural subsidies go into agricultural loans and rural infrastructural investment (in a state agricultural program from 2007 to 2012, half of the budget was for supporting loans). The portion of loans going into modernizing production infrastructure is substantial but held to be too low to cover structural deficits (Nefedova 2014, 332).
13. The proverb goes back to a famous sixteenth century drawing by Pieter van der Heyden. I am grateful to Alexander Nikulin for suggesting this metaphor.
14. Companies’ financial reports publish the income of board members but do not differentiate between wage categories in the operational business. Hence estimates on these are based on fieldwork insights rather than statistics.
15. For related arguments in other contexts, see Barry 2013 and Appel 2019.
CHAPTER 5. TACTICS
1. This is famously expressed in Marx’s bee-architect allegory. He writes: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement” (Marx [1867] 2015, 12).
2. Arendt writes: “Thinking and working are two different activities which never quite coincide; the thinker who wants the world to know the ‘content’ of his thoughts must first of all stop thinking and remember his thoughts. Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 90–91).
3. A speech act that brings into being what it declares is an illocution.
4. Enterprises’ social contributions have become harder to quantify in the post-Soviet period. They appear in statistics when enterprises receive formal payment for and keep an official account of services to village administrations and households, but not if they provide them as an informal substitute for outstanding wages, taxes, or land rent. More recently, however, there has been a tendency to formalize such services (Lindner and Vorbrugg 2012; Moser 2016; Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019).
5. “Slaves on our own land” is a formulation commonly but not consistently used in rural Russia (see Allina-Pisano 2008, 3; Humphrey 2007; Lindner 2007). In the given context, it was used to point to the paradox that landownership may not bring you much freedom if you cannot make a living from it, and options to move elsewhere are limited.
6. One should add that the Russian countryside has seen a trend of steady out-migration since early Soviet times, and that there is no statistical data on the number of persons leaving rural areas and moving to cities permanently nowadays (Nefedova 2014, 28).
7. Rural unemployment rates are not well covered in the official statistics, and they are partly contradicted in the literature: Wegren finds that more than one-third of rural dwellers were unemployed in 2010 (Wegren 2014, 92–93), while Nefedova speaks of 9 percent rural unemployment in 2011 and contrasts it with 5.3 percent in cities (Nefedova 2014, 71). Kalugina and Fadeeva (2009) estimate rural unemployment at 55 percent.
8. Labor shortages occur among those with various qualifications. Still, many analysts (Kalugina 2012; Kvartiuk et al. 2020) and enterprise representatives emphasize the deterioration of agricultural educational institutions and standards following the collapse of the Soviet system and the outmigration of the “most capable” members of the rural population and college graduates. According to different statistics, only one-third of the students graduating from agricultural subjects at state colleges and universities started work in agricultural occupations, and only one-fifth returned to villages in 2006 to 2007 (Skul’skaia and Shirokova 2009, 97).
9. Much agricultural labor is seasonal, and a deficit in the agricultural workforce during harvest times was evident already in the 1980s, when Soviet soldiers and students had to help out in field operations (Nefedova 2014, 69).
10. Some of the biggest and most sustained protests over recent years were organized around issues of elections, corruption, and planned reforms such as the national pension reform. Protests in rural areas included those against planned waste incinerating plants and landfills or issues of water pollution, often organized by networks that included both rural and urban actors.
11. Part of the surveillance of operations and workers is based on smart applications of machinery. In this instance, the application would calculate if fuel consumption corresponds to the covered acreage, and a mismatch would be taken as an indicator of fuel theft.
12. Khoziaika is the female form of khoziain.
CHAPTER 6. RECONNECTION
1. See Poverty as Subsistence by Mihai Varga (2023) for a related argument on Romania and Ukraine.
2. This resonates with broader and often more normative calls to conceptually decouple dispossession from property so that the critique of dispossession does not reify individualistic, liberal, or legalist property relations (Balibar 2014; Butler and Athanasiou 2013).
3. Much of this theorization draws on long-established intellectual traditions that emphasize land’s particular status and central role in relation to both human existence and capitalist relations. The two classical references here are Marx’s ([1867] 2015) “so-called primitive accumulation” in the first volume of Capital, and Polanyi’s ([1945] 2001) conceptualization, in the Great Transformation, of land as a fictitious commodity, in tension with marketization and capitalist appropriation. For both Marx and Polanyi, changing land relations form part of broader arguments about historical shifts toward market capitalism.
4. Levien’s conclusion rests on a deliberately narrow definition of dispossession by “extra-economic” forces. For broader understandings of dispossession, an extensive literature shows how the dispossession of land does not always take such open forms (D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011), but it may be immanent in emergent market and property relations (Li 2014a; Verdery 2003); enforced through state regulation and law (Whitehead, R. Jones, and M. Jones 2007) or material infrastructures (Blomley 2003, 2007); and legitimized through modernization, development, or improvement narratives (Gidwani 2008; Hart 2002; Li 2007; Nichols 2018).
5. The point goes beyond the question of landed property. Most critiques of landed dispossession in critical agrarian studies do not presuppose private property, but they may consider the establishment and enforcement of property rights (Blomley 2003) as among the processes that cause dispossession regardless of whether or not formal property titles existed before (D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011; Peluso 1992), or address the denial of land rights rather than land seizure (Adnan 2013). This echoes a twist in Marxian thinking that allowed the perspective on the relationship between property and dispossession to be reversed and the separation between producers and means of production to be viewed as what establishes private property and capitalist relations in the first place (Nichols 2018). It also echoes Polanyi’s ([1945] 2001) contribution of showing the limits to attempts at commodifying land, which remains a fictitious and unruly commodity rather than a good that could be appropriated smoothly (Wolford 2007). And yet, even if we exchange landed property for land access, a narrow focus on land relations risks presupposing wrongly that subjects or communities could thrive from land access alone.
6. With increased general attention to dispossession in the social sciences, more studies followed recently (Khalvashi 2018; Kušić 2024; Triantis 2018).
7. Exceptions include Chari’s and Verdery’s (2009) work in which they discuss Harvey’s notion of ABD in relation to state socialism and its collapse. Even here, however, we see an existing notion of dispossession being applied to the context of (vanished) Second World rather than developed from within it.
8. Studies of post-Soviet rural poverty and inequality have been more common (Gerry, Nivorozhkin, and Rigg 2008; Spoor 2008; Wegren 2014), but arguably these phenomena, too, remain not well understood (Wengle 2022, 32).
9. It is often associated with Teodor Shanin who, besides (co-)founding the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Moscow School of Economics and Social Sciences, also shaped the field of Russian rural studies.
10. I am grateful to Alexander Nikulin for pointing this out to me.
11. Similar points have been made by numerous authors recently (Cima and Sovová 2022; Jehlička 2021; Kangas and Salmenniemi 2016; Karkov and Valiavicharska 2018; Müller 2020; Tlostanova 2015, 2019). One part of the diagnosis is that international, often anglophone, audiences were not very perceptive of conceptual and further broader insights from the broader region of former state-socialist (South) East European and Central Asian states. Another is that scholars in Eastern Europe and the broader “region” work under relatively unfavorable practical and material circumstances and are trained in academic traditions that often may not be compatible with the current trends and demands of anglophone academic debates (Trubina et al. 2020). Seeing such constraints more clearly is intended to bring more attention to the substantial conceptual and theoretical work from and on “the region.” Vivid examples include work that emerges at the intersection of postcolonial and postsocialist theorizing (Chari and Verdery 2009; Kangas and Salmenniemi 2016; Karkov and Valiavicharska 2018; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006). Recently, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has spurred and mainstreamed debates on decolonizing knowledge production in Ukraine (Oksamytna 2023), as well as in Baltic, Central Asian, and other countries.
12. While there are a number of studies that build on extensive fieldwork in the Russian countryside conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s (Allina-Pisano 2008; Lindner 2008; Nefedova and Pallot 2006; Pallot and Nefedova 2007; Shanin, Nikulin, and Danilov 2002; Visser 2008; Wegren 2005), much of the more recent work by both Russian and international colleagues is based on quantitative methods, surveys and statistics, web research, expert interviews, and short field visits, and/or provides general overviews or comparison between regions. Others analyze and evaluate ongoing juridical reforms and institutional change (Leonard 2011; Shagaida 2010; Uzun et al. 2009) or adopt a more historical perspective (Kaz’min 2012; Nikulin 2014; Wengle 2022). A few recent book-length fieldwork-based studies have been published (Billé and Humphrey 2021; Moser 2015), and some monographs published in Russian include fieldwork, among other methods (Kalugina 2015; Nefedova 2014).
13. In contrast to dispersed dispossession, these seem to be examples of state-backed dispossession by force that comes close to conceptual archetypes of dispossession in Marxist theoretical traditions (Levien 2013a).
14. This schematic characterization helps us see how the broader processes of concentration and dispossession in rural Russia differ from the finance-driven global rush on farmland and agriculture (Fairbairn 2020; Ouma 2020), or purer (neo)liberal pathways of agrarian change (Adnan 2013; Levien 2018; Mishra 2020).
15. Other studies emphasize “indeterminacy” (Balazs 2023) and the intersection of slow and more direct forms of violence (Ryabchuk 2023) as an effect of systemic transitions or ruptures. They revisit an older subject in studies of the region—how the disintegration of state-socialist structures has destabilized the present and future horizons (Humphrey 2002; Todorova and Gille 2010)—and show how it lives on through more current reconfigurations that include neoliberalization (Yurchenko 2017) or authoritarian shifts (Mamonova 2019). Postindustrial and further “abandoned” spaces more generally have often provoked similar interpretations and theorization (Biehl 2013b; Carse 2018; Gordillo 2014; Petryna 2002), as have studies on the relationship between direct and everyday forms of violence (Pain 2019; Thompson forthcoming).
16. This clearly concerns the ways respective histories have or have not been dealt with. At a national level, the collective processing of Soviet history has been variously suppressed, and memories of this history are instrumentalized. The more systematic attempts to come to terms with its legacy have been concentrated in some metropolitan circles and NGOs that focused on political repression and persecution more than socioeconomic effects in the peripheries. National and local elites managed to derive relative benefit from the havoc that followed the dissolution of the Soviet system and thus have little interest in much transparency around these processes. On a local level, the disintegration of institutions and notorious instability arguably also hampered coming to terms with the histories of deprivation systematically. That said, a sense of disorientation and deep insecurity in the face of complex (geo)political ruptures is not unique to the Russian countryside (Genz et al. 2023; Knight 2015).
17. As far as dispersed dispossession resulted in a fragmentation of time horizons and the crumbling of dreams of a great or better future, constitutive for Soviet modernity (Buck-Morss 2000), very different kinds of restoration promises imply the hope of bringing back some future.
18. For a similar point in a study on Romania, see Đunda 2023. For a conceptual reflection on how projects relate to successful and failed foregoing ones, see Barry and Gambino 2024.
19. One can observe similarities to what has been termed the post-Fordist affect (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012).
20. Most of these ideologies and projects are far right, although a blending with state socialist elements can lead to peculiar ideological constellations.
21. In an article preceding her book, Berlant links her reasoning to Anthony Giddens’s concept of structuration. Gidddens (1984, 25) writes: “In speaking of the structural properties of social systems I mean their institutionalized features, giving ‘solidity’ across time and space. I use the concept of ‘structures’ to get at relations of transformation and mediation which are the ‘circuit switches’ underlying observed conditions of system reproduction.”
22. A curiosity toward the persisting, abandoned, “uncanny,” disintegrating, or recombined infrastructure is evident in much literature on former state-socialist contexts. Such a focus is not without difficulties. Too often have such persistent or crumbling infrastructures been narrowly interpreted or even fetishized as remains of the past, and a focus on infrastructural disintegration cemented an overemphasis on the Soviet system and its collapse (Bennett 2021). Yet there is a plurality of perspectives on crumbling infrastructures. We have seen how rural residents refer to crumbling infrastructures as hermeneutic tools to make sense of a complex present and to link questions pertaining to the past, present, and future. For related arguments, see Dzenovska 2018, Pohl 2021, Vorbrugg 2022.