PREFACE

As I finalize this book in 2023, Russia’s unjustified war against Ukraine has drawn new public interest to both states. Long labeled as transition economies, both countries have, in very different ways, again become places experiencing fundamental disruptions. Rightly, most attention has been on the destruction and human suffering in Ukraine.

I found it difficult to return to this project after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war has created much to react to, and my frustration and anger at the Russian establishment had grown to a point where I needed to accommodate it. Working on the manuscript helped me to remind myself and learn, in different ways, again and again, that the people of a country are of course not identical to a political system that often exploits and oppresses them—which does not resolve difficult questions of responsibility and complicity. I hope this book can contribute to a more nuanced perception of the social realities within Russia over a decade that seems central in the genealogy of the present historical moment: the 2010s.

I conducted fieldwork for this book in Russia from 2012 through 2014, and follow-up fieldwork in 2021, but most of it before the 2014 annexation of Crimea. I also did most of the writing before the 2022 invasion. I abstain from trying to (re)interpret this study in light of this war. However, I hope the book contributes to a better understanding of the place Russia has become, a question that has become more popular, as well as pressing, considering the wars its armies are waging. Furthermore, some of the main topics addressed in this book do speak to questions that have received broader interest under current conditions and deserve more attention.

When food exports from Ukraine and Russia became uncertain or stalled after February 2022, new international attention was brought to the extent to which both countries are global powerhouses of food production. This book tells a story about the conditions under which Russia established itself as a top wheat exporter—or as an agricultural “superpower,” as the official rhetoric would have it. The formation of large agricultural companies is a central part of that. This study offers rare, grounded insights into the making and failing of such companies and their projects, and the contact zones between companies and rural actors.

The war further brought attention to how inhabitants of rural and marginalized regions within Russia, including so-called ethnic territories, are deprived of livelihoods and futures to the extent that they came to constitute a massive “reserve army” of soldiers more than workers. Besides direct coercion, including the recruitment of prisoners, it was economic deprivation in various peripheral areas that reportedly drove many to serve, and die, as soldiers in the war. Of course, this cannot justify the deaths or any other cruelties that Russian soldiers have inflicted on Ukraine. But it helps explain the circumstances that enabled the mobilization into the army and mercenary groups of people who could be sent into what journalists described as a “meat grinder.”

Russia is among the most economically unequal of the former state-socialist countries. According to World Bank data, it is also one of the most unequal countries in the northern hemisphere, behind only a few other countries, including the United States. After the disintegration of the Soviet system, poverty and a lack of options have become particularly prevalent in rural areas. Most popular interpretations of what stabilizes the Russian political establishment, including the compliance or political passivity of rural populations, focus on propaganda, ideology, and nostalgia. Dispersed Dispossession focuses on material circumstances and economic conditions. It highlights the relationship between the deprivation of rural populations and the concentration of capital and power through often state-aligned businesses. It helps to explain how far these circumstances limit the agency of rural inhabitants, and how promises of stability and revival resonate with many of them. This does not justify support for or compliance with what an increasing number of observers describe as a totalitarian, or even fascist, political regime. But it may complicate the story of what led there. The economic violence throughout recent Russian history deserves recognition, including, of course, the staggeringly unjust political-economic system that emerged during market reforms. This book considers how Western business interests, reform agendas, and other transnational connections played a formative role in the Russian countryside, alongside domestic forces.

The concept of dispossession helps emphasize how widespread poverty and other forms of deprivation are not just unfortunate side effects of policies or the result of historical or environmental circumstances, but are linked to decisions taken and not taken, accountability denied, and powerful actors gaining profit based on others’ deprivation. This book focuses on dispossession of a particular kind. What I conceptualize as “dispersed dispossession” articulates the separation of complex webs of relations and the deterioration of collective goods constitutive for well-being and agency. It implies the fundamentally unequal capabilities to navigate disruptive change and to repurpose, revalue, and appropriate devalued and degraded resources. It emphasizes drawn-out processes of dispossession in which preexisting harms and injustices, accumulated over historical periods and different political-economic systems, are perpetuated and exploited, and it helps us better understand how this affects social imaginaries. It further helps to grasp and theorize forms of agency that do not fit established understandings of resistance, complicating the cliché of rural inhabitants’ general passivity and compliance.

This book is based on situated case studies. Over around ten months of fieldwork, I gathered insights from the contact zones between residents and workers, agricultural enterprises and companies, and representatives of the state apparatus. My aim was to demonstrate ways of thinking and conceptualizing from the Russian countryside, in conversation with the people I met. I am convinced that rigorous fieldwork-based studies offer unique possibilities for such theorizing. Yet I write this preface at a point in history when conducting such research in Russia has become extremely difficult for foreign researchers and, for different reasons, also for researchers with Russian passports or affiliations. In many ways, research conditions and freedoms had already gradually deteriorated throughout the 2010s. Since 2022, many of the remaining opportunities have been blocked.

In the first decade after the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc post-1991, fundamental systemic changes within former state-socialist countries coincided with new possibilities for research—or “freedoms,” to echo some of the dominant rhetoric of those days. Through the lifting of state-dictated requirements and restrictions, researchers at Eastern European institutions gained freedom in what to study and how. As the collapse of the socialist state undermined research budgets and institutions, this freedom of choice and expression often coincided with being freed from the means to work in research, a situation akin to Marxian “double freedom.” Many scholars left academia or left their institutions for others in the West. The situation was less ambivalent for more privileged Western scholars, who gained access to archives, fieldwork options, and various data in “the East” and returned to their institutional homes in “the West,” reporting how they had been greeted enthusiastically by colleagues eager to collaborate. Publishing in English and other Western languages, these scholars were well equipped to satisfy the increased public and academic interest in stories from “behind the former Iron Curtain.” Much has changed since the 1990s, of course—enough for scholars to suggest the necessity of entirely abandoning the idea that there still is, if there ever was, anything like a “postsocialist condition” that could characterize the complex and heterogeneous region of former Soviet and socialist states, or any single one of them.

As researchers, we also bring our own histories to the issues we study. I found a welcoming academic environment when I first traveled as an exchange student to Russia, to the Institute of Geography at Moscow State University in 2008, and three years later as a PhD candidate. I enjoyed the privilege of learning from, collaborating with, and building on the crucial help and support of Russian colleagues. Being a native speaker of Czech helped me to acquire proficiency in Russian relatively quickly during courses at the University of Tübingen, and later during long stays in Russia and Ukraine. My family background directed some of my curiosity and gave me a certain sensitivity to the heterogeneity of and sometimes violent history that shaped these countries. More recently, as for many others with research and biographical ties to Eastern Europe, Russia’s ongoing war deeply affected my ways of relating to Russia. It is not that I have had romantic ideas about the Russian state, which has long waged wars and been highly repressive toward some groups. For instance, by the end of the period covered in this study, many if not most of the more prominent libertarian leftist activists whom I met during my first trips to Russia were in exile, imprisoned, or dead. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, most Russian friends and colleagues with whom I continue to collaborate academically left Russia and are in exile. I stopped collaborations with Russian institutions from which my research, and this study, had greatly benefited in the past.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, impactful and devastating in many ways, also became a brutal real-world demonstration of how “the region” is anything but homogeneous, as it is shaped by antagonistic and conflicting political and economic forces, including stark differences in relationships to the (state-socialist) pasts. While Putin uses various occasions for long and inaccurate lessons in Russian history, in many former state-socialist states outside of Russia calls for ideological distance from this past have been amplified. Dispersed Dispossession speaks to the newly heated battles of interpretation of the Soviet legacy but abstains from the often ideological stance of defending or despising state socialism. Rather, it traces how it matters in everyday situations and how the roots of dispossession may span different political-economic systems. The war also amplified calls by academics, artists, cultural workers, and others to decenter and decolonize knowledge production in and on “the region.” This is because academic scholarship, cultural production, and public perception remain biased toward Russia. And, within this bias, the country’s centers rather than its more peripheral territories (including much of rural Russia as well as Indigenous territories and so-called ethnic territories) are the focus. Many therefore call for a twofold decentering of knowledge production, away from the West and toward the former state-socialist East, including Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and away from the Russian center and toward various margins within this region.

This book is based on a study in Russia. It is, in some sense, even situated in the Russian heartland. I conducted fieldwork in the western regions of Lipetsk, Voronezh, Rostov, Perm, and the city of Moscow. All these regions have been part of Russia since the early decades of the tsardom in the sixteenth century, and most of its rural population is counted as “ethnic Russian.” Even though this study is situated in rural areas, which differ greatly from urban centers, they are still relatively close to the country’s center of power, symbolized by Moscow, in terms of geography and public perception.

This does not mean, however, that this book follows well-trodden paths in Western academic knowledge production. This is the first book on Russia, or any Eastern European country, published in this book series, and there are few such books recently published in geography and English overall. Book-length studies on rural Russia, based on in-depth fieldwork, have become rare across disciplines over recent years due to increasing challenges. Most books on Russia, and other Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasian, and Central Asian countries, have been published in book series with a regional focus. In this respect, I see it as a privilege and an opportunity to have this work published in a general human geography book series. I hope this signals a trend toward increased scientific interest in this region that will not be limited to Russia. I further hope it can contribute to the strengthening of relational perspectives that, rather than exceptionalizing Russia as a villain or victim, connect its imperial history and revival to imperialisms elsewhere, and its violent capitalism to varieties of capitalism elsewhere. Finally, I hope it can contribute to showing that some stories that emerge from Russia deserve a place in the broader thinking about and longing for a livable and more just future.