Introduction

A giant Russian sugar company had taken control of most of the six thousand hectares of farmland in a village where I had started fieldwork in 2013. From Moscow’s “Shaninka,”¹ I called a friend living in the village to inquire about the event. He replied rather indifferently, “There’s nothing new, nothing has changed, it’s always the same here.” This certainly was not the kind of answer I had expected, entering my second year of fieldwork at that time, tracing large investment projects across several Russian regions. Didn’t the story sound like a massive land grab? Puzzled, I drove to the village.

What I encountered did indeed turn out to be surprisingly nondramatic, as the land deal has had little obvious immediate impact on the village or the lives of its inhabitants. There were no fences or other big infrastructure. The company, like many others at that time, had taken over land previously worked by other large farming enterprises, in often troubled economic conditions, rather than by smallholders. As Russian agriculture had been industrialized decades before, in Soviet times, it was not recent land deals that had displaced peasant farmers. Most of the village’s farmland was located several kilometers away, accessed by dirt roads, partly across a highway. The portion of villagers employed in industrial agriculture had shrunk constantly since the 1990s, and subsistence or family farmers cultivated land that remained unaffected by the land deal.

By acquiring this huge land bank, the sugar company had not taken over something that would have been very close and dear to most villagers at that point in history. Rather, it had added a chapter to a longer story of reconfigurations and disconnections that had shaped the village over the past decades. I found traces of disconnections both in people’s narratives and in village landscapes, where one could wander for hours around abandoned fields, stables, and other remains of former production and dwelling. Many villagers offered clearer and more lively accounts of the piecemeal demise of “their” former Soviet collective enterprises than of the more recent acquisition of enterprises and land from which they had already become alienated. And they described the apparent “land grab” as a continuation of deprivation, hardships, and uncertainty rather than as a novel event.

The concept of dispersed dispossession aims to illuminate such situations, which I found common yet often perplexing. It captures and relates five characteristics of a specific kind of dispossession. First, it captures the deterioration of state- or community-mediated collective goods, support systems, material infrastructures, social contracts, and the separation of further webs of relations constitutive for well-being and agency. Second, rather than through direct seizure, it works through the fundamentally unequal capacities to keep hold of resources, to navigate disintegration and to repurpose, revalue, and appropriate devaluated and degraded goods. Third, it captures drawn-out processes of dispossession in which preexisting harms and injustices accumulated over historical periods and political-economic systems are perpetuated and exploited. Fourth, dispersed dispossession shapes the horizon of conceivable alternatives and plausible promises. Finally, it comes with profound implications for the conditions and conceptualization of resistance and agency.

This book, and the idea of dispersed dispossession, build on a study of rural change in Russia within a specific period, the 2010s. I demonstrate how attention to dispersed dispossession is necessary to understand rural deprivation in this context, and how the context offers special opportunities for studying and thinking through related forms of dispossession. Yet dispersed dispossession is not unique or limited to Russia, nor is it the only form of dispossession one can encounter there. The concept supplements established conceptualizations and helps to grasp forms of dispossession that may otherwise elude our attention, in Russia and elsewhere.

Dispersed dispossession also offers opportunities for reflecting on the conceptual and political implications of the various ways of conceptualizing dispossession more broadly. The notion of dispossession is inherently critical. By calling something dispossession, you already criticize it. More fundamentally, critique constitutes dispossession. The language of dispossession translates what could otherwise be understood as bad fate or tragedy into a problem that necessarily relates to questions of (in)justice, power, and profit. Different concepts of dispossession involve different forms of critique. We may hence ask: How do specific concepts of dispossession emphasize certain processes with unjust effects but detract from others? Which dimensions of dispossession does a certain kind of critique problematize, and what is left out of the picture? This book offers answers to such questions in the context of rural change in Russia, but it also looks beyond. It reflects on forms of dispossession that may be rooted in state socialism and in its demise, in the successes and failures of the capitalist reforms that followed, and in the successes and failures of agricultural investment projects. Dispersed dispossession aims to make sense of complex and often ambivalent empirical realities, identifying patterns and contextualizing them in history and political economy, more than offering functional explanations of dispossession as an effect or integral part of the workings of one systemic cause alone.

This study combines extensive fieldwork with a sensitivity to complex histories and temporalities to better understand changing and disrupted “landscapes” (biophysical, economic, political, and social),² how actors navigate them, and how rapid and massive accumulation of agricultural assets occurs in parallel to the slower and often more complex processes of rural deterioration and persistence. It investigates the interactions, intersections, and relationships between different groups of actors—rural dwellers and large agricultural companies, company representatives and village administrations, workers and managers, managers and government representatives, local administrations and rural dwellers, large enterprises and family farmers. It is, in this sense, also a study of situated relationships between rural residents and state and economic actors, based on a total of ten months of fieldwork between 2012 and 2021, and in five Russian regions between Moscow, the Southern Steppes of Rostov Oblast, and the Urals in the east. It focuses on the concrete places where the connections that constitute rural worlds wither, are forged, and (re)negotiated.

In the following chapters, we will encounter familiar figures such as the ruling party, economically invested politicians, and politically involved business-persons in less familiar settings: not in Moscow or other centers of power, but in mostly rural places across several regions. These situated insights, together with historical and political-economic contextualization and context-sensitive conceptualization, will provide insights on configurations and processes that often do not fit grand narratives of post-Soviet path-dependence or the (neoliberal) market economy. Yet I shall begin with some popular, spectacular, and partly problematic representations of the Russian countryside and agriculture to illustrate some tensions this study engages with and to introduce a discursive landscape that the following chapters aim to deconstruct.

Slow Crisis, Big Promises

“Agriculture has been the most troublesome sector of the Russian economy for as long as one can remember,” write Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky (2006, 44), echoing an opinion widely held even in the 2010s. “We are number one,” claims Vladimir Putin in sharp contrast, commenting on Russian wheat exports in 2017.³ The history of Russian agriculture is not short of dramatic episodes and has often been described in superlatives.

Russia’s arable land is among the largest in the world. Agrarian lands have been repeatedly expanded far into northern forests and southeastern steppes, most famously during the so-called Virgin Lands campaign, which followed Nikita Khrushchev’s 1953 plan to boost Soviet agrarian production by plowing up large areas of the Russian and Kazakh steppes. The Soviet countryside has witnessed some of the arguably most radical and large-scale agrarian reforms in world history—the collectivization under Stalin and later privatization encompassing millions of rural dwellers, thousands of large farms, and millions of hectares of land. Cropland abandonment that followed the disintegration of the Soviet agrarian system has been described as the most abrupt and widespread land-use change of the twentieth century in the northern hemisphere (Kurganova et al. 2014), and it is still seen by many as a symbol of a deep-rooted agrarian crisis.

In media, public, and policy discourses within the country and the West, the Russian countryside is often represented as a site of contradictions: spectacular despair and foreclosed future, but also and increasingly as a site of spectacular agricultural and economic potential. The first narrative describes a “mass exodus,” “orphaned villages” (Strelnikova 2011), and “ghost villages” (Shapovalova 2011), as sites of “slow death” and without “much hope left for revival” (Nemtsova 2015). Images of social, political, and economic stagnation stand alongside more dramatic ones that describe a “struggle for survival” (Schepp 2010). For some, “the lifeblood of Russia’s vast and fertile countryside appears to be draining away forever” (Shapovalova 2011). Such quotes echo a broader discourse on the Russian countryside as a place of hardship, poverty, alcoholism, and apathy that everyone who can, chooses to leave. Such representations tend to stereotype, blame, or victimize rural dwellers and places. But they also point to very real hardships, crises, and structural disadvantages. Up to 50 percent of rural households are estimated to have been around or below the official subsistence minimum in the 1990s, the decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and a “ruralization of poverty” (Gerry, Nivorozhkin, and Rigg 2008) continued into the following decades (chapter 3).

The Yeltsin government in the 1990s was infamous for agricultural pessimism. Some of its representatives, including Yegor Gaidar and former minister of finance Alexei Kudrin, even described the post-Soviet agricultural sector as a “black hole” that will never become effective and will swallow all resources that governments or businesses invest (Wegren 2014, 84). In 2009, in contrast, President Dmitri Medvedev published a guest column in the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung that—against the backdrop of the food price crisis of that time—used Russia’s record yields in 2008 to underline the country’s unique agricultural potential: “Russia is number one concerning its farmland’s area and quality,” wrote Medvedev. He supported his claim with the fact that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris stores Russian Black Soil as a standard for soil structure and fertility (Medvedev 2009). In Medvedev’s narrative, Russia’s future agricultural potential is huge because— in contrast to most other countries—cropped areas can still be expanded and outputs enhanced. Here, the yet unused agricultural potential is described as a potential rather than a deficit.

Reclaiming Russia’s place among the world’s leading agricultural producers, and redefining domestic agriculture as a strategic priority, became a prominent narrative of that time. In January 2010, Medvedev signed a food security doctrine⁴ that promised to “ensure food security as the essential component of the national security, predict and prevent emerging threats and risks to the country’s economy, improve its stability, create conditions for a dynamic development of agri-industrial and fishery complexes and improvement of the population’s welfare” (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service 2010, Article 26, p. 11). Vladimir Putin later declared that Russian agriculture had ceased to be a “black hole” and had become one of the “locomotives” for the development of the country (Moskvin 2012) and “one of the flagships of our economy,” “developing actively and dynamically” (TASS 2021).

Increased business interest in the agrarian sector dates from the early 2000s. When legal restrictions on the land market were lifted in 2002, companies became aware of the country’s low land prices and diagnosed yield gaps that investments could close. When from 2007 crop failure and global demand for food, fodder, and biofuel drove up market prices, domestic as well as international businesses began to sense “an investors’ nirvana” (Lucas 2013). Some started ambitious business ventures, with one Western company priding itself on working a land bank not only twice the size of Hong Kong but also “endowed with some of the most fertile soils in the world” (BEF 2015). At the time, however, a Swedish business newspaper mocked the company that had “ploughed” millions of dollars “in the Russian soil” (cited in Lander and Kuns 2021, 22), and two years later, with massive losses on its books, it was sold to a Russian company. Other investors, too, spectacularly failed to deliver on promised targets. Indeed, only one of the four companies included in the initial sample for this study in 2012 still existed by the end of 2015—and they had been indebted and loss-making before—which echoes a more general tendency of that time in Russia (Luyt, Santos, and Carita 2013; Visser, Spoor, and Mamonova 2014). Some of these “disappearing” companies had controlled land banks larger than the territory of Luxembourg, which is home to more than half a million people. This reminds us that we should not simply equate size with power and stability. And yet the concentration of control over farmland and other agricultural assets continued. In 2020, more than sixty companies were reported to control land banks of more than one hundred thousand hectares each, with six of them controlling more than half a million hectares (BEFL 2020).

Since the 2010s, journalists and analysts within the country and the West have increasingly contemplated whether Russia may be “the emerging global ‘breadbasket’” (Visser, Spoor, and Mamonova 2014) and the implications of a (re)emergent agricultural powerhouse or agro-superpower (Zhou 2022). Such aspirations have been evident in official statements emphasizing Russian agriculture’s geoeconomic and political significance. For example, the Kremlin website quotes Putin saying that “we will need to conquer (zavoëvyvat’) foreign markets, and why not—with so much land, and such colossal arable land that can still yet increase. In this sense, we are the richest country—not in terms of oil and gas, but in terms of the possibilities for agriculture. And the need for food in the world will only grow” (Kremlin 2015). The issue acquired new meaning and urgency after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine when, amid fears of rising food prices and food shortages around the globe, the volume of both countries’ wheat exports became evident to a wider public.

Global heating, too, has increased speculation about Russia’s potential agrarian superpower status. Assessments of the climate crisis have become less denialist and more nuanced among people in power in Moscow, and its projected devastating consequences have become somewhat more frequently and openly addressed (Conley and Newlin 2021).⁵ Yet the prospect of agricultural frontiers being pushed north (Hannah et al. 2020), and related farmland gains in the midterm, foster expectations of relative future advantage on global grain markets. In an article titled “How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis,” the New York Times Magazine echoed such expectations, noting that, as the “planet continues to warm, vast new stretches of Russia will become suitable for agriculture” (Lustgarten 2020). The effects of global heating in Russia are predicted to be mostly catastrophic, as in other parts of the world. Therefore, depicting it as a winner in absolute terms is misguided. But relative strategic advantages may well be expected. Persistent decline, pervasive abandonment, staggering potential and accumulation, strategic importance: representations of the Russian countryside are full of tensions, many of which this study attempts to unpack.

The Conundrum of Rural Dispossession

The concurrence of poverty and despair and stunning economic potential is not contradictory in principle, of course, but it may be just another instance of profiting from others’ misery.⁶ However, there is a tension between mundane forms of rural deprivation and episodes of spectacular degradation, huge land deals, or exaggerated development and business promises that can be problematic. Many rural communities around the globe repeatedly experience deprivation and dispossession. To date, the global poor are predominantly rural and mostly employed in the agricultural sector (World Bank 2016). Already disadvantaged rural populations are often particularly vulnerable to existential risks, dispossession, and exclusion (Dudley 2000; Gidwani 2008; Li 2014a; Watts [1983] 2013). Rural poverty and deprivation tend to be normalized, historically and into the present. They gain broader public attention mostly when culminating in disturbing images and episodes: like when farmer suicides rise sharply and come to symbolize prevalent conditions of rural poverty, indebtedness, and desperation, such as in India in recent years. Or when rural communities and organizations address deprivations publicly through protest and direct action, such as the popular Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil. Or when reports about “land grabs” in countries of the Global South create powerful images of unjust seizure.

Making dispossession visible by turning it into a spectacle comes with analytical pitfalls, however. It may misrepresent rural populations one-dimensionally as either victims or heroic resistance fighters (Levien 2018). It may also focus too strongly on dramatic figures and images at the expense of sound evidence and analytical depth (Oya 2013). The quieter, more uneventful, and unspectacular forms of dispossession, by contrast, often remain invisible or are dismissed as less relevant than their “more attention-grabbing counterparts” (Stoler 2013, 5), such as land grabs that the media and policymakers but also social movements tend to focus on (Li 2014a; Vorbrugg 2022). Among other things, this lack of attention has to do with conceptual language. Although dispossession is one of the most important topics in critical agrarian studies, it is, maybe surprisingly, rarely defined as a concept in this literature (D. Hall 2021; Levien 2018).

The land grab trope, particularly popular in public, activist, and academic discourses in the early 2010s, is a well-known and much-discussed example of how rural dispossession may be presented as straightforward. Temporally and causally, dispossession here follows from the appropriation of farmland by powerful states or private investors, to the extent that rural dispossession and the land grab may appear synonymous. A narrow focus on dramatic episodes of land takeovers, especially during the early land-grab debate, has been variously criticized⁷ and the debate has moved on. Yet the limitations inherent in the idea of the land grab can help illustrate the need for multidimensional concepts of rural dispossession.

For rural dwellers in Russia who are at the center of this study, land’s usefulness and worth are contingent on bundles of relations and other resources that allow them to benefit from land access. Furthermore, while fundamental for some, and in some respects, land is only one among a variety of resources that support rural livelihoods. Hence land access alone is not a sufficient condition for securing rural livelihoods, and it is not always a necessary one (Dudley 2000; Li 2014a; Oliveira, B. M. McKay, and Liu 2020; Ribot and Peluso 2003). As land relations are complex, so are the processes of their breakdown and alienation, ranging from straightforward theft to the withering of opportunities to benefit from land access (Bluwstein et al. 2018; D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011). This does not mean that land relations are irrelevant. But close attention is required to understand how land matters, in different ways, and to whom. Land’s role in dispossession, then, should be seen as a question to investigate more than a given, and as one element within broader bundles of relations and resources (Ribot and Peluso 2003). This study thus contributes to a growing literature on rural change and dispossession in relation to complex, socially and geographically diverse, and historically contingent land relations.⁸

Concepts help us to grasp the nonobvious. For rural dispossession in Russia, one task is to address processes that are more mundane and, at the same time, systemic, than the dramatic episodes emphasized in popular discourses on the Russian countryside. This includes turning attention to forms of dispossession that often go unnoticed, whether by broader critical international audiences as they do not fit the more established framings of dispossession such as land grabbing, (post)colonial seizure, or neoliberal privatization; or because they are rarely met by organized and visible protests on the ground, or addressed by NGOs, international activist networks, and journalists. Understanding such forms of dispossession can be challenging if they unfold through complex historical temporalities and the reconfiguration of complex sets of relations. Yet the forms of dispossession addressed in this book are not invisible or marginal. Rather than bringing to light hidden realities, this study proposes ways of dealing with some of the analytical, representational, and political challenges of addressing, contextualizing, and criticizing well-documented forms of crisis and deprivation.

Rural Change

The 2010s, covered in this study, were a crucial period of rural and agrarian change in Russia in various respects. This was a period of continued agricultural reform and the consolidation of landownership and land markets. Large agricultural companies gained prominence in this period, including foreign investors and joint ventures. Government policies and programs often favored large producers that have further advantages in accessing credit and investing in new production technologies. Still, bankruptcies and sales of even large enterprises and companies remained common, and almost all foreign investors had quit Russian agriculture by the end of the decade. The adaptation of new farming technologies and large producers’ pushes toward increased efficiency led to the continued decrease in demand for manual labor in agriculture. Some regional and local disparities kept growing during the period. While some regions experienced improved living standards due to government support schemes, increased productivity, or the diversification of rural economies, others experienced rural depopulation, the deterioration of social and material infrastructure, and a continuing lack of opportunities. State programs addressing rural unemployment, poverty, and infrastructural issues were consolidated in the 2010s with varying success, but, together with stabilization and even modest increases of wages and pensions, they had a significant impact on overall rural living conditions. At a national scale, Russia boosted agricultural production and exports, and from 2016 onward it regularly topped the list of the world’s largest wheat exporters. In 2014, Russia imposed an embargo on agricultural imports from the United States, the European Union, and some other countries in retaliation for sanctions that these entities had imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea. This embargo further spurred the domestic production of certain agricultural products (Wengle 2016).

While this study is set in the 2010s, understanding the broader historical trajectory of these changes is important in grasping the specificities of rural landscapes and the agrarian economy in Russia more broadly. Large-scale industrialized agriculture was introduced to Russia, and many other state-socialist countries, with the establishment of collective and state farms (kolkhozes and sovkhozes) in the early Soviet period (chapter 3). The so-called collectivization and industrialization of agriculture implied a radical redesign of the countryside. New settlements, schools and cultural centers, roads and railroads, silos, machinery bases, irrigation systems and other infrastructure, multistory buildings, and large fields were created to realize a collectivized agrarian way of living and industrial mode of production (Josephson et al. 2013; Scott 1998).

The post-Soviet agrarian and land reforms, too, were an immense and, in some respects, unique socioeconomic experiment that aimed to reconfigure not only land access and ownership but also the established mode of agricultural production and rural way of living. Agriculture was to be modernized but also scaled down and decollectivized, and Soviet-style large industrial farms were to be replaced with private farms or farming cooperatives. In Russia and other former state-socialist countries, market reformers in the 1990s wanted to see large state-run farming enterprises, seen as notoriously inefficient and representatives of a failed agricultural system, replaced by Western-type private family farms (Rylko and Jolly 2005; World Bank 1992).⁹ To this end, the state distributed entitlements (pai) to farmland and other assets among workers in the early 1990s. Document holders were entitled to a share of farmland of a certain size (e.g., four hectares) within a large farm’s landbank, but the location of such a share would be unspecified. Relatively burdensome procedures were required to turn land entitlements into ownership of a specific piece of land, and many shareholders abstained from it.

However, this post-Soviet land and agrarian reform has been described as incomplete (Shagaida 2010; Volkov, Khlystun, and Fomin 2021; Wegren 2009). Family farming remained relatively marginal. More than policies and reform plans, the 1990s were shaped by a deep agrarian crisis, with Russia’s “commercial agriculture being downsized in a way and at a rate that have no precedent in Russia’s history” (Ioffe 2005, 200). Plummeting production, bankruptcies of enterprises, mass layoffs of workers, crumbling production infrastructures, abandonment of villages that had been built around single main enterprises, and widespread poverty were among the results. In many of these respects, the crisis resembled one in postindustrial settings more than peasant or smallholder agriculture (Hann 2003). But it also implied a “simplification” (Pichler, Schmid, and Gingrich 2022) of land use and economic activity that one may rather associate with industrialization: while most Soviet farming enterprise harvested a range of crops, kept livestock, processed some of their products on the farm, and further provided social and cultural services (chapter 2), rural residents often criticize their successors for concentrating production and cutting many of these functions. Even though Russian agriculture began to recover from the direst phase of this crisis by the turn of the century, there remained a sense in the 2010s among many rural residents that the crisis had become permanent as poverty, precarity, and exposure to various risks became an intrinsic part of rural life and the agrarian economy.

While the post-Soviet land reform has been associated with dispossession (Allina-Pisano 2008), it is not a typical example of landed dispossession as rural dwellers were, formally, granted individual land rights (Wegren 2009).¹⁰ More than two decades later, land documents play a highly ambivalent role for rural residents in Russia. This may seem surprising, given the importance that both liberal (Soto 2001) and critical (Benjaminsen et al. 2009; Peluso and C. Lund 2011; Pichler 2015) scholars in general ascribe to land rights in securing smallholders’ land tenure or, conversely, depriving them of informal land access. In interviews conducted for this study, however, rural dwellers explained how they hardly cared about land documents, which they may have forgotten, lost, never claimed, or sold for some derisory amount (chapter 3). Paper entitlements can even become a negative asset for rural dwellers, as they can be taxed for land they do not use or fined for not using and thereby “degrading” farmland.

One reason is that an entitlement does not guarantee access to land or the ability to derive benefits from it (Ribot and Peluso 2003). In some instances, unfavorable regulations, bureaucrats, and local elites prevented rural residents from exchanging their land entitlement for an actual piece of land (chapter 2). Furthermore, in Russia as in other postsocialist countries, landed property often turned out to be an unattractive prospect for individual households for economic reasons (Allina-Pisano 2008; Hann 2003, 2011). Lacking access to machinery, credit, securities, lucrative markets, legal and technical expertise, and facing complications in access to actual land, comparatively few individuals and households were ready, able, or willing to start small private farming enterprises.

A second reason is that rural residents in this study use private plots around their houses for household production rather than the large formerly collective fields to which abovementioned entitlements apply. This means that subsistence farming was not directly affected by large land deals. Private household plots, already established during the Soviet period, are usually close to homes, relatively small, and suited for (semi)manual family agriculture. In contrast, fields and production infrastructures related to the former state and collective farms have been designed for large-scale agriculture, which came to pose hurdles for post-Soviet landholders lacking the machinery and further means to operate at such a scale. In their capacity as smallholders, rural residents were alienated from much of the land surrounding them due to a large-scale landscape design and mode of production. They could continue to use such land if they stayed with large farming enterprises, and this is what often happened, at least for some time.

From the early years of agricultural reform, the dispersion and concentration of agricultural assets went in parallel. After the turn of the century, state legislatures and subsidies shifted back to benefiting large agricultural enterprises (Uzun, Shagaida, and Sarajkin 2012). Many small private farms disappeared a few years after they had been established (Wegren 2011). What emerged, rather than a family farming sector, was a dual agrarian structure (Spoor 2012) in which large agricultural enterprises and wage laborers do most commercial agricultural production while many rural households are engaged in subsidiary farming on plots around their houses (usually less than one hectare in size) to supplement their food supply. As the two forms of production remain closely entangled (Pallot and Nefedova 2007), many rural dwellers continue to depend on large farming enterprises not only for jobs but also for various technical or material support to maintain households and household production. In effect, large-scale agriculture remained prevalent in commercial farming. The accumulation of land and other agricultural assets by powerful businesses was relatively opaque and remains incomplete, with stark regional differences (Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk 2023). While powerful companies and more successful private farmers have long consolidated control over most land in agriculturally favorable regions such as the Southern Steppes and Central Black Earth, less favorable regions experienced a much weaker or delayed increase of interest in agriculture, and dozens of millions of hectares of agricultural land remain abandoned in other parts of the country (Prishchepov et al. 2013).

Rural dwellers rarely see subsistence farming as endangered by agrocompanies, which are not in direct competition with them for the same land or markets, and they do not always reject land deals and big investors (Visser et al. 2015). They do care, however, if there are jobs, schools, medical centers, and functioning social and institutional networks available in their village and whether a village is a place that allows them to live or start something new. Large agrarian enterprises play ambivalent roles in this regard. To different extents, they provide services that support individual villagers and communities: sending workers and tractors to clean the roads during winter; maintaining housing, water, and electricity infrastructures; and providing special support for pensioners who make up a large part of many villages’ populations. Workers and villagers may borrow money from enterprises for weddings, funerals, or to cover medical costs (chapter 5).

Industrial agriculture also remains dominant in how rural inhabitants envision a good life. I have not met a single rural dweller who would have described living on private subsidiary agriculture alone as an acceptable, let alone desirable, option: It provides very little income, relies on much manual family labor, and often—far from peasant autonomy—goes along with unfavorable dependencies on large agricultural enterprises and middlemen for access to machinery and markets. It does not provide an escape from poverty. Thus, being thrown back into household production is often experienced as regression (Kalugina 2014, 118) while large-scale industrial agriculture is associated, by many, with modernization and progress (Smith 2014; Wengle 2022) and with being part of a working collective and the national economy. Such tendencies do not mean that land was irrelevant or that there were no alternatives to large industrial agriculture in the Russian countryside. Various forms of rural subsistence and smallholder farming practices exist, and some of them present themselves as such alternatives (Nikulin and Trotsuk 2016; Visser et al. 2015). However, thus far, they provide necessary subsistence or entrepreneurial niches for some rather than alternatives at a systemic level.

This study focuses on the deterioration of relational, collective, and institutionalized goods that is at the center of many rural dwellers’ criticisms. Many criticize the devaluation of agricultural assets and labor; farm enterprises’ recurrent bankruptcies and dismissal of workers; the loss of various forms of social, technological, and monetary support formerly provided by large-scale enterprises and the state; and the deterioration of various infrastructure and local institutions. Although established concepts of dispossession seem rather ill-suited to address many of these prevalent forms of deprivation in the Russian countryside, there are hardly any alternative concepts to make sense of the processes described here. Dispersed Dispossession attempts exactly this.

The book is concerned with the disintegration of valuable and supportive relations at various scales. Some of these transformations relate directly or indirectly to the demise of state socialism. I do not intend to propose any general concept of “postsocialist” dispossession here, however. Not only would this go beyond the scope of this study, it would also risk romanticizing state socialism, essentializing the postsocialist condition (Kangas and Salmenniemi 2016; M. Muller 2019), and sidelining how dispossession was and remains unequally distributed across these spaces. For instance, the historic suffering and the death toll caused by Stalinist agricultural policies for people in Ukraine and certain Soviet minorities was not only more severe but qualitatively different from that for most rural dwellers in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (Snyder 2012; see also chapter 2). Unequally distributed, too, were the benefits and losses during the postsocialist and all ensuing transitions. Yet, as I will detail in the conclusion, there remains a need to acknowledge, conceptualize, and work through forms of dispossession related to the postsocialist “condition” (Buck-Morss 2006), as well as an opportunity to pin down forms of dispossession that are particularly clear in such contexts but may not be unique to them.

As another potential pitfall, a focus on dispossession may emphasize losses over emerging possibilities, deterioration over improvement, and an orientation to the past more than the future. Hence, it could reproduce biases in academic and popular representations of the region in general and its countryside in particular, or economic determinism in studies of the region. This study is written with the aim to avoid such kinds of determinism while focusing on dispersed dispossession, to which I turn now, as one dimension of more complex political economic and lived realities.

Dispersal

Given the size of the companies, the pace of accumulation, and a massive concentration of agricultural assets in Russian agriculture today, the idea of dispersed dispossession may seem counterintuitive. Dispersion suggests diffusion rather than massive concentration, creeping rather than eventful transformation, and elusiveness rather than clear shifts. This tension, however, is essential for the argument put forward here and helpful to get to the subtler but also more systemic patterns of dispossession at the center of this study. To speak of dispersed dispossession is not to deny the magnitude of accumulation processes or the fact that some get rich while others become or remain poor. However, it refrains from taking the relation between these processes for granted and shows that a close analysis of dispossession may well open space for new questions and shed light on less-expected drivers and stakes and different temporalities.¹¹

One finds frequent though semiconceptual uses of the notion “dispersed” in various recent social-scientific studies¹² that are often used to indicate conceptual and methodological challenges associated with a certain phenomena’s relative elusiveness, apparent randomness, or dispersion across time and space. This book aims to develop dispersed dispossession as a concept rather than a metaphor, but it also works with the notion’s imagery character. The Online Cambridge Dictionary defines the verb “disperse” as “to scatter or move away over a large area, or to cause this to happen.” Dispersed dispossession speaks to scattering and disintegration.

In this sense, “dispersal” also reverberates with terms that are used as concepts in studies in postsocialist settings and relate to themes often voiced by inhabitants of the Russian countryside: disintegration, deterioration, discontinuity, decline, devaluation, deindustrialization, deeconomization, demodernization, decollectivization, depopulation, disorientation, or disenchantment.¹³ In Russian, there is a comparable cluster of terms, many of them with the prefixes ras/raz, indicating the undoing, taking or falling apart of things, a lack, a rupture, or regression.¹⁴ Thinking of them as a family of related terms is useful as it allows a clustering of related everyday and academic concepts—which we will encounter through the chapters—around a common theme to open new perspectives on the problem of dispersed dispossession.

Recursive Crises, Foreclosed Futures: The Temporalities of Dispersed Dispossession

Conditions for the types of accumulation and dispossession addressed in this study were shaped by context-specific crises that span the Soviet phase, the reform period, and contemporary hybrid or authoritarian state capitalism.¹⁵ They led, among other things, to a massive devaluation and multiscale disintegration of agriculture that were not a mere function of capitalist accumulation but provided a basis for it. Crises and failures are not uncommon to this economic sector elsewhere. As Susanne Wengle (2022, 7) puts it, failures “are important elements of agricultural histories, and the list of vulnerabilities of industrial agriculture, in Russia as elsewhere, is long and growing.” In this study, we encounter such failures at different scales, from technological disruptions to systemic crises, which are remarkably common subjects in rural dwellers’ accounts. In our conversations, rural residents recalled poverty and mismanagement during Soviet times. They recalled how, in the early years of market reforms, new enterprises were unable to take off and old ones unable to carry on, pay wages, and continue production. They have seen the successive failures associated with state socialism and market reforms, each of them promising to undo the evils of the previous system. Politicians and investment companies often promise to fix the effects of past crises in one way or another, and they mostly fail to live up to any of these promises.

Such a sense of repeated and related crises is confirmed by analyses of the agrarian political economy. Under its relatively stable surface, the late Soviet agricultural system was strongly dependent on state budgets, which, in turn, strongly depended on revenues from oil and gas exports and thus were vulnerable to global market volatilities and further factors even before market reforms (Nefedova 2014, 76). When market reformers stressed that the Soviet agricultural system was far from sustainable—economically, politically, and environmentally—they extended a diagnosis and reform agenda that began under Soviet governments in the 1980s (Lindner 2007). However, reforms could not solve many of the problems and contradictions built into the system, and they created new ones. The Soviet agrarian system was based on logics of abundance, expansion, extraction, and intensification and resulted in massive ecological deterioration and waste of resources (Josephson et al. 2013; Wengle 2022). Market reforms provided little means to clean up the mess created in Soviet times or alternatives for workers who became “superfluous” as enterprises closed or were reorganized according to principles of efficiency. Decollectivization, too, has been an official reform goal that many still associate with crisis and dispossession: it involved material losses and was a process that eroded the very potential for collective agency. Decollectivization was meant to undo Soviet collectivization, which was, of course, a historic process that constituted another, more blatant form of dispossession. If we understand dispossession as unfolding in repeated spirals, it may seem ironic, but not necessarily surprising, that both collectivization and decollectivization can be described in terms of state-imposed, historic dispossession.

In emphasizing the interlocking of crises, alienation, and dispossession across historic periods, the idea of dispersed dispossession does not presuppose “integrity”—wholeness, intactness, authenticity, stability—as a reference base. Dispossession cannot always be attributed to one specific political system or period. Rather than identifying either state socialism or neoliberal capitalism as solely responsible for dispossession, the question to be investigated then becomes how it is rooted in and perpetuated through the succession of programs, regimes, and crises that caused a “multiplicity of destructions” (Gordillo 2014, 19) and created a condition in which dispossession is immanent. This has important implications for rural relations in former socialist contexts, while similar arguments have been made for (settler) colonial and other contexts as well (Bluwstein et al. 2018; León 2023; Mollett 2016; Nichols 2020; Watts [1983] 2013).

It is ironic that reforms that had promised agrarian, rural, and overall economic development were and often remain perceived as leading to regression and demodernization on the ground. This seeming contradiction is no coincidence, however. The disintegration of the old system was among the reform’s intended aims, and many reformers presented it as a necessary brief phase of creative destruction that would be followed by new growth and prosperity. That’s why critics labeled the reforms “shock therapy.”¹⁶ But against the idea of a brief, painful but salutary intervention, many rural dwellers today still emphasize the experience of a persistent shock over that of therapy. According to their accounts, the “therapy” led to dismantling more than maintaining or (re)building and did not fill many of the gaps it had created. Disintegration, and with it the “interstices of the old world and the new” (Dzenovska 2020, 23), turned out to be much more persistent than reformers had promised, and many expressed a sense that an old world had vanished and a promised new one failed to come about.¹⁷ The idea of dispersed dispossession implies that this is more than a mere sentiment, shedding light on how certain futures were and remained foreclosed to certain people. This does not imply historic determinism, however, as some not only found ways to cope with difficult situations but also to open future pathways that would have been impossible in earlier years or decades.

Lived Realities of Disintegration: Disorientation, Disconnection, and Disenchantment

If we imagine dispossession as a drama, the idea of dispersion impacts the entire scene—its duration, subject matter, roles, and context. If dispossession results from recurrent crises more than from single actions and events, this has consequences for the figure of “the dispossessed,” too. If the category should apply to all who live and act under these conditions, this would include large parts of entire generations. However, as the forms of and degrees to which people are affected depend on subject positions, such generic use of the category would make little sense. It is not necessary either. A focus on the mechanisms and effects of dispossession allows for acknowledging dispossession as a historic, and in this respect collective, experience without categorizing persons. Hence, and in contrast to some earlier work on post-Soviet dispossession (Humphrey 1996; Rigi 2003), I deliberately abstain from using the category of “the dispossessed.”¹⁸ Subjects are always more than merely dispossessed. Further, we also should be able to address dispossession even in instances in which it is difficult to identify the dispossessor, or a “villain to blame” (Li 2014a, 16). Dispersed dispossession does not always have a clear subject–object relation or manifest in clear dispossessive actions.¹⁹ Rather than focusing on isolated goods that can be held in private property, it is about collective goods, infrastructures, and further relations that support and sustain social and economic life, the upkeep of village and household economies.

Dispersion evokes the image of a cloudy liquid or fog. This resonates with the persistent difficulties, described by many research participants, in navigating what appears to them as uncertain circumstances, recurrent and unpredictable changes, and unclear options. Rather than being deprived of one specific thing, many describe their situation as a mess with no identifiable way out (Li 2014a). The chapters detail various causes of this situation: a deep and enduring agrarian crisis; the piecemeal erosion of government and local support structures; reforms that have not filled the gaps created by the disintegration of the Soviet agrarian system; inaccessible or unpredictable agricultural markets; and laws and bureaucracies that aren’t working in rural dwellers’ interest. During the “dispersion of the people” (Marx [1867] 2015, 516) in which many have left the countryside or attempted to do so, those who stay are often faced with being stranded in a place without a future, where particularly older generations have long struggled with the sense of being left behind. In this and other senses, spatial fragmentation in the countryside has become part of an unsettling collective experience (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2004).

These conditions formed over drawn-out periods and sometimes in spirals, which makes it harder, even for those who live through them, to make sense of them. Also, these experiences are what people were often left with when development promises did not materialize, so the sense of being caught in a place without a future implies disenchantment. This does not mean, of course, that dispersed dispossession took away all of people’s agency and vision, but it has impacted the conditions for developing agency and vision. In a fog, it can be hard to imagine the world beyond one’s limited vision, or one may be distracted by false images of what lies beyond the fog.²⁰ Forces that curtail agency in such a way can be the unintended side effects of historical processes but also opacity and occlusion built into institutionalized processes and intentional obfuscation. Dispersion, or a fog, can benefit the interests of those better able to navigate it themselves or exploit others’ disorientation, so there can be incentives to create or at least not dissolve it. Dispossession that unfolds under such conditions is not of the kind that would be obvious to “the dispossessed” or the analysts (Vorbrugg 2022), which is partly why dispersed dispossession requires a distinct conceptual vocabulary.

Dispossession, Appropriation, Agency

The concept of dispersed dispossession aims to extend understandings of dispossession to include aspects of dispersal. Questions may arise at that point: Taking seriously the described qualities of dispersal, is dispossession still the right concept to use? Why should we speak of dispossession if it is not necessarily the intended result of action or a function of capital accumulation? Also, isn’t one political and analytical strength of dispossession as a concept how it allows for the clear and explicit calling out of instances of illegitimate theft? If this is the case, does the idea of dispersal water down this critical edge?

One may argue that such tensions could be avoided by simply using a different term such as deprivation, alienation, or abandonment. While I do use these terms in this study, I stick to dispossession as the overarching concept for several reasons. In Marxist and other critical analytical traditions, dispossession is conceptualized in ways that imply relating, dialectically or otherwise, the losses of some to the gains of others, deprivation and theft being linked with appropriation and accumulation. Dispersed dispossession also assumes that dispossession is best understood in relation to state coercion and capitalist appropriation on the one hand and the agency of the deprived on the other. As this book deals, inter alia, with the effects of a historic redistribution of wealth and control, goods and “bads” at a massive scale, such a relational perspective helps develop a critical understanding of the historical moment. Interpreting these processes of systemic change as implying dispossession is to insist that the deprivation of many is not simply an inevitable side effect of necessary reforms, but that it is bound to concrete decisions, policies, actions, nonactions, or willful withdrawal. It also means investigating the concrete relationship between gains for some and losses for others—and, indeed, investigating this relationship is even more necessary if it does not take the form of straightforward and obvious theft. It means insisting on asking questions about drivers and responsibility behind those forms of abandonment and neglect that do not immediately serve anyone’s profit. To speak of dispossession in situations often interpreted as a historic tragedy means to insist that things could be and become otherwise and to hold those who shape them accountable. It also means insisting that deprivation is not simply a normal continuation of structural disadvantage that has been characteristic of rural life in Russia over most of the past centuries, but that it has been driven by dynamic forces of dispossession.

Given the variety of conceptualizations of dispossession and even more semiconceptual uses of the term, speaking of dispossession does not in itself provide conceptual clarity. This flexibility can be a strength, however, when it allows concepts to be adapted to the historic and geographic context. Following Robert Nichols (2020, 5), “As with most useful terms of political articulation, the concept of dispossession can be mobilized in a variety of manners, for diverse and competing purposes. Its appeal and utility resides precisely with its protean quality.”

Appropriation

Historically and throughout the present, dispersed dispossession goes along with appropriation. It is well documented how many of the now wealthiest individuals and companies in Russia laid a basis for their power and fortunes by taking advantage of the “freeing up” of cheap assets that resulted from the disintegration of the Soviet political economic system (Barnes 2006; Dzarasov 2014; Kagarlicky 1992, 2002). A hunger for undervalued assets is not unique to Russian capitalists, of course, but it can be argued that many of them have specialized in exploiting opportunities to swallow the fruits of devaluation within their own country.²¹ This occurred relatively late and slowly in agriculture, which drew the interest of big business gradually, at different times in different regions, but overall only by the turn of the century (Rylko and Jolly 2005) when the “redistribution” of the biggest pies was already relatively consolidated in many other sectors. The prospects for profitability of investments in agriculture were highly uncertain in the early decades of transition (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006), and to some degree this remains the case. Investment projects investigated for this book were only partly a grab for land and often more of a gamble on future agricultural potential. The success of these gambles was determined not least by how far they could be hedged through state guarantees and supported by state programs.

The rapid and massive growth of large agricultural companies would not have been possible without the rounds of crisis, devaluation, and disintegration that made land, agricultural enterprises, and labor abundant, freely available, and cheap. These conditions partly persist both because of difficulties in solving them and the opportunities they provide to elites (chapter 4). Agriculture is a sector that has become clearly dominated by domestic businesses. Russia’s ten most profitable agribusinesses are reported to have generated a total of $11.35 billion in revenue in 2019 (Large Scale Agriculture 2021). Although “only” four of Russia’s 118 reported billionaires listed by Forbes in 2021 have made a larger share of their wealth in agriculture and food production, their existence shows that agriculture can bring a fortune to some. Most foreign investment into the sector, by contrast, was relatively short-lived.

Massive concentration notwithstanding, dispossession, as it is addressed by rural dwellers and conceptualized in this book, does not strictly follow, chronologically or causally, from companies’ land deals and enterprise takeovers in a narrow sense. Agricultural assets and labor in post-Soviet Russia were heavily devalued before capital showed any appetite for investing in it. Consequently, rural dwellers will accuse investing companies of exploiting existing deprivations rather than creating them. Many rural dwellers are not opposed to, and even wish for, a “good” investor to revive villages and enterprises—a task many see as impossible to tackle without substantial state or company support. Disintegration and devaluation caused a fog that helps to conceal theft and created material conditions that make it easy to legitimize private investment and state interventions as corresponding with popular demands.

Under conditions unfavorable for smallholder farming for most, many rural dwellers heavily depend on large agricultural enterprises for employment. Agricultural enterprises, which often are the single significant employers in a village, can exploit this situation and sell poorly paid jobs as employment opportunities, as can politicians promising development to harvest votes. In this regard, dispersed dispossession created conditions to take from the rural deprived what is useful to the powerful: their land, their votes, their labor power, or even their lives when they are sent to war. Some rural dwellers address this as blunt exploitation and dispossession. But the story is complicated by how many enterprises fulfill social functions of the kind one may rather expect from the state—functions that make them appear as capitalist exploiters and provisioners of social support at the same time (chapters 2 and 5).

Reassembling

Dispersed dispossession erodes the conditions for many types of agency and results in increased vulnerability. Yet those who experience it are not passive victims of their circumstances. The chapters describe different ways of acting that respond to dispersed dispossession directly or that occur under conditions formed through it. Analogous to the family of de-/dis- terms that help characterize “dispersal,” a family of re- terms offers an appropriate entry point to understanding such agency: relating, repairing, recreating, recombining, reviving, regenerating, redeeming, restoring, reproducing, reinventing, recycling, and renewing. The prefix re- points to doing something again or returning something to a former state. Few things can simply be returned, but variations can be reinvented and reenacted, as I detail in chapter 2. We find variations of this theme in studies in former state-socialist settings.²² Empirically, we see it in attempts to maintain and revive reliable social contracts and material infrastructures, relations of support and care that have value in themselves and form the basis for individual and collective agency. We also see it in claims for necessary support from authorities. In this sense, they resemble notions of care that emphasize humans’ general dependence on sustaining environments and relations of care (Tronto 2009 [1993]) and how these are impacted by conditions of damage and precarity (Kovács 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Stengers 2015).

One may cluster these terms under the umbrella of (re)assembling, not to privilege assembling as a general approach to the social (Latour 2005), but rather as a way of binding together three forms of agency central in this study. First, (re)assembling is a logical reaction to disintegration and dispersal and the forms of dispossession it implies. Where elements fall apart, they may be recombined and recomposed, and postsocialist contexts form an established site to study this. One may recall David Stark’s (1996, 995) famous formulation of rebuilding organizations and institutions “with the ruins of communism.” This book, too, investigates the relationship between ruination, recombination, and agency, which allows questions of agency to be linked to disruptive change while acknowledging that the context is no longer that of the post-Soviet phase. Second, assembling is as much about assemblages as it is about the agency that both underlies and emerges from it. Agency is conceptualized in a co-constitutive relationship to structures and infrastructures across a range of theoretical traditions and social-scientific studies.²³ In this study, we will see the important role of forms of agency that aim at creating better conditions for further agency by strengthening infrastructures and collectives. Creating “transitional infrastructure” (Berlant 2022, 24) responds to disintegration and crisis and helps to navigate and play an active role in ongoing transitions. Third, assemblies of people, in a more traditional sense of the social, play a constitutive role for collective agency in this study (chapters 2 and 5). As with other infrastructural work, assembling people requires and creates and strengthens a basis for collective agency.

Outline

While this introduction aims at presenting dispersed dispossession as a coherent concept, the chapters present partly contrasting insights that reflect complex realities, including local and regional differences. The idea of dispersed dispossession should help us to think across such differences. As the chapters build on one another, I recommend reading them in the given order.

The brief first chapter introduces the empirical cases and fieldwork sites along with the study’s approach and methods, including reflections on multilocality and multitemporality.

Chapter 2 explores the prevalence of large-scale farming and the persistence of certain Soviet-type arrangements from the viewpoint of current conflicts and organizing at the village level. It traces actors’ creative and inventive ways to involve themselves in such changes and act toward them. This includes the revaluation and negotiation of institutions with a Soviet stamp—such as the kolkhoz, which I reconceptualize as a set of social relations enacted under conditions of fundamental change, reinvented rather than persisting. Empirically, the chapter mainly draws on a village community’s mobilization against an attempted takeover of farmland by an investor. This case provided a rare opportunity to study contemporary kolkhoz relations as an object of dispute and adaptation, and the transformation of land entitlements (which have long been considered rather irrelevant) into crucial instruments to support the functioning of the local enterprise.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to slow crisis and recursive rounds of dispossession over time, rooted, seemingly paradoxically, both in the Soviet agrarian system and its disintegration. It shows how historic disintegration and devaluation continue to matter. Rural dwellers refer to the ruins of built infrastructures and other constituents of place to make sense of and express drawn-out losses and constitutive absences. I argue that following such sense-making is a powerful way to better understand how dispersed dispossession unfolds on the ground and what was lost and by whom. It turns attention to context-specific forms of dispossession inscribed in prevailing conditions: production and social infrastructures disintegrated; agricultural assets and labor undervalued; agency limited; and futures uncertain.

Chapter 4 illustrates and contextualizes the renewed interest in farmland and agriculture in Russia from the early 2000s. It shows that much of the accumulation process is based on the massive devaluation and disintegration of the agricultural sector, which made assets cheap and available, and state policies that—by the turn of the century—shifted back to privileging large agricultural producers. It deconstructs the image of investors’ omnipotence and their promises of investment in farmland being a safe bet and brings economic and managerial failure into the picture. The question of who wins and who loses should be seen in this context. Some managers and others draw benefits despite or because of enterprises’ economic difficulties, as they promise solutions to fix and finally overcome them. For many rural residents, in contrast, the recurrent failures of agricultural projects stand in a long row of unfulfilled improvement promises.

Chapter 5 investigates local rearrangements after investing companies have entered the scene. It sets a particular focus on the occupation and reconfiguration of the historically established local monopoly status enjoyed by enterprises and the implied questions of power. Some investors have tried to disentangle themselves from social obligations but failed to do so if they could not fully disregard their workers’ social needs and conditions of local compliance. Also, as agricultural operations remain insecure on their purely economic side, some companies take over responsibilities of rural development, which allows them to tap into state resources. Such conditions complicate class relations, and the chapter describes how they nurture specific forms of dependency but also how they compromise. It describes the tactics used by workers and rural residents on the one hand and enterprises and companies on the other.

Chapter 6 concludes by wrapping up the previous chapters’ insights on a conceptual level. It reflects on relational goods, unequal capacities to navigate disruptive change, the perpetuation and exploitation of historical injustice, and the conditions for alternative visions, resistance, and agency in the context of dispersed dispossession—in Russia and elsewhere.