CHAPTER 5

Tactics

With the directors of the local agricultural enterprise and stud farm, we arrive at a building site close to the farm’s main base in the village of Lipenka. A dozen workers on tractors, bulldozers, and trucks are busy tearing down what was left of former kolkhoz stables. The massive brick buildings must have been solid in former days, still obvious nearly two decades after their abandonment. As the foreman approaches us, the director of the stables introduces the farm director with the words: “This is the director of Lipenka.” Formally, one may object that the mayor is the head of the village while the man called “director of Lipenka” is the director of an agricultural enterprise called Traktor. One may also wonder why the director of the much more profitable stables ascribes this honor to a man constantly complaining about the economic performance of his enterprise. Furthermore, both men work for the same, not very transparent, company structure, headed by a powerful regional businessman and politician. Although they are directors on a local level, villagers will often speak of them as subordinates with limited competencies in their companies. Despite this, the “director of Lipenka” is widely considered to be the most powerful person in the village. As the conversation on how to transform this part of the village continues, they begin to call the place “Lipengrad,” with the new ending upscaling the village into a gorod—a city or town. It is a joke or a fantasy. Beyond wealthy urbanites visiting the stables, there is not much of an urban feel to the village, and many young people keep leaving for the “real” cities. At the same time, the village receives some funds from the regional and federal budget, mediated through the company leadership’s political ties. In this respect, the company does at least connect the village to flows of state resources.

I am reminded of another instance with a wealthy businessman from the nearby regional capital choosing to register some of his enterprises in the small village of Zhary, and his taxes suddenly came to make up the largest portion of the village administration’s budget. He runs his own glossy magazine that published a report on the village titled “Republic of Zhary.” With the businessman’s portrait on the issue’s cover, it is not hard to guess who the imagined sovereign would be. Again, what seems to be rather grotesque fantasies of sovereignty, on the one hand, correspond, on the other hand, with the opinion widely held by locals and village mayors that—given the breakdown of the local agricultural enterprise some years before—the village largely depends on the businessman’s capital and influence. In this regard, he may be seen as the village’s informal ruler.

Some business actors imagine themselves as equipped not only with the power to make live, but also to make die. I ask an expat production manager how they dealt with a driver who drove his tractor into a tree when drunk. “We fired him, but we should have shot him” was his prompt answer, probably intended to be funny, but it echoed much of the authoritarian tone in his and his colleagues’ usual speech, how they justified poor wages and working conditions by workers’ deviance, and portraying themselves as those who would bring order. I frequently encountered similar instances, somewhere between megalomaniac power fantasies and substantial authority. This chapter investigates what underlies such “fantasies” and the implications in terms of workers’, villagers’, and companies’ power and agency.

Monopoly, Power, Interdependence

The “director of Lipenka” hosted me during most of my time in the village, and I gained insights into the workings of his authority. His patronage opened many doors for me. His support would enable and facilitate my efforts to meet enterprise employees or administrative personnel. But he could also block my efforts. He would often know what I was doing and pull his strings. My interlocutor’s moderate criticism of the enterprise would suddenly turn into appraisal after a phone call during which I heard the director’s deep and husky voice at the other end of the line. The enterprise canteen, preparing mainly the farm’s own produce, would feed me for free. I had no vehicle in the village, but the director’s brief phone calls would suffice to find a car or truck heading wherever I had to go or to reschedule a ride in that direction. His overview and command of machinery, vehicles, and workers enabled him to arrange various support for workers, villagers, the village administration, or, in this instance, for me. Just like directors of other farms, he was in a position to direct and redirect resources and operations that were useful for a variety of purposes, including but not limited to agricultural production: machines that could work kolkhoz fields but also private plots, carry agricultural produce but also building materials, specialists who could fix defects on the farm or in a household, workers who could run field operations but also maintain public infrastructure, or materials no longer needed for the agricultural enterprise but useful on a private building site. Requesting bank loans, villagers may depend on their director’s guarantee of creditworthiness, and the latter’s local authority may get them out of trouble with the police or juridical organs.

Even though the “director of Lipenka” works for a company investing fossil fuel capital, this is not where such monopoly power is primarily nested. Similar patterns can be found across enterprises with a strong kolkhoz lineage, private farming enterprises grown large, and investment projects. Many of the houses people live in were built and occasionally are still owned by the agricultural enterprise, which may also be the source of the sugar, butter, bread, or oil on kitchen tables, distributed to households as rent for land shares. Farm enterprises may provide food for the local kindergarten and school, sponsor the local football team and provide the van that will take them to matches on weekends. Some organize activities for local pensioners and provide a tribute to war veterans. They contribute to festivities and cultural events. At cost price, they provide technical resources or fodder for villagers’ subsidiary production, or lay water or gas pipes to workers’ houses. After heavy snowfall they have tractors and bulldozers to clean streets in the villages and the roads that connect them to highways and towns. In exceptional situations such as marriages, births, or family members’ illnesses or deaths, workers and villagers may borrow money from enterprise directors. The enterprise will often provide a car to carry the dead and a tractor to dig out a grave; in some sense, it thus quite literally accompanies villagers from cradle to grave. We are hence revisiting the theme of the khoziaistvo introduced in chapter 2 and will investigate more deeply how it relates to questions of power at different scales. We will see how the “new masters” who came with outside investment navigate and reconfigure kolkhoz arrangements and how they exploit but also are obliged to them.

Investors build on local monopoly patterns rather than install them from scratch. And although some aspects of monopoly power work in their favor, it also demands responsibilities that they may not have chosen freely. In Lipenka, the businessman who owns the farm enterprise, stables, and a majority of land shares, and employs the directors, is also an elected member of the regional parliament, holds various ministerial posts, and is the chief regional manager of the company that runs the village gas supply. He usually travels to the village by helicopter; hardly anyone has ever seen him, and no one on the ground seems to have insight into the workings of the political-economic web he directs. And still, he is connected to the village in so many ways: sitting in parliament “for them,” owning land that surrounds them, owning the gas pipes that run into their homes, employing large parts of the village population but also seeing a part of their earnings flow back to his enterprises when they pay for gas and other services.

The “director of Lipenka” often underlines his responsibility for the village, pointing out that he runs and creates structures that will provide jobs and income, sustain and stimulate the village economy, and eventually keep the village alive. “This is all for the people,” he claims. “People want jobs, and how will they get them? And who will create them?” Even though such narratives of “good farm enterprises” are contested, they resonate with the widely held view that villages with no running enterprise are usually worse off and that if the “old” enterprises did not manage to survive under the new, tough economic conditions, it is up to new agricultural companies strong enough to resurrect production to sustain villages in future. Hope rests on the ostensibly powerful and stable investment companies that often promise to take care of village populations’ needs.

The self-declared “new sovereign” has more in common with the khoziain from chapter 2—the enterprise director taking care of the enterprise, village, and workers—than one might expect (how far either of them meet expectations is a different question). Both hold much local authority. Formally, they decide whether to support individuals and the village at large in a particular way or not, to further downscale or rebuild an enterprise, to fire workers or employ them. This corresponds with frequent statements by rural dwellers and authorities such as, “Village X is governed by investor Y,” or “they really established a government of their own here.”

At the same time, the dependencies—in more “traditional” kolkhoz-like enterprises and incoming investors—covered in this study are not merely one-sided. In tiny villages often surrounded by dozens of square kilometers of fields, enterprises often depend on village populations’ labor force to keep going. Rural residents today are free to leave a village and settle elsewhere. This is different from historical phases when agricultural labor was disciplined and organized through direct coercion, such as during the Soviet kolkhoz regime until 1969, when membership was inherited and members were not free to leave their enterprise or occupation, or during times of serfdom in imperial Russia. Thus, somewhat in contrast to the sovereignty fantasies that opened this chapter, my emphasis here is also on how different sides navigate and negotiate the circumstances they find themselves in. I argue that managers and directors often employ tactics that cannot but engage with the various necessities they encounter, including economic but also social circumstances in the places where they operate.

Fostering informal ties with villages may seem unexpected for investors. Following notions of economization, privatization, marketization, or commercialization, we may assume that takeovers by large companies would result in a streamlining of operations according to clear economic rationalities and a disembedding of economic operations. Profit-seeking agricultural companies would then reorganize “kolkhoz webs” according to purer economic principles, try to offload social responsibilities, and separate the economic from the social and political. I did encounter such attempts. For instance, one village mayor described the arrival of an investment project as follows: “Still in the process of arriving at our territory, they said right away that ‘this social burden, we won’t take it on ourselves’ . . . [They] addressed the village population and said right away that ‘we will not come forward with . . . organizing events and investing in social and cultural infrastructure. We will allot you taxes, they will go into the local budget, and you will be fine’” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2013).

But things did not work out that way for the company. “They kept on participating, even though they said we will not help, but they did” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2013). The enterprise did not become very profitable, the amount of taxes they paid were low, and the village administration remained dependent on informal help. Workers and villagers, too, remained dependent on informal support from the enterprise—and the enterprise remained dependent on workers. For the enterprise director, the urge to engage with the social sphere mirrored the simple fact that nobody else would and that dropping it would harm the enterprise—as he illustrates with this episode: “The governor arrived by helicopter and told me: ‘If you want your school to be closed, leave everything as it is. But if you don’t want it to be closed, reduce the expenses per pupil by 30 percent.’ But how will you reduce expenses per pupil in a village school? Producing new children . . . is not realistic” (Businessman, Perm region, 2010).

The school was eventually preserved without spurring births for that purpose—which would mean a reversal of the tendency of shrinking classes, which increases the costs per pupil. Instead, the renovation of the school building allowed for sharp cuts in energy costs. The investor admits he was easily convinced by the governor to take over the task: for an enterprise that depends heavily on young specialists, the prospect of losing the local school— with the closest substitute twenty kilometers away on gravel road—could pose an existential risk. As state authorities were reluctant to take action to preserve the school, it was up to the enterprise to do so. While the governor had little stakes in a small village that he could forget about after leaving on his helicopter, the businessman had become invested in the village by choosing to take over its farm enterprise.

That the businessman had to adapt to the circumstances had much to do with the distinct operational environment. In contrast to his urban factory, which he says can be managed “without taking into account the social structure of the city at all” (Businessman, Perm region, 2010), his role in the village is “completely different.” Here, “it turns out that the social infrastructure rests upon the enterprise anyway. There is no other variant. . . . For us, this is bad” (Businessman, Perm region, 2010). He is explicit that it is not enthusiasm for rural development or benevolence, but rather a necessity that urges him into this role: “I’m urged [to take up such responsibilities]. I’m still one of those who count money. You have to understand clearly that I’m not some, so to say, a socially oriented person. That’s not true” (Businessman, Perm region, 2011). He makes explicit what other directors and managers rather formulate between the lines when he admits how much he adopts his tactics to the circumstances he encounters in a specific location. He had arrived with a tight business plan and management principles but then saw himself confronted with entanglements he may have wished to avoid but could not ignore or reject—as he describes in another illustrative example:

The less private subsidiary agriculture there will be in this village, the better for me. The more people will work in the enterprise, the more attractive for me. The greater their devotion to their work, the easier for me to take them to work, even during their days off, during harvest time. Take them for twelve-hour working days, when they go home only to sleep and then back to work, sleep and back to work. Because the cycles of the highest workload coincide. I need them in August to September, but then they also need themselves on their household plots. Last year we gave them potatoes, said “Take as much as you want,” to prevent them from planting and digging their own potatoes with a shovel on their plots. . . . But then, when people keep cows, I cannot go and tell them: you have to slaughter this cow; otherwise, I won’t give you a job. . . . I have two options: either I will start fighting with their cow or make arrangements for this cow to consume as little time as possible. Thus I say: keep your cow, but don’t mow your hay. When we have done ours, we will bring you two bales . . . and you can feed your cow all winter long. For me . . . the costs are minimal, but he will do his job as a tractor driver and not walk around with his scythe (Businessman, Perm region, 2010).

Here is our urban dollar-millionaire competing with villagers’ potatoes and cows. Many of the “new” agricultural actors articulated similar surprise or frustration. I remember how shocked one expat production manager was when we arrived on one of their farms and learned that their half-million-dollar tractors were standing idle during a crucial harvest day because the drivers were busy digging potatoes on their household plots. Their large-scale operations were meant to run smoothly based on expensive technology, but molding workers’ living realities into these schemes turned out to be more complex than expected. This stands in stark contrast to the image of smooth operations created by companies (chapter 4). While abstracting from social embeddedness in a shareholder presentation is easy, doing so on a farm level may be impossible—the increased employment of modern machinery and technologies notwithstanding.

Managers are hence urged to adapt to local demands to some extent. A representative of a foreign investor remarked:

On the one hand, you can call it . . . trying to work responsibly. . . . This is one side of the story. On the other hand, you very much depend on the local people. Because they are your workers. In the end, it’s the local Russian people who really have to execute the jobs. . . . In the end, it’s in collaboration with the locals . . . so, you also try to keep the good relationships between them and you . . . provide them with either financial aid, but also sometimes to keep roads clean. . . . All publicly listed companies . . . need to have a chapter in their annual report about sustainable business, about responsible operations, so . . . of course, if you do things like that . . . you can write a chapter in your annual report [that is] always good for investors. . . . But . . . the main thing is that we want to keep a good relationship between the locals and you as a farming company (Production manager, Voronezh, 2012).

One thing we have to be very careful about obviously is that we have some of the local people who [are owners of land shares] and we still need some of them, we still need their local support for us to carry on, on a long-term legal basis. That’s important, we can’t ignore that. And at the same time . . . you can’t get away from the fact that there is a certain amount of social responsibility attached to being the only employer in most of the villages that we work. But at the same time, if we are not a profitable employer, there will be no one either. . . . I need to be able to pay the key personnel more than we’re paying now, to keep them working on the farm . . . because they are the ones, these tractor drivers, sprayer operators, without them everything stops. So we have to work on a system that keeps them motivated, happy, and working (Production manager, Lipetsk region, 2014).

Such interdependencies are context-specific and change over time. Some enterprises pursue strategies of cutting back on various aspects of local social embeddedness or refrain from rebuilding them in places where bankruptcies have erased previous relations and commitments. Where proximity allows enterprises to recruit workers from other towns or villages, they seem more likely to free themselves from responsibilities and less hesitant to close down local production bases, as they can continue working land banks from elsewhere. In other instances, companies split their operations in a single village into agricultural enterprises, which employ village populations on minimum wages and providing village services, and some more profitable businesses such as the abovementioned horse farm or a recreational center. The former keeps a village alive at a minimum, the latter has freed itself from the responsibilities that come with enterprises’ local authority (Village mayor, Rostov region, 2013). Changes in farming technologies and organizational patterns reduce the number of workers needed, and many enterprises are in a process of shrinking their workforce. Managers describe that they are in a position to care less about villagers’ and administrations’ needs and demands as soon as they bring a majority of land shares under their control, so they no longer depend on shareholder assemblies. “People become insignificant” then, one journalist commented, since it becomes the investor “alone who constitutes any assembly” (Journalist, Rostov, 2012). In that regard, this study’s findings are in line with others on changing formal and informal, or explicit and implicit “corporate social responsibility” in Russian large farm enterprises (Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019). It also indicates, however, that rather than straightforward uprooting, we should expect gradual reconfiguration of entanglements, not so much oriented to a pure market model but something more hybrid.

What I described as monopoly power is not beyond such hybridity. Large farm enterprises are pivotal nodes in local power relations and resource flows and often central in upholding various aspects of life in a village. At the same time, companies’ dispersed control—and management structures—imply that the more fundamental decisions are often made elsewhere, by people and in spheres relatively distant from these enterprises. This dispersion of local control can lead to a “thinning” (Appel 2019, 51) of formal responsibility, liability and accountability, and weak predictability and reliability for rural residents. In the cases discussed here, interdependence between enterprises and villagers does mean that the former cannot fully ignore the latter’s needs and interests. Yet it also became clear that this interdependence is not stable but contingent on changing circumstances.

Tactics, Nonsovereign Power, and the State

When I approached huge farming companies in Russia, controlling hundreds of thousands of hectares and employing hundreds of workers, I expected them to implement their schemes straightforwardly. At a closer look, it turned out that even huge investors’ projects remained prone to failure and bound to context-specific demands and necessities much more than even company directors and managers would have expected. The instances described in the previous paragraphs thus remind us that we should not reach conclusions on investors’ capacities to implement business plans and models from their sovereignty fantasies, the goals they declare, and the sizes of their operations. Making business plans and acting in a social world are different, and market rationalities are not the only ones that matter, as I shall argue.

One may conclude that, somewhat against the grain of this chapter’s opening passages, company leaders rarely act as omnipotent sovereigns; rather, they navigate tricky circumstances. The difference can be described as one between tactics and strategies. A strategy anticipates the desired result and for this purpose partly abstracts from concrete circumstances that it aims to transgress and transform: it forms realities according to a plan. Michel de Certeau ([1984] 2004, xix) calls strategy “the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power . . . can be isolated from an ‘environment.’” In contrast, he defines tactic as a calculus that cannot count on such a privileged position: “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance” (De Certeau ([1984] 2004, xix). With this differentiation, one could say that enterprises are thrown back to tactic maneuvering when they would prefer to implement a strategy. One production manager states: “You can have the best strategy in the world, but unless you can successfully implement it, it is just a piece of paper” (Production manager, Lipetsk region, 2014).

Should we be surprised to see the evolution of tactics rather than an implementation of strategies? What may lead to surprise on the side of social scientists is that much social theory is biased to see strategies, the implementation of schemes and plans, and knowledgeable actors where there may be more open search, adaptation, trial and error, and ignorance (McGoey 2012; Stark 2009). We find a bias of that kind in many classical works and among some of the most brilliant and influential thinkers. Think of Karl Marx, for whom the capacity to anticipate results defines human action and the labor process¹; of Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on the models that will guide the work of the laboring subject²; or Max Weber’s category of instrumental (zweckrational) action—an action that pursues ends that are defined beforehand (Weber 1922, 27).

A variety of approaches aims to include the unplanned, of course. In the terms of performativity-thinking, one can say that performative action rarely produces realities in the sense of bringing into being directly what it declares. A “weaker” (Christophers 2014, 18) version of performativity—a perlocution in J. L. Austin’s terminology³—depends on an “external reality that does not immediately or necessarily yield to the efficacy of sovereign authority” and thus “operates on the conditions of non-sovereign power” (Butler 2010, 151). Such acts do not “produce realities” but rather “depend upon them to be successful” and thereby “alter an ongoing situation” (Butler 2010, 151). Hence the “assumption of a ‘sovereign’ speaker is lost, and whatever conception of agency takes its place presumes that agency is itself dispersed” (Butler 2010, 151).

Attendance to such nonsovereign performativity brings to light the interplay between economic ambitions and rationalities on the one hand, and circumstances that actors did not choose but cannot avoid on the other. It helps to unmask sovereignty fantasies for what they are and to better understand how even powerful companies must navigate complex webs of relations in their attempts to remold villages and enterprises. Companies may find local entanglements constraining or find ways to adapt their tactics and exploit them. For instance, they can try to exploit social and political entanglements to stabilize operations that would be rather fragile on their “pure” economic side.

Many agricultural enterprises in Russia continue to fulfill functions that overlap with state responsibilities (Lindner 2008). The picture has changed since the late Soviet period, when one-quarter of enterprise expenditures went into social infrastructure (Nefedova 2014, 76).⁴ But especially in villages where an enterprise is not merely the only significant employer but also a moneylender, supplier of machinery, raw materials, and agricultural produce—the boundary between economic operations and social functions tends to be blurred. In Lipenka, the executive agricultural manager describes how he frequently explains to his boss why the company should invest in the village social sphere at all. The farm is not profitable, support is quite costly, and still, the enterprise has an interest in keeping the village alive and workers content enough to remain in their jobs. The slow decay of village social facilities, outmigration, villagers’ discontent or even active opposition could all become problematic for the enterprise in the midterm. What is more, as local disputes have shown, “disorder” in the village can cause inconveniences to this boss whose involvement in the regional government makes him accountable, to some degree, to other regional elites who prefer calm over scandals (see also Mamonova 2016).

The pattern is not unique to this village. Enterprise representatives often complain about being forced to take on responsibilities that they say should belong to the state. When they “solve certain social problems . . . on their territories” (District administration employee, Lipetsk region, 2014), this can be motivated by vital self-interest in maintaining some functioning order. They have, after all, territories and populations to care for. But providing social functions or taking up responsibilities for unprosperous villages and enterprises can also be part of explicit deals with state authorities. The following quotation echoes a common pattern and perception: “Unprofitable enterprises are compensated by profitable ones. And this is a policy to save the village. Now [a midsize farmer nearby] is buying a village, he has a farm there. They tell him that the farm is unprofitable, why does he need this? He says, ‘I’m solving a social problem.’ People will leave—the village will die” (Agricultural consultant, Nizhniy Novgorod region, 2021).

In return for solving social problems, enterprises can gain political support or access to state programs, both of which can be of no less vital interest than sustaining relations at a village level. The state owns significant portions of the country’s farmland (Uzun 2012), and state authorities play a critical role in approving land and enterprise transactions (Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor 2012). In effect, companies depend heavily on state support if they attempt to expand, but also for their day-to-day operations (Kuns, Visser, and Wästfelt 2016; Wengle 2018). And even if state authorities do not help a business, it will be better if they do not hamper it either.

In Russia, as in most countries, agriculture’s profitability hinges on state subsidies. The resulting dependence is increased by the fact that agricultural markets remain relatively unstable and unfavorable for producers. But the distribution of subsidies and other state benefits varies across regions and enterprises. Besides agrarian subsidies and state programs that help them with costly investments in machinery, storage, and processing facilities, or obtaining favorable loans, some enterprises also receive state support for tasks related to “rural development.” Relevant programs comprise subsidized wages or homes to attract workers. Not only do enterprises depend on the state to (cross-)subsidize their operations, but the state also depends on enterprises for parts of its rural development agenda. For instance, our potato-millionaire emphasizes how his enterprise mediates state funds: “If the president says, ‘We have to develop agriculture,’ they very much have to find this object that they might develop” (Businessman, Perm region, 2010). This echoes the historical experience that both Soviet and Russian agrarian and developmental state projects were often grand in their ambitions and scale, but they often were not implemented as designed at a local level (Scott 1998; Smith 2014; Wengle 2022).

Individual entrepreneurs and business leaders can draw various forms of capital from playing such mediatory roles. For businesspeople with political ambitions, getting involved in rural development and agriculture can be a stepping stone to higher political mandates. Both oligarchs in this chapter fall into this category. The owner of the enterprise in Lipenka already held high management posts in the energy sector and was a representative in the regional parliament before expanding into agriculture. Besides energy and agriculture, the web of enterprises under his command comprises food processing, horse breeding and competition, crafts and small industries, hotels, a nature reserve, and further minor businesses across the region. Economic flows in this business web are organized in circuits through which enterprises share and trade their products and resources; these circuits and translations also occur between economic and political operations and forms of capital in the web. As illustrated earlier in this chapter, nonprofitable enterprises are taken over and sustained in exchange for economic and political benefits, and the company boss builds power and authority on his capacity to direct various resources at a regional level—not unlike enterprise directors at village level.

The other industrialist who turned to farming runs a twin rural economic structure that comprises the potato farm and a commercial tour base. He, too, engages in rural development programs. When he was appointed as regional minister of agriculture in 2013, informants with insight into regional policy circles confirmed that he climbed the political ladder not least due to his farm experiment. His potato enterprise has not been a success story, but it had helped him gain political power and status.

Dependencies and resource flows between enterprises and villages, enterprises and the state, and exchanges between economic, social, and political capital are not specific to a particular type of enterprise. However, tapping into many of these flows is easier for larger enterprises and companies. Managers and directors of medium-sized enterprises (controlling less than ten thousand hectares) complain that as agrarian subsidies and rural development programs are increasingly handed over from district to regional and federal bodies, established “good relations” at local and district levels become increasingly irrelevant. Village and district administrations for their part describe how they lose their influence on enterprises that increasingly reach deals with regional rather than local authorities. Hence the upscaling of entanglements aggravates one-sided dependencies on agricultural enterprises. Larger companies also try to capitalize on their real or claimed economic and political strength to legitimize investment projects. They promise to pay wages and taxes, and to revive enterprises and entire villages through their economic and social activity. After similar promises by smaller enterprises and companies may have failed in the past, displaying size and claiming strength is a strategy used to convince local residents and authorities that they are, after all, able to get the job done.

Exploitation

Agriculture has become a historically and structurally disadvantaged sector, and this has implications for agricultural workers, patterns of exploitation, and rural politics. For many workers in Russian agriculture, the situation has improved since the peak of the agrarian crisis. Given the amount and frequency of enterprise bankruptcies over the years, agrarian workers do not tend to criticize agricultural enterprises for exploiting them. The general sense in many rural places is that you are unlikely to make big profits in primary agriculture, and—in contrast to other sectors—if you do, you possibly even deserve it. Rural dwellers engaged in subsidiary household production may very well agree with those managing large farms that the five rubles they get for a kilogram of potatoes won’t bring much prosperity to either of them: for producers, it barely covers the production costs, while retailers’ markups are around 300 percent. Similarly, rural dwellers described the difference between the 10-ruble selling price for one liter of milk and the 35 rubles they pay in a shop and conclude that agricultural production is hardly profitable.

Class antagonism and complaints about the unequal distribution of profits and benefits are not absent from villages and enterprises, of course. Still, a prevailing basic sense is that primary agriculture disadvantages both workers and enterprises. When wages are low and paid late, workers often understand this as a sign of shared hardship rather than an exploitative strategy. Inequality is seen less as an issue within an enterprise, a village, or agriculture, and more between agriculture and other economic sectors, the rural and the urban, the peripheries and the centers. Some urbanites visiting the countryside show signs of much greater wealth than local agrarian elites. Top managers and directors of big agrarian companies are rather perceived as urban and nonagricultural “outsiders.” Rarely are they seen in villages, and if they are, they have often traveled from urban offices in expensive cars or helicopters. Also, rural dwellers know that in many instances companies invest capital that has not originally been made in agriculture.

Which forms of exploitation and politics emerge when enterprises hold powerful local monopolies but are struggling in economic terms? First, such a condition shapes the possibilities and rationalities of employment. Dmitry Ivanovich, whom I portrayed as a khoziain in chapter 2, describes the contradiction he faces between employing more villagers or paying them better: “Wages are low and we don’t have any [capital] reserves. . . . We could pay [more], for two or three months. Then there would be no diesel, no fertilizer, and eventually economic collapse. I do understand that . . . people do not earn full-value wages, but otherwise, there wouldn’t be anything left at all. . . . I have five tractors, and I know I could replace them with one. I can take up credit and buy it and I will have this one tractor. And where will I put these four people? They all work and receive their wages, more or less . . .” (Private farmer, Lipetsk region, 2013).

The quote illustrates a basic rationality that I found many rural dwellers share to some degree: that agricultural enterprises should provide employment as a priority and that decent wage levels are a secondary issue, especially when employment alternatives are scarce. Such rationalities can be used to the disadvantage of workers. Given high levels of informality and low levels of transparency, it is often hard to tell when, exactly, agricultural producers mobilize difficulties in the agrarian sector to veil profits they do make or responsibilities they could take. But certainly many do, to various degrees.

Another prevalent image frequently used against claims for higher wages and better working conditions is that of rural subsistence. Entanglements between subsidiary household production and large farms can create a squeeze between subsistence and wage labor. In an illustrative instance, I met a farm manager dressed in Armani and driving a Mercedes explaining that villagers were actually alright with minimum wages as they grew most of what they needed in their gardens. In a more general sense, subsistence farming is mobilized as an implicit or explicit legitimation for low wage levels in the countryside. One production manager, who had moved to a village some years before, explains:

Everybody thinks that people in the village should, for some reason, get less money . . . they think that even specialists, civil servants . . . if you work in a village, you should earn less. I ask them: “And why do you think this should be the case?” . . . and they say: “Well, you all have your subsidiary farming . . . you live on subsidiary farming.” And I tell them: “So, you don’t think that people want some better clothes as in the city, eat the way you eat, go to a shop or buy a car? . . . Why do you think that I should earn less than you do?” Go to any shop here and compare the prices to those in the city, the prices here are one and a half times higher. As if [they assumed these goods] arrived here on foot (LFE director, Perm region, 2014).

Rural disadvantage notwithstanding, many enterprises can count on hurdles that keep villagers from leaving the place. A manager explains: “If you live in the village, where else can you go? What choices do you have there? Not a lot. Except from just keep[ing] on working for the company that is there. Unless you would move to the city or would move to Moscow and do something completely different. But many villages, they don’t have so much choice” (Production manager, Voronezh, 2014).

While this young expat manager seems to underestimate rural residents’ agency, stressing a high level of dependence on local enterprises is appropriate. Rural residents may be attached to place and people, be responsible for elderly family members, or face a lack of opportunities elsewhere. Such attachments can bind them to a particular place, and this dependency can be exploited by enterprises. While daily and weekly commuting and seasonal labor migration are common, especially among men, they often end up in badly paid jobs, and their commuting increases the workload of women who stay in the village with responsibilities for children, elderly family members, or household farms.

The “exchange rates” for transferring rural forms of capital to urban spheres are often unfavorable. The amount you may get for selling a one-hundred-square-meter house in a village will most likely be insufficient to buy a single-room apartment in a town or city. Agricultural qualifications and work experience may be of little value for urban jobs, and those who leave villages may, again, lack access to better-paid alternatives. Private subsidiary agriculture, enterprise support, and land rent will provide a basic livelihood within low-budget village economies, but much less in a city. For instance, one thousand rubles you may receive annually for a land share won’t help you much with the two-hundred-thousand-ruble rent for a small flat. Instances of individuals or families choosing to return to their villages after facing difficulties and disappointment in cities are not uncommon. In short, the relative disadvantage bound to agriculture and rural political economies is not something that people can easily escape by leaving. At times, rural dwellers describe themselves as “slaves on our own land,”⁵ with nowhere to go.

While agricultural enterprises can exploit rural dwellers’ attachment to places that keep them from leaving, they also fear the deterioration of conditions that keep these places livable. Beyond wages, the availability of schools, kindergartens, medical centers and personnel, shops, reasonable streets and transport, electricity, gas, internet, and mobile phone connections all impact whether potential workers will stay in or move to a village. In many places, it seems easier for enterprises to ignore demands for higher wages, or pay wages and taxes months late, than to avoid investing in the village. But this is not enough to keep all rural residents in place and content. The low prestige of agriculture, low wages for hard work, and the perception of instability are frequently named as reasons why younger generations especially leave the country (Kvartiuk et al. 2020).⁶ At the same time, the number of persons employed in agriculture, forestry, and fishery in Russia declined by nearly one-third between 2005 and 2014—from over 4 million to below 2.8 million (Rosstat 2015b, 61), and the trend is expected to continue (Wegren 2014, 92–93).⁷

Managers in all enterprises I studied spoke about the risk of running out of crucial workers. They voice the concern that, even if they do not lack workers today, they build on a delicate equilibrium that may very well cause them trouble tomorrow. Younger workers leave villages while those who will not leave are getting older. One Agrokultura production manager reflects that, in some places, “the biggest competition (among agro-companies) is in finding good people. . . . It’s not so much about land. . . . On a production level, it’s mainly people that they are fighting about” (Production manager, Voronezh, 2012).

Managers and directors I interviewed for this study therefore travel around villages, universities, and training centers to fill vacancies or to hire a specialist on the spot.⁸ They invest money and political capital to enable village youths to attend university or to avoid the army if they commit to joining the enterprise later. They organize daily shuttle transport for workers from distant places and build houses for others. And some have considerably increased wages for key personnel such as specialists and tractor drivers. Yet some enterprises already lack workers today, have machinery standing idle because of a lack of personnel, or refrain from expanding production into more labor-intensive sectors for the same reason.⁹ As this company director reflects: “We have 120 people working with us. We assume that we will run out of this labor resource. That is, even with the most favorable social situation we can create in the village, there is the objective understanding that the number of workers will decrease every year. We cannot overcome urbanization, that’s a global process” (Businessman, Perm region, 2012).

Difficulties to fill certain positions have an impact on enterprise–worker relations. Mangers have to ask recently dismissed workers to return to their former jobs, being unable to find anyone to replace them: “They say that they will dismiss. But how to dismiss? They lack people anyhow” (Private farmer, Rostov region, 2013). Or, from the perspective of an enterprise owner: “[In my] engineering enterprise, [when a worker] comes to work drunk, too late, I will fire him. I have a million-city [a city with more than a million people] behind me. I have constant hiring and dismissal, turnover. Here is a village, here we are stuck. Here we lack people, we don’t have the labor resource” (Businessman, Perm region, 2011).

The labor balance varies a lot across places, however. One expat manager compares the employment situation in Russia with agricultural enterprises in Western Europe and complains that, besides core workers, they need to employ “a huge amount of other people that you need, like accountants, security, check men . . . it’s just a whole army that you need to keep just the machinery going, which you don’t have back home” (Production manager, Voronezh, 2014). Another manager explained that his farm would be much easier to manage if he reduced the workforce from 125 workers at that time to 30, and at the same time it would allow him to increase salaries for critical workers and specialists. But he fears that the dismissal of a large number of workers may backfire. Guards and watchmen employed on some farms already outnumber tractor drivers several times. A further deterioration of living conditions and spirit could destabilize existing local consent and spur appropriation, refusal, and sabotage.

The reserve army in this case is not exactly Marx’s ([1867] 2015, 784) reserve army or surplus population “always ready for exploitation,” surrounding an enterprise and keeping rates of exploitation high. Even efficiency-driven managers hesitate to dismiss a “redundant” worker who happens to be a family member of a “crucial” one, as this may motivate the whole family to leave the village. Also, any further decline of the village population could increase problems in the future. Since administrations’ budgets are calculated per registered inhabitant, and schools’ budgets per pupil, population decline may result in the further deterioration of social infrastructure, which in turn will increase the difficulties to attract or keep critical workers. Unemployment and labor shortages exist alongside each other.

Persistence

Scholars have noted the relative absence of organized movements or resistance in the Russian countryside (Mamonova 2016; Mamonova and Visser 2014) compared to other geographic contexts. There have been few publicly visible protests around agrarian issues over recent decades and hardly any politically organized groups or networks of peasants and agrarian workers within the country or as part of international networks such as La Via Campesina. Although agricultural trade unions exist in principle, they play a minor and rather defensive role and are often accused of being puppet organizations. While protests are not uncommon in the country in general, they have rarely included rural areas, and then concerns have tended to be related to environmental issues more than agriculture.¹⁰ One notable exception was a tractor caravan, organized by private farmers, heading to Moscow from the Krasnodar region in the summer of 2016 in protest of raider seizures (hostile land and enterprise takeovers), corruption, and fraud. Protests by farmers are common: writing letters to authorities; organizing social media campaigns; attempting to draw media attention through actions such as hunger strikes; or engaging in more silent and hidden acts of sabotage or appropriation. Most of such acts that I learned about were quite dispersed, organized individually, and, at times, opportunistic, aimed at seizing resources for individual enterprises without further political aims.

Less common, according to my interviews and further sources, are strikes by workers on large farms. Union organizing and the lawful staging of strikes are difficult in Russia in general (Matveev 2019a), and the level of political organization among agrarian workers is low (Visser et al. 2015). And yet such absence of strikes is surprising given the big collectives of workers on large farms that could form a basis for labor organization, or the fact that a strike by tractor or combine drivers during harvest periods would allow for substantial pressure on enterprises as harvest failure would be economically disastrous. This raises questions about political organization and other factors stimulating or hampering the formation of resistance or organized agrarian politics more generally and under specific historical-geographic circumstances (Mamonova 2019; Wolford 2010). Rather than attempting to discuss these questions in general, I turn to one specific aspect that corresponds with dispersed dispossession in particular and will argue for taking struggles for continuation and persistence seriously as forms of political agency, besides more disruptive counterparts often framed as resistance in a narrower sense.

Remarkably, the only strike I read or heard about resulted from the firing of a farm director by the mother company after which the collective of workers refused to work—until the fired director encouraged them to return to work. The farm director in question was famous for her support of workers and her skill in keeping the collective together and operations going. One instance I witnessed illustrates this vividly. Much had gone wrong on the farm over recent days: a new seeder was standing idle due to a leaking tube, and so was one urgently needed tractor with a bug in the navigation system. The company engineers had not been able to organize spare parts yet. Two drivers refused to work because the newly installed computers on their tractors miscalculated the hectare coverage and fuel consumption in a way that would have earned them negative wages.¹¹ Accusations of theft had been passed on to the main office by an expat manager although they later turned out to be wrong.

The farm director invited one of the mother company’s production managers to her office where she had gathered a dozen key farm personnel. Not hiding her anger—not about technical difficulties, which occur in large-scale farming, but more about management’s mistakes in coping with the situation—she began to enact her role as a khoziaika¹², master and caretaker, and recover her authority and the workers’ dignity. Employing some brilliant rhetorical strategies, she redirected the accusations from the collective toward management failures at higher levels: a second glance or an inquiry with a farm specialist would have resolved the allegation of theft on the spot and without causing a scandal. Solutions proposed by company management to get staff and machines back to work ignored the situation of workers afraid of losing wages and reluctant to be employed on other machinery. Fiercely demanding respect for the workers, she came forward with a solution that all parties could (or had to) agree on. In a well-staged, on-the-spot phone call, she even managed to order the urgently needed spare part that the company could not get hold of, claiming back some of the competence over machinery that had been transferred to the head office. She instantly filled the gaps she had just brought to light and reclaimed authority, showed herself to be a skillful mediator, and constructed a close bond between herself and the collective.

I suggest that the political moment here—and by extension the reaction to the director’s dismissal—has parallels to the defense of kolkhoz relations discussed in chapter 2. In both instances, concerns and action were directed toward the maintenance of arrangements and agreements that villagers and workers relied on for employment options, working conditions, and some social security. The shareholder collective in Setovka mobilized to keep a local enterprise and the associated support structure intact, and a workers’ collective under Agrokultura mobilized against the dismissal of a farm director standing up for workers. These can be understood as “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985) insofar as in both cases the collectives would have been in a weak position to engage in open, organized forms of resistance. Rather than interrupting or sabotaging operations and structures, however, actors here aimed at stabilizing certain existing arrangements. Pressure to collaborate with established enterprises and companies follows from the view that things would be worse without them.

Such stabilizing tactics should not be confused with passivity or the absence of political agency. In Saba Mahmood’s terms, “What may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility . . . may very well be a form of agency. . . . Agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that result in [progressive] change but also those that aim toward continuity, stasis, and stability” (Mahmood 2001, 212). Writing about rural Latvia, and thus closer to this study’s context, Dace Dzenovska (2018, 21) describes how rural residents act to postpone what they call “slow extinction” in an attempt to maintain “life in a harsh present with hope, but not certainty, that life would go on.” Similarly, for this study, I would stress the importance of acknowledging the practices described here as agency.

Dispersed dispossession provides a background against which tactics that aim toward continuity and stability appear plausible and become graspable as adaptive and creative forms of agency that respond to disruptive changes and high levels of uncertainty. I don’t suggest that such tactics were, per se, politically effective or emancipatory. But they make sense under given circumstances. As Maria Todorova writes about post-Soviet coping strategies, “The longing for security and stability often leads people toward stupidity, but it is not a stupid longing” (Todorova 2010a, 7). Dispersed dispossession forms the horizons of imagination, expectations, and plausibility. As a matter of workers’ experience, a nonworking enterprise often causes much more trouble than a working one. Farm operations stagnate and collapse regularly, for various reasons, but rarely for the benefit of workers. A politics of persistence aims at keeping changes predictable, authorities accountable, and decision-making inclusive. It may be modest in its concrete aims but it is, at the same time, quite fundamental in that it targets relations that form the basis for security and predictability, as well as agency. This is not to say that dispersed dispossession rendered more coordinated, proactive, or radical forms of political mobilization impossible or would fully explain the relative absence of organized movements in rural Russia. Coordinated resistance needs to be organized, and whether or not it will occur in the face of dispersed dispossession depends, as in other instances, on factors such as leadership, institutional hosts able to mediate and organize mobilization, experience, and other resources for collective action to draw on (R. Hall et al. 2015; Motta and Nilsen 2011).

How rural residents usually criticize what they experience, and what they have experienced in the past, further helps to make sense of the politics or persistence under these specific circumstances. Some of the fiercest and most straightforward criticism of enterprises and investors I encountered was directed against those who not merely shut down a local enterprise but also plundered and sold off productive infrastructure, thus depriving local populations of a basis and means of production and value creation (chapter 3). Harsh criticism is also directed against enterprises and companies that draw substantial benefits from state programs and subsidies but do not use them to the benefit of workers and villages. Instances include such companies that bought up farms with government support without developing them. Sometimes they are accused of using such deals merely to “grab” state resources: “Like a dog on a heap of hay, it does not eat but does not give anything to anyone else either” (LFE director, Lipetsk region, 2012). Such criticism resonates with studies that emphasize the role of “insider rent” (Dzarasov 2014) in Russian capitalism: the degree to which elites are able to tap into state-controlled resources to privatize benefits from them.

Rural actors measure the “behavior” of such enterprises and companies against investment promises. Many would emphasize that the term “investor,” loaded with positive connotations, should not apply to those who do not live up to promises to revive production, to provide employment and broader social supports, and hence contribute to local development—promises that have often been made to legitimize investment projects in the first place. Company owners and top managers visiting a village on a helicopter once a year, avoiding meeting villagers, exemplify management acting beyond rural populations’ reach, and decoupling of business and population interests. Such projects are criticized for profiting from state subsidies and the availability and cheapness of resources such as farmland and farms, but not to the benefit of local communities. Rural dwellers in these situations articulate anger and frustration since they find themselves disregarded and betrayed in various roles at the same time: as owners (with property that makes no difference), as workers (left without jobs), and as citizens (with little benefit from agricultural subsidies and rural development agendas, and without political influence). They lament the loss of a place and role they think they should have within a political economy, and they criticize how companies exploit and perpetuate patterns of dispersed dispossession that for many began with the disintegration of the Soviet agrarian system and for some even before that.