CHAPTER 6

Reconnection

The Idea of dispersed dispossession is significant beyond the context of this study. While the histories of colonialism and totalitarianism continue to matter and to cause harm (Kuzio 2023; Stoler 2016), the concept resonates with a wide range of circumstances. Further, in an era in which the economic order is increasingly described as post-neoliberal (Berndt and Boeckler 2023; Bishop and Payne 2021), authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are on the rise (Koch 2022), austerity and systemic crises threaten the fabric of social life (Berlant 2022; Ryabchuk 2023), and environmental crises directly affect ever more people (Dankelman and Naidu 2020; Tsing et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2023), rethinking concepts of rural dispossession, and dispossession more generally, is timely and necessary. The idea of dispersed dispossession should help illuminate mechanisms and dimensions of dispossession that elude other concepts and framings. This study emphasizes five such dimensions. First, the concept 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, 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. Third, rather than by direct seizure, dispersed dispossession works through the fundamentally unequal capacities to navigate disintegration and to repurpose, revalue, and appropriate devaluated and degraded goods. Fourth, it shapes the horizon of conceivable alternatives and plausible promises. Finally, it comes with profound implications for the conditions and conceptualization of resistance and agency. I conclude by revisiting these points.

Relational Goods

As we have seen, dispersed dispossession is less about the separation of rural dwellers from land alone, or the violation of property rights, but rather about changing political-economic, social, and physical landscapes and actors’ capacities to navigate them. One can choose different historical starting points for telling this story—a choice with a profound impact on the narrative. This section emphasizes the post-Soviet reforms while the following sections address how further pasts and futures are folded into the present. Even decades after their onset, post-Soviet land and agricultural reforms remain significant for current rural relations. Rural actors themselves still frequently refer to them to make sense of the circumstances they encounter in the present, with many interpreting them as a starting point of a series of changes and developments that led to lasting uncertainty and instability and that deprived them of something other than individual property. The post-Soviet disintegration is part of the genealogy of rural conditions in the 2010s.

The reforms’ results should not be confused with reformers’ declared objectives. Both in letter and in effect, however, these reforms aimed far beyond redistributing land access; they aimed at rearranging the system of agrarian production and rural life and redesigning the countryside. The logic of decollectivization was to undo the historic evils and mistakes of collectivization, replacing central planning with economic freedom, markets, and entrepreneurial initiative, and Soviet-style large farm enterprises with private farms (Allina-Pisano 2008; Hann 2003; Wegren 2009). Both the implications and partial failure of this agenda shaped the meaning and mechanisms of rural dispossession in Russia in the 2010s. As land entitlements failed to play the role of a silver bullet to reorganize the agricultural system, land relations became complicated (Lerman and Shagaida 2007; Shagaida 2010). As we have seen, many rural dwellers were unable to become the kind of economic subject envisioned by market reformers—private farmers cultivating their own land. Accordingly, they identify the roots of their deprivation not so much in losing access to land but rather in their limited capacities to secure decent livelihoods under circumstances they would describe as unjust for agricultural producers in general and smallholders in particular. Land entitlements, in many cases, did not serve their interests very well because they could not use or keep them. They could not use them if benefiting from land rights would have required access to other resources—such as infrastructure, machinery, subsidies, insurance, markets, agronomic, managerial, or legal expertise—that they were lacking or that they lost at the same time they obtained property titles. This occurred most profoundly in places and regions less favorable for agriculture. In more favorable agricultural regions, rural dwellers often could not keep land entitlements. Here, agriculture drew earlier and stronger business interest (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006; Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019; Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk 2023), and rural residents were more directly dispossessed of land by agricultural companies that exploited diffused and vague property relations and corruption in the legal and political system (Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor 2012).

The story of dispersed dispossession is hence also one about the limits and failures of land reform and the limits to individual property in land more broadly. Rather than security, rural residents had gained “dispersed ownership” (Kurakin 2015, 153). If we were to tell the story of rural dispossession in post-Soviet Russia with a narrow focus on landed property, as a story of rural residents “only” losing their land, this would in some sense extend the market reform’s failed basic promise—that property titles would provide a sufficient basis for a private small-scale farming sector to develop and that farming households would be provided with a stable income and a place in a restructured national agrarian system.¹ Some rural dwellers indeed speak of land titles as symbols of reform failure and hence as part and parcel of the process that deprived them. Contrary to initial reform promises, property titles did not create independent peasants but instead revealed their dependence on sustaining relationships mediated by the state, agricultural enterprises, or local communities. Much of the reform was perceived as a crisis, and crises can reveal people’s dependence on various enabling and sustaining relationships that are denied in great parts of modern, and especially liberal, world views (Hoppe 2024). Property-based reform promises failed not least due to their implicit reductionism, presupposing and envisioning counterfactual self-sufficiency if property rights were granted.²

The concentration of agricultural assets that began by the turn of the century and intensified in subsequent years does not usually displace subsistence farming or pose immediate threats to individual land rights, as the land that companies acquire has largely been worked by large enterprises since Soviet times. Dispossession here usually does not constitute an event or boil down to a separation from farmland as a primary theft. Rather, it works through the separation of complex webs of relations. What makes the issue of land access rather secondary for many rural dwellers in Russia is the breakdown and lack of a broader array of supports that would enable them to benefit from it in the first place. These are not merely supplementary means to the realization of farmland potential but resources in their own right.

We have seen that the goods at stake in dispersed dispossession can resemble state-mediated public goods or community-mediated commons. Often, they don’t fit these categories, a point to which we’ll return below. In broad terms, the objects of dispersed dispossession can be defined as relational goods (Donati 2019). Rural residents may demand them from the state, co-create them collectively, or lament their absence. We have seen, for instance, how communities fight for the preservation or restoration of ways of governing an enterprise as a khoziaistvo rather than a business, aiming toward need fulfillment more than production. Such relations can be paternalistic (Rogers 2006), but we have also witnessed how rural dwellers take an active role in restoring and reinventing collective arrangements, and claim their role in and benefits from a khoziaistvo. From this perspective, rural residents cling to large enterprises not due to an abstract or nostalgic preference for large-scale farming, but because the latter function as mediators of enterprise-controlled and state-provided resources vital for rural populations and institutions such as village administrations. In this regard, the goods mediated through a khoziaistvo can be understood as relational goods that both consist of and emerge from social relations (Donati 2019), and which collectives can demand but also co-create.

An increased sensitivity for relational goods can benefit rural and agrarian studies more broadly, not least to broaden and deepen concepts of rural dispossession that often focus on land (Edelman and Wolford 2017). Landed dispossession is the most prominent and most broadly theorized form of rural dispossession.³ Many studies find, or assume, that rural dispossession follows, temporally and causally, from the appropriation of farmland by powerful states or private investors. This is often presented as straightforward and obvious. Michael Levien (2013b, 379) offers a compellingly clear and conceptually elaborate summary of some often implicit assumptions when he describes land as “essentially a zero-sum asset” of finite supply and under high current demand that “can either stay with a farmer or be given to a capitalist.” He assumes that the dispossession of land “constitutes a total and one-time threat to people’s means of production and subsistence . . . a sudden, exogenous and irreversible threat to people’s livelihoods, homes, and ways of life” (Levien 2013b, 363). He concludes that the dispossession of land comes with “inescapable transparency” and “cannot be obscured” since “any farmer can see perfectly clearly the threat this poses to his or her existence” (Levien 2013b, 362).⁴

I do not wish to challenge the accuracy of such findings for their specific contexts, and I acknowledge that agrarian and rural studies do consider goods and resources beyond land. It still seems worth emphasizing that the distinct and context-specific significance and role of land relations need to be studied in a way that does not collapse the assumption and diagnosis into one. If land becomes the unquestioned object and common denominator of rural dispossession, it may sometimes turn into an empty signifier and foreclose rather than stimulate explicit investigation.⁵ The problem then is not only with empirical inaccuracy but also with the very scope and solidity of such critique. When ideas of rural dispossession are narrowed down to land grabs, this brings the risk of bracketing other forms of dispossession and assuming that as long as there is no land grab, there is no problem (Vorbrugg 2019). The peasant or local landholder then figures as the only kind of potentially dispossessed subject—and not the wage laborer or the unemployed, the self-employed depending on state support, or the worker leaving behind land and family and migrating to a city, often in possession of land titles and still without sufficient income. It is characters of the latter kind, however, who figure predominantly in our study.

In Russia, farmland takeovers are often not coincident with the loss of means of production or subsistence; they are not transparent, such that people do not know for sure what or who deprives them, or how; and they are commonly not understood as a zero-sum game in which investors grab what should belong to the peasants. It is a matter of historical experience for many rural residents that individual land rights or access did not substitute for agricultural subsidies and rural development programs, or for local arrangements, including kolkhoz relations, that would provide security and support. This does not mean that land relations were irrelevant. Personal subsidiary farming (food production on private plots) remains important for many households. Besides agriculture, land is used for various purposes, including fishing, mushroom and berry picking, beekeeping, and rural tourism. Residents are also attached to rural places and land for social, cultural, and environmental reasons. Many say they enjoy the relative calm and freedom in the countryside, including the distance from state authorities. Land relations do matter in rural Russia. However, I am cautious about framing them as a nucleus that would define livelihoods, or around which rural livelihoods would “naturally” evolve.

Dispossession after State Socialism

The idea of dispersed dispossession emerged from a study in the Russian countryside. While it is not unique to the Russian or “postsocialist” context, and not the only form of dispossession one would find there, it is contingent on historical context, including the implications of state socialism and its demise. The question of dispossession after the demise of state socialism has been academically addressed early, recurrently, and prominently (Allina-Pisano 2007, 2008; Humphrey 1996; Kalb 2009; Kalugina 2007; Nazpary 2002; Verdery 2003).⁶ Notions of “cultural” (Creed 2011) and “moral” (Hann 2011) dispossession emerged from these debates. While these studies offer both important empirical insights and original conceptual contributions, interestingly they have remained relatively disconnected from most of the broader debates on dispossession in the social sciences.⁷ Most studies of postsocialism have engaged rather superficially with dispossession as a concept and the theoretical traditions underlying it, while postsocialist contexts are largely ignored within more general debates. As a result, there remains a gap between empirical studies of dispossession in the region—which tend to use the term in a descriptive manner and as if it was self-evident—and broader debates on dispossession that largely bracket (post)socialist contexts and thereby wrongly imply that they had little or no theoretical significance.⁸ This gap is more than a coincidental omission. It rather reflects some distinct challenges in bridging these debates.

In academic debates within Russia, the question of rural dispossession in the post-Soviet period has not been addressed systematically and has remained surprisingly absent (Kalugina 2015, 231). Context-specific theoretical and methodological preferences only partially explain this. Russian scholars’ hesitance to draw on critical theoretical traditions, labeled as Marxist, is sometimes taken to explain prominent gaps between “Eastern” and “Western” post-Soviet academic discourses (Ėtkind 2011; Tlostanova 2012). In Russian rural studies, however, a significant left-leaning tradition exists and prevails.⁹ These scholars, as well as their colleagues in the liberal camp, do not principally shy away from criticizing failed policies, unscrupulous businesses, and other drivers of rural deprivation. But they rarely apply a language of dispossession, arguably because it can appear ambivalent. The post-Soviet reforms granted agricultural workers property rights rather than depriving them of ownership, which complicates the application of property-based understandings of dispossession. This has led some to argue that dispossession in postsocialist settings can be hidden rather than obvious. Katherine Verdery (2003, 76) found that underlying “the rise of responsible owners and entrepreneurs . . . lurked forces that dispossess” in Romania—a finding that holds true for Russia, too. I would emphasize, however, that dispossession seems elusive here due to the limits of conceptual language rather than the invisibility of its effects.

Interestingly, while dispossession in a liberal and legal sense translates clumsily into Russian, one of the several terms for deprivation captures part of the idea of dispersed dispossession quite well. Obezdolivanie, literally and in its older meaning, means being bereft of a share in something rather than individual ownership.¹⁰ This book has aimed to address the need and under-explored potential for theorizing dispossession along the lines of losing one’s share in collective goods and place in social arrangements.

For the absence of post-Soviet realities from broader critical debates on dispossession, it is important that while concepts of dispossession may appear as universal, they are rather bound to distinct historic-geographic contexts. Robert Nichols (2020, 51) identifies “two contexts and two conceptual lineages behind the language of dispossession: one European and one Anglocolonial,” where the first refers to the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the latter to the appropriation of Indigenous territory through property-based “legalized theft.” These conceptual lineages do not fit Russia and other former socialist contexts very well. Historically, Russia did not transition from feudalism to capitalism, but to state socialism. Until recently, Russian colonial history has rarely been acknowledged. It has been discussed and theorized mainly in countries with historical experience of it, but these debates have not traveled well beyond these contexts and have hardly impacted conceptualizations of dispossession. The absence of insights from the region in debates on dispossession reflects the more general marginalization of the “Global East” (M. Müller 2020) as a space from which significant questions or original concepts and theories may emerge.¹¹

Studies of agrarian change in Russia based on extensive fieldwork have become rare since the beginning of the 2010s.¹² Conceptual contributions have not been a main priority of most recent studies of rural change in Russia or have received only limited attention in international, mainly anglophone, debates. Such hurdles notwithstanding, some themes in the literature on post-Soviet dispossession seem well suited to connect to more general debates. Earlier scholars have revisited and extended concepts such as that of property (Hann 2005; Verdery and Humphrey 2004; Verdery 1999) or neoliberalism (Collier 2011; Hirt, Sellar, and Young 2013) through the lens of postsocialist privatization. I want to suggest that, similarly, we can revisit and extend concepts of dispossession. The dispossession of collective goods, meaning, options, and agency has been a recurrent theme in studies of postsocialist privatization. Jessica Pisano, for instance, found that during privatization, agrarian “worker-shareholders were dispossessed of the land and farms they had collectively regarded as their own” (Allina-Pisano 2008, 185). Caroline Humphrey (1996, 72) suggested that the “dispossessed” in Russia “are created by the specifically post-Soviet political domains of which they are no longer a part.”

Such dispossession has often been treated as a historical and regional specificity, but its significance extends beyond regional framings. Understood as “part of a historically specific transition from one form of social organization to another” (Nichols 2020, 77), immanent in “microlevel practices that worked to dismantle one infrastructure of life and replace it with another” (Nichols 2020, 45), postsocialist dispossession corresponds very well with historical instances of settler colonialism or the great enclosure, or systemic ruptures and crises: it relates to changes at a societal level and to the infrastructure of life. This resonates with findings that contemporary dispossession elsewhere also works through “social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism” (Byrd et al. 2018, 1) or can occur as an unexpected and unplanned piecemeal erosion of social relations (Li 2014a; Povinelli 2011). It also resonates with reflection on life and deprivation on a “damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017), environmental damage that has been caused by both capitalist and state socialist systems (Gille 2022; P. R. Josephson et al. 2013).

In this respect, this study speaks to a growing literature that emphasizes conditions of prolonged crisis, deteriorated livelihood bases, and systemic disadvantage over eventful dispossession. Concepts that have been coined and used to address such conditions include abandonment (Biehl 2013b; Povinelli 2011), duress (Stoler 2016), and structural, slow, silent, and ordinary violence (Das 2007; Galtung 1969; Nixon 2011; Watts [1983] 2013). They have been related to deprivation rooted in colonialism, imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitation, multiple crises, structural adjustment, pollution and ecological deterioration, and austerity in the Global North, South, and East. I laid out my reasons for sticking to the concept of dispossession in the introduction.

Appropriation

Dispersed dispossession creates specific conditions for appropriation and concentration, devaluing and freeing assets that then become easy to seize. In post-Soviet Russia, privatization alongside the disintegration of the agrarian system, the mass bankruptcy of enterprises, and the devaluation of labor and further agricultural assets set the conditions for the growth of huge agricultural companies—the infamous “agroholdings” (Rylko and Jolly 2005; Shagaida 2012), also mocked as “oligarkhozes” (Nikulin 2011). They exemplify a massive concentration of land control, market shares, state subsidies, and political influence for powerful companies. Seen from this perspective, the story of dispossession can be told as one of accumulation: the powerful and privileged gained opportunities for appropriating available and undervalued assets. Rural residents formally gained property titles, which, however, turned out to be relatively useless or insecure. Concurrently, they lost social security and guarantees, and their place as members of enterprises, villages, and the national economy. This echoes a more general historical pattern in which the creation of property relations and dispossession are part of the very same process in which the transfer of property and the transformation into property go hand in hand (Nichols 2020, 31).

Yet the genealogy of “concentration” (Clapp 2023) of assets, control, and power in the Russian agricultural system begins before privatization. The “collectivization” under Stalin (the creation of large farms and industrialized agriculture through the dispossession of peasants) and “decollectivization” during market reforms (the freeing of agricultural assets through the distribution of property titles, for instance) were opposed historical forces that, nevertheless and ironically, both played a constitutive role in the concentration of agricultural assets and power that we find today. As we have seen, agribusinesses and investors draw advantage and opportunities from villages, enterprises, and fields formed for and through large-scale industrial farming over decades. The dispersion of state and collective farms—one declared goal of post-Soviet reforms—eventually reverted to even greater concentration as far as large producers are concerned. A homogenization of production occurred in parallel. While large Soviet enterprises produced a range of products, also to cater to local needs, their successor enterprises often gradually cut back to focus on the most lucrative ones, and larger companies restructured farms they bought to produce a single or just a few products.

They also benefit from a relative abundance of farmland created by successive Soviet governments pumping trillions of gas- and petro-rubles into the expansion of the cultivated areas (P. R. Josephson et al. 2013; Nefedova 2014). This abundance, together with the massive devaluation in the post-Soviet agricultural crisis, turned agricultural land into a category of “Cheap Nature” (Moore 2015)—a resource, created outside of capitalist relations, hugely undervalued and easy to appropriate and exploit. The dispersion of land and enterprise ownership in the post-Soviet period, the distribution of land entitlements to individual owners, many of whom could not really use them individually, created opportunities to appropriate devalued agricultural assets. Domestic elites were the main beneficiaries. Their group composition changed much less than the political-economic systems from which they derived their privilege (Barnes 2006; Dzarasov 2014), which is another continuity in concentration trajectories across political systems and ruptures.

While this is an example of assets that have been produced outside of capitalism being absorbed into capitalist relations, I would argue that their freeing through crisis and devaluation itself can be understood more accurately as historically contingent rather than a function of capitalist accumulation. The appropriation of devalued resources was not always straightforward either. Over the chapters, we have seen projects to control and channel resources “without immediately capitalizing” them (Moore 2015, 95). Companies’ motivations to appropriate farms and land were diverse, and economic and political benefits were not always immediate. If disintegration and devaluation are drawn-out processes, the same is true for appropriation through reintegration, recombination, and revaluation. Dispersed dispossession is thus characterized by repetitive rounds of promise, failure, abandonment, integration, and appropriation. Different types of dispossession can occur in parallel in the same political-economic context, however, and instances of direct land theft are also reported in rural Russia. In those instances, state–business entanglements provide impunity for companies that dispossess rural dwellers by force.¹³ Such incidents have been reported to be most common in southwestern parts of Russia and around Moscow (Nikulin 2012; Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor 2012; Visser and Spoor 2011).

Dispersed dispossession also resulted in partial codependence between rural residents and enterprises. Agriculture is a risky and not always profitable business in Russia, and “official” agricultural subsidies are low in international comparison. However, many of the more successful companies tap into other resources, use various diversification and hedging strategies, or are part of varied business conglomerates. Those characterized by deep regional embeddedness, multisector configuration, and entanglement with politics and developmental agendas echo the Soviet model of territorial-production complexes (Rutt 1986) and are better understood as complex hybrids than pure capitalist companies or agrarian producers (chapter 5). Enterprises strongly entangled with rural development policies are rewarded for taking on social functions. When they mediate state subsidies and rural development programs, or take over social responsibilities and services, they respond both to the need to maintain a degree of livability in villages for the workers on whom they depend and to demands from those parts of the state apparatus that promote developmentalist promises (Matveev and Zhuravlev 2023; Wengle 2015). State actors, in turn, rely on them to implement development agendas and keep political ties on the ground.

The form and extent of social provision by agricultural enterprises change over time and vary across regions (Nefedova 2014; Ryzhova 2022; Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019). Strong agribusinesses in favorable agricultural regions tend to cut back and formalize kolkhoz-type services as they can pay higher wages, invest in machinery that reduces their dependency on workers, and operate in an environment in which the survival of a village does not fully depend on their support and guarantees. Local needs are changing, too. Where local administrations can get funds for renovating a school from state programs, there is no need for an enterprise to take up that task. Where rural residents give up subsidiary farming, they do not need companies to work their fields or provide fodder for their animals. They may be interested in better roads or mobile data connection, however. Infrastructural development of this kind goes beyond what local enterprises can provide. In contrast, large companies or powerful businesspeople closely entangled with state authorities can facilitate larger development projects, as we have seen. In short, state–business symbioses change and may be upscaled, but they persist.

This echoes studies that find that the current economic policy regime in Russia “represents a mix of different paradigms” (Matveev 2019b, 29), including the concurrence of state developmentalism and “withdrawal from previous social obligations” (Kulmala et al. 2014, 540). It helps to situate Russian agribusinesses within the broader variations of capitalism and to differentiate the story of concentration and dispossession in Russia from finance-driven or neoliberal pathways elsewhere.¹⁴

Horizons

Dispersed dispossession unfolds in drawn-out temporalities rather than clear-cut events. We have seen how arrangements that have stopped working for the present also lost their capacity to carry a promise for the future. With Akhil Gupta (2018, 69), we can argue that the “temporal structure” of such situations is specific. He uses the notion of “suspension” to describe an indeterminate state that is not merely a transformational moment between a beginning and end point, but one that “needs to be theorized as its own condition of being” (Gupta 2015) to better understand how an indeterminate present corresponds with an open or uncertain future. Related observations have been made and theorized for former socialist settings. Dace Dzenovska (2020, 23) conceptualizes the ”interstices of the old world and the new” as emptiness, or an interregnum. As the old is withering away and the new cannot emerge, the present itself becomes relatively unstable and open, inscribed with loss and possibility (Dzenovska, Artiukh, and Martin 2023).¹⁵ This study’s contribution to a better understanding of situations characterized by such suspension is twofold: it reflects on their impact on rural imaginaries and agency, and it demonstrates how businesspeople and politicians frame such situations, including the history of failed improvement promises, to justify projects that promise to fix them in the future (Barry and Gambino 2024).

We have seen how the suspension of credible political promises is part of what shapes both material conditions and social imaginaries. It has to do with the succession of powerfully imposed but often spectacularly failing schemes (Scott 1998; Smirnova 2019). The Soviet system obviously failed to meet its high-modernist development targets and ideological promises (Buck-Morss 2000; Scott 1998; Yurchak 2006). Market reforms resulted in sharper inequalities and failed to bring about the promised kinds of agricultural modes of production and subjects. Agribusinesses often failed to meet promises to both shareholders and local stakeholders, and even to achieve profitability. Dispossession was partly implied in these projects, an effect of their failure, or both. The situation is historically complex, and Russian public discourses addressing it are not coherent.¹⁶ For many rural residents, it seems difficult to make sense of this situation, but many ascribe their deprivation, or the state of suspension they find themselves in, to schemes and promises that didn’t work.

This perception shapes the horizon of possible and desirable alternatives. Even those who continue to emphasize certain benefits of the Soviet system show awareness of its downsides and the fact that there is no way back to it. But promises related to the market and land reforms did not materialize either, and many rural dwellers lost faith in the option of smallholder farming long before they lost land titles to agricultural companies. Similarly, the promise that a restructured post-Soviet economy would provide pathways from villages to cities, and from agriculture to other economic sectors, materialized for some but was impossible or unfavorable for others. With subsistence agriculture providing a poor alternative, and peasant farming a difficult or unrealistic one, rural residents did not become the kind of peasant farmers envisioned in market reforms.

The sense of inhabiting a situation shaped by repetitions of failing improvement promises may lead to disillusionment or cynicism. Yet situations of suspension are not situations of stagnation, as they open specific possibilities for specific actors. For instance, even though contemporary agricultural companies’ business models are different from historic kolkhozes, they can still build on the unpopularity of market reforms among rural populations. Carrying on with large-scale agriculture, they promise that this will preserve local farms, provide jobs, and prevent further deterioration. The relative common sense of being caught in a present ripe with precarity and crises of everyday reproduction (Nikulin and Trotsuk 2016) can be turned productive for some. It is mobilized and exploited by politicians out for votes and companies out for land and cheap labor, with both promising development, improvement, and employment to those who become part of their respective projects. As the threat of further deterioration lingers, promises to fix the situation and revive large farms, local agriculture, and villages have become common. Such promises can relate to a longing to reverse disintegration, reinstall infrastructures, agency, even a lost sense of temporality, bringing back prospects for a future that seemed lost or at least uncertain.¹⁷ Material infrastructures often appear as “the most concrete things that could establish a link between the past, the present, and the future” (Dzenovska 2018, 22), and the promise to revive deteriorated infrastructures can be mobilized to legitimate all kinds of projects, including exploitative and extractive ones.¹⁸

Remembering past empty, nonperformative, or failed promises, many rural dwellers show healthy mistrust and skepticism toward such promises made by authorities or companies. They address the repetition of a long list of unfulfilled promises, failed schemes, and crises. And yet, many see themselves depending on the state or companies (or hybrids of both) perceived as powerful enough to fix persisting and deeply ingrained problems. On an ideological level, therefore, it can be said that dispersed dispossession works “through multidirectional temporalities of threat and promise” (Ahmann 2022, 301). One of the often implicit and sometimes explicit threats brought forward by state authorities and company representatives is to not intervene, to leave things as they are, or allow further deterioration. Keeping enterprises and villages going is an effort that must be made by someone willing and able to do so. When forms of local self-governance and economic subsistence have deteriorated and been replaced by centralized hierarchies and economic or political dependency, any local agency to revive a place can seem highly constrained (Farmer 2004; Kovács 2016; Li 2014a; Watts [1983] 2013). Rural residents do criticize companies and politicians for perpetuating existing deprivations and not living up to those improvement promises that played an important role in legitimizing investment projects in the first place. And yet a perceived lack of alternatives keeps them dependent on such actors. Joan Robinson (1962, 45) provocatively stated that the “misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” I heard similar assessments, put forward in more blunt and bitter forms, in many places across rural Russia.

This book demonstrates how the continuous failure of promises, expectations, and hopes does not necessarily or immediately destabilize the workings of companies, or larger economic and political projects and systems. This is not unique to rural Russia. Lauren Berlant (2011) has shown how “cruel optimism,” the attachment to unachievable promises and fantasies, is immanent to the workings of late liberal capitalism. The conditions, promises, and longings that we have dealt with in this study are different. I found little hope for models of capitalist/democratic development of the Western type, also compared to studies of rural change in other former state-socialist countries (Dzenovska 2022). The kind of “cruel optimism” we saw in this study is less teleological and future-bound. Rather, it mirrors the circular and recursive temporal patterns of dispersed dispossession itself. Promises of a better future take a detour to the past as they pledge to fix past deterioration and restore what many deem was lost: security, predictability, collectivity, and the basis for hope.¹⁹ Promises of this kind are made to seem plausible against the backdrop of disintegration, and they create and reiterate imaginative horizons of a better future in which some of the lost accomplishments of the past have been restored. But promise-making also comes with its own history. The disappointment of earlier promises generates a longing for new ones and at the same time undermines their credibility. Situations of this kind are full of internal contradictions.

Promises to fix problems in the present by “returning” to a better past are always dubious. But in our case, any promise to restore a situation “before dispossession” is particularly implausible because, as I have argued, dispersed dispossession is best understood as perpetuating and exploiting historical injustice, degradation, and failures, the underlying causes of which span different political-economic phases. In this understanding, there never was an intact situation before dispossession “to return to.” Also, the recursive quality of dispersed dispossession is related to the recursive workings of reform, developmental or investment projects that create new realities that cannot be reversed. Answers to dispersed dispossession therefore cannot lie in the past. The traditionalist and revisionist political ideologies and projects²⁰ denying this are dangerous but common in (rural) Russia and the broader “region” (Bluhm and Varga 2020; Mamonova 2019). They are an obvious part of current Russian state propaganda and ideology and may explain some of the compliance with a regime become fully totalitarian. It would be inadequate, however, to explain such elements away through post-Soviet “nostalgia” or related diagnoses of Russian or “Eastern” attachment to the past. This study demonstrates how many rural residents—guilty of nostalgia, passivity, and compliance according to many popular accounts—critically reflect on the past or at least on aspects that are or were close to their experience or occurred in places where they live. It is important not to project inconvenient ideologies on convenient suspects. Some Western popular discourses tend to project a distorted relationship with the past onto Eastern Europeans, and some Russian urban discourses apply a similar pattern to Russian villagers. This study shows that the picture is more complicated. We may be well advised to approach the misuses of misrepresented history as part of a larger ideological project rather than the disposition of a certain population.

Dispersed Agency

What I have described as persistence in the previous chapter does not turn villages into places of stagnation. For most actors, passivity and stagnation would be bad options. Russian villages can be understood as sites of permanent reinvention. Oligarchs reinvent themselves as sovereigns of a village. Agricultural producers try to reinvent agriculture with new technologies, products, and ways of producing. Some villages are being reinvented as places of leisure rather than agriculture. And rural dwellers, too, reinvent themselves all the time: from workers in the regulated kolkhoz system to self-employed service providers or small entrepreneurs, commuters or new urbanites. Here, we see concurrences of continuity and change rather than a conflict between them. Conflicts evolve around how to organize changes, who benefits from them, and what will support rural dwellers to find their way through them. These practices and negotiations have often been characterized as mundane, “quiet,” or “silent” (Mamonova 2019; Visser et al. 2015; Visser et al. 2019) to differentiate them from open forms of resistance. It could be added that they often remain silent about future promises and big visions, and that discourses formulating visions for rural development in Russia have rather been driven by experts (Nikulin and Trotsuk 2016; Vorbrugg, Fatulaeva, and Dobrynin 2014).

We have discussed various tactics by which rural residents react to dispersed dispossession. Villagers often attempt to maintain, restore, or reinvent social contracts, material infrastructures, and institutions that would provide some security and predictability and a basis for individual and collective agency. If dispersed dispossession works through feedback loops, constraining agency, and creating vulnerabilities and dependencies that reinforce further dispossession, these tactics aim to break this cycle. Renovating a cultural center or a school helps to revive a place, and consolidating social contracts and relations of trust and responsibility enhances capacities for collective action. Relating, realigning, repairing, and regenerating are ways of acting that lay the ground for actions to take and things to emerge in the future, forms of agency that act back on their own conditions. If successful, they strengthen the capacity for collective agency. They can provide a basis to organize against intentional theft, but also against those forms of deprivation more characteristic of dispersed dispossession, such as authorities’ and apparatuses’ “indifference to arbitrary outcomes” (Gupta 2012, 6). They are, in terms of a theory of access discussed earlier, concerned with the social and material conditions that underly “the ability to derive benefit from things” (Ribot and Peluso 2003, 153).

In the introduction, I framed such ways of acting as (re)assembling. We now see how this framing resonates with conceptualizations of agency in former socialist contexts described as maintenance, endurance, repair, recombination, and small but significant deeds (Dzenovska 2018; Nikulin and Trotsuk 2022; Ringel 2018; Stark 1996). It further resonates with notions of endurance, but also the limits to and exhaustion of agency under conditions of abandonment and crises of everyday reproduction (Biehl 2013b; Das 2007; Povinelli 2011; Stoler 2016). In some ways, it also resembles practices of commoning. However, while such practices are relatively common in various former socialist countries, people and movements rarely use the label “commons,” in part, arguably, because of the uneasy association with state socialist collectivization (Toto et al. 2023). Also, although strong traditions of rural commons existed in pre-Soviet Russia (Lindner 2008; Smirnova 2019), there is no living memory of this time, and the occasional references to these historical commons, the obshchina, remained rather vague and partly disputed in my conversations with rural residents. More frequent than references to “the commons,” obshchina, are references to “the communal,” kommunal’noe or obshchestvennoe. These notions were in heavy use in the Soviet period. As we have seen, however, current uses adapt them to current conditions and reinvent them. They may be better understood as relational goods: this turns their relationship to specific historical forms into an empirical question rather than an implication of the concept. As they refer to forms of provision and support that can be demanded from the state or an enterprise or organized by community collectives, they blur, on a practical level, the boundary between the commons often associated with micro-politics, and public goods associated with state-provided social welfare. It is the first of these options, demanding support from authorities, that tends to be emphasized by those who characterize rural populations as dependent, compliant, or passive. A focus on reassembling sheds light on the more proactive forms of agency that exist, even though they may be relatively quiet or hidden (Jehlička et al. 2020; Jehlička 2021).

This is not to romanticize such forms of agency or suggest that they were prevalent in the Russian countryside. Indeed a lack of collaboration has been identified as among the reasons why local political or social initiatives have failed or why rural residents have failed to resist resource takeovers (Mamonova and Visser 2014; Ryzhova 2022). Studies that illuminate tendencies of political passivity and compliance that underly the relative absence of rural social movements or open forms of resistance remain important, not least because they help us better understand the popular support for authoritarian and populist regimes and politicians (Kovács 2022; Mamonova 2019). However, we should avoid reproducing clichés of apathetic villagers and collective paralysis because they are inaccurate, unfair, and do not provide good explanations (chapter 2). We should aim, rather, to better understand the forms of agency that do exist, beyond narrow understandings of open resistance. We have seen, for instance, that the quasi-absence of land rights movements is understandable given the limited use and worth that most rural dwellers in Russia derive from land rights. Why should they struggle for something most strongly associated with a range of broken promises and unfulfilled expectations? As an alternative to noting the absence of certain forms of political agency, we may focus on existing forms and conceptualizing tactics of reassembling that respond to dispersed dispossession as agency.

This is significant for studies of rural Russia, broader rural and agrarian studies, and crisis-ridden contexts in general. Lauren Berlant (2022, 25) argues that the “question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures” under conditions of prolonged crisis and institutional failure that lead to “infrastructural collapse” (Berlant 2022, 96) of things like roads, economies, health systems, social relations, moral economies or options, and imagination for political agency and claim-making. In such moments of crisis, in her words, “politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission” (Berlant 2022, 24). Infrastructure is important to manage the contingency and violence immanent in such conditions. In this perspective, infrastructure and its relation to a changing world are processual: infrastructure is what “binds us to the world in movement” (Berlant 2016, 394),²¹ a form of mediation, or “a technology of engagement” (Berlant 2022, 105). This resonates with rural residents’ attempts, described in this book, to repair, restore, and reinvent various infrastructures to navigate situations complicated by ruptures, contingency, and the disintegration of sustaining relations. Such a broad understanding of infrastructure is helpful to emphasize the importance of systems of reproduction in crisis, and of concrete relations and resources that sustain lives and agency under such conditions. It helps to understand how infrastructures are at the heart of struggles around dispersed dispossession.²²

This reflects subjects’ dependence on powers beyond themselves and its implications for conceptualizing dispossession. If we understand social beings as always in relation to and depending on others—humans, things, supporting environments and structures—they are never self-sufficient or in full possession of themselves. As Butler and Athanasiou (2013, 4, my emphasis) put it, “If we are beings who can be deprived of place, livelihood, shelter, food, and protection, if we can lose our citizenship, our homes, and our rights, then we are fundamentally dependent on those powers that alternately sustain or deprive us, and that holds a certain power over our very survival.” Or, as Berlant (2022, 3) puts it, “no one was ever sovereign, just mostly operating according to some imaginable, often distorted image of their power over things, actions, people, and causality.” Understanding dependence as a part of the human condition while acknowledging the very unequal distribution of its concrete forms helps us better understand the situation that actors in this study find themselves in. Their dependence on institutions, material infrastructures, social contracts, and various supports is context-specific but not exceptional. This is why various forms of practical, technical, medical, educational, and economic support, and the infrastructures, institutions, and agreements on which they depend, should count as objects of dispossession. One benefit is the opening for understandings of political agency that do not presuppose contrafactual individual self-sufficiency and independence. Arturo Escobar and others have shown how acknowledging and fostering “interexistence and interbeing” (Escobar 2018, 175) can become the basis for a politics of the relational and societal transitions. In this study, rural residents’ efforts to sustain or restore various infrastructure and supportive relationships shed light on them as both stakes in dispossession and conditions of political agency. It is thus that they may also provide a basis for hope, recovery, and a progressive politics of healing and justice.