CHAPTER 1
Traces
I start from the assumption that we cannot know the problem of dispossession before the inquiry, and that it therefore deserves both close empirical attention and context-sensitive conceptualization. The idea of dispersed dispossession does not boil down to individual experiences of dispossession. Rather, in this study, I build on the exchange with my interlocutors about such experiences and the interpretations of them as a lens to investigate patterns of dispossession contingent on historical trajectories and political-economic structures and shifts. I understand such patterns as shared experiences under given historical circumstances, affecting larger numbers of people over extended periods. Hence this study starts from ethnographic situations, but it does not stop there. Rather, it makes sense of these situations through references to historical circumstances, agrarian political economy, and structural change. It is thus that patterns of dispossession come into view and situated accounts of historical change become possible.
To trace changing sets of relations within changing systemic circumstances, this study builds on a tradition of ethnographic research that aims at generating, questioning, and expanding concepts by bringing them into conversation with empirical inquiry and hence adapting them to the analytical and political pressures and requirements of historical circumstances and lived realities. It is a tradition that takes real-world complexity and puzzlement about the limits of familiar assumptions and categories as a starting point of study, reflection, and conceptualization.1 Such intellectual work is not unique to ethnography, of course. We may understand it as a form of “mobile thought” that follows the idea to never cease to “think about the same things differently” (Foucault 1997, 136) and “opens to what concepts implicitly and often quietly foreclose, as well as what they encourage and condone” (Stoler 2016, 18–19). Ethnographies use mobile and “thick” inquiry (Rabinow and Marcus 2008, 81) as one way of achieving this. This chapter introduces the main sites of my inquiry and relates fieldwork and conceptual work.
Tracing Dispossession
Fieldwork does not lead ethnographers to tell authentic stories. At the very least, however, fieldwork urged me to let go of inadequate stories I might have told if relying only on written sources and interviews. I arrived in the field as a critic but found that I had to reimagine my own critical orientation to develop what I think is a more adequate account of dispossession, appropriation, and rural change. The unlearning of incorrect assumptions was a critical step in the process, enabled by long conversations with rural dwellers, enterprise workers, managers and directors, local politicians and bureaucrats, and Russian colleagues. Tania Li (2014a, 5) describes ethnography as a form of research that “disrupts the ethnographer’s prior categories and assumptions, exposing uncharted territory where familiar categories don’t hold (and thus) opens up the possibility of generating new knowledge and connections.” The discordancy and disruption thus generated should spur inquiry and critical reflection, implying the question of what sort of translation between theoretical concepts and empirical encounters allows “for the process to be potentially heuristic” (Fassin 2014, 70). Such irritations inspired me to reformulate the problem of rural dispossession in a more complex and interesting way.
This is an ethnography of social and political-economic processes much more than of local cultural characteristics or research participants’ lifeworlds. I understand my ethnographic interlocutors as their “own ethnographer(s)” (Mol 2002, 15)—not ethnographers of feelings, meanings, or perspectives, but of events, situations, and shifts, offering their interpretations and reflecting on the implications for someone in their position. Understanding interlocutors as their own ethnographers can be the basis for forms of epistemic partnership in which research participants offer their descriptions, interpretations, and theorizing (Biehl 2013a). In this sense, too, this is an ethnography of dispossession more than of “the dispossessed.”
During fieldwork in villages, I lived in several homes with families or by myself, joined work, leisure activities, and events, immersed myself in various aspects of local life, engaged in long conversations, and conducted interviews. In parallel, I met with, interviewed, and accompanied company managers, enterprise directors, representatives of local or district administrations and regional ministries. That I was moving between these spheres was at times perceived as unusual but relevant. Many foreign company representatives are agricultural experts but sometimes not familiar with rural Russian settings or the Russian language. They found it curious that I was staying in villages for longer periods and were interested in what I had to say about interactions with village inhabitants and workers. Rural residents and workers were often interested in my experiences with managers of investment companies and also in villages in other parts of the country. My position was characterized by such forms of “betweenness” (England 1994; Katz 1994). My Eastern European family background and my proficiency in Russian helped me to be perceived as a partial insider in some ways, although many found my role as a Western European academic rather curious. I was crossing social boundaries constantly, finding myself lighting my way to some overflowing outdoor latrine through ankle-deep mud and chicken manure, and half a day later I was passing double security checks at a company entrance beside a manager. To some people I met, the distances and modes of my traveling appeared as an unaffordable luxury. Others thought I might wish to stay in hotels that would have consumed the three-year project budget within a week.
As mentioned in the introduction, the causes and courses of dispersed dispossession may seem hard to reconstruct and responsibilities hard to ascribe from a ground-level perspective, rooted as they are in complex and layered processes spanning several decades. It is often outside forces that are blamed. It may be obvious who took over an enterprise or farmland, but much less who or what contributed to a situation in which people saw no alternative to and became dependent on investment companies or state agencies to get things running again. What should be blamed: the failed models, projects and promises of state socialism, or market capitalism? Was the main problem with individuals who exploited uncertainty for fraud and individual gains, or with circumstances that may have forced many into illicit activities? Rural dwellers regularly discuss such questions, which mirrors some of the challenges in making sense of a condition perceived as obscured by historic events. Many of the more concrete forces shaping villages, such as agribusinesses and state authorities, can also appear relatively elusive. They may make concrete improvement promises about which villagers may be highly skeptical, and for good reason. They may also operate in relatively obscure networks of power and control with uncertain responsibilities (chapters 4 and 5). While foreign investing companies may seem alien with their attempts to implement new business rationalities, the deliberate obscurity and lack of transparency that characterize the operation of many Russian companies do not make the latter any more approachable. Local enterprise directors, bureaucrats, and politicians often appear to be more approachable. However, their agency or their ability to make a real difference are often called into question by rural residents, and by such actors themselves, who claim the decisions that really matter are made elsewhere.
In his reflections on multisited research, George Marcus (1997, 97) describes “the anxieties of knowing that one is somehow tied in to what is happening elsewhere” and suggests that they can result in particular forms of ethnographic complicity. Rural dwellers’ sense of being affected by an “elsewhere” spurred many discussions—they were curious if my traveling and multisite research offered any insights relevant to making sense of their condition. A sense of depending on powers beyond individual reach runs through this study. It relates to a broad range of supports mentioned in the introduction and detailed in the following chapters. On a very general level, this reflects how “interdependency establishes our vulnerability to social forms of deprivation” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 5). On the level of empirical analysis, the idea that lives and livelihoods inevitably depend on relations that support and sustain them directs attention to how and how much such supports (or their relative absence) are unequally distributed across places and subject positions, and how dispossession is already part of the conditions that some inhabit.
Landscapes
This book is an inquiry into the changing relations and interactions between rural communities, companies, village administrations, and state representatives. These partly unfold in villages; however, villages are not bounded or isolated sites but rather nested within complex translocal relations. Established rural–urban ties include villagers’ daily, weekly, or seasonal commuting, in-and outmigration, urbanites spending weekends and summer holidays at their dachas or visiting relatives in the countryside, or the trading of household agricultural produce at town and city markets. Certain villages have become more isolated over time through the diminishing of regional markets or the loss of public transport options while new connections may have emerged, for instance, by new companies entering the scene. In historical and structural terms, rural economies have long been, and remain, fundamentally shaped by regional, national, and transnational political-economic powers.
There is a long history of centralized control over the countryside and its inhabitants, as well as state-directed programs and experiments: (forced) resettlement schemes, the industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in the early Soviet period, the countless large-scale agronomic and technological experiments that followed, and state programs that reshaped many facets of rural life, from education and culture to family arrangements. The post-Soviet plans for the reorganization of agriculture were written in and implemented from the center, too. As the state withdrew control and resources in the process, resulting “voids” were partly filled by private companies that entered the village scene from “elsewhere,” or remained unfilled. In any case, many rural dwellers recount this as a historical experience of increased dependency on decisions and powers far beyond them. This study, too, starts from specific places but follows problems that refer to other places, spheres, or times.
During extensive research trips, I conducted fieldwork in three villages affected by large investment projects. I also gained direct insights into the everyday operations of one of the largest Western-listed investment companies, Agrokultura, and an agricultural subsidiary operating within the web of power and capital of Russia’s largest gas company, Gazprom. After exploratory visits in 2011, I kept revisiting these places from 2012 to 2014 and during brief follow-up research stays in 2017 and 2021. I conducted ten months of fieldwork, including longer stays in villages, several multiday excursions with company managers who took me along on visits to their enterprises, and interviews with enterprise representatives, officials and bureaucrats, trade unionists, and various “experts” in different places. After fieldwork, I could draw on rich insights gathered in hundreds of field notes pages and around seventy-five interviews with rural dwellers and administrations, enterprise and company representatives, different kinds of experts, and others. The names of most places and companies are anonymized. As an exception, I refrained from anonymizing Agrokultura, which was bought in 2014 by a Russian company. The operations of Agrokultura have been analyzed in various studies (see chapter 5), and readers should be able to compare them. The anonymization of persons is guaranteed, however.
The Russian Federation is a vast country spanning not only eleven time zones but also a large number of climatic and vegetation zones, highly differentiated settlement and infrastructural patterns, and eighty-two federal administrative units (not counting three federal cities) with partly differing agricultural regulations and policies. It has been emphasized that this spatial complexity corresponds with a highly variegated rural and agrarian landscape (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006). This study cannot represent such regional diversity and does not intend to provide an encompassing picture. Rather, it draws on several contrasting cases in four main regions, plus scattered insights from several others (see figure 1.1). The regions of Rostov and Voronezh count among the country’s most fertile; Lipetsk is part of the Central Black Earth region, just like Voronezh, but located farther north and not included in the country’s top ten regions; and the region of Perm is less favorable in terms of agriculture.2 Working on four cases in parallel allowed for fruitful contrasting and helped avoid inadequate generalizations based on a single case. What I learned from the trajectories and actors’ interpretations in one case would often help me readjust my perspective or assumptions in another.
Setovka
Setovka is a village in the region of Perm where I was often reminded of stories that people elsewhere told about the past. It seemed that a particular mixture of relative remoteness, a solid agricultural enterprise, and an active and well-organized village administration have preserved some of the relations that people in other places were lamenting: For instance, an enterprise keeping people employed and sticking to kolkhoz obligations to care for the village infrastructure and household needs (chapter 2), and a village administration that also contributed to upholding social functions.
People in Setovka are no economically better off than those in many other rural places that I have visited. They, too, complain about poverty, a lack of prospects in the village for them and their children, the insecurity of rural life and the fragility of local institutions. In the recent past, the village community took an active stance in preserving relations and institutions that served it. It mobilized against and eventually turned down an attempted takeover of the village farmland and enterprise by an external investor. Business interest in agriculture was a relatively recent phenomenon in the region at that time, where more farmland was still becoming fallow than falling prey to any land grabs, so the attempted takeover came as a surprise. One of the things that makes this case so interesting is how the mobilization against the takeover— and for the preservation of the kolkhoz—articulated a vision of what rural life after the failure of many earlier promises and beyond investment should look like. It provided an opportunity to study the rearticulation and reinvention of kolkhoz relations as a contingent social contract, in and for the present. My research in Setovka provides the backbone of chapter 2 and informs other chapters to a lesser extent.
Letnevo
Letnevo is a village in the region of Lipetsk. With about three thousand inhabitants, it is one of the larger villages in the region and the largest in this sample. It has shrunk since the end of the Soviet period, however, when the population of 4,500 inhabitants corresponded with the equally unusual number of four major agricultural enterprises. It offers important insights into the partial and gradual disentanglement of the agricultural and the rural, and into inhabitants’ tactics in the face of changing circumstances. Mikhail,3 for instance, my host in Letnevo, runs a small farming unit with some pigs and chickens, and a 0.4-hectare household plot on which he grows mainly potatoes and pumpkins. He owns a tractor and two smaller trucks with which he offers services to fellow villagers, filling gaps left by the vanished agricultural enterprises that previously provided machinery for private subsidiary agriculture. During labor-intensive times such as plowing and harvesting, Mikhail would leave on his tractor early in the morning and return late, after sunset. However, as subsidiary agriculture in the village gradually diminishes, he is now experimenting with new services beyond agriculture, such as baking bricks, which he offers in his own and surrounding villages.
Many villagers describe agriculture as fading away from the village scene. Two comparatively small private farmers work some one hundred hectares and employ a handful of workers each. Many households produce vegetables, fruit, eggs, milk, and meat for their own consumption, but increasingly less for sale. The village’s farmland has been under cultivation by various larger holding companies for several years. During my fieldwork period, in 2013, the land and the remains of the local farm were taken over, again, by one of the largest Russian sugar-producing companies. People did not lament the withdrawal of the former operator that had gone into bankruptcy and not paid wages for months. The new company, however, abolished the local production base and shifted operations to a central base around thirty-five kilometers away, a move that further decoupled the village from commercial agriculture. This case study supports mainly chapters 3 and 5.
Lipenka
I visited Lipenka—a village of two thousand inhabitants in the Rostov region in the Southern Steppes—to speak to a private farmer who was in a dispute with a Rostov-based investment company over approximately 130 hectares of farmland. The latter controlled around 4,500 hectares in this village, which made it the largest but not the only agrarian producer: there were also around forty private farmers, the greatest number of all villages in this study’s sample and one of the reasons, villagers told me, for relatively frequent conflicts. I interviewed villagers who were involved in the land dispute, as their land was under lease contracts with the company and they wanted to hand it over to the farmer. Two hours after I paid a surprise visit to the local farm director, I received an unexpected phone call from the regional capital and was invited to meet the company director.
I met the man in his office where one could see him—in a photograph— posing next to Alexey Miller, CEO of Gazprom, who had just made it to Forbes’s list of the world’s most powerful people that year. I left with a business card that displayed his former formal ties with the State Duma (the Russian parliament). His boss turned out to be the CEO of one of Gazprom’s regional branches, deputy of the regional parliament, and holder of several central regional-level positions in the ruling party United Russia. With the director of the agricultural branch, I traveled, for several days, to the farms and other enterprises belonging to their complex and opaque company network. I also kept returning to the village of Lipenka for follow-up research and exchanges with villagers. The case mainly informs chapters 4 and 5.
Agrokultura
Agrokultura was a Swedish investment company that operated in four Russian regions and Ukraine. During fieldwork, I mostly engaged with some expat agricultural specialists who had left behind homes and families to become part of what they regarded as a grand and promising project. They would proudly show the farms and fields they operated here—the size of which was unknown in their countries of origin. They would also emphasize that they were confronted with an extraordinary task. In their eyes, the Russian agricultural system was inefficient, corrupt, run-down, and reliant on state support that certain companies would receive and others—such as theirs—did not. Many of them thus seemed to perceive themselves as part of a historic experiment to realize a new business model. Their job was to fundamentally reorganize production schemes on a scale unprecedented for a private company. To this aim, they brought different kinds of expertise, new machines and production technologies, and a degree of command over the company’s financial means. While some of them lived in the villages where they worked, many traveled to farms from cities. Many relied on interpreters for their work and would hang out with fellow expats in their free time.
In 2014, the company’s assets were bought up by a Russian competitor. For the operational managers I engaged with, it was no secret even years before that there was a substantial gap between the company’s great plans and bright promises on the one hand, and the operational business on the other. They knew very well that profit and efficiency would not emerge solely from the availability of cheap, fertile farmland and rising demand on global food markets. Their stories and interactions with workers and farm directors documented here reveal much about the contradictions immanent to the investment project. At first sight, the company may have appeared as a typical land-grabber: foreign, stock-exchange listed, taking control of a quarter of a million hectares within a few years. Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate the implications of large-scale operations and holdings, and that they do not necessarily result in sovereign strategies or stable operations.
Timescapes
Scholars have recurrently warned that the past is being overemphasized in post-Soviet research on the region. Todorova (2010a, 3) sees an “obsession over Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in the transformation literature. Concepts of transition/transformation as well as those of the postsocialist/post-Soviet have been criticized for being teleological, outdated, and imposed by Western scholars (Buck-Morss 2006; Gille 2010; Humphrey 2007; M. Müller 2019; Stark 1996; Verdery 2007), or, again, for “defining the present in terms of its past” (Sakwa 1999, 3). The idea of postsocialism further privileges a certain rupture (the collapse of the Soviet system) and thus the formative power of actually existing socialism over other systems such as capitalism (M. Müller 2019).
Such concerns apply to studies of the Russian countryside. Much has changed there since the early post-Soviet years. In many places, and respects, the conditions for rural residents have improved. There has been a return of pension and unemployment transfer payments, and better conditions for rural entrepreneurship. New smaller and larger businesses in and beyond agriculture provide opportunities for some. And still, hardly anyone here seems to perceive the past as over and done with. Research participants in this study are most immediately concerned with the present and future, and yet many of them refer to memories and accounts of the past to make sense of the present, and they interpret their current situation as fundamentally shaped during past processes and events. The recurrent bankruptcies of agricultural enterprises, the many who have left, or the lasting disintegration of infrastructures and institutions have left their mark. They do not determine the future, but they have eroded the possibility of certain futures for certain persons. This is part of what makes dispersed dispossession a historically rooted experience.
This illustrates how we must move away from imaginaries that are stuck in the past but may not forget about the histories that shaped the present, and how various elements of the past are “out there” as parts of the world we encounter or inhabit (Gordon 2008, 166). Hence the importance of broadening the temporal scope and considering how Soviet and post-Soviet history is folded into present situations in often complex ways. Historical reverberations may continue to matter in more obvious ways in rural settings compared to urban ones. This study thus takes the Russian countryside as a privileged setting to theorize social and political-economic transformation within complex “timescapes” (Adam 2010). Building on analytical traditions that show how institutions with a Soviet legacy do not simply persist as a product of inertia (Dzenovska, Artiukh, and Martin 2023; Stark 1996; Todorova and Gille 2010), the study demonstrates how elements of “the past” are being reclaimed, reinvented, and enacted by both rural dwellers and enterprise managers in the face of fundamental change.
As Ann Stoler (2016, 352–53) puts it, notions of legacy or path dependence offer only vague orientation to distinguish “between what holds and what lies dormant, between residue and recomposition, between what is a holdover and what is reinvested, between a weak and a tenacious trace,” and few conceptual tools to better understand why certain institutions remain important and how they prevail or change. Rather, we must show how histories matter in particular contexts and to particular people. This study does not refer to history as if it was merely context, or, even less so, destiny. History must make its way through the present to make a claim on the story: being narrated and reactivated in conversation and discourse, mobilized and redeployed in practice, or leaving a clear mark on material and institutional landscapes, or persons’ agencies. In an ethnography attentive to complex timescapes, then, one task is to trace how the past is “reinvented and textualized through the discourses and practices of the present” (Britzman 1995, 234). Another is to go beyond past boundedness and the sense of a “futureless present” (Ringel 2018, 158), even if this mirrors local perceptions and narratives, and illuminate how actors actually remain agents under these circumstances and how they relate to the future.