CHAPTER 3

Ruins

The following words, uttered in 2014 by the mayor of a small village in the Perm region, recall how the local farm enterprise was taken apart in 2004. The event marked the end of a local agricultural enterprise in the village.

There was a war going on here. They took away, seized, drove away . . . this was a terrifying moment. There was a tractor standing in our village administration. . . . They even stole that one, took it. . . . In such an instance today, I would understand that they . . . [lack] the documents for the tractor . . . it would be possible to hide it somewhere. . . . Such big guys came, really took everything, and drove off. Such excitement. It carried on, it was really terrible. Day and night the screech of nails. They completely took everything apart. Made off with everything that remained. Because, they said, “we worked in the kolkhoz for all of our lives, and they take away everything; so we take home at least something, a nail, a plank.” Such was people’s attitude. It was impossible to stop them from taking apart all these. . . . There was such a nice garage here, our man said: “Come on, guys, we will not take it apart. We will use it for our machinery.” But they could not stop them, they could not. Just day and night screeching of nails, planks, iron . . . only some were able to hide something. What belonged to others, they just took away. . . . See, one of our [men], drove on a tractor. They took him off the tractor. Gave him a thick ear. Got on the tractor, drove away, cut it up, that’s it. He even howled. A man howled, with pity for his tractor, on which he worked. It was a new tractor. They took it and drove it away (Village mayor, Perm region, 2014).

This narrative is dramatic. The event fundamentally changed village life. It occurred suddenly, it seemed to come from the outside, and it took villagers by surprise. The mayor’s description makes tangible the process of destruction: sounds, materials, actors, feelings, and interactions. But however vivid the description, a closer reading reveals that what happened was far from straightforward or obvious. The mayor describes her puzzlement in this situation in which she simply did not know what to do. It is only in retrospect that she identifies some agency she may have had, but which she did not realize at the time. Agency seemed to be on the side of those who caused the destruction, but even here the picture becomes blurry. Who were they? On the one hand, there were the “big guys” who “came” to the village as strangers. They had been hired for taking apart the enterprise infrastructure. But then there were also the villagers themselves. As the “outsiders” took apart the farm, some of the locals began to appropriate parts of the formerly collective infrastructure, taking home bricks, iron, and planks. It became hard to distinguish who did the looting and who was affected by it.

Responsibility for the event is ascribed to the farm owner who had taken over the enterprise from his father. He never explained his decision publicly, but apparently he decided to get rid of the nonlucrative farm and squeeze out whatever money he could get. He quickly sold off a nonprofitable asset. But the enterprise closure reflects a more complex temporal structure. The breakup of the farm goes on for days, and even ten years later it is remembered vividly as an event with fundamental and lasting effects. Villagers justify their appropriation of material by claiming their part in building up the enterprise. To them, the ruination of the enterprise means the devaluation of both past labor and future possibility, as for the man who will not be able to work on “his” new tractor in future. There is no agricultural enterprise left in the village, only some of the land is worked by neighboring farms.

This description is among the more spectacular ones, but it is not unusual. The agrarian and rural crisis that set in with the collapse of the Soviet system became manifest in the breakdown of organizational, subsidiary, and distributional structures from the national to the local level. Among the effects were the bankruptcy of many enterprises, the reduction of labor-intensive production and mass dismissal of workers, and the deterioration of material infrastructure and institutionalized support of the kind described in the previous chapter. To address such forms of loss, concepts of dispossession must go beyond individual property, rights, or access and include the decay and dismantling of webs of relations that (used to) support various aspects of collective and individual life. Dispossession occurs not only in but through crises (Dudley 2000; Harvey 2003), and it results not merely in individual but in collective loss.

Actors on the ground refer to ruins as heuristic tools to make sense of complex processes of dispersed dispossession as an iterative process drawn out over time that spans a range of scales and in which individual stories and world history are intermingled. The reflection on ruins and ruination, as I shall argue, helps to address representational challenges that have to do with the dispersed character of the forms of dispossession discussed here. As reported in earlier studies (Paxson 2005; Rogers 2006), during fieldwork I often heard rural dwellers summing up experiences over the past few decades with the statement vse razvalili: “They ruined/broke down/messed up everything.” So if creative destruction, or dismantling an existing system to pave the way for installing a new one, is among the core aims of “shock therapy,” the destructive part has clearly left a lasting impression. Building a new system turned out to be more complicated, however. Many rural dwellers still describe their situation as unstable and unpredictable. I will argue that their references to the ruins of a more stable and comprehensible past can be understood in this specific context of a precarious present. References to ruins illustrate what exactly has been lost, but also indicate that things have been, and could become, otherwise: they “denaturalize the present” (Gordillo 2014, 14) and (re)orient it toward the past and future. While the previous chapter focused on kolkhoz relations being enacted in and for the present, this chapter looks at the post-Soviet agrarian crisis and investigates its implications for/in the present, as part of the history that shaped it and as part of how actors make sense of it.

The perception of ruination goes beyond the built environment. Millions of hectares of overgrown fields spread across Russia became a symbol of agrarian decline. In this respect, they came to be regarded as ruined landscapes.¹ The scope of farmland abandonment is at times interpreted as an immense loss of agricultural productivity on a national scale. Indeed, much agricultural land fell fallow during and after the collapse of the Soviet agricultural system (Prishchepov et al. 2013), and researchers described the abandonment of millions of hectares of agricultural land in the former Soviet republics—with Russia having the lion’s share—as the most abrupt and widespread land-use change in the twentieth century in the northern hemisphere (Kurganova et al. 2014). Although most farmland abandonment occurred in cold northern or dry southeastern parts of the country and areas remote from larger cities and villages, it created fine-grained and dynamic patchworks. Scholars have described the resulting spatial pattern as “fragmented space” or an “archipelago” of productive farms amid deteriorating and abandoned “black holes” (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2004).²

Dwelling on ruination, I am aware of the risk of reproducing stereotypes of the Russian countryside as generally “ruined.” This would be politically problematic but also counterfactual. People find ways to get by, and new opportunities emerge. Just like other places, Russian villages are home to people who appear to be optimistic, happy about what they have, and curious about what the future will bring. Many give explicit reasons why they prefer to live in the countryside: a calm and green environment rather than urban chaos and noise, or the possibility to live in a house, grow one’s food, and get by with occasional jobs rather than stronger dependence on waged income, rental housing, and commodified food supply. In more productive agricultural regions, there are economic opportunities for skilled workers or drivers, and some private farmers have improved greatly over recent years. There are also possibilities beyond agriculture. In the village described in the opening quote, for instance, the regional government opened a psychiatric hospital; a rich businessman registered in the municipality and pays taxes there; and some new entrepreneurial projects have emerged. A growing number of dachniki—urban dwellers setting up huts and houses for weekend trips and summer holidays— generate demand for local produce and bring jobs in construction and maintenance. Some village inhabitants commute to other villages, towns, or cities for work. To what extent people kept or lost jobs, found acceptable income alternatives, and find it easy or hard to adapt to changing circumstances varies across places and subject positions. And yet what I describe as ruination here is part of the picture, and ignoring that would risk leaving both harsh material realities and misrepresentations unaddressed. I shall continue this venture into ruination by giving some background on the post-Soviet agrarian crisis, and from there move on to problems and challenges of representation, and the ethnographic present of this study.

Systemic Crisis

Many analysts, commentators, and persons with firsthand experience point to the downsides of post-Soviet disintegration and market reforms when addressing the dire conditions for rural communities in that period. They do not always agree on its causes, extent, and durability, however. More optimistic commentators interpret the post-Soviet agrarian crisis as an interlude between more stable and prosperous periods. For them, it is finally modernized production infrastructure, a consolidated state budget allowing for expanded spending on agrarian subsidies, rural development, and social services, and the closure of infrastructure and provision gaps concerning roads, products, and services providing a basis for relatively optimistic foresight (Izryadnova et al. 2015). More pessimistic interpretations by rural actors and analysts see permanent damage rather than temporary reshuffling. For agrarian sociologist Zemfira Kalugina (2014, 118), for instance, “the reforms have not only failed to achieve what they intended, but have in some sense ‘turned back the clock,’” throwing many households back to reliance on informal income and household farming, and dependence on manual family labor. Many analyses lie between such poles and differentiate upsides and downsides. They may acknowledge the lasting increase of inequalities among regions, enterprises, and households, but also point to economic recovery, new social policies, or models of sustainable production (Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk 2023, 2018; Nefedova 2014). There is indeed a need for a nuanced view. The emergence of new forms of rural life, economy, and livelihoods, improvements to the overall economic situation in the countryside, and social provision should be acknowledged. It seems equally important, however, not to overlook the sectors that did not recover and the wounds that would not heal.

The question of how far the agricultural crisis was a direct consequence of the reform as it was designed, or rather resulted from a failure to implement it properly and fix underlying issues remains contested. The question of state withdrawal is a case in point here and complicates the picture (Wegren 2000). As Ioffe and colleagues (2006, 29) reflect, the “most significant change in agricultural production was never legislated, yet it had a more immediate and far-reaching impact on productivity than any law passed by the Duma. This far-reaching change came from the collapse of the state-run procurement and output distribution system and the removal of government price controls. In other words, collective and state farms . . . suddenly were largely left to their own devices.”

One may object that state withdrawal was very much part of a political agenda to dismantle an existing agrarian system and replace it with a new one. In a decisive period, the push in this direction came less from the legislative State Duma and more from then-president Yeltsin and his administration, and was propagated by influential Western politicians, technocrats, and institutions such as the IMF. The question of whether the “collapse” of the state-run system was an integral part of a deliberately imposed shock therapy (Klein 2007), or rather resulted from a cascade of crisis dynamics, remains important in terms of historic assessment (Matveev 2019b) but goes beyond the scope of this book, which is more concerned with the structured and structuring effects of agrarian dispossession and crisis as opposed to the drivers behind those effects.

In any case, the gap between optimistic reform talk and the actual withdrawal of resources and breakdown of agricultural production and rural livelihoods was obvious in the 1990s. Agriculture was certainly not on top of policymakers’ and businesspersons’ interests at that time, and some of them openly labeled Russian agriculture as a rather hopeless sector. State investments and subsidies in agriculture were severely curtailed or cut (Nefedova 2014, 78; Wegren et al. 2014, 382). State policies had an “urban bias” (Wegren 2014, 82) and favored industrial over agrarian production and urban over rural development. While prices for industrial products and agricultural inputs increased, the government did little to support agricultural wholesale prices but rather kept them low to support food availability in the cities. If the entire Russian economy was deeply affected by instability and a massive devaluation of assets and commodities, the agricultural sector was hit particularly hard. In a contracting economy, agriculture lost volume and productivity relative to other economic sectors, and its contribution to the national GDP halved during the 1990s. Food production fell about 50 percent in this decade (Wegren 2014, 83), and agricultural enterprises’ output decreased by over 60 percent (Rosstat 2002a, 205). While agricultural wholesale prices were kept low by consumers’ limited purchasing power, government food-price regulation, and cheap imports, the prices for agricultural inputs, machinery, fuel, energy, and chemicals increased and resulted in a steadily growing gap between input costs and output prices. In contrast to Soviet policies that benefited the farms (Nefedova 2014, 75), agrarian producers became strongly disadvantaged in comparison to other sectors along the food chain, with profit margins shifting dramatically to food processing and retail (Zinchenko 2002, 69). During the first three years of market reforms, consumer food prices rose 4.5 times more than wholesale prices (Nefedova 2014, 79–80). State subsidies also plummeted. While agriculture was receiving 28 percent of the total investment in the Russian economy from 1965 to 1985, in 2001 agriculture got just 2.7 percent of “the vastly diminished total investment” (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 28).

The majority of large farms fell into debt after 1991, and the share of nonprofitable enterprises reached 84 percent in 1998 (Rosstat 2002b, 30). The amount had decreased to 28 percent by 2011 (Rosstat 2015a, 48) but this, to a large degree, was due to changes in state legislation and accounting that spurred the liquidation of nonprofitable enterprises (Uzun, Shagaida, and Sarajkin 2012, 5–6): the total number of agrarian enterprises decreased from nearly twenty-seven thousand in 1995 to around sixteen thousand in 2007 and less than seven thousand in 2011 (Rosstat 2002b, 2011, 2013). Many of the surviving enterprises radically cut back the former kolkhozes’ wide range of products and shut down facilities for vegetable and fruit production, milk and meat processing, and local bakeries. Crop production—which is seasonal and less labor- and capital-intensive—became predominant. The number of agricultural workers declined from more than 9.7 million in 1990 to 7.3 million in 2007 and 4.6 million in 2020 (Rosstat n.d.; Wegren 2014, 100).

Rural inhabitants were greatly affected. Alternative local jobs were limited, as were options to find work elsewhere. From 1991 onward, the deterioration of rural living conditions can be seen along with several indicators such as income, material consumption, housing, infrastructure, and access to and quality of services (Wegren 2014, 50).³ The result was a “ruralization of poverty” (Gerry, Nivorozhkin, and Rigg 2008). Agricultural workers faced the double burden of falling real incomes across the national economy and “a drastic divergence” (Wegren 2014, 50) in average income compared to other sectors of the economy. This was the reversal of an earlier trend. From the 1950s onward, Soviet state policies led to an improvement of rural populations’ living standards in comparison to other areas. According to official statistics, a farmworker in the RSFSR received 81 percent of the monthly monetary income of an industrial worker in 1975 and 102 percent in 1990. The figure declined to 32 percent in the RF around the year 2000. Agricultural wages were lower but also more uncertain than those in other economic sectors. Throughout the 1990s, higher percentages of rural workers did not receive their salaries, and higher percentages of rural pensioners did not receive pensions (or salaries) (Wegren 2014, 51). The percentage of the agricultural workforce with a nominal salary at or below the subsistence minimum declined from a staggering 80.2 in 2000 to 67.8 in 2004 (Rosstat 2005, 162). It was down to 3.7 percent in 2019 (Rosstat 2019, 127). At a household level, however, 53.4 percent of rural households are reported to have had monetary incomes below the subsistence minimum in 2019 compared to 46.6 percent of urban households (Rosstat 2021, 76).⁴

During the height of the agrarian crisis in the 1990s, feedback loops led to downward spirals. Managers’ confidence in the largely unprofitable agricultural sector was so low that they shied away from any investment (Nefedova 2014, 81). Farm enterprises, in their struggle for economic survival, often avoided taxation, which affected village administrations’ budgets for maintaining social infrastructure (Kalugina 2014, 120). The collapse of safety nets at different scales further increased poverty rates. Even though inequality within the rural sphere remained far below urban levels (Wegren 2014, 52–53), the Russian government estimated that 27 percent of rural dwellers were “extremely poor” based on monetary income (and 15 percent based on total income) (Wegren 2014, 79). The fall in rural life-expectancy by almost six years between 1986 and 1994, according to official statistics, cannot be fully explained by poverty, but it is certainly related to the political-economic crisis in the country and particularly the countryside (Eberstadt 2010, 72–74; Rosstat 2010, 101).⁵

Rural households continued to depend on crisis-ridden large farms as the single main employers in villages, the main providers of social functions, and as technical support for household production (chapter 2). In effect, the restructuring or vanishing of large farms in some instances also caused trouble for private subsidiary agriculture (Pallot and Nefedova 2007), which became increasingly important during this period. In the late 1990s, according to some sources, the total labor hours spent in personal subsidiary farming exceeded those in formal agriculture, and a significant part of rural populations reported it was their main food source (Pallot and Nefedova 2007, 19–21). The share of household production of potatoes, vegetables, and livestock increased. For instance, while the number of cattle and pigs held on large farms decreased massively in the early 1990s and steadily thereafter, numbers remained relatively stable and partly increased for personal subsidiary farming. If households already produced a large share of milk and beef during the Soviet period, the share increased in post-Soviet times and stood at 57 percent for beef and 42 percent for milk in 2017 (Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019). While subsidiary household farming thus helped rural households avoid starvation even in the most severe periods of crisis, the downside is being thrown back to an economy of survival with very limited economic benefits and heavy reliance on burdensome manual labor. Instead of peasant self-sufficiency, rural dwellers kept depending on large farms (as suppliers of fodder and machinery) and on unstable agrarian markets.

Different social groups were affected differently by the crisis, and stark differences remain. In agricultural enterprises, women provide most of the seasonal labor and temporary employment, as well as ill-paid and exhausting jobs in animal husbandry, cleaning, or maintenance (Wegren et al. 2014). Better-paying jobs such as tractor drivers, engineers, or mechanics are male-dominated, and female agronomists, economists, or farm managers are comparatively rare (Wegren et al. 2014, 375). Outside agriculture, women are predominantly employed in rural economies’ worst-paid sectors: retail, culture (such as the local cultural centers called doma kul’tury), village administration, or as cooks in schools, farms, and kindergartens. And, as elsewhere, women do much more unpaid work in households and personal subsidiary farming (Pallot and Nefedova 2007). As mentioned, stark differences between agrarian workers and rural elites (such as farm directors, specialists, and party officials) were characteristic of Soviet agrarian communities. Such class differences turned out to be more persistent than the political-economic system. For instance, rural elites did much better during restructuring and were more likely to benefit from land reforms by acquiring or renting more land (Wegren 2009). The agrarian crisis also meant different things for different generations. Older generations saw the devaluation and deterioration of the products of their lifelong labor, ranging from the abolishment of farms they helped build to the plummeting of pensions. For the working generation, the crisis brought a long phase of extreme uncertainty with very different outcomes for individuals. And rural youths left the countryside at very high rates in historical or international comparison.

When an overall economic upturn occurred around the turn of the century, its benefits were distributed unequally across the rural–urban divide: urban poverty declined at twice the rate of rural poverty, and so the latter became predominant by 2004 (Gerry, Nivorozhkin, and Rigg 2008, 599). This trend continues. In a 2009 survey among rural households in twenty-nine regions, low income/rural poverty was named as the number one problem (65 percent of respondents) confronting the countryside (Wegren 2014, 77–78). The 2013 average nominal monthly income in agriculture, hunting, and forestry (the statistics aggregate these three sectors) was 14,129 rubles (around $460), which was 53 percent of that year’s national average (Rosstat 2014, 435–40). In 2019, it had increased to 31,728 rubles (still around the same U.S. dollar equivalent by the exchange rate at that time), which was 66 percent of that year’s national average (Rosstat 2019, 150–53). Rural unemployment, too, remained significantly higher than in the overall economy (Kalugina 2014, 125).

National food production has increased remarkably over recent years. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Russian agriculture grew steadily (Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019), and the nominal ruble value of agricultural production has increased more than fivefold. Pretax profits in agriculture have risen from 11.8 billion to 160.3 billion rubles, and average annual grain harvests have increased substantially (Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk 2023, 3). The recent production volume of several field crops was increased by factors of two to six compared to the late Soviet period (Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019), a trend that reflects increased productivity and specialization, and global demand. The growth in gross product from agriculture has exceeded the growth rate in national GDP in six of eight years, from 2013 to 2020 (based on ruble value), and Russian wheat exports ranked either first or second globally by volume in every agricultural year since 2014/2015 (Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019).⁶ However, the recovery of agriculture is concentrated in a few regions and agrarian sectors. Out of Russia’s eighty-five federal subjects, food production is strongly concentrated in the top five and top ten regions (Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk 2023). This confirms the older hypothesis of spatial fragmentation of the post-Soviet countryside (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2004, 2006). Parts of the labor- and resource-intensive livestock sector, notably beef and milk, either contracted further or did not grow significantly (Uzun, Shagaida, and Lerman 2019) as domestic demand partly decreased with diminishing purchasing power, and remains covered mainly through imports.

Hence the effects of some recent national-level agricultural revivals are highly unequally distributed among regions, places, sectors, and households. Primary agriculture remains risky and often hardly profitable for family farmers and some larger farms struggling with unfavorable prices and costs; high interest on loans for seeds, chemical, machinery, and further investments; or crop failure. In consequence, many rural dwellers see themselves, enterprises that employ them, and even large agricultural investors as structurally disadvantaged by the fact that they work in agriculture.

Crises on Top of Preceding Ones

As is well known, the reforms of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods were framed and justified as a necessary fix to an inefficient and rundown agrarian system. While some were promoting targeted measures to deal with flaws, others claimed it was necessary to fundamentally dismantle the old system and replace it. In the end, the reform was a mixture of both. Analysts and actors on the ground energetically discussed the question of how flawed the Soviet agrarian system was. It is still relevant, not least for judgments on whether post-Soviet reforms caused the crisis or failed to fully fix a previous one.

The late Soviet phase is described by rural dwellers and historians as one of relative stability and prosperity, especially in contrast to the economic hardships and state repression during collectivization and the postwar period on the one hand and the 1990s’ agrarian crisis on the other. The agrarian sector gained attention and some priority in the Brezhnev era. From the 1960s to the 1980s, state expenditures on agriculture increased to 20–28 percent of the overall state budget in contrast to 7 percent in the postwar era. The effects on rural development (including rural housing, social and medical provision, schools, and culture) were significant, and agrarian jobs became relatively well paid. However, the effects on productivity levels were rather modest, and consequently the attempt to intensify agricultural production went along with an excess of expenditures over results. In the late Soviet period, agricultural subsidies accounted for more than 80 percent of the sector’s gross output, which made them the highest in the world (Nefedova 2014, 61–65). Therefore, under its relatively stable surface, late Soviet agriculture was strongly dependent on state support and thus relatively prone to crises even before market reforms, such as when, around 1990, decreasing state income from oil and gas exports had a direct impact on the agricultural system. Yields per hectare, milk yields per cow, and other indicators of farm productivity had increased up to the 1970s but remained rather stagnant thereafter while state subsidies increased substantially (Nefedova 2014, 76). The crisis of late Soviet agriculture was a silent one—silenced in official accounts, not always tangible on the ground— but the perceived stability was far from sustainable economically, politically, or environmentally.

The downsides of the Soviet agrarian system are well documented. The plummeting of agrarian productivity over the first years of collectivization resulted in famines. Agricultural expansionism, including the infamous so-called Virgin Lands campaign, was overall ecologically devastating, drew on involuntary resettlement, wiped out other land-use forms such as grazing, and drained resources from core agricultural regions. Ecosystems, landscapes, and rivers were sacrificed for agrarian industrialization. Soil erosion and salination became serious problems overall and degraded some areas to the extent that agriculture became impossible there. The intensification of fertilizer and machinery use without much worker protection had serious health impacts. And pouring incomes from oil and gas exports into agriculture was part of what stabilized an inefficient system for quite some time.⁷ Besides cutting subsidies, with some devastating effects, market reforms offered little to fix many of these problems. During the early years, they rather stimulated withdrawal from agriculture. More recent agrarian recovery raised the level of outputs and monetary wages, but many of the problems inherited from the Soviet or early reform phase remain unresolved.

Overall, authors have drawn different conclusions from the Soviet agrarian system. Historian Jenny Leigh Smith (2014, 6) argues that because many of the studies about Soviet agriculture were written by Cold War–era researchers with anti-Soviet biases, the tendency to describe Soviet agriculture as a complete failure still unduly dominates its perception in the West. She concludes that “Soviet agriculture had much in common with its counterparts in capitalist countries around the world” (Smith 2014, 20). It was functional but “inefficient, vulnerable, chaotic, and frustratingly reliant on the natural environment” (Smith 2014, 20). Such a framing allows for acknowledging the dysfunctionalities of and damage caused by the Soviet agrarian system without turning that into a general justification for the “shock therapy” that followed. Many Russia-based researchers abstain from taking a general pro- or anti-Soviet stance when judging the merits and downsides of the Soviet agrarian system (Nikulin 2014; Shanin 1990), and, as this study shows, rural residents often do so as well.

This study follows that path, putting forward the argument that dispersed dispossession is inherent to rounds of succeeding policies and projects, their intended and unintended consequences, and failures. All are part of a history of dispossession in this specific context, and dispossession is part of this context’s history. However, as mentioned, it is only a part of it, and the (hi)story of dispossession is one among many stories.

Spectacular Despair: Clichés of the Russian Countryside

Most Western audiences are provided only little insight into rural Russia. The general decrease of attention and spending directed to the country by Western news outlets over recent years and decades went in parallel with a strong (some claim nearly exclusive) focus on geopolitics, Moscow, and the Kremlin. The Russian “provinces” are hardly covered at all (Gathmann and Scholl 2011; Neef 2012). Amid this relative silence, however, one finds striking stereotypes of the Russian countryside, with portrayals of it as desperate and in constant decline. One finds comparable stereotypes in discourses within Russia, too, even though there are surely more alternative stories available. I dwell on such representations here to address and deconstruct stereotypes, but also because they are pointing to actual representational and analytical challenges that should be addressed and not simply avoided.

“Vodka and isolation: welcome to rural Russia” is how a 2007 Reuters article introduces rural Russia to its readers, and it goes on in this spirit: “Alcoholism, devout religious faith and a sense of scratching a living on the fringes of civilization—the hallmarks of the Russian countryside down the ages—linger, sometimes just below the surface” (Kilner 2007). Describing the Russian countryside as a place where nothing will be accomplished, and not much ever was, is a common representational pattern. Another author describes her first impressions of a village called Paradise: “A few slow hours on a wildly bumpy, muddy road, and here we were in the half-abandoned village of Paradise, with black, crooked houses, a heavy-drinking population, and everybody depressed and angry with [the district center] and Moscow authorities. Paradise seemed forgotten among the fields covered in wild grass” (Nemtsova 2015). How do people get by in such places? Hardly at all, such articles often seem to suggest. One article published in the German Der Spiegel starts its exploration of a village called “Future,” stating that “the struggle for survival begins right at the place name sign” (Schepp 2010, February 7). The story evokes the impression that there was little to say about the village’s population besides its drinking or dying. Decay seems omnipresent; even the village shop had to close because “the old were too old, too ill or too drunk, [and] the young moved away, or were too dumb, too apathetic or too drunk” (Schepp 2010, February 7). A dying village with a dying population. “Mother I have some news for you; I will die now” are said to be the last words of a man who drank himself to death. These words are the caption to a photograph showing his mother drinking the same kind of schnapps in the company of neighbors (Schepp 2010, February 7). The article emphasizes that the scene was not unusual, but that what it describes for the village “Future” holds true for rural Russia more generally: “‘Future’ is everywhere, and in vast Siberia and Central Russia, except some booming cities, its plagues are omnipresent: the backwardness, the decrease in population, and alcoholism” (Schepp 2010, February 7, all translations mine).

To display “dying villages” as exemplary for (rural) Russia as a whole is an established representational pattern. In an article titled “Rural Russia Is Dying of Poverty, Neglect,” the author states: “The area around this rural enclave is in steep decline; once-thriving fields are empty and the population is in free fall. Along with many other towns and villages in vast rural Russia, it’s a microcosm for a country that, according to recent studies, is withering away. . . . Today, the hamlets dot a forsaken land of rampant poverty where men drink from morning to night. The interconnected crises of low fertility, high death rates and ragged infrastructure have left much of the nation barren” (Lasseter 2009, August 5).

Such diagnoses are generalized for “myriad villages dying a slow death in Russia’s provinces” (Khazov-Cassia 2015) and without “much hope left for revival” (Nemtsova 2015). One report concludes that “the lifeblood of Russia’s vast and fertile countryside appears to be draining away forever” (Shapovalova 2011, August 30).⁸

Deterioration, a dead end, despair. These are descriptions of the more drastic kind. But they are not exceptional either in their content or in the use of figurative language and photographs creating vivid images of decline and despair, particularly in Western media representation where they exist in a broader context of stereotypes about Russia.⁹ Rural residents are othered twofold: as postsocialist and rural (Kay, Shubin, and Thelen 2012). Readers familiar with the post-Soviet context may be reminded of post-Soviet ruin-gazing as a more general pattern of perception, beyond villages. Rebecca Litchfield’s 2014 photobook Soviet Ghosts: A Communist Empire in Decay, filled with crumbling buildings and infrastructure, illustrates what can be described as a broader tendency by Western journalists, photographers, bloggers, or scholars to fetishize “the infrastructural ruination of places” across the former Soviet Union (Bennett 2021, 332) as traces of “a past civilization” (Bennett 2021, 336). The display of postindustrial decay in the West has been criticized as “ruin porn,” with the city of Detroit being the most prominent example (Pohl 2021), and we see that much of this critique holds true concerning descriptions of the Russian countryside: a voyeuristic and potentially obsessive focus on decay and negativity projected onto such places, and a tendency to turn invisible or misrepresent those inhabiting “ruined” spaces. Stereotypes are not necessarily absolutely “wrong” but—as Stuart Hall (1997) reminds us—are situated within “regimes of representation” that generate reductionist, binary, essentializing, and naturalizing truths about groups of people, places, or other entities.¹⁰ Hence the need for a different politics of representation that will address disintegration, loss, and suffering as part but not the essence of these rural realities.

Misrepresentation and projection are by no means new phenomena when it comes to the Russian countryside. Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky, had lamented peasant conservatism and remained ambivalent about their role in the Soviet project (Shanin 1985). Later Soviet state discourses, however, cherished agricultural workers’ vital role in feeding the Soviet nation, celebrated the productivity of the scientific industrialized agrarian system and its workers, and romanticized the harmony and pleasure of collective labor in the kolkhoz (Buck-Morss 2000; P. R. Josephson et al. 2013).¹¹ In the 1990s, Russian and foreign market reformers problematized rural communities’ ostensible conservatism and reluctance to change and ascribed it to collectivism and egalitarianism, which they saw as rooted in the prerevolutionary obchshina,¹² Soviet collectivization, or both (Lindner 2008). Different political camps within Russia recurrently mobilize ideas of villagers’ ostensible backwardness. The oppositional former Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, for instance, blamed national stagnation on a rural Russia dissociated from modern urbanites:

There are, indeed, two Russias. The first Russia consists of about fifteen million “modernist and European” citizens . . . who live mostly in large- and medium-sized cities, have a higher education, and are employed in the private sector . . . they are the foundation of the opposition movement. The second Russia consists of about forty million conservative citizens . . . they are nostalgic about the Soviet period, support Putin, and believe the country as a whole is moving in the right direction. They are mainly residents of outlying provinces, small- and medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Their distinguishing feature is their dependence on government support in the form of salaries, pensions, social benefits, and subsidies from the federal budget (Ruzhkov 2012, September 18).

Around the same time, Putin in his electoral campaign declared demographic decline—symbolized by “ghost villages”—as the “most acute problem of contemporary Russia” (True 2012). Projections and problematizations of the countryside in their various forms are often employed for the sake of intervention and programs of reconfiguration, as will be discussed in the following chapters. The remainder of this chapter is concerned with the continuation and aftermath of the agrarian crisis.

Silent Violence

I get involved in a random chat with two elderly ladies sitting on a bench on a small side street in Letnevo. It is one of the first sunny and mild days after a cold winter, and coming together on the street, picking up some sun, and chatting with whoever happens to be out there seems quite natural. The two women continue with their talk and seem to accept me as an interlocutor who happens to be there, not evoking much surprise, and quickly a sense of familiarity emerges. They speak about things that happened in the village, something that Putin said on television, and about their families. This is where their narratives take a sad turn.

One woman’s son died in a Moscow hospital three weeks earlier. She says it was murder, or maybe an accident. In any case, she thinks it was related to his job there, and it was the search for a job that had taken him to Moscow several years before. She has not seen her daughter for ten years since she left for Austria and has not been back to Russia since then. Her mother says it is because she fears that she may not be allowed to return once she leaves the country where life is easier. The other woman begins to talk about her son who died in Moscow twelve years ago, stating that he had been killed but not knowing much about the details of his death. She has a second, younger son who stayed in the village and, as she says, spends his days hanging around and drinking in the village center. Her daughter, who holds a college degree, had been working at the local branch of a bank for eight years, earning 7,000 rubles (around $250) a month. Recently she found a job with an agri-company, which comes with several hours of commuting every day, but also with 22,000-ruble monthly wage. A third woman joins in. She mentions how her son died in a car accident some time ago, probably drunk.

The three continue to talk about sons and grandsons who had been working as guards in a city for some time, spending a good part of their modest income on transport or a city apartment. Some of them quit these jobs and went back to informal or irregular employment in the village, often accompanied by heavy drinking. The women do not seem to blame these young men for how they live, although it makes them suffer, too. Rather, they seem angry about the violent conditions that foreclose options and choices for a good and safe life. It strikes me how they seem to perceive the choice to drink one’s life away as not being of less legitimacy or dignity than life-threatening, underpaid, or otherwise humiliating labor for someone else’s profit.

All of this does not appear as spectacular or even unusual in the women’s narratives—they speak of these things as if they were rather normal. Nor am I surprised, as these stories remind me of many others that I have heard over several months during fieldwork: about untimely deaths related to hard and dangerous work, heavy drinking, or suicides, and the sorrow of those (mostly women) outliving their (mostly male) children and spouses. They also remind me of a half-eaten potato that I saw lying on a table at the construction site of a bania some days ago. A friend who was showing me the place remarked that the man who had left it there died the next day, unexpectedly, at the age of twenty-four. But the half-eaten potato still lying on this table, while the person who had left it there died two weeks before, did not seem out of place as it would have in many other sites. (Why would a young man die so suddenly? Why would the potato he started to eat transcend his own presence on that scene?)

Such encounters remained disturbing, but they were not unusual. They reminded me of zones of latent warfare that I have visited. Rural dwellers, too, sometimes compared post-Soviet transformation to war. I conducted one period of fieldwork some weeks after the Russian army annexed Crimea. Fighting in Eastern Ukraine intensified and became a constant topic on Russian television. I found the propagandistic coverage in Russian state media hardly bearable and was shocked how many, though certainly not all, of the people I talked to seemed to believe it, or at least not actively question it. But other reactions were remarkable, too. In response to images and stories of people losing relatives, property, places to live, and livelihoods in the Donbas—much emphasized in state media coverage—my interlocutors would express their compassion and often also relate to these images by describing how what they saw reminded them of their own experiences: for many, the most severe parts of the reform period had occurred alongside the loss of family members, savings, jobs, perspectives, and homes. Others have experienced and still remember the war brought upon them by Nazi Germany. Some of them would compare the taking apart of enterprise infrastructures—such as the one described in the opening quote of this chapter—to the looting by German troops or the hardships caused by the breakdown of monetary wages, state support, and supply structures during market reforms with the situation after World War II.¹³ Even though most remember the 1990s as the most severe phase and point out that many things have improved substantially since then, many still seem to consider the present condition as substantially shaped by crisis, not full recovery.

This does not bring us back to images of the desperate Russian village. It rather points to the subtle ways in which violent and traumatic pasts can be woven into the present (Das 2007) and become part of an “uneventful violence” (Nixon 2011, 8) and “dispersed suffering” (Povinelli 2011, 4) that require analytical, societal, and political attention even if “there is nothing spectacular to report” as “nothing happens that rises to the level of an event let alone crisis” (Povinelli 2011, 4). We see analytical and representational challenges here. The potato would not have made its way into my field notes had my friend not told me the story behind it. The three women would have remained within what I perceived as a peaceful normalcy of sitting in the spring sun had our conversation not shifted to the “normalcy” of their sons’ untimely deaths. In representational terms, such conditions may be said to “suffer from a drama deficit” (Nixon 2011, 52) that may be substituted through dramatization as a means to turn the normalized and dispersed visible. One is thus confronted with a representational landscape in which poverty and distress usually remain normalized and of little interest to the public and gain attention mostly through dramatization, adding urgency to drawn-out calamities that easily elude event-centered patterns of representation and perception. Both options seem wanting.

Speaking through Ruins

Abandoned factories, mines, military bases, and towns may come to mind as among the better-known visual symbols of post-Soviet disintegration. Their appearance is often more spectacular than that of crumbling agricultural infrastructure or bushes growing over fields. Still, the remains of former agricultural facilities and abandoned houses, as well as abandoned fields, seem omnipresent across rural Russia, both visually and in people’s narratives. Often, such “ruins” are part of inhabited places—and not abandoned ghost villages— with people living beside and among them. Even as they became dysfunctional, they did not become meaningless. References to ruins and voids are frequent in rural dwellers’ narratives. They are referred to and can be read as signifiers of complex processes and symbols of changes often difficult to grasp but still impactful.

I encountered the abandoned remains of former production bases, stables, offices, irrigation systems, dormitories, canteens, and installations in every village that I visited (figures 3.3–3.5). These ruins have different histories: sometimes their disintegration evolved around clear-cut events such as the one described in the opening quote of this chapter; sometimes they fell out of use and slowly into decay. Traces such as building skeletons usually remain, and even if they disappear completely, there remains a spot to point to and recall what used to occupy it. In an often stunningly detailed manner, rural dwellers recall the names of farm directors and specialists in succession over decades; the number of workers, specialists, brigades, cows, or sheep that their farms used to consist of; and how many tons of wheat, potatoes, or other field crops they used to produce. They also emphasize that from today’s perspective, it seems as if they had been living in another world. Some people I spoke to seemed able to reproduce a more detailed picture of the state of the village decades ago than of the present one, which I understand as an effect of estrangement and the simple fact that they no longer worked for a local kolkhoz.

Many rural dwellers say they still find it hard to understand or describe how things have changed so fundamentally over the years: how enterprises were reorganized, and property relations reconfigured, how some enterprises got by while others failed, how production breakdowns, dismissals, and bankruptcies came so suddenly, and how villagers themselves made ends meet under harsh conditions. In this light, their frequent references to ruins can be understood as pointing to a past that remains relevant. “Have you seen the remains of these buildings standing on the left when you enter the village? These used to be stables with five thousand goats. Have you seen how solid these walls were? They would have served their purpose for decades to come.” “There used to be a machinery base between the main road and the graveyard. I used to work there. All the kolkhoz machinery was repaired there.” Or: “All these buildings were built by the kolkhoz, the kolkhoz built houses and apartments for its many workers. Have you seen in what state they are now? They are run down, and half of them are empty.” Ruins point to a vanished past that remains relevant—allowing for comparison over time and allowing sense to be made of what seems like a “displacement without moving” that “leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable” (Nixon 2011, 19). Given the broad consensus among both rural dwellers and many commentators that the post-Soviet collapse and restructuring had particularly painful effects on rural sites, one may understand references to ruins as among the ways to express how in particular they were painful. Rural dwellers in this study thus were not interested in ruins as mere leftovers, but as symbols for connectivities to histories that “bear on the present [but] can escape scrutiny” (Stoler 2016, 5).

Villagers hence draw on the “pluritemporality of the ruin” (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013, 471) as it resonates with the pluritemporality of the changes they witnessed. They employ ruins as “trans-temporal hinges” (Pedersen and Nielsen 2013); as heuristic devices that allow connecting phenomena across time, create links to a vanished past that remains relevant, map complex timescapes, and depict particular absences. One rural dweller describes security men guarding abandoned stables as the sign of an absurd situation: “They all left, all. They left from here and now four people are watching over the farm building. What are they guarding there? There’s nothing left, only bricks” (Rural dweller, Lipetsk region, 2012). These ruins are understood as signs of both rupture and continuity, and a vanished and devalued past, troubling those who have decided to stay on. They point to what actors are “left with” (Stoler 2013, 9), to “the uneven pace with which people can extricate themselves from the structures and signs by which remains take hold” (Stoler 2013, 7–8), and to a perceived gap between what is and what could be (chapter 4).

How exactly people are “compelled to live amongst the ruins of their former lives” (Butler 2013) is distributed unequally across different subject positions. Elderly people often describe how the crumbling infrastructures surrounding them are more than dead substance to them since they represent their own past labor, their own “sweat and blood” that they invested in the kolkhoz, as an elderly former worker puts it (Rural dweller, Rostov region, 2012). The tragedy they express is not what Alexander Herzen called “chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price” (quoted from Arendt 1970, 27), or Immanuel Kant when he wrote that “the earlier generations seem to carry on their burdensome business only for the sake of the latter [who] . . . should have the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building” (quoted from Arendt 1970, 27). For many former kolkhoz workers, however, the promise of building up something that would benefit their children is among the many promises that were not realized. It turns out that progressivism’s failure annihilated their efforts to build a house that later generations could dwell in, and that many of their children today must pay a different price.

The ruins of buildings and infrastructure point beyond themselves. To some extent, they are interpreted as signifiers for decay and disintegration of entire villages. Recall how rural actors refer to kolkhozes and their successor enterprises as mestoobrazuiushchee or gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie (chapter 2): enterprises that were designed to be villages’ single main economic bases and employers and effectively came to uphold large parts of villages’ economic and social life. The term is suggestive. Predpriiatie translates as enterprise, grad (or gorod) as town, and obrazuiushchee links the two. Obrazovat’ is to found, to establish, or to form, and it is attributed to the enterprise: it is the enterprise that founds, establishes, and forms, and it is the village that is being founded, established, and formed by the enterprise. When villagers speak of the gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie nowadays, they often address the implications of its disappearance. What happens when the enterprise vanishes but the village remains? What will reproduce life in the village in the future? What is left of this intrinsically relational formation when one part crumbles? What will become of the village without this foundation? We are reminded of the kolkhoz, and encounter it again, in “ruins.”

Rural dwellers’ references to ruins often point to the very specific changes, voids, and losses that occurred over recent decades. They are employed to make specific points even if general judgments about the course of history remain disputed or are seen as pointless. They point to how systemic collapse became concrete. As scholars of ruination point out, ruins allow for telling contingent stories that “emerge at the interface between personal and collective memory, as material remains mediate between history and individual experience” (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013, 472). Rural dwellers refer to ruins to point to the shared loss of places built and inhabited collectively through systemic change and collapse, thereby connecting the locally specific and the historical. Because kolkhoz infrastructures, similar to factories, were bound to Soviet modernization ideologies, ruins here stand “as stark reminders of a vision of the future—a mode of relating the present to a possible future—that [are] now past” (Collier 2011, 6). Similar to developmental projects in other contexts (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018), infrastructure promised development in Soviet modernity, too, and the disintegration of infrastructures was seen as a sign of shattered future promises (Buck-Morss 2000; Humphrey 2005).¹⁴

How rural residents point to abandoned farmland is often similar to how they point to crumbling built infrastructure. Ioffe and colleagues (2006, 222) offer a vivid description of deteriorating or abandoned landscapes and built infrastructure that reflects some of the more pessimistic descriptions from rural residents I encountered: “Pervasive signs of regress include abandoned villages, spontaneous reforestation of previously cultivated fields, rapacious timber cutting in forests, lack of social services, and the profound decay of the communication infrastructure.” From rural dwellers’ perspective, the abandonment of production facilities and farmland can be understood as symptoms of the same underlying problems, the loss of productive capacity and the withering of diverse relations that, in combination, used to be generative of agricultural produce, income, and meaning. It has been suggested that soil can be understood as infrastructure (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Rural residents in this study, too, point to a breakdown of infrastructure that includes built environments, land, and soil.

Devaluation by Disintegration: Instruments, Infrastructure, and Income

Let us return to this chapter’s opening quote, the village mayor’s description of how the local farm enterprise was being taken apart. Recall how she describes a tractor driver’s reaction to losing his tractor: “He even howled. A man howled, with pity for his tractor, on which he worked. It was a new tractor. They took it and drove it away” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2014). One may ask: What is it that made this man so desperate? The tractor driver’s relation to his tractor seems substantially different from, say, that of an imagined prototype worker to a means of production that belonged to someone else and from which that worker is therefore already alienated.¹⁵ So, what kind of thing may the tractor be to the driver, and how does it matter to him?

Context-specific meanings offer a partial explanation. One may point out that in Soviet times, drivers would often take tractors home after work and park them in front of their houses as if they owned them, and some do so even today. On past and current large farms, two drivers will continuously work on and care for one specific tractor for many years and perceive any commands to change this as an open assault. Beyond historical and habitual reasons, however, the tractor establishes a certain relation between the driver and the world he inhabits and thus can be seen as actually becoming a part of an extension of this subject. Without his tractor, one may say, in analogy to John Law (1992, 383–84), that the driver would be “something quite other.” It is not only the tractor that constitutes his worker personality, of course, but also experience gathered and competence gained in this role, maybe the reputation earned of being a good driver, and so on. The loss of the tractor may thus mean the devaluation of both past and future labor, as the labor invested in creating skills and competencies is made worthless and decoupled from future employment and income options, and livelihood options are made uncertain. When the interviewee emphasizes that “it was a new tractor,” she indicates that it could have fulfilled this function for years to come. This is the kind of loss that redefines futures. The tractor is thus part of a bundle of relations that constitutes the driver in the world he inhabits, linked to a place in society, a productive capacity, and prospects for the future, and thus losing it bears aspects of “desubjectivation” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013).

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the role of instruments in the labor process are instructive in making explicit the relationship between such desubjectivation and livelihood. For Arendt ([1958] 1998), labor—in contrast to work that creates specific things—is an ongoing activity that sustains and reproduces life itself in a repetitive process. Instruments are an integral part of the labor process, in which “the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred” (Arendt [(1958) 1998], 166). To refer to the tractor driver for the last time: the distinction between agricultural laborers and their implements becomes blurred, as does the clear distinction between means and ends and the labor process itself. Losing a tractor is not merely losing some abstract job. Rather, the loss of the tractor decouples the driver from an ongoing productive and value-creating process, from a labor collective, exchange loops and markets, a national economy, as well as the ideology of feeding the nation. In this sense, the loss directly relates to different levels of desubjectivation.

This argument can be “upscaled” from machines to infrastructure. Akin to this chapter’s opening quote, former kolkhoz workers vividly describe how irrigation systems, stables, and machinery in their home villages were taken apart and sold off for scrap metal, and how remaining buildings fell out of use, underlining the relationship between infrastructure and people’s capacities. A former mayor states that “they broke the kolkhozes and broke the occupation at the same time. Within one, two years . . . it is a different story when they take apart some . . . factory where you can take it apart . . . and nothing around really changes. Within a year another factory will have emerged somewhere . . . but we peasants have to live somewhere, for us, this is a gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie, we have to exist somewhere. Here, they destroyed it all at once” (Former village mayor, Perm region, 2013).

Here, we reencounter the gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie (an enterprise that grounds and shapes a village) as providing the material and organizational basis for production. At stake are not just jobs but agriculture as an occupation—an occupation that many villagers are not only used to but also trained and qualified for. In a sense, the enterprise plays a similar role for the village community that the tractor plays for the driver: enterprises with vehicles, machinery, irrigation systems, stables, bakeries, and functioning farm management constitute a productive relationship between a village population and its agricultural potential, and so the collective productive capacity and the potential to generate future income are at stake here. Infrastructures here are among the conditions of productivity, value creation, and employment. They are not stable once they are set up; they require maintenance (Gupta 2018) or can be actively dismantled. The role and value of land, if understood as a “medium of expression” (Nichols 2020, 74) rather than naturally given, is fundamentally entangled with these infrastructures.

Many rural dwellers today emphasize the painful divergence between local agricultural potential on the one hand, and local productive capacity on the other: fields lying fallow, meadows and stables remaining empty, and people with the power and skills to turn this potential into productivity remain unemployed. For them, there is an obvious gap between what could be and what is, between a given resource potential and the means to realize it. The agricultural potential is still there, every day, just in front of their eyes, but as they do not benefit from it, it rather appears as a reminder of lost possibilities.

A Ruin and a Gap: Dispossession in Transformation

Ruination has been a prominent theme in representations and reflections of the crumbling Soviet empire. David Stark (1996) prominently proposed a different reading of ruins that emphasizes not so much decay but making and becoming in complex, contingent, and contested processes of “recombination.”¹⁶ Stark conceptualizes post-Soviet societal change as “rearrangements in the patterns of how multiple orders are interwoven” and undertakes the analytical task to “examine how actors in the postsocialist context are rebuilding organizations and institutions not on the ruins but with the ruins of communism as they redeploy available resources in response to their immediate practical dilemmas” (Stark 1996, 995). The idea of “building with the ruins of communism” has become one leitmotif for understanding postsocialist transformation in the Western social sciences. It underscores actors’ agency in rebuilding and hence directs attention to the future. But what about the ruins?

In Stark’s writings, ruins are turned into building material in transformative processes of rebuilding. Ann Stoler’s (2013, 2016) reading of the ruins of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery offers a fruitful contrast. Stoler does not start from a set distinction between ruins and a generative activity of rebuilding. She suggests shifting the focus away from “ruins” as a noun and on “ruination” as “an active, ongoing process” and on the verb “to ruin” (Stoler 2016, 346). The focus is “not on inert remains but on the histories they recruit and on their vital reconfigurations” (Stoler 2016, 348). This helps to understand how ruination yields new damage and renewed disparities, not so much what is “‘left’ but what people are ‘left with’: what remains that blocks livelihoods and health . . . the social afterlife of degraded infrastructures; distressed sensibilities,” etc. (Stoler 2016, 348). Following Stoler, we may say that one should not replace a focus on the past with a focus on emergence that turns a blind eye to history. Rather, the task is to deal with the different temporalities of ruination, how historical formations leave their marks through “uneven temporal sedimentations,” and how their “ruins contour and carve through the psychic and material space in which people live” (Stoler 2013, 2). Ruination, then, not only leaves actors with material to recombine and reconstruct, but with “leftovers” that may stick to them in unwelcome ways and become part of the structural circumstances that limit their agency.

Importantly, capacities to disentangle from or redeploy ruins and recombine their pieces are distributed unequally among actors. This does not mean that only elites retained agency during the disintegration. In the context of this study, some villagers have gained advantage from appropriating materials and resources from disintegrating collective enterprises, as indicated in the chapter’s opening quote. Some private farmers, as well as households, appropriated collective enterprises’ resources for their family farming. Some who played an active role in the reorganization of enterprises reportedly sacrificed the village community’s interest for their personal advantage. Some enterprise directors gradually transferred collective farms into private property. While some would argue they were forced into such tactics as the only available option to get by, others obviously used them to enhance their wealth.

The scenario of gaps that could not be filled was little accounted for in optimistic visions for post-Soviet transition, which saw private family farms filling the space hitherto occupied by state and collective enterprises (Spoor 2012). It seems more consistent with interpretations of market reforms as neoliberal “shock therapy” that deprived populations of hitherto state-controlled goods and made them available to domestic elites and international capital (Harvey 2003; Kagarlicky 2002; Klein 2007). It remains contested to what extent Western states and capitalist interests contributed to bringing down the Soviet system, which is a historical argument for caution regarding the implicit or explicit functionalism in such arguments. In any case, it is well documented how the post-Soviet disintegration provided the basis for large-scale appropriation of assets and accumulation of wealth and control by domestic elites, who came to be known as business oligarchs, and international businesses that came to penetrate vast “new” markets (Barnes 2006). Disintegration here is not a mere function of capitalist accumulation, but it can be exploited for its sake.

I do not suggest that we should return to the debate on post-Soviet disintegration, but that thinking along the lines of ruination and disintegration can help prevent an “inclusionary bias” (Bair and Werner 2011, 989) through a narrow focus on the expansion of capitalist relations and the incorporation of people, places, and assets into capitalist circuits.¹⁷ This is not to disregard appropriation but to ask how it builds on the disintegration and devaluation without reducing the latter to a function of the former. Besides the need to acknowledge that there is a history to current forms of dispossession (such as the land grab’s colonial predecessors), we need to understand how history can be a constitutive part of dispossession: how support, infrastructure, guarantees, and securities eroded over time; how the failure of one scheme or project prepared the ground for the following one; and how gradual devaluation and disintegration resulted in states of uncertainty and abandonment in which people felt caught between the “no more” and the “not yet.” We are then reminded that dispersed dispossession is drawn out over time, not only in the sense that it unfolds slowly but also as it sticks. It cannot be reversed and fixed by simply reestablishing the connection, or by recognition of historical injustice (Coulthard 2014) as it created a new condition and restructured future options. Even the partial recovery of the Russian agrarian sector (Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk 2018; Wengle 2018, 2019) has not solved issues of rural disadvantage and dispossession. At the same time, to return to two images from the introduction, it was not that a “black hole” was turned into an “investors’ nirvana.” The appropriation of devalued assets was not sudden, and it was rarely straightforward. The following chapter explores how companies navigate and try to capitalize on devaluation, suspension, and indeterminacy.