CHAPTER 2

Kolkhoz

“There is no kolkhoz any longer.” Such a statement would count as true in various senses and situations today. In its original meaning, the term kolkhoz refers to Soviet collective farms. As those were formally abolished shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet system, kolkhozes ceased to exist in a legal and formal sense. Market reformers envisioned peasant farms as taking their place. To a significant extent, however, they were replaced by large farming enterprises in a different formal guise, registered as joint-stock companies, private or state agricultural enterprises, cooperatives, or forming part of larger holding companies. So, while the kolkhoz may be dead, large-scale farming is alive and well in contemporary Russia. And this is only the formal side of things.

“There is no kolkhoz any longer. This isn’t the Soviet Union anymore.” I have repeatedly heard such statements in conversations and arguments during fieldwork. While in a literal sense they confirm a truism, in a more comprehensive sense they indicate that there is more to the story. More than the repetition of a known fact, these statements are mostly uttered in contested situations and respond to actual or alleged persistence of elements of the Soviet agrarian system. Large farms were reregistered and renamed, but they “never became what their new names implied” (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 29). In this sense, continued kolkhoz talk also stands for attempts to make sense of hybrid forms that are neither a continuation of the old nor the realization of new models envisioned in reform policies (Pavlovskaya 2013). Furthermore, many references to the kolkhoz are framed in positive rather than negative terms. Many stories related by my interlocutors literally started from and ended with the kolkhoz, and I encountered what I shall call kolkhoz relations in all the villages covered in this study. They were present in the material texture and infrastructures, in organizational patterns, economic rationalities, and social expectations, or the claims and judgments of various actors, from workers to bureaucrats. Hence the importance of understanding not only the persistence and dominance of industrialized large-scale agriculture as such but also the liveliness and contestations beneath its surface.

Stories of Soviet kolkhozes and their post-Soviet afterlives have been presented to an international readership early and prominently by Caroline Humphrey (1983, 1999), and the kolkhoz remained a central theme in post-Soviet rural studies (Allina-Pisano 2008; Nikulin 2003). So why do I revisit the kolkhoz theme in a book on rural dispossession? I will show how it points to institutionalized support, material infrastructures, collective arrangements, and entitlements as goods on which rural dwellers and livelihoods depend—often more than on land rights or property titles. I do not approach kolkhoz relations in terms of path dependence or legacy, however, since such framings provide few conceptual tools to better understand why some elements and relations remain important and how they prevail (Collier 2011; Humphrey 2002; Stoler 2016; Todorova 2010b). I start from situations characterized by change and uncertainty rather than continuity, and I trace actors’ creative and inventive ways to involve themselves in such changes, including the revaluation, negotiation, and reenactment of elements with a socialist history. Contrary to images of rural stagnation, I argue that invoking the kolkhoz remains important because recurrent changes and reorganization generate ruptures and contradictions that open up situations for negotiation and criticism.

Past and present kolkhozes

The kolkhoz has been the primary organizational unit of Soviet agriculture at a local level. The term is a contraction of kollektivnoe khoziaistvo, a collective farm. Kolkhozes existed alongside state farms called sovkhozes. The historical origins of collective and state farms differ, as did certain formal characteristics. However, variation within both categories has been found to exceed variation between them, and attempts to unify working conditions across farm categories have led to a further blurring of strict differences over time (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 21–22).¹ When people speak of Soviet collective and state farms today, they rarely differentiate between these two variants of the Soviet agrarian enterprise model, and the term kolkhoz is used as a shorthand for Soviet agrarian enterprises in general in the places covered in this study. Collective and state farms have been described as “a microcosm” or “extensions” of the Soviet state (Humphrey 1999, 3–4), but they are also shaped by a significant portion of local rationalities, dynamics, and requirements. This echoes the broader idea that the Soviet enterprise was not simply an economic institution but “the primary unit of soviet society” (Clarke 1992, 7). State guarantees and protections were mediated through collective farms, and so were many practical social services such as housing, heating and electricity, repairs of homes and roads, and even the support of medical services, schools and kindergartens, and local cultural activities.

Khoziaistvo—usually translated as “farm” in kollektivnoe khoziaistvo (collective farm)—reflects some of the ways in which it is more than a farm or an enterprise. The root khoz originally referred to the household and its organization and management. In recent and contemporary uses, it can refer to a range of different subjects like sel’skoe or narodnoe khoziaistvo: agriculture and national economy. Hence it refers to ways of managing the economy. Stephen Collier (2011, 81) argues that it originally referred to units at the nexus of production and need fulfillment, and hence a substantive understanding of the economy in a Polanyian sense,² in contrast to the liberal formal understanding. If we follow that logic, the idea of khoziaistvo would not apply to a farm managed by principles of the Western economic mainstream.³ Actually existing kolkhozes did not fully comply with Soviet planning either. For instance, they failed to fully displace the household as the nexus of production and need fulfillment; rather, they became part of a complex of industrial and household farming that has been described as symbiotic (Humphrey 1999; Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019).

Yet the idea that a khoziaistvo is responsible for fulfilling a population’s material needs, rather than merely providing jobs and paying taxes, remains prevalent, both regarding kolkhoz successor enterprises and agriculture more generally, which in Russian is sel’skoe—that is, rural—khoziaistvo. As one agricultural bureaucrat argues: “We are either sel’skoe khoziaistvo, which ensures the country’s strategic food security, or we are business. Let’s decide. If we are sel’skoe khoziaistvo, then you support us with subsidies, and we produce the products the country needs. Or we are business, but then we sell [our produce] to the state at the price we set. And the market will show” (Head of district agricultural department, Nizhniy Novgorod region, 2021).

While the idea of the khoziaistvo opens possibilities for criticizing the market economy, or its specific shortcomings, and arguing for economic alternatives, there is no point in romanticizing the historic kolkhoz. At its worst, the Soviet agrarian system was grounded in a totalitarian state project (Scott 1998, 217) that combined oppression, economic inefficiency, ecological devastation, and manifold gaps between policies and local realities. It is well documented that, unlike the name suggests, collective farms were hardly egalitarian and, in many respects, they were quite hierarchical organizations. Humphrey (1999, 435) found that “jobs in the farm [were] very unequal in pay and conditions of work” and that there was a distinct power hierarchy headed by the kolkhoz chairman and including a ladder of specialists, party representatives, and foremen “above” the kolkhoz workers. Also, while the general meeting of kolkhozniks was formally the highest authority, studies found that in practice it mostly affirmed decisions made by local authorities or higher-level officials (Humphrey 1999). Dependence on local authorities was, and in an altered form remains, particularly strong as villagers depend on the enterprise not only for jobs but also for a range of supports and services that are also governed within the kolkhoz microcosms. Furthermore, in many instances, rural dwellers depended on household food production “while toiling for a kolkhoz” (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 25) and hence carried a double burden of fulfilling state-directed production plans and ensuring their own subsistence.

As collective and state farms became the dominant form of organizing Soviet agriculture during the collectivization (1928–1940) under Stalin, their history is further bound to what is remembered as a particularly grim chapter of Soviet history. Collectivization was a project based on ostensibly universal political-economic laws and principles that aimed at integrating a vast territory with a heterogeneous population into a centrally planned national political economy. It aimed at developing the countryside, overcoming what the Soviets perceived as painful backwardness. It also aimed at generating resources that could be used for the USSR’s ambitious industrialization plans more broadly (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 13).⁴ While some promises of collectivization, such as the delivery of tractors and other machinery, were perceived positively among large parts of the rural population, and certain groups such as landless peasants benefited, the majority of the rural population generally opposed collectivization, partly through hidden or open resistance. Collectivization was “a massive economic and social experiment” (Humphrey 1999, 1), but the Russian peasantry had been subject to great—and often greatly failing—experiments before. Particularly in the Central Asian republics and “ethnic” territories of the vast Soviet empire, collectivization continued much older patterns of what has been called Russia’s “internal colonization” (Ėtkind 2011). There, it was experienced as an attack by the center on locally distinct values and ways of organizing households, villages, agriculture, and local economies more broadly, which provoked particularly strong resistance in these territories (Humphrey 1999). But resistance occurred in other parts, too. The Soviets responded with force, and many deemed enemies of collectivization were resettled to places such as Siberia or Kazakhstan. Best known is the instance of the so-called kulaks, peasants who were wealthier than average and experienced high levels of expropriation and persecution, partly because of resistance to collectivization and partly because of their being labeled as class enemies within Soviet society. A combination of state-imposed punishment for peasant boycotts and other resistance strategies, mismanagement, and droughts resulted in famines that led to the starvation of millions over the first decade of collectivization. In the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, there was comparatively strong popular resistance to collectivization, and the effects of the Great Famine in 1932–34 were particularly grave, resulting in millions of deaths and still remembered as Holodomor across Ukraine.⁵

Despite its high degree of centralization, the Soviet agrarian system did not form or create a monolithic block (Shanin 1985). Policies were changing and some were ambiguous; gaps between what was written on paper and what occurred on the ground were prevalent. Many got by despite rather than because of the insufficient Soviet schemes, by inhabiting and altering them (Smith 2014; Wädekin 1973). Market reforms did not create a monolithic system either. Rather, they marked the beginning of a process that resulted in a spatially variegated and still shifting rural landscape (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006). Many rural dwellers today are aware of the violent and dysfunctional sides of the Soviet agrarian system. At the same time, in retrospect, they still acknowledge the commitment to equalizing living conditions in the countryside alongside the provision of social services as a Soviet achievement. As inequalities between families, between different villages, as well as enterprises and regions, increased after the collapse of the Soviet system, the deterioration of these equalizing forces is often addressed as a loss.

The market-oriented agricultural reforms were carried out along several main lines: the reorganization of the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, the support of the emerging private agrarian sector, and land reforms (Kalugina 2014). They were directed mainly by the federal government toward the regions, raiony (districts), and villages where communities and officials had little direct influence.⁶ Certain reforms were launched in the late Soviet Union after Gorbachev, but they were pushed much harder under Yeltsin. On December 27, 1991, one day after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin passed Presidential Decree No. 323, “On Urgent Measures for Implementing Land Reform in the Russian Federation,” which required kolkhozes and sovkhozes to complete their reorganization by January 1, 1993. The majority of enterprises formally met the target of reorganization, but most enterprise authorities and assemblies chose to reorganize in ways that allowed for leaving the workers’ collective and the organizational structure of the enterprise more or less intact (Lindner 2008).

This had much to do with the general political-economic condition at that time. Throughout the 1990s, many of the large farm enterprises were in a difficult economic situation, did not pay workers wages for months or even years, and often went bankrupt. Still, leaving the enterprise and starting their own seemed like a worse option for many workers. The entire agricultural sector was in a desperate situation at that time, drained by the withdrawal of state support, low prices on agricultural produce caused by the decline of domestic household purchasing power and cheap agricultural imports that came with trade liberation, and government strategies of keeping food prices deliberately low to ensure food supply in cities. Simultaneously, input prices for machinery, seeds, and fertilizers rose. Access to markets and state support was often difficult, especially for small producers,⁷ and markets were volatile. In short, most rural dwellers had little opportunity to become peasants, and rather remained wage laborers (Kalugina 2012). The deterioration of the formal economy, including hyperinflation and chaotic, sometimes inaccessible, agricultural markets in many instances, increased local populations’ dependence on large farms. As money became relatively worthless, or at least insufficient to keep up and organize the flow of materials, goods, and services, informal exchange and various forms of barter became crucial elements of local economies—and became reasons why, from the perspective of rural dwellers, collective farms had to continue. As Humphrey (1999, 461) puts it, “In these circumstances people are attached to collectives because they are the only thing that looks like a functioning intermediate institution and stand in for what is almost a nonfunctioning state at the village level.”

What accounts for this failure of the goal to create peasant farms? Some ascribe it to the circumstances of implementation, such as farm directors and other local elites manipulating land distribution to defend their privilege and status (Allina-Pisano 2008). Others argue that the reform was not really designed to prevent large farms from keeping their land and remaining the main agricultural producers (Wegren 2009). Yet others emphasize that large farms did not persist because they were doing well, but because rural dwellers and state and local authorities all preferred to keep them running for the simple lack of other employment options in the villages (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 92)—so they provided a “vehicle for collective survival” (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006, 117). In terms of lasting effects, which interest us here, the important point is that most former collective and state farms were not split into smaller units but, as business interest in agriculture gradually emerged, incorporated into even larger agricultural companies.

State policies were oscillating between creating conditions for small private farms and benefiting large agribusinesses (Nefedova 2014, 78). State support for private farmers was relatively strong during a brief period from 1992 to 1994, when the number of registered private farms rose significantly. It never became a mass phenomenon, however, partly because starting a business was difficult enough to keep most of the less powerful rural dwellers out of business. After the turn of the century, the Putin government implemented an overall more supportive agricultural policy but dedicated most attention to the strengthening of large agricultural enterprises. At this time, the total number of private farms—which had been below initial expectations from the beginning—was already decreasing again (Wegren 2011, 219). Under the official category of private peasant farms, today one finds a wide range, from small units based on family labor to large enterprises that have outgrown former collective enterprises in size (Nefedova 2014, 118; Uzun 2012, 141–42).

The category of private farms, used in official statistics, is thus not an adequate indicator of the development of smallholder farming in Russia. While there are certain regions and places with a significant portion of smaller private farmers, the predominant form of household agriculture today is supplementary—that is, noncommercial or semicommercial—agriculture on household plots (Pallot and Nefedova 2007). Assessments of how much household farming continues to depend on large farms differ substantially. Some scholars report that surveyed households rely much more on the support of family members and relatives rather than on large farms (Wegren 2009, 122), while others emphasize that household farming still fundamentally depends on resources provided by large farms (Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky 2006; Pallot and Nefedova 2007). Many of these studies are dated. In the current study, the importance of large farm support for household agriculture, and local communities more generally, varied across case studies, with the case discussed in this chapter being an instance of strong and complex interlinkages between kolkhoz and household economies.

Post-Soviet Land

During the Soviet period, all land belonged to the state, and individuals had certain use rights but no ownership of land. Land reform in Russia—in contrast to postsocialist Eastern and Central European states (Hann 2003; Verdery 2003)—was organized as a distribution rather than restitution. Land was not returned to families who had owned it before collectivization (which, due to prerevolutionary property structures, would have been difficult anyhow). Rather, the former kolkhoz workers and certain other professional groups received certificates for fractional ownership in the enterprise property such as buildings and machinery and agricultural land.⁸ Still, the scale of this distribution was massive. Between 1992 and 1997, approximately 117.6 Mha were formally privatized, and 11.9 million land shares were allocated. By 2002, 7.7 million shares had been distributed to private owners (Wegren 2009, 16).

In Russian, land titles are mostly referred to as pai (shares). Much kolkhoz property was organized in pai in early socialist times, too, but these pai disappeared with the development of collective ownership on later Soviet farms in which the “direct participants in production and appropriation [were] big collectivities of people” (Humphrey 1999, 94). So pai played a transitional role on the way to Soviet agriculture as well as out of it. They certified a shareholder’s right to land of a certain size within large land banks that now formally belonged to the collective of shareholders.⁹ It has been argued that the persistence of large farms can be partly explained by the distribution of entitlements rather than real land during the post-Soviet reform (Wegren 2009, 6). It also created conditions for the distinct forms of rural dispossession in Russia over the last decades.

As mentioned, due to the dire circumstances very few rural dwellers could or wanted to start their own farming businesses and work the land themselves. As Jessica Allina-Pisano (2008, 4–5) notes, “Economic constraints limited rural people’s desire and capacity to convert paper rights into actual allocation of land in the fields,” as land acquisition to start a family farming business was not a particularly attractive prospect for most (Humphrey 1999; Kalugina 2014; Ryzhova 2022). In many regions, the demand and price for land were low. After the bankruptcy of agricultural enterprises, land documents sometimes lost their value completely or were sold for merely symbolic amounts. Hence a land title’s use and exchange value were limited for individual shareholders. Furthermore, given regularly changing legislation, landownership seemed highly uncertain.

Differentiating between abstract land titles and “real land” is important to understand not only the course of land reform but also rural dwellers’ actual attachments to land. Setovka’s community, to which we turn shortly, is an agricultural one and people are living on and from the land in various respects: They grow food on household plots, many work for the agricultural enterprise, some work land as private farmers, and some keep livestock. For many, their relations to the place, and the land, are a reason to stay and live in this remote village. But the land that rural dwellers work on a household basis is different from that which has been distributed through entitlements. In Soviet times, most rural households had access to land—usually around 0.4 hectares—often located around houses, which they could use for private subsidiary agriculture.¹⁰ Food production on these plots remains important and sometimes constitutes a major source of family income (Pallot and Nefedova 2007). Kolkhoz fields reorganized during land reform, by contrast, sometimes reach sizes of several hundred hectares as they were designed for industrial agriculture (see figures 2.2 and 2.3) and can be located kilometers away from a village. Household farms can work parts of these fields, but this presupposes agreements with running large enterprises as well as machinery and infrastructure that many households could not afford. Large enterprises, in contrast, usually still command such machinery and infrastructure. Hence, for maintaining land relations through industrial agriculture, a working enterprise is much more important than individual land titles and property.

Land Sales

Setovka is a village in the Perm region. Around 900 inhabitants were registered here in 2013, out of which 190 were younger than 16, and 160 of pension age. The agricultural enterprise has changed its legal form and organizational structure several times over the last two decades, but it is commonly understood as the direct successor of the Soviet collective enterprise, still controlling around 4,500 hectares of farmland. With around 140 workers in 2014—a relatively large number due to keeping 550 dairy cows—the enterprise remains, by far, the village’s biggest employer (followed by the local school and kindergarten with 32 employees). A significant portion of village inhabitants commute to work in towns and cities. The enterprise had been loss-making for some time but reached profitability in the early 2010s. The village administration’s budget hinged (80 percent) on transfer payments from the regional and federal levels.

Conditions for agricultural production in the district are average, good for dairy farming or growing potatoes, but barely profitable for large-scale production of crops or most vegetables. Business interest in agriculture—beyond existing enterprises’ attempts to carry on—was practically nonexistent over the last decades and remained relatively weak even during times of rising interest in agriculture since the late 2000s. This sets it apart from regions such as the Central Black Earth and the Southern Steppes, which have been dominated by large grain-producing companies for many years (see chapter 4).

The attempt by a neighboring enterprise to gain control over the village’s farmland in 2007 thus took the village community and authorities by surprise. This takeover was ultimately prevented by a coalition of the village mayor, the enterprise director, and the assembly of owners of land shares. Instances of community-based resistance and collective action to prevent land sales are rare in rural Russia, according to both the literature (Mamonova 2016; Mamonova and Visser 2014; Visser et al. 2015) and my investigations. This is part of what makes this case so interesting. Also, this mobilization spurred a debate and reflection on the material basis as well as the social contract of communal living in Setovka. The inhabitants of the village have called the local enterprise “their kolkhoz” before, but during the controversy, the term has been given more explicit and to some extent new meaning. As the kolkhoz could no longer be taken for granted, stories about what it is and why it matters gained impact. This is not to say that an authentic kolkhoz has been preserved. The enterprise in question had been a private farm and not all villagers called it a kolkhoz all the time. Rather, we are dealing with a hybrid and contingent organizational form that is not only subject to continuous change but also stands at the fringe of quite contradictory organizing and guiding principles—not least between the private and the collective (Lindner 2013), which creates a tension that is navigated more than resolved. Such renegotiation of kolkhoz relations started with land sales.

For many years, I was told, there has been little concern about agricultural land in Setovka. After the formal dissolution of kolkhozes, the former kolkhoz workers received two kinds of documents entitling them to fractional ownership in the enterprise property: certifying property in buildings and machinery and in agricultural land. Titles in enterprise infrastructure and equipment were redeemed in exchange for enterprise services, raw material, natural produce, or housing property, and most of them were fully covered in 2013. But the documents certifying property in 7.5 hectares of farmland were mostly ignored by both their owners and the farm enterprise over the first fifteen years. As in other instances, only very few would work the land privately, and possibilities to sell titles were limited by the fact that only the local enterprise had an interest in it. The enterprise just carried on working the land as it had done before without buying land shares or paying rent. This also implied, however, that it worked this land without a legally binding contract. As the enterprise director reflects in retrospect, “It was our fault that we did not conduct the work of clarification in time. We thought: Who would ever care about this land?” (LFE director, Perm region, 2013).

This silence around supposedly useless land titles ended in 2007 when a businessman from the regional capital Perm, who thus far had made his money in industry, started buying land shares in Setovka and other villages. He had already taken over and restructured the entire enterprise in a neighboring village the year before, one year after its bankruptcy. Being also involved in regional politics, he further presented plans to develop the villages in which he operated. In Setovka, as in many other instances, the exact form of land title transactions remained somewhat foggy. A local middleman is said to have approached title-owning villagers individually and offered them 8,500 rubles (around $320 in early 2007) per land title certifying ownership of 7.5 hectares. The village’s mayor found out about the land sales by chance from a regional land registry and informed the enterprise director. He could not at first believe that villagers were selling land entitlements; the mayor had to convince him. Land sales thus hit the village authorities by surprise; they appeared unexpected or even unthinkable. The mayor describes her reaction to the news as a shock that she felt bodily: “At that moment I went through this very horror, and I literally stopped moving—I had some terrible pain in my legs. Seeing that our people could behave this way came as a real shock for me. I could understand if they sold land lying fallow already, [land] of a nonexistent kolkhoz. But that of a working enterprise! It was the first time that I encountered such a thing, that the land of a working enterprise was bought up. And I was very worried” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2010).

The expanding enterprise had already bought seventy out of the 539 land titles of the enterprise’s land bank. Most of these documents were not formalized as individual property: they entitled the holder to fractional ownership but without specifying any concrete parcel of land. Few shareholders had taken up the lengthy, complicated, and costly bureaucratic process of formalizing land titles. Thus, while property entitlements were owned individually, the land bank as such remained collectively managed.

The law¹¹ defines the collective of shareholders as the authority to decide on any changes to a land bank in which individuals own titles but no clearly defined physical parcel of land, including the process of formalizing ownership in such a piece of land (Shagaida 2010). As the “investor” had bought entitlements and not actual farmland, the assembly of shareholders had to approve the location of the land before he could legally work it. The assembly is not obliged to approve the location preferred by the party demanding the formalization, and thus has substantial power to block such requests. The investor thus aimed at acquiring most of the land shares, which would have brought him the majority of votes in the shareholder assembly, enabling him to outvote all other members on the formalization of land titles. Thus, stopping sales before this political tipping point and regaining control over the village farmland became an urgent task for the village authorities.

After the mayor had convinced the kolkhoz director that land sales had occurred, they jointly initiated a shareholder assembly. Until then, sales had been conducted privately, beyond public attention, and not articulated as a matter of collective concern. This changed with the assembly that brought together 241 shareholders, which made it the largest in decades. The matter of land sales was turned into a more-than-individual, collective issue potentially threatening the very fabric of common village life. The effects were immediate, as the village mayor recalls: “We really brought together a big, a very big number of inhabitants, living on our territory, explaining that their action creates the threat of liquidating a running enterprise. And then sales actually stopped” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2013).¹²

How could shareholders so quickly be convinced to stop selling their shares? The mayor describes the shift away from the indifferent attitude toward share ownership that had prevailed before the assembly:

[People would think,] what’s the use of this piece of paper lying around? It was, after all, issued in the year 1992, but the sales occurred in 2007. This is to say, the document is lying around for fifteen years, without movement, and . . . is of no use for you. “Will you work this land?”—“No, I won’t.”—“Well, so then sell it, there is an opportunity; there is someone who wants to buy it and will give you money. Why should it bother you?” I suppose that in most cases people did this either unconsciously or out of material necessity . . . because when they later came to us, and we told them: “Why do you give away land which [the enterprise] is working? . . . Your children are living here, work in this kolkhoz. You sold this land today, where will your son be working tomorrow?” They weren’t aware of this issue. . . . When you start talking to them, they really begin to sweat instantly, they flush; “What, why did we do it like this?,” but they have already done it. . . . Therefore, when during the meeting we explained to people what this might lead up to; to the abolishment of the jobs of their own children, relatives, and friends. . . . Then people began to realize (Village mayor, Perm region, 2010).

Land documents were perceived as useless paper lying around. A further reason for rural residents to consider selling land certificates was the perceived uncertainty of this ownership. One rural dweller explained her reasons for considering selling her share in 2013: “And maybe it will happen that, just as it came, it will be gone, this land. And that’s it. Just as they gave us these certificates, they will take them from us. They will say: ‘You used to have land, and now it is gone.’ The government has its own policies, after all. . . . Who knows what turns policies will take. We cannot, so to say, foresee that. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. At least something, at least 15,000 [rubles]” (Rural dweller, Perm region, 2013).

These 15,000 rubles that shareholders could get for a share at this later point were roughly equivalent to $500, or an average monthly agricultural wage. This amount seems formidable if one understands it to be in exchange for a useless and worthless certificate. However, not everyone saw it that way. Some emphasized that shares in enterprises and land, besides becoming a political instrument to keep the local enterprise alive, were meant to reward workers for long years of labor on collective enterprises and should have allowed them to gain economic independence. To some degree, both claims correspond with the official reform logic. Seen this way, 15,000 rubles was no great sum at all.

Six years after the assembly, villagers remember the possibility that “the kolkhoz will be left without land” (Rural dweller, Perm region, 2013) as a critical turning point in the village and in local attitudes. The shareholder assembly turned land certificates into a contested and political issue as the realization that the kolkhoz could be lost in Setovka reshaped the kolkhoz and the village. Some villagers describe others’ decision to sell land as irrational because at that time prices were so low and the benefits from selling a share were so limited that they could not possibly outweigh the risks caused by the damage done to the enterprise. Others emphasize that those who sold needed money urgently, even these “cheap, worthless eight thousand [rubles]” (Former village mayor, Perm region, 2013), for instance, for medicine or surgery. Further, since land titles brought so few benefits in the present and possibly also in the future, the decision to sell made sense from an individual viewpoint: “We understand what this land really gives, it will not give its gains immediately. . . . They sold, and they also understood. Say even some heavy drinker, he also understood that the situation will not change within the next ten years. . . . But money is needed today! And so, will he be a hero of the day or not, and so he didn’t hang a care on this decision. . . . They announce it today, I will go, give it to them” (Former village mayor, Perm region, 2013).

Others similarly describe sales as quite understandable since people were offered “real money” or “living money” (zhivye den’gi) for “dead paper,” as the land documents were often called. The investor’s offer to buy shares created an opportunity that had not existed before to sell titles. Thus, seen from the angle of private property, the decision to sell land titles may seem perfectly rational: gaining no benefit from owning these titles, people realized some benefits by selling them. In this sense, the assembly was also mobilized against individualistic notions of freedom implicit in the concept of private property. Interestingly, I have not heard villagers complaining about a curtailment of their freedoms. Rather, the land entitlements were given new meaning and worth. Had they appeared as worthless to an individual, they now became meaningful and even vital for the functioning of a collective. While selling land appeared as a rational and legitimate decision at one point, it was turned into something to regret and be ashamed of in retrospect. Land titles have become a different thing in the process.

”We forgot about [the land titles], . . . and then when the law began to work, everyone took them out, remembered them,” is how the enterprise director describes their life course in the village (LFE director, Perm region, 2013). To remember land titles, their owners had to be reminded of them. During the shareholder assembly in 2007, the mayor described the history, role, and current state of land titles: their number and size, who received them in 1992, shareholders’ rights and options, and the current status of collective long-term leases.¹³ Thereafter, many villagers began to sell their land documents to the local “kolkhoz.” This implied investing labor. They had to search for their forgotten documents, these “pieces of paper.” If they could not find them, they had to get them reissued. Lawyers and surveyors had to be involved, and someone had to pay for the procedure. Efforts and resources had to be invested to formalize property titles, and there had to be a reason for doing so. Therefore, the “law began to work” only after land titles had become subject to explicit interests. The “fuzziness” of post-Soviet property relations (Verdery 1999), and institutional constraints on the full formalization of land entitlements (Allina-Pisano 2008; Shagaida 2010), certainly had hindered formalization before, but more importantly, the formalization of land titles had to become meaningful for villagers and the local enterprise alike to be set in motion. The formalization of land titles promised to stabilize rather indeterminate land relations, but different parties followed different aims. The two enterprises struggled to consolidate their control over land banks, the local administration supported its enterprise to protect the village’s economic basis, and shareholders were enrolled in the struggle as their individual decisions turned out to stabilize or destabilize some of the village’s most fundamental arrangements. Land titles, long seen as dead paper, now became vital tools.

Kolkhoz Relations

Besides calling the enterprise their kolkhoz, villagers today refer to the enterprise as the gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie. The term refers to the mono-functional settlement model that dominated Soviet planning and effectively shaped most villages’ economic structures. Here, enterprises are planned to be a settlement’s single main economic base that results in the (often ongoing) dependence of whole villages’ economies and wider social functions on single enterprises (Nefedova 2014, 74).¹⁴ In a relatively isolated village such as Setovka, the impact of and dependence on such an enterprise is amplified, and even today the vanishing of an enterprise can appear as an existential threat to villagers: “How should we live without the kolkhoz? . . . So many people will be left even without work . . . but the kolkhoz won’t be anymore, our school won’t be anymore, nothing will remain then. People will go somewhere, will go to search . . . and the last children that remained here will leave us. . . . All the village lives around the kolkhoz” (Rural dweller, Perm region, 2013).

To better understand what brings people to the conclusion that “the village lives around the kolkhoz” and would be threatened in its entirety by its disappearance, it is important to understand these enterprises as more than agricultural producers and employers. To varying degrees, they continue to be units of production and need fulfillment in the sense of the khoziaistvo, even after kolkhozes and the underlying planning structures were formally abolished long ago. Setovka’s inhabitants pointed to neighboring villages that had lost their local enterprises. The mayor of one such village describes the event as follows:

When the kolkhoz ceased to exist, I was in shock. I said to myself, how shall we live at all? How? Here the kolkhoz, there the kolkhoz helped out. I knew that the [former] mayor, just after the roads were covered with snow, immediately would call the kolkhoz—“Help us immediately with the machinery.” They come and do it. The water pipes are old. We need this dredger urgently. The kolkhoz would come and helped anyway. I was in such perplexity. I thought, oh my god, how shall we live, how shall we live at all? We won’t be able to. Well, the devil is not as frightening as he is painted. So we, gradually, got over it by ourselves. But how, who helped? . . . Private tractor owners . . . and other kolkhozes [from neighboring villages]. . . . They didn’t let us die. I would like to thank them. They helped (Village mayor, Perm region, 2014).

The event she describes is the complete sell-off and dismantling of the local agricultural infrastructure in 2004, after a change in enterprise ownership. She addresses the effects in existential terms, as in many other comparable instances: “How shall we live at all?” Part of the reason is that the enterprise is more than an agricultural producer; it “helps” the village in different ways by satisfying individual and collective material needs. The quote indicates that maintaining these functions is more important than preserving the organizational or legal form—if there are other units that can take over these functions, the collective farm enterprise can in principle be substituted. Kolkhoz relations as conceptualized here are hybrid and changing, and we will encounter them in different forms over the chapters.

Three different terms are commonly used for enterprise provision for rural dwellers, households, and village administrations. Pomoshch’ translates as help, aid, assistance, or succor, and may imply dependence on authorities’ goodwill. Podderzhka translates into support or maintenance and implies a stronger sense of obligation and necessity. If pomoshch’ is based more on personal relations and friendship, podderzhka points to a form of responsibility that comes with authority. Podderzhka is what parents are obliged to provide for children, or what the state is obliged to provide for citizens. Podderzhka rests on a social contract and considers recipients’ specific needs and vulnerabilities. Usluga, finally, translates as service or favor and bears a similar dual meaning to the English term. It may refer to a service offered for payment, but also to the act of serving (sluzhif’)—a person, a cause, or a god. These different meanings illustrate that kolkhoz relations of help and support are contingent and hybrid from the very beginning, related as they are to different rationalities and orders of worth. As we shall see, they may also be altered, employed, and redeployed by different actors for different ends.

The obligation to help is institutionalized and an object of negotiation between various authorities, from the local to the state level. But it also results from concrete needs. To sustain social life in a village, someone must clean the roads after heavy snowfall or repair them from time to time, someone has to take care of the school or cultural center buildings, someone has to take care of and repair local water systems, and someone has to remove the garbage from a village. Even private subsidiary agriculture often depends on machinery provided by a local enterprise. Obligations to provide such services are formalized to varying degrees, but formal responsibilities often do not match actual capacities or willingness. Enterprises with the technical and organizational capacity to do something about concrete needs that arise in their villages thus often substitute formal responsibilities of the state or of underfinanced and understaffed village administrations (Moser and Lindner 2011). They may have strategic reasons for doing so. At a basic level, they have an interest in keeping village life going because they depend on villagers as workers and landowners. An enterprise does not have to be in an economically stable or powerful position to provide support that appears vital from the perspective of villagers and the village administration. Even enterprises that struggle to be profitable can provide machinery, workers, know-how, and organizational capacities that can be vital for local communities. On a local scale, enterprises bundle a wide range of resources. As one farm director puts it: “Everything goes through the kolkhoz (Vse idet cherez kolkhoz)” (LFE director, Perm region, 2013). The enterprise constitutes an “obligatory passage point” (Callon 1986) that coordinates decision-making, capital and resources, instruments, infrastructures, and labor (see chapter 5).

Enterprises’ support for workers or villagers is significant because wages may be high enough for workers to get by, but they are often insufficient to set aside money for extra expenses. Without the enterprises’ support, for instance, a young specialist will often be unable to create a home and family. Private subsidiary agriculture, for example, gains significance for households that have to get by on low incomes. Enterprises’ support in situations of special need, or by technical support for subsidiary farming, thus represent fixes that are also related to low incomes and poverty (Pallot and Nefedova 2007, 26).

As Setovka’s kolkhoz came under threat, making an implicit “social contract”¹⁵ explicit provided the basis for problematizing and criticizing individual decisions, navigating possible development pathways, and stabilizing social relations. That the kolkhoz was mobilized, and the kolkhoz contract rearticulated, rather than simply left unchanged, is important for two reasons: first, adapting and stabilizing these relations required action and justification. Second, it occurred under conditions of change rather than stagnation. Land sales catalyzed the use of land titles to ends very different from privatization, and these were bound to the articulation of the kolkhoz as a social contract. No longer taken for granted, the kolkhoz was turned into a shared matter of concern, an institution that had to be upheld collectively. As a private farmer in Setovka concludes: “The kolkhoz needs us, too.”

Had individual land rights caused a threat to the enterprise before, now they were used to enroll shareholders in the project of preserving the kolkhoz. One shareholder describes this new engagement with land entitlements from his perspective:

The fact that all stick to their kolkhoz is still present here, with . . . our collective, village collective. And that’s why particularly the attitude to selling land away somewhere is seen as somewhat negative. . . . See, I am a shareholder myself. . . . Of course, I didn’t hurry to give [the land to an external enterprise], but I also see that I will not work it myself either, I am not quite a kolkhoznik. Thus, I took it and gave it to [the local kolkhoz director]. Although a year has passed already since [then, he] didn’t give me a penny yet. This shows that he isn’t even able to pay for the land shares that we gave him, that is, his economic condition is very weak, you see? But, knowing about this situation, we will still give him [our shares]. Let him work this land rather than some [neighboring enterprise] there. Even if I haven’t received my money from [him], I know, that . . . the land will stay in place, the kolkhoz will keep on existing for some time on a legitimate basis, and people will be employed (Former village mayor, Perm region, 2013).

From the viewpoint of property ownership, giving your land titles to the local enterprise without being paid seems irrational. But we see a different kind of normative framework here. After the village assembly, property titles were used for stabilizing and recreating kolkhoz relations. Kolkhoz relations were politicized and turned explicit to be preserved. The land would “stay in place” for the kolkhoz, and the kolkhoz would keep the land available for villagers to work it, and allow the village to stay in place, too. This became the prevailing story about the village and the kolkhoz. It shows, among other things, the complexity of land relations.

Kolkhoz relations have been and are rearticulated in other places, too. In a village in the Central Black Earth region, Dmitry Ivanovich, a former kolkhoz agronomist, started a private farming enterprise in 2004. That same year, a regional company took over the former collective farm and land bank, promising fresh capital, new machinery, and an increase in production. The shareholder assembly agreed on a preliminary lease contract limited to eleven months. As in many other instances across rural Russia at that time, the investor did not revive production but sold off what they could (see chapter 3). As Dmitry Ivanovich describes in retrospect: “Within one year, practically nothing was left of the enterprise. All basic facilities, everything possible, all metal they carried away for sale, buildings . . . they even took out the doors. They dug up the irrigation, there had been ten kilometers of irrigation here, for around six hundred hectares. . . . They slaughtered all cattle, not even one pig, not one cow remained. These investors . . .” (LFE director, Lipetsk region, 2012).

Having witnessed this looting, local shareholders approached Dmitry Ivanovich with the request to take over what remained of the enterprise as the lease contract was about to expire—although the initial start-up of his private farm had not earned much local sympathy some months earlier, similar to many other private farmers at that time (Nefedova 2014). After the dismantling of the former kolkhoz, however, shareholders were ready to let him use all the village lands for free: people did not expect him to pay rent, but to revive the enterprise, employ villagers, and reestablish kolkhoz services, says the man who thus became an enterprise director. Only when the enterprise had been stabilized would land rents be reintroduced. He agreed and took over the enterprise along with the responsibility of sustaining the village. In 2014, ten years after having started his private farm on 160 hectares, the enterprise that Dmitry Ivanovich headed has grown beyond the former kolkhoz, comprising a land bank of about 7,000 hectares.

The enterprise is formally registered as a private farm, but kolkhoz relations are as strong there as they are in Setovka. To revive the enterprise and its collective functions was, after all, a central part of the agreement with the village collective from the beginning: “They gave us these papers, saying ‘Here, yours’. . . We took them, people united, and the enterprise remained, as it had been before” (LFE director, Lipetsk region, 2012). The director lives in a house right opposite the farm enterprise’s three-room central office, and the several hours we spent in conversation revealed what being a khoziain—the head of a khoziaistvo¹⁶—meant for him: people would approach him at home or in the office, look for him across the vast farm territory, and his two mobile phones would often ring simultaneously. Villagers’ inquiries would concern employment or building materials, enterprise machinery for repairs or cultivation, and financial help in crisis situations. People asked for his advice on agronomic or market issues or approached him to sell him their land titles. He would never reject any request straight away, villagers told me, even if people approached him at home before he set off to work early in the morning.¹⁷ He never even rejected any of my requests for meetings.

The director explains that his engagement also reflects the enterprises’ founding agreement. People delegated power and responsibility to him to run the enterprise as a kolkhoz. This obliges him to provide support and services, but also to keep the enterprise intact and running: “People . . . gave me their land shares. This is why they come to the enterprise as if it was their home. I take up all the questions and give them millet. And if I would sell, where would they turn to? . . . They would treat them like livestock, and in the end, you do not only sell the enterprise but your people. Your village” (LFE director, Lipetsk region, 2012).

Obligations to people’s needs form part of agreements. For instance, even after villagers sell land titles to Dmitry Ivanovich, he will keep on cultivating their household plots and deliver them an as-if rent of two-hundred kilos of grain per share per annum. He thus upholds kolkhoz-like forms of support even after the formal privatization of the enterprise and land.

Sticking to kolkhoz obligations does not necessarily contradict economic rationality. For instance, villagers, workers, and district authorities repeatedly told me that Dmitry Ivanovich is managing with only a few guards keeping an eye on machinery, products, and workers. “Why should people steal,” one man commented, “when they are getting what they demand, and it is the enterprise that is keeping up the entire village?” This is remarkable, given that in many other enterprises, guards outnumber agricultural workers—to prevent theft, but also to control labor discipline. Foreign company representatives blamed up to 50 percent of losses of operational profits, or an equivalent of 25 percent additional “taxes,” on theft and its indirect consequences (Lander and Kuns 2021, 23). This echoes results from other studies that found that “some instrumental reasons for social support have partly remained in place” (Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019, 582). At a more general level, it has been argued that khoziaistvo can be understood as a form of governance at different scales, from the biopolitics of managing national populations (Collier 2011) to the networks of rights and obligations that the khoziains of agricultural enterprises create and steer as a basis of their own power and authority, which, to comply with local moral economies, implies social obligations (Rogers 2006).

Back in Setovka, one manager in the investor’s enterprise tells a similar story about the kolkhoz that he describes as puzzling in comparison to his own experience: “I asked [the kolkhoz director], how do you work? ‘But [our workers] work themselves, they work with me,’ he said, ‘get ready themselves. Although their wages are much lower than with us. We [in contrast] must chase them, unfortunately’” (LFE director Perm region, 2014). In the investor’s enterprise, another interlocutor explains, people would perceive themselves as working for a master, in contrast to Setovka, where they perceive themselves as working for themselves.

Kolkhoz relations can be translated into economic strategies. I witnessed how directors and managers calculated that by investing in support and thus building loyalty, they would save more on security measures. Only one step further, managers’ strategic use of support associated with the kolkhoz can help them “to persuade people to work for them for the miserly money wages they can pay” (Pallot and Nefedova 2007, 26; Rogers 2006) or want to pay. We will return to related issues in chapter 5. There are further downsides to such forms of authority. Patronage is part of what is expected from a khoziain, but it is largely informal and can be quite arbitrary. Paternalism is part of what constitutes their power and authority, and we will encounter different examples of how old and new “masters” used and misused such power for their benefit.

Enacting the Kolkhoz

In Setovka, we see that, among other things, kolkhoz relations can also both reflect and ground rural residents’ agency and their ways of navigating present conditions. When villagers started to mobilize to preserve their “kolkhoz” in 2007, they fought for an institution that had been formally abolished fifteen years before. And yet this is not a story of stagnation. The concerns that I encountered in Setovka and other villages were not that kolkhoz relations might change; they were constantly changing anyhow. Rather, concerns were that they may break down and leave a void that would not be filled. Even in Setovka, where the sense of kolkhoz was described as particularly strong, it was not perceived as intact or stable even before the 2007 local crisis. For instance, when land sales occurred, some villagers were angered by a form of betrayal against the “kolkhozness” of their enterprise, including one villager who actively agitated for and helped to mediate land sales. The mayor recalls: “There was an ongoing reorganization of the enterprise from one form to another. There was a sort of anger. A kolkhoz is a collective enterprise, and thus when it was transformed into a private one, sensible people did not understand how it was that they found themselves in a private one . . . Kolia was angry, and offended, that wages were not paid out, and the enterprise was made a private one at the same time” (Village mayor, Perm region, 2010).

Frustration among rural dwellers about the simultaneous nonpayment of wages and actual loss of enterprise shares—and hence the devaluation of both current and past labor—are not unique to Setovka. The enterprise here, just as many others, had gone through various collective and cooperative organizational and ownership formats¹⁸ before it became a private limited liability company in 2008.¹⁹ Shareholders’ titles have evaporated in the process and been transformed into the informal right to benefit from kolkhoz services.

The 2007 land sales were followed by the formalization of land relations and the accumulation of land property in the hands of the “old” kolkhoz director. The number of land shares he owned increased from insignificant in 2007 to 87 in 2011, and 270 in 2013, which made him the majority owner. He states that he had not expected “that people would bring their shares so actively” (LFE director, Perm region, 2012). The increase in sales was not only the effect of local dynamics but also of a growing fear that state authorities were becoming more serious about requiring the formalization of land titles and nationalizing non-formalized land shares sooner or later. Three years after the assembly, the two enterprise directors met in person, and “the investor” proposed to incorporate the Setovka farm into the structure of his enterprise. The old “kolkhoz director” turned down the proposal. However, now the single owner of the enterprise and majority owner of the land bank, it was up to him to decide, and he could have sold the enterprise without any assembly having a say.

An enterprise task force initiated the formalization process for more than 325 land titles.²⁰ The leasing contracts between shareholders and the farm enterprise were renewed, and for the first time they implied something akin to rent: the shareholders were assigned the right to kolkhoz services equaling 500 rubles.²¹ This introduced a new distinction among village inhabitants, as before the assembly the only effective differentiation concerning enterprise services was whether people were enterprise employees or not. But now, those without land titles had to pay higher prices for kolkhoz services. Furthermore, a gradual monetization of leases followed.²²

To think of the kolkhoz as relations being enacted, rather than being the product of institutional inertia or structural persistence, allows us to acknowledge the agency of those who actively uphold or reinvent kolkhoz relations, but it is also important because this kind of continuity is far from guaranteed under given political-economic circumstances. Kolkhoz relations are not a mere legacy but constitute goods that have to be defended as some agricultural enterprises struggle for economic survival or actively try to get rid of them. As Setovka’s former mayor puts it: “Today a kolkhoz stands as an ordinary businessman. That is, if it exists or not doesn’t concern anyone . . . If it crashes today, well, that’s it, sorry, the businessman didn’t make it, the business collapsed. That’s it!” (Former village mayor, Perm region, 2013).

Seen from this angle, claiming the kolkhoz means laying claim to a form of organizing the economy that stands against its time, defending a substantive approach to the economy against a formal one. Claims to the kolkhoz are employed against economic models that would lead to the abandonment of workers, farms, land, machinery, or cattle. Many thus look at the kolkhoz as something that exists despite rather than because of current political-economic conditions. When such claims are enacted, they bring into being new and hybrid arrangements. Villagers often emphasize that things would be organized differently if market principles were fully applied and that this would not only affect the formal economy of the agricultural enterprise but also household production, which relies heavily on kolkhoz support: “Without the kolkhoz, we will be lost. . . . If private [entrepreneurs] will cultivate [our household plots], prices will rise. Private is private, in the end. Demand creates supply. . . . We will turn to him, he will charge an exorbitant price, and that will be the end of the story. And we will be left with our plots and with a shovel [laughs], digging” (Rural dweller, Perm region, 2013).

The kind of agency described in this chapter, mobilized against such prospects of losing formal and informal arrangements that uphold livelihoods, does not quite match most established images of rural resistance and radical politics. We don’t see a grassroots movement defending smallholder farming, no opposition against industrialized agriculture, and no well-coordinated rural movement. What we see is a struggle for the maintenance of social contracts and obligations, the preservation of infrastructures and institutions, agricultural enterprises that produce goods but also provide various supports. Underlying such strategies may be the sense that preserving what still works is more realistic than setting up or waiting for alternatives. This is how a farmer in another region puts it: “The entire infrastructure in agriculture was built under the USSR It is rarely built today. It persists. But someday it will fall into disrepair” (Private farmer, Nizhniy Novgorod region, 2021).

Such strategies may seem somewhat conservative. But they can also be understood as a reasonable form of situated agency, which I framed in the introduction as (re)assembling: bringing or holding together people; maintaining social relations and material infrastructures underlying individual and collective agency; and becoming even more important under conditions of much uncertainty and fundamental change.

Situating Present Kolkhoz Relations Historically

The prevailing relevance of kolkhoz relations speaks to the limits of post-Soviet agrarian reforms, including the land reform that failed to fill many of the gaps created by the dismantling of the previous system. To some degree, kolkhoz relations persisted because they were not substituted, for example, through working schemes based on land rights and family farm agriculture. The hybrid formations that resulted from this differ substantially from rural economic patterns in other parts of the world (Averkieva 2017), and this matters greatly for a context-specific understanding of rural dispossession in Russia. In the introduction, I defined dispersed dispossession as a drawn-out and recursive process that implies the deterioration, separation, and rearrangement of webs of relations. We can now see kolkhoz relations as among the goods at stake.

Addressing kolkhoz relations as being enacted and reinvented in correspondence with distinct historical-geographic situations helps free them from the “sovietness” sometimes ascribed to them, and to disqualify related claims; it allows them to be rehabilitated as legitimate claims to organizing economic relations in specific ways. Rural dwellers do not romanticize the Soviet past by referring to the kolkhoz, although memories may appear a bit too rosy in some accounts when contrasting the relatively robust social policies during the late Soviet period with the harsh post-Soviet crisis. But people disagree and argue about what has changed for better or worse over the past decades: memories and opinions expressed by some are criticized as overoptimistic or nostalgic by others. Some emphasize how village life has always been comparatively hard; others talk about family members’ deportation during “dekulakization” or the supply shortages during the Soviet period. People may stress they liked Soviet-era employment security but appreciate the relative freedom of choice of employment now. Some say they were better off during the early transformation period, when no wages were paid and workers were allowed to use kolkhoz produce, materials, and machinery for private purposes (such as building or renovating houses, or private subsidiary agriculture) than after the return of monetary wages that did not cover basic needs. They may acknowledge that nowadays many more people own private cars than ever before, but also that the deterioration of public transport in rural areas poses problems for many who do not. People may appreciate the current influx of urban capital—people from the cities buying land, hiring villagers for constructing dachas, and spending on their weekend trips and summer holidays (Caldwell 2010)—but at the same time they see the rural–urban divide growing. They may lament the ongoing decrease of agricultural jobs but acknowledge the rise in pensions or government support for entrepreneurial activities.

Many rural dwellers’ narratives on the changes over the last years very much consider and are even built on ambivalence. This is different from being nostalgic about the Soviet system. Through their stories on how systemic changes translated into place-specific trajectories, they demonstrate that “lamenting the losses that came with the collapse of state socialism does not imply wishing it back” (Gille 2010, 286). Rather, paying attention to how the past is selectively mobilized and reconstructed in contemporary social practices (Hörschelmann and Stenning 2008) allows one to grasp how it is invoked “to contrast it with, and thereby criticize, the present” (Pine 2007, 111), to draw clearer contours of a present that often seems unfavorable, uncertain, and somewhat elusive. Hence many such references have “no more to do with the desire to return to a remembered or idealized past than with the project of defining and claiming autonomy in the present” (Boyer 2010, 25) and to lay claim to goods that remain unrecognized within the now-dominant orders of worth.

It has been shown in many studies and is widely recognized that many of the ways in which the past is being evoked and reinvented in contemporary Russia are regressive or otherwise politically problematic. It is not always possible to draw a clear line between past-bound political propaganda and populism and what I described in this chapter as understandable and often legitimate claims. One of the tasks, then, is to recognize ambivalence both of historic conditions and claims made on this basis.