Russia's Unknown Agriculture: Household Production in Post-Socialist Rural Russia (Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies Series)

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RUSSIA’S UNKNOWN AGRICULTURE

ALSO PUBLISHED BY OX F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S I N T H E OX F O R D G E O G R A P H I C A L A N D E N V I RO N M E N TA L S T U D I E S S E R I E S Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest Thomas W. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II Worlds of Food Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch The Nature of the State Excavating the Political Ecologies of the Modern State Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, and Martin Jones Decolonizing the Colonial City Urbanization and Stratiﬁcation in Kingston, Jamaica Colin Clarke Industrial Transformation in the Developing World Michael T. Rock and David P. Angel The Globalized City Economic Restructuring and Social Polarization in European Cities Edited by Frank Moulaert, Arantxa Rodriguez, and Erik Swyngedouw Conﬂict, Consensus, and Rationality in Environmental Planning An Institutional Discourse Approach Yvonne Rydin Globalization and Urban Change Capital, Culture, and Paciﬁc Rim Mega-Projects Kris Olds Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes William M. Denevan Poliomyelitis A World Geography: Emergence to Eradication Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew Cliff War Epidemics An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military Conﬂict and Civil Strife, 1850–2000 Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew Cliff Social Power and the Urbanization of Water Flows of Power Erik Swyngedouw

Russia’s Unknown Agriculture Household Production in Post-Communist Russia Judith Pallot and Tat yana Nefedova

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Judith Pallot and Tat yana Nefedova 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–922741–9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Jeremy and Julia

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EDITORS’ PREFACE Even as processes of globalization expand in range and scale, the world remains marked by huge inequalities, social divisions and environmental degradation. We continue to live in a world marked by inequality and injustice; torn apart by poverty, war, and disputes over the right to own, control, and use resources, and by religious, ethnic, and racialized conﬂicts; and marked by differences in living standards and quality of life both within and between societies, based on class, gender, age, and other social distinctions. This series is driven by the desire to explore and explain these inequalities, as well as to investigate the possibilities of socio-spatial justice and environmental sustainability. The key issues of our times are interwoven spatial issues. Climate change, global warming, the inequitable use of resources by the world’s richest nations, the global movement of capital and labour, the development of new technologies, pandemics and new diseases that may jump the species gap, are transforming and remaking spatial divisions within and between power blocs, nation-states, regions, and communities. New theoretical responses to these changes are also emerging both within and beyond geography as the practices, technologies, and signiﬁcance of spatial difference are being addressed in a range of disciplines. The ubiquitous rhetoric of globalization and the uncritical division between the local and the global are being critically examined across disciplinary and academic borders and older versions of internationalism, social justice, and environmental management are being rethought by geographers and others in work that insists on the articulation of the local within larger frameworks as both an intellectual and an ethical project. The Oxford Geography and Environmental Studies series aims to reﬂect these new approaches and interdisciplinary work, as well as to continue to publish the best original research in geography and environmental studies. Gordon L. Clark Diana Liverman Linda McDowell David Thomas Sarah Whatmore

PREFACE Russia’s unknown agriculture is not, of course, ‘unknown’. Anyone who has ever visited Russia and ventured beyond Moscow or St Petersburg will have observed the patchwork of allotments encircling the cities crammed full of vegetables and fruit bushes, often with an ingeniously modiﬁed garden shed serving as a modest ‘dacha’ at one end. For those who venture further aﬁeld, into Russia’s villages, the herds of cattle under the watchful eye of a small boy, main thoroughfares that seem to double up as places for pigs and a variety of fowls to forage, and plot upon plot of potatoes are evidence of how seriously Russians take the task of providing themselves with food. In fact, more than 50 per cent of Russia’s domestically produced vegetables, root crops, meat, and milk originates from the household sector but as far as the ofﬁcials in the Ministry of Agriculture and in its subordinate departments in the regions are concerned, this does not count as agriculture proper. In all the visits we made to local authority agricultural departments during the course of research for this book, we did not meet one that considered the household sector to be its responsibility. Household food production, we were told, belongs to the social, not the economic sphere. The intention of this book is to place the household sector in the centre of debate about Russia’s agriculture future. As both authors are geographers, it was inevitable that once we had found that we shared a common interest in household production, we would approach the subject from a geographical perspective. Our previous knowledge of farming systems had led us to believe that there was a deﬁnite ‘geography’ to the household food producing sector. We were not disappointed. Once on the lookout, we discovered a veritable mosaic of ‘vernacular’ economic regions—clusters and zones of informal, small-scale, and specialized crop and livestock production—that alternatively paralleled or complemented production in the large farm sector or, where large farms had collapsed, replaced it. These regions that will not be found on any map of Russian agriculture can only be discovered and studied by visiting the countryside. Thus it was that we spent four to ﬁve years travelling to distant and not so distant places in rural Russia, talking to people, taking questionnaires, examining local agricultural records, and using those most reliable of the geographer’s tools, our eyes, to observe and record this unknown geography. We had originally intended to write a single book of our results, but when it came to writing up it was obvious that we would need two versions that reﬂected the interests of the lead author in each case and of the needs, as we perceived them, of the potential readerships. The Russian ‘version’ has already been published (T. Nefedova and J. Pallot, Neizvesntoe sel skoe khozyaistvo, ili zachem nuzhna korova?, Moscow: Novoe izdaltel stvo, 2006). There are many people to thank for their contributions to this work. The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust without which the collaboration

Preface

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would not have been possible. In several regions (Ryazan , Novgorod, The Republic of Chuvashia and others), our work overlapped with another project on Russian agriculture in which Tat yana Nefedova was involved and which was supported by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geography. We are grateful for the access we have been given to the ﬁndings of this research. In this respect we would like to give special thanks to Grigorii Ioffe, a principal investigator of this project, who was involved in collecting the materials relating to part of Moscow and Ryazan oblasts and Chuvashia. Particular thanks also go to Aleksandra Makeeva who helped with questionnaire surveys in Samara, Novogorod, and Arkhangel sk oblasts. We are grateful to colleagues in the Institute of Geography who assisted at various stages of the project. We are indebted to colleagues in the geography departments of the regions in which we conducted our research who helped with many of the practicalities and allocated students to us to help with questionnaires and act as chauffeurs. In the case of Aleksander Zyryanov, Dean of Geography in Perm State University, this involved organizing our travel by kayak to reach some of the remoter villages, and also accompanying us. We want to thank all the regional and district administrators and other ofﬁcials who were prepared to make time to answer our questions and to give us the data we asked for, the directors and accountants who showed us around their farms, and, ﬁnally, the people who were prepared to take time from labouring on their plots to answer our questions. The Institute of Geography, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford have supported us throughout. Particular thanks must go to Ailsa Allen for producing all the maps and ﬁgures for this book against a tight schedule and to Oxford University Press for agreeing to publish and doing such an efﬁcient editorial job. I am indebted to Tanya for teaching me so much about rural Russia. Finally, my personal thanks go to Jeremy and Julia for allowing me to disappear for protracted periods into the Russian countryside secure in the knowledge that between them they would keep the show on the road at home. J.P.

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CONTENTS List of Plates

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List of Figures List of Tables

xiii xv

1. Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others

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2. The Practice and Theory of Personal Subsidiary Farming in Soviet and Russian Agriculture

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3. The Geographical Diversity of Rural Household Production

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4. The Environmental Resources of Rural People’s Farms

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5. Household Production and the Large Farm Sector

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6. Ethno-cultural Differentiation in Household Production

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7. Household Production’s Nearest Neighbours: Small and Independent Farming in the Russian Countryside

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8. Household Food Production—What Next?

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References

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Index

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LIST OF PLATES 3.1. A typical household plot of the forested belt 3.2. A pensioner, one of three remaining in this dying village Gornozavod district in the Urals 3.3. A plot in Saratov oblast largely given over to livestock sheds 3.4. Poultry are a specialization in the extreme south 3.5. Plots occupied exclusively by polytunnels for growing early cucumbers in Ozeritsy, Lukhovitsy district 4.1. A supplementary plot at the edge of the village rented from the local authority in Lukhovitsy district 4.2. A young boy watching over the common herd grazing on abandoned collective farm land in Andropov district, Stavropol krai 4.3. A herdsman bringing the cattle home in the evening in Kurilovka, Novouzensk district 4.4. Selling smoked ﬁsh, berries, and mushrooms on the Moscow–St Petersburg highway at Bezborovo 4.5. Kottedzhi in Stavropol krai 5.1. Agricultural workers in Stavropol krai selling on the cereals they receive in wages 5.2. A householder’s cow having its feet checked by a large-farm vet in Krasnaya Poima, Lukhovitsy district 6.1. Barda district potato cultivation 6.2. A koshara in the steppe of Stavropol krai 6.3. A chaban with his sheepdog in the Saratov steppe in Novouzensk district 7.1. A zemlianka, the temporary home of a member of a rental brigade near Rovnoe, Saratov oblast 7.2. Osman’s tomato ‘plantation’ in Novoaleksandrov district Stavropol krai 7.3. Osman’s ‘hacienda’ 7.4. Genady’s semi-private ranch rented from Rus in Andropov district, Stavropol krai 8.1. Inside a rural market in the south of Russia 8.2. Selling from the back of a car in a local market in southern Russia 8.3. Onions produced by peripatetic brigades for sale on the roadside in Stavropol krai 8.4. Roadside sales, a preferred option for some households 8.5. The milk collection in Kurilovka, Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast

Photographs by Judith Pallot

59 60 64 67 69 83 89 89 97 101 111 119 137 146 148 163 165 166 168 192 192 194 194 195

LIST OF FIGURES 1.1. Oblasts and krais included in the investigation of people’s farms in Russia 2.1. Agricultural production by different types of farm, 1991–2003 as a percentage of 1990 2.2. Number of employees in large agricultural enterprises and of households involved in personal food production, 1990–2002 3.1. Output from the household sector as a percentage share of total agricultural output by region, 2003 3.2. Gross output per capita from the household sector by region, 2003 3.3. Changes in the number of large livestock in the household and large farm sectors, 1940–2004 3.4. Livestock in the ownership of rural households in 2003 3.5. Production of potatoes by rural households, 1990 and 1998 3.6. The number of additional people a single rural inhabitant could supply with vegetables from the household sector, 1990 and 1998 3.7. The number of additional people a single rural inhabitant could supply with milk from the household sector, 1990 and 1998 3.8. The density of population and number of large livestock per 100 population in (A) the non-black earth and (B) the southern half of European Russia, 1990 and 2000 3.9. Distance-decay on a transect from Moscow city to Ryazan 3.10. The ground-plan of a typical allotment in the peripheries of central or northern European Russia 3.11. The ground-plan of a typical allotment in Novouzensk district in the eastern dry steppe 3.12. The ground-plan of a fruit-producing household in Georgievsk district, Stavropol krai 3.13. The ground-plan of an allotment in the cucumber ‘province’ of Lukhovitsy district 4.1. The relationship and dependencies of household food producers in (a) the forest and (b) the steppe regions of European Russia 4.2. Schematic diagram showing the variety of environmental resources a household in central Russia can draw upon for food production 4.3. Schematic diagram showing the variety of environmental resources households draw upon for food production in (a) Kosa district, Perm krai and (b) Novoaleksandrovsk district, Stavropol krai 4.4. The ground-plan of Makarovo village, Lotoshino district, showing the boundaries negotiated between the rural administration and Kirov sovkhoz in 1991 4.5. Land use in Resshevatskaya rural administration, Stavropol krai 4.6. Land use in Sukhoi Karabulak, Saratov oblast 4.7. Troitso village, Perm oblast showing the disputed ﬁelds reclaimed by the poultry combine

10 19 20 40 40 42 43 46 49 50

54 55 58 63 66 68 75 77

78

82 85 87 103

xiv

List of Figures

5.1. The territorial organization of a mixed cereal- and livestock-producing Soviet kolkhoz 5.2. Schematic diagram of the relationships between rural households and large farms that support personal food production 5.3. ‘Black holes’ in European Russia’s agricultural geography 5.4. Factors affecting the degree of cross-subsidy between the large and small farm sectors 5.5. The physical zonation of Lukhovitsy district, Moscow oblast 5.6. ZAO Galovskoe, Bassanovka, Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast 6.1. German settlements on the Middle Volga in the nineteenth century 6.2. A section of the dry steppe in Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast, showing the distribution of ranches 7.1. The number of private peasant farms per 1,000 rural inhabitants, 2004 7.2. The average size of peasant farms, 2004 7.3. The ground-plan of Nizhne Maslova, Lukhovitsy district, showing the subdivision of surrounding arable land into private farms 7.4. The former territory of the Shirokii Karamysh state farm in Lysye Gory district, Saratov oblast, showing the land belonging to three large private farms 7.5. The different origins of land making up Zharikov’s private farm, Lysye Gory district, Saratov oblast 7.6. Output per capita and the relative contribution of urban and rural plot holders to the total output of the people’s farm sector

107 109 114 115 120 123 143 147 172 173 174 179 180 183

LIST OF TABLES 1.1. Number of administrative regions, settlements, interviews, and questionnaires included in the investigation of rural household production in Russia 2.1. Percentage of the total value of agricultural output by ofﬁcial category of farm, 1992–2004 2.2. Percentage share of the main agricultural products produced by ofﬁcial category of farm, 1992,1997, and 2004 2.3. Total output from people’s farms by branch of production 3.1. Relative and absolute numbers of livestock owned by rural households, 1991–2003 3.2. The number of additional people in each macroeconomic region that one rural inhabitant of the same region is able to support with a variety of household sector products 3.3. Livestock in rural household ownership in different agri-environmental zones of European Russia 3.4. Comparison of the intensity of household livestock production in Ryazan and Saratov oblasts in relation to distance of rural districts from the oblast capital and the natural environment 3.5. Some characteristics of population and livestock ownership in Pestravka district, Samara oblast, 2004 4.1. The distribution of land in the ownership of agricultural organizations, private farms, and personal subsidiary farms in rural Russia, 1950–2004 4.2. The percentage share of land belonging to agricultural organizations, private ‘peasant’ farms, and people’s farms by economic region, 1990 and 2000 4.3. The percentage distribution of households by the size of household plot in the survey districts 4.4. The parameters of household land use and livestock ownership in a selection of large farms in Saratov oblast 4.5. The parameters of household land use and livestock ownership in a selection of large farms in Moscow oblast 5.1. Selected indices of production on large agricultural organizations and household farms in Lukhovitsy rural district, 2000 6.1. Livestock and crop production in the household sector in Barda district, Perm krai 6.2. Allotment sizes and numbers of animals held by Chuvash-, Kazakh-, and Russian-headed households in Saratov oblast 7.1. The dynamics of private ‘peasant’ farm formation, 1993–2004 8.1. The proportion of different crop and livestock products entering the market from the rural and urban household sector, 2003 8.2. The market engagement of households in the survey districts 8.3. The market orientation of ethnic groups surveyed in Saratov oblast and the Republic of Chuvashia 8.4. Future production plans of households

11 18 18 19 42

48 52

56 62 79

80 81 91 92 122 137 152 171 190 197 199 200

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1 Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others The Varied Forms of ‘Personal Subsidiary Husbandry’ in Post-Soviet Russia We met Ana Petrovna, an elderly woman in a padded jacket and shawl, on a roadside verge with her goat. She was pleased to pass the time telling her story to the visitors to her village, one hundred miles to the west of Moscow city. Ana Petrovna has been retired from her job as a farm worker for many years and has lived alone since the death of her second husband. She receives a pension of 900 roubles a month (about £20 sterling at 2003 exchange rates) of which just under half goes on paying for utilities and other services. Were it not for the vegetable patch (ogorod) next to her house and her goat Masha, who supplies her with milk, soured cream, and cheese, it would be difﬁcult for Ana Petrovna to live on this income. Her allotment is small—four ‘one-hundredths’ or sotki (where one sotka is 100 sq. m). It is given over mainly to potatoes, but there are also several rows of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and cabbages, two apple trees, raspberry canes, and redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes. On her 400 sq. m Ana Petrovna can produce enough food for the year. In early autumn much of her effort goes into salting and preserving the output of her plot to get her through the winter months, which she adds to the mushrooms and berries, gathered in the forests around her village, that she dried and bottled earlier in the summer. Ana Petrovna rarely eats meat; when she was younger she used to keep a cow and a calf for slaughtering each year, but this is beyond her now. She buys staples that she cannot produce herself in the small village shop: groats, bread, sugar, vegetable oil, and chocolate for an occasional treat. Ana Petrovna has a daughter living in Moscow who comes to the village during the potato-picking season to help with the harvest. She returns to Moscow laden with potatoes and vegetables even though, as she tells her mother, they are not expensive to buy in the city, even for a teacher on a low salary. Ana Petrovna is in many respects an archetype that, despite the decade and a half of change that we call the post-Soviet transition, continues to inform the popular image of life in rural Russia. According to the image, household production is an occupation of elderly couples and widows who have no alternative

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Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others

but to live out their days in Russia’s dying villages, surviving as best they can on the food they grow on their allotments, their meagre pensions, and, if they are lucky, the help of their neighbours or urban relatives. The old women who line the highways into the large cities selling potatoes by the bucketful or who cluster around metro stations with their bottled and pickled fruits and vegetables for sale are the manifestation of a tradition of self-provisioning of which Russia is both proud (since it is a reminder of the pre-Soviet past) and embarrassed (its continued existence evidence of the state’s failure to provide adequately for the rural poor and elderly). In the four years spent researching this book, during which we visited 150 villages in thirty-ﬁve rural districts in European Russia and the Urals, we encountered many people like Ana Petrovna. They invited us into their homes and fed us on cabbage soup and soured cream while they told us their stories. But we also met many other people who, although relying upon their own and their family’s labour to grow vegetables on the household plot and to tend livestock, in other respects differed from Ana Petrovna by a considerable degree. These were the young, dynamic households, also found in large numbers in rural Russia, that by making the most of the environmental resources at their disposal are able to produce sufﬁcient to feed their families and to earn enough to rebuild their home, buy a car, or put their son or daughter through university—households like those of Lara and her husband Misha, and of Ivan and Sonya. Lara lives in the village of Nizhne Maslovo in a rural district in the south of Moscow oblast with her husband, her elderly parents, and one teenage son. Lara is a teacher in the local primary school but her family’s principal money income is from ‘personal subsidiary farming’, which exceeds by two to three times the combined wages and pensions of herself, her husband (who has worked on the largest private farm in the district since 1994), and her parents. Like other households in the village, Lara and Misha grow cabbages, which they pickle and sell in one of Moscow’s farmers’ markets. The plot of land next to the house is a reasonable size, thirty sotok (3,000 sq. m), but since 2002 they have rented an additional plot from the local authority on which they also grow cabbages. This has made some beds available for Lara to grow potatoes and vegetables for family consumption. Cultivating cabbages is hard work; with the exception of the ploughing, for which they hire a fellow villager with a tractor in the spring, all the planting out, weeding, watering, and harvesting are done by hand by the household members. The shredding of the cabbages into large wooden barrels and their salting to make kvashennaya kapusta, the Russian version of sauerkraut, is also done by hand. Lara and her mother guard their pickling recipe jealously; they have regular customers in the market and have recently negotiated a contract to supply a Moscow restaurant with pickled cabbage throughout the year, so it is important to maintain quality. Beginning in the autumn, Lara and her husband take it in turns to go into town at the weekends to sell their cabbages. For several years they have used the same pitch for which they pay the ofﬁcial market fee and, more crucially, the bribe

Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others

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demanded by the racketeers who are really in control. When they have spare time on weekdays Lara or Misha sell from boxes on the street, in this case paying a bribe to a policeman. These payments are absorbed in the price they charge but they have no difﬁculty shifting the annual harvest by early spring in time for the beginning of the new cycle. Misha spent all his working life on the kolkhoz and this entitled him to claim 3–4 ha of land under the land reforms passed in the early 1990s, but he decided against this as he was keen to avoid any interference from local ofﬁcials or the attention of the tax police. Lara and Misha are sure that this was the correct decision since they have made sufﬁcient from growing cabbages in the past decade on their allotment and rented land in the village to buy food and consumer durables and to save for their son’s future university education. Lara and Misha do not keep any animals; growing and processing cabbages occupies more than enough of their time. By contrast, Natasha and Ivan, another couple who told us their story, put all their energies into meat and dairy production; the plot of land adjacent to their house is a jumble of sheds and barns used for their animals and feed storage which leaves only a few square metres for growing vegetables. They live in the large village of Bazarnyi Karabulak on the right bank of the river Volga in Saratov oblast, 856 km (450 miles) south-east of Moscow. Ivan works as a tractor driver on the former kolkhoz, now transformed into an ‘AO’ (aktsionernoe obshchestvo), or joint-stock agricultural company. Before 1991, his salary was good by Soviet standards and he had been able to purchase a house and a motorcycle and sidecar. After the collapse of communism, Ivan suffered the effects of the reduction of the state’s subsidy to agriculture; his monthly wage dwindled and through the 1990s he had to accept the greater part of it in kind. In 2002, he was receiving the equivalent of 800 roubles a month in a mixture of money, cereals, and vegetable oil. Natasha, meanwhile, was earning 500 roubles a month as a library assistant in the district centre library. Soon after 1991, Natasha and Ivan decided to invest in a cow. There are abundant hay meadows and pastures around their village and the cereals that Ivan receives as part of his wage provide hard feed for small animals all year round. Ivan is also in the fortunate position of being able to use the kolkhoz tractor to mow and transport hay, and he can make extra money on the side by providing a service for others in the village as well. He is conﬁdent that the large farm’s administration will continue to turn a blind eye to this ‘unofﬁcial’ use of their machinery because, as Ivan graphically put it, tractor drivers prepared to work for 800 roubles per month are ‘not thick on the ground’. Looking after the animals is Natasha’s task. She has to get up at four or ﬁve o’clock in the morning to milk the cow, and it is milked again at seven o’clock in the evening. During the summer, when the cows are out during the daytime, Natasha milks at noon as well, going to the pasture with her pail. Some milk is kept back for family use but most is stored in the cellar overnight prior to being processed into soured cream and soft cheese. Unlike some of her neighbours with smaller families, Natasha does not sell fresh milk in the market but she does sell her cheese and cream. Most income from their personal farming comes from the

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Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others

sale of the annual calf to buyers from Saratov city farmers’ market who visit the village almost daily with refrigerated lorries in the spring. In 2001, when we visited Bazarnyi Karabulak, Ivan and Natasha had been paid 9,000 roubles for their 18-month-old bullock which was just a little bit less than Ivan’s annual earnings for that year. The previous year Natasha and Ivan had expanded into pig production, buying two piglets at the local market to fatten over the winter. They kept one for themselves and sold the other. Meat prices were good in 2001, so they were buying in three piglets for the following year. They were looking forward to making a comfortable proﬁt from its sale. As we learned on our travels in rural Russia, the common calculation made by rural households is that three piglets are needed to make a proﬁt, since two are needed to feed the family and cover the cost of the livestock feed bill. Ivan and Natasha are considered to be moderately well off by their fellow villagers. However, the pressure of feeding a young family limits the volume of surplus they have to sell. There are households in Bazarnyi Karabulak with two or three cows and the same number of sows that make considerably more than Natasha and Ivan. These are the households that live in brick houses, with a new car standing outside.

What’s in a Name? The three different households described above are all ofﬁcially classiﬁed as being engaged in ‘personal subsidiary farming’ (lichnoe podsobnoe khozyaistvo). This is an obvious misnomer: for one thing, the farming activities of the three households are not ‘subsidiary’ but, rather, are either the sole or a major source of livelihood. Secondly, while Ana Patrovna’s and Ivan and Natasha’s crop and animal husbandry is ‘personal’ in the sense that the ﬁrst call on production is the satisfaction of household consumption needs, the same is not true of Lara and Misha’s cabbage business. That the misnomer is preserved is testimony both to the power of the ideology relating to small-scale farming in Russia and to the multidimensional (neo-liberals would say ‘unﬁnished’) nature of the post-Soviet transition. For reasons that will become clear in the chapters that follow, the interests of the central and local state, as well as of the ‘personal subsidiary’ farmers themselves, are served by preserving clear boundaries between such individual small-scale production and ‘other forms’ of farming in the Russian countryside. The ofﬁcial deﬁnitions of these ‘other forms’ of farming can be confusing for anyone trying to understand the structure of contemporary Russian agriculture. Living among all the ‘personal subsidiary’ farmers in most rural districts are the owners of private ‘peasant farm economies’ (krest yanskie fermskie khozyaistva) who, using land they acquired under the provisions of post-Soviet land reforms, are supposed to be engaged in farming as a business. As with personal subsidiary farming, subsumed within the ofﬁcial category of private peasant farms is an

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extraordinary range of forms, in this instance covering a spectrum from small and medium-sized units that, in their use of family labour and of intermediate technologies, hardly differ from the more commercialized ‘personal subsidiary’ farms, to enterprises covering several hundred hectares with substantial hired labour forces and considerable capital endowment. Then there is that peculiarly Russian phenomenon of the ﬁctitious private peasant farm, a unit that appears in the records of the local agricultural department but cannot be traced anywhere on the ground. As intriguing, are the farms that appear in the records as ‘private peasant farms’ in so far as crop production is concerned, but as ‘personal subsidiary farms’ where livestock husbandry is concerned. It turns out, therefore, that the Russian village has ‘personal subsidiary farms’ that are neither subsidiary nor engaged primarily in production for personal consumption, and ‘peasant farms’ that include in their ranks powerful capitalist enterprises that stretch the deﬁnition of ‘peasant’ to breaking point. But the potential confusion does not end there, because both personal subsidiary farms and private peasant farms exist in a sea of large farms that appear in ofﬁcial statistics as agricultural ‘organizations’ or ‘enterprises’ (sel skokhozyaistvennie organisatsii/predpriyatiya). These are the large-scale units which are heirs to the giant sovkhozi and kolkhozi of the Soviet period but whose formal titles— ‘joint-stock companies’ (the open and closed variety), ‘productive cooperatives’, ‘state’, and ‘subsidiary’ enterprises—offer no better guide to their content than do the names given to their smaller counterparts. Helpfully, rural people still often refer to these farms as kolkhozi and sovkhozi and many have, in any case, retained their Soviet names, which celebrate events in the revolutionary calendar and revolutionary heroes. The tripartite classiﬁcation described above is supposed to be inclusive of all the farms, from the smallest to the largest, that exist in contemporary rural Russia, but the reality is that there are many agricultural producers that fall outside the ofﬁcial categories and are invisible in the agricultural record. Some of these are the product of new processes associated with the political and economic changes that have accompanied the post-Soviet transition but others existed during the Soviet period and have been given new life since 1991. Among the former is the livestock enterprise belonging to the extended family of Fatima, a recent migrant from Dagestan whom we interviewed in 2003 in a hamlet in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in Stavropol krai. Fatima came to southern Russia with her husband, his two brothers, and their families in the early 1990s when the collective farm on which they all worked in Dagestan collapsed; neighbouring Stavropol krai was sparsely populated compared with their native land and in the early 1990s there was abundant pasture going for nothing as a result of large farms pulling out of livestock production to concentrate on more proﬁtable cereals. Pregor’ya, to which the family was directed, had housed a livestock subdivision of a mixed collective farm during the Soviet period but the farm workers had moved out when the collective slaughtered its herds. The new arrivals bought two adjacent houses from the local authority and, with the twenty or so sheep and cattle they

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had brought from Dagestan, started producing beef and mutton. Importantly for them, the grazing land around the village had been abandoned by the large farm and was available for their use. For a decade Fatima’s family has grazed its livestock free of charge with nobody objecting; indeed there were advantages for the local authority in turning a blind eye to such ‘unregulated’ use since were the land not grazed it would be invaded by common ragweed (ambrosia artemisiifolia) which, once it takes hold in an area, invades cereal ﬁelds reducing yields. Furthermore, by letting Fatima and her relatives provide for themselves, the local authority did not have to take responsibility for supporting them. In 2004, the combined herd of the extended family had grown to seventy head of cattle and one hundred ewes. Sales of beef and mutton (destined for Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus) have allowed Fatima’s family to invest in building new sheds for overwintering their livestock. Fatima does not have a vegetable plot to tend since the family has not yet been allocated one by the local authority. In 2004, a cloud appeared on the horizon when the rural assembly (sel skii skhod) sitting in the stanitsa (a large ‘Cossack’ settlement) twelve miles away passed a resolution limiting the head of livestock to ﬁve per household for residents within its territory. Fatima told us that the family was not unduly alarmed by this move which it interpreted as rent-seeking on the part of the local ofﬁcials; an appropriately pitched bribe to the head of the administration would allow ‘a mutually advantageous way’ around the ruling to be found. She dismissed the idea that the move might be politically motivated—a product of resurgent Cossack nationalism—or motivated by a genuine concern about over-grazing. Fatima’s story is relevant to an exploration of household food production because, in the absence of any alternative ways of describing it, her family’s livestock business is classiﬁed by the local administration as belonging to the personal subsidiary economy. The family’s cattle and sheep are included in the administration’s census of livestock that it takes every year, part of its ofﬁcial obligation to monitor the livestock in personal ownership in its territory. Had Fatima’s family been registered as owners of a private peasant farm, these data would be collected by the agricultural department of the district authority and the business would have been subject to the normal rules and regulations governing ‘formal’ agricultural enterprises. However, the family would not be entitled to become legal owners of the pastures they are currently using, even if they wanted to take this step. It is obvious that the business in which Fatima’s family is engaged is far removed from the subsistence activity of Ana Petrovna, but the same can be said also of Lara and Misha’s cabbage business. In so far as neither pay taxes on the proﬁts they make, both belong to the half-world of Russia’s shadow economy, at least according to some deﬁnitions of such activity (Ledeneva, 1998; Shanin, 1999). Assuming a spectrum in the informal agrarian sector from genuine personal subsidiary farms to semi-legal commercial enterprises, Fatima’s family is obviously further along it than are Natasha and Ivan. The same is true of the

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many families of livestock husbandmen, the majority of recent arrivals from the north Caucasus republics, who have settled on abandoned ranches or koshary in the semi-desert regions of the Lower Volga and Caspian Basin and have large ﬂocks of sheep that are counted by local ofﬁcials as belonging to the ‘personal subsidiary’ category for want of any alternative. The southern and eastern steppes are also home to another type of agricultural activity that ﬁts uneasily into the ofﬁcial categorization. These are private brigades, or teams, that rent irrigated land from large farms to grow commercial vegetables in return for a portion of the crop. The majority of these brigades are peripatetic and are organized by ethnic minorities from the former Soviet republics, most drawn from groups that were deported from their homelands in the late 1930s and 1940s. Some use family labour, but others hire people locally or bring their own teams with them. In the dry eastern districts of Saratov oblast we found local Russian women working on the onion ‘plantations’, as they are known locally, for twenty-ﬁve roubles a day in 2002. Usually, brigade leaders live in dugouts (zemlyanki) or caravans in the ﬁelds during the growing season but brigade leaders who have returned to the same farm every year can build more permanent structures, which they call their ‘hacienda’, at the corner of a ﬁeld. A large proportion of the watermelons and onions that are shipped in convoys of trucks to the cities of northern Russia in the summer originate in such sharecropping teams. It is doubtful whether much of this activity ﬁnds its way into the ofﬁcial record but it can be the basis of considerable personal wealth; in Novouzensk in left-bank Saratov oblast our attention was drawn repeatedly to the large brick-built house in the centre, the winter residence of one of the more successful ethnic Korean team leaders. All the farm units referred to so far are located in rural districts (raiony) and the labour force, whether household members or wage workers, are registered as rural residents (omitting, it is true, the gasterbeiter from the former Soviet republics and the internally displaced people and other in-migrants who have yet to receive residence permits in their new home and the entitlement to a plot of land that goes with these). But there is another category of food producer that has to be included in the analyses of the informal sector: the urban plot holder. Again like many of the rural forms, urban plot holding is not a new phenomenon; during the Soviet period urban dwellers used the plots attached to their summer residences to grow food. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, urban plot holding expanded enormously when, as a hedge against difﬁcult times to come, the state made land available on the outskirts of towns to any household wanting to grow its own food. One of the striking features of the immediate postSoviet period was the appearance of allotments around Russian towns and cities, some subsequently sprouting elaborate constructions that served both as garden sheds and temporary summer accommodation. Fifteen years after the collapse of communism large numbers of urban dwellers meet part of their food needs by growing their own fruit and vegetables on these allotments. Like the ‘personal subsidiary farming’ of rural dwellers, the plots of urban dwellers are intended

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for the production of food for personal consumption but, unlike the former, they generally are used exclusively for this purpose. Nevertheless, there is a category of urban dweller who may be engaged in more commercially orientated production. These are the people who are registered in the towns but have inherited or built houses in the countryside with household plots attached and have adopted the same sort of farming practices as their ‘rural’ neighbours. In the early 1990s a new term, ‘people’s farming’ (khozyaistvo naseleniya), began to be used, and was subsequently given ofﬁcial recognition, to describe all forms of allotment or household production including both urban and rural practitioners.

Researching the Geography of ‘Personal Subsidiary Farming’ in Russia This book is about the geography of the varied forms of ‘people’s farming’ in contemporary Russia. Its focus is rural households—on the, so-called, personal subsidiary farming undertaken by people living in Russia’s rural districts. This emphasis, which excludes the vast army of urban allotment holders, reﬂects the authors’ longstanding interest in the rural economy and the pivotal role rural household production has played in the development of post-Soviet agriculture. This is not to say that urban food production has not been an important feature of the post-Soviet ‘transition’; it has been, but its importance is in the role it has played in the post-Soviet urban economy. Urban food production is separate from other forms of agriculture; the sources of inputs are different and its distribution channels are exclusively informal. By contrast, rural household production is an integral element of the agrarian economy and, while many rural households also are engaged in production for personal consumption and use informal exchange networks, production for the market is widespread. Furthermore, production and marketing of produce in the household sector takes place within a framework of social, economic, and political processes that bind rural households into a relationship with other actors in rural Russia, so that the future of one part of the system is dependent upon developments in other parts. As will become obvious in the chapters that follow, the future of Russian agriculture is, in large measure, the future of the relationship between small and large farming and between corporate/collectivist and the myriad forms of individual and privately owned farms. The research on which this book draws was carried out between 2000 and 2004. Its immediate aim was to identify the combination of factors that are shaping the character of household food production at different spatial scales. Since the relative positioning of phenomena in space and society–environment relations lies at the heart of geography, it was natural that the inﬂuence of location and the character of the physical environment would ﬁgure prominently in the investigation and the choice of region and rural districts to study reﬂects the importance of these two variables. This conventional economic-geographic

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approach was expected to, and did, produce predictable results—personal subsidiary farming, like ‘formal’ agriculture, turns out to be zonal at the national scale (potatoes in the centre and north, melons and aubergines in the south) and there is a clearly discernible distance-decay function around market centres in the degree to which household production is commercialized—but it also threw up anomalies that pointed to other lines of enquiry and to other factors that are involved in shaping production. Principal among these latter are ethnicity and the character of the relationship in any place between large agricultural enterprises and household farms, both of which mediate the effects of environment and distance at the sub-regional level. Tracking the interplay between these factors involved the use of an eclectic range of sources and methods of investigation, including the analysis of ofﬁcial statistics, structured and open-ended interviews with the range of actors involved in the agri-food system, conversations and observation in the ﬁeld, and the consumption of much home-produced food and beverages.

Statistical sources The use of ofﬁcial statistics relating to rural household food production is problematic in two respects. First, statistical data reﬂect the ofﬁcial construction of this type of farming so that ﬁgures are given for ‘agricultural organizations’, ‘private peasant farms’, and ‘people’s farms’ with the last often aggregating urban and rural producers. At the lower level, in the regions and in rural districts (raiony), ofﬁcial statistics pose problems for different reasons. In this case, it is not uncommon for production on plots belonging to urban registered dwellers to be excluded from data gathering altogether. Regional agricultural departments are preoccupied with large-scale farming and, as often as not, the statistics produced on household production simply present averages across the whole sector for broad categories of produce—meat, milk, vegetables, fruit—aggregated for the region or rural districts as a whole. Data at the sub-district (sel skii okrug) level can be obtained only by visiting individual rural administrations and the data held relate just to the numbers of livestock and movables in personal ownership and landownership, and not to volumes of production. The second problem with ofﬁcial statistics relating to people’s farming concerns its representativeness. Whereas data on large farms and private peasant farms is collected by local agricultural departments on a regular, quarterly basis, the statistics that appear in national agricultural censuses on people’s farms are taken from a small sample of 16,000, equivalent to 0.1 per cent of the total (sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004: 85). The reliability of the ﬁgures that are presented depends upon the conscientiousness of local ofﬁcials and on the accuracy with which the chosen respondents answer the questions, both of which are questionable. In the absence of independent surveys, the ofﬁcial statistics have to constitute the main source for describing people’s farming at the national and

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regional scale but what they show, necessarily, must be treated with caution. In this book we use ofﬁcial data to create maps and tables comparing production in the household sector across Russia’s administrative and macroeconomic regions for the major types of product, and over time. The absence for some regions of systematic data on people’s farms at sub-regional level and the difﬁculty of accessing regional censuses (these are not sent to Moscow but have to be obtained directly from statistical ofﬁces in oblast and republican capitals) limited our ability to produce a sub-regional analysis for the whole country. The availability of regional statistics on people’s farming disaggregated to the level of rural district was an important criterion in the choice of case study regions.

The selection of case study regions Figure 1.1 and Table 1.1 show the regions and rural districts in which we conducted our investigations. Apart from the requirement that there were at least some statistics available relating to household production, the choice of administrative

AO NO PAO K

O M

PK

O R

R C

aO S O S K S

Rgions included in the e inv estigation

Fig. 1.1. Oblasts and krais included in the investigation of people’s farms in Russia. (AO = Arkhangel sk Oblast; CR = Chuvash Republic; KPAO = Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug; MO = Moscow Oblast; NO = Novgorod Oblast; PK = Perm Krai; RO = Ryazan Oblast; SaO = Samara Oblast; SO = Saratov Oblast; SK = Stavropol Krai.)

Table 1.1. Number of administrative regions, settlements, interviews, and questionnaires included in the investigation of rural household production in Russia .. .. Survey .. year .. .. Perm .. 2002 .. 2003 Novgorod .. .. 2004 Archangel sk .. 2001 Moscow .. .. 2000 Ryazan . Republic of Chuvashia ... 2002 .. 2004 Samara .. .. 2001 Saratov .. 2003 Stavropol .. .. Total . Republic, Oblast, or Krai

.. .. Rural .. administrations .. .. 7 .. .. 1 .. .. 1 .. 5 .. .. 2 .. 3 .. .. 3 .. .. 6 .. 7 .. .. 35 .

.. .. Settlements .. .. .. 29 .. .. 5 .. .. 6 .. 35 .. .. 8 .. 10 .. . 5 ... .. 26 .. 26 .. .. 150 .

.. .. Interviews .. conducted .. .. 92 .. .. 18 .. .. 20 .. 77 .. .. 23 .. 25 .. .. 17 .. .. 113 .. 81 .. .. 466 .

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Questionnaires completed 225 17 0 62 89 70 0 243 225 931

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region (oblast, krai, or republic) was governed, in the ﬁrst instance, by the need to include at least one from each of the major natural-geographical regions of European Russia in which farming is practised—the boreal forest (taiga), mixed forest, forest steppe, steppe, and semi-desert—and with different degrees of centrality/peripherality. The most northerly region chosen was Perm krai (formerly Perm oblast and the Komi-Permyak Automonous Oblast) in the boreal forests of the pre-Ural region. Large agriculture was introduced into the northern districts of the krai during the Soviet period to support forestry, which brought settlers to the region, many of whom in the early years (1930–53) were exiles and prisoners. Since 1991, large farms have collapsed in the north and forestry also is in decline but, despite high levels of out-migration, there is still a signiﬁcant permanent population in the region, including the young, who have stayed behind. Further to the south in the krai agricultural resources are more typical of the non-black earth zone and agriculture remains the mainstay of the rural economy in a number of districts. In addition to Perm krai, the investigation of single rural districts in Novgorod and Arkhangel sk oblasts provided the opportunity for further insights into the condition of household food production in the coniferous forest but, as can be seen from Table 1.1, the scope of the research was more limited than in Perm where the rural districts from different sub-regions were included in the study. At the other end of the environmental spectrum, the eastern districts of Saratov oblast and of Stavropol krai provided examples of farming in the arid steppe and semi-desert. Naturally suited to extensive livestock husbandry, these regions are also on the margins of effective cultivation. They became integrated into the USSR’s cereal belt during the Virgin Lands Campaign launched by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s. European Russia’s main farming regions lying between the northern forests and semi-deserts are represented in the investigation by rural districts in Moscow oblast (mixed forest and podzolic soils) and Ryazan (transitional from mixed forest to forest-steppe) in the Central Industrial Region, right-bank Saratov and Samara oblasts in the Middle Volga (forest-steppe and black earths), and the central and western districts of Stavropol krai in the south. Each has its speciﬁc features that commended it for inclusion in the investigation. Moscow oblast demonstrates the effect of the national capital on the farming economy. Ryazan oblast was chosen as a contrast to its neighbour; soil and climatic conditions are more favourable here than in Moscow oblast but as it is situated at a distance from the inﬂuence of the Moscow agglomeration, many of its rural districts suffer from depopulation and out-migration of the economically active population. Ryazan oblast gave us one example of the classic Russian glubinka, or out-of-the-way place. The forest-steppe proper is represented by rural districts on the right bank of the Volga in Saratov oblast. Unlike Moscow and Ryazan , Saratov contains within its borders a broad range of agri-environmental conditions, as well as having a centrally situated regional capital. This made it a particularly useful oblast in which to examine the relative importance of market and environment on the development of household production. Samara oblast, in which a small-

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scale investigation was conducted, is similar to Saratov in this respect, the regional capital is among the more economically dynamic in European Russia providing a useful comparator with Moscow oblast. It was important to choose a successful farming region from Russia’s traditional cereal belt. Stavropol krai satisﬁes this criterion and has a diversity of environments similar in range to those in Saratov oblast. Thus in the centre and west there are districts with cereal monoculture in the large farm sector but these give way to the different environments in the more temperate foothills of the Caucasus Mountains to the south and to the semi-deserts to the east. Originally, our intention had been to study household production in the mountains proper in the Republic of Dagestan, but by 2004 the personal risks involved in undertaking rural research in the region meant that it had to be excluded from the study. In addition to representing different agri-climatic regions and degrees of centrality, the ethnic structure of the chosen regions was diverse, with respect to both intra- and inter-regional comparisons. Ethnic Russians constitute the majority population in all, but in the case of the territories east of the Volga, the southern Urals, and in the semi-deserts and foothills of the Caucasus mountains in Stavropol krai, other, largely Muslim, ethnic groups are locally dominant. The southern and eastern steppes are a mosaic of ‘agricultural-culture islands’, which permitted us to interrogate the effect of ethnicity on the character of household production. The Republic of Chuvashia was also included in the study since it is ethnically diverse; the titular population is in the majority in rural districts but there are also pockets of Russian, Mordovian, and Tatar villages. Rural districts constituted the next rung of the investigation. These, together with urban districts, are the principal administrative divisions of the eighty-six subjects of the Russian Federation. Using regional level statistics, we identiﬁed rural districts that would capture the ethnic and environmental diversity of each oblast, krai, or republic and different degrees of centrality relative to the regional capital. Within these, a further selection was made of rural administrations (sel skie administratsii) and individual settlements for ﬁeldwork. It was at this level of the investigation that we were able to introduce the ethnic composition and the speciﬁc relationship of large and small farming into the selection criteria. Local ofﬁcials were able to advise on the existence of ethnically homogenous or mixed rural districts and settlements, and of localized specialization in people’s farming—these do not show up in the statistics collected in the regions so local knowledge was essential in order to identify them. Large farms (the ‘agricultural organizations’ and enterprises of the national censuses) are often coterminous with rural administrations and can contain within them a number of settlements. In making our selection among the large farms in rural districts, we sought to identify a range in terms of their ‘economic health’. Thus, in any district we would seek to identify, at a minimum, one successful, proﬁt-making enterprise (if such existed), one stable but loss-making enterprise, and one weak enterprise. Production and proﬁtability data held in district agricultural departments allowed

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us to verify the status of the large farms and private ‘peasant’ farms at the district level.

Local level investigations One of the features of undertaking research in rural Russia is that when it comes to collecting data in the ﬁeld the strict requirements of scientiﬁc social enquiry have to be thrown out of the window (although see O’ Brien and Patsiorkovsky, 2006). The changes that have taken place in Russia since 1991 have opened up areas of research that previously were not possible and inhibitions in provincial Russia about talking to outsiders (whether foreigners or from the Moscow Academy of Sciences) have been replaced by a willingness to share data and recount experiences in a way that is no longer possible in the West where access to information is protected. Perhaps because the rules for sharing information are not yet systematized across Russia, independent researchers are subject to the whims of local administrators and, in particular, to their degree of preparedness to help access statistical data and for introductions and permissions. The attitude of the district administrator to the arrival of one foreigner and one Muscovite at short notice or, indeed, previously unannounced could inﬂuence the subsequent course of work in a district. We were fortunate in most cases to meet with enthusiastic and helpful responses; only on one occasion did we have to abort our research because of obstruction by the local authority; that, interestingly, was in the one district where we had given plenty of notice of our arrival. For the most part, we were given access to records of farm productivity and land use by district departments of agriculture and district land committees and were assisted in setting up interviews with farm managers, local cooperatives, private farmers, and other entrepreneurs. We organized our own visits to rural administrations (sel skie administratsii), the lowest rung in the territorial administrative hierarchy, where we were able to access information about the population characteristics, landownership, and the ownership of livestock for every settlement. These data were necessary to help us make the selection of households to interview. The interviews with individual households engaged in food production constituted the bedrock of our research giving meaning to the broad-brush picture derived from national and regional statistics. Since our objective was to develop a general idea of farming practices in a given place rather than to interrogate the situation of particular types of households, we were mainly interested in interviewing people who could provide informed answers and who could direct us to other people who could answer speciﬁc questions. Initial anxieties that the presence of a foreigner would result in reticence were quickly dispelled during the ﬁrst period of ﬁeldwork in Lukhovitsy district when it proved to be an advantage reassuring our interview partners that we were not from the tax inspectorate and that our purpose was truly academic. We developed an instinctive

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understanding between us of who should be the lead interviewer, whether with ofﬁcials or with plot holders, and who was better left to make a record of the conversation. Interviews were of variable length lasting between ﬁfteen minutes and an hour or more and could involve sharing a meal. In all cases we explained the purpose of the interview, emphasizing its voluntary nature and that personal details would not be revealed. The principal ethical problem was the expectation on the part of some respondents that we would be able to bring inﬂuence to bear on solving problems they were encountering. In addition to open-ended interviews with people engaged in household production, we also conducted questionnaire surveys among rural households, using the services of post-graduate geographers from the regional universities for the purpose. The questionnaires were designed as a check both on the ﬁndings of the interviews and on the ofﬁcial data contained in national statistics. Ten to twenty questionnaires were sufﬁcient for the purpose in each village included in the survey. It was at the local level that we were able to cast the net of the investigation into household production wider than the ofﬁcial categorization. Thus, although a majority of our respondents would have been ofﬁcially classiﬁed as being engaged in personal subsidiary production, we also sought out people engaged in other forms of small farming who either did not fall into any recognizable ofﬁcial type-class or whose farming, despite being classiﬁed differently, nevertheless possessed similar characteristics to those of the surrounding ‘ordinary’ rural household producers. Thus it was that we included among our interview partners people who were urban-registered but owned rural household plots, internally displaced people who were not entitled to a plot but were nevertheless engaged in some form of either arable or animal husbandry, members and leaders of independent contract brigades or teams, small private ‘peasant’ farms that did not hire labour, and rural entrepreneurs, farm managers, private farm owners, and rural professionals who, in addition to their main employment, engaged in some form of ‘personal subsidiary farming’.

The Organization of the Book The circumstances under which rural people in Russia produce food on their household plots are intriguing and multifaceted and seem to resist generalization. Four years in the ﬁeld led us to the conclusion that the story of household production would ﬁnally be told only when every ‘subject of the federation’ had been visited. Instead of allowing ourselves this luxury, in the chapters that follow we employ the conventional academic strategy of ordering the body of information that we have at hand in order to arrive at what we believe are useful generalizations that speak to the preoccupations of theorists of post-communism, to geographers interested in small farming in general, and, somewhat more cautiously, to Russia’s rural policy-makers. In Chapter 2 we examine the role of ‘people’s farming’ in the overall domestic food economy of Russia and discuss

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how such small-scale food production became embedded in the Soviet agrarian system and how it is understood by ofﬁcials and scholars alike. Chapter 3 is our most ‘geographical’ chapter; in it we describe the what and where of rural household production at three spatial scales—national, regional, and local—and discuss the extent to which patterns of production can be explained by differences in geographic environment and location. Subsequent chapters examine the range of additional factors that have a bearing on the character of household production in any place. These include, in Chapter 4, the environmental resources upon which rural household food producers draw in different parts of Russia, how they are accessed, and whether this has been changing in the ﬁfteen years since communism’s collapse. Although it would be an exaggeration to argue that the resources base of the household sector is being threatened at the present time, we do identify some areas of vulnerability. Chapter 5 considers the inﬂuence of the large farm sector on household production in any place. It turns out that large farm inputs are crucial to the reproduction of some branches of household production, but not all, and that they have a role to play in differentiating the character of production at the regional and sub-regional level. Chapter 6, examines evidence that ethnic and cultural factors have a bearing on production. The association of particular branches of production and methods of husbandry with speciﬁc ethnic groups can be locally marked, although ethnicity is a weak explanatory factor in the household production’s geography. In the penultimate chapter, we broaden the horizon to consider a variety of other forms of small and private farming that have made their appearance in the Russian countryside since 1991. The book ends with a discussion in the ﬁnal chapter of how far household production has become commercialized, and speculates about its future. We have also included appendices at the end of chapters containing materials from local newspapers or other sources that are illustrative of elements of the preceding discussion.

2 The Practice and Theory of Personal Subsidiary Farming in Soviet and Russian Agriculture The Contribution of People’s Farms to Food Production and the Household Economy The story the ofﬁcial statistics tell about production in the household sector is remarkable for a country as urbanized and industrialized as the Russian Federation. As Table 2.1 shows, this former industrial giant and major oil producer derives 51 per cent of the value of its agricultural produce from farms that, on average, are under one hectare in size and, according to ofﬁcial land use statistics, occupy just 6.6 per cent of the country’s agricultural land (Sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004: 56). At the end of the Soviet period personal subsidiary farming was responsible for 26 per cent of the USSR’s agricultural output, a smaller share than now but still signiﬁcant for what was at that time the world’s second largest industrial economy (Agrarnaya reforma v Rossii, 2000: 204). The post-Soviet expansion in the sector’s relative contribution mainly took place in the early 1990s after which it maintained a steady but more modest increase from the second half of the 1990s to 2002. It fell back in subsequent years but in 2004 was still contributing twice as much as before the USSR’s collapse. In West European countries such small-scale agricultural activity supplements production on large farms or it caters to niche markets. In Russia, the pattern is different and small farms are the principal producers of certain staple foodstuffs such as potatoes and vegetables and equal partners in the production of meat and dairy products. This is shown in Table 2.2. In 1990, before the collapse of communism, personal subsidiary farms accounted for 30 per cent of the country’s vegetables and fruit and between 13 and 42 per cent of the beef, pork, and mutton; collective and state farms were also major producers of these products (ibid. 205). The complementarity between large and small farming was thus a feature of the Soviet period, but it has been brought into sharper relief in the post-communist period. As a result, the importance of people’s farms in the agri-food system in the Russian Federation today can be properly understood only within the context of

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Personal Subsidiary Farming

Table 2.1. Percentage of the total value of agricultural output by ofﬁcial category of farm, 1992–2004 .. . . . . . . .. 1992 ... 1995 ... 2000 ... 2001 ... 2002 ... 2003 ... 2004 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . Agricultural Organizations ... 67.1 ... 50.2 ... 43.4 ... 43.9 ... 39.8 ... 39.7 ... 43.1 .. 31.8 .. 47.9 .. 53.6 . 52.4 .. 56.5 .. 55.8 . 51.0 People’s farms . .. .. .. .. .. . . .. Private peasant farms 1.1 .. 1.9 .. 3.0 .. 3.7 .. 3.7 .. 4.5 .. 5.9 Source: Russia in Figures, 2005: 210. Year

changes in large farming. There is an extensive scholarly literature that describes how collective and state farms were dealt a blow by the end of state subsidy and support through direct investment and the centralized procurement of their product (ibid passim; Leonard, 2000; O’Brien and Wegren, 2002; Serova, 1999; 2000). The majority of large farms quickly fell into debt after 1991 as a result of having to pay market prices for inputs and the difﬁculties of adapting to the loss of guaranteed outlets. The impact on output was dramatic and catastrophic; between 1991 and 2000 the volume of agricultural produce in the large farm sector shrank by 60 per cent (Rossiya v tsifrakh, 2001; Sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004). The decline, with a recent small upturn, is shown graphically in Fig. 2.1. The crisis particularly afﬂicted the livestock sector, when collective and state farms sold off or slaughtered their beef and dairy herds and pigs. In geographically marginal farming regions such as the north and the semi-deserts in the south and east, the sown area contracted and land reverted to forest or to steppe grasses (Ioffe and Nefedova, 2004). The expansion of ‘people’s farming’ was the mirror image of the contraction in the large-farm sector. Output increased absolutely in the early 1990s and through the decade it remained 13–18 per cent above the 1990 level. Growth was uneven, however. It was marked in the vegetable, potato, and soft fruit sector but was less pronounced in the livestock sector, as Table 2.3 shows. These differences reﬂect an urban/rural split. The expansion in the volume of market garden produce was largely the result of the creation of new plots for urban dwellers, used exclusively for vegetables, fruit, and ﬂowers. The Table 2.2. Percentage share of the main agricultural products produced by ofﬁcial category of farm, 1992, 1997, and 2004 .. .. Agricultural .. .. .. .. organizations .. . .. 1992 ... 1997 ... 2004 ... Produce .. .. .. .. .. . . . .. 98.0 ... 93.0 ... 81.2 ... Cereals .. . .. .. Sugar beet .. 98.0 .. 95.7 .. 88.6 ... .. . .. .. Sunﬂowers . 94.0 . 87.8 . 74.4 .. .. . . . Potatoes .. 21.3 ... 7.7 ... 6.2 ... Vegetables ... 45.0 ... 22.2 ... 14.9 ... Meat/poultry ... 64.6 ... 42.5 ... 45.1 ... .. 68.5 .. 51.3 .. 45.0 .. Milk .. . . . .. 78.3 ... 69.2 ... 72.8 ... Eggs Sources: Sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i 211–14.

1992

People’s farms .. .. .. 1997 .. .. .. .. . .. 0.8 ... .. 0.8 .. .. . .. 1.4 ... .. 91.3 .. ... 76.9 ... .. . .. 55.9 ... ... 47.2 ... .. . . 30.4 ..

2004

— 1.4 — 1.1 — 1.1 78.7 91.8 55.0 80.2 35.4 52.5 31.5 52.2 26.1 26.7 lesovodstvo, 2004: 39;

.. Private ‘peasant’ .. .. farms .. .. 1992 ... 1997 ... 2004 .. .. .. .. . . .. 2.0 ... 6.2 ... 17.4 .. . .. .. 2.0 .. 3.5 ... 10.3 .. . .. .. 6.0 .. 10.8 ... 24.5 .. — .. 1.0 .. 2.0 .. . . .. — ... 1.5 ... 4.9 .. — .. 1.6 .. 2.4 .. . . .. — ... 1.5 ... 2.8 .. — .. 0.4 .. 0.5 . . . Russia in Figures, 2005:

Personal Subsidiary Farming

19

170 150 130 Total production

110 90

Agricultural enterprises

70 50

Household producers

30

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

−10

1991

10

Fig. 2.1. Agricultural production by different types of farm, 1991–2003 as a percentage of 1990. Sources: Sel skoe khozyaistvo . . . 1998: 32; Osnovnye pokazateli . . . 2004: 5.

scope for increasing levels of output in rural Russia—the locus of individual meat and milk production—was, by contrast, more limited. Today, people’s farming is not registering the massive increases that it did in the early 1990s but output remains high in most sectors and still exceeds by 10–13 per cent the levels of the last years of the Soviet regime. The production by ‘ordinary’ Russians of more than half the country’s domestic food represents an enormous national effort. According to one authority (Gorbacheva, 2000), 420 million person-hours were expended in people’s farming in the late 1990s. This was more than in formal agriculture—245 million personhours annually—and two-thirds as much as in industry—600 million personhours (see Fig. 2.2). Ofﬁcial labour statistics for 2001 show every person in Russia spending an average of 141 hours producing their own food (growing crops, livestock rearing, and natural resource harvesting) with this number doubling in marginal regions in the north and east (for example, in Novgorod and Pskov oblast in the European North the ﬁgure rises to 230–50 hours and in the Republic Table 2.3. Total output from people’s farms by branch of production .. . . . . . . .. 1992 ... 1995 ... 2000 ... 2001 ... 2002 ... 2003 ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . .. 29.9 ... 35.9 ... 31.4 ... 32.4 ... 30.6 ... 34.1 ... Potatoes (mill. tons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vegetables (mill. tons) .. 5.5 .. 8.3 .. 9.7 .. 10.6 .. 10.6 .. 11.8 ... .. 2.0 .. 1.7 .. 2.7 .. 2.4 .. 3.0 .. 2.5 .. Fruit and berries (mill. tons) .. . . . . . . Cattle and poultry (mill. tons .. 2.9 ... 2.8 ... 2.6 ... 2.5 ... 2.6 ... 2.6 ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. slaughter weight) .. . . . . . . Milk (mill. tons) .. 14.8 ... 16.3 ... 16.4 ... 16.8 ... 16.8 ... 17.2 ... . . . . . . .. 11.2 .. 10.2 .. 9.8 .. 9.9 .. 9.7 .. 9.7 ... Eggs (milliard) .. 57.5 .. 39.8 .. 23.0 .. 23.7 .. 25.7 .. 25.6 .. Wool (thous. tons) . . . . . . . Sources: Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, 1996; Sel skoe khozyaistvo v rossii, Sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004: 9.

2004 33.0 11.5 3.2 2.6 16.7 9.5 n/d 2002,

Personal Subsidiary Farming

25000 20000 Employed on large farms

15000

Personal subsidiary farms

10000

Orchards Vegetable plots

2002

2001

1999

2000

1998

1996

1997

1995

1994

1993

1992

0

1991

5000

1990

Number of agricultural workers and numbers of household producers

20

Fig. 2.2. Number of employees in large agricultural enterprises and of households involved in personal food production, 1990–2002.

of Buratiya to 340 hours) (Ekonomicheskaya aktivnost naseleniya, 2002: 106) but these ﬁgures may well underestimate the full extent of the labour input into people’s farming as independent surveys have found much higher levels of activity. One study in Pskov oblast, for example, calculated that individuals expended an average of 1,210 hours per annum, or thirty working weeks, on their plots (Seeth et al., 1998). But even taking the ofﬁcial ﬁgures at their face value, measured against an eight-hour working day, the commitment to individual food production averages out at eighteen days a year. If the role of people’s farming in producing Russia’s food is obvious and signiﬁcant, its role in the household economy is a more difﬁcult matter to probe since there is no agreed methodology over how to calculate ‘income’—either as money earned from sales or as an income equivalent of total production— or how to treat the produce recycled through the farm as livestock feed and seed for the forthcoming year. Furthermore, rural people are often reluctant to reveal the full extent of income earned by the sale of produce which places a question mark over some budget studies. It has been estimated that income from personal food production rose from 21.6 per cent of total household income in 1990 to 60 per cent in 1996, but in one study it was set much lower at 6 per cent for urban and 29 per cent for rural households (Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost , 1999: 153). The 2002 national census showed the proportion of households in Russia using their plots to earn income was relatively small, 12.5 per cent of the total, but that there were large differences between urban and rural households, 5.7 and 31.4 per cent respectively (Itogi vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya 2002 goda, 2004: 10). In another independent national survey 25 per cent of rural household income came from food production with the remainder from wages (30 per cent), pensions (17 per cent), and other social transfers and sources (28 per cent) (Sostoyanie sotsial no-trudovoi sfery sela . . . , 2000: 65). Individual

Personal Subsidiary Farming

21

case studies indicate that there are large variations around these averages. Thus, in Vologda oblast, Yastrebinskaya (1999: 69) found that personal food production accounted for 17–50 per cent of the household budget in the villages she surveyed, while in Danilovka, Saratov oblast, Fadeeva (2002) found the proportion was over 60 per cent. Where the contribution of personally produced food to direct consumption is concerned, there are marked urban/rural differences. Thus, whereas 40.8 per cent of rural inhabitants report personal production as their main food source, the equivalent ﬁgure for urban dwellers is 14.8 per cent. There is more similarity where personally produced food is supplementary to other sources (45.6 per cent for rural and 36.6 per cent for urban households) (Maloe predprinimatel stvo v Rossii, 2004: 146). Ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial statistics, for all their problems, speak to the fact that people’s farming in the post-Soviet period has come to occupy a signiﬁcant place in the Russian agri-food production system and that it is a source of subsistence and livelihood for large numbers of households. This feature of post-Soviet life could not have come about had some form of small farming not already existed in Russia. There are many ways in which today’s household production is different from its Soviet precursors but there are also strong continuities, which will be described in the chapters that follow. The appearance en masse of urban plot holders is one striking change from the Soviet period. In rural areas, the story has been more one of the continuation of past practices—but at higher levels of intensity—and of greater market engagement. The adaptations in ‘personal subsidiary farming’ in rural districts, including the emergence of commercial forms of smallholder farming, has taken place on the basis of pre-existing systems for accessing inputs, an infrastructure for marketing output, and the existence of a pool of knowledge about arable and animal husbandry acquired during the Soviet period within the context of collective and state farms. Before proceeding to further discussion of post-1991 developments, this important pre-history is reviewed.

Household Plots in the ‘Long History’ of the Russian Peasantry Personal subsidiary farming occupied a particular place in the Soviet agricultural system and to understand why today, in the changed circumstances of the postSoviet transformation, it continues to be accorded a distinctive status in the theory and practice of Russian agriculture it is helpful to review its history (for histories of the sector, see Shmelev, 2002: 31–91; Wadekin, 1973). The category ‘personal subsidiary farming’ grew out of the experiences of the collectivization campaign in the 1930s. Prior to collectivization, peasant households produced food for their own consumption, and among the resources they had at their disposal to do this was the area of land adjacent to the izba, hut or house, that was occupied by vegetables and fruit bushes, alongside the jumble of pens and sheds for animals and

22

Personal Subsidiary Farming

fowls. The produce of the household plot was an indivisible part of the economy of the peasant farmer; together with the cereals and other crops cultivated on the household’s arable allotment, or nadel, in the open ﬁelds, and the dairy and meat products from the animals that were grazed on the village’s common pasture and fallow ﬁelds, the fruit and vegetables cultivated on the allotment on the home farm plot provided for the peasants’ subsistence needs and for the tribute payable in the form of taxes to the landlord or state. In places where land was scarce, income from farming was supplemented by off-farm earnings from labour migrations, industrial outwork, or small-scale manufacturing. In some central regions these sources of income displaced farming as the main source of subsistence and income in the peasant economy, leading to the abandonment of the strips in the open ﬁelds (Pallot, 1990a: 238–40). Rarely, though, did households cease to grow vegetables and fruit on the home farm plot or to keep small livestock. The use of a plot of land to grow vegetables and on which to keep pigs and a cow was as important in urban as in rural pre-revolutionary Russia, although in larger towns, such as Moscow and St Petersburg, it was conﬁned to the outer districts. Russia was not much different from other pre-modern societies in these respects. When, in the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, the state in the Stolypin Land Reform (1906–17) attempted to break up the traditional village and to replace the open ﬁeld system by consolidated farms in the fashion of the American Midwest, the household plot adjacent to the dwelling was an integral component of the ideal consolidated farm, the khutor, that the state tried to get the peasantry to accept (Macey, 1992; Pallot, 1999). Throughout Europe, and despite the revolutionary changes brought about in farming by mechanization and intensiﬁcation, farmers continued to produce their own food well into the twentieth century. Russia’s distinctiveness lies in the longevity of the practice and its apparent embeddedness in the otherwise highly capitalized agri-food production system. The reasons for this lie in the particular way in which the Soviet state approached agrarian modernization on the 1930s. The landmark in the Soviet transformation of agriculture was in 1929/30 when the Stalinist state took the decision to collectivize farming. Collectivization sought to transfer agricultural labour onto an industrial footing and to forge agricultural workers out of ‘backward’ peasants. The initial plan for sculpting collective farms from open ﬁeld villages involved the surrender by the peasants of their communally and individually owned land, household plots included, but, as is well known, this process met with peasant resistance expressed in noncooperation, armed protest, and the mass slaughter by the peasantry of their livestock (Fitzpatrick, 1994; Viola, 1996). Despite being able to draw upon the full power of the security forces to subdue this resistance, the state was forced into a compromise with the peasants. Among other things, the compromise involved agreeing to allow the peasants to retain a small amount of land and some productive livestock for their personal use when they joined collective farms. Thus originated the household plot (uchastok) on which the members of collective farms were allowed to practise ‘personal supplementary’ husbandry. The plots

Personal Subsidiary Farming

23

often were the very same allotments the peasants had been using in the village communes that had survived the 1917 revolution. In the ﬁrst two decades after collectivization, which included years of famine, war and a state procurement policy that left farms with little residual to feed the rural workforce, production on household plots was, indeed, largely for personal consumption, although even at this early stage the peasants, if they could, sold food produced on their plots in the urban market. Household plots turned out to be vital to the reproduction of the peasant household in the three decades immediately after collectivization but they also proved their worth for the state since they reduced the size of the rural wage bill. What, from the state’s point of view, had begun as a temporary compromise to quell peasant resistance became a ﬁxed feature of the Soviet agri-food system which in the post-Stalin years grew to make a substantial contribution to overall food production in the country, especially in the fruit, vegetable, and meat and dairy sectors (Hedlund, 1984: 1–3). Few in the Soviet leadership were comfortable with the state’s dependence upon the personal farming sector to help feed the population and, at times, this resulted in measures to curb the sector’s growth or to eliminate it entirely. However, it was understood that the withering away of the household sector was bound up with improving efﬁciency and changing incentives in the socialized sector and providing rural people with the wages and social beneﬁts that would reduce their dependence on their plots. The Soviet state invested vast amounts of money into the ‘agro-industrial complex’ in the last decades of communist rule but, whatever the results achieved in the ‘formal’ sector, household production remained a persistent feature of the agrarian economy. Indeed, the interrelationship between giant socialized farms and small personal plots was one of the deﬁning features of Soviet socialist agriculture. This truth was revealed ﬁrst for Western audiences in the groundbreaking book by the Cambridge anthropologist Carolyn Humphrey (1998), who described the symbiotic relationship she found in collective farms in Buratiya in eastern Siberia. The relationship consisted of a type of social contract between farm managements and their workers whereby the former would work for the latter in return for receiving inputs to the personal farming sector to supplement wages and pensions. The transfers from large farms to the personal subsidiary farms took a variety of forms, from formally negotiated packages at one end of the spectrum, to the unwritten agreement to turn a blind eye to the illicit use and theft of collective property at the other. The symbiosis between large and small, socialized and personal (or private) sectors was a relationship that ofﬁcials in the USSR were aware of but chose not to comment upon. The state’s lack of comfort with the household sector is understandable; independent production, even if represented as personal and subsidiary rather than private and market-oriented, nevertheless was a reminder of the failure of the state’s social project to transform peasants into workers and to eliminate the last vestiges of the market (Medvedev, 1987: 365–8). Furthermore, there were concerns, probably justiﬁed, that work on the personal plot was deﬂecting effort from the socialized sector and was a drain on large farm resources, even though it tied

24

Personal Subsidiary Farming

workers to the land. However, the communist state was never sufﬁciently conﬁdent in the ability of socialized farming to meet the food needs of the Soviet people to abolish it entirely. The nearest it came to this was under Nikita Khrushchev when there was a campaign to liquidate plots, but this did not survive the leader’s demise in 1964 (Medvedev and Medvedev, 1976: 28–36). The principal threat to household production after the fall of Khrushchev, in fact, came less from the opposition of communist ideologues to the sector than from ‘natural processes’, such as rising rural living standards and real wages in the major farming regions and rural depopulation in the centre and north. At the end of the Soviet period, in a notable reversal of previous attitudes, the growing lack of interest among young people in rural areas in farming and out-migration became a cause of anxiety that overruled more ideological concerns about the commercial content of household production if it helped keep people on the land (Pallot, 1990b: 669). Party leaders made their peace with the idea of a division of labour in Soviet agriculture consisting of giant collectivist enterprises specializing in cereals, industrial crops, and factory-farmed meat and dairy products embedded within which were micro-farms specializing in labourintensive crop and livestock products. During the last decade of Soviet rule, acceptance of this fact coincided with a more general shift in attitudes towards labour organization and accountability in large farming. Agricultural reform was high on the agenda of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (Moskoff, 1990; Pallot, 1991; Wadekin, 1990; Wegren, 1998). Among other aims, his agricultural reforms sought to decentralize decision-making within the context of large farms through the development of rental brigades (arendnie podrady)—teams of people united by blood, friendship, or interest—that would take responsibility for, and be rewarded according to, the product of one sphere of a farm’s activities or parcel of land. Potentially, the reform carried the prospect of creating medium-scale farm units in Russia and of ending Soviet agriculture’s traditional dualism, but it had hardly been launched when it was overtaken by the events that were to lead to the end of Soviet rule. Boris Yel tsin, the Russian Federation’s ﬁrst president, took steps quickly to dismantle the structures of the Soviet era. In reforms promulgated in the early 1990s, which have been extended and modiﬁed since, the new Russian state attempted to break up collective and state farms and replace them by privately owned family farms. These reforms have been only partially successful; private peasant farms did begin to appear in the Russian countryside but they have not succeeded in displacing collective and state farms which, despite undergoing internal reorganizations and legal redeﬁnition, have nevertheless continued to dominate the post-Soviet farming sector. Meanwhile, personal subsidiary farming on household plots has acquired a more autonomous status than it had during the Soviet period and can take place outside the framework of large farms. However, the interrelationship between large-scale units and personal subsidiary farms remains as strong as ever in some places and continues to shape the direction in the development of both.

Personal Subsidiary Farming

25

The historical legacy of the Soviet dualistic farm structure, with the post-Soviet addition of private ‘peasant’ farms, is the foundation upon which the tripartite division of farm types described in the previous chapter rests. Agricultural organizations are heirs to the Soviet collective and state farms, rural people’s farms are heirs to the personal subsidiary plots of the collective farm members and state farm employees, and private peasant farms—the new creations—can variously be understood as developments on from Gorbachev’s rental brigades or, more radically, as latter-day Stolypin farms (Macey, 1990, 1993). These categories bring with them a historical baggage that continues to shape how they are understood today. Thus, just as during the Soviet period the clear distinctions drawn between large-scale socialized farms and personal subsidiary production contained within it a clear statement about the direction in which Soviet agriculture was moving— that is, towards ever more socialized, and therefore technologically advanced and intensive forms of farming—so the post-Soviet tripartite division is informed by a revised teleology according to which Russian agriculture is moving towards ever deeper market engagement with the private farms in the vanguard. In both, the role accorded to the household sector is for it to disappear as the transition, alternatively to communism or capitalism, takes place (Agrarnaya reforma v Rossii, 2000: 212–4). Despite the limited extension in 2007 of credit to Russia’s smallest farmers, household production is no more part of the narrative of agrarian development today than it was during the Soviet period.

The Household Sector in Post-Soviet Ideology of Agrarian Development The invisibility of the household sector in ofﬁcial discourse about agrarian development is in large part a reﬂection of the deeply entrenched ‘productivism’ that characterizes Russian thinking about agriculture and the rural world (Shubin, 2006). Productivism, a term that has entered studies of agrarian systems in recent years, refers to the tendency in the developed capitalist economies to valorize intensive over other forms of agriculture and to equate the ‘rural’ with ‘agricultural’. During the Soviet period, collective and state farms provided the framework within which the planning of rural social development and physical infrastructure took place and the principal index of the command administrative system’s success in rural Russia was the volume of the annual cereal harvest. Integrated rural development involving the coordinated planning of population and settlement, the environment and the broader economy including non-agricultural activities and the full range of farm enterprises, household plots included, did not ﬁgure in the Soviet approach. The one notable exception was Leonid Brezhnev’s programme for the development of the non-black earth belt in the 1970s (Hedlund, 1984: 86–7) which was prompted by catastrophic population decline and concerns about depopulation of villages in the region at a time when ‘rural nostalgia’ was on the rise.

26

Personal Subsidiary Farming

Productivist attitudes have carried over into the post-Soviet period so that instead of grasping the opportunities afforded by the contraction of large farming to focus upon formerly neglected branches of the rural economy, society, and environment and to develop a more integrated approach to ‘the rural’, the postSoviet state has carried forward many of its predecessor’s preoccupations. The state of the ploughing campaign may no longer make headline news at the national level but in the local press it still does, and the attention of ofﬁcials at the regional and district levels of the agricultural bureaucracies remains ﬁrmly ﬁxed on production in the ‘formal’ sector (agricultural organizations and private peasant farms). Personal subsidiary farming is understood at the local level as belonging to the social, rather than economic, sphere and is dealt with by other departments and lower levels of bureaucracy. Thus, while the contribution of people’s farms to food production is generally recognized in Russia, it is problematized as a social welfare, rather than economic, issue. This has had the advantage of stimulating much-needed debate about the welfare status of marginal rural households, which can suffer from discrimination in their pensions and beneﬁts compared with urban people. Prior to 2003, for example, rural dwellers were not entitled to state beneﬁts if they had a plot unless they registered their ‘business’ with the local authority, which few were prepared to do for fear of bureaucratic interference and taxation (Praust, 1998: 2). In contrast, issues relating to the economic activities of rural households—for example, their lack of access to credit or marketing channels—have remained largely unexplored (although see Silaeva, 2000: 141–2). Meanwhile, there is evidence of a growing suspicion on the part of some rural producers of personal subsidiary production stimulated, in part, by its relative success; members of AKKOR, the association of private peasant farmers, for example, have begun to put pressure on government to end the exemptions that household production enjoys from labour and tax legislation. Private farmers are irritated by the cross-subsidies the household sector receives from agricultural organizations and the negative impact household production can have on the labour market. Meanwhile, it has not escaped the notice of agrarian reformers that the continuing interdependence of the large farm and household sector is a potential brake on farm restructuring since both parties in the equation have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo—large farms, in order to persuade people to work for them for the miserly money wages they can pay, and rural households, in order to secure access to the inputs they need for their husbandry. The new suspicion is that household producers, far from being a neutral force with respect to the agrarian reforms to which the state has been committed since the early 1990s, in fact constitute one of the obstacles standing in the way of their realization. This is a potentially uncomfortable position for rural households that depend for their reproduction on small farming; in 1929 a similar conviction that peasant farming stood in the way of progress led to Stalin’s war against the peasantry. If there are practical policy-related reasons why household production remains outside the mainstream of ofﬁcial thinking about agriculture, the neo-liberal

Personal Subsidiary Farming

27

economic doctrine to which the post-Soviet governments have subscribed with varying degrees of enthusiasm since 1991 provides an ideological justiﬁcation for this stance. Neo-liberalism predicts the eventual elimination of sub-optimal economic actors. When applied to the agrarian sector in the Russian Federation, this would imply the demise not only of the vast majority of loss-making large-scale enterprises, but the elimination and/or transformation of small-scale producers as well. The process of the transformation in the latter case would be both economic—market penetration laying bare the inefﬁciencies of household production and undermining its markets—and social—the modernization of state welfare systems rendering the need for rural people to engage in producing their own food other than as a hobby—redundant. Of course, even the most ardent of neo-liberals does not predict the imminent demise of the household sector, but the belief that the contribution it makes to overall food production is bound to drop as the market restructures the agrarian economy reassures Russia’s policy-makers that, whatever might need to be done in the short term through reform of the welfare system to support the vulnerable who currently depend upon their plots, there is no need to include the sector in the longer-term planning for agriculture’s advance. A version of Russia’s path to agrarian modernization that does include provision for the further development of small farming has been articulated in recent years in response to the failure of the 1991 agrarian and land reforms to replace the collective and state farms with independent privately owned farms. With the number of private peasant farms stuck around the quarter of a million mark for several years now and producing a very small, albeit rising, proportion of total output, some experts in the agrarian academies have begun to look to the household sector for the entrepreneurial impulse needed to establish a new generation of private farms in the countryside. Scholars, including those of the inﬂuential Agrarian Institute of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, for example, have begun to ask whether, in view of the household sector’s continuing vitality, it may constitute the bedrock upon which to construct private (capitalist) farms (Petrikov, 1999; Uzun, 1999a; Kozlov, 2001a: 37). The original assumption of the 1991 agrarian reforms was that private farms would be formed as a result of farmworkers’ withdrawal from large farms, not, as would seem to be implied in the new suggestion, under the latter’s umbrella. A step in this direction of facilitating ‘the transformation of household producers into private farmers’ was taken with recent modiﬁcations to the land reform that allow households to apply for private peasant farmer status in relation to their household plots, for allotments to be combined with other land (for example, arable shares and rented land) in single unitary farms and that entitle households to two years interest-free credit, albeit secured against their land and moveables. These provisions, which will be discussed in a little more (but not too much) detail below, merely serve to underline how strange have been the arrangements that have existed since the USSR’s collapse governing agricultural land where different types of farm, each covered by its own set of rules, have been identiﬁed fundamentally by their

28

Personal Subsidiary Farming

historico-legal origin. Despite the small shifts in how the household sector’s future is understood in the higher echelons of the state, at the local level the productivist paradigm continues to hold sway. Over the four years of ﬁeldwork during which we interviewed countless numbers of ofﬁcials in local agricultural departments, we found no one who considered household production to be part of his or her brief. Rather, we were met with puzzlement that a research project on agriculture should be asking questions about such small beer.

The Household Sector in Post-Soviet Land Reform Reﬂecting the general attitudes to the sector described above, land used for household production has not been the subject of much legislative interest. Rather, the focus has been on restructuring the framework of collective and state farm enterprises with the aim of developing commercial forms of farming on large and medium-sized units. Land reforms introduced since 1991 have conﬁrmed pre-existing legal boundaries between household plots on the one hand, and ‘agricultural organizations’ and private farms on the other. Household production is understood as taking place on plots lying within the boundaries of rural settlements and is governed by the regulations pertaining to such land, while urban allotments are covered by their own set of regulations (‘On garden, vegetable and dacha non-commercial cooperatives’, 15 April 1998, amended 2000 and 2002). In 2003, a law speciﬁcally relating to personal subsidiary production was introduced (‘On personal subsidiary production’, 2003) which brought together earlier provisions with respect to the sector contained in the broader land reform legislation (Wegren, 2004). The path to the present set of legal regulations governing rural household production has broadly followed the four phases of post-Soviet land and agrarian reform.

The ﬁrst phase: 1991–1993 The ﬁrst phase of land reform followed the dissolution of the USSR and it took place at a time when calls for the ‘re-peasantization’ of Russia were at their most vocal. Under the active leadership of Boris Yel tsin, agrarian policy was structured around a vision for the Russian countryside that would see the replacement of large-scale socialized agricultural enterprises by individual privately owned farms. The emphasis in the reform at this time was iconoclastic, concerned more with destroying the collective and state farms than informed by any clear ideas of how the new structures were to emerge or the form they would take. New laws required large farms to undergo a process of internal reorganization, but more important for rural dwellers was the provision for transferring land from large farms into their private ownership. There were two elements to this; the ﬁrst, which received most media and academic attention but did not appeal immediately to the rural population, was laws enabling workers and pensioners to claim a share

Personal Subsidiary Farming

29

of the land and capital of their parent farm with a view to using these shares to set up an independent private farm. The second element required collective and state farms to surrender to rural administrations (still called ‘soviets’ at this time) land lying within the boundaries of rural settlements. This was of more immediate interest to rural people. The land in question included allotments, communal pastures and some hayﬁelds, as well as non-agricultural land under communal buildings and roads. Whereas in the past farm managements had been responsible for allocating plots to households, now the responsibility was transferred to the local administration. Resident rural households were able to apply for title to their plot so that ﬁnally they became the legal owners of the land they needed for personal subsidiary husbandry. During this ﬁrst stage of reform it was not possible for rural dwellers to add the shares of land they were entitled to withdraw from their parent farm to the allotments to which they now held title in the village. If they wanted to farm their land share, they had to register formally as a private peasant farm. The land reform thus (re-)erected a boundary for small farmers between personal subsidiary farming, which took place on household plots, and commercial farming, which was supposed to take place on land shares withdrawn from large farms. The transfer of land under settlements eroded the control over all the land enclosed within farm boundaries that socialized farms had exercised during the Soviet period. In a later chapter we will show that this transfer was contested. Collective and state farm monopoly over agricultural land was further eroded by the transfer of some land in their possession to local authority land funds (fondi pereraspredeleniya) from which land could be allocated for private farms to people who were not entitled to claim a share of collective or state farm land or, alternatively, it could be parcelled out for rent. The ﬁrst stage of the land reform thus effected a transfer in the ownership of land in rural Russia away from large farms towards individual households and municipalities. Nevertheless, large farms remained the principal users of agricultural land in rural Russia and, moreover, continued to have more than a passing resemblance, organizationally, to their predecessors.

The second phase: changes arising from the 1993 Constitution Following the acceptance of a new Russian Constitution in 1993, which removed the former prohibition on the conveyance of land, land reform entered a second phase. The impact of a land market in Russia, in fact, had limited impact on large farms because the Russian parliament refused to extend the land market to agricultural land, but it did apply to land lying within the boundaries of rural settlements and thus had an impact on the household sector. In 1993, a system already existed in Russia’s villages for assigning prices to land. These were the so-called ‘normative prices’ that were set at twice the value of the land tax,

30

Personal Subsidiary Farming

this latter being differentiated according to the location and quality of the soil. Land has continued to be priced according to normative values. In 2002, the average normative price was 350 dollars a hectare with the extremes in the Nenets Autonomous okrug in the far north of Siberia, where they were well below this average, and in Krasnodar krai, Russia’s prime agricultural region, where they were ten times higher. Normative prices were also above average in suburban locations, where an additional coefﬁcient was applied to household plots occupied by second homes or dachas. Under the 1993 law these normative prices were supposed to be used for conveying land even though they clearly bore little relationship to market clearing prices. In reality, an informal land market had long existed in Russia’s villages; in rural areas near to the larger cities land had been changing hands in the Soviet period at prices well above the legal norms, despite prohibitions. The principal effect of the lifting of restrictions on land conveyance in such places was to legalize the well-established practice of informal transfers. Just as in the past, individuals and local authorities today circumvent the regulations governing ofﬁcial prices for household plots and other land falling within rural settlements (Nefedova, Polyan, and Trevish, 2001: 374–400). For individual rural households, now the legitimate owners of their household plots, the introduction of a limited land market has widened the options open to them if, for example, they wish to quit the countryside or acquire an additional plot. The downside is that they can now ﬁnd themselves under intense pressure to sell their land or they can ﬁnd the pastures or meadowlands in communal use or held on short-term leases sold from under their feet.

The third phase: from 1996 A presidential decree in 1996, ‘On the implementation of citizens’ constitutional rights to land’, heralded the third phase of land reform. The decree represented an attempt on the part of the Yel tsin government to encourage more rural people to claim their land shares from large farms and it was the ofﬁcial response to the sluggish take-up of this element of the 1991–3 reforms. In the earlier phase, rural people’s rights to withdraw land from their parent farm had been conditional upon its use to form a private peasant farm but now, with the new presidential decree, the use to which shares could be put was extended. The idea was that freeing up the restrictions on what people could do with their shares would facilitate the accumulation of land in the hands of an effective agrarian class (Serova, 2000). For the household sector, the important consequence of the decree was that it opened up the possibility that anyone who wanted to extend the land resource base of ‘personal subsidiary farming’ could use their land share to do this, without it affecting legal status. The new provision can been viewed as transgressing the traditional boundary between ‘personal subsidiary’ and other forms of private farming, and the change

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may well have been informed by the idea that the expansion of the personal sector might provide one route to the formation of private commercial farms. In reality, the change has remained ‘academic’; rural people wishing to expand household production prefer to rent land from local authorities rather than take on additional land in private ownership.

The fourth phase: 2003 to present In its fourth phase, land reform has returned to the question of the land market. A new law, ‘On Land Transactions’, which came into effect in 2003, attempted to roll out the right to buy and sell to all agricultural land. The law was deeply contested in the Duma and this is reﬂected in the conditional nature of the land market that has been introduced. Critics of the law draw attention to the numerous constraints on free purchase and sale; the involvement of local government in land transactions (its right, for example, of ﬁrst refusal in any transaction), the exclusion of foreigners from the right to buy agricultural land, and limitations on the amount of land that can be included in one transaction. The framing of the law, it is argued, presents much scope for bribery and corruption in the land market (Wegren, 2002: 659). A more optimistic view would be to see the law as paving the way for the emergence at some time in the future of a proper land market that has the potential to shake up property relations in the Russian countryside. A problem encountered in the years immediately after the law was announced has been the failure for ‘corresponding legislation’ to be enacted at the local level in the regions and republics. In most regions the land market remains slack and in many places large farms and local administrations combine forces to resist the land market. This is true even in oblasts like Saratov, Samara, and Kaliningrad and the republic of Tatarstan that prior to 2003 had pioneered the land market. It turns out that there is little appetite in rural Russia for any measure that would erode large farms (Ellman, 2003). In this respect the aims of local elites and the rank and ﬁle of the rural population are in tune with one another. There are, however, some straws in the wind, which do not necessarily auger well for the household sector. In Chapter 4 we will be showing how the introduction of a land market, albeit a sluggish one, is challenging the access that rural people have traditionally enjoyed to a wide range of rural resources they need for personal subsidiary production.

Theorizing Household Food Production If the household sector has remained peripheral to the core concerns of ofﬁcials in charge of Russian agriculture, the same is not true of academe. The proliferation of urban allotment holders and the expansion of the relative share of produce from people’s farms entering the urban food chain could not pass without comment by scholars debating the nature of the post-communist transformation.

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The initial ‘take’ on post-communist household production was to theorize it as an adaptive response to the collapse of communism and the economic shocks of the market transition. In naming their book Surviving Post-Socialism, Pine and Bridger (1998) encapsulated for a Western audience what for a time was the received wisdom about personal food production and other forms of small-scale household-based economic activity in the countries emerging from socialism (but see also Seeth et al., 1998; Varies, 2000). Framing the discussion in the more general exploration of post-communism’s winners and losers, the argument was that people cast onto the margins of society as a result of the job losses, cutbacks in social beneﬁts, wage arrears, and price hikes of the early 1990s had to produce their own food in order to survive. Personal food production was a form of selfhelp, or a survival strategy, engaged in by the new poor and it was a symptom of their economic distress. As applied to the period in the immediate aftermath of communism’s collapse when normal food supply chains were interrupted, this thesis had much to commend it. Empirical studies in the early 1990s in a variety of urban and rural locations throughout East-Central Europe and the former USSR seemed to conﬁrm the thesis that, even if not universally the case, economic distress did seem to be a factor in the explosion of personal food production associated with end of communism, and this argument continues to be made at the present time (Caskie, 2000; Fadeeva, 1997; Pallot and Moran, 2000; Rodionova, 1999; Round, 2005, 2006; Seeth et al., 1998). The Western understanding of household production as a defensive or survival strategy did not differ from the view of the sector developed by researchers in Russia’s leading agricultural research and policy institutions, such as VIAPI (the All-Russia Institute of Agricultural Problems and Information) and RASKhN (the Russian Academy of Agricultural Science) (see Nikonov, 1995, for a history of these institutions), although Western academics generally aligned themselves with the critics of neo-liberalism. Alternative theorizations of the economic changes taking place in Russia such as Hellman’s (1998) partial reform equilibrium trap and the ethnographic approaches of Burawoy and Verdery (1999) and Humphrey (2002), for example, challenged the assumption of an unproblematic, linear progression to a market economy in Russia and, implicitly, doubted that there would be a speedy delivery of Russia’s poor from the need to produce their own food. However, in the light of further empirical studies, the survival strategy or ‘defence-against-poverty’ view has, itself, sustained criticism. Simon Clarke (1999), for example, on the basis of surveys of a number of provincial capitals, showed that the use of allotments to grow food is an inferior survival strategy for urban dwellers; even in the restricted labour markets of Russia’s medium-sized towns there are always, Clarke argues, more rational alternatives to personal food production. Other studies, meanwhile, have shown that it is not invariably the very poor who engage in personal food production, but rather it is an activity associated with households higher on the socio-economic scale. These ﬁndings would suggest that the decision of households to grow their own food is not always forced upon them by necessity but may be the product of more multifaceted

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33

processes. For Adrian Smith (2000), author of a study in two Slovakian towns, these ‘other’ processes are more cultural than economic. When confronted by uncertainty, Smith’s suggestion is that populations in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union are predisposed to seek to minimize livelihood risk by growing their own food; the expansion of household production since communism’s collapse is not as a result of people making an economic calculation that this is the most rational thing to do but is a historically legitimized response to troubled times. Household production should be understood as a culturally and historically constituted phenomenon. Clarke’s and Smith’s work concerns urban food production. Their conclusions do not necessarily apply to rural districts, where there were fewer alternative employments to farming once the collective and state farms began shedding labour in the aftermath of 1991. Furthermore, all but a small minority of rural households were already engaged in personal subsidiary farming prior to 1991. For these reasons, it was obvious that household production would expand to ﬁll the livelihood gap left by the collapse of other employments, although by just how much might not have been predicted. Even more than among urban plot holders, rural household production is differentiated—both within villages by socio-economic status and, as the next chapter will show, geographically. While there are people in rural Russia for whom the raison d’être of producing their own food is, without question, to avoid starvation, there are also those, probably constituting the majority of able-bodied people of working age, for whom the motivation goes beyond survival in its ‘basic needs’ or physical sense. The question that has troubled theorists of post-communism is how these rural households in all their diversity can best be described; are they small farmers, smallholders, part-time or hobby farmers, family farmers, petty commodity producers, or peasants, and what is their relationship to capital? For an inﬂuential group of rural sociologists many of whom are associated with the Centre of Peasant Studies and Rural Reform in the Moscow Higher School of Sociology and Economics, the answer to the ﬁrst question is that household production should be understood as a form of peasant farming that can be analysed by reference to the classics of peasant studies. A. N. Chayanov’s ‘theory of the peasant economy’ developed at the beginning of the twentieth century and concepts such as ‘moral’, ‘shadow’, and ‘ex-polary’ economies, popular among theorists of developing societies from the second half of the twentieth century, such as Theodor Shanin (who heads up the Moscow Centre of Peasant Studies and Rural Reform) and James Scott, inform their approach. Accordingly, rural households, whether producing food exclusively for their own use or also for sale, are understood to be engaged in a particular sort of non-acquisitive production, the principal motivation for which is the reproduction of the household, where the household is the principal unit of production and consumption. This is the standard deﬁnition of peasantry (Shanin, 1990: 23–4). Much work has been undertaken in rural Russia since 1991 investigating rural social institutions—in particular the household and village community—and

34

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excavating the moral economy of the contemporary Russian village. The results can be read in the Moscow Centre’s annual journal, Peasant Studies: Theory, History, Today (Krest yanovedenie: teoriya, istoriya, sovremmennost ) and in the publications of other sociologists and anthropologists, such as V. G. Vinogradskii (1999, 2000), working in the same vein. These studies have been directed towards analysing the processes reshaping rural society—budget studies have (re)posed the early twentieth-century question of whether market penetration is differentiating rural households into rich and poor (proto-proletarian and proto-capitalist) or whether there are countervailing tendencies in operation consolidating the peasantry—and identifying vestiges of the pre-revolutionary peasant commune (obshchina), including its institutions such as the village assembly (skhod), and traditional practices, such as systems of mutual assistance (pomoch ). Post-communism, it is argued, created conditions for the (re-)emergence of the peasantry as a subordinate, or subaltern, class in Russia which, in some respects, is analogous to third-world peasantries (see Krest yanovedenie,1996, 1997, 1999– 2003). The (re)peasantization of Russian society is an outward expression of the social marginalization that has been brought about by the country’s rush to engage with global capitalism. These ideas have resonated with Western scholars. Hann’s (2002) recent edited volume on post-socialist rural society parallels the Russian-based work on peasantry. In that volume Humphrey (p. 272) argues that current rural society contains many hangovers from the pre-1917 rural society, while Miller and Heady (2003: 276) in a three-village study ﬁnd many traditional features of Russian peasant society still there today, and argue for more research to take place into equalization processes in rural Russia. In an interesting aside to these propositions, the neo-Marxist Gavin Kitchen (1998) draws attention also to the potential political dimension of this process, representing the expansion of personal subsidiary farming post-1991 in Russia as the ‘revenge’ of the peasantry for the dispossession it suffered during collectivization. In contrast, O’Brien and Patsiorkovsky (2006: 190), resurrecting the challenge of the 1960s and 1970s debates about peasantry, insist that household producers be understood as ‘rational economic actors’ and a new ‘petit bourgeoisie’. Household food production, or using the ofﬁcial nomenclature ‘people’s farming’, is not a phenomenon that can easily be captured by universalizing theorization, although the various explanations for its expansion post-1991 all contain valuable insights for the discussions that follow. Eclecticism, as ever, has much to commend it. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider whether the attempt to ﬁnd a category that simultaneously explains Ana Petrovna, Natasha, Misha, and the rest is, in fact, well founded. The question, ‘what’s in a name?’ posed in the previous chapter is relevant because it is a reminder that the identiﬁcation of household producers in Russia takes place bureaucratically, by reference to the historical origin and legal status of land holdings. The category, ‘people’s farms’, separates and combines small-scale food producers in Russia without reference to their socio-economic character or to what they produce, how they produce it, and what they then do with it. Despite the implied critique of the ofﬁcial viewpoint

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35

they contain, existing theories about the post-communist expansion in household production are mostly content to work within ofﬁcial categories, rather than to subject them to interrogation. The understanding of ‘rural society’ as ‘peasant society’ gives legitimacy to this essentialization and perpetuates the view that household food production needs to be considered separately, using different analytical techniques and referring to different concepts, from ‘normal’ agriculture. Thus, although the Moscow school of ‘peasant studies’ under Theodor Shanin’s direction is careful not to subscribe to the ofﬁcial boundaries, the deﬁnitions and analyses it provides of peasantry have been taken up by people advising on the agrarian policy (see e.g. Agrarnaya reforma v Rossii, 2000; Shmelev, 2002: 235–8; Silaeva, 2000: 138; Ovchintseva, 2000: 138). Today’s scholars may also seek their authority from Lenin. A recent edited volume on agrarian reform by the inﬂuential All-Russian Institute of Agrarian Problems and Information uses the insistence of both Marx and Lenin, that small farming must give way to large, to argue against the tendency on the part of some economists to collapse all small farms into a single category of ‘family farm’ or semeinoe khozyaistvo (Agrarnaya reforma v Rossii, 2000: 212–13). Similarly, Stephen Wegren (2004: 238), one of the principal Western scholars of Russian agrarian reform, argues that it is a mistake to ‘lump together’ personal subsidiary and other forms of private farming since the former are ‘quite different’ from the latter by virtue of the owners’ non-commercial motivations, the small size of their plots, and the low degree of mechanization and commercialization. A striking feature of food production by rural households revealed in existing empirical studies is its temporal and geographical situatedness. In the immediate aftermath of communism’s collapse it was, indeed, possible to read the proliferation of plots around cities and towns as evidence of the population’s response to threatened hunger as a result of the loss of exchange entitlements, but the same quite obviously does not apply today when urban dwellers’ garden and orchard plots are used more for recreation than for staving off hunger. On the other hand, as John Round (2006) has shown in a study of pensioner plot holders in Magadan, who can be counted the most marginal social group in the most marginal of geographical regions of Russia, personal food production still plays an important role in survival. He insists that the ‘survival strategy’ model is relevant in this case. Meanwhile, in rural Russia the use of the household plot to grow food remains, as it always was, integral to the way of life of practically all households regardless of socio-economic status, from the top managers of large farms to pensioners in receipt of the minimum state pension. The change since 1991 in the volume and destination of what is produced on plots has created a new dynamic but how precisely this is reshaping rural society is time- and place-speciﬁc. Among geographers, household production has been located in the ‘decommoditized spaces of post-socialism’ or the ‘dead space’ beyond the islands of integration with the global economic system represented by a small number of large cities (Dienes, 2002). Inevitably, such an approach to Russia’s space economy does not sit easily with the commercialization that is developing in

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some places in the household sector. In reality, while there are, of course, ‘decommoditized spaces’ in rural Russia, there are also plenty of ‘commoditized spaces’ as well, which, moreover, are not invariably to be found in the environs of cities as might be expected. There are sharp differences in the degree of market engagement among rural food producers that map onto geographical differences in patterns of specialization and diversiﬁcation in the agrarian and household economy at all spatial scales. Previous investigations of rural Russia have not, as a general rule, engaged with the uneven geography of household production, preferring instead to generalize from individual case studies or to make individual village comparisons across large geographic areas (O’Brien, Patsiorkovski, and Dersham, 2000 and O’Brien and Patsiorkovski, 2006). Alexander Nikulin (2001), the leading researcher of Shanin’s team, has attempted a classiﬁcation of household production that describes a variety of different roles for household production in Russia’s agrarian economy. His classiﬁcation identiﬁes a number of different trajectories for household production and includes ‘commercialization’ where the tendency is for ever greater engagement with the market, ‘glubinization’ (from the Russian word glubinka for an out-of-the-way place) where the tendency is towards the consolidation of the natural economy, ‘minifundization’, where household producers are dependent upon a relationship with large farms, and so on. Even if these tendencies remain, for the time being, just that—tendencies—and their ﬁnal outcome uncertain, the identiﬁcation of these processes nevertheless raises the question of whether Russia already today has not one but several fundamental types of people’s farms, some of which, moreover, may have less in common with each other than with other agricultural producers in rural Russia. Moreover, since the conditions giving rise to different tendencies are very often concentrated in space, the question also arises of whether the transformation of household production is an inherently geographical process. The central argument of this book is that it is.

Appendix The following are two extracts taken from the Lukhovitsy vesti, the weekly Lukhovitsy district newspaper. The ﬁrst extract was on the front page, and describes the state of the sowing campaign in the agricultural enterprises in the district. It is reminiscent of similar reports during the Soviet period when they were used to stimulate ‘socialist competition’ and to ‘name and shame’ farms that were falling behind. Neither private peasant farmers nor plot holders are included in the report. The second extract, which is about the household sector, is from the back page of the same edition. Its treatment of the household sector is typical, reproducing the idea that it is mainly pensioners who are involved in this form of production and that its purpose is recreational; this despite the fact that, as Chapter 3 will show, Lukhovitsy district has among the most commercialized household producers in the country who, moreover, are drawn from all age groups.

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Extract 1: ‘Sowing Diary’ Yesterday morning spring sowings had been completed on 10,601 hectares of the district’s total 15,959 hectares, 60 per cent of the target. The abundant rainfall has held up the pace of work. But those enterprises that ﬁnished sowings earlier were pleased about the rain because this is needed for normal growth. SPKh ‘Vrachevo-Gorki’ is notable for its high tempo of work, fulﬁlling its spring sowing target by 105 per cent. Also working well is ‘Menta’ (97%), ‘Grigor evskoe’ (81%). Most other agricultural enterprises are satisfactory but ‘Dedinova’, ‘Lyubichy’, and ‘Red October’ are behind plan. But these are located on the alluvial lowlands which always have waterlogged soils. The area of spring cereals sown exceeds the amount harvested [the previous year]—7,329 compared with 6,528. This is due to the efforts of ‘Vrachevo-Gorki’, ‘Lukhovitskii’, ‘Osetr’, ‘Grigor evskoe’, ‘Astapova’, and ‘Menta’. The plan has been fulﬁlled 111 per cent. The replanting of winter cereals has been completed by the workers of ‘Vrachevo-Gorki’, ‘Grigor evskoe’, ‘Astapova’, ‘Nosovets’ but on ‘Oreshkovo’ and ‘Polyanka’ they haven’t even begun this work. Maize has been sown on 1,148 hectares as against the plan of 4,970. SPKh ‘Lenin’, ‘VrachevoGorki’, ‘Priokskii’, ‘Lukhovitskii’ are doing well. But not one hectare had been sown by the morning of the 16 May in SPKh ‘im Il’icha’, ‘Oreshkovo’, ‘Polyanka’, ‘Grigor evskoe’, ‘Astapovo’, ‘Lyubichi’, ‘Menta’, ‘Bor’. Potatoes have been sown on 236 hectares out of 725 planned. ‘Vrachevo-Gorki’ is the one farm to complete planting. Others have not begun. The following have not begun sowing annual grasses: ‘Oreshkovo’, ‘Polyanka’. In all only half of the planned areas has been planted: this is not enough. Vegetables have been planted on 536 hectares; that is, 67 per cent of the plan. Carrots have been planted out, and beetroots planted on 67 hectares of 157. Cabbages have been sown on all farms except ‘Polyanka’, ‘Lyubichi’, and ‘Bora’ even though the land has been prepared for them. Leading the ﬁeld with vegetables are SPKh ‘Priokskii’ (86%) and also PNO ‘Poima’ and SPkh ‘Lenin’. These have all fulﬁlled 71 per cent of their plan.’ Lukhovitskie Vesti, 58 (17 May 2001), front page

Extract 2: ‘Advice to vegetable growers: think about your health’ Working vegetable plots and gardens demands a lot of energy and time and many people forget about their health. Wherever you look, you will ﬁnd plots being worked almost exclusively by pensioners. Unfortunately, we often forget about our age and our physical capabilities. On the eve of the allotment season, the ﬁrst thing you should do is check up on your health. Make an appointment with the doctor and update your medicines. Work on the allotment can injure your hands and feet, and scratches from sweetbriar (eglantine), and roses can draw blood. Therefore, it is important always to have some iodine and plasters at hand. Old people who have bad hearts should have with them ‘Validol’ or ‘Korvalol’ . . . Without doubt you need to have some fresh water on your plot, soap and a towel. It goes without saying that you should wash your hands after work and before eating. Some people forget this. It’s especially important to be careful when handling the chemicals you use to rid your crops of pests and diseases. The most effective way of combating, for example, Colorado beetle is, in fact, to sweep them into a bucket with a stick (there are practically no chemical preparations that work against them). You can always ﬁnd alternatives to chemicals and you must always consider their impact on your health. Before you take fresh manure onto the ﬁelds disinfect it and leave it to dry for the summer. If you don’t, it is bad

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both for the quality of the vegetable harvest and for your health. And how do we work on our plots? We bend over so our heads are down all the time. As a result eyes dim, the pulse increases, legs ache and blood pressure rises . . . monotonous labour is not only tiring but it is also very dangerous for our grannies and grandpas. In the past at factories we used to do exercises before beginning work. We should do gymnastics before working on our plots too . . . Tell yourselves that the plot is not just work—it is an act of creation. A good harvest needs intelligence, knowledge, and good health. The conclusion is simple—follow a regime of work, relaxation, and nourishment. Avoid physical and socio-psychological stress. Good health should be the aim. Ibid., back page

3 The Geographical Diversity of Rural Household Production In the ﬁrst chapter we introduced the reader to a variety of different types of household agricultural producers and we also suggested that the character of production is shaped by speciﬁc sets of circumstances that determine what they produce, how they produce it, and how they dispose of the product. In the next four chapters we explore these ‘speciﬁc circumstances’ and their interaction to produce distinctive geographies of household production. We begin, in this chapter, with the geographer’s traditional explanatory variables—physical environment, distance from the market, and population resources (see also Nefedova and Pallot, 2002; Pallot and Nefedova, 2003a).

Differentiation in Household Production at the National Level Regional patterns in the relative and absolute share of the household sector in agricultural output The impressive contribution that individual rural households make to domestic food production in the Russian Federation does not fall evenly between regions; were all households to produce the same range and volume of produce, variations in the size and composition of the rural population, the level of urbanization, and the volume of output from other farms would still create a geographical pattern. The importance of this background context is obvious when comparing Figs. 3.1 and 3.2, which are two different ways of representing the regional contribution of the household sector to the Russian domestic food economy. The ﬁrst ﬁgure shows household food production as a percentage share of the value of agricultural output by regions and the second, the per capita output in tons. In the ﬁrst map, regions with low population densities and/or with a struggling large farm sector, such as in regions in north and east Siberia and the VolgaUrals region, stand out for the size (over 60%) of the contribution the household sector makes. In the middle rank are regions where the household sector might have been expected to make a large contribution to total production because of a

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% share of total output < 40

61−75

40−50

76−91

51−60

Fig. 3.1. Output from the household sector as a percentage share of total agricultural output by region, 2003. Source: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost . . . , 2003: 14; Sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004: 37.

Tons per capita < 10

21−8

10−15 16−20

Fig. 3.2. Gross output (in tons) per capita from the household sector by region, 2003. Source: Chislo i sostav domokhozyaistv, 2004: 6–19; Osnovnye pokazateli . . . 2004.

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

41

favourable physical environment and dynamically growing population, but whose performance is muted because of the productivity of the large farm sector. These include Russia’s main cereal-producing regions in the European south. Finally, a below average contribution (dropping to under 40%) is made in the cluster of oblasts in the ‘old-settled’ European Centre where both large and small farming are struggling to overcome the effects of decades of depopulation and underinvestment in rural infrastructure. The second map, showing gross output per head, reﬁnes and modiﬁes this picture. In this map, Moscow stands out from other oblasts for its low output per head. In oblasts such as Tula and Bryansk to the south-west and in the others encircling the capital region, rural households’ output is between 15 and 28 tons of produce per capita annually on their plots (largely, as we will see below, potatoes destined for urban markets). Moscow oblast’s per capita output is, low despite the large rural population and a labour potential for agriculture unequalled elsewhere in Russia bar in the south. The explanation is that much of this labour is engaged in non-agricultural employments. A second region with a low per capita output is the north and consists of those oblasts in European Russia, the Urals, and Siberia, which have a short growing season, low population densities, and a lack of markets to stimulate production. Reliance on domestically produced food is universal in rural communities in the north, but the opportunities for producing surpluses are strictly limited. The extreme south is a third region with a low average gross output per head. In this case, the reasons for the muted performance of the household sector are varied and include a bottom-heavy population pyramid, limited access to land and water resources, and the diversion of the rural population into other forms of household production, including, for example, ﬁshing.

Regional variation in household livestock husbandry Households do not everywhere produce the same range of crops and livestock; there is specialization in household production at the national, regional, and local levels. In terms of product mix, livestock husbandry is the main differentiating factor in the household sector at all spatial scales. Ofﬁcial Ministry of Agriculture statistics show that the share of household large livestock (cows and beef cattle) in the national herd grew after 1991 (from 17% of the total at the end of the Soviet period to 36% in 2000) and that the share of the total pig population also grew (from 18 to 43%). This apparent expansion in livestock holdings was, in fact, largely the result of the catastrophic collapse of livestock husbandry in the large farm sector, as Fig. 3.3 shows. The fact that there are twenty-four cattle and twenty pigs per 100 rural inhabitants against an average family size of 2.8 underlines the fact that by no means every rural household in Russia keeps livestock. Since the collapse of communism the map of household livestock husbandry has been ﬂuid; regions that have the greatest per capita number of cattle, for example, are not necessarily those that experienced the greatest post-communist increases.

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Geographical Diversity, Rural Production 70

Millions of head

60 50 Agricultural enterprises

40 30

Households

20 10 0

1940

1960

1970

1980

1990

1995

2000

2004

Fig. 3.3. Changes in the number of large livestock in the household and large farm sectors, 1940–2004. Source: Narodnoe khozyaistvo . . . , 1987: 157, 163, 179; Osnovnye pokazateli sel skogo khozyaistva v Rossii, 2004: 17; Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, 1996: 580.

Table 3.1 gives the trends for Russia’s macroeconomic regions: livestock numbers increased relative to large farms everywhere but the number per capita declined in many places, including in the traditional cattle rearing regions of the Southern Urals and the Middle Volga. The composition of livestock kept by households in different regions has also changed. Thus, in the traditional cattle-rearing oblasts in Table 3.1. Relative and absolute numbers of livestock owned by rural households, 1991– 2003 .. .. .. Livestock, Livestock per 100 .. .. Average .. .. .. .. % of total herd rural inhabitants .. .. household .. . . .. .. . .. .. Cattle Pigs Cattle Pigs size .. Macroeconomic .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . .. 1991 .. 2003 . 1991 .. 2003 .. 1991 .. 2003 . 1991 .. 2003 ... region 2004 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . .. . . .. 10 ... 24 ... 28 ... 22 ... 12 ... 10 ... 16 ... 5 ... North 2.6 . . . . . . . . .. 10 .. 22 .. 14 .. 25 .. 16 .. 11 .. 15 .. 7 ... North West 2.5 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Centre 2.5 .. 9 .. 20 .. 24 .. 41 .. 17 .. 13 .. 20 .. 13 .. .. 15 .. 30 .. 16 .. 38 .. 27 .. 25 .. 14 .. 18 .. Volga-Vyatka 2.7 . . . . . . . . . Central Black Earth ... 12 ... 31 ... 11 ... 42 ... 23 ... 22 ... 17 ... 28 ... 2.6 .. 18 .. 41 .. 10 .. 44 .. 35 .. 36 .. 13 .. 25 .. Volga 2.8 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 19 .. 54 .. 15 .. 38 .. 20 .. 24 .. 14 .. 16 .. North Caucasus 3.5 . . . . . . . .. . Ural 2.9 .. 22 ... 46 ... 15 ... 41 ... 41 ... 42 ... 13 ... 18 ... .. 20 .. 40 .. 26 .. 54 .. 38 .. 35 .. 23 .. 35 .. West Siberia 2.8 . . . . . . . .. . East Siberia 3.0 .. 28 ... 61 ... 41 ... 68 ... 50 ... 51 ... 37 ... 28 ... .. 20 .. 64 .. 33 .. 53 .. 24 .. 25 .. 27 .. 9 .. Far East 3.0 . . . . . . . . .. .. 17 ... 36 ... 20 ... 25 ... 32 ... 23 ... 30 ... 7 ... Kaliningrad 3.2 .. 17 .. 41 .. 18 .. 44 .. 29 .. 28 .. 18 .. 20 .. Russia total 2.9 . . . . . . . . . Sources: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost khozyaistva naseleniya v Rossii 1999: 108–16; Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost khozyaistva naseleniya v Rossii, 2003: 112–14; Chislo i sostav domokhozyaistv, 2004: 6–19.

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

43

Number of livestock per 100 rural inhabitants < 10

31−40

10−20

41−50

21−30

51−105

Fig. 3.4. Large livestock in the ownership of rural households in 2003 (no. per 100 rural inhabitants). Source: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost khozyaistva naseleniya v Rossii, 2003: 112–14.

the dry steppe of the Middle Volga and Southern Urals, the number of beef cattle has remained constant or declined somewhat, but there has been an expansion of pig rearing. In contrast, macro regions where pig rearing used to be well developed in the household sector—in the North, North West, and Far East—have abandoned this activity because of the decline of meat and dairy production in the large farms that used to be a source of piglets and feed grains. The ﬁgure of thirty-six head per 100 population, which is the number at which every household would have a cow or pig, is a useful threshold to use to distinguish places in which livestock husbandry is an integral part of household production and those where it is likely to be of secondary importance. Beginning ﬁrst with cows and beef cattle, between one-ﬁfth and one-sixth of all rural administrative districts in the Russian Federation have numbers exceeding the threshold. As Fig. 3.4 shows, these districts are found in the south and east of Russia. Together they have 40 per cent of all cattle in household ownership but just 18 per cent of the rural population. National republics and rural districts with a predominantly ethnic minority population tend to be heavily represented among the places with high livestock holdings, as are those in which cereal monoculture has taken over from mixed farming. In Dagestan in the North Caucasus, for example, there are some rural districts where livestock holdings in the household sector exceed by two to three times the threshold ﬁgure.

44

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

As a rule, wherever livestock husbandry remains important in the large farm economy, the household sector struggles to develop this branch of production. This includes central regions of European Russia where proximity to large urban markets might have been expected to stimulate dairy and meat production in the household sector. Climatic constraints limit numbers elsewhere; in the north where there are abundant natural pastures, the long overwintering period puts a cap on the number of cattle households can keep. The pattern with respect to pigs differs in some respects from cattle. Compared with the ownership of large livestock, roughly half as many rural districts specialize in pig rearing in the household sector. Thirty-seven per cent of all pigs belonging to rural households are concentrated in just 10 per cent of all rural administrative districts. Outside Siberia, the central black earth region and the Middle Volga have the greatest concentration of pigs. As with cattle farming, Moscow and Leningrad oblasts, together with a majority of northern rural districts, are underrepresented in pig rearing. Summarizing the geographical pattern of livestock husbandry, there is a clear gradient from north to south and west to east in both the relative and absolute number of livestock held by rural households. To a large extent this distribution tracks the transition in the large farm sector from mixed, intensive farming in the non-black earth oblasts to cereal monoculture in the steppe and dry steppe. Within the cereal belt, livestock husbandry in the household sector tends to be concentrated in the peripheries, in more marginal environments (either mountain or semi-arid), and in the ‘ethnic’ republics and rural districts elsewhere with large concentrations of non-Russian ethnic minorities.

Regional variation in household arable husbandry Whereas the effect of the environment is mediated by other factors in household livestock husbandry, when it comes to growing its effect is more direct. Russia is a northern country, the bulk of its landmass lying in regions of sparse population and with unfavourable agri-climatic resources. Arable cultivation is more sensitive to the heat–moisture balance (that is the ratio of the daily sum of temperatures above 10◦ C to the evapo-transpiration rate) with the result that there are limits to what can be grown where. According to Russian classiﬁcatory systems, only one-third of the entire territory of European Russia has favourable temperature conditions for arable farming: that is, with a temperature index of above 22◦ C (Kashtanov 1983). Fifty-seven per cent of the rural population lives in such regions (Nefedova 2003a: 266). At the other extreme, 35 per cent of Russia’s territory, in which 6 per cent of the rural population lives, has a temperature index of less than 12◦ C, which means that crops can be grown only under glass. Thus, one-third of Russia’s rural population lives in semi-marginal environments for agriculture, with temperature indices of between 16 and 22◦ C, where only hardy crops can be grown and even these are vulnerable to late and early frosts. When

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

45

precipitation is added to the equation, the picture alters for the worse. A favourable heat–moisture balance where the ratio of rainfall to evaporation is about equal exists in only 7 per cent of Russia’s territory. However, much of this territory falls in regions where soils are acidic and bogs abundant. To the north of this region, precipitation is adequate but temperatures are too low for effective agriculture while to the south, annual precipitation levels decline. One-quarter of Russia’s territory falls into regions affected by some degree of drought every second or third year and a further 11 per cent (in which also 11% of the rural population lives) experience extreme aridity. These familiar constraints under which Russian agriculture labours challenge Russia’s small producers who do not generally have access to modern technologies to moderate climatic extremes. The potato, the crop par excellence of Russian household production, does not do well everywhere. In the north growth is stunted and the crop can be caught by late frosts, while in the semi-arid south and east beyond the river Volga, conditions are too dry for potatoes to do well. Nevertheless, with some notable exceptions among national minority populations, rural people try to grow potatoes whatever the climate, even if this means taking the somewhat extravagant step of using irrigation. The principal potato-producing regions where climate and soil combine to create favourable conditions for cultivating tubers are conﬁned to the centre and north-west of European Russia. Figure 3.5 shows how the per capita production of potatoes changed in the ﬁrst decade after the end of communist rule. Regions with the highest values (over 1,000 kg. per capita) of output, extending in a broad but discontinuous belt from Russia’s western borderland into the southern regions of Siberia and the Far East, consolidated their position. The distribution of other vegetables and fruit produced in the household sector is also sensitive to the heat–moisture balance. The cultivation of Mediterranean fruits and vegetables—aubergines, peppers, courgettes, vines, and melons—is concentrated in the south and south-east of European Russia. Onions, carrots and other root crops, cabbages, tomatoes, and cucumbers are grown universally, albeit under polythene or irrigated in some places.

Geographical patterns of surplus production in the household sector It is obvious that the environment confers a comparative advantage on some regions in the production of particular crops and livestock products. Surplus produce enters local, regional, and national exchange networks. In Stavropol krai, for example, the exchange of products takes place between the foothills and plains; villages in Predgornyi rural administration in Essentuki district specialize in potatoes (because of the moist microclimate at high elevation here tubers can reach several kilograms each) that are bartered for melons, aubergines, and onions from the plains below. At a higher spatial scale, citrus fruits, Mediterranean vegetables, and melons from the south supply markets in central and northern

46

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

1990

Kg per capita < 10

31−40

10−20

41−50

21−30

1998

Kg per capita < 250

751−1000

250−500

1001−1500

501−750

1501−2400

Fig. 3.5. Production of potatoes by rural households (in kilograms per capita), 1990 and 1998. Source: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost . . . , 2003: 87–132.

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

47

Russia, but by far the greatest quantity of surpluses from the household sector is disposed of through unofﬁcial channels (to relatives and in gift exchange) or enters regional markets. Ministry of Agriculture statistics do not record the volume of surpluses produced in the household sector but we have been able to calculate these by comparing production and consumption data for rural districts. We did this by averaging out production data for each district (excluding from large farms and private peasant farms) across the whole resident rural population regardless of age and of employment sector. These were adjusted to take account of household farm needs, such as fodder for livestock and seed, by deducting 50 per cent of the volume of potatoes, 30 per cent of vegetables and 25 per cent of milk produced (Individual nyi sektor . . . 1999: 16). The comparison of these production data with average demand data for the whole regional (oblast, republic, and krai) population, including its towns, gives a ﬁgure that is the number of ‘additional people’ one rural inhabitant is able to support from the household sector after his or her own needs have been satisﬁed. This is not, of course, a measure of produce marketed (for which see Chapter 8) since some is diverted to informal exchange and giftgiving networks, but it is a good indication of the volume of rural to urban ﬂow. In the tables and ﬁgures, we show the volume of surplus produced for four major household sector products; potatoes, vegetables, milk, and meat, and compare these regionally. As Table 3.2 shows, per capita surpluses were relatively modest in 1990. The exception was potatoes, which were grown in sufﬁcient quantities to support two to three people in addition to the resident population. During the course of the following decade there was a small increase in the volume of potatoes produced relative to the size of the rural population in most regions of the Russian Federation with the Centre, the North-West and the North macroeconomic regions conﬁrming their position as the principal producers. By the end of the 1990s one rural inhabitant in the Centre was growing sufﬁcient potatoes to support 5.4 people. Given an average household size of 2.5 in this region, the ﬁgures indicate that every rural household was capable of supporting eleven additional people! Unlike potatoes, vegetables were grown primarily for personal consumption during the Soviet period and rural inhabitants did not always have sufﬁcient for their own needs. By the end of the 1990s this situation had changed and most regions were producing surpluses, with the Centre, the North West, and North in European Russia drawing ahead of the others (Fig. 3.6). Since the central and northern macroeconomic regions have experienced high levels of rural depopulation since the USSR’s collapse much of this increment may well be due to urban inhabitants helping elderly relatives to grow food. In contrast to potatoes and vegetables, the greatest increase in per capita meat and milk production in the 1990s was in the south and east of the Russian Federation and was associated with the acquisition of additional livestock by rural people once former restrictions on private livestock were lifted (Fig. 3.7). Such expansion was only possible because of the continued existence here of large cereal farms prepared to supply rural

48

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

Table 3.2. The number of additional people in each macroeconomic region that one rural inhabitant of the same region is able to support with a variety of household sector products .. . .. .. Potatoes Meat Milk .. .. .. Vegetables ... .. . .. .. .. .. .. . Regions .. 1990 .. 1998 .. 1990 .. 1998 .. 1990 .. 1998 ... 1990 ... 1998 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . North .. 2.0 ... 3.5 ... 0.2 ... 1.6 ... 0.6 ... 0.8 ... 0.4 ... 1.1 .. 2.7 .. 4.5 .. 0.7 .. 2.6 .. 0.6 .. 0.9 .. 0.6 .. 1.5 North-West .. . . . . . . . Centre .. 3.3 ... 5.4 ... 0.7 ... 2.6 ... 0.7 ... 1.1 ... 0.6 ... 1.3 . . . . . . . .. 2.3 .. 3.9 .. 0.7 .. 2.5 .. 1.0 .. 1.8 .. 0.9 ... 1.6 Volga-Vyatka Central Black Earth ... 2.7 ... 3.8 ... 0.9 ... 1.8 ... 0.9 ... 1.8 ... 0.7 ... 1.3 .. . . . . . . . Volga .. 2.5 ... 2.5 ... 0.6 ... 1.8 ... 0.9 ... 1.8 ... 0.9 ... 1.6 .. 1.1 .. 1.6 .. 0.5 .. 0.9 .. 0.9 .. 1.3 .. 0.5 .. 1.0 North Caucasus .. . . . . . . . Ural .. 2.8 ... 2.8 ... 0.6 ... 2.0 ... 1.0 ... 1.6 ... 0.9 ... 1.6 . . . . . . . West Siberia .. 3.3 .. 2.5 .. 0.7 .. 1.6 .. 0.9 .. 1.6 .. 0.8 ... 1.5 .. 2.4 .. 2.8 .. 0.5 .. 1.9 .. 0.8 .. 1.5 .. 0.7 .. 1.7 East Siberia . .. . . . . . . .. 1.8 ... 2.8 ... 0.5 ... 1.9 ... 0.7 ... 0.6 ... 0.4 ... 1.3 Far East .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. Kaliningrad .. 2.2 .. 3.1 .. 1.3 .. 1.8 .. 1.0 . 1.1 .. 1.3 ... 1.8 .. 2.5 .. 3.1 .. 0.6 .. 1.8 .. 0.8 .. 1.4 .. 0.8 .. 1.4 Russia total Sources: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost khozyaistva naseleniya v Rossii 1999: 87– 132; Sel skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii 2000: 396–405.

households with feed grains. The greatest surpluses of meat produced on rural people’s farms were concentrated in the Volga, Volga-Vyatka, and Central Black Earth macroeconomic regions and of milk, Kaliningrad and East Siberia. The tables and maps conﬁrm that household production has a deﬁnite geography, no less varied than large farming. Like large-scale agriculture, there are north–south and west–east axes associated with differences in the environmental resources available for agriculture. This regional differentiation in household production is not a new phenomenon but it has been accentuated in the post-Soviet period in response to changes in the economic environment and in the state of the large farm sector. The household sector has not stood still over the past ten to ﬁfteen years but has adapted to the challenges and opportunities of the ‘transition’. The growth in the surpluses produced in the decade 1990–2000 is striking and suggestive of a commercial turn in people’s farming that is contributing to the deepening regional differences in the sector.

Differentiation in Household Production at the Regional Level At the national level environment is clearly an important inﬂuence determining which branches households are able to develop. At the level of individual regions, it is also important. Sometimes this is because of an oblast’s large north/south or east/west spread. Stavropol krai, for example, stands astride three ‘natural zones’: steppe, semi-desert, and mountain, whereas Moscow oblast belongs exclusively to the mixed forest zone. It can also reﬂect the existence of ‘azonal’ soil and climate complexes—Perm oblast, otherwise belonging to the zone of continuous

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

49

1990

Number of people < 0.5

1.6−2

0.5−1 1.1−1.5

1998

Number of people < 0.5

1.6−2

0.5−1

2.1−3

1.1−1.5

3.1−4.5

Fig. 3.6. The number of additional people a single rural inhabitant could supply with vegetables from the household sector (minus 30% diverted to livestock feed), in 1990 and 1998. Source: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost . . . , 2003: 87–132; Sel sko khozyaistvo . . . , 2000: 369–405.

50

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

1990

Number of people < 0.5

1.6−2

0.5−1 1.1−1.5

1998

Number of people < 0.5

1.6−2

0.5−1

2.1−3.5

1.1−1.5

Fig. 3.7. The number of additional people a single rural inhabitant could supply with milk from the household sector (minus 25% diverted to feed livestock), 1990 and 1998. Source: As for Fig. 3.6.

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

51

coniferous forest, has an area of ‘steppe’ south of the city. These regional level variations in environmental conditions are usually less important than other factors, which can be illustrated with our own survey data. In Table 3.3 we give household livestock holdings in a selection of rural districts occupying different ‘natural zones’. In broad outline, the data are consistent with inter-regional patterns described in the section above with the number of livestock per head rising with the transition from forested regions in the north of European Russia to steppe and semi-arid regions in the south—but there are also exceptions that can only be explained by reference to regional level factors. Thus, the large number of households without livestock in Lukhovitsy and Perm rural districts is associated with their suburban locations but the similarly low number of livestock holding households in Valdai district, Novogorod oblast, is associated with population decline and a lack of markets. Barda district is different again. This is an ethnic Bashkir enclave that has a long tradition of cattle rearing to supply the Perm city market. In the dry steppe, the explanation for the low incidence of livestock ownership in Levokumskoe rural district compared with the two rural districts in left-bank Saratov oblast in similar arid environments lies in the different post-Soviet histories of the large farm sector. In the former, cereals are still produced by agricultural enterprises providing inputs into the household sector, but in the latter such farms have all but disappeared. Later chapters will explore how the relationship with large enterprises and ethnicity impacts upon household production. Below we continue the exploration of the inﬂuence of ‘classic’ geographical factors upon regional patterns of household production.

Population and labour resources for household production Between 1959 and 1990 the population of rural Russia declined by 30 per cent. The most intense population loss was in the non-black earth zone, especially in the regions north and north-west of Moscow where thirteen districts lost more than half their population over the period. By contrast, population grew in the south and south-east of European Russia as a result of high rates of both natural increase and in-migration. Population growth rates over the same period varied in oblasts between districts located within the sphere of inﬂuence of the large cities, where population growth was dynamic, and the peripheries where growth rates were low. By the end of the Soviet period peripheral districts of non-black earth oblasts had up to three times fewer rural inhabitants than rural districts located next to regional capitals. In the south of European Russia, the gradient was less steep but still population densities close to cities were on average twice those at the peripheries. These differences have been carried over and intensiﬁed in the past ﬁfteen years. Forty-two per cent of the territory of the non-black earth region has population densities under 5 per sq. km (in 1959 the ﬁgure was 17%). (Nefedova, Polyan, and Treivish 2001: 240–72).

Table 3.3. Livestock in rural household ownership in different agri-environmental zones of European Russia .. Percentage distribution of households with different numbers of livestock .. .. .. . .. Large livestock Pigs Fowls .. .. Sheep and goats ... .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rural district .. Oblast ... 0 .. 1 .. 2–5 .. >5 .. 0 .. 1–5 .. >5 .. 0 .. 1–5 .. >5 .. 0 ... 1–50 ... >50 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . .. .. . . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Coniferous forest .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. . . . .. PK .. 19 .. 59 .. 22 .. 0 . 75 .. 22 .. 3 . 42 .. 33 .. 25 . 69 .. 31 ... Kosa 0 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . .. Gornozavod 0 .. PK .. 26 .. 58 .. 16 .. 0 .. 95 .. 5 .. 0 .. 74 .. 26 ... 0 .. 52 ... 48 ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Mixed forest .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . .. 36 .. 64 .. .. MO .. 68 ... 19 ... 13 ... 0 .. 96 ... 4 ... 0 .. 81 ... 15 ... Lukhovitsy 4 0 . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. PK .. 95 .. 5 .. 0 .. 0 .. 80 .. 20 .. 0 .. 90 .. 10 .. Perm 0 ... 75 ... 25 ... 0 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . Barda 0 .. PK .. 18 .. 63 .. 15 .. 0 .. 88 .. 12 .. 0 .. 86 .. 13 .. 1 .. 46 ... 54 ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. NO .. 71 .. 23 .. 6 .. 0 .. 65 .. 35 . 0 .. 82 .. 18 .. Valdai 0 ... 0 .. 100 .. 0 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Forest steppe .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. SO .. 9 .. 27 .. 59 .. 2 .. 32 .. 57 .. 11 .. 82 .. 11 .. B. Karabulak 7 ... 100 .. 0 .. 0 .. .. .. . .. . . . . . . . . . Lysye Gory 0 .. SO ... 3 ... 28 ... 66 ... 3 .. 38 ... 52 .. 10 .. 76 ... 24 ... 0 .. 17 ... 83 ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rovnoe 1 .. SO .. 27 .. 34 .. 37 .. 2 .. 66 .. 29 .. 5 .. 85 .. 13 .. 2 .. 39 .. 60 .. .. SO .. 15 .. 14 .. 61 .. 10 .. 36 .. 50 .. 14 .. 79 .. 6 .. 15 .. 24 .. 74 .. Novouzensk 2 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. SK .. 83 .. 10 .. 5 .. 2 .. 70 .. 30 .. 10 .. 94 .. 1 .. 5 .. 22 .. 71 .. Levokumskoe 7 . . . . .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Southern cereal belt ... .. .. .. .. ... .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Novoaleksandrovsk . SK . 41 . 32 . 27 . 0 .. 34 . 59 .. 7 .. 93 . 5 . 2 .. 11 . 73 ... 16 . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . Andropov . SK .. 61 .. 36 .. 26 .. 2 . 38 .. 53 . 9 . 90 .. 6 .. 4 . 8 .. 77 .. 15 MO = Moscow oblast; NO = Novgorod oblast; PK = Perm krai; SK = Stavropol krai; SO = Saratov oblast Source: authors’ own survey.

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

53

The collapse of the Soviet Union clearly exacerbated the problems of districts already experiencing population decline and has left many of the remoter villages home to solitary pensioners or elderly couples. The proportion of households consisting of no more than two people in the North West and Centre macroeconomic regions is around 60 per cent of the total, and similar ﬁgures are recorded for the neighbouring districts in the Central Black Earth and Volga-Vyatka regions. In these places, household production is focused upon subsistence. The fortunate are those who can rely on the help of young urban relatives. With age and inﬁrmity, it is animal husbandry that is the ﬁrst to go. The unfavourable situation with regard to labour in northern regions is a contributory factor to the marked north– south decline in per capita livestock ownership. Whereas urban relatives can be prevailed upon to help the elderly with cultivation, planting, and harvesting, the same is not true when it comes to livestock production, which requires assistance all year round. In contrast to the general picture of rural population decline, there are pockets and regions of dynamic population growth in rural Russia. These include districts within the vicinity of large towns and in the south where rural districts with stable or growing populations increase in number as the heavily populated republics of the North Caucasus are approached. Thus, while it is undeniably the case that rural depopulation has created places in the Russian countryside where household production is in decline for the simple reason that the population is dying out, this is not universally the case. O’Brien, Patsiorkovski, and Dersham (2000) have drawn attention to the labour potential that can be deployed in personal husbandry in much of rural Russia. Furthermore, population density does not appear to have much impact upon geographical variation in the character of household production at the regional level. Figure 3.8 shows that where livestock ownership is concerned, in both the non-black earth and black earth zones the greatest number of cattle per hundred rural inhabitants is to be found in places with below average rural population densities and in the south these values are highest in districts with fewer than 5 people per sq. km. In the non-black earth centre, in contrast, there has been a shrinking back of livestock numbers in the most heavily populated rural districts. These patterns and trends suggest that there are complex forces at work differentiating household production at regional level, of which rural population density is but one.

Distance from market/relative location The steep gradient in population densities between rural districts close to regional capitals and at the peripheries is a reminder of the strong centre–periphery differences that exist in Russian regions, which can exceed inter-regional differences. This pattern very largely reﬂects the historical neglect of the peripheries—the absence of good roads, for example, has been bemoaned for decades by rural specialists, both for the impact on rural living standards and farm productivity.

Under 5

5 to 10

11 to 15

16 to 20

21 to 30

0

Density of population in people/sq km

10 0

5 to 10

5

2000 20

Under 5

10

1990

30

11 to 15

2000

16 to 20

1990

15

40

31 to 40

20

50

21 to 30

25

Over 50

30

60

41 to 50

35

(B) Number of large livestock/100 rural population

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

31 to 40

(A) Number of large livestock/100 rural inhabitants

54

Density of population in people/sq km

Fig. 3.8. The density of population (people/per sq. km) and number of large livestock per 100 population in (A) the non-black earth and (B) the southern half of European Russia, 1990 and 2000. Source: Calculated from regional statistical digests.

There is a steep gradient in formal agriculture between the centre and peripheries of oblasts and in the non-black earth centre it is only in the immediate vicinity of large urban centres that large ‘agro-enterprises’ show any signs of growth and proﬁtability (Ioffe and Nefedova, 2001). The peripheries of oblasts, especially in the non-black earth zone, are where the Russian glubinka is to be found. This is a pattern inherited from the Soviet period when the structuring of agricultural procurements tended to limit the sphere of inﬂuence of even the largest urban centres on agricultural land use (Pallot and Shaw, 1981: 173). Figure 3.9 shows data diagrammatically for a variety of standard of living and production indices on a transect from the outskirts of Moscow city to the far boundary of Ryazan oblast to the south-east. The data relate to eight districts located at ever-increasing distances from Moscow city. The ﬁrst four are in Moscow oblast and the second four in Ryazan oblast with a ﬁfth (consisting of two districts) adjacent to the Ryazan city. Population density and the condition of rural housing can be taken as a measure of the welfare of the rural population. Cereal and milk yields and the share of milk and meat originating in the household sector are a measure of the productivity and ‘health’ of the large farm sector. The graph is striking in showing the rapid deterioration of welfare and agricultural productivity with increasing distance from Moscow, which is only broken in a slight improvement in the vicinity of Ryazan city. In the ﬁfteen years since the USSR’s collapse, the market stimulus of large cities has inevitably begun to reshape farm activity but in what directions and, more crucially, how far out from the central cities the inﬂuence of urban markets extends is variable (Ovchintseva, 1999). A comparative study made by Amelina (2000) of large enterprise and small farm activity in two different locations conﬁrms the variability in geographical patterns at the regional scale. In Vsevolozhsk district in Leningrad oblast agricultural enterprises are ‘progressive’; they pay a regular monthly money wage of 1,500 roubles at 1999

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

55

90 Cereal yield centner/hectare

80

Milk yield kg/cow

70

% share of meat in household production

60 50

% share of milk in household production

40

Density of rural population in people/square km

30 20

% of homes with indoor sanitation

10 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Fig. 3.9. Distance-decay on a transect from Moscow city to Ryazan . Source: Authors’ calculations using district-level statistics.

prices. This contrasts with enterprises in Engels rural district, Saratov oblast, where pay is in kind and equivalent to 269 roubles. Whereas in the former household production is relatively muted and plays a genuine ‘supplementary role’, in the latter farmworkers rely on household production to generate core income. The income generated from household plots in Engels is four times greater than in Vsevolozhsk district. Research for this volume took us to the suburbs of Saratov where, in the settlement of Pristanoe situated on the banks of the river Volga, many households are engaged in the production of salad crops for sale into the Saratov market. Commercial production of vegetables and salad crops exists in the environs of the other major cities included in this study, although it was not equally developed, and there were localized pockets of commercial production situated at some distance from the major urban centres. In a ﬁnal exercise at the regional level, we bring together the three variables that have been considered above—population, distance, and environment—to see to how they combine at the regional level (Table 3.4). Data limitations mean that we have to rely upon simple descriptive statistics but the results are clear enough to see from these. Ryazan and Saratov oblasts were chosen for the analysis because they both span a number of natural regions (and between them cover the spectrum from taiga to semi-desert), as well as manifesting the characteristic steep gradients from centre to periphery in population densities. As before, livestock numbers and meat and milk production have been chosen as the indicators and they are grouped according to the natural zone into which they fall and to their relative location which, in this case, is simpliﬁed into suburban (that is, the rural districts next to the city boundary), transitional (districts placed second and third in spatial ranking) and peripheral districts (ranked fourth and upwards). The table

Table 3.4. Comparison of the intensity of household livestock production in Ryazan and Saratov oblasts in relation to distance of rural districts from the oblast capital and the natural environment .. .. .. .. No. livestock .. .. per 100 rural .. .. .. Population . inhabitants .. .. density .. .. . . Sheep .. (per sq. km) .. Cattle .. Pigs ... and goats . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Ryazan oblast .. .. .. .. . Suburban 26 8 .. 8 ... 6 .. .. . .. .. 15 ... 13 ... Transitional 10 14 .. . .. 23 .. 19 . Peripheral 9 14 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 11 .. .. Northern coniferous 6 21 24 . .. . .. .. 15 ... 14 ... Mixed forest 12 12 .. . .. . Southern forest-steppe .. 10 12 .. 23 ... 20 ... .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Saratov oblast .. .. .. . .. 18 .. 10 ... Suburban 16 7 .. . .. . .. Transitional 8 15 .. 36 ... 29 ... .. .. 42 .. 37 .. .. Peripheral 6 26 . .. . .. .. 34 ... 29 ... Right bank forest-steppe .. 7 20 . .. . .. .. 30 ... 29 ... Right bank steppe 8 13 .. . . . .. 39 .. 32 ... Left bank dry steppe 7 18 .. . . . .. . 56 . 17 . Left bank semi-desert 5 40

Oblasts with rural districts grouped according to relative location and physical environment

.. .. Household .. production as a .. .. percentage share of .. total production .. .. .. .. Milk .. Meat .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. 24 26 .. .. 60 36 .. .. .. .. 69 47 .. .. .. .. 65 54 .. .. .. 61 38 .. .. .. 66 40 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 48 57 .. .. .. .. 69 54 .. .. 79 67 .. .. .. .. .. .. 75 56 .. .. 62 49 .. .. .. .. 75 66 .. .. 74 85

.. .. Production .. per rural .. .. inhabitant .. (in kg) .. .. .. .. .. Meat .. Milk .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 22 ... 240 .. 53 ... 430 .. . .. 76 .. 559 .. .. .. .. 56 600 .. . .. 50 ... 392 .. 74 ... 496 .. . .. .. .. .. .. . .. 53 .. 394 .. 125 .. 746 .. .. .. 138 .. 868 . .. . .. 110 .. 753 .. .. 586 .. 103 .. .. 126 .. 791 .. .. . 126 . 1036

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

57

shows that centre–periphery gradients are much sharper than those associated with natural regions. Thus, in both oblasts the number of livestock per hundred rural inhabitants and output of meat and milk rise along a centre–periphery axis. The highest values for the ownership of cattle and sheep and for milk production are in the semi-arid regions, which also are the most peripheral in relation to Saratov city and the least densely populated. A similar, albeit weaker, relationship between marginal natural environment, peripheral location, and low population density exists in Ryazan oblast.

Contrasting Peripheries in the North and South of European Russia The steep gradient between the centre of oblasts and their peripheries is a universal feature but the character of the household production is not the same in every periphery. There are differences that are expressed in the physical organization of the household plot. Figure 3.10 is the ground plan of a ‘typical’ household plot that might be found in the peripheries of oblasts in central and northern European Russia. The plot has provision for both crop and livestock husbandry and for winter storage of hay collected from common lands beyond. These types of plots can be seen in every village on the Russian plain but with movement north, south, and east, alterations in organization become obvious to those with a keen eye. They reﬂect the changing balance between and within crop and livestock husbandry in different peripheries.

Household production in the glubinka Valdai rural district in Novgorod oblast is located on the watershed between the basin of the Upper Volga and the drainage system of lake Il men . This is the core area of ancient Russian settlement but in the twenty-ﬁrst century it is a typical glubinka, or out-of-the-way place, halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg. During Soviet times there were ten kolkhozi and sovkhozi in Valdai rural district— mixed enterprises producing cereals, beef, and dairy products. In 2003, there were only three farms left, with 400–500 head of cattle between them, 100 hectares of land sown to rye and clover, and 700 workers, the majority neither working nor being paid. After a decade of inactivity, Novgorod Holdings has reopened a poultry farm and local ofﬁcials speak of the possibility of cereal and clover cultivation in the west of the district where conditions favour mixed farming, but these are modest signs of recovery compared with more centrally located places in rural Russia. There are employment opportunities in the developing tourist industry in the north-east corner of the district, where there is an annual inﬂux of 75,000 visitors from Moscow and St Petersburg who come to enjoy the lakes and forests for which this part of the Valdai is so well known. In Shuya-skii

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Hay

Hay barn

Vegetables or potatoes Potatoes

W.C.

Fuel wood

Pig shed

House

Feedgrain store and shed for cows Feedgrain store and shed for calves

Grass

Entrance Street

Fig. 3.10. The ground-plan of a typical allotment in the peripheries of central or northern European Russia.

rural administration, there are 568 seasonally occupied second homes, many the restored wooden houses of former agricultural workers who have long since left the district. By comparison there are just 180 houses occupied by permanent residents.

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59

Plate 3.1. A typical household plot of the forested belt. The plot is fully occupied with potatoes and vegetables and there is a sizeable barn for overwintering animals and storing hay.

The growth of tourism in the Valdai has come too late for the permanent residents of the district, for whom the collapse of farming in the 1990s represented the ﬁnal stage of the process of rural population decline begun in the Soviet period. In 1959 the population was 22,000, but by 2001 it had fallen to exactly half this number. Such population contraction is normal for the peripheries of oblasts in the non-black earth zone and in Valdai, as elsewhere, it has been accompanied by the deepening of social ills; the progressive impoverishment of the elderly, increasing levels of alcoholism, and the selective out-migration of young people. According to local government statistics, half the working population was employed permanently or temporarily in the tourist industry in 2001, but in the rest of the rural administration employment opportunities diminish and people are thrown back on their plots to survive. Household plots in Valdai district are not large—about 1,000 to 2,000 sq. m (10–20 sotok). Only those few households that keep cattle need additional land for hay mowing and this is either rented from the local authority at a peppercorn rent or is simply taken from abandoned kolkhoz ﬁelds. Plots are used for potatoes and a few rows of other vegetables, and 50 per cent of households leave part of it unsown. With only one-quarter of all households keeping a cow and pig, and sheep and goat rearing a rarity, livestock husbandry is much reduced today from what it was in the past when every second household had some animals. The household sector has not recovered from the crisis of the early 1990s when

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collective farms liquidated their herds leading to the closure of the local dairy, which had been the principal market for the peasants’ milk. A plan developed by the local authority to award grants to households to develop milk production in return for them supplying milk for the tourist industry had no takers. Ofﬁcials blamed the local population’s passivity and alcohol consumption but, in truth, many people are too old to keep dairy cows and would have difﬁculty obtaining hard feed for winter stall-feeding. The lack of a local source of feed grains also explains the low incidence of pig rearing in Valdai district, although why more households do not keep goats which are less demanding of high-quality feed than either cows or pigs is puzzling. The one growth area in personal food production has been natural resource harvesting. Ninety per cent of our respondents regularly collect mushrooms and berries in the forest and 30 per cent ﬁsh, and one-third sell their gleanings on the Moscow–St Petersburg highway. Smaller numbers sell milk and potatoes to summer visitors. Compared with more centrally located rural districts, the percentage of commercially oriented households (that is households selling 50% of their produce on a regular basis) is small. People living in the west of the district, away from the popular tourist area and the highway, are in the most difﬁcult situation; here households have to survive exclusively on their allotments and natural resource harvesting, relying on the pensions of the elderly for money income to buy the essentials that cannot be produced domestically. It is not surprising that there are

Plate 3.2. A pensioner, one of three remaining in this dying village in Gornozavod district in the Urals.

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few households we spoke to who believe there has been an improvement in their life since the Soviet Union’s collapse. The Valdai is an example of what some geographers would identify as ‘dead’ or a ‘demonetized’ space of post-Soviet Russia, separating the ‘islands’ of cities such as Moscow, St Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg that have been integrated into the global economy. Demonetized spaces are quintessentially those in which the mass of the population has to rely upon their own labour and the access they have to natural resources and land to survive, a condition that describes Valdai and countless other rural districts in Russia well. But not all peripheries are dead space as understood in the ‘archipelago model’. In rural districts in the peripheries of oblasts occupying the dry steppe east of the River Volga and in the south there is plenty of money in circulation, a large portion of it originating in the household sector, as the next example illustrates.

Livestock husbandry in the dry peripheries beyond the River Volga Pestravka rural district is one of the southernmost districts of Samara oblast. It is peripheral both to the core settled areas of European Russia and to the regional centre, Samara. Although Samara is among the more successful agricultural oblasts in European Russia, Pestravka district suffers from the classic problems of peripherality. Of its twelve large agricultural enterprises, three are bankrupt, two have been taken over by ‘investors’ who have stripped the farms of their assets and left land unploughed, and the remainder are loss making. After the USSR’s collapse a rapid transition took place in farming in Pestravka district as large farms switched to concentrating exclusively on cereal production—this was reﬂected in the contraction of livestock numbers from over 8,000 in 1991 to under 2,000 in 2004. This decline was partially offset by expansion in the household sector. Maiskii rural administration in the east of Pestravka district is typical in its population characteristics for the rural district. As Table 3.5 shows, ofﬁcial unemployment levels are high and local ofﬁcials conﬁrm that wage levels for those who do have employment are low – from 300 to 1,300 roubles per month in 2004—but lack of formal employment is compensated for by high activity rates in household animal husbandry. Judging from the statistics shown in the table, every household in Maiskoe has a cow and some pigs and fowls, and two-thirds have sheep and goats. Evidently, people in Maiskii have plenty to keep them occupied and, as they conﬁrmed in interviews, they have been able to make sufﬁcient from the sale of milk and meat products to sustain a satisfactory standard of living. One-third of households in Maiskii own a car and households with three cows or more are able to earn enough to send their children to university or rent a ﬂat in the city. The principal complaint Maiskoe households have is that marketing their produce is difﬁcult. In the past, collective farms took surplus produce from households, but after the herds were sold off this marketing channel dried up. Households

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Table 3.5. Some characteristics of population and livestock ownership in Pestravka district, Samara oblast, 2004 .. .. Number of Settlements ... households .. .. Maiskoe 496 .. Ovsyanka ... 48 . .. Lozovoi 48 . Mikheevka .. 157 . Telishovka ... 169 . Kryukovo 29 .. .. . Total 947

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

.. Head of livestock .. .. per 10 households .. .. . % of total population .. .. Sheep ... .. .. .. . Pensioners .. Unemployed .. Cattle .. Pigs .. and goats ... Fowls .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. . 30 16 4 26 .. 11 ... 15 .. .. .. .. . .. 229 . . .. 55 .. 84 . 73 38 12 .. . . . . .. .. 18 ... 11 .. .. 24 47 21 50 .. . .. .. .. 16 57 14 ... 10 ... 5 20 . . .. .. .. 3 27 3 ... 2 ... 6 17 .. .. .. . . . . .. 28 41 16 .. 33 .. 18 .. .. 140 .. .. . .. .. .. . 14 ... 15 .. . 24 32 7 39

Source: Local agricultural department of the rural administration.

increasingly process surplus milk into cheeses and soured cream rather than selling it fresh and they dispose of their meat to buyers from the Samara markets. The strong development of household livestock husbandry in Pestravka is not unusual for other places in the semi-arid peripheries. As in Samara oblast, rural districts of left-bank Saratov oblast located on the border with Kazakhstan witnessed a transition from mixed to exclusively cereal production in collective and state farms in the immediate aftermath of the USSR’s collapse. Harvests are unstable in the semi-arid environment of Novouzensk district but sufﬁcient is produced in most years for transfers to be made to the household sector. These transfers underpin a thriving household livestock business. In Novouzensk, household plots, which here measure no more than 200 to 500 sq. m. (2–5 sotok), are crammed full of sheds and barns for rearing livestock and storing winter feed and hay; only a small patch is retained for growing vegetables for the household (Fig. 3.11). In 2001, pork was the most proﬁtable: piglets bought in the spring for fattening and sale nine months later were able to increase their value by ﬁve to ten times. Cattle ownership was also widespread, and in 2001 only 15 per cent of all households surveyed in Novouzensk district did not have a cow. Compared with central European Russian peripheries, populations are relatively young in the arid peripheries east of the River Volga and family size is above average, with the result that a high proportion of meat and dairy products produced in the household sector is retained for personal use. Nevertheless, among our respondents, onethird regularly sold more than 50 per cent of the pork and beef they produced. This compares with 10 per cent who recollected selling over 50 per cent in 1990. Whereas ﬁfteen years ago people had to make the journey to market, now most sales are to buyers who arrive in these remote villages with refrigerated lorries or cattle trucks. The crucial difference between the semi-arid peripheries and the peripheries of central European Russian oblasts is the support that is available to the household sector from large agricultural enterprises. Even though the former collectives in Pestravka and Novouzensk are not in good shape, those that have survived are a

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production Common land 2nd entrance

Pig shed

Tractor

Gate Haystacks

Wooden planks: building materials

Hay barn

W.C.

Organic manure

Cow shed

Bullock shed

Calf shed Bath house

Vegetable store

Vegetable plot

Vegetable plot

Bench

Summer kitchen

House

Garage

Water-butt

Main entrance Street

Fig. 3.11. The ground-plan of a typical allotment in Novouzensk district in the eastern dry steppe.

63

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Plate 3.3. A plot in Saratov oblast largely given over to livestock sheds. This plot holder kept pigs as well as a cow and calf.

local source of feed grains that are necessary to support pig rearing and for the winter stall-feeding of cattle. In Pestravka, for example, as much as one-third of the annual cereal harvest is transferred to households at subsidized rates and in Novouzensk in poor harvest years the share is even greater, essentially all that is left over after seed has been retained for next year’s sowings. In Chapter 5 we describe how this relationship works between the large and small farm sector in different places.

Localized Specializations in Household Production Whereas at the national and regional levels there is a clear geographical division of labour in household production, at the level of individual districts there is far greater uniformity in what is produced. Rural markets are colourful, vibrant affairs and they constitute an important site for the sale and exchange of produce, but their inﬂuence on household production is overshadowed by the power of the larger markets in the regional capitals. Nevertheless, micro-geographies of household production do exist at the level of individual districts. In some of the districts visited for this study, we came across individual or groups of villages that specialized in a particular branch of production; the Bashkir villages of Barda district in Perm oblast are celebrated for the high quality of their potatoes and Beloomut in Lukhovitsy district, Moscow oblast, is known for its

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65

cheeses and soured cream. In the south of Russia households that have access to irrigation water make the most of the hot, sunny summers to grow a range of Mediterranean fruits and in these places the household plot is given over to fruit trees, bushes, and soft fruits (Fig. 3.12 is the ground plan of a fruit-producing household in Stavropol krai). Households in the cereal-producing oblasts in the south, where feedgrains are plentiful but there is a shortage of grazing land, specialize in a variety of fowl—chickens, geese, and turkeys. Within the fruitgrowing regions there can be distinctive localized specializations. In Georgievsk district, for example, the village of Shumyan is known for strawberries (which occupy more than half the area of each household in good years). In some cases, the products of such localized specializations enter local exchange networks— we have already referred above to the exchange of potatoes and Mediterranean fruit and vegetables across the lowland/foothill divide in the south of Stavropol krai—but more often they enter regional food markets. Local specializations are sensitive to changes in the external environment and are frequently ephemeral as a consequence; the strawberry crop had failed in Shumyan in 2003 because of drought and households were not planning to replant the following year, and rearing coypus for fur and meat, which had become popular in the mid 1990s in the south, was out of fashion by 2003 because of the animals’ high fatality rates. In other cases it is a changing economic environment that results in formerly successful specializations being dropped; the overproduction of meat in 2003–4 resulted in households scaling down the number of pigs they reared for sale in the south and east. But there are examples of localized specialization in the household sector, which provide a regular and reliable income for the households involved, where a village or group of villages has been able to establish a reputation in urban markets for its products, sufﬁcient to withstand temporary setbacks. The Russians have borrowed the concept of the brand (brend ), from Western marketing to describe this situation.

Cucumber producers of Lukhovitsy district, Moscow oblast In spring and early summer, villages in Lukhovitsy district on the right bank of the River Oka, strung out along the road from Krasnaya Poima to Fruktovaya, present an unusual picture. The plots of land at the front, side, and back of people’s houses are ﬁlled with line upon line of polytunnels. No tree or fruit bushes are to be seen. There are no exceptions; every square metre of land is thus occupied (Fig. 3.13). Everyone in these villages who is capable of work is engaged in the cultivation of cucumbers. Lukhovitsy cucumbers are particularly favoured in the Moscow market. They are ready in May, four or ﬁve weeks ahead of the main crop in Moscow oblast when high prices mean that there are large proﬁts to be made. But the work is hard. There are no heated glasshouses or mains-fed irrigation systems so success depends upon the vigilance and energy of the proprietors of the cucumber plots who open and close the polythene tubes as changing weather

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Fruit bushes

Vegetable and soft fruit plot

Vines

Cold store

Bathroom

Grain store

W.C. Poultry enclosure

Orchard

Poultry shed

Veranda House

Garage Flower garden Entrance

Poultry run Street

Fig. 3.12. The ground-plan of a fruit-producing household in Georgievsk district, Stavropol krai.

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Plate 3.4. Poultry are a specialization in the extreme south. In this case the plot holder in Stavropol krai had appropriated part of the village green for his turkeys.

conditions dictate, and carry water for the plants by hand from well or pump. Given these technologies, the maximum the average household (often using the labour power of relatives living in the city) can cultivate is 25–30 sotok (25,000– 30,000 sq. m.), which is also the average size of allotment in Lukhovitsy. A division of labour between generations is typical in these villages; ploughing, planting out, and harvesting is done with the help of young relatives living in Moscow city or other towns in the oblast, while the elderly permanent residents take charge of the time-consuming task of regulating the heat–moisture balance of the growing plants and helping bring in the crop. Cucumber cultivation in this part of Lukhovitsy is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it predates the collapse of the USSR. Villages on the right bank of the River Oka specialized in fruit production before the 1917 Revolution, but fruit trees on ‘private plots’ were either dug up by collective farm peasants in the 1930s in response to the imposition of taxes, or perished in the severe winter of 1941 and were not replanted. After the Second World War, peasants in these villages used their plots to grow potatoes and vegetables. Cucumbers and tomatoes were the business of state farms, where they were grown in giant glasshouses. Gradually, however, production shifted from the socialized to the ‘private’ sector. Expertise in cucumber cultivation, combined with the development of successful

Geographical Diversity, Rural Production

Fruit bushes

68

Cucumbers

W.C.

Barn

Well

Veranda Orchard

Flower bed

Vegetable plot (radishes & other vegetables)

Flower bed

House

Vegetable plot

Garage

Entrance Street Fig. 3.13. The ground-plan of an allotment in the cucumber ‘province’ of Lukhovitsy district.

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Plate 3.5. Plots occupied exclusively by polytunnels for growing early cucumbers in Ozeritsy, Lukhovitsy district.

intermediate technologies, transformed ‘subsidiary production’ on peasants’ plots into a highly specialized activity which out-survived the eventual disappearance of cucumber production in large farms. The best years for the cucumber producers of Lukhovitsy district were in the 1980s, when travel to Moscow by suburban electric train was cheap and prices in the Moscow markets were high. It was possible in the 1980s for producers to make sufﬁcient proﬁt from the cucumbers they grew on the plots adjacent to their houses to buy a car or, over several seasons, to build themselves a brick house. The 1990s have seen a relative decline in the proﬁtability of cucumber production because of the rising cost of inputs and falling prices at the ‘allotment gate’. Whereas in the 1980s producers made the journey to market, today they sell to buyers who visit the villages with their lorries daily during the harvesting season. This development is, in part, a consequence of rising transport costs which have made direct sales, involving the expensive journey to Moscow, less advantageous than in the past, but it also reﬂects the intensity of the labour process, where a worker is better deployed in maximizing the daily harvest of cucumbers than in personally delivering the crop to market. Cooperation among households, which could reduce the dependence on buyers from the city, is inhibited in the villages by intense competition and secrecy about innovations in the production process. In the spring of 2001 our interview partners took great steps to make sure that we did not discover the strain of cucumber seeds they were bringing on for fear that the information might reach the ears of their

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neighbours. Despite the lack of cooperation and the capture of the cucumber trade by middlemen, households do well out of their cucumbers. One hundred square metres of land can produce a ton of cucumbers in the season, which at prices in the early 2000s could earn 4,000–5,000 roubles gross, and 3,000–4,000 net of costs. Given an average size allotment of 2,500 sq. m, it is clear that cucumber production constitutes a signiﬁcant source of income for households in the cucumber villages. Our interview partners in Lukhovitsy were not prepared to reveal the income they obtain from cucumber and radish production, how the money earned was distributed among the people participating in production, or the share of total household income this represented. The criterion we used to assess how well they were doing was the condition of their housing since, in contemporary Russia, house improvement and building is the most common luxury on which spare income is put by both urban and rural dwellers. Allocating houses to one of ﬁve classiﬁcatory groups, with the extremes consisting of two-storey brick houses (category 1) and unimproved wooden houses (category 5), Vykopanki and Ozeritsy, both in the cucumber region, scored well. In these villages the ﬁrst two categories accounted for about half of all housing. In contrast, in Astapova, a village located on the watershed above the river Oka where household production focused on the production of milk and potatoes more typical for rural districts in central Russia, only one-third of all houses belong to the top two categories and 20 per cent to the lower two. The localized specialization in the cucumber ‘province’ has developed on the basis of an advantageous location relative to Moscow and the favourable aspect of the Oka’s high right bank, as well as chance factors with their origins in the Soviet period. Today processes are in play that are reproducing this specialization in the district and spreading it beyond the original core producing villages. Cucumbers are displacing other crops in allotments in lowland villages and the district administration actively promotes the Lukhovitsy ‘brand’, placing cucumbers alongside MIG jets, which are the other major product of the district, in its publicity (for a more detailed discussion of household production in Lukhovitsy, see Pallot and Nefedova, 2003b).

Commercial tomato production in Kinel -Cherkasy Kinel -Cherkasy lies on one of the Volga’s small left-bank tributaries 88 km east of the city of Samara. It is a village with a population of 19,000, making it Russia’s largest rural settlement, excluding the ‘Cossack’ settlements (stanitsi) in the south of Russia. Its fame does not come from its size, however, but from the fact that every second household in the village is engaged in commercial tomato cultivation. Livestock husbandry is weakly developed in the village with only one household in ten having a cow and/or pig despite that the fact that villages in the Middle Volga are generally associated with high levels of livestock ownership. Tomatoes have long been grown by households in Kinel -Cherkasy but production

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assumed a commercial character in the 1980s when a gas supply was brought to the village allowing households to heat greenhouses to bring on an early crop. Now greenhouses occupy 200–400 sq. m (2–4 sotki) of the 15,000 sq. m (15 sotok) household plots in the village, with some households having more than one greenhouse. Typically, from 500 to several thousand seedlings are planted out in greenhouses in March for harvest in late May. During this time the temperature in the glasshouses cannot be allowed to drop below 18◦ C. As in Lukhovitsy, the labour input to tomato production is intensive, two to three hours a day at minimum. The plants have to be irrigated every other day, a task that takes no less than three hours and, additionally, there is pricking out to be done. Harvesting is also labour intensive, so much so that additional labour has to be drafted in. This can take the form of urban relatives, but in Kinel - Cherkasy seasonal hired labour is also taken on at a rate of 100 roubles a day, plus lunch. A small number of households hire permanent workers. Marketing of the crop takes place through three channels: some households take their crop to market themselves making a weekly trip to Samara, Buguruslan, and other towns in neighbouring Tatarstan. Others, the smallest producers, rely on roadside sales, but the majority rely on visiting buyers, principally from Samara. At the beginning of July 2004, tomato producers were selling their tomatoes for 17 roubles/kg. These were being sold on by the middlemen for 23–4 roubles and were retailing in shops and market for 40 roubles. Households reported that they could make an income of 100,000 roubles from even a small greenhouse with 500 tomato plants. With expenditures of 70,000 roubles, these rates still meant that, spread over the year, they were making the equivalent of 2,500 roubles a month just from growing tomatoes. Many of the smaller tomato producers also grow potatoes and onions, both crops that mature after the end of the tomato season. The sale of these further boosts income from the allotment. The larger producers are able to make substantial proﬁts even accounting for the wage bill for hired labour and as a result count tomatoes as a their principal income source. Reﬂecting the success of the tomato business, the level of prosperity in Kinel Cherkasy is high for rural settlements. According to the local administration records there are 24,000 private motor vehicles in the settlement (more than one per rural inhabitant) and the village, atypically for Russia, has numerous cafés and shops. The buoyant household sector in Kinel -Cherkasy is reproduced elsewhere in Samara oblast; in the neighbouring district of Pokhnistevo there are many villages that specialize in cucumbers and villages in Krasnyi Yar district near to the industrial city of Tol yatti specialize in vegetables as well, producing on average 180 kg per head annually. A further four rural districts produce 180 kg of vegetables per head. The combination of a large local market, a large population, and the possibility for irrigation using the waters of the Volga’s tributaries has been decisive in these developments. The principal future constraint for Kinel Cherkasy’s tomato producers is the availability and price of the gas needed to heat glasshouses.

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The passing of the onion producers of Lake Nero The ﬁnal example is rather different from the previous two in that it is of a localized specialization that has been unable to sustain itself in the post-Soviet period. This is further evidence, if such is needed, of the post-Soviet transition’s differential impact on the household sector, which has its own pattern of winners and losers. Lake Nero is an ancient lakebed in Yaroslavl oblast whose light alluvial soils have since historic times been used for market gardening. As early as the seventeenth century a division of labour had developed among vegetable producers in Lake Nero; in one zone the emphasis was on producing seedlings, in another bringing on carrots, in another onions, in another cucumbers, and so on (Saushkin, 1947: 167). At the end of the nineteenth century Lake Nero sustained a large population. Onions, cucumbers, and green peas were the most labourintensive of the crops grown but they were also the most proﬁtable (Bezobrazov, 1885: 345). Soviet collectivization did not initially change the orientation and methods of farming in Lake Nero. Collective farms were able to make a good income from fulﬁlling state quotas for vegetables. Parts of the production cycle remained individual; the kolkhoz would plough the land but make individual farm members responsible for the cultivation (thinning out and weeding) of particular vegetable plots (Saushkin, 1947: 174). In 1937, 80 per cent of the arable land in Rostov rural district remained under vegetables, with just 20 per cent under cereals. Gradually, however, the ratio of vegetables to cereals changed as collective farms came under pressure to fulﬁl ever-larger quotas for grain sales. Meanwhile, as elsewhere in the non-black earth zone, the rural population began to age as the young left for Yaroslavl and Moscow. The years 1990–1 dealt a deathblow to vegetable production on large farms—they could not ﬁnd markets for their products—but it continued on individuals’ allotments. In the onion-producing villages, households experimented with new strains of onion seeds, adding popular sweet onions to the classic white Rostov variety for which the district is known. However, diversiﬁcation began to erode specialization at the village level as households sought to spread risk by growing a broader range of vegetables and more subsistence crops such as the potato. Lake Nero still creates an impression, as it did in the past, but the landscape contains evidence of the shifts of the last decades. Drainage of the swamps that surrounded the shrunken lake ceased after the large farms collapsed and water and bog plants have reinvaded many vegetable plots. The allotments belonging to local villagers extend in long, thin ribbons right down to the saturated edge of the lake, because this is where the best soils lie. As in the past, onions are the dominant crop, but they are interplanted with strips of other vegetables making a colourful linear mosaic. Uncharacteristically for Russian villages there are no fences separating allotments. Lake Nero’s villages are visibly suffering from the ravages of depopulation. Porech e-Rybnoe, for example, has experienced a threefold decline in population during the past ﬁfty years but with the post-Soviet collapse of the

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local state farm, any prospect of its revival has disappeared. The same is true of neighbouring Sylost where the population has dropped from 1,000 to 300. Here, the former state farm still exists but it only provides employment for a handful of people. In both villages pensioners continue to grow onions and carrots for sale, some selling from pitches on the Moscow–St Petersburg highway, but the majority selling to buyers-up from Moscow and St Petersburg markets. Lake Nero onions still command respect in the markets of Moscow and other large cities on the Russian plain. In 2002, it was possible in one summer for onion producers to sell between two and four tons of onions and to make an income of 50,000–100,000 roubles, putting them on a par with Lukhovitsy cucumber producers. Unlike in Lukhovitsy, however, there is no new generation of producers to take the tradition forward. Specialization in Lake Nero is an example of geographical inertia in the household sector. The pensioners who have remained will end their lives growing onions, but it is difﬁcult to see how the villages here will avoid a fate similar to those in Valdai district.

4 The Environmental Resources of Rural People’s Farms Regional Differences in the Environmental Resources Used in Personal Subsidiary Production In Fig. 4.1 we show diagrammatically the contrasting relationships and dependencies of rural households in the forested region of European Russia, north of Moscow and in the black earth steppe to the south. In this and the following chapters we analyse the various components making up these food production systems, beginning with the land. At the heart of personal subsidiary farming in rural Russia is the household plot or uchastok; the small parcel of land lying within the boundary of rural settlements on which rural dwellers may grow crops and construct outbuildings. Ever since the translation of Karl Wadekin’s (1973) seminal work, the uchastok has been referred to in English language literature as the ‘private plot’, and ‘personal subsidiary farming’ as ‘private farming’. The underlying conceit of the Western view, which it must be remembered grew out of the Cold War ideological battles between communism and market capitalism, was that the private plot was proof of the efﬁcacy of individualism and private property over collectivism and social ownership. In reality, of course, household plots were not ‘private’ in the neoclassical understanding of property rights, since they could be neither bought nor sold (nor, indeed, was there much protection for their users from their alienation) and the food individuals produced did not originate exclusively from the plot but drew on other environmental resources, access to which was covered by a variety of often ill-deﬁned rights and obligations. Since 1991, there have been some important improvements in property rights for the rural population. In particular, they have acquired title deeds to their plots (although there are size limits and their conveyance has to take place according to normative prices) and the use of other resources has, in some cases, been subject to legal regulation or (re)codiﬁed. At the local level, land use often remains governed more by custom than by the provisions of statutes and codes. It thus makes sense when discussing rural people’s access to resources to deﬁne ‘property rights’ broadly as a ﬁeld of public claims and entitlements over a variety of resources, rather than as a bundle of clearly deﬁned rights. Assuming, after

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(a) Household reproduction, reciprocal exchange

Market

Mushrooms and other forest products

Meat and poultry

Root crops

DISPOSAL

HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION

ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES

Coniferous Forests/Taiga

KEY Inputs Outputs

(b) Household reproduction, reciprocal exchange

DISPOSAL

Market

Buyers up

Fruit

Vegetables

HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION

Meat Large farm

Black Earth Steppe

ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES

Fig. 4.1. The relationship and dependencies of household food producers in (a) the forest and (b) the steppe regions of European Russia.

Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann (1999), four layers of social organization where property is concerned: ideology and culture, legal regulation, property as multifunctional relationships, and property practices, it is the last two of these that have the greatest relevance for understanding how resources are used in household food production in rural Russia today. This was also the case in the past (Hahn, 2003: 25). The post-Soviet state has embraced the principles of the market and private property and introduced laws, albeit tardily where agricultural land is

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concerned, to extend property rights to its citizens. However, of greater practical signiﬁcance to rural people than ‘who owns what’, is how the managers of these resources exercise their power to grant or withhold access. Whether deﬁned narrowly as property rights or more broadly in relational and practical terms, there is much confusion in Russia’s villages about who has the right to use which resources and on what basis access is granted or withheld. It is not just the users who express ignorance but the managers of rural resources can themselves be unclear about the formal property rights attaching to any parcel of land. Local ofﬁcials have had difﬁculty keeping up with the rapidly changing legislation and regulations, or they choose wilfully to misunderstand the law. An example of the latter related to the provision, included in the recent revision to land law, allowing rural inhabitants to use their land shares without registering as a private farm; in two rural districts local ofﬁcials insisted that they had no intention of permitting this. Rural people have been quick to exploit the confusions surrounding property rights and the balance, to date, has tended to work in their favour. In places where land is abundant, which given current levels of agricultural activity is almost everywhere except in the immediate suburban zones and the traditional cereal producing regions in the south, rural people can ‘help themselves’ to land and can harvest the natural resources of the forest more or less unimpeded. The traditional gatekeepers—the managements of large farms, local government, and central state agencies—have quite often encouraged an extension of popular use of environmental resources by turning a blind eye to illegal practices. However, with land privatization moving ahead and large farming recovering from the deep lows of the 1990s, the balance is set to shift so that the access rural people have customarily enjoyed to a wide range of land resources may become increasingly vulnerable. Already in suburban locations competition for land has eroded rural people’s access. Figures 4.2 and 4.3 are schematic diagrams showing the range of environmental resources on which households in different agro-climatic zones of Russia can draw in order to produce food in the three principal branches of its production— growing, livestock husbandry, and natural resource harvesting. As Fig. 4.2 shows, a rural household in Russia might use upward of half a dozen different parcels of land for producing crops and a variety of ‘open access’ and communal resources for pasture and haymaking. The same parcel of land can double up for different uses, for example, arable can serve as pasture after the harvest. The ﬁgure describes the situation that may be found in Russia’s mixed forest and forest-steppe zones. To the north and south, the balance of different resources changes, as Fig. 4.3 shows. In Kosa district, Perm oblast, deep in the taiga food production relies on the use of large areas of grazing land and hay meadows beyond the household plot, and also upon access to the state forest fund for natural resource harvesting and for livestock grazing. In Novoaleksandrovsk, Stavropol krai, in the heart of the cereal belt, crop production is conﬁned to a small household plot. In the south, household production is focused either on small animals—poultry, coypus, and pigs—in which case the plot is crammed

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KEY Privately owned allotment (uchastok)

Other environmental resources (such as hay meadow, scrub, pastures, fallow and harvested fields)

Agreed usership rights ‘Illegal’ or informal use

LAND WITHIN BOUNDARIES OF LARGE FARMS

Arable plots in large farm fields available for potato cultivation

Hay meadow allotment

Allotments available for rent from local authority, including arable and hay meadows

LAND WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF RURAL SETTLEMENTS

Common access pasture

Allotment attached to dwelling

Other land including abandoned allotments, verges

House

STATE OWNED LAND

Reserve land (in local authority land fund)

Hay meadows, pastures, and other forest resources in state forests, shelterbelts, ‘polygons’, roadside verges

Fig. 4.2. Schematic diagram showing the variety of environmental resources a household in central Russia can draw upon for food production.

full with livestock sheds and cages or, where there is a reliable water supply, on southern latitude fruits and vegetables. The access rural people have to environmental resources is a major determinant in the geographical differentiation of household production. Below we describe in greater detail the principles governing rural people’s use of land for arable and livestock husbandry and of Russia’s forests, lakes, and rivers for natural resource harvesting.

78

Environmental Resources of Rural Farms KEY Privately owned allotment (uchastok) Agreed usership rights ‘Illegal’ or informal use

a) 1--2 hectare allotment of haymeadow

Former state farm land

Land belonging to local (village) authority including abandoned allotments, pastures, district land fund

0.6 hectare allotment

State forest; for grazing, hay-making, natural resource harvesting

b) Small amount of common pasture, roadside verges

0.2 hectare allotment

Fig. 4.3. Schematic diagram showing the variety of environmental resources households in (a) Kosa district, Perm krai and (b) Novoaleksandrovsk district, Stavropol krai draw upon for food production.

Land for growing The law entitles rural households to a plot of land for personal subsidiary production. Whereas during the Soviet period plots were allocated by collective and state farm managements, under post-Soviet land reforms, responsibility for allocating plots passed to local authorities, where it remains today. Any new household settling in the countryside can apply to the relevant local authority

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Table 4.1. The distribution of land (in percentages) in the ownership of agricultural organizations, private farms, and personal subsidiary farms in rural Russia, 1950–2004 .. 1950 .. 1960 .. 1970 .. 1980 .. 1990 .. 1995 .. 2000 .. 2004 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . Kolkhozi and other large farms . 97.6 . 98.5 .. 98.2 .. 98.2 .. 98.1 .. 81.7 .. 81.9 ... 76.1 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . Private peasant farms .. — .. — .. — .. — .. — .. 5.0 .. 6.8 ... 9.4 . . . . . . . All people’s farms including: .. 2.4 .. 1.4 .. 1.8 .. 1.8 .. 1.8 .. 4.7 .. 6.0 ... 6.6 .. 2.4 .. 1.2 .. 1.5 .. 1.4 .. 1.4 .. 2.5 .. 2.8 .. 3.4 Personal subsidiary plots .. . . . . . . . .. — ... 0.2 ... 0.3 ... 0.4 ... 0.5 ... 0.9 ... 0.8 ... 0.8 Gardens and allotments1 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Other plots .. — .. — .. — .. — .. — .. 1.3 .. 2.4 .. 2.4 .. — .. — .. — .. — .. — .. 8.6 .. 5.3 .. 7.9 Other agricultural users 1

Garden cooperatives and allotments in individual and collective use. Sources: Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, 1996: 551; Narodnoe khozyaistvo RSFSR . . . , 1957: 127; Sel skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii 2000: 52, 86; Zemel nii fond RSFSR 1961; Sel skoe khozyaistv, okhota i lesovodstvo 2004: 55, 97.

for the allocation of a plot, which the latter is obliged to satisfy, so long as the household has a residence permit and land is available. Local norms deﬁne the maximum and minimum size of plots. These were established in the early 1990s when land was transferred to local authorities from large farms, and they were calculated by dividing the number of resident households into the amount of land subject to transfer with deductions being made for permanent pasture, land needed for infrastructure development, and spaces for ‘communal and social consumption’ and ‘reserve land’ which was to remain in local authority use for future allocation. Any household, which at the time of the transfer was using a plot exceeding the norm, had to surrender the surplus to the local authority or, if there was little demand for land, pay compensation to continue using it. Once the initial allocations had been made, households could apply for title deeds to their plots. It is the ownership of a plot that brings with it the right for rural households to engage in ‘personal subsidiary farming’ (Wegren, 2004: 236–7). Table 4.1 shows how the share of land under plots changed in the second half of the twentieth and the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century, and Table 4.2, the regional breakdown. The continuing domination of the large farm sector in rural Russia is obvious from the ﬁrst table even though inroads have been made since communism’s collapse. The land formally attributed to the rural households has risen dramatically to its current level of 6 per cent of all agricultural land, with this growth largely accounted for by the allocation of plots to urban households. The share of land under rural household plots has risen to 2.8 per cent of the total, restoring it to 1950s levels. There are also large regional differences in the distribution of land between different agricultural producers and how these have changed over time. The large increments in northern regions were largely a function of the collapse of large farms and of the failure of the private farmer movement to take off. In southern, steppe, and black earth regions where large farms were better able to maintain their position and/or private farms made signiﬁcant advances, the increments in the share of people’s farms were more

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Table 4.2. The percentage share of land belonging to agricultural organizations, private ‘peasant’ farms, and people’s farms by economic region, 1990 and 2000 .. .. .. .. Macro-regions .. .. .. The North .. North West .. .. Centre .. Volga-Vyatka .. Central Black Earth ... .. Volga .. .. North Caucasus .. Ural .. .. West Siberia .. East Siberia .. .. Far East .. .. Kaliningrad .. Russia total

Rural . 1990 .. 2000 .. .. 2.5 .. 6.4 . 3.4 ... 10.1 2.4 ... 5.0 2.8 ... 4.8 3.1 ... 6.0 0.7 ... 0.9 . 1.8 ... 2.3 1.0 .. 2.2 . 0.7 .. 1.6 . 0.8 ... 3.9 1.3 ... 8.4 1.7 ... 3.9 1.4 .. 3.1

.. . ..People’s farms.. .. . .. .. .. .. Urban .. .. . ... 1990 ... 2000 ... . .. . .. 1.4 ... 9.1 ... . .. .. .. 2.2 .. 8.0 ... . .. . . .. 1.0 .. 3.6 ... .. 0.7 .. 5.7 .. ... 0.6 ... 0.1 ... .. . . .. 0.4 ... 1.0 ... ... 0.5 ... 3.7 ... .. 0.5 .. 4.9 .. .. . . .. 0.4 ... 4.1 ... .. . .. .. 0.3 .. 5.6 ... .. 1.4 .. 5.7 .. .. .. .. ... 0.9 ... 4.1 ... . 0.6 . 3.6 .

Total . 1990 .. 2000 .. .. 3.9 .. 15.5 . 5.6 ... 18.1 3.4 ... 8.6 3.5 ... 10.5 3.7 ... 6.1 1.1 ... 1.9 . 2.3 ... 6.0 1.5 .. 7.1 . 1.1 .. 5.7 . 1.1 ... 9.5 2.7 ... 14.1 2.6 ... 8.0 2.0 .. 6.7

.. . .. Private .. Agricultural .. farms .. enterprises .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. 2000 .. 1990 ... 2000 .. .. .. . .. . 5.0 ... 96.1 .. 79.5 .. . .. .. 94.4 ... 74.4 7.5 .. . . 4.4 .. 96.6 ... 87.0 .. .. .. 3.1 .. 96.5 ... 86.4 .. .. 4.6 ... 96.3 ... 89.3 .. .. 98.9 .. 88.3 9.8 .. .. . .. 9.4 ... 97.7 ... 84.6 .. . 5.1 .. 98.5 ... 87.8 .. . .. 8.3 .. 98.9 ... 86.0 .. . .. 4.6 ... 98.9 ... 85.9 .. . . .. 12.4 .. 97.3 ... 73.5 .. 16.0 .. 97.4 .. 76.0 . .. . 7.0 .. 98.0 .. 86.3 .

Sources: Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik 1996: 551; Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost khozyaistva naseleniya v Rossii, 1999: 45–59; Sel skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii 2000: 198–200.

muted. Comparing rural and urban people’s farms, the advance in the share of the latter exceeds by some margin the increments in the former, the exception to this rule being the black earth belt. Table 4.1 conﬁrms that the period of the formation of urban allotments it over, whereas the share of land under rural plots continues to grow. The normal size range for rural plots is 0.3 to 0.6 ha but in the North and North West macroeconomic regions the average size can rise locally to 3–4 ha. It was largely because of the large leap in plot size in such peripheral regions, a consequence of the inclusion here of hay meadows in the redistributions that took place in the early 1990s, that the average size of rural plots doubled after communism’s collapse. In most regions, average plot size has not grown very much. Rural plots lie within settlement boundaries but they are not always located within the curtilage of the owner’s dwelling. In those villages where individual dwellings were replaced by apartment blocks and other prefabricated dwellings, a process that began in the 1960s under Nikita Khrushchev and was continued under his successors (Pallot, 1979), allotments can be located away from the living zones. Many settlements have a mixture of curtilage and non-curtilage plots. Krasnaya Poima village, the central settlement of the state farm of the same name in Lukhovitsy district in Moscow oblast, is an example. Here, there are individual dwellings on 0.6 ha plots, which accommodate a 0.2–0.3 ha allotment, semidetached houses built during the Khrushchev era on much smaller lots (0.4 ha) with only limited room left for a vegetable garden, and ﬁve-storey apartment blocks. Households living in the second two types of dwelling have been allocated

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Table 4.3. The percentage distribution of households by the size of household plot in the survey districts Environmental zone and district

Northern coniferous forest: Kosa Gornozavod Forested non-black earth: Lukhovitsy Perm Barda Valdai Forest steppe: Bazarnyi Karabulak Lysye Gory Dry steppe: Rovnoe Novouzensk Levokumskoe Southern cereal belt: Novoaleksandrov Andropov

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Oblast or krai1

PK PK MO PK PK NO SO SO SO SO SK SK SK

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Sotki <10 14 42 7 72 24 18 68 89 86 98 82 25 29

(1 sotka = 100 sq.m) .. .. .. 11–20 .. >21 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 55 31 .. .. 53 5 ... ... ... ... .. .. 40 53 .. .. 28 0 .. .. .. .. 59 17 .. .. 64 18 . . .. .. .. .. .. .. 27 5 . . .. .. 11 0 . ... ... .. 9 5 . .. .. .. 1 1 .. .. 15 0 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 30 41 .. .. 36 34 . .

MO = Moscow oblast; NO = Novgorod oblast; PK = Perm krai; SK = Stavropol krai; SO = Saratov oblast. Source: Authors’ survey. 1

allotments in specially zoned parcels away from the built-up area. There are also separate plots zoned for storage and livestock sheds. In Krasnaya Poima, the rural administration attempted to ensure that all households ended up with approximately the same amount of land for growing, but while some rough equality in the size of holdings exists at village level, between settlements there can be differences depending upon their status—whether a village (selo or derevnya) or an urban-type settlement (poselok gorodskogo tipa), with residents of the former entitled to larger plots than the latter. In Lysye Gory district, Saratov oblast, for example, plots in rural villages are 4,000 sq.m (40 sotok) and in urban-type settlements 1,500 sq. m (15 sotok). In Table 4.3 we summarize data relating to the size of household plots in different geographic zones in which we conducted our questionnaires. The differences between the steppe and dry steppe districts, where more than 80 per cent of households have plots under 1,000 sq.m, and districts in the forested centre and north and in the southern grain belt is striking. In absolute terms the amount of land that passed from the control of large farms to rural authorities, including for onward transmission as plots to individual rural households, was not large. Nevertheless, the process was not uncontested— large farms resented the loss of land and, with it, a means for controlling their labour force. Resistance surfaced in the negotiations over where boundaries were drawn around village settlements. In Lotoshino district in Moscow oblast, the management of the Kirov state farm insisted upon retaining the plots of

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Fig. 4.4. The ground-plan of Makarovo village, Lotoshino district, showing the boundaries negotiated between the rural administration and Kirov sovkhoz in 1991. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

unoccupied dwellings that lay adjacent to its ﬁelds, with the result that sovkhoz and rural administration land are minutely interdigitated (see Fig. 4.4). The rural administration was forced into a lengthy process of applying for additional land within three years of the subdivision to provide for new households. In common with many other farm managers, the director of the large farm still refers to the four or ﬁve settlements enclosed, amoeba-like, by its ﬁelds as belonging to the farms: ‘All that land belongs to them (the local authority), but it is mine’ (interview 21 May 2001).

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Plate 4.1. A supplementary plot at the edge of the village rented from the local authority in Lukhovitsy district.

In parts of Russia where population is growing dynamically, as in the southern cereal producing regions, the ﬁxed amount of land available for distribution as household plots poses a difﬁcult problem for local authorities. In the western districts of Stavropol krai, for example, a combination of high rates of natural increase and in-migration taking place in the context of proﬁt-making large enterprises (that jealously guard their land resource) means that local authorities have limited scope for meeting the demand for new or supplementary household plots. In the environs of large cities, local authorities face similar problems although it is often self-imposed since they hold back land that could be allocated as plots in the hope of making money from second home development. However, it would be incorrect to conclude that there is a large unmet demand among rural households for additional arable land. Russia has abundant agricultural land available for individual use and, except in places where there is competition from other users, there is generally sufﬁcient for households wishing to expand personal subsidiary production to do so. Many loss-making large farms were happy to divest themselves of their least productive hectares. These passed into district reserve land funds and became available for allocation to private farms and for rent. In reality, much reserve land has been abandoned for lack of demand. The unique quality of the plots allocated at the time of the land reforms is that they constitute the only part of the land used in personal subsidiary production

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that is in the inalienable ownership of a household. Most households were quick to apply for the title deeds to their plots, although we found some villages in which the process of issuing these was still incomplete in 2001–4. Rural households are free to use their arable plots more or less as they wish; they can leave them empty, ﬁll them with livestock sheds, plant them with trees or ﬂowers, grow vegetables on them, rent them out, and sell them. In this respect the plots differ from other agricultural land in private ownership, which is subject to regulation governing its use—land remaining uncultivated, for example, can be conﬁscated by the local authority. Today, plot holders can claim their share of large farm land in order to expand personal subsidiary farming without having to register as a private farm. The change in the law allowing this has the potential to transform the scale of operation of personal subsidiary farming but, as of the summer of 2006, it had been largely ignored. The principal means by which rural households, in fact, extend the area of land available for growing is by renting supplementary plots. Much of the land rented by households for personal subsidiary farming is local authority owned and it is located within settlement boundaries. Except in those villages where there is signiﬁcant competition for land, such as in the immediate vicinity of towns or in the cereal-producing south, local authority rents have been low or involve nothing more than the leaser taking on the payment of the nominal land tax. Leases are normally short-term, for one season at a time, but low rental costs and convenience has, to date, outweighed the fears households might have about the insecurity of tenure. However, local authorities are not obliged to make their reserve land available to households for rent. In Rasshevatskaya rural administration, Novoaleksandrovsk district, Stavropol krai, for example, the rural administration rents the reserve land it acquired in 1992 back to the large farm, even though rural household plots are small—under 600 sq.m. The reserve land in question is shown on the land use map of Rasshevatskaya rural administration in Fig. 4.5. The authority’s defence is that the income from rent is needed to maintain services in the settlement. A common practice in oblasts in the European centre and stretching east to beyond the River Volga, is for large farms to make some of their land available every year for division into potato plots for individual household use. The terms governing the use of such plots are negotiated by the farm’s trade union or rural administration on villagers’ behalf and they vary from one district or large farm to the next. Thus, whereas in some places the right to a plot is extended to all residents—farm workers, pensioners, and ‘social sphere’ workers—in others the right is limited to farmworkers only. Similarly, whether a charge is levied for the plots varies, with some enterprises making no charge and others graduating charges according to the users’ employment status. Characteristically, the large farm prepares the land for cultivation, using its own tractor brigades, and may or may not fertilize the land. Each recipient household is responsible, meanwhile, for supplying seed potatoes, planting, weeding, and pest control, harvesting and marketing the product. Where local authorities have large areas of reserve land

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KEY Land under dwellings and household plots

Reserve arable land under the plough (rented to Novoaleksandrov Farm)

Woodland Haymeadows Permanent pasture Settlement boundary

yyaa tastkaa eehveav assh R. Re

Resshevatskaya Rural Administration Nov

oal

ek

sa

nd

ro

vs

ki

if a

rm la

nd

Nov

oa

le

k

sa

0

nd

ro

vsk

ii far mla

nd

2 km

Fig. 4.5. Land use in Resshevatskaya rural administration, Stavropol krai. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

they also can divide it for potato cultivation, normally charging a rent to cover the cost of hiring a tractor brigade to do the ploughing. In the village of Novaya Krasavskaya, Lysye Gory district, Saratov oblast, the management of the potato ﬁelds is a joint enterprise between the rural administration, to whom the land belongs, the local large farm enterprise, and private farmers, and each takes it in turns to plough the land. The arable component of land under household production can thus consist of a number of different parts: the household plot which is in private ownership, a

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Environmental Resources of Rural Farms

local authority allotment normally held on a short-term lease, and a seasonal plot for potato cultivation made available by the local large farm, the use of which is normally secured by some form of collective agreement.

Land for livestock Although the household arable plot is most often used for the cultivation of vegetables and fruit, there are parts of Russia where it is almost entirely ﬁlled with sheds, stables, barns, and pens. This is the situation in the semi-arid districts beyond the River Volga where livestock husbandry dominates household food production. Such places are a reminder that arable land constitutes only one component of the physical resources needed in household production. For households with sheep, goats, and cattle access to hay meadows and pastures is as important as an additional arable plot. Although the precise amount varies depending upon the quality of the grass that can be mown, the length of the overwintering season, and the availability of hard feed, one head of large livestock needs on average three tons of hay a year. The arrangement for accessing this quantity of hay varies. With the exception of northern forested regions where they have been allocated to households in private ownership, local authorities, large farms, and other enterprises own most hay meadows, or they are located in state forests. Generally, hay meadows are parcelled out for renting to individual households on annual leases. Probably a minority of households in rural Russia mow their own hay today; instead they employ a fellow villager with a tractor or private farmers to mow and transport it for them. Nevertheless, the lone man scything hay on road edges is a familiar sight in parts of Russia where most land is given over to cereals. Wherever there is a shortage of ‘ofﬁcial’ hay meadows or rents are too high, rural people make use of other sources which, in addition to roadside verges, include the grassy strips around woodlands, uncultivated headlands and ‘wastes’—places that are difﬁcult to put under the plough such as ravines—and set-aside and other parcels of land to which no ofﬁcial organization has laid claim. The sources of grazing land for village cattle, sheep, and goats are similarly varied. Rural settlements have permanent pastures that are used communally by households on payment of a fee. Figure 4.6 shows the location of permanent pastures attached to the village of Sukoi Karabulak on the Volga. When land was transferred from large farms to local authorities in the early 1990s, the size of permanent pastures was determined by applying a norm (of 0.3–0.7 ha per head of large livestock) to the then existing number of livestock in any rural settlement. As with the transfer of arable land, large enterprises were not always cooperative. In Kirovskii rural administration of Lotoshino district, land that previously had been used for common grazing was withdrawn from villagers in 1992 when the sovkhoz began building on it. The village was allocated a new parcel of permanent pasture on land that the large farm did not itself want, a marshy place which, according to villagers, is suitable only for goats. Throughout Russia herd sizes have changed

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KEY Pastures belonging to Sukhoi Karabulak village

Land owned by railway Household plots

Land under utilities

Supplementary allotments

Sukhoi Karabulak 282.6 hectares including: 84.2 pasture 35.8 arable 0

0.5 km

rS Rive

i ho uk

ra Ka

lak bu

Canteen School

333.5 hectares pasture

Rural administration

Fig. 4.6. Land use in Sukhoi Karabulak, Saratov oblast. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

since the reallocations were made in 1992, so that today there are disproportions in the amount of common pasture available in relation to the size of herds. Shortage of pasture is a common complaint in rural Russia and it is especially a problem in places where households have wanted to increase the number of their cattle (Adukova, 1999: 209–11). The decision of households to keep additional head of large livestock can create a critical situation on the common pasture, forcing communities to seek out alternative sources of summer grazing. In most places, the organization of communal grazing is the business of livestock-owning households, although the local administration can play a role in setting up the annual meeting at which the composition and size of the village herd(s) and the grazing regime is decided. There is usually an upper limit of one hundred head of large livestock in each herd, with some large villages in

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the principal livestock regions having three or four. At the annual meeting the decision is made about how the herd is to be supervised, what charges are to be levied (these are normally 15–25 roubles per head/month), when the summer pasture period is to begin and end, and, very occasionally, how many head are to be permitted to each household. The meeting also elects representatives to negotiate with other parties access to supplementary grazing if the village pastures are insufﬁcient. There are two principal models of supervision: the ﬁrst involves households agreeing among themselves to take turns overseeing the herd and the second, the hiring of one or more professional herdsman for the season. In the second case, households normally contribute to the wage bill proportionally to the number of livestock they have in the herd and, if it is the local custom, to provide subsistence for the herdsmen, each contributing a bucket of potatoes, for example. Exceptionally, they can take it in turns to provide shelter. Such collective arrangements apply in large villages where a majority of households own livestock. In Russia’s dying hamlets, which have only a handful of livestock, the common herd is dispensed with and owners, instead, tether their cows to prevent them from roaming. The common herd is also dispensed with in places where semi-nomadic grazing is practised and settlements dispersed, such as in the semi-arid peripheries in the south and east. The common herd is above all a feature of Russia’s core farming regions. In the regions where herd size has grown in the past decade, communal pastures attached to settlements can no longer provide grazing for the entire herd for the whole summer season (from April/May to September/October, depending upon the region). The shortfalls are made up in diverse ways and include using the stubble or fallow ﬁelds of large agricultural enterprises, pastures abandoned by large farms when they liquidated their herds, ‘unused’ land included in the regional land fund, and a rich variety of state-owned resources, including the margins and clearings of forests, shelter belts, and even the ‘polygons’ enclosing rocket silos. These can be grazed with or without the permission of the statutory owners and can be an individual or communal endeavour. The practice of stubble grazing is abhorrent to the managers of proﬁt-making large farms in Russia’s cereal-producing regions (the objection is that it tramples the soil, herds can escape into ﬁelds that have not yet been harvested, and villagers’ cattle can spread disease). Opening large farm ﬁelds for stubble grazing is a relatively common practice in some places, however. In Bessanovka rural administration in Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast, for example, the common herd is grazed on local authority land from May to the end of June when it is transferred onto the ﬁelds of the large farm, where it stays until September. It then returns to the village pastures before being brought inside for the winter. There are some ingenious local solutions to the need for pasture in Novouzensk; in villages bordering Kazakhstan police turn a blind eye to a daily trek of cattle across the border to graze on the abandoned ﬁelds of Kazakh collective farms. This practice was under threat in the summer of 2001 by proposed reforms of the border patrols to tighten up on drug smuggling. In the southern districts of Stavropol krai, the

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Plate 4.2. A young boy watching over the common herd grazing on abandoned collective farm land in Andropov district, Stavropol krai.

Plate 4.3. A herdsman bringing the cattle home in the evening in Kurilovka, Novouzensk district.

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shelter belts that Stalin ordered planted as part of the Transformation of Nature scheme, today provide grazing for the sheep of recent settlers from the North Caucasus. At the other end of the country in the north of Perm oblast where the state farms established in the 1960s to provision forest workers have all but disappeared, households use abandoned ﬁelds to graze their herds or they take advantage of post-1991 cutbacks in the number of forest wardens to allow their cattle to roam freely in the forest.

Quantifying the Agricultural Land Resources Used in Personal Subsidiary Farming From the discussion above it should be apparent that a far larger area of land is mobilized into personal subsidiary farming than is revealed in national statistics. Ofﬁcial statistics record only the land earmarked for use as plots at the time of the transfers of the early 1990s. Excluded is all the land that is used beyond settlement boundaries, pastures, and hay meadows. Attempts to arrive at a ﬁgure that does accurately reﬂect the amount of land used face difﬁculty because of the temporary and informal nature of many of the arrangements under which rural households access the land. At the top end of the estimates that have been made, Uzun (1999b) calculates that as much as one-third of all agricultural land in Russia is used at some time for the purposes of personal subsidiary farming. This ﬁgure puts a different perspective on household production’s achievement; to produce 50 per cent of agricultural produce from one-third of Russia’s agricultural land is an achievement worthy of comment, but it is not, perhaps, to be marvelled at in quite the same way as if it were from a mere 6 per cent of the land. Uzun includes land that is treated as ‘open access’ resources by rural dwellers, the use of which is not covered by any formal arrangements, so his ﬁgures must be seen as speculative. In our investigation we conﬁned the calculation to land whose use is subject to some formal arrangements (such as potato plots, rented meadows, and pastures) so the discrepancy is less pronounced. Nonetheless, the amount of land actually in use can exceed the ofﬁcial ﬁgure by several percentage points. The size of the discrepancy depends upon the character of the region (whether it is densely or sparsely populated, for example), and the nature of specialization in large and small farming. Tables 4.4 and 4.5 compare the distribution of land at the local level in Moscow and Saratov oblasts. In Table 4.4 data are given for right- and left-bank districts of Saratov oblast occupying forest-steppe (Bazarnyi Karabulak) and dry steppe (Novouzensk and Rovnoe) respectively, and in Table 4.5 the data are from two rural districts in Moscow oblast, Lotoshino in the west and Lukhovitsy in the south-east. The tables include all supplementary land in the use of rural households including arable belonging to the local administration and large farms, pastures, and hay meadows. It also shows the level of livestock ownership, as this is an important factor in determining the resource needs of the producers.

Table 4.4. The parameters of household land use and livestock ownership in a selection of large farms in Saratov oblast Rural districts Name of large farms Land owned by large farm (ha) of which arable Rural households (no.) Land owned (ha) of which arable (ha) Large livestock (no.) Large livestock/100 households Large livestock as % of total herd1 Household plots as % of total agricultural land Household plots as % of total arable Total agricultural land in use per household (ha) 1

.. .. Rovnoe .. .. .. First of May .. .. .. 12,845.0 .. .. 6,742.0 .. 623.0 .. .. 754.0 .. 87.0 .. .. 1,002.0 .. 160.0 .. .. 74.0 .. .. 3.0 .. 0.6 .. . 1.2

.. Novouzensk .. .. .. .. .. Tapovskoe .. Petropavlovskii .. .. . .. .. 12,517.0 ... 15,508.0 . .. 5,126.0 .. 7,809.0 ... .. 275.0 ... 289.0 .. .. 540.0 ... 436.0 .. .. 58.0 . 31.0 .. . .. 850.0 ... 551.0 .. 309.0 ... 191.0 .. .. 51.0 ... 57.0 .. . .. 4.0 .. 3.0 .. .. 0.7 .. 0.6 .. . 2.0 . 1.5

Refers to the total livestock belonging to the large farm and households. Source: From farm managements and local administrations.

.. .. New Life .. .. .. 15,649.0 .. .. 10,992.0 .. 296.0 .. 530.0 .. .. 20.0 .. .. 568.0 .. 192.0 .. . 34.0 .. .. 3.0 . .. 0.3 .. 1.8

.. Bazarnyi Karabulak .. .. .. .. Friendship ... Dry Karabulak .. .. .. . .. 9,483.0 ... 6,165.0 .. . 3,400.0 .. 7,577.0 ... .. 717.0 ... 423.0 .. .. 515.0 ... 377.0 .. . 212.0 .. 146.0 .. .. 390.0 ... 246.0 .. .. 54.0 .. 58.0 .. .. 24.0 ... 52.0 .. . .. 5.0 .. 6.0 .. . 2.7 .. 4.1 .. . . 0.7 . 0.9

Table 4.5. The parameters of household land use and livestock ownership in a selection of large farms in Moscow oblast Rural districts Name of large farm Land owned by large farm (ha) of which arable Rural households in individual houses (no.) Rural households in apartments (no.) Land owned (ha) of which arable Large livestock (no.) Large livestock/100 households Large livestock as % of total herd1 Household plots as a % of total agricultural land Total agricultural land in use per household (ha) 1

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Lukhovitsy . . Kr. Poima .. Astapovo .. Polyanka .. .. .. .. 5,632.0 .. 6,916.0 .. 3,104.0 .. . 2,327.0 .. 5,935.0 ... 2,094.0 . 373.0 .. 199.0 ... 333.0 1,100.0 ... 424.0 ... 260.0 . . 482.0 .. 345.0 .. 269.0 . . 305.0 .. 280.0 .. 174.0 . . 150.0 ... 159.0 ... 77.0 10.0 ... 26.0 ... 13.0 2.5 ... 7.9 ... 12.8 . . 8.3 .. 4.6 .. 8.0 .. .. 0.3 0.6 0.5

Refers to the total herd belonging to the large farm and households. Source: From farm managements and local administrations.

.. .. .. .. .. Kirov .. .. .. 8,487.0 .. 6,282.0 .. .. 223.0 .. 884.0 .. .. 292.0 .. .. 250.0 .. 69.0 .. 6.0 .. .. 0.7 .. 3.3 .. .. 0.3

Lotoshino .. . .. Lotoshino ... Savostino .. .. .. . .. 7,022.0 ... 4,227.0 .. 5,261.0 .. 2,585.0 .. . 780.0 ... 349.0 .. .. 75.0 ... 0.0 .. . .. 243.0 .. 190.0 .. 206.0 ... 160.0 .. . .. 86.0 ... 48.0 .. 10.0 ... 14.0 .. .. 3.4 ... 2.3 .. . .. 3.4 .. 4.3 .. .. 0.3 0.5

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Ofﬁcial statistics tell us that the share of all agricultural land under household plots in Saratov oblast is 0.8 per cent (or 1.4 per cent with urban dwellers’ plots included). As is obvious from the table, when rented hay meadows, communal pastures, and potato plots in the collective ﬁelds are added the amount actually in use is greater than this—between 0.3 and 0.6 ha, which is equivalent to 3.3–8.3 per cent of the oblast’s agricultural land. This is approximately ﬁve times the ofﬁcial ﬁgure. In Saratov, the emphasis is on livestock husbandry, population densities are low, and natural pastureland abundant. This contrasts with Moscow oblast where population densities are high, the way of life in rural districts is semi-urban, and the emphasis in personal subsidiary farming is on crops rather than livestock. Since arable makes up the greater part of the land used in rural household production and a majority of this is in the form of privately owned household plots, the discrepancy in Moscow oblast between ofﬁcial ﬁgures and those that take account of extra-allotment resources is less than in Saratov. The ofﬁcial ﬁgure for the share of land under people’s farms in Moscow oblast is 5 per cent and the range for our sample is 3.3–8.3 per cent. Although the amount of land used in household food production in the Saratov sample considerably exceeds that in Moscow in absolute and relative terms, the share of the total agricultural land attributable to household producers is less in the former (2.7–5.8%) than the latter (3.3–8.3%). It seems probable that given the circumstances of the post-Soviet transformation when levels of supervision over environmental resources has declined, rural households draw more extensively on extra-plot and extra-settlement resources than during the Soviet period. Despite this, their share of all land remains small. However, as the comparison of Saratov and Moscow oblasts shows, there is variation in the balance between the use of resources that are in households’ personal ownership and the access to which is therefore secure, and those that are in the ownership of other institutions and agencies, where access has to be negotiated and is conditional.

Harvesting Natural Resources Food production in rural households is not conﬁned to arable and animal husbandry. Collecting and processing resources naturally occurring in the environment are often combined with growing and livestock husbandry to supplement subsistence and for onward marketing. This activity is not conﬁned to rural dwellers: urban Russians have a long tradition of collecting mushrooms and berries, hunting, and ﬁshing but they do this primarily for recreational purposes. In the case of rural dwellers, natural resource harvesting can constitute one of the pillars upon which their food security is founded. This is especially true in remote regions where forests are abundant but climatic conditions reduce the productivity of crops, and animal husbandry is limited by the need to provide feed for long months of overwintering. As we have already seen, access to woodlands

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and forests for grazing livestock and for hay mowing is important to households in some parts of Russia. In this section we consider the other resources that rural people draw from Russia’s forests and watercourses. The Russian Forest Code governs the use of forests and woodlands for the purpose of harvesting natural products. The current code, which came into operation in February 1997, allows for any Russian citizen to enter state forests for the purposes of collecting mushrooms, berries, and other natural products for personal consumption and it also allows for the collection of fallen timber for use as fuel. The Forest Code allows timber felling, whether for household construction or for fuel wood, only under licence and restricts the harvesting of some non-timber resources, such as cranberries, if they are needed by the state for commercial exploitation. Separate provisions that may also require the purchase of a permit cover ﬁshing and hunting game. During our ﬁeldwork rural people are normally reluctant to own up to poaching, but not all; the ﬁsherman who supported his household by dynamiting ﬁsh in the Volga, the head of a rural administration who took us out shooting woodcock at dusk without a hunting licence, and the household head who admitted to helping himself to timber from the surrounding forest to reconstruct his house conﬁrmed for us the suspicion that rural people use any opportunity that presents itself to ﬁll their larders and/or pockets, even if this means breaking the law. Cutbacks in the number of forest wardens and members of enforcement agencies who are prepared to turn a blind eye (not least because in remote regions they too rely on natural resource harvesting to supplement their meagre wages) mean that at the present time the possibility of being held to account is, evidently, often worth the risk.

Gathering mushrooms and berries Russian forests have a wide variety of mushrooms; in addition, to the favoured cep (belyi grib), there are a variety of tubular mushrooms (podochinoviki, boletus scaber, mokhoviki, boletus lutens) and lamellar mushrooms. Russians know their mushrooms well—they have long constituted an important element of the diet in forested regions. Wild berries have also been an element of the Russian diet since pre-revolutionary times. There is a variety of berries in Russian forests. They are processed by rural people into preserves and bottled and, like mushrooms, are kept both for personal use and for sale. In the north of Perm oblast, for example, more than 90 per cent of the respondents to our questionnaire reported that they collect and trade mushrooms and berries and in other districts of the oblast the ﬁgure was still high at 60–80 per cent. In Novgorod oblast, the equivalent ﬁgure is 80–90 per cent. The importance of mushrooms in the rural diet in such places is nothing new, nor is the practice of selling on surpluses to fellow villagers or to town dwellers travelling along arterial roads, which was common during the Soviet period. The new development is the commercialization of the mushroom and berry trade and the emergence of ‘mushroom barons’ who organize

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harvesting and trade in forest products, with the rural poor in peripheral regions at the bottom of the chain. The northern districts of the Komi-Permyak region of Perm krai lie deep in the taiga. Forestry and farming have collapsed here and local populations have been forced back on their own devices to survive. Beginning at the end of July and continuing until the end of August during the mushroom growing season when ceps and orange-cap mushrooms (boletus versipellis) appear in waves, small mushroom stalls (besedki-gribochki) appear on the roadside every two to three kilometres. There is little through trafﬁc in the region so the vendors are not trying to sell to casual passers-by as might be the case in Moscow oblast; rather, they are waiting for refrigerated trucks to arrive that make the journey to buy up mushrooms for customers in southern Russia, the Baltic countries, and Ukraine. The north of the Komi-Permayk region has acquired a reputation for mushrooms among commercial food retailers in more populous regions of Russia. This reputation is built on the pure abundance of mushrooms, particularly ceps, in the region but also is facilitated by the good network of trunk roads that was developed for forestry and is still maintained today, not least to facilitate access to the many penal colonies that are still to be found here (Pallot, 2005). The external demand for mushrooms has stimulated high levels of forest harvesting among local people (more than 80% of the respondents to our questionnaire in Nizhnaya Kosa and Poroshevo villages in Kosa district sell berries and mushrooms). New organizational forms have emerged to supply the trade; entrepreneurs recruit teams of mushrooms pickers to live in huts in the forests during the most active mushroom period. The pickers bring mushrooms harvested deep in the forests to collecting points at times pre-appointed to coincide with the arrival of the refrigerated trucks. Similar organizational forms have been developed to harvest cranberries, which are also sold on to food producers from central Russia. In Kargopol district in Arkhangel sk oblast mushrooms and berries are also important in the rural household economy. In almost every village in the district there is a person with whom buyers from Kargopol , Nyandoma, Kostroma, and other medium-sized towns or cities make a contract to buy berries and mushrooms. During the season, buyers come two or three times weekly and take away 200–400 k of berries from the local organizer-entrepreneurs, who retain 10 per cent of the crop to sell themselves. Collecting and selling berries is an important source of income for rural people; in 2004 a kilogram of cloudberries (Rubus chamaemorus), a close relative of raspberries, was fetching 90–100 roubles from the buyers. Throughout July and August village people collect cloudberries and whortleberries (Vaccinium myrtallus) and in the autumn cowberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea var. vitis-idaea) and cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon). The collapse of large farms in this part of Arkhangel sk oblast has meant that rural people now depend upon the berry and mushroom harvests for their livelihood and even declare themselves to prefer collecting berries to the heavy ﬁeld work of the kolkhoz. In Kargopol there is a small processing factory that buys from the population to produce a variety of natural preserves.

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Apart from mushroom and berries, Russia’s forests are a source of other products that are of use in the rural food economy. Among the products that can be gathered to supplement the household diet or for selling on are nuts, medicinal grasses and other herbs, and wood sap (the latter to drink). Leaf litter and rushes can also be collected for livestock bedding, mulching, and weaving and for use on the allotment. Forest clearings can be used for the placement of beehives. In Russia’s principal commercial forestry regions, timber is important in the household economy, displacing the production of food products as the main source of money income. The result of our questionnaires in forested regions showed that rural people access timber for their own needs and to sell on through a variety of channels. In Gornozavod district in the Urals, Perm krai, where the rural economy developed on the basis of coal mining, forestry, and dredging diamonds and gold, some 40 per cent of the rural households harvest timber themselves by purchasing a licence. The remaining 60 per cent, largely pensioners, purchase timber from private harvesting organizations or from the forest authority. In Barda rural district in the south of the oblast, which has a younger population, over half the households questioned cut timber themselves. Illegal harvesting is rife among the predominantly Bashkir population in the villages on the forested watershed of the district, the harvested timber destined for neighbouring Bashkortostan where there is a shortage of fuel wood and building materials.

Fishing and hunting Wild animals and birds are a source of subsistence for households. We did not encounter organized buying up of game analogous to the mushroom and berry trade, but this does not, of course, mean that rural people do not use hunting as a source of income. Where there is access to bodies of water, recreational ﬁshing is a popular activity among rural and urban Russians, and the sight of men ﬁshing over ice holes in the winter months is common, whether it is on the Finnish gulf off Vasilevskii island in St Petersburg or on the rivers ﬂowing through the Russian plain. Fishing is also a source of livelihood for some rural households and, in places, takes over from the cultivation of the household plot and animal husbandry. This is most common where large farming has collapsed. In Kargopol district, households in villages on the shores of Lake Lacha specialize in ﬁshing. Outings can yield 50–5000 kg catches of pike-perch, bream, perch, and salmon which can be sold to shops in Kargopol or to the ﬁsh combine in the town for 25–30 roubles/kg. Fishing licences cost 150 roubles to local people, as against the 600 roubles charged to outsiders. On Russia’s highways in the forested oblasts to the north of Moscow there are clusters of villages where ﬁsh are brought to be salted and smoked for selling on. Villages such as Zavidovo, Bezborovo, Melkovskii, and Radchenko, around the Ivan kov reservoir where the Moscow–Petersburg highway crosses the River Volga, are all involved in smoking ﬁsh for sale to passers-by. Fish have

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Plate 4.4. Selling smoked ﬁsh, berries, and mushrooms on the Moscow–St Petersburg highway at Bezborovo.

been smoked by households in these villages since pre-revolutionary times but whereas in the past local ﬁsh formed the basis of the domestic industry, today ﬁsh comes from further aﬁeld and includes sea ﬁsh harvested off the north coast. Customers stopping to purchase ﬁsh from roadside stalls may believe it is caught in the local reservoir, but often it has been bought in bulk from ﬁsh markets in Moscow or Tver . The smoking of ﬁsh still takes place in small domestic ovens, but organizationally it has been captured by outsiders, mainly ethnic Armenians, who moved into the villages during the 1990s buying up houses vacated in the previous ﬁfteen years. These new entrepreneurs employ local people to catch and smoke ﬁsh and as roadside vendors who are allowed to retain 10 per cent of the takings. In the summer of 2003, smoked bream and pike-perch were selling for 5–70 roubles each, catﬁsh and lamprey for 200–50 roubles, and the true delicacy, conger, for 400–500 roubles, but trade was not particularly brisk. Although to all outward appearances these villages are the site of a thriving domestic industry that makes the most of local environmental resources, only a minority of local people are, in fact, involved in the smoked ﬁsh trade. The majority who work are employed on construction sites or in the local sovkhoz and poultry combine, while the rest make a livelihood by combining ﬁshing with growing potatoes and gathering mushrooms.

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On the Volga river ﬁshing supplements crop or animal husbandry and for some households that have difﬁculty accessing the inputs needed for farming it can become the primary activity. Illegal use of nets and dynamite, according to one of our respondents, is widespread due to lack of enforcement, although ﬁnes and even imprisonment can await serious offenders if caught. Sasha, a poacher in the village of Privolnoe in Rovnoe district, Saratov oblast, described to us how he turned to ﬁshing when he left his job in the local post ofﬁce. He uses a line to catch sheetﬁsh, going out in his boat at night because he has not bought a licence. In 2001, he could sell 1 kg for 50 roubles. Either he sells to intermediaries or his grandmother sells directly in the local market, in which case he can get a higher price. His friend ﬁshes for crayﬁsh, and, allegedly, by swimming underwater, he is able to ﬁll a bag in twenty minutes. Both men say they live well on the ﬁsh they catch.

The Environment, Capital and the Security of Local People’s Access to the Resources they Need for Personal Subsidiary Farming The security of a form of production that depends so heavily upon land to which access is conditional and temporary must be in question. In the longer term, some of the resources that are currently being deployed in the household sector will be under threat from the re-establishment by the legitimate owners of their existing rights or from the establishment of new rights. One potential threat is associated with the recovery of the large farm sector. In 2002, some twenty million hectares of agricultural land in the ownership of large enterprises lay fallow or had been abandoned (Nefedova, 2003a, 2003b: 281–90). It is unlikely that all this land will be brought back into use, especially in the environmentally more marginal regions, but some will, with a resulting negative impact on households that have been making use of it in the meantime for grazing or hay mowing. Similarly, recovery of large farm fortunes could put villagers’ potato plots in enterprise ﬁelds at risk, which would have a substantial impact on the income-generating capacity of households in Russia’s central oblasts. A more immediate threat is from the onward march of land privatization in rural Russia. There is evidence that the extension of market relations is already resulting in the withdrawal of rural households’ access to pastures or to supplementary land lying within settlement boundaries. It is not only local authorities that see the income-generating capacity of land; agricultural enterprises, private farmers, and ‘new investors’ in rural Russia cannot be expected to remain immune to the possibilities for making money once the sale and purchase of agricultural land becomes commonplace. Rural districts surrounding large cities and the successful cereal-producing regions have already emerged as sites of localized conﬂicts between rural households and other land users.

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Competition for land is not the only potential threat to the reproduction of the environmental resource base of household production; rural people’s use can itself constitute a threat by degrading the resource or, more indirectly, it can provoke the imposition of regulations from authorities charged with overseeing the environment. In the early twenty-ﬁrst century these threats are barely visible clouds on the horizon. The authors were reminded of the importance of retaining a broader perspective when, in answer to a question about the damage peasant cattle cause in forests, an environmental campaigner observed that since harvesting companies were annually removing stands equivalent in area to France, the impact of a few village cattle on young timber stands was not a high priority. Our interlocutor had a point. Nevertheless, in the rapidly changing circumstances following the demise of Soviet Russia, it would be a mistake to be complacent about the potential consequences of exceeding the carrying capacity of the resources currently deployed in household production. Sasha, the poacher from Rovnoe, observed that in the past he had caught chub and pike-perch as well as sheetﬁsh but these have now disappeared because of overﬁshing; it might not be the small time poachers who bear the main responsibility, but they must be contributors to the problem. Everywhere villagers commented upon the poor quality of common pastures that are almost universally unmanaged and vulnerable to overgrazing. The shelter-belts in southern Russia are an even more obvious demonstration of the potential damage to the environment of uncontrolled use; they are being plundered by local people for fuel wood. The agricultural enterprises and private farmers across whose land the shelter-belts run claim not to have the resources at the present time to police this theft or to replant trees. In places, the shelter-belts have been replaced by lowlying scrub which has an adverse affect on the efﬁciency of the belts to ameliorate the climate for farming. This is no trivial matter in the south where dry winds from the deserts to the east and south can remove tons of topsoil in the course of few hours.

Common pastures for kottedzhi By far the most common reason for the loss of land from personal subsidiary farming is its use for housing development, and common pastures are the most vulnerable. Both the pastures lying within the boundaries of settlements, which local people look upon as their common property, and those beyond the village boundaries, which they are more likely to be using according to informal agreement, can be reallocated for the development of second homes—kottedzhi and dachas. The most susceptible rural districts are those lying within commuting distance of large cities but with rising car ownership more distant places are also vulnerable. One example is Pristanoe, a rural settlement located on the bank of the Volga within commuting distance of Saratov city. In 1992 it lost its hay meadows and pastures when the district authority sold these for second home development. Nina Ivanovna, working in the rural administration in 2001,

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explained that the houses for ‘new Russians’ were put up without the Russian equivalent of planning consent being obtained. In the context of the chaos of the early 1990s the story at Pristanoe is not unusual; bribe-taking was endemic at this time and regulations were difﬁcult to enforce. Local people, moreover, were still gripped by fear of the consequences of taking on the authorities. Today, there are only ﬁfteen cows, twenty goats and ﬁve pigs left in Pristanoe and its neighbouring two villages whereas in 1990 there were 215 cattle, 146 pigs, 41 sheep and goats, and 3,000 fowls. The few remaining livestock-owning households have to cut hay from an island in the river that they can access only by boat. The passivity of rural people threatened with the withdrawal of access to a resource upon which they have been relying for domestic food production reﬂects their powerlessness in the face of private capital and the often corrupt local elites. The legal basis for rural people’s current use of environmental resources is, moreover, weak; pre-revolutionary customary rights to land were wiped out in the 1930s and have not been restored in the post-Soviet period. Nowhere is the powerlessness of rural people more apparent than in the rural districts surrounding the nation’s capital where individual households are caught up in a three-way competition for land between proﬁt-making agricultural enterprises, private farmers, and property developers. Rural people rarely beneﬁt from this competition, unless it is to sell their home and move elsewhere. The conveyance of household plots and allotments in the environs of Moscow is intense. Here the value of one sotka (100 sq. m) of land can reach several thousand dollars, compared with a few hundred in the oblast’s outer districts. District authorities do not hold on to reserve land in such places and the possibilities for individual households extending personal subsidiary farming by renting additional land simply do not exist. Common pastures have long since disappeared in villages surrounding the city. It is not only personal subsidiary farms that are in retreat in the rural districts adjacent to the city; the area of sown land in large enterprises in 2001 was 56 per cent of its 1990 level in rural districts circling Moscow city compared with 79–81 per cent in the second-, third-, and fourth-rank districts. This land has passed into the hands of private farmers or has been allocated for urban allotments, in which case it has remained in agricultural use, but a large portion has also been used for housing developments. In theory the reclassiﬁcation of agricultural land is a time-consuming process but local authorities have found ways around regulations. The most common device is for rural administrations to exploit the right they have been given to use up to three hectares of land for building purposes without seeking higher authority. By making multiple changes to adjacent three-hectare blocks of land, parcels of sufﬁciently large size to interest property developers can be created. Property developers have also been successful in obtaining change of use for land of failed farms, having themselves contributed to the farms’ decent into bankruptcy by buying up the land shares of rural dwellers. For the relatively small sums they receive for their shares,

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Plate 4.5. Kottedzhi in Stavropol krai, of the sort that are invading agricultural land, including common pastures, around all major Russian cities.

rural people have been divested of land that, had they hung onto it, they could today have mobilized into personal subsidiary production or invested in a private farm. Each instance where local people lose access they previously enjoyed to agricultural resources has its own special set of circumstances and the actors involved in making decisions do so from their speciﬁc perspective. The evidence that local people have been the victims of corrupt and unjust practices is sometimes quite clear-cut, but this is not always the case. The claims that rural people make to their right to access particular resources can be tenuous and, furthermore, members of a village do not always speak with one voice. The interests of livestock-owning and non-livestock-owning households can be in conﬂict, as can different generations of rural dwellers, the employed and nonemployed, those intending to stay and those planning to leave, and so on. In peasant societies, conﬂicts over resources are often mediated by the community of households and elders, which also organize collective resistance to the incursions of outsiders. Such community-based defence of resources is weakly developed in rural Russia. Communal meetings (skhody) can discuss access issues but, even assuming a consensus can be reached, their power to affect outcomes is limited. Local authorities that might be expected to defend their constituents are often compromised by the relationships they have with local economic elites and their need to balance budgets, or they are simply too weak compared with higher authorities. Not much conﬁdence is vested in the courts to achieve satisfactory

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remedies, since statutory law does not cover many of the claims people have to particular resources. Rural people can attempt to drum up broader support for their cause by involving the media, and they generally ﬁnd a receptive audience among conservative opponents of the privatization of agricultural land or the dismantling of large collectivist farm enterprises. Local protestors are most successful at mobilizing support among a wider public if they can implicate a private entrepreneur or bring evidence forward of the involvement of corrupt ofﬁcials, or if they can show the relevance of their case to a broader problem. The rural administration of Borgustanskaya stanitsa, one of a cluster of settlements specializing in producing potatoes in Stavropol krai, for example, was involved in the summer of 2003 in court proceedings with OOO Kholod, a frozen food company that had bought 150 hectares of land from the collective farm when the latter went into liquidation. When the company failed to cultivate the land it had acquired, the rural administration claimed ﬁfty hectares as pasture for the stanitsa’s herds, arguing that it was its responsibility to make sure that agricultural land was used, an argument that carries much emotional weight in Russia. It is no coincidence that this example of a local administration’s defence of its constituents’ right to ‘unused’ land occurred in the south of Stavropol krai where Cossack nationalism has militantly resisted any land privatizations that make ‘territorial inroads’ into the land of the Cossack hosts. Protest over the loss of pasture and hay meadows in the village of Triotso in Perm Krai has become similarly politicized. In this case, Zvezda, the former newspaper of the communist party in Perm , came forward to champion the cause of villagers (Zvezda, 1, 27 June 2002). Like many land disputes, the claims and counterclaims in Troitso cannot be understood by reference to the formal property rights of the parties involved (these are relatively straightforward), but are better captured by examining the social and political relationships and traditional practices that have, until recently, shaped land use in the settlement. Troitso is located on the bank of the River Sylva, a one and a half hour express bus ride from Perm . In Soviet times, the majority of Troitso’s able-bodied population was employed in the nearby poultry combine, which also was the principal ‘landowner’ in the district, producing cereals for battery poultry. There were just over 150 households in Troitso itself and three smaller villages in the district, about one-third of which owned livestock which grazed on communal pastures and in the winter was fed on hay mowed free of charge on the poultry combine’s land. In 1992 the poultry farm closed, forcing the population to rely on their plots for a livelihood. At much the same time, in the free-for-all in rural building that took place after communism’s collapse, the district authority began selling off the villages’ land for the development of dacha settlements and santoria (vacation rest homes). Within ten years some 1,700 plots had been allocated for housing and urban dwellers’ vegetable allotments and ﬁve large santoria built. Much of

Environmental Resources of Rural Farms

103

KEY Garden allotments for non-residents

Common pasture

Troitso allotments

Meadow

Household plots

Hotels and rest homes

Woodland or forest

CF = Land claimed by the chicken farm

CF

CF CF CF

CF

CF

CF

Recreation Base

CF CF CF

CF

Troitsa

Cemetery

CF CF CF

0

Cemetery

0.5 km

Fig. 4.7. Troitso village, Perm oblast, showing the disputed ﬁelds reclaimed by the poultry combine. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

the land for this development was on the ridge above the village, the site of the common pasture, but residents were able to use the former combine’s land for grazing and hay mowing. In 2000, events took a turn for the worse when private company Sylvenskaya ZAO bought the poultry combine with a view to restarting business. The company moved rapidly, putting up fences to bar access to its land—the disputed land is shown in as CF Fig. 4.7. It was at this point that the villagers embarked upon a letter-writing campaign and enjoined the help

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Environmental Resources of Rural Farms

of Evgenii Plotnikov, one of the investigating journalists of Zvezda, who wrote a hard-hitting article in defence of the villagers’ supposed rights. In 2003, there was no prospect that the decisions that had led to this would be reversed, but the pressure applied as a result of the protest going public may have contributed to Sylvenskaya ZAO’s agreement to rent hay meadows to the villagers on one-year leases at a reasonable rent. But in 2003, the livestock holding households were not appeased; they resented having to pay rent for resources they considered to be theirs and they continue to point out that there is still no solution to the grazing problem; currently they have to graze their livestock for part of the summer on the banks of the Sylva, where day-trippers leave rubbish and glass, which can injure the animals. Rural people draw on a diverse range of resources to produce food. The picture with respect to the long-term security of tenure or user rights over these is complex and there are obvious areas of vulnerability for the household sector. The contrast between households in the northern peripheries, which may be relatively conﬁdent that their current use of land and forest is unlikely to be withdrawn in the near future, contrasts with households within commuting distance of a large city that can wake up one day to ﬁnd that the pasture they thought was in community ownership has been sold off for development. In most of rural Russia, land is still there for the taking and owners and managers are keen to encourage its use rather than to see it return to its ‘natural’ state. It is for this reason that the question of who is the legal owner of this or that parcel of land is not a question that concerns many rural people. Yet, as the examples of where customary uses have been challenged show, it is a question in which local people should interest themselves if the future of domestic food production is to be secured.

Appendix Protesting Triotso residents composed this letter, which was taken up as a campaign against privatization by Zvezda, the former Communist Party newspaper in Perm Krai.

Letter to the editor We, residents of Triotso village, Perm district, are turning to you for help. The problem is that the Director of the Poultry Combine ‘Sylvenskaya’, citizen Rangulov, has privatized all the land around us. As a result we have nowhere to graze our cattle, and we cannot even extend the cemetery. We approached Rangulov with our land problem and he replied, ‘Buy some yourselves’! How can this be? Our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived and worked here.

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And suddenly the chicken farm seized all the arable, meadows, and pastures. Yes, and it’s even begun to sell it off. Where’s the justice in this? We consider that the privatization of the land by the chicken farm is illegal. We are appealing to you to act as arbitrator in this dispute. Signed: N. A Antonenko, headman Troitso village, Perm’ district (on behalf of the local inhabitants) Zvezda (Perm oblast’s independent newspaper), 94, 27 June 2002, p. 1.

5 Household Production and the Large Farm Sector Household production varies according to the range of resources available to it; different environments give rise to different types of production, setting limits upon what can be produced. But as we saw in the previous chapter, in order to gain access to the environmental resources they need, households are at the mercy of a variety of gatekeepers that include local authorities, large farm managements, other private landowners, and the community at large. Among the other actors with which rural households have to interact, by far the most important in most regions are the large farms or ‘agricultural enterprises’. In this respect, there is continuity with the Soviet period when the managements of collective and state farms determined the social, cultural, and political character of rural places and the economic welfare of the rural population. Collective and state farms were like ‘company towns’, but with their authority extending over large territories and embracing a number of populated places. Figure 5.1 shows the territorial arrangement typical of a collective farm during the Soviet period. Since 1991, many of their former areas of authority, both formal and informal, have been withdrawn from large farms; they have lost control of land under rural settlements and they have reduced inﬂuence over a range of local services where their interventions used to be decisive. To advocates of market reforms, the retreat of large farms from these areas is a welcome rationalization of the agrarian economy and part of the process of redirecting farm activities towards producing agricultural products by the most efﬁcient means possible. But this retreat has often left a gap that cashstrapped local authorities and private enterprise have not yet been able to plug, so that rural people’s experience of the market transition is of the loss of formal employment and a reduction in the level of services they previously enjoyed. In this situation, it is not surprising that rural Russia has been the scene of a muted, but real, contestation of market reform on the part of people intent on defending their access to resources and services to which they still believe they are entitled. The weapons at the disposal of rural households are limited and the legal basis for their claims is often tenuous or non-existent. With respect to the relationship with large farms, however, the rural people do have some

Household Production, Large Farm Sector

IV III

S Po

VI

V

VI

II

I

107

III

IV

D

II

VII

V

VI

Pi

VII

I Rail station

IV

FS

S

V

VI

VI

VII

VIII

III II

VII

V

IV

I

III I II

Individual houses and allotments

Arable Meadow

Pasture Forest

Kolkhoz boundary Road

S Stables

Pi Pig farm

Po Poultry

D Dairy farm

FS Feed Store I--VIII

Field numbers

Fig. 5.1. The territorial organization of a mixed cereal- and livestock-producing Soviet kolkhoz. Source: Ivanov, 1974: 31.

cards up their sleeves. For example, where there is a shortage of labour or where large farms are struggling economically, there is every reason for the latter to maintain good relations with the local community in order to secure the labour they need at least cost. But even for more successful farms or in places where labour is abundant, the threat that local people will transfer their land shares to a private farm can act as an incentive for large farms to ‘look after’ the local population. These are reasons why the relationship with local populations remains as important to large farms as in the past (Bondarenko, 1997; Nikulin, 1999; Praust, 1997). Some farm directors are, it is true, reluctant guardians of the paternalistic tradition, but there are still many who, socialized into the Soviet system, appear genuinely to believe they have a duty towards local populations. Therefore, although weakened by the extension of the market, the relationship between

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large farms and local communities continues to shape the welfare of the rural population. In this chapter, we examine how this relationship impacts upon production in the household sector and comment upon the ways in which it has been changing in recent years. We begin by examining the range of goods and services that the household sector draws from large farms—before presenting some case studies illustrating the diversity of the relationship and its inﬂuence on small farming in different places.

Inputs into Household Production from the Large Farm Sector Figure 5.2 shows the range of inputs that rural people in Russia have traditionally been able to rely upon from large farms. They are divided in the diagram into three principal categories: land, transfers in kind, and services. Land, which has already been considered in the previous chapter, is an important element in the cross-subsidy to the household sector, especially in those regions where potato production is important. Outside the centre and north-west, land is less important than services and transfers in kind. Inevitably, not every large farm is able or willing to make all the transfers shown in the ﬁgure. There is great variability in what they are able and willing to do for local people, as there is in the way in which cross-subsidies are structured with respect to the different social groups making up the rural population; workers, pensioners, social sphere workers, in-migrants, dachniki, shareholders, and non-shareholders. Rural people universally complain that they are receiving less help from the large farm sector than they did in the past and that services that they received free of charge previously now have to be paid for (Adukova, 1999: 209; Fadeeva, Nikulin, and Vinogradskii, 2002).

Wages in kind During the Stalin era peasant members of collective farms were rarely paid a money wage but had to subsist on the product of their household plot; if they were paid, this took place once a year after the delivery of state procurements. Nikita Khrushchev, who was leader during 1957–64, introduced a monthly wage for collective farmworkers and other monetary beneﬁts, such as pensions. It took several more years after these reforms for the wage relativities between agriculture and industry to improve, but by the 1980s there was a rough parity between agricultural and industrial wages and rural people could now afford to buy consumer goods, including televisions and refrigerators that until then had been the exclusive province of urban USSR. The improvement in rural wages and pensions led to a decline in rural people’s dependence on personal food production

Household Production, Large Farm Sector

109

KEY Transfer from large farms to household sector Transfer from household sector to large farms

Services:

In kind transfers: - In lieu of wages and dividends: animal feed, hay, young animals - Theft

- Transport - Ploughing - Haymaking - Marketing - Other benefits negotiated by trade unions for farm employees

Land (free or for rent): - Arable - Pastures - Hay meadows

Rural Households: - Farm employees - Pensioners - Social sphere workers

Labour

(but not dachniki and other non-registered households)

Political support

Land share

Fig. 5.2. Schematic diagram of the relationships between rural households and large farms that support personal food production.

but with the dawn of the new era in 1991 the situation with wages worsened. In the aftermath of the communist system’s collapse, the large farm economy was thrown into disarray, and is only now recovering. An immediate impact was that throughout Russia, including in the premier agricultural regions, money wages for agricultural labour disappeared, to be replaced by wages in kind. The restoration of money wages has been a slow process. Today, there are large farms that meet 70–100 per cent of their wage bill in roubles, but the more common situation is for money to make up only 15–50 per cent of the wage. Furthermore, compared with other sectors of employment, the average

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agricultural wage remains low. Whereas workers in ﬁnancial services and the oil and gas industry earn 20,500–43,500 roubles a month, in light industry and agriculture the average is 3,500–5,000 roubles (Izvestiya, 25 April 2006: 1–2). According to the Levada Centre, which monitors the standard of living in Russia, the average Russian household needs an income per family member of 11,700 roubles per month to lead a ‘normal life’. The agricultural wage falls far below this threshold and in many places struggles to exceed the ofﬁcial poverty line of 2,690 roubles, let alone the 5,800 roubles per head the Levada centre believes the more appropriate ﬁgure. Some of the shortfall in the agricultural wage is compensated for by its payment in kind, since the transfers of cereals, feed grains, and other agricultural produce are normally valued below market prices and it is easy for households to add value to them. In Chuvashia, for example, farmworkers are paid in milk—sometimes as much as six litres a month. Since nearly everyone has their own cow, the surplus is processed domestically into soured cream, curd cheese, and butter for sale in urban markets. Elsewhere, sacks of wheat paid to workers as part of their wage is made into bread for sale (a study by Serova and Khramova (2000) showed an increase of 11–12 per cent of the bread grains being taken for milling by independent households in the 1990s). Feed grains, meanwhile, are converted into meat and milk. Rural workers avoid the problem of other light industry workers who have to shift products for which there is often no market; a common sight for travellers along arterial routes is women and men selling anything from bicycles and toys to dishcloths, in which they have been paid in local factories. The advantage of the agricultural transfers is that the recipient households can either consume them directly or choose to convert them into saleable products.

Dividends in kind It is not only farmworkers who obtain some of the inputs they need for household food production from large farms. Transfers are made to a broad range of the rural population in lieu of rents and dividends owing on land shares allocated at the time of the land reforms of the early 1990s. As with wages, payments, if they are made, are invariably in kind—in the form of feed grains, meat, bread, vegetable oils, sugar, and, more occasionally, in services such as haymaking and transportation. Rural pensioners are the principal beneﬁciaries and the produce transferred in lieu of dividends or a rental payment provides pensioners such as Ana Petrovna with the feed grains that they need to keep a goat or cow and some hens and geese. Agricultural workers who were farm members at the time of the land reform are also beneﬁciaries of transfers in return for shares, but recent migrants, seasonal labourers, and the children of living shareholders who work on large farms have no entitlements. Normally, people who have left the district to take up work elsewhere are dropped from the list of beneﬁciaries. There are many anomalies surrounding the administration of shareholder rights in rural

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Plate 5.1. Agricultural workers in Stavropol krai selling on the cereals they receive in wages. This is an important source of feed grain for other rural households in the south.

Russia and critics’ observations that the relationship between large farms and pensioner shareholders, in particular, is exploitative are undoubtedly true (for example, the dividend or rent paid to pensioners is often less than that paid to worker-shareholders for the same amount of land). Furthermore, there are farms that make no payments at all (Allina-Pisano, 2002). Rural people in the districts included in this study did not, as a general rule, object to being paid their wages or dividends in kind, although they complained that the general level was too low. Where pensioners are concerned, many did not connect the support they received from large farms with their shareholder status; they simply assumed that the large farms were continuing to fulﬁl a general obligation to former workers, as they had done in the Soviet period. The managers of agricultural enterprises, for their part, did not contest the public discourse afﬁrming their ‘moral responsibility’ for pensioners and in some places they extended this obligation to public sector workers. Payments in kind, whether for wages, dividends or rent, give households the ﬂexibility to respond rapidly to market changes; for example, whereas in 2001 rural people in Saratov oblast and Stavropol krai used the cereals transferred to them by large farms to expand the numbers of pigs and beef cattle they had, by 2003 changes in price relativities meant that it was more advantageous for them to sell cereals without converting them into meat and dairy products. In the early 1990s the disappearance of money

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from the rural economy meant that payments in kind kept household production alive and, in the process, allowed rural households to survive. A decade later many of the same households were using these transfers strategically to respond to changes in the market and to generate an income that with due diligence and some luck could greatly exceed the average monthly agricultural wage.

Theft When we asked Raisa during an interview in Sanadar, Stavropol krai, in September 2003, where she got the feed grains for her eight cows, she replied without any hesitation or embarrassment, ‘I steal some and buy some’. Her attitude is typical of many in rural Russia who subscribe to the view that ‘everything belonging to the kolkhoz, belongs to me.’ Efendiev and Bolotina (2002) have made a detailed investigation of the accepted norms of behaviour in rural Russia in Belgorod oblast. Their survey found that only 33 per cent of the respondents believed it unacceptable for a milkmaid to help herself to milk or forage from her workplace. A majority, 52 per cent, while regretting the practice, thought it acceptable. One of our respondents who worked in the slaughterhouse of a collective farm in Saratov oblast for which he was paid a ‘miserly wage’ told us that he only worked there in order to be able to ‘skim’ meat. He claimed his employers knew about this and budgeted for it. It would appear that the tendency of rural dwellers to view agricultural enterprise resources as free goods has spilled over into the post-Soviet period. But times are changing; in the southern grain belt notices have appeared in ﬁelds warning of the penalties for theft, and private security ﬁrms and guard dogs are hired to patrol growing crops, although it is true that these measures are more against harvester-wielding organized gangs that can remove whole ﬁelds of maize or wheat overnight, than against individual rural households. But costconscious farm directors who have begun to lock and guard grain stores have their own workers in their sights. When taken together with the land and other environmental resources to which local people have access, the transfers made by large farms constitute a major prop for the household food economy. In the past decade, the existence of these transfers has been the principal reason why rural workers have been prepared to turn out to plough the ﬁelds of Russia’s large agricultural enterprises and to bring in the harvest. The estimates made by the large farm managers we interviewed in Russia’s central and southern farming regions of the share of the annual budget expended on cross-subsidy indicate that the cost need not be excessive (it ranged from 2% to 30%). The higher ﬁgure is for farms, such as one we will describe below in Novouzensk rural district, which runs a deﬁcit most years and puts much of its effort into keeping the household sector aﬂoat. From the point of view of large farms, making transfers in kind rather than paying money wages is a way of conserving cash that is needed to buy fuel and modernize technologies. This was a particularly important motivation during the years immediately after

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the USSR’s collapse and remains so today, even though the fortunes of many farms have begun to improve. By paying workers and shareholders in grain, hay, meat, vegetable oil, and butter instead of money, enterprises can adjust the proportion they market to the most tax-efﬁcient level (Kozlov, 2001a: 78). Other cross-subsidies are similarly in large farms’ self-interest; the extension of free or subsidized veterinary services to rural households, for example, helps large farms protect their own herds from contamination with diseases from village livestock. The reality is, of course, that the costs and beneﬁts of the interrelationship between large and small farming include intangibles such as the political and social capital it can earn for a farm’s director. The beneﬁts to the household sector are obvious, although there may be costs to individual households in lost opportunities to capitalize on land shares and in loss of independence.

Factors Inﬂuencing the Changing Economic Relationship Between Large Farms and Rural Households The ‘social contract’ struck between the large farm sector and the rural population was barely acknowledged during the Soviet period, with the result that it was not the subject of systematic investigation; farmworkers were supposed to give their labour to the collective as part of their contribution to socialist construction, not because they had been promised a piglet or feed grains for their cow. The practice of making transfers to households to support individual food production was a universal feature of ‘socialized agriculture’. A principal difference today is that the universality of the system has broken down and there are places where rural households have no ties at all with the large farm sector. These include both highly commercialized vegetable producers in the vicinity of large towns that do not need inputs from the large farm sector and households that have effectively been cast off by large farms and left to ‘go it alone’. These latter are in those parts of Russia, mainly in the non-black earth centre and the north, where large farming has been in terminal crisis since 1991. Figure 5.3 is a map of European Russia showing the distribution of economically unviable large farms or the ‘black holes’ in post-Soviet agricultural geography; in these regions the household sector cannot count on any signiﬁcant support from large farms. These stand in contrast to those regions where the relationship with large farms underpins specialization in the household sector. Between these extremes, the inﬂuence of the relationship with large farms is variable and depends upon speciﬁc local conditions. Figure 5.4 presents diagrammatically the combination of factors that affect the level of support large farms give the household sector. The top of the diagram (A) shows the circumstances under which a large farm might be expected to make signiﬁcant transfers to the household sector, and the bottom (B), the opposite. The motivation that lay behind the Soviet-era social contract between large and small farms is much the same today as it was in the past, only now it exists within the context of a market economy. This includes the existence of a labour market.

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Moscow oblast

Northern, Perm′ krai

Saratov oblast

Oblast boundary Stavropol′ krai

Depressed agricultural areas: ‘Black holes’ Problem areas Other agricultural areas Not applicable

Fig. 5.3. ‘Black holes’ in European Russia’s agricultural geography. Sources: Nefedova, 2003b: 137; Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavski, 2004.

There is a popular belief that the downsizing of large farms in the 1990s has resulted in the principal agricultural regions being awash with surplus labour. In reality, the opposite can be the case. Rural districts in close proximity to large cities that offer alternative employment to agricultural labourers, for example, can struggle to maintain a core workforce. In Lukhovitsy district, Moscow oblast, large farms have been forced to recruit workers from Ukraine and Moldova, even though the rural population is stable. The pressure on large farms in the district is to put together a competitive package of beneﬁts in order to keep a core labour force. This is in contrast to the situation in European Russia’s southern cereal belt where proximity to the heavily populated north Caucasus republics, combined with the war in Chechnya, has led to high levels of in-migration that have saturated the local labour market. Although, therefore, the surpluses produced by cereal enterprises in the south would allow them to make generous transfers to the household sector, they do not necessarily feel under pressure to do so. It is in

Household Production, Large Farm Sector

115

A Competition from private farmers: for labour and for land shares

Farm managers have traditional attitudes towards large farms’ role in local community

Good access to alternative employment for the rural population

Large crosssubsidies from enterprises to household production

Large farm economy healthy with a majority of large farms making a profit

Small or declining population with limited possibilities for the recruitment of seasonal labour

Household production complementary to large farm production; for example, pig and poultry production in regions where large farms concentrate on cereal monoculture

B Few viable private farmers in district

Farm managers hostile to the traditional role of supporting rural communities

Poor access to alternative employment

Limited crosssubsidies from enterprises to household production

Abundant labour force and/or possibilities to recruit seasonal and migrant labour

Household sector geared towards vegetable and fruit production and/or natural resource harvesting

Large farm economy in deficit

Fig. 5.4. Factors affecting the degree of cross-subsidy between the large and small farm sectors.

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the south that the trend towards replacing wages in kind by money wages is most advanced. The private farming sector struggles to match the cross-subsidies offered by former collective and state farms but some have been successful in attracting key workers away from agricultural enterprises by offering better work conditions and enhanced beneﬁts in kind. The greater pressure from private farms is on the land resources of the large farms. Viable private ‘peasant’ farms are most numerous in those parts of Russia that have the best resources for commercial cereal production and it is in these regions that the greatest inroads have been made into the landownership of the former collective and state farms. One response to the threat is for large farms to give their shareholders incentives not to withdraw their shares. These include the payment of enhanced dividends and extending other services to pensioners, in particular. Where competition between the large farm sector and private farmers is intense, household production is, potentially, the winner. Successful cereal-producing regions with large numbers of private farms are also places of ﬂourishing pig and poultry production in the household sector as a result of regular transfers of feed grains from cereal producers in lieu of dividends and wages. Pensioners in such regions tend to do better than their counterparts elsewhere in Russia since they hold the majority of shares in large farms. Those who are not able to use their dividend payments themselves sell them on in local markets, thus helping to sustain the livestock husbandry of others. By contrast, in places where the private farm movement has failed to take off, or has been suppressed, the pressure on the large farms to meet their obligations to shareholders, in particular to the elderly, is less, and this may contribute to smaller and irregular transfers. The relative health of the large farm economy has an obvious impact upon the level of cross-subsidy that can be made to the household sector, although its effect is complicated because of the tendency for many large enterprises to try to hide their surpluses to avoid tax. Thus a loss-making farm might, in reality, be in quite good shape, and using transfers in kind to disguise the size of its surplus. These farms need to be distinguished from those that are genuinely in a cycle of decline from which recovery is doubtful, and, also from those that have dedicated themselves to support of the household sector and have little interest in improving their performance. The situation with respect to proﬁt-making enterprises is also variable. There are successful farms that make substantial direct and indirect transfers to the household sector and give support to a broad base of rural people, citing their moral obligation to do so. In time, it is likely that market pressure will erode these attitudes. Other successful enterprises, those, for example, that by virtue of their status as specialist stockbreeding and experimental stations do not have shareholders or that are sufﬁciently proﬁtable to be able to pay their workers a high average money wage, have been able to cut back on the level of cross-subsidy. In Russia’s traditional breadbasket in the south, the tendency for the support traditionally given to the household sector to be eroded by the post-2000 recovery

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of the large farm sector is exacerbated by the attractiveness of large farms to outside investors who are unhampered by ‘moral’ obligations to local people. An example is MiG (Misha i Grisha), a company that has taken over a number of large enterprises in Stavropol krai. After each takeover, MiG downsizes the labour force, reorients production to cereal monoculture, and sells off loss-making enterprises, such as livestock farms. Part of the process involves ‘inviting’ shareholders to sign eleven-month contracts to leave their land shares with MiG—the eleven months obviates the necessity of registering the farms as cooperatives of private peasant farmers. Shareholders receive one ton of cereals per annum for their land share but ‘in recognition of the investment MiG has made in the land’, they now have to pay for it.

Variable Practice at the Local Level The factors shown in Fig. 5.4 interrelate in complex ways to produce a pattern of cross-subsidy speciﬁc to particular locales with the result that it is not always possible to predict which large farms will be generous and which will not. Places in which household production is heavily supported by the local large farm can stand cheek-by-jowl with places where little support is forthcoming because of differences in the management practices, the peculiarities of the local labour market, or physical conditions creating a comparative advantage in one form of household production over another. The best way to show the multifaceted character of the processes producing one outcome or another is to illustrate it with speciﬁc examples taken from the different regions included in this investigation.

‘Little Lord why don’t you help us anymore’? Divergent attitudes among farm managements in Lukhovitsy district In the village of Krasnaya Poima in Lukhovitsy district, Moscow oblast, we witnessed the following exchange between an old woman supervising half a dozen cows grazing on the roadside verge and the chairman of the local large farm, Poima NPO (nauchno-proizvoditel noe obedinenie). The old woman approached the chairman in his four-wheel drive with the question, ‘Why are you hurting us like this, my little lord? We love you so much, but you won’t take our milk. The inspector says the milk’s not good—but it is. We make sure the buckets are cold, so everything is ﬁne.’ Nikolai Ivanovich Isaenko, interrupted from the exposition he was giving his foreign visitor on the farm’s success, was taken aback by the old woman’s challenge but refused to give in to the pressure: N.I.: Do you have a lot of surplus milk? Surely not everyone has enough to sell? OLD WOMAN: Yes, everyone has milk to sell. We get a good half-ton a day from our cows. Nice creamy milk too. Go on, take it, we won’t haggle over the price.

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N.I.: I can’t take it myself. The quality isn’t good enough, there are bacteria . . . one bucket of your milk will spoil my whole batch. I’ll have a word with the Lukhovitsy dairy for you. Maybe they’ll take it. I’ll give you a truck to deliver it from the farm. OLD WOMAN: Well, go on then, have a word with them, lend us a hand. Where would we be without you?

Commenting on this exchange, Isaenko explains that the farm has negotiated a lucrative contract with a dairy in Moscow to supply it with milk for manufacture into children’s milk products. Until two years prior to our visit, the farm had bought milk from villagers that it added to its own and sold on to the local dairy in Lukhovitsy. With the new contract, the farm had had to stop because of the quality standards demanded by the new purchaser. The local authority had attempted to step into the breach by negotiating a deal for villagers with the local diary but this had failed because the prices were too low; the villagers, it turned out, preferred to try for higher prices in the local market and from selling to second home owners. The encounter between the old woman and Poima’s director shows that rural people’s expectation is still that the large farm should support the household sector. Isaenko, who has been the director of the farm for over ten years (previously he was ﬁrst secretary of the district communist party), for his part falls effortlessly into the role of local barin (overlord) so long as it does not compromise his farm’s business. Thus, he is prepared to lend villagers the farm’s milk lorry to transport milk free of charge to the local dairy but he will not compromise on his refusal to buy villagers’ milk. This same director has taken the unpopular step of securing the large farm’s stores against theft, an action that has boosted the farm’s sales of mixed feed to local people from 400 to 3,000 tons per annum. NPO Poima is a proﬁt-making farm, the most successful in Lukhovitsy, that beneﬁts from its location near to the Moscow conurbation. It has 5,740 head of cattle, including 2,250 milk cows, which by Russian standards produce high milk yields, and a successful market garden business producing vegetables for the capital. It makes sufﬁcient from livestock husbandry and vegetables to be able to pay its workers a relatively good wage, 2,800 roubles a month in 2001. Seventy per cent of the wage is paid in money and the remainder in kind. Isaenko has clear views about the limits of his obligation to the local population. He is prepared to offer support to households that are using their plots for genuine subsistence but he makes households that sell a lot of their produce pay for any services his farm offers. The principal contribution Krasnaya Poima farm makes to the household sector is 150 hectares of the farm’s arable for potato allotments, offered free to current and former farmworkers and adjusted in size to the age composition of the recipient’s household (adults receive 5 sotok per head and children 3). Isaenko’s workforce ploughs the land and marks out boundaries (the ﬁelds thus used change each year). The farm has stopped providing manure to fertilize the land but it does still sell seed potatoes to workers at ‘a nominal price’. Because the farm is a ‘scientiﬁc breeding station’, Isaenko does not have shareholders but he does

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Plate 5.2. A householder’s cow having its feet checked by a large-farm vet in Krasnaya Poima, Lukhovitsy district.

give an annual bonus to farmworkers and to ‘his’ pensioners: 100 kg of cabbages, 100 kg of potatoes, 50 kg of carrots, and 50 kg of sugar beet. The approximately one-third of the workers’ wages given in kind takes the form of feed grains and hay. Additionally, Isaenko sells young bullocks for fattening to anyone who wants to take one. Isaenko sees himself as a progressive farm director who has embraced the principles of the market. He has tried to put the relationship with the household sector on a transparent footing and, where possible, he has introduced market elements; for example, he charges for the rent of hay meadows and workers caught stealing from the feed-grain stores are charged for what they have taken at market prices. Tractor drivers who want to earn extra money by ploughing fellow-villagers’ plots have to obtain a licence and pay 100 roubles per 100 sq. m ploughed. Given the size of Krasnaya Poima’s turnover, the cost of cross-subsidies, to use Isaenko’s words, is ‘trivial’, but the relationship with local people cannot be similarly dismissed. In an unguarded moment Isaenko admitted that he would like to see village cattle slaughtered because of the threat they pose to the farm’s herd and he describes as ‘disgraceful’ the use of household production for commercial purposes or to support relatives in town. Under Isaenko’s management, Krasnaya Poima has gone a long way down the road of transforming the relationship with the household sector but has not withdrawn from it entirely. Krasnaya Poima has a large labour force, which reﬂects its relatively low level of mechanization compared with equivalent Western large

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0

Zone I – Alluvial lowlands

Zone II – Fertile river terraces Kolkhoz im Lenina

R.

Zone III – Watershed

Ok

a

Sov. Krasnaya Poima

Sov. Priokskii

Lukhovitsy AO Osetr

Sov. Polyankii

Beloomut

Sov. Lukhovitskii AO Krasnaya Oktobrya R. Ok a *Sov. Nizhnemavlovskii

Sov. VrachevoGorki

Sov. Astapovo

Zone I

Kolkhoz im Ilicha

Boundaries of large-scale farms (*now dissolved)

AO Grigo'revskoe

Zone II

Industrial and living zones attached to Lukhovitsy Lukhovitsky leskhoz Alluvial land parcels belonging to Krasnaya Poima & Priokskii agricultural enterprises

AO Menta

Zone III

Fig. 5.5. The physical zonation of Lukhovitsy district, Moscow oblast. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

farms but, even so, the farm has to employ seasonal labour and the army to bring in the vegetable harvest. This, no doubt, puts pressure on Isaenko to maintain a positive relationship with local people and limits how far down the road he can go towards disengagement with household production. NPO Krasnaya Poima beneﬁts from its situation on the ﬂoodplains that occupy the left bank of the River Oka (Zone I in Fig. 5.5 and see Table 5.1). The alluvial soils and fertile water-meadows give the farm a comparative advantage in producing vegetables and in milk and meat production. It also beneﬁts from its location relative to Moscow. Lukhovitsy district stands astride north–south trunk routes, yet it is distant enough from the capital not to face competition for land from urban property developers who, closer to the city, have undermined

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the farming economy. Household producers are similarly well placed, although domestic dairy and meat production would be more developed were transfers from the large farm sector greater. The situation of households in Beloomut, a settlement of urban type, is a case in point. It developed during the Soviet period as a centre for household cheese and milk production when there was a buoyant local market (the settlement had a clothing factory with a large labour force) and when households enjoyed better access than they have today to pastures on the alluvial ﬂoodplain and could buy forage and mixed feed cheaply. Today, dairying is in decline in Beloomut and the emphasis has shifted in household production towards potatoes and other roots such as carrots, which do well in the sandy soils, and the cucumbers and radishes for which the district is renowned. With the exception of potatoes where households rely on large farm plots, vegetables and root crops can be produced independently. In the villages on the rightbank terraces of the River Oka, the household sector has severed its links with large farms (Zone II in Fig. 5.5). In the cucumber and cabbage ‘provinces’ of Lukhovitsy, described in Chapter 3, it is possible to make sufﬁcient from trade in vegetables to be able to dispense with the low average wages farm labour offers. It is no coincidence that one of the agricultural enterprises on the left bank—Nizhne Maslovo—has dissolved while as a result of division during the land reform in the early 1990s, Polyanka (see Table 5.1) was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2001 because of accumulated debts and the difﬁculty of recruiting labour. The third agricultural zone (Zone III in Fig. 5.5) occupies high ground in the south and west of Lukhovitsy district. It is a region of classic mixed cereal and milk production on large farms and of potatoes, meat, and milk in the household sector. The leading farm in the zone is SPK Astapova (Table 5.1) which, although a much smaller operation, is similar to Krasnaya Poima in being proﬁt-making and in paying its workers a money wage (in 2001 the average wage on the farm was 2,500 roubles per month). The farm’s director, Vladimir Andreevich Antipov, is different from Isaenko of Krasnaya Poima in being a strong critic of market reforms and in his clearly expressed desire to return to a time before Russian agriculture was ‘sabotaged’ by Western advisers. Whereas Isaenko’s attitude to the household sector could be described as ﬁrm but tolerant, Antipov is overtly hostile. He is an opponent of land reform, which ﬁnds expression in his refusal to recognize the rights of shareholders to a say in running the farm or to a share of the farm’s proﬁts. He is convinced that small farms, whether in the household or private ‘peasant’ sector, will disappear once the government has ‘come to its senses’ and resumed proper support of collectivist farms. Despite these attitudes, Antipov does make some of the farm resources available for the household sector, but exclusively to his own workers. They receive 15,000 sq.m plots in the collective’s ﬁelds to grow potatoes and can buy forage crops at subsidized prices. Unlike Isaenko, Antipov ‘turns a blind eye’ to farmworkers using farm trucks and tractors to earn extra money moonlighting, and although he complains about theft from his forage stores he has not sealed them off, pleading lack of resources to do so. He makes the farm’s veterinary services available to the local herd, but insists

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Table 5.1. Selected indices of production on large agricultural organizations and household farms in Lukhovitsy rural district, 2000 .. .. .. Name of agricultural .. .. organization .. .. .. Principal specialization .. .. .. No. workers .. Average monthly wage (roubles) .. .. Agricultural land (ha) .. .. of which arable .. Large livestock (no.) .. .. Large livestock/worker (no.) .. Milk yield/cow (kg/p.a.) .. .. Annual production .. .. Milk (tonnes) .. .. Meat (dead weight in tons) .. Cereals (tons) .. .. Potatoes (tons) .. Vegetables (tons) .. . 1 In ownership of households located ... . on territory of each large farm .. .. Arable land (ha) .. Large livestock (no.) .. .. Pigs (no.) .. .. Sheep and goats (no.) .. Specialization .. .. .. .

Krasnaya. Poima

.. .. Astapova .. Polyanka .. .. .. NPO SPKh OAO .. .. .. .. . . Vegetables, .. Cereals, .. Vegetables, milk, meat ... meat, milk ... potatoes .. . .. 810 386 133 .. .. .. 1,508 2,774 2,033 .. . .. 3,104 .. 5,632 6,916 .. .. 2,327 5,935 .. 2,094 .. .. . .. 5,740 2,576 525 .. . .. .. 7 7 4 .. .. 6,235 4,101 .. 2,736 .. .. .. .. .. .. . 14,017 6,401 717 .. .. . .. .. 2,436 1,489 236 . . .. .. 180 5,278 931 .. .. 879 959 .. 1,227 .. .. 1,521 .. 15,453 — .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 305 280 174 .. .. 150 159 77 .. .. .. .. 200 310 20 .. .. .. .. 240 220 100 . . Vegetables, .. Dairy, meat .. Vegetables, .. .. potatoes, .. potatoes .. potatoes .. dairy, meat .. 1 This excludes urban registered households with permanent residences or second homes. Sources: Unpublished materials of Lukhovitsy district statistical department 2001; authors’ own survey, 2001.

on payment if veterinarians are called out at night. The key to these concessions, which do not add up to much, is the difﬁcult local labour market. Young people have been attracted away from Astapova to ﬁnd jobs in Lukhovitsy and further aﬁeld, with the result that the farm has been forced to employ in-migrants from the former socialist republics (it employed seventeen Moldovans in 2001, whom it accommodated in the settlement’s social club). Inhabitants of Astapovo who were interviewed say that they ‘live normally’ on the basis of their wages or pensions and selling small quantities of potatoes and meat, but few can generate the large incomes possible in lowland Lukhovitsy.

‘Looking after our peasants’ in Bassanovka, Novouzensk district ZAO Galovskoe, a ‘closed agricultural company’, is located in Bassanovka rural administration in the far north-east corner of Novousensk district, which is itself at the eastern extremity of Saratov oblast (Fig. 5.6). The district is in the dry steppe

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KEY Ershovskii District District boundary Kolkhoz boundary Road River

Talovka

Bassanovka Rural Authority

Kolkhoz “Road to Communism”

Kolkhoz “Ray of October”

Novouzensk District

Kolkhoz “Zhidkova”

Fig. 5.6. ZAO Galovskoe, Bassanovka, Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast. Source: Karta zemlepol zovanii novouzenskogo raiona saratovskoi oblasti, 1990: sheet 13.

and it was converted to arable during Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign, which sought to make the semi-arid interior of the USSR into a major cereal-producing province to complement the traditional breadbasket of the north Caucasus and Ukraine in the 1960s. The collective farm established in Bassanovka as a result of the campaign has shared the chequered history of other farms in the Virgin Lands—bumper harvests coming every two to three years out of ten are interspersed with years of average harvests or of drought-induced failures. In this area of Saratov oblast average yields are 0.1–1.2 tons/ha for spring wheat (compared with 3 tons/ha in Stavropol krai, 5 tons/ha in Germany, and 6 tons/ha in Holland

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(Nefedova, 2003b: 271)). Under the command administrative system, the farm was not allowed to fail, despite such low yields. In the post-Soviet period when places similar to Novouzensk district in neighbouring Kazakhstan have reverted to pastoralism, ZAO Galovskoe is hanging on, but with a changed rationale. Whereas during the Soviet period, the primary call on the harvest was the fulﬁlment of state procurements, today the ﬁrst call on the harvest is the local population—the farmworkers, pensioners, and social sphere workers who live in the rural district— and institutions such as the school and the club. The social contract between the large farms and the households in Bassanovka is strong, with the household and large farm sectors operating as a closed system providing vital inputs to each other. Occasional bumper harvests, which allow Galovskoe to pay off its debts and to replace worn-out technologies, have meant that the large farm has been able to avoid bankruptcy. In average harvest years it beneﬁts from being able to reduce its sales and to adjust its income to the bare minimum needed to continue operations for the forthcoming year. The guarantee of transfers of feed grains has meant that the household sector has been able to produce substantial surpluses of pork and beef and to sustain a reasonable livelihood for households in all but the worst harvest years, in this environmentally challenging region. The key to the reproduction of this mutually beneﬁcial system is the husband and wife ‘team’ of Vladimir Pavlevich, the director of ZAO Galovskoe, and Nina Valilevna, the head of Bassanovka rural administration. Against the environmental odds Galovskoe, under Vladimir Pavlevich’s direction, continues to put the maximum amount of land under the plough every year even though rarely can he count on a harvest of more than 12 centners (where 1 centner equals 100 kg). In 1999 it dropped to 1.3 centners. Cereal cultivation has become more difﬁcult since the collapse of the Soviet Union; the farm can no longer afford to irrigate, and has to grapple with locust swarms that, with the collapse of agriculture over the border in Kazakhstan, have re-emerged as a problem and result in losses of, on average, 17 per cent of the harvest. In order to make Galovskoe proﬁtable Vladimir Pavlevich would have to sack the majority of his 308 strong labour force, reduce the sown area drastically, and borrow money to purchase labour-saving technologies. He does not believe that this would be ‘morally defensible’ because it would undermine the lucrative household economy that supports the local population. Running the farm as he does, he is able to produce sufﬁcient most years to pay his workers their wages in kind and shareholders a dividend, as well as to fulﬁl what he sees as his more general obligations to the local community. Nina Valilevna plays a large role in negotiating transfers and identifying particularly needy households. At an average of 300 roubles, wages on ZAO Galovskoe are low compared with the farms in Lukhovitsy district, and are paid entirely in kind. ‘Dividend’ payments are made annually to ‘shareholders’ who in this remote place appear to include everyone, regardless of whether they have ever worked on the farm. So long as the spring wheat yields 10 centners/ha, agricultural workers receive a ‘dividend’ against their putative land share of 6 centners of grain, pensioners

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4 centners and social sphere workers 3 centners. If the yield falls below this threshold, anything left over after seed grain has been kept back for the forthcoming year is shared among people who can pay. The farm marks out arable plots for potato cultivation in its ﬁelds, but because it is in everyone’s interest to maximize the cereal harvest rent is charged on them using an upward sliding scale starting at 10 roubles per 100 sq.m and rising to 25 roubles for households renting more than 200 sq.m. The farm also rents out to its workers extra arable allotments, which can be irrigated, in the Uzun valley. The village herd is permitted onto the farm’s stubble ﬁelds for one week after the harvest, and hay mowing is permitted on the slopes of the ravines that criss-cross the farm. Finally, the farm pays for all burials in the village and provides free meat for wedding and funeral feasts. The 749 inhabitants of Bassanovka rural administration beneﬁt from their relationship with the large farm more than do their counterparts in Lukhovitsy rural district. Nina Valilevna conﬁrmed that households in the settlements in the administration are able to live well on the income they make from livestock husbandry, even though they are remote from any major markets and have to rely upon visiting buyers to sell their livestock products. Households with three head of cattle, two calves, nine pigs for fattening, and thirty to sixty fowls are the norm, and in 2001, many were planning to expand the number of pigs they held because a good harvest was predicted. Nina Valilevna and Vladimir Pavlevich are proud of their combined efforts to support the local community, from which, it should be noted, they also personally beneﬁt. They have their own cattle and pig business supported by transfers from the large farm which, together with what they earn in formal employment, gives them a joint family income well above the average for the region. Their attitudes are far removed from those of Isaenko of Krasnaya Poima.

‘Agricultural organizations’, ‘private farms’, and the household economy in Russia’s traditional breadbasket In contrast to the semi-arid regions east of the River Volga, the heat–moisture balance in the extreme south of European Russia is favourable for the cultivation of winter wheat and other high-yielding cereals, although there is an ever-present danger of desiccating winds from the deserts in Kazakhstan in the summer months that can damage standing crops and remove topsoil. It is in the south that the majority of Russia’s proﬁt-making agricultural enterprises are to be found and that the private farmer movement can be said to have taken off. The proﬁt to be made from cereal monoculture is the reason why this region has become the scene of the type of investor takeovers described in the previous chapter. More than anywhere else in Russia, large farms in the south are under pressure to improve efﬁciency if they are to survive. SPK Rodina (‘The Motherland Cooperative’) is a large agricultural enterprise occupying the greater part of Novoaleksandrovsk district in the north-west of Stavropol krai. This district is the eastern extension of Russia’s

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premier cereal-producing region. Novoaleksandrovsk district has a population of 5,590, mostly concentrated in the stanitsa that gives it its name. In addition to Rodina, there are many private farms in the district. The chairman, the former vice-chairman of Rodina when it was a state farm, took over the running of the farm in 1998 and inherited several million roubles of debt. Under Dubin’s management the farm has been turned around; yields of more than 25 centners/ha are not uncommon now and livestock holdings have been restructured to sustainable levels (which has involved the elimination of sheep). Dubin describes himself as a ‘strong disciplinarian’ and he attributes the farm’s recent success to his policy of zero tolerance with respect to the punctuality and sobriety of his workforce. He is proud of the fact that he has been able to expand the farm’s labour force to 1,000 from the 400 employed in 1998. This achievement, which in any other advanced agricultural system would be evidence of gross inefﬁciency, has a different meaning for Dubin. He believes that it is incumbent upon him to ‘look after our own’, to which end he is prepared to pursue of policy of ‘paying less but employing more’. Like many other people claiming Cossack ethnic identity in the region, Dubin has an exclusive understanding of what constitutes ‘our own’, so that his philanthropy is conditional. Rodina’s labour force is under threat from the dynamic and, from Dubin’s point of view, predatory private farm sector in the district which leaves him with no alternative but to take the obligation to shareholders seriously. In 2004, 3,250 of the land shares in Rodina belonged to pensioners and a further 400 to members of the workforce. When it is considered that the 600 additional workers Dubin has taken on since 1998 are the ‘sons and daughters’ of existing shareholders, his labour policy begins to make more sense as a strategy to secure the longterm territorial integrity of the farm. Thirty-four per cent of the farm’s annual proﬁt (paid in kind in the form of cereals, sugar beet, and vegetable oil) is distributed as dividends to shareholders. There is a ceiling of three tons p.a. (in 2004, shareholders received two and a half tons as the harvest had been reduced by dust storms in high summer) in order to enable the farm to renew equipment and buy new machinery. Additionally, the farm pays the funeral expenses of shareholders and is prepared to make them modest interest-free loans. The farm also offers a variety of services to its workers and shareholders, including ploughing allotments and the hire of vehicles, and sells subsidized feed grains and ﬂour. These various transfers allow ‘entitled households’ to keep a range of livestock, although shortages of pasture put the emphasis on small livestock, such as pigs and poultry. Nadiya, for example, explained how the combined value of her own, her husband’s, and her father’s shares earns the household 9 tons of cereals, 40 kg of vegetable oil, and 50 kg of sugar. Nadiya left Rodina to work as a cook for a private farmer, but she did not take her shares with her. She is paid in kind at her new place of work, earning the equivalent of half a share (in Novoaleksandrovsk, the value of the land share, pai, is the common unit in which remuneration is

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discussed). These inputs allow the household to keep two cows (which produce two calves for fattening), ﬁve pigs, more than a dozen geese and chickens and to have feed grains left over to sell on to other households. Sale of meat and poultry and cereals allows the household to make a ‘reasonable’ income that exceeds the value of the household’s joint earnings. Nadiya also grows tomatoes and vegetables on a small allotment next to the house, which Rodina ploughs for her. Like other shareholders in Rodina, Nadiya has signed an agreement to leave her land share with the farm for ten years. This gives the large farm some protection against loss of its land, at least in the short term but, as the chairman recognizes, the best defence is to maintain the incentive for shareholders to remain loyal. The dividend Rodina pays its shareholders sets the level for all large producers in Novoaleksandrovsk district. Among private farmers only those who are able to match the payments made by the large farm can succeed in the market for shareholder land. Yuri Kuznetsev, who has accumulated 100 shares, giving him a unit of over 400 ha, farms around the settlement of Mokraya Balka. He grows winter wheat (obtaining yields of 20–45 centners/ha), barley, and sunﬂowers. Kuznetsev pays his shareholders a dividend of three tons of barley and wheat, and sugar which compares favourably with the package offered by Rodina. Furthermore, since the number of his shareholders is smaller than Rodina’s he is able to give them more personal attention than the large farm. One pensioner couple cited this as the principal advantage of transferring land shares to private farmers; for example, they are phoned regularly to ask what they need. Kuznetsev, like other private farmers, pays his workers exclusively in kind (three tons of barley and two of wheat) but converts this into money for them by taking it back to sell on their behalf, thus reducing his farm’s tax bill. Another farmer is Vladimir Zaitsev who has a 500-ha farm. Zaitsev’s farm is made up of his own land shares and those of his brother, the accountant, and two sleeping partners, plus a large quantity of land rented from the local authority. Zaitsev hires nine workers whom he pays a monthly wage of ﬁfty roubles and a 7 per cent share of the harvest. Zaitsev claims that people prefer to work for private farmers because pay and conditions are better than on Rodina. The transfers in kind that Zaitsev makes to his workers and shareholders allow them to keep up to ﬁve pigs which, assuming that four are sold, generates a healthy income that at 2003 prices was greater than the value of the cereal transfers. Novoaleksandrovsk provides an example of the way in which the private farm sector plays a role in the character and volume of cross-subsidy between the large and small farm sectors. Despite the fact that Rodina is a successful large farm that has little difﬁculty recruiting labour, it cannot cut back on the cross-subsidies it makes to the household sector in the way the large farms in Lukhovitsy district are able to, despite their far less favourable labour market. The rural population is ultimately the beneﬁciary, but only that section of it that holds shares—just oneﬁfth of Novoaleksandrovsk’s population. The local authority accountant described how, with a monthly income of 850 roubles and effectively no support from

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Rodina (she is able to buy straw and lucerne but only at market prices), she has difﬁculty making ends meet. In the past, under the previous chairman, anyone from the local community was able to take a piglet for fattening and could buy subsidized feed-grains from the farm. Both large farms and to a lesser extent private farms invest in public works. Proﬁt-making large farms, for example, quite often help rebuild local churches, repair school buildings and clubs, and provide the staples for school meals. Although these public works, in theory, beneﬁt everyone, there are circumstances, especially in the south, where this is not the case. As an example, Kuznetsev pays for a school bus to take children from Mokraya Balka to the distant school but he will not permit this service to be used by the children of the Korean in-migrant families in the village. In the next chapter, we discuss the ways in which ethnicity is a factor in the development of the household farming sector in different parts of Russia. Before this, we review one ﬁnal example of how the relationship with large agricultural enterprises affects household production by examining what happens when the collapse of large-scale farming leaves households having to go it alone, without any support. The example is drawn from the former Komi-Permyak autonomous okrug in the north of Perm oblast.

‘On their own’: household farms in the depopulating peripheries of northern Russia The rural districts located in the north of Perm oblast in what was until 2004 the Komi-Permyak Autonomous Oblast are ﬁrmly included in one of Russian agriculture’s ‘black holes’ shown in Fig. 5.3. The current population of Kosa district is 9,247 and consists of a core population of Komi-Permyaks, plus inmigrants who came here either as involuntary exiles and prisoners of the Stalinist Gulag in the 1930s to 1950s or voluntarily from the 1960s attracted by high wages in the timber industry. The majority of the newcomers to the region worked as lumberjacks and were sustained by food transported up the River Kama as part of the ‘Northern Shipment’ and by locally produced food from state farms that were introduced into this otherwise unpromising region for agriculture speciﬁcally for the purpose of supporting other primary industries. With the help of central subsidies, these state farms were able to satisfy much of the local demand for meat and dairy products, while the workers in the timber and allied industries supplemented their diet by growing vegetables on their allotments. Members of state and collective farms, who were mostly local people, grew vegetables and potatoes but were able also to use their privileged access to their parent farms’ fodder crops, and to the abundant hay meadows along the northern rivers and in forest clearings, to keep a cow and some pigs. The withdrawal of state subsidy from the agricultural sector with the ending of central planning has meant that, almost without exception, large farming has collapsed in this region of Perm

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oblast and with it has gone the support it used to give to the household economy (Pallot and Moran, 2000). Kosinskii sovkhoz is an example. It is situated to the north-west of the district capital. In 2002, the sovkhoz just about existed, but it was a shell compared with former times. Whereas in the past it had sown 1,000 ha of cereals and feed grains every year, in 2002 the two brigades that remained on the farm had been able to sow just 200 ha to clover and 50 to hardy cereals and they were planning to cut hay from a further 50 ha of water-meadow. Of the remaining land, 250 ha had brieﬂy been transferred to the local authority for redistribution but after one year it has been returned to the sovkhoz. This land together with other unploughed hectares had been abandoned to the forest. One brigade worked out of the village of Nizhne Kosa, which has a population of 150 Komi-Permyaks. The population has no alternative but to subsist on personal crop and livestock husbandry—there are ﬁfty to sixty cows in the village, at least one per household—and natural resource harvesting. The common refrain heard in rural Russia, ‘We don’t live, we just exist’, rang true when uttered by the brigade leader in this remote village. Vladimir Snigirev explained that the brigade was twenty-ﬁve strong but as the members received no pay, few turn up for work. The brigade had managed to sow 70 ha of oats and wheat in June (May is still too cold to sow in this part of Russia) that had produced a yield of 10 centners/ha. This entire crop is used to feed the brigade’s ninety head of beef cattle, its sole source of income for the year. The previous year, the brigade had had twice the number of cattle to fatten and several litters of piglets. The piglets had been given to the twenty-ﬁve workers as their wage. This year the workers would be given a calf each and a share in any money earned by selling beef cattle to the meat combine in the regional capital, Kudymkar. The members of the brigade are all shareholders in the sovkhoz although, as Snigirev observed, there was not much to share and the land had, in any case, reverted to forest. As for dividends, the right to use the brigade’s tractor or horse could count for this. Vladimir Snigirev, a trained tractor driver, said that he was considering quitting the farm to work for a local entrepreneur who owns several shops, including the bakery, in Kosa. As nobody had come forward to take over the brigade, it was clear that in 2002 we were witnessing the dying embers of Kosinskii sovkhoz. From this point on, the members of Snigirev’s brigade would have to get on without the help of the farm. This means that they will have to try to make some money by collecting and selling mushrooms and berries from the forests or cutting hay for pensioners. Like so many households in the north, they will have to feed their cows on an exclusive diet of grass and hay all year round. In short, the collapse of the sovkhoz will mean the ﬁnal reversion of the village to a natural economy based on the cultivation of hardy roots and vegetables and the limited number of livestock that can be supported by natural forage sources. The future for the majority of rural people in the north of Perm krai, whether they previously were employed in state farms or forest enterprises, is bleak,

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but there are some exceptions. Further on along the road from Nizhne Kosa is Poroshevo, a rural administration of 600 people. In the Soviet period the sovkhoz in Poroshevo had several livestock farms and a herd of 1,600 cattle, but these were all sold off or distributed to villagers in 1996 (each received one cow and a calf). Since then, ﬁfty workers have remained on the farm’s books but their employment consists of mowing hay for ten to eleven pensioners in the village for twenty-ﬁve roubles a day. All that remains of the farm is ﬁfteen horses. Meanwhile, 30 per cent of the former arable land has been lost to forest regeneration. The remainder has been saved from this fate largely as a result of the attentions of the villagers who use it for rough grazing and mowing hay. The majority of households in Poroshevo grow potatoes, cabbages, and carrots for home consumption and sell meat in markets in Solikamsk and Berezniki but their principal source of income is horse-breeding which, after the demise of the sovkhoz, took off in the village. As agricultural enterprises collapsed in the district and people who previously had relied on their parent farm or forest organization to deliver hay and fuel wood now had to gather it themselves, Poroshevans responded by ﬁrst rearing horses for their own needs and then supplying surrounding villages. Their business has only been strengthened by the rising price of diesel fuel, which make tractors an expensive luxury in this region. By the standard of the north, Poroshevo is ﬂourishing; the village school has thirty pupils and houses are in a good state of repair. Poroshevo is an exception in having identiﬁed a local niche market. The majority of villages in the north of Perm krai resemble Nizhne Kosa more than Poroshevo. The collapse of large enterprises has placed household production at the centre of household reproduction. This is not unusual in post-Soviet Russia but households in the north do not have the local markets or the subsidized inputs that have allowed production elsewhere in Russia to take a commercial turn. One lifeline for these households is natural resource harvesting which can produce a money income to supplement the social transfers that keep money circulating even in these most remote of places (Moran, 2001, 2004). As our examples show, the relationship with the large farm sector is a key element in the vitality of the household sector in Russia. With deeper market penetration, the balance of advantage in the relationship must turn against the latter. This is already evident in places dominated by agri-enterprises, such as in the environs of urban agglomerations, where wages have largely replaced payment in kind and other transfers are focused exclusively on a contracting body of pensioners and shareholding farm employees. Similarly, but for different reasons, in marginal farming regions the dissolution of large farms has reduced the level of cross-subsidy the household sector can expect from large farms; ‘support’ in these places takes the form of looting what remains of their resources and squatting on their land. The loosening of ties does not necessarily spell the demise of all household production, however. Given a good location relative to urban markets, household producers can do well supplying niche markets for

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fruit, root crops, and vegetables. At the other end of the commercial spectrum, there is little outside threat to the natural economy of those households that continue to inhabit Russia’s remote and inhospitable environments other, that is, than the ‘natural’ process of gradually dying out. In the middle ground between these two poles, the old symbiosis between the large and small farm sector still exists with local people expecting to get some support for production from their local large farm and the large farm, for its part, expecting the rural labour force to turn out to work its ﬁelds. This relationship has resulted in the remarkable ability of both the former collective and state farms and the household sector to survive in the new market economy.

Appendix The extract here is from the collective agreement made between trade union representatives and the management of AO Lotoshino (an agricultural organization of the closed type, a former collective farm). The previous sections of the agreement included a statement of the farm’s targets, and agreed work plans and wage rates, and the sections following details of health and safety policies and of the penalties for turning up to work drunk or late and for theft.

Section 3. The Social Development of the Work Collective In order to create the necessary conditions for the high productivity of labour, to increase the workforce’s level of activity, cultural development, and health and leisure, the management and trade union agree to the following:

r To sell every worker and pensioner a bull calf for fattening r To sell every worker and pensioner 30 litres of milk a month at cost price r To sell every worker 6 kilograms, and every pensioner 3 kilograms, of meat six times a year on national holidays at a price agreed by the management and trade union

r To sell 15 kilograms of meat for special occasions: weddings, funerals, army mobi-

r r r r r

lization, and jubilees. (Rates: Funerals: 500 roubles for workers and pensioners, and 200 roubles for the children and parents of workers. For jubilees for people over 55–60 years of age who have worked for 30 years—500 roubles; 25–30 years—400 roubles; 20–25 years—300 roubles; up to 20 years—200 roubles) During periods of intense ﬁeldwork the management and trade union will organize a ﬁeld canteen to feed workers free of charge twice a day for which it will make available a specially adapted vehicle To sell piglets and calves at subsidized prices Provide free transport for workers called up to serve in the army and for funerals (rate: 100 roubles) Compensation for accidents, such as ﬁre—500 roubles Free transport to hospital in Moscow

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r Dig grave free of charge for workers or pensioners r Money for veterans of 9th May an agreed sum of money r Sell workers organic manure at an agreed sum per one ton r Give material aid in cases of absence from work due to illness for more than two months, 500 roubles

r Make a tractor available to plough allotments.

6 Ethno-cultural Differentiation in Household Production Agricultural-cultural Islands and Household Production Russia is a multi-ethnic country with more than two hundred different ‘ofﬁcially recognized’ ethnic groups. Of these, twenty-seven have been given administrative recognition in the form of national republics, which together with non-ethnically based oblasts and krais (regions and territories) make up the Russian Federation. The Great Russians are numerically the most dominant group accounting for 80 per cent of the population. Next come the Tatars at 5.5 million, or 4 per cent of the total, and then Ukrainians, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Chechens, Armenians, and other much less numerous groups. Soviet nationality policy did much to preserve ethnic identities in Russia, even though these were supposed to be transcended by a higher ‘Soviet socialist’ identity. When the USSR collapsed it did so along ethnic lines, and the post-Soviet Russian government was forced to accept ethnoterritorialism as an organizing principle of the new federal state (Smith, 1990, 1999). The major nationalities are not spatially discrete; many members of the most numerous nationalities live outside their republic and in only a minority of the national republics is the titular ethnic group the majority population. However, at lower scales, the picture is different and spatial segregation along ethnic lines can be marked, especially in rural areas. The southern steppe, describing an arc stretching from the Ukrainian border in the west to the regions beyond the River Volga in the east is, in fact, a veritable ethnic mosaic. Travellers who visited the southern and eastern steppe of European Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries commented upon the variety of national and religious groups of different descent settled in the area. Apart from the Russians who had come south during the protracted conquest of the steppe, people were to be found there of German, Swedish, Armenian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Walachian, Moldavian, Polish, Jewish, and Greek origin together with the descendants of the traditional steppe dwellers, the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Kirghiz, Kalmyks, and Mordvinians. The ethnic diversity of the settlers in the steppe was matched by the diversity of their cultural mores and religions. The southern steppe became a refuge for non-conformist groups from Europe such as the Moravian brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites, or from within Russia,

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such as the Dukhobors and Old Believers. These coexisted with members of the Russian Orthodox Church and the ‘pagan’ former nomads. The duc de Richelieu in a report to the tsar of a tour of the southern steppe at the beginning of the nineteenth century made the observation: Never sire, in any part of the world, have there been nations so different in manners, languages, customs and dress living within so restricted a space. The Nogais occupy the left bank of the Molotschna, families from Great Russia the right bank, then higher up are the Mnemonists, facing the Germans, half Lutheran, half Catholic: higher up again the Tolmak, the Little Russians, members of the Greek religion, then the Russian sect the Dukhoboitsi. (Quoted in Pallot and Shaw, 1990: 79)

As the duc de Richelieu’s report indicates, the various ethnic and religious groups inhabiting the steppe retained their cultural distinctiveness and, as each group generally occupied a separate settlement, they remained geographically separate as well. Such was the distinctiveness of these groups that they can be said to have formed ‘culture islands’ in the steppe similar to the ones observed by W.M. Kollmorgen (1941) in the American South. Thus, on an investigative tour of Russia Baron von Haxthausen observed of German settlers in the Volga Basin: ‘We felt at once transported to the valleys of the Vistula, in Westphalia, so thoroughly German was everything around us, not merely the people . . . a landscape painter might very well call the scenery German’ (quoted in Pallot and Shaw, 1990: 80). In the decades before the 1917 Revolution some groups left Imperial Russia (the Mennonites, for example, migrated to North and South America when the government rescinded their exemption from military service), but discrete agricultural culture islands, identiﬁable in the landscape by the layout of their ﬁelds and vernacular architecture, continued to be a feature of the steppe after 1917 (see Martin, 2001, for early plans to create ‘ethnic’ administrative districts in rural areas). Events later in the twentieth century were to erode spatial ethno-cultural boundaries; the collectivization of agriculture (1929–33) and the forced deportation of nationalities under Stalin, together with other more ‘normal’ migration processes associated with modernization, inevitably led to greater ethnic mixing and the loss of many ethnic markers. Despite all these upheavals, right to the end of the Soviet period the southern steppe remained a patchwork of nationalities and ethnicities where, although less pronounced than a century before, it was possible to ﬁnd villages and whole rural districts dominated by one ethnic or cultural group. In this respect the late Soviet countryside was different from the towns and cities where the allocation of state housing tended to suppress the emergence of distinctive urban social and ethnic neighbourhoods. In post-Soviet Russia issues of identity have been at the forefront of discussions about the nature of citizenship and heightened ethnic awareness has led to a period of ethnic sorting involving a gathering in of ethnic minorities to the national republics, which has, in some cases, been imitated at lower spatial

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scales; Moscow and St Petersburg, for example, have begun to see the emergence of distinct ethnic as well as social quarters. In rural districts ethnic sorting has also been taking place especially in those parts of the country where inter-ethnic relations have historically been difﬁcult. Principal among these is the south where aggressive ‘nationalism’ on the part of Cossacks is directed against non-Russian, non-Christian peoples, especially, but not exclusively, from the north Caucasus republics. Deepening awareness of ethnic difference has led to increasing territorial segregation, especially as between Russians and non-Russians, the former concentrating in core settlements and the latter conﬁned to peripheral villages or pre-existing ethnic enclaves. For the purposes of this investigation, the interesting feature of the current process of ethno-territorial segregation in the extreme south and east of the River Volga is that it maps on to a division of labour in household production between intensive crop and dairy husbandry, on the one hand, and extensive beef raising and shepherding, on the other. Ethnic processes also appear to be relevant in another of Russia’s shadow farm sectors—the peripatetic rental sector. The rental brigades that are responsible for the bulk of onions, tomatoes, and watermelons produced in the south and east of European Russia today are strongly associated with minorities drawn from former deported peoples—ethnic Koreans and Meshetian Turks, in particular. And the herdsmen, who subcontract the outer ﬁeld stations of former collective and state farms in the dry steppe, are almost exclusively Kazakhs, Chechens, and Dargintsi. In this chapter we examine the extent to which ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ are factors in the geographical variation of rural household production. For the purpose of our investigations, we recorded individuals’ nationality by the criteria that were used in the past for the purposes of passport registration (i.e. as deﬁned by the nationality of the parents or, in the case of mixed parentage, by individual choice), while recognizing that this may, in speciﬁc cases, be a superﬁcial indication of ethnic consciousness (Zaslavsky, 1994). As agricultural production data disaggregated by ‘nationality’ are not available, the patterns and practices of household producers from different ethno-cultural groups described below are based upon our own surveys in villages and rural districts in Saratov oblast, Stavropol and Perm krais and the Republic of Chuvashia, all four of which have substantial ethnic minority populations. We had to rely upon local knowledge to direct us to ethnic enclaves in these oblasts. Using this somewhat haphazard method, we came upon a rich diversity of twenty-ﬁrst century agricultural culture islands. We begin this chapter by describing some of these.

‘Barda potatoes’: the preferred choice of the discerning Perm consumer In the south of Perm oblast, some 125 km (78 miles) from the regional capital, there is a Muslim enclave. Ninety-three per cent of Barda district’s population is Bashkir. Most of the district occupies alluvial lowlands on the southern margin of

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the continuous boreal forest and it is an eastern outpost of the main concentration of Bashkirs in what is now the Republic of Bashkortostan. Ethnic Russians surround the Bashkirs on all sides and there is a cluster of ‘Russian’ villages in the north-east corner of the district itself. Young people in Barda are bilingual but their grandparents have a poor command of the Russian language. During the Soviet period, Bashkirs in Barda reproduced their cultural identity through the distinctive architecture of their dwellings, which are built around a courtyard and enclosed by high fences and ornamental gates painted bright blue, and by maintaining Bashkir culinary customs, crafts, and traditional song and dance. Bashkir cultural identity was also celebrated in the local ethnographic museum, which alongside the awards and banners of achievement during the Soviet period and the memorial room to the victims and heroes of the Great Patriotic War, contained examples of Bashkir domestic and agricultural artefacts. The preservation of the outward indicators of ethnicity was consistent with the Soviet formula of ‘national in form, socialist in content’; elements of folklore were allowed in Barda, but religious observance was not. Mullahs made their reappearance in the last years of Soviet power and from 1991, mosques began to be built all over the district. It is the ambition of the current district head, the former director of the largest collective farm in the district, to see a mosque built in every settlement. The proliferation of mosques is evidence of the wealth that exists in the Bashkir community, as is the high density of individually owned farm vehicles and cultivators standing at the gates of every other dwelling. These manifestations of relative prosperity are contradicted by the Perm statistical yearbook which shows Barda to be one of the oblast’s poorest rural districts. Thus, according to one authoritative publication, Barda district, ‘occupies one of the bottom places in the oblast in terms of its socio-economic development, and must be considered a problem region’ (Permskaya oblast . . . 1997: 145). This verdict is based on formal welfare indicators, including ofﬁcial unemployment ﬁgures, and the fact that large farms (the district is exclusively agricultural) have been in decline since 1991. It does not take into account income earned from the ﬂourishing household sector. ‘Barda potatoes’ are sold in the large urban markets in Perm and Kungur and they are purchased by people who are convinced that the product is superior to potatoes heralding from other places in the oblast. Allotments in Barda are large, from 10 to 30 sotok (1,000–3,000 sq. m) and some households rent additional 1,000–1,500 sq. m plots from the local authority. Typically, three-quarters of the plot is devoted to potatoes, with the remainder planted to a variety of vegetables for personal consumption. The Colorado beetle is endemic in this part of Russia and has the potential fatally to destroy the annual crop, but women and children in Barda spend their daylight hours in the spring removing every beetle from the potato plants by hand. It may be that the secret of the Barda potato’s success is the intensive labour the large Muslim families are able to apply to cultivation. Table 6.1 shows that Barda produces more potatoes per hundred rural inhabitants than its neighbours and, correspondingly, fewer vegetables. There are

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Plate 6.1. Barda district potato cultivation.

differences in the livestock sector as well; pigs are few and far between in the district, but cattle numbers are high. Households in Barda also specialize in milk and meat production, their post-1991 development helped by the decision of the local authority to transfer 1–2 ha plots of hay meadows and pastures from failing large farms into the private ownership of individual households. Through the 1990s collective farm managements in the district resisted attempts by farm members to withdraw their land shares, but by 2003 this resistance had broken down. Many households have claimed their arable shares but contrary to the intention of the law, these shares have not been turned into private farms or even Table 6.1. Livestock and crop production in the household sector in Barda district, Perm Krai (per 100 rural population) in 2001

Livestock (no.) Cattle (including milk cows) Pigs Annual production (tons) Vegetables Potatoes Milk Meat

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

Barda 29 1 17 78 54 8

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

Neighbouring rural districts 18 8 29 71 36 7

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

Perm oblast average 16 8 45 58 32 6

Sources: Osnovnye pokazateli razvitiya gorodov i raionov Permskoi oblasti, 2002: 19; Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost Khozyaistva naseleniya . . . , 2002: 31–41.

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put to the plough. Instead, they have been left fallow by their new owners to be used for hay mowing and pasture. The head of the district has passed a decree requiring the cultivation of land shares but there was not much evidence in the summer of 2002 that either he or his constituents intended to pay much attention to this requirement. The abundance of pasture and hay meadows at the disposal of households in Barda means that they have been able to dispense with the large farm support so crucial elsewhere to household animal husbandry. Of Barda’s twenty-two large agricultural enterprises, only four were not making a loss in 2002. In the summer haymaking season the streets in Barda’s villages are busy with privately owned lorries and tractors and trailers returning from the distant ﬁelds loaded with hay for storage in the ample barns lining one side of the home farm courtyard. Barda households have other sources of income apart from selling potatoes, meat, and milk. Many households are in receipt of remittances sent home by young male family members who go away, sometimes for years at a time, to work on the oil and gas rigs in West Siberia. The forests on the hilly land standing above the central valley of the district are also a source of income from an illicit timber trade that supplies villages in Bashkortostan with building materials. These income streams supplement earnings from the household agricultural sector and have allowed households to buy their tractors, lorries, and cultivators. Another relevant factor in the success of the household economy in Barda is that Bashkirs have a strong family tradition that includes an expectation that dwelling and land will pass on to successive generations. The young people who leave to work in the oilﬁelds are all expected to return later in life to resume their place in the extended household. In this respect the Barda Bashkirs differ from the surrounding Russian population among whom there is as strong an expectation that children will escape rural life and move permanently into the towns. A short journey to the villages in Barda’s north-east corner demonstrates the differences in household husbandry between Bashkir and Russians in this region. Dwellings in the north-east are poorly repaired, allotments are partially abandoned, and many houses lie empty. In common with other agricultural enterprises in the district, the former collective farm here has virtually stopped sowing. This has released land to the household sector, but the local population has not claimed this as supplementary hay meadows and pastures. Shermeika is the largest of the Russian villages and the former central settlement of the collective farm. A skeleton staff still works in the farm ofﬁce. Despite the relative abundance of land, four-ﬁfths of households in Shermeika produce food exclusively for their own consumption and the majority of livestock-owning households (80 per cent of the total) have only one cow compared to one-quarter of the Bashkir households that have two or more. Local people recognize that their household economy does not bear comparison with that of their Bashkir neighbours. They attribute this to an inferior natural environment (they are located in the wooded hilly region as opposed to the river valley) and to their exclusion from the ethnically based trade networks of Barda’s Bashkirs with Bashkortostan. There is a high

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level of dissatisfaction in Shermeika. Sixty per cent of the respondents to our survey complained that life had got worse since Soviet times. By comparison, a majority of people in the Bashkir villages reported that life had remained the same or improved since 1991. People in Shermeika do not believe the village has a future. These attitudes create a general atmosphere of apathy in the village, which contrasts with the more vibrant Bashkir villages.

Greek fruit and vegetable producers in the south of Stavropol krai: the advantage of diasporas The association of Barda rural district with the potato is similar to Lukhovitsy district’s association with early cucumbers. ‘Ethnicity’ in the former case may play a role through the Bashkirs’ strong family tradition and may also have a role to play in authenticating the ‘brand’ among the capital city’s consumers who buy their potatoes in the city’s central market. It is likely that a more important factor is the existence of alternative income streams available to the Bashkir households in Barda, which have an effect similar to the support that large farms give local communities in the steppe east of the River Volga described in the previous chapter. External support, whether in the form of transfers in kind from former collective farms or side earnings, may be crucial in enabling households to expand household production in the post-Soviet period. From this point of view, ethnic groups with overseas diasporas are in a particularly advantageous position. Communities of Pontic Greeks have been settled from the earliest times along the Black Sea littoral but the Greeks in Stavropol krai arrived from Turkey in the nineteenth century. In Dubovaya Balka, a Greek village in Andropov rural district, there is a bronze statue to Alexander II which the community erected a few years ago to commemorate the assistance he gave Greeks in their ﬂight from the Turks (this action may be the confused origin of the false rumour that a statue has been erected to Vladimir Putin in Sanamar, another Greek village, to thank him for restoring to the village its original Greek name). Out-migration has reduced the number of households in Dubovaya Balka from 300 to 120 in the past decade but Greek ethnic identity remains strong, with weddings and feast days attracting crowds of ﬁve hundred or more from all over the south of the krai. The majority of Greeks in Stavropol krai (67 % of the total) are concentrated in villages in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains in the vicinity of the popular spas of Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk, and Essentuki. During the Soviet period, collective and state farms in the region specialized in fruit production and farmworkers were able to supplement their wages by supplying independent tourists to the resorts with ‘Mediterranean’ fruit and vegetables in local markets. Since 1991, large farms have grubbed up their orchards as fruit production is less proﬁtable than cereals and sunﬂowers, but villages, including those with large Greek populations such as Urozhainyii near Essentuki, are still crammed with cherry, apricot, peach, plum, and apple trees. The market for fruit remains in the resort towns even though trade has declined as rising costs of internal travel have eroded the casual tourist trade.

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More recently tourism has suffered a further blow because of the targeting of the resorts by Chechen terrorists. Georgii has a stall on the main highway into Essentuki. He is one of the ethnic Greeks who make up 50 per cent of the population of Urozhainyi. He owns three adjacent houses, which places him among the better off households in the village. Each house has an allotment attached so that in total Georgii and his extended family own a total of 28 sotok (2,800 sq. m) of land. A large portion of this is an orchard of peach and plum trees. The remainder is used to grow aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes, and salad crops that Georgii sells at the side of the road. He has a further 1,000 sq. m ‘in the ﬁelds’ in which he grows potatoes. As fruit and vegetable production is less proﬁtable than previously, Georgii decided in 2002 to diversify into pig rearing, buying twenty piglets to fatten, but he is not planning to reduce fruit and vegetable production. As with many Greek families, Georgii has a son in Greece who sends back remittances (another son is in Moscow, leaving a third at home to help his father). In the early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many young Greeks took up the invitation of the Greek government to become Greek citizens (Voutira, 1991). One decade later, disillusioned by a failure to ﬁnd employment, many who left have returned to Russia, but the link with Greece has not been severed. Today, the typical pattern is for young people to go on temporary labour migrations lasting one to two years to work in the Greek building trade. Much of the money earned is ploughed back into villages in Russia and is used to build Greek Orthodox churches and to rebuild houses. In Sanamar, elaborate white ‘villas’ have been built on the outskirts of the village and it has also acquired a brand new, elaborate, Greek Orthodox Church. In theory, the income stream from diaspora earnings takes pressure off households to make a living from selling fruit but in practice it appears to have had the opposite affect, allowing Greek households to maintain their orchards despite their current relative lack of proﬁtability.

Tatar traders and husbandmen in the glubinka of Saratov oblast The ethnic Greeks in Stavropol krai are instructive because they show that ‘new wealth’ in Russia is not exclusively an urban phenomenon. The pockets of ‘indigenous’ wealth (as opposed to ‘incomer’ wealth of the ‘New Russians’ who build second homes in the countryside) that exist in rural Russia have largely escaped the attention of commentators on the post-Soviet transition. Without a nationwide systematic survey, it is difﬁcult to determine the extent to which these pockets are associated with speciﬁc ethnic minorities, but as the previous two examples have shown, ethnicity can be a key to gaining access to additional income and it can reinforce people’s attachment to a particular place. In these circumstances, distinctive enclaves similar to the pre-Revolutionary agricultural culture islands can be produced and reproduced in the countryside. Yakovlevka is in Bazarnyi Karabulak district located in the furthest western extremity of Saratov oblast where it borders with Penza. Yakovlevka is a large

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village with 620 households and 99 per cent of the population is ethnically Tatar. Its current population is 1,784, of which one-quarter is under 16 years old. Yakovlevka’s obvious prosperity marks it out from the majority of villages located in the peripheries of oblasts. Houses in the village are large by the standards of the Russian countryside—many are two-storey affairs with two bathrooms—and 20 per cent have been newly constructed in brick with chrome roofs adorned with crescents. Even the smaller, more modest houses built in the traditional manner of wood faced with white clay, are neat and well maintained. Unusually, the village is supplied with hot and cold running water and gas is also supplied to all homes. The courtyards behind the high fences enclosing each house are often asphalted. Half the village’s households have their own car and truck. At the side or behind each house there is an assortment of livestock sheds and barns and in the front, a small vegetable garden. Yakovlevka has a large new mosque, ﬁve shops, a café, school, kindergarten, and health centre and a club was under construction in 2003. This is a more than respectable level of service provision compared with West European villages of comparable size. Many people in Yakovlevka wear elements of traditional dress—the women brightly coloured headscarves and shifts and men, embroidered skullcaps—and the whole village comes to a halt when prayers are called from the minaret. The source of Yakovlevka’s prosperity is trade. The village, it turns out, is home to the many intermediaries who keep Russia’s rural economy running smoothly. Traders from Yakovlevka buy and sell all over the region and their customers include both large producers—agricultural enterprises from which they buy cereals and meat to sell on to urban retailers, ﬂourmills, and food-processing organizations—and the household sector from which they buy meat and vegetables to sell in the region’s markets. Household production is truly a ‘subsidiary’ activity in Yakovlevka. Growing vegetables is relatively limited in the village but most households have two or more head of large livestock. In 2003, there were 1,500 cattle (which include 550 milk cows), 442 sheep, 123 horses, and abundant chickens, geese, and turkeys. The village also rears a camel for slaughter at an annual festival. The Yakovlevskii agricultural artel plays an important role in the economic and social life of the village. This enterprise was formed in 1991 out of the local kolkhoz when Abryashit Akchurin, the director, persuaded the majority of farm employees and pensioners to sign over their land shares in perpetuity to a ‘new’ agricultural organization. In return, for the land the organization thus acquired, Abryashit Akchurin supplies the village with electricity and water free of charge, pays for the meat for weddings, hires out the artel’s tractors, provides meat, free milk, and transport for the village school. The 150 workers in the artel receive a ‘decent wage’, above the national average. As in other places, the cross-subsidy these beneﬁts represent helps to support the household livestock sector, which, in addition, beneﬁts from additional grazing land for the village’s several herds. Akchurin has negotiated a deal with a failing enterprise in neighbouring Penze oblast which involves the artel ploughing its ﬁelds in return for grazing rights

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for 1,200 cattle on the abandoned collective ﬁelds. This makes pastures near Yakolevka available for village cattle and sheep. Unravelling the relationships that explain the existence of this enclave deep in the Saratov countryside is difﬁcult. Russian observers insist that Tatars are ‘natural traders’, but as Akchurin observes, there are three Tatar villages across the border in Penze that are extremely poor, which he attributes to inter-village rivalries and ‘mutual thievery’. Households from Yakovlevka were, in fact, involved in trade during the Soviet period when it had to be conducted underground and those involved ran the risk of being arrested and imprisoned as ‘speculators’. Post-Soviet ‘commerce’, as Akchurin refers to the current activity, has been built upon long-established networks that have been jealously guarded to the beneﬁt of the whole community. Yakovlevka is a ‘closed’ community. The core population is hostile to outsiders and the local authority shunts off any newcomer households to the neighbouring small settlement of Abdulovka. But prosperity may bring its problems; family size is falling as a result of young couples limiting the number of children (two children is now the norm, whereas in the past it was six or seven) and intergenerational differences over religious observance are surfacing. Furthermore, there is some discontent in the village with Akchurin, who is accused of having tricked people into giving up their land shares. Some villagers are threatening legal action against the Yakovlevskii artel to secure their land entitlements in order to be able to set up their own farms.

Ethnic absences There are some empty spaces in the ethno-cultural mosaic of the Russian steppe. Among the agricultural-culture islands on which pre-revolutionary visitors commented, German villages attracted much attention. A. Klaus, the nineteenthcentury author of the most comprehensive work on foreign settlers in Russia, devoted much of his work to describing the villages of settlers from the German plain: ‘In the steppes, where previously there was neither water nor any sign of woodland, quite miraculously, one after the other, robust villages have ﬂowered each with an abundance of well-drawn water, groves of fruit, mulberry and timber-bearing trees, rich well-cultivated corn ﬁelds, whole ﬂocks of sheep, and excellent breeds of horses and cattle’ (quoted in Pallot and Shaw, 1990: 80–1). Germans, together with a variety of religious groups from the Low Countries and Switzerland, had begun to arrive in Russia during the eighteenth century in the reign of Catherine the Great. They were invited speciﬁcally for the purpose of settling the steppe after the Russian defeat of the Tatar descendents of Genghis Khan. The settlers were nonconformists who took up Catherine II’s invitation in order to avoid military service in their homeland. In the nineteenth century they lost their exemption to military service, which was a signal for many to leave Russia, but at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution there was still a large ‘German’ population in the southern Ukraine and the Middle Volga consisting of successful farmers. Figure 6.1 shows the German colonies on the Volga in the early twentieth century.

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Fig. 6.1. German settlements on the Middle Volga in the nineteenth century. Source: Pallot and Shaw, 1990: 85.

In 1918 the Bolshevik government founded the Volga German Republic on the Middle Volga river in today’s Saratov and Samara oblasts and centred on the town of Marx (previously ‘Baronsk’, ‘Ekaterinenstadt’, ‘Markstadt’). With the outbreak of war in 1941, the German republic was abolished and ethnic Germans were deported to Siberia, the Altai, and northern Kazakhstan where they had to remain until the 1970s when restrictions were lifted on their right to return to the Volga (Polyan, 2001: 163–70). Only a few took the opportunity to return at this time since ‘compensatory forced migration’ after their original expulsion meant that their houses were occupied and their return was opposed by the newcomers. In the 1990s there was a brief period when the idea of restoring the Volga German Republic was canvassed again and, in preparation, land was allocated for return settlers and new houses built, but these ideas came to nothing. Russia’s ethnic Germans preferred to take up the German government’s offer of a new home in Germany. German cultural islands that so impressed nineteenth-century visitors, and even continued to make an impression in the 1930s, in the twenty-ﬁrst century

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remain just a memory, an episode in the long history of colonization in the Middle Volga region. Some settlements on the left bank of the Volga river in Saratov still have echoes of their past as centres of German settlement. Although the German names of settlements were replaced with Russian names—Kochetnoe for Gel tsel, Krasnopol e for Preis, Prival noe for Varenburg, Skatovka for Straub, Tarlikovka for Dinnel—and have not been restored since 1991, local people are aware of what they are and will occasionally use them ‘for effect’. In one former German village, Rovnoe (formerly Zel man) included in our survey, there is an ethnographic museum opened in the last ten years that charts the history of German settlement in the district. Rovnoe was founded in 1767 by Catherine II and on the eve of the revolution it was a ﬂourishing centre of trade; grain was brought to Zel man from the Volga steppes and transported downstream to the Black sea ports, or upstream, in exchange for timber from the north. The village’s Lutheran churches and ﬂour mills were destroyed as part of the Soviet offensive against ‘speculators’ and religious observance but the German-built ordinary houses remained and the design was subsequently preserved during successive rebuildings. They are distinguishable today from their square logs, not round as is the traditional Russian way, and roofs with four faces rather than two. Between one-ﬁfth and one-third of Rovnoe’s houses, occupied now for half a century by Russians, Chuvashes, and Kazakhs, are of this vernacular German style. The new houses built by the regional authority in anticipation of returning German families from the Altai and Kazakhstan are located in small clusters outside existing villages. The wellordered rural landscape that so impressed earlier visitors to the Volga republic has not been recreated, however. The few German households that have returned to Rovnoe grow the same sorts of potatoes and vegetables, and keep a single cow for milk, as do their Russian neighbours. The resettlement has not been sustained. The majority of ethnic German families that came in the 1990s stayed only a short while before continuing their journey west.

Ethnic Differentiation in Household Production The examples given above demonstrate that at the local level ethnic communities can be associated with particular patterns of crop and livestock husbandry but in order to be able to make more general statements about the role of ethno-cultural factors in differentiating household production, a more systematic analysis is needed that focuses upon higher spatial scales.

Cultivators and pastoralists in the south-eastern steppe Prior to collectivization in the 1930s, peasant farming in Russia could be classiﬁed into four basic systems (Pallot and Shaw, 1990: 112). These were the long fallow

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145

system, the three-ﬁeld system, the multiple ﬁeld system, and intensive industrial and commercial systems. Of the four, the three-ﬁeld system was the most dominant in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia. It was practised throughout the core settled areas of European Russia but had begun to be superseded by more intensive systems around towns. In the peripheries of European Russia extensive farming was still practised up to the beginning of the twentieth century but it also was being modiﬁed under the pressure of population and the market. In the classic long fallow system, land was rested for twenty years or more between periods of cultivation but this had given way in all but the most marginal places to a shorter period of fallowing, lasting two to three years, or had degenerated into pestropol e (continuous cropping) or monoculture. Three-course rotations had also begun to make an appearance in the traditional extensive farming regions, brought in by migrants from central Russia or Europe who settled in river valleys. These extensive and more intensive systems of cultivation formed the outer boundary of sedentary farming in Europe. Beyond was the realm of the Nogai Tatars, Kazakhs, and other steppe peoples who engaged in pastoral nomadism (kochevoe khozyaistvo). The lifestyle of these peoples became a special target of the collectivization drive in the 1930s when the state, in the name of modernization and in order to establish political control over them, forced them to give up their nomadic way of life. The resulting slaughter of livestock in protest is one of the tragic episodes of the collectivization campaign. Over the next few decades, sedentary farming was imposed on the nomadic peoples. Large collective farms that combined cereal cultivation and livestock husbandry extended the margin of cultivation ever further into the dry steppe and semi-desert and at the same time brought more settlers from central Russia. Animal numbers, which had suffered badly at the time of collectivization, recovered only slowly and rearing was accompanied by the introduction of new methods of livestock husbandry that were modelled on practices in the mixed cereal–livestock collectives in Russia’s leading farming regions. Thus, animals were concentrated in large fermy and periods of stall-feeding were increased. However, the poor quality of summer pastures meant that in the most peripheral regions in the south and east, herds often were grazed for long periods considerable distances from the home farm. Unease about the ‘uncontrolled’ nature of this transhumance led to the ministry of agriculture’s decision in the 1970s to build permanent livestock outstations attached to collective farms—there could be as many as ﬁfty to one hundred such stations per farm—in the steppes. Each ranch, or koshara, had its own dedicated pastures surrounding the homestead, ﬂock of sheep or herd of cattle, and chaban or herdsman. The chaban would live all year round on the koshara with his family and a brigade of herdsmen. The job of the chaban was to meet the annual target for wool and/or meat as speciﬁed by the parent collective farm but he was also allowed to keep a deﬁned number of ‘private’ sheep alongside the ofﬁcial collective farm ﬂock. Tens of thousands of sheep and cattle were distributed to koshary during the course of the 1970s in the dry interior and south of the USSR. They created a

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Plate 6.2. A koshara in the steppe of Stavropol krai.

distinctive pattern of settlement in these regions, as Fig. 6.2 shows. It was a pattern that symbolized the ﬁnal victory of sedentary livestock husbandry over nomadic pastoralism in the steppe. Outposts of traditional pastoral systems remained only among reindeer herders in the Arctic and sub-Artic regions and in the mountainous regions of the north Caucasus such as Dagestan, where the annual movement to alpine pastures of livestock from lowland collective farms kept the tradition of transhumance alive. Levokumskoe is the most easterly rural district of Stavropol krai. It lies in the region of semi-desert in the south-east of European Russia and is dissected by the River Kuma in an east–west direction. This part of Stavropol krai stands at a cultural boundary between Christian Orthodox and Muslim peoples. During the Soviet period Levokumskoe had an exclusively agrarian economy (today Rosneft extracts oil in the district as well) consisting of intensive viticulture in the Kuma valley, mixed farming based on the irrigated cultivation of cereals and lucerne stretching out from the valley, and sheep and cattle herding in the steppe and semi-deserts beyond the margin of irrigation. Like other districts in the south-east steppe, Levokumskoe was an area of active in-migration in the twentieth century. In the post-war period settlers arrived here from Western Russia as part of semivoluntary agricultural resettlement programmes and the Virgin Lands campaign. It was also the chosen destination of small groups of return migrants from outside the USSR, including the Molokane or ‘milkeaters’, a Russian Protestant sect that had been exiled by Catherine II to the southern borders of the Russian empire and found themselves in Turkey in 1917. In 1961, they were invited back to Russia by

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147

Mirnyi

Kolkhoz Put’ Lenina State Farm Algainskii

Leninskii

Petropavlovka Rural Authority Riv . er M

U

ze

n

’

0

Lokhmatovka

Truba

5 km

Novouzensk District KA

ZA

KEY KH

ST

District boundary AN

Kolkhoz boundary Road River Shelter belts Ranch (koshara)

Fig. 6.2. A section of the dry steppe in Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast, showing the distribution of ranches. Source: Karta zemlepol zovanii novouzenskogog raiona saratovskoi oblasti, 1990: sheet 13.

Khrushchev and offered land and horses in either Astrakhan or Stavropol krai. They chose Stavropol and, arriving in 1962, settled in two villages in the Kuma valley from which they spread out in subsequent years, founding ‘colonies’ in more far-ﬂung parts of the district. One hundred families, for example, made their way to Turksad in the north-east corner. Another wave of in-migration began in the last two decades of Soviet rule and continues to the present day. It involves people

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Ethno-cultural Differentiation

Plate 6.3. A chaban with his sheepdog in the Saratov steppe in Novouzensk district.

from Dagestan and Chechnya, who come from different cultural and religious backgrounds than the earlier generation of migrants. In the last twenty years of Soviet rule the number of people from Dagestan (principally Dargintsi and Avartsi) and Chechens increased by ﬁve to six times in Stavropol and Krasnodar territories (and by three to ﬁve times on the Volga) compared with an increase by one and two-ﬁfths in their home republics (Belozerov, 1998). Kolosov (1998) believes ofﬁcial ﬁgures underestimate by an order of three the number of migrants from the north Caucasus republics into the two southern territories. In Levokumskoe rural district Dargintsi make up 30 per cent of the population (but, following Kolosov, probably more) and there are signiﬁcant numbers of Avartsi, Chechens, and Kalmyks. A by-product of the recent migrations into Levokumskoe has been the intensiﬁcation of the ethno-geographical division of labour in farming in the district that has its roots in the historical divisions in this part of Russia between pastoral and

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149

arable farming. During the Soviet period there was already a tendency for chabany on collective farms to be selected from among the non-Slavic groups so that, even at this time, in their outer territories there were small agricultural-culture ‘islets’. By the end of the Soviet period chaban ‘dynasties’ had been established on the koshary. What happened next was to a large extent predictable. With economic crisis in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, many of the collective and state farms in Levokumskoe reduced the size of the their livestock holdings or liquidated them altogether. There was a sixfold decline in the number of sheep, which meant that collectives no longer had any need for all their ranches or for the herdsmen living on them. Today’s koshary can be one of three types. First, there are those that have been retained by agricultural enterprises and continue to raise sheep or beef cattle for them, relying on the parent farm for inputs of hay and hard feed for overwintering. The ratio of enterprise to the chaban’s animals has often changed to the advantage of the latter. Zainulaev, for example, who manages a ranch on the territory of the principal agricultural enterprise in Turksad, has an equal number of ewes to the parent enterprise. In Soviet times, the farm had 68,000 ewes but this ﬁgure has fallen to 3,000 at the present time. Today, the farm has just six functioning ranches out of a previous total of ﬁfty-ﬁve. Second, there are ranches that have been taken into private ownership or are rented ‘in perpetuity’ from the parent collective, and third, those that have no clearly deﬁned legal status where the resident chaban has simply disengaged from the parent farm without going through the process of registering as its private owner or negotiating a rental contract with the parent farm. This third type is usually in the most remote places and local ofﬁcials, by their own admission, rarely visit them. It is widely believed among the Russians in Levokumskoe that the koshary have become home to ‘illegal’ migrants from Dagestan, but no reliable count has been made either of the number of people or, for that matter, the size of ﬂocks on them. The small numbers of ranches that have remained an integral part of a large farm are supplied with inputs, but independent herdsmen have to purchase or produce their own. Furthermore, since pastures were excluded from the land reforms of the early 1990s, independent herdsmen have to rent pasture and hay meadows from the local authority or large farm. In order to expand their range of pastures, many have returned to former extensive grazing practices. At the beginning of the summer, after lambing is ﬁnished, shepherds set off with the ﬂocks to pastures that can be 40 km (25 miles) away, returning only after two or three months. The distant pastures in question are a mixture of ‘long fallows’—in reality, the abandoned ﬁelds of the former collectives—or ﬁelds that have been recently harvested. Both are treated by the herdsmen as free goods but their use can be a source of tension with sedentary farmers. One agricultural enterprise located in the Kuma valley for three years running in the early 2000s sowed lucerne on 1,000 ha of irrigated land near Turksad but had to abandon the land because of illegal grazing. While their menfolk are away with the herds, (na kachelke), women remain on the home ranch with the children and old people.

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Crops cannot grow on the saline soils of the dry steppe but normally the women tend one or two milk cows and poultry that are kept for personal needs. If the north and eastern interior of Levokumskoe district is the site of the re-emergence of a form of semi-nomadic pastoralism driven forward by ethnic groups from the north Caucasus, the settlements strung out along the Kuma valley for the past ﬁfteen years have seen the consolidation of traditional forms of crop husbandry associated with the largely Russian population. During the Soviet period ﬁve sovkhozi in the valley specialized in viticulture, growing vines on the river terraces, but, like many Soviet large farms, they were also involved in a range of other crop and livestock products. Each sovkhoz had a large hinterland extending into the dry steppe and semi-desert beyond where lucerne and cereals would be grown, irrigated by water from the Caucasus range. The personal subsidiary farming of the farm employees (90.8 % of whom were Russian) imitated that of the parent farm; households grew their own vines, southern fruits, and vegetables and kept a cow, using pastures along the river and forage supplied by the large farm from the annual cereal harvest. Tamara Mikhailovna, the chief accountant of ZAO Levokumskoe in the settlement of Novokumskoe, told us the farm’s history. The sovkhoz was founded in 1934 and it has its own winery that sends wine to the state bottling plant in the district centre. The farm has 3,781 ha of land, of which 666 ha are under vines and 68 ha, orchards. The remaining land, which is located in the steppe beyond the valley, is designated for grass and cereal cultivation on the basis of which the farm is able to support a small herd of beef and dairy cattle (300 head down from 700 in the past) and make feed grains available for sale to villagers. There are 900 resident households in Novokumskoe and a population of 2,026 in 2003. This population is swollen in the harvest season by temporary labourers transported from Dagestan to pick grapes, a task that was done by students in the past. Allotments in Novokumskoe are small—500 sq. m.—but households are entitled to a further 500 sq. m. for growing potatoes in the farm’s ﬁelds and can rent 100 sq. m of irrigated land for fruit and vegetables. In the past, the farm had given its workers ‘wine materials’ to convert into wine and had also bought grapes from the population. Both practices have now ceased, undermining the independent wine production that had supplemented the incomes of households in the valley in the Soviet period. Also gone are many of the milk cows in personal ownership, a result of the local authority building on former pastures to accommodate Russians moving in from steppe villages (the authority refuses to allocate houses to non-Russians) and reduced transfers of forage from the large farm. Today, households in Novokumskoe between them own just 110 cows and 150 pigs. Household production has been refocused in the past ﬁfteen years away from more commercial products, such as wine and meat and milk, to staples and, particularly, the potato. The boundary that has emerged between ‘forest’ and ‘steppe’ cultures in Levokumskoe district and elsewhere in the Russian south can lead to competition over resources, exacerbating ethnic tensions. Instead of celebrating the fact that

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151

the activities of the herders from the north Caucasus have gone a long way towards offsetting the decline in livestock numbers after 1991, Russians criticize Darginsti grazing practices and have withdrawn further into the Kuma valley. Too easily, it seems, the population in Russia’s south is prepared to buy into stereotypical discourses about ethnicity. Thus we learned from Avartsi that Russians are ‘too lazy’ to put in the hard work needed to get a vegetable brigade off the ground, from Russians that north Caucasus people cannot grow crops, and from just about everyone that only the Dargintsi can make a go of extensive sheep farming. The people we met who, by their example, contested these stereotypes—the Molokane family in Turksad that had a successful melon business and had no plans to quit their farm and Victor, the Russian chaban, who quite evidently was an efﬁcient and innovative sheep and beef farmer—are too uncommon to offer much prospect of a lessening of the ethnic dimension in the geographical division of labour in farming in the extreme south.

Household production at the cultural crossroads on the Middle Volga Like Stavropol krai, Saratov oblast stood astride the frontier between sedentary farming systems and nomadic pastoralism in the nineteenth century. It was also at the intersection of Finno-Ungric peoples from the north, Turkic peoples (including Tatars and Kazakhs) from the south and east, and Russians and other peoples from further west, including the foreign settlers invited into Russia from Europe in the eighteenth century. Most recently Saratov has been a destination for migrants from the north Caucasus republics. Of the oblasts included in this study, Saratov is by far the most ethnically diverse. It also contains a diversity of natural environments. The River Volga divides the oblast longitudinally. To the east, there is the dry steppe that merges into semi-desert on the border with Kazakhstan. In the oblast’s eastern extremities Kazakhs are locally the dominant ethnic group and Russians, the minority. There are smaller numbers of Chechens and other north Caucasus peoples east of the River Volga as well. The physical contrast with right-bank Saratov is striking. Western Saratov oblast on the high right bank of the Volga river is an area of undulating black earths occupying part of the forest steppe zone. It is populated by Russians, with signiﬁcant minorities of Mordovians from the Finno-Ungric group of peoples, and Chuvashes and Tatars from the Turkic group. Table 6.2 is of land use and livestock holdings for the Russians and principal ethnic minorities in the oblast. The data for households beyond the River Volga was collected in two rural districts, Rovnoe and Novouzensk. The former occupies the low ﬂood plain of the left bank while the latter is situated in its south-eastern corner bordering Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs of the left bank historically were pastoralists who, like other nomadic peoples, were forced into permanent settlements in the Soviet period. As is evident from the table, the historical attachment to livestock husbandry has remained with the Kazakhs who have small arable

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Table 6.2. Allotment sizes and numbers of animals held by Chuvash-, Kazakh-, and Russian-headed households in Saratov oblast (% distribution of all households surveyed)

Household attributes

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

Left bank Kazakhs

Plots under 5 sotok 1 Addtional allotment Cattle None 1 2–3 >3 Pigs None 1–3 4–5 >5 Sheep None 1–5 >5 1 One sotka = 100 sq. m. Source: Authors’ questionnaire.

83 0 5 5 50 40 50 26 20 6 57 10 33

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Russians 68 3 25 18 39 18 44 30 12 14 94 4 2

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

Right bank Chuvashes 29 16 27 33 40 0 27 40 33 0 87 13 0

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Russians 38 28 13 17 43 28 31 32 22 15 81 11 7

allotments—over 80 per cent under 500 sq. m.—and large livestock holdings. Ninety per cent of Kazakh households in Rovnoe and Novouzensk in 2001 had between two and ﬁve head of cattle (excluding bull calves and heifers) and almost one family in ﬁve had more than ﬁve head. Proportionately fewer households keep sheep, but those that do keep ten or more. Whereas cattle are mainly kept in the village herd, sheep are generally pastured on more distant long fallows, often being taken into ﬂocks on the many koshary that pepper the dry steppe here. Interestingly, in the past ten years, Kazakhs employed by former collectives have responded in the same way as Russians to the substitution of cereals for a money wage by developing pig rearing, even though their faith prohibits their being used for personal consumption. The Kazakhs thus combine intensive with extensive forms of livestock husbandry but their assimilation of sedentary forms of farming has not extended to shifting the balance of production towards growing. Kazakhs’ household plots are crammed full of sheds and barns with only the smallest area left for vegetables for home consumption. None of the Kazakh households in our sample took on extra land made available by parent large farms to grow potatoes. Russian households in left-bank districts are also noted for livestock husbandry which is more developed here than in central Russian oblasts. The principal difference in the pattern of animal husbandry compared with the Kazakhs is its intensive character. Dairy production and pig rearing are well developed among them but only a small minority keep sheep. The village of Kurilovka in Novouzensk, known for its production of milk, is typical of Russian villages in the district. In Kurilovka and its dependent hamlet of Krepost Uzen there are around

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153

2,000 head of cattle in household ownership for a total population of 3,000. Every family has a cow and a heifer and several have more. The cattle are organized into several herds of 200–300 head and are grazed on the village’s common pastures and on the abandoned ﬁelds of the nearby collective farm. Households in the village specialize in milk production and have organized their own daily milk collection and delivery to the local dairy, submitting their milk to quality control. In Kurilovka the multicoloured wooden houses with white carved windows and doorframes are well maintained and testify to the relative prosperity of the village. Unusually for rural Russia, the village has a piped water system, which allows vegetable plots to be irrigated. The part of Saratov oblast that lies on the right bank of the River Volga has more favourable conditions for cultivation than the left bank; its climate is more moist and its black earth soils more fertile. In the nineteenth century, peasant farming was intensive on the right bank, Tatars and Chuvashes adopting the threeﬁeld system from Russians colonizers. In the twentieth century, under Soviet central planning, the region was included in the broad cereal- and livestockproducing belt extending from Ukraine to the River Volga, and it was one of the USSR’s leading agricultural regions. Russians are in the majority on the right bank but in some villages there is a majority or signiﬁcant minority of Chuvashes, Mordovians, and Tatars. As is obvious from Table 6.2, which is based on data collected from two rural districts on the right bank—Bazarnyi Karabulak and Lysye Gory—the differences in the practice of household production that distinguish Kazakh from Russian households in left-bank villages are more muted when Chuvashes are compared with Russians. Chuvash households tend to have smaller plots and a smaller percentage supplement their plot with additional arable (16% compared with 28% of Russians), but they also have proportionately fewer livestock. Chuvashes also have fewer cars and motor vehicles. These data indicate that Chuvashes are, on average, poorer than their Russian neighbours which is conﬁrmed by the outward appearances of their houses; Kazanla, one of the Chuvash villages in Bazarnyi Karabulak, has more old wooden houses and less well-maintained roads than neighbouring villages. There is no easy explanation for why Chuvash households do relatively less well than others in right-bank Saratov, although in the case of Kazanla a difﬁcult relationship between the management of the local agricultural enterprise and the population might be a factor. The reason does not lie in differences in farming practices; both Russian and Chuvash households in the district practise mixed husbandry, growing potatoes and vegetables and keeping livestock. In Saratov oblast echoes of the historic division between sedentary mixed farming and extensive herding are more muted than in Stavropol krai. The differences are even more muted among households specializing in crop production. The villages of Sukhoi Karabulak and Klyuchi, for example, have a local reputation for producing onions, similar to Barda’s reputation for potatoes in Perm krai. Unlike in Barda, there is no association in these villages with a particular ethnic group. Households in both villages produce an average of four to six tons of onions a year

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and have subsidiary specializations in pumpkins and meat, but Sukhoi Karabulak has a majority Russian population and Klyuchi, Mordovian. Saratov belongs to the longer-settled regions of Russia and was subject to earlier phases of Russian colonization than the south. In the extreme east of the oblast there is the same geographical division of labour between intensive livestock producers located in large settlements in the river valleys and sheep and beef herders on koshary as in Stavropol krai, but in Saratov’s case this does not map quite so cleanly onto the ethnic geography.

Household production in the Chuvash national republic The region north of Saratov oblast stretching from the Middle Volga to the Urals is the homeland of a variety of Turkic and Finno-Ungric groups. In 1991, the largest groups of these nationalities were given the status of full republics (during the Soviet period they had administrative recognition in the form of national ‘autonomies’). Together with national republics elsewhere in Russia and ‘nonethnic’ oblasts and krais where ethnic Russians are in a majority, they make up the Russian federal state. If the ‘ethnic factor’ has an impact upon the character of household production, it is most likely to be expressed in places where ethnic Russians have historically been less dominant. The republic of Chuvashia is located in the central part of European Russia and, with a total population of 1.4 million people but small territory (18,300 sq. km or 7,100 sq. miles), it is one of the most densely populated regions in the Russian Federation. The Chuvashes are a Turkic people who were converted to the Orthodox religion after the Russian state annexed territory in the Middle Volga in the sixteenth century. At this time, the Chuvashes were already practising sedentary farming but with the emphasis on livestock husbandry. Today Chuvashes constitute 68 per cent of the population in the republic with Tatars, Russians, and Mordovians making up sizeable minorities. There is a high degree of spatial segregation in rural areas between these different ethnicities; there are clusters of Russian villages in the south-west, of Tatars in the east, and Mordovians in the south-west where the Chuvash Republic borders with Nizhne Novgorod oblast, Tatarstan, and the Republic of Mordovia, respectively. Interviews were conducted in ﬁve Russian, Tatar, and Chuvash villages in the summer of 2002. A striking feature of the ﬁve villages, regardless of which ethnic group is dominant, is the comparatively large amount of land to which households have access. Household plots are 20–30 sotok (2,000–3,000 sq. m) in size and it is relatively common for households to rent additional 1-ha plots of hay meadows and pasture from local administrations. Despite being similarly advantaged in their access to land resources, the post-Soviet history of household production among Chuvashes, Russians, and Tatars has diverged. Krasnochetai is populated by Chuvashes. The village and its neighbours is tidy and well-kept and, although not ostentatious, has an air of relative prosperity. Prior

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to 1991, livestock husbandry among Chuvash households was limited by legal restrictions on animal numbers but once these were lifted, households rapidly increased their holdings both of cattle and pigs. The contrast with the Russian villages of Alatyr in the south-west of the republic is considerable. Population densities are three times lower in this part of Chuvashia than elsewhere and Alatyr ’s ageing population, high levels of alcoholism, and dilapidated buildings complete the general picture of a place that has more in common with the rural backwaters of the centre and north-west of European Russia than of other rural districts in the Middle Volga. Household production in Alatyr is based primarily on growing. Livestock numbers are low, more than half the households surveyed do not own any animals and those that do, keep a single cow or pig. This is a consequence of the ageing population and of a failing large farm sector that is not able to make the transfers that support livestock husbandry elsewhere on the Volga. Forty per cent of households questioned in Alatyr reported that they were producing less than they were a decade ago, another 40 per cent that they were producing the same, and only 20 per cent that they had increased production. This is despite the fact that Alatyr is located in the most favourable farming region of Chuvashia and, moreover, has large expanses of woodland, with the opportunities they present for developing natural resource harvesting. Komsonol rural district in the east presents yet another contrast. Komsomol is an ethnically mixed district of Tatar and Chuvash villages. The Tatar villages, which can have populations of one thousand, are larger than those inhabited by Chuvashes. External appearances indicate prosperity. Houses are well maintained with many new stone-built structures that have been decorated in the last decade with Muslim religious symbols and every settlement has at least one mosque. Cars, and often a truck also, stand at each gateway. As in the Chuvash villages, livestock ownership in the Tatar settlements is high with two to three head of large livestock per household being the norm and households with more not uncommon. As distinct from the Chuvashes, the initial expansion of livestock in the early 1990s in the Tatar villages was not sustained and numbers have stabilized. Household production in Tatar villages tends to ﬁt the description of being ‘personal’ and ‘subsidiary’ far more than is the case in the neighbouring Chuvash villages where households market three-quarters of what they produce. Tatar households have multiple income streams that include side earnings from labour migrations to work in the oil industry in Tatarstan and general trade. The example of Chuvashia demonstrates the importance of demographic potential in differentiating patterns of household production. A dearth of human capital limits the possibilities for households to develop production beyond their subsistence needs and, in the worst case, it sounds the death-knell for small-scale husbandry. As observed above, population densities in Russian enclaves in Chuvashia are three times lower than the average for the republic. This may well be an indication of the greater difﬁculty keeping ethnic Russians ‘down on the farm’ than is the case among other nationalities, but in the case of Chuvashia it is also a consequence of the post-Soviet gathering in of ethnicities to their homelands.

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The Russians who are quitting the Chuvash countryside are heading not for Cheboksary but for towns on the Russian plain. Ethnic Russian respondents to our questionnaires expressed a strong general desire to leave the countryside; 55 per cent wanted this for themselves and 70 per cent for their children. By comparison, 25 per cent of Chuvashes questioned would like to move to cities and 60 per cent wanted this for their children, while none of the Tatar respondents expressed a desire to move to the city and only 13 per cent wanted this for their children. Local ofﬁcials in Chuvashia attribute the greater stability and prosperity of Chuvash and Tatar households compared with those of the Russians to the ‘rural mentality’ of the former, but it is obvious that there are other factors involved, including relationships with the large farm system which, as we saw in the previous chapter, are crucial to successful household livestock husbandry. When viewing household production through the lens of ethnicity, it is tempting to conclude that for all the populist discourse in the past twenty years about Russia’s peasant roots, when it comes to making a living from household production the ethnic Russian ‘peasant’ compares unfavourably with some of the non-Russians that inhabit the country. Whereas in the nineteenth century it was Russia’s ethnic Germans who carried away the prizes for efﬁcient agrarian husbandry, it appears to be the ethnic minorities of the north Caucasus and the Kazakhs who have grasped the opportunities presented by the collapse of communism to expand individual production in agriculture. In the next chapter we will show that some of the most commercially successful new forms of private and semi-private farming that have developed in the past two decades are associated with non-Russian ethnic groups and the domination of the unofﬁcial food trade by non-Russians is well known. Yet it would be a mistake to overemphasize the role of the ‘ethnic factor’. The successful specialization of Lukhovitsy cabbage and cucumber producers, the majority of whom are ethnic Russians, and the success of suburban vegetable producers is a reminder that relative location is a powerful factor in determining the orientation of household production, with physical conditions and the access to land and other inputs also important. Where culture and ethnicity do appear to play a role in household production they are invariably mediated by other place-speciﬁc factors that encourage the development of farming in a particular direction. The association with a particular ethnic group is almost accidental. It seems redundant, but maybe necessary, to observe that there is no inherent reason why the Bashkirs of Barda are better at producing potatoes than ethnic Russians, or Kazakhs better herdsmen.

Appendix We reproduce here the resolution passed by the Duma of Kazanskii rural administration in Stavropol krai which established a stint (an upper limit) on the village’s common pastures. It is typical of such resolutions that were being adopted in many villages in the krai in the summer of 2003. Although it states that its aim

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is conservation of pastures, the administrator admitted that the resolution had won support among the electorate because it was directed at the activities of in-migrants from the north Caucasus. He agreed that pastures were not really a problem in the rural administration because there was so much abandoned land.

Resolution Number 15 of the Kazinskii Rural Soviet, Andropov district, Stavropol krai. 18 May 2003 In accordance with the law of Stavropol krai ‘On the regulation of the pasturing and grazing of livestock and fowls on the territory of Stavropol krai’ and on the basis of the methodology on the carrying capacity of pastures prepared by specialists in the Stavropol branch of the Ministry of Agriculture together with senior scientists of the GAU, Stavropol Higher Livestock and Feed Institute, with the aim of achieving the rational use of pastureland in the municipal ownership Kazanskii Rural Soviet Duma resolved: 1. To deﬁne a norm for the number of livestock that can graze on pastures under the authority of the Kazanskii Rural Soviet according to the following limits: a. large horned livestock, three head per household b. sheep and goats in a ratio of 1 : 10 [to cattle], but no more than 30 head per household. 2. Any household wishing to keep more livestock than the above norms must rent pastures and withdraw their land share from OOO SP ‘Kazanskoe’ and ofﬁcially register as a peasant farm economy. 3. [There follows a list of the six areas of pastureland to which this applies.] 4. This resolution becomes active ten days after promulgation. Signed by the chairman of the Rural Soviet Duma: V. V. Litvinenko

7 Household Production’s Nearest Neighbours: Small and Independent Farming in the Russian Countryside The Russian countryside has a rich variety of small and independent farmers, in addition to household producers. While many appear in records, the existence of others is hidden or is misrepresented in ofﬁcial typologies. Like household producers, these other independent producers cover a spectrum from those that are engaged primarily in producing for personal consumption to those that are oriented to the market and may employ hired labour. Their legal status varies; some are formally registered with local authorities as a separate farm, business, or smallholding but others exist within the framework of a larger organization or on the basis of informal contracts. Among the former are peasant farm economies (krestyankie fermskie khozyaistva) hereafter private farms, formed under the provisions of the land reform, small specialized agricultural businesses, and the allotments and smallholdings of urban residents. Among the latter is a rich variety of permanent and temporary businesses that use land under sharecropping and other rental agreements negotiated with larger farms and local authorities. They include the ranches (koshary) and peripatetic teams or rental brigades (arendnie brigady) described in the previous chapter, and more orthodox types of tenant farms. The justiﬁcation for pulling this mixed bag together into a single chapter is that they either overlap or share some crucial characteristic with household producers: it may be the small scale of their operations or that much of their activity takes place ‘in the shadows’, or that like household producers they can be simultaneously involved in producing for their own consumption and for the market. Their existence suggests the need to examine the ways in which capital is reworking economic and social relationships in rural Russia, inside and outside existing institutions and the formal structures of power.

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Decentralization and Independent Farming on the Soviet Kolkhoz : From ‘links’ to Family Brigades Soviet collective and state farms were not unchanging institutions; their management structure, forms of labour organization, methods of remuneration, and forward and backward linkages evolved over the course of the sixty years after collectivization. From the relatively simple structures of the early 1930s, when one farm gathered the land, labour, and livestock of a village under a single central management, collective and state farms developed into complex organizations with multiple subdivisions that extended over a territory of tens of thousands of hectares and embraced several settlements. One element of the reforms attempted by successive post-war leaderships to improve the efﬁciency of these giant units concerned internal labour organization and remuneration. In the early days of socialized agriculture, labour had been organized as in industry—in brigades under the direction of a brigade leader that produced to centrally set targets. These brigades were often uni-functional, responsible for one particular task around the farm such as ploughing, weeding, or milking and they could be mechanized (worked by the elite of the agricultural labour force) or unmechanized. Wages were determined by labour-days (trudodni) worked. As farms grew in size and agricultural technologies became more complex, these forms of labour organization became increasingly unwieldy and, more importantly, demotivating (Laird and Laird, 1970). The task for the Communist Party then was to develop forms of labour organization that improved efﬁciency without undermining the fundamental principles of collectivism in farming. The ﬁrst major attempt was the link (or zveno) experiment launched in response to the 1963 harvest failure. The link system was essentially an attempt to decentralize labour on collective farms by contracting small teams of ﬁve to six workers to take responsibility for the whole production cycle on one part of the larger farm. The initial results of the trial were encouraging but the reform failed to take off because it upset hardliners who saw it as the thin end of the wedge that would spell the end of socialist agriculture (Hedlund and Lundahl, 1982; Pospielovsky, 1970). The main efforts of Khrushchev’s successors were directed towards improving the upstream and downstream linkages of agriculture and in developing agriindustries, although at farm level internal organization continued to evolve. Farms acquired large management teams, made up of higher education-trained specialists in agronomy, engineering, economics, and accountancy at the same time as authority was devolved downwards to individual brigades or fermy. It was during this period that koshary made their appearance on farms in the semi-arid margins. By the last decade of Soviet power, the scene was set for radical change in the internal structure of socialized farms (the differences between kolkhozi and sovkhozi had by now dwindled). The centrepiece of Mikhail Gorbachev’s sweeping agricultural reforms launched in 1984 was the ‘family’ (semeinii) and/or ‘rental’ (arendnii) brigade; these were small teams of workers who came together

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either on the basis of family ties or mutual interest to negotiate a contract with their parent kolkhoz or sovkhoz either to rent a certain piece of land or to supply a given service. The rent payable to the parent collective usually took the form of a pre-negotiated amount of produce, with everything in excess of this being left with the brigade to dispose of. The authors of the reform insisted that rental contracts would not undermine the socialist essence of Soviet agriculture, since the land and capital resources remained in the ownership of the parent farm; the ‘family’ or ‘rental’ contract, they insisted, was not a ﬁrst step towards capitalism but a return to true Leninist principles and the idea of the ‘socialist peasant’. There was too little time before the Soviet Union went into free fall at the end of the 1980s for Gorbachev’s agrarian reforms to make serious inroads into the existing structure of Soviet agriculture, but the debate that had taken place about the need to ‘return land to the peasant’ and the critique this implied of giant farms had laid the foundation for the land reforms that quickly followed the USSR’s demise. Boris Yel tsin, the ﬁrst president of the Russian Federation, followed Gorbachev in declaring himself a champion of the ‘Russian peasant’. Under him, legislative changes were set in train to allow independent farming to develop outside the framework of large farms. Since 1991, anyone in Russia has been able to set up a private farm on land acquired from local authorities or by withdrawing shares from large farms, so long as they cultivate it within two years, and plenty of opportunities have been created to rent land on long- or short-term leases. The most successful of Russia’s private farms, those that are held up as examples of Russia’s agrarian future, are large (200 ha or more) and consist of both privately owned and rented land. They contrast with much smaller farms that have been forged exclusively out of the owner’s land shares and those that are made up exclusively of land held on long-term lease from local authorities or other institutions (including agricultural enterprises). These farms operate independently of the former kolkhozi and sovkhozi and, in this respect, they have travelled on a considerable distance from their Soviet precursors. There are some types of private or independent farmers, however, that remain attached to the agricultural enterprise for some element of the production process. It is with these that we begin our exploration of household producers’ nearest neighbours.

Tenants and Sharecroppers in the European South and East Land rent has become a widespread phenomenon in post-Soviet Russia, but tenant farming as understood in the United Kingdom, where a landowner lets an integrated farm to a tenant on a long-term, inheritable lease is uncommon, if it exists at all. There are farms in Russia that consist largely of rented land, but the home farm buildings are typically separate from this land and are owned or rented separately by the farmer, who may also have a small core of his or

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her own land. Irsan Gerasimovich Kim, an ethnic Korean but of mixed Russian and Korean parentage, who until ten years ago was employed by a state farm in Stavropol krai, is typical of this sort of farmer. In the middle 1980s, Irsan Gerasimovich was one of the people who responded to Gorbachev’s agricultural reforms by negotiating a rental contract with his parent farm. On the land he rented he grew watermelons, handing over a portion of the crop to the sovkhoz as rent. As part of the deal the sovkhoz serviced the irrigation channels and pipes, and provided water free of charge. This business was doing well when the USSR collapsed but since he had not notched up sufﬁcient years in the state farm to be entitled to a land share, Kim now applied to the local authority land committee for 38 ha from the land fund, which he was duly allocated. This land did not have access to an irrigation channel and he wanted to continue producing watermelons, so he rented an additional 120 ha situated on the River Kuma and took out a loan to lay his own irrigation pipes. Today, Irsan Gerasimovich owns three tractors, employs a workforce of thirty-eight people, and makes 100,000–120,000 roubles proﬁt annually on his watermelons, carrots, onions, and cabbages. Irsan Gerasimovich’s watermelon and vegetable farm is situated in a broad region embracing European Russia’s eastern and southern oblasts, stretching from Samara and Saratov in the north to Stavropol and Krasnodar krai in the south, which traditionally has produced a substantial portion of Russia’s melons and early vegetables. Whereas before the collapse of the USSR, collective and state farms were responsible for the bulk of this crop, today it is tenant farmers who produce them. These tenants are almost exclusively foreigners from the ‘near abroad’—ethnic minorities that were deported from their Soviet homeland to Kazakhstan and Central Asia in the 1930s, or more recent migrants from the north Caucasus republics. Irsan Gerasimovich is not typical of the majority of the Korean, MeskhetianTurk, and Avartsi tenant farmers who rent irrigated land for commercial vegetable production. He represents the ‘legal end’ of the spectrum; his rental contract is registered with the local authority, he pays taxes on his proﬁts, he has to abide by Russian labour law, and he has a Russian passport and residence permit that entitle him to own a house and land. The vast majority of other intensive vegetable producers, in contrast to Kim, have no legal status. They are the peripatetic brigades that ‘work’ the eastern and southern regions of European Russia renting small plots of irrigated land (usually under 15 ha) for a single growing season. Some have become semipermanent, returning to the same plot of land or landowner every year, and some even have built themselves a dwelling or rented a house in the nearby village. Others rent land in a different place every year and return to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan or ﬁnd employment in northern cities for the winter. They represent a very speciﬁc Russian phenomenon, born of the combination of an over-regulated and inefﬁcient large farm sector on the one hand, and a willingness of those in power to turn a blind eye to this particular manifestation of the informal economy on the other. They were already an unacknowledged feature of farming in the

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semi-arid peripheries as far back as the 1960s but their numbers have proliferated in the post-Soviet period.

‘Shadow’ watermelons and onions in Saratov oblast Rovnoe district, Saratov oblast, is the northern extent of the Russian watermelongrowing region and, as elsewhere, since 1991 production of this crop has passed from the collective farm sector to private teams of between six and a dozen individuals. In this district, the teams are almost exclusively ethnic Koreans. The normal arrangement is for the large farm to provide the land and to lend the team tractors for ploughing and, through its system of irrigation channels, to deliver water to the site. The team, meanwhile, provides seeds and labour, pays the pumping costs for irrigation water, maintains irrigation channels on site, and arranges its own domestic accommodation. Rent takes the form of either a ﬁxed volume of produce, a proportion of the harvest, or whichever is the greater of the two. The details are spelled out in a written or verbal contract between the two parties that is renegotiated annually. There are two types of team. The ﬁrst consists of a group of individuals who come together to negotiate the contract with the large farm but thereafter work separately on their own plots of between two and ﬁve hectares, often using family labour to do so. The second consists of a single individual who negotiates the contract and hires workers to do the work. In Rovnoe district this hired labour is drawn predominantly from among the local ethnic Russian population. During the summer period, the brigade leaders and their families live directly in the ﬁelds in zemlianki. These are small pits dug at the end of the rows of crops covered with boards, which, in turn, are covered with earth or sods. Inside, these dugouts are faced with veneer and furnished with beds, tables, and chairs. Water is near at hand in the irrigation ditches and can be diverted for use in ﬁeld showers. The advantage of these dugouts over caravans and other temporary shelters is obvious when it is considered that summer daytime temperatures in August can reach over 35 ◦ C but can drop by 18–20 ◦ C at night. They also provide protection from the hot dry winds from the deserts that are a problem in the summer, darkening the air with dust. Watermelons need high inputs of labour to be grown successfully. This is one reason why they have disappeared from the large farm sector. They do not need rich soil (their roots reach to a depth of 7 m) but they cannot do without the sun, so keeping young plants free of weeds is important. The main job of the labour deployed by brigades is to weed and hoe during the growing season. The teams pay workers low wages for such work (25–40 roubles a day in 2001) or use their own family labour. Such exploitation and self-exploitation, which is widespread among commercial producers in the household sector too, is integral to the peripatetic brigade system and is the reason why the teams are able to make a proﬁt. The director of one large farm that rents its land to brigades admitted

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Plate 7.1. A zemlianka, the temporary home of a member of a rental brigade near Rovnoe, Saratov oblast.

that their main advantage is that the farm does not have to ‘worry itself ’ over the conditions of labour. But there are other advantages as well; the produce received as rent used to ‘pay’ the permanent large farm workforce or was sold to boost farm income, land is used that otherwise would be abandoned, and irrigation channels are kept clear and in use. The OAO Vladimirskoe, which rents its land out to four teams for the cultivation of water- and honeydew melons, carrots, and onions, takes 25–30 per cent of the harvest of each brigade. In 2000, 100 ha were under this use, and in 2002 it had grown to 250 ha. Teams take on all the risks associated with cultivation and marketing. These can be considerable because of Rovnoe’s relatively northern location; its harvest is later than its more southerly neighbours that can get their crop to the market earlier, and yields are vulnerable to variable levels of sunshine in this part of the dry steppe. In any year brigades can make a lot of money—but they can also go bust. Some farms dispense with organized teams and rent ‘rows’ in the ﬁelds directly to seasonal workers who each live in a dugout at the end of ‘their’ row. Mikhael Shokhin, one of the successful private farmers in Rovnoe district who has grown his farm from 75 ha to 3,500 ha, sharecrops part of his land with seasonal workers that he hires directly. Unlike OAO Vladimirskoe, he has to supervise the labour force, but this is worth his while for the greater share of the crop, 85 per cent, he is able to command. In another variation, some large farms allocate an irrigated plot to one of their own employees, paying them a small wage (in Pervomaiskii agricultural artel this was 250 roubles/month in 2001) to put together and run a

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brigade made up of off-farm hired workers. The local authority is content to turn a blind eye to these various arrangements, which are all ways of bypassing labour legislation and of ‘concealing’ income from the tax authorities.

‘Plantation’ tomatoes in Stavropol krai Sovkhoz Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) used to be a thriving vegetable-growing farm in the Novoaleksandrovsk district of Stavropol krai with 1,000 ha of irrigated land. Now tenants occupy part of this land. The tenant farms, or ‘plantations’ as they are known locally, are immediately identiﬁable by long rows of vegetables in the midst of otherwise abandoned ﬁelds and from the makeshift constructions made of plywood that stand at the ﬁeld edges. One team leader, a Korean, came to Stavropol krai from Central Asia in the early 1990s to grow cabbages, carrots, beetroots, and onions. He has a house in Stavropol city but spends the whole summer in the ﬁelds supervising his workforce, which consists of eleven Romanies recruited from neighbouring Krasnodar krai. The workforce is paid (a shocking) ten roubles a day wage plus their food. As one explained, they have to accept this lowly paid work because they are not passport holders and no one else will employ them. There is a large pool of marginal labour in the south of Russia that is excluded from formal employment either because it does not have the correct documentation and/or because of the racism of potential employers. The team leaders, who do not have such scruples, have been the beneﬁciaries of these circumstances. In 2003, ten roubles would not buy a bar of chocolate. In 2003, on the road leaving the settlement where the headquarters of Red Star farm is situated, there was a sign indicating that one hundred metres further on and to the right there were tomatoes and peppers for sale. A track led from the roadside edge through ﬁelds, half of which were overgrown with weeds and half planted with vegetables. It ended at a modest, makeshift bungalow standing on a tiny triangular parcel of land between the ﬁelds. Three cows were grazing at the ﬁeld edge and the forecourt was full of ducks, geese, chickens, and turkeys. This is the ‘hacienda’ (fazienda) of two Turkish-Meskhetintsy, brothers who have been living here since they migrated to Russia with their families in 1996. Meskhetian Turks are among the groups that were deported to Uzbekistan by Stalin in the 1930s. Their homeland, Meskheti, is on the border between Turkey and Georgia. Like other deported groups, the Mekhetians were subsequently rehabilitated but they could not return to their home villages as ‘compensatory migrants’ had occupied these. As a result many stayed on in Uzbekistan until forced out by pogroms associated with the rise of Uzbek nationalism in 1989–91. Osman and Ramil Dijakameli are more fortunate than many of the Meskhetian Turks who went to neighbouring Krasnodar krai where discrimination is overt—they have been granted a Russian passport, as they are entitled to under the 1991 Law on Citizenship. However, in 2003, they had not been granted a residence permit (propiska) that would entitle them to apply for a plot of land.

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Plate 7.2. Osman’s tomato ‘plantation’ in Novoaleksandrov district Stavropol krai.

The contract between the brothers and the Red Star farm is renegotiated every year. In 2003, the brigade rented 12 ha for 8,000 dollars, equivalent to about 300 dollars per ha, in return for which the farm ploughed the land. The contract requires an advance payment of half the rent and the remainder, after the harvest, in kind. The occupation of the small plot on which the brothers have built their dwelling is not covered in the contract. The 12 ha of agricultural land the brigade rents is divided into 1–3 ha lots between Osman and Ramil and their three other brothers who have a ‘hacienda’ elsewhere. Each family works its lot separately, sometimes hiring workers from the large farm who are paid with a bucket of tomatoes and 60–80 roubles cash a day, but the core labour force is family. In 2003, the brothers were growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. An experiment with cabbages the previous year had failed because there was no market. Osman, the eldest brother, is a slightly larger than life ﬁgure, whom we interviewed in the ﬁeld. He used to be a builder in Uzbekistan but turned to farming when he arrived in Russia. He explained how the tomato seeds are brought on in makeshift glasshouses next to the hacienda and planted out in rows once the danger of frosts had passed. A major task during the growing season is to dig irrigation ditches to take water to plants in the ﬁeld. This has to be done by hand—the large farm does not help with mechanical diggers—and is the work

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Plate 7.3. Osman’s ‘hacienda’, where he lives with his extended family.

of the male family members and hired hands. Osman’s wife stays on the hacienda during the day to look after the cattle and poultry, but his daughters can help out in the ﬁelds, particularly at harvest time. Osman had sown sixty rows of tomatoes in 2003. The bulk of the crop, other than what he owes the large farm, is sold to middlemen who come daily to pick up tomatoes. They were paying 3 roubles/kg in 2003 as against 4–5 roubles/kg for direct sales (for comparison tomatoes were being sold in Moscow markets in July 2003 for 20–30 roubles/kg). Osman would like to own land and to build a proper house but cannot do so because he does not have a residence permit. There are many ‘vegetable’ brigades in Stavropol krai. It is no coincidence that the non-Russians who put together the teams are foreigners from the former Soviet republics and internally displaced people from the north Caucasus republics. They are people who are denied the right of ordinary citizens to own land or a household plot who, therefore, have no alternative but to farm in the shadow economy. In addition to Turks and Koreans, there are Vietnamese, Kurdish, Avartsi, and Dargintsi teams. If it is easy to explain why certain non-Russians gravitate towards peripatetic brigades, it is less easy to explain why ethnic Russians do not respond to the abundant opportunities to rent good quality land to grow vegetables for sale themselves. We were told that there are some ‘Russian’ teams in Stavropol krai, including one ‘potato brigade’ in Novoaleksandrovsk district, but we were unable to track any down. The same question about the ethnic association with particular

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forms of farming arises when we move on to consider the other form of tenancy in Russia’s southern and eastern peripheries that, similarly, derives its character from the perpetuation of the Soviet-style large farm—the semi-private ranches or koshary.

Semi-private Ranches in the Dry Peripheries In the previous chapter we described how remote parts of the dry steppe and semi-desert have been colonized by migrants from the north Caucasus republics who occupy abandoned koshary, and have returned to the pastoral practices of earlier generations of steppe dwellers. Although, for want of any alternative, the ﬂocks on these remote outstations are classiﬁed by local administrations as belonging to the ‘personal subsidiary economy’, in reality they are at the illegal end of the shadow economy. There is no ofﬁcial record of the size of the ﬂocks and who owns them, and the thriving trade in mutton and wool that takes place with Dagestan is similarly unrecorded and untaxed. These ‘shadow koshary’ are the speciﬁc product of the contraction of livestock husbandry in the large farm sector, demographic pressure in the north Caucasus republics, the war in Chechnya, and an ongoing process of ethno-spatial segregation. The koshary of the Soviet period—so different from these post-Soviet heirs— are worth pausing on because their introduction was an early venture into agrarian devolution within the context of the collective and state farm system. Koshary formed in the 1970s pre-visioned the ‘rental’ and ‘family’ contract brigades of the Gorbachev era. In the post-Soviet period, the koshary that have been retained by their parent farms are another example of continuity in interdependency that exists between farm sectors in Russia.

Rented koshary in the south We start with an exception. Genady is one of the small number of Russians who has responded to the opportunity presented by the collapse of livestock husbandry in the large farm sector to set up his own ranch in European Russia’s semiarid southern steppes. Genady rents his koshara from the Rus ‘Peasant farm cooperative’, the largest ‘private farm’ in Andropov district, Stavropol krai. In reality Rus is what is left of the collective farm after several restructurings. Under the terms of the contract with Rus , Genady pays the cooperative 85 per cent of the lambs and wool he produces each spring so long as the number is above an agreed threshold. If he falls below this threshold, as he did in 2002, he has to make up the deﬁcit from his own ﬂock. The cooperative supplies Genady with grazing land, and forage to supplement grazing during the winter, which lasts here from December to April. Genady has to pay a deposit for the forage (in 2003, this was the not inconsiderable sum of 6,500 roubles), which is returned if he fulﬁls his side of the contract. In addition to the sheep, Genady also keeps twenty-eight

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Plate 7.4. Genady’s semi-private ranch rented from Rus in Andropov district, Stavropol krai.

cattle (including nine milk cows) for which he buys feed from the large farm cooperative. Genady’s koshara is well organized and efﬁciently run. When he started out, he had 130 ewes but he has been able almost to double this number. He can afford to hire two shepherds who live with their families on the koshara—Genady himself lives in the nearby village of Yankul —and he also hires two sheep shearers in the summer. He sells his lambs, beef, and wool to intermediaries, and milk to the Stavropol milk combine. He is able to make additional income in the summer by taking villagers’ sheep into his ﬂock. Genady would like to become fully independent, but in order to do this he would need a loan to rent or buy land and machinery for haymaking which he cannot afford to do at present. In the meantime, the need to rely on the cooperative for winter feed limits the possibilities for expansion beyond 500 ewes. Interdependency with the large farm sector, it turns out, is a feature of livestock husbandry not just in the household sector but in larger-scale private operations as well. As we will see below, the independent private peasant farms set up under the land reform are exclusively cereal and vegetable producers. If they keep livestock, they do it as a form of personal subsidiary production that is not included in the farm’s accounts. Genady is thus unlikely to be able to realize his dream of owning a fully privatized ranch

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but he is, nevertheless, optimistic about the future, believing that mutton will hold its price in the expanding north Caucasus market.

‘The best koshara in the motherland’ Mohamed Said is a well-known chaban in the north-east of Stavropol krai. He came to the krai from Dagestan in 1964 and joined the Druzhba, ‘Friendship’, collective farm, rising through the ranks to become a brigade leader. When he applied for a koshara he was allocated one on a prime site not far from Urozhainoe, the headquarters of the collective farm. Said welcomed Gorbachev’s reforms and persuaded the farm to let him set up a ‘rental brigade’ within the collective farm. He agreed to ‘pay’ the parent farm a proportion of the lambs he produced in the spring as rent for the koshara and surrounding grazing land. Said did well out of this deal and expanded to take on two additional koshary. By the late 1980s, he was managing 4,000 sheep, including ewes and lambs for fattening and in 1987, as a result of achieving a lambing rate of 1.5 lambs per ewe, he won a medal for running the best koshara in the Russian Republic. He was able to buy a car out of the proﬁt he made from his business and repair and extend his house. Today, Said is still an employee of the Druzhba farm but the number of sheep he manages has shrunk back as a result of the farm reducing its ﬂock. He specializes today in fattening 4–18 month-old lambs and at any time has 1,000 head. In addition, he has 200 of his own lambs for fattening, which count as his personal subsidiary production. He has ten to twelve people working for him— all employees of Druzhba but chosen by him—each of which is entitled to keep 100 ‘private’ lambs at the ranch. Mohamed Said is dependent upon the Druzhba for some inputs, including three-quarters of the hay and fodder the animals need during the winter when they are brought inside. From May to November, the sheep graze on ﬁelds belonging to the farm, some 40 km (25 miles) away, under the eye of Said’s shepherds. Like Genady, Mohamed Said would like to have his own sheep farm, but since the permanent pastures surrounding his koshara are ineligible to be privatized he is not prepared to go down this path at present. In the meantime he satisﬁes his entrepreneurial ambitions by investing in the neighbouring collective farm, Krasnyi Budonovits, which was near bankruptcy before he stepped in. In 2000, he negotiated a deal with the farm to supply it with fuel, fertilizer, and combines (he owns several) in the harvesting season in return for 15,000 tons of grain. In the three years that followed, the farm succeeded in delivering only 20–30 per cent of the agreed amount which, as Said explained, put him in the position of ‘controlling the decisions’ on the farm. These parallel farm businesses provide an example of the curious hybridity of forms that exist today in the Russian countryside. Said is a member of AO Druzhba (and as such receives his 3 tons of cereals every year in return for leaving his land share with the farm), he is a tenant farmer, a

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personal subsidiary producer with 200 sheep, and, in his role as investor, he is the dominant partner in a large farm enterprise. He is clearly a big player in the agrarian economy in the eastern districts of Stavropol krai and is treated with respect by local agricultural ofﬁcials.

Private ‘peasant’ Farms None of the farms discussed already in this book—the subsistence and commercial smallholdings belonging to rural households, peripatetic brigades, and ranches—are, in fact, farms in the Russian meaning of the word. The term fermskoe, or in its longer ofﬁcial form, krest yanskoe fermskoe khozaistvo (peasant farm economy) is reserved for the creations of post-Soviet land reform. The term ﬁrst entered the ofﬁcial agricultural lexicon in a law passed on 27 December 1990, before the USSR’s collapse, which deﬁned the peasant farm as ‘an independent managerial subject with the rights of a juridical persona, represented by an individual citizen, a family, or group of individuals, who carry out the production, processing and sale of agricultural produce’ (Fermskoe khozaistvo . . . 1999: 165). Initially, peasant-farm economies were different from individual household producers precisely because they were ‘juridical personae’, which meant that their owners had the right to open bank accounts, enter into business arrangements with other enterprises and organizations, and take on hired labour. In 1995 this legal distinction was dropped, but in order to qualify to be a peasant farm the business still had to be ofﬁcially registered with the local authority. What this means in practice is that unlike household producers, peasant farms have to keep records and accounts, pay taxes, and subject themselves to the same sort of monitoring as other businesses in Russia. Another difference when compared with the household sector is that continued possession of the land is conditional upon that land being used. Land not cultivated within two years of its acquisition— using it for haymaking and pasture does not count—can be seized by local authorities.

The geography of the farmer movement The Russian deﬁnition of a peasant farm is a tautology; therefore, the principal criterion for determining whether a peasant farm exists is that it is registered as such with the authorities. As we observed in Chapter 2, the adjective ‘peasant’ attached to these farms derives from their conceptual origin in Soviet-era discussions about agrarian reforms rather than because these farms conform to the deﬁnition of ‘peasantry’ as a social formation. In this chapter we prefer to use the adjective ‘private’ to describe them. The story the ofﬁcial statistics tell of the ‘farmer movement’ is of an initial rapid uptake followed by a levelling off. In 1991 there were 4,000 registered

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Table 7.1. The dynamics of private ‘peasant’ farm formation, 1993–2004 .. . .. Number of private peasant farms in ... 2004 .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. . 1995 as .. 1997 as .. 2000 as .. 2004 as . Average .. As % of ... No. per 1,000 .. .. . . . . rural .. % of .. % of .. % of .. % of .. farm size .. all private ... .. 1993 .. 1995 .. 1997 .. 2000 .. (ha) .. farms .. population ... ... ... ... ... ... ... . .. .. . . .. . .. 100 .. .. 153 ... 100 ... Russia 97 ... 100 ... 69 7 .. .. .. .. .. . . . . North 90 . 92 . 85 . 41 1.2 3 . . .. 127 .. .. .. . . .. 156 .. 103 ... North-West 95 ... 83 .. 19 9 .. 3.3 .. .. .. .. .. . . . Centre 98 .. 95 .. 99 .. 30 6 .. 10.5 .. .. 143 .. ... 3.5 ... Volga-Vyatka ... 151 ... 101 ... 99 ... 106 ... 35 4 ... 4.5 ... Central Black- ... 122 ... 90 ... 94 ... 109 ... 105 4 .. .. .. .. .. .. . Earth .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. 12.3 .. .. 134 ... Middle Volga 97 .. 97 .. 96 .. 164 8 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. North Caucasus. 181 .. 114 .. 101 .. 116 . 33 11 .. 35.2 .. . .. . .. Ural 92 ... 93 ... 96 ... 93 5 .. 148 ... ... 10.5 .. .. .. .. 129 .. 159 .. . .. West Siberia 90 93 85 8.1 5 . . . . .. .. . . . . . .. .. 4.9 .. 181 .. East Siberia 94 . 93 .. 90 .. 83 5 . . . . . . . .. .. 3.8 . 122 .. Far East 88 .. 90 .. 90 .. 53 6 . .. .. .. 543 ... 130 ... 139 ... Kaliningrad 94 .. 20 21 . . 2.1

Source: Sel skoe khozyaistvo, 2002: 192; Sel skokhozyastvennaya deyatel nost , 1999: 49–52.

private farms in Russia but by 1996 this number had grown to 280,000. Thereafter numbers began to decline and in 2000 there were 262,000. There has been a slight increase since then but it is clear that the movement has found a ‘natural level’ around the 260,000–270,000 mark for the time being. The initial rapid formation of peasant farms took place against a backdrop of opposition from agricultural enterprises, which used their right to choose the location of land parcels to discourage withdrawals by allocating remote and poor quality plots. On the other hand, in the early reform years there were government incentives, in the form of cheap credit, for example, to support new farmers. The subsequent slowdown has taken place despite changes in the law that have strengthened the power of individuals relative to large farms. Recent changes have been less about forming new farms than the differentiation of those that already exist, as some farms have accumulated additional land and grown into viable businesses but others have failed to make this transition. The average size of farm today is around 69 ha (compared with 40 ha a decade ago) but more than a half (57%) have less than 20 ha. At the other end of the scale, 13 per cent of private farms have over 100 ha, and 4.5 per cent over 200 (Sel skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo 2004: 98). The majority of private farms are small-to medium-scale enterprises. The private farm economy has a deﬁnite geography (Table 7.1). The movement to form new farms started most rapidly in Kaliningrad oblast and the number of farms has continued to grow there, albeit at a slower rate. The north Caucasus, which includes Russia’s most successful grain-producing regions, also showed sustained growth until 1999 when for the ﬁrst time since 1993 the number of private farms declined, and in the Middle Volga macro-economic region numbers had already begun to stabilize in the mid 1990s. These are also the two regions

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Private farms per 1,000 population <3

10−12

3−6

13−33

7−9

Fig. 7.1. The number of private peasant farms per 1,000 rural inhabitants, 2004. Source: Maloe predprinimatel stvo . . . , 2004: 117–19; Chislennost naseleniya, 2004.

with the greatest share of Russia’s private farms (35.2 and 12.3% respectively). Everywhere else, the total number of private farms had already begun to fall by the mid 1990s, with the net loss being particularly marked in the North and in Siberia. A comparison of the Middle Volga and the north Caucasus shows how size can vary. In the former region private farms are large, on average 164 ha, while in the latter they are a modest 33 ha. The north Caucasus, in reality, divides into the lowland regions where farms are of comparable size to the Volga, and the non-Russian republics where they are much smaller due to population pressure on limited agricultural resources. In the south and south-east of European Russia there are oblasts with the greatest densities of peasant farms in all of Russia (Fig. 7.1). At the top of the list are Volgograd, Stavropol krai, and the Republic of Dagestan where there are about 30 private farms per 1,000 rural population. In these regions about 10 per cent of the rural population live on private farms. Although Krasnodar krai has the largest absolute number of private farms created under the provision of the land reform, the relative number is half that in neighbouring Stavropol krai because powerful and proﬁt-making agricultural enterprises have been able to suppress much potential demand for private farm land in the territory. In forested regions in European Russia, the North-West macro-economic region has the greatest density of private farms, but farm size is well below average (Fig. 7.2).

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Average size of private farm (ha) < 10

51−100

10−20

101−400

21−50

Fig. 7.2. The average size of peasant farms (ha), 2004. Source: Maloe predprinimatel stvo . . . , 2004: 117–19.

‘Real’ and ‘ﬁctitious’ private farms In every district visited during our investigation we asked for the total number of private farms. Without exception, the response to the request was the same; we were given the number of registered farms but with the qualiﬁcation that not all of these were ‘real’. This response, which could be interpreted as an encouraging example of honesty on the part of local ofﬁcials used in the past to concealing failures, in truth was evidence that the traditional prejudices of the ‘productivist’ agrarian discourse in Russia still hold sway. What the ofﬁcials had in mind when they referred to ‘real’ private farms were farms that are larger than average, proﬁt making, employers of hired labour, and with good prospects of future growth. Whether the state’s intention when it introduced a law allowing individual farmworkers to withdraw their 3–20 ha parcels from their parent kolkhozi and sovkhozi was all along to give preference to the big players is a moot point, but ﬁfteen years on it is obvious that ofﬁcials at the local level are informed by a model of a private farm that is more ‘capitalist’ than ‘peasant’. Such farms normally number no more than one or two in most rural districts. Their owners are mainly former collective and state farm managers and other members of the rural elite who were strategically placed in the early 1990s to take most advantage of the land reform (Allina-Pisano, 2005). The history surrounding the subdivision of the Nizhnemaslovskii sovkhoz is an example. We have already encountered Nizhne Maslova earlier; it is the village in Lukhovitsy

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0

0.5 km

Land shares allocated to members of Nizhnemaslovskii collective Transferred to local authority land fund

Land shares currently in the use of their owners

95.2 31.4

97.1

45.4

26.3 R. Me ch

Dolgomost’e

146.7

a

19.1

54.0 15.3 37.3

9.4

81.3

7.3

116.5

Nizhne Maslova 94.3

27.3 91.2

Kareevo 73.6 91.9

Pasture

Barsuki 70.6 9.4

185.8

Fields in collective use with size in hectares Buildings

62.5

Soin's farm Soin's house

Fig. 7.3. The ground-plan of Nizhne Maslova, Lukhovitsy district, showing the subdivision of surrounding arable land into private farms. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

district, Moscow oblast, known for the production of salted cabbage. Already during the Soviet era, the large farm was in difﬁculties because of the workforce’s preoccupation with producing cabbages for sale on their allotments, and these intensiﬁed after 1991. New rules democratizing the election of farm chair brought to power Nikolai Aleksandrovich Soin who, instead of trying to put the farm back on its feet, used his position to persuade the workforce to become independent farmers. In 1994, the district land committee was invited in to divide up the farm’s land (see Fig. 7.3). One hundred and ﬁfty households were involved. The arable

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nearest to the village was divided into long narrow strips each equivalent to the district norm of 3.8 ha, and the surplus was transferred to the district reserve fund. Soin received his own share but he supplemented this by renting back from the local authority much of the land that had been transferred to the reserve fund. What he lacked in the way of machinery, Soin was able to purchase using government loans and by persuading pensioners entitled to a share of the farm capital to invest in his farm. For many of the households that became private farmers in Nizhne Maslova the change to the new order did not turn out well. Within three years of the land division, the majority had surrendered their land to the local authority or simply abandoned it. It turned out that expanding cabbage cultivation onto the 3.8 ha plots was costly in time and money and attracted unwelcome attention from the local authorities. Most people had been able to cultivate only a hectare or so of their land share. In 2001 there were fourteen functioning private farms in Nizhne Maslova, most small scale. Pasha and Raisa Loshakov, for example, have 8 ha of land made up of two land shares and their household plot. Pasha had been a member of a ‘Gorbachev’ rental brigade from 1986, and he responded quickly to the suggestion to set up his own farm. He was able to persuade the land committee to allocate his and Raisa’s land shares in the 20 ha plot that he was already working and, as he was one of the sovkhoz’s economists and Raisa its accountant, he was well placed to purchase a tractor cheaply when the sovkhoz fell apart in 1994. Pasha and Raisa struggle to make a proﬁt on their farm but they have done well enough selling the sauerkraut they process on the farm to improve their house, ‘eat well’, and buy a car. They do all the work on the farm themselves but they have an agreement for mutual help with a friend, another of the original rental team, who also has a small cabbage farm. Like many small private farmers Pasha and Raisa do not have a bank account and they avoid paying taxes on the sauerkraut they sell by accounting for it under their household economy. Soin’s farm is in a completely different league. He farms 124 ha of land, all but 3.8 ha rented from the local authority. He specializes in vegetables and potatoes and his is one of three farms that together produce 45 per cent of Lukhovitsy district’s potato crop. Soin has twenty-eight permanent workers plus an accountant, deputy director, and agronomist. He also has a ‘long-standing relationship’ with the army in Ryazan oblast to supply soldiers to work on the farm at harvest time in return for potatoes. Soin is the regional organizer of the AKKOR, the Association of Peasant Farmers, from which position he argues for the ‘legalization’ of the household sector that, he believes, should be required to pay income tax. He pays himself a salary of 6,000 roubles a month and the rest of his proﬁt he saves or reinvests in the farm. It is the small private farms formed by rank-and-ﬁle farm members of agricultural enterprises, acting either unilaterally or with fellow villagers, that are, invariably, dismissed as ‘pretend’ or ‘ﬁctitious’ by local ofﬁcials, even though many, like Pasha and Raisa’s, deliver a reasonable livelihood for their owners. More apposite candidates for title of ‘pretend’ than these small holders are the ‘cooperatives of peasant farms’ formed when former collective and state farms

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embark upon subdivision as a survival strategy. The peasant-farm cooperative, SPK Rus in Stavropol krai from which Genady rents his koshara described in the section above is an example. Rus was forged in 2001 out of a former kolkhoz, Vpered (‘Forward’), in a process that became familiar in the Russian countryside in the 1990s which involved managements transferring all the proﬁt-making elements of their farm into a new ‘cooperative’, leaving the debts with the rump of the old collective. In Rus ’s case the cooperative took 7,000 ha of agricultural land which was made up of 330 shares and the ﬁxed and moveable capital that was still in good repair. Unlike in Nizhne Maslova, the land shares were not translated into identiﬁable plots on the ground. Ivan Petrovich Malyarov, the former director of Vpered and existing director of Rus , conﬁrmed that today’s slimmed-down farm is run in much the same way as was the larger predecessor. It makes a proﬁt and its formal classiﬁcation as a ‘cooperative of peasant farm economies’ gives it the advantage of a reduced tax burden compared with agricultural enterprises. The rump of the old farm has long since disappeared. These varied types of ofﬁcially designated peasant farm economies can be found in almost any district of European Russia barring the northern peripheries. Wherever we went, we would ﬁnd a small number of large private farms contributing to the bulk of produce emanating from the private farm sector and production statistics that often excluded the product of the many smaller farms. A conservative estimate is that something like one-quarter to one-half of the produce of the ofﬁcial private farm sector is omitted from the ﬁgures that appear in local statistical handbooks under the columns headed ‘peasant farm economies’. In Rovnoe district, Saratov oblast, for example, where private farms range between thirty and several hundred ha in size, production statistics are collected from only half of the registered total. Were these omissions added to production from the household sector, they would boost the already high contribution small farming makes to the value of total agricultural output in Russia.

Spatial clusters of private farms: the example of Lysye Gory in Saratov oblast Saratov oblast has a reputation for experimentation in farming. At the end of 1997, long before the federal Duma agreed to allow the conveyance of agricultural land, Saratov oblast passed its own law to allow the buying and selling of agricultural land (Zakon Saratovskoi oblasti ‘O Zemle’, 12 November 1997). Saratov was also among the leading oblasts for investing in the development of the private farm sector. Today, with 7 per cent of all agricultural produce originating in the private sector, the oblast is fourth (behind the Republics of Sakha and Altai and Astrakhan oblast) in the country’s league for the development of the farmer movement. Against this general background, Lysye Gory district stands out for the apparent success of the farmer movement. According to local statistical records private farms are responsible for almost three-quarters of the cereals, half the

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meat, and one-quarter of the milk produced in the district. Private farms own more than 100,000 ha of land in Lysye Gory, compared with the collective sector’s 25,000 ha and individual households’, 12,000 ha. There are just four agricultural enterprises left in the district: two are ‘subsidiary’ enterprises belonging to nonagricultural institutions and two are kolkhozi. Both have consciously hung on to Soviet-type organization and both are proﬁt-making. Lysye Gory district is located in the forest-steppe in the middle of Saratov oblast on the right bank of the River Volga. It has always been exclusively agricultural. The regional centre, a ‘settlement of urban type’, has a population of over 8,000 but is too small and too poor to become a centre of local life. Despite acquiring the obligatory club and new housing estates of apartment blocks in the 1970s, none of the latter was supplied with running water. In 2002, Lysye Gory had a restaurant and a few shops but these did not detract from the general backwater atmosphere of the settlement. The farmer movement in Lysye Gory clearly built on earlier changes in collective and state farms. Many of the ﬁrst to petition for their own farms had been involved in the formation of the ‘contract brigades’ in the 1980s. From 1991, their withdrawal from collective and state farms—here the land share is 14.5 ha—dragged many rank-and-ﬁle farmworkers into the reform and forced changes in what remained of their parent farms. As the latter faced the prospect of having to repay debts from an ever-decreasing land area, it made sense for them to re-register as cooperatives in order to side step bankruptcy. An example is the Bol shoi Sever (‘Large Northern’) Cooperative that took the place of a kolkhoz of the same name and today embraces 6,200 ha of arable land. There are nine such transformed collectives occupying a total of 26,100,000 ha of ploughed land, onethird of the total in the district. They boost the ﬁgures for the farmer movement in the district, although they have a unitary management structure and vertical lines of command, just like the old collectives. Discounting these cooperatives of private farmers, the ﬁgures for Lysye Gory are, nevertheless, impressive. Of the 372 registered private farms, 270 ﬁle annual production results with the local authority. The owners of the remaining 102, accounting for roughly 15 per cent of all private farmland in the district, have either abandoned their land, rent it out or use some portion of it to supplement their household economy. The village of Shirokii Karamysh, located 30 km (19 miles) from the district centre, is a real rural backwater. The Shirokii Karamysh State Farm, run from the village, was huge even by Soviet standards and commanded 16,000 ha of agricultural land. In the early 1980s it began to run into trouble; although its cereal harvest was respectable, its 3,000 head of cattle were low yielding and the losses in the livestock sector resulted in an overall deﬁcit in the farm’s budget. Ivan Petrovich Gresev, the director, was the initiator of the farmer movement. He had a history of difﬁcult relations with the local Communist Party in the 1980s and had twice resigned as director to set up his own rental brigade. With the introduction of the post-Soviet land reform, he set about accumulating the shares needed to make a viable farm. First, he combined his own family’s shares with those of four other

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families, which gave him 100 ha, and then over the next few years he ‘purchased’ a further 400 ha by persuading other shareholders to invest their land in the farm, and rented another 200 ha from the local authority. In the early days the original four families used only their own labour to farm the land, but nowadays they employ four permanent workers who are paid the equivalent of 1,700 roubles in money and produce. Seventy employees of Shirokii Karamysh sovkhoz followed Gresev’s example and set up between them about 30 ‘peasant farm economies’. The ﬁrst to follow was one of Gresev’s closest associates, Viktor Bokaenkov. He had headed a Gorbachev rental brigade and now with four team-mates set up a 100 ha farm. A mass exodus of workers who transferred their shares to him followed his withdrawal from the farm, so that he now has 1,000 ha. He pays each shareholder a ton of grain, one sack of ﬂour, and ten litres of sunﬂower oil a year, the going rate for shareholders in the large private farms in Lysye Gory. Vladimir Goferberg, an ethnic German, was another of the farm employees to follow Gresev’s example. Goferberg’s parents came to Saratov in 1969 from Tyumen in West Siberia to which they had been exiled in the 1930s. Vladimir trained as an agronomist and was employed on the sovkhoz as a section leader. His wife was one of the sovkhoz’s zoo-technicians. In setting up their own farm they decided, atypically, to specialize in animal husbandry. Shirokii Karamysh was disposing of its herds by allocating four cows to shareholders. By combining their eight head with those allocated to pensioners and taking out a loan to buy some more, the Goferbergs were able to start with a herd of 140 cattle. They were allocated 130 ha of irrigated land on which to grow lucerne (this was more than their accumulated shares entitled them to but nobody else wanted this land). Within three years it was obvious that there was no proﬁt to be made from livestock so the Goferbergs switched to irrigated potato and vegetable production (beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, and cabbages) and they were soon doing sufﬁciently well to be able to rent an additional 650 ha of arable for cereals and sunﬂowers. The farm has a permanent labour force of ten who are paid in money and in kind at the local rate, and seasonal workers are also taken on for the vegetable harvest at a rate of 40 roubles cash and 40 roubles-worth of vegetables daily. At any one time in the summer, there can be ﬁfty workers on the farm. In 2002, the Goferbergs were trying to make up their minds whether to follow the example of other ‘Russian Germans’ and migrate to Germany. They cited ‘constant bureaucratic interference’ as the reason why, despite the success of their enterprise, they were considering this step. Figure 7.4 shows the location of some of the large private farms formed in Shirokii Karamysh. Judging from the experiences of private farmers such as these, the optimal size of unit for cereal production in this part of the forest-steppe is 500–1,500 ha and a permanent labour force of between ten and ﬁfteen workers. This land is not necessarily all in a single place but, reﬂecting its varied origins, is likely to be in various degrees of fragmentation. Figure 7.5 shows the land parcels that make up a farm in the south of Lysye Gory. This size of enterprise allows

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179

Parizhskaya Kommuna

Co-operative of peasant farmers ‘Yuzhnoe’

Shirokii Karamysh

KEY Oblast boundary District boundary Former kolkhoz boundary Field boundary Road River Settlements

Gr

Arable land of school

Bu

Arable and pasture of local authorities State forest

Gr

Gorfeberg’s farm

Gr

Gresev’s farm

Bu

Bukaenkov’s farm

Go

Beloe Ozero Gr

Woodland Go

Bu

Go

Go

Bolshie Kapeni Rural Authority

Ko

ed River M

0

ve

t di

sa

lkh

Go

oz

‘P

ut

’K

Ko

mm

un

izm

10 km

Fig. 7.4. The former territory of the Shirokii Karamysh state farm in Lysye Gory district, Saratov oblast, showing the land belonging to three large private farms. Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

farmers to build up reserves as a buffer against poor harvests. Of the seventy people who withdrew their land from Shirokii Karamysh at the same time as Gresev, Bokaenkov, and Goferberg, about ten are today substantial private farms that have been able to grow as a result of adding in the shares of pensioners and

180

District boundary Former kolkhoz boundary Field boundary River

Nevezhkino Rural Authority

Pasture Zharikov’s farm: Privately owned land

Shirokova Balka

Land rented from local authority land fund Land rented from shareholders

Own share

Purchased 4 hectares (28,000 R.)

0

Fig. 7.5. The different origins of land making up Zharikov’s private farm, Lysye Gory district, Saratov oblast Source: Reproduced from rural administration plan.

1 km

Small and Independent Rural Farming

KEY

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181

farmworkers. Their owners were all able to exploit existing contacts to obtain the inputs needed for their new business and to secure loans. Despite their success, these farms are not beyond exploiting the tax-exempt status of the household sector to further their business. Gresev, for example, has 20 sows, which yield 200 piglets for fattening. The sale of one of these makes Gresev sufﬁcient to pay the monthly wage bill for four workers. Bokoenkov also fattens 200 piglets and additionally has 40 cattle, all kept in his wife’s name as her personal subsidiary economy. If one-third of the original thirty private farms formed in the wake of Gresev’s withdrawal from Shirokii Karamysh are substantial businesses, a further third can be described as modest enterprises that reproduce themselves on a year-byyear basis but do not make sufﬁcient proﬁt to allow investment in expanding production. These farms are small, no more than 50 ha, made up of the land shares of two or three family members plus small quantities of rented land. Like their larger counterparts these are cereal units, but a large portion of what they produce is used to cross-subsidize their livestock business, which like the larger farms, is run separately as a ‘personal subsidiary’ enterprise. Typically, it is the meat and dairy products that they sell from the household side of their business that generate most income for these farms. Cereals make a proﬁt only in good years when there are surpluses that can be sold as hard feed to other households in the district. There are households engaged in household production elsewhere in Saratov oblast that make more income than do these private farmers (various authors draw attention to the fact that many private farms are difﬁcult to distinguish from household producers, see e.g. Brytkov, 1999; Kozlov, 2001b: 34). The ﬁnal one-third of the private farms formed when Gresev withdrew from Shirokii Karamysh subsequently failed. Like the previous group these were single share/single owner farms or they consisted of small friendship and family groups. Their land shares today have either been invested in one of the large private farms, rented out, abandoned, or partially used as an extension to household production. Members of this group rely for their livelihood exclusively on their household plots. The Shirokii Karamysh state farm continued to exist until 1997 when it quietly ‘passed away’. It had disposed of all its livestock several years before and the small number of workers that remained on its books had long since ceased to be paid. Cereal yields on the private farms equal or exceed those of the sovkhoz they have replaced but there is far less land under the plough than previously. Part of the area that has been abandoned is 1,000 ha of irrigated land—Goferberg’s 140 ha is all that remains. Another change is the disappearance of large-scale livestock husbandry. Cattle and small livestock are now concentrated exclusively in the household sector and production is small-scale. The barns, milking parlours, and animal sheds of the state farms lie in ruins, but in their stead new brickbuilt farmhouses with all modern conveniences have appeared in the landscape, standing in the centre of the new farms.

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Private peasant farms and the household sector The farmer movement in Lysye Gory gained a momentum that is absent in many other rural districts. The withdrawal of key personnel from kolkhozi and sovkhozi shifted the balance from the old-style Soviet collectivist enterprises to new farm businesses until a tipping point was reached when new farm formation became a mass movement. The changes have reverberated throughout the whole of local society with the larger private farms taking on many of the functions of the former collective and state farms. First, they have become the district’s principal employers. In the early days, workers were reluctant to quit agricultural enterprises for private farms because of loyalty to their parent farm and, probably more importantly, because they lacked conﬁdence that the reforms would not be reversed. By the middle of the 1990s as private farms bedded down and agricultural enterprises defaulted on wages, these inhibitions began to be overcome and work on private farms became sought after. Private farms in Lysye Gory pay regular wages that include feed grains that help support personal livestock husbandry. Second, the possibility of investing land shares in private farms created an opportunity for workers to give up formal employment and to concentrate, instead, on household production; a land share can earn one to two tons of grain a year in rent, plus quantities of hay, straw, and sunﬂower oil if placed with a successful private farmer. Some shareholders temporarily rent their land to private farmers with the intention of redeeming it at a later date when they themselves have saved enough to begin farming. Third, private farms now perform many of the social functions of kolkhozi and sovkhozi. If in the past people went to the state farm management to ask for the village club to be repaired or to borrow a vehicle for a school outing, now they go to the large private farmers among whom there are those who understand the value of social capital and are prepared to invest in ‘public works’. But the substitution of the role of the kolkhoz and sovkhoz is inevitably partial since private farmers have to maintain proﬁt margins. In the Soviet period collective and state farms were not allowed to go bankrupt. Today this has changed. Where employment is concerned, for example, private farms take on only the labour they need; Shirokii Karamysh state farm employed 300 workers, its successors provide permanent employment for 100 workers and seasonal work for a further 50. The likelihood is that this number will diminish as the larger farms intensify production. In 2003, the Goferbergs were considering replacing manual labour by a machine to sort seeds and using herbicides to keep weeds down. If rural people have already learned that labour markets can create unemployment, they are also beginning to understand some of its other consequences. As we observed in Chapter 5, one element of the relationship between workers and collective farms was that the latter turned a blind eye to all sorts of questionable work practices, including theft and alcoholism. Private farmers cannot afford to be so indulgent; they guard their grain stores and dismiss workers caught stealing and who turn up to work late or drunk. Private farmers can, therefore, be unpopular among local people, including among their own workforce.

Small and Independent Rural Farming a) Ouput per capita from urban and rural plots (roubles/month), 2002

183

b) Gross output from urban and rural plots (milliard roubles), 2002

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

500 400 300 200 100 0 Rural

Urban

Rural

Urban

Fig. 7.6. Output per capita and the relative contribution of urban and rural plot holders to the total output of the people’s farm sector. Source: Sel skokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost . . . , 2003: 151.

For rural people who have access neither to work nor to a land share, the consequences of the dissolution of agricultural enterprises in Lysye Gory are bad. The settlement of Shirokii Karamysh has a population of 1,500, the majority of whom now have to survive on what they produce on the household plot. In addition to the contraction of jobs in farming, the working population has also had to suffer the closure of a vegetable and jam factory. The cost of buying animal feed conﬁnes livestock husbandry largely to waged or shareholding households and, locally, the possibilities for marketing produce from the household plot are limited. It is not surprising that villages in Lysye Gory are depressing places, with poorly maintained houses and high levels of alcoholism. As of 2003, the communities from which the new farmers have come had yet to experience the beneﬁts of trickle-down.

Urban Plot Holders The ﬁnal type of independent producer to be considered is the urban plot holder. As Fig. 7.6 shows, urban households produce more than 50 per cent by value of domestically produced food consumed in post-Soviet Russia but less than half as much as per capita as rural households (under 200 roubles per month as against over 400 for rural households at 2003 prices) (Sel skhokhozyaistvennaya deyatel nost . . . 2003: 151). Urban food production was one of the striking developments of the ﬁrst decade of post-Soviet power (Agapora and Kostyleva, 2000). Russians have a long tradition of retiring to the countryside for the summer but until the collapse of the USSR the majority of urban dwellers had to conﬁne their excursions into the countryside to day trips into the forest to pick mushrooms and berries. Today’s vegetable allotments on the outskirts of cities combine practical food production with this long-standing tradition of rural relaxation.

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Suburban gardens and allotments By far the most common way for urban dwellers to engage in personal food production is to join a garden and allotment cooperative. These manage areas of land suitable for growing that have been laid out by local authorities in small plots for allocation to urban households. They began to appear on the outskirts of cities in the 1950s but their number proliferated in the 1990s and now they are found on the urban–rural fringe of all Russia’s towns and cities. In the sixty years after the Second World War the number of families with access to an allotment rose from 40 thousand around 1950 to over 14 million in 2001 (Rossiya v tsifrakh 2001: 202). Garden plots (sady) may be used for building but there are strict rules governing their footprint and the height of the half house/half sheds that have appeared on them. The plots are small, typically 600–800 sq. m, and they are used very intensively to grow vegetables and soft fruits, and there are always a few fruit trees. Seldom are they used for potatoes because they are too small. Allotments (ogorody) differ little from garden plots in how they are used but, unlike the former, they cannot be privately owned and in theory tenants are not allowed to build anything more elaborate than a shed on them. In reality, allotments have become the site of little summerhouses in which people spend the night alongside the tools they need to cultivate the land. The number of allotments has remained more or less stable in the past decade (there were 5.1 million families in 1990 and more or less the same number in 2000) which reﬂects their lesser popularity compared to garden plots. The average size of an allotment plot has increased from 200–300 sq. m, which it was at the end of the Soviet period, to an average of 850 sq. m (Sel skoe khozyaistvo . . . 2000: 86). Allotments are most commonly found in rural districts on the outskirts of small towns and ‘settlements of urban type’. They are used to cultivate vegetables and sometimes potatoes, but they are generally not planted with fruit trees.

Rural homes and purpose-built dachas The raison d’être of garden cooperatives and allotments is to provide urbanites with the opportunity to grow their own food so it is not surprising that most of the vegetables and fruit produced by urban dwellers emanates from these plots. Another site of ‘urban’ food production is the rural homes, often located in the heart of rural Russia, that have been inherited or bought by urban dwellers. Villages in Lukhovitsy and Lotoshino districts in peripheries of Moscow oblast provide homes for people who are registered as urban dwellers but who spend long periods of time in the countryside. In these two districts between one-seventh and one-third of all houses belong to urban households. The newcomers tend to be concentrated in smaller settlements that previously housed a single collective farm brigade but subsequently emptied either because farms provided alternative, better serviced housing in the central farm settlements or because populations simply died out. In Lotoshino there are villages with seventy to eighty houses in use of which fewer than ten are permanently occupied. In some cases, the

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newcomers become permanent residents, although, since many prefer to keep a foothold in the capital by renting out the ﬂat they have there, many do not register as such. Lotoshino and Lukhovitsy also have garden cooperatives. The inﬂux of people to these and to rural second homes doubles the population of the two districts in the summer months. In the Pereslav -Zaleskii district in the south of neighbouring Yaroslavl oblast, the local rural population of 26 thousand people quadruples each summer as 36 thousand second home owners with their families and 13 thousand garden cooperative members arrive from Moscow and Moscow oblast. It is extremely difﬁcult to establish just how many Muscovites make the annual exodus from the city to take up residence in the countryside but it is likely that the number is considerable, reaching over one million (Nefedova, Polyan, and Treivish 2001: 383–8). Lotoshino, Lukhovitsy, and Pereslav -Zasleskii are all over 200 km (125 miles) from Moscow. Nearer to the city, Muscovites have bought up all the vacant rural houses. In addition to these existing houses, new purpose-built second homes have been erected on greenﬁeld sites. Together with the garden cooperatives and allotments, these ‘dacha settlements’ take up a signiﬁcant area and individually can be larger than substantial villages and small towns found in Moscow oblast (Nefedova, 2003b: 29–51). The older dacha settlements, including those that are still today associated with communities of artists and writers, such as Peredelkino and Abramstevo, tend to be much nearer the city (for a history of the dacha see Lovell, 2003). These dachas, some now a hundred years old, are generally small, wooden, two-storey houses and the most attractive are located among tall pine and ﬁr trees. Unlike the purpose-built dacha settlements that have appeared in the last two decades, the older dachas have a large plot of land attached to them—between 1,200 and 5,000 sq. m. Their modern incarnations have half this amount of land, while village-based rural homes have the same sized plots as the permanent residents’. The use to which the land attached to the sort of rural second homes described above varies. It can be used for growing food, but as a low intensity activity—a few trees, several rows of strawberries, and salad crops—and it is more common for it not to be cultivated. These plots are kept for pleasure and they do not play any signiﬁcant role in a household’s food economy. During their sojourn in the countryside the main contribution these second home owners make to the rural economy is by buying produce from the permanent rural population. In other cases, especially when second homes have become a permanent residence or where a previously functioning household farm has been inherited, the attached plot can be used more intensively and patterns of crop cultivation do not differ much from those of the surrounding population. In the cucumber province of Lukhovitsy district, urban-headed households differed little from rural households in the methods and aims of production. Imitating local production patterns is more difﬁcult where the emphasis is on livestock husbandry, partly because it is a yearround commitment, but also because it requires a relationship with the large farm sector to provide feed grains.

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Urbs in Rure: the osobnyaki and kottedzhi of Russia’s new rich and middle classes The ﬁnal type of rural second home is really a nascent middle-class suburb. In the ﬁfteen years since the collapse of communism, estates of substantial detached houses have appeared in the environs of all large cities. These are the private houses that initially belonged to the Russian noveaux riches, but are today spreading to the growing middle class. Unlike many rural dwellings, these houses have all the normal urban-type services including running water and sanitation. They qualify for inclusion here simply because, in their pattern of occupancy, they can resemble the dacha; that is, they are used only during the summer months. Patterns of use are changing, however, and permanent occupancy is becoming more common. They tend to appear within and alongside existing dacha areas in greenﬁeld sites on former agricultural land. In addition to new, often gated, estates of country houses—the so called kottedzhi—substantial private houses built on the site of a former dwelling have appeared, some with extensive areas of land attached. These have been developed into personal estates, or osobnyaki. Neither the elaborate nor the more modest individual private houses are sites of food production. As is the case with the other forms of private and independent farming considered in this chapter, there is an area of overlap between rural and urban household production. The case for collapsing the distinction has been recognized by the Russian authorities in the concept of people’s farms (khozyaistvo naseleniya), a form of small-scale husbandry engaged in for personal consumption. Yet, as is obvious from the previous chapters, much rural household production is not readily encompassed by this deﬁnition because it is quite clearly geared to the market. In the concluding chapter, we attempt a reclassiﬁcation of all Russian small farms according to their engagement with market.

Appendix The following is a translation of an article from a rural district newspaper in Penza oblast, situated to the north of Saratov. It is a report of how the oblast agricultural department has decided to respond to pressure from the centre to increase the number of private peasant farms. As the article shows, Penza’s response is to make an inventory of livestock and crops in the personal subsidiary (household) sector with a view to identifying those households with large numbers of livestock (5–7 head) that should register as private farms. The article does not make clear what methods will be used to make the households register, but the response in the villages is easy to predict—livestock will be hidden or slaughtered to bring the numbers down below the threshold. The proposed action of the local agricultural department is very reminiscent of the way in which, under the Stolypin Land Reform a century earlier, land organization ofﬁcials (zemleustroiteli) entered

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villages to persuade (without much success) peasants to set up individual private farms (see Pallot, 1999):

‘The number of farmers will grow’ In the near future no fewer that 70 new peasant farmer farms will be formed in the district. This is the task that the government has placed before every municipal authority and it has been the subject of every joint meeting between the administrators of rural districts and the head of the oblast agricultural department, V. I. Buchenkov. Last Tuesday V. I. Buchenkov and several specialists set out on visits to all rural districts with the aim of having concrete conversations with local ofﬁcials about the formation of independent peasant farms and offering them access to future credit for the purpose. He explained that the oblast authorities are anxious about the fact that there has been an absolute decrease in the number of livestock in the household sector. This is possibly because of the many people in the villages who have taken to going off on labour migrations, the collapse of large agricultural enterprises, the high price of feed grains, and the ageing population. Meanwhile there has been an increase in the number of livestock kept on private peasant farms. This latter is partly due to the availability of credit to such farms under the programme to develop the national agro-industrial complex. From next year the regional government has promised 100 million roubles credit to pay for the development of private farms, 80 million of which are earmarked for developing livestock husbandry and 20 million for building glasshouses. As the head of the district administration S. E. Papshev noted, today in the district we have 136 private farms but there are also 200 families earning below the poverty line and three thousand individuals who have left to work in Moscow. Because of this it would be difﬁcult, although not impossible, to organize more private farms. Three to four could be formed per rural administration. During a two-week period two ofﬁcials from the regional agricultural administration will travel around the villages in order to ﬁnd people who are ready to form private farms. Priority will be given to conversations with households with ﬁve to seven bullocks, milk cows, or pigs in the personal subsidiary sector; it is precisely these that must (dolzhni) be the ﬁrst to register as private farmers. At the Tuesday meeting livestock statistics for the oblast were analysed. V. I. Buchenkov noted that the oblast lags behind its planned output of milk and meat products in large enterprises. The size of the milk herd has especially contracted. In order to get a more accurate picture of what is happening in the villages, from this year work will take place in Bugrovka and Sulaka to count the precise number of cattle and poultry owned by households and what is cultivated on allotments. On the basis of these statistics, we will form a general picture of household production with a view to establishing a programme for their development into farms. V. Grigor ev, Sel skaya Nov (15 December 2006), nos. 104–5: 1 and 3.

8 Household Food Production—What Next? The previous chapters have shown how diverse are the patterns of household food production in Russia; most rural households grow a mixture of vegetables, roots, and fruit and might keep some poultry and small and large livestock for personal consumption, but many also have developed one or more branches geared to the market. Specialization is a feature of the post-Soviet ‘personal subsidiary economy’ and it has been associated with a deepening geographical division of labour in the sector. In this concluding chapter, we examine the extent to which the degree of market engagement of households maps onto the patterns of specialization and diversiﬁcation we have described in the previous pages. The aim is to shed some light on the questions posed at the beginning of this book about the ‘nature’ of household production and its place in Russia’s evolving agri-food economy. It seems to us self-evident that the degree and character of household production’s subsumption to the market is the key to understanding the different directions in which it might be taken in the future. There is still little consensus among theorists of the peasantry about capitalism’s impact on small producers, but few would disagree that the market is the dominant transformative process whether, as in the case of households located in the suburbs of the major cities, it is to bind them ever more tightly into the market nexus or, as in the northern peripheries, its very absence reproduces their marginality. In the villages in which we conducted our surveys we encountered households positioned at different points along a ‘market’ spectrum. At one end there were those that were producing food exclusively to meet their own and their family’s consumption needs. These households sell surpluses, if they have them, in order to earn a money income to buy the staples they cannot produce themselves, but this is not their principal motivation. The noted Russian rural sociologist Vinogradskii (1999), among others, has identiﬁed the existence of spontaneous non-monetary networks cooperation developing among rural households aimed at achieving food security, but even in the most remote places we visited, we found that primitive markets did exist. Social transfers and wages bring money into the peripheries, conferring purchasing power on particular social groups,

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such as pensioners and social sphere workers, who then constitute a market for produce from other people’s allotments or for berries, mushrooms, and fuel wood gathered from the forest by the able-bodied. Even Solym , the most northerly settlement included in our investigation in the KPAO, has its own entrepreneur, Stefan, who makes a weekly trip to Perm to buy goods to sell on to his fellow villagers. Stefan has also set up an intensive pig farm in the settlement and, with his brother, invested in a string of bakeries to supply villages in the north of Kosa district. Solym is an unpromising candidate for such entrepreneurial activity; it is a former exile settlement from the Stalin era that later became a home for forestry workers, but since the collapse of the timber trade its inhabitants have been forced back onto their plots to survive. Despite railing against his fellow villagers for their lack of initiative, there is sufﬁcient money in circulation in Solym for Stefan’s businesses to do moderately well and earn sufﬁcient for him to rent a ﬂat in Perm so that Svetlana, his wife, can study at Perm University. At the other end of the spectrum from those engaged primarily in producing for personal consumption are households that have restructured production with a view to maximizing income from sales. In the ﬁfteen years since the collapse of communism, there has been a general shift in the position of households along the spectrum in the direction of such market engaged households. Within villages, differences in demographic structure, access to the inputs they need for arable and livestock husbandry, and other ‘initial conditions’ have meant that households have not all been similarly placed to respond to the market. The process of socio-economic differentiation has undoubtedly been taking place in post-Soviet rural communities since 1991, although whether this will lead in the longer term to the emergence of a deﬁnite class structure remains to be seen. Among the least well placed to adapt to the changed conditions are small and elderly households, those that have been abandoned by their urban relatives, and households where alcoholism is a problem (O’Brien, Patsiorkorski, and Dersham, 2005). Differentiation is also expressed geographically with spatial clusters of market-oriented household production standing in sharp contrast to places that have witnessed a consolidation of the natural economy or that have been caught up in a downward spiral of poverty and deprivation. In the north of Perm oblast, the refrigerated trucks from St Petersburg arriving to buy up mushrooms are ‘counterbalanced’ by others from Berezniki to the east bringing bottles of industrial alcohol to sell to the inhabitants of otherwise abandoned forestry villages. Whether the process of intra-village differentiation is proceeding more intensely than inter-village differentiation must await detailed sociological research, but it is worth observing that in Lukhovitsy district there are plenty of pensioner households that are doing well from specializing in cucumbers and cabbages, and there are youthful households in the north which, because of the absence of shops, use their plots exclusively for self-provisioning. Geography, it appears, does ‘matter’.

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Marketing the Products of the Household Sector In the Soviet understanding of the ‘personal subsidiary economy’, most of the product of the household plot was supposed to be consumed by immediate household members. Surpluses were generally disposed of locally, most sold to the parent kolkhoz or sovkhoz or to the local RAIPO—the local authority retail chain. A proportion of produce was also sold in collective farm markets that were found in every town or city in the USSR. In these markets prices were controlled, although they were allowed to ﬂuctuate between predetermined thresholds and the produce on sale was subject to health and safety monitoring. Additionally, depending upon how strictly the state decided to enforce its laws against private trade at any time, rural people also sold surpluses directly to consumers, in unofﬁcial markets, or from makeshift stalls along the main highways and at railway stations. During the Soviet period ofﬁcial unease about the existence of a semi-private sector in agriculture meant that the role of ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial markets for household produce remained off limits for research with the result that there is no systematic information either about what proportion of such produce was marketed or of the channels that were used. Therefore, it is difﬁcult to make temporal comparisons of the household sector’s engagement with the market. The expansion in the volume of rural–urban transfers discussed in Chapter 3 is suggestive of an expansion in the amount of produce entering the market, but these ﬁgures are only a rough guide since unknown quantities are destined for family members, enter other informal networks, or are sold in rural markets. If it is impossible to track changes over the past ﬁfteen years in the proportion of home produced food entering the market, recent survey evidence gives a snapshot of the situation at the present time. Table 8.1 is of the proportion of different food products marketed by urban and rural households in 2003. As the table shows, around one-quarter of all vegetables, between one-quarter and one-third of all Table 8.1. The proportion of different crop and livestock products entering the market from the rural and urban household sector, 2003

Potatoes Cabbages Cucumbers Tomatoes Melons Cereals Beef Pork Milk Eggs Honey

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

All households 16.4 19.5 11.2 16.5 18.4 59.9 53.8 41.2 35.6 20.7 53.7

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Urban 5.2 2.8 3.6 3.2 4.8 92.0 29.9 31.4 29.1 11.2 72.3

Source: Maloe Predprinimatel stvo, 2004: 147.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Rural 21.4 29.3 18.4 28.7 24.3 56.6 56.6 42.5 36.3 22.8 49.5

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milk and eggs, and one-half of all the meat produced by rural households entered the market in that year. The proportions for crop products were much smaller for urban households, conﬁrming that most are destined for personal consumption. The ﬁgures for livestock products marketed by urban households can largely be discounted, since the absolute numbers involved in animal husbandry are small. The same applies to cereals that are grown by only small numbers of households. It is obvious from the ﬁgures that dairy and meat production is more commercialized than that of root crops and vegetables, but it has to be remembered that whereas almost all households grow some crops for personal consumption, it is unusual for households specializing in vegetables or roots to be able to keep animals for the same purpose. In selling their produce rural households have a choice of marketing channels. These include:

r Local markets in villages, district centres, and small towns to which the producers themselves bring their produce;

r Larger urban markets, including those in regional centres where producers can either sell their produce themselves or subcontract to stall owners to sell on; r Direct sales at the roadside, ‘farm gate’, and house-to-house; r Large farms or local authority run marketing cooperatives; r Intermediaries or visiting buyers-up who bulk-buy from villages; r Institutions including schools and hospitals; r Food processing plants, dairies or commercial outlets such as restaurants. Of these various channels, the sale of produce to intermediaries has been one of the striking features of the post-Soviet commercialization of household production. We have described how large refrigerated trucks and lorries arrive in villages to buy up vegetables, forest products, meat, and live animals from small producers. In most cases, such buyers work out of the regional farmers’ markets but they can also service inter-regional and national markets; purchasing ‘southern produce’ such as watermelons to sell in the northern cities is an example. The reliance of household producers on visiting buyers is a reﬂection of the weak development of the formal marketing infrastructure in Russia and of rising transport costs that make taking their own produce to market too expensive for the producers. Cucumber producers in Lukhovitsy district had taken a conscious decision to deploy household labour to maximize the daily cucumber harvest rather than take the crop to Moscow themselves, despite having to accept a lower price per kilogram from visiting buyers than they might achieve by direct sales. We encountered buyers-up in all the regions we visited where there are surpluses to be sold, although the intensity of their activity depended upon relative location and the volume and potential value of the available produce. In suburban zones, for example, households still tend to sell their produce themselves; around Perm city, just one-quarter of the vegetable-producing households we questioned sold to middlemen, one-third sold to second home owners, and the remainder travelled

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Plate 8.1. Inside a rural market in the south of Russia

Plate 8.2. Selling piglets from the back of a car in a local market in southern Russia. In the past rural people would obtain their piglets for fattening from the large farms

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to the city to sell their vegetables. By contrast, in the north of the oblast, far from large population centres, some 75 per cent of the product (mainly berries and mushrooms) of the household sector that enters the market is sold to out-ofregion buyers. This form of marketing is also developed in the south of Russia. In Stavropol krai between one-half and two-thirds of the households we surveyed sell to visiting buyers, compared with one-quarter to one-third who take the produce to market themselves. One of the most lucrative markets for rural household producers is that of second home owners; wherever new dacha settlements have been developed in large numbers, these constitute a market for rural household produce and, locally, they can reduce dependence on intermediaries. The advantage of the ‘dacha market’ is that it allows direct sales and hence commands higher prices, while transport costs are low or zero. The disadvantage is that the market is seasonal. This affects the milk sector, in particular, where production continues more or less throughout the year; cow-owning households experience difﬁculty marketing their produce once the vacation season is over. Local markets, which are colourful affairs, work all year round but their ability to absorb much of the surplus product of the household sector tends to be limited. They are more important for meat and dairy sales than for vegetables, fruit, and roots since most rural households produce these themselves. However, they are an important outlet for selling on the cereals and other produce received in lieu of wages and pensions from the large farm sector and, in the spring, baby animals. Whereas most people in the past bought their piglets for fattening from the collective or state farm, today they buy them in the local market from households that specialize in producing young stock. Analogous to local markets are roadside sales and stations on mainline railways where overnight expresses make a stop. Depending upon the extent to which these various venues have been captured by the ‘market maﬁa’, the producers have to pay to secure a pitch. Armenian ‘entrepreneurs’ control all the stalls selling smoked ﬁsh along the Moscow–St Petersburg highway described in Chapter 4 and prevent independent households from setting up their own pitch. Least popular among rural people is selling to institutions since these generally offer ﬁxed prices that are considered too low. We saw in Chapter 5 how rural people prefer to try their luck with direct sales in the hope of striking a better deal than tying themselves into a permanent contract with a dairy. Many rural people still consider that the former collective farms should buy up their surpluses but few are able or willing to fulﬁl this role today. The contraction of this market has been particularly problematic in the dairy sector where in the past collective farms would make a daily milk collection. These purchases were advantageous for large farms, helping them to meet their procurement targets without having incurred the extra expense involved in expanding their own herds. With this channel now gone as a result of the contraction of livestock husbandry on large farms and greater quality control of those that have been retained, rural people are experiencing difﬁculties disposing of milk. Milk prices are too low today to make it proﬁtable for dairies to collect villagers’ milk. In one village, Kurilovka in

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Plate 8.3. Onions produced by peripatetic brigades for sale on the roadside in Stavropol krai

Plate 8.4. Roadside sales are still a preferred option for some households

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Plate 8.5. The milk collection in Kurilovka, Novouzensk district, Saratov oblast

Saratov oblast, where households keep many dairy cows, villagers have organized a daily collection by horse and cart and have negotiated a contract with the local dairy to take their milk. This is obviously a constructive development but it was a rare example in the places we visited.

Trends in Market Production Russian agrarian experts cannot agree among themselves how far the trend in the household sector towards the commercialization of production has progressed in the past ﬁfteen years. Ofﬁcial statistics give a modest ﬁgure of 8 per cent for the proportion of all households producing food for sale in 2002 (Ekonomicheskaya aktivnost 2002: 84) but recognize the existence of wide regional variations. Whereas in Novgorod oblast just 4 per cent of all rural households are recorded as selling some of their product, the ﬁgure rises to 16 per cent in Saratov oblast, 24 per cent in Belgorod oblast, and 36 per cent in Kalmykia. Independent investigators, generally, put the proportion of households selling produce higher. Petrikov (1999) of the All-Russian Institute for Agrarian Problems and Information, for example, gives a ﬁgure nearer 10–15 per cent. On the basis of their investigation in Belgorod, Efendiev and Bolotina (2002) estimate that 40 per cent of households sell their milk and one-third, their meat. This exceeds the ofﬁcial ﬁgure of one-quarter for the oblast. Our own surveys, similarly, suggest that the ofﬁcial ﬁgures underestimate the degree of market engagement in many places.

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One source of the differences in estimates is that there is no agreed methodology for measuring the commercialization of household production. It is one thing for people in the outer districts of Novgorod oblast to grasp any opportunity that might arise to sell their surplus milk or the mushrooms and berries they have collected in the forest, but quite another for the tomato producers of Kinel Cherkasy to adopt a production strategy adapted to the demands of the Samara market. Both are evidence of market penetration in rural Russia but they denote different degrees of subsumption to capital. In our investigation we attempted to distinguish between different intensities of market engagement in our sample rural districts. Respondents were invited to state the percentage of the annual product that they marketed and whether it was done on a regular basis. As our purpose was to identify spatial patterns, we did not attempt to analyse the role of sales in individual household budgets. We did, however, include a control question that asked about the share of income derived from sales of produce. In our analysis we considered as ‘more commercialized’ households that sold more than 50 per cent of their annual product on a regular basis, ‘less commercialized’ those that sold under 50 per cent but always expected to sell some, and ‘noncommercialized’, those those that sold under 10 per cent of what they produced and only sporadically. These thresholds are essentially arbitrary—Praust (1999: 191), for example, uses an upper threshold of 80 per cent of product marketed to identify commercial households and 30 per cent marketed to identify subsistence (potrebitel nye) households—but as our intention is to identify relative degrees of engagement with the market and not absolute categories, the difference is not important. Applying Praust’s thresholds does not change the broad geographical pattern of ‘more’ and ‘less’ commercialized households that our data reveal. A more intractable issue with this type of cross-sectional analysis is what it can reveal about longer-term trends. It would obviously make a difference to the conclusions we can reach about the development trajectories of household production if we were able to predict whether the households in the middle group— the ‘less commercialized’—were likely, in the future, to join one of the polar groups or remain much the same as they are at present. This question can only be answered by longitudinal analyses, which was beyond the scope of this study. The results we present in Table 8.2 are thus a snapshot of the degree of market engagement among rural households in the early 2000s and cannot be read for what they might reveal about future trends. They cover fourteen rural districts (and 404 respondents). We have included data on the proportion of product that is transferred to relatives living elsewhere since this affects the size of surplus available for sale. The pattern of market engagement shown in the table maps roughly on to the geography of specialization in household production discussed in this book. Thus, among the districts with the largest number of households belonging to the more commercialized category are those specializing in vegetables (Lukhovitsy, Ryazan and Perm ) and in meat and milk production (Bazarnyi Karabulak and Lysye Gory). These districts are located centrally within European Russia in

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Table 8.2. The market engagement of households in the survey districts .. Households in each district (%) .. .. . . .. Market ... Semi-market ... Not market .. oriented .. oriented .. oriented .. .. .. .. .. .. . . .. . Northern taiga .. . .. .. .. Kosa (Perm oblast) ... 24 24 52 . .. . .. .. Gornozavod 0 26 74 .. .. . .. .. .. Mixed forest .. .. .. Lukhovitsy (Moscow .. 45 25 30 .. .. .. .. .. oblast) .. .. .. .. .. Perm (Perm oblast) .. 39 18 43 .. .. . Barda 25 31 44 .. ... .. .. .. .. Valdai (Novgorod 18 41 41 .. .. .. oblast) .. .. .. . .. .. .. Ryazan (Ryazan 30 50 20 .. .. .. oblast) .. .. .. .. .. .. Forest-steppe .. . ... .. Bazarnyi Karabulak .. 42 36 22 . .. .. .. (Saratov oblast) .. .. .. .. .. .. Lysye Gory 37 33 30 .. .. .. .. Dry steppe .. .. .. .. .. Rovnoe (Saratov 16 38 46 .. .. .. .. .. .. oblast) .. .. .. Novouzensk 29 31 40 .. .. .. .. .. .. Levokumskoe 15 5 78 . .. .. .. (Stavropol krai) .. .. .. . . .. Southern cereal belt .. .. .. .. Novoaleksandrovsk ... 11 23 66 .. . .. .. .. (Stavropol krai) .. .. .. .. .. Andropov 24 26 50 . Source: Authors’ survey.

.. .. Proportion of total product .. given to urban relatives .. .. < 20% ... 20–50% ... > 50% .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. . .. ... ... 5 .. 11 .. 28 .. .. 10 .. 16 .. 26 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 6 .. 13 .. 42 .. .. .. .. . .. ... . 5 9 .. 27 .. .. .. 24 3 ... 43 ... ... 18 ... 36 ... 6 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. n/d .. n/d .. n/d .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 7 .. 20 9 ... .. .. .. .. ... ... 28 . 17 7 ... .. ... .. .. .. .. 25 .. 20 .. 12 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 8 15 3 .. .. .. .. 10 .. 10 .. 3 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 14 .. 19 .. 14 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 22 .. 17 .. 21

regions of more moderate physical environment that are less hostile to human settlement than are those to the north, south, and east. With the exception of Lysye Gory, they are located near large urban markets or on trunk roads giving easy access to them. In short, they all beneﬁt from a favourable geographic location and their emergence as sites of commercial small-scale farming is no surprise. If the inﬂuence of large towns is to an extent predictable, so too is the inﬂuence of distance and an unfavourable physical environment on the low level of market involvement of households in the northern districts of Perm oblast, in Kosa and Gornozavod, and in the ‘internal peripheries’ of more centrally located oblasts in the mixed forest belt, such as Valdai in Novgorod. An ageing population, the collapse of the large farm sector, and poor infrastructure exacerbate these geographical problems for the development of links with the market in these regions. Even so, and even in such unpromising places, there are opportunities for specialization geared towards niche or local markets, as the example of the horse traders of Poroshevo in KPAO described in Chapter 5 illustrated. The story the survey results tell in the southern and eastern steppes is more complicated than in the centre and north of European Russia because of the

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crucial, but variable, role here of the relationship with the large farm sector and of a dynamically growing rural population. The small numbers of more commercialized household producers in Novoaleksandrovsk and Andropov districts, located in the heart of Russia’s most favourable farming region, is immediately striking; here, the success of large farming has suppressed the development of a commercial household sector. This is partly because farm work is a source of money income lessening pressure on households to generate income from their plots but also because there is more limited access here to the inputs needed for household production. Support from large farms is greater, the more marginal the environment in the south and east but large families (or a low labour–consumption balance) can reduce the size of surpluses available for sale. Average family size is 3.5 in the east and south compared with 2.9 for Russia generally (Chislo i sostav domokhozyaistv 2004: 6–19). Large family size is also part of the explanation for the relatively small number of commercialized households in Barda district despite being known for its production of potatoes and meat for the Perm market. Still, even in Novouzensk, on the border with Kazakhstan, where families are large and major markets a long way away, as many as 60 per cent of all households included in our survey sell more than 10 per cent of what they produce, and for nearly one half of these it is over 50 per cent. As we learned in Chapter 4, the development of livestock husbandry, which is the basis of commercial meat production, is associated with a particularly supportive large farm sector in the eastern dry steppes. If the inﬂuence of distance and environment, mediated in places by the nature of the relationship with the large farm sector, is expressed clearly in the different degrees of market engagement of rural household production, the effect of ethnicity is more ambiguous. As we observed in Chapter 6, ethnic myth-making is rife in rural Russia, especially in the multicultural south. Among the popular myths is the supposed superior commercial-mindedness of non-Russians, particularly the Tatars and the peoples from the north Caucasus republics, which has been fuelled, in part, by the fact that many of the visiting buyers who work out of the major urban markets are non-Russians. Where household producers themselves are concerned, the link between market engagement and ethnicity is weak, although locally there can be some interesting exceptions to the general rule. One example is of Kazakh households in the most easterly districts of Saratov oblast, among whom there is a higher degree of market involvement than among their Russian and Ukrainian neighbours, as Table 8.3 shows. Despite the larger average size of their households, Kazakhs produce greater volumes of marketable surpluses than do their non-Kazakh neighbours, which may also be the explanation for the higher incidence among them of private car and lorry ownership. But this ‘ethnic effect’ is not repeated in Rovnoe district, where the proportion of Kazakhs and Russian households regularly marketing more than 50 per cent of their produce does not differ much. The reason is that whereas in Novouzensk the product mix is different on Kazakh and Russian farms (Kazakhs concentrate exclusively on meat production, whereas Russians produce dairy products and vegetables as well),

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Table 8.3. The market orientation of ethnic groups surveyed in Saratov oblast and the Republic of Chuvashia .. Households (%) .. .. .. .. Market Semi-market . .. Not market . .. .. .. . .. Ethnic group .. oriented .. oriented .. oriented . .. . .. . . .. .. .. .. . .. . Saratov oblast .. .. .. .. . . . .. Russians and . Rovnoe 26 27 47 . .. .. .. Ukrainians .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. Kazakhs 27 45 28 .. .. . .. .. .. Novouzensk 27 29 44 .. Russians and ... .. .. .. Ukrainians .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Kazakhs 68 14 18 .. . . . .. .. Russians and .. Lysye Gory 41 41 18 .. . . .. Ukrainians . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Bazarnyi Karabulak ... Russians and ... 52 30 18 .. .. .. Ukrainians .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 56 31 13 .. Chuvashes ... .. .. .. Republic of Chuvashia ... . . . . .. .. Russians .. .. 0 33 67 .. .. .. .. .. .. Chuvashes .. . 28 28 41 .. .. .. . . . . 7 40 47 . Tatars Source: Authors’ survey: Saratov, 2001; Chuvashia, 2002.

.. .. Owning car .. or lorry .. . ... .. .. 35 .. .. .. 36 .. .. 36 .. .. .. 50 .. 21 .. .. .. .. 61 .. .. .. 25 .. .. .. 7 .. .. 26 .. 40

in Rovnoe both Russians and Kazakhs have to concentrate on the production of vegetables and melons because of the absence of support from large farms in the district. The same inconclusive picture is repeated on the right bank of the river Volga where the differences in the degree of commercialization among Chuvashes, Russians, and Ukrainians are not very marked, even though locally the Chuvashes have a reputation for being commercially minded. The example of the Chuvash republic, shown at the bottom of the table, is a helpful reminder of the caution that is needed in drawing conclusions from ﬁgures about how much households market. Both Russians and Tatars appear from the data in Table 8.3 to have failed to grasp opportunities to make money by selling produce from their personal husbandry, but it will be recalled from Chapter 6 that the reasons for the low percentage of more commercialized farms for the two groups could not, in fact, be more different. Russian villages in Chuvashia have suffered out-migration of the young and the people who remain are too old to keep livestock. In the Tatar villages, by contrast, there are large numbers of livestock but they are kept primarily for the personal consumption needs of large Tatar extended families that look to trade rather than agriculture to generate money income and to maintain a high standard of living. Whereas the former are subsistence producers, the latter might be better described as hobby or part-time farmers. As for the future of the household sector, a political decision will have to be made about whether to continue to exclude it from mainstream agrarian policymaking (the preferred option of the producers themselves who are suspicious of dirigisme) or whether to attempt its integration into the mainstream with a

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Household Food Production—What Next? Table 8.4. Future production plans of households (ranked according to the % of more commercialized household producers in each district sample) .. Hypothetical plans for future .. .. production. households (%) . . .. . . Rural district . Rank ... No change ... Increase ... Decrease .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. Lukhovitsy 1 ... 54 4 42 .. .. .. .. Bazarnyi Karabulak ... 2 ... 30 52 18 . . . .. .. .. Perm district 3 ... 75 5 20 . . .. . .. .. Lysye Gory 4 .. 27 40 33 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Ryazan district 5 11 28 61 . .. .. .. .. .. Novouzensk 6 .. 18 58 24 .. .. .. .. .. Barda 7 ... 64 18 18 .. . . .. .. .. Andropov 8 ... 23 34 43 .. .. .. . .. .. Kosa 8 .. 75 17 8 .. . . . .. 10 .. .. .. Valdai 35 24 41 .. .. .. .. Rovnoe 25 41 34 .. 11 .. .. .. .. 12 .. .. .. Levokumskoe 57 29 14 .. .. .. .. Novoaleksandrovsk .. 13 .. 24 35 41 .. .. .. . .. .. Gornozavod 53 16 32 . 14 .. Source: Authors’ survey.

view to harnessing it to help build the capitalist farm economy in Russia. Our investigations indicate that if the latter turns out to be the preferred option, much will need to be done to persuade Russia’s household producers to expand beyond current levels of production. Rural households might look to their personal arable and livestock husbandry to make enough money to buy luxuries, to rebuild their houses, and to put their children through higher education, but they show little inclination to take their farm to a higher level. In our questionnaire we asked our interview partners to tell us how they would respond to a ﬁvefold increase in their current household income (or to a level at which they would no longer need to produce their own food). It is striking in how few districts households would use this opportunity to invest in their smallholding. The majority, including the households in Lukhovitsy district, would rather leave production at the same level as at present or would reduce production (Table 8.4). If the ‘entrepreneurial impulse’ that undoubtedly exists in the household sector is to be harnessed to restart the farmer movement, it is obvious that much thought needs to be put into the development of incentives that would encourage households to invest in their smallholdings. These might include access to cheap credit and agricultural extension and help in setting up marketing cooperatives such as those in Kurilovka described above, but they also need to include ways of convincing households that the resource base on which they currently depend is secure and that there are reliable alternative sources of inputs to the former collective and state farms.

Deconstructing the Boundaries Around People’s Farms In the previous chapter we argued that household production is just one among several different forms of small, independent, farming in Russia. Ofﬁcial

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classiﬁcations of Russian farm types fall into three discrete categories— agricultural organizations/enterprises, private peasant farms, and ‘people’s’ farms—and make the exploration of the commonalities and differences between these difﬁcult. The insistence that ‘people’s farms’ in Russia are a unique social and economic formation is understandable—there are few industrialized and urbanized countries in the world where most of the vegetables and meat consumed originate in plots of under a hectare in size—but it is also disabling when it comes to thinking creatively about their future and learning lessons from other cultures. Where European comparisons are concerned, for example, it does not seem extravagant to suggest that the urban plot holders who journey out to the suburbs and beyond to grow vegetables, ﬂowers, and strawberries, may be motivated by much the same considerations as German hobby farmers or English allotment holders, even though they are more numerous. In the same vein, there are small farms on the Mediterranean littoral with which useful comparisons might be made. In Italy on the island of Elba where one of the authors takes her vacations, there are small farmers who, as in Russia, are engaged in production both for the market and personal consumption. Renzo has two hectares of land divided into three separate parcels on an east-facing slope on which he cultivates vines and a selection of fruit and vegetables. He retired from his agricultural labouring job in the lowland vineyards a few years ago and now devotes his time to supplying his large extended family with wine, vegetables, and wild boar (which he has a licence to shoot in the hunting season) and sells on surplus produce to supplement his pension. Rather than insisting on its uniqueness, it is possible to view household production in Russia as an eastward extension of European small farming, albeit with distinctive Russian characteristics. Like their European counterparts, Russian small farms are subsumed to a lesser or greater degree to capital and, as in Europe, they occupy a subordinate position in the hierarchy of power. Whether we choose to call these small production units ‘peasant-’ or some other form of ‘hyphenated’ farm—subsistence, hobby or, indeed, small—would be of purely academic interest were it not for the fact that the Russian state insists upon classifying them in a way that presupposes their difference from other types of agricultural production unit and, following from this, has devised a speciﬁc set of laws and regulations applying just to them. This approach is reminiscent not only of the Soviet period, when classiﬁcation was a cornerstone of maintaining the disciplinary order, but also of pre-revolutionary Russia when peasants and landowners were subject in law to different rights and obligations with respect to their land. The current laws relating to people’s farms as currently framed are, of course, to the general advantage of plot holders who are suspicious of any interference in their activities, but it may not be good in the long term since it condemns household production to a cycle of endless reproduction of petty commodity production, involution, and subjugation to the most primitive forms of market exploitation. People’s farms are not, of course, the only small independent producers in Russia that suffer from state’s obsession with categorization (Praust, 1998: 192).

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People’s farms have been constructed as the ofﬁcial ‘Other’ of the agri-food production system, but as Chapter 7 has shown there are, in addition, production units whose existence is not recognized at all. Below we present our own (re)classiﬁcation of the independent and small farms that we found in the Russian countryside during the course of our research, based on their degree of market engagement. We chose this in preference to other possible criteria— such as size and legal status (as preferred by ofﬁcialdom), proﬁtability, ownership (whether corporate, individual, or family), labour (household or hired)—because it is the market that is the principal force behind agrarian change at the present time. Heading the list are what we can call ‘private kolkhoz farms’—the farms that have been formed by collective and state farm elites from the land shares of their former employees, described in the previous chapter. Essentially, these are slimmed down ‘collectives’, which reproduce at a smaller scale the organization of larger agricultural enterprises. These farms market everything they produce, except for that portion that has to be retained for production purposes and for the in-kind component of workers’ wages. Next in the ranking come formally registered private peasant farms that make sufﬁcient proﬁt from cereal or vegetable production to be able to employ a permanent labour force. They produce for the market and, like the private kolkhoz farms, they use a portion of their proﬁt to invest in expanding and modernizing production. After them, there are three groups of farms that, while selling the bulk of what they produce, are much smaller operations and are not in a position to reinvest in their farm or are unwilling to do so. In descending size they are: ofﬁcially registered private peasant farms, tenant farms that rent land from large agricultural enterprises for crop production or to graze livestock, and commercialized crop and livestock household producers. These farms can employ hired labour, especially the ﬁrst two, but, normally, this is on a casual or seasonal basis. They look to the crops and livestock products they sell to maintain a reasonable standard of living, which may include the acquisition of modest luxuries such as a car or a superior education for their children. In all the subsequent categories, production for consumption equals or exceeds in importance production for the market. They divide into those units that will market any produce surplus to their own needs—small private peasant farms, the majority of rural households, and a small number of urban registered households—and those that rarely if ever enter the market. The second is a highly differentiated group consisting of both rural and urban households, including those that because of a low labour–consumption balance or an unfavourable natural resource base cannot produce surpluses and those for whom producing food is a recreational activity. Instead of an orderly transition to an agrarian structure of appropriately sized ofﬁcially sanctioned private farms, Russia’s emergent capitalism has peppered the landscape with petty commodity producers and other ‘primitive’ forms of agricultural enterprise occupying the interstices between the large farms. Many

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of these are built on insecure legal foundations and among them household producers are by no means the most vulnerable—they are legal and they have a core land resource, the household plot, in their inalienable ownership—but they do face a variety of threats. The real challenge for Russia’s policy-makers is to devise policies that recognize the varied needs of all these types of independent and small farms; that is, in places where production is already commercialized, policies that simultaneously encourage modernization and integration without stiﬂing by over-regulation the impulse that led to the engagement with the market in the ﬁrst place; and, in the margins, policies that shore up selfprovisioning as a bulwark against the negative consequences of social and economic exclusion that, if left to run on unchecked, will depopulate vast areas of Russia’s peripheries. In the European Union support is given to small farming in marginal regions—crofters in the Scottish highlands and mountain farms in the Alps and Slovenia—for a combination of aesthetic, welfare, and socio-cultural reasons. Without intervention many forms of traditional husbandry that might be worth saving will disappear from the Russian countryside. It is not long ago that farmers in the United Kingdom sold their produce in local markets, and the knowledge about how to make jam and to bottle fruit was universal. When these traditional forms of husbandry and trade disappeared, they did so in the course of a generation and, as current attempts to breathe new life into regional production systems have shown, they are difﬁcult to resurrect once lost.

Conclusion Four years of ﬁeldwork and one of digesting and discussing our ﬁndings yielded a surprising degree of agreement between the two authors about their subject but, inevitably, some of the observations that have meaning for the native Russian audience have been lost by the need in the current volume to focus the presentation on a Western audience. It seems right, therefore, to leave the ﬁnal word to Tanya Nefedova to try to convey some of these deeper meanings embedded in the postSoviet experience of Russia’s ‘unknown agriculture’.

Postscript by Tat yana Nefedova ‘It is well known that Russian academics are more inclined to criticize developments in their country in the 1990s than are their foreign colleagues. Maybe this is associated with the hopes people had that this time it was not going to be another case of “we hoped for the best, but everything turned out the same”. The task of Russian academics seems often to be to explain why so little changes in their country, and thus it is in the case of attempts to restructure the Russian farm economy. In the 1990s, our society underwent what can superﬁcially be described

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as “culture shock”. According to socio-psychologists culture shock is associated with feelings of low self-esteem, fear of unexpected change, material deprivations, and the loss of familiar roles. In some measure all levels of Russian society have experienced these feelings. In the 1990s Russia embraced the West—especially young people and especially urbanites. The introduction of the market has brought about many changes but how precisely things have turned out is down more to what people think and the models of society and economy that have informed their actions. For example, people of the post-war generation were socialized into a system where everyone had to learn how to circumvent laws and rules. The system we lived under was inhuman and lacked perspective, and people lived with many restrictions on their lives. In the countryside, in particular, people became used to having a limited range of choices and this restricted their geographical and temporal horizons. Lack of freedom was to some extent compensated for by the system of social provisioning, but these former guarantees have now disappeared and been replaced by the unfamiliar discipline of the market. Faced with changes such as the loss of a guaranteed job in the kolkhoz and forced to concentrate all their energies on their plots, rural people are convinced of their misfortune, even though they may earn no less than they did in the past. People who are actually worse off than before are often in this situation not because they lack opportunities to earn some more but because they cannot, or do not want to see how it can be done. In my view, the principal constraint on the further development of individual farming in Russia is rural people’s limited horizons; they are unable to see beyond their few square metres of allotment, even if they have been successful in making money from it by responding to the demands of the market. There is, quite simply, an enormous gulf between the world of the household plot and what goes on beyond. The communalism of the prerevolutionary obshchina (rural community) and the collectivist nature of work in the kolkhoz when nobody had to take responsibility for anything, suppressed the development of personal initiative and focused rural people’s attention on the small world of the household plot. The bureaucracy, as a burden on everyone, exacerbated people’s fear of taking responsibility and stiﬂed attempts at change. The parochialism of rural people is a paradox given the vastness of Russia and its highly mobile population. When people blame the weak development of private farming on inappropriate laws or on insufﬁcient land and start-up capital, they are identifying real weaknesses but missing the main problem—the deﬁciencies in human capital that are unlikely to be solved in the present generation, and possibly not in the next. Thus it is that when, in the 1990s, opportunities were created for independent economic activity, individual household production (like small enterprises in the towns) became a site of activity that simultaneously demonstrated society’s problems and its successes. Through being able to support themselves from their plots, rural people’s conﬁdence grew. Urban and rural plots proved to be a defence against loss of earnings and price hikes in towns

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and it is difﬁcult to imagine to what depths of poverty our population would have sunk were it not for the micro-plots producing food to eat and surpluses to sell. Little plots are ubiquitous—an absurdity in a country where half the population lives in large cities. Of course, the role of small farming will decline as large farming re-establishes itself after its long crisis, but still there will be whole villages and regions where personal production will continue to be the principal, and not just supplementary, source of livelihood. In the 1990s, personal husbandry played a pivotal role both in the urban and rural economy and also in mobilizing people’s labour, talents, and feelings of accountability. Russia’s unknown agriculture is also an unknown geography: zones and clusters of private, informal, and specialized farming. Everyone—from those in neighbourhoods to those in the nation’s capitals—is aware of this agriculture, but it is not shown on economic maps or included in development programmes. At the local level it is not difﬁcult to miss the clusters if you are on the lookout; a reasonably attentive traveller will observe them in the monoculture of cucumbers or onions on household plots or in the glasshouses exclusively given over to tomatoes, the plantations of potatoes, or unusually large herds of cattle on the pastures surrounding a village. These are “vernacular” economic regions—“familiar”, unofﬁcial, occupying the lowest spatial rung—whose existence is overlooked by ofﬁcials and scholarly “experts”. They can be discovered only by visiting the countryside and it is only there that they can be studied. The strange thing is that it is precisely this small-scale activity that is guaranteeing the continued existence of the former collectivist agricultural enterprises (even though were they able to live without them, rural people would be among the ﬁrst to sign their death warrant). They explain why collective farms have proved to be more stable than economist-reformers had earlier predicted. Nevertheless, the market does its work. Social and geographical polarization is developing apace, as is the ethnic segregation of the rural population. These processes are a source of tension in rural society but they are sites also of growth. Rural people have grown tired of constant change; large enterprises, private farms, and household farms are in need of a period of stability and serious support. Bearing in mind the extent of rural poverty, help is needed in the form of credit for the rural population (alas, recent programmes that extend credit to small holders are hedged around with so many conditions that few households will be prepared to take them up) and the development of rural infrastructure that would help incorporate small, independent farming into the formal economy. What more needs to be done to convince the powers that be that these things simply do not exist in the countryside? The absence of a marketing infrastructure is a particularly severe problem, more so than land about which our politicians have had so much discussion. The creation of a marketing infrastructure would help those households that are able and want to produce surpluses to sell; those

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who cannot will in any case complete their programme of “work” with the vodka bottle. It is important that the next generation, in particular that small proportion that will stay in the countryside, has models to emulate of how it is possible to make a good livelihood from the land. When the future of agriculture is considered, including the contribution of people’s farms, we must bear in mind that ﬁrst, Russia’s population is declining, and second, that the productivity of labour on large and medium-sized agricultural enterprises will increase. Modernization will take place in farming, in the ﬁrst instance in the large farms. There is a realistic hope that already by the middle of this century they will achieve yields equivalent to those currently found in Finland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary and that they will be able to meet domestic demand. This could be achieved with considerably less land and fewer livestock than we have at present. West European peasants ceased growing their own vegetables when it became cheaper to buy them in the nearest shop. This would suggest that the length of time that household production in Russia will remain depends upon on two things: ﬁrst, the ability of large farms and the government to provide the population with food, and second, wage levels. In theory this is true, but in reality it will also depend upon whether the time-honoured Russian belief that vacant land is an abomination will fade. For rural people the household plot is a thing of value—simultaneously a source of subsistence and a place to live. Urban dwellers ﬁnd it relatively easy to give up the natural economy and substitute ﬂowers and a lawn for vegetables once they earn enough to buy food in the markets. This transition represents, in essence, the transition of society to a new level of development. In rural areas, the situation is more complex. In Russia land has always been viewed as a “mother”, as a source of sustenance. But this ethic is, in fact, rather weakly developed. It is sufﬁcient just to compare how Lithuanians and Russians look after their land either side of the border in Kaliningrad. Natural conditions are identical but even decades of socialism could not kill in the Lithuanians their love of natural beauty. Every Lithuanian house has window-boxes and ﬂower-beds. Go across the border and the villages are completely different. There are no ﬂowers, at best there will be a fence lined with marigolds or hollyhocks. And people will be out on the street discussing the universe or their neighbours’ behaviour. Beyond the fence will be a halfabandoned plot with some rows of potatoes and vegetables. So the question, “when in Russia will potatoes be replaced by ﬂowers on the household plot?” remains open, and the answer will not necessarily have a lot to do with how much money people have or how much is in the shops. Maybe it will disappear when there are no more people left in the countryside. The non-black earth region is already a farming desert with more or less successful agriculture conﬁned to oases around towns and rural areas beyond the realm of second homes and migrant settlers. In the south, by contrast, the cultural and economic diversity of the countryside seems set to continue and intensify, while the main

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guarantee of the continued existence of large and small farms alike seems to rely on the conservatism of rural people. Clearly the future possibilities and constraints in the rural economy are geographically differentiated and are not necessarily easy to predict using standard macroeconomic models. And contrary to what might be thought by agrarian reformers, they are not necessarily susceptible to manipulation in pursuit of the goals of political leadership.’

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INDEX Academy of Agricultural Sciences 27, 32 AKKOR 26, 175 agricultural culture islands 13, 133–5, 140, 142 agrarian reforms 26, 27, 28, 35, 160, 170, 207 agricultural organizations (enterprises) 9, 13, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 36, 37, 42, 51, 54, 62, 79, 80, 88, 98, 99, 100, 106, 111, 116, 122, 125, 141, 153, 160, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 182, 183, 200–2, 205 collapse of 60, 121, 129–30, 138, 187 theft from 112, 149 see also large farms agro-climatic regions 13, 48, 76 alcoholism 59, 155, 182–3, 189 All-Russian Institute of Agricultural Problems and Information 35, 195 allotments 2, 3, 8, 22–3, 27, 32, 37, 60, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80, 96, 102, 118, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 138, 140, 174, 189, 201, 204 laws relating to 28–9 organization of 58, 63, 68, 71, 77, 78 sale of 100 size of 1, 67, 70, 80–1, 136, 150, 152 urban 7, 8, 31, 80, 100, 158, 183, 184–5, 187 see also household plot Altai, the 143, 144, 176 arable husbandry 15, 21, 77, 93, 148–9, 200 regional variation of 44–5 Arkhangel sk oblast 12 Armenians 97, 133 Astrakhan oblast 147, 176 Avartsi (ethnic group) 148, 151, 161 Baltic states 95 Bashkirs (ethnic group) 51, 64, 96, 133, 135–9, 156 Bashkortostan, republic of 96, 136, 138 Belgorod oblast 112, 195 berries: collecting 1, 19, 60, 93–6, 97, 129, 183, 189, 193, 196 Brezhnev, Leonid 25 bribes 2, 3, 6, 31, 100 brigades: collective farm 129, 184 contract 15, 177 family 159–60 private 7

rental (peripatetic) 24, 25, 135, 151, 161–70, 175, 177, 178, 194 tractor 84–5 see also teams Bryansk oblast 41 Buratiya, republic 20, 23 buyers (-up) 4, 62, 69, 71, 73, 75, 95, 125, 191, 193, 198 see also middlemen Capitalist farms 27 Catherine II 142, 144, 146 Cattle: grazing 88, 89, 90, 99, 104, 152, 205 numbers 5, 6, 41–4, 53, 56, 57, 62, 87, 100, 111, 118, 125, 130, 137, 141, 142, 152, 153, 157, 168, 177, 187 output 19 rearing 42, 51, 64, 86, 125, 129, 145–6, 149, 150, 153 sale of 62, 129 see also livestock Centre (macroeconomic region) 33, 41, 42, 47, 48, 53, 80, 171 Central Black Earth (macroeconomic region) 42, 48, 53, 80 cereal production 5, 24, 57, 61, 62, 124, 129, 145, 146, 150, 168 on private farms 127, 168, 176–8, 181, 202 cereal monoculture 13, 43, 44, 115, 117, 125 cereal-producing regions 44, 65, 76, 83, 88, 98, 114, 116, 123, 153 chaban 145, 148, 149, 151, 169 see also herdsmen Chayanov, A. N. 33 Cheboksary 156 Chechens (ethnic group) 133, 135, 148, 151 Chechnya 114, 148, 167 churches 128, 134, 140, 144 Chuvashia, republic of 11, 13, 110, 135, 154, 155, 156, 199 Chuvashes (ethnic group) 133, 144, 151, 155, 156, 199 climate 12, 44, 45, 93, 99, 153 colorado beetle 37, 136 collective and state farms: collapse of 128, 181, 182 in Soviet period 22–3, 72, 108, 145, 149, 159, 193, 205

216

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collective and state . . . (cont.) liquidation of livestock on 41–2, 60, 149 reform of 24, 27, 28–9, 177 collectivization 21, 22, 23, 24, 72, 134, 144, 145, 159 commercialization 35–6, 94, 191, 195, 196, 199 common pastures: see pastures communal grazing: see grazing communism 25,74 collapse of 3, 7, 17, 32–3, 41, 79–80, 102, 156, 186, 189 communist party 177 coniferous forest 12, 15, 52, 75, 81 see also taiga cooperatives 14 garden and allotment- 28, 79, 184–5 marketing 191, 200 of peasant farmers 117, 167–8, 175–7 cossacks 21 nationalism 6, 102, 135 settlements 6, 70 coypus (nutria) 65, 76 cranberries 94–5 credit 25, 26, 27, 171, 187, 200, 205 cross-subsidy (from large farms to household sector) 108, 112, 115–16, 117, 127, 130, 141 Dachas 30, 99, 184–5, 187 Dagestan, republic 5–6, 13, 16, 146, 148–50, 167, 172 dairy: cows 18, 60, 150, 195 production 3, 23–4, 44, 122, 135, 152, 191, 193 products 17, 22, 57, 62, 111, 120, 128, 181, 193, 198 Dargintsi (ethnic group) 135, 148, 151, 166 ‘decommoditized’ (or dead) space 35, 61 depopulation 12, 15, 24, 41, 53, 72 see also migration diasporas 139–40 dividends (for land shares) 109, 110–11, 116, 124, 126–7, 129 division of labour 24, 72, 135 geographical 64, 148, 151, 154, 188 generational 67 domestic industry 97 drought 45, 65, 123 dugouts (zemlianki) 7, 162 Duma 31, 156, 157, 176 Ekaterinburg 61 elderly, see pensioners

entrepreneurs 14, 15, 95, 97, 193 ethnicity 9, 13, 16, 51, 128, 135–6, 139–40, 151, 156, 198 European Centre (region) European Russia 2, 12, 13, 41, 44–5, 47, 51, 52, 54, 57–8, 61, 74–5, 113, 125, 133, 135, 143, 145–6, 161, 172, 176, 196, 197 exiles 12, 128, 146, 178, 189 Fallow land 22, 77, 88, 98, 144, 145, 149, 152 family farms 24, 33, 35 Far East (macroeconomic region) 43, 48, 80, 171 farm managers 14, 15, 82, 107, 112, 115, 119, 173 farmer movement 170, 176–7, 182, 200 ﬁshing 41, 60, 93–4, 96–8, 99, 193 forest 18, 51, 56, 60, 75, 76, 77, 88, 90, 93–6, 99, 128, 129–30, 138, 150, 183, 196 coniferous 12, 51, 52, 75, 81, 95, 136 code 94 mixed 12, 48, 52, 56, 76, 197 -steppe 12, 52, 56, 76, 81, 90, 151, 177, 179, 197 forestry 94 villages 189 forest-steppe: see forest fuel wood 58, 94, 96, 99, 189 gasterbeiter 7 see also labour and migrants geographical inertia 73 German settlers 133 glubinka 12, 36, 54, 57, 140 goats 52, 56, 60, 62, 86, 100, 122, 157 see also small livestock Gorbachev, Mikhail 19, 24, 25, 159, 160, 169, 175, 178 grazing: communal 86, 87, 88, 89 illegal 149 land 6, 65, 76, 78, 86, 87, 90, 94, 98, 103, 130, 169, 267 semi-nomadic (extensive) 88, 149 stubble 88 rights 141 see also pasture Greeks (Pontic) 139–40 greenhouses 71 ‘Haciendas’ 7, 164, 165, 166 haymeadows 3, 76, 77, 80, 90, 93, 99, 102, 104, 109, 119, 128, 137, 138, 149, 154 see also meadows

Index Haxthausen, Baron von 134 heat-moisture balance 44, 45, 125 herdsmen 88, 135, 145, 149, 156 see also chaban hired labour, see labour hobby farms 33, 201 household plots 2, 8, 15, 21–3, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 55, 57, 59, 62, 65, 71, 74, 76, 81–7, 91–2, 93, 96, 100, 103, 108, 152, 154, 166, 175, 181, 183, 190, 203, 204, 205, 206 see also allotments households: size 41, 47, 62, 142, 198 hunting, of game 93–4, 96, 201 Illegal use of land and forests 76, 77, 78, 96, 98, 105 see also poaching informal economy 6, 7, 161 exchange 8, 30, 47, 190 see also shadow economy investors—in large farms 61, 98, 117 irrigation, use of 7, 45, 71, 124, 125, 146, 149, 150, 153, 161, 164, 178, 181 Kaliningrad oblast 31, 42, 48, 80, 171, 206 Kalmykia, republic 195 Kalmyks (ethnic group) 133 Kama, River 128 Kazakhs (ethnic group) 135, 144, 145, 151, 152, 156, 198–9 Kazakhstan 62, 88, 124, 143, 144, 151, 161, 198 Khrushchev, Nikita 12, 24, 80, 108, 123, 147 Klaus, A. 142 kolkhozi (and sovkhozi) 3, 5, 57, 72, 95, 107, 112, 141, 159–60, 173, 176, 177, 182, 190, 204 private kolkhoz farms 202 see also collective and state farms Kollmorgen W. M. 134 Komi-Permyak Autonomous Oblast (now incorporated into Perm krai) 10, 12, 95, 128 Komi-Permyaks (ethnic group) 129 kottedzhi 99–101, 186 Koreans (ethnic group) 135, 162, 166 koshara(y) 7, 145–7, 149, 152, 154, 158, 159, 167, 169, 176 Krasnodar krai 30, 148, 161, 164, 172 Kudymkar 129 Kuma, River 146–7, 149–50, 151, 161 Kurds (ethnic group) 166

217

Lacha, Lake 96 labour 7, 19, 20, 22, 24, 33, 38, 41, 51–3, 61, 69, 71, 72, 81, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131, 136, 159, 162–5, 178, 182, 191, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206 family 2, 5, 7, 67, 162, 178 hired 5, 15, 71, 158, 162, 170, 173, 202 law 26, 161 market 26, 32, 113, 114, 117, 122, 127, 182 seasonal 110, 115, 119–20, 150 see also gasterbeiter and migrants land: abandoned 4, 7, 22, 59, 77, 78, 83, 88, 89, 90, 98, 129, 138, 142, 149, 153, 157, 163, 164, 167, 175, 177, 181, 206 fragmentation 178 fund 29, 77, 78, 83, 88, 161, 174, 180 market 29–30, 31, 74, 100, 176 ownership 9, 14, 29, 31, 79, 84, 93, 104, 116, 122, 137, 157, 160, 203 private 28, 31, 84, 85, 86, 149 privatization of 76, 98, 102, 104, 105 rent 7, 29, 31, 59, 77, 83, 104, 109, 111, 119, 125, 130, 149, 150, 154, 157, 160–1, 162–3, 165–6, 168, 169, 177, 178, 182, 202 reserve 77, 79, 83, 84, 85, 100, 175, 179 shares (entitlements) 29–30, 76, 100, 107, 110, 113, 115, 117, 126, 127, 137–8, 141, 142, 160, 174, 175–6, 181–2, 201 land reform 3, 4, 27, 28, 78, 83, 110, 149, 160 Stolypin 22, 25, 186 see also agrarian reform large farms 5, 12, 13, 14, 20, 24, 26, 72, 76, 77, 79, 81–3, 90, 91, 92, 106, 139, 106–32, 160, 191, 193, 203, 206 competition with private farms 116 economic health of 13, 44, 54, 95, 109, 115, 116, 136, 137, 155, 161, 197 reform of 28–35 see also agricultural organizations large farm sector 13, 16, 48, 51, 79, 98, 106–32 inputs to household sector from 16, 23, 26, 51, 75, 84, 86, 108–13, 124, 127, 130, 149, 152, 156, 163, 168, 169, 198, 185, 193, 198, 199, 200 output and production of 18, 39–44, 61, 69, 72, 88, 139, 150, 162, 167, 193 Lenin, V. I. 35 Leningrad oblast 44, 54 links (zvena) 159–60, 197

218

Index

livestock: husbandry 5, 12, 41–4, 57, 59, 60–2, 70, 76, 77, 86, 93, 116, 118, 125, 129, 144, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154–5, 156, 167–8, 181, 182, 183, 185, 187, 189, 193, 200 large 41, 42, 44, 52, 86, 87, 91, 92, 122, 141, 152, 155, 188 small 22, 126, 181 see also cattle, dairy cows, goats, pigs, poultry, sheep local administration 6, 29, 31, 71, 87, 90, 91, 92, 102, 154, 167 see also local authorities, rural administrations local authorities 5, 14, 26, 60, 78, 118, 127, 142, 161, 164, 177, 190, 191 agricultural department of 5, 6, 9, 13, 28, 186 land belonging to 2, 6, 29, 59, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 127, 129, 136, 137, 149, 150, 175, 178 registration of private farms by 161, 170 see also rural administrations locusts 124 Magadan oblast 35 markets: 27, 41, 45, 51, 62, 72, 97, 188, 206 farmers’ 190, 191 local 116, 130, 139, 191, 193, 197, 203 national 191 niche 17, 130 regional 47, 64, 65, 69, 73, 141 rural 64, 190 unofﬁcial (illegal) 190 see also land market market gardening 72 market engagement (of household producers) 21, 25, 36, 98, 188, 195–8, 201 see also commercialization maﬁa 193 meadows 90, 105, 120, 149 see also haymeadows meat production 3, 55, 65, 130, 154, 191, 198 and dairy 17, 19, 22, 43, 47, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 120–1, 122, 137, 138, 153, 177, 181, 196 Mediterranean (southern) fruit and vegetable production 135, 139, 150, 191 Meskhetian Turks (ethnic group) 135, 139, 161, 164–6 Middle Volga (macroeconomic region) 12, 42, 43, 44, 70, 142–4, 151–5, 171, 172

middlemen 70, 71, 166, 191 see also buyers migration 12, 22, 24, 51, 59, 83, 114–15, 134, 139, 143, 146, 147, 155, 187, 199 see also depopulation migrants 7, 15, 22, 108, 110, 115, 122, 140, 145, 148, 155, 157, 161, 167, 187 compensatory 164 illegal 149 return 146 milk production: see meat and dairy production Ministry of Agriculture 41, 47 Moldova, republic of 114 Molokane (protestant religious sect) 146 Mordovia, republic of 154 Mordovians (ethnic group) 13, 154 moral economy 34 Moscow Centre of Peasant Studies and Rural Reform 33, 35 Moscow city 1, 2, 10, 12, 22, 54, 55, 57, 60, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 93, 96–7, 100, 118, 131, 135, 140, 166, 185, 187, 191, 193 Moscow oblast 2, 10, 12, 13, 41, 44, 48, 52, 54, 64, 65, 80, 81, 90, 92, 93, 95, 114, 117, 120, 174, 184, 185, 197 mosques 136, 141, 155 mushroom collecting 1, 60, 75, 93, 94–7, 129, 183, 189, 193, 196 natural resource harvesting 19, 60, 76, 77, 78, 93, 94, 115, 129, 130, 155 see also mushroom collecting, berries, ﬁshing, hunting Nenets, autonomous oblast 30 neo-liberalism 27, 32 Nero, Lake 72–3 ‘New Russians’ 100, 140 Nikulin, A. 36 nomadic pastoralism: see pastoralism Non-Black Earth zone 12, 25, 44, 51, 53, 54, 59, 72, 81, 113, 206 non-conformist religious groups 133–4 North, the (macroeconomic region) 19, 42, 43, 47, 48, 80, 171, 172 North-West, the (macroeconomic region) 42, 43, 47, 48, 80, 171, 172 North Caucasus macroeconomic region 6, 42, 43, 48, 53, 80, 171 Novgorod oblast 52, 57, 81, 94, 195, 196 Obshchina 34, 204 Oka, River 65, 67, 70, 120, 121

Index onion production: by peripatetic brigades 7, 135, 161, 162–4, 194 specialization 72–3, 153 output of people’s farms: regional pattern of 39–41, 45, 57 rural-urban comparison 183 share of total 17, 18–19, 176 Pastoralism 124, 134, 145, 150–1 pastures (permanent) 3, 6, 44, 78, 86–8, 90, 98, 109, 121, 137, 138, 142, 145, 146, 149, 150, 169, 205 communal 29, 30, 88, 93, 99, 102, 153, 156 sale of 99, 100, 101, 105, 150 quality of 145, 157 see also grazing peasant farm economies 4, 158, 170 see also private farming peasant farms: concept of 4–5, 9, 25, 170, 200, 202 formed by land reform 24, 27, 170–3, 175, 182, 187–8 see also private farms peasantry 21–2, 26, 33–4, 35, 170, 176, 178, 188 penal colonies 95 pensioners 28, 35, 36–7, 53, 62, 73, 84, 96, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 119, 124, 126, 130, 131–2, 141, 175, 178, 179, 189 people’s farms: concept of 25, 26, 34, 36, 186, 200–6 Perm city 51, 102, 135, 136, 189, 198 Perm krai 10, 11, 12, 48, 52, 64, 76, 78, 81, 90, 94, 95, 96, 102–5, 122, 128–9, 130, 135, 137, 153, 189, 196, 197 Penza oblast 140–2, 186 personal subsidiary farms: concept of 2–8, 17, 26–8, 29, 30, 33, 34, 74, 79 personal subsidiary farming: laws relating to 28–31, 84 in Soviet period 17, 21, 23–4 physical (geographical) environment 8, 39, 41, 56, 197 pigs 18, 22, 44, 60, 61, 76–7, 126, 128, 137, 155, 187 numbers in household ownership 41, 42, 52, 56, 62, 65, 100, 111, 122, 125, 127, 137, 152, 159 see also livestock Pine and Bridger 32 ‘plantations’ 7, 164, 205 poaching 94, 95, 98, 99 see also illegal use of land and forests

219

population density 53–7 post-Soviet transition (transformation) 1, 4, 5, 21, 72, 93, 140 potato production 17, 18, 19, 45, 46, 47–8, 108, 121, 122, 128, 130, 140 on large farm land 77, 84–5, 86, 90, 93, 98, 118–19, 121, 125, 150, 152 on household plots 1, 2, 58, 59, 150, 153 marketing 2, 41, 60, 122, 138, 190 specialization in 45, 64–5, 102, 122, 135–6, 137, 139, 153, 156, 175, 178, 198 poultry 18, 19, 57, 66, 67, 75, 76, 115, 116, 126, 127, 150, 166, 187, 188 combine 97, 102–4 poor, the 2, 32, 34, 95, 142 prices 4, 18, 54–5, 65, 69, 70, 110, 118, 119, 121, 127, 128, 131, 190, 193 for land 29, 30, 74 prisoners 12, 128 private farmer movement 79, 80, 125 private farmers 14, 85, 86, 98, 99, 100, 126–7, 163, 175, 178, 181, 182 private farming 16, 30, 35, 74, 116, 156 see also peasant farm economies private farms 2, 125–6, 128, 158–60, 167, 173–83, 203–4 acquisition of land shares by 107, 116, 126, 137, 182 in land reform 25–6, 27, 28–9, 79, 83, 160, 176 number of 171, 172, 176, 177, 187 registration of 76, 84, 186–7 share of agricultural land under 79, 177 ‘private plots’ 67, 74 productivism 25, 173 property rights 74, 76, 102 Pskov oblast 19, 20 Racketeers 3, see also maﬁa RAIPO 190 rental brigades, see brigades, teams Richelieu, duc de 134 Roma 164 rural administrations 9, 13, 14, 29, 45, 58, 59, 81, 82, 84, 85, 94, 99–100, 102, 124, 157, 187 see also local administration, local authorities rural settlements 70, 71, 86, 99, 106 boundaries of 28–9, 30, 74, 77 Ryazan oblast 11, 12, 54, 55, 57, 175, 196, 197, 200

220

Index

Sakha, republic of 176 Samara oblast 10, 11, 12, 31, 61, 62, 70, 71, 143, 161, 196 St Petersburg 22, 57, 60, 73, 96, 135, 189, 193 Saratov oblast 3, 7, 10, 12, 13, 21, 51, 55, 56, 62, 64, 90, 91, 93, 111, 112, 122, 123, 135, 140–51, 152, 153, 154, 162–3, 176–81, 195, 198, 199 Saratov city 4, 55, 57, 99 Scott, John 33 second homes 30, 58, 99, 122, 140, 185, 206 see also dachas semi-desert 7, 12, 13, 18, 48, 55, 56, 145, 146, 150, 151, 167 shadow economy 6, 158, 166, 167 see also informal economy Shanin, Theodor 6, 33, 35 sharecropping 7, 158, 160, 163 sheep rearing 5, 6, 7, 52, 56, 59, 61, 62, 86, 90, 100, 122, 126, 141, 142, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152, 154, 157, 167, 168, 169–70 see also livestock shelter-belts 88, 90, 99 Siberia 23, 30, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 80, 138, 143, 171, 172, 178 social sphere workers 84, 108, 109, 124, 125, 189 Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature 90 state farms, see collective farms Stavropol krai 6, 11, 12, 13, 45, 48, 52, 65, 67, 83, 101, 102, 111, 117, 123, 135, 139–40, 146–51, 153–4, 156–7, 161, 164–70, 172, 176, 193, 194 steppes 7, 12, 13, 18, 43, 44, 48, 51, 56, 61, 63, 74, 75, 81, 90, 122, 133, 134, 135, 139, 142, 144–8, 150, 151, 152, 163, 167, 197, 198 subsistence 6, 21, 22, 53, 72, 88, 93, 96, 118, 152, 155, 170, 196, 199, 201, 206 survival strategy: concept of 32, 35, 176 Sylva, River 102, 104

Taiga 12, 55, 75, 76, 95, 197 see also coniferous forest Tatars (ethnic group) 133, 142, 145, 151, 153–4, 198, 199 Tatarstan 31, 71, 155 teams 7, 15, 24, 95, 158, 159–60, 162–7 see also brigades tenant farmers 160–1, 164, 184 theft 23, 99, 109, 112–13, 118, 121, 131, 182 timber 94, 96, 99, 128, 138, 142, 144, 189 tourism in rural areas 59, 139–40 Tula oblast 41 Tver oblast 97 Ukraine 95, 114, 123, 142, 153 Ukrainians 133, 199 Upper Volga (macroeconomic regon) 42, 57 urban plot holders 7, 21, 33, 183–6 Village assembly (skhod) 34 Volga, River 3, 12, 45, 55, 61, 62, 70, 71, 84, 86, 94, 96, 98, 99, 125, 133, 134, 135, 139, 143, 144, 151, 153, 177, 199 Volga German Republic 143 Volga-Urals (macroeconomic region) 39, 143 Volga-Vyatka (macroeconomic region) 42, 48, 53, 80, 171 vegetable plot 6, 20, 37, 63, 68, 72, 153 see also allotments, household plots Virgin Lands Campaign 12, 123, 153 viticulture 146, 150 Volgograd 172 Vologda oblast 21 wages 2, 20, 23–4, 26, 94, 108, 109, 110, 112, 116, 121, 124, 128, 130, 139, 159, 162, 182, 188 in kind 108, 109, 111, 116, 119, 124, 193, 202 wage arrears 182 watermelons 7, 9, 45, 135, 161, 162–3, 190, 191, 199 Yarsoslavl oblast 72, 185 Yel tsin, Boris 24, 28, 160

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