Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Localising privatisation, disconnecting locales – Mechanismsof disintegration in post-socialist rural Russia

Peter Lindner

Department of Human Geography, Frankfurt University, Robert-Mayer-Str. 8, 60325 Frankfurt, Germany

Received 18 February 2003; received in revised form 5 May 2006

Abstract

Soviet collectives in general and especially the kolkhozes in rural areas were much more than merely production units. They regulateda signiWcant part of everyday life in the villages and thus have to be seen as all-embracing social institutions, constituting the bedrock forrural communities. Relying on the homogenising eVect of the kolkhoz-mechanism most authors who analyse the process of transforma-tion in the Post-Soviet Russian countryside highlight the failures of privatisation and consequently presume continuity and not change.This paper argues, Wrst, that in view of the weakness of the central state in the 90s a considerable leeway existed at the local level fordiVerent ways and degrees to implement the reform legislation and, second, that the concrete outcomes of the restructuring can only beadequately understood focusing on interests and power relations on the micro level rather than dealing with farms as such as the ‘actingunits’.

The common vantage point for most of the kolkhozes was an “alliance for the locale” between management and workers. It had itsroots in the fear to become “slaves on one’s own land” if non-local investors would be allowed to buy agricultural land, to remain withoutinfrastructure like streets, water supply and kindergartens if the kolkhoz would be divided up and to lack the machinery to work the pri-vate plots without the support of the farms. But beyond this consensus the chairmen of the collective farms could rely on a bulk of diVer-ent allocative and authoritative resources to stage-manage privatisation. This introduced a highly ‘individual’ moment in the process andled to rising disparities and an increasing disintegration of rural Russia in the 1990s. Using a farm in southern Russia as an example thecloser look at these resources and the “failed privatisation” unveils, that not continuity, but hybrid amalgamations of old and new char-acterise the Post-Soviet Russian countryside.© 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Russia; Privatisation; Village communities; Power structures; Kolkhoz; Rural development

1. Introduction

The Soviet system, with its centrally planned economy,constituted an eVective mechanism of homogenisation forrural areas in Russia. This holds true not only in terms ofeconomic variables or the standard of living, but in a muchmore comprehensive sense. Collective farms like the Sovietkolkhozes acted not merely as production units but as all-embracing social institutions, regulating a signiWcant partof everyday life in the villages (Gambold Miller, 2001, p.152; KaneV, 2000, p. 2; Levada, 1993, 68V). Leisure time

E-mail address: plindner@uni-frankfurt.de

0016-7185/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.11.009

activities, annual festivals, the general provision of infra-structure and the assignment to individuals of functionsand roles within the village communities were as wellorganised within the framework of the “kolkhoz-mecha-nism” as the symbiotic relationship between personal sub-sidiary farming and the collective farm. The legal basis forthe internal organisation of the kolkhozes was the “ThirdModel Charter for the Kolkhoz” (Brunner and Westen,1970), which was approved by the all-union congress of thekolkhoz workers on November 27, 1969 and implementedacross the huge territory of the former Soviet Union.

Referring to this shared heritage as the constitutionalstarting-point for transformation, attempts to analyse theoutcomes of post-1991 privatisation tend to be generalizing

P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504 495

and all-embracing rather than diVerentiating and discrimi-nating. A number of research themes and topics haveemerged which explain the present against the backgroundof the past, thereby predominantly highlighting continuityand not change. They include the economic crisis ofRussian agriculture (OECD, 1998, 47V), the preservation ofkolkhoz structures in spite of formal privatisation (Brookset al., 1996, p. xi; Craumer, 1994, p. 342; Lerman, 1998,319f), the failure of all eVorts to promote private farmingbeyond already established personal subsidiary farming(IoVe and Nefedova, 1997, p. 157; Nickolsky, 1998, 203V),the absence of properly functioning market structures andthe prevalence of barter (Commander et al., 2000; Dolud,2001; Humphrey, 2002, 14V; Kitching, 1998, 6V), unrealisticprice relations between input factors for agriculture and itsproduct outcomes (Mathijs and Swinnen, 1998, 9V; Petri-kov, 2000, 161V), and the depiction of rural societies as“collective”, “egalitarian” (Wegren, 1994, 1998, 2000, 18V)or “feudal” (Gambold Miller, 2003; Tschernina, 1996, p. 14;Verdery, 1996).

On the other hand, there is an increasing awareness ofthe limitations of such generalising interpretations, giventhe growing evidence of the diVerences in the transforma-tion process, and the lack of detailed studies at the microlevel1 (Förster, 2000, p. 57; Stadelbauer, 2000, p. 65). It isexactly this discrepancy which Allina-Pisano (2003, p. 17)criticises so aptly as a tendency among scholars “to focuson explanation without always providing an adequateempirical foundation for their claims”. Of course, theacknowledgement of regional particularities in rural Rus-sia, often roughly classiWed along the three most evidentgradients of diVerence, “west-east”, “south-north” and“distance from a big city”, was commonplace already inSoviet times (Nefedova, 2000, p. 47). But rarely is the cen-tral focus of works on the countryside in post-communistRussia on increasing diVerentiation and rising disparitieswhich are – among others – reXected in a growing gapbetween prospering and declining farms after privatisation(Fig. 1(a)). As such, this could simply be attributed to thepower of market forces, favouring regions with a morepropitious natural environment for agriculture. But diVer-ences are also growing within regions (Fig. 1(b) and (c)).This points to the fact that economic development hereis shaped by much more than climatic and pedologicalconditions alone. By identifying and analysing diVerentsocio-economic trajectories of development like “farmeri-sation” (fermerizacija), “cooperation” (kooperacija),“haziendisation” (as’endizacija) and “holdingisation”(choldingizacija), Nikulin (2002; see also Lindner 2003) isstill one of the very few who demonstrate what that couldimply. In other words, the more “privatisation” is lookedat empirically and in its local translation, the more the pic-ture of a uniform “rural Russia” is replaced by that of a

1 Among the noteworthy exceptions are Allina-Pisano (2003), Amelina(2001), Gambold Miller (2001) and Humphrey (1998).

patchwork of disconnected and fundamentally diVerentlocales.2

The emergence of diVerence in the rural developmentthus points towards not only the decentralisation of powerper se, but also to the locally deWned “responses” to thisprocess. While decentralisation is an integral, principal partof privatisation itself, which is the reason for its prevalencein many transformation studies, individual, local reactionsto this general change remain rather less researched. Conse-quently, ‘the rural’ has turned into a seemingly homoge-nous category, which, so the general perspective, is, as awhole, subject to external interference. The aim of thispaper now is to shift the focus on internal processes, downto the local level, and show how responses to externally ini-tiated change were negotiated within village communities.This includes exploring the ways and means by which indi-viduals, as part of that change, were able to seize power,thereby disconnecting local territory from its existingbroader social, economic and legal environment and mak-ing it “diVerent”. The analysis underpinning this paper isbased on 18 months of Weldwork in three villages in diVer-ent regions of the European part of Russia, although thefocus here is primarily on one village in the region of Kra-snodar on the Black Sea.3 The Wrst part of the article pro-vides a short summary of the national regulation on theprivatisation of collective farms, as it was faced by the kol-khozes as their new operating environment. Part twoexplains how these new regulations were responded to andde facto implemented at the local level, and part threeargues that transformation means anything but a uniformimplementation of new forms of legislative regulation bydemonstrating how speciWc relationships of power, andindividual actors, shaped the development of locales.

2. Kolkhoznik, farmer, stockholder: restructuring the agricultural sector in Russia

The legislation on the privatisation of collective farmscan basically be grouped into three successive phases,although the shift from one to the next was rather moregradual than clearly demarcated.4 The Wrst two phasesare of particular importance for the new, in many ways

2 The notion “locale” refers to Giddens (1995, 169f).3 Many of the respondents insisted on anonymity and therefore name

and exact location of the village cannot be revealed. The author wishes tothank the “German Research Foundation” for its generous support of thisproject.

4 See Amelina (2001, 55V), OECD (1998, 78V), Petrikov (2000, 55V) andWegren (1998, 69V) for slightly diVering classiWcations. Especially in thedelineation of the Wrst phase, the grouping of the OECD appears to bemuch more conclusive than Petrikov’s. Decree no. 323, which was issuedon 27 December 1991, already displays the new approach of the secondphase in so far as it not only permits, but explicitly prescribes, changes.The legislation since the end of the 1990s could be distinguished as mark-ing a fourth phase, which would move to the centre the ‘planned elimina-tion’ of unproWtable farms, as deWned by regulations concerningbankruptcy.

496 P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504

redeWned scope for local actors to respond to the new cir-cumstances which implied at once new leeway as well asnew restrictions for the distribution of functions, roles andpower. The third phase, from the late 1990s onwards, is oneprimarily of consolidating the new regulative frameworkand moving towards a more supportive policy for ruralareas. This phase is thus eVectively a continuation of phasetwo and will therefore not feature separately in this analy-sis.

Phase I: Since the end of the 1980s, the governmentunder Gorbachev started to modify some of the basic legis-lation aVecting agriculture, thereby putting decades oldtaboos of the socialist legal system into question, and partlyeven abolishing them. This, at least theoretically, opened upnew scope for farms to operate, but there was no compul-sion for them to adopt any changes at all. The approach ofthis Wrst phase of reforms, still under the Soviet system, isbest exempliWed by three pieces of legislation passed in late1990 and mid-1991 respectively: “On the Peasant Farm”(no. 348-1, 22 November 1990), “On Land Reform” (no.374-1, 23 November 1990) which included necessary related

changes of the constitution, and “On Local Self-Govern-ment in the Russian Federation” (no. 1550-1, 6 July 1991).

– The Wrst two pieces of legislation “On the PeasantFarm” and “On Land Reform” are similar in content,and were passed almost simultaneously. The latter onerepresents a historic hiatus, since it lifted the nationalisa-tion of land, one of the core pillars of Soviet ideology.Although adopted later than “On the Peasant Farm”, ifonly by one day, it was a precondition for putting landreform into practice, i.e. allowing the private operationof a farm, ownership of private land5 and marketing ofagricultural products independent of state organisations.

5 The real situation concerning a market for agricultural land was muchmore nebulous than this might suggest, as mutually contradictive legisla-tion was still in force (Skyner, 2001; Zentner, 2000). The new land codewhich was signed by President Putin as recent as 25 October 2001, was anattempt to create a comprehensive new legal basis, but this excluded agri-cultural land for political reasons. A limited market for agricultural landhad existed for some years already, but its transactions are usually not reg-istered oYcially.

Fig. 1. Pareto-curves showing rising economic disparities in agriculture after the privatisation of the collective farms in Russia as a whole (above) andwithin single regions like Brjansk (below on the left) and Krasnodar (below on the right). Restriction only to relational changes allows for the use of ‘prob-lematic’ variables like revenue;other indicators not shown here conWrm the displayed tendencies.

P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504 497

– The third late-Soviet piece of legislation, “On Local Self-Government in the Russian Federation” does not referexplicitly to privatisation as such, but sets out new rulesfor the relationship between the new Russian centralgovernment and subordinate administrative units. Itthus provides an important framework for the ways inwhich post-communist restructuring processes can beput into practice in individual places by local actors. Atthe same time, it ends the hitherto dominant principle ofa double subordination of local authorities – horizon-tally towards the Soviets as ruling bodies, and vertically,towards the next higher administrative level in the Sovietstate hierarchy.6

Phase II: The second phase of farm privatisation beganimmediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union inDecember 1991. The rather hesitant take up of the new pos-sibilities created by the Wrst round of legislation to reformthe agricultural sector provoked a shift of policy from rely-ing on a voluntary response to the ‘incentives’ created bythe new conditions to change through decree by the newgovernment. Responsibility for compliance with theinstructions contained in those decrees, but also the neces-sary implementational powers, rested with the chairmen ofthe collective farms. Several Presidential Decrees,7 togetherwith more detailed rules for their implementation,8 estab-lished the new framework for Russian agriculture whichhas been in place until today. The three cornerstones ofthese new arrangements were:

– A Wnal deadline of 1 January 1993 was set for all collec-tive farms to “bring their status in accordance with thelaw on Enterprises and Entrepreneurial Activities”(para. 3 of Decree no. 323, 27 December 1991). Thiswas eVectively meant to impose de facto independencefrom the state by transferring the state-controlledfarms to a private sector-style ownership arrangement,such as a private shareholding company, limited liabil-ity partnership, agricultural cooperative or, after divid-ing them up, several smaller privately and individuallyowned farms. By 1 January 1993, 19.700 former kolkho-zes and sovkhozes, or 77% of all relevant farms, had

6 For a rather critical evaluation of the legislation on local self-govern-ment, see Mildner (1996, 96V) and Kropp (1995, 296V).

7 The decisive impetus came from Presidential Decree no. 323 “On Ur-gent Measures for Implementing Land Reform in the Russian Federa-tion” (27 December 1991) and from the Government Decree no. 86 “Onthe Procedure for the Reorganisation of Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes” (29December 1991), although, at a later date, both were partially contradictedby decisions such as “On the Course of Agricultural Reforms in the Rus-sian Federation” (no. 138, 6 March 1992).

8 See “On the Procedure of Setting Up Norms for the Free Transfer ofLand as Citizens’ Property” (Presidential Decree no. 213, 2 March 1992)“On the Procedure of Privatisation and Reorganisation of Enterprises andOrganisations of the Agriculture-Industrial Complex” (Government Deci-sion no. 708, 4 September 1992) and “On the Regulation of Legal Condi-tions Concerning Land Ownership and the Development of AgriculturalReforms in Russia” (Presidential Decree no. 1767, 27 October 1993).

at least formally completed their legal transfer (seeTable 1).

– The privatisation of capital, including Wxed as well ascurrent assets, and land, constituted a prerequisite forthis reorganisation. For that, certiWcates on propertyand land shares were issued to the workers which couldeither be redeemed in natura or contributed to the start-up capital of the privatised farm, in exchange for annualdividends and rents which in many instances had littlemore than symbolic value. Again, the real situation wasmuch more diYcult and contested than the national leg-islative arrangements had envisaged. For instance, evenafter the adoption of the new constitution in December1993, more than 10 regions of the Federation refused theapproval of private property (Brooks et al., 1996, p. 16).

– One of the main factors behind the looming disintegra-tion of village communities was the possibility for thecollective farms to oZoad their existing responsibilitiesfor maintaining objects of the so-called “social sphere”(schools, kindergartens, basic infrastructure, housing) tothe relevant village administration. These, however, wereWnancially ill-equipped to cope with this new burden.Inevitably, new lines of conXict emerged, and individual,ad hoc local solutions needed to be negotiated. Thesenew arrangements must not be underestimated in theircontinued importance for deWning the relationshipbetween state administration, village communities andfarm management.

The policy change between the Wrst and the second phaseis signiWcant for the whole project of restructuring the agri-cultural sector in Russia. Although it started by oVering newscope for decision making at the local level, it soon gained acoercive character with strong top-down elements, when thedevolved arrangements produced little progress towardsprivatisation. Most of those registrations as private farmerwhich did take place (see Table 2), were mainly stimulatedby tax reductions or subsidies, rather than a readiness towork independently from the former collective farms. As aresult, the collective farms continued to work as before. The

Table 1Selected indicators on the reorganisation process (farm numbers in 1000s)

Source: Brooks et al. (1996, p. 2).Note: The diVerence between the total sum and the sum of the separatevalues may be attributed to bankruptcies with a subsequent division intonew private enterprises and other legal forms which were omitted in thetable. The percentage values shown in brackets are therefore only approx-imations.

Legal status January 1993 January 1994

Total number of reorganisedfarms in thousands, of which

19.7 (D 77%of all farms)

24.3 (D 95%of all farms)

Retained former status 7.0 (36%) 8.4 (35%)Became closed shareholding Wrmsand limited liability partnerships

8.6 (44%) 11.5 (47%)

Became open shareholding Wrms 0.3 (2%) 0.3 (1%)Became co-operatives 1.7 (9%) 1.9 (8%)Became associations of privatefarmers

0.7 (4%) 0.9 (4%)

498 P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504

liberal government under President Yeltsin, which viewedthem as “semi-feudal” entities (Nickolsky, 1998, p. 204) andstrongholds of communist political attitudes,9 came underpressure, and relied on measures which Emel’yanov, a presi-dential adviser at the time, later even called a “Stalinistapproach”.10 This inevitably put the chairmen of the collec-tive farms in a quite diYcult position, sandwiched betweentheir accountability vis-à-vis the central authorities on theone hand, and a widespread rejection of the reforms among‘their’ village communities on the other. Coupled withstrongly varying social and economic conditions, this set thecourse for growing disparities in the future.

3. New labels, old contents? Policy implementation at the local level

Privatisation implicitly means a reordering of actorroles, functions and resources.11 It opens up possibilities tocall the established hierarchical system of decision makinginto question, to redistribute territorial competencies andresponsibilities, and to reorganise socio-spatial arrange-ments. In Russia, the leeway for such changes was unusu-ally wide, because the centre had lost much of its authorityafter the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Centrifugal powersgained inXuence, meaning a weakening of eVective controlmechanisms to direct local development and potentially

9 The existence of a “red belt”, a ribbon of regions stretching south ofMoscow from west to east, which is characterised by a high economicimportance of agriculture and a disproportionately high percentage ofsupporters of the communist candidate in the Presidential Elections of1993 (Clem and Craumer, 1995), seemed later to conWrm these concerns.However no convincing evidence does exist that this has really any ideo-logical roots and is not merely the reaction to the sharp economic down-turn in rural areas where “communism” is widely associated with thehigher standard of living in the past.10 A. Emel’janov in the two-part programme “The Undeveloped Coun-

tryside” by S. Sorokina, which was transmitted by the Russian broadcasterNTV on 7 and 8 February 2001 at 7.50 p.m.11 In the following, the author refers to Giddens’ (1995) concept of re-

sources as a precondition of power.

Table 2Development of privately held farms according to selected indicators

Source: Amelina (2006), Goskomstat Rossii (2003, p. 410), Petrikov (2000,p. 190), there are slight diVerences between the sources.

Year Number ofprivate farms

Annualincrease/decrease

Total area of allfarms in 1.000 ha

Average sizein ha

1991 4.400 – 181 411992 49.000 +44.600 2.068 421993 183.400 +134.400 7.810 431994 269.900 +86.500 11.340 421995 279.200 +9.300 11.870 431996 280.100 +900 12.001 431997 278.600 ¡1.500 12.237 441998 274.300 ¡4.300 13.045 481999 270.200 ¡4.100 13.845 512000 261.100 ¡9.100 14.384 552001 260.500 ¡600 15.292 592002 265.500 +5.000 16.525 622003 264.000 ¡1.500 17.662 67

guarantee a uniform implementation of reform legislation.Yet opportunities for change were at the same timeextremely restricted because of the limited availability ofresources to Wnance any modiWcations to the status quo,such as a greater specialisation of production, the purchaseof better equipment from western manufacturers or thedrawing up of an up-to-date land register which is in ruralareas lacking until today. This contradictory framework setthe scene within which all relevant actors sought to pursuetheir interests and construct new (or re-construct old) localnetworks of social and economic relationships.

The modiWcations to the legal status of an enterpriseentail changes to its property relations, and it is from thisperspective that the legal changes are usually analysed. Butwhen focusing on ‘public’ debates within the village com-munities, diVerent priorities and discursive foci becomeapparent. Generally, the selection of the new legal status fora privatised farm was discussed against the background ofa common interest in the preservation of the respectivework collective. Property and land shares were in this con-text Wrst and foremost perceived as a guarantee of, and/ormeans to, remain a member of this collective. Conse-quently, and in sharp contrast to the expectations of manyliberal reformers, requests to individualise the newlyobtained property rights were a rare case, and their quan-tity in terms of both the actual size of the plot of land andthe amount of property shares remained of secondaryimportance. Instead, allocative as well as authoritativeresources continue to depend on professional status andallow the maximisation of personal income on the basis ofa system which could best be called “access-based” (Ame-lina, 2001, p. 45). The case study of the kolkhoz “Majak”serves as an example to illustrate that peculiar post-Sovietentanglement of community, property and power.

3.1. Legal status and the village community

The former kolkhoz “Majak” owned around 11,247 ha ofmostly arable land, where grain, sunXower, sugar beet and achanging variety of other Weld corps were grown, comple-mented by several dairy farming and meat-producing units.In Soviet times more than 2000 workers used to beemployed here, half of which lost their jobs as part of thereorganisation process during the 1990s.12

The Wrst step taken was to convert the kolkhoz into aclosed shareholding Wrm. How this change was received bythe workforce is not clear, as there was little public debateon this issue in the village. Only very few outside the innercircle of the farm’s management knew the legal circum-stances and thus rank-and-Wle workers were unable to con-sider any alternatives for the future ownership structure ofthe farm. This initial situation was not at all unique. Allmanagers of the collective farms were held personally

12 The chairman has meanwhile published his perspective on the restruc-turing process in an autobiographic format (Kobegura, 2001).

P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504 499

responsible for the implementation of the state-deWnedreforms. It thus was in their immediate interest to familiarisethemselves with the new legislation. This acquired knowl-edge became an important asset during the further course ofprivatisation. Moreover, fairly soon after the beginning ofthe changes, a peculiar, somewhat cynical opinion abouttheir potential participation in the reorganisation processemerged among the villagers, which they saw conWrmed bylater events: “Those in the kontora13 do what they want any-way” was a typical statement in many of this author’s inter-views. The chairman of Majak readily accepted this sense ofcynicism and felt no need to change that through informa-tion campaigns, such as those employed by the World Bankprivatisation and reorganisation programme (InternationalFinance Corporation/The Overseas Development Adminis-tration, 1995, p. 41; Rodionova, 2001): “What nonsense ifjournalists stick a microphone under a farmer’s nose andenquire about their view on reorganisation”, he onceexplained to this author, “my wife has a middle-school cer-tiWcate and there is no doubt about that she is one of themore educated here in the village. But she does not under-stand what is going on. How is the average farmer to under-stand it? Reorganisation is our businessƒ” This statementclearly highlights that the theoretical claims about participa-tory ways of decision-making made by those advocating pri-vatisation, and the actual processes of decision makingabout a new legal status for the state-controlled farm, arenot entirely the same pair of shoes.

But although alternatives were hardly discussed amongthe workers it would be wrong to characterise their positionas simply “indiVerent”. On a number of occasions, the clearpreference for a legal form was articulated, which wouldallow the retention of a collective organisation of work.This preference may support the common stereotype of adeeply engrained, century old culture of collectivism andegalitarianism in rural Russia (Lindner and Nikulin, 2004).In fact, it reXects well-founded concerns about the immedi-ate future of securing a livelihood in the countryside. Thisled to the emergence of two basic interests shared betweenthe village community and the farm’s management: Wrst,the new legal form should unambiguously assure that itwould remain impossible for non-local investors to buyshares of land or property from the former collective farm.Behind that stood the fear to become “slaves on one’s ownland” in service for big, non-local agricultural companies14

(see also Humphrey, 2002, p. 168). Second, a broad consen-sus existed that dividing up the kolkhoz would be a threatto the village as a whole, because nobody would then feelresponsible for maintaining the communal infrastructurewhich had so far been the farm’s responsibility. Preventing

13 The kontora is the central administrative oYce of a kolkhoz.14 In environmentally favourable regions, like Krasnodar, grain produc-

tion guarantees enormous rates of proWtability. Consequently, big compa-nies of the energy sector, like “Gasprom”, and food producers, havealready started to acquire entire collective farms (IoVe, 2005, p. 189; Niku-lin, 2005).

a division into several smaller, private farms was thus seenas crucial. As a result, the few villagers who were actuallyinterested in becoming independent farmers faced consider-able opposition to their plans (see also Hivon, 1995, 18f;Van Atta, 1993, p. 87). The Wrst aim was accomplished bychoosing the legal form of a closed shareholding Wrm mean-while the oYcial registration as an “enterprise for seed cul-tivation and stockbreeding” ensured the second one.15 Thiscongruency of interests thus created a de facto “alliance forthe locale” between workers and management, which subse-quently, albeit inadvertently, constituted a prerequisite forthe highly unequal distribution of power in post-reformRussian village communities.

In contrast to this, the second step of reform was exclu-sively a ‘private venture’ on the part of the chairman withconsiderable scope to advance his controlling role in the vil-lage. On the one hand, as mentioned above, initial experi-ences with the transformation process had resulted in agrowing feeling of resignation among the village workers:“In the past we used to quarrel, there was shouting andarguing at our assemblies. But now? We became accus-tomed to it, it’s uselessƒ” was a female dairy worker’scommentary on the annual general assembly which verywell sums up the prevailing opinion in the village. Onthe other, this second change was not entirely due to thenew legislation alone, about which anybody could haveinformed themselves independently. Rather, it relied on thepersonal experiences of the farm’s chairman, stemmingfrom several information trips to Western Europe and theUnited States during the 1990s, where he was visiting alarge number of agricultural enterprises of diVerent sizes,types of specialisation, and legal forms. A particularimpression on him made a farm business in Thuringia, inthe former East Germany, which had just completed thetransformation from a socialist agricultural co-operativeinto a limited liability partnership with a number of specia-lised production units. The know-how he gained there,recorded on hours of video footage, provided him with alarge pool of strategic alternatives for the management ofhis own business. What was a limited liability partnershipin Thuringia should become an agro-holding company inKrasnodar, consisting of many small sub-units of varyingdegree of independence under the roof of a central manage-ment. This transfer of western policy examples to Russia asblueprints for ‘good practice’, which had at the macro levelshown rather limited success was used by Majak’s managerhighly selectively, purposefully combining them with prac-tices established in the village. The resulting hybrid amal-gamation was intended to, on the one hand, safeguard theold conWguration of power, while, on the other, also stimu-lating a new feeling of ownership among the workers toenhance their productivity.

15 According to federal legislation, enterprises for seed cultivation andstockbreeding were exempted from the obligation to assign land to privatefarmers. Obtaining this status became a popular strategy which led toinnumerable legal disputes (Beljaeva and Samobnik, 1998, p. 8).

500 P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504

3.2. New patterns of property rights

The legislation for the restructuring of the Russian agri-cultural sector is characterised by a high trust in theeYciency-generating power of market forces. Innovativeowner–entrepreneurs, generally seen as the major pillar ofmarket oriented development approaches, were therefore –at least initially – supposed to dominate the post-socialistagricultural landscape. As a consequence, restructuring Wrstand foremost focused on property rights and an equal dis-tribution of land and property shares. In turn, an accumu-lation of shares in the hands of a “triumvirate” ofchairman, chief bookkeeper and agronomist was later iden-tiWed as one of the main problems of restructuring (IoVeand Nefedova, 1997, p. 151).

Privatisation in the narrow sense of a transfer of propertyrights took place in Majak between 1993 (registration of allpersons entitled to receive shares) and 1995 (issue and distri-bution of certiWcates), and thus consisted of two stages:

(1) All workers on the farm’s payroll, as well as pension-ers and “long-term absentees” (i.e. those who were onmilitary service or on an education/training coursefunded by the farm), were entitled to a share of thekolkhoz land, not, however, public sector employees(local administration oYcers, teachers, etc.). The totalarea of the farm’s agricultural land was divided by thenumber of qualifying applicants, resulting in an enti-tlement of 4.58 ha each. The overwhelming majorityof the new land owners contributed their shares to thefounding capital of the new company (see Map 1), inexchange for a set amount of agricultural productseach year, which they could purchase at cost of pro-duction. In 1999, for example, this equalled one tonneof grain, 50 kg of sugar and 20 kg of vegetable oil pershare.

(2) In contrast, entitlement to a share in the farm’s build-ings and equipment was restricted to those listed asactually working on the farm at the time of distribu-

Map 1. Land property distribution in the former kolkhoz Majak after privatisation.

P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504 501

tion. Their individual life-long income from theirfarm employment was calculated, and the sum of allregistered workers’ incomes was then set against thebook value of the whole kolkhoz as an enterprise. Theresulting ratio of 1–0.24 meant that each rouble (i.e.100 kopeks) of hitherto earned lifetime income enti-tled to a property share of 24 kopeks. To put this incontext, in the year 2000, 50 roubles in stock value fora stake in a privatised farm returned a dividend of 2roubles, an average household’s ownership of 250shares would thus yield about 500 roubles annually.

Map 1 shows the distribution of the newly privatisedownership plots across the territory of the former kolkhozMajak by category of owner, i.e. ‘village administration’,‘private farmers’ or ‘agricultural company’. The whole issueof privatisation is too much a contested issue to allowinformation on individual private ownership of land sharesto be available and thus mapped. But it became clear dur-ing several interviews that the original intention by thefarm’s management to buy back the bulk of the shares fromthe new owners did not work according to plan. Only the“drinkers and idle-bones”16 were willing to sell their landparcels. It was partly a new pride of ownership among thevillage community, and partly an appreciation of the landas a kind of “last resort” for harder times, which under-mined the farm management’s speculative strategy toincrease its land holding in a piecemeal way. Still, consider-able inequalities resulted from the whole process of distrib-uting kolkhoz land and property. Thus, whereas today anaverage family owns two units of land shares (i.e. 9.16 ha),the managing director and the leading agronomist possessaround 70 shares, i.e. 300 ha each. The situation with Wnan-cial stocks is similar, with the average household owningapproximately 250 stocks, while senior employees in theadministration might have about 6.000, and the manage-ment up to 20.000, which amounts to roughly 10% of allshares. These Wgures are not only important with respect tothe annual dividends but also because the voting rights atthe general assembly are of course tied to stock ownership.

Although property rights are distributed unequally infavour of the management, it was unable to buy up Majakentirely, and this picture is repeated at most other formercollective farms. Much of the highly uneven distribution ofincome is, however, less the consequence of property own-ership alone, but stems from the diVering possibilities to‘privately appropriate’ or ‘redirect’ material farm resourcesor proWts generated within the regular production process.What might look like a typical phenomenon accompanyingthe transformation process, is in fact the continuation, ifmodiWed, of the “access-based distribution system” (in con-trast to an ownership-based system) characterising plannedeconomies (Amelina, 2001, 45V). For rank and Wle workers

16 This pejorative formulation was literally used in several interviews andindicates that the sale of land became socially stigmatised.

this permitted using machinery or ‘obtaining’ seeds, pesti-cides and agricultural products without charge from thefarm’s own supply, often eVectively turning it into a form of‘resource infrastructure’ for private household production(Lindner, 2002, p. 262). But for the manager of Majak, pri-vate beneWts take on a diVerent scale. He is able to buy upthe farm’s grain output as a private agricultural merchantat a heavily discounted price, only to then resell it at worldmarket prices. Thus he earns about $200.000 a year,whereas the oYcial wage of a labourer in the Weld stillreaches merely $300.17 But neither income nor propertyrights were the sole, perhaps not even the most decisivesources of power, which allowed the former chairman tostage privatisation as a one-man show.

4. Stage-managing privatisation

As at the macro level, it became increasingly clear also atvillage and farm level that the end of the Soviet Union didnot necessarily indicate the beginning of the transition froma planned to the western blueprint of a market economy,but it has rather to be understood as an open-ended pro-cess. The crucial diVerence in the case of Majak is the patri-monial role of the manager – adopted by himself, but atleast partly also granted to him by his workers. This eVec-tively continues a tradition carried over from Soviet times.It is characterised by a feeling of responsibility, competenceand power, which extends far beyond the economic per-spective, and eVectively turned the Soviet-era collective intoa “state within the state” (Clarke, 1992, p. 27), into places ofa “curious hybrid of large-scale industrial organization,quasi-feudal social relations, and patrimonial rulership”(Garcelon, 1997, p. 319). In Majak, this manifests itselftoday in four main types of responses:

Firstly, running the enterprise is not solely an economic-functional exercise for the manager, but it takes on a muchwider role as basis of, and instrument for, the deWnition ofhis identity, social role and position within the local commu-nity. Ironically, but not without signiWcance, sometimes outof frustration and sometimes respect, he is referred to by thevillagers as the “big chieftain”. For him, this position is notrestricted to the duration of his working life until retirement,and the legal form of an agricultural holding company giveshim the right to stay on as chairman of the supervisoryboard, and thus, eVectively, the head of the local community.

Secondly, the relationship between the manager and hisemployees blurs the lines between work and private life. Insome cases, the farm enterprise Wnances the education oftalented students, in others it would help in private lawsuits. But in any case, a common consciousness is main-tained that these are not entitlements or “civil rights” of thevillagers, but rather forms of “voluntary assistance” whichare granted on a one by one case, and are entirely at the

17 The author would like to thank Dr. Aleksandr Nikulin who workedfor several years on this farm as part of a sociological longitudinal study,and who is thus able to assess the reliability of these Wgures.

502 P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504

manager’s discretion. Of course, this does not always workto the workers’ advantage, and matters of private life mayalso be used to chasten them in the public sphere of theworkplace. “Clean the courtyard in front of your houseWrst, before you come and ask me for any favour or sup-port”, the manager once told oV a woman who asked toborrow a tractor for a few hours.

Thirdly, the delimitations of responsibility and power aredrawn spatially and not sectorally: The manager is the cen-tral institution in charge of everything that happens in“his” territory. He considers caring for tidiness and order inpublic spaces his duty just as much as the organisation ofvillage festivals and, if to a decreasing extent, the mainte-nance of the village’s public infrastructure. His comprehen-sive territorial power, allowing him to combine ‘legislative’,‘executive’ and ‘judicative’ functions in one person,becomes impressively clear when he issues new rules andregulations, personally supervises obedience, and deter-mines penalties. He also, in some limited cooperation withthe head of the village administration, is the main channelfor the village’s ‘external relations’ in political and eco-nomic matters.

Fourthly, besides pure proWt, what could be called theostentatious symbolism of a Xourishing enterprise, plays anenormous role as an indicator of success and displays thetransgression of the “economic” in a narrow sense. Thisincludes representational design of the main oYce building,meticulously trimmed Welds, modern computerised equip-ment, a ranking among the 300 most proWtable agriculturalenterprises in Russia (Uzun and Zorina, 2001), and also animpressive museum and a prestigious sanatorium in the vil-lage. Partly, this might be traced back to the fact thatmoney had a completely diVerent meaning under the sys-tem of the Soviet command economy. Only for privatehouseholds, it fulWlled a primary role as the means of pay-ment for goods. For the production sector it was no morethan simply an accounting unit. Given the all-dominatingstate supply- and delivery-system, and the highly ‘Xexible’allocation of credits, the publicly scrutinised measure of anenterprise’s success was not a monetary Wgure, but ratherproduction related quantities. They included “the size of itslabour force and the number of tons they produced, thehouses it had built, the number of places for children in itskindergartens and in summer camps, the sporting, medicaland cultural facilities it provided, the number of pensionersit supported” (Clarke, 1992, p. 7). Another reason for thisnon-pecuniary display of success is the generally criticalattitude of the public towards ‘proWt’. This has its roots inthe stigmatised image projected during Soviet times andbecomes eVective especially in small communities with theirhigh degree of mutual social control. In addition to that, toavoid taxation, usually only a smaller percentage of theactual proWt is declared to the authorities, and the fullWgures are studiously kept oV the books.

Under such conditions, how does the manager succeedin maintaining his nearly unrestricted position of power? Acomparison with other restructured collective farms shows,

that the scope for farm managers to gain control is linkedto the general economic situation in ‘their’ areas. Successhere can become an important justiWcation for their claimat the general assembly to be the right person for the lead-ing job. The resulting status of a legitimised manager, con-Wrmed by periodical elections, involves the authoritativeresources which formerly rested in the party system. Theseresources have gained considerably in both scope and rangesince control from ‘above’ weakened as part of the dissolu-tion of the Soviet state. Today, they exceed by far theresources one would expect for somebody who formallyhas merely received a mandate to serve as trustee for theshareholders. If, however, conditions are poor, and the localpopulation is economically struggling, then this may welllead to growing pressure on the relevant farm manager toallow a collective decision on how to use the scarceresources to best make ends meet. The manager then mayeVectively be little more than the leader of a ‘survival com-munity’, continuously being threatened by dismissal at thenext general assembly.

In the case of Majak, the reliance on authoritativeresources was supported and supplemented by a discursivesuperiority of the manager on the basis of three patterns ofargumentation which the author came repeatedly acrossduring Weldwork:

1. “The west” acts very much as a general orientation forjudging economic eYciency, and cannot reasonably bechallenged, given its economic superiority which isdeemed evident to everyone. At the same time, referenceto western ways of doing things can be used by the man-agement rather arbitrarily to justify decisions made.Only the manager and a few members of the centraladministration have ever been to Western Europe or theUnited States and thus any entrepreneurial decision,which claims adherence to “western standards”, is eVec-tively beyond any reasonable question by ordinaryworkers.18

2. “The law” is another Xexibly citable source of justiWca-tion, as it at once invokes awareness among rank and Wleworkers of their lacking competence. “You know, thereis such a law, but then there are also the laws of our kol-khoz, and they are superior to the laws of the state” themanager once told a cleaning woman, for instance, justi-fying why she would not receive the share of land of herlate husband. Of course, this contravened completely theexisting legal situation.

3. Finally, quoting “the sciences” as the rationale behind anentrepreneurial decision or directive draws its ‘convinc-ing’ power from the fact that the authority of the man-ager is in the Bourdieuian sense objectiWed by his

18 Two recently published surveys, conducted by the Levada Center andthe Public Opinion Foundation, conWrm the contradictory image of “theWest” in Russia; see http://www.levada.ru./interrelations3.html and http://bd.fom.ru/zip/tb0523.zip.

P. Lindner / Geoforum 38 (2007) 494–504 503

certiWcates of higher education, which, of course, none ofthe workers has.

5. Conclusion

The crucial laws to enforce the privatisation and restruc-turing of the collective farms in Russia were passed atexactly the same time when the Soviet Union was oYciallydissolved. This situation was characterised by an extremelyweak state, an ongoing struggle between centrifugal andcentripetal forces and an often conXicting legislationbetween diVerent administrative levels, all of which openedup hitherto unknown possibilities for local decision mak-ing. The reform legislation itself explicitly transferredresponsibilities to the farms, without, at least initially, evenspecifying procedures for restructuring and the concretesteps to be taken. The case of Majak (in line with the otherformer kolkhozes where the author worked) suggests, thatunder these circumstances the focus on legal privatisationoverestimated the compulsory nature and enforceability ofproperty rights, while neglecting the role of establishedsocial institutions and the distribution of power in the localcommunity of a collective farm.19 The resulting changesmight at a Wrst glance appear as a partly intended, partlyunintended, wholesale empowerment of local communities.But in most cases, they were more than counteracted by thesimultaneous sharp economic downturn which left noresources other than for organising survival at subsistencelevel. This led to two interdependent and mutually reinforc-ing processes:

Firstly, locales hitherto linked to the state by the homog-enising “kolkhoz-mechanism” which was much more thanmerely a means to organise production, were now funda-mentally disconnected from their external environment.Public transport in rural areas became worse, newspaperswere no longer distributed free of charge and vacation trips,formerly organised and subsidised by state organisations,became too expensive for the rural population, or ceased tobe available altogether. Localities thus lost much of theirembeddedness in state structures, as the command econ-omy was replaced by a (hardly functioning) marketapproach, support for infrastructure was rolled back andcultural institutions, like the Soviet “cultural centres” in thevillages, were abandoned. Finally, the disappearance of theCommunist Party left a political and hierarchical powervacuum. After privatisation of the collective farms, theform and nature of a locale thus increasingly became moreand more a local matter, based on what local people madeof it.

Secondly, as local power relations were highly unequal,local fortunes, much more than before, depended on the

19 In line with this, Amelina (2001, 65V, 310V) regards the gap between re-form legislation and reform implementation (respectively institutionalisa-tion) as one of the most important factors for explaining the discrepancybetween federal intentions and local outcomes as well as between regionaldiVerences.

decisions of individuals who were able to Wll the political andhierarchical vacuum created by the disappearance of theSoviet state. As a consequence, economic diVerences grewnot only between regions, which could be interpreted as theresult of varying natural conditions in a market environ-ment, but also within. The key resources to become the newelites in rural areas were in the hands of the old ones. Theformer chairmen of the collective farms held the knowledgeabout the new legislation in a setting where previous experi-ences and existing know-how in general were widely invali-dated. They could draw on authority stemming merely froma post in oYce, whereas Soviet state authorities were losinginXuence. Thus, the remaining material resources in ruralareas rested with them, while the state deliberately withdrewits support (Wegren, 2005, 35V). But the new structuralenvironment alone did not pre-determine the locally speciWcoutcomes of the restructuring process. The agro-holdingMajak is as much a result of these general preconditions asof the individual biography and personality of its chairmanand his impressions gained from travels to the West. It isthis tension between the general and the individual forces,which makes the post-communist rural landscape looksimultaneously so uniform and yet so diverse.

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