The End of Peasantry?: The Disintegration of Rural Russia 0822959410, 9780822959410

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The End of Peasantry? Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova, and

Ilya Zaslavsky

EX LIBRIS NEW YORK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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THE

END

OF PEASANTRY?

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies Jonathan Harris, Editor

The End of Peasantry? +

THE TR WEEN

CARIN

OF

DISINTEGRATION RURAL

RUSSIA

Grigory loffe, Tatyana Nefedova,

and Ilya Zaslavsky

UNIVERSITY

OF

PITTSBURGH

PRESS

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Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Copyright © 2006, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper 10987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data loffe, G. V. (Grigorii Viktorovich)

The end of peasantry? : the disintegration of rural Russia / Grigory loffe, Tatyana Nefedova, and Ilya Zaslavsky.

p. cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8229-4295-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8229-5941-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Agriculture—Economic aspects—Russia (Federation) I. Nefedova, T. G. (Tatiana

Grigorevna)

II. Zaslavsky, Ilya, 1963—

. III. Title. IV. Series.

HD1995.15.Z8L64 2006 338.10947—dce22

2006019185

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments ~

vi

xi

. Introduction: Where the Story Begins . Working Land in Russia

1

20

. Development in Breadth, Russian Style . Rural Villagers

45

79

. Market Adjustment and Spatial Change From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation . Regionalization

107 130

156

. The Transformation of Russian Agriculture at Close Range . Conclusion: Geography /s Destiny Notes

229

Selected Bibliography Index

251

245

221

171

TABLES

AND

FIGURES

Tables

2.1.

Percentage of collective and state farms in farmland and agricultural Output

21

2.2.

Regional land in collective and in state farms as a percentage of total agriculturalland 22

2.3.

Selected indicators of Russia's agriculture

2.4.

Percent distribution of output, cattle, and cropland by farmtype

2.5.

Actual meat imports and import quotas, 2003

2.6.

Annual grain output in the Russian Federation

3.1.

Grain yields, 1870s

3.2.

Grain yields, 2003

3.3.

Milk yields per cow, 1870s

3.4.

Milk yields per cow, 2003

24 42

43

52

52

53 53

3.5.

Gross national income adjusted by purchasing power parity, 2002

3.6.

Northernness and harshness of climate

3.7.

Thermal zones of European Russia

3.8.

Moisture zones of European Russia

3.9.

68

73

74 75

European Russia's rural population and land area distribution between moisture zones

3.10.

35

75

European Russia's rural land distribution between thermal and moisture zones 76

vi

Tables and Figures « vii

Distribution of gross agricultural output between thermal and moisture zones of European Russia, 1996-2000

76

Russia's rural population change, 1959-2000

82

Rural population density change, 1897-2002

85

Social acceptability of specific behaviors

99

Registered family farms (RFFs) by region of Russia

Actual and “required” number oflarge cities Land use in Russia 131 Changes in farmland usage, 1970-2001

122

128

131

Change in farmland total and in arable land by macroregion of Russia

132

Rural population and cropland dynamics across Russia’s macroregions

137

Cropland as a function of rural population

Dynamics of arable and fallowedland

137

138

Cropland in 2000 as a percentage of that in 1990 intwo regions

139

Pearson correlations between agricultural productivity and logarithms of selected characteristics of arural setting 146

Designation of theoretical black holes and problem districts

151

Bimodal distribution of European Russia's districts: percent share of landarea 162 Ute

Bimodal distribution of European Russia's districts: percent share of population 162

Ue.

Bimodal distribution of European Russia's districts: percent share of rural gross agricultural output 162

7.4.

Typological taxons

‘Stolle

Selected indicators in the case study 173 Agricultural output in topological tiers of the Moscow region

2,

164

8.3.

Percent distribution of rural population and agricultural output of collective farms by topological tier of the Moscow region,

8.4.

Percent concentration of farmland, livestock, and output in the

2000-2001

179

districts of the Moscow region

179

8.6.

Change in land use categories, 1985-2001 184 Rural land in de facto private and de facto collective uses

8.7.

De facto private and de facto collective land uses by topological

8.5.

tier

185

184

178

viii ¢ Tables and Figures

8.8. 8.9.

Percent distribution of private agricultural and recreation-agricultural land use by topological tier, 2000 187 Market price of 0.01 hectare of land at various distances from the Moscow Ring Motorway

189

194

8.10.

Indices of agricultural activity in the Valdai district, 2001

8.11.

8.13.

Farmland and cattle on collective farms in the Valdai district 195 Rural population and agricultural employment on collective farms in the Valdai district 197 201 Statistics on four peripheral districts of the Chuvash republic

8.14.

Statistics on case study districts, Stavropol region

8.12.

214

Figures 1.1.

Concrete fence, environs of Moscow

6

7

1.2.

Castlelike fence, environs of Moscow

1.3.

Wood-and-brick fence, environs of Moscow

7 7

1.4.

Concrete-and-brick fence, environs of Moscow

3.1.

Farmland, arable land, and cropland in European Russia

3.2.

Density of hard surface roads by European countries and macroregions in Russia

3.3.

47

54

Grain yield by European countries and macroregions of the Soviet Union, 1986-1990

55

3.4.

Grain yield in the European part of the Soviet Union, 1980s

3.5.

Gross agricultural output, Leningrad region, 1985

57

59

3.6.

Gross agricultural output, Yaroslavl region, 1985

60

3.7.

Gross agricultural output, Novgorod region, 1985

61

3.8.

Demo-economic base structure of European areas ofthe former Soviet 64 Union

3.9.

Percentage of rural households with access to sewerage in Ryazan oblast, 2000 65

3.10.

Environmentally marginal lands in European Russia

77

4.1.

Rural population in 1990 as a percentage of that in 1959

4.2.

Rural net migration per ten thousand rural residents, 1979-1988

83

4.3.

Rural net migration per ten thousand rural residents, 1994-1995

83

4.4.

Rural net migration per ten thousand rural residents, 1999-2000

84

5.1.

Agricultural macroregions of European Russia

5.2.

Bioclimatic potential by rural district of European Russia

80

108 111

Tables and Figures « ix

5.3.

Average grain yields by rural district, 1996-2000

5.4.

Difference between actual and normative grain yields, European Russia

112

113

5.5.

Average milk yield per cow by topological tier

5.6.

Average grain yields by topological tier

114

114

5.7.

Rural population density by rural district, 2002

5.8.

Average rural population density by topological tier, 2000

115

5.9.

Percentage share of unprofitable collective farms, 2001

116 118

5.10.

Average number of registered family farms per one thousand rural residents by topological tier, 2000 123

5.11.

Percentage distribution of rural districts’ land area by topological tier in the nonchernozem zone 125

5.12.

Percentage distribution of the output of vegetables on collective farms, household farms, and registered family farms by topological tier in the nonchernozem zone 125

5.13.

Percentage distribution of the output of milk on collective farms, household farms, and registered family farms by topological tier in the nonchernozem zone 125

5.14.

Percentage distribution of the output of meat on collective farms, household farms, and registered family farms by topological tier in the nonchernozem zone

5.15.

Average agricultural output by topological tier in the nonchernozem zone

5.16.

126

126

Average agricultural output in metric tons by topological tier in the south 126

6.1.

Continuity and change in farmland dynamics

133

6.2.

Continuity and change in cropland dynamics

135

6.3.

Observed versus estimated extent of cropland depending on rural population (by region of European Russia), 2000 136

6.4.

Latitudinal range in Pskov versus Perm regions

6.5.

Scattergram showing soil fertility and cropland change

6.6.

Scattergram showing rural population density and cropland change 141

6.7.

Scattergram showing agricultural output and cropland dynamics

6.8. 6.9.

Cropland and production trends 145 Collective farm productivity by rural district, 2000

6.10.

Modeling collective farm productivity

6.11.

Depressed agricultural areas

150

149

140

147

141

144

x ¢ Tables and Figures

6.12.

The emerging “archipelago” of commercial farming

152

6.13.

Theoretical and empirical “black holes” and problem areas

153

7.1.

Biomes of European Russia

7.2.

The spatial stratification of the countryside: Accessibility zones

158

7.3.

Accessibility and environment

8.1.

Case study regions

8.2.

Districts of the Moscow region grouped in four topological tiers

160

163

172

8.3.

Gross agricultural output, Moscow region, 1975

177

8.4.

Gross agricultural output, Moscow region, 1986

177

8.5.

Gross agricultural output, Moscow region, 1998-2000

8.6.

Normative land values in the Moscow region

8.7.

Gross agricultural output, Novgorod region, 2000

8.8.

The three sectors of the Valdai district

8.9.

Abandoned farmland in the Valdai district, Novgorod region

176

178

188 190

191

8.10.

Location ofa soil pit in a coniferous forest, Valdai district

191

192

8.11.

Profile of topsoil formerly modified by plowing

8.12.

Drained and subsequently abandoned field in the Valdai district

192

8.13.

Case study districts in the Chuvash republic

8.14.

House ina Tatar village in the Chuvash republic

8.15.

Surveying Tatar women in the Komsomolsky district in the Chuvash republic 205

8.16.

Grain elevator in the Stavropol region

194

201

203

206

8.17.

Rural population density, Stavropol region

8.18.

Grain yield, Stavropolregion

207

8.19.

Gross agricultural output, Stavropol region, 2001

8.20.

Chechen worker hired to guard a field of wheat, Stavropol region

8.21.

“Private property” sign on a field of wheat, Stavropol region

8.22.

Case study districts, Stavropolregion

208

215

209 211

211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research leading to this book was funded by the National Science Foundation (Award BCS-0134109). The authors are grateful to all those who helped us along the way, especially John Adams (University of Minnesota), Tom Baerwald (National Science Foundation), Nancy Ries (Colgate University), Donald

Samson (Radford University), Jonathan Harris and Ilya Prizel (University of Pittsburgh), and Craig ZumBrunnen (University of Washington). Our special thanks to Peter Kracht of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

xi

THE

END

OF PEASANTRY?

Introduction Where the Story Begins

Two features define this book: it is written by scholars of human geography and it is primarily about the European regions of Russia. Following a tradition nurtured by Russian geographers such as Piotr Semionov (Tian-Shansky) and Piotr Savitsky and historians such as Sergei Solovyev and Vasily Kliuchevsky, we view characteristics of the broadly defined environment as causative agents as well as constraints on Russia’s socioeconomic development. We are not apologetic about the alleged “determinism” of this approach. Environmental determinism has no political agenda of its own; it can be used to further any ideological argument, from providing an excuse for colonial domination to contemporary antiglobalism and the anathema of market forces.' As if to prove this idea, some recent books, which point to the harsh

physical environment as a drag on Russia’s competitiveness in the international economic order, belong to far-flung ideological quarters and apply different interpretations to the same empirical evidence. Andrei Parshev, for example, makes a point that economic liberalism has no place in Russia and thus the nation’s involvement in free trade is self-defeating in view of the higher production costs associated with inherent environmental disadvantages. Guided by the same information about the harsh physical environment,

Fiona Hill

and Clifford Gaddy strongly favor Russia’s openness but would rather see the

2 e Introduction

country “shrink distance and get warmer” by relocating its productive assets to more hospitable regions.’ For better or worse, our version of environmentalism or environmental

determinism, as the concept has come to be known, is not an a priori idée fixe that would trigger, inform, or shape our undertaking. We have a combined life experience of 138 years in Russia, which continues to grow, as one of us

still lives there and the other two visit annually. In our joint and separate research endeavors, over and over again we ran into spatial regularities, such as center-periphery, north-south, and west-east gradients, whose meaningful and demonstrable effect on economic and social life has outlived Russia’s systems of feudalism, capitalism, and Soviet-style socialism and continues to make a

difference. Because we spent our formative years in Russia, we do not feel bound

by the outcomes of Western intellectual battles such as the fight over environmenta] determinism that unfolded between the 1920s and the late 1940s among American geographers and culminated in the closure of some premier geography departments in academia. To this day college textbook authors recoil from environmental explanations even when they appear to be credible. One economic geography textbook says, for example, that “most of the world’s people tend to be concentrated along the edges of continents, river valleys, at low elevations, and in humid midlatitude and subtropical climates.” Though seemingly innocuous, this statement is immediately followed by a disclaimer: “To say that climate and resources control population distribution is environmental determinism, a view long discredited because it is simplistic and often factually incorrect.”* Under the Soviets, however, a deterministic paradigm

was never defeated as “simplistic” or “factually incorrect.” It was not even sidelined in the name of political correctness. Rather, the excoriation of determinism “became officially canonized as part of Stalinist dogma.” It is little wonder that today environmental determinism is regarded by some Russian writers as a new and fashionable orthodoxy, with all the pretenses of a normative theory.’ Apparently, however, the principle of reactive perception is at work: what was bad prior to 1991 is now good, and vice versa. Parshev’s book is a case in point. We do not share or condone the above pretenses; it is all the

more natural for us to assume that exonerating geographical factors as causative agents in geographic research is much like forcing an open door. What we wish is simply to pursue research that fits our professional discipline. If environment does indeed matter, as we think it does, it should not be

reduced to its physiographic components. Accessibility to the major centers of economic life is integral to human environment as well. Because the impact of vastly improved communication is felt everywhere in the economically ad-

Introduction

« 3

vanced world, physical accessibility is often thought of as having lost its significance. Thus, in the early days of the Internet boom there was much talk ofthe “death of distance.” However, it now appears that even “the supposedly seamless Internet is constrained by the realities of geography.” As a result, there is now some talk about the “revenge of geography,” the idea that the location of customers targeted by electronic retailers and marketers continues to be important. This perspective, however, strikes us as narrow. Geography is not reasserting itself only through new technology. Despite the achievements made possible by electronic communication, physical distance and relative location never ceased to be important, in part because many national and regional settings are products of the past and in part because electronic communication is not accessible to all.° “With the ‘end of history,” writes Vittorio Strada, “geography is reviving, and the traditional historiosophy seems to be supplanted not so much by geopolitics as by a sort of geosophy understood as a discipline investigating and interpreting the large spaces into which our planet is divided. The inner structure of each of these spaces appears as a definitive state system and, consequently, as a discrete historical process.”” That this reasoning emerged in the context of studying Russia is noteworthy, as Russia is a peculiar “empire of space’; its burden has long been acknowledged, and no technological or eco-

nomic innovation seems to have alleviated it so far. Whereas geography is the prism through which we view Russia as the focus of our research, its subject is farming. Farming is of interest to us as the activity with the most extensive use of land. Except in the regions with marginal physical environment, this activity has traditionally filled most interurban space. Because of this circumstance, change in agricultural land use is a warning sign of a broader change in human colonization and settlement of the land. The existence of a continuous zone of settlement has long been considered a defining feature of Europe, from the Atlantic coast to the Urals. To be

sure, the spatial continuity of that zone was never absolute, particularly in its northern section where land under the plow was interspersed with forests. But as more and more land was plowed, forests shrank into islands and vast inter-

urban spaces became cropland. Scattered over this space and largely engaged in farming, Russia's rural population has been keeping Russia’s ecumene in one piece.

This book addresses the opposite process: the conversion of a continuous social space into a fragmented one, a kind of archipelago. Three-quarters of Russia’s arable land is within the European portion of Russia (90 million hectares out of 119 million hectares in the entire Russian Federation). As the

4 e Introduction

prime extraurban use of land in European Russia almost everywhere but in the extreme north, farming offers the exemplary activity setting for analysis of spatial fragmentation, the process whose significance transcends agriculture. The growing contrasts in agricultural land use intensity and land abandonment (as one of the extreme expressions of these contrasts) are of special interest to us. Because the abandoned farmland is found in the outlying districts of many Russian regions, the enduring or residual agrarian ecumene of

European Russia comes to resemble an archipelago. The formation of this archipelago is a fascinating story, and this book will introduce the Western reader to that story. Critical to understanding the development of this patchwork of farmland, however, is a full appreciation of exactly where this story begins. Therein lies a problem for the storytellers, as some readers may already have an appreciation of where the tale begins and thus need less introduction than others. Those engaged in designing college curricula are familiar with this problem of prerequisite knowledge. Sometimes the problem takes on a mulltidisciplinary dimension. For example, those compiling texts for in-depth world regional geography courses find it necessary to preface their work with a brief narrative of regional history, especially if the prospective student audience is physically and culturally remote from the world region in question. Consequently, all the geography texts devoted to Russia and designed for the English-speaking audience have their introductory chapter focus on Russian history.* This approach is a low-cost means of eliminating the need for a prerequisite course in Russian history. Like any shortcut, however, it entails a risk, which in this case would be tripping into rough terrain, exacerbating the problem instead of solving it. The terrain of Russian history, after all, is

not only “rugged”; it is also vast, thus, laying it out in twenty or thirty pages may produce an account so compressed that it defeats its very purpose, which is not to obscure but to clarify. Hence, one has a quandary without a universal solution. We find ourselves in a similar situation. Our research was not originally intended to extend beyond the beginning of Russian systemic reform, which commenced in the early 1990s, but the causes of the emerging fragmented space go back much further in time. No book can be entirely self-contained, but in an attempt to broaden this book’s reach we would like to begin by sharing our understanding of some relevant aspects of Russian history that can be viewed as the forerunners of the process that we study. Our preferred solution to the “prerequisite problem” is not so much to compress or streamline history as to conceptualize it in a manner conducive to understanding our major theme. For a more factual and fuller account of Russia’s agrarian history,

we refer the English-speaking reader to Rural Russia under the Old Régime by

Introduction

¢ 5

Geroid Tanquary Robinson, which has been through five editions, and also to Continuity and Change in Rural Russia by Grigory loffe and Tatyana Nefedova.

Westernizers and Slavophiles Russians have long embraced two contrasting perspectives on their history. According to one of them, Russia started out as a genuinely European cultural entity, has always been proceeding along the path of development blazed by West Europeans, and, despite some notable detours from that path, it is still on

that road. In many crucial ways it replicates the progress of the West, adjusting its achievements to take root in Russian “soil.” This intellectual tradition has lately come to interpret the notable detours from the European path as more formal than substantive. For example, referring to the Marxian succession of social formations, Russian-style socialism is sometimes viewed as feudalism (a pre-capitalist formation) under the smoke screen of Marxist sloganeering. This view is of course nothing new. “Possibly state socialism is the nearest modern concept . . . with which we can compare the feudal state,’ wrote an American agrarian historian as early as 1925, when state socialism was at its early stage.’ According to another perspective, Russia’s path of development is unique, so much so that it defies comparison with Europe. In this view Russia is unique primarily because its collective psyche is steeped in sobornost, the inborn proclivity of every individual to dissolve in a collective and to subordinate one’s ego to the collective will of a social entity, be that a rural commune or the entire nation. Spiritually, Russia is not Europe, and so every attempt to follow its path is destined to fail. The first perspective is embraced by the so-called Westernizers, whereas the so-called Slavophiles (a misnomer emanating from the unfounded idea that Russians can speak on behalf of all Slavs) favor the second view. Both Western scholars and Russian Westernizers claim that the “attempts to find in the ‘Russian soul’ an innate striving toward communality (‘sobornost’) and ‘family happiness’ . . . represent little more than romantic flights from . . . realities,” as well as acute feelings of inferiority relative to Europe and America.” By the same token, it is doubtful that Russians’ striving for communality is indeed “innate.” According to our observations, Russians are not averse to indi-

vidualism of the most rugged sort, for example, in reaction to enforced forms of collective existence. By the same token, collectivism in Russia is seldom a

personal choice; rather, it is a survival pattern spontaneously exercised willynilly by, and sometimes deliberately marketed for, the poor. As long as poverty is almost everybody’s lot in a local community, a region, or for that matter the entire country, collectivism becomes the ambient environment. But as soon as

6 ¢ Introduction

Russians have more than average means, the very first thing they do is detach their personal space from that of everybody else. . Today, tall and often elaborate fences with hefty gate locks arrest one’s attention in the Russian version of suburbia (see figures 1.1-1.4), a playground of the newly rich. Likewise, fences of considerable height surround the property of the more successful rural villagers. Rarely in America, stereotyped as the hotbed of individualism, can one witness such an irrepressible urge to physically disassociate from the community. To be sure, fenced landholding is not uncommon in America, but it is not nearly as ubiquitous as in Russia,

where personal space finds itself in an uneasy relationship with higher-order spaces—communal, regional, and national. Russian communities affected by growing income disparity among its members do not normally join in coordinated action to finance beautification and improvement of nearby public spaces, including access roads. The very expensive mansions of the “New Russians” and the poor and often impassable roads leading to them quite often coexist; the homeowners are reluctant to share expenses because they believe that someone who is richer than they are or needs the road more will not contribute his or her fair share. Eventually, the most prosperous neighbors withdraw from any preliminary negotiation to finance an access road linking the community with a municipally, regionally, or federally maintained roadway. They just buy very expensive foreign SUVs and do not care about their neighbors who drive less expensive cars. So much for the famed Russian collectivism.

Figure 1.1. Concrete fence, environs of Moscow

Figure 1.2. Castlelike fence,

environs of Moscow

Figure 1.3. Wood-andbrick fence, environs of Moscow

Figure 1.4. Concrete-

and-brick fence,

environs of Moscow

8 e Introduction

Capitalism's Second Coming and the Realities of Rural Russia

The advent of market reform in the early 1990s has been the second (or by some accounts, the third) appearance of a market economy in Russia. Russia's first encounter with capitalism dates back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century; it was facilitated by the emancipation of serfs in 1861. This encounter was inconsistent and short, as it was interrupted by World War I and the 1917 Communist revolution. During the years of the so-called New Economic Policy, 1921-1927, Russia’s Communist leaders themselves loosened the recently

acquired reins of centralized control and flirted with market forces, yet they finally made a political decision to squelch them. Only in the early 1990s did capitalism make a comeback following the seventy-year ostensible deviation from the “European” path of development. In 1897, 87.4 percent of Russia’s population lived in the countryside, and “with a minor discount for the gentry and the clergy, this rural sea of people consisted of peasants.”"' Since then, Russia has been significantly modernized. In 2005, 73 percent of Russia’s population is urban, and agriculture is the official occupation for 11 percent of Russia’s labor force. While there is no denying the magnitude of that change, the elements of continuity deserve more attention than they are usually given. Surprisingly few Russia watchers contemplate the idea that Russia, in fact, continues to be an exceedingly rural country. It is primarily rural in terms of mentality; because urbanization was delayed, most of Russia’s urbanites were born and raised in traditional Russian villages. According to Anatoly Vishnevsky, in 1990, when urbanites made up 66 percent of the entire Soviet population, only 15 to 17 percent of those who were sixty or older had been born in urban areas; of those in their forties, about 40 per-

cent had. Only among those twenty-two and younger did the percentage of urban-born individuals exceed 50 percent.” Russia is also exceedingly rural in a more immediate sense, that is, in terms of rank-and-file Russians’ continuing involvement in working the land. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, 39 percent of Russia’s rural population of working age was employed by agricultural enterprises (down from 48 percent in 1990), and approximately 25 percent of it was engaged in subsistence agriculture, that is, working only on one’s own household farm (up from 10 percent in 1990). Altogether, there are 16 million rural household farms in Russia. Additionally, 14 million urbanites own a plot in the so-called “collective orchards,” and 5 million urbanites own a plot in “collective vegetable gardens.” There are also 2 million dacha owners, most of whom grow food as well. The total is 37 million families, or more than 100 million people. Additionally, more than 20 million statistical urbanites (residents of small and medium-

sized towns) permanently live in traditional rural cottages with vegetable

Introduction

« 9

gardens adjacent to them. Altogether, these statistics mean that no fewer than 120 million Russians (out of the total population of 144 million) are working

land in one way or another.” To our knowledge, the far-reaching implications of this mass involvement in farming are rarely given appropriate attention, the attention that would be commensurate with the actual significance of this fact for understanding the Russian world view and the Russian psyche. In this vast and essentially rural country, all the vicissitudes of history have left lasting marks. Some of these historical occurrences underlie concepts or subjects that we believe constitute essential prerequisites for appreciating the chapters that follow. They include serfdom or bondage, the redistributive peasant commune, the elite versus the masses, collectivization, the peasant theory of Russian communism, and the post-1991 withdrawal of the state from the agrarian scene. Serfdom

Serfdom was the legal attachment of peasants to land and their subordination to a landlord. In its legal sense, serfdom may be traced to the code of law passed in 1497 under Ivan the Third. Thereafter, landlords’ prerogatives in regard to their peasants widened, and the severity and rigidity of constraints to which peasants were subjected increased. Thus, the Ulozhenie of 1649, Russia’s first

printed code of law, “gave legal sanction to violence by explicitly denying the peasantry any escape from their serfdom and by prescribing corporal—even capital—punishment for a wide variety of minor offenses. [In the Ulozhenie] the knout alone is mentioned 141 times.’* However, up until the late 1500s, peasants had a right to move from one landlord to another on Saint George Day (Yur’ev den’), 26 November, but those who fled their lord indiscriminately were to be apprehended and punished. In 1592, even the one-day opportunity to legally escape an oppressive master was cancelled. By all accounts, the principle of serfdom abounded in cruelty toward peasants, particularly from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the

first quarter of the nineteenth century. During that period, serfdom was actually identical to slavery. Peasants could be bought and sold without land, and parents could be separated from their children, while the proprietor was to be held liable for beating and torture only in the case of a peasant’s death. Economically, peasants were required to contribute to their lords’ well-being through corvée (working for their former lord) and/or quit-rent (working on

the side for cash and paying a part of it to the former proprietor). Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, much later than in other European countries. However, for decades thereafter the emancipated serfs were redeeming their land from their former proprietors. The continuation of the merciless exploita-

10 ¢ Introduction

tion of peasants was one of the major causes of the abortive Russian revolution of 1905-1907 and the successful 1917 revolution. By 1917, no less than 85 percent of Russia’s population was still in a condition of peasantry, and the overwhelming majority of those who fought in the victorious 1917 Communist revolution and during the subsequent civil war that helped solidify Soviet rule were born and raised as rural villagers. Therefore, it is important to keep their habitual forms of self-organization in mind. Obshchina

The most well-known of these habitual forms of selforganization was a peasant commune, known in Russia as obshchina or mir. In the very beginning of his superb collection of pre-revolutionary writings about a peasant commune, Geroid Tanquary Robinson shrewdly contrasted the two microcosms of agrarian colonization: that in Russia and that in North America: “Ordinarily . . . Russian colonists did not live the lonely life of an American frontier family. In the number and in the close inter-relationship of its inhabitants, the smallest Russian settlement had usually the double character ofa village and a family.”” When a village included several households, each usually had one or more strips of land in each of the several fields. And in each of these fields all the households were obliged to abide by the same cycle of cropping and fallowing. It was the custom to redivide the meadows each year before the mowing, while the pasturelands and forests were generally used in common. Among the powers of the commune were thus “the distribution of land and the regulation of its use, the apportionment of tiaglo (feudal obligations), the election of village authorities (elders) . . . the collection of funds for expenditures of the

mir (the peasant commune in its administrative capacity), the organization of mutual aid, and the resolution of civil and minor criminal affairs. During the

17th and 18th centuries equalizing repartitions of land became the norm.”’* Repartitions were conducted in response to demographic changes (births and deaths) at the household level and to the variable quality of land. Instead of having permanent use of a particular parcel, each household received a particular share of communal land. This practice strengthened the commune’s fiscal and administrative rights as a collective with regard to its members. A Russian peasant commune thus involved many manifestations of collectivism. Through periodic repartition and mutual social control, a commune provided for peasant schooling through group action. Although not all peasant communes practiced repartitioning, about three-quarters of all peasant households with allotments in European Russia did follow this practice from 1877 to 1905.’ Communes with hereditary household allotments existed mostly in the western and southwestern provinces, that is, areas predominantly populated

Introduction

¢ 11

by Ukrainians and Belarusians. Yet in both repartitioning and hereditary communes each peasant family typically held a set of dispersed strips of plowland, and the whole conglomerate of strips held by a commune involved a common crop rotation and a common pasture right.

The abolition of bondage in Russia in 1861 enhanced the already conspicuous role of peasant communes because taxes and payments to redeem land from landlords were levied upon a commune as a whole, not upon individual households. This collective or joint responsibility (krugovaya poruka) was first and foremost the means to ensure the continuation of payments but was simultaneously a strong motive for peasants to stick together. Because each member of the obshchina could count on communal support in dire circumstances, communal bonds inhibited rural outmigration and could extend the lifespan of crisis-ridden economic units. Even temporary migration was supposed to be subject to communal endorsement. In a peasant commune, the possibility always existed of displacing a household head and appointing another member of the same family to take that position. A peasant, therefore, depended on a commune not only for access to land but also for social status. Combined with land repartitioning, such social organization did not facilitate initiative and motivation. Communal leadership, which generally consisted of the elders, meddled in the property relationships of peasant families. A head of a household could not arbitrarily bequeath property to individual children, let alone transfer it to other hands without communal endorsement. Every son was to inherit a part of his late father’s land allotment and some of his implements in order to fulfill his duties to the commune. However, family members did not have full sovereignty over their interpersonal relationships. Everything they earned, including earnings in a city during their leaves of absence from the commune, was supposed to replenish the family budget. With families numbering six on average, it meant that, say, a childless brother earning decent money as a temporary migrant in a city was working to support the family of his brother who remained in the village sharing his father’s home. The tradition of mutual material support by family members was very persistent, outliving even instances of a patriarchal family virtually splitting up when some members moved to cities or towns permanently. It is still common for Russian urbanites to rely on their rural relatives for food supplies, whereas the latter rely on urbanites during the sowing and harvest and for other land-tending chores. Addressing an issue intensely debated in Russian historiography, Robinson concluded that it would be “forever impossible” to resolve whether communal arrangements in Russia were official or popularly inspired or whether they had their origin chiefly in the legal environment or the social culture." Echoing Vasily Kliuchevsky, the famed Russian historian, Leonid Milov

12 ¢ Introduction

sees the roots of the Russian peasantry’s communal organization in a short crop-farming season and the low fertility of the soil in the Russian heartland. Due to the well-known climatic conditions in Western Europe (westerly airflow and the Gulf Stream), crop farmers can work land all year except in December andJanuary, whereas in central Russia, the working season lasts only

from the beginning of May to the beginning of October. Infertile and acid podzolic soils add to the natural constraints on farming. “Under such conditions,” writes Milov, “to receive

a minimum acceptable result, maximum con-

centration of effort was required during a fairly short time stretch. However, the individual peasant household could not achieve the requisite concentration of effort during the time that nature assigned to agricultural work.” Milov believes that the Russian peasant commune was integral to what he calls the compensatory survival mechanism, hence the commune’s crucial role over the entire thousand years of Russian history. Serfdom, according to Milov, managed to neutralize the commune as the basis of peasant resistance. The cruelty of serfdom stems from objective necessity to withhold surplus value that was destined to be low under the prevailing environmental conditions. Boris Mironov disagrees with Milov. For Mironov, collective land use

in Russia initially was conditioned by the abundance of vacant land. Thus every individual household would acquire as much land and as good a parcel of land as it could until the reserve of vacant land in a region was exhausted, following which land was destined to become a commodity. Yet because other important underpinnings of market relations (such as personal freedom and the development of industry) were late in coming, collective land use became a transitional form—from first-come, first-grab, to legal private ownership, a form supported by the class of landlords interested in uninterrupted land redemption payments. Mironov observes that “communal order was a social arrangement typical for all pre-industrial societies of Europe. In Russia this order existed longer not because of Russia’s inborn specificity, but because of its delayed socio-economic development.””°

Be that as it may, the Russian peasant commune was regarded as the major hindrance to Russia’s economic development, and so both under the last Russian tsar and under the New Economic Policy of 1921-1927, the conditions became such that the most enterprising and independent-minded peasants could withdraw from their communes. In both cases, however, the reforms did not have enough time to materialize. The Stolypin reform launched in 1906 ran into World War I, and the New Economic Policy was abandoned in 1927. Quite a few peasants who took out titles to their land and established individual farms fell victim to the collectivization of Russian agriculture.

Introduction

¢ 13

Collectivization

The collectivization of 1929-1935 pursued the goal of creating large landholdings (up to several thousand hectares) called collective farms that would jointly own and manage land, cattle, and farm implements. Officially, the tasks of the collectivization campaign undertaken between 1929 and 1935 were to achieve technological advancement in agriculture quickly, which reportedly was only possible on large farms, and to eradicate any emergent signs of capitalism. However, an even more important goal for the Bolsheviks was to ensure speedy accumulation of means for their crash industrialization program. While peasants could not be relied on politically, only they could be counted on as the source of financing for industrialization in a predominantly agricultural country. It was, therefore, important to subjugate peasants and to deprive them of political clout and freedom to dispose of their produce in their own ways. Doing so would make it possible to regulate the commercial exchange of food for non-food items so that huge savings could be accumulated in government hands. Beginning in January 1933, collectivization made it possible for farmgate grain and other food prices to be set at one-tenth or one-twelfth of fair market prices. It became the most important way that the state pumped financial resources out of the countryside. Some theorists held that to support industrialization it was sufficient to secure a 2 percent annual growth of grain output between 1928 and 1940. During the entire period between 1801 and 1914, however, grain yields increased on average 0.5 percent annually. According to one scholar, “The question thus remains how one could achieve a 2 percent increase absent a market, that is, when a peasant is not interested in the growth of commercial farming and at the same time ferociously hates private capital and private capital in the village.”*! The answer to this question was pursued by combining modern technology with deeply ingrained communal custom. It therefore no longer seems paradoxical that newly established collective farms, whose overt mission was to eradicate peasant communes

and

thus modernize agriculture, in fact drew on the peasants’ patriarchal ethos of equality in poverty. There is a clear succession from the traditional Russian peasant commune to the kolkhoz (a collective farm), with both systems

alienating peasants from property and uprooting the sense of individual responsibility, replacing it with reliance upon the collective. Those independent farmers who had withdrawn from their communes and been successful were subject to fierce hatred. And the principal hate-mongers were those on whom the Bolsheviks staked their future.

14 ¢ Introduction

The Elite versus the Masses Collectivization is often justifiably referred to as serfdom revisited. This time, however, it was administered in the name of and on behalf of the newly emerg-

ing egalitarian society, a society that ostensibly and proudly disposed of exploitation and social stratification. In Russia, it should be noted, such contrasts

in well-being had traditionally been acute. While peasants were an underclass of sorts similar to that in other countries, the social distance between them

and their proprietors was arguably more significant than in any other European society.

Nicholas Riasanovsky referred to the Russian proverb “Sytyi golodnogo ne razumeyet,” which he loosely translated as, “A satiated man is not a com-

rade of a hungry one.” “This bit of folk wisdom,” writes Riasanovsky, “has undeniable relevance to Russian history. In imperial Russia, some of the sati-

ated tended.to be satiated to the full, while the hungry ones went very hungry. During the nineteenth century, Russia possessed the most splendid court and perhaps the most palatial and magnificent capital city in Europe, as well as an exquisite literature and a glorious ballet, but most of its people endured a marginal existence with every drought threatening starvation.” An American traveler to Russia in the 1830s wrote that the village poor, “generally wanting the comforts which are supplied to the Negro on our best-ordered plantations, appeared to me to be no less degraded in intellect, character, and personal bearing. Indeed, the marks of physical and personal degradation were so strong, that I was irresistibly compelled to abandon certain theories not uncommon among my countrymen atgore: in regard to the intrinsic superiority of the white race over all others.” “One hardly needs to be reminded,” notes Riasanovsky, “that ae division between the elite and the masses in Russia paralleled similar divisions in other countries. Still, the Russian split was not quite like the others, or at least it represented a more extreme species of the same genus. In this, as in so many other cases, the evolution of Russia seems to offer a sharper and cruder version of what happened to the west of it.”*4 A gap of this magnitude between social strata is much like an electrical “separation of charge,” which is stable up to a point but once in a while leads to an unusually mighty release of the accumulated tension through the sociopolitical equivalents of lightning and thunder. “God save me from witnessing a Russian rebellion, senseless and unrelenting,” wrote Alexander Pushkin in his

history of Pugachev’s Rebellion. The social discontent that emerged in Russia early in the twentieth century was on a scale unseen anywhere in Western Europe, where the upper classes had understood their vested interest in contributing to the well-being of the masses through organized charities and

Introduction

¢ 15

negotiations with trade unions. The Russian elite failed to develop similar selfpreservation techniques.

This failure makes anybody preoccupied with social stability worry when he or she is faced with the resurgence of extreme income disparity in the Russia of the 1990s. Indeed, according to Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development, in the first quarter of 2004 the officially recorded income ofthe upper decile (10 percent) of Russians exceeded that in the bottom decile by a factor of 15.” There were thirty-six U.S.-dollar billionaires in Russia, and at the same time the officially reported national average monetary income was 5,779 rubles or $199 a month, according to a report issued by Goskomstat (State Statistical Bureau of Russia) in March 2004.” According to a report issued by the World Bank in 2004, the share of rural Russians with income below the poverty line was 30.4 percent, which is twice as high as in urban Russia. According to the same report, the share stands in inverse proportion with the settlement size: in Moscow, the percentage ofpoor residents was just 6.6 percent.” Agriculture furnishes the lowest average salary among all the thirty-seven employment sectors for which salary and wage statistics are available. The average monthly salary in agriculture is 35 percent of the national average, or less than $70.” Obviously, profit from selling the produce of household farms is not included in that average. However, to our knowledge, personal incomes in large cities are underestimated to a much larger extent than incomes in rural areas. In a large city, many people have multiple sources of income, and a significant part of salaries may be paid in cash, leaving no paper trail. Afanasii Fet, a Russian poet and successful farm owner, once observed

that “those in [Saint Petersburg and Moscow] who are used to unending cir-

culation of capital do not want to understand how the entire vast area . . . ekes out a living without a penny for months in a row.” This observation, made in 1871, is every bit as true in 2005. As this book will show, large segments of the Russian countryside have a “natural” economy with little exposure to monetary exchange. To be sure, the rural poor no longer pose any immediate danger for the country’s financial and economic elite. These poor people are not only considerably less numerous than in the beginning of the twentieth century but also scattered and disunited; the continuing depletion of Russian villages’ human resources through outmigration has long drained them of people who are the most industrious, sober, and conscious of their own interests. This circumstance is even more obvious as far as the articulation of collective interests is concerned. It is the urban poor and disfranchised whose discontent may be explosive. Be that as it may, it is tempting to view the Soviet period as Russian society’s historical exercise in self-regulation; if Russians are indeed prone, as they seem to be, to develop and recklessly reproduce a potentially dangerous

16 ¢ Introduction

level of social inequity, a counteracting force must be called upon to keep this inequity in check. The Peasant Theory of Russian Communism The emergence of a social order whose economic essence is redistribution of profits so that those potentially rich are kept from using their profits as they see fit and those potentially poor are kept from starvation, can be seen as just such a counteracting force. For some analysts, the true antecedents of this order are not so much rooted in Marxism as in the peasant tradition of Russia. In his classic research on the Soviet nomenklatura, Mikhail Voslensky pointed to the very high percentage of the rural born among the higher echelon of Soviet leaders. “Just read the . . . obituaries of the high-level older generation bureaucrats appearing in the Soviet press,” writes Voslensky, “and you will see that the overwhelming majority of them were born and raised as peasants.*° Anatoly Vishnevsky notes that the share of urban-born Soviet leaders was at its highest during the first years after the 1917 Communist revolution, when the country was primarily rural. This circumstance reflects the fact that major Bolsheviks recruited from the nation’s intellectual elite. However, as the

rate of urbanization went up, the share of rural-born leaders was growing, not declining, and as urbanization progressed further, a tradition to promote former rural villagers to positions of prominence did not subside. For example, among the new members of the Communist Party's Politbureau, the Central

Committee

(CC) secretaries, and members of the CC’s Organizational De-

partment who first occupied their posts in 1970-1979, nearly two-thirds were rural born. Out of one hundred people who came to leadership positions in the party over the period from 1950 to 1989, forty-seven were born in rural villages and seventeen in the so-called PGT, a semiurban type of residential area. Only twenty-two were born in major cities, including just two from Moscow and no one from Leningrad; nine out of these twenty-two full-fledged urbanites came to leadership positions very late in this period, under Gorbachev.”' Vishnevsky does not consider these statistics to be coincidental. Regardless of what Marxism was really worth, when it “stepped out of the elitist circles and got in touch with peasant masses or, still worse, masses of the lumpen or marginals already no longer rural, yet not quite urban, this revolutionary school of thought could not help but regenerate into something else.” Vishnevsky believes that the Communist revolution in Russia matched Oswald Spengler’s notion of a “conservative revolution” that set out to modernize Russia by medieval means. Russian peasantry with its primitive communal instincts and redistributive ethos could not help but impact the Soviet pattern of development in a most crucial way.”

Introduction

¢ 17

According to some scholars, Russia’s rural communal ethos is the true

cradle of Russian Communism, and its many facets have been thoroughly studied. Among these facets are a cult of patience; a proclivity to tolerate inherited inequality, rather than inequality resulting from individual differences in ingenuity, talent, and work ethic; a cult of leadership in which a strong individual would make a decision for the rank-and-file and thus relieve them from the burden of making personal choices; a Manichaean world view, whereby the utmost evil wages the perennial tug of war with the utmost virtue without a sense of anything whatsoever between those extremes; and a belief in abiding by moral reasoning rather than legal norms. Vishnevsky points out that Soviet urbanization was accomplished in record time, too quickly for the acculturation of archaic peasant masses rushing into the cities. In contrast to Western Europe, where the swift growth of urban population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was preceded by centuries of gradual qualitative change in urban life, the Soviet type of development led as much to the ruralization of the urban places as it did to the urbanization of rural villagers. The same idea is stressed by Alexander Akhiazer. The archaic rural culture steeped in equality in poverty came to dominate the entire urban milieu, not just enclaves of village huts inside cities. To be sure,

the type of sociocultural control that befits genuine urbanization was emerging under the Soviets but very slowly due to such inherently Soviet elements as the lack of an officially recognized housing “market,” rampant standardization of residential blocks, a restrictive policy of urban residence permits (the so-called propiska), and a lack of self-governance. Vishnevsky’s stance falls into a school of thought founded by Nikolai Berdiaev. In his book The Origin of Russian Communism (1937), Berdiaev attributed Communism’s most essential features to Russia’s oriental affinities (among which he included communal collectivism), not to Marxism. Whereas the latter had come to be the source of Communist symbolism, the former provided human capital susceptible to social engineering and made it possible to muster the energy of the entire nation. “In the USSR, the family is forming, the close-knit circle of relatives, the household teaming with children, with

Stalin as the father or the elder brother to all of them,” wrote Andrei Platonov,

a superb prose writer and a keen observer of Russian life, in 1935.** The school of thought that promoted this perspective was immediately held back because the ideologically indoctrinated audience was not ready to listen. When Nicholas P. Vakar published his book The Taproot of Soviet Society (1962), in which he showed that the Soviet polity was essentially a reincarnation of the Russian peasantry’s traditional communal arrangements now extended over the entire society under a smoke screen of Marxist symbols, the Western audience was even less impressed. The idea of Vakar’s book was

18 ¢ Introduction

actually not original; in it he restated some of Berdiaev’s earlier thoughts, ridding them of some elements that would strike a chord only with readers well versed in Russian history and fleshing them out with new data. But even rehashing some older concepts from the 1930s was apparently still ahead of its time in 1962. When Vakar’s book was published that year, it was deemed eccentric and fell into oblivion. The cold war was in full swing, and it came to a head during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. At that time, touting some shadowy cultural roots for Communism was too much for the politically agitated reader. The Western “agitprop” considered Communism not only ominous, even from afar, but also theoretically false, a product of entirely erroneous and misleading theory. The fact that Marxism swayed quite a few people in the West aggravated the ideological excitement. It was only much later, when Communism

had retreated from the forefront of international affairs, that

Berdiaev’s cultural paradigm began to gain ground; in fact, it is now part and parcel of the Russian Westernizers’ way of thinking.” In the meantime, for Russian Communists history has come full circle; since the early 1990s and

until recently, their most ardent supporters have been peasants from Russia's south, not industrial workers.

It follows logically from the peasant theory that the Soviet order did not collapse under the burden of economic and political problems endemic to it. Communism came to an end when the tenacious equality-in-poverty mentality originally nurtured by the redistributive peasant commune and subsequently harnessed by the Bolsheviks had weakened its grip over the majority of educated people in a few principal urban areas. The urbanization of the people’s mentality, a cosmopolitan and highly individualistic trend, had finally grown through the cracks in the Soviet system, as grass shoots through asphalt. The end of Communism was thus based on the newly emerging sociocultural situation at least as much as on overt political indoctrination and/ or economic imperatives. Perhaps the confluence of all three—cultural, economic, and political—factors determined it. However, this shift occurred only in a few principal urban centers, notably Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which became the loci of the crucial constituency for regime change.*° For most other regions of Russia, a mental shift of this nature could not be expected to occur at once. And for the bulk of Russia’s rural villagers, the de facto social outcasts, it is unlikely to occur at all during their lifetimes. SDP,

SE

The remainder of this book follows the logic largely informed by the approach that is integral to our profession: we uncover and interpret spatial structures rather than view only extraterritorial phenomena such as systemic changes

Introduction

« 19

in socioeconomic order, technology, and rural demographics. Our research, however, complements that conducted by others and does not by any means replace it. We favor a multiplicity of research approaches and/or perspectives. Moreover, work by economists, political scientists, and sociologists often provides us with a point of departure for our own research endeavors, as does the account of Russia’s agrarian history outlined above.”

3} Working Land in Russia

Soviet agriculture was bimodal, as it included collective and state farms on the

one hand and what was termed “personal auxiliary farming” (lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo) or household plots on the other. These private gardens have always been important for rural survival. In 1928, on the eve of collectivization, individual peasant households accounted for 96 percent of the entire area sown to crops. By 1940, they were left with just 4 percent of that area, and by 1958 with 2 percent, the balance (98 percent) being collective and state farms.’ Yet these statistics are difficult to reconcile with those reflecting the proportions of agricultural output produced by each of the two modes of farming, collective and household. For example, in 1940, collective and state farms ac-

counted for only 35 percent of meat and 30 percent of all milk produced in Russia.’ Officially, rural households supplied their cattle with feed themselves. It is unlikely, however, that they could produce this much feed on just 2 percent of the nation’s cropland. The household sector always annoyed Soviet authorities. Some Russian researchers aver that in the Soviet Union, there were two collectivization campaigns, not one. The first one, under Stalin, did away with private farmers as a Class; the second one, under Khrushchev, finished the job of converting

peasants into Marxian proletarians by depriving them of a considerable share 20

Working Land in Russia « 21

of their own livestock and introducing permits that allowed only very small private vegetable gardens.’ However, even by the mid-1960s, the proportion of peasant income from household farming was still twice that from collective farming." The role of household farming was always important under the Soviets because ofthe national food deficit, which was mitigated by close ties between rural villagers and their urban relatives. By 1990, household farms produced more than one-quarter of Russia's agricultural output even though they officially accounted for only about 2 percent of the cropping area (table 2.1). The potato output of household farms was especially high in proportion to the total (66 percent) and fairly significant in other products, as reflected in table 2.1. Socialized farm production units, by which we mean collective and state farms established under collectivization, were not carved in stone either. They

were intermittently joined together and broken up into smaller units. Over time, the enlargement trend prevailed. Thus, if the average landholding of a collective farm was just five hundred hectares in 1940, it was already close to four thousand hectares in 1958. In the late 1980s, many socialized farm units

changed their status, mostly from collective to state farms. Such changes were invariably caused by their lingering inefficiency as perceived by the Communist Party organs holding the reins of their management. Party officials seemed to believe that once the “correct” administrative rearrangements had been accomplished, all problems would be resolved. With the passage of time, the proportion of state farms vis-a-vis the overall number of production units grew. Initially the difference between a kolkhoz (collective farm) and a sovkhoz (state farm) was that the latter was state owned, whereas the former held all

its fixed assets (buildings, implements, livestock, perennial plants), its output, Table 2.1. Percentage of collective and state farms in farmland and agricultural output ma

1940

Total farmland

No data

Total output (monetary value)

No data

Grain

99

Potatoes

46

1960 oo

Vegetable Milk Note: The agricultural output not produced by collective and state farms is produced by household farms. Sources: Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR v 1987 godu (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1988), 157, 163, 179; Rossia v tsifrakh (Moscow: Finansy i Statistika, 2001), 200-201; Rosstiskii statisticheskii yezhegodnik (Moscow: Finansy i Statistika, 1996), 551; Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR 1957 (Moscow: Gosstatizdat), 127; Selskoe

khoziaistvo Rossii 2000 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2002), 86; Zemelnyi Fond 1961 (Moscow: TSSU RSFSR,

1961).

22 ¢ Working Land in Russia

and its profit in communal (formally defined as “cooperative”) property. The idea was'to keep collective farms at a somewhat lower level of state control over property so that their dependence on public funds to make ends meet would be held in check. However, in all cases land remained public property,

and it was administratively attached to collective farms free of taxation and for an unlimited time. The difference between collective and state farms, how-

ever, was purely nominal when it came to their relationships with the state concerning agricultural output. It is no wonder that before long, more subtle differences between the two types of socialized farms virtually evaporated. Nevertheless, the transformation of collective farms into state farms continued to preoccupy the authorities, and by 1989 the share of state farms in the overall number of farm units was at an all-time high. To some extent, this

change was linked to a fad of the 1970s: large specialized farms. Collective farms were dominant in the south, but in the north and east

they accounted for only about a quarter of the agricultural land (table 2.2). This regional disparity was related to a combination of two factors: the specialization of a production unit and the unit’s performance. Units that tended to be transformed into state farms were of three types: highly specialized livestock farms that were mostly profitable and located in proximity to large cities; collective farms on whose land expensive reclamation projects were implemented; and the most chronically unprofitable farms. For the last, transformation into a state farm was a locally publicized act of rescue from economic ruin, which, however, seldom resulted in economic recovery. For these rea-

Table 2.2. Regional land in collective and state farms as a percentage of total agricultural land 1960 collective

| 1989 collective

North and northwest

62

Industrial Center

64

Volga-Vyatka

83

55

Chernozem center

70

66

Volga

54

Northern Caucasus

58

|

27,

1960 state

17

1989 state

60

40

Urals Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East

Russia Total

Sources: Zemelnyi Fond RSFSR: prilozheniye k statisticheskomu bulletenuiu TSSU RSFSR, no. 19 (Moscow: TSSU RSFSR, 1961), 46, 171; Zemelnyi Fond RSFSR na 1 Noyabria 1989 (Moscow: Goskomstat RSFSR, 1990), 98.

Working Land in Russia « 23 sons, state farms became the more heterogeneous farm category as compared to collective farms.

Rural Development

The scenes of rural life in Russia—wooden huts built around traditional firewood stoves as the only heating devices, makeshift wooden fences around personal plots in front of those huts, no aesthetically pleasing flowerbeds, just vegetable patches, no piped water and plumbing, and no paved roads—remained largely unchanged from pre-1917 times up to the 1960s. With the exception of rural villages in proximity to large cities and most villages within the Moscow, Leningrad, and Kaliningrad (former East Prussia) regions, electricity arrived in the Russian countryside only in the 1960s. In the majority of the so-called non-black-earth or nonchernozem regions (the northern half of European Russia), no less than one-half of all rural settlements lacked electricity as recently as 1966.’ To this day, a telephone is rare in Russian village homes, and even more rare is a flush toilet. By rural homes we mean permanent rural residences whose occupants work the land for a living, not homes sold to urbanites and used as seasonal dachas. Until the late 1980s, having a telephone in a traditional rural home was an exceptional mark of belonging to the management team of a collective farm (e.g., a chairperson, bookkeeper, agronomist,

or farm animal technician).

Until the mid-1960s, much of the investment in rural Russia was directed to farm equipment and other elements of the production chain such as seed and fertilizer, not the rural infrastructure, which would be best described as “rudimentary.” The production capacity sustained several setbacks, two of which were associated with the world wars. However, the third setback, which occurred in the wake of the collectivization campaign, was coercive

with respect to wealthier peasants and exceeded the damage inflicted by the wars. In reaction to the coercive policies, 25 million head of cattle (including 10 million cows), 17.7 million horses, more than 10 million pigs, and 71 million sheep and goats were prematurely slaughtered by peasants in 1929-1933 to avoid surrendering them to collective farms.° The pre-collectivization level of livestock was restored only in the late 1950s. Yields of most crops plummeted; collective farms regained the 1913 level only by 1940 (table 2.3), though the per capita production of grain by 1940 was only half of what it had been before World War I due to rapid population growth in the meantime, without commensurate growth in agricultural productivity. It would seem that the immediate economic consequences of restricting the enterprise of the more successful peasants were so disastrous that they

24 ¢ Working Land in Russia Table 2.3. Selected indicators of Russia’s agriculture (within borders of the Russian Federation) |Indicators/Years

|Cropping area, million ha Total output ofgrain, million tons Wheat yields, centners per ha

1913

1928

1940

1950

1960

No data 50.0

9271

89.0

120.7

55.6

46.8

8.1

76.2

79

Te

10.7

Total output of flax-fiber, thousand tons

Flax-fiber yields, centners per ha

298

25S

739

NI

240

1.6

1.2

27.8

30.2

|

2.4

Number ofcattle (cows and bulls),

in millions

No data

38.2

Sources: Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR 1958 (Moscow: TSSU, 1959); Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR 1970 (Moscow: Statistika, 1971).

would cause the authorities to pause. Yet their faith in the patience, resilience, and vitality of Russian (as well as Belarusian, Ukrainian, and other) peasantry was so tenacious that the authorities stuck to their plan. As time went by, more and more people with peasant roots presided over each and every economic sector, including agriculture. The issue of rank-and-file Russians’ complicity in repressions and other coercive policies has by now been discussed by several authors, notably by Alexander Akhiazer. loffe and Nefedova also touched upon this issue in their book Continuity and Change in Rural Russia.’ World War II inflicted still more damage on the demographic potential of the Russian village, on top of the dispossession of the so-called kulaks (wealthier peasants, some of whom used hired labor) during the collectivization campaign. No less than 9 million rural Russians were killed in that war (out of a total of 72 million rural residents in 1939), and many more were

wounded. The primitive conditions of rural life and the pull of postwar industrial expansion in various regions of the Soviet Union nudged more and more younger villagers to leave the countryside. As a combined result of coercion, wars, and the harsh conditions of rural life, agricultural productivity

remained exceedingly low. Despite significant investment in agricultural machinery, production of some crops decreased to a level below what it was prior to World War I. Power utilized in Russian agriculture increased fourfold in the late 1950s compared to 1913 because of collective and state farms’ 500,000 tractors and 300,000 grain harvesting combines. Yet no growth in agricultural productivity (e.g., yields of major crops, milk yields per cow, etc.) occurred until the late 1960s. According to Nikonoy, in 1950 peasants contributed 73 percent of their total working time to socialized farming and 10 percent to other state and cooperative institutions. Only 17 percent of their working time was spent on household farming, that is, on tiny subsidiary plots allowed for personal use.

Working Land in Russia « 25

However, only 20 percent of a household’s income was earned on collective and state farms.* So while toiling for a kolkhoz peasants actually made their living on their own. It was in essence a throwback to corvée, arguably at least as cruel as prior to 1861. In 1954, Soviet leadérs made a historic decision to develop the so-called “virgin lands,” a vast span of pristine dry steppes in the northern part of Kazakhstan and western Siberia’s southern region. This effort would require resettlement and colonization on a national scale, as well as considerable investment. After its launch in 1954, the virgin lands campaign lasted for more than a decade. During its first three years alone, 32 million hectares were converted into cropland. Other analysts (e.g., Nikonov and Nikolsky) have explored the extent of

this campaign’s success and/or failure.’ To us, the important point is that in the early 1950s, the Soviets were deeply concerned with the minuscule growth in agricultural output. At the time, they possessed the human capital and the financial means to alleviate the problem, yet they decided to expand the agricultural frontier rather than invest in the long-settled rural areas. This move was made in the habit of the Soviet leaders’ imperial predecessors; it seemed

that in Russia and the Soviet Union at large there would always be room for agricultural expansion. A side effect of the virgin lands campaign was that no significant increase in rural investment in the European section of the country followed until the late 1960s. For example, in 1960, 55 percent of all tractors (including 74 percent of the most state-of-the-art tractors with the brand name Belarus) and 83 percent of all grain combines were assigned to the virgin lands. From 1954 to 1959, the Soviet Union added 45 million hectares to the farmland in Kazakhstan and western Siberia but lost 13 million hectares in the European section of the country.”° The lingering deficit of rural development affected European Russia more than the westernmost part of the Soviet Union, that is, more than

Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the Baltics. There, interurban distances are

generally shorter, so a higher proportion of the countryside could capitalize on the spillover effect of urban developments. In addition, roads and other elements of rural infrastructure were historically better in the Soviet Union’s west, especially on lands incorporated in 1939-1940. Also, under the provisions of central planning, the sheer distance from the decision-making center matters considerably, and the Russian Federation was far more spacious than any other republic, with many more remote places falling out of the government’s sight. To be sure, agriculture, rural construction, and light industry

were the economic sectors with the most decentralized planning and management available under Soviet rule. Unlike the enterprises of heavy industry,

which were managed exclusively by the federal government, these activities

26 ¢ Working Land in Russia

were within the purview of the republics themselves. However, out of the several tiers of state administration concentrated in the city of Moscow—national (USSR), republican (Russia), regional (oblast), and local (the city itself)—the

weakest and the least funded tier was that responsible for the Russian Federation, and it was this republican tier of the Moscow-based nomenklatura that was responsible for agriculture.” All of the above reasons ensured that agricultural activity in far-flung regions of Russia suffered the most neglect. This situation could not help but contribute to the changing geography of agricultural productivity in the European section of the Soviet Union. Whereas in the 1950s and early 1960s this geography generally reflected relative soil fertility, with grain yields in the less fertile regions (the Baltics, Belarus, and the northern half of European Russia) below those in the blackearth regions (Ukraine and southern Russia), by the 1970s a west-east gradient that had existed before the Communist revolution reappeared. Even Belarus, which was dirt poor prior to World War II, began to outproduce European Russia both in grain yields and in milk yields per cow. What is more, all the western republics, especially the Baltics and Belarus, surpassed European Russia in return on agricultural investment.” Only in the late 1960s, when the virgin lands campaign was coming to a close, was a significant increase in rural investment in the long-settled regions initiated, in the wake of the Plenum of the Communist

Party of the Soviet

Union’s (CPSU) Central Committee in March 1965. Subsequently, a special investment program was adopted in 1974 for the nonchernozem zone (NCZ) of Russia, which was recognized as the most agriculturally neglected part of the entire country. To be sure, the nonchernozem zone includes Moscow

and Leningrad, regions that did not quite fit this qualification. The remaining twenty-seven regions in the northern half of European Russia, however, fit this classification all too well. Three principal directions of agricultural development were emphasized: land reclamation, “chemicalization,” and industrialization of farming.

From 1966 forward, the proportion of agriculture in the overall budget outlay was increased to 29 percent in selected years and never dropped below 20 percent before the collapse of the Soviet Union.” This investment stood in contrast with that of the previous period (1946-1965), when the respective budgetary allocation was only 7 to 10 percent of the total. As a result, between 1965 and 1990, the monetary value of the fixed assets of Russian agriculture increased sixfold. That included a fivefold growth in the overall power of the country’s fleet of tractors and a sixfold growth in the application of fertilizers.“ About half of all agricultural investment was directed toward the construction of gigantic cattle-breeding farms and to land reclamation projects involving artificial drainage and irrigation.

Working Land in Russia ¢ 27

The unprecedented sixfold growth in invested capital resulted in only a 50 percent growth in agricultural output, however.” It did exceed population growth (which was 35 percent during the same period) but not to the extent it was expected to. Importantly, while the yields of major crops and milk yields per cow reached their all-time maximums in Russia, they were still lower than

in every other economically advanced country of the world. Official Soviet statistics about the individual, regional, and national col-

lective and state farms’ profitability were largely unreliable. This lack of reliability was not due to intentional falsification, however. Rather, it was because

the scale of subsidization and written-off debts was not taken into account. For example, according to the Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR data books the number of money-losing collective farms had been reduced from 74 percent in 1980 to 3 percent in 1990; for state farms the respective percentages are 67 and 3."° The progress in profitability seems fantastic until one discovers that the 1982 Food Program introduced the practice of farm-gate price markups, which boosted the profit margins of many farms. To be sure, the prices at which collective and state farms used to sell produce to the state had long been differentiated regionally. Until 1982, this differentiation was exclusively at the macroregional, not local, level, and it was intended to make up for variations in natural fertili-

ty. The policy introduced in 1982 provided that in cases where the flat regional price for a product (milk or wheat, for example) did not cover its production costs on a collective or state farm, the price could be locally adjusted to ensure a certain profit margin. The markups over the established regional prices ranged from a few to several hundred percentage points. This practice was intended to ensure the survival of farms that were basically unprofitable. These markups became the most important mechanism for allocating budget support for agriculture. Other state supports included a free supply of machines, discounted prices on fuel and lubricants, a stable network of local buyers for each product/farm, the dispatching of military units and hundreds of thousands of urbanites at a time to harvest crops, and such benefits as temporary loans of additional trucks and other vehicles belonging to urban institutions. According to an estimate by Sergei Danquert, Russia's deputy minister of agriculture in 2002, the federal subsidies of the mid-1980s totaled the equivalent of $60 billion a year, which is about the same level that the European Union (EU) was spending in subsidies to its farmers in 2002.’” Reform or State Withdrawal?

It has become a matter of course to label the change in the Russian economy that occurred after the breakup of the Soviet Union as a market reform. Indeed, removing state controls over prices and foreign trade and large-scale

28 ¢ Working Land in Russia

privatization constitute the textbook components of changing a command economic system into a market one. Russian agriculture obviously has been affected, yet by all accounts its losses have so far exceeded gains. In 1998, the output of crop farming was just 56 percent of that in 1990 (calculated in stable prices), and the relative output of animal husbandry was only 49.7 percent. Growth resumed in 1999 following seven years of reform, but output in 2002 was still only 67.5 percent of what it had been twelve years earlier." From 1991 to 2001, the output of grain declined by 27 percent; sugar beets, 54.8 percent; sunflowers, 20.6 percent; flax, 18.4 percent, meat, 58.5 percent; milk, 41 percent; eggs, 26.4 percent; and wool, by a factor of5.6.” According to various sources, from 20 million to 30 million hectares of

arable land alone are already abandoned, and our field observations imply that both figures may be an understatement.” (Note that, prior to its enlargement in 2004, the entire European Union had just 75 million hectares ofarable land.) The number of cattle on Russian farms reached its peak (60 million) in

1985-1987 and has been declining since then, especially since 1990. In 2002, only 26 million cattle remained, 46 percent ofthe 1990 total. Likewise, in 2002 Russian farms had only 40 percent of the number ofpigs they had in 1990 and only 25 percent of the number of sheep and goats. The collective sector has been the biggest loser; in 2002 collective farms had only 35 percent of the cattle, 27 percent of the pigs, and 2 percent of the sheep that they had in 1990.*! In contrast to Soviet times, when the state of the physical plant and agricultural machinery at the disposal of Russian farms was reflected in the monetary value of fixed assets (osnovnye fondy) and regularly published, it is difficult to locate any data on their current condition that would be both reliable and comparable across time and space. The infrequent media reports from individual farms all across Russia and evidence obtained in field trips suggest that the number of Russian farms with new machines has plummeted, while what machinery is available has been subject to wear and tear. In 2002, 8,500 new

domestic combine harvesters were purchased by Russian farms, while at the same time about 200,000 old combines were written off from the farms’ balance sheets. From 1965 to 1985, Russian agriculture was receiving 28 percent

of the total investment in the Russian economy. In contrast to that, in 2001 agriculture got just 2.7 percent of the vastly diminished total investment.” Two pieces of legislation have been particularly well publicized in the context of Russian agrarian reform. The first was the federal government’s ruling in December 1991 that all collective and state farms become joint stock companies (JSC) and partnerships with limited responsibility (PLR) or break up into groups of family-owned farms. (Subsequently, the option to remain collective and state farms was also added.) The second seemingly groundbreaking change was instituted by the Land Code of 2003, which allowed the

Working Land in Russia ¢ 29

sale of agricultural land. This legislation was adopted after being debated for twelve years, with the Communists opposing it. As is always the case with a Russian law, its implementation matters more than the law itself. The intended results of new legislation are seldom realized. More often than not, the results are a far cry from the change that was originally sought. The implementation of the 1991 ruling resembled a haphazard topdown political campaign, and from that perspective one prominent analyst even likened it to the collectivization of 1929-1935.”* The objectives of the 1991 ruling were not explained to members of the collective and state farms. They became formal shareholders, and the word “kolkhoz’ (collective farm) gave

way to “JSC” or “PLR.” But the farms never became what their new names implied. Profit allocation in these production units continues to be based on labor input, not on accumulated shares, and the old rules still govern their production activity and accounting practices. Technically, the members of the former collective farms can withdraw their shares, but this action is a relatively rare event, and most of the members do not even know the monetary

value of those shares. With regard to selling agricultural land, the implementation of the Land Code of 2003 is subject to a veto by regional legislatures. In practice, where demand for land is significant, as is the case in Russia’s south and in proximity to large cities, forty-nine-year moratoria are applied. These moratoria, however, are sidestepped each time local bureaucrats receive a kickback from a wealthy buyer. Obviously, where demand is minuscule because of the poor quality of the land and/or rural depopulation, land sales and transfers are rare. The most significant change in agricultural production was never legislated, yet it had a more immediate and far-reaching impact on productivity than any law passed by the Duma. This far-reaching change came from the collapse of the state-run procurement and output distribution systems and the removal of government price controls. In other words, collective and

state farms (renamed JSC), which used to be supplied with machinery for free, received large subsidies to ensure a profit margin, and were kept on a short administrative leash, suddenly were largely left to their own devices. The result was a massive reduction in livestock tantamount to that sustained during collectivization and land abandonment. The current role of the state in Russian agriculture is but a shadow of what it once was. To be sure, the financial resources of the federal government have improved and the state is returning to the agrarian scene, but it is doing so in the capacity of an antimarket force, just as any state does in a market economy. The scale of the state’s reappearance on that scene is incomparably less than the scale of its presence under the Soviets. Consequently, Stephen Wegren’s concept of “state withdrawal” continues to be the most lucid notion

30 ¢ Working Land in Russia

applied to the rural developments in Russia since 1991, as it reflects what transpired in the Russian countryside more accurately than the notion of reform.” The effects of this withdrawal are all the more profound given the state's especially powerful role in agriculture in the last decades of Soviet rule. The change in early 1992 was from one extreme to the other, and it was abrupt. The idea that the “reform” was actually an abrupt state withdrawal is in line with the views expressed by some other analysts. According to Nikolsky, “Strictly speaking, the agrarian policies of the [Russian] government conducted since the early 1990s are not a reform.” Alexei Kovalchuk indicates that the defining feature of the agricultural situation in 2004 is “that it is no longer manageable,” much like a runaway train. He attributes this circumstance to the “swift demolition of the command system not followed by any systematic action.” Needless to say, the state withdrawal resulted in a drastic reduction of the state’s financial input, including both investment and subsidy.” In 2002 federal subsidies to agriculture totaled slightly more than the equivalent of $1 billion, down from $60 billion in the late 1980s. According to the Russian consulting firm Assessor, the owner of one hectare of farmland in

the United States gets $200 from the American government, a farmer in the EU would get $800 from that government, and the Russian farmer would get just $12.50.7° Other significant changes since 1991 include the emergence of new players in Russian agriculture and considerable change in the recorded distribution of output between existing players, notably between household and collective farms. New Agricultural Operators A household farm is not officially a business, even though it may function as one. Consequently, household farm output is not taxed, and its owner does not qualify for business loans. However, during the perestroika of the Gorbachev era in the late 1980s there emerged a new category of agricultural enterprise: registered family agricultural businesses. In 1991, there were only about 4,000 of these registered private farms in Russia. However, by 1995 there were 279,000 of them. A combination of

factors conditioned such phenomenal growth: considerable tax credit and discounted loans, the opportunity to buy farm implements at discounted prices, relative ease in obtaining land, a generally supportive political climate, and personal enthusiasm. In the early 1990s, private farmers were mostly selfrecruited from the rural elite—agronomists, animal technicians, engineers,

and even the leaders of collective and state farms. Those farms thus lost some of the most enterprising of their cadre. In the mid-1990s, the special preferences and discounts were cancelled,

Working Land in Russia ¢ 31

and private farmers found themselves in the same conditions as the former collective farms. In actuality, though, private farms could not compete with larger producers. On average, a private farmer in Russia has fifty hectares of land; in European Russia, the most common size of a private farm is only twenty to thirty hectares. Using 7 percent of Russia’s farmland, private farmers account for just 3 percent of the output. The most common specialization of private farms is sunflowers (14 percent of Russia’s total output) and grain (8 percent), that is, products that are relatively cheap, hence the small proportion of total output in monetary terms. Around 2000, more than one-half of private farms were losing money, and every fourth such farm had more than half of its land idle. According to Vladimir Bashmachnikoy, president of the Russian Association of Independent Farmers, “The 10-year experience of registered private farms in Russia shows that few of them could build or purchase machines and livestock themselves. Out of 270,000 registered farmers, only about 30,000 have not been crushed by the pressure of the market and have been able to set up a viable commercial farm. Another third just feed themselves. And the remaining third have quit.””” Another type of new agricultural operator, the type that seems to hold more promise (for better or worse), is the vertically integrated agribusiness (that is, one organization controlling each level of production, from farming to processing to marketing). Successful food processors initiated these operations. The idea of contractual links between large farms and food processors stemmed from the general success of the latter and their ultimate dependency on the former to supply perishables such as milk. Growth in agriculture commenced in 1999, but most collective farms are losing money. In contrast to that situation, many domestic food processors, including dairy, juice, and sometimes sweetshop producers, have been profitable since the mid-1990s, but their

further development was stymied by a deficit of high-quality farm produce. The 1998 default and ruble devaluations made agricultural imports costlier. So the idea became popular that industry, both domestic and foreign, would pull Russian farms out of the quagmire. The contractual links between farms and processors that have emerged since then range from long-term agreements (stipulating exchange of agricultural products for agricuitural investment) to wholesale purchase of entire farms that become incorporated in agroindustrial holdings. Comprehensive information about vertical cooperation and integration of farms and food processors across Russia is impossible to obtain, as no entity within or outside the Russian government seems to monitor such developments systematically. Ioffe and Nefedova systematized piecemeal data from the late 1990s for an article in Europe-Asia Studies. Since that time, two conflicting developments have attracted attention: the establishment of new verti-

NEW YORK WSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

32 ¢ Working Land in Russia

cal structures, including those with capital accumulated outside food processing, and emerging disillusionment about the ability of vertical integration to invigorate Russian farms.

The most publicized corporate group may be Wimm-Bill-Dunn, which is active in the dairy and fruit juice markets.” It possesses four premier milk farms in the Moscow region, with a total of twenty thousand hectares of farm-

land, twenty thousand cows, and twenty-two food processing enterprises in various regions, including the Moscow-based Lianozovsky Milk Processing Plant. In October 2003 Wimm-Bill-Dunn was briefly rumored to be on the verge of acquisition by the French dairy giant Danone.” In addition to WimmBill-Dunn, the following corporate groups are the most publicized by the Russian media: APK Agros, RusAgro, Razguliai-Ukrros, Planeta Management, APK Cherkizovsky, and Rusagroproyekt. APK Agros was spun off in 2002 from Interros, owned by Vladimir Potanin. Among Interros’s major assets is the Noriisk Nickel operation, which produces 20 percent of the world’s nickel output. APK Agros is active in grain, pork, and poultry markets; it purchased several chicken farms in Stavropol krai (territory) and set up several new grain producing farms on leased land in Russia’s south.” RusAgro emerged in 1996 as a sugar refining business. In 1998, it embarked on its own production of sugar beets, having created for this purpose a farm, Agrointer, in Belgorod oblast in cooperation with Deleplanque & Cie (France). In 2005, RusAgro co-owned nine sugar beet farms in Belgorod oblast, and it has invested the equivalent of $3.5 million in those farms. Since 2000, RusAgro has been actively expanding its grain operations. The holdings’ website claims that in 2002 alone it invested $500,000 in agriculture.” In Russia this sum would be equivalent to one-half of the entire federal aid to collective farms. It is unclear what the grain producing assets of the holding are, that is, whether it leases land or buys up existing farms. Razguliai-Ukrros is yet another sugar and grain company. It has longterm land leases in Krasnodar krai and Rostov, Kursk, and Voronezh oblasts,

and it is expanding its grain producing branch. The sugar branch of the company does not seem to work land on its own; rather, it operates sugar refineries in several southern regions.” Planeta Management is a branch of Sibneft, once owned by Roman Abramovich, better known later on as the owner of the British soccer club

Chelsea. In November 2003, Planeta was transferred to the British-based Mill-

house Capital. As a food producer, Planeta had emerged in 2001 under the leadership of Andrei Blokh, the former Sibneft president. Planeta owns five meat processing plants (8 percent of Russia's meat production), six poultry farms, and eleven milk processors, and it controls many retail outlets, primar-

Working Land in Russia « 33

ily in the large cities of Siberia. The most well-known structure controlled by Planeta is Omskii Bekon (Bacon of Omsk), the largest pork-processing plant in Russia. Omskii Bekon itself has the structure of a vertically integrated company.” APK Cherkizovsky produces 11 percent of the sausage in Russia and controls nine meat processing plants (of which Moscow-based Cherkizovsky is the largest, hence the name of the entire corporate group), seven poultry farms, and two large hog farms. Prior to 1998, 85 percent of the meat Cherki: zovsky made into sausage was imported. However, in August 1998 these imports became too expensive for the processor; hence its expansion into farming operations.” Rusagroproyekt is a vertical agribusiness group created by David Yakobashvili and Gavriil Yushvayev, the co-owners

of Wimm-Bill-Dunn,

but

formally not affiliated with it. The group owns thirty-six former state farms, four large-scale mechanized bakeries (also producing breakfast cereal), an oil storage facility, an agricultural machinery factory, and a meat processing plant in the Volgograd region. In Krasnodar krai, it owns the Azov shipyard, 44 percent of the shares of the Azov seaport grain elevator in the town of Yeisk, and 15 percent of the shares of the Yeisk seaport itself. Rusagroproyekt’s plans for 2005 were to increase their grain processing operations to 1 million tons. The group already leases 250,000 hectares of farmland, and its planned investments in agriculture will make it one of the top three producers alongside APK Agros and RusAgro. The amount of land Rusagroproyekt uses is second only to that of the Russian natural gas conglomerate Gazprom.”° According to Dmitry Rylko of the Moscow-based Institute of Agrarian Markets, vertically integrated companies are “currently picking up the last unaffiliated farms of Moscow Oblast and continue to buy up the best farms in other regions.” However,

according to Gennady Frolov, the manager

of

Cherkizovsky, “No more than 10 percent of all Russian collective farms may be of interest to those buyers. The rest are irremediable.”’” Some large food processors have changed hands, and it is not always immediately apparent who controls them. These six organizations, all headquartered in Moscow, are the most potent players in the Russian food market. However, there are many regional corporate groups that originated as food processors but have expanded into agriculture. The best known are Zerno Povolzhya and Buket (Saratov), Aston (Rostov-Don), Agrico (Samara), Agrokholding (Kursk), and Stoilenskaya Niva

(Belgorod).

There is no statistical base from which to characterize the extent of farms’ involvement in agroindustrial companies. The share of such integrated farms in the total agricultural output, as well as the dynamics involved, is also

34 e¢ Working Land in Russia

unknown. The agricultural managers of those companies are secretive and avoid contacts with journalists and researchers. Contacts with some neighboring farms and district administrations make us believe that when a corporate business comes to the district, its tax base does not serve local needs and it

does not even submit reports to the local statistical bureau. V. V. Patsiorkovsky estimates that about 6 percent of Russian collective farms are part of vertically integrated agribusiness structures, and those farms produce 9 percent of the gross agricultural output.”* It is unclear, however, how such estimates

were made. The initial zeal of the new agricultural operators has, it seems, proven difficult to sustain. Even David Yakobashvili of Rusagroproyekt and Wimm-Bill-Dunn representatives complain about low returns and the slow pace of capital turnover, and Fiodor Kliuka, the former owner of Stoilenskaya Niva, says that investing and then not managing the investment project singlehandedly is a road to failure. Dmitry Rylko compares the expansion of Russia’s corporate structures into agriculture with the bonanza farms of Minnesota and North Dakota in 1875-1890, the epic story described by Hiram M. Drache. According to Rylko, the size of land parcels currently under corporate control in Russia is comparable to those of the bonanza farms in the Upper Midwest. Russian corporate agribusinesses currently control by various means (ownership, lease, and contracts) about 3 million hectares of farmland;

four corporations control more than 300,000 hectares each, and at least six corporations control 100,000 hectares. Most of the technological modernization

of Russian farming is taking place on this land. For example, out of $84 million spent by Russian importers in 2001 for foreign grain combines, at least $60 million was spent by the new farming operators. However, Rylko believes that some of the factors that led to the ultimate decline of bonanza farms in North America may soon be replicated in Russia.*° Corporate farming operators have run into four principal problems. One of them is that technocratic managers find it difficult to adjust to a production activity that is largely controlled by nature rather than management, particularly with respect to crop farming. A collateral problem is that the costs of establishing cohesive vertical management structures have proven higher than expected. Indeed, according to Yuri Kostyuk, who oversees all farming operations of RusAgro, “Many milk, grain, and other food processors expanded into farming under pressure from the local administrations and in hope that farming would become profitable at some point in time. It is not by accident that sugar refineries, dairy processing plants, grain elevators, and mills were privatized first, whereas collective farms did not interest anybody. They are still unappealing because . . . state regulation of the agricultural market does not exist, and the state aid to farmers is inadequate to make agriculture profitable and attractive for investors. . . No vertically integrated structures will invest

Working Land in Russia ¢ 35

in working land, if imported stuff [subject to processing] is cheaper than domestic.” Kostyuk believes that vertical integration is feasible only when profit is generated at every rung of the ladder, and the only hope of making farming profitable lies in state support. The third problem of agroindustrial integration cited by Rylko is that the new operators face an acute deficit of skilled workers in the rural villages. Finally, the new operators are viewed as aliens by the majority ofrural villagers, who resist their management style.“

Shifts in the Distribution of Output and Land As mentioned above, Russian statistics are compiled in ways that do not enable researchers to estimate the agricultural output attributed to farms affiliated with agribusinesses. Official statistics cover just three agricultural sectors: collective, household, and noncorporate private. The major shifts that occurred after 1990 were between the collective and household sectors (table 2.4). By

2001, household farms were already producing more than half of the entire output, up from 25 percent on the eve of the Soviet Union’s breakup. They were contributing more than half of the milk and meat and almost all the potatoes and other vegetables. The growth in the household sector was especially vigorous in 1991-1992, in the wake of retail food price decontrol. During that period, household farms’ output increased 18 percent. In subsequent years, this output has never sustained growth above the 20 percent of the 1990 level. Moreover, by the end of the 1990s, household farms’ output began to decline. Although household farms are the major producer (at least overtly), they are not the major landholder, at least de jure (table 2.4). What is more, they

are very diverse. While some are commercial establishments that are not regTable 2.4. Percent distribution of output, cattle, and cropland by farm type —

L

Total output output |Grain ————__+—__—

Collective farms 1990

2001

74

44

| oo",

0.3

Household farms

Registered family farms

26 88

Vegetable output

70

18

30

Milk output

76

47

24

Meat output Number of cattle

Number ofpigs Cropland Sources: Selskoe khoziaistvo v Rossii 1998 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1999), 34-69; Selskoe khoziaistvo v

Rossii 2002 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2003), 32-71.

36 ¢ Working Land in Russia

istered as independent farms for the tax-related reason mentioned above, the majority are subsistence providers that can exist only in symbiosis with parent collective farms. Although table 2.4 includes exact data about cropland as it stands in the books, it is actually unclear how much labor, land, and capital

each mode of farming operations effectively uses; consequently, their relative efficiency is unknown. Only targeted surveys such as those conducted by Judith Pallot and Tatyana Nefedova are able to shed light on the household sector of Russian agriculture.” Officially, the collective farm sector remains the largest landholder; it controls 81.9 percent of farmland versus 11.3 percent controlled by household farms and 6.8 percent by registered private farms. However, 83 to 86 percent of the twenty-seven thousand collective farms are effectively bankrupt; their costs exceed revenues, and they are delinquent on their debt payments. By 2003, about fourteen thousand collective farms had had their bank accounts

frozen by the government and therefore could not obtain a bank loan to purchase fuel and machinery. In 2002, the overall debt of collective farms to the

federal and regional budgets increased by 70 billion rubles; in early 2003, the debt was about 350 billion rubles and rising. In 2003, 60 billion rubles were written off that debt, so the remaining debt did not decline.” According to Leonid Paidiyev, an associate of the State Corporation of Credit Institutions’ Restructuring (GK ARCO) and a popular expert at the online site Otkrytaya Ekonomika (www.opec.ru), 5 percent of collective farms are “normal market enterprises” that can and do use bank credit as it is, that is, with current inter-

est rates; 15 percent are enterprises that could be raised to that level through “elementary re-organization’; and the remaining 80 percent are entities with seminatural economies that will not be able to repay their debt under any circumstances.** The significant increase in household farms’ share of output is actually due to the collective sector's failure. But while there is no reason to doubt this statement, the accuracy of land use and output distribution data from the postSoviet period (contained in table 2.4) may be easily called into question.

Dubious Accuracy of Output and Land Use Records Our field observations show that rural households use more land than they own. There are essentially three types of land that rural residents use for their own needs: land attached to a rural residence, additional land within a settlement leased out by the rural administration, and land leased out by a collective farm. To produce feed for one cow usually requires from 0.030 to 0.070 hectare. Land is usually leased for a nominal fee. Some Russian scholars believe that overall no less than one-third ofall the farmland in Russia is used by rural

Working Land in Russia ¢ 37

households for their needs.** The magnitude of this hidden land use grew significantly in the 1990s, as collective farms reduced their cropping areas. Essentially, symbiotic relationships exist between collective and household farms. In many cases, the sole rationale for the collective farm’s lingering existence is that it is a de facto conduit for state aid to household operations. If the collective farm exists on paper, people can obtain fertilizer and feed concentrate for their own cattle. Observations of such relationships have allowed some scholars to doubt the statistical records of household farm output. For example, Azer Efendiev and Irina Bolotina believe that the officially recorded percentage of household farming in the gross agricultural output is exaggerated by at least a factor of 1.5. Their opinion is based on an observation that up to 50 percent of the feed grain and up to 40 percent of the hay used by a typical household farm in Belgorod oblast, one of the premier agricultural regions of Russia, are obtained from a collective farm, “and there are valid reasons to

believe that the remaining animal feed is from the same source as well, only obtained illegally. . . . Today’s peasant household farming in Russia will not survive a single day without [parent] collective farms,’ conclude Efendiev and Bolotina.*° Other evidence suggests that household farms’ output may be exaggerated, whereas that of collective farms and, to some extent, private farms is

downplayed. In contrast to Soviet times, in the first decade of the twenty-first century there is a pervasive tendency to underreport output in order to minimize corporate taxes, and household farms are exempt from taxation. To artificially assign more output to household farms than they actually produced is easy because the output of household farms in Russia is routinely assessed on the basis of local surveys of just 0.1 percent of the entire region’s (an oblast’s or republic's) pool of such farms. In contrast to collective farms, all of which annually file identically designed statistical reports, household farms are subject to sample surveys. The guidelines for designing a regional sample require selecting 25 percent of the rural districts (raiony), 15 percent of the rural administrations of the selected districts, 10 percent of rural villages under each selected administration, and typical household farms within selected villages.” As far as we know, there is no rigorous control or supervision to ensure that regional samples are consistent and representative. The resulting evaluation of regional household farm output obviously hinges on the subjectivity of local statisticians. In summary, much of the agricultural output in Russia is produced through peculiar collective arrangements that defy strict classification. These arrangements resulted from multiple adjustments and the combination of erstwhile regimented forms (collective farms) with those spontaneously evolving from the ground up. All of these symbiotic production units are facing an ex-

38 ¢ Working Land in Russia ternal environment that has changed a lot since 1991. Administratively, this

environment has become much less coercive but at the same time it no longer protects the farms from the economic realities of the world beyond the farm gate. Some of these realities are difficult to surmount, especially the so-called “price scissors’ and food imports. The “Price Scissors”

The disparity between agricultural product prices and the cost of agricultural inputs such as fuel and machinery is called the “price scissors,” one of the two most publicized travails of Russian agriculture. Whenever any local agricultural operator or a parliamentary spokesperson for regional or national agricultural interests is interviewed, this topic is the first one discussed. According to Nikolai Kharitonov, an agrarian lobbyist and presidential hopeful, in 2001 one ton of diesel fuel cost forty-five hundred rubles; in 2002, seven thousand

rubles, and in 2003, close to ten thousand rubles. At the same time, the price of one ton of wheat has been between twelve hundred and sixteen hundred rubles. According to another member of parliament, Yaroslav Shvyriayev, who represented the former Regions of Russia faction, from 1993 to 2003 the price of wheat doubled, but the price of diesel fuel increased by a factor of 9.6 and for gasoline the factor was 8.2. According to Alexei Gordeyev, Russia's minister of agriculture, because of the growing price disparity, the total revenue of Russia's collectives in 2002 was a twentieth of what it was in 2001, despite the fact that in 2002 actual productivity was higher than in 2001.** Note that the World Trade Organization (WTO) insists on further increases in domestic fuel prices as a prerequisite for Russia’s admission. Prior to 2002, most of the vastly diminished subsidies were channeled through discounted short-term credits. Their function was to replenish farms’ working capital (for seed, fuel, lubricants, animal feed, and spare parts). Such credits were administered during sowing and harvesting and were supposed to be paid off by the end of December. However, most credits were never paid off. In June 2002, the federal government established new credit rules. According to these rules, most credit is for a three-year term; the government subsidizes two-thirds of the interest that the farms are supposed to pay back to the banks; the farm’s property (but not land) acts as collateral; and the banks are free to determine the credit worthiness of a farm.” Should such practices take root, they will make the availability of agricultural credit even more selective than before, simply because half of all collective farms have had their bank ac-

counts frozen and no more than 5 percent have a tolerable credit history. Ironically, instead of sending a warning signal to improve management practices,

Working Land in Russia « 39

freezing farms’ bank accounts sets up a cycle: it stimulates the “dumping” of farm products for cash, and this practice effectively means lower prices. The idea floated by former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov during his visit to the successful pedigree farm Irten in Novosibirsk oblast in July 2003, that long-term debts of collective farms will be restructured only on the condition that debts on current credit are paid off on time, would be worthy ofcloser attention were it not for the fact that dozens of similar initiatives have been put forward without any meaningful effect since the commencement of Gorbachev’s perestroika.”” The same holds true in regard to Kasyanov’s statement that farms not honoring their current financial obligations would be declared bankrupt and that external crisis management would be appointed. It is entirely unclear who would become a “crisis manager” under the existing acute deficit of able rural leaders. Even in the 1980s, 20 percent of all collective farms

produced 70 percent of the total output.”’ Compared with the recent and the more distant past, the current degree of farms’ polarization is deeper, as the overwhelming majority of them have degenerated as economic units. Under this condition, pleas of “aid the strong, not the weak” that are emanating with ever-increasing frequency from local policy makers accelerate the demise of the majority of Russian farms.” Because federal subsidies are minuscule and unavailable for many farms,

regionally administered subsidies appear to be more important. According to some sources, regional budget supports account for two-thirds of all state support of Russian agriculture.’’ However, the generosity of regional budgets varies by region, which sparks interregional conflicts and tears the domestic

market apart. For example, broiler chicken producers from the Samara region complain that they cannot compete with those from Orenburg and Mordovia, where subsidies account for 5.6 rubles per kilo of chicken (whose average cost of production in Russia is about 30 rubles or a dollar per kilo).’* Because there are no rules stipulating a level playing field, even the best Russian farms have a hard time planning their activities; they face entirely unforeseen competition from both domestic and foreign producers.

Food Imports The issue of food imports deserves special attention. “Prodovolstvennya bezopasnost strany” (national food supply security) has long been a catch phrase in Russia. For some reason, it is believed that food imports should not exceed

20 percent of domestic consumption. If a country imports 30 to 40 percent of what it eats, as is the case with Russia, it is described as being on the verge of compromising its independence. To be sure, 70 to 80 percent of some com-

40 ¢ Working Land in Russia

modities, notably sugar and beef, are imported. According to some sources, the monetary value of food imports to Russia matches that of Russia’s oil exports.” The mainstream Russian media broach the subject of government subsidies to farmers in the West about as frequently as they focus on the “price scissors.” These subsidies enable foreign exporters to dump low-priced products in the Russian market. This practice reportedly causes up to $13 billion in damage to Russian food producers each year, though the methodology of such assessments is unclear.’ The outcry, however, is loud and lasting, and it

is accompanied by wild-eyed exaggerations and chimeras typical for Russia’s public discourse. The usually well-balanced source Argumenty i fakty has presented the following diatribe: We are under the onslaught of cheap foreign foods that our mercenary bureaucrats buy up for dumping prices and bring to this city [Saint Petersburg]. ... What they bring is such crap . . . it only destroys people. All these preservatives, all the genetically altered ingredients which are so abundant in the West end up in our people’s livers. [The Westerners] do not eat that stuff themselves; rather, they would send it to us. We are for them like

Africa or a third-world country wherein anything can be dumped for profit. Instead of burying those “Bush’s legs” [U.S.-produced chicken leg quarters] somewhere in an Arizona desert or in the state of Iowa, they send them to us and earn money on that... . In America, they don’t eat them at all! America eats chicken breasts, necks, and wings, while drumsticks are separated and,

according to their laws, they should be destroyed. Only dog food is allowed to be made of those drumsticks, but this would only utilize a small part of

the stuff. So they have to dispose ofthe rest, and lo and behold, they discovered Russia to push it on. I think that after eating those drumsticks for one straight year one will simply die out of excessive cholesterol.” To be sure, this tirade is not from a staff writer; it is part of an interview with

Alexander Egorov, chair of the Leningrad regional branch of the Agrarian Party and a local sovkhoz director. But no sober-minded editorial commentary is offered, and the entire interview is titled “Agrarians Are Convinced: Peasants Can Feed Russia and Europe,” which is more of an article of faith than anything else. With pervasive opinions like this one, fanned by the “national patriotic’ circles, the government finally began to take heed. So far, it has come up with import quotas. Some analysts noticed that those quotas were introduced when growth in agriculture conditioned by the 1998 devaluation of the ruble and the ensuing import substitution began to show signs of abating. The first

Working Land in Russia « 41

quotas were set in 2002 on raw sugar. Out of 6 million tons of refined sugar produced in Russia, 4 million tons are produced from imported raw sugar and the balance from domestic sugar beets. It is believed that the introduction of the quotas helped forestall the economic demise of Russian sugar beet producers; in 2003 the cropland devoted to sugar beets was 15 percent greater than in 2002."

In early 2002, the Russian government attempted to limit chicken imports from the United States under the pretext of poor veterinary controls that overlooked salmonella poisoning in chicken produced by fourteen out of four hundred American poultry farms exporting to Russia. A smear campaign against “Bush’s legs” was launched by the media, with the above-quoted interview from Argumenty i fakty coming in handy. In these authors’ opinion, Russian chicken is indeed tastier, as is the case with most organically produced food. To be sure, Russian produce is not entirely organic; it just uses one antibiotic instead of the five allowed and used in the United States, and the proportion of feed that is grain is higher at Russian poultry farms while the use of artificial diet supplements is lower. Also, Russian feed grain producers use less mineral fertilizer. Regrettably, all these advantages are bound to evaporate as Russian producers compete with their Western counterparts. However, the above-mentioned smear campaign did not have consumer preferences as its target. A report about a survey that the Russian Institute of Agrarian Monitoring conducted in 2002 exposed the true goals of the entire “chicken war.” The report testified that “because of a scandal with “Bush’s legs’ the demand for American chicken lessened significantly. And this acted as a psychological endorsement of price hikes” on Russian-produced chicken.” After retail prices increased by at least 10 percent, thus benefiting the retailers, Russian and American veterinary control services signed a protocol on 22 March 2002 stipulating that American suppliers would meet thirteen conditions, and on 15 April 2002 American imports resumed. This action was to be predicted because within the foreseeable future, Russian poultry farms cannot meet the domestic de-

mand for chicken. Out of 166 large poultry farms, only 29 are working at full capacity; 119 farms require modernization, and 30 percent of all poultry producers are on the verge of bankruptcy. Thus the chicken deficit is about eighty thousand tons a month.” In January 2003, import quotas on both red meat and chicken were introduced (table 2.5). It is unclear, though, whether this move will help Russian

animal husbandry. The quotas resulted from effective lobbying by such groups as the Union of Russian Meat Packers (Miasnoi Soyuz Rossii). Its leader, Mush-

eg Mamikonian, claims that in the European Union beef is subsidized at a rate of 0.8 euro per kilo, which is comparable with the retail price of beef in Russia.

42 ¢ Working Land in Russia Table 2.5. Actual meat imports and import quotas for 2003 in thousand tons |

|

2001

2002*

Quota for 2003

Beef Pork

| |

476 398

638 533

315 338

-|

|

Poultry

|

1391

1149

744

|

Note: *Estimate.

Source: Mikhail Sergeev, “Ogranichenie importa miasa kak predvestnik novoi ekonomicheskoi politiki,” StranaRu, 28 January 2003, http://www.strana.ru/print/170073.html.

As aresult, the before-customs price of one kilo of beef is the equivalent $1.30,

whereas without subsidies it would cost $2.20, which approximately matches beef production costs at Russian farms. “This is why, should European farmers be brought to Russia, they would go bust, their famed technologies notwithstanding,” Mamikonian concludes." Even if accurate, the above data lend themselves to various interpretations. In the same interview, Mamikonian

acknowledged that in the area of

beef “we have only ten large producers left, whose market share is within 3 to 5 percent. To collect the rest, we have to make the rounds of about 1 million rural households, and they don’t have an accountant and an administrator

with a corporate seal.” This statement of course means that true production costs are simply unknown. It is even more disputable that the degradation of animal husbandry in Russia that Mamikonian refers to is traceable to Western subsidies. For example, the data on pork imports to Russia shows that the largest suppliers are Brazil (45 percent of pork imports) and China (11 percent), the countries where agricultural subsidies are low; only one-fifth of pork imports are from the European Union, but their prices are often lower than those of the Brazilian and Chinese firms.” It is almost certain that the retailers and go-betweens, not farmers, will capitalize on price hikes that will follow the introduction of quotas. Russia's Grain Bonanza

Following three years of crop failures (1998-2000), Russia had two straight years with bumper crops (table 2.6). This bonanza, however, was no blessing for the Russian farmer. Because of a drastic reduction in feed grain consumption (due to a drastic decrease in cattle), the bumper crops created a grain surplus of about 15 million tons. As a result, domestic grain prices plummeted: in 2001 one ton of class 3 wheat was priced at twenty-five hundred rubles, but in 2002 prices fell to between seventeen hundred and nineteen hundred rubles per ton.** Most farms actually sold grain for even less. Because so many farms have their bank accounts frozen, they fall short of fuel and lubricants

Working Land in Russia * 43 Table 2.6. Annual grain output in the Russian Federation, million tons 1976—|

1981—|

1986—|

1991—|

1996

1980

|1985

|1990

|1995

|2000 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998

| 1999 | 2000

2001

2002 | 2003 | 2004

73106

| 92.0 | 104.3)

87.9

| 65.2 | 63.4 | 69.3 | 88.6 |47.9 | 54.7 | 65.5

85.2: |86,5 ||.73.5

Exe

Note: *Estimate. Sources: Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1996), 563; Selskoe khoziaistvo v Rossti 2000 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2002), 58; Zhanna Oleinik, “Rossiiskoe zerno uidiot zarubezh,”

RBC Daily, 11 May 2004, http://www.ikar.ru/press/2004_05_/o.shtml.

on the eve of sowing. This situation is to the benefit of the so-called treidery (a calque of “traders”), a growing class of middlemen. They offer necessary supplies in exchange for future crops. Prices at which treidery bought up grain in 2002 were usually eight hundred to twelve hundred rubles per ton, which was just two hundred to four hundred rubles above production costs. Treidery are the ones with the highest profit margin and the speediest capital turnover in the entire food industry; according to available estimates, in one year their total revenue was the equivalent of $17.2 billion, while they reinvested just

$2 billion in their enterprises.” According to Dmitri Ushakoy, financial director of Agros, “Trade in grain, in the normal sense of the term, does not exist in Russia. Out of the entire 2001 grain output, only 20 percent was disposed of through grain exchanges and other market infrastructure. All the rest was barter.”*° In 2001, the government came up with the idea of so-called “state interventions’—buying up grain from the farms while the product is still high priced. However, two years in a row the good idea was brought to naught by haphazard implementation. Both in 2001 and in 2002, state purchases commenced in November. Because farms’ warehouses are inadequate and poorly equipped, by that time most grain was already in the treidery’s hands; it was they who capitalized on the state interventions. As for the farmers, most of them, ironically, profited far less from bumper crops than they did from meager crops a couple of years before. The year 2003 is a case in point: because the total grain output was only 73.5 million tons (or slightly short of domestic consumption), grain prices were twice as high as in 2002.” While Russia has once again become a net exporter of grain, the total capacity of its grain terminals in Novorossiisk, Saint Petersburg, and several

small Sea of Azov ports was barely enough to process 6 million tons. The actual exports were much larger, however, as an unrecorded amount of grain crossed the border with Belarus, for the’ most part ending up in Italy and Greece. According to Marina Smovzh, in 2002 Russia exported 18.4 million tons for a total of $1.4 billion and once again became one of the world’s major grain exporters. This success, however, was not to be repeated in 2003 because

44 ¢ Working Land in Russia

of a much lower output. Still, by September 2003, 3.2 million tons had been

already exported.

Agriculture has been the most troublesome sector of the Russian economy for as long as one can remember. Russian agriculture went through some crucial turning points in the past, like the abolition of serfdom and collectivization. But the magnitude of its current travails seems to exceed what has befallen it in the past. The unrelenting demographic trends do not leave hope for longterm retention of rural labor in much of the Russian agrarian ecumene, and the sudden imposition of market forces has left Russian rural folk out in the cold, divided, antagonized, and pauperized to the extreme. As one member of

Russia’s Council of the Federation, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, put it, “The hand of Adam Smith, which has already clutched the Rus-

sian peasant by his throat, will soon squeeze the life out of him.”” Although Russian agriculture has been in trouble under various socioeconomic formations, most if not all explanations for its numerous

failures

have invoked structures derived from the dominant socioeconomic order such as incentives, ownership, spontaneous and enforced communal forms, management, legal issues, and the like. Far from denying the significance of aspatial explanatory frameworks (e.g., political economy or legal, managerial, technological conditions, etc.) in the travails of Russian farming, the following chapters explore the idea of agricultural development constraints that arise from Russia's environment (physical and social alike). The idea that low efficiency and poor outcomes have been the scourge of the Russian countryside irrespective of the dominant socioeconomic order may in part derive from the neglect of these objective constraints. The remainder of this book explores the strong spatial dimensions of these constraints, discusses their implications, and evaluates the resulting prospects for Russia's agricultural development.

Development in Breadth, Russian Style

If one feature of the national agricultural system sets Russia apart from most, ifnot all, countries of the Old World and invokes comparisons with the Americas, it is Russia’s lasting agricultural expansion. For a long time this process was integral to the growth of the Russian state, but farmland expansion was its major driving force only initially, prior to the mid-1700s, when frontiers indeed expanded as people sought out more fertile land. Later on, it was the quest for hunting and mineral resources as well as rivalry with other great powers that drove Russia's continuing expansion. This quest created a vast land reserve whose agricultural colonization then proceeded for nearly two centuries. In his book about European Russia, Alfred Hettner wrote in 1905 that “the spread of Russia and the Russians, which used to occupy a fairly small space, over the entire expanse of the immense East European plain is one of the most momentous events of world history.’ Indeed, when the core of the centralized Russian state, Muscovy, emerged in the late 1400s, it did not exceed

500,000 square kilometers in size. It was larger than the core areas of other Eu-

ropean nations to begin with, yet far from gigantic. This nucleus took shape in what is now the northern two-thirds of the Industrial Center, a macroeconomic region encompassing Moscow and the surrounding provinces, and the

45

46 * Development in Breadth, Russian Style

lower part of yet another such macroregion, the North. The dominant type of natural vegetation in the area is forest: coniferous in the north and mixed coniferous and broadleaf forest in the south. The city of Moscow is at the junction between these biomes. The Eastern Slavs from whom Russians descended had migrated into this “cradle” of the Russian state from the southwest, most probably in the ninth century, and assimilated the local Ugric tribes.* Interestingly, in the language of the local Ugric tribe the hydronym (or hydrological toponym) “Moskva,” the name of the river on whose banks the future Russian capital was to be founded, meant “dirty water.” Early agriculturalists from among the Eastern Slavs engaged in shifting or slash-and-burn farming to reclaim small parcels from the aggressive forest. Poorly drained and infertile podzolic soils (resembling cinders) were frequently exhausted, and that required clearing more and more forest. According to Boris Rodoman, the natural landscapes of the Russian heartland set up this area for fishing, hunting, and animal husbandry, not for crop farming; thus, early on, cultivation of crops in the area required coercion by the princes and boyars who assigned less lucrative trades, of which farming was one, to the underclass of the time.’ Until the middle of the 1700s, Russians had been confined to their forest-

ed heartland. To the south lay wooded steppes and steppes proper, with their superior chernozem, or black soils, but they were under the control of hostile

Turkic nomads. A significant agricultural expansion into the steppe regions to the southeast of Muscovy finally took place in the late 1700s, after the pacification of those nomads. This expansion resulted in an enormous increase in cultivable space, and expansion continued for two centuries, reaching a peak in the late 1970s (figure 3.1). Increases in arable land were especially significant during the periods from 1860 to 1887, 1921 to 1928, and 1954 to 1963; the set-

backs sustained during times of war were more than offset during peacetime. Based on Yuly Yanson’s data, around the early 1870s the overall cropping area in European Russia did not exceed 38 million hectares, and about one-third ofall arable land was laid fallow.’ At that time, only small pockets of cropland existed to the east ofthe Urals. By 1913, following large-scale resettlement to Siberia along the path of the emerging Trans-Siberian railway line (completed in its entirety in 1916, with the major construction effort having taken place in the 1890s), the area sown to crops reached 69.8 million hect-

ares. It then diminished to 51.8 million hectares during the turbulent years of 1914-1921 but had expanded to 92 million hectares by 1940.’ After reaching its lowest wartime level of 87.7 million hectares in 1942, as early as 1943 the level

of cropland in use already exceeded the pre-war level. Thereafter, cropland expanded on annual basis and reached 126.8 million hectares in 1976.° This expanse of active cropland was as vast as it ever got and was a major turning

Development in Breadth, Russian Style * 47

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\ 1.33 on gley soils) zones, In the latter case (parts of Vologda and Kostroma oblasts as well as the republic of Karelia), relatively small pockets of arable land are usually interspersed with aggressive forests. Any interruption in agricultural activity risks losing these pockets to the surrounding forests. ‘Tables 3.7-3.9 contain the distributions of European Russia's farmland obtained on the joint basis of maps contained in Prirodno (1983), the network of 1,483 raions (minor civil divisions) of European Russia as of the year 2000,

Table 3.7. Thermal zones of European Russia defined on the basis of sums of daily

mean temperatures in excess of 10 degrees Celsius by rural district Zone’s % shares in ; aa Rural Degree-days

_| Description

ae

Total

Arable

land area]

land

popula| tion

Rural i population density in

| persons per f NS Ss ;

Extremely cold; suitable only for vegetables with a short growing ~ 1200

season

22

\

1

Relatively cold; suitable only for 1200-1600

early ripening crops

:

nce

Seek

1

| lo

oe

dt

|

Y

|!

|

3

ae

Colder than average; suitable for mid-season maturing crops: cereals, potatoes, flax, and sugar

1600-2200 beets used for animal feed seed TishSel Bt Sere ae Average temperatures; suitable for mid-season maturing crops, including corn, sunflowers, and

2200-2800

|

sugar beetsx2) Above

average

Sk

27

19

e

He

{

24

44

ae

3]

32

i

|

10

=

\4

{ead

Temperatures;

suitable for late-ripening crops,

2800-3400

including corn, rice, and

| soybeans

4

| 30

Mountainous

districts

25 |

Crop farming is impossible

3

C 0

=

22 i

29

Source: Calculated from data in Prirodno-selskokhoziaistvennoye rayonirovanive zemelnogo fonda SSSR (Moscow: Kolos, 1983)

|

Development in Breadth, Russian Style * 75 Table 3.8. Moisture zones of European Russia defined on the basis of annual precipitation and evaporation by rural district Ratio of precipitation to evaporation

% chance ofyears with variable moisture supply Moisture zones

Arid

105

Excessively arid

O33 —0)95

Arid

0.55—0.77 0.771

039

Humid

99-100

1

0

12-31

Semiarid

33

59

Semihumid

13

55

24

5

33

32

1

15

20

|

Excessively humid

Humid

68-88

55:0)

gley soils

Semiarid

0-1

if

|

Excessively humid

Source: Calculated on the basis of data in Prirodno-selskokhoziaistvennoye rayonirovaniye zemelnogo fonda SSSR (Moscow: Kolos, 1983).

Table 3.9. European Russia’s rural population and land area distribution between moisture zones % share of moisture zone in Ratio of precipitation to evaporation

Total land area

Moisture zones

< 0.33

Excessively arid

0.33-0.55

Arid

0.55—0.77

Semiarid

0.77-1

Semihumid

1-1.33

Humid

Rural population

Rural population density in persons per sqkm

Zi

;

1—1.33 on

gley soils

Excessively humid Mountainous districts

3

Source: Calculated on the basis of data in Prirodno-selskokhoziaistvennoye rayonirovaniye zemelnogo fonda SSSR (Moscow: Kolos, 1983).

and records of rural population and arable land procured from regional statistical data books issued in 2001. These tables show that 38 percent of European Russia is marginally cold, and 27 percent is submarginally cold; 11 percent of European Russia is marginally arid, 25 percent is submarginally arid; and 25 percent is marginally wet. These distributions apply to the total land area. The same tables, however, suggest that only 2 to 3 percent of arable land is marginally cold and 25 percent is submarginally cold; about 16 percent of arable land falls in the area with 70 to 90 percent probability of drought, and about onethird of arable land is in the semiarid area where, on average, drought conditions occur every three years.

76 ¢ Development in Breadth, Russian Style Table 3.10. European Russia’s rural land distribution between thermal and moisture Zones

Ratio ofprecipitation to evaporation 1.0-1.33 on

Degree-days

< 0.33

< 1200

0.33—0.55 | 0.55—0.77

1.0-1.33

gley soils

—=

1200-1600 | — 1600-2200 | — 20-2800) ee |2800-3400 | 4 |Total

4

Note: The smaller highlighted rectangle fits the area favorable for agriculture; the outer part of the larger highlighted rectangle includes submarginal areas. Source: Calculated by the authors.

Table 3.11. Distribution of gross agricultural output between thermal and moisture zones of European Russia, 1996-2000 |

Ratio ofprecipitation to evaporation 1.0—-1.33 on

Degree-days

< 0.33

0:33=0;55) | 0.55=0.77

< 1200

=

=

1200-1600

=

=

1600-2200

=

=

2200-2800

—

2

2800-3400

1

6

Total

1

8

gley soils

100

Note: The smaller highlighted rectangle fits the area favorable for agriculture; the outer part of the larger highlighted rectangle includes submarginal areas. Source: Calculated by the authors.

Successful farming requires a certain combination of heat and moisture. Following Field’s example, we compiled table 3.10 and the attendant map (figure 3.10) with a bimodal distribution of European Russia’s total land between categories based on levels of heat and moisture. A small rectangle within this table fits the area favorable for agriculture; it accounts for 10 percent of European Russia. The outer part of a larger rectangular in the same table includes submarginal areas, which account for an additional 40 percent. This means that half of all European Russia is ill suited for agriculture. According to table 3.11, however, marginal lands contribute 15 percent of the gross agricultural output, with 9 percent of it contributed by excessively arid and 6 percent by excessively cold areas. Submarginal areas account for the largest share of output: 59 percent, including 38 percent produced in cold areas. Areas with an optimal supply of heat and moisture account for only 29 percent of the total output.

Development in Breadth, Russian Style * 77 Figure 3.10. Environmentally marginal lands in European Russia

a

Marginal

Submarginal No data

They are located in the piedmont of the North Caucasus (with the exception of its easternmost part) and in the southwest of the central chernozem macroregion.

These results may indeed suggest that the consistently poor performance of Russian farming may, if only to some extent, be explained by unwarranted agricultural expansion into areas ill suited for agriculture. It is highly likely,

though, that this expansion is not the only factor that matters. While the next chapter focuses on one other such factor, rural depopulation, the most important conclusion that the present chapter leads to is that Russia's agricultural development began to show signs of overextension long before the advent of the market economy that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. We have

78 * Development in Breadth, Russian Style

seen three such signs: the persistent west-east gradient of productivity, quasiThunian rings of outwardly declining agricultural productivity around Russian cities, and massive encroachment into harsh physical environments. The following chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the fourth relevant factor: working land in areas too thinly populated to support prevailing technology and managerial practices.

4 Rural Villagers

In 2002, 38.8 million people (26.7 percent ofthe total) lived in the Russian countryside. Retirees accounted for about 23 percent of the rural population. Rural residents were scattered among roughly 150,000 villages, many of which (by some accounts more than half) could not be reached on paved roads. Russia's rural population reached its maximum by the early 1930s. The 1926 census estimate was 76 million. Each subsequent census until that of 1989 showed a steady decline in rural population. Rural outmigration paralleled industrialization, but until the early 1930s the rate of natural increase in the countryside more than offset population losses through migration. In Russia as a whole, rural births continued to outnumber deaths until 1992, but outmi-

gration had exceeded natural increase since the early 1930s. By 1950, the rural population had declined to 58 million and, by 1989, to less than 39 million. The largest decrease was recorded in the northern half of European Russia, its

nonchernozem zone (NCZ).

Because of the spatially varied rate of population decline, the geography of the rural population changed: the share of the Russian south in Russia's overall rural population doubled; the share of the Urals, as well as that of the regions to the east of the Urals, also grew; but the share of the NCZ, where

most industrial regions are located, sagged. In 1897, the geographic gravity 79

80 ¢ Rural Villagers

center of Russia’s rural population was in the current Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk) region on the Volga River, the homeland of Vladimir Lenin; by the mid-1900s it had shifted to the northern part of the Orenburg region (southern Urals), and by 1990 it had “migrated” to Bashkortostan.’

Between 1959 and 1989, Russia lost almost 30 percent of its rural population; in the thirteen regions of central Russia and the northwest, the rural

population was halved (figure 4.1). Depopulation in the strict sense commences when deaths begin to outnumber births, which is what happened in much of the center and the northwest in the early to mid-1960s. In the south during the same period, the rural population grew, as did the largely nonagricultural rural population in the northeast of Russia. In the entire NCZ, encompassing twenty-nine regions in the northern half of European Russia, rural population grew only in one: the Leningrad region. Located in the northwest, this region borders the regions of Pskov and Great Novgorod, which have the most significant rural depopulation in Russia. Intraregional contrasts in rural population dynamics were also at their highest in the NCZ. There, rural districts abutting the city limits (periurban districts) did not lose much rural population and some even gained, whereas the outlying districts experienced a significant loss of rural population. Although this dynamic for the most part applies to the environs of larger cities, proximity to smaller towns occasionally also lessened population decline. For

Below 50

Figure 4.1. Rural population in 1990 as a percentage ofthat in 1959

Rural Villagers ¢ 81

example, in the outer part of the Uglich district (the upper Volga and Yaroslavl region) by the mid-1980s only 25 percent of the 1959 population had been retained, whereas in the immediate environs of the town of Uglich (forty thousand residents), the 1980s population was 80 percent of that in 1959, One result of rural depopulation is myriad abandoned wooden huts with planked windows, and as we will show in the next chapter millions of formerly arable hectares are now spontaneously forested land. According to the 1989 census, 22 percent of all rural households are single-person households, and 20 percent of Russian villages have fewer than ten people.’ In Russia, with its tradition of nucleated (rather than dispersed) villages, this category of vil-

lages with fewer than ten residents includes dying settlements. In 1989, villages with fewer than ten residents accounted for only 0.5 percent of Russia’s rural population. Another 4 percent of rural persons lived in villages with ten to fifty residents. These percentages apply to Russia as a whole. At the same time in the Pskov region as many as 43 percent of the villages had fewer than ten residents and contained 6 percent of the region’s rural population; almost one-third of the region’s rural population lived in villages with fewer than fifty inhabitants.* In the neighboring Great Novgorod and Tver regions, the distribution is about the same. The census of 2002 did not record any major change in rural settlement. The number of villages with fewer than ten residents had grown from 30,000 to 35,000 (22 percent of all rural settlements). Also in 2002 about 13,000 villag-

es were shown as having no population at all.’ The previous censuses did not include this category. As a result, the overall number of recorded rural villages increased from 151,000 to 155,000. Subtracting 13,000 from this last number

gives only 142,000 villages, which is a significant decrease from 1989. In reality, the decrease is even greater because of reclassification: in the 1990s, quite a few settlements with semiurban status, the so-called PGTs, became rural

villages. Thus, one may say that about 30 percent of Russia’s rural settlements have either died or are about to do so. Dying villages are especially abundant in the nonchernozem zone, but the dying villages exist in the south as well. In the early 1990s, the rural population of Russia suddenly began to grow. Initially (1991-1992), that apparent growth was entirely the result of reclassification (table 4.1). Whereas prior to 1991 outsized villages often gained urban status, the reverse process commenced thereafter. Now small towns were keen on becoming villages (not so much due to depopulation as to lax rules of land allotment in the countryside). This process explains the change from negative to positive in the last column of table 4.1. In 1992-1994, though,

rural growth was genuine. The two factors behind this short-lived rural population growth were the removal of state controls over retail prices, which left many urbanites worried about feeding their families (some recent migrants

82 ¢ Rural Villagers Table 4.1. Russia’s rural population change in thousands ofpeople, 1959-2000 Total change

OOK

1045.4

—1289.2

—364.1

71.0 19.8 10.4 58.8 43.7 —32.4 200.9 38.0 Wf

Sources: Demographic Yearbooks of the Russian Federation (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1995), 19; Demographic Yearbooks of the Russian Federation (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2001), 21; Chislennost i migratsii (Moscow:

Goskomstat, 2001), 17.

from rural villages decided to return home so they could live off their household plots), and the “return” migration of mostly ethnic Russians from central Asia and Siberia. In the previous intercensus period (1979-1988), rural net migration was positive (that is, the incoming migration exceeded the outgoing migration) only in three European regions with crop farming: Moscow, Leningrad, and Stavropol (figure 4.2). In 1990 (one-year data), eleven Russian regions recorded positive net migration. By the mid-1990s, all regions of European Russia, with the exception of those in the extreme north, had attracted rural population (figure 4.3). However, most returnees from central Asia and Siberia, that is, the peo-

ple who largely made up the influx, were urbanites by birth and upbringing, and they dropped anchor in rural villages only because few cities and towns offered them dwellings. For most of them, however, settling in a village was a mere stepping stone to a nearby town. By the mid-1990s, the most painful stage in Russian capitalism’s second coming apparently was over, and so from 1995 on, the rural population decline resumed as migration assumed its previous, long-lasting pattern: from the countryside to the city. Only the countryside of Moscow, Leningrad, and some southern regions (notably Belgorod, Stavropol, and Krasnodar) remain significant magnets for migrants (figure 4.4). To be sure, net migration to the countryside of many regions in the European

Rural Villagers * 83

Be above 100 50-100

ee 0-50

Pee -50-0 -100- -50

pee Below -100

Figure 4.2. Rural net migration per ten thousand rural residents, 1979-1988

>

\

B® avove 100

2:22] 60-0 -100- -50

pee Below -100

Figure 4.3. Rural net migration per ten thousand rural residents, 1994-1995

84 © Rural Villagers

==] -100- -50

L Figure 4.4. Rural net migration per ten thousand rural residents, 1999-2000

section of Russia remains positive to this day (in 1998, there were thirty-nine such regions), but in most places this migration is just a trickle that does not have a significant impact on the ratio of deaths to births. (As mentioned above,

in Russia as a whole the natural increase of rural population has been negative since 1992.) What is more, by 2001, the exodus from the countryside had

returned to its 1990 level (see table 4.1).

Rural Population Density

In 2001, the average rural population density in Russia was three people per square kilometer. In European Russia, it was seven people per square kilometer, including ten people per square kilometer in the center, eighteen people per square kilometer in the central chernozem macroregion, and twenty-two people per square kilometer in the North Caucasus. However, these averages are not overly informative, as rural population density contrasts within regions often exceed those between them. A series of maps published by Dmitry Lukhmanov shows how a vast area with a dense rural population of more than twenty-five people per square kilometer recorded in 1897 in much of European Russia progressively shrank, from one census to another, so that by 1989 only some periurban pockets of high population density remained; throughout the

Rural Villagers ¢ 85 Table 4.2. Rural population density change, 1897-2002 1897-2002

Area type

Uninhabited

Population density (persons per sq km)

1897 (%)

1959 (%)

1989 (%)

2002 (%)

Waele

(change in thousand sq km per area type)

uees

Very sparsely settled Sparsely settled Moderately settled Densely settled

Very densely settled Total

Source: Based on data provided by D. N. Lukhmanoy for rural districts in Gorod i derevnia v yevropeiskoi Rossii (Moscow: OGI, 2001), 229-48, 298-302; census figures for 2002 from Predvaritelnye itogi userossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya (Moscow: GKS, 2003).

same period the zone of dense urban settlement stretching along the northern slopes of the Caucasus widened.° On the basis of these data, spatial proportions in rural population density can be determined. For example, the proportion of thinly settled areas— those with rural population density from one to ten people per square kilometer—doubled throughout the twentieth century. That is, they increased by 1 million square kilometers, as the sum of the three upper rows in the last column of table 4.2 testifies. To some extent, this shift occurred due to coloni-

zation of the north and the southeast, but for the most part it was due to rural population losses through migration and negative natural increase. By 1989, three-quarters of European Russia became thinly settled. Between 1989 and 2002, no significant changes occurred in this regard, although very thinly and thinly settled areas somewhat lessened, as the regions of the NCZ (other than those in its extreme north) received migrants. Migration and negative natural increase also explain the expansion of the medium densely settled areas from 19.9 percent (see table 4.2) to 20.3 percent of the entire land area, according to our census-based

calculations.

Within

European

Russia, one-quarter of

the entire rural population lives in areas with a population density exceeding twenty people per square kilometer; in the NCZ, however, only slightly more than one-fifth of all rural folks live in such areas, whereas in the south about one-third do. At the same time, almost 40 percent of European Russia's rural

86 © Rural Villagers

population lives in areas with fewer than ten people per square kilometer, and in the NCZ half of all rural villagers live in such areas. These sparsely settled areas account for the lion’s share of the total land. Rural Russia between Generic and Singular

Although rural population change in Russia has been thoroughly analyzed by native researchers, rarely have the spatial dynamics of population in Russia been compared with those in economically advanced countries. The existing theories of spatial change in population, however, have been derived exclu-

sively from the generalizations of Western experiences, much like aspatial demographic theories (e.g., Malthusian and demographic transition). We will address this deficiency. According to Wilbur Zelinsky’s theory of staggered growth and decline cycles, the northeast was the first region of the United States to experience rapid agricultural progress and then rural attrition, and “soon after a concentric crest and trough of rural maximum and decline began to pulsate steadily outward toward the far corners of the country.”” This theory seems to fit European Russia, though unlike the United States, Russia’s historic core is of course inland. However, just as occurred in the northeastern part of the

United States, the junction of Russia’s center and northwest first led in growth and then declined, while other regions went through the same phases later, with the actual time lag standing in more or less direct proportion to distance from that junction. The area in question is situated between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, more specificaliy, where the regions of Pskov, Novgorod, and Tver meet. Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two principal population centers that are 651 kilometers apart, have not witnessed any sizable population growth between them for a very long time, since approximately the 1880s.* Prior to that, much of the space between Moscow and Saint Petersburg was characterized by agrarian overpopulation. As a result of the rural exodus due to industrial growth in both Russian capitals, however, by 1913 the space between them

was already classed as an area with a population of a more appropriate size relative to its capacity to sustain it. Between 1926 and 1938, the rural population between Moscow and Leningrad shrank by 20 percent and from 1939 to 1958, by 50 percent.’ By the early 1960s, the death rate in the area began to exceed the birth rate due to extensive outmigration of younger people. The process of rural population decline initially involved most of the Moscow-Leningrad interurban space, including the Moscow and Leningrad regions themselves; however, it subsequently stopped at their borders, and by the 1960s the rural population of these “capital” regions had already begun to stabilize. In contrast, in the remainder of the interurban space (in the Tver, Pskov, and Great

Rural Villagers * 87

Novgorod regions), population decline bottomed out between 1959 and 1989. Just over a decade later in the outlying districts of these regions, rural population density was below five people per square kilometer, and the proportion of elderly people in the local population ranged between 1 in 3 and 1 in 2. This area has had the most drastic rural depopulation in European Russia, and it is currently experiencing secondary (this time recreational) “colonization” by dachniks from both Russian capitals, a process we discuss later in this book. In Russia, the overall rural population decline commenced earlier than in the United States (in the 1930s versus the 1950s) but later than in Western

Europe. As in rural America, in Russia “the redistribution of rural population is to a much higher degree the result of migration differentials than of differentials in vital rates.”'° Moreover, much like in the United States before the advent of counterurbanization, there is a positive correlation between the

pace of rural population decline and the percentage share of rural villagers in the total population of the area. The major cause of rural migration in Russia has been a striking differential in the quality of rural versus urban life, far

greater than that in any economically advanced country. So it makes sense that where this differential has diminished, as in the Moscow and Leningrad

regions, the pace of outmigration lessened. (To be sure, rural natives in many of these regions have long been replaced by newcomers from other regions.) Rural population numbers are also quite stable in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and in the vicinity of every major Russian city. In the Soviet Union, most scholars tended to view a settlement system as

the result of fulfilling planned targets of appropriate population concentration at different levels of the settlement hierarchy by allocating investment accordingly. Many such targets, however, were not achieved, as some of the largest cities continued to grow despite officially imposed restraints, while too many villages were depopulated despite attempts to resuscitate them. So beginning in the late 1970s, some Soviet scholars began to borrow Western theories that

postulated a spontaneous evolutionary path that a national and/or regional settlement network is expected to follow. At that time, publications by John Gibbs as well as by Peter Hall and David Hay and others became especially popular with Soviet scholars who looked to the West for theoretical guidance.'' Those Western scholars put forward the succession of stages, from the

accelerated growth of the largest cities to first the moderate and then the more radical “polarization reversal” and counterurbanization whereby small towns and rural villages begin to grow the fastest while growth of the largest cities slows and eventually halts. In the 1970s, population decline commenced in large cities of northwestern Europe, and it was similarly accompanied by the vigorous growth of suburbs and some freestanding small towns. This phenomenon was perceived

88 ¢ Rural Villagers

as the waning of long-term urbanization trends, and it spawned numerous publications analyzing the stages of urbanization viewed as consecutive patterns in a population’s spatial redistribution. According to some authors, “the move towards ‘counterurbanization’ was most conspicuous in the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK, and Switzerland. It was also evident in Sweden, Germany, Belgium, and France, but Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Norway

continued to experience regional concentration.”’* Consequently, a distinction was drawn between a pattern of population redistribution that dominated in some U.S. regions and in northwestern Europe, which was associated with a complete reversal of migration in favor of suburban and rural regions, and the

pattern that occurred in the rest of Western Europe, where the flows from periphery to core merely diminished.’ One of the most straightforward approaches to population redistribution belongs to Hermanus Geyer and Thomas Kontuly, who developed the differential urbanization theory. Their idea is

that “counterurbanization represents the final phase in the first cycle of urban development,” so it is not only preceded by a population's spatial concentration (unfolding earlier within the same cycle) but is followed by it as well (which signifies the commencement of the next cycle). The spatial shifts in the Soviet Union's settlement systems were hardly occurring in step with those observed in the West. Specifically, a stage “of population redistribution in which the larger settlements decline (or stagnate) in their populations due to net migration losses, while the smaller ones, such as villages and small or medium-sized ‘free-standing’ towns, increase their populations through net migration gains” has never actually arrived, at least not yet.” The 1991-1994 pericd, during which the rural population experienced sudden growth, stands as the exception. As mentioned above, it was a

short-lived phenomenon driven by the acute crisis in cities in the wake of the removal of state price controls and stagnating industry. Already by 1995 the situation had, formally speaking, returned to what had been normal for Russia

for more than a century: a positive relationship between the initial size of the settlement and its population dynamic during a time period. Rural outmigration was in full swing yet again. Outside the one-hour accessibility range of Russia’s regional capitals (in the cases of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the range is wider), rural life is even more archaic today, and the gap between these backwater areas and those capitals is even wider than it was under the Soviets. This advanced polarization of rural space has indefinitely postponed the prospect of mobility transition in Russia. Writing about rural migration in Western Europe, where this transition has been in progress for a long time and people now flock to smaller settlements outside the urban fringes, a British author expressed the view that “effectively contemporary rural migrations reinforce what [has been] de-

Rural Villagers * 89

scribed as the post-war ‘social avalanche’ which swept away the last traces of ‘village life’ and transformed life for everybody everywhere. .. . There is no point whatsoever in talking any longer about ‘village life’ and ‘farm life.’ It’s just life.”"* One can hardly come up with a description more at odds with what one actually finds in most of Russia. Apparently the sheer size of Russia’s space made it difficult or impossible to standardize living conditions. What we discern in the Russia of today, though, is not exactly a throw-

back to the pre-1991 situation. Low fertility and high mortality have suppressed population growth almost everywhere it takes place at all. In addition, the regional population decrease from the periphery is not as vigorous as before. Although essential preconditions for Western-style suburbanization (financially feasible consumer demand, a spatially flexible housing market, and a tertiary job base, as well as good roads and means of transportation) are largely unavailable in Russia, the pent-up desire to relocate from the congested cities has already materialized in some modest population shifts. That the resulting suburbanization is for the most part a seasonal (summer) phenomenon in part derives from inertia and in part from the still tight system of residential permits. Were it not for the fear of irretrievably losing the privilege of being, say, a Muscovite, more people would probably opt for permanent residence outside the central city. Tatyana Nefedova and Andrei Treivish undertook the most explicit attempt to fit Russia into the differential urbanization theory. Keeping the five theoretical stages of the urbanization cycle in view, they looked for a match between these stages and the actual developments in specific Russian regions.” It appeared that by the end of the twentieth century most of Russia was in the beginning of the polarized reversal stage (stage 3 in the Geyer-Kontuly continuum) whereby medium-sized towns lead in population growth while large cities seem to have lost their former attractiveness and selected small towns resume growth. According to Nefedova and Treivish, the “short-run towards the advanced polarization reversal or early counter-urbanization stages” in 1991-1994 was premature, that is, it was not inherent in the evolutionary logic of the differential urbanization theory; rather, it was caused by the external and disruptive factor of socioeconomic crisis. According to Nefedova and Treivish,

the most probable scenario for the foreseeable future is “the advanced intermediate city stage,” which, according to the differential urbanization theory, precedes counterurbanization.’* This stage does not spell widespread rural revival, particularly in a vast country such as Russia, although periurban and rural areas with the highest natural soil fertility will most likely consolidate their past gains and develop further. What makes widespread rural revival highly improbable in Russia is the combination of an exceedingly low birth rate and an increasing demand for nonagricultural labor. Of course, the enormity of

90 ¢ Rural Villagers

Russia’s space should be factored in as well. As a result, the fragmentation of rural space in Russia will most likely continue. Rural Population Change and Agriculture In the 1970s and 1980s, when births still outnumbered deaths in the Russian

countryside but rural exodus was in full swing and rural population numbers were shrinking in every Russian region, many periurban places (that were still rural in their official status, however) recorded population growth. Contrary to what might be expected, the agricultural contingent of the periurban population was growing the fastest.'? These areas also enjoyed higher quality agricultural labor. The disruptive influence of urbanization on agriculture in the West as described by Western analysts hardly fits the Russian context.” Russia’s entire rural space has been so deprived of modern infrastructure that periurban districts immediately affected by the adjacent cities stand out as islands of modernity. As a result, agriculture has in fact benefited from urbanization in most, if not all, Russian regions.

Whereas in the West exodus from farms was conditioned by rapidly advancing farm technology and by the powerful competition of areas with superior soil fertility, the rural exodus in Russia occurred ahead of those advances

and has gone far beyond technology’s ability to eliminate manual labor. As we discussed in an earlier chapter, collective farming is by far the largest employer in the Russian countryside: in 1990, 48 percent of the rural population of working age were employed by collective and state farms; by 2000, this share had dropped to 39 percent. This decrease in employment is, however, smaller than the drop in output, which has decreased by almost half since the late 1980s, an incongruity that is probably due to a lack of alternative employment in rural areas. For a long time, rural depopulation and the ensuing labor shortage was one of the most frequently discussed rural issues. Today, however, it is rural

unemployment that commands attention, which is seemingly at odds with the decades-long lamentation about the shortage of rural labor.*' Indeed, since 1996, the officially recorded rate of unemployment in rural regions has been higher than in urban areas (11.6 percent versus 9.6 percent in 2000). In nine-

teen Russian regions, it exceeds 20 percent of the rural labor force. The unemployment rate is particularly high in the republics of the North Caucasus. For example, in Ingushetia, with its scores of refugees from neighboring Chechnya, 59 percent of rural residents are unemployed and in Dagestan, 42 percent. Also, in some ethnically Russian regions where agricultural output dropped very significantly, between one-quarter and one-third of the rural labor force

Rural Villagers ¢ 91

is unemployed. This situation exists, for example, in the Pskov, Pensa, Rostov, and Volgograd regions.” To some extent, these statistics on joblessness reflect the different value of cash benefits, however small, in the city versus the village. In large cities in particular many choose not to register as job seekers, and they work temporary jobs and receive payments in cash without any paper trail. In contrast, in villages beyond short commuting distances to large cities, cash appears to be the most deficient commodity, as barter and natural economy (that is, producing to meet family needs, with a limited role for transactions with the world outside a subsistence farm) reign supreme, hence the much higher rate of unemployment registration in the countryside than in urban areas. Even in the countryside, however, unemployment data do not reflect the widespread nature of this phenomenon. Extrapolating the survey data obtained using the International Organization of Labor’s methodology put the 1999 rural unemployment in Russia at 18 percent.” By some accounts, in the 1990s the number of those employed only on their household farms increased from between 1.4 million and 2 million people to between 3.4 million and 4 million people, and their share in the working-age rural population increased from one-tenth to almost a quarter.** Our statistical analyses nevertheless suggest that the sheer number of people per unit of land is still the most important predictor of collective farm productivity; Pearson correlations between rural population density on the one hand and grain yields and milk yields per cow on the other are close to 0.7 in the fourteen hundred rural districts of European Russia.” Very few profitable collective farms exist in rural areas with fewer than ten persons per square kilometer. Our inquiry into these relationships will be discussed in the next chapter. At this point, though, it would be appropriate to examine the quality of the rural labor force. After all, it is not just the quantity of laborers that matters. There is no systematic data set pertaining to this aspect of the labor pool, yet our field observations as well as many other sources lead to a tentative conclusion: all too many of the rural unemployed are simply unemployable because of chronic alcoholism. While the observations related below are unsystematic and disconnected, they are numerous and come from different and unrelated sources, and therefore we believe them to be credible.

Rural Labor Impairments The idea that the quality of human capital in the countryside is the factor most restricting agricultural growth and market-style agricultural expansion is not new.” In Russia, drinking and theft have been national maladies for as long

92 ¢ Rural Villagers

as one can remember. A popular legend has it that when Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826), a brilliant historian, was asked to state briefly what was going on in his homeland, he uttered just one word: “Voruyut” (They steal).” A perva-

sive national malady, it is by all accounts more serious in the Russian village than in the city. In cities, theft is more often camouflaged and more readily

prosecuted. In villages, however, it is more open and more readily tolerated. “Morally challenged people remained on the collective farm,” says Anatoly Loginoy, a collective farm chairman from the Vologda region. Even those who are caught red-handed stealing from the farm he does not fire. “I'd better subtract this damage from their pay,” he says. But the average monthly pay on his farm is just four hundred rubles (fourteen dollars). In the entire district of Vashkino, where Loginov’s farm is situated, there are nine collective farms,

eight of which are unprofitable. Asked why these farms still exist, Alexander Ivanov, the head of the district administration, says, “They do not want to

disband, and I do not want to be responsible for terminating these farms. The people would simply go under. There is no other work in the district.” In 1995 on a field trip to a collective farm in the northern part of Yaroslavl region, Ioffe and Nefedova heard a heart-wrenching bellow; it was like a dozen bagpipe players tuning up their instruments at the same time. Emanating from the local cowshed, the bellow was produced by two hundred skeletal cows that had been not milked three days in a row. The dairy workers had received their long-delayed pay, and for three days they had been drunk and did not show up for work. There was nobody around to replace them, a situation highly typical of a depopulated outlying area. Actually, some retirees would have volunteered but only for cash on the spot. Cash, however, was unavailable; even staffers’ scheduled pay was delayed and thus was being devalued by ongoing inflation. The stockpiled animal feed was being stolen by shareholders for their own cattle. The cooperative attempted to assign some of its calves to households (together with a part of the necessary feed), in hopes of getting the animals back when they matured and then paying the householders for their labor, to no avail. The level of apathy was such that nobody was willing to help out, even in summer. Asa

result, the calves were being slaughtered, at a huge

loss for the farm. Not all people are so lazy. Machine operators can work vigorously on occasion. But almost everybody has bouts of hard drinking, and one had better stay away from them during these times. Those of a different mold are long gone. Only alcoholics and retirees remain, along with a few others attached to the area due to uncontrollable circumstances. Still, up until 1995 the cooperative used to make ends meet, but only because of subsidies. In the

1990s, as a result of the crisis in cities, people began to return to the villages. The local resettlement “boom” soon subsided, however, without tangibly ben-

Rural Villagers * 93

efiting the farm: the few newcomers either do not work in agriculture or go to seed through drink after having joined the local environment.” Theft and drinking are often interconnected. Governor Yevgeny Mikhailov of the Pskov oblast revealed in an interview in Izvestia that in the summer of 2000 villagers of his region repeatedly pulled down electric wires to sell as nonferrous scrap metal in order to buy alcohol. As a result, dozens of villages stayed without electricity for weeks between April and June 2000. What is particularly impressive is that eight hundred people perished in 2000 while dismantling those wires—twice as many as those killed in combat in Chechnya during the same period.” On a field trip to the Kostroma region in 2001, Tatyana Nefedova learned that the administration of a large collective farm had decided to replace cash payments with “debit cards” (cardboard, not plastic). Such cards could be used in local stores to buy any food item but alcohol. At one point, however, this practice was interrupted and cash payments resumed. Immediately, most villagers went into binge drinking and refrained from work for days in a row, so the administration had to restore the debit cards. Nefedova also learned that in the Kosa district of Komi-Permiak okrug, recently reunited with the Perm region, one-third of all deaths are due to unnatural causes, and half of those are

due to poisoning by poorly distilled industrial alcohol. By the villagers’ own account, between one-third and half of rural adults are chronic alcoholics. The

pervasiveness

of rural alcoholism

is well known,

so first-hand

observations of the phenomenon no longer come as a shock, yet “scientific” analyses have persistently avoided the issue by refusing to name it. To be sure, some thought-provoking ideas about the problem continue to be delivered by the Russian media. Sometimes it is not so much the nature of the information disclosed that appears striking as it is the casual tone with which it is related. “It may be that the farm's attempt at eradication of theft may exceed the enterprise’s energy,” a columnist for an agribusiness journal writes. “The thing is that they would always steal, so it is important to make sure that theft does not reach the level where it is critical for business.” Some farms are trying to limit drinking by fiscal means. For example, on farms associated with RusAgro, workers are paid in cash only after the harvest is over. Prior to that,

the workers receive vouchers that cannot be cashed right away. Yuri Kostyuk of RusAgro comments, “The very fact of receiving pay is a festive occasion, which has to be celebrated.” One other popular means of fighting alcoholism—forcing workers to get implants that cause the body to react adversely to even small quantities of liquor—is described in the same agribusiness journal: “The director of the sovkhoz Vostochyii, Astrakhan oblast, talked one worker into those implants.

94 ¢ Rural Villagers We found a doctor, assigned an advance payment, and drove this worker to

the city... . Now already five workers have implants. This is a precious cadre of workers that we cannot fire because there are no other machine operators in the village.” Because money is the most deficient commodity in the Russian village, _ buying a bottle of vodka in a local store has become a rare occasion for most, one associated with major holidays and family celebrations. More frequently people get alcohol from local moonshine producers, who charge twenty to twenty-five rubles for a half-liter bottle (compared with sixty rubles for a bottle of vodka in a typical rural food store) but peddle a product of poor quality. As stated above, an even more popular drink in the Russian village of today is an ethanol-based industrial blend such as a glass cleaner. These substitutes are especially poisonous. An article in Izvestia describing this situation focuses on an unsuccessful women-led fight for sobriety in one of the villages of the Bolsheselsky raion of Yaroslavl oblast. In that village, even middle-school children became inveterate drunkards; in pursuit of cash, they began to burglarize lonely retired women.” Bolsheselsky was the very first rural raion Grigory loffe surveyed soon after his graduation from Moscow State University in 1974. As an associate of the physical planning department of the Rosgiproniiselstroi, he was dispatched to gather data from the pokhoziaistvennye knigi (household record books) of rural Soviets with the aim of distinguishing between the prospective centers of rural investment and rank-and-file villages that would be subject to resettlement. In the record books, about every eighth local child was referred to as in-

valid detstva, that is, a child with a congenital defect. A rural Soviet’s secretary explained that most of these children were mentally retarded due to chronic drinking of at least one of their parents. Already in the early 1970s, the spread of rural alcoholism was astounding. At that time, however, most people drank hard liquor produced and certified by the state. Almost thirty years later, the situation is apparently past the point when diagnoses like “drinking,” “binge drinking,” and perhaps even “alcoholism” reflect the true meaning of the problem. What is going on today is more aptly described as “pervasive human degradation,” “profound degeneration of a genetic pool,” and so on. While such qualifications may sound harsh, they are not off the mark at all. The following are some excerpts from an article about the new managers recently dispatched to the Russian villages by corporate agroindustrial groups: New managers who came to the village could deal with urban collectives,

large and small, without a problem. Having come to the village, they realized that although people are plentiful, there is nobody to work with.

Rural Villagers ¢ 95 [This specific observation is in reference to Moscow oblast, one of the least

debased segments of the Russian countryside. “They drink so much,” says the manager of sovkhoz Semenoyskoye near Mozhaisk. “It’s a shame that young women drink as well: if my milkmaids haven't come to work, it’s always because of a hangover.” Almost all the new companies had to spend through the nose to safeguard the leased land from thieves. The detachments of guards were at times 200 to 300 people strong. However, they were not always helpful: the villagers still contrived to outwit those guards, and the guards did not stand on

scruples either. Sergei Kisliakov, a sovkhoz director from Samara oblast, reminisces: “At first we hired the militiamen. They did not let anybody dig up potatoes, but they did themselves and invited their families to take part. Then we hired the Cossacks; those, however, used to have a good time with the girls, then they slept all day long, and in the meantime, potatoes were

being stolen by the sack.” In Samara oblast, eight volunteers created an association of private grain farmers. In 2002, they had 12 members and 4,000 hectares of farmland, most otf which is leased from collective farms. Vladimir Storozhkoy, the associ-

ation’s leader, describes contrasting working habits in this way: “During summer heat, our members sweat over in the fields. They only take a short lunch break and hurry back to work. In the meantime, in the surrounding collective farms, there is nobody in the fields, combine operators sit in the

shadow at the pond and drink beer. They are tired.” Storozhkov reminisces about how during harvest their truck driver was apprehended by militia at midnight. The militiamen were certain that the driver was transporting stolen grain. “They still cannot understand that those who steal do that in broad daylight during daytime and in front of everybody. As for us, we had to harvest as soon as possible before grain begins crumbling, so we worked day and night.””

The majority of new managers agree that it makes more sense to set up a new agricultural business than to deal with an effectively bankrupt collective farm. The reason is that with an existing farm one faces the problem of selecting the best and firing the worst laborers, “which is fraught with social tension.” “This generation has to change so something can change for the better in the village,” says Vladimir Bovin, general director of the Agrico corporation in Samara oblast.”* Ilya Shteinberg argues that due to the selective hiring policies of agroindustrial corporations, peasants will soon become an endangered species, exotic creatures from a tourist prospectus. Shteinberg calls the agribusinesses’

96 © Rural Villagers

policy with respect to the rural labor force and its social needs “colonial,” with a reference to Marx’s definition of capitalist colonialism as cleansing the area of its aboriginal population for more progressive and profitable production.” The description of the same policies by Gennady Kulik, a former minister of agriculture and an influential agrarian lobbyist, is identical: “When it comes to the acquisition of the agricultural enterprises by agribusiness, I am in favor of selling them in their entirety. And what does Potanin [owner of Interros and

one of the wealthiest Russian tycoons] do in Stavropol? He only leases land, machines, repair workshops, and gas stations. The rest are not needed. Out of 500 people previously on a farm, they hire 200. What will befall the rest?”* According to a iongitudinal survey conducted in the Saratov region, more than 50 percent of the respondents named rural unemployment the biggest problem of village life in 2003, and the same result was recorded in 1993. The second most significant problem referred to in 2003 and 1993 among those living in the countryside was a feeling of inferiority. In 1993, the third most significant problem was theft; in 2003, the use of drugs took third place, with theft as the fourth most important problem, although the actual percentage of those referring to theft as a problem (34 percent) did not change from 1993 to 2003. Just as in 1993, in 2003, laziness and parasitism were considered to be the

main features of fellow villagers.” It is illustrative that the most important incentive for receiving good grades.in a village secondary school appears to be the possibility for the more successful students to leave their village for good and relocate to the city. In one of the Volga villages in the Saratov region, second-grade pupils were asked, “What do teachers tell you so you work hard and maintain discipline?” The most widespread response was, “If you don’t study well, you will remain in the village and become alcoholics and imbeciles.””° An Insightful Probe of Village Mores For a long time, no researchers went beyond unsystematic observations of the quality ofhuman resources in the Russian countryside. However, the situation began to change in the late 1990s. Russian sociologists, equipped with modern theories and also willing to call things by their proper names, began to ask questions that could shed light on accepted norms of everyday rural behavior, attitudes, and motivations. Of several known research attempts in that area,

the most revealing, articulate, and cogent analysis is by Efendiev and Bolotina. It is based on two representative surveys conducted in 2000 in Belgorod oblast, one of the premier agricultural regions of Russia.“ The Belgorod oblast is blessed with some of the world’s best chernozem soils. Unlike the nonchernozem zone of Russia, here most villages are large

Rural Villagers

¢ 97

and those abandoned or about to die out are rare, and younger generations are well represented in the villages. The region is compact and has one of the best developed networks of paved roads in Russia; natural gas and piped water are available in every village, although their availability in each house is subject to the household’s budget constraints. By the time of the survey, there had been no pension arrears; salaried employees in the public sector (e.g., teachers) were regularly paid. Also, outlets were created for households to sell surpluses of their output, and they were assisted with transporting those surpluses. However, despite decidedly more favorable external conditions for rural residents than in most Russian regions, only 27.8 percent of all surveyed households perceived their livelihood as tolerable (all basic needs are met, but buying new clothes and durable goods is problematic), while only 0.8 percent were entirely satisfied. More than half of all households barely made ends meet: they wear old clothes, and any necessary purchase beyond daily food puts people’s budgets under inordinate strain and requires borrowing money. In-depth interviews and observations inside people’s homes showed that these self-perceptions probably understate the actual level of deprivation. Of all households, those of the retirees fared the worst: 16 percent of them lived in abject poverty, and 72 percent barely made ends meet.” Efendiev and Bolotina set out to highlight some of the major reasons behind those hardships routinely experienced in one of the most fertile regions of Russia. The following important findings are noteworthy. At the time of the survey, the monthly revenue from pensions (701.5 rubles) exceeded the average wage on collective farms (350 rubles) and in state budget-supported institutions (500 rubles). Under these conditions, the most widespread reason

for the retirees’ actual deprivation is that more than half of them support nonworking adult children, alcoholics for the most part. However, only 32 percent of the retirees receive support from their grown children. Efendiev and Bolotina charge that the elements of the market implanted in the Russian countryside boil down to vastly expanded freedom of choice (to be a member of a collective farm, to become a registered independent farmer,

or to live off one’s household farm) and moderate state assistance to those

exercising this freedom (e.g., bank credits to home builders to be paid off by agricultural production; aid to households selling milk, meat, and eggs, etc.;

delivery of network utilities such as natural gas, with households charged in-

stallation costs and service fees should they choose to use these utilities). As freedom of choice expanded, one’s ability to make a difference in one’s livelihood gained in importance. While people were previously held on a short leash, it has been significantly lengthened during the years of the socalled reform. The spread of three attitudes was probed: unresisting acceptance of one’s current livelihood (“This is as good as it gets; we do not antici-

98 « Rural Villagers

pate a better life”); wistfulness or desire to live better yet without undertaking any practical steps in that direction (“We hope and dream that our situation will improve somehow’); and activism, implying practical steps toward the improvement of one’s living conditions and the realization of one’s responsibility for that improvement (“We undertake concrete steps toward a better life”). About 58 percent of those surveyed adhere to the second attitude, and three-quarters of those professing it are poor or extremely poor; 16 percent profess total resignation; and only 26 percent are activists. This last attitude is usually embraced by those whose well-being is above average.” Self-restraint or “minimization of needs” appears to be a frequently encountered habit, particularly among those who are resigned and submissive but also among passive dreamers. For example, despite available piped water, only 33 percent of young households have a shower, and 28.7 percent not only lack this amenity but also do not feel any urgency of acquiring it (the remaining 33 percent do feel such urgency but simply do not have adequate funds and do not foresee having them in the future). A similar situation pertains to a vehicle. According to the existing stereotype, most, if not all, youngsters in Russia want a vehicle. Also, in the countryside a car is more of a necessity than

luxury. However, out of younger households surveyed, 38.8 percent have a car, 25.9 percent want a car but just cannot afford one, but 34.5 percent do not believe they need one.“ Efendiev and Bolotina write that a deep-seated conflict between two attitudes, activist (embraced by the minority) and wistful (embraced by the majority), is the principal if latent conflict of rural life in today’s Russia, just as it was during the years of the New Economic Policy preceding collectivization. This conflict is hidden only up to a point. Because the conflicting attitudes— one preaching individual responsibility and the other fomenting the spirit of dependency—are driving social stratification, they are fuel for a potential explosion.” Just as instructive is finding out which actions or outcomes are deemed normal or legitimate by the rural villagers and which are denounced as inappropriate. It is well known among sociologists that survey participants, when presented with questions that have a noticeable moral undertone, tend to give

self-flattering answers. If that is true, then the following revelations are indeed alarming. The authors presented their respondents with twenty-six scenarios and asked them to class each as either “totally inappropriate,” “unwelcome but by and large acceptable in today’s life (one you would turn a blind eye to),” or “entirely acceptable” (“I do not see anything wrong about it’). Table 4.3 includes some results. The recurring theme is theft. While theft of personal property is decidedly disapproved of, stealing property from a collective farm is deemed quite acceptable. According to the authors of the survey, the wide-

Rural Villagers *« 99 Table 4.3. Social acceptability of specific behaviors Percentage

responding “Undesirable, | Percentage Percentage yet generally responding responding acceptable” “T don’t see “Entirely (just avert anything unacceptable” | one’s eyes) wrong”

Scenario

Aman from the same village has drunk too much (after work or on a day off), created a

disturbance, and lay down in the road

54.3

People from the same village drink alcohol at work and then keep on working under the influence A collective farm tractor operator drove home to lunch in a farm’s tractor A dairy worker stole milk (or combined

(3s

58.9

35.4

Mites)

SF)

7.6

5.6

fodder) from a collective farm cowshed in order to make ends meet

Children went to a collective farm field to

get sunflowers for themselves Somebody got into a house when the

:

occupants were not home and stole all the money

i

A man from the same village took hay from a collective farm to feed his own cow A farm (or an office) boss is bent on giving the most important jobs to “yes-men” and relatives

55.6

31.9

ES

Children got into somebody’s orchard and picked apples for themselves

Bia)

44.2

22.8

Source: A. G. Efendiev and I. A. Bolotina, “Sovremennoe rossiiskoe selo: na perelome epoch i reform. Opyt institutsianogo analiza,” Mir Rossii 11, no. 4 (2002): 23 (based on a 2000 survey of857 ablebodied residents ofnine villages of the Belgorod region).

spread toleration of theft from a collective farm is what makes it legitimate in the eyes of rural residents. However, because stealing from a collective farm,

but not from a fellow villager, is deemed acceptable, it is reasonable to ask if this kind of theft is condoned because it is perceived as compensation for long-term wage arrears or other improprieties of the collective farm arrangement. The alternative explanation is that stealing is “simply” a sociocultural phenomenon, an expression of “institutional” immaturity whereby universal

ethical norms precluding theft have not developed. A series of in-depth interviews allowed Efendiev and Bolotina to validate this alternative explanation and reject the economic compensation theory. It appeared that 49.5 percent of respondents acknowledged that they steal themselves, while only 5.9 percent responded that they do not steal because they are disgusted by the idea. At the same time, 22.8 percent said they do not steal because there is nothing to steal

100 ¢ Rural Villagers

anymore. No evidence was found to suggest that those who steal are poorer than those who do not. On the contrary, acknowledgment of personally committed acts of theft is almost equally widespread among self-acknowledged paupers and well-to-do rural residents. In addition, those who are prone to attribute theft to economic reasons acknowledge most frequently that they steal themselves. Thus economic compensation has all the trappings of an excuse. On the contrary, those who resort to moral reasoning (e.g., “people have lost their conscience”) commit acts of theft six to seven times less often. Finally, the frequency of one’s confession to stealing correlates with references to what one’s parents used to do. The authors’ conclusion: in a Russian village, theft is a sociocultural, not an economic, phenomenon.”

Efendiev and Bolotina show that access to a collective farm’s grain, combined fodder, and transport to deliver them from a field or a collective farm’s warehouse to one’s household farm is a critical factor in household farm productivity. Thus, the collective farm manager and team leaders who routinely have such access usually have more productive household operations. Although close to 80 percent of all villagers surveyed called the current condition of their collective farm “bad” or “very bad,” very few wanted to withdraw. Two-thirds said they do receive some income from their collective farm, and one-third acknowledged that they need animal feed that can be procured from the collective farm legally or illegally. It appears that professing dissatisfaction with the current economic condition of most collective farms does not lead to rejection of this mode of farming in principle. On the contrary, collective organization of agricultural work is deemed most legitimate. The respondents were given four possible options for transforming collective farms: (1) transfer them to state management that would preside over agricultural production and village affairs in general (the de facto return to state farms or to the Soviet-style collective farm at best); (2) disband collective farms and distribute the land among their members so every household would work land on its

own; (3) disband collective farms and distribute the land among those willing to become independent farmers so the rest may lease their land shares to those farmers and be hired by them as laborers; and (4) transfer collective farms to

the jurisdiction of a strong manufacturing enterprise that would become the co-owner ofthe land. This part of the survey resulted in two meaningful outcomes. The first was that many people (more than one-third of those surveyed) were stumped and could not decide upon an option. Those without any particular opinion were especially numerous among the poor. Efendiev and Bolotina hypothesize that some rural villagers are “dim-witted” or “intellectually challenged,”

a hypothesis that may come across as politically incorrect rather than unrealistic. The second outcome was that the overwhelming majority of those who

Rural Villagers * 101

had an opinion flatly rejected options (2) and (3). Interestingly, not just the poor rejected those options; 76 percent of well-to-do villagers said “no” to the second option, and 67 percent said “no” to the third.” Attachment to collective forms of work thus remains incredibly strong and is apparently deep-séated, a trait we have described in previous publications.” According to our observations, though, collective ways are not trans-

ferred to most activities outside a large farm: in today’s Russian village, help in plowing up one’s backyard or in home repairs is no longer provided free, and villagers typically do not coordinate sale and supply activities related to their household farms. It looks as though in the process of market transformation the Russian villagers are losing much publicized traditional fortes like generosity and unselfishness and not gaining anything valuable in return.” One might say that the above accounts of rural labor situations and village mores reflect the advanced stage of degradation of “traditional” rural communities in the ethnically Russian countryside, but hardly anybody corroborated the existence of an ideal community (as the point of departure for the process of degradation) at any point in time. On the contrary, most accounts of Russian village life in the nineteenth century and before reflect intractable problems,”” Nevertheless, there is a lingering image of the Russian peasant as an “angel-custodian” of Russianness and a self-sacrificing benefactor of the motherland. This image is at times skillfully promoted by nationalist writers (¢.g,, Vasily Belov), and if it is a good approximation of the ideal that might have existed somewhere at some point in time, then everything points to an unrelenting trend: most, if not all, rural communities not per-

meated and transformed (or corrupted?) by cosmopolitan urban influences are languishing and cannot be seriously counted on as an economic asset, but only as wards of the state. Apparently Shteinberg’s prediction of the Russian peasant becoming a rare oddity or endangered species has to be taken seriously, Such communities may have only a limited number of years or, at best,

a few decades Jeft, because rural depopulation, this time occurring against the backdrop of population declines throughout the country, is not going to be reversed any time soon, While in the Russian south the situation is for the most part not this gloomy, economic salvation there often comes from outsiders. Such outsiders are often new agricultural operators from the corporate world of Russian business. (In the south they are routinely called “investors.” )Ethnically non-Russian migrants are yet another vehicle of rejuvenation and often transform rural communities willy-nilly, serving as the agent of change whose significance will only grow with time. ‘Traditional rural communities are still alive and well, however, in most

Muslim republics of Russia. “In Bashkiriya [a Russian name for Bashkortostan], the traditional countryside is alive,’ writes a Russian observer, “a true

102 ¢ Rural Villagers

village is still around. . . . In rural Bashkiriya, they work a great deal, build a lot, and drink rarely—this alone makes the rural Bashkirian hinterland amazing beyond belief." In Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, this sober work ethic has apparently benefited large-scale collective agriculture, not just the private sector. Both republics are Russia’s new agricultural leaders, and Tatarstan has

taken over as the new leader in grain output, outstripping Krasnodar, the most fertile agricultural region of Russia. Large families, widespread mutual assistance and coordination between rural households, and incomparably less heavy drinking (or drinking at all) distinguish rural communities in Muslim republics. The only region in which we researched the predominantly nonRussian countryside, however, is the Chuvash republic, including its ethnic Tatar enclaves, which we discuss later in this book.

“Aliens” in the Russian Village We first began to encounter non-Russian agricultural specialists (e.g., agronomists, animal farm technicians, and accountants) in the collective and state

farms of the nonchernozem zone as early as the early 1970s. Most of them were from the ethnic republics of the North Caucasus, where they graduated from agricultural colleges and were assigned to work well to the north of their homeland. If they were easily discernible in Russian cities that always contained a fair number of ethnically non-Russian stock, they stood out all the more in the countryside of Russia proper, where to come across an ethnic “alien” (that is, anybody who would not be Russian or, in some rare cases, Ukrainian or Belarusian) would have been next to impossible prior to the 1960s. Today, however, non-Russians in the Russian countryside are no odd-

ity anymore and are quite widespread. They can be divided into at least two groups: seasonal migrants and those who settle there permanently. (Other divisions might include legal migrants and those whose migration and settlement leave no records at all.)

Tatyana Nefedova observed seasonal migrants in various regions of European Russia, for the most part but not exclusively in its borderland regions. For example, in the arid eastern part of the Saratov region bordering Kazakhstan, there are scores of ethnic Korean watermelon growers. They come from central Asia and Kazakhstan, work in teams, lease land from the local collec-

tive farms, and live in masterfully arranged and well-maintained dugouts. The locals often moonlight for the Koreans, weeding and grumbling about the low pay, yet they almost never take a risk to team up with fellow locals to produce lucrative but labor-intensive watermelons commercially. Seasonal Korean agricultural migrant teams can be encountered in many regions of the Russian south.

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In the arid eastern part of the Stavropol region, local collective farms

employ thousands of migrants from neighboring Dagestan throughout the entire growing season; some of these migrants lease land and produce vegetables and watermelons commercially. The Astrakhan region controlling the Volga River delta and bordering Kazakhstan is the destination of twenty-four thousand to thirty-eight thousand migrants a month from April to October. About one-half of those are Tadzhiks in pursuit of temporary jobs, and between one-quarter and one-third are Uzbeks. These people are expected to register as temporary migrants within three days of their arrival and to leave Russia within ninety days. Yet according to the local militia, roughly half of them never register, and many overstay their visas. It is hard to say how many of them actually stay in Astrakhan, but in the border districts of the region foreigners account for up to 40 percent of the agricultural labor force. Temporary jobs in agriculture pay a pittance, so the locals prefer to work for Korean and Dagestani land leasers or leave agriculture altogether. This situation creates a niche for the Tadzhiks, who are ready to work for any pay at all. In many western regions of Russia, seasonal migrants from Ukraine and Belarus work on weeding and harvesting. Such work usually lasts three to four weeks and leaves no paper trail. In recent years, a new form of seasonal migration has developed: operators of grain harvesting combines from Turkey bring their machines to Russia after the harvest in their country is over and they work in exchange for 15 to 20 percent of the harvested grain. Their combines are the world’s best brands, and the harvesters’ labor ethic is exemplary. They work day and night, using Meskhetian Turkish migrants from central Asia as their interpreters. The Izvestia daily, which in 2002 published an article about the Turkish

harvesters in the Stavropol region, mentioned that this outfit had been hired for the fourth straight year. According to local agricultural managers, using Turkish labor made economic sense. The newspaper appended its account of importing agricultural labor from Turkey with an improvised and unscientific poll of both experts and randomly selected people. “Can foreigners harvest Russian grain well?” was the sole question asked. “Of course, they can,” said

Andrei Parshey, whose book Why Russia Is Not America we referenced earlier. “But for us,” Parshev continued, “this is not a nice situation at all. For how long are we going to feed others? What are we for then? When the Cathedral ofJesus Christ the Savior was under construction, I was passing by and discovered that Turkish construction workers were toiling at it. There is overpopulation in Turkey and under-population in the Russian village. Hence, pressure from their side. Once begun, this process will be difficult to stop. One could solve this problem by not letting anybody in. Some people shy away from talking about this, but actually the immigration rules are very strict both in Europe

104 ¢ Rural Villagers

and the United States. Apparently the push hasn't yet come to shove for us.” While the latter statement, the mention of depopulation, and the alleged difficulty in stemming the influx of foreigners are all on target, there is a note of dissonance, as Parshev apparently overlooked or was not informed of the fact that Turkish labor, as discussed in the article, is used in Stavropol, a Russian re-

gion without a deficit of rural labor. Another response to the question Izvestia posed came from a thirty-five-year-old restaurant manager: “I don’t think they should [harvest in Russia],” she said. “This is not the foreigners’ business. Nev-

er before have I heard that foreigners harvest grain in Russia.” A vice president of a public relations firm had this to say: “Why not? It depends which foreigners you are talking about. If these are from the near abroad [the former Soviet republics], then they have as much experience harvesting grain as us. If, however, these are some Africans who previously only picked bananas, they will run into problems. As for the Turks, they must grow something, though their country is mountainous.” A forty-year-old military officer said, “Yes, maybe they [the foreigners] can, if they come with their own harvesting machines. As for our combines, only a Russian man can operate them.””” This cacophony of responses reflects a lack of serious societal discourse in preparation for what can hardly be avoided in the years to come: an influx of foreigners as the only antidote to the depopulation of Russia, the largest country in the world. To be sure, the necessity of this discourse has been asserted by a few Russian experts (such as Zhanna A. Zayonchkovskaya and Anatoly G. Vishnevsky), but the general public remains largely unaware of the acute nature of the problem. The Turkish labor force involvement in Stavropol is apparently past the experimental stage and is relatively large scale. There are about a dozen separate cases of farmland leased by Westerners. A French family set up a pig farm enterprise in the Belgorod region.” In 2000, farmers from Scotland took out a forty-nine-year lease, the longest term foreigners may have under the Russian Land Code, on as much as 400,000 hectares of idle land in the Penza region,

in one of the world’s best swaths of chernozem. Andrei Shashin, president of Zemlia i Nedvizhimost’, a land and real estate firm that facilitated the transaction, said, “What’s the difference who works on our land? The collective farms

are a shambles any way. If a foreigner, who is able to work land, creates jobs for our people, why would this be bad?”* By all accounts, more and more seasonal agricultural migrants at some point decide to settle permanently in Russia. Most of the migrants from Kazakhstan and central Asia that are not ethnic Russians settle in the regions that border Kazakhstan. By now an unusually open rural environment has evolved there, an environment conducive to receiving new migrants. Apparently the penetration by non-Russian newcomers of the inner Russian regions

Rural Villagers * 105

is a matter of time. Yet some pioneers have already established a beachhead of sorts. For example, twenty-five Koreans from Uzbekistan have restored the abandoned greenhouses near the town of Kirishi, in the eastern part of the Leningrad region, and were even invited to restore some flax-growing farms in the neighboring region of Great Novgorod.” On 5 July 2004, the third channel of Moscow television included a segment in their evening newscast devoted to mass employment of Tadzhiks at an agricultural cooperative in the Vologda region. The cooperative’s accountant emphasized that the Tadzhiks do not plunge into binge drinking after each pay day and are happy to be able to send home one thousand to fifteen hundred rubles a month. Tensions between the locals and the “aliens” arise primarily in regions that are not depopulated and/or where the intrusion of the newcomers disrupts usual farming operations. These tensions occur for the most part in the Krasnodar and Stavropol regions, whose ethnic Russian population feels endangered by numerous migrants from the nearby Muslim republics (and in the Krasnodar region, also by ethnic Armenian migrants). In these areas radical nationalist movements such as Russian National Unity have their strongholds in every larger village, and most ofthe Russians are negatively disposed to the aliens, particularly Muslims, and do not let them into the largest and centrally located settlements at all. But the migrants settle in less favored locations and percolate from there. In the eastern part of Stavropol, the newcomers exacerbate the problem of overgrazing typical for arid regions. Numerous cattle and sheep belonging to the newcomers from Dagestan prevent local collective farms from using the pockets of irrigated farming that are remote from the settlements. Irrigation causes salinization of most soils, so in the past these

remote fields emerged on soils resistant to salinization. As these fields cannot be guarded effectively, grazing cattle damaged them, and as a result the collective farms had to discontinue irrigated crop farming operations. This situation, in turn, aggravated interethnic tensions.

In summary, much of the countryside in European Russia is ailing demographically and otherwise. Rural depopulation of quite a few areas is but a part of the problem. Apparently due to a long tradition of coerced collectivism and poor living conditions in the countryside, the long-term decrease in rural and free-standing small-town populations has been aggravated by the self-selection of “movers” versus “stayers.” Those who are most industrious,

bright, dexterous, savvy, and least given to heavy drinking tended to leave for

the city, while the most passive and resigned tended to stay. As a result, a distinctive population not particularly receptive to innovation and change is left in much of the countryside, especially but not only in its outlying segments. In the Soviet past, firing a binge drinker was next to impossible; one was sup-

106 ¢ Rural Villagers

posed to resort to moral exhortation instead. Firing a drunkard is an option that many agricultural managers now take, but finding a sober replacement is more difficult than ever before. Russian agribusiness is interested only in purchasing and/or leasing land on the best farms, and even there it is not willing to take over most laborers. These trends produce far-reaching spatial contrasts in agricultural productivity.

5) Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

To uncover spatial variance in the performance of collective farms, a raion or rural district arguably represents the best level of spatial resolution. While the most salient aspects of agricultural variance (e.g., output, specialization, and agricultural resources) are readily apparent on a more generalized basis (that is, at the regional level involving oblasts and ethnic republics), these areas are

too vast to capture the actual predictors of productivity. In European Russia, the size of the average region is about fifty-seven thousand square kilometers (excluding the extreme north), and most such territorial units are monocentric, with noticeable internal contrasts in their

capital city’s accessibility and in soil fertility as well. Any data structured by such regions would therefore blur significant contrasts in what proved to be the major predictors of agricultural productivity in Russia. On the other hand, focusing on twenty-seven thousand collective farms with an average size of fifty-four hundred hectares or fifty-four square kilometers, including twenty-five hundred hectares of cropland, would involve many factors of a largely random nature, including the quality of the agricultural managers. Therefore aggregation of the data to the intermediate or rural district level seems to suit our needs best. The average district in European Russia is two thousand square kilometers in size and has about twenty collective farms. 107

108 * Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

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ao Kostroma

& ‘Sy Kursk

Ryazan Lipetsk

eee “Tegorod LY

u

morse’ a

}Tambov

“e / sVoronezh

—

Penza

A

ce

Om Sie

ey

© Stood)

Kerachay-h

KabardinoN. Ostia.

Kalmykia e)

i

e8y:

a

Sverdlovsk

ae

-

Kurgan

~

Chelyabinsk

\ Orenburg

4

Hy

-_

ap :

;

ral

\ Le

a“ ow

an

/ Bashkortostan

ave a

“S

is wen

’

See

t Krasnodar

Adyge

—

2

Ulyano skae Ve

wecels

bea QA

ie, FA Mari Ef

ot

p

: Be

S 2

AY

w.

Cae

Ingusht..

onecunya ..

‘\ Dagestan

=

{

a

#\W

Southern edge of nonchernozem zone

“"**,,.« Southern edge of the northern areas one

with little crop farming (excluded from the data set)

=

Figure 5.1. Agricultural macroregions of European Russia

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 109

Obviously, districts vary in size, with smaller districts predictably situated in more densely populated regions and closer to the regional capitals. Virtually all districts are monocentric; their borders, conditioned by the topology of the transportation system and settlement network and by labor gravitation, have been largely stable for several decades. Our data set includes about sixty variables for 1,267 districts of European Russia. In the following analysis, only a part of this data set will be used, as in the preceding chapter. Districts of the far north with no crop farming were excluded from the set. Physiographically, the remaining districts fall into the NCZ or nonchernozem zone (682 districts) and the south (585 districts).! The

principal designated distinction between the NCZ and the south (figure 5.1)’ is the percentage of arable land. In the south, it ranges from 60 to 80 percent of most districts’ total areas. In the NCZ, however, it ranges only from 10 percent to 40 percent, much of the rest being forest tracts, so cultivated fields and

forests in the NCZ are interspersed. From the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, land improvement projects expanded fields at the expense of forests and marshes. The opposite process of spontaneous secondary reforestation began to win the tug of war in later years, affecting outlying districts the most. The junctions of the regions are visible on aerial photographs because of diminished open spaces. The Collective Farm Sector

For the purpose of spatial analysis, measures of agricultural productivity and the dynamics of cattle and cropland, as well as demographics, natural soil fertility, and location variables, are of particular importance. Five indicators describe the overall output of collective farms in our data set: grain yields and milk yields per cow for 1989-1991 and 1999-2001, and the 1998 gross agricultural output. The choice of particular products, grain and milk, is motivated by their ubiquity in Russia. Agricultural specialization is much less distinct in Russia than in the United States, and Soviets’ tendency to ensure regional selfsufficiency in food undercut efforts to boost specialization.* While some farms do not produce grain and/or milk, all districts do. Normally they assign about half of their cropland to grain (wheat, rye, corn, oats, and barley, in descend-

ing order). Milk yield per cow is a more complex indicator compared to grain yield, as the former simultaneously reflects the quantity and quality of feed, technological practices, and the overall treatment of animals. The use of a monetary indicator of gross output (for the generally successful year of 1998) controls for the actual variance in specialization. All the above indicators correlate (Pearson correlations between the in-

110 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

dicators’ logarithms ranging from 0.49 to 0.66) but not closely enough to permit excluding any of them. What is noteworthy is that the statistically unnormalized (i.e., not divided by land) monetary measure ofa district’s agricultural output is closely associated with in-kind measures of productivity (per unit of land and per cow). This correlation indicates economies of scale: yields tend to be higher where large-scale operations exist. In Russia, the estimate of natural soil fertility has been traditionally based on long-term records of grain yields on specially designated, regionally representative parcels of land that do not use irrigation, drainage, or any sophisticated cultivation methods. That is, they reflect the natural conditions of soil type, heat, and moisture, or what is referred to as the bioclimatic potential of the area. The respective pattern (figure 5.2) is not nearly the mosaic that the actual yields produce (figure 5.3), and the layout of biomes (coniferous for-

est, broadleaf forest, and steppe) and ecotones (mixed forest and forest steppe) shows through this pattern, with the highest potential yields predictably associated with the most fertile western margins of forest steppe and steppe. The comparison of the environmentally prescribed and actual yields (figure 5.4) suggests that in many areas the actual yield is short of the environmentally conditioned norm. Also, while the actual yields correlate with soil fertility (R = .692 in 1986-1990 and R = .725 in 1996-2000), there are apparently other powerful factors behind their spatial pattern (figure 5.3). The average 19992001 grain yield in Russia was only 1.5 tons per hectare. As figure 5.3 shows, yields above 2.0 tons per hectare occur mostly in the south and in periurban districts of the NCZ. Such districts account for only 8 percent of European Russia's total land and 25 percent of its rural population. On the other hand, less than 1.0 ton per hectare is produced on 20 percent of the total land area.* The average milk yield per cow on Russia’s collective farms in 2000 was a meager 2,138 kilograms. Anecdotal evidence suggests that cows yielding this little milk are being mistreated. Indeed, livestock specialists all across Russia claim that a “normal” food ration (by which they mean four meals a day totaling no less than 3.5 percent of a cow's body weight in daily consumption of dry matter and warm water) alone can ensure 3,000 kilograms of milk, while

yields in excess of 4,000 kilograms require additional investment in pedigree cows, veterinary control, and feeding expertise. Yields above 4,000 kilograms occur in only thirty-seven districts, which account for 2 percent of European Russia's land and are situated for the most part in proximity to Moscow and Saint Petersburg. About one hundred districts (10 percent of the land and 20 percent of the rural population) achieve the reportedly “normal” threshold of 3,000 kilograms. At the same time, on 40 percent ofthe land (30 percent ofthe

rural population), milk yields are below the average of2,138 kilograms.’ In our data base, variables describing location are: distance from the

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change « 111

Kaliningrad Petersburg

eg a4

+

Wer Hundreds kg of grain per hectare

7.6 —15 IS1— 22.5

B® 220-30 0150 00 0

100 200

200

Miles AOO Kilometers

WE 30.1 and higher aA

Southern edge of nonchernozem zone

a

Figure 5.2. Bioclimatic potential (for sustained grain yields on regionally representative parcels under natural conditions ofsoil type, heat, and moisture) by rural district of European Russia in hundreds ofkilograms per hectare, 2000. Source: Based on data from Prirodno-selskokhoziaistvennoye raionirovantye zemelnogo fonda SSSR (Moscow: Kolos, 1983).

112 « Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

Arkhangelsk

Hundreds kg of grain per hectare |

0 50100 0 100 200

200 Miles 400 Kilometers

10.0 and lower

10.1 - 15.0 15.1 - 20.0 B® 20.1 -300 cae 30.1 and higher as

No data / Not applicable

Figure 5.3. Average grain yields by rural district in hundreds of kilograms per hectare, 1996-2000

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change ¢ 113

Tens kg of grain per hectare Ve 11 and more 1 to 10 0 or no data

L

WM

iont0

0

-11 and more

0

50

100

100

200

200

Miles

400 Kilometers

Figure 5.4. Difference between actual and normative grain yields in European Russia in tens of kilograms per hectare

114 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

provincial center, the relative order of that neighborhood from the provincial center (e.g., periurban districts are considered first-order neighbors), and the urban population potential, which measures the location of a given district relative to all cities of European Russia.° Whereas the first two variables are indicators of the districts’ relative location (physical and topological, respectively) within specific regions, the last measure describes location relative to

the entire “urban field” of European Russia. Because regions and their constituent districts vary in size, the order of neighborhood variable proved to be especially useful for interregional comparisons and generalization.’ From 1990 to 2000, the contrasts in both grain yields and milk yields per cow (as measured by the ratio of standard deviation to the average) increased. In the NCZ, the spatial expression of this increase has been a growing contrast between periurban and outlying districts (figures 5.5 and 5.6), and the same has also been typical for the most arid eastern part of the south. Overall, districts whose productivity had been higher in 1990 fared even better, relative to other districts, a decade later.

The key demographic variables in our data base are rural population Figure 5.5. Average milk yield per cow in kilograms by topological tier (numbered from 1 to 7)

Figure 5.6. Average grain

yields in hectograms per hectare by topological tier (numbered from 1 to 7)

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change « 115

f Ld

St. x Petersburg

Arkhangelsk

Vologda

People per sq. km eel

5.0 and lower

5.1 - 10.0 0

50100

200

10.1 - 20.0

Miles

PF 201-300 0

100 200

400 Kilometers

ee

30.1 and higher

Figure 5.7. Rural population density by rural district, excluding the populations of district centers, per square kilometer, 2002

116 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

@ South

Figure 5.8. Average rural population density by topological tier (numbered from 1 to

7), 2000 density outside the district centers and the percentage share of retirees. While in Russia most able-bodied villagers (and a considerable number of urbanites

as well) work land to produce food, association with farming is somewhat less common in district centers, where a considerable number of people work for district administration and local services and utilities. Rural population density (figure 5.7) declines outward from the regional capitals (figure 5.8) and correlates closely with each of five indicators of agricultural productivity (Pearson correlations ranging from 0.63 to 0.79 when using logarithmic scale). In areas where there are fewer than five people per square kilometer, not even 1 ton of grain per hectare is achieved. Only districts with more than fifteen people per square kilometer have milk yields in excess of 3,000 kilograms per cow. Retirees (women fifty-five and older and men sixty and older) account

for 30 to 34 percent of the rural population in most regions, whereas children (zero to fifteen years of age) make up only 16 to 18 percent. The districts with the highest proportion of retirees are between Moscow and Saint Petersburg and in the regions south of Moscow. No meaningful correlation, however, ex-

ists between aging and agricultural productivity in the collective sector.

Prospects for Collective Farming In the early 1990s, when Russian reform began, some Western-trained ana-

lysts predicted a quick disintegration of most collective and state farms in Russia and the advent of the Western-style farmer. Ioffe and Nefedova analyzed illusions of that sort and their possible underpinnings.* The collective sector, of course, survived, although most ofits production units are no longer called

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 117

collective farms. Moreover, since the start of reform the overall number of de facto collective farms has even grown (from 25,800 in 1990 to 27,600 in 2000),

while the average number oflaborers per one such farm declined from 322 in 1990 to 170 in 2000.’

In 1995, on 57 percent of all collective farms, production costs exceeded revenues. This situation, however, was nothing new. For example, in 1980, 70 percent ofcollective and state farms operated at a loss. In 1996, 1997, and 1998,

79 percent, 82 percent, and 88 percent of all collective farms lost money. It seemed like they had reached the end ofthe line. But in 1999-2000, almost half of farms generated some profit; in 2001, “only” 46 percent did not. Of products produced by collective farms, meat is almost ubiquitously unprofitable, while milk is profitable by and large. The highest profit margin has been in grain, sunflowers, and potatoes. Overall, the profit margin in crop farming was at the 42 to 45 percent level in 1999-2000." In some regions of the Industrial Center, money-losing collective farms occasionally account for as many as 97 percent of the overall number of farm units (the Ivanovo and Smolensk regions had the highest percentage rate); even in the Moscow and Leningrad regions, up to two-thirds of farm units in some years operate at a loss. By 2000, the regional differentiation had become even more vivid than before (figure 5.9); there are fewer unprofitable farms in the south, around Moscow, and in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Yet in such

nonchernozem regions as Kostroma and Briansk more than 70 percent of farm units are still operating at a loss. A Russian collective farm, however, is not just a production unit; it is

also a community, a vehicle for collective survival. Otherwise, most collectives that are economically bankrupt would be disbanded by now. Collective farms normally control social services administered to their members and supply household farming operations with seed, fertilizer, and veterinary aid. Shifting cattle from collective to household premises in times of need is often practiced as well. In many cases, there is a truly symbiotic relationship between the “parent” collective farm and the household farms of its members. Because, as shown earlier, the state largely withdrew from agriculture, its process of adjustment to the unruly market that filled the void and the attendant spatial change can be viewed as spontaneous; Russian researchers refer to these changes as “self-organization.” Among other things, this self organization reveals itself in the redistribution of output between the modes of farming, as discussed earlier. The economic monopoly of the collective farm in the traditional Russian countryside thus appears to be a thing of the past. However, the collective farms are also transforming, and some incorporate

capitalist principles that are peculiarly fused with socialist ones. The main paths of adaptation can be characterized as retreat, advance-

118 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

Figure 5.9. Percentage share of unprofitable collective farms, 2001

ment, and steady-state. Although “retreat” and “advancement” sound like value-laden labels, they are not as straightforward as “good” and “bad.” The most widespread form of retreat is a return to the classic Soviet-style kolkhoz, with managers counting on the state’s ability to write off debts indefinitely and to purchase and/or market the output. This version of the kolkhoz has been resurgent in areas with strong regional financial support of agriculture, for example, in Tatarstan and the Ulyanovsk region. The most radical backwardlooking experience of that kind has been the establishment of the so-called state unitary enterprises known as GUPs, which is a Russian acronym. Under this arrangement, the former collective farm’s members must give up their shares to the enterprise, managers are appointed, and prices are set by the regional administration. Such enterprises usually have a lot of functioning assets and are situated on good soils. The establishment of GUPs, which is particularly widespread in the region of Lipetsk (one of the central chernozem regions), seems to promote the role of the regional administration as a selfstyled player on the agricultural market. Among the advancement strategies, seven engage attention. Each strat-

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change « 119

egy employs a different management style. In one strategy, a collective farm continues to be an independent production unit. In it, the old paternalist system is retained in the person of a talented and selfless leader, a “communistcapitalist” in Ilya Shteinberg’s definition, a person who has managed to add marketing to his or her innate social, leadership, and agronomic skills." Such a leader commands great moral authority and does not steal from the farm, and the leader's organizational skills ensure the profitability of the farm and decent pay to its members. Leaders of this kind were never widespread. Today, there are even fewer than before 1992, but they can still be encountered occasionally, especially in the environs of large cities and in the major breadbasket regions of the south. Zemfira Kalugina, who studied the adaptation of collective farms in Novosibirsk oblast, noted that “the so-called ‘red’ directors . . . ideologically did not approve of the reforms, but in practice demonstrated market models

of economic behavior. In contrast, young directors, while embracing . . . the ongoing transformations, did not possess adequate real-world experience and found themselves helpless . . . in the present economic environment.” Kalugina’s shrewd observation draws attention to the acute scarcity of rural leaders in today’s Russia. Another strategy is for administrator-owners to buy up the land and property shares from the collective farm members. Often they end up withdrawing from the collective farm to set up their own businesses, in which they re-create the old leadership style. A collective farm may also be incorporated in a vertical agribusiness structure that branches off from a profitable industry (e.g., iron ore processors in the Belgorod region) or results from acquisition by domestic and/or foreign investors with capital accumulated in food processing.” In another strategy a collective farm becomes part of a horizontal (regional) bureaucratic-commercial structure, the so-called agrarian-industrial corporation, which is often given a name that includes the word “Niva” (meaning “field of grain”). Such structures exist, for example, in Orel and Ryazan. The funds at their disposal are generated by a few profitable food processors, so the structures redistribute these funds, offering subsidized fuel, equipment,

and other supplies to local farms in exchange for a commitment to sell their produce exclusively to the local food processors. A collective farm that is still economically strong but has failed to pay off its debts on time may be declared bankrupt, and the entire property of the farm is then transferred to an outside “investor” who has bribed the regional administrators. Such a pattern is widespread in major grain-producing regions such as Stavropol. The investor usually dispenses with farming practices that do not fit regional specialization but had been important locally as they en-

120 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

sured full employment in the area (e.g., animal husbandry in grain-producing areas). The investor tries to extract as much profit as possible from monoculture without crop rotation in a short period of time. In another strategy, a new and smaller collective farm emerges in place of a larger debt-ridden farm that has been declared bankrupt, and the former

farm’s management receives the possibility of a new start. This strategy, practiced in many nonchernozem regions, sometimes does help improve circum-

stances. A final strategy is for a successful farm to increase in size by taking over one or two unsuccessful farms in the neighborhood. This practice is gaining in importance in the environs of large cities in the NCZ. Here, land is deficient, and suburban farms sometimes acquire land for producing animal feed from relatively remote and ailing farms. In our judgment, the above strategies pertain to no more than 40 percent of Russian collective farms; these farms are likely to survive. The bal-

ance consists of persistently unprofitable units, most of which are going to pass away one way or another. We identify three groups of ailing collective farms, in ascending order of predicament. The most likely to survive are farms whose insolvency is caused primarily by an ill-qualified and/or thieving administration. Such a farm stands a chance of recovery if it sheds its present management and attracts investors. Its chances of survival may increase when influenced by favorable location (e.g., periurban) and specialization that fits well into current market. Less likely to survive are farms still living off their Soviet-made technological potential whose labor has not been quite depleted by outmigration. Such farms may languish for several years, scavenging spare parts from abandoned equipment, patching holes in cowsheds’ roofs, and hoping against hope that the old system of state support will eventually return. Such farms are typically in the semiperiphery (not periurban but not in an outlying rural district either) in the NCZ, in the central chernozem region (e.g., in the Tambov or Penza regions), and even in the North Caucasus (primarily in the Rostov region). Farms whose decrepit condition dates back to pre-reform years and whose location is confined to areas with acute depopulation have the worst prognosis. Their output is enough only to supply the remaining members with milk and meat. There may still be one hundred to two hundred cattle, but there is no money in the farm’s account and many fields are overgrown with broom sedge, blackberry briers, and birches. Apathy reigns. Such farms are most widespread in the outlying districts of the nonchernozem zone. For example, during our field trip to the Valdai district of the Great Novgorod region in 2003 we learned that not a single collective farm in that district sowed crops that year. Yet no collective farm in the district has disbanded, and they will exist until the federal bankruptcy law is enforced.

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 121

Some of the severely handicapped collective farms may be “rescued” by joining a nearby or even a distant profitable farm (many periurban farms do not have enough land to produce animal feed of their own), leasing out land where there is demand for it, transforming the farm into cooperatives producing hay and gathering mushrooms and berries, or splitting the farm into constituent household operations. One silver lining in the current crisis is that it forces the production activity of a collective farm to match its labor potential. Even prior to this crisis, keeping more livestock and more land under the plow than the farm was able to sustain with a reasonable level of return did not make economic sense. Yet the system of purely administrative control did not allow the collective farm to dispose of redundant land and cattle. Today this is possible, and a result is growing disparity in collective farm productivity.

People's Farms Our data base also includes information about the two other modes of farming operations: the registered family farm (RFF) and the household farm (HEF). However, productivity statistics for these modes of farming are available only for some rural districts. The Russian Goskomstat routinely generates productivity totals only for entire regions, and as was shown in a previous chapter, the accuracy of this procedure raises doubts, particularly in regard to household farms. Consequently, detailed analysis of private farms can rely only on field observations. Here, we will nevertheless share our understanding of the

spatial pattern of people’s farms achieved on the basis of selectively available information. Two macroregions of Russia, the Volga and the North Caucasus, lead in the percentage of RFFs in the overall farmland (table 5.1). The North Caucasus contains one-third of all the RFFs in Russia, but in this macroregion they are small on average (thirty hectares); in the Volga macroregion, the average RFF exceeds one hundred hectares. In the North Caucasus, the number of RFFs per one thousand rural residents is highest (table 5.1). Within the North Caucasus,

the number of RFFs is especially high in Stavropol and Dagestan. Also Volgograd (part of the Volga macroregion) and Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad are among the leaders. In the Krasnodar region, with its large collective farms and high population density in the countryside, the number of RFFs per one thousand people is moderate, even though this region has more RFFs than any other region of Russia. In general, RFFs are more plentiful in the south, where their principal specialization is grain and sunflowers. The Ural and Volga macroregions lead in RFF contribution to total grain output. For example, in the region of Sara-

122 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change Table 5.1. Registered family farms (RFFs) by region of Russia Average size of

Percent growth in

RFFs in hectares

RFFs

Percentage | Percentage in total of REFs

numberof | in total | RFFs farmland

1993

1995.

1997.

1999

Region

1995

1997

1999

2000

2000

Russia

153

100

97

97

55

European north

127

90

92

96

30

1.4

Northwest

156

103

95

94

18

4.0 10.7

2000

100

Center

143

98

95

98

29

Volga-Vyatka

151

101

99

101

33

oye

Central Chernozem

122

50°]

94

100

63

4.2

North Caucasus

181

114

101

95

30

30.5

Ural

148

92

93

99

60

11.0

Western Siberia

159

90

93

96

109

9.7

Eastern Siberia

181

94

93

96

65

555)

Far East

22:

88

90

98

50

4.3

Kaliningrad

543

130

139

L0G

lets

2.3

2001

2 ef.

0.5

Sources: Selskoe khoziaistvo Rossii 2000 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2002), 192; Selskokhoziaistvennaya deyatelnost naselenia (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000), 49-52.

tov, RFFs produce 16 percent of grain; in Cheliabinsk, 11 percent; and in Volgograd and Rostov, 10 percent. Only in Dagestan, where RFFs and HFs have effectively replaced the collective farms, and in the northwest, do RFFs not specialize in grain or sunflowers. In most regions of theNCZ, RFFs are barely visible as part of the periurban population, that is, in rural districts abutting the limits of amajor city. The regions of the northwest seem to be the only exceptions to this rule, but even there, RFFs are more widespread in the second topological tier. The same tier is the locus of most RFFs in the eastern part of the NCZ. In the central NCZ RFFs gravitate to the third tier, but there are very few of them, both in periurban and outlying districts (figure 5.10). Of the available statistics on household farms, the number of cattle in their possession is arguably the most reliable. We have focused on two indicators: the number of cattle owned by individuals per one hundred rural residents and the percentage of cattle owned by individuals. The latter indicator is a close correlate of HFs’ share in the regional outputs of milk and meat. A lot of cattle on local HFs does not necessarily mean that local collective farms are unsuccessful. In the entire district-structured data base covering European Russia, however, the more cattle people have, the lower is the share of the

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 123

Northwest

Figure 5.10. Average number

of registered family farms per

one thousand rural residents by topological tier

(numbered from 1

VolgaVyatka

to 7), 2000

Volga-Ural ethnic republics

Central chernozem

Volga and southern Urals

Caucasus' piedmont

Caucasus republics

collective sector in the overall number of cattle in the district; the Pearson cor-

relation between these indicators exceeds 0.6.

Dagestan is the leader in the number of cattle per one hundred residents; eight districts of this republic top the ranking order of ail European Russia's districts. For example, in the Charodinsky district of Dagestan, there are 115 head of cattle per one hundred residents, and 108 head in the Laksky district.

Local collective farms have transferred most (85 percent) of their cattle into private hands. A different situation exists in Bashkortostan, where there are

also a lot of cattle in HFs, 70 to 80 head per one hundred residents, but private ownership of cattle coexists with large collective farm herds. The same is true in some districts of Kabardino-Balkaria and Mordovia.

124 * Market Adjustment and Spatial Change

In the ethnically Russian districts, privately owned cattle as a rule are not nearly as numerous as in the republics, although in the Saratov and Orenburg regions, where reasonably good grain production on collective farms allows them to generously supply HFs with animal feed, there are a lot of private cattle as well. But even there, the districts that lead are those with larger numbers of ethnic Kazakh, Tatar, and Bashkir populations. This situation may be due to the fact, mentioned in a previous chapter, that the sociodemographic erosion of rural communities in the ethnic Russian districts is far more advanced than among the Muslim populations.’* Larger families and more mutual support of households and generations enable families to keep more cattle on HFs. Also, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan are the republics with the highest level of regional financial support of collective farms, which supply households with cheap animal feed. The lowest numbers ofcattle on HFs are in the Krasnodar, Moscow, and Leningrad regions. In terms of the number of pigs on HFs, the Saratov, Kursk, Orel, and Orenburg regions lead the rest; obviously, the lowest number ofpigs is on HFs in the Muslim republics and, for a different reason (less overall dependence of the rural population on HFs), in the Moscow and Leningrad regions. How is the share of cattle on HFs distributed among rural districts in different topological tiers? It appears that this distribution reflects the productivity gradient of collective farms, as shown in figure 5.6. In contrast, the share of cattle on HFs increases as distance from the major city increases but drops again in the most remote districts, which are particularly depopulated. This is definitely the case in the Industrial Center and the northwest areas (excluding the Moscow and Leningrad regions). In the north, however, more cattle on HFs are kept in the second tier. However, the regions in the north are vast, so the average physical distance from the districts of the second tier to the regional capital is 125 kilometers, which is the same as the third tier’s average distance to the capital in the Industrial Center. In the south, center-periphery gradients are more gentle, with some increase in private cattle ownership toward the periphery or no increase at all, as is the case in the Stavropol and Krasnodar regions. Modes of Farming and Location

Each of the three modes of Russian farming—collective farms, RFEFs, and HFs—has a spatial pattern of its own, that is, it succeeds the most and/or gravitates toward specific topological tiers. If, by and large, the contribution of HFs is particularly significant where collective farms are in the worst shape, the question arises as to whether HFs (and also RFFs) compensate for the slump in the collective sector. The answer to this question can be seen at least in part

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 125

by juxtaposing the spatial profiles pertaining to different products and modes of farming, The distribution of the total land area of rural districts between the tiers in the NCZ is such that the area of the periurban districts (first-order neighbors of the regional capitals) is the smallest and the area of the fourth tier is the largest, because not all regions have districts that would fall into the topological tiers of higher order and their respective territories are smaller (figure 5.11). The distribution of the total area of the southern regions of European Russia is almost the same. In the NCZ, collective farms in periurban districts produce the most vegetables; the total output of vegetables produced by all three modes of farmFigure 5.11. Percentage

distribution of rural districts’ land area by topological tier in the nonchernozem zone

Figure 5.12. Percentage

distribution of the output of vegetables on collective farms (CFs), household farms (HFs), and

registered family farms (RFFs) by topological tier in the nonchernozem ZONE

Figure 5.13. Percentage distribution of the output of milk on collective farms (CFs), household farms (HFs), and

registered family farms (RFFs) by topological tier in the nonchernozem

zone

126 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change Figure 5.14. Percentage

distribution of the output of meat on collective farms (CFs), household farms (HEs), and

registered family farms (REFS) by topological tier in the nonchernozem

zone

Figure 5.15, Average agricultural output BS milk

B meat M vegetables

» . per square kilometer

by topological tier in : the nonchernozem

Zone

§ grain

Figure 5.16.

8 milk

Average agricultural

gw meat

output in

O vegetables

per square

metric tons

Kilometer by Bgrain

topological tier

in the south

ing is at its highest in the second tier. In this tier the contribution of private producers is significant (see figure 5.12). The role of the first and especially second tiers is heightened in the output of both milk and meat (figures 5.13 and 5.14). From the second tier outward, the output of collective farms declines, as does the output of the private sectors; the private sector dominates the output of meat beginning with the third tier, while in milk output the collective farms’ lead is apparent everywhere. In the south, the role of periurban districts is significant as well, although to the degree that exists in the NCZ,

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 127

while the total output received from all three modes of farming peaks in the more remote third tier. It appears that the spatial selectivity of different modes of farming is extreme only in the NCZ, where productive collective farms tend to be found near the cities, HFs tend to dominate farming output in the outlying districts, and RFFs do the best “in between.” Apparently, they can avoid both competition with collective farms, which are strong in the Russian-style suburbs, and the social ruin characteristic in the periphery. Because in the south both problems are not as pronounced, RFFs can do well anywhere in the centerperiphery continuum. Yet the center-periphery gradient appears to characterize the spatial pattern of agriculture in all of European Russia. Dividing the output of each topological tier by the tier’s size, we receive the outwardly descending curves for both the NCZ and the south; only in the NCZ does the

gradient get steep as soon as one crosses the city limits, whereas in the south this happens at a greater distance from the city (figures 5.15 and 5.16). This conclusion resonates with our previous discussion of the Thunian economic landscapes and with the paramount significance of the physical distance factor in all of Russia. Whereas distance from a city is one crucial factor influencing agricultural land use intensity in Russia, another factor is the city’s size. In the NCZ,

the larger the city, the higher both grain and milk yields are in the periurban district or districts. The centripetal gradients are particularly steep around cities with more than 500,000 residents, which means that productivity is high

near the city limits and declines steeply with increasing distance from the city, as figures 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7 showed. The drop-off in productivity is also significant around cities with populations between 250,000 and 500,000; it is less significant around cities with more than 100,000 but fewer than 250,000 residents.

Towns of smaller size do not normally “generate” agricultural productivity gradients, although some do. In the south, only the largest cities (with more than 500,000 residents) form vivid concentric zones of outwardly declining agricultural productivity. In general, in the south a lattice or network of smaller but more or less equidistant towns with 20,000 to 50,000 residents ensures a

reasonably high agricultural productivity in their environs. How Many Cities Are Missing?

If distance from a large city is so meaningful for agricultural productivity, can we not determine how many cities are required so there would be no hopeless backwater areas with ailing farms and abandoned land? Obviously, solv-

ing this problem is impractical and would be even if the overall population of

128 ¢ Market Adjustment and Spatial Change Table 5.2. Actual and “required” number of large cities (more than 100,000 residents) Area with Minimum deficit Average deficit of | of large population Actual distance large cities, |citiesasa | Number of | of “missing” number of | between thousands | percentage | “missing” | cities in cities cities, km | ofsgkm of the total | large cities | millions Area with

Area Russia

European Russia

European north European Russia

without the north Northwest without Leningrad region

Leningrad region Center without Moscow region Moscow region

Volga-Vyatka Central Chernozem

Volga North Caucasus without ethnic

republics Ethnic republics of North Caucasus Urals

Source: Calculations by the authors.

Russia were not on the decline. Cities do not emerge simply because nearby farmers need them. But however impractical this problem-solving exercise, it echoes one of the popular themes in Russian human geography: the lack of large cities not so much for agriculture’s sake but for the accomplishment of a larger task, which is to generate a web of social contacts and integrate Russia’s vast space. We referred to this theme earlier in the book in conjunction with what looks like agricultural overextension. The calculation of a hypothetical number of “missing cities” will therefore point to the regions where this overextension is particularly significant. As discussed above, collective farms fare best within the two topological tiers closest to the city. The centers of second-order neighbors are on average 65 kilometers away from the regional capital, and most regions are monocentric. In such a way the 130-kilometer distance between cities with at least 100,000 residents may be considered a theoretical threshold beyond which large-scale agriculture in Russia goes awry for the most part. At the above threshold, the

Market Adjustment and Spatial Change * 129

average hinterland of the city (that is, the area where those more successful collective farms exist) is within the range of 14,000 to 17,000 square kilome-

ters, depending on the configuration of this hinterland. In Russia, the actual average distance between cities larger than 100,000 residents is 323 kilometers. It is only somewhat larger than the average interurban distance in the entire Soviet Union in 1985, which was 287 km."* Disaggregated calculations applied to the set of macroregions included in table 5.2 show that in five-sixths of Russia cities are deficient in number. In much of Russia, however, there is no commercial agriculture. As for European Russia without its far north, cities are

still lacking here on one-third of its land. Most of this neglected land lies in the NCZ but outside the Moscow region; only half of this land area has an adequate number of large cities. Even the macroregion of the Industrial Center (but without the environs of Moscow) lacks as many as ten cities. Within all of European Russia, there is a deficit of sixty-four large cities with a total population of 6 million to 7 million people.

6 From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation

The collective farm sector remains the largest landholder in Russia, even though it is no longer the largest producer, according to official statistics. The post-1990 state withdrawal from agriculture made it clear that many collective farms possess more land than they are able to use. This situation is especially apparent in the regions of the outer and inner periphery, which experienced rural depopulation. Whereas the outer periphery (or periphery, in the strict sense of the word) is in Siberia, the European north, and a few other envi-

ronmentally marginal areas such as the arid southeast of European Russia, the inner periphery consists of outlying rural districts (i.e., remote from the major cities) within the older regions of settlement. When the rank-and-file collective farms realized that the entire hierarchy of agricultural administration (from Moscow to regional center to district center to collective farm) had collapsed and had neither financial resources to allocate nor political will to order, remind, reward, or penalize, they began to dispose of redundant land. The overall redistribution of Russia's land by land use function (table 6.1) during the post-Soviet period has been impressive at first glance: whereas the amount of land devoted to agricultural enterprises shrank by an enormous 201.5 million hectares, the amount in forest and reserves grew by 184.5 million

From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation ¢ 131 hectares. In reality, most of this change has been nominal, as many forests for-

merly within collective and state farm landholdings had been excluded from previous statistical profiles, as had many rural villages. The aspect of change that seems to be more significant is that the 19-million-hectare reduction in farmland was only slightly offset by the increase in land under settlements, industry, and transport—that is, land use categories with which contraction of farmland is typically associated in urbanized areas. This change is a strong, if indirect, sign of farmland abandonment. Spatial Dynamics of Farmland In 1970, Russia's total farmland covered 222 million hectares, of which 157 million were in European Russia.’ Between 1970 and 1990, fewer than 2 mil-

lion hectares of arable land were lost in European Russia, whereas during one subsequent decade more than 10 million hectares were lost (table 6.2). One

can distinguish between two kinds of farmland contraction: outer contraction, resulting from population leaving the resource periphery (Siberia and the European north); and inner contraction, whose nature is not straightforward,

especially considering that the rural population of European Russia was replenished by almost a million people during the first half of the 1990s. Table 6.1. Land use in Russia, millions of hectares

Total farmland

Land under settlements ofall types Land in industrial, transportation, and defense use

Land devoted to nature parks and reserves Forest and land reserve Other

Sources: Selskoe khoziaistvo Rossii 1998 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1999), 50; “Zemelnaya reforma,

1990-2002,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 1 (2004): 94.

Table 6.2. Changes in farmland usage, millions of hectares, 1970-2001 Change in farmland

2001 area

Arable land

1956 | 1191 Buropean Russia

136.3

1970-1990

1990-2001

Change in arable land 1970-1990

1990-2001

89.0

Sources: Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR v 1971 godu (Moscow: Finansy i Statistika, 1972), 166-68; Regiony Rossii 1999 (Moscow: Gendalf, 2001), 289-92; Selskoye khoziaistvo v Rossii 2000 (Moscow: Goskomstat,

2002), 201-3.

132 ¢ From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation Table 6.3. Change in farmland total and in arable land by macroregion of Russia Change in farmlandasa | percentage of Changein © | farmland at Change in 2001 (million | total farmland | beginning of _| arable land

Change in arable land as a percentage of arable land at beginning of

ha)

period

(million ha)

period

(million ha)

Farm- | Arable Region

Russia

2001

| 1990

[195.9 |1191 |8.2|-179|-37 |-8.4| -15

euopeannorth |1.0 [04[=o es ieece7: ag eee

[-12.7|

-1

+01 |=O. 4.6 | -2.9 |-15.0

4. | |—4.8

European south

Volga and southern Urals

;

:

+0.5 | —4.4 | +0.7

6.5

0.5

Southern Siberia Northern Siberia and Far East Sources: Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR (Moscow: Finansy i Statistika, 1970), 165-68; Selskoe khoziaistvo Rossii 1998 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1999), 181-84; Selskoe khoziaistvo v Rossii 2002 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2003), 195-97.

Our calculations (table 6.3) have shown that although the scale of farm-

land contraction in the extreme north of European Russia and in Siberia has been impressive, those areas’ share in Russia’s overall farmland abandonment is insignificant.* For example, the extreme north accounts for only 3 percent of European Russia's farmland loss between 1970 and 2001. Together with Siberia, it accounts for 17 percent of the entire Russian Federation’s loss of farmland during the same period. Thus, the majority of the lost farmland falls into the inner contraction category. Russian researchers have designated several periods of Russia’s agricultural development: pre-kolkhoz (1897-1930), early kolkhoz (1930-1960), late

kolkhoz (1960-1990), and post-kolkhoz (1991—present).? During the first and the second periods, extensive development or development in breadth prevailed, as the expansion of farmland suppressed the effect of growing investment. During the third period, however, some intensification of agriculture was achieved on available farmland through greater allocation of material resources than ever before. Together with the Soviet economy at large, however,

the entire agricultural sector was entering a systemic crisis, and spatial contraction of farming operations commenced in some Russian regions in part as a result of this crisis and in part as a result of rural depopulation. The fourth period is not yet over, but it has already resulted in an unprecedented contraction of the agricultural activity space.

From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation ¢ 133

1990 - 2000

canon | Aa |a |e Cad | BO |_| 1897 Tsubiity

[convaesonl | at |

Expansion

ae ee

satiny |__| a]

8

Figure 6.1. Continuity and change in farmland dynamics

The regional breakdown of total farmland dynamics can be characterized on the basis of two maps (figure 6.1). The first two periods of agricultural development are combined in this figure, so the actual theme of the analysis is the degree of continuity in regional trends prior to and after 1990. Note that the 1897 data were recalculated into the current regional borders on the basis of available topographic maps. Based on these maps in figure 6.1, European Russia can be subdivided into three latitudinal zones with different farmland trends over the course of the twentieth century. One is a zone of relative stability (the amount of farmland has not changed much) that straddles the junction between the nonchernozem zone (NCZ) and better endowed regions immediately to the south of it. The zone stretches from Briansk and Orel in the west to the ethnic republics between the Volga River and the Urals. The Belgorod region, one of the best endowed regions of Russia, forms a freestanding enclave in which the

developments fit the same pattern: stability. Another zone shows intensive agricultural expansion prior to 1960 and stability thereafter. This zone includes the southern and southeastern fringes of European Russia (without the eth-

134 ¢ From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation

nic republics of the North Caucasus, on which no 1897 data were available), encompassing much of the Volga macroregion, the piedmont regions of the North Caucasus, the southern Urals, and some black-earth regions (Penza and

Tambov). The third zone shows contraction of farmland prior to 1990. This zone encompasses most of the NCZ. Within the last zone, we detect three subzones showing the different processes by which farmland dwindled. One showed continuous contraction and encompassed the regions of Pskov, Great Novgorod, Vologda, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Ivanovo, Karelia, Perm, and Sverdlovsk. In this subzone

the peak of agricultural colonization had been achieved by the beginning of the twentieth century; since that time, however, farmland has been shrinking

steadily, like a drying rawhide. The contraction continued after 1990, although its pace slowed. The Moscow region is included in this category as well, although in contrast to the above-mentioned regions, more farmland was lost to

urban expansion in that region than to rural depopulation. Another subzone, which included Leningrad, Smolensk,

and Kirov, showed stability prior to

1960, yielding to moderate contraction thereafter. The subzone that includes Arkhangelsk and Komi experienced expansion prior to 1960 and drastic contraction thereafter, with the pace of decline slowing after 1990.

Cropland Spatial Dynamics The farmland characterized above consists of two major subcategories: arable land and pastures or meadows. Arable land consists of the area sown to crops and the area temporarily set aside or fallowed. During the Soviet period, reduction of arable land was always considered less acceptable because the assignment of agricultural machinery was based on arable land area. Because collective farms knew all too well that showing a reduction of arable land in the books would not benefit them, they increased the records of fallowed land when they could not maintain all of their fields under cultivation. The transfer of arable land to other uses may show up in the books only after as much as a ten-year delay. Consequently, the area sown to crops (cropland) is a more reliable statistic in Russia, as it is not just a land use category but also an entry in bookkeeping accounts submitted annually and sent up the ranks of agricultural administration. Regional trends of cropland dynamics can be identified based on the two maps in figure 6.2. Regions with steady expansion of cropping area prior to 1990 are the northern and northeastern margins of European Russia, the

environmentally marginal areas that are least favorable for any crop farming whatsoever. No wonder that following the state withdrawal from agriculture in 1991, the expansion of cropland in those regions immediately gave way to

From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation

* 135

ate

sf, SS S

att

1960 - 1990

Expansion

| =

Jsubiiy [|

Conran

oes (a

|Expansion] Stability [Contraction