A Social History of Collective Farm Privatization in Russia

MANY PERESTROIKAS: A SOCIAL HISTORY

OF COLLECTIVE FARM PRIVATIZATION IN RUSSIA

ELISA R. GOLLUB

B.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ, 1998

A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2001

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2011

This dissertation by Elisa R. Gollub is accepted in its present form

by the Department of History as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______

(Abbott Gleason), Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______

(Patricia Herlihy), Reader

Date______

(Ethan Pollock), Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______

(Peter M. Weber), Dean of the Graduate School

iii CURRICULUM VITAE

Elisa R. Gollub was born in Sacramento, California on July 31, 1975. She attended U.C.

Santa Cruz, earning a B.A. in European History with Honors in the Major and graduating Phi

Beta Kappa. She entered the Ph.D. program in History at Brown University in 2000, earning her

M.A. in Modern Russian History in 2001. She took a leave of absence in 2002, teaching high school and then working at an international nonprofit focused on business development in Russia.

She returned to Brown in 2006 to complete her dissertation on the social history of collective farm privatization. She has served as teaching assistant for six history courses at Brown. Her dissertation research and writing has been funded by Brown University, Fulbright-Hays and the

American Association of University Women.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It takes a village to write a dissertation about Russian villages. My debts of gratitude run deep and span several continents. My heartfelt thanks go to Tom Gleason, who tirelessly advised me throughout my graduate study, providing intellectual mentorship, personal encouragement and consistent good humor at every step. He is a true role model as a scholar and a human being, and this dissertation would not have been possible without him. I also count my lucky stars to have been able to work with Patricia Herlihy, whose intelligence, kindness and humor could always make things better when they were difficult. Ethan Pollock brought teaching mentorship, practical and intellectual guidance, and helped me see the big picture. I would also like to thank

Lynne deBenedette, not only for the expert Russian language training, but also for her friendly support through the stages of my graduate career. Karen Mota, Mary Beth Bryson, Cherrie

Guerzon and Julissa Bautista made the History Department at Brown a warm and welcoming place.

I am very grateful to the organizations that supported me and to the scholars, archivists and other individuals who moved my research forward. They are too numerous to mention so this is just a beginning. Margaret Paxson and Liesl Gambold provided invaluable contacts and tips that helped jumpstart my fieldwork. In Russia, Igor Morozov, Tatyana Prokopyeva, Eugene

Dolbyshev, and Pavel Serin took me on very memorable and instructive trips to villages in my early stages of research. My colleagues from the Center for Citizen Initiatives Olga Kriakova and

Natasha Ivanova were particularly helpful in setting up farm visits for me, and I thank Sharon

Tennison from CCI for the contacts. Teodor Shanin and Alexander Nikulin opened the conferences, library, and archives of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences to me and provided friendly encouragement. Liubov Denisova kindly offered her expertise and very sound advice on conducting oral histories with villagers. Jacob Kolker helped me set up my v research and home base in Riazan’. I would have been lost in Krasnodar without Nona and

Margo Shahnazarian, and would not have enjoyed my stay nearly as much if I couldn’t relax at

Karina’s beauty salon when I returned from village stays. Alexander and Alexandra Manuylov were of immeasurable assistance, helping me find my Krasnodar farm site and sharing their own field experiences and interview transcripts with me.

Great colleagues and friends who supported me through the process, read chapter drafts and otherwise helped my project grow include Alexis Peri, Paula Goldman, Elta Smith, Krista

Goff, Nicole Eaton, Sara Leone, Naomi Baer, Rebecca Wangh, Sabrina Reese, James Meyer,

Andrea Mazzarino, Susan Zaraysky and Trille Loft. Oane Visser deserves special thanks for joining me on part of the journey. Scott Neft has walked by my side through some of the most harrowing passages and I’ll always be grateful.

Then there is my amazing family. I owe my parents a million thanks, including for giving me incredible siblings. Sara and Mike have generously opened their home to me during my last year writing, for which I am so thankful. Jeremy has stepped in with key writing edits, and he and Rachel also offered their living room on standby anytime I wanted, not to mention providing pumpkin dinners and cookie nights when I’m in town. Yosef has an uncanny ability to get in touch from afar exactly when I can use a big brother, such as when he called a split-second after electricity went out in my new Nizhnii apartment. Cousins Mike and Sophia prepared helpful chapter comments while Jennifer and Katia offered moral support. Jodi, Jeff, Caleb and

Alexa gave me a fabulous home away from home and a family in Rhode Island that I never knew

I had. You are all the best.

Finally, while their names must be confidential, I am forever indebted to everyone who agreed to be interviewed by me, and even more to the individuals and families who hosted me in the countryside with unfailing generosity and warmth. They truly made this dissertation possible.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Thank You, Comrade Brezhnev, 21 For Our Normal Lives?

Chapter 2: Many Perestroikas 61

Chapter 3: Utopian Transitology 90

Chapter 4: Privatization Process At My Farm 114 Sites

Chapter 5: Perspectives on Privatization 148

Chapter 6: Women at the Top 191

Conclusion 237

Bibliography 243

vii

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS

Page

Map of Russia 3

Births and Deaths Among Rural Population 142 of Shilovo District, 1980 to 2007

Marriages and Divorces Among Rural 143 Population of Shilovo District, 1980 to 2003

In-migration and Out-migration in Rural 144 Areas of Shilovo District, 1990 to 2007

Women’s and Men’s Work at Farms 210

Women’s and Men’s Work at Home 208

viii

Introduction

This dissertation sprang from my interest in doing oral history research in post-Soviet

Russia. On a business trip to Russia in the summer of 2005, I interviewed entrepreneurs about the growth of their businesses after the massive economic and political transformations occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was fascinated by their stories of what the collapse meant to them, personally as well as professionally. Our conversations sometimes veered away from prosaic business matters as we philosophized about how their mentalities and lifestyles shifted in response to these nationwide changes. Intrigued, I wanted to further travel throughout Russia and ask people about how they experienced and understood the fall of the

Soviet Union and how their lives changed in result.

I decided to focus on voices from the countryside when a colleague sent me a dramatic newspaper article profiling one of our clients, who successfully built a private farm “on the ruins of a failed Soviet collective.”1 Histories of post-Soviet transformations generally focus on metropolitan areas and industries, while rural history remains largely unwritten. It became clear that oral history is absolutely necessary for investigating the experiences, thoughts and feelings of farm workers, which are rarely recorded for posterity. The simple research question driving my study became: how do villagers understand collective farm privatization, and what do they say about their recent history?

At the outset, I thought this would be a study of regional and local differences. I expected to return from the field having heard a wide range of experiences and perspectives. To my surprise, my history became a study of commonalities, even despite local differences. I was struck by how incredibly similar people’s outlooks were across my quite different research sites.

1 In the interests of confidentiality I do not cite this source. At the time I worked for the Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI) a San Francisco non-profit focused on business management training for Russian entrepreneurs. 1 Everywhere I went, people told the same basic stories about their past. To some extent this reflects the struggles that they all shared in common during the difficult 1990s. But I argue the historical visions broadly popular among farm workers also take on a life of their own. They need to be understood as narratives that are not simply the sum of individual or collective experience, but much more. The narratives start to inform people’s perceptions and recollections and shape their retellings.

In this dissertation I interpret this narrative phenomenon, even as I find that including villagers’ perspectives poses challenges to traditional historical accounts. The Brezhnev years,

General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, even the “transition to capitalism” (if one can be said to have occurred) appear quite differently when seen through villagers’ eyes.

Accepted historical narratives in the U.S. do not include the information I gathered. The stories we tell about the 1970s, perestroika, power shifts during post-Soviet transformations, or women in the post-Soviet era, fail to consider the countryside or people’s own experiences, beliefs, attitudes, memories or feelings. But it’s not just that this story has not been written. Considering people’s experiences in the countryside forces us to rethink our periodization and the way we characterize key moments and eras in Russian history, taking into account additional and contradictory versions. This dissertation thus makes both historical and historiographical arguments, while presenting and critically analyzing villagers’ narratives about their past.

Research Sites

I traveled to nine regions in central European Russia and visited some 35 farms during preliminary research in the summer of 2006 as well as during my research year from 2007 to

2008. I chose three main sites to focus on, in Nizhegorod (for simplicity and because many interviewees referred to the region this way, I call the region “Nizhnii” and the main city, Nizhnii

Novgorod, “Nizhnii” from now on), Riazan’, and Krasnodar regions, for what was initially to be

2 my comparative study. Nizhnii and Riazan’ regions adjoin at one tip, as shown in the map below

(regions number 10 and 14), while Krasnodar lies in Russia’s south, on the Black Sea.

From Russia Map, at: http://www.russiamap.org/map.php?map=pol 1

I wanted farms that were very different from each other. I selected farms of diverse sizes in geographically diverse regions, with different soil, climate, and terrain features. I looked for farms with different economic success rates as Soviet farms and private enterprises, and I tried to find dissimilar local power structures, where farm managers have differing relationships with local administrations. I worked with Russian contacts to get access to villages, picking the most hospitable places for research that still met my criteria. Two sites housed one collective farm

(kolkhoz) each; my third site was home to two state farms (sovkhozes). In theory kolkhoz

“members” collectively owned their farm, while sovkhozes were larger, “workers” labored for the

3 state and were better remunerated in wages. But I discovered that in reality there was very little functional difference between these types of farms in the period I study.

As a former sovkhoz director related to me, “...in the kolkhoz there was more democracy.

But it was the same—they appointed me, and they appointed the chairmen of the kolkhoz….the kolkhozniks [collective farm members] elected their own chairman, but the Party organ sent the man. They recommended. And everyone put up their hand,” His son appended, “one man, and everyone voted for him.” The former director continued:

there was no particular difference. For example, they called us to the district [Party] committee…It would already be ten o’clock in the evening. They called us up one by one and gave us a dressing-down. Give over all our grain, corn, wheat. Well, it’s the workers who have to give it up. About 100 kg remains for workers and the rest needs to all be given out. Look, here is your plan, everything is assigned there…and we all sit in the corridor and wait. Who’s next. They call him in. They call me in. Look, you harvested this much—I have to account for everything—you gave out [sold to the state] this quantity, there should still remain this much. Keep this much for seeds…give this much to the workers, and the rest take to the grain elevator. OK, but I don’t have this, all this is already gone. Oh, you don’t have it. Tomorrow we’re sending a commission. We’ll start to monitor the trash. They will go, if they see grain remaining, we’ll process everything again. Well, maybe there are people carrying baskets, guzzling for days. We’ll re-process everything. Then there will be grain. It was tough. And a leader of a kolkhoz is sitting right next to me. They also call him in. It was all the same; all the same; all the same….the same corridor, at the same time; there was no big difference….it was all [managed] by each district.2

I also include information and quotations from site visits that were not among my main three sites to support my conclusions. While I preserve the Russian words, in English I use

“collective farm” or simply “collective” as an umbrella term signifying both types of farms in the dissertation.

At each main site, the farms I studied were connected to a cluster of villages, from which they drew employees and where they housed different buildings, fields, and production branches.

I tried to visit each village connected to the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, whether by walking, catching rides, or using public transportation or taxis, as distances could be quite large between the furthest villages. At the farms and in their associated villages, I interviewed current and retired workers, observed goings-on, and collected copies of farm archives, records, and local

2 Interview with Valero, in the courtyard of his son’s home, Krasnodar site, 7/15/08. 4 histories where they existed. Meanwhile in the regional and district capital cities, I read in libraries and archives and met academics and government officials (and took proper showers and did laundry). I did not pay my rural hosts or interviewees, though I did bring my hosts presents and tried to also give my interviewees small presents, such as souvenirs from the U.S. I rented an apartment in each regional capital (ie, Nizhnii Novgorod, Riazan’ and Krasnodar) to set up a home base. I first took several day trips to my farm sites to meet my contacts. I soon found a family or two to host me in the villages. Then I would spend several days to three weeks in the village at a time, returning to the city for a week or two to do urban research, back-up data, etc.

I recorded more than 100 semi-structured interviews with villagers. I took pre-composed interview guides to the field, which I always had at hand, though I tried to let conversation flow naturally and be guided by what my interviewers wanted to talk about. Some people refused to be recorded but agreed to talk to me. In these cases I took notes by hand while we conversed.

When it wasn’t possible to record or take notes on the spot, I took notes as soon as I possibly could after interesting conversations. I also made extensive field notes about my observations, jotting down my impressions of people and interviews, including how people looked and sounded, the tones they used, what emotions they seemed to express, how I felt and what stuck in my mind afterwards, the better to jog my memory when writing up results. Here is an introduction to my three chief sites, in the order that I visited them:

Nizhnii Site

400 km from Moscow, Nizhnii region is trisected by the Volga and Oka Rivers and features average soil and climate conditions for a non-Black Earth, central Russian region.

Industry, including engineering and metalworking, provide most of the region’s revenue.

Agriculture is not particularly strong here, and livestock cultivation is the most profitable branch.3

3 Regional government official website: http://www.government-nnov.ru/?id=13726 5 My research site is located in Gorodets district, in the central-western part of the region, where milk, meat, eggs, grain, potatoes and other vegetables are grown.

I first visited the farm site during preliminary research in the summer of 2006.

Anthropologist Liesl Gambold Miller, who writes about one of the private farm successor enterprises to the kolkhoz (which I am calling Pobeda), generously shared her contacts with me.

People in Nizhnii site remembered Liesl and appreciated that I also needed a village “home.”

Here, I was quickly invited to stay a weekend with Olga, a very hospitable, middle-aged farm worker who performed a variety of jobs including controlling access to warehouses and the farm’s gas supply. Adopted on sight by the family dog and Olga’s granddaughter, I became the perpetual part-time guest and stayed up to three weeks at a time. A young animal technician also invited me to stay with her family and I stayed in their home in a different village several times, which gave me easier access to villages on the other side of Kolkhoz Pobeda’s territory.

Pobeda was formed when two parent kolkhozes were fused in 1977 as part of the farm enlargement campaign first begun by General Secretary Khrushchev. Housing construction in one of the associated settlements intensified at the same time. Pobeda consistently placed in the top three or four farm-producers of its district during late socialist years. It grew vegetables and raised animals for dairy, at one time also growing a lot of flax, which was gradually reduced but not phased out until the kolkhoz was reorganized in 1994. At its peak, Pobeda had more than forty working tractors. Although the land was not particularly fertile there, multiple workers claimed proudly that with the use of fertilizer, they could get produce “like in the Black Earth.”

In Soviet years, people living in the villages associated with Pobeda worked at the farm or in rural social services or local administration. There was no other rural employer at this site competing with the farm.

6 Riazan’ Site

Bisected by the Oka River and partially by the Don River, Riazan’ is a historic center of industrial production. Manufacturing, engineering and metal-working are top-producing industries. It has a typical climate for central Russia. As in Nizhnii, livestock farming is the most profitable industry, though there are patches of quite fertile soil near the river basins, and the region is widely considered to hold good prospects for both industrial and agrarian production.

Cattle, pigs, sheep, and poultry are tended, while barley, wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat, beets, potatoes, and some fruits and berries are grown. Before the 1990s, Riazan’ was an important milk, meat, and bread producer for central Russia, though during the ‘90s production fell.4

I also visited my Riazan’ site during preliminary research in 2006. Moscow-based ethnographer Igor Morozov graciously let me accompany him during part of his fieldwork in Orel region. A Russian university student was to be my interpreter. The student’s mother came from a kolkhoz in Riazan’ region, and by the end of the Orel trip I had been invited to visit his mom’s kolkhoz. I eagerly accepted and at the end of the summer traveled to Orel site, interviewed several of their relatives and family friends, and met the director of the privatized former kolkhoz

Pervoe Maia. Elena, a woman in her late thirties who directed the farm, was quite interested in my research and offered to help me if I returned in the winter, when work around the farm would slow. When I returned the following winter, Elena insisted that I live onsite only with her family.

She told me she worried about my safety staying anywhere else and wanted to make sure I was all right. I eventually had free run of the farm and associated villages, and there was no question of keeping an official eye on me.

Living with the farm director seemed to pose both pitfalls and benefits for my research.

People assumed I had influence with her, and often tried to relay messages or requests for assistance through me. They also praised her to the skies and were wary of saying anything

4 Regional government website: http://www.ryazanreg.ru/economics/agroindustrial/; and Kommersant Daily, http://www.kommersant.com/t-65/r_5/n_409/Ryazan_Region/. 7 negative about the farm in its current incarnation. At the same time, I was able to observe a lot of farm and village business from the corner of the room. Locals frequently stopped by Elena’s house with questions—either official farm business or other issues. After the initial hubbub of having an American around, people sometimes forgot I was there when they had pressing matters to discuss—or ignored my recorder on the table when discussion got heated. Elena and others told me multiple times, “this is not for your recorder!” when discussing their business. I never recorded against their wishes, but I was able to listen and learn from conversations I would not have had access to without living with the director. Elena also helped me get access to the district archive in Shilovo, where no foreigner had ever worked, and on several occasions she drove me around to interview people who were not within walking distance of her house. I also took public buses, elektrichkas (old-fashioned trains), and taxis, and caught rides with locals between cities and villages at this site.

Kolkhoz Pervoe Maia focused on meat and milk production and had about 200 employees in the 1970s. It also grew grain and a number of vegetables. At the height of its operations in the

‘70s, it tended more than 1200 bulls and maintained a large dairy herd as well. Crop farming was not profitable for the farm, but meat and milk production sometimes were. The farm was not especially high-performing, but in volume of dairy production it often made the top three list in its district, and specific milkmaids won a number of awards for their high-volume work, one receiving the especially prestigious Order of Lenin. The kolkhoz accountant remembered that the farm had always been poor and was never rich. This was the poorest and worst endowed farm of my three main research sites.

Krasnodar Site

In the south of Russia and the north of the Caucuses, bordering the country of Georgia and on the banks of the Black and Azov seas, Krasnodar is a diverse border region. It houses big money industries including oil pipelines and agriculture. The climate varies from the plains to the 8 mountains, to the seas and banks of more than 500 rivers. The region is considered the current bread-basket of Russia due to its fertile, largely Black Earth soil. It produces the highest quantity of grain, beets, fruits and berries of any Russian region; the second highest quantity of eggs, meat, poultry, sunflower seeds and honey; and the third highest volume of milk.5

While I visited Krasnodar city during my preliminary research and knew I wanted to research in Russia’s fertile south, I had not firmly chosen one farm site before my research year.

Sasha Manuylov and Sasha Kasyanova, anthropologists based in Krasnodar, suggested a farm in the region and eventually drove me to what would become my site. They introduced me to their friend Nastia, the former director of culture for the villages associated with the two former sovkhozes, who agreed to host me and help facilitate my research locally. Here too I took buses, trains and taxis, and sometimes caught rides between Krasnodar (city), Belorechensk (the district capital city) and the villages. Belorechensk district is located in the southeast of the region.6

Two sovkhozes operated at my Krasnodar field site. Both split off from one original kolkhoz formed during initial collectivization. Sovkhoz Plamia raised cows and pigs and grew vegetables including tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and potatoes, as well as selling milk. This sovkhoz was always somewhat poorer than the second. Sovkhoz Traktor specialized in tobacco for a few decades, phasing it out in the 1970s in favor of fruit production. The sovkhoz maintained large apple orchards and also grew plums, apricots, strawberries and other fruit. This farm used slightly more land than Plamia, cultivated more produce, and always had a bit more money in circulation, according to many villagers. They said Traktor also historically had more and better buildings and equipment, and maintained them better than Plamia.

A number of my interviewees living in the associated villages had worked at both farms at different times—a few switching employment between the farms more than once. Fifteen to sixteen years after both sovkhozes closed doors, when I researched onsite, memories of the two

5 Official regional website: http://www.krasnodar.ru/en/content/565/show/14753/

6 See official municipal website for information on the district: http://www.belorechensk.ru/view/all_info/. 9 bled together for villagers. My interviewees said so much about village life during the sovkhoz era, that it came to make sense not to try to separate the farms and write only about one; but to include both in my study, since both were inextricably interwoven into village life and villagers’ memories. In the district archive in Belorechensk, I found economic and other data specific to each farm. But for my study, the similarities came to be more important than emphasizing minor distinctions, especially since people did not represent themselves to have had different experiences working at each farm.

The sovkhozes did not technically operate on Black Earth soil, but farming was still sufficiently promising and lucrative there that private, small-time family farmers were profiting here in 2008—the only research site where this was the case. This was the only site of my three that featured multiple rural employers during late Soviet years. A leskhoz, or timber farm, also operated in some of the same villages. Villagers could also find employment at a nearby chemical plant, a sanatorium, a summer camp for children, and rural preschool and grade school.

Additionally, two villages associated with the former sovkhozes were populated almost entirely by Cossacks, whose settlements dated back to the nineteenth century here. In the 2000s, these villages were legally administered by a (neo-)traditional Cossack chief or ataman, who worked harmoniously with regional authorities. Circumstances, cultures, and even systems of rural administration were really quite different at my Krasnodar site from my Nizhnii and Riazan’ sites—which made the similarities in the histories people told there all the more surprising.

Oral History as Method

Oral history is a very diverse, interdisciplinary field. The oral historian draws on sociology, anthropology, psychology and linguistics for information about how to conduct and interpret interviews, and a rich literature explores these interconnections.7 As I spent months in

7 See for example Ronald Grele and Studs Terkel, et al, Envelopes of Sound: the Art of Oral History, Second edition (New York: Praeger, 1991), Jan Vansina, Oral tradition; a study in historical methodology, 10 my field sites, my research in some ways bridges the divides between history, ethnography and anthropology. I build upon the work of historians Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, who have developed an excellent model of scholarship, which they dub “ethno-history.”8 Following their approach, I use people’s speech intact when possible and give long quotations to show how they think and speak. I analyze the patterns I discovered in my interviewees’ narratives and offer my own interpretations, but try to make this transparent so that their opinions emerge distinctly and alternative readings are kept possible in my text. I also leave myself in the dissertation, and often keep my questions on the page when I quote at length from my interviewees. Artificially removing myself would give a false impression of how people framed their stories.

My approach to using oral histories is three-pronged. I use what people to say to: 1) get information about what happened, 2) most importantly, to uncover people’s feelings, perceptions, interpretations and senses of history---the subjective meanings that people make of their past, and

3) to unpeel some of the layers of their narratives and show how people construct their memories, analyzing what is at stake to them when they articulate their historical visions. I will elaborate on each point in turn.

transl. by H. M. Wright (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1965), Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and other stories: form and meaning in oral history (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), and Robert Atkinson, The Life Story Interview (Qualitative Research Methods) (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc, 1998). On interconnections between history and anthropology methods, see for example John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) Nicholas Dirks, et al, eds. Culture/Power/History: a reader in contemporary social theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.) Some scholars also suggest that studying regions of the former Soviet Union necessitates an interdisciplinary approach due to the limitations of traditional sources and methods. For example, Vladimir Shlapentokh calls for a “multi-source” approach to investigating the Soviet past, in Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 15; while Caroline Humphrey argues that an interdisciplinary approach is needed to study postsocialism in “Introduction” to The Unmaking Of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2002).

8 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: the history of a lesbian community (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). See also Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), a classic example of ethnographic history work that also influences my approach. 11

The chief problem with relying on oral histories to supply historical information is of course the twin unreliability of both memory and testimony. Neurobiologists suggest that when people remember experiences, they don’t necessarily retrieve the data the same way each instance, but rather can make new neural connections and recreate a slightly new version of events in different retellings.9 People often have motivations (known or subconscious) to lie, evade, redirect, or manipulate impressions. They can think and talk metaphorically, with symbols, instead of always meaning what they literally say. Scholars suggest this occurs particularly frequently among uneducated, lower socioeconomic groups.10 I find this to be true in my study. My interviewees frequently use symbolism, myth and metaphor to describe their past.

I take my task in these cases to be showing where the myths lie, while placing them in sufficient historical context to convey why they ring true to my interviewees.

At the same time, I support voices in the oral history field arguing that we need to consider some of what people say to be valid historical evidence.11 Some information is not discoverable through any other method but should still inform historical accounts. For example,

Kolkhoz Pobeda at my Nizhnii site joined the World Bank’s farm privatization program in 1993.

Notes from the general farm assembly where workers voted to join—and thus to privatize their collective—record a unanimous vote to join by all in attendance, but don’t provide record of any

9 For example Jerry Rudy, The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2008).

10 Historian Alessandro Portelli suggests that oral histories from non-hegemonic socioeconomic groups are more linked to folk narrative traditions that intertwine history, poetry and legend more than the written genres of the more educated. Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (New York: Routledge, 1998), 65.

11 See social anthropologist Ruth Finnegan, who offers a table generalizing the types of facts we can believe when they emerge in oral histories, such as that place names tend to be accurate; people’s stated occupations are usually at least partly accurate; dates should never be trusted, etc. Ruth Finnegan, “Family Myths, Memories and Interviewing,” in Perks and Thomson,181. Portelli further suggests that oral testimonies have compensatory features that offset the fact that they are chronologically distanced from the events they recall. Stories may be told many times, discussed among community members, and the culture can perpetuate remembering certain types of stories. Portelli (2006), 37. 12 discussion. Just about everyone who discussed the privatization process with me, however, said it was a divisive decision. It was crystal clear that hard feelings lingered even in 2007, and several private farm directors and managers tried not to speak to some of their counterparts at competing farms. The official record offers no trace of this dissent or the fact that oppositional farm factions arose in 1992. An important part of the story of farm privatization would be left untold if we did not accept as evidence the testimony of some two dozen farm workers that privatization by model program was a bitter, divisive decision and process. People could have exaggerated the extent of the hard feelings, misremembered the extent of the quarrels or the content of the arguments. However, we need to accept that if so many people say there was quarreling and hard feelings—there was. I make two points about this information: 1) we should use the testimony of these people as valid evidence of what happened, and 2) historical experience has intrinsic value and needs to be considered along with documented facts and events.

But let’s take a claim completely unrelated to people’s subjective feelings, which oral histories are best suited to uncover. Also at Nizhnii site, people told me that the last kolkhoz chairman opened his own private farm after reorganization. Yet documentation of the regional

Department of Agriculture and the World Bank does not mention this, as I detail later. When I probed, my interviewees said the chairman opened his farm shortly after reorganization, but not immediately—perhaps within the year. They felt this fact belonged in my history of their kolkhoz’s privatization even though it is missing in the official record. With claims like these, I include the point in my history and note that evidence is solely anecdotal. I also try to note roughly how many people make the claim.

To verify and supplement oral histories, I use written sources including farm reports, government records from local agricultural departments housed in regional and district archives, including annual reports and administrative decisions, kolkhoz and village histories compiled by locals, official statistics from national, regional and district offices, and newspaper articles. 13

In analyzing how people understand their past, I rely on insights from theorists of collective memory and narrative studies, who stress that memories are inextricably linked to social context and oral histories reveal not mere individual perspectives, but also suggest the collective or multiple collectivities with which individuals identify.12 This approach is best suited for my study since my interviewees so clearly and consistently speak for a collective, telling common stories, often about collective suffering. As a rule, uneducated farm workers in my study express perspectives very different from my urban interviewees’, and from the very economically privileged in the countryside. I explore these distinctions and show how my oral histories reflect growing inequalities in the countryside.

I also investigate the identity claims that people make, sometimes implicitly. People identify with particular social groups (sometimes multiple or overlapping)—especially with the

“simple people,” assumed but never explicitly stated to be the innocent, morally superior characters in the story of post-Soviet privatizations. This is never more evident than when people try to claim identities that are a stretch for them, such as when a rural mayor tries to assert his alliance with the simple people, and is mocked by everyone in the room after he leaves (as I describe later). In this way, my research both reflects the perspectives of different socioeconomic groups, and shows how people construe collective identities through the act of narration—

12 For example, see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). In Susan Crane’s wording, interpreting and extending Halbwachs’ conclusions, “lived experience and collective memory ‘interpenetrate’ each other…” Susan Crane, “Writing the individual back into collective memory,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (Dec. 1997), 1377. Here she writes about autobiographies but I believe the point applies to oral testimonies as well. Staughton Lynd suggests that oral histories of poor people necessarily have a group as their subject, since poor people tend to see their lives as inseparable from family, friends, location and collective context. Staughton Lynd, “Oral history from below,” The Oral History Review 21, no. 1 (Spring 1993), 1-8. Alon Confino specifically suggests approaching memory as related to collective mentalities and situating memories in relation to each other and society writ large. Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (Dec. 1997), 1390.

14 identities that are sometimes fictive or a reach.13 I suggest that my interviewees’ historical narratives help them imaginatively recreate a collective solidarity that has been lost or damaged.

Soviet nostalgia figures prominently in their life stories. I argue their nostalgia works to the same end, helping them recreate in speech and emotion the lost “togetherness” of the golden 1970s, even as it functions as a critique of 1990s reforms. Since it recurs so frequently, I address their nostalgia in several places in the dissertation.

Thus while I began investigating what villagers thought and felt about farm privatization,

I ended with material showing how people actively construct their memories and why they choose certain narratives.14 Oral history lets us uncover and in historian Michael Frisch’s words,

“evaluat[e] the nature of the process of historical memory—how people make sense of their past, how they connect individual experience and its social context, how the past becomes part of the

13 Here I accept narrative studies insights from Michel Foucault and other scholars that human discourse is not necessarily reflective, but productive and that what people say about their past helps constitute their present (and future). As scholars like Joan Scott explain, quantities like experience and identity are constructed through words, in discourse, and experience is always mediated and expressed through available language and cultural signifiers. See for example Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22-40. As Bal, Crewe and Spitzer explore, acts of recall have performative elements and functions. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,1999). From post-Soviet studies, Zavisca adds that choosing historical narratives is itself a way to align with certain social groups. Jane Zavisca, “Contesting Capitalism at the Post-Soviet Dacha: The Meaning of Food Cultivation for Urban Russians,” Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003), 786-810.

14 As Pierre Nora emphasizes, memory is an active or “perpetually actual phenomenon…” Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), transl. Marc Roudebush, 8. Again, remembering is not just a personal process, but is influenced by people’s social context, culture, and language, as scholars like oral historian Alistair Thomson suggest. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also, for example, M. Roper, “Re-remembering the soldier heroes: the psychic and social construction of memory in personal narratives of the Great War,” in History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): 181-204, M. Andrews, S. D. Sclater, C. Squire and A. Treacher, eds. The Uses of Narrative: Explorations in Sociology, Psychology and Cultural Studies (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004). I further utilize the insight of theorists of history, memory, trauma, experiences of the self and collective identity, that Susan Brisons sums up as, “…this view of the self as narrative, modified to account for relational aspects of the self, is the one I invoke here in discussing the undoing of the self by trauma and its remaking through acts of memory.” Susan Brison, “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” in Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer (1999), 41.

15 present, and how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them.”15 In this way the supposed unreliability of memory can actually let us see how people’s senses of history relate to their present circumstances, how they perform their sense of personal and social identity through historical narrations, as well as how individual memory interacts with group identification. My oral histories reveal some of the constituent elements of which memory is crafted and sometimes reshaped, and I note this in the dissertation where possible.

Interviewer-Interviewee Dynamics

A peculiarity of working with oral histories is that conversation is shaped by the personal dynamics between interviewer and interviewee. In the former Soviet Union, this is further complicated by people’s special wariness of talking to outsiders based on Soviet propaganda and the legacy of the Cold War; the influence of official Soviet histories on their stories; and the fact that privatization remains a politically sensitive topic in Russia.

I tried to mitigate these issues by staying months at each site and developing personal relationships with—or at least becoming something of a known factor to—my interviewees, and in this way gaining some trust and credibility. People were always quite curious about my life and life in the U.S. in general, and I tried to answer all their questions as best I could and as openly as I felt comfortable doing. Telling them about myself helped their willingness to tell me about themselves. Once in a while I sensed a particular moment or shift in an interview when people were satisfied they had a handle on me. For example, at Krasnodar site I obtained the interview with the former Soviet sovkhoz director only with great difficulty. He remained bitter about sovkhoz closure and the politics of the 1990s and found the topics offensive, several acquaintances told me. He refused an interview several times and only relented after his son got

15 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 188. 16 to know me and interceded on my behalf. As we sat on benches in the courtyard of his son’s home at dusk, the former director and other family members grilled me for over an hour about

America, our educational system, my career plans and my life. The director set the tone and the atmosphere was tense. The family finally seemed to relax a little on hearing that I was the youngest child of a large family. “So everyone loves you and you do what you want,” the director’s adult daughter, a teacher who had studied some psychology, remarked, satisfied that she’d figured me out. I said something like, “I guess so,” and that’s when the tension lifted. The director leaned back into a looser posture and his son suggested I start asking questions about farm history.16

Not everyone coded me so benignly. Some identified me as belonging to the same group as the international consultants who advised on Russia’s economic “transition.” I could never be positive exactly who people meant when they said “yours” or “your people,” but this typically meant the Americans who came to work on farm privatization or advised the reformist government in the ‘90s. These associations were overwhelmingly negative. People rarely said

“your people” without disparaging. However the negativity never seemed personally directed at me, and people were quite happy to sit and have me record them criticizing the ‘90s reforms.

In other instances, I seemed to stand in for some (global) educated, intelligentsia class.

By terms of the implied hierarchy, my interviewees could claim that since they were uneducated, they didn’t know anything and had nothing to say about history. This could reflect cultural assumptions about what knowledge is and who rightfully “has” it. But it could also simply be a way to avoid discussing sensitive topics. One retired couple complained about the oligarchs,

Roman Abramovich in particular, at length. But when I asked how their farm came to be a private enterprise, they said they are stupid, uneducated people who don’t know anything.17 This

16 Interview in Krasnodar site, 7/15/08.

17 Nikolai and Tatiana, interview in their home, Riazan’ site, 2/16/08. 17 protestation recurred a number of times in my study, though often people stayed in conversation despite their protestations of ignorance and told me interesting things.

The specter of the Cold War appeared when people half-joked about my being an

“agent.” This happened frequently when people first met me. Presumably they worried about my being a spy for the U.S., but since people generally distrusted both authorities and outsiders, the idea of being an “agent” seemed to have a special resonance of its own, independent from what entity I was imagined to represent. Some may have been afraid I was employed by their own government. (Never having met an American before, many people could not accurately identify or guess where I was from. I felt that if I kept completely silent I could “pass” for Russian at times, since people in villages and even in regional and district cities did not expect to encounter a foreigner. Once I opened my mouth and spoke with an accent it was a different story. One lady still hazarded a guess that I was from Moscow; others suggested from the Ukraine or the Baltic

States.) Yet times had changed; so these were uncomfortable jokes, or at times, exclamations about how strange it was that an American could now wander around a Russian village without a retinue of KGB trailing me. In Krasnodar, I was mailing back-up data home at a post office one day when the elderly man next in line said curiously, watching me address the CDs and papers,

“not spy material?” “Only spy material,” I replied cheerfully, to which he responded, “ha!

Everyone knows agents don’t make anything anymore.” One set of quite successful private farmer partners I visited for a day in Krasnodar region seemed quite serious about the question of whether I was an agent. “Of course, I’m an agent,” I tried to joke, “but…what would an agent be looking for here?” “Our trade secrets,” one of them remarked soberly. In that instance their wariness did seem to color the interaction. They fed me lunch, gave me a tour of the farm and let me speak to a few workers while they were in the room, and then happily deposited me back at the bus station. I couldn’t be sure how or what people considered me, but I chose my three main research sites partly on the basis of where people seemed most receptive, hospitable, and where I had some certainty that villagers would talk to me. 18 At a couple of my sites, villagers were already experienced in giving interviews to scientific researchers and thus were accordingly more approachable. In my Nizhnii site, many people remembered hearing about, if not talking to, Liesl Gambold Miller, the anthropologist who works at one of the farms there, as well as another American graduate student who appeared onsite in the decade before I arrived. In my Krasnodar site, many villagers knew about or had worked with several Russian anthropologists who researched a few different topics in the area. In

Riazan’, however, I was the first academic researcher who worked in my research villages (not counting a college student from the village who wrote a paper about the farm; another who did a few oral histories and wrote a paper about village history; and the rural librarian who collected photographs and interviewed elderly residents, compiling several pamphlets on local history and war heroes). At this location, I first arrived in 2006 with a student who came from the village, and when I returned two years later the farm director took me in to her home and helped facilitate my research. If they didn’t know me well, people at least felt that they’d known me for several years and watched my progress with my academic studies as well as my Russian language skills.

Simply showing up repeatedly, and over the course of a few years, seemed to help my credibility and research access.

Chapter Map

Chapters One and Two, “Thank You, Comrade Brezhnev, For Our Normal Lives,” and

“Many Perestroikas,” look at late socialist history from the perspective of my interviewees.

There are huge gaps in historiography on the Brezhnev period and perestroika years. No synthetic, comprehensive history of the Brezhnev years even exists. My study argues for retiring the “stagnation” view of this era, once we consider social history in the countryside. Even the classic dates we set for Soviet history, such as Gorbachev’s speech introducing perestroika in

1986, don’t necessarily reflect the majority of people’s experiences. 1986 was just not an important date for the countryside, as Chapter Two explores. 19 Chapter Three, “Utopian Transitology,” explains the Russian state and World Bank plans for farm privatization, using archival evidence and my firsthand interviews to offer the theories and mechanisms of transformation attempted. I build on other scholars’ critiques to discuss the utopianism of some of the capitalist reformers, blinded by their faith in private property as well their privilege which let them ignore the social cost to millions of Russians. Chapter Four,

“Privatization Processes at My Farm Sites,” details how my farm sites actually privatized, and what challenges and trials villagers endured in the 1990s. This chapter emphasizes the struggles that my interviewees shared during the decade.

Chapter Five, “Perspectives on Privatization,” analyzes the patterns people use when they talk about farm privatization, unpacking how their historical memories are shaped, what purposes they can serve and what social implications they bear. It exposes some of what influences their perspectives besides their own experiences, looking at how they shape their memories and articulate identity claims.

Chapter Six, “Women at the Top,” addresses broad social changes in the countryside and how people are re-evaluating their Soviet past through the prism of looking at how interviewees talk about gender roles. I also find that women became farm directors in the1990s in record historical numbers, which has been ignored by scholarly literature thus far.

20 Chapter One: Thank You, Comrade Brezhnev, For Our Normal Lives?

Introduction.

In the mid 1980s, General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev depicted the Brezhnev years as the time of “stagnation” of Soviet society. Reformers painted the era “as a time of waste and decay” in part to justify their ideas for radical changes to the system during perestroika. This assessment of the Brezhnev years became dominant in Western accounts as well.1 Observers saw an aging gerontocracy with frail bodies leading a confederation in declining economic health.2 Political and cultural life seemed to have fossilized, while the second economy flourished. Cynicism, disillusionment and pessimism reigned. Scholars frequently used the word

“gray” to describe the tenor of the times.3 Urban elites began to resent the regime and long for escape to more congenial places, while the bulk of Soviet citizenry became increasingly pessimistic about their standard of living and opportunities for the future.4

The second economy filled in goods and services the government couldn’t consistently provide. People relied increasingly on their friends and family to obtain what they needed—or influence the right person who could help. The rate of economic growth slowed as government poured more and more money into defense and the faltering agricultural sector. For example,

1 For many scholars the stagnation view was a retrospective vision of late Soviet society and economy, informed both by Gorbachev’s statements and the Soviet collapse in 1991. For example see Hillel Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), Manuel Castells, End of Millenium (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), Peter Rutland, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The role of local party organs in economic management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Alexander Dallin, “The Causes of the Soviet Collapse,” in The Soviet System; From Crisis to Collapse, ed. Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 673-695.

2 Gorbachev advisor and economist Abel Aganbegyan asserted that the Soviet economy had been declining since 1967. Abel Aganbegyan, “New Directions in Soviet Economics,” New Left Review I, 169 (May-June 1998), 89-96.

3 For example, Millar writes of the “gray, conservative pallor [that] overspread the regime,” in James Millar, “The Little Deal: Brezhnev's Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism,” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (Winter 1985), 697.

4 Bushnell, John, "The New Soviet Man Turns Pessimist," Survey 24, no. 2 (Spring 1979) 24, 1-18. 21 economist Alec Nove notes that Brezhnev allocated an investment of 71 billion rubles into agriculture from 1966 to 1970, more than double the 34.2 billion invested between 1961 and

1965. While the full amount did not make it to farms, total investment in agriculture still more than doubled just from 1960 to 1968.5 By the mid-1970s, about 25% of all new investment into the Soviet economy was devoted to agriculture, but production was not significantly improving.6

Yet the long 1970s, or the Brezhnev years from 1964-1982, was also the era in which citizens benefited most from the social guarantees the Soviets provided, as a few scholars noted.7

In comparative terms, the 1970s were much more secure, prosperous and comfortable than the decades before and after. At collective farms, this was the period when being a kolkhoznik provided the most material and social benefit of the 20th century. Scholars describe how the state made deliberate attempts to raise standards of living, effectively coming to a new social bargain with the urban working class as well as agricultural laborers during this period.8 Agriculture and rural life enjoyed special attention and an unusually high level of state funding. This generation of villagers could even be considered the economic “winners” of the socialist system, a few

5Alec Nove, “Soviet Agriculture Under Brezhnev,” Slavic Review 29, no. 3 (September 1970 ), 388, 403, and 408. He also explains that the state raised the prices it paid to farms for agricultural products during the Brezhnev period, while keeping the retail cost of food to urban consumers the same, proportionally paying increasingly more from the government’s budget. He also explains the limitations of the Brezhnev- Kosygin reforms of 1965, which aimed to make enterprises including farms more self-sufficient, but had little effect. On these themes also see also David Carey, “Soviet Agriculture: Recent Performance and Future Plans,” in Soviet Economy in a New Perspective, ed. John Hardt (Washington, D.C.: Joint Economic Committee, 1976), 575-599, James Millar, “The Prospects for Soviet Agriculture,” Problems of Communism 26, no. 3 (May-June 1977), 1-16, Alfred Evans, “Interrepublic Inequality in Agricultural Development in the USSR,” Slavic Review 40, no. 4 (Winter 1981), 570-584.

6 Judith Pallot, ““The Countryside Under Gorbachev,” in The Soviet Union: A New Regional Geography? ed. Michael Bradshaw (London: Bellhaven Press, 1991), 88.

7See Ian Thatcher, “Brezhnev as Leader,” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, ed. Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (London: Palgrave, 2002), 29.

8 For example, see Michael Kochin, “Decollectivization of Agriculture and the Planned Economy,” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (August 1996), 736 on how the regime worked to gain legitimacy among villagers with guaranteed wages and “subsidized inefficiencies.” 22 scholars asserted.9 As economist Mark Harrison writes, “agriculture was no longer exploited to foster industrialization; on the contrary, it became a net recipient of government subsidies paid for by the rest of the economy.”10 While modern states tend to exhibit “urban bias,” devoting resources to cities at the expense of the rural population, in central Russia this trend was briefly reversed in the 1970s.11 “For the first time,” writes anthropologist Chris Hann, “state resources flowed systematically into… [the agrarian] sector rather than out of it.”12 Far from the stagnation usually associated with Brezhnev’s reign, this was when life at collective farms seemed to work best.

The countryside was starting to catch up to cities. As political scientist Alfred Evans writes (in 1981), “the intensification of agricultural development in the Soviet Union in recent years has contributed to a reduction of inequality between some broad social classes (industrial workers and farmers) and residential groups (urban and rural inhabitants).”13 The rural population and working class accordingly became the main support constituency of the Soviet regime, while the intelligentsia and growing professionalized or middle classes were becoming disenchanted.14 As political scientist Donna Bahry writes, “evidence from the Brezhnev era

9For more on peasants as the main beneficiaries of the socialist revolution (at least by the 1970s), see Jerzy Tepicht, “A Project for Research on the Peasant Revolution of Our Time,” Journal of Peasant Studies 2, no. 3 (1975), 257-269.

10Mark Harrison, “Economic Growth and Slowdown,” in Bacon and Sandle (2002), 47.

11The urban bias theory and term was propounded by Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: a Study of Urban Bias in World Development (London: Temple Smith, 1977).

12Chris Hann, “Introduction: Decollectivisation and the Moral Economy,” in The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition, ed. Chris Hann (New Brunswick: Lit Verlag, 2003), 11. The author doesn’t mention Brezhnev years specifically here but discusses the phenomenon by which after initial collectivization, later generations of peasants began to actually benefit from their relations with the socialist state.

13 Evans (1981), 584.

14 See Martin Walker, The Waking Giant: Gorbachev’s Russia (New York: Pantheon Books,1986); Michael Hamm, The City in Soviet History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,1976); Chauncy Harris, “Urbanization and Population Growth in the Soviet Union, 1959-1970,” Geographical Review 61, no. 1 (January 1971), 102-124; Henry Morton and Robert Stuart, eds., The Contemporary Soviet City (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1984); James Millar, ed. Politics, Work and Daily Life in the U.S.S.R.: A 23 suggested that the least privileged felt the most satisfied with their lives and the most wedded to

Soviet values; people with higher status and more material benefits ranked among the most discontented.”15

For my interviewees, this was the golden era. People used comparative and nostalgic terms to describe farm life at the time. This chapter explains the features of the ‘70s that inspired this nostalgia as well as how people mythologized the farms in memory. It explores the social dynamics and what can be called the “emotional economy” of late socialism.

I. What Seemed So Great About the 1970s?

Historical Comparisons

Part of what made the 1970s seem so golden to my interviewees was the memory of hardships they or their families had faced earlier. People spoke extensively about the historical traumas the rural population endured. They spontaneously began describing collectivization, de- kulakization, the Great Fatherland War and the deprivations of the post-war period. My interviewees often wanted to talk about collectivization and de-kulakization even when I posed no direct question on the subject. While I always broached pre-Soviet history and asked whether people could tell me about the origins of their kolkhoz, I didn’t ask about the process of collectivization per se.16 But the subject was so emotionally laden for people that they wanted to speak about it. At the same time, the horrors of collectivization and the war were thoroughly safe topics for people to discuss with me (and had been safe topics ever since Gorbachev encouraged

Survey of Former Soviet Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); also Valerie Bunce, “Neither Equality nor Efficiency: International and Domestic Inequalities in the Soviet Bloc,” in Communism and the Politics of Inequalities, ed. Daniel Nelson (Lexington: Heath,1983), 5-34; on the expanding education, urbanization, and professionalization of Soviet citizens at the time, creating the makings of a Soviet middle class.

15 Donna Bahry, “Society transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika,” Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (1993), 517.

16 Prepared questions on my interview guide read: “Could you tell me a little about the former kolkhoz in your area? When was it founded? Was it a strong kolkhoz? What were its specialties? What were the main events in its history?” 24 open discussion of at least some aspects of Stalinist victimization). They bore none of the remaining political sensitivities that talking about farm privatization still carried with it. These were appropriate subjects about which to express strong feelings and people could be fairly open about this more remote past.

The collective farms were created through the brutal theft of ordinary people’s resources.

The first decade of collective farm life was the high Stalinism of the 1930s, with its deliberately engineered famines, burdensome tax regime on the rural population, and peasants forced to work at farms without pay (they worked for trudodni, some small amount of natural produce in lieu of wages).17 People wanted to talk about what had been taken from their families during collectivization—and who was victimized. Children of kulaks and seredniaks reported their designation as rich or middle peasants and the ensuing persecution with indignation. Boris, an eighty five year old former kolkhoz electrician and carpenter, remembered:

…the time when my grandpa had a house, not far from here, we were still all very small. He had a small business; they were manufacturing things at home. They were washing valenki [wool boots], and people came to dispossess them. They dispossessed them for that, but my father and grandfather managed to escape…They went to the village of N---, otherwise they would take them [they’d be arrested]. People came; they tore apart their house and took the left over wood away to S---. They were after them for the fact that they were working hard day and night washing these boots.18

At times, someone would mention individuals who had been de-kulakized on their street or in their family. A few people discussed who was responsible for local de-kulakization: often,

17See for example Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1986); Viktor Danilov and others, eds., The Tragedy of the Russian Village: Collectivization and Dekulakization. Documents and Materials, in 5 volumes, 1927-1939 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999); Robert Davies, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia I: The Socialist Offensive; The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929—1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Soviet Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (New York: Norton, 1975); James Millar, Two Views on Soviet Collectivization of Agriculture (Washington, DC: Wilson Center, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1981); D’ann Penner, Famine: 1932-1933 in the Soviet Countryside, translation of the Russian title; On the materials of the Volga Region, the Don and the Kuban with Viktor Kondrashin. (Samara: Samara University Press, 2002); Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Stephen Wheatcroft and others, eds., The Years of Hunger, Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933 (New York: Palgrave, 2004) on collectivization, famines and Stalinism in the countryside.

18Boris, on bench outside his home, Nizhnii, 10/9/07. 25 village good-for-nothings and layabouts, “who never worked a day in their lives,” eighty-four year old Anna said heatedly. “That’s who were employed to take everything from the hardworking peasants who’d built something for themselves.”19 The trauma of the initial events as well as the deep social resentments they reinforced and engendered lingered in village memory.

Some older interviewees might remember both collectivization and working under duress, without pay during the first decades at farms. Denied internal passports for much longer than the urban population, villagers could not legally move or even travel elsewhere. “…We had individual farms. And then everybody was made to enter the kolkhoz by force. …We would do whatever they told us to do,” Boris related. “When we finished one type of work they would send us to do something else, there was plenty of work, all kinds of work, and we did them all… They wouldn’t let us go anywhere. They wouldn’t let us [go] to the city. We would do what they told us to do… If you wanted to get a job in the city they wouldn’t let you go. We had no passports…We worked day and night, that’s what happened here.”20 Many people also talked about the excruciating levels of taxes they were required to pay, in the form of natural produce given to the state, even if they were left hungry themselves.21

World War II, which began during the second decade of collective farm existence, also frequently came up in conversation. Men were called away and women and children struggled to keep everyone fed, homesteads tended and the farms running. As documented by historians and confirmed by first-person accounts, the post-war years were the hardest for the countryside.22

“After the war, there was hunger; we were hungry, “ said Tatiana, now in her 80s. “During the

19Anna, in her home, Nizhnii, 10/8/08.

20Boris, Nizhnii, 10/9/07.

21For example, Matvei¸a 77 year old interviewee at his home, Nizhnii, 10/19/07.

22For description of the post-war period in the countryside, see Liubov Denisova’s Sud’ba Russkoi Krest’ianki v XX Veke (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007). 26 war it wasn’t so bad, we didn’t see Germans here, it wasn’t terrible…after the war we were hungry. We mixed some additives into the bread…”23

People discussed hardships and how they managed to get by, often with awe and pride about what they had faced. Mikhail, a seventy-six-year old former tractor operator whose brother worked in an urban factory in the provincial capital during the war, talked about how his brother would steal some dried potatoes in gloves or an apron to bring to the family and their mother would make blini. People who had a cow fared well enough, but neighbors without a cow

“swelled up” from hunger and malnutrition during those years.24 Others talked about how they made food stretch by adding wood shavings to gruel, or how as small children they had to help their mothers work at the farm and handle home chores while fathers were absent.

Rebuilding after the war took time. “We had to revive everything,” said Matvei, a 77- year-old former brigadier, “it was really hard for us. There were government loans. Everything that we earned we gave over to the government. We had to revive the people’s farming. This took five to seven years [other accounts suggest it took much longer]. After the 1950s it got a little easier, prices fell, they started to pay wages, and bread appeared in stores….Then there was

Khrushchev-kukuruznik [roughly: the corn guy; said in a tone suggesting, that crazy corn guy].”25

Interviewees didn’t tend to refer to Khrushchev unless I asked. My research sites were not special corn-cultivation areas. People talked about collective farm amalgamation during

Khrushchev’s era. Many recalled their dissatisfaction with having to combine their local kolkhoz with another. This was particularly contentious at the Nizhnii site. But people didn’t tend to pick out the 1960s as a very discrete era. Things slowly improved after the war, and most interviewees dated the “good years” roughly to the Brezhnev period, emphasizing particular years in the 1970s when conditions seemed at their best.

23Nikolai and Tatiana, in their home, Riazan’, 3/12/08.

24Mikhail and Svetlana, in their home, Riazan’, 4/18/08.

25Matvei, in his home, 10/19/07, Nizhnii. 27

Farm Stability and Material Security

Farms seemed secure in this period, and people remembered farm management being very stable and predictable. At the farm in Riazan’, the most fondly remembered chairman lasted seventeen years, until a rapid turnover of leaders began in the mid 1980s. Several did not last a year.26 In Nizhnii, one chairman led from 1968 until the early 1980s.27 In Krasnodar site, one sovkhoz director managed for about fifteen years, before he was replaced during perestroika.28

People held their leaders very responsible for the fate of their farms during perestroika and through privatization. When they looked back at their past, the staying power of Brezhnevian farm chairmen symbolized the lost stability of the period. If this was stagnation, it seemed truly beneficial to my interviewees.29 People remembered their leaders’ faults, but also tended to credit one or two with making farms run well during the era of stability. As Artum, a milk truck driver in his late fifties put it, “I think we had more order in the past. People were more responsible. Milkmaids paid more attention to their work. The chairmen were old people, very experienced; they knew everything and they took care of working people. Now they don’t care.”30 People continued to hold leaders very responsible for the fate of their farms in the

2000s—and contrasted current leaders unfavorably with Brezhnev-era chairmen. No one could

26This was confirmed by several interviewees, including Lena, Riazan’, 2/13/08 and Maria, in her office, Riazan’, 3/12/08. Chairmen were appointed by the local Party committee, in consultation with local administration—though a formal, “popular” vote was also held at farms.

27 From list written for me by secretary of rural administration; the exact date the chairman ended his term is not included, though there were three more chairmen after his tenure, until the farm privatized in 1993 (one of whom I was told led for just one and a half years.) List given to me in administration office, Nizhnii, 11/26/07.

28Several interviewees, including five relatives agreeing together in a joint interview, in Inna’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

29 See also Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press,1991), on the phenomenon of people benefiting from stagnation, 166.

30 Phone conversation with Artum from Nizhnii (while I was in Riazan’), 4/19/08. 28 match the staying power of those leaders, and people associated leadership stability with farm and work stability in general.

The farms weren’t truly profitable at the time, as will be discussed shortly, but many of my interviewees remembered their farms being quite prosperous. Lena and Ira, two retired milkmaids in their seventies, together described their farm as very well-to-do. Discussing farm leadership from the 1960s to 1970s, Lena remarked, “the kolkhoz was more or less wealthy

(bogatii).” Ira agreed, “[it was] wealthy.” “There was [good] discipline,” Lena continued. “Yes, discipline, and everything was organized well…” said Ira. “There were a lot of workers,” continued Lena, “and even a pipe line for milk.” “They paid wages twice every month and the pay wasn’t bad,” recalled Ira…31

The seeming farm prosperity reassured workers and seemed to translate to household comfort—if not actual prosperity. Sonia, a retired livestock specialist in her 80s, recounted how well the farm was doing, due in no small part to the talents of the long-standing chairman, which led straight into a story about good household conditions:

The chairman of the kolkhoz was a very gifted man then…He died—probably 6 years ago. He knew how to make a kopek. He was thrifty. They got big profits from flax, and there was the poultry house, and they raised geese in the summer…they developed sheep breeding here. They grew vegetables, they had their own greenhouses, they grew tomatoes…they grew cabbage, in the meadows where the river sometimes overflows. After the flood it’s a good place to plant— and there was cabbage there…

Sonia’s forty-six-year-old daughter Anna, visiting from the city where she worked as an engineer, chimed in:

And…in ‘75, our father already bought a Zhiguli. It was a very good car. None of us drove except me…and since ’76 or ‘77 I have had a license to drive a car. And I drove it. I want to say that this shows the quality of life in those years. It was such that you could buy a car. True, this was by purchase order. At the time there weren’t free sales. But a kolkhoznik could get a referral to priority place in the line at that time. There was this favorable condition.

Their neighbor, my host Olga, who brought me to Sonia and Anna’s and stayed a few minutes chatting, explained, “The chairman submitted an application to the regional capital, and they sent

31 Lena and Ira, in Lena’s home, Riazan’, 2/13/08. 29 the cars] out from there. We also got our own car, a Moskvich, in this way.”32 A number of my interviewees managed to buy cars in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Kolkhoznik Purchasing Power

Along with the access they found even to theoretically restricted items, many people also talked about the high purchasing power their wages gave them at the time. They remembered building or buying homes in the village, and easily saving for a few months to buy big ticket items. Though they didn’t earn much, they were satisfied that they could buy what they needed and wanted. They knew they could improve their material conditions over time through working and saving—as well as a good relationship with their chairman or other personal connections

(blat), so integral to Soviet life they often went without saying. Marina, a 53-year-old fieldworker living in Krasnodar site (the far south of Russia), said that her family even found a way to buy a pair of nylons from Moscow during the 1970s. It was difficult but possible. “You could get whatever you really wanted,” Marina commented.33

Marina might have simply harbored low expectations. People couldn’t find absolutely everything or anything they desired. Consumer goods were quite scarce. As Galia, a fifty-three year old field worker told me, “We didn’t have anything here. Everything we got—we got by blat. We had to go through someone who had blat. There were no sausages, no creamy butter…in strawberry season we went to the Ukraine by train. Our neighbor went and brought me strawberries, traveling with around three hundred trays. They brought us sausage, butter, candy, we gave them money and that’s all. It was like that every year. Also we didn’t have things for children. Here in 1979 we didn’t have sleepers for toddlers; no tights; no detergent; in general we didn’t have bed linens; we didn’t have anything at that time. Everything we did find

32 Sonia, Anna and Olga, in Sonia’s home, Nizhnii, 10/8/07.

33 Marina, in her home, Krasnodar, 8/2/08. 30 was through someone—through the Ukraine or Moscow.”34 Even with the second economy people couldn’t meet all their consumer desires. Yet at least they felt they could afford the items that were for sale in the Soviet Union.

Aleksandr, former sovkhoz technician and current businessman in his late forties, described how at that time, people could save for two months and buy a fridge—for just 100 rubles.35 My frequent host at Nizhnii site Olga, a forty-nine-year-old woman who kept warehouse keys to the farm and seemed to have a variety of odd jobs at the establishment, did not want to participate in a formal or recorded interview. But she told me a lot about local history while walking around the premises or cooking at home. “Back then,” she said with satisfaction while showing me the house where her parents once lived, “we got married, bought our house and rebuilt it to our liking within the year. That’s what you could do then.”36 “Our family had a modern toilet in the early 1980s,” Liudmila, an accountant in her forties reminisced effusively,

“everyone in the whole village would come by to use it!”37

As the existence of one lone modern toilet in the village might suggest, these were clearly not high material standards for Westerners or even Soviet city dwellers of the 1970s. While the

Moscow exhibition of 1959 featuring an American model kitchen may have prompted unfavorable comparisons on the part of Soviet viewers to their own—if they believed it to be real—villagers even in retrospect reported high satisfaction with what they had during the

Brezhnev era. If Moscow residents were thinking about what the insides of American kitchens looked like, villagers in central Russia had no way of doing so. A middle class may have been emerging in cities, but was not apparent in the countryside. Images of the nomenklatura feasting on caviar at Yalta resorts inform Western popular ideas about late socialism. But in the village,

34 Galia, in her home, Krasnodar, 8/2/08.

35 Aleksandr, driving from city to village, Riazan’, 3/11/08.

36 Olga, walking around village, Nizhnii, 10/30/07.

37 Liudmila, farm office, Riazan’, 4/18/08. 31 everyone lived in very similar circumstances. Everyone knew what workers earned at farms, including chairmen, and the differences were small. Sonia, a middle-aged local now working in a nearby town, thought chairmen had made seven times as much as the lowliest fieldworker, and felt this was an acceptable ratio—much more acceptable, surely, than the staggering salary differentials of the 2000s.38 While nationally, urban residents began building dachas in villages in the 70s and 80s, at my research sites dacha-building didn’t boom until the 90s or even 2000s.39

The sharp contrasts between fully modernized, beautiful dachas with indoor plumbing and gas standing next to traditional peasant houses with no amenities and goats in the courtyard, common sights in the 2000s, didn’t exist in the 1970s.

Instead, villagers enjoyed a rough social equality. People couldn’t look next door and covet what Ivan Ivanovich had on display. As political scientists Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle write, “The material benefits of the Brezhnev years may have been meager…but at least, from the point of view of many Russians and particularly the older generation, they were available more reliably, and on a more egalitarian basis.”40 People appreciated that their standard of living was rising, and the lack of visible contrasts in wealth certainly contributed to their satisfaction—and their retrospective vision of a simpler and better time.

Economic Incentives

People not only found access and purchasing power, but also felt they had good opportunities, including incentives to work extra and make more money. Igor, a middle-aged mechanical engineer specializing in agriculture, remembered being contracted as part of a team in the summer of 1972 to help make hay. Ordinarily he and his peers made up to 200 rubles a

38Anna and Sonia, Nizhnii, 10/8/07.

39For example, locals authorities in Riazan’ site first considered people who built summer vacation homes there numerous enough to count in their po-khoziaistvenni knigi titled “Dachniki” of 2002-5, Shilovo Municipal Archive, 141:3:47 and 49.

40Bacon and Sandle (2003), 205. 32 month, but during the harvest he said they could earn 1000 rubles. Outside teams or individuals moonlighting with extra responsibilities at their own farm, “if they worked well, could earn a lot,”

Igor said. “Sometimes one person could earn five times more than another…Incentives were everywhere. Personal interest in work existed,” he took pains to emphasize. “And the money was good. You could even live well on 200 rubles [a month] anyway.”41 People hired unofficially or quasi-officially to perform extra work around the farm were called shabashniki and they could often negotiate their own moonlighting rates. Igor described how sovkhozi found it difficult to pay unofficial moonlighters, but it was simple for kolkhozi and he had done a lot of this type of work in his time.42 Much depended on personal relationships with the kolkhoz chairman, who might hire even urban factory workers or mechanics for construction or other short-term projects. There was a delicate line between official and unofficial activity, Igor explained. Sometimes a factory chief would send workers to farms officially, say for a two-week project—but the extra pay the farm gave the team, for working efficiently and well, might be under the table. In this way factories became farm patrons, supplying them with temporary work brigades. Igor thought the shabashniki were numerous enough to constitute a social stratum in themselves: strong men who could do work and were paid more, accordingly. Kolkhozniki could also organize such “brigades” or work teams to work in neighboring farms. There could be tension between people’s official and unofficial (or quasi-official) jobs, and people might work less hard during their regular shifts knowing the farm would have to pay them more to work

“extra.” At any rate, interviewees like Igor made clear that people were offered various types of economic incentives during the 1970s at farms. Many people seconded his claim that people who were interested and industrious could find a way to earn extra during the period.

41 Igor, at his home, village in Nizhnii province (not main research site), 8/15/06 (during preliminary dissertation research).

42 This was actually the only difference between sovkhozi and kolkhozi during the period that anyone described to me. 33 Aside from contract work, people also sold home-produced crops and goods, such as vegetables grown in kitchen gardens, mushrooms foraged in forests, or homemade vodkas or sometimes wines. Private plot production was enthusiastically supported by Brezhnev due to concerns over food production.43 The need was sufficiently great that the 1977 Constitution included a clause explicitly stating the need for state and collective farms to assist with villagers’ cultivation of home plots, and people were encouraged to farm on their private plots and sell produce.44 At times their economic activities straddled or crossed the line between legal and black market initiatives. Eighty-five-year-old Jelina, who had worked for years in kolkhoz fields, described the Brezhnev years with satisfaction, both in terms of the goods people could buy and the expanded opportunities kolkhozniks found to market the crops they grew in their home plots.

When I asked what Brezhnev years were like at her farm, she responded “after the war, goods started to appear in stores. We sold products in Moscow, at Danilovskii farmer’s market: greens, pig meat, potatoes, bull or cow meat. We had to pay a tax on each sack of produce we sold.

They were fifty kg bags—but we sewed an extra compartment and filled the bags to eighty kg when we sold the potatoes.”45

People also worked extra to fulfill and sometimes to over-fulfill central production quotas if they could. Fulfilling the norms would become a family affair, as my interviewees described.

Children would go out to the fields to help parents and relatives would stand in for each other, helping pick strawberries or weed vegetable patches after their work day finished. At her farm,

Inna reported how children were enlisted to pick apples in the summer, working into the night in

43 See Wadekin on the historical ambivalence with which Soviets related to the private plot earlier. Karl Eugen-Wadekin, The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture, Second edition, ed. George Karcz, transl. Keith Bush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

44 Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and private life of the Soviet people: changing values in post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press,1989), 161. See also Wadekin (1973) on the “private” farming sector, who explains that collective farms produced most grain and industrial crops, while farm workers produced most of Russia’s fruits and vegetables and some meat and dairy working on their home plots.

45 Jelina, in her home, Riazan’, 8/23/06 (during preliminary dissertation research). 34 the fields.46 If people couldn’t meet quotas their pay was docked. But if they over-fulfilled their quota they’d get extra products, including sugar, butter or grain at the end of the year. They were given awards and plaques for their hard work, which people took genuine pride in showing me, and they also received coupons for household goods—even to buy cars. One family in Krasnodar who all worked together to exceed quotas bought a Moskvich straight from the factory at the beginning of the 1980s.47 “It was interesting then,” said Olga, who became a private farmer in the 1990s, “we had a goal and there was incentive.”48

Vladimir, a rural school teacher, commented sarcastically, “the ‘80s were the times when it was really prospering. It was the golden age of Brezhnev—the time of stagnation. When the most important thing was not what you have done, but the way you have reported it. The most important thing everywhere and for everybody was to report on time and well. I felt this in my own skin.”49 Similarly, Igor said that his kolkhoz, required to sell the state a large quantity of meat per year, allowed families to use farm pastures for their own cows. Families sold their animals to the farm and the farm would then sell to the state.50 Farms and individuals tried to meet norms by any means and submit the right reports. Vladimir’s perspective seemed to encompass or even reconcile the two typically opposite views on the period: it was both stagnation and the golden era in his account. What mattered was not farm productivity; but the appearance or reporting of productivity—while individuals and households made out satisfactorily for themselves.

Services for Kolkhozniks

46 Inna, in group interview, “Five Relatives,” in her sister’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

47 Five Relatives, 6/28/08.

48 Olga, interview in home of former director of culture, Krasnodar, 6/30/08.

49 Vladimir, in his home, Nizhnii, 11/10/07.

50 Igor, same interview. 35 Most of the goods and services villagers relied on for daily life were provided free of charge. They benefited from transportation on farm vehicles, borrowed farm equipment to cultivate household plots, received free energy, fuel and water, were given or simply took farm produce for home use, and no one had to pay for medical treatments. Housing was free and not difficult for farm workers to obtain. Twenty-six new flats were built yearly for farm specialists, an ex-chairman reported in Nizhnii.51 Village infrastructure was maintained by the state. Many of my interviewees thought that local roads had been better paved in the late 70s than they were in the early 2000s. Streetlamps functioned and were repaired when lights burned out, people said.52 The farms themselves devoted manpower and equipment to maintaining village facilities, and local administration handled remaining needs. “There was always someone to call if you lost power or something stopped working. You’d call the raikom [district Party committee] and they’d send someone over,” said Maria, a local administration official and one-time kolkhoz chair.53 Land and property were tended and there seemed to be accountability and responsibility, even if standards were low or conditions primitive.

Work and Public Belonging

People went to work every day, but didn’t consider their formal employment to provide the purpose of their lives. They didn’t need to spend inordinate amounts of time or thought building their careers. Work could essentially be taken for granted. While many talked of working hard at exhausting labor, Aleksandr the businessman was blunt and provocative in his depiction of the work ethos: “People didn’t work hard. No one cared. There wasn’t accountability. They’d work however they liked for the collective, leave when they wanted--- then work for themselves… no one thought about profits and no one thought about improving the

51Vasilli, Nizhnii, 11/8/07.

52Maria, in her office, Riazan, 3/12/08.

53Maria, Riazan, 3/12/08. 36 life in the village. No one thought about those things. But there was work, there was pay, there were pensions… people were happier [veselie].”54 Tania, a schoolteacher and principal, and her husband Igor, an agronomist, reflecting on what had changed by 2008, put it this way, “Earlier you just worked and came home. Now you have to think about what’s next all the time.”55

If you could “just work” and then go home on any given day, farm general meetings represented occasions at which you could just show up without much effort spent to participate.

As a milkmaid from Riazan’ said, “only a few people spoke out at those meetings. I kept my mouth shut. But this one woman, D---, she was a sharp critic…”56 Ania, another former milkmaid, commented, “oh, only people who had nowhere to hide went to the farm general meetings.”57 But afterwards, people always gathered at the club to drink.

Anthropologist Aleksey Yurchak argues that by what he calls “late socialism,” people were taking part in official, mandatory ideological and work-related events “without really being there…people not only arranged parallel events at ideological functions [such as reading books during meetings], but also tried to arrange as much free time for themselves as possible within the official sphere. Free time became one of the most valuable commodities in late socialism. It should be understood in a broad sense as a time of mental noninvolvement in the official sphere.

Thus, even the time wasted at work by doing nothing became perceived as free time.”58 My firsthand sources support his conclusions. Aside from a few dissidents and people who found themselves in direct conflict with the regime, most people simply went about what they considered to be normal life. They showed up to work and to meetings as required, but focused

54Aleksandr, Riazan’, 3/11/08.

55Tania and Igor, in their home, Krasnodar, 8/6/08.

56Ekaterina, in her home, Riazan’, 2/27/08.

57Ania, in her home, Riazan’, 4/15/08.

58 Aleksei Yurchak, “The cynical reason of late socialism: Power, pretense, and the anekdot,” Public Culture 9 (1997), 184. Here he also analyzes the mechanism of what he calls Soviet citizens’ “pretense recognition” of official ideology and the social and psychological functions of the ubiquitous Soviet anekdot, which he says found its golden age during Brezhnev years. 37 more of their energies on personal pursuits: going to the club, working on home plots or hanging out with family and friends.

As social scientist Vladimir Shlapentokh writes, “…since the late 1950s the Soviet people have gradually but unswervingly diverted their interests from the state to their primary groups (family, friends, and lovers) and to semilegal and illegal civil society as well as to illegal activity inside the public sector….[people are absorbed] in their private interests and the desire to improve their life…” while participating in ritualistic demonstrations of political loyalty that held little meaning to people.59 In political scientist James Scott’s tremendously influential account, foot-dragging at work is of course a classic example of passive resistance by the disenfranchised, or “weapons of the weak.”60 While this certainly applies to kolkhoznik behavior in earlier years at collective farms, I suggest that by late socialism, uninspired farm work represented less resistance than simple habit or accepted social convention. My interviewees didn’t talk about resenting the collective farms and resisting by not working overly hard. Perhaps they wouldn’t have admitted resentment to me, but I think the work ethic in the 1970s and ‘80s is better understood as part of the socioeconomic structure of the period and the way people were enabled to focus on private life. People were not trying to subvert or wreck farm industries; what they wanted was not to make waves, while focusing on alternative pursuits—for my interviewees, home and social life.61

Life outside work meant cultivating home plots, raising children and tending to home and hearth; or pursuing individual interests such as whittling, fishing, hunting, relaxing, sitting and drinking.

59 Shlapentokh (1989), 13. Shlapentokh’s focus is to critique the illegal activities and hollow public rituals of Brezhnev years, characterizing the time as stagnation. However it’s also possible to see how for kolkhozniks, these were not bad work and living conditions.

60 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1985).

61 In his book Yurchak (2006) writes about the sub-cultures and svoi-circles of urban residents of the time, however my interviewees found little access to alternative urban cultures and seemed to simply focus on personal and family matters. Alexey Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 38 Work and public life were not just farcical, however. Rather people truly became attached to their work teams and collective. They did the bulk of their socializing with colleagues, cultivating life-long personal relationships. It was the camaraderie they remembered and prized, at least as much as their accomplishments at work.

Togetherness

Considered collectively, oral history accounts paint a picture of what was considered normal for the period. People spoke about both material conditions and intangibles. To most respondents, normal life meant feeling part of a big, active, lively collective and enjoying a great deal of togetherness and socializing. “We were all in it together,“ as Inna, a middle-aged fieldworker, put it.62 This togetherness was evident at work, in shared goals as well as the camaraderie of constantly working with other people, in fully populated “brigades” (work teams) of fifteen or twenty. Milkmaids reminisced about joking, chatting, and singing at work. “It was hard work but we were jollier then,” Liuba, an award-winning dairymaid, recalled, “there were more people around. We sang as we worked and were all together all the time.”63 My frequent

Nizhnii host Olga commented casually, “of course it was more interesting then. There were more people everywhere. I worked in a twenty-person brigade!”64

That togetherness extended beyond working hours. Village social and cultural events were centrally organized, either by the farm or the club. Village clubs enjoyed sufficient funding to run game nights, movie nights, or simple open hours at the club where people could gather and drink. Galia the field worker remembered watching her first movie at the club. She was a young child—not yet in school. “I was five or six. All of us kids from my street ran there [to the club].

For two hours in the club. Our mother let us go. I didn’t understand: where was this from? What

62Family interview; Inna Senkin, in her sister’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

63Liuba and Sveta, in their home, 4/17/08, Riazan’.

64Olga, walking home from work at farm, 10/3/07,Nizhnii. 39 was it? We became afraid and ran from the place where the film was projected on the wall. Then we fell asleep in a heap on the floor.”65 Some villages also maintained small libraries. Many interviewees reminisced about the wholesome entertainment available to village youth.

At rural holidays such as “Agriculture Day” everyone gathered together for state- subsidized food, drink and speeches followed inevitably by dancing and merriment. After farm general assembly meetings, people would go to the club together to drink. Work and socializing with colleagues bled over into family and social life in general. A few farm specialists from

Riazan’ reminisced one afternoon in the office. Liudmila, who was a schoolchild in the 1970s, related her memories while two other women added assents:

...We socialized together in the kolkhoz. We went out in nature [the woods, fields, or to the river] to relax. We had Troitsa, the holiday. We went out in nature, boiled fish soup, grilled shashliki, drank vodka…with the kids, we took the kids. Here in the forest or down to the river. It was fun earlier. Yes. We celebrated all the holidays. And when there wasn’t a club, we got together in the school. We had these events. They were very good. Somehow we did everything together. And we sang songs, “Who knows him, what is he implying…” and I sang “Three White Horses.” But that was back when we had Roma as a harmonist. No, it was fun, it’s true. The main thing was for Roma not to drink, or the rest would all be foolishness. And also Sasha went out with us, right? He went. We went out and had concerts. We asked him and he played for us. Exactly. Right. That’s how it was. No, it was really interesting. Now the young are not the same. We had birthdays during Soviet times. Somehow they organized it and events happened in the school. All the same, it was somehow different. Yes, yes, somehow some of it was obligatory. No. There was a kind of responsibility. You could say that there was something in the pioneer organization. Well all these things were organized. You have scouts, we have pioneers. And now the children. They don’t even read books, but just sit at the computers. They don’t even play games. I remember my childhood like this: constant skipping rope, classics, playing ball…66

Liudmila’s fond memories of childhood blend together with the centrally organized and funded holidays, birthdays and festivities characteristic of Soviet young adulthood. Professor of

Literature and Cultural History Catriona Kelly points out that such entertainment was provided to village children only beginning in the 1960s, so these organized events were special to the

65 Galia, Krasnodar, 8/2/08.

66 Joint interview in farm office, Riazan’, 4/18/08.

40 period.67 While nostalgia for youth may be commonplace in any society, Liudmila and other speakers here revealed nostalgia for the specific social order of late socialism as well. There was almost no distinction in their minds between working at the farm, work holidays and social life in general. At one village in Krasnodar site, there had been two state farms as well as several other employers locally (a sanatorium, a children’s camp, preschool, timber farm and chemical plant)— my only research site where multiple employers existed. People couldn’t remember precisely which farm gave produce and support to the school, camp or sanatorium. But together all the employers, and particularly the state farms, fed and supported all the institutions of village life.

People didn’t always distinguish between the two farms in memory and sometimes switched actual employment from one to the other. In memory the distinctions were less important than the sense of being all-in-it-together. In Krasnodar, too, it was impossible for informants to separate working life at the farm from village social life in general—and both involved a great deal of social solidarity. Villages at all sites had sports clubs with soccer teams. “Within one generation, twenty to thirty years after World War II, things had improved radically,” a sociologist of the village told me. “Education, entertainment, living conditions, medical services and social infrastructure---whereas now, for the most part it’s all been destroyed!”68 These conditions enabled great social solidarity. As Mariana, a former milkmaid put it, “We used to live collectively, as well as work…[and she repeated] we lived [collectively]!”69

“It Was More Fun Back Then!”

People repeatedly made statements that life during the 1970s had been more fun, happy, cheerful, pleasant, or interesting. The terms I heard most were veselee and interesnoe, more fun

67 Kelly (2009), 15. She discusses how many adults in the 1990s and 2000s talk about their happier childhoods and reveal a sense that their innocence was ruined by the collapses of the 1990s.

68 Interview in her office, Nizhnii (city) 9/11/07.

69 Mariana, in her home, Riazan’, 2/27/08. 41 and more interesting. Or as Anna, a fieldworker summed up, “it was hard then but we were happier (radovalis’). Now there’s so much envy, and people in the street don’t greet you.”70

Interviewees constantly made implicit comparisons to the present: in contrast to the 1990s and

2000s, people remembered being happier in the 1970s.

One of the most vivid symbols of how much more cheerful village life had been was that people alleged that everyone used to sing much more at that time—especially in Riazan’ and

Krasnodar sites. Milkmaids in Riazan’ sang in the early mornings by the river—and sometimes at work in the cowsheds. “Things were hard; but we sang more and had more fun, anyway.

There was singing and there was joy (radost’). It’s not like that now,” said Lena, a former milkmaid in her 70s.71 At Krasnodar site, Sveta, a fieldworker described, “chances are, you’d be walking down the street and at three different places in the khutor you’d hear people singing. In the van when they picked you up to take you to work in the morning, someone would break into song and everyone would join in.” Her sister Masha agreed, “It’s true; we’d eat lunch and sing.

In the evening you could walk down the street and hear people singing in two or three places…they used to sit outside their homes on the benches and sing. Now if you hear singing it’s probably a drunk. People substituted TV and cassette players and forgot how to sing themselves…you can see, singing is dying out…”72

Was working at a farm just one long, bucolic musical in the 1970s? What significance should we attach to the fact that people say they sang more frequently, publicly, and loudly in the

1970s then ever afterward? It may not be possible to obtain outside verification of whether villagers truly used to sing more during Brezhnev years—though I tend to believe my interviewees. (Why would they make this up? Also because there were simply more people in villages in those years, and they were perpetually together, in company.) What’s important is that

70 Anna, informal conversation at her home in village in Krasnodar region (not a main field site), 5/4/08.

71 Lena, in her home, Riazan’, 2/13/08.

72 Sveta and Masha, in interview with Five Relatives, Krasnodar, 6/28/08. 42 memories of singing the old songs in the pasture land, by the river, in the truck driving to the fields were very emotionally resonant. This was symbolically important to my interviewees. It also was clearly a place marker for nostalgia in their narratives. As Slavicist Svetlana Boym writes, “the music of home [is] a permanent accompaniment of nostalgia…”73 Memories of singing symbolized how much happier people felt they were then, as Lena made clear.

The Emotional Economy of Late Socialism

Anthropologists Liesl Gambold Miller and Patrick Heady argue for increased attention to what they call the “emotional economy” underlying economic activity and relationships, meaning

“a pattern of emotional commitments and rivalries in which people’s practical activities also make sense as expressions of their sense of personal identity and community.” They suggest nostalgic laments they heard from Russian villagers during fieldwork should be seen as having a basis in fact rather than simply dismissed, as often happens. What’s typically seen as “mere” nostalgic rhetoric is actually due to shared memories of real, and to some extent measurable, changes in objective circumstances as well as shifts in “patterns of emotionally significant behavior.”74 They focus on what happened to people’s emotional commitment to mutual assistance when it no longer made rational economic sense in villages, finding that when rational interest and emotional commitments conflict, “neither will be properly acted on.”

Following their lead and also that of social anthropologist Maruska Svasek, who suggests that emotions should be considered “powerful social forces” in themselves, here I’ll take a

73 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York:Basic Books, 2002), 4. She also mentions that Rosseau wrote about cowbells as a nostalgic trigger for Swiss soldiers diagnosed with pathological nostalgia in the 17th century.

74 Liesl Gambold Miller and Patrick Heady, “Nostalgia and the Emotional Economy: a Comparative Look at Rural Russia,” in Postsocialism: Politics and Emotion in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Maruska Svasek (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 49.

43 speculative step back to reflect on how to characterize the emotional economy of late socialism.75

As mentioned in and inferred from their accounts, most of my interviewees felt proud and secure working at their farms, which seemed to be strong and quite functional enterprises. They experienced belonging and felt connected at work and in the village. Farm life informed a generally sociable village lifestyle, with frequent holidays and celebrations organized by the either the farm itself or the club or school. People knew their coworkers very well and could easily watch people’s behavior—which created the right conditions for trust and mutual assistance, as Gambold Miller and Heady describe, in which emotional commitments coincide with the opportunity to verify people’s actions and hence reasonably expect reciprocity. There was greater social solidarity. It makes sense that in this social and work setting, many people talked about and revealed feeling trust, stability, security and contentment. And at least in retrospect, most of my interviewees felt they had been happier in the 1970s. It may not be possible to assess whether people were truly as happy as they said, though it seems plausible. But their memories of greater happiness are clear signposts of what changed for them, and the emotional impact of farm restructuring in the 1990s. The fact that people’s life stories reveal that most of my interviewees consider themselves to have been happier in the 1970s is significant— both for their understanding of their pasts, and also for the potential that narrative has to affect their present day choices, such as in choosing which politicians to support.

Nostalgia

That the statements people made were often in the comparative mode—it was more fun or more interesting back then—shows how they were constructing their life stories through the somewhat nostalgic lens of the 2000s. Using Gambold Miller and Heady’s precedent, I also interpret the recurrence of nostalgia in my interviewees’ stories as evidence of substantial loss

75 Maruska Svasek, “Postsocialist Ownership: Emotions, Power and Morality in a Czech Village,” in Svasek (2006), 96. 44 that demands investigation. Nostalgia is often seen as reactionary or overly sentimental and hence not to be taken seriously. Political scientist Kimberly Smith convincingly asserts that our contemporary concept of nostalgia was borne out of political conflicts over industrialization in the nineteenth century, and “…allows advocates of industrialization and modernization to dismiss the complaints of their opponents as products of distorted memories and aberrant emotionality.

The concept of nostalgia thus helps to silence the victims of modernization,” particularly its rural victims.76 Simply dismissing nostalgia is a relatively easy way to politically discredit people who claim that socioeconomic changes have done them harm.

Theorizing how nostalgia functions, sociologist Fred Davis emphasizes the social context of individuals’ nostalgia, claiming that nostalgia maintains collective solidarity when people face difficult times such as economic depression or war. Nostalgia for the past thus occurs when

76 Kimberly Smith, “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 505-527. Or as Andreas Huyssen, who discusses nostalgia as a form of memory, writes, “after all, it is the ideology of modernization itself that has given nostalgia its bad name, and we do not need to abide by that judgment.” Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 88. See also Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, “The Modalities of Nostalgia,” Current Sociology 54, no. 6 (2006), 919-941; Boym (2002) for a detailed history of how the concept of nostalgia has evolved from pathology to global epidemic; and Malcom Chase and Christopher Shaw, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) for more on the conditions in which nostalgia develops and how it relates to present conditions. Several scholars of post-Soviet experience suggest that Soviet nostalgia has utopian elements. For example, describing the self-proclaimed dispossessed in Kazakhstan, Joma Nazpary sees nostalgia for the past as people’s romantic replacement for the future destroyed by economic transformation. “Through distorted and romanticized images of the Soviet era people design the contours of a better egalitarian future. While nostalgia becomes an element of utopia, the projection of utopia onto the past provides evidence of its possibility in the future,” Joma Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossesion in Kazakhstan (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 144. See also Boym (2002) on people longing for the past that never was, and Petra Rothman, who contends that utopia is an apt characterization of post-Soviet nostalgic practices simply because they “articulate a vision that desires what cannot be had…” Petra Rethmann, “Chto Delat’? Ethnography in the Post-Soviet Cultural Context,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 99, no. 4 (Dec. 1997), 772. I disagree with these characterizations. My interviewees were not looking to restore what was gone, nor even idly hoping for its restoration. They were clear that times had changed and many were adapting quite well to new realities. I believe there is a clear difference between looking forward and looking back. Characterizing Soviet nostalgia as utopian makes both people’s hopes, and their regrets and losses, all too easy to dismiss. Instead, I emphasize nostalgia’s practical functions in the present for my interviewees, as a tool for re-imagining collectivity and critiquing economic transformations, as I discuss further later.

45 people feel threatened by their present circumstances.77 I extend Davis’ theory by arguing that, in my study, nostalgia does not simply maintain collective solidarity, but actually imaginatively recreates a social solidarity that has been lost or damaged. Through telling stories about the glory days at their farm, people could recreate in speech and emotion the lost togetherness of the 1970s.

In the process they re-imagine their sense of community and collective belonging, on somewhat new grounds: the positive attribution of their shared Soviet past (even when they no longer work or socialize together in farm brigades or at the village club). I also suggest nostalgia works as a popular critique of the socioeconomic transformations wrought by the reforms of the 1990s, a point I’ll return to in Chapter Five. Thus, in my research, people’s statements were telling both about the Brezhnev years and also about what they felt they’d lost since. As such their histories revealed some instances of mythologizing their collective farms.

II. Where Is The Myth in the Retelling?

If farms and villages found more government support than at any other moment in the

20th century and this translated into the greatest satisfaction for villagers in the long 1970s than at any other time during the century—what’s mythical in my interviewees’ depiction of Brezhnev years as their golden age? In terms of material quality of life as well as subjective experiences of social solidarity and feelings of trust, security, satisfaction and happiness, it’s hard to argue with people’s assessment that the period was the best time ever to work at a Soviet collective farm.

The Brezhnev years were a novel time at farms, made possible by more government subsidy as well as social support and acceptance of kolkhoznik private initiative than ever before or after. It is completely understandable that villagers missed the 1970s when they compared them to both earlier historical periods and to the disastrous 1990s (as I will discuss shortly in the dissertation).

77 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: a Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press New York, 1979). See also Susan Holak and William Havlena, “Feelings, Fantasies, and Memories: An Examination of the Emotional Components of Nostalgia,” Journal of Business Research 42: 3 (July 1998), 217-226, on the bittersweet quality that defines nostalgia. 46 Still I find that my interviewees mythologized collective farms in a specific way: they credited the farms themselves as the main providers of the social good of the era. In nostalgic renditions of history, the farms took center stage as both source and symbol of the good life during late socialism. At some level, most people knew that their farms, and through them, rural social services, were absolutely reliant on (ever increasing) state subsidy. But they did not emphasize this fact, instead fore-grounding the perceived strength of their farms. Often they seemed to mistake the farms for their benefactors—and not the state. In some moments they did regret— vocally and bitterly—the passing of those state guarantees and privileges. But taken as a whole their stories over-emphasized the role of the farms themselves, building them up as functional, prosperous, and somewhat mythical happy economic entities, filled with singing milkmaids and satisfied fieldworkers—often without noting the huge government supports that enabled the farms to exist at all. The rest of the chapter looks at instances when people mythologized the farms in their oral histories, either by exaggerating strengths or downplaying problems.

Farm Strength

Some interviewees talked about their former kolkhoz in glowing terms that don’t match other evidence of the farm’s historical operations. Farm strength and productivity were particularly misremembered and exaggerated in oral histories at my Nizhnii site. Matvei, a former brigadier, took a pragmatic tone, saying he thought the kolkhoz had placed fourth or seventh best in the raion, and that farms in the raion were fairly average, not particularly strong or weak as farms went.78 Vlad, an eighty-one-year-old former mechanic, related in entirely different, proud tones about the same kolkhoz that the farm had always been about fourth place for the raion!79 Yet Vasillii, former chairman, declared the kolkhoz had been number one in the

78Matvei, in his home, Nizhnii, 10/19/07.

79 Vlad, interview in his home, Nizhnii, 11/26/07. 47 district.80 Meanwhile Nina, farm accountant, maintained that the farm had still been strong at the time of reorganization: third place in the district, she thought.81 Since “socialist competitions” for production were held annually and farm rankings (along with records of the accomplishments of specific farm divisions and outstanding or notably poorly-performing workers) were published in local press, everyone read about where their farm stood, comparatively. Yet people remembered these rankings impressionistically, not precisely. (The published rankings might not have contained real production numbers, agricultural workers being no exception to the tendency in

Soviet industry to inflate production numbers for higher-ups. In Riazan’, even a news article from 1987 published milk yield numbers that a farm specialist said could not possibly have been real.82 But no one told me that farm rankings were suspect.) In Nizhnii, most informants described their kolkhoz in very positive terms, saying it was quite successful, strong and stable.

Sheep and pig husbandry were really excellent, observed a retired animal specialist.83 People discussed the large land area of kolkhoz fields, the numbers of cattle, the vegetables they cultivated, and generally the work of their brigades with pride. People talked about their farm being strong, solid, and good, and having worked very well before reorganization in the 90s. The common attitude was to question why their good farm had then been ruined.

While annual reports show the yearly fluctuations to be expected of agriculture in the

1970s, documents from the late ‘80s and ‘90s show that the Nizhnii kolkhoz was experiencing serious problems by the time the decision was taken to participate in the World Bank’s Model

Reorganization Program in ‘93-‘94. Indeed, according to the Regional Department of

80 Vasillii, in his office, Nizhnii, 10/19/07.

81 Nina, in her office, Nizhnii, 11/7/07.

82Elena and Petr, at home, Riazan, 2/15/08.

83Nadezhda, in farm office, Nizhnii, 10/19/07. 48 Agriculture’s analysis, farms that volunteered to be reorganized were “…in critical financial situations… close to complete insolvency and shutting down production activities….”84

A few of my interviewees blamed the last chairman for leading the farm close to ruin and making privatization by Model Program necessary. Denis, who opened his own small farm immediately after privatization, talked about the fact that the kolkhoz was already failing and there was no point in trying to hang on.85 However he was the sole person so clear on this. Most people simply talked about their prosperous kolkhoz.

At all farms in the region overall, records comparing areas of land cultivation and farm productivity of 1965, 1975, 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1988 show steady decline. The squares of land used for farming fell even as the rural population, the population of working age, and the number of actual kolkhoz and sovkhoz workers declined—from about 320,000 in 1965 to 211,00 in 1988.

Production numbers for potatoes, grain and sugar beet were at their lowest by 1988.86 It may have been sensible to farm on smaller areas if the population was falling, but the downward trends nevertheless represented troubling agricultural decline, and the shrinking production worried authorities. Records thus show farm decline in the area beginning in the mid-60s but significantly worsening in the late ‘80s.

Locals interviewed might not have been aware that their farm was running at a loss on paper, and in quite bad shape by the late ‘80s. Or perhaps people simply didn’t attach much importance to the fact that their farm was technically unprofitable even during much of the 70s.

Their perceptions of farm strength and profitability were formed through the work of their hands, their fully populated work brigades, the animals and vegetables they could see before their eyes

84Nizhnii Novgorod Central Archive, 3075:7:6181:1995:1,Historical Document on the Process of Fulfilling the Program “Privatization of Land and Reorganization of Agricultural Enterprises”, of the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform.

85 Denis, interview in his home, Nizhnii, 11/7/07.

863075:7:5499:1988, Main indicators of the development of the agro-industrial complex of farms of the oblast, agro-industrial committee, Gorky Oblast. Numbers of workers rounded to nearest ten thousand. 49 and the food on their tables. They didn’t all realize the extent to which kolkhoz existence relied on central subsidization. Perhaps resentment over privatization at Nizhnii site led people to emphasize how strong their farm had been even more than other places. I don’t think this conclusion was duplicitous, but rather indicative of how cheated people felt. Their memories and stories were colored and shaped by this resentment.

At other research sites, people seemed to harbor fewer illusions about how strong or profitable their farms had actually been. In Riazan’, most villagers were clear that their farm typically fell in the bottom third ranking for farms in the district, as borne out by newspaper reports.87 Lidia, a former kolkhoz chief accountant said matter of factly that the kolkhoz only showed a profit one or two years in the three decades she’d worked on site (the profitable years being two in the late 1970s).88 Sasha, a former sovkhoz engineer in his fifties at Krasnodar site, described how irrationally central planning for the farms operated in practice, and connected the inefficiency to the eventual agricultural collapse.89 But his realistic viewpoint was rare. A former milkmaid declared to me that the Riazan’ kolkhoz had been a “millionaire! Very rich and successful; it won prizes…”90 Perhaps she was exaggerating for the foreigner’s benefit, but she seemed sincere enough.

A few people knew their farms were unprofitable and operations were poorly planned— especially the more educated on site, such as trained engineers. But the most common view I heard was that farms were strong and worked well. Even when people didn’t seem to misperceive kolkhoz strength, they insisted that life for them had been better when the kolkhoz existed. The fact that the farms were economically unprofitable, whether or not interviewees

87For example, see published ranking of farms by milk yield production in regional press such as: “Nadoeno Moloka Ot Korovii,” Za Kommunisticheskii Trud, 15 June 1976, 3.

88Lidia, in cowshed, Riazan’, 3/13/08.

89 Sasha, in his home, Krasnodar, 6/30/08.

90 Georgina, in her home, 2/27/08. 50 understood or acknowledged the fact, did not appear to mean that people didn’t live well while working at farms. In retrospect, people did not point out that the farms were unprofitable. Rather many people inflated farm strength in their memories, tending to mythologize or romanticize the institutions now that they were gone.

Management Problems with Discipline at Farms

The management perspective on farm discipline, as reflected in official records, was much less affirmative than workers’ view. As Shlapentokh points out, high job satisfaction among farm laborers in the 1970s did not mean people worked hard or efficiently. That satisfaction reported in several sociological surveys of the period might in fact correlate with lax attitudes towards work, “ease of pilfering, social life in the workplace, and so on…”91 He characterizes farm workers as “wasteful with ‘socialist property’ but ‘zealous’ toward their private property: people indifferent to farm resources were very careful with their home plots, which is how laborers managed to produce almost a third of all agricultural products of the country on their home plots.”92

Drunkenness

My interviewees’ attitudes towards work discipline and the extent to which drunkenness was a problem were mixed, but on the whole resigned and humorous. The bulk of “ordinary” informants didn’t see such matters as serious problems, which contributed to the rosy picture they presented of the bygone era. Farm specialists in Riazan’ related a sardonic chastushka which signaled their resignation to drinking at the farm and the humor, if dark or sarcastic, with which they treated it (it rhymes in Russian):

91 Shlapentokh (1989), 46. He references Soviet sociologists Kolbanovskii, Iadov and Kissel’, Ivanov and Patrushev, Lobanov and Cherkasov.

92 Shlapentokh (1989), 94. 51 There’s a chief bookkeeper in the kolkhoz; He can’t even catch a fly; He can’t catch a fly; He can only drink vodka.93

Here the refrain pokes fun at a farm specialist, revealing that it was not just common workers or ordinary loafers who had problems with drink at work. Indeed, at the Riazan’ site, one in the succession of short-lived chairmen of the late 80s was infamous for having been a drunkard, and probably ultimately keeled over from drinking-related heart problems.94

Written records from the period, however, show that managers considered drinking quite a serious farm problem and social ill among workers. Drunkenness seemed a consistent problem to management throughout the years. Records of director decisions from one of the Krasnodar state farms detail the problem. The language used in administrative records about the problem and disciplinary action taken didn’t change much from 1970 to 1992. It was not easy for leaders to figure out what to do with drunken workers and the problem was never fully solved. Many

“stern conversations” were held over the years. State farm workers were routinely threatened with losing their jobs, though I didn’t see documentation that anyone was actually fired.95

For example, an order signed on July 14, 1970, details that a worker in the 5th division came to work drunk and that two cattle tenders left their young cattle without watching them and went home to sleep [presumably also due to drink]. The decision taken was to have a “stern conversation” with the first worker and strip him of his grain allotment. The two cattle tenders

93Told to me by farm specialist in office, 4/18/08, Riazan’.

94According to four different informants, Riazan’.

95Here I present material from one of the Krasnodar farms. Archival material available went only up to 1992, when both state farms closed doors. My access to director prikazi was restricted after the archivist saw me reading about disciplinary actions. The archivist flipped through volumes of prikazi from the second site and said there were no records of punishment for drinking at the smaller sovkhoz. They rewarded better and people worked better, she thought. Conversation in Belorechensk Municipal Archive, Krasnodar, 8/5/08.

52 were also subject to a stern conversation and told that if it happened again, they’d be fired.96 It was not a good summer at the farm from the perspective of top management. On July 16, the director wrote about how work discipline for Division Four had recently fallen sharply , resulting in an interruption of fodder production and a decrease in milk yield. While drinking is not explicitly mentioned, it can safely be assumed this was part of the problem. Drinking was the usual reason for absenteeism and shoddy work and the documents before and after this case deal explicitly with disciplining drunk workers. The decision here was to hold the management accountable and threaten to fire the head and brigadier of animal husbandry for the division if work didn’t quickly improve (the two were listed by name).97 A further prikaz discussed the problematic lack of sobriety of tractor operators.98 In December of 1970, the director decided to have stern conversations with brigadiers who showed up to work drunk, again listed by name.99

A volume from 1980 lists similar problems and disciplinary actions or threats; mainly, more stern conversations with workers who had a penchant for drink.100 Management decided

“further harsh measures of punishment” would be taken to discipline two perpetually drunk tractorists in 1980, but the measures taken were not specified.101 On the 29th of that December in

1980, the sovkhoz director decided to take away bonus payment for a month and also to deduct one day’s pay from another worker at fault.102

Popular press echoed and intensified management’s concerns. In 1988, four people were dismissed from (Riazan’ site) kolkhoz membership for drinking and absenteeism. Excluding

96Belorechensk, 50: 1: 123: 27: prikazi direktora po osnovonoi deiatelnosti, 14 July 1970, signed by the Sovkhoz Director.

9750:1:123:33.

9850:1:123:43.

9950:1:123:177.

10050:1:324: multiple pages, see below for examples.

10150:1:324: 191 Prikaz N 339.

10250:1:324:208 N353, 29 December 1980. 53 someone from the kolkhoz was a rare event, requiring a general vote of all workers. A newspaper article from the district newspaper dramatically detailed the general kolkhoz meeting at which members unanimously decided to exclude her. The meeting had been called to discuss labor discipline at the farm. The whole village was apparently fascinated. The village club was packed. The chairman made some introductory remarks about farm operations, talking about the difficult financial times the farm was facing and how they needed to count every ruble…

But the very most important matter, he said after warming up, was labor discipline. And this was limping along at the farm. Drunkenness often led to truancy from work. In the last year, about 1800 working days were lost to people not showing up to work due to drink. He estimated the material losses at 30,000 rubles! This could all be attributed to bad use of spirits. He went on to discuss the case of the former brigadier of animal husbandry, V.L., who perpetually lost people’s respect and trust. She started coming to work in a non-sober condition or just in general didn’t go to work. She doctored records and created unhealthy conditions for the collective. They tried helping her overcome her problems in vain. Kolkhoz management relieved her of some of her responsibilities but this didn’t help either. She continued her drunken ways as before. The general meeting had been called to bring the drunk before people to look them in the eye. An old man questioned her in angry tones, “How long will you keep drinking? Enough of disgracing us!” Someone else chimed in from the back of the hall, “the kolkhoz gave you a good apartment and a job---live and be happy.” Another voice argued, though, “what kind of apartment was it? Empty and cold.” (This woman, though, was not a disciplined worker, either. By the way, her mother was just fined that day when ten liters of homebrew were removed from her home.) Other kolkhozniks piped in with critical comments. “How are you not ashamed?” a brigadier of the dairy herd queried with pain in his heart, “you don’t set up your apartment well, you don’t want to work, and we should look after you like a nanny? Enough already! Let’s send such people out of the kolkhoz.” Other specialists went on to describe how this type of bad discipline resulted in work losses and hurt everyone’s quality of life, which some kolkhozniks still fail to understand... And so it went. The meeting was stormy, disturbed and loud. Someone brought up that if the farm better mechanized their animal husbandry processes, they would need labor less and not have to put up with bad workers. The head of the district court, an official of the district’s department of internal affairs and the district procurator spoke at the meeting. It was decided to exclude four people from the kolkhoz on the basis of systematic drunkenness and violating labor discipline. The vote was unanimous “in favor of this just decision”. The second secretary of the raikom of the party also attended.103

The media, management and outside authorities were thus much more concerned about kolkhoznik drinking than any kolkhoznik ever reported feeling in conversation with me. For

103Grigor’ev, P., “Demokratiia v Deistvii: Kollektiv Reshil: Iskluchit’,” Za Kommunisticheskii Trud,” 4 February 1988, No 15 (9194). Locals said the woman in question was reputed to have killed her husband and thrown the body in the river, though no body was ever recovered. There may have been more to her exclusion than reported here. 54 example, two old friends (retired milkmaids) talking informally on the street with me in Riazan’ spoke about drinking in contradictory terms. They were both in their 60s. One asked whether I didn’t smoke, and on learning that I didn’t, both agreed how bad smoking and drinking are for people. Then they began laughing and launched into a story about how they used to drink and one once fell over from drinking and smoking.104 These two were joking around to pass the time, and recalling youthful shenanigans is probably universal to humankind. Still their humorous downplaying of the problem of drinking was fairly typical.

An elderly interviewee who still kept and rode a horse and cart laughed about how many people used to be drunk on the roads. Many more people used horses and everyone would ride their carts around, drinking alcohol in the winter.105 Here, he seemed to acknowledge that having a lot of drunks on the road (even on horses) might be problematic, but his narrative was somewhat bemused, as though he was remembering somewhat funny or even idyllic things about the past or the good old days.

Aleksandr, a middle-aged businessman from the village, laughingly described how back then, “everyone drank; but they would go to work at 8 am the next morning if they drank the night before. They’d get up in the morning drink, and go out on the tractors.” He said this not so much to lament the fact that workers used to drink, but the declining contemporary work ethic, evidenced by the fact that now people would drink and just not go to work! This appeared to have been unthinkable in the past. “Now if someone drinks at night, in the morning he’ll say his head hurts and won’t go to work! In the past no one would do so; now they won’t show up to work for two days. They broke their habit of working.” 106 Clearly, worker perspectives differed greatly from management’s.

104Zina and Inna, on street, Riazan’, 2/28/08.

105Informal conversation when I got a ride on the cart between local villages, Riazan’, 4/16/08.

106Aleksandr, giving me a ride from city to village; recorded in my field notes same day, Riazan’, 3/11/08. 55 Drinking is of course still a problem in Russia, in the countryside in particular. This was impossible to miss from firsthand observation, such as the day at the Nizhnii site when people went to introduce me to the chief power-engineering specialist and he was sleeping off a binge under the grain dryer.107 Other workers seemed embarrassed but laughed about it for the rest of the day. Another morning at the same site, a specialist screamed at a worker over the phone for not showing up to work because he’d been out drinking the night before. She alternated between threats, anger, cajoling and humor in dealing with the situation.108 This was a real problem to management, overlooked or downplayed in many of my interviewees’ nostalgic narratives.

Stealing

In similar vein, informants could discuss stealing from the farm in humorous terms, as something they were bemused by but took rather lightly. Several people from Krasnodar laughed about how they would take apples from the fields or grapes from vineyards at night.109 Pasha, former sovkhoz director laughingly related the deals he would make with people, letting them take produce in exchange for what he needed done that was not strictly official, or simply to maintain good relations.110 In Nizhnii, managers in 2008 conflicted with current and retired workers on the issue. A young, new farm director asked my host Olga, generally one of the key, trusted and responsible ‘doers’ around the farm, whether she was going to pay for the gas she siphoned off the farm stock for personal use. She told the story of the conversation they had with displeasure later, deeming the director wrong to ask. For his part, the director stated early on that

107Observed at the farm in Nizhnii on 9/30/07.

108Overheard outside potatoe sorting point, Nizhnii, 9/29/07.

109For example, Plotnikovs, in their home, Krasnodar, 5/5/08.

110Pasha, at café outside provincial bus station, Krasnodar, 6/15/08. 56 it was a major problem that workers didn’t consider taking farm goods or products to be

‘stealing’, and saw this as very old fashioned.111

Historical records show that earlier kolkhoz management didn’t take the matter lightly, either. Prikazi of the sovkhoz director in KSN show that various disciplinary conversations and actions were undertaken when workers stole. Incidents noted include a farm driver using a car with a friend for personal means at night and a worker regularly “taking potatoes from wagons and warehouse by the bucket.”112 So while light stealing was common around the farm, people sometimes faced consequences for it. Whether they got away with it might depend on their relations with the manager, the deals they had made, how much they needed the items, whether they had a pattern of “loafing around and taking buckets of apples” or how egregious the theft seemed.113 Rules were inconsistently enforced and ‘taking’ remained commonplace even after privatization.

In the 70s and 80s, people could help themselves to the produce they needed. The farm willingly gave them fertilizer, use of equipment and various bonuses of goods in kind for their work. These common benefits were incentives and a collective survival strategy—people would have a hard time working their home plots otherwise. Theoretically everything was collectively owned so taking things not specifically given might seem to not be stealing to people. As

Humphrey and Vysokovskii have pointed out, people developed “false sense[s] of ownership” about their homes or dachas. Farm workers notoriously considered themselves to deserve to use,

111The woman related the incident while I shadowed her at work on 11/08/07; the manager talked about stealing in general in an interview in the farm office in Nizhnii, 9/28/07.

112Belorechensk, 50:1:123:176 No 289; 28 December 1970; and 177, 15 Jan 1971.

113Farm director in office, Krasnodar region, not in main research site, 5/16/08.

57 and essentially to own, the fruits of their labor.114 Yet this attitude and practice were real problems to management, seen as hurting farm profits.

Outmigration

It’s common knowledge that villagers migrated to towns and cities once they got passports and obtained freedom of movement. At my research sites, rates were low in Krasnodar but higher in Nizhnii and Riazan’. In Nizhnii, a former chief accountant of the kolkhoz described outmigration as slowing in the 1970s, as government funding made villages more attractive for young people to stay and raise families. Some even returned from cities during the ‘70s.115 In

Krasnodar, people felt that outmigration had not been much of an issue historically or in contemporary times. They were proud of their Cossack village being cohesive and an attractive place for their children to remain. Instead of complaining about outmigration, they talked about resenting the migration of Turkic refugees to their region and village.

In Riazan’, outmigration was more of a consistent problem in both statistical information and people’s memories. But there were still simply more people and younger people in the late

Soviet period despite outmigration. Aging, death and the declining birth rate caused the depopulation more than outmigration. So people didn’t distinguish exactly how much of a problem outmigration had ever been. They discussed it as a contemporary problem, something to lament, but with a notable exception didn’t really talk about how many people left, and when.116

Statistical data from the municipal archive showed the rural population drastically declining—

114 Humphrey (2002), 186-187; Aleksandr Vysokovskii, “Will Domesticity Return?” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age, Design and Social History, ed. W. C. Brumfield and Blair Ruble (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 271-308.

115This is from a written document prepared for me in lieu of her answering questions verbally, given to me in district capital city local administration cafeteria, Nizhnii, on 9/12/07.

116The exception was the once kolkhoz chair, longtime local administration officer Maria, who reported that the young left the village from 1976-8 but tended to stay in 1979, interview in her office, Riazan’, 4/17/08. 58 falling by more than half from 1962 to 1986. It declined steeply between 1962 and 1968. But between 1968 and 1986, the population fell most steeply, by about half.117

People in Riazan’ and Nizhnii talked about the young leaving villages as a problem in general terms. But they also reminisced about the days when villages were more populated. In oral histories, they didn’t usually specify precisely which years people stayed and which years they left villages. Most people represented the situation such that in the good years, many more young people stayed in villages and there were good opportunities to work, get housing, raise and educate children.118 The populated 1970s were set in contrast to the depopulated villages of the

2000s—even if not all the years of the ‘70s were equally populated. Valentina, the former kolkhoz chief accountant turned private farm director in Nizhnii in the 90s, connected the two facts. She explained that the government ran multiple programs for improving village life in the

1970s, including building new houses for young farm worker families that were granted for free, that were eventually eliminated in the 1980s.119 Other people certainly bemoaned the fact that housing was later no longer offered to workers and saw this as a disincentive for people to stay in villages. But they didn’t directly connect the government funding with the era when young people stayed in the village by their accounts. It appears more naturalized or even romanticized, the halcyon days when villages prospered, milkmaids sang in the cowsheds, and young people picnicked by the river after work.

117Statistics specially printed for me by the Shilovo Territorial Organ of the Federal Government Statistics Service of Riazan’ Oblast (Riazan’Stat): information on main demographic indicators from 1980-2007, and also specially printed for me by the municipal archive director in Shilovo, broken down by six village sites for years 1962, 1964, 1968, 1986, 1990 and 1991, from 21:1:71:104, 974, 1142 and 1168, Shilovo, Riazan’.

118At the best farm years, not only did local schools function in villages, but the farm would send promising pupils to get agricultural specialist educations, which specialists at each site had benefited from.

119Written answers given to me by Valentina, Nizhnii, 9/12/07. 59 Conclusion.

Thus while the 1970s were generally the best time to work at collective farms, people often downplayed serious problems at farms in their oral histories. There were clear instances of romanticization and nostalgia in their accounts. I suggest that the extent of romanticization points to the enormity of what people felt they later lost. This loss was not just of a certain (all things considered, rather low) level of material comfort and stability, nor of the opportunity for material betterment, though those were significant. But people also lost out socially and emotionally, including in terms of social solidarity, village sociability, feelings of personal connectedness, trust, and good cheer. To some extent, they recreated these feelings through their nostalgic renditions of their history.

As public policy scholar John Short writes, “the term ‘myth’ does not imply falsehood to be contrasted with reality…The important question is not, ‘is it true?’ but ‘whose truth is it?’”120

Similarly, how villagers understood and what they felt about their past is important in its own right. My aim here is not to debunk their accounts for their inaccuracies or exaggerations, but to show how it is that the 1970s became a foundational myth of collective farm life for my interviewees—and some of the great sense of loss they experienced at the passing of that era.

120 John Short, Imagined Country: Environment, culture and society (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press,1991), xxii.

60 Chapter Two: Many Perestroikas

“What’s long, green and smells like sausages?” “A train going from Moscow to Gorkii.” perestroika-era anekdot in Nizhnii region about how people would travel to Moscow to get goods they could no longer find in local stores.

Introduction.

For the history of high politics, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s open admission of the many problems the Soviet Union faced and his announcement of the novel perestroika agenda in 1986 was a watershed moment.1 Worldwide, all eyes turned to Russia. The West marveled at the new freedoms possible to Soviet citizens and Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace

Prize in 1990. The period from 1985 to 1991 seemed to be an epoch of great change, marking a startling rupture in Soviet politics. Moscow and Washington were abuzz with excitement and debate. But in villages, oral history accounts revealed that perestroika barely registered with much of the local population. Many interviewees declared that perestroika didn’t affect them.

Only one person spontaneously used the word glasnost’ while discussing the period. Just three interviewees mentioned specific policy initiatives that Gorbachev enacted and discussed feeling the effects. At first take, it seemed the moment did not resonate in memory as a turning point for villagers. Yet for some interlocutors, perestroika was truly an evocative and emotionally laden subject. This chapter explores the various meanings that people assigned to perestroika. Its finds that people experienced multiple perestroikas in rural life, and Gorbachev’s was not particularly notable among them. People had divergent notions of what Gorbachev’s perestroika was and what it brought to rural life. I set their perspectives against the backdrop of agricultural reforms attempted to explain why many of them felt nothing had changed—yet also blamed perestroika

1 Gorbachev declared the launching of perestroika at the Twenty Seventh Party Congress in 1986, describing it as a revolution from both above and below that would take radical democratization measures. See for example Brian Crozier, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: ‘Peace’ and the Secret War (London and Lexington: The Claridge Press, 1990), 45.

61 for instigating broad social collapse. In the end, I argue, it does not make sense to consider

Gorbachev’s perestroika as either a moment of rupture or a distinct historical period.

A note about methodology:

Questions on my original interview guide read, “what effect did perestroika have on the kolkhoz? How did perestroika affect your job? How did perestroika affect your life outside of work? Did life in the village change a lot during perestroika?” These followed questions about kolkhoz agricultural specialties and historical turning points. If I asked questions like these about

“perestroika” without reference to Gorbachev or the late 1980s, people’s answers revealed their initial and central association with the term (broadly used in Russian to signify all kinds of restructuring efforts). Usually, the term signified farm reorganization to them (whenever in the

1990s it occurred at their site) first and foremost. Their answers to an out of context question about perestroika were thus the first clues that Gorbachev’s policy changes did not alter much for them. To find out how they experienced the perestroika of the late 1980s begun by Gorbachev, I started asking about “Gorbachev’s perestroika” or specified a date range, such as by asking about

“perestroika of the late ‘80s.” In this way I obtained information about what perestroika broadly meant to people and the relative lack of importance of Gorbachev’s perestroika in their senses of history—as well as information specifically about the lack of impact of Gorbachev’s policy changes locally.

I. Perestroika As Farm Reorganization or Closure

As I have said, then, to many people the word perestroika mainly referred to their farm’s reorganization or closure, which occurred in different years during the 1990s. For example, for residents at Nizhnii site, kolkhoz reorganization through participation in the Model Farm

Reorganization Program was the unforgettable perestroika that affected them—the only one they thought to speak about. 62 Answering the question “how did perestroika affect life in your village?” Nadezhda, a fifty-six year old former animal technician (handling animal health care and health and breeding records) for the kolkhoz, replied that village life had been “very consistent until 1994, when there was perestroika and everything began to change.” Pressed for details, Nadezhda explained that perestroika started in the fall of 1993. This was when her farm joined the Nizhnii Model Farm

Reorganization Program. The kolkhoz had already been split up by February of 1994. She had been opposed to perestroika, which meant dividing up the farm: “it had been a strong and good farm. All those changes were very painful,” she remembered.2

Vasilii, former kolkhoz chairman and current private farm director, showed that perestroika chiefly meant farm reorganization to him as well. Asked to compare his working day now with his working day as chair during Soviet times, he soon began talking about the period of kolkhoz reorganization, referring to the “perestroika times.” “It was a big problem of those times in Russia, when we had perestroika.” His new farm had little machinery, no founding capital and leaders didn’t know how they could stand on their feet. “How did perestroika influence [us]?

Well, in any organization I say 90 to 95% depends on the boss…” He launched again into discussion of management difficulties and the problems facing his private farm. He thought that kolkhoz reorganization had been a major mistake. “If we were not divided then, now we would live just wonderfully. But because of perestroika the directors had to decide where to go. We could not stand in the same position and wait for somebody to give us something…maybe the manna from heaven—no, no, one thing really prevented us from good development: the fact that we were separated, divided! Otherwise we would live just wonderfully.” There’s an implicit contradiction in what Vasilii says here: does everything depend on the leader or did restructuring the kolkhoz into smaller private farms ruin everything? In making the twin assertions, though,

Vasilii manages to both give himself credit and make the larger point that despite his own farm’s success, he still felt kolkhoz dissolution had been a mistake. By 2007, Vasilii’s private farm was

2 Nadezhda, in private farm office, Nizhnii, 10/19/07. 63 the only kolkhoz successor enterprise actually profiting, so in holding the boss responsible he was patting himself on the back. Still he regretted the division of the kolkhoz into smaller farms, and felt village society overall would be “living just wonderfully” and local farming as a whole doing better if not for reorganization.

To sovkhoz workers at Krasnodar site, too, perestroika signified the closure of their two state farms, which occurred in 1992 (not during Gorbachev’s term in power). A group of five relatives, all former sovkhoz workers, sat around a table laid for tea on a Saturday night remembering, giving me a group interview as well as a warm welcome to the village. When I asked what happened at the farm at the time of perestroika in the 1980s, one said, “Nothing changed. The farms were just the same.” Another piped in, “When the land was given out, that was it.” The first speaker continued:

One: This perestroika started—no, it wasn’t even perestroika, but the collapse of the sovkhozes, and all this happened.

Q: What influence did perestroika have on life here?

One: What influence? [in an angry tone] They gave us coupons, it was a nightmare, what happened.

Three: And they didn’t pay us our wages, it was years, for years people didn’t get their money. For years people here didn’t get money.

One: It was horrible, what happened. At any enterprise they might not give out pay.

Three: People were unprotected. It was horrible. There was nowhere to go and complain. There was no power [accountable], this lack of any responsible authority [bezvlastie]….

Q: Did this start in the 1980s?

One: Yes, sometime at the end of the 1980s.

Five: I don’t know exactly, I’ll look in the documents, my work papers…

One: Perestroika began, in my opinion, somewhere…ah ah ah, that wasn’t perestroika.

Three: 1992 or 1991…

One: Yes, the money changed in 1992, when…

Three: 1992 or 1991.

Q: That is, when people didn’t receive wages?

64 Three: When perestroika began, that’s when it happened, probably.

One: And that’s what happened.

Three: It happened immediately with the pay.

One: And they started to fire people from work. There was a serious downsizing…[ later in the conversation]…Perestroika really hurt us. As if that weren’t enough, then they changed the money on us.”3

Unsurprisingly, the speakers did not recall exact dates with precision. The late 1980s and

1990s appear somewhat collapsed together in their joint narrative. Speaker One seemed to be using “perestroika” to refer to Gorbachev’s program of the late 1980s, correcting herself when she started discussing the period after the collapse, saying “no,” that wasn’t perestroika. Yet even though she seemed to primarily identify the word perestroika with the Gorbachev era, the association in her mind and the really significant matter was the collapse of the local farms.

Speaker Three, on the other hand, dating perestroika to 1991 or 1992, clearly meant the time when her farm closed and economic crisis intensified. The period from 1985 to 1991 didn’t qualify as the important perestroika to discuss. Thus people’s speech showed that Gorbachev’s perestroika paled in comparison to others they experienced.

II. Rural Life as a Series of Perestroikas

Several interviewees took a longer historical view, describing the series of perestroikas they witnessed in the countryside as a whole. For example, Vladimir, a garrulous former school teacher turned private farmer in his late fifties whose career had taken him to various different

Soviet regions and republics, had a unique take on perestroika. Yet it still meshed with other informants’ de-emphasis of Gorbachev’s impact. Vladimir talked for nearly five hours straight in one sitting. A very articulate and engaged interviewee, he seemed delighted that I was there to talk about history and had much to say about every topic. The historic moments he dubbed perestroika are worth examining one by one. He related that the perestroika of the late 1980s was

3 Five relatives, at one’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08. 65 one of many in the course of Soviet history. “It began with Mikoyan [Anastas Mikoyan, First

Deputy Premier under General Secretary Khrushchev] trying to stop the increasing centralization by instituting sovnarkhozes,” Vladimir said. This was an attempt in the late 1950s to decentralize economic decision-making by dividing the USSR into different zones, each administered by a sovnarkhoz, or economic council. About 100 such councils were established in 1957 to manage regional economies, which historian Alexander Gerschenkron calls “an act of radical decentralization of industrial organization.”4 Vladimir declared that while the sovnarkhozes were later abolished, some notion of making decisions based on economic zones rather than pure central directives persisted. Then, in his account, there was the farm enlargement campaign of the 1960s. By this policy, Khrushchev united poor-performing farms with more prosperous ones, cutting funding for farms and villages deemed unpromising and greatly enlarging the land plot and workforce of many farms.5 Next, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, there was the khozrashchet initiative, to make farms self-supporting, Vladimir said. Brezhnev and

Kosygin had made khozrashchet, or enterprise self-financing, part of their packet of 1965 reforms

4 Alexander Gerschenkron, “The Changeability of a Dictatorship,” World Politics 14, no. 4 (July 1962), 580. In our interview Vladimir did not detail agricultural policy specifically in reference to decentralization, but some were attempted under Khrushchev, with few positive results. See for example Lazar Volin, “Soviet Agricultural Policy After Stalin,” Journal of Farm Economics 38, no. 2 (May 1956), 282-283; and on why results were slim, see for example Alec Nove, “Soviet Agriculture Marks Time,” Foreign Affairs 40, no. 4 (July 1962), 587-593 and the same author, “Soviet Agriculture under Brezhnev,” Slavic Review 29, no. 3 (September 1970), 381-383.

5 The campaign continued for two decades, though Khrushchev scaled back initial plans to create “agrotowns” in place of traditional villages. See for example Karl-Eugen Wadekin, Agrarian Policies in Communist Europe: a Critical Introduction (Towota, New Jersey: Allanheld, Osmun & Co. Publishers, Inc., 1982), 50-51. Ostensibly to improve agricultural production, the measure to supersize farms was criticized inside Russia for heralding the death of many Russian villages, now becoming either urbanized or neglected. Observers such as Nicolaevsky argued that the aim of the reform was social more than economic—perhaps the decisive blow in the Soviet effort to eliminate the peasantry as a class. Boris Nicolaevsky, “The New Soviet Campaign Against the Peasant,” Russian Review 10, no. 2 (April 1951), 81- 98. A literary movement arose in response to these policies in the 1960s, when the “derevianshchiki” bemoaned the loss of values and spirituality that they thought accompanied the restructuring of village life. 66 in an effort to increase accountability, efficiency and profits—though there were few or no substantive results.6

But at the end of the 1980s, the economy of the Soviet Union started going bankrupt. In

Vladimir’s view, the main problems were financial in origin. He had a detailed explanation of the cause, which dovetailed surprisingly well with popular Western accounts of Soviet military overextension, the slowdown of world oil prices, Russia’s inability to reform its economy during the new information age—and hence inability keep up globally. Everything started to fall apart during perestroika, he mentioned, seeming to refer to Gorbachev’s perestroika, warming to the topic. But next he declared that actually no perestroika in agriculture ever occurred. It did occur in the military field; however not beginning in 1985, but much earlier.

“The energy crises of the 1950s and 1960s in other countries led them to make structural changes in the economy, but here it didn’t happen. We had perestroika only in the military field.

All the wisest, smartest and most global technologies were made in the military sector of the economy. Nothing was done in agriculture.” This was somewhat contradictory, as Vladimir had just listed all the reforms above that either included or targeted agriculture. Perhaps he meant that those reforms attempted had failed. The perestroika of the late ‘80s “had an indirect effect on farms, in that maybe people started to change psychologically from that time,” he thought.

“When the perestroika took place and people started thinking about these things, they realized that property should belong to somebody. There should be a definite owner and the land should have a definite owner. Only in this case will normal work on the land take place. Our farm leaders reacted very quickly to what was going on and decided to participate in the process.”

Here Vladimir made a seamless verbal transition between the perestroika that ostensibly began in 1985, to his farm’s decision to participate in the Model Farm Reorganization Program of

1992. One could say that perestroika was still underway in the early 1990s. But if it began in

6 On implementation at farms, see for example Alfred Evans Jr., “Interrepublic Inequality in Agricultural Development in the USSR,” Slavic Review 40, no. 4 (winter 1981), 570-584. 67 1985, then farm leaders’ reacting in 1992 was not so very quick. His speech shows that to

Vladimir as well, then, perestroika basically meant farm reorganization, and was not associated with Gorbachev’s other policies—which he thought didn’t really reach agriculture in any case.

Incidentally, Vladimir downplayed even the significance of glasnost’, contextualizing it in Soviet history as not a moment of radical rupture but a continuation of ongoing trends toward openness and freedom. “It wasn’t just Gorbachev who introduced glasnost’,” he maintained, “it had been growing steadily. If in 1937 I told a wrong joke in the wrong place, then next day I would be en route to Kolyma [the infamous and feared Siberian gulag camp]. But during Brezhnev’s times, we could tell jokes in the street.”7 Perestroika was thus everything and nothing in Vladimir’s depiction: both continuous (or at least intermittent) throughout Soviet history, yet also never occurred (especially in the countryside).

Boris, the eighty-five year old former electrician and carpenter whose father was de- kulakized for washing wool boots in Chapter One, used simpler words to make effectively the same point as Vladimir. Boris did not use the word perestroika, but also he took a longer perspective on top-down efforts to reorganize agriculture during his lifetime. He too described rural life as a kind of never ending series of restructuring attempts imposed from the outside.

Q: Do you remember the way kolkhozes were formed?

Boris: It’s a difficult story and it will take a long time to tell. They were formed by force. I will put it this way. Everything was formed by force…

Q: …I have heard that all kolkhozes were created by violence, but what exactly happened here?

Boris: All kolkhozes were formed by force. There were several different situations, at some point kolkhozes were formed, then they fell apart. This is what’s happening till now. …..[He discusses the de-kulakization of his father and grandfather for several minutes.]…This was the first period of kolkhozes. Then, during the second period, the kolkhozes would be formed then would fall apart, then they would restore them again. All that happened and I remember all these things. And now the last period is going on in my life, now they took away our land, they paid us very little money, 5 rubles for 100 square meters. And now we have no land.

Q: So they bought your land for 5000 rubles? [I’d already heard the amount and the typical land plot size from other interviewees.]

7 Vladimir, in his home, Nizhnii, 11/10/07. He was my only rural interviewee who mentioned glasnost’. 68

Boris: Yes, like this. Who were they?

Boris’ sister Galina: Some bosses, God knows.

Boris: So they were fighting against us all our life long.

In his account Boris seemed to cover the period of initial collectivization and perhaps later Soviet schemes to unite troubled farms with more prosperous ones under Khrushchev. Or perhaps his

“second period” still referred to very early collectivization. But the “last period” for him was land sales to new “bosses,” which occurred in 2006 at his site.8 I was surprised that Boris didn’t mention the kolkhoz decollectivization of 1993-1994 in his list; just land sale, the final step in decollectivization. Perhaps farm reorganization was less memorable to him than other interviewees since he had already been retired, lived in one of the most remote villages associated with the former kolkhoz, and it mattered less to him on a day-to-day level. Or maybe his “last period” might have encompassed the era stretching from decollectivization in 1993 to the purchase of farm workers’ land plots in 2006. Boris didn’t use the language or broader historical references to which the more-educated Vladimir had access. But Boris was similarly describing that there had been several moments of agricultural restructuring during his lifetime—as well as displaying his feelings of resentment and powerlessness in relation to those changes.

Gorbachev’s perestroika notably did not figure into his account.

Interviewees like Vladimir and Boris thus recalled key moments of rural restructuring in

Soviet history and saw these on a historical continuum, not granting Gorbachev’s perestroika much significance in the list. We could also understand not just Soviet efforts to remake the countryside, but the even larger context of peasant history in Russia as a whole, as characterized by episodic top-down efforts to restructure agriculture and rural life. These would also include the institution and evolution of serfdom and the disappointing liberation of the serfs in 1861.

8 Land sales were not fully legislated until the 2000s, as will be discussed further in Chapter Three. 69 III. Gorbachev’s Perestroika Understood Variously

Conversations about the perestroika of the late 1980s often led to a welter of contradictory narratives emerging. Depictions varied immensely from person to person.

Interviewees were ambiguous about which changes actually began under, or due to, Gorbachev.

People contradicted themselves and each other on such fundamental questions as: did everything start to fall apart locally during Gorbachev’s perestroika; or did nothing really change? When exactly did perestroika begin, and in what did it consist? While people harbored several associations with the term and strong feelings about the historical period, their narratives were often a little jumbled. It was impossible to pin Gorbachev’s perestroika period down to an exact date range or specific policy implementation. It was variously understood by different people, and no one clear, socially or commonly agreed upon narrative emerged from oral histories.

As I mentioned, when I asked specifically about Gorbachev’s perestroika or farm life of the mid to late 1980s, many people reported hardly noticing that changes were underway.

“Perestroika didn’t particularly reach us here. We basically didn’t feel it.” Valentina, a plain- spoken former kolkhoz agronomist who opened her own private farm in the mid 1990s in Nizhnii site declared definitively.9 Anatolii, a kolkhoz worker turned private farmer turned lawyer in his mid forties, waxed practically philosophical about perestroika. He didn’t specifically say that perestroika didn’t affect them locally. But all his answers to questions about the period were abstract, about watching and considering developments elsewhere. Here is an interview excerpt:

Q: Tell me in detail what influence perestroika had on the kolkhoz.

A: Perestroika found influence not only on the kolkhoz, but also on all of society. Kolkhozniks composed just thirteen percent. Perestroika was declared for industrial production, and we by inertia, it was given to us, too. We didn’t understand how it was possible to restructure ourselves [perestroit’sia] at the time, with what plan to try to restructure [perestraivat’], although they wanted to restructure [perestroit’] humanity. The issue of perestroika—it’s a political matter.

Q: Did you feel Gorbachev’s perestroika at the end of the 1980s here?

9 Valentina, at post office downstairs from local administration office, Nizhnii site, 11/27/07. 70 A: At that time they called perestroika “the winds of change.” We won’t be saying anything against the government. History develops in spirals. They had wanted to remake humanity, but it’s difficult to remake a man.

Q: Did life here change during the time of perestroika?

A: I think that these changes couldn’t help but affect us too. They also affected us in the sense that, a man could see what was happening in the country and in which way [those things were happening], maybe for the better or for the worse, but he could try to reconstruct himself, and reorient his point of view to what was happening in the country. Maybe he wasn’t educated, but he [still] started to see people differently. If water drops into a bucket every day, it will do its work, and make a hole. And here it was the same. Every day on the television they showed perestroika, and people thought, how are we to restructure ourselves...Although they did have their oppositional positions. In general, it’s an interesting philosophical matter.10

Anatolii was vague and wary of saying anything overtly political, but I didn’t think he was trying to be evasive. If anything, maybe he was trying to be polite. He didn’t contradict me or tell me my initial question was off-base. He just showed me by his response that my question about the effects of Gorbachev’s perestroika on his farm and in his village was practically senseless. When he thought about perestroika, he recalled watching the evening news and wondering what would happen next. Sometimes when people answered questions about local conditions with reference to abstraction and recourse to generality, it could signify they were trying to avoid discussing something. People could of course say a great deal by omission. But in this case, what could there be to hide? Anatolii, who lived in the largest village associated with the former kolkhoz at the Nizhnii site, really didn’t notice drastic changes to rural life from 1985 to 1991.

In another interview, Matvei, the seventy-six year old former brigadier from the same village, commented, “Perestroika really didn’t have an appreciable effect on the kolkhoz. We worked just the same, and everything was planned [from the center] just the same.”11 In a follow- up interview, he would slightly contradict himself, saying that reform of kolkhozes did begin under Gorbachev, in the sense that the long-standing farm chairman was replaced then since

10 Anatolii, at home, Nizhnii, 12/4/07.

11 Matvei, at home, Nizhnii, 9/10/07. 71 people were eager for change. But his initial reaction and basic answer was that nothing much changed during Gorbachev’s perestroika at his farm or where he lived.

Anastasia, a 58-year old animal technician, gave a very similar response about not having felt perestroika locally. Questioned about the influence of “Gorbachev’s perestroika” on the kolkhoz, she responded:

Nu, what influence, how to say it…All the same, just like we used to work, so we kept working. It was all the same, it seems to me; I didn’t sense anything [different]. Little by little, a bit afterwards we slowly started to live normally again [unclear when exactly she meant]. Then again we had everything with the money not being worth much, the flight of money, it climbing higher and higher. Well, I don’t really know, what to say in general…what it was like further…But then, just like we had worked, that’s how we were working. Maybe, somewhere in the factories it was noticed, and just to us it wasn’t noticeable. Just like we always got up early to work, so we kept working, that’s how we also worked…It seems to me there was none [no influence]. Personally I didn’t notice anything different, for myself.12

This attitude was absolutely commonplace. People didn’t speak about an upheaval and even remarked that they really didn’t notice Gorbachev’s reforms. They certainly didn’t remember the time as a turbulent or emotional. This was no turning or breaking—or even especially memorable—point in their history.

If at some moments in conversation perestroika seemed to have no impact upon many of my interviewees, at other moments or to other people, perestroika signaled the origins of broader

Soviet collapse. The term came to refer not to specific policies or their effects, but rather became a kind of placeholder or time marker for the beginning of the end. People frequently talked about a “full” or “complete” collapse or disintegration—not just of farms but of the Soviet Union and the late socialist way of life in villages. Eighty-three year old Galina, former fieldworker with a fourth-class education, declared emphatically, “Gorbachev ruined the whole country,” while her brother Boris appended that no one understood what was happening until after Yeltsin’s tenure in power. Galina said that it had been “horrible,” having to buy things with product tickets, not

12 Anastasia, at home, Riazan, 2/14/08. 72 knowing what goods would be in the stores any given day, and having to go without when items weren’t there.13

People frequently articulated variants of, “then there was perestroika and everything fell apart.” Inessa, a middle-aged animal tender, commented, “Gorbachev was making 20,000 rubles, while pensioners got 2000. Politicians are only in it for themselves. Workers get nothing.

During perestroika buildings weren’t built; things only broke.”14 “A full collapse [razval polnostiu] happened to us, “ Maksim, a former fieldoworker in his fifties, said when asked what happened in his village during perestroika. “Enterprises went to pieces; the kolkhozes immediately ended.”15 “Everything collapsed [razrushilos’],” seventy-three year old Larisa maintained.16 “They collapsed....everything crashed down...” commented Yana succintly, a former milkmaid in her eighties, about the perestroika period.17 Oksana, former director of culture in her village now in her seventies, literally cursed Gorbachev when I asked about perestroika. “They destroyed the kolkhoz and life.” She said. “There you have perestroika.” For three or four months they didn’t receive pensions or wages; one year under Yeltsin it was for six months, she said.18 Thus while Oksana associated perestroika with Gorbachev to some extent, in a larger sense the term really meant the entire collapse of the Soviet Union.

When people talked about perestroika as the beginning of collapse, the years 1985 to

1991 often collapsed together in their accounts. Asked to recall what happened to them, people often remembered a string of calamities and the hardships they endured, without particularly distinguishing individual years. But many said the downward spiral started with (and they

13 Boris and Galina, outside their home, NIzhnii, 10/10/07.

14 Inessa, informal conversation in her home, Nizhnii, 10/8/07.

15 Maksim, in street outside his home, Krasnodar, 7/2/08.

16 Larisa, in her home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

17 Yana, in her home, Riazan’, during preliminary research, August 2006.

18 Oksana, in her home, Riazan’, 2/28/08. 73 concluded, was caused by) Gorbachev’s perestroika. Emotively, perestroika became a quick referent of collapse, detached from any particular policy content, specific local effect, event, or even date range. For example, Anna, a daughter of kolkhozniks in her late forties now working at an urban factory, talked about Gorbachev’s disastrous dry law and that she first thought the

Soviet Union might cease to exist when Gorbachev started his new politics and the republics began leaving the Union—all in the same breath.19

Did people experience perestroika and the Soviet collapse as a string of continuous calamities, each quickly following on the heels of another? They may have even begun to experience time differently, as if events were speeding up, like watching a train heading off tracks into certain collision.20 This would explain the ellipses, disjunctures, and collapse of years together inside their accounts. Or did they simply remember collapse this way—perestroika becoming the turning point in conversation, script and memory that it perhaps had not been at the time in villages? Or do the paradoxical statements accurately reflect different people’s divergent experiences; to some perestroika was the start of the end, while it didn’t affect others? While yet others were confused, without a consolidated, unified, coherent or fully processed “take” on their experience, such that at some points in conversation perestroika was one thing and in another mood or minute, something else entirely?

I suggest that in recitations like Anna’s, perestroika became a symbol or focal point for the intense anxieties Russians harbored about social change. My village interviewees touched on themes that resonated with the urban population as well. To a great extent, this was a shared, broader discourse about the perils and horrors perestroika had wrought, iterated by urban elite as well as rural kolkhozniks. Observers at the time noticed the very pessimistic Russian discussion

19 Anna, in her mother’s home, Nizhnii, 11/26/07.

20 Several scholars argue that the Soviet collapse and rapid economic and social transformations forced people to relate to and experience time itself differently. See Nazpary (2002) and Boym (2002). Verdery (1996) argues that the socialist collision with capitalist relations towards time actually served as a cause of the Soviet collapse. 74 of the changes underway, for example noting Russians’ “fears and gloomy predictions” or the

“pervading sense of fragmentation” people seemed to feel.21 In many accounts, the epoch seemed to take on larger-than-life proportions and implications.

People related rumors they’d heard from friends or relatives in cities or remembered from

TV shows, such as the “Torch of Perestroika,” which according to a sociologist in Nizhnii, showed chocolate candies, sausages and other goods found in trash heaps. There was food thrown away by the sides of highways; food in garbage dumps; but none in the stores. Then

“they” started giving out ration cards. “People measure their relation to power by the satisfaction of their basic needs,” she related heatedly. “To change the political regime in a country you need to lower the possibilities of meeting people’s basic needs!” In her mind, food shortages were deliberately engineered in order to cause dissatisfaction with the Communists and effect regime change. She said a few correspondence students at Nizhnii’s Agricultural University told her a story. They were driving cattle to the slaughterhouse and were stopped on the road by some men who asked how much they would sell the cattle for. They replied, and the men offered them twice as much to just unload the meat in the forest somewhere, instead. The changes begun by perestroika had left Russia vulnerable to their Asian neighbors, who could be ready to invade, the scholar added.22

At times my village interviewees also talked about perestroika as the start of awful and sinister developments. Inna, the fieldworker in her early sixties, and Valentina, the accountant turned private farm director in her fifties, blamed perestroika for the ecological contamination of foodstuffs, which became both unhealthy and tasteless in their accounts.23 Seventy-three year old

21 Lewin(1991), 169.

22 Nina, in her office at a university in Nizhnii city, 9/11/07.

23 Inna, in her home, Krasnodar, 7/1/08 and Valentina, in farm office, Nizhnii, 9/19/07.

75 Larisa lamented about the rash of suicides perestroika had brought to Russia.24 The five relatives who gave me a long Saturday night joint interview about their farms talked about how mothers began abandoning their children because they could no longer feed them once reforms began.

Yet these people could only give me one or two local examples of these horrors. They claimed that Evgeniia, former division accountant for the sovkhoz, had lost her mind because of perestroika, “as everyone knew.”25 They went on to discuss the time their family greenhouses were wrecked by government officials. Such private industry and accumulation of wealth were still off limits. Afterwards, the officiating agents were eternally apologetic, but at the time they had their job to do. The victims thought this happened during perestroika. It definitely occurred sometime during the 1980s, they knew. But they were vague about when exactly, just remaining bitter that then they were considered parasites, while now people who did the exact same things were celebrated as entrepreneurs. One relative thought this happened during Gorbachev’s time while another thought it was under Andropov. “Did it happen at the time of perestroika?” I asked. “Yes,” Speaker Four replied. “As soon as Gorbachev came to power, he started to break

[lomat’] [things].” “It seems to me that, well, wasn’t it Andropov?” asked Speaker Three.

“Gorbachev,” Speaker Four. “Okay, we won’t argue,” Speaker Four conceded. “In 1985?” I asked. “No,” Speaker One chimed in, “not in 1985. I don’t remember when exactly it was in the

1980s.”26

I don’t have external verification of the date of the official greenhouse wrecking. It’s possible it happened during perestroika. But since Gorbachev was bent on encouraging private farming, it would seem more likely that the episode occurred before his reforms. Either way, it is telling that while informants weren’t in fact positive it happened during perestroika, the event was still strongly linked in their minds with perestroika. An event in fact quite contrary to the spirit of

24 Larisa, in her home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

25 Five Relatives, in one’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

26 Five Relatives, at one’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08. 76 the reforms Gorbachev promulgated was incontrovertibly linked to the perestroika era in memory. I suggest this was due to perestroika’s eventual symbolism as the cause of a multitude of problems, abuses, neglectful episodes and catastrophes, the start of “breaking things.”

In a fascinating ethnography of Russian conversation during perestroika that focuses on the speech patterns of Moscow intelligentsia, Nancy Ries categorizes motifs thematically, unpacking some of their social import and functions.27 She finds that perestroika took on mythical elements in the retelling. Stories of suffering, cataclysm, and the “complete destruction” or “full collapse” perestroika engendered proliferated in conversation as well as in the media.

These genres and contents helped speakers source their identities, make meaning of their daily lives, unite themselves to the mythologized simple people more generally, and take pride in their everyday tenacity. At the same time the stories could serve to reinforce people’s sense of powerlessness and reify constructions of “us”, “them,” and “other”—typically, the long-suffering simple people vs. the rich and powerful, the “bosses” in Galina the fieldworker’s phrasing.

Extending Ries’ conclusions a bit further, a broad assumption of victimization could also render general social intolerance and some specific groups’ victimizations invisible, a theme that will be returned to in Chapter Five.

My research did not determine whether villagers used the same language and made the same complaints in 1990 that they expressed in the 2000s (or how Moscow intelligents were talking about perestroika in the 2000s). It’s possible that kolkhozniks started making these statments only after some time had passed---and the elites could have been saying very different things by then. But the coincidence of terms and themes nevertheless suggests broad-based social resonance. Very different sorts of people harbored some similar worries about perestroika, whether or not they felt those fears at exactly the same time. This was a deeply resonant subject, and anxieties about political and social change were shared across socioeconomic strata. The

27 Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika (Cornell: Cornell University Press,1997). 77 complete weight of villagers’ contradictory accounts suggests the full collapse was just one of several ways to discuss perestroika, a strand in popular imagination that recurred among several other understandings of the era.

IV. Why did People Feel This Way? Gorbachev’s Perestroika Policies Unpacked

People’s perspective that perestroika didn’t alter the way their farm worked meshes with scholarly accounts of the failures of Gorbachev’s agricultural reforms. Partly this was due to the political deadlock over reforms. A fierce debate raged in Russia over what to do about agriculture. The most radical reformers, the “progressives,” advocated immediate farm privatization, hoped to replace the collectives with small private farms, and wanted to fully legalize land sales and purchases. Those on the political “right” called instead for renewed investment into the collective farm system, focusing on improving agricultural production rather than drastically altering the system. They feared that legalizing land sales would enable massive speculation in real estate. Land reform legislation was stymied for years because top government officials could not reconcile these opposing views, as I’ll describe in Chapter Three. In general many more ideas for economic reform were discussed than ever became policy. Then, many of the policies legislated were difficult to implement or met resistance and were thus never, or only partially or nominally, fulfilled.28

Gorbachev’s own thinking about agriculture appears to have shifted during his time at the helm of the Soviet Union. As economist Karl-Eugen Wadekin points out, while in 1985

Gorbachev still seemed to believe in the viability of the collective farming system, by 1988 he implicitly blamed that system for agriculture’s failures, putting more hope in the emergence of

28 On the halting, experimental nature of economic reform, see for example Marshall Goldman, What Went Wrong With Perestroika? (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1992), or Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Recalling perestroika, Gorbachev himself wrote in a March 13, 2010 NYT op-ed, “…In the heat of political battles we lost sight of the economy,” www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14gorbachev.html?scp=1&sq=perestroika%20anniversary&st=cse 78 small-scale private farming than in the revival of the collective system.29 He didn’t however plan to eliminate collective or state farms straightaway. He stressed farm autonomy, hoping to gradually transform collective farms to cooperatives. He wanted peasants to become more productive farmers—masters themselves, instead of “day laborers.” He talked about the

“centrality of humans” in the countryside and how to unleash their entrepreneurial farming potential, previously squashed by earlier Soviet leaders.30 Gorbachev’s long-term vision seemed to have been of a countryside dotted with small farms working harmoniously in and with cooperative associations to handle product distribution and other infrastructural needs. At the time his stance was considered moderate in the spectrum of reform ideas circulating, representing a kind of “semi-privatization” of farming, during most of his tenure in office.31 Most Russian citizens seemed to support private ownership of small quantities of land—but not private ownership of large-scale farming plots. Gorbachev supported land leasing for up to 100 years, but seemed to remain wary of private ownership—though he suggested Soviet republics make their own choices about land ownership. A summary of the main agricultural policy changes he attempted follows:

Administrative Reform

Gorbachev attempted to streamline agricultural bureaucracy and improve the efficiency of central planning. In 1985 he abolished five of the existing ministries plus one committee in charge of agriculture (some but not all of the government entities that managed agriculture), creating instead the State Committee for the Agro-Industrial Complex (Gosagroprom). However

29 Karl-Eugen Wadekin, “Agriculture,” in Gorbachev and Perestroika, ed. Martin McCauley (London: The MacMillan Press LTD, 1990), 70.

30 See Teodor Shanin, “Soviet Agriculture and Perestroika: Four Models: The most urgent task and the furthest shore,” Sociologia Ruralis 29, no. 1 (1989), 20; and Roy Laird, The Soviet Legacy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 58.

31 Laird (1993), 57-74. 79 this Committee simply became another disappointing bureaucracy, perhaps because of

Gorbachev’s limited political choices in selecting top personnel, as historian Archie Brown suggests.32 In the fraught political climate, he felt he needed to install someone who would be loyal to him personally. The man he appointed as head, Vsevelod Murakhovskii, had a long history of working with Gorbachev, but seemed to perhaps not be qualified in terms of organizational management skills.33 Agriculture remained centralized and collectivized.

Gosagroprom was abolished in 1989 and many of its responsibilities transferred from Soviet to

Russian purview.

At local levels, new agricultural administrative organs were created and old ones were renamed. Informational and education meetings were called and a paper trail generated in response to each new agricultural edict. I found an extensive record of compliance with administrative reorganization imperatives in my research sites. As early as 1986, sovkhoz administration in Krasnodar site was writing reports detailing how they would meet new statutes on agricultural management and increasing private plot production.34 A district organization to develop the “agro-industrial complex” (APK) of all farms was organized in 1986.35 In 1989, in response to changing federal principles about the “Marxist-Leninist political-economic basis” of the sovkhoz, the new APK management decided to conduct new political-economic seminars for the re-education of farm leaders.36 In Nizhnii site, a wealth of reports detail varied production

32 Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 143.

33 Ilya Zemtsov and John Farrar, Gorbachev: The Man and the System (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 53.

34 Belorechensk Municipal Archive, Krasnodar Krai, (from now on I’ll abbreviate as Belorechensk) from prikazi direktora po osnovnoi deyatelnosti no.s 178-305, from 25.06.1986 to 26.12.1986; for example, on compliance with 1985 laws, see 50:1:447:29.

35 See the April 18, 1986 Decision on the Creation of Belorechensk District’s Agro-Industrial Unification, by which the two sovkhozes were joined with eight others under a new APK administrative group: 57:1:877:12-13.

36 Prikaz-Postanovlenie 23-1-1989 “On Changes to the System of Marxist-Leninist Education in Subdivisions of Sovkhoz [Traktor]”: 50:475:43-44. 80 plans for the 1980s as well as the formation of new administrative organs including a department devoted to “planning social-economic development of APK”.37 “It was a headache handling all that reorganization!” a department of agriculture employee commented during a mostly uninformative interview.38 In Riazan’ site, new commissions of the party’s executive committee in the district were similarly organized to manage agricultural land administration.39 But there is little evidence that the new provincial administrative bodies overseeing agriculture changed anything about the way farms ran. Perhaps this was because they were largely staffed with the same local specialists and provincial elites who were already key players in agricultural management previously.

Collective Farm Independence

Gorbachev wanted farms to become more independent from central bureaucratic planning, handling their own cost accounting and electing their leaders freely. Yet this never became a reality; in part, as economist Edward Cook argues, because reformers hesitated at the social cost and equity considerations of cutting off farm subsidies completely.40 Only a very few of my interviewees said anything about khozrashchet policies. The idea seemed to have little practical effect in changing the way farms were managed—though it did lay theoretical rationale to withdrawing state subsidies for farms.

The Law on Enterprises of 1988, which applied to farms as well as industrial enterprises, stipulated popular elections of enterprise leaders. At all three of my main research sites, farm leaders changed during the perestroika period, at two farms in an atmosphere of controversy, with

37 Nizhegorodskaia Central Archive (from now on I’ll abbreviate as Nizhnii) 3075:7:5467: 45 for 1988. For examples of provincial plans for capital investment into kolkhozes for 1986-1990 see 3075:7:389-390. The province’s “Department of Agriculture and Land Reform” with its eighteen sub-departments didn’t appear until late 1991: see p 84-89 and 3075:7:6024, which details administrative changes.

38 Svetlana (all names changed), at her desk in oblast Ministry of Agriculture, 10/12/07.

39 See Shilovo Municipal Archive (Shilovo) 141:71:7 from 1990.

40 See Edward Cook, “Reforming Soviet Agriculture,” in Perestroika in the Countryside, 47-62. 81 some locals wanting change and others supporting the long-standing leader. A select few interviewees discussed leader replacements at the end of the 1980s as true popular decisions among workers. But most commonly, people described it as official policy to replace chairmen with new leaders more amenable to change. This explanation was so standard across my research sites that I looked for documentation about the perestroika-era policy of replacing farm chairmen before realizing that this was not official policy.

In the Gorbachev period and continuing even in to the 2000s, however, local officials retained high informal influence on farm post appointments. For example, an official in district administration at Riazan’ site said that she and other colleagues from the department of agricultural management recommended that farms hire specific specialists and other employees on a continuing basis even in 2008—just without official power to enforce or veto appointments.41 Business at most collective farms, then, went on as usual. As Lidia, a trained veterinarian and current executive director of her farm put it, “it’s all the same if you have to feed, wash and pasture the cattle. We worked just like always.”42

Contract Labor and Land Leasing

Aside from administrative reform, Gorbachev instituted the collective contract

(kollektivnii podriad) and lease contracting (arendnii podriad), in order to spur groups of people, including families, to farm for themselves by leasing land from the collectives. The podriad system had existed since 1961 as an alternate pay system for work teams at farms, based on their tangible output rather than the number of workdays they earned. Meant to enhance productivity, in practical terms people’s wage structures had not substantially altered. Gorbachev now expanded the collective contract system so farms could employ new kinds of work teams,

41 From interview in her office, Shilovo, Riazan’, 2/18/07. Also see Allina-Pisano (2008) on the consolidation of power in the hands of some local officials after the Soviet Union collapsed.

42 Lidia, in her home, Riazan’, 2/4/08. 82 including individual families and small groups of voluntary workers. They would be supplied land and all necessary means to cultivate the land by the parent farm, but organize the work themselves. They would deliver produce back to the parent farm and be paid according to how much they produced. These work teams would ideally take on greater responsibility for land cultivation and livestock tending, etc, than regular kolkhozniks, having a more personal stake.

Wadekin notes that in practice, however, the main impact of instituting new contract terms at farms was to blur the line between private and socialist production.43 Contracts did not seem to be adopted en masse, and fulfillment rates were low even when contracts were formed.

Farm specialists and managers feared losing control and did not want to cede good farm land, while workers expected serious practical difficulties, including lacking any money to invest in their operations, as well as resistance from farm managers and possible hostility from neighbors and colleagues.44

Soon officials realized that without any long-term stake in the land or farming processes, people’s incentive to take greater care and responsibility had not increased. In 1989 the Supreme

Soviet decreed that individuals or groups, including families, could lease land for up to fifty years, and made the lease heritable to family members actively working the land. The decree stipulated lease payments and land taxes for lessees.45 However, land theoretically available for leasing found few takers in reality. Farm workers were mostly uninterested in the risks and lacked the capital, supplies, manpower, equipment, and networks for marketing that farming required. Farm chairmen and directors had understandably little incentive to lease out their best land, or render equipment or other assistance to would-be new farmers. The contractual leasing

43 Wadekin (1990), 77.

44 Pallot (1991), 92. For economic explanation of why the contract systems failed see Karen Brooks, “Soviet Agricultural Policy and Pricing under Gorbachev,” in Soviet Agriculture: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Kenneth Gray (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 116-129, who argues that the collective contract failed to decentralize agricultural decision making.

45 See for example Laird (1993), 59. 83 idea was not broadly implemented in Russia.46 At my research sites, while I found newspaper articles about a few well-publicized farmers who struck out on their own during the Gorbachev- era, my interviewees did not report that anyone leased land where they were.

Land Ownership

Perhaps starting to see the collectives as unviable and recognizing the failures of leasing, towards the end of his tenure, Gorbachev started the process of making land ownership legal.

The “Law on Land Reform” of 1990 was the first legislation of the Soviet Union to permit private ownership of land used for agricultural purposes. In the same year, the “Law on Peasant Farms” set out the basic mechanism for individuals to disband from collectives and begin private farming. Collectives were to give out land shares in the form of paper certificates of entitlement to all farm workers, who were now able to leave the farm with a land share of the size specified in their certificate. Land not withdrawn was considered held in “joint shared ownership.”47 The right to buy and sell land remained fiercely contested and was not legislated at this time.

That land was now to be given to farm workers for free was a dramatic reversal of Soviet and imperial Russian history—at least in concept. However the mechanisms for workers to disband from collectives and obtain a tangible land plot were not specified. Farms had no incentive to help people disband and posed numerous obstacles to those who made the effort, as will be discussed further in Chapters Three and Four. Most farm workers had little motive to strike out on their own, as they still lacked both the capital and equipment necessary to farm alone. Farms had even less incentive to help them than they’d had to assist those simply leasing land. For most rural areas, the changes were mainly on paper. As anthropologist Oane Visser

46 Brown (1996), 144, also Laird (1993), 60-71.

47 See Natalya Shaigada, “Agricultural Land Market in Russia: Living With Constraints,” Comparative Economic Studies 47 (2005), 128. Individual land plots across Russia ranged from 2 to 15 hectares of formerly collective property. Alakoz, V. V. “O Sovershenstvovanii Zemel’nogo Zakonodatel’stva,” in Zemel’naia Reforma: Na Opiate Nizhegorodskoi Oblasti, ed. L. P. Kravchenko (Moscow: Rossiskaia Gazeta with Sotsial’naia Zashita, 1994), 5. 84 writes on the shifts in agricultural policies, “…as of 1990, these reforms had not brought forth any significant results.”48 Of my three main research sites, only Krasnodar saw individuals try to disband and begin private farms during the Gorbachev period. Those few, early private farmers faced significant resistance from their farms and local officials, as I will explain. Interviewees explained that the very first farmers even at Krasnodar site (the only site where private farming eventually flourished) quickly failed.

Private Plot

As the experimental reforms in agriculture showed few results, private plot cultivation boomed, becoming ever more important to food production in the country. Not just kolkhozniks but also urbanites were growing food in plots around their homes or dachas, and this would only increase after the Soviet collapse.49

Why Reforms Failed

Scholars offer differing perspectives on why Gorbachev’s agricultural reforms failed.

According to political scientist Stephen Wegren, the agricultural reforms attempted during perestroika were misguided. Political leaders hoped to solve food shortages by changing the way food was produced—essentially writing off the large collective and state farms as useless, while encouraging the emergence of private farming. However the food shortages of the late 1980s were in fact mainly due to large-scale breakdowns in Russia’s distribution network.50 By this line

48 Oane Visser, Crucial Connections: The Persistence of Large Farm Enterprises in Russia, dissertation (Nijmegen: Radbound University, Netherlands, 2008), 37.

49 On private plot production, see Judith Pallot and Tat’iana Nefedova, Russia's Unknown Agriculture: Household Production in Post-Socialist Rural Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

50 Stephen Wegren, Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 60. 85 of thinking, even had production-focused initiatives proved highly successful and far-reaching, the initial problem would remain.

Economist Marshall Goldman attributes Gorbachev’s agricultural failures to his focus on the superministry and the machine tool industry, instead of on measures to stimulate grass-roots farming.51 Historian David Macey however points out that it was somewhat anachronistic to expect family farming to take off in Russia when it was losing out to large corporations in most advanced capitalist countries.52

According to political scientist Jessica Allina-Pisano, collective and state farms actually began to adapt to changing economics in the 1980s and were perfectly capable of adjusting to full market relations. Once money for subsidies started to fall and infrastructure to deteriorate, farms immediately looked for ways to increase their earnings. Even before 1991 they were already starting to pay less attention to state demands and finding higher prices selling produce on world markets. Gorbachev did not have to give up on the collectives. If Soviet and even post-Soviet leaders had worked with the collectives rather than trying to dismantle them, there would almost certainly have been much lower social cost for the rural population.53

Local Decline

At my sites, work life did not change much; however the farms were seriously declining in economic terms. Rural populations were further dwindling, even as food shortages in cities worsened. At Krasnodar site, Plamia sovkhoz, which featured tobacco as a main crop, had

51 Marshall Goldman, “Gorbachev the Economist,” Foreign Affairs 69, no. 2 (Spring, 1990), 28-44.

52 David Macey, “Gorbachev and Stolypin: Soviet Agrarian Reform in Historical Perspective,” in Perestroika in the Countryside: Agricultural Reform in the Gorbachev Era, ed. William Moskoff (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), 17.

53 Jessica Allina Pisano, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property in the Black Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 44.

86 already not met production plans for any year between 1976 and 1981.54 Sovkhoz protocols show that Lenin farm held significant debt to Gosbank already by 1985—and the debt load worsened in succeeding years.55

At Nizhnii site, provincial officials were warning on the record that the demographic situation in villages was making agricultural production a problem by 1986. Young people were migrating out of villages and the rural labor force was already in trouble. Officials noted that home plot cultivation as well as growing other rural industries to attract and keep rural residents would help overall agricultural production.56 Regional Department of Agriculture personnel wrote in 1988 about the need for social reconstruction of kolkhozes and strengthening the personnel force.57 Analytical reports of the province show an overall steady decline in the area of farmland being successfully cultivated between 1965 and 1988, and significant reduction in grain production from 1984 to 1988.58

Lidia, the chief animal technician who served as deputy director at Riazan’ site related that their kolkhoz, typically third or fourth poorest producing farm in its district, was only profitable one or two years after the late 1970s.59 This site saw the most dramatic demographic decline during the period, due to both death and outmigration (partly since the cities of Riazan’ and Moscow were in reasonable proximity for young people looking to move out). District statistics show a significant decrease in the rural population in villages associated with the kolkhoz between the years 1968 and 1986. The population in 1990 and 1991 was even lower. At

54 (Belorechensk) 46:1:271 analysis of the farm’s economic activities of 1980-1981; p 39 for summary.

55 For example, (Belorechensk) 50:1:445:48 annual report of 1985, and 50:1:477 production-financial plan for 1989, p 24 on credit details for 1989.

56 (Nizhnii) spravka of 1986, 3075:7:5155:27-29.

57 (Nizhnii) spravka of 1988, 3075:7:5671:1-6.

58 (Nizhnii) 3075:7:5499:2-6.

59 Lidia, interview in her home, Riazan’, 2/4/08.

87 the six villages associated with Kolkhoz Pervoe Maia, in late Soviet years the total number of occupied households fell from 591 in 1962, to 394 in 1991. The total population in those villages decreased by more than 50%, from 1,772 in 1962, to 766 people in 1991.60 The rural population steadily declined from 1980 to 2008, with population totals lower every single year, such that within 28 years, the rural population of Shilovo District had dwindled almost by half: from

31,983 to 17,812 people.61 At my research kolkhoz, government subsidies for milk and meat products kept the farm afloat, reported Lidia and other kolkhoz specialists. In this, the kolkhoz was all too typical for central Russia

Conclusion

It's an open question to what extent Gorbachev’s policies were radical, or consistent with earlier Soviet agricultural reforms. There were certainly great continuities. For example, as

Vladimir the former private farmer pointed out above, Brezhnev and Kosygin had made khozrashchet precepts part of their package of 1965 economic reforms. Soviet leaders in the mid-

‘60s were already trying to get enterprises including farms to be responsible for their own finances in order to increase efficiency and profitability. Gorbachev’s reiteration of these principles was just that: a restatement of ideas that had long informed Soviet policy—and his iteration accomplished no more than Brezhnev’s. Additionally, contract work was not a new concept in the late 1980s. While permitting private farming outside of the collective system

60 Numbers specially collected and printed out for me by Shilovo archivist, in a document titled “Dannie po naselenniim punktam [the name of the rural] sel’skogo Soveta o kolichestve khoziaistv i chislennosti naseleniia,” from 21:1:71: 104, 974, 1142 and 1168. The villages were not depopulated at the exact same rates, but the overall negative trend existed for all of them. The villages closest to the kolkhoz center, with more population to begin with and more developed infrastructure, were depopulated at lower rates than the further out and smaller villages.

61 Four pages of statistics specially printed for me by Shilovo Statistics Office, an organ of Federal Statistics of Riazan’ (Riazan’stat), using national census numbers, titled “Napravlaiem informatsiiu po osnovniim pokazateliam, kharakterizuiushchim demograficheskie protsessii sel’skogo naseleniia Shilovskogo raiona Riazanskoi oblasti za 1980-2077gg.” 88 sounded radical, in reality the lines between the new and heralded private “farming” and the expansion of private plot farming by kolkhozniks, for which there was long Soviet tradition.

Gorbachev’s attempts to tinker with agricultural productivity can easily be seen as just another episode in the string of failed late socialist agricultural reforms. His most radical measure was to institute land ownership in 1990. But this had little practical effect in villages. Since

Gorbachev’s policy changes were ineffective, it was easy for people to harbor divergent beliefs and project various fears onto the period, attributing all manner of sinister happenings to perestroika in retrospect.

During Gorbachev’s years as General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union, then, kolkhoz economies declined while attempts to reform agriculture found little practical effect. Life for people working at collectives may have gotten harder as the economy deteriorated, but my interviewees did not fundamentally think about the Gorbachev perestroika period as the momentous era of change that people in Moscow or Washington hoped it to be. From my interviewees’ perspective, it doesn’t make sense to talk about perestroika as a discrete period or to use Gorbachev’s perestroika as an analytical framework to understand their history. There were many perestroikas in their farms’ pasts, and people understood Gorbachev’s perestroika variously. To some it took on great and sinister import in retrospect, signaling the beginning of collapse, while to others it meant very little.

89 Chapter Three: Utopian Transitology

While the last two chapters discussed late socialist history at farms and in villages, now the dissertation ventures into the complex story of post-Soviet farm privatizations. This chapter addresses the Russian state and World Bank’s plans for farm privatization and how these plans failed. To this end I use archival documents, International Finance Corporation (the private investment arm of the World Bank) booklets, secondary literature, newspaper articles, and several interviews with Russians who worked on privatization at the time. I add farm workers’ perspectives at a few points, however I devote Chapter Five, “Perspectives on Privatization,” to exploring their speech, perceptions, and memories much more fully. Here, I build on criticisms already articulated by other scholars to argue that the reformers were utopian in their blind faith in private property as the panacea for the problems plaguing Russian agriculture.

Official Intentions For Privatization

After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, President of the Russian Federation Boris

Yeltsin endeavored to rapidly create a market economy in place of the socialist command system.

Plans for exactly how prosperous capitalist farms were to develop in the Russian countryside were not completely coherent in 1991. But Yeltsin and his reformers clearly saw no future prospects in the collectives and wanted to replace them with smaller farms where land and property would be privately owned.1 In distinction to the Baltic states and most Central European countries, Russia chose to redistribute agricultural land to farm workers, instead of offering

1 See Judith Pallott and Tatiana Nefedova, “Trajectories in People’s Farming in Moscow oblast during the post-socialist transformation,” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003), 345-362; also Stephen Wegren Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 1998) and Don van Atta, ed., The Farmer Threat: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transformation in Post-Socialist Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993). 90 restitution to pre-Soviet land owners.2 Yeltsin took legal measures to force collective farms to privatize. However the new legal requirements did little to substantively transform Russian agriculture.

New legislation required collective and state farms to transform to private enterprises

(several categories were possible, such as collectively owned businesses, joint stock companies or limited liability partnerships) and to give land and property ownership to their workers. In theory, this would provide incentive for workers to leave the collectives and open their own farms, as well as make them more responsible workers at the former collectives, now that they had ownership stakes. Yeltsin attempted to create a market in rural land. However allowing rural land to be bought and sold remained a fiercely divisive issue among government officials, many still afraid of exploitative speculation in rural real estate. While Yeltsin advocated a completely free market in land, his opposition in the Duma wanted to ensure rural land would remain in agricultural use and supported only a highly regulated market. The president issued multiple decrees on land sales to try to circumvent the Duma. Rural land and property ownership was thus legislated largely through a number of presidential decrees, which went further than the houses of legislature were willing to go. Due to the political infighting and lack of consensus, legislation codified only the sale of small plots of land during the 1990s, although broad ownership became possible.

Legislative Changes

While the laws Gorbachev passed on land reform and private peasant farming in 1990 laid the foundations for reform by permitting private ownership of small plots, the 1991 Land

Code of the Russian Federation restated and formalized these provisions, which as economists

2 On post-Soviet rural transformations outside Russia, see for example Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) and Nigel Swain, “Agricultural Restitution and Co-operative Transformation in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia,” Europe-Asia Studies 51: 7 (November 1999), 1199-1219. 91 Lerman and Shaigada write, “laid the road for mass privatization of land.”3 A presidential decree of 1991 restated the right first granted in 1990 for farm workers to withdraw from farms with land and property shares (though without the right to buy or sell those shares) and ordered farms to distribute those shares. In 1991 farms began to hand out land share certificates to workers which asserted rights to ownership of a land share of a specified size.

Yeltsin’s decrees in 1992 permitted the sale of those land shares to other farm workers and to the parent collective farm. Tangible land plots could be sold only in specific circumstances, including by an heir when an owner died, when the owner retired, when the owner moved to another region, or when the owner wanted to use the money from the sale to open a new, non-agricultural business.4 Presidential decrees also permitted the experimental sale of dacha and kitchen garden plots in Moscow region, with restrictions including that the land had to be used for agricultural purposes, and could not be resold for ten years if the owner had received the plot for free. A 1992 deadline was set for farms to re-register as private enterprises, which was later extended to 1993.5 In a compromise effort, probably angling to prevent a national referendum on general land ownership and maintain some restrictions on the rural land market, the Duma in 1992 lifted the ten-year moratorium Gorbachev had first imposed on resale of dacha and kitchen garden plots.6

In September of 1993, Yeltsin famously shut down the legislature to end the stalemates over the direction of reforms, which culminated in ten days of violence in Moscow streets. With dissenting lawmakers temporarily out of the way, Yeltsin instituted a presidential decree “on

3 Zvi Lerman and Natalya Shaigada, “Land Reform and Development of Agricultural Land Markets in Russia,” Selected Paper prepared for presentation at the American Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, July 24-27, 2005, 3; also Stephen Wegren, “Rural Reform in Russia, “ RFE/RL Research Report 2, no. 43 (29 October 1993), 43-53, and Wegren, “Farm Privatization in Nizhnii Novgorod: A Model for Russia?” RFE/RL Research Report 3, no. 21 (27 May 1994), 19.

4 Lerman and Shaigada (2005), 4.

5 Visser (2008), 36-37.

6 Andrew Barnes, “What’s the Difference? Industrial Privatisation and Agricultural Land Reform in Russia, 1990-1996,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 5 (July 1998), 849. 92 regulation of land relations and the development of agrarian reform in Russia,” which restated the requirement for farms to give out shares via certificates of ownership. But now he declared the shares could be bought and sold at any time if the land was used for agricultural purposes. He tried several more times to lessen regulations on land sales by issuing decrees, including a 1996 decree allowing unlimited amounts of land to be leased and increasing the maximum allowed plot of land that could be designated as a private plot.7 The fate of larger land plots still hung in question, however. The legislature would have to pass a new land code, which would replace and supercede the presidential decrees. But the Duma and the President could still not agree on terms and struggled over land sale restrictions for years. The eventual law on rural land transactions which fully legalized purchases and sales came into effect a decade later, in 2003.

Thus the legislation of the first half of the 1990s had made buying and selling small land plots theoretically legal. But no procedures or mechanisms were specified by which farm workers were to request, withdraw, or sell their land shares received from parent farms. As my oral histories revealed, people were not sure about whether, how, or to whom a landowner could sell shares in the 1990s. Confusion reigned.8

Farms across Russia began to re-register as private businesses in effort to comply with the federal mandates. But it quickly became clear that the legal change to “privatization,” was being accomplished in name only. Many farms were changing their legal status without changing anything else about their management or operations.9 Farm leaders as well as local government officials often saw farm privatization as threats to their power and against their interests. They tended to resist real change. Even when leaders did not mount overt resistance, there was not much knowledge, vision, experience or extra resources or support in currency to help them

7 This may have been part of his bid to win electoral support facing the 1996 elections; see Barnes (1998).

8 See also Stephen Wegren, “Land Reform and the land market in Russia: operation, constraints and prospects,” Europe-Asia Studies 49, no. 6 (1997), 966.

9 See for example Lerman et al, Agriculture in transition: Land policies and evolving farm structures in Post-Soviet Countries (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 93 suddenly start working “on the market.”10 It was relatively easy to declare that collective and state farms should become private—and not too difficult to technically re-register as such. But this was the smallest tip of the iceberg. Changing incentives, marketing structures, planning methods—the whole host of deep institutional changes needed to thoroughly turn farms capitalist remained elusive.

As late as 1995, 87% of Russia’s agricultural land was still held by the former collective and state farms (mostly but not entirely re-registered as private).11 Only a very small amount of actual land (as opposed to certificates of land ownership) had in fact been distributed to individuals. Not only did farm managers resist redistribution, but also the population was wary of trying to farm privately in the tough economic climate. Private subsidiary plot farming (Lichnie

Podsobnie Khoziaistva, or LPKH) grew extensively, for both survival and marketization of extra produce. But people failed to start large numbers of new, small, private commercial farms

(Krestianskie Fermerskie Khoziaiastva, or KFKH). They almost exclusively simply leased their land plots back to parent farms. Leasing remains the most common form of agricultural land usage into the 2000s.12

Meanwhile, land ownership documents could be incompletely formalized for years.

Many people told me anecdotally that they had still not drawn up the necessary legal documents to privatize land even when I researched in 2007 and 2008—while many others were working on privatization documentation at the time or had just formalized paperwork, in the process of selling their land shares to new investors. Many farms operated with purely informal land use arrangements. Simply changing legislation had not spurred farms to transform much. Meanwhile

10 For exploration of the disincentives to reform farms, the preferences of workers to conform, and the manipulation of farm leaders to preserve power, see for example Petrick and Carter “Critical masses in the decollectivisation of post-Soviet agriculture,” European Review of Agricultural Economics Vol 36 (2) (2009), 231-252; also Allina-Pisano (2008) on the phenomenon and motivation for farms and local administrations to create a record of compliance while blocking true transformation.

11 Wegren (2004), 970.

12 See Lerman (2005), 20. 94 Russia’s agricultural output declined every year in the first half of the 1990s.13 As the

International Finance Corporation put it in 1995, “…These largely pro forma reorganizations did little to incentivize farm labor and failed to develop a sense of ownership among farm workers.

Ownership was transferred from the government to the collective, but not from the collective to the individual. The task of effecting a meaningful reorganization of Russia’s agricultural sector was incomplete.”14

Agricultural Initiatives in the Regions

A few regions with reform-minded administrations experimented with special initiatives to restructure or otherwise improve agriculture. Some found international aid among the various

European and American consultants who poured into the region after the Soviet collapse to advise on the market transition. Tula, Dagestan, and Riazan’ regions implemented programs targeting specific facets of agriculture.15 Swiss consultants established one of Russia’s first agro-banks in

Orel region in the late 1990s, granting farmers fertilizer, seeds, fungicides and pesticides on a seasonal credit basis.16 The Rural Development Institute, based in Seattle, created legal consultancy centers in Samara and Vladimir regions beginning in 1996 to help villagers learn about and use their legal rights to agricultural land, using funding from sources including USAID

13 Karen Brooks et al, Agricultural Reform in Russia: A View from the Farm Level, A World Bank Discussion Paper no. 327 (Washington, D.C.: IBRD/The World Bank, 1996), xvii.

14 International Finance Corporation in conjunction with the Overseas Development Administration, Land Privatization and Farm Reorganization in Russia (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1995), 3. This was the manual written for general use, based on the previous three years of privatization experience and monitoring.

15 For example see Stephen Wegren, “Farm Privatization in Nizhnii Novgorod: A Model for Russia?” RFE/RL Research Report 3, no. 21 (May 1994), 16-17 on the plan in Tula region to break the agroindustrial monopoly of the collective system.

16 From information including corporate powerpoints given to me by Lukas Scharer, head of the project, by email, in March 2011.

95 and the Gates Foundation.17 The World Bank’s ARIS project built on the Nizhnii reform experience to construct more rural consultancy centers in Nizhnii and other central Russian regions, from 1994 to 2001.18

Nizhnii was the most reformist of the reforming regions, dubbed the “laboratory of reform” or the “Mecca of privatization.” Economist Grigory Yavlinsky came to Nizhnii to work on privatization in the region after his broader “500 Days” program for Gorbachev failed.

Nizhnii’s governor Boris Nemtsov was eager to experiment with industrial as well as agricultural privatization and welcomed Yavlinsky’s assistance. Regional government managed to achieve rare, perhaps unique cooperation between legislative and executive branches, as well as between central and provincial soviets.19 If privatization was going to work anywhere, this was the place.

Seen as a progressive region due to its pro-reform administration, Nizhnii attracted the World

Bank to help with industrial privatization almost immediately after the Soviet collapse. First, projects the IFC collaborated with Nizhnii administration on was privatization of small shops and the trucking industry.20 Nemtsov quickly became interested in extending the World Bank’s pioneering model to his region’s faltering agricultural sector and invited the International Finance

Corporation (the IFC) to help with agriculture as well.

There still existed no broad consensus on agricultural policy in the country—it remained the controversial issue it first became during perestroika years. The agricultural program had its critics even inside Nizhnii. Regional press reported getting huge quantities of letters on the

17 Leonard Rolfes, Jr. and Gregory Mohrman, “Legal Aid Centers in Russia: Helping Rural People Improve Their Lives,” RDI Reports on Foreign Aid and Development 102 (February 2000).

18 See for example V. M. Baumin, “Preface,” in Kozlov (2000), 3-4, also the World Bank project summary online at http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&m enuPK=228424&Projectid=P008811.

19 K. Brown, “Nizhny Novgorod: A Regional Solution to National Problems?” RFE/RL Research Report 2.5 (1993), 17-23.

20 T.F. Buss and L.C. Yancer, “Privatizing the Russian economy,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 14, no. 2 (1996), 211-225. 96 subject. As one correspondent noted, while the fate of the hamlet hangs in balance, the question of what to do divides so-called “democrats” from “radicals.” While “some say only kolkhozes should remain land owners…others [argue] that it’s the very kolkhozes that are guilty in the draft that swept food products off the shelves of stores, and that the private entrepreneur (chastnik) would long ago have fed the country. This argument came to a climax at the very moment that the…law of the RF [Russian Federation] ‘On Land Reform’ came into existence.”21 Whether to privatize farms at all remained contested, but Governor Nemtsov’s eagerness, buttressed by the high degree of coordination between regional center and districts ensured that the privatization project would be implemented.

The Nizhnii Novgorod Model Farm Reorganization Program

The Nizhnii Model Farm Reorganization Program, a joint Russian-IFC project, was the most comprehensive, extensive and ambitious farm privatization program undertaken in Russia.

While other projects and programs worked on specific issues pertaining to agricultural development, there was no other single scheme that aimed to thoroughly privatize collective and state farms, laid painstaking plans for the process, and aimed to become the model procedure used throughout the country. It targeted nothing less than breaking up the collectives for good and spurring smaller farming enterprises—throughout the nation. There was no competing model or project of similar scope or breadth attempted.

At regional officials’ request, the IFC got involved in 1992. They joined together with

Russian academics (many from the Moscow Academy of Sciences’ Agrarian Institute) government officials from Moscow and Nizhnii, and representatives of the British Know How

Fund to form farm privatization plans. Regional government created a new Department of

21 Unsigned, “Vestnik Agroproma: Spetsial’nii Viipisk No. 13,” of Nizhegorodskaia Pravda (November 30, 1990), 1.

97 Agriculture and Land Reform to manage the reforms.22 A new consulting center for the project opened in Nizhnii (city), housing the international specialists and Russian colleagues.23 Four rural consultancy centers (located in district capital cities) were eventually established by the

British Know How Fund, and British corporations ULG Consultants and ADAS to help private farm operations. Two British experts remained working at the centers for five years.24 A delegation of Russians was sent to the U.S. to meet with American officials and farmers and learn capitalist farming strategies and visited farms around the San Francisco Bay Area, and USAID also lent financing to the Program.25

Reforming regions were encouraged to collaborate and share experiences inside Russia.

Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin and minister of privatization Anatolii Chubais personally lent support to the scheme, traveling to the area to visit the first auctions of collective farm property. In 1994 an enthusiastic Chernomyrdin declared the Nizhnii Model to be Russia’s official model of farm privatization. Two government resolutions formalized the recommendation that the model be used throughout Russia: “On the Practice of Agrarian

Transformation in Nizhnii Novgorod Province,” and “On Agricultural Enterprise Reform

22 The department was originally created on December 25, 1991. 3075:7:5467:84-90, Predislovie k opisis 7, 1990-1993, explains administrative changes to the department as well as the various departments and work teams within it.

23 They were specially recruited and joined for financial, among other, reasons, related one participant, a sociologist who previously headed a lab at a state university, where she earned enough “to buy one or one and a half kilos of sausage a month!” She described an excited and optimistic work team for the privatization project, and students joining them who later became business directors. Interview in her Moscow office, 3/4/08. The program got Russians and foreigners working together as never before, as another participant described in an interview in her office, Nizhnii, 11/2/07.

24 V.V. Kozlov, Sozdanie i Organizatsiia Deiatel’nosti Regional’noi Informatsionno-konsul’tatsionnoi Sluzhbii APK (Na Primere Nizhegorodskoi Oblasti), (Moscow: Rosinformagrotekh, 2000), 19. In practice, though, only a few of my farm worker interviewees knew about the consultancy centers and no one remembered much about them (and this was at a pilot farm, where workers were sure to find comparatively high information and access).

25 Wegren (1994), 20. A participant in the Bay Area delegation also told me about the trip in an interview.

98 Allowing for the Experience in Nizhnii Novgorod Province.”26 As international development specialists Alan Rew and Angelika Brustinow describe, however, the Prime Minister’s statements amounted to a “nebulous” and “non-obligatory” endorsement of the Model Program.27 Specific federal resources were not allocated to develop and extend the program. In reality, adoption of the model depended on the interest of regional administrations.

The reform agenda was based on the classic World Bank platform of liberalization, privatization and deregulation—the accepted contemporary paradigm for economic reform in post-Soviet states. Hoping to overhaul the famously inefficient central planning of Soviet years, reformers strove to break up the large collectives and transfer ownership from the state to individuals. Instituting private property took center stage as the major reform element. Planners fully expected that giving farm workers their own land and property would spur their productivity and convince them to enter the market economy, perhaps by starting their own family farms. The reformers considered social service provision to be an impediment to farm efficiency and profitability. If farms could be freed from their social service duties in the village, they could focus on the economic bottom line, which would surely enhance agricultural production. Rural social service management was to be transferred to the responsibility of local administration.

“Objects of the social sphere” (as they were called in official records) such as schools, kindergartens, worker cafeterias and medical service stations were placed under rural administration budgets.

Anthropologist Oane Visser convincingly argues that the program design reflected a compromise between two quite different goals: making farming more efficient, and also

26 Brooks et al, (1996), 21.

27 Alan Rew and Angelika Brustinow, “Resolution and Validation of Property Reform,” in Development as process: concepts and methods for working with complexity, ed. David Mosse, John Farrington, Alan Rew (New York: Routledge, 1998), 152. 99 empowering Russia’s peasants.28 Public statements and program documents frequently contained emancipatory terms, explicitly discussing how peasants would be both freed and empowered by the dissolution of the defunct collectives, seen as Stalinist relics that offered workers no freedom of self-determination. As Governor Nemtsov wrote, “The program provides a fair, transparent and free process of agricultural reorganization in which farmers make their own choice regarding the size of new enterprises and their ownership.”29 The IFC declared that two principles were of utmost importance in the process: “freedom of choice for individuals: Individuals themselves must regain control of agricultural activities and drive privatization. Fairness: In order to give equal access to all individuals, the process has to be transparent and radically different from the old way of ‘behind-the-scenes’ decision making.”30 An academic in Nizhnii who worked with the Program during the ‘90s said to me excitedly, “in 1861 peasants had to buy land for money.

Now we gave it to them—for free! This was the major social and economic content of the reform. In the 1990’s was the completion of 1861.”31

Participation in the Model Program was thus voluntary. The Program was advertised in regional press including through articles placed in Nizhegorodskaia Novosti in 1992, through regional government publications such as “Zemlia Nizhegorodskaia,” IFC project compilations including “Zemel’naia Reforma,” as well as through word of mouth.32 Farm workers decided to participate by a majority vote at general meetings. Once workers voted at a general assembly meeting to join the program, they were guided by a complex administrative structure. They had to create an internal farm commission of workers who would lead the proceedings. Districts land

28 Oane Visser, “Property, Labour Relations and Social Obligations in Russia’s Privatised Farm Enterprises,” in Changing Properties of Property, ed. Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda- Beckmann and Melanie Wiber (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 126.

29 Boris Nemtsov, “Foreword,” IFC (1995).

30 IFC (1998-1999) project materials, cited by Gambold Miller (2001), 36.

31 Interview in his office, Nizhnii Agricultural Institute, 9/17/07.

32 Kozlov (2000), 15.

100 commissions were created to oversee land share distribution, under the oversight of the regional commission for agricultural reorganization—first by Governor Nemtsov and later by the Minister of Agriculture.33 Representatives of both district and regional administration were required to participate in farm auctions. Russian academics and students, recruited both regionally and in

Moscow, joined the regional consultancy centers and traveled to farms to witness and manage proceedings. While some of these people were undoubtedly privatization enthusiasts, others simply took the work opportunity, some rather bemused by the proceedings, such as a young

Nizhnii engineer who accepted the “strange job” of traveling to farms on weekends to privatize them.34

In 1993 a new arm of the IFC was created to reorganize the collective farms, called Fond

ZERNO (or ZeRNO, as it was sometimes written in press, the name both an acronym for land reform in Nizhnii region and a play on words signifying seed fund, although it was subsequently usually called a project or program and not a “fund”). A detailed rubric was developed to guide the process. Russian agrarian specialists from Moscow, international lawyers, and the IFC project group headed by American Alan Bigman together designed the multi-stage procedure:

The Plan: Project ZERNO

Project work began with informational campaigns at farms to recruit participants.

Success in getting farms to join relied on interesting a few key individuals at farms who would then promote the program to other workers. The whole process was deliberately designed to be cashless since the idea was to fairly distribute land for free to farm workers, not to enable profiteering.

33 3075:7:6181:1-3 Department of Agriculture and Land Reform’s Documents (Certificates, information , etc) on the progress of fulfilling the Program “Privatization of Land and Reorganization of Agricultural Enterprises of Nizhegorod Oblast.”

34 As related to me by his housemate at the time, a young American teaching English in Nizhnii who was invited to accompany him.

101 Several steps were to be undertaken once a farm chose to participate:

1) The continuing informational campaign: An “informational corner” was posted in the farm office building, listing citizen rights and eventually posting the names of all owners of land and property shares. People who then disputed their shares or the proceedings could address either their internal farm commission or the outside consultants.35 Any resemblance to Bolshevik “red corners” set up during initial collectivization for propaganda as well as leisure pursuits at collectives went unremarked in IFC papers.

2) Farm inventory: Experts from the committee of land organization, a regional cadastre organization, traveled to farm premises to count the number of hectares available for redistribution and survey the quality of each hectare for farming. They would make a detailed map, marking arable and pastureland. Each hectare was given a point rating, in newly devised

“ballo-gektar” units, which fixed its value for the auction. More fertile land received higher points, and less fertile, such as grasslands or hayfields, got lower appraisals. The farm’s total number of land points was divided by the number of local residents who had the right to receive land (workers, pensioners, and a few other categories of citizens), which provided the baseline calculation for how many points to give workers. In this way everyone got an equal number of points for land that they could trade at the auction. Once it came time to actually divide up the land, high value farmland could be given out in smaller quantities to shareholders than land appraised at a lower value, so that distribution would be equitable. A similar system was used to inventory farm property. The project team made a list of all farm property, including vehicles, other equipment, buildings, livestock, fertilizer, seeds, and so on. The value of each piece was assessed in “share rubles,” the unit of estimation for property value created by planners. For

35 In practice, none of my interviewees described ever talking to any of the consultants themselves and wouldn’t have known how to reach them even if they felt comfortable bringing up their problems.

102 property, though, seniority at the farm was considered, and workers received varying points.36

The internal farm commission appraised all property, generating a very detailed inventory meant to include every single implement belonging to the farm, no matter how small. Using the inventories, the farm commission drew up a protocol to take to the auctions. No outsiders or foreigners were permitted to buy land or property—only farm workers and managers.

3) Granting certificates of ownership: Participants were given certificates asserting their ownership of land and property shares, worth the specified points and share-rubles. These documents did not retain legal use but were mechanisms for initial redistribution and for trading at the auctions. Tangible property ownership was not fixed at this stage.

4) Making agreements: Planners feared that holding immediate auctions could create chaos and many disagreements over the disposal of farm property. They attempted to prevent this by building an agreement-making stage into the reorganization process. As Governor Nemtsov articulated the matter, the hope was that fulfilling the program would prevent people fighting each other for land, or “face-fighting on the strips.”37 Shareholders were to meet informally to agree, if possible, on who would claim which property at the auctions. Would be-farm leaders at this stage tried to gather locals together to work for their planned farms, and contribute their land and property shares in lease. The more shares a prospective leader could gather for his or her farm, the more formerly collective land and property he or she could “buy” at the auctions.

Individuals wishing to farm solo could keep their shares for themselves. It could take months for locals to decide what to do and farm leaders to work out agreements over property.

36 Rew and Brustinow (1998), 154-5.

37 Boris Nemtsov, speaking at a kolkhoz auction, quoted by Vladimir Ionov, “’ZERNO’ Tsenniikh Sortov,” Vestnik Privatizatsii 1993 No. 18, 77. 103 5) The auctions (often called “distributive meetings” or just “meetings” after organizers realized

Russians held negative associations with the word “auction”): In the final stage of the process, land and property were formally divided up and prior agreements legally solidified at public auctions.38 People could use their shares to claim property in the first round of the auction when there was no dispute. If more than one person laid claim to an object, the meeting would proceed to a second round, when on the spot bargaining and trading would occur. In the third round, all remaining or extraneous land was to be distributed.39

The Model Program ostensibly did not set out to impose any particular outcome or type of organization on de-collectivized farms. However World Bank theory then in currency deemed large, kolkhoz-scale farms to be just transitional enterprises and saw the most promise in smaller- scale family farms.40 Individuals who displayed entrepreneurship in striving to become private farmers were seen as keys to the future and initially received special support.41 Pensioners participated as passive investors in new farms created through kolkhoz reorganization, choosing where to lease their land. When joint stock companies were created, workers got shares in the company, which in theory would pay them dividends. In farms organized as collectives, people got membership on the books, with the size of the property share they contributed noted. In

LLPs, similar notes in foundational papers documented everyone’s share. People were to be remunerated for use of their shares as worked out by agreement between the farms and their

38 Liesl Gambold (Miller), “Potatoes for Petrol: The Effects of Agricultural Reform in a Russian Village,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA 2001), 36.

39 Aleksandr Tsarev, “Nemtsov po selam ‘ZeRNO’ razvozit’,” Birzha Plus Svoi Dom 1995, no. 11, 11; see also Brooks et al (1996), 21.

40 See Visser (2008), 83-84.

41 A. N. Golubtsev, “Information Support for the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Land Reform Programme,” at Sixth IWG.AGRI Seminar on Agricultural Statistics Russian Federation, (St. Petersburg: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development State Committee of the Russian Federation on Statistics; Government of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region with the participation of FAO, UN/ECE, EUROSTAT, 29 June - 3 July 1998), 2. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/30/2698969.pdf 104 lessees.

After six months of project planning, the Program was implemented on a test-case basis with six volunteer farms. While most farms were not prospering in the nascent market conditions, reformers looked for pilot farms that had decent production histories and seemed likely to succeed as private enterprises. One farm quickly dropped out, leaving five pilots for the program—one of which was my Nizhnii research site. All five pilots were fully reorganized by the end of 1994.

Regional administration planned to support new private farming in several ways. Private farms were given lighter tax loads—which according to interviewees at Nizhnii site, meant paying no taxes at all for several years. An attempt was made to provide farms with legal advice, assistance, and templates of registration documents, land and property share contracts between farms and shareholders, and certificates of ownership.42 With these measures regional administration hoped to mitigate the significant challenges they expected individuals and new farms to face, including: large and unclear tax obligations, a lack of farmer-friendly interest rates and credit terms, as well as the complexity and expense of drawing up legal deeds of ownership.43

Nizhnii’s Department of Agriculture and Land Reform included line items in its budget to support the kolkhoz successor farm enterprises and independent “farmers”, including: subsidies for buying raw materials, transporting fodder, buying supplies for animal and flax cultivation, for technological needs in vegetable, flax and wool cultivation; and programs to cover initial farm losses due to investments in mixed fodder, elite seeds, mineral fertilizers and other capital investments.44

423075:7:6129:13 Informational Certificate.

43 3075:7:6129a:7-8, Report by the current head of the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform.

44 3075:7:6173:2. 105 Results at Pilot Farms

IFC as well as regional records show positive initial results of reorganization by model.

The new private farms were performing better than average for their districts. Preliminary IFC reports found that the rural “social sphere” was preserved and functional; crop yield at new enterprises was about 30% higher than average for the districts, salaries were one and a half times higher on average; and contracts between enterprises and shareholders were being upheld, evidenced by the fact that only one lawsuit had been filed in court for non-fulfillment.45

Eager to provide a showpiece of privatization success, regional administration also closely watched initial farm reorganization results. Positive indicators would make for great public relations, help garner greater national and international investment, and help stave off the criticism of non-believers. The Department of Land Reform sent representatives out to pilot farms to closely monitor proceedings, and further programs were later created to continue monitoring reorganized farms. According to regional assessment, three to seven months after reorganization, the new enterprises had higher production and sales numbers than non- reorganized farms. They were creative at finding new marketing opportunities and seemed to have good future prospects. Significant measures had been taken to reduce production costs

(including hiring decreased numbers of workers or firing others).46 Wages were higher. New farms found more additional, non-agricultural income sources, such as by opening small stores on their territories. Drunkenness and theft were reported to have decreased. The social sphere was

“preserved and improving” and reorganized farms counted fewer social problems (ie, recorded

45 IFC, Land Privatization and Farm Reorganization in Russia (Washington, D.C.: IFC in conjunction with the Overseas Development Administration, 1995), 15. While the IFC makes cautionary notes about its data, including mentioning that it’s difficult to separate the results of reorganization from larger macroeconomic factors, here it fails to note that the lack of lawsuits may not be a sound indicator of contract compliance at farms in the rural Russian context.

46 Research suggests however that managers tended not to fire employees, partly because they feared fired workers would loot farms even more uncontrollably than people still on staff. The smaller numbers of workers staffing farms after reorganization was usually due to villager migration to cities for better work. See Visser (2006).

106 complaints about preschools, schools, medical services, etc.)47 Grain harvests were from 10 to

30% higher at reorganized farms.48

Agriculture as a whole in the region and districts was not faring well in 1994, however.

Only dairy herd productivity grew regionally. For spring fieldwork, indicators were down about

6%. Heads of cattle fell an average of 4% at non-reorganized farms; they fell between 1 to 7% at reorganized. Bank indebtedness was a huge problem at all farms, with loans being used both for operations and to pay wages.49 Even in reform-eager Nizhnii province, state funding for agriculture was drastically declining. Overall, government investment into agriculture in the region fell by 4.5 times proportionately between 1991 and 1995.50 When the state was withdrawing farm subsidies overall, any preferential tax, credit or subsidy terms were sure to have an impact at new farms. It’s an open question whether the new private farms’ higher indicators resulted from these preferential terms—and not privatization itself.51

Thus for at least a year or two the new farms performed, if not profitably, at least less badly than average for farms in their locations. The numbers also made clear that there was great variety in successor enterprises at reorganized farms (both the five pilots and the farms that joined afterwards, as I will discuss). As the IFC noted, some successor farms were doing quite well while others struggled, so averaging their production results was somewhat misleading, if it was

47 See 3075:7:6181:12-15 Table of Economic Indicators at Reorganized and Non-reorganized Farms of Nizhegorodskaia Oblast’ 1993-1994, which also used sociological data from a survey of 482 workers from 5 reorganized farms and 204 workers from 4 non-reorganized farms.

48 This from Governor Nemtsov again, in Aleksandr Tsarev, “Nemtsov po selam ‘ZeRNO’ razvozit’,” Birzha Plus Svoi Dom 1995, no. 11, 11; see also Brooks et al (1996), 11.

49 3075:7:6129a:6-7.

50 3075:7:6173:41 in analysis of financial activities of agricultural enterprises, 1995.

51 See Michael Kochin, “Decollectivization of agriculture and the planned economy,” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (1996), 717-739; also Wegren (1994), 26-27, who details the advantageous credit terms and subsidies given to new private farms by Nizhnii administration, and decides that the Nizhnii Model has limited application in other regions if similar financial incentives are not proffered.

107 significant that this average was still higher than average for their districts.52

The advantages of reorganization on the whole proved sadly short-lived, however. At the first farms reorganized, the new private farms’ higher production numbers and other indicators quickly leveled out—in some cases less than a year after reorganization. By the end of 1995, official sources reported that almost 70% of the farms reorganized by the project were

“technically bankrupt” (if kept alive by local administrations).53 Social sphere objects had only partially transferred to local administration budgets in districts of the region. Even at one of the five pilot farms, local administration had not yet taken on social responsibilities as of 1995.

Financing for land improvements was missing; federal funds promised had not arrived.54

A tight-lipped employee at the Ministry, who printed out a few token statistical documents on farming for me, told me that overall in the region agricultural indicators fell after Project

ZERNO, as compared to indicators in other central Russian regions in the mid 1990s. He said that in Gorodetskii district, where my research farm was located, only two out of five restructured farms had survived to 2007. He thought this was typical for reorganization results.55

Spreading The Model Beyond The Pilots

After reorganization of the five pilot farms (and probably, raised awareness in the region about the subsidies available to new private farms), the regional committee began receiving many applications from farms hoping to participate in the program. Most of the farms who joined the

52 IFC (1995), 15.

53 Rew and Brustinow (1998), 158.

54 3075:7:6181:23 Report signed by the Head of the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform for the region.

55 Interview in his office, Ministry of Agriculture, Nizhnii (city), 9/11/07.

108 program after the pilots were in even worse conditions than the first five, suggesting that struggling farms turned to the Program out of desperation, nearly completely insolvent already.56

Eventually, more than 300 farms in Nizhnii region were reformed using Program

ZERNO. Then Deputy of Director of the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform remembered during an interview that 333 farms, or about 45% of the collective farms of the region, had been reorganized by the program.57 Most other farms complied completely with privatization laws without using the program--about another 140 farms in the region, according to scholar V. V. Kozlov. By his estimate, the region successfully reformed three fourths of its farms during the 1990s, while the remaining quarter simply changed their foundational documents (ie, re-registered as private) without changing property relations.58 In 1997 Fond ZERNO separated from the IFC to become a solely Russian organization in Nizhnii, funded equally by the British

Know How Fund and regional administration.59

Outside of Nizhnii, by 1995 Governor Nemtsov thought that three other Russian regions were “basically” using the Nizhnii process: Riazan’, Orel and Rostov, while Krasnoyarsk and

Irkutsk were showing great interest. The problem was that the program required highly qualified specialists—and the only working center for training people in the program was located in

Nizhnii (city).60 By the end of 1996, the program had reached ten to eleven Russian regions.61

56 3075:7:6181:1 Informational certificate of Department of Agriculture and Land Reform for 1994-1995.

57 Interview in his office, Nizhnii (city), 9/17/07. He felt that the program had established key beginnings to reform, and especially provided a good model for detailed land evaluation, that he wished were still in use. But he thought the Model Program had never been completely fulfilled.

58 Viacheslav Vasilievich Kozlov, Sozdanie i Organizatsiia Deiatel’nosti Regional’noi Informatsionno- konsul’tatsionnoi Sluzhbii APK (Na Primere Nizhegorodskoi Oblasti), (Moscow: Rosinformagrotekh, 2000), 17.

59 Gambold Miller (2001), 35.

60 Quoted in Aleksandr Tsarev (1996), 11. Other sources claimed that other regions, including Yaroslavl were also using the program. See for example Rainich, A. “V Kontseptsii est’ ‘ZeRNO’,” Zemle Nizhegorodskaia 1995 N6, 1. See also Mezhdunarodnii Zhizn 7-1995, Moscow, 67-69, “Pochemu Kanadtsi v Riazani?” which said Riazan’, Rostov and Orlov regions were next on the list after Nizhnii.

109 But political opposition continued. Once Nemtsov was appointed Prime Minister by Yeltsin in

1997 and left the province, regional politics shifted away from reform. The program for continuing farm reorganization and subsidy slowly ground to a halt. The program was never formally ended. Interest and funding seem to have simply waned.62 It didn’t help that by mid- decade, reorganized farms looked to be struggling comparably to all other farms in the region.

While the Nizhnii Model had been declared THE model for Russia in 1994, the plan was never funded on a large scale by the Russian state.63 The program appears to have fizzled out. How or when precisely it ended, however, remains a mystery. Scholarly attention turned to the general crisis in agriculture and people stopped watching the Nizhnii Model Program. No one penned its obituary; it just faded from record.

As a whole privatization was incompletely accomplished at collective and state farms in

Russia in the 1990s. As political scientist Stephen Wegren writes about Yeltsin battling his more conservative legislature over reform, “the net effect [of Yeltsin’s efforts to privatize agriculture and create a market for rural land] was to create legislative confusion at the national level compounded by widely differing regional land laws that hindered entrepreneurial activity…As a result of Gorbachev’s modest ambitions in land reform and Yel’tsin’s incomplete reform,

Russia’s contemporary land reform delivered much less than is commonly understood.”64 The dwindling of subsidies to collective farms and their successor enterprises, combined with overall macroeconomic crisis, prolonged the troubles of agriculture. Further, the sudden change in price

61 See Rew and Brustinow, in Mosse et al (1998), 156.

62 My Nizhnii interviewees said the program rather quickly stopped appearing on television and in newspaper articles, while scholarly attention also dropped off.

63 Michael Kochin, “Decollectivization of agriculture and the planned economy,” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (1996), 735.

64 Stephen Wegren, “Land Reform in Russia: What Went Wrong?” Post-Soviet Affairs 24, no. 2 (2008), 122-123.

110 structure of the early 1990s, part of “shock reform,” led to great disparity between the low prices farms could get for their products as compared to their high costs buying industrial goods and energy resources.

An academic participating in an all-Russian scientific conference in January of 1995 in

Moscow decried that “reform has stopped” and “development out of the agro-industrial crisis is meaningless without an economic transformation of the country.”65 Farm output declined so severely during the ‘90s that total output at the end of the decade was less than two thirds of the output of 1992. Collective and state farms and their large-scale successor enterprises fared worst, by 1997 producing about one third of their 1990 numbers (which had then been considered at crisis levels!)66 As of 2000, very large farms (the successor enterprises to collectives, in many cases simply re-registered as private companies) were still using 86.3% of Russia’s farmland, and their managers retained their power in the countryside.67 The ‘90s-era reformers failed not only to improve agricultural production—but even to thoroughly privatize Russia’s farms.

Conclusion.

As I have explained, the carefully laid plans for farm privatization were never fully funded or implemented in Russia. If they had been, perhaps the outcome might have been more positive. If new private farms had continued to receive the supports planned and initially granted

(at least in Nizhnii) on an ongoing basis, agriculture might look very different now. But it can also be argued that privatizers—both Russian and international—at the end of the century imagined a transformation of the countryside just as radical as Stalin’s collectivization; and just as utopian as early Bolshevik imagery of the communist future.

65 A. Rainich, “V Kontseptsii est’ ‘ZeRNO’,” Zemle Nizhegorodskaia 6 (1995), 1.

66 Geliy Shmeliov, Bruce McWilliams, John Giraldez, and Alexander Vedrashko, “Agriculture,” in The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry, ed. Lawrence Klein and Marshall Pomer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 334-335.

67 Pallot and Nefedova (2003), 345. 111 The Yeltsin-era reformers’ emphasis on giving farm workers land as the major element of change proved their outsize faith in private ownership. A certificate of land ownership was to suddenly revolutionize farming. The emancipatory rhetoric belied a harsh social reality that reformers did not consider and for which they took no responsibility, as Chapter Four will detail.

In their haste to privatize, reformers imagined social needs in villages, formerly met by collective farms, would somehow take care of themselves. They were not concerned with the fact that local administration budgets had no money with which to provide rural services. Their task was rapid economic privatization and they believed ownership and a free market would solve all problems.

Anthropologist Katherine Verdery points out that in the post-Cold War context, the very ideological nature of the idea of private property itself blinded reformers to the long-term consequences of their programs.68

Similarly, historian Esther-Kingston Mann notes that “in discourses on privatization, we enter a world of myth and romance where courageous architects of private property rights confront starkly dichotomized choices between progress and backwardness…a characteristic feature of the romantic narrative is that its heroes and heroines overshadow – and are too often prone to demonise – the non-elite individuals and social groups who play out their lives offstage or behind the scenes.”69 Or as Svetlana Boym writes, “It was as if that lost revolutionary teleology that provided purpose and meaning to the surrounding chaos of transition was found again, only this time it was not Marxist-Leninist but capitalist.”70 I agree with these scholars and take their analyses a small step further in suggesting that the reformers’ images of the capitalist future they thought they could quickly create were positively utopian. Their grand narratives of

68 Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

69 Esther Kingston-Mann, “The Romance of Privatisation and its Unheralded Challengers,” in von Benda- Beckmann et al (2006), 58.

70 Boym (2002), 64. 112 capitalist progress left little room for the stories or social realities of farm workers newly impoverished during the cataclysmic 1990s, which I relate in Chapter Four.

113 Chapter Four: Privatization Processes at My Farm Sites

This chapter provides a local history of farm privatization after the Soviet collapse at my three main sites, using both the written evidence and my interviewees’ memories and perceptions.

While I already described Nizhnii region’s experience with privatization in Chapter Three, here I include general information about the progress of decollectivization in Riazan’ and Krasnodar regions as well as my research farms’ specifics. I describe each site in turn, bringing the histories up to the date of my research year in 2007-2008. The four farms took very different routes to decollectivization. Nevertheless I show that villagers faced many hardships in common during the ‘90s. This partially explains the similarity of their narratives about privatization.

Nizhnii Site: Reversion to Earlier Soviet Organization

Kolkhoz Pobeda, one of the Model Program’s first five pilot farms in the country, was thus reorganized to much fanfare. The auctions of land and property were televised, with local and national politicians including Chernomyrdrin and Nemtsov making appearances to extol the historic nature of the proceedings. The former kolkhoz chief accountant told me she overheard

Nemtsov jokingly say to IFC project leader Alan Bigman, “if you make this a Potemkin village

I’ll kill you!” at one of the meetings.1 Hopes at least among some officials and participants were high as to what reorganization by model could accomplish—on site and for Russia as a whole.

However, rather than empowering ordinary farm workers through land grants and free choice over where and how to work, participation in the project was really pushed through by a few local leaders. In the end workers resented having their kolkhoz disbanded. The reorganization process fueled bitter enmities still felt fifteen years later. Not only did modern, capitalist farming fail to thrive after reorganization, but the villages associated with Pobeda effectively reverted to an earlier Soviet farm formation once the kolkhoz ended.

1 Informal conversation in car in Gorodets, Nizhnii, 9/19/07. 114 In accordance with the law, everyone at kolkhoz Pobeda was given ownership rights to forty sotok of land each in 1992. Typically, this changed exactly nothing at the farm. Pobeda retained the status of collective farm right up until the auctions that broke it up into smaller farming entities. Money was running out at Pobeda in the early ‘90s. My interviewees remembered not having been paid in 1993 and 1994—by different accounts, from three to nine months. Oral histories revealed that there was a “back-story” to the farm’s participation, as Nina, a former accountant (not the chief, but lower in the administrative hierarchy of the kolkhoz) told me towards the end of our third interview, her tone bitter and her voice slightly hushed, as though she had now decided to tell me what really happened.2 Heated, politicized infighting splintered kolkhoz leadership in the few years leading up to participation in the Model Program, and hostilities were drastically heightened by reorganization.

Vasilii, the chairman with more than a decade of experience at the helm, was voted out of office around 1991. He was replaced by Mikhail, a newcomer to the site more amenable to radical reform who was willing to break up the collective. But not without acrimony. Factions sprung up in support of and opposition to Vasilii. People associated the change in leadership with the eventual decision to join the Program. The pro-Vasilii group became the anti-reorganization contingent. Sonia, who grew up at the kolkhoz, described it this way, “There was a leader here,

[Vasilii]. Then they impeached him. They removed him, and then right at that moment occurred the division of land and property shares [pai and dolia]. And several local farms split off from the common Pobeda kolkhoz.”3 Reorganization had in fact occurred a year or two after Vasilii was impeached, but in memory it seemed like the same moment to people like Sonia. “It was a year of bitter politics,” Natasha, a former fieldwork brigadier and agronomist who became a

2 We first met during my preliminary research in 2006 and then she granted me two formal, recorded interviews during my 2007-8 research year. Nina, interview in a private farm office, Nizhnii, 12/4/07.

3 Sonia, in her mother’s house, Nizhnii, 10/08/07.

115 private farmer in the 1990s, remembered about the decision to reorganize.4 Vasilii himself, demoted to engineer, proved the most vocal opponent of joining the Model Program, writing a long letter to government officials and speaking out at farm general meetings.5 Valentina the former chief accountant was by all reports the most eager and active reorganization proponent.

Mikhail, the last kolkhoz chairman, worked with Valentina to bring the Model Program to the farm. My interviewees were hesitant to discuss the arguments in depth, but loyalty to various leaders became clear enough when workers eventually had to choose which new farm to join after kolkhoz dissolution. In 1993 when the process was just beginning, the farm had to collectively decide to join the Program at a general meeting, at which only one person voted against.6 In oral histories, people said they felt pressured by leaders (mainly Valentina and Mikhail) to vote in favor. Nina, a middle-aged bookkeeper, described the vote to join Project ZERNO thus:

Q: So at the general meeting, kolkhozniks all agreed [to participate]?

A: Well, you know, it all depends on how you present it. They didn’t fully understand everything--what could happen, what it would bring. If at that time [Vasilii] had been chairman, this would not have happened.

She implicitly blamed Mikhail the last chair, for the choice. Her claim that people didn’t understand what was transpiring was echoed both by other farm managers and less-skilled farm workers themselves, as will be explored further in Chapter Four. “Nam predlozhili,” Anatolii, a former field worker, described, in the recurrent phrasing my interviewees used that could signify

4 Natasha, in rural post office, Nizhnii, 10/16/07.

5 He didn’t keep a copy of the letter. Vasilii, interview in his private farm office, Nizhnii, 10/19/07.

6 Copy of protocol given to me by Valentina, the former chief accountant of the kolkhoz, titled “Extract of Protocol Number Two: General Meeting of the Members of Kolkhoz [Pobeda],” of 8 December, 1993. 440 out of 619 kolkhoz members attended. The first agenda item was that Mikhail, the current chairman, suggested electing Valentina to lead the meeting. The vote for this was unanimous. I imagine Vasilii, the outspoken former chairman, cast the sole vote against joining the Model Program, although this was never confirmed.

116 either “they ordered us” or “it was suggested to us.” “We could have refused, but the collective had worked so long under this pressure…”7

Once workers at Pobeda chose to volunteer and the farm was selected to become a pilot for the Program, the IFC sent representatives onsite to conduct a thorough farm inventory. The farm lay on 3109 hectares of land, housed 1840 head of cattle, employed 454 workers, had cultivated 3,272 metric tons of grain in 1993 and also grew stockfeed, grain and flax, grew sheep and produced milk.8 Nizhnii’s Department of Agriculture and Land Reform also sent representatives to visit the site, and kept similar records of farm property, including their single tractor-field brigade, six complex animal cultivation brigades, one car-tractor enterprises, and one workshop of auxiliary industries (including a power saw bench, carpentry and mill).9

After months of preparatory work and agreement-forming, the auction of Pobeda’s land took place on March 10, 1994. The property auction was held on March 11th. 758 people held land shares, of whom 454 were kolkhoz workers (the rest being mostly pensioners; also social service workers working on the farm’s territory or who successfully claimed shares).10 713 people held property entitlements. Three large-scale private farm enterprises emerged through reorganization, along with three smaller “farmer” operations and two new enterprises not involved in farming: one provided technical service and equipment maintenance; the other offered accounting services.11 Almost all villagers leased their shares to one of the three newly formed larger private farms. Contracts were drawn up for this purpose. Shareholders were to

7 Anatolii, in his home, Nizhnii, 12/4/07. 8 IFC (1995), 6-10.

9 3075:7:6129:2-4; 1994 historical certificate on the progress of land reform.

10 IFC (1995), 6-10; also the report from the regional Department of Agriculture and Land Reform No. 10- 1/2-33 of 11 April 1994, 3075:7:6129a:11.

11 IFC (1995), 10; regional records in 3075:7:6129a:44 also offered detailed kolkhoz successor enterprise information, including registration status, number of workers, land plot broken down by ploughed fields, haystacks and pasture, number of bulls and cows, tractors, combines, lorries, etc. This level of attention to individual farms was unique in regional records, revealing the great interest the Model Program attracted and the importance to regional administration and the project of carefully documenting proceedings.

117 receive payment in return for land use. In reality people told me they got either payment in kind

(produce or services) or nothing.

Both regional administration and the IFC kept detailed records of reorganization proceedings and the initial results.12 Oral histories confirmed the official record but for one point: a number of my interviewees remembered one more small private farm appearing after reorganization. They meant Mikhail, the last kolkhoz chair, who opened his own farm within a year—though there is no official record of this in the documents on reorganization (as will be discussed further in Chapter Five). The three larger, “mixed partnership” farms used the bulk of former kolkhoz land: two of these together using 82% of the fields and close to the same proportion of its property; all three together used 95% of former kolkhoz pasture land. The new farms continued the kolkhoz’s production branches with one minor difference: reorganization seemed to provide the catalyst for phasing out flax production.13 All villagers who were cultivating home plots continued to do so.14

The three larger successor farms were opened by previous kolkhoz specialists or leaders: one by Vasilii, the second-to-last chairman, and another by Valentina, the former chief accountant

(who had been rivals now for several years at the farm). Of the private farmers who opened doors, Natasha had been a brigadier and agronomist; Vladimir was formerly a teacher and military man who had traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and was not a local; and only one man, Denis, had no advanced education or specialization at the farm before striking out as a

“farmer” (KFKH). Denis’ small family farm on 51 hectares briefly became a regional poster child of fermerskii success. He was praised not just for his work in agriculture, but also for his

12 Chart in IFC (1995), 10, also Department of Agriculture and Land Reform records, for example 3075:7:6129a:44 for very thorough kolkhoz successor enterprise information, including a chart listing registration status, number of workers, land plot broken down by ploughed fields, haystacks and pasture, number of bulls and cows, tractors, combines and lorries, etc. This level of attention to individual farms was unique for the region, as it closely monitored and documented the privatization program.

13 Spravka 3075: 7: 6129:9. A time and resource intensive crop that generated low yields, it was being phased out all over the district around the same time.

14 3075:7:6129:8. 118 entrepreneurialism and ingenuity in renovating an unused cafeteria to open a café, bringing the farm additional revenue.

While project rhetoric had emphasized empowering ordinary villagers to make new, free choices, at Pobeda almost all laborers continued to work for one of the previous top managers after reorganization. In oral histories they talked about feeling that little had changed for them, and they held their leaders responsible for reorganization, as will be explored in Chapter Four.

Workers were supposed to get rental contracts for the use of their land plots and receive compensation—but no rental contracts were drawn up and people reported never getting anything in return for farm use of their land. “When privatization started, people didn’t understand anything at all,” exclaimed Sonia. “They divided everything into shares—and people absolutely didn’t understand this!” Her mother Anna, in her 80s, chimed in, “someone there decided, and people didn’t know anything about it. People [were] like cattle to them!”15 Valentina, the former chief accountant who opened her own farm successor enterprise, admitted that people seemed to have “fog in their heads” throughout the whole reorganization endeavor. “People sat through all the meetings and eventually voted for reorganization, but their heads were cloudy. No one really knew what was happening.” Then shortly after the fact, people began to bemoan the dissolution of the kolkhoz, asking themselves what they’d done in horror, she said.16 It wasn’t just Pobeda where the leaders pushed reorganization through. Governor Nemtsov noted in 1993 that the main reorganization supporters were the farm leaders themselves, “who had to force their subordinates to slave labor,” during Soviet years and were now eager to receive real property, while “the majority of the peasantry still remain passive.”17 The reorganization had been so carefully planned to be transparent, but in the end simple workers didn’t necessarily understand it or feel they had much choice in the matter (as Chapter Five will detail further).

15 Sonia, in her mother’s home, Nizhnii, 10/8/07.

16 Valentina, in farm office, Nizhnii, 11/26/07.

17 Nemtsov in Ionov (1993), 77. See also the Nemtsov interview in Sel’skaia Zhizn 20 January 1994, 2. 119 Redistribution of kolkhoz land and property did not occur quite so tidily as the IFC’s charts made it appear. Dividing the physical property posed many challenges. The IFC did note that at Pobeda, “…spare parts contained in a warehouse were auctioned as a separate lot of current assets, and the lot was acquired by several different buyers. When the lot was distributed, each buyer determined the value of his/her purchase share, but not the actual distribution of spare parts. As a result, there were several conflicts over the distribution of the actual spare parts.”18

Several of my interviewees went into much greater detail about how difficult and irrational it seemed to divide farm property by auction. One day Nina walked me around the grounds of

Vasilii’s private farm, where she now worked. She pointed out two literally adjoining barns, touching each other. One belonged to Vasilii’s farm, and the other to Katia’s farm (the third and smallest successor farm). Farm grounds could not so easily be physically separated. Land and property of different farms were enmeshed together here. People at the different farms couldn’t get any distance from each other after the bitter redistribution process; instead, they had to walk by each other every day simply to get to work.

There was also bitter controversy over whether locals who worked in local social services but not at the kolkhoz itself should receive land shares. Hard feelings about this also surfaced in my oral histories. . “I argued a lot,” Vadim, chief of rural administration, described to me. “I argued because…teachers, workers on the (federal) budget, who worked in this territory, who taught the children of kolkhoz people, and people doing other things [maybe doctors…] who took care of kids in the kindergarten…weren’t included. Didn’t receive either property shares or land shares. Is it right? People who created conditions for work for kolkhoz workers didn’t receive anything. Although they had always worked in the same collective. Is it fair? Is it right?”19

Anastasia, a 67-year old accountant in local administration who had also been a local teacher, complained bitterly about this very problem. She remained offended in 2007 that she had not

18 IFC (1995), 88.

19 Vadim, in his office in local (rural) administration, Nizhnii, 11/19/07. 120 received a land share from Pobeda—although her whole life had centered around the kolkhoz, she felt.20 For people like Anastasia, the kolkhoz wasn’t really separable from village life as a whole.

This was particularly stark in Anastasia’s case (as was the case in many Russian villages) where the kolkhoz was the main industry and employer apart from the small rural administration office.

Dividing farm workers from other villagers who didn’t technically work at the farm but were still part of the kolkhoz community just didn’t make sense to most people, who thought that everyone living in villages associated with Pobeda deserved land shares.21

A few interviewees noted that Pobeda had disaggregated largely along pre-

Khrushchevian amalgamation lines—thirty years later. The two villages that had unhappily united in 1977 split up again. Valentina’s farm opened in one, and Vasilii’s (as well as Katia’s smaller farm) in the second village. The amalgamation had been contentious during the ‘70s, but people had had no choice. One village, located closer to the district’s capital city, prided itself on having more intellectuals. The second featured more “workers.” But the “workers’” kolkhoz ran more efficiently and resented having to integrate the other kolkhoz into their operations, interviewees said. In 1992 and 1993, people told me they heard slogans like, “let’s revive our old

[pre-Khruschev era] kolkhoz!” in the villages.22 Although the villages essentially split back apart, with one or more farms in each, there were a few dissenters living in each village who were loyal to the other farm leader. These people leased land to the leader in the other village and commuted to work there. While reformers longed to see modern, capitalist, private farming

20 Anastasia, in her house, Nizhnii, 11/19/07.

21 On this point see also Liesl Gambold Miller, “What the Peasants Think: The Effects of Agricultural Restructuring in a Russian Village,” Anthropology of East Europe Review (2010), 4.; also Wegren (1994) and O’ Brien (1998), on how village social organization and relationships were inadequately assessed by reformers; and Visser (2006)on the inseparability of the kolkhoz from the village.

22 Vladimir, Liz, Matvei and others in oral histories. These were the two largest villages that had been associated with Pobeda—there were still smaller surrounding villages where people lived. 121 flourish in 1990s Russia, what they accomplished at Nizhnii site was partially an effective reversion to an earlier Soviet model of farm and village organization.

In 2007, the original private farmers had already failed and closed but for Denis, who was quietly starting the process. In my interview with him, Denis recalled that it was common in the mid 1990s for newspaper correspondents to call him with questions—or even show up at his doorstep unannounced, as I did. He told me the story of his farm’s success: how “with luck and

God’s help” he had good potato and grain harvests for several years, enabling him to repay his initial loan, taken in 1994 at a 240% interest rate over a five year period.23 I was surprised later to hear from other interviewees that he was currently in process of closing his farm, unable to meet tax obligations. One new private family farm had emerged on site at the end of the 1990s, opened by a couple who left Vasilii’s farm. This farm was still operating, run by the women and teenager of the household, while the husband of the family now worked in the provincial capital. The farm struggled year to year, and the year that I researched had re-registered as a personal subsidiary plot operation (LPKH) rather than a farming enterprise (KFKH). Villagers didn’t know whether

Mikhail, the last kolkhoz chair who opened his farm about a year after reorganization in a neighboring district, was still running it or had moved on to other business.

Only one of the three larger scale kolkhoz successor farm enterprises was profiting:

Vasilii’s farm. Multiple villagers attributed this to his use of the network he’d developed during his tenure as kolkhoz chair, which helped him win contracts to sell produce at a state hospital in a neighboring district, for example (and a few disgruntled workers accused him of shady business practices as well). Valentina’s farm hovered near bankruptcy for years, before being bought out in 2006 by a Moscow-based investor, who sent new management on site and started to import cows from Holland to turn around dairy production. Workers were dubious about the changes, the merits of the new management team, and unsure what would happen next. Concrete land

23 Denis, in his home, Nizhnii, 11/7/07. 122 plots were fixed for farm workers at Valentina’s farm only in 2005, when the investor first appeared, wanting to buy the land. Land shares sold for 5,000 rubles a plot in a one-time transaction. Interviewees felt they had few other options and were not benefiting from their land plots in any case—though by 2007 they were beginning to question whether they’d received a fair price. Katia’s farm (the smallest of the three major successor enterprises; locally derided as the farm where all the drunks and lazies went) was in bankruptcy proceedings when I was researching. When I stopped by the farm office, management pointedly advised me to turn around, walk down the road six kilometers and visit a collective that had never reorganized, instead.

Village depopulation had progressed at an alarming rate. Of the six villages associated with 60 Years, one had housed more than 100 residents in the 1980s; but fewer than 20 lived there in 2007. In one of the most remote outposts from former center of the kolkhoz, only three permanent residents remained and dachniks outnumbered locals. The closest city to the provincial capital remained more populated as people could commute to the city for work. But outlying villages became positively isolated once the kolkhoz broke up. A small truck with grocery items made a circuit of remote villages where only a few pensioners lived, often, every few weeks—weather and roads permitting, no small matter in winter months.

When unused former kolkhoz buildings and physical objects deteriorated they were simply abandoned where they stood, along with the remnants of private farms gone bankrupt in the ‘90s. Walking down roads in the second-largest village associated with the kolkhoz, and the smaller village bordering it, I could see the edifice of an abandoned mill, a schoolhouse and dormitory no longer in use with broken windows and general disrepair, and several large, rusty pieces of expired equipment dotting the fields. It took a few months to sink in that I was seeing not just poverty, but artifacts of the breakdown of what had once been. It began to make sense when people said they saw most of what they built over the course of their lifetimes crumble before their eyes after their kolkhoz was reorganized out of existence. 123 The rural population was still declining and farms only beginning to be rebuilt fifteen years after reorganization. When I researched, conditions of agriculture and village life at Nizhnii site looked very similar to those at Riazan’ site. Kolkhoz successor enterprises were struggling, private farmers had failed, and villagers sounded bitter. The heralded World Bank program did not show any positive results over the long-term.

Riazan’ Site: Decline, not Transformation

Riazan’ region was slower to reform than Nizhnii. By the end of 1992, only 43% of the region’s farms had re-registered as private enterprises. Time was fast running out to meet the

1993 reorganization deadline. As a journalist noted, several districts conducted reorganization work much more actively and enthusiastically than the rest. Unaccomplished reorganization could be faulted to the “weak work” of district and internal (farm) commissions. Problems with share distribution were the same as faced in Nizhnii region—and everywhere: the question of who rightfully should get land and property shares was disputed, and national legislation did little to specify in these cases. Previous farm workers no longer employed there—no matter what their tenure had been—were not being given shares in Riazan’. Reorganization meetings at farms were carried out without pensioners present, and afterwards there would be a tide of complaints from those absent. One district started generating land sale certificates between individuals, only to be sanctioned for contradicting the 1991 presidential decree prohibiting sales. Another district failed to check people’s qualifications or passport data when registering new private farmers and illegally registered a government worker as a farmer. And the list of problems continued.24

Of thirteen central Russian regions, Riazan’ took fourth place in the level of unemployment. Every fourth enterprise in the region was unprofitable. While the prices of

24 N. Shibokaeva, “What to Call You now? On the process of reorganization of kolkhozi and sovkhozi of the region,” Golos (regional) no. 15, (17-23 December 1992), 11. The author was deputy head of department for reorganizing farms, privatization of business and development of market relations for the region. 124 consumer goods and service rose more than 73%, peasants didn’t receive wages for three to four months on average. This matched what several people told me onsite about 1993 to 1994 being the toughest years. Most agricultural enterprises were becoming ruined, observers concluded— and the rural crisis of Riazan’ region had not improved over the course of the year 1994.25

A regional decree of 1996 declared that industry and agriculture began to do better in

1995, when the rate of decline seemed to slow. But then the drought of 1995 meant gross agricultural production fell by 31%, due mainly to a grain shortage, though other crops fared better. The region outlined incredibly broad rural development goals, including: bringing agriculture out of the crisis of falling production; stabilizing economic conditions; forming effective types of farms; creating market infrastructure; working with a range of investment projects to increase production and agriculture’s economic potential; expanding food resources and moving away from peasant self-sufficiency for main food products; improving the material- technical basis for agricultural goods producers; training cadre to work within market relations; and social development of the village, especially as related to stabilizing human resources and agricultural labor in the countryside.26

Thus regional administration was sufficiently aware of village problems. But industrial transformation occupied many more pages in the 1996 decree than agricultural. No new committee was designated to work on the social development of the villages, which fell to the regional Management of Agriculture and Food Department. One man was in charge of rural social problems—scheduled to be addressed in the second quarter of 1996. Rural development did not appear to be a budget priority for the region.

25 Unsigned, “The experience of August. Hot Experience. 25 August—all Russian rural gathering,” Zemlia i Trud no 34: 185,(23-39 August 1994), 1.

26 Decree by G. K. Merkulov, the Head of Administration for Riazan’ Region: Postanovlenie of 14 May 1996, no. 220: “O Kompleksnom Plane Deiistviia Administratsii Oblasti Po Realizatstii V 1996 Gody Programmii Pravitel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii ‘Reformii I Razvitie Rossiskoi Ekonomiki v 1995-1997 Godakh,’” 23. 125 The region tried out the Nizhnii Model for a few years, beginning in the winter of 1994.

Four farms in critical condition, all in different districts, were chosen as pilot farms for the project.27 One of these had a harvest three times lower than the district average in the last year; at another, workers hadn’t been paid for nine months (also longer than average at farms, if several months delay was becoming normal).28 In January of 1995, a delegation of farm specialists was sent to Canada to learn about capitalist agriculture (mirroring the Nizhnii delegation, which traveled to the Bay Area in the U.S.) One of the participants noted in regional press that the reforms hadn’t shown great results yet in Russia, but blamed this on the social and economic conditions of the country. “The kolkhozi basically remain kolkhozi, which is why they decided to introduce the Nizhnii Model to Riazan’.”29 American and Canadian consultants traveled to the region to help implement farm privatizations—just as in Nizhnii. The IFC participated with special financing from the Canadian government and several international consultants came to

Riazan’, as they had come to Nizhnii.

In 1996, the region intended to support farms that chose to privatize using the Model

Program with subsidies and preferential credit.30 But observers reported mostly on the failure of this support to materialize and how farms were struggling.31 If any support existed initially, it was even shorter-lived than Nemtsov’s help for private farms in Nizhnii had proved.

By 1997, many locals had decided the Program was a failure in Riazan’, evidenced by a regional forum reported in local press. One discussant commented bitterly that promises of bright

27 T. Frolova, “On the program of privatization of land and reorganization of agricultural enterprises,” Vecherniaia Riazan’ (2 December1994), 6.

28 Unsigned, “Kanadskoe Delo v Riazanskoi Derevne,” Agrarnaia Reforma 4 (Jan 26-Feb. 1, 1995), 5.

29 Anashkin, “Is the Nizhnii experience taking root on Ryazan earth?” Vecherniaia Riazan’ (3 February, 1995), 4.

30 Postanovlenie N.220, 25.

31 For example, see M. A. Korobeinnikov, Agrarnaia Reforma: Krest’ianstvo I Vlast’. Istoricheskii Opiit. Analiz. Prognoz. (Moscow: Ekonomicheskaia Literatura, 2000), 3-7 on failures of reform and decrease of investment in villages, and 111-118 on social costs and the need for renewed government funding. 126 capitalist futures for farms had been a tall tale, that crumbled as soon as foreigners left the region.

The Model was blamed for creating disastrous enmity and rivalry at former collectives--indeed, the Program was humorously dubbed, “divorce, Nizhegorodskai-style,” by one columnist.32

Another speaker at the forum compared the favorable conditions that Nemtsov had created, offering preferential credit and funding to new farms, to the “funny” situtation in Riazan’. The correspondent concluded that “reorganization is not easy” and “no miracle occurred—but it couldn’t occur without support, without grants, without credit…maybe these will appear later?”33

Speaking with me in 2008, a sociologist who had worked with the Model Program in

Nizhnii said she thought part of the problem was that reforms were implemented in higher functioning farms in Nizhnii region, whereas they were attempted on farms in the worst condition in Riazan’, where farms were overall poorer to begin with.34 As I explained in Chapter Three, my research indicated that even farms in Nizhnii had turned to the Model Program when they were already in critical shape. But she was quite right that Riazan’ farms were faring even worse. The region attempted farm reorganization by Model Program without even the minimal financial support in place for new private farms that existed initially in Nizhnii.

After the first pilot farm reorganizations were deemed failures, the Model Program seemed to fizzle out in Riazan’ as well. Locals at my research farm had never heard of it.

At Kolkhoz Pervoe Maia, chairmen began to turn over rapidly beginning in the early

1980s, as discussed in Chapter Two. To comply with legislation, the kolkhoz quietly re-registered as a limited liability company in 1992. Nothing changed at the farm apart from this technicality.

Interviewees said they were paid for about six months of 1993 and 1994. Some months they were

32 “Kanadskoe Delo…” 5.

33 Natalia Golikova, “How are the children and step-children of the Nizhnii Model Living?” Riazanskie Vedemosti (26 June 1997), 2.

34 Interview in her office, Moscow, 3/4/08. 127 given part of their wages in cash, and part in goods in kind, such as milk or sour cream. At the end of the 1990s the farm changed its registration to agricultural cooperative, managers believing this would confer tax benefit. Again, the change didn’t herald any operation or management changes at the farm and signified little, if anything, to workers and villagers. Many villagers continued to call their form “kolkhoz” in 2008. The executive director of the farm also discussed it as, if not a kolkhoz in name, in every other respect. She talked about feeling responsibility towards workers and village residents not employed at the farm alike, and contrasted this community responsibility toward how she imagined new, private farming entrepreneurs might operate, free to make decisions based on profit and efficiency without considering social support for the villages.35

If the form but not the content changed at Lenin kolkhoz after the Soviet collapse, the

1990s to 2000s still witnessed profound shifts at the farm. The farm drastically declined. Unable to pay good—if any—wages, it lost able-bodied personnel to cities even as older workers retired and many passed away. While it had about 200 employees in 1990 (already a decline from peak years in the late 1970s), there were 20 some workers in 2008. Meanwhile, retirees formed the bulk of the population living fulltime in villages of Pervoe Maia, while many households had members workings in cities. Before finding sponsorship, the farm had shrunk to less than 10% of the workforce it once had and nearly gone bankrupt. Buildings and equipment fell into disrepair, such that in 2008 management was embarrassed to have me visit farm facilities. They gave me free access to wander the farm, talk to people and attend weekly all-staff meetings only after two months on site.

The withdrawal of state funding for the farm in the 1990s was compounded by the failure and closure of secondary processing plants that had previously bought kolkhoz products. The milk processing plant in the district's capital city quickly shut down after the Soviet collapse, which meant the farm struggled to find buyers. It eventually had to transport some of its milk to

35 Elena, informal conversation in her car, Riazan’, 4/20/08. 128 Moscow for sale. There also used to exist a meat processing plant and a large animal complex in the district that raised bulls. The tractor and equipment station closed and the farm was suddenly on its own, with three working tractors remaining in 2008. At its peak there had been 30 available for use.36

The farm hovered near bankruptcy for years until they attracted outside investment in the

2000s. One investor began negotiations to buy the farm in 2006 but pulled out. Another investor, or “sponsor” in locals’ terms, actually bought out the farm in 2007, and in 2008 farm transformation was only beginning. The director was demoted to executive director and local managers were beginning to communicate with and report to a new management team based in

Moscow. Villagers were glad that investment had materialized and thought this was the only hope for saving their farm, even as they approached a very uncertain farm transition in its early stages at the time of my research. Most villagers sold their land shares to the new investor in

2007. The farm director felt this was disadvantageous and had warned villagers not to sell right away, but people chose the cash buyout anyway. The head of rural administration encouraged land sale, mediating between the Moscow investor and villagers.

In 2008, the farm management team struggled to meet the demands of the new parent company, which chose not to send new management onsite immediately. I participated in a somewhat comic and poignant episode when Elena, the executive director, rang my cell phone and asked me to come into the farm office one day. She wanted to know if I could help send an email to Moscow. First I had to help the chief accountant, unfamiliar with computers, Excel charts and email systems, attach a spreadsheet to an email and send to Moscow. But then I also had to provide an internet connection, by using my cell phone as a modem, held above my head for better reception, connected by cable to my laptop (I tried but failed to troubleshoot the farm’s own internet connection on their office computer, only just installed and not functioning). In

36 Interview with Lidia, in her home, Riazan’, 2/4/08. 129 2008 its future seemed very uncertain to villagers, many of whom talked about being glad that their children were finding opportunities in cities.

Krasnodar Site: Farm Closures

The fertile land in Krasnodar region provided incentive and promise for private farming—much more so than at Nizhnii and Riazan’ sites. People had higher expectations for farming success here, both for small-scale private “farmers” and privatized or newly formed large farm enterprises. Businessmen could expect real profits and were more eager to try their luck. At the same time, as a border region, Krasnodar saw several waves of migrants and refugees arrive after 1991. People moved both to cities and to the countryside. Many tried to support themselves with family farming operations. These tended to be very poor families, with few other options— some of the poorest of the poor, often ethnic minorities from former Soviet republics, trying their hands at farming, as political scientist Allina-Pisano indicates was common in the 1990s.37

Farming competition was complicated by ethnic tensions between new arrivals and locals in villages.

The rural population in Belorechensk district, where sovkhozes Plamia and Traktor were located, counted residents of seventy-four different national and ethnic backgrounds in 2002.38

Ethnic hostilities increased in the 1990s, mainly between native Cossacks and Meskhetian

Turkish refugees migrating to the area. I witnessed one such incident during my research. After a Cossack gathering, several young men from one of the villages went to drink in a pub, ran into some “Turks” and got in to a fight. They returned to the village where I was staying promising a

“blood war.” Village men started driving up, parking, and gathering in the village center with sticks and weapons in their hands and car trunks, outside the ramshackle Soviet “House of

37 Allina-Pisano (2008), 102.

38 Thirteen people checked off “other nationalities not listed” in this census survey, and ten people declined to give information about their nationalities. “Itogi Vserossiisskoi Perepisi Naselenia 2002 goda: Natsional’nii sostav I vladenie yazikami, grazhdanstvo,” 55-56, printed for me by Krasnodarstat office. 130 Culture” (or club, as it was called in my other sites). Women and children fringed the outside of a loose circle, some yelling, crying or pleading with the men not to start anything. Everyone hung around for a few hours, ready for a showdown when the Turks arrived—but Russian riot police closed the road into the village before further incident, and monitored the scene for the rest of the week while people got back to work and tensions blew over. One family told me about how the rural Cossack council had met and decided to ask Meskhetian Turkish refugees in the village to leave, buying them out of their recently purchased apartments. Locals blamed the refugees for increased theft in the village and distrusted their new neighbors, who had arrived hoping to do subsistence farming.39 Locals were themselves already busy with their own family farming operations.

The same basic procedures for farm privatization had been undertaken here. In the region as a whole, share distribution occurred in the early 1990s, with more than 6000 land shares doled out in Krasnodar region. Most of these were leased to new or newly privatized agricultural enterprises. In 1997 the Chairman of the Committee of Agro-industrial Politics, Land Use and

Land Reform of the regional legislative assembly spoke publicly about the great tasks provincial administration faced in renewing agriculture. He mentioned farms’ dire needs for equipment and money and noted the huge disparity between industrial and agricultural prices and the soaring costs of energy resources, which crippled farms.40 The land may have been more fertile in

Krasnodar region, but farm enterprises and individual “farmers” still had to overcome many of the same structural economic difficulties as in other areas.

The farm workers who became land and property share holders in the region were not sufficiently compensated for the use of their land, which was being publicly discussed by the

2000s. Many people testified to regional press about renting land to enterprises and never

39 Interview in their home, Krasnodar, 8/3/08.

40 Unsigned, “Breaking it was easy, but renewing it difficult,” Literaturnaia Kuban 4:14 (16-28 February 1997), 2. 131 receiving any legal documents. Farms just took their certificates of share ownership from them.

Press noted in 2004 that most contracts involving land share rental did not accord with the latest

Citizen Code, meaning that if contracts were checked, shareowners would not receive payment for the rental of their land as of January 2005.41 Also in 2004, more than half of former kolkhozi and sovkhozi in the region were declared insolvent, and regional administration chose to cut off insolvent farms from any government help. However a journalist noted the new law was unjust: of the general sum of farm indebtedness, constituting 3.8 million rubles, 2.1 million rubles were counted in the form of fines and penalties. The writer implied though didn’t state that these fines were cripplingly high, and the reader can similarly infer that perhaps the fines were unfairly assessed in the first place, a product of official corruption, which many interviewees at various farm sites in Krasnodar complained to me about.42

At my research site, both farms reregistered as private enterprises in 1991 in compliance with the national mandate (quite early compared to many Russian farms).43 Workers were given certificates of land share ownership in 1992. Both sovkhozi closed doors quite soon after the

Soviet Union collapsed.44 District records show both farms to have been in serious debt before they closed.45 Ending the farm was possibly a way to liquidate their debt. Workers at one of the farms described not being paid wages for six months between 1991 and 1992. People started

41 “Commentary,” Krasnodarskie Izvestiia 151: 3224 (9 October 2004), 4.

42 Rossiskaia Gazeta 247: 3624 (9 November 2004), 6.

43 27 August 1991 Reshenie n. 452/I of Belorechensk City’s Executive Committee of the Soviet of People’s Deputies of Krasnodar Region, “on the Transformation of the Form of Ownership of Sovkhoz [Traktor] and consolidation of land use,” which mandated that the sovkhoz transform to a private collective enterprise (kollektivnoe sel’skokhoziastvennoe predpriiatie), Belorechensk Municipal Archive 4:1:771:33; the same decision regarding [Plamia] Sovkhoz in 4:1:771:143.

44 Postanovlenie 19 February 1992 N 215, in which the head of Belorechensk Administration declares that the sovkhoz is to be liquidated on account of its insolvency, and names a seven-person commission to carry out sovkhoz liquidation. 337:8:273.

45 For example see Prikaz “O prekrashenii deiatelnosti maliix predpriyatii obrazovanniikh pri sovkhoze [Plamia]” marking official recognition of the sovkhoz’s insolvency and closing its related bank accounts 50:1:494:1. 132 leaving the farm at that time. Some tried to withdraw their land shares and begin their own private cultivation as soon as they could in 1990 or 1991. Others looked for work in the closest cities (which still required a one-way commute of more than an hour by car). There was no one large-scale successor enterprise to either sovkhoz. Mostly people started developing existing or building new greenhouses to grow vegetables, and tried to sell their produce in cities or to intermediaries who began to visit the villages. Villagers reported that the very earliest would-be farmers, who separated their land shares from the sovkhoz while the parent farm still existed, had almost all failed. Maybe three remained, and only one of those seemed to be truly prospering.

Others either leased or sold their land or hung on to it hoping land value would rise.46 According to anecdotal accounts, the last sovkhoz director of one of the two farms started his own farm and created a farmer’s association immediately after the sovkhoz closed, but the association he headed also folded within a few years.

Not just the two sovkhozes but all rural employers closed operations in the decade of the

Soviet collapse. Sovkhoz apple fields became overgrown and the closest village to them soon disappeared from view. The timber farm that had operated there closed in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s any last residents still employed at the sovkhoz also moved away when their farm closed. Villagers living nearby came to take away any usable building or other materials that residents left behind, leaving only the foundations of homes still standing. Lush foliage rapidly overgrew the foundations, erasing any trace of the former village to a casual observer. Contacts drove me through on a weekend visit to a lake one day and I could barely believe that there had even been a village there. The local chemical factory went bankrupt, the local sanatorium and mineral pool fell into disrepair, the preschool closed and the grade school functioned in crisis conditions, unable to pay teachers and rapidly losing students. It still ran at all thanks to heroic efforts of the principal, herself in poor health in 2008. The medical services station shut down for several years in the ‘90s. The village club stopped being funded, and windows broken were no

46 Interview with “Five Relatives,” in one’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08. 133 longer repaired, lightbulbs no longer replaced, no regular cleaning or maintenance, and no heat for most of the 1990s. Activities there drastically dwindled. The two state farms together had built edifices, taken care of repairs, and provided food for all the villages’ social institutions.

Without the farms, no one took responsibility. Rural administration lacked money in the budget to do much. The sanatorium and children’s camp, those key Soviet institutions of good cheer described in Chapter One, were special sites of nostalgia for my interviewees. The crumbling edifices became tangible symbols of breakdown and collapse. The barren apple fields overgrown with weeds stood as a similar reminder.

In 2008, locals mainly made their living from family greenhouse crop cultivation, and a few larger-scale enterprises farm had arisen that grew strawberries and other crops. People felt insecure about their futures and were keenly aware of their vulnerability: one bad season or debilitating illness and they and their family farms would face dire straits. But the climate and soil were good enough in this southern Russian area that people could profit as small-scale private farmers. Many houses and gardens were well-maintained and comfortable, and my interviewees overall had more modern amenities and seemed better-off materially than Nizhnii and Riazan’ site contacts. Economic disparity between former sovkhoz workers was growing, as a couple of private farmers really prospered, bought equipment from firms in Krasnodar city and grew their businesses, while some other villagers became their hired labor. One interviewee estimated that up to half of former sovkhoz fields were now being cultivated by villagers without proper documentation. Those families would be vulnerable to being fined or having their operations shut down if discovered. No corporate investor had appeared to buy up farm land here. But the old chemical factory was purchased in 2007 by a Moscow businessman, whose company planned to re-open the sanatorium as a private resort.

Due to the successful greenhouse cultivation, overall most of my interviewees felt that they had grown more prosperous by 2008 than they described having been during late Soviet years. But they too had faced some similar hardships and endured some of the same challenging 134 circumstance and experiences as my interviewees at Riazan’ and Nizhnii sites. Despite the high hopes of the early 1990s, the decade had proved disastrous at many levels in the countryside.

Each research site, then, privatized by different means. Pobeda in Nizhnii reorganized to great fanfare through the Model Program. Management at Pervoe Maia in Riazan’ merely re- registered the enterprise as private while altering nothing at the farm; while Krasnodar sokhozes

Traktor and Plamia declared bankruptcy and closed almost immediately following the Soviet collapse. Individual farm fates were obviously influenced by many factors. The reform- mindedness of regional and local administration greatly affected the thoroughness of the privatization process, as officials had much power to decide whether to enforce national legislation truly—or only nominally. By the same token, farm directors also played large roles in the privatization process—or the failure to privatize. The reforms so optimistically (or naively) planned to be “bottom up” in practice became exercises in “top-down” decision-making, based on what those at the top locally and regionally considered their interests to be.

While the land under cultivation was not particularly better for cultivation at Nizhnii site than Riazan’, in Nizhnii the reform-happy regional government found both international assistance and willing farm managers who would push broad privatization through. In Riazan’ site no one seemed to harbor particular ambitions to farm privately, and the farm struggled until it found an investor in 2006. In Krasnodar site land was fertile enough that when the sovkhozes ran out of money, people had some faith they’d be able to profit from private farming or expanded subsidiary plot cultivation. Some left the sovkhozes to try private farming even before the farms closed doors. Meanwhile sovkhoz directors found it most auspicious to close the state farms than continue to run them as private enterprises with sovkhoz debt. Directors as well as workers eventually did find profit in smaller-scale farming with greenhouse crop cultivation.

In this way my three research sites presented a small sample of the various fates that farms found in the immediate post-Soviet era. But what was striking when talking to people, 135 even those in Krasnodar site, was the experiences of hardship combined with very limited choices that they remembered when discussing the 1990s. Next I look at the general claims they made that I verify and flesh out using primary and secondary sources—the hardships and experiences that were shared across my sites.

Experiences in Common

Ordinary Russians faced economic difficulties in the 1990s often considered to be worse than the global Depression of the 1920s. Here I point to the general features of rural experiences during the decade, showing the commonalities across my research sites despite different privatization pathways.

Limited Employment Options

My interviewees faced severely constrained opportunities in the countryside, both at successor enterprises to collectives and if they wanted to start their own farms. First people told me about the decline or demise of their farms. All four of my research farms experienced crisis conditions in the early part of the decade—and two had closed by 1993. Nizhnii and Riazan’ farms were essentially bankrupt for years, barely hanging on from one harvest to the next and operating in debt. Then, the majority of individual private “peasant farmer” farms (KFKH) that initially opened quickly failed. For a host of reasons, private farmers faced an uphill battle. They lacked expertise, equipment, financial capital and professional networks. On top of all that, they could face discrimination and backstabbing from neighbors, their former employers and farm managers, or local administration. As economists Sazonov and Sazonova point out, de facto agricultural policy implementation in the regions favored large farm enterprises. Peasant farmers did not necessarily have the knowledge or access to participate in federal or regional programs

136 even when these could have rendered support.47 The risks were large enough that only a relatively small number of people even tried to become private farmers. Numbers of farmers seemed to peak in 1994, at around 280,000, and hovered around 260,000 for the rest of the decade, representing about 5% of rural households.48

Vladimir, who became a private farmer in Nizhnii in 1993, became quite agitated talking about this with me. I asked whether he thought the national programs begun in 2006 to stimulate farming were the continuation of early 1990s reforms; or something different. “It’s not that they’re a continuation,” he exclaimed, “I say these programs for credit for farms and even personal households are ten years too late! If these credits had been available ten years ago, I would have a good farm now.” Nearing retirement age anyway, Vladimir had already given up on his farm. Yet he understandably remained bitter that no assistance or safety net had supported his farming efforts in the early 1990s (even after reorganization by Model).49

If private farming was realistically not considered a viable choice by many people, villagers faced extremely limited employment options. In Nizhnii and Riazan’ sites, the farms had been the chief and essentially the sole employers onsite (but for rural administration or schools in the biggest village at each site). In Krasnodar there had always been other employers besides the sovkhozes; but these too closed doors in the 1990s. Farm workers could choose the riskiest path and strike out on their own, lease their shares to reorganized collectives, or try to find work in regional cities—usually without any particular transferable skill set or profession.

New Ownership—But a Net Loss of Resources

47 Sergei Sazonov and Damira Sazonova, “Development of Peasant Farms in Central Russia,” Comparative Economic Studies 47 (2005), 101-114.

48 Don Van Atta, “The Return of Individual Farming in Russia,” in The “Farmer Threat”: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993) and Stephen Wegren, Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), chapters 5 and 6; also Wegren (1994), 16; and V. Uzun, “Large and small business in Russian agriculture: adaptation to market,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 1 (2005), 85-100.

49 Vladimir, in his house, Nizhnii, 11/10/07. 137 At the same time, people’s use of the land and property shares granted them was highly limited. When they leased shares back to a privatized collective or a new successor enterprise, they may have received payment in kind and/or inputs for their subsidiary plots (such as seeds, fertilizer, or the use of tractors.) But they had always received assistance with their subsidiary plot from the collective farms in late socialist years. “Payment in kind” for land leases sounded like a benefit—but in fact it represented no net gain for villagers. As new shareholders in farms, villagers often received less than they were used to in late Soviet years.50 Insolvent farms, unsupported by the state, could not give out much. Interviewees said some years they got no in kind payment since their farm was struggling. As Gambold Miller found at one of the successor enterprises to Kolkhoz Pobeda, people never felt they actually owned anything besides their house and household plots. The certificates of land plot ownership meant nothing to people.51 This is not because villagers failed to understand the concept of ownership. Rather, that ownership was constrained, as rights to buy and sell were not thoroughly legislated.52 Nothing fundamentally changed for people and they derived no real, or at least net, benefit from it. Meanwhile people who left collectives with their land shares could rely on no such handouts, assistance or borrowed equipment at all.

As I indicated earlier, land share ownership remains incompletely formalized and documented into the 2000s. This is partly due to the inordinate expense and bureaucratic hurdles

50 See V. Uzun, “Privatization of Land and Farm Restructuring: Ideas, Mechanisms, Results, Problems,” Farm Profitability, Sustainability, and Restructuring in Russia, ed. Institute for Economy in Transition (Moscow: Analytical Centre Agrifood Economy of IET, 1999), 36-50; Visser (2006); also Caroline Humphrey, Marx Went Away But Karl Stayed Behind (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1998), 472.

51 Liesl Gambold Miller and Patrick Heady, “Nostalgia and the Emotional Economy: a Comparative Look at Rural Russia,” in Postsocialism: Politics and emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Maruska Svasek (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 40

52 See for example Zvi Lerman, “Does land reform matter? Some experiences from the former Soviet Union,” European Review of Agricultural Economics 25, no. 3 (1998), 307-330; also Wegren (2008), who argues that the reform generated such shallow property rights in reality that it may not deserve to be considered one of Russia’s great land reforms.

138 imposed on villagers wishing to formalize their ownership.53 The prospect of urban capital appearing to buy up farmland is perceived with trepidation by much of the rural population, and stories are emerging about people being tricked, cheated, or pressured to give up or undersell their land plots. As Wegren notes, this process is sometimes called a “war” in Russian press— and it’s one in which “common households do not have the financial, legal, or even political resources to win the war over land with the urban rich.”54 In the 2000s, locals must contend not just with domestic but also international actors and corporations eager to obtain inexpensive agricultural land.55

Impoverishment and Inequality

Workers who continued to find employment at successor farm enterprises saw their wages as well as their buying power steeply decline. Agricultural wages fell by half in the first few years of the ‘90s, and it became completely normal for workers’ not to be paid for months at a time (at my research sites, between two to nine months at a time). From 1990 to 2000, rural workers’ wages fell from 95% to 40% of the average salaries for the whole country.56 Of course, the “shock therapy” of the early 1990s increased poverty overall. Price freeing in January 1992 meant that almost immediately the average wage lost half its purchasing power.57 While across

Russia people’s savings were liquidated by hyperinflation, the rural population seemed to be hit

53 See Natalya Shaigada, “Agricultural Land Market in Russia: Living with Constraints,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 1 (March 2005), 127-140.

54 Wegren (2008), 144. Rural “land grabbing” by domestic and international actors is fast increasing in the 2000s in Russia.

55 Oane Visser and Max Spoor, “Land Grabbing in Post-Soviet Eurasia: the World’s Largest Agricultural Land Reserves at Stake,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 2 (March 2011), 299-323.

56 Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik. Moscow, 2001.

57 Vladimir Mikhalev, “Poverty and Social Assistance,” in The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry, ed. Lawrence Klein and Marshall Pomer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 251-270.

139 harder than the urban.58 If there was truly a brief “rural advantage” during late socialist years in

Russia, that moment was decidedly over. Poverty, on the increase throughout Russia, grew proportionately more in the countryside than in urban areas, creating what some scholars point to as a ”ruralization” of poverty. The early Russian 21st century (like the early 20th century) again exhibits strong urban bias.59 Central Russian regions where I did my fieldwork became significantly poorer in 1992-1993. Far from transforming to capitalist relations, exchanges in the countryside became increasingly demonetized, as people turned to barter, exchange and mutual aid—as some scholars suggest, as during pre-modern times.60

Villagers turned to their household plots for survival, and expanded prodcution to sell in markets and supplement their meager incomes. In 1998, food production on individual subsidiary plots accounted for 58% of the value of food produced inside Russia (and the proportion was still slightly more than half in 2007). Even urban professionals were growing some of their own food in garden plots. As of 2000, income from sales of products from household plots still accounted for one third to one half of rural families’ budgets.61 While the rural population overall became significantly poorer in the ‘90s, growing wealth stratification in the country became newly visible to my interviewees. Wealthy urbanites began to build summer homes in villages in the later ‘90s, creating literal juxtapositions of wealth and poverty side by side in many villages.

58 See Csaba Csaki, John Nash, Vera Matusevich and Holger Kray, Food and Agricultural Policy in Russia: Progress to Date and the Road Forward, World Bank Technical Paper no. 523 (Washington, D.C.: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank, 2002), 106.

59 Gerry, CJ, Nivorozhkin, E and Rigg, JA The great divide:'ruralisation'of poverty in Russia, Cambridge Journal of Economics 32:4, 593 (2008), 4 and 9; see also Stephen Wegren et al, “Why Russia’s Rural Poor are Poor,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (2003).

60 See for example Victor Zaslavsky, “From Redistribution to Marketization,” in The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, ed. Gail Lapidus (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), 115-142, who writes about the economic transformation overall that “…a barter economy is coming into being, replacing the old ‘command-administrative economy.’” 125.

61 See Oksana Lylova, 82. “Village Dwellers' Economic Adaptation to Market Conditions,” Sociological Research, vol. 44, no. 2, March-April 2005, pp. 78-94. She also discusses the fewer economic options and employment choices villagers found then urbanites, who could retrain and change professions with greater ease—which necessitated villagers’ increased focus on home plot production. She likens these to the traditional family farms of pre-Soviet years. 140

Worsening Demographics

The demographic situation in villages continued to worsen. As in urban areas, inmigration in the early 90s from former Soviet republics as well as from poorer to stronger regions inside Russia partially masked the extent of the demographic problem in villages. The decline in the rural population has generally kept pace with urban decline, keeping the ratio of rural residents at about 27% even as the overall population steadily declines. However in the second half of the 1990s, as migration to rural areas slowed, rural population growth became negative overall in Russia, and deaths began to exceed births. The death rate of rural residents grew from

13% in 1990 to 17% in 2000, while the birth rate of the same years fell from 15.5% to 9.8%.

Male mortality was higher than female. As economists Csaba Csaki et al of the World Bank note,

“The structure of population [in] rural areas is gradually changing. There are fewer young people. If this trend continues over [a] longer period of time, an aging and alcohol-ridden rural population will undermine the potential of [the] rural economy for recovery and growth.”62

To take my Riazan’ research site as an example: in Kolkhoz Pervoe Maia’s district, records show a dramatic downward demographic spiral from 1980 to 2008 (and by all accounts continuing).63 The total rural population of the district decreased every single year, dwindling nearly by half in 28 years, from 31,983 to 17,812.

The fewest rural births in the district occurred in 1996. In 2007, births were 58.5% of the

1980 count. The lowest ratios of births to deaths took place in 1994 and 2002 (at -30.3% population growth, and -33.8% population growth, respectively) but all years showed a negative

62 Csaba Csaki, John Nash, Vera Matusevich, Holger Kray, Food and Agricultural Policy in Russia: Progress to Date and the Road Forward (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2002), 104.

63 Data from four pages of statistics specially printed for me by Shilovo Statistics Office, an organ of Federal Statistics of Riazan’ (Riazan’stat), titled “Napravlaiem informatsiiu po osnovniim pokazateliam, kharakterizuiushchim demograficheskie protsessii sel’skogo naseleniia Shilovskogo raiona Riazanskoi oblasti za 1980-2077gg,” unless otherwise noted. 141 number for population growth. In 2007, there were 38.8 deaths in the district, to 8.4 births per

1000 people. Here is a graphical representation of births to deaths among people living full-time in rural areas of the district:

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 Deaths

1980 Births 1990 1997 2007

Marriages decreased and divorces increased. In 1980 there had been 9.1 marriages and

0.8 divorces per 1000 people (the highest year for marriage rates of the period), while in 2003 the rate was 4.2 marriages and 2.3 divorces. Here is a graph of this dynamic:

142 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Divorces per 1000 people 1980 Marriages per 1000 people 1988 1994 2003

For the period 1990 to 2007, migration to rural areas of the district was highest between

1990 and 1992. People from other countries (ie, former Soviet republics) arrived in highest numbers in 1991, immediately after the Soviet collapse; and lowest numbers in 2003.

Surprisingly, outmigration from the villages was considerably lower than in-migration, but the population was still falling as rural inhabitants died. Here is a graph of migration to and from the rural parts of Shilovo district, in numbers of individuals:

143 1400

1200

1000

800 Inmigration 600 Outmigration

400

200

0 1990 1992 2000 2007

I was told by the head of rural administration that the majority of the rural population of the district started to be of pension age in 1995.64 Yet some turnover of the village population continues, as young villagers migrate to cities for work, occasionally (and sometimes temporarily) returning, while dachniki arrive seasonally to build summer homes.

Social Services and Cultural Life Falter

Because of the migrating and dying population, dearth of labor power and steep reduction in state support in the 90s, capable locals were left to handle village social needs as best they could—whether farm or local administration workers or even former Soviet cultural workers.

Farms that are successors to Soviet collectives still tend to offer informal kinds of help to villagers, such as loaning out equipment for work on household plots or plowing the small land plots that individuals then seed. To some extent there’s a blurring of roles between farms, local administration, and social service providers in villages. There is also some overlap of the

64 Interview with head of rural administration, in her office, Riazan’, 2/4/08.

144 personnel staffing farm offices and local administration. In the more prosperous regions the government may again be taking responsibility for social infrastructure. However, most communities have relied on local resources to keep struggling rural schools and other institutions going. The government funding that exists for social needs has shifted since the 90s, with a greater proportion coming from local administration rather than federal budgets. Yet local administrations never had enough money in their budgets to maintain the services at even former

Soviet levels.

Not just social services, but also the centrally organized and funded village social and cultural life was abandoned in the 1990s. Club activities decreased and facilities stopped being maintained. People told me that living in villages became less social—or less cheerful, as discussed in Chapter One. A number of interviewees complained about how everyone sat at home watching television now, in the new economy.

Macro-Level Agricultural Recovery in 2000s

In the early 2000s, large farms, many of them reorganized or simply renamed, nominally private collectives continue to dominate the Russian countryside. Yet as the overall economy began to stabilize during Putin years, conditions for agriculture also started to improve. Most observers date a slow rural recovery beginning after the 1998 financial collapse.65 Total (private) investment into agriculture more than doubled merely from 2003 to 2006 and continued to grow through 2008.66 In many instances this means that businesses based in Moscow have been buying out farms in the regions, which I observed in every region I visited. Now that it’s fully possible

65 The 1998 fiscal crisis actually somewhat helped agriculture, since prices for agricultural goods finally rose relative to prices of industrial goods and energy. On late 1990s recovery, see for example Grigory Ioffe and Tatyana Nefedova, “Areas of Crisis in Russian Agriculture: A Geographic Perspective,” Post- Soviet Geography and Economics 41, no. 4 (June 2000), 288-305, who argue that proximity to urban markets played a large role in farm recovery, while the effect of privatization reforms has been a negligible factor in farm productivity.

66 Calculated from Russian Ministry of Agriculture statistics, available online at http://www.mcx.ru/documents/document/show/11703.164.htm 145 to legally buy and sell land urban investors are becoming interested in rural real estate. Outsiders to the villages are starting to take over former collective farms. Very large agro holdings are now springing up, particularly in more fertile areas in Russia’s south, though their numbers are not officially tracked by the Ministry of Agriculture and little research yet addresses their impact on the countryside.67 Peasant farming is also making a small but noticeable inroad into agriculture.

From 2006 to 2009 these farms consistently produced 20 to 21% of Russia’s total grain harvest.68

But who are the so-called peasant farmers of the 2000s? More research needs to determine the proportion of (perhaps former) urbanites as opposed to villagers who register, own, and run peasant farms in the 2000s. My study suggests these may not be the same kolkhozniks who tried to start family farms during the 1990s.

Evidence suggests that while large-scale agriculture may finally be recovering from the disastrous 1990s, individual farm workers did not experience the empowerment that land ownership was supposed to bring. Former collectives remain the biggest users of agricultural land, and retain most of their Soviet land—if they are not growing even larger. As Wegren writes, “…private individuals…have not become ‘masters of the land’ [in Gorbachev’s phrasing of 1989]…by the late Putin period there was evidence that ordinary people were being dispossessed of their rights to land and land shares. Russia’s contemporary land reform has not

67 See Dmitri Rylko and Robert Jolly, “Russia’s New Agricultural Operators: Their Emergence, Growth and Impact,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 1 (March 2005), 115-126 on the risks of what may be a Russian latifunda being constituted; also Dmitri Rylko, Robert Jolly and Maria Mosolkova, “Organizational Innovation in Russian Agriculture: The Emergence of ‘New Agricultural Operators’ and Its Consequences,” Paper for Presentation at EAAE Seminar “From Households to firms with independent legal status: the spectrum of institutional units in the development of European agriculture,” (Ashford, UK: 9-10 April 2005) for discussion of the recovery, the process by which outsiders are gaining control over farms and farm assets, and the emergence of large agroholdings in the 2000s, as well as innovations within more “traditional” farms. See also Eugenia Serova, “Results of Transformation of Russian Agri- food Sector,” in Reflecting Transformation in Post-socialist Rural Areas, ed. Maarit Heinonen, et al (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 19, who discusses the emergence of these extremely large farms as representing the opposite of what 1990s reformers intended.

68 Meanwhile in 2008 sales of their products accounted for 8.5% of the total value of all agricultural sales in the country. Ministry of Agriculture Statistics, “Struktura Proizvodstva Osnovniikh Vidov Sels’skokhoziaiistvennoi Produktsii po Kategoriiam Khoziaiistv,” and “14.2: Struktura Produktsii Sel’skogo Khoziaiistva po Kategoriiam,” available online at http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b10_13/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d4/14-02.htm. 146 transformed society or the rural sector in the ways that were originally expected…only a relatively small portion of Russia’s agricultural land ended up in the hands of individuals and households…”69

My interviewees thus shared many difficult experiences in the 1990s. Their incomes fell, likewise their purchasing power and standard of living declined for much of the decade. Their employment choices were highly constrained. Land and property ownership proved mostly hollow, the straw men of the new economic regime. People were restricted from using what had formerly been common resources, such as collective farm tractors or fertilizer. They saw much of what they built at farms crumble. Social and cultural life in villages atrophied even as village society literally shrank. It is hardly surprising that these broadly shared hardships seemed more important to them than whether or how their farms privatized. These common experiences greatly influenced people’s perspectives on privatization, which I turn to next.

69 Wegren (2008), 124. The most extensive study on how ordinary villagers have and are being dispossessed of their land and rights is Allina-Pisano’s monograph (2008). 147 Chapter Five: Perspectives on Privatization

As I demonstrated in Chapter Four, privatization took place very differently depending on location and the specific circumstances of the farm, farm leaders, and officials involved. And yet, although my interviewees’ farms had been privatized quite differently, oral histories reveal that at on personal and collective levels, how people experienced and remembered privatization was to a great extent shared. That is to say, almost regardless of the location of their farms, their positions at those farms, and the land settlements that they received, they tended to recollect and describe the privatization process in a remarkably similar manner. The uniformity of their narratives is striking. It makes sense when we consider that they experienced the same overarching events from a similarly disadvantaged position. They faced economic crisis in the

1990s worse than the global depression of the 1920s—which hit villagers even harder than urban residents. The hardship, struggle, the decline in population, infrastructure and the diminishing economic returns for villagers in Russia formed the common foundation of my interviewees’ interpretations of the 1990s. Most of them were true “losers” in the privatization process, and their oral histories reflect that reality. A sense of having been cheated and victimized threads through people’s accounts. In this chapter, I discuss the core features of their narratives of victimization, uncovering the specific reasons behind their memories and impressions. I detect three broad, recurring themes in their oral history narratives: claims that new ownership rights were hollow; that criminality and fraud were rampant; and that elites deprived the “simple people” by taking formerly common resources. Although some of my interviews offer alternative viewpoints, which I discuss below, I demonstrate the important implications of this largely shared narrative about privatization.

I also find that oral histories reveal much more than the hard realities villagers shared.

Peoples’ accounts show the influence of various elements outside their own experiences, including broader social fears, their neighbors’ experiences, contemporary politics, newspapers 148 and television, the incursion of outsiders into their villages, the land sales of the 2000s, and the emergence and growth of visible inequalities in the countryside. Their stories are not always literally factual, but rather tropes such as the farm down the road, the “bosses,” the “Muscovites,” even the sovkhozes and kolkhozes themselves, appear fraught with symbolic significance. I submit that my interviewees’ nostalgic historical narratives show them in the process of rethinking Soviet history and reformulating their personal and collective identities.

I. Hollow Ownership

People display strong feelings of having been cheated through the land redistribution process. In my interviews, many people insisted that even if they received land in the 1990s, they didn’t benefit from it. Moreover, their testimonies show a striking and very common omission: their shares in collective farm property—if they ever received any—seemed so worthless that people rarely mentioned them. (The terms for land and property shares were generally but not totally distinguishable; people typically used “pai” for land share and “dolia” for property share and explained this to be correct terminology, sometimes also specifying “zemel’nii pai” for land share. Once in a while someone would also use “pai” to mean property share.) Even if they tended to forget that they were due property, people still feel deep acrimony over what happened with their land shares—likely because many of them were just starting to sell land to outside investors in 2006.

We Didn’t Get Any Land!

A number of people complained that they never got the land they were promised, whether this was directly stated or insinuated. Maksim is a private farmer in his fifties. When we met in

2008 he was struggling to obtain necessary approval to open a small snack shop on abandoned farmland. He told me angrily, “people were supposed to get land—but we didn’t…they were

149 supposed to separate out land shares for people, but no one got anything.”1 When people made comments like these about the collective, sometimes they were thinking about one specific group: the small number of villagers who had never received shares, such as Anastasia in Niznhii, or other rural social service (but not farm) workers. These people’s lives had still been kolkhoz- centered, inextricably woven into the fabric of collective farm community, and yet sometimes they were denied shares.

However, more of the time my interviewees were referring to the serious obstacles people faced when trying to get an actual land plot in place of their ownership certificate—obstacles that could be insurmountable. Villagers described in vivid detail how they were at the mercy of the farm directors and heads of local administration who apportioned concrete land parcels when they tried to withdraw their land share from collective use. Logically, these local leaders had no incentive to give away good farmland to individuals—particularly to low status villagers without wealth or political connections. They did have, however, definite stakes in preserving the rural status quo, maintaining collectives, and/or saving the best land for themselves or high status people who could command access. There was thus a clear conflict of interest in making farm directors responsible for distributing land plots. The land ownership certificates were typically given to individuals but then collected and held either by a farm director, when people were leased shares to the farm, or in the office of local administration. In some cases people never saw their certificates at all. Shares could effectively be held without ransom and people truly prevented from getting the land they were due. The situation was ripe for manipulation, and the most vulnerable members of village society, including new migrants and refugees from former

Soviet republics, were the biggest victims. In Jessica Allina-Pisano’s account, manipulation

1 Maksim, informal conversation outside his home, Krasnodar, 7/13/08.

150 reached such extensive proportions that it constituted a hidden, unofficial resistance on the part of both farm directors and administration officials to truly giving people land.2

My research shows that villagers faced multiple problems when they tried to utilize their land ownership rights. These problems continued even at the time of my research, when, for example, while reading at the municipal archive housed in the local administration offices, I overheard an elderly woman trying to find records about her kolkhoznii land share. She argued with the archivist that she was supposed to own land and administration needed to supply her documentation.3 Vlad, the 81-year-old former machine operator and brigadier, was infuriated about the processes ordinary people had to go through to get their land. “You have to ask people what and how to do it [if you want to get land],” he described. “There are many people who haven’t seen any land, but write all these petitions…it is simply offensive.”4

Thus while some villagers never got land they thought they were owed, others suffered through the lengthy and expensive processes of having land apportioned that their ownership certificates promised. Yet even people who received land made the same claims and arguments about land ownership, often speaking in the plural, for the collective. For many of my interviewees the statement “we never got any land” functioned at a rhetorical level. It went hand in hand with the common assertion that people could barely do anything with land they received, which I will discuss next. The land ownership on paper seemed like a legal fiction to many.

People like Maksim did not feel that the certificate, which anyway did not remain long in their own hands, signified real ownership (as I suggested earlier.) In 2008, he and his family in fact were farming on land they already owned, and he was attempting to use another plot, for which his family theoretically owned rights, to open a new business. Maksim was already benefiting to some extent from land privatization. Still he felt the process for land allotment was so flawed and

2 Allina-Pisano (2008).

3 In Belorechensk Municipal Archive, Krasnodar, 8/8/08.

4 Vlad, outside his home, Nizhnii, 11/26/07. 151 using the land so difficult, that taking a broad perspective, it was almost as if people hadn’t even received the land they were promised. And still he spoke for the collective on the issue of land ownership.

When Sasha the former agronomist told me about people farming the fields without documentation, he also blamed this on problems with formalizing the legal right to land ownership. These included having to travel to the provincial capital multiple times to fill out paperwork and get signatures, and the high expense of getting ownership correctly documented, as well as having to bribe officials. The right to land was so cumbersome and expensive to utilize even in 2008, that many villagers used land unofficially instead, as Sasha pointed out. This practice made them vulnerable to fines, if not expulsion from the land if officials chose to prosecute.5

We Couldn’t Do Anything With the Land We Got!

Perhaps an even more ubiquitous complaint I heard was that people couldn’t really do anything with land they did receive. Even when my interviewees managed to obtain land they were due, they were still at the mercy of local leaders who decided where that land plot would physically lie, and hence what quality it would be for farming. Many people were angry about having been allotted “bad” or even “the worst” land with which to farm: meaning it was of poor quality, and/or remote from where they lived. This was no small disadvantage for villagers without cars or other transport or equipment, or who couldn’t afford gas with which to travel to their plots. People starting small family farms would still work their home plot or “kitchen garden,” while also using the land they received from former collective farm fields. Life was much more difficult if that land was quite far away from their homes.

5 Sasha, in his home, Krasnodar, 6/30/08. See also Shaigada (2005) on the constraints landowners faced. He did not say that anyone in his villages had yet been prosecuted, but rather that people worked in fear. 152 For example, here is how Evgeniia, former sovkhoz accountant, told the story of trying to start farming with her mother in the early 1990s. Everyone received a certificate of land share ownership on January 1, 1992, entitling them to 4 hectares of agricultural land. Those certificates were first “collected” by the re-registered sovkhoz, while it still existed. After her sovkhoz declared bankruptcy and closed its doors later in 1992, the certificates passed in to the hands of

“our chief (glava)” which meant the village ataman in her Cossack village. He gave a

“recommendation” of which land would be theirs, and people had to come to agreement with him before receiving a concrete plot (she did not specify what this entailed.) When I asked directly,

Evgeniia allowed that the procedure had been “in general fair (normal’no).” But then she started describing the problems with the land she was given. The plots she and her mother received were far away in the fields outside her village and were not of high quality. Her share was on a slope and lay somewhat lower than the rest of the field. Water collected and stood on her land. It wasn’t just her family that felt unsatisfied with land apportionment. She said the very first people to receive land were given the very worst parcels, where “almost nothing would grow.” While the sovkhoz still existed, leaders resisted giving land out. Someone called the new land committee of the district, who sent a representative to the village to investigate and oversee land distribution. It was a major problem for those first people who tried to get land, Evgeniia described, though it gradually got easier for would-be private farmers in her village.6

It’s easy to imagine that there would have been some dispute and hard feelings no matter what attempts were made to distribute land equitably. People understandably remember these disputes even despite varying local histories. But while at Nizhnii site, the reorganization team had surveyed and evaluated farm land, in order to precisely determine the worth, equivalency, and fair exchange rates for land and property shares—at Krasnodar site no such attempt had ever even been made. Shares were given out solely at local leader discretion. This was the much more common scenario across central Russia when no special privatization program was used.

6 Evgeniia, in her house, Krasnodar, 6/30/08. 153 Even in Nizhnii, the mechanism only functioned in the initial stage of kolkhoz reorganization.

People who later wanted to withdraw land they had placed with one of the new farm enterprises depended on that farm director, in consultation with local administration, to allot their land plot and compensate them for their property shares. Anatolii and Natalia, a couple who first joined

Vasilii’s farm and then decided to start their own farm in the late 1990s, were full of complaints.

Once they wanted to withdraw from the farm, Vasilii got together with Vadim, the head of local administration, to decide what land to give them, as Anatolii related…

When we left [the private farm] we didn’t get hardly anything that we could have gotten at the time of [kolkhoz] reorganization. We would have received a solid part [of land] and grown our own farm. After I had worked for five years at [Vasilii’s] farm, I understood that I was ready, I wanted to work [for myself]…then our director didn’t give me hardly anything. He started to find reasons for not granting the land. Then the property share which consisted of half a million—I was given one tractor with two wheels; and then they would still ask me why I didn’t develop this farm. How was I going to develop it if there was no credit, and you gave me two wheels?! And even with this we found a way to organize and cultivate our six hectares. You can’t abandon [the land] to neglect. But if we had received our share at the right time, we could have competed with Vasilii, like Denis [who became a “farmer” immediately at the time of reorganization]. They [probably: Denis and/or Vasilii] when they left [the kolkhoz], they took a large part of all the infrastructure: mechanical parts and the social sphere. They took apartments; they took cattle. For five years all these companies were not assessed any taxes. But we; when we received land, we had to pay for the land and for transportation from the very beginning. No preferential terms. If we had not had to pay taxes and had received what we were supposed to receive, we could truly have developed [the farm] much more quickly. Rural administration was supposed to offer us help, but it was never rendered. I reflect on what could have been, if we had felt this assistance…7

The combination of farm director resistance, the indifference of local administration, and the expiration of initial preferential programs and credit for private farmers severely limited what

Anatolii and Natalia felt they could do. By 2007, Natalia was still running the farm with her mother and teenaged son, but they had reduced the size of land under cultivation and re-registered as personal subsidiary plot workers (LPKH) rather than farmers (KFKH).8

7 Anatolii and Natalia, in their home, Nizhnii, 12/4/07.

8 It’s possible to distinguish varieties of private farmer enterprises in existence in Russia. For example of the distinctions see Tatiana Nefedova, Sel’skaia Rossiia na Pereput’e (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2003), 234-5 and Vasilii Uzun, “Klassifikatsiia sel’khozproizvoditelei Rossii,” Rossiiskaia Zemlia 1 (2010), 4-5. For simplicity here, I use “farmer,” “fermer,” or “private farmer,” to mean individual private farmer, who might employ household or hired labor, no matter the size of the land plot or profitability of the enterprise. In contrast, I use “farm successor enterprise,” to mean re-registered or reorganized farm enterprises coming from or succeeding a parent kolkhoz or sovkhoz. The sizes and revenues of these farms can also vary 154 Many others echoed Anatolii’s lament that even if they managed to obtain land, they had little means with which to work it. In Soviet years villagers used collective farm equipment including tractors to cultivate their home plots. But in the 1990s, if a villager withdrew his or her share from the kolkhoz successor enterprise, who was going to lend a tractor, give fuel, fertilizer, or seeds or help with harvesting? Many successor enterprises continued to help their workers and shareholders informally, but they had little incentive to help villagers who left their farms. Vlad exclaimed angrily, “they didn’t consider one thing: what is a ‘farmer’ here?! For him there has to be a whole farm: all the equipment with which to weed and cultivate—everything. But say he gets a hold of 15 to 20 hectares. What is he going to do with that land? Nothing. Somehow nobody ever foresaw the need for equipment. And everything was ruined.” With his diatribe,

Vlad also underscored that private or entrepreneurial “farmer” was a foreign entity and identity to kolkhozniks, who still strongly identified with being part of a collective.

Olga the private farmer said bitterly, “We were given naked earth and [our] hands, no more. It was like being de-kulakized all over again.”9 Here Olga takes decollectivization partly as a spur to reflect on her Soviet past. She doesn’t mean that sovkhoz closure was exactly or literally equivalent to Stalin’s campaign to persecute kulaks. But she shows the depth of her bitterness at being deprived of formerly collective resources (including the fertilizer, tractors, seeds and produce that workers could freely borrow or take)—even as she invests old categories with a slightly reformulated meaning. The significance of de-kulakization now appears as mostly about taking away people’s resources. She is recasting older history even as she reflects on her recent past.

Olga herself was one of the most successful farmers in Krasnodar site, yet she remained angry over both the fact and the terms of sovkhoz dissolution and land privatization. Reformers

immensely. But at my research sites, these were the larger, corporate or collective enterprises while farmers tended to have smaller, family operations.

9 Olga, interview in former director of culture’s home (where I lived on site), Krasnodar, 6/30/08. 155 may sincerely have thought that giving villagers land in ownership at no cost would be a boon to them. But even leaving the practical problems with implementation and distribution and the incomplete nature of land ownership legislation aside, what villagers experienced through the transaction was having resources taken away from them that they had formerly enjoyed. The fact of ownership was a booby prize. It hardly seemed like a net gain even to those villagers who looked like economic “winners” fifteen years later.

People’s twin assertions about land ownership initially appear contradictory: both that they never got land and that they couldn’t do anything with the land they received. But in context these sentiments essentially referred to the same phenomenon, differently worded. Not getting land was not so different from getting land they couldn’t use. The list of usage challenges people faced was extensive even when they managed to bypass resistance from farm directors or local administration. Aside from the obvious lack of equipment, there were related problems of lack of capital, lack of credit, lack of transportation, insurance, markets and ways to market, training for new private farmers or agricultural subsidies for their endeavors (subsidies which are quite normal in many capitalist countries), and the list continues. Almost all my interviewees who tried becoming private farmers quickly failed in the 1990s. Those who leased their shares to new farms received little or nothing in return. As sociologist Oskana Lylova writes, “the amount of dividends and share earnings does not exceed 5 percent, and it is basically of a purely ostensible or symbolic character, which is an indication of the flawed nature of stock owners’ right to make an income from the land shares that they own.”10 As discussed earlier, people might get some produce in kind from the farm for use of their land shares—if they were lucky. Their farms were struggling and could excuse non-payment by their poverty, but the fact remains that land ownership conferred little to no benefit to kolkhozniks in the 1990s. In the 2000s many of them were easily convinced to sell their shares at low prices to investors, to at least get some meager, immediate benefit from what they had come to believe were largely useless land shares.

10 Lylova (2005), 82. 156

II. FRAUD AND CRIMINALITY

Overall in my oral histories, the dominant viewpoint was that the economic reforms and transformations of the 1990s, including but not limited to enterprise and land privatization, had been exercises in defrauding ordinary people. My interviewees’ perception that privatization was all fraud was formed in part by observing national events, including a few large-scale, notorious swindles. Their speech often flowed smoothly back and forth between stories of national and local criminality and injustice as though part of one narrative. In fact, their national-level tales may have reflected media coverage of ‘90s era criminality more than personal or local experiences, but nevertheless my subjects felt this phenomenon on an extremely personal level.

Fraud was inextricably linked to the histories of farm privatization that they told.

Privatization as Fraud

At all of my research sites, people commonly declared that privatization had been a thoroughly criminal affair. This was often said casually, off-hand, as though something very obvious was being related. Obman, deception or fraud, was the term my interviewees used almost as a synonym for privatization. “Oh, privatization—that was all about deceiving people,” said Grisha, a middle-aged villager who earned his living from a number of part-time ventures including fishing, remarked in passing after I explained my research topic.11 This absolutely typical statement occurred even in purely social contexts. The sentiment was not limited to kolkhozniks, but voiced by many people in both villages and cities. This was a shared idiom, and people were sure the fraud involved business and government together. People might display anger or neutrality, horror or sarcastic detachment when making such comments. When trying to

11 Grisha, in small village in Krasnodar (not one of main research sites), in the street, 5/6/08. 157 help me set up meetings with agricultural management in his region, a local scholar warned me that officials would not speak to me honestly, since “privatization was a criminal affair.”12

Rural teacher Danil declared that what had appeared in Russia in the 1990s was not mere corruption, but a unique form of “bandit capitalism”, whereby crime not only reached the highest levels of government—but became the basis of its operations:

In Yeltsin’s time was when bandit capitalism flourished. I had a distant relative who worked in Yeltsin’s security. He was a KGB agent; now he’s in retirement…The matter got to the point that, Yeltsin was completely surrounded by them [he doesn’t specify exactly who “they” were], they laid the table for him, [Yeltsin] signed [some documents] and he [either the relative or Yeltsin; not specified] became rich without working. That’s what happened, the most real, criminal [affairs]…At the time it was Yeltsin, his circle,--who have now became oligarchs. It’s offensive to the simple people. [In the US] rich people do everything by their labor and talent for financial business, or industry, or trading…They [take] centuries. Everything from father to son, the work [passes on]. Everything [here] changed, everything became very hard work. Our simple people were robbed during privatizations. And oligarchs appeared, who are now, in my opinion, more numerous than your millionaires in America…and all this was the people’s money. Where they didn’t pay us wages: gas, oil; they privatized and that was it. I think this period was also a tragedy for the people. And to this day I think, even if [things are] more or less [OK] for urban residents, I think now it’s a tragedy for rural youth…Our children finish rural schools, and where are they to go? They need a lot of money to study further, and they have nowhere to live. Take my school: we arrived to the mountains, to dormitories, studied for free, if you worked well, maybe got married, in four to five years you received a house. The state took care of the simple people (prostoi narod).13

Here Danil’s comparative systems approach and excoriation of Russian bandit capitalism stemmed from his own personal experiences attending and teaching school at the end of the

Soviet period, which he extended to the population as a whole. The problem lay not just with the bandits, but also in the state’s relinquishment of social responsibilities. Danil’s moral critique was as much about the proper role of governance as the behavior of the criminals. This theme recurred in many other conversations. For example, one of my hosts in Riazan’ site started

12 Gena, in his office at a university, Riazan’, 3/6/08.

13 Danil, at rural school staff room, Riazan’, 4/16/08. See David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002) for description of these men’s backgrounds and rise to power. My interviewees did not say a lot about the oligarchs, although the term functioned symbolically as shorthand for elite crooks (aside from the few men usually considered oligarchs by scholars, who took most of the proceeds from initial privatization auctions of Russia’s industrial wealth and installed Yeltsin in his second term as Russia’s president.) My interviewees used the term dismissively or offhand to signal anyone wealthy they distrusted, as in, “some oligarch bought the kolkhoz,” as Vita, a former fieldworker remarked, in small village in Krasnodar (not a main research site), 5/6/08. 158 swearing practically every time someone mentioned the Communists. I returned one night from visiting a couple who had shown me their Party cards during the course of the evening, and related this around the table at “home” when my hosts asked about the night. Petr filled in that he hated the Communists—those careerists and opportunists. “They were people who never worked; never did anything; they were just put in power. They just stole. In the ‘90s when everything crashed, those people fled to the warm places.”14

To people like Petr, it was no far stretch to imagine that that the crises of the 1990s— national and local—had been knowingly precipitated by people “at the top” who stood to benefit:

Russian politicians and businessmen along with the international consultants swooping in to advise on privatization and capitalize from it. People didn’t try to separate out exactly which acts or events were technically criminal. Based on their personal experiences of hardship and their general understanding of broad privatization processes, they concluded that all politicians, advisors and businessmen harbored ill intent from the very beginning of reform.15

My interviewees were well aware that Russia became infamous in the 1990s for its unbridled, robber baron or “bandit” capitalism. Informed by Marxist teleology, people even debated whether this was the inevitable first stage in the growth of market relations.16 Some observers thought perhaps there was a socialist-propaganda-generated self-fulfilling prophecy at

14 Petr, informal conversation, his house, Riazan’, 4/18/08.

15 See also Allina-Pisano (2008), 186-7; also Harry West and Todd Sanders, Transparency and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2003) on the broader appearance of conspiracy theories following implementation of structural adjustment programs worldwide; also Joma Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (London: Pluto Press, 2002), who suggests elites knowingly foster chaos in order to push through changes in property rights.

16 This was the primitive capital accumulation phase of economic development, when capital would be gathered in the hands of a very few people (ie the exploiting class). Russian apologetics compared Russia’s 1990s to North America’s 19th century, with its robber baron magnates who laid some of the foundations of the industrial economy; or to the Dickensian capitalism of mid 19th century England. Other observers maintained that organized crime is not an element of capitalism but a distinct problem, for example, see Gary Dempsey, Mafia Capitalism or Red Legacy?, cato.org, January 7, 1998 or Alexander Filatov, “Unethical Business Behavior in Post-Communist Russia: Origins and Trends,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1994), 11-15, on the popular acceptance of “wild capitalism” as a necessary developmental stage providing legitimacy to unethical business practices. 159 play: people created what they thought capitalism was: naked greed finding expression through ruthless predation.17 Russia experienced a significant increase in crime in the 1990s, usually explained by such factors as social insecurity, rising unemployment, and moral anomie resulting from people having difficulties adjusting to the new socioeconomic regime in its beginning stages.18 Partly the increased crime stemmed from the release of prisoners that started during perestroika years and continued after the fall of the Soviet Union, when ordinary criminals were freed alongside political prisoners.19

Additionally, the new cooperatives formed during perestroika provided venues for businessmen involved in black market dealings. Several of the major business criminals of the

1990s got their starts in perestroika-era cooperatives.20 There was a horrific two-year gang war involving street shootouts in 1993-1994, which touched even London and New York. The

“mafia” became a potent symbol for people, who saw the bandits both as destroying social order but sometimes also as wielding the only hope left for defending social order as state power eroded.21 Observers tied the rise in organized crime to the disintegration of state authority and the

17 For example see Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the looting of Russia (Chicago : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000) 323-4. On Russians’ expectations of capitalism see for example the 1991 sociological survey of rural respondents in Krasnodar region reported in Sovetskaia Kuban’ (Wednesday 13 March 1991), 3, in which respondents associated market relations with the separation of society into rich and poor; inflation and shortages of goods. People expected unhappiness and social tension to rise.

18 See Tanya Frisby, “The Rise of Organised Crime in Russia: Its Roots and Social Significance,” Europe- Asia Studies 50, no. 1 (1998), 27-49.

19 See Caroline Humphrey, “Russian protection rackets and the appropriation of law and order,” in States and Illegal Practices, ed. Josiah McConnell Heyman (New York: Berg, 1999), who also wrote about infighting between criminal groups, including the appearance of a new class, the “thawed-outs,” during the 1990s. “The idea here is that the Soviet regime froze its people, but now young men have unfrozen, becoming somehow inhuman in the process. Otmorozhenniye is slang for people who are cruel, immoral and volatile, unwise and avaricious…Even other bandits see them as…‘out of order’.” 214.

20 See Stephen Handleman, “The Russian ‘Mafiya,” Foreign Affairs 73: 83 (1994) on the heavily criminal nature of the cooperatives.

21 See Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) on the symbolism of the mafia during the 1990s, and how this symbolism reflected people’s anxieties about statelessness during a time “when the visible hand of the state is being replaced by the invisible hand of the market,” 219; and Nancy Ries, “Honest Bandits’ and ‘Warped People’: Russian 160 uncertainties of economic transformation, including weak property rights legislation and enforcement.22

My interviewees felt that organized crime touched their regions as well—if not their actual villages. Timur, one of my contacts in Riazan’ who investigated criminal transactions for the Ministry of Internal Affairs told me multiple stories about gang rumbles in the region during the 1990s. In the early to mid-years of the decade, there “was more or less open warfare” between rival gangs in the city center, with much of the violence occurring near Teatralnaia

Square, he said. One gang built a church to improve their public image where they buried victims. Another group tried to blow the church up with a radio-controlled bomb, but police intercepted the signal and detonated early. The man who financed the church renovation was on the run internationally in 2008. Timur said most of the criminals never went to jail: nothing could be proved. As was typical at the time, the mayor of the district was widely known to have ties to the gangsters—so prosecutions were politically blocked.23

“I have really negative associations with Yeltsin’s times,” said Anton, a partner in an agricultural equipment importing business in Krasnodar, “even though I voted for him then. The human values were so bad: people were sent to Chechnya; there were so many dead…the ‘90s showed you can steal, cheat, and it will all work out well. You don’t have to work. It was

Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay,” in Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, ed. Carol Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, Kay Warren (Durham, NC :Duke University Press, 2002), 276-315, on people looking to the mafia for order, in part because they “seem to embody the very qualities that characterize strong states…one of the conceptual mafias in contemporary Russia functions as a discursive projection of people’s yearnings for a rational, distinct, and strong state apparatus.” 309. See Humphrey (1999) on Russian protection rackets and their connections to police and politicans, 199; also Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008) on the incidence of transnational organized crime in the post-Communist era.

22 See especially Federico Varese, “Is Sicily the future of Russia? Private protection and the rise of the Russian Mafia,” European Journal of Sociology 35:2 (1994), 224-258; also Humphrey (1999), who writes, “When a state establishes, or transforms, itself primarily in terms of an economic rationale, before a constitutional or legal one, it may happen that the law becomes something that is up for definition and appropriation. In this situation, the ‘law’ of the bandits enters the arena alongside that of the state…it becomes a ‘culture’ to which others may be attracted or repelled,” 224.

23 Timur, informal conversation while walking around Riazan’ (city), 4/12/08. 161 hardcore banditry….those who broke the Soviet Union should have planned ahead to replace it; but they just wanted power and money. [It was all about] ambition.”24

My urban contacts like Timur and Anton supplied national and regional details about the criminality they felt (or knew) happened. Interestingly, my kolkhoznik interviewees made the same kinds of statements, incorporating the criminality that they saw on the national and regional- level into their own personal memories of the decade. They connected privatization to the general criminality they felt their society had been prey to, and which had massive symbolic weight in their historical narratives.

It wasn’t just organized crime that sparked my interviewees’ ire. Many of them also felt that the official economic policies of the early ‘90s had targeted and exploited ordinary people as well. When the 1990s came up in conversation, middle-aged Yura listed six ways that ordinary people had been deceived in rapid fire, including the MMM pyramid scheme (which I’ll discuss soon) and the devaluation of money. Yura was indignant, even infuriated that all the wealth and resources of the country went to such a small group of people. “Normal people got nothing,” he opined, “we have to pay bribes for everything, even to get decent medicine…and it’s not just that

[we] are left with nothing, no wealth from all the rich resources of the country—but we’re taken for everything we’ve got on top of it. Tricked.”25 When I asked about his personal experience he spoke about corruption on the general, national level. He may have felt wary about getting into personal details—a general answer was always safer for sensitive topics. However Yura was clearly infuriated by the history he related, and the national policies and events were genuinely interwoven through his personal memories of the period. He deemed all the “shock therapy” policies evidence of deception--even measures undertaken to try to improve the economy that backfired or carried great social cost, like economist and Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar’s price freeing that allowed inflation to skyrocket. The causes, symptoms and consequences of the huge

24 Anton, interview in his office, Krasnodar (city), 5/15/08.

25 Yura, in his garden, Krasnodar, 6/30/08. 162 economic crisis thus collapse together as deliberate deception and exploitation in people like

Yura’s minds’.

Yura was far from the only interviewee to consider devaluation of money to have been a criminal affair. When I was starting to leave a birthday dinner, Lida and Luba, former sovkhoz fieldworkers, spontaneously started talking about the 1990s. They discussed the devaluation of money, the runaway inflation and how people were just left with nothing after a lifetime of hard work. “It wasn’t right,” Luba said, using the same condemnatory tone in which she proceeded to discuss the voucher pyramid schemes.26 It didn’t matter to people whether crime was accomplished or policies simply ill thought out—if the effect on them was equivalent.

Abandonment by the state of farms and social life in villages was experienced together with hyperinflation and fraudulent voucher schemes as one and the same phenomenon. All together are condemned as deliberate deception.

The Vouchers and the Land Share Certificates

People sounded especially indignant talking about the vouchers. Voucher privatization quickly followed Prime Minister Gaidar’s initial “shock therapy” measures, designed to speedily transform Russia’s economy. Devised by economist Anatolii Chubais, the plan gave all citizens vouchers entitling them to shares in Russia’s industries. In theory, people could then use their vouchers to buy shares in enterprises at privatization auctions. In reality, the individual vouchers weren’t worth enough to purchase anything significant. People either invested their vouchers in the company where they worked; placed them with one of the new mutual funds set up for this purpose; or sold them on the street, typically at incredibly low prices, for ready cash. They were purportedly worth about $7 apiece in the winter of 1993-1994.27

26 Lida and Luba, at their house, Krasnodar, 8/7/08.

27 Aditionally inflation and ruble devaluation destroyed the value of the vouchers. See “Selling the Country for Vouchers” in Klebnikov (2000), 110-143. 163 While insiders with connections could make huge profits buying companies for low prices in the (often rigged) auctions, ordinary people usually got nothing. The legitimate mutual funds didn’t tend to compensate people for inflation—and most were in fact pyramid schemes that stole what little money people had. The MMM scheme was probably the most infamous of these. Founded as a trading cooperative in 1989, it had grown to encompass twenty companies by 1994. It promised investors returns of up to 3,000 percent and functioned as a Ponzi scheme, paying off early investors with money coming from later participants. Its cover blown, the company collapsed in the summer of 1994.28 “Oh, the vouchers,” former kolkhoznik Vita exclaimed apropos of privatization, “we put them in the voucher fund that Yeltsin himself invested in but never got even one ruble!”29 “They played us for fools, played us and played us, “ field worker Marina related once my recorder was safely turned off after our formal interview.

“They were pyramid schemes. We have two vouchers just lying around the house somewhere, worth nothing.”30

To many of my interviewees, the certificates promising land ownership that were granted to workers when kolkhozes became private farms became linked in memory with the vouchers.

Here is Vlad’s, the retired carpenter, story of farm privatization in Nizhnii:

Q: But at that time didn’t people generally vote for reorganization?

A: Here’s how it came to be. When they conceived the plan of reorganizing, Chernomyrdin, Chubais—those figures arrived [here]! Chernomyrdin with the tribunes: “This [farm reorganization] model is suitable for all of Russia!” Those leaders! They all gathered and they decided everything between themselves. Only here in the beginning were the vouchers, and then these land shares, in order to separate everything into shares. And look, we showed the whole people how and what. Chernomyrdin walked out [of the meeting], and everyone

28 See Eliot Borenstein, “Public Offerings: MMM and the Marketing of Melodrama,” in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, ed. Adele Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 49-75, and Adele Barker, (1999), on the cultural significance of the MMM affair.

29 Vita, informal conversation in her home, a village in Krasnodar region (not a main research site), 5/6/08.

30 Marina, interview in her home, Krasnodar site, 8/7/08. She went on to discuss the theft of tractors after privatization, which will be discussed in Section Three. 164 surrounded him: “and equipment, where is it?” And he, “we will deliver, we will do everything.” That’s how reorganization went…31

The vouchers were inserted into his story about farm dissolution, seeming to lead directly to the land shares, as though they were part of the same process. The logic of connecting vouchers to land shares is all too evident. People were supposed to earn money from investing their vouchers in new mutual funds—but never got any profit. People were supposed to get land from the land share certificates—but all too often that land was intangible and conferred little or no benefit.

Many people described the vouchers and the land share certificates in the same breath. In another example, here is Irina, a 58-year old milkmaid on the process of getting a land share certificate:

Q: When did you get the certificates, and who gave them?

A: In the ‘90s we probably got them [she probably means herself and her husband]. They gave [them] to us, it was the administration of the rural council.

Q: Here?

A: In this village, where the [farm] office is now, there used to be the rural council. And they gave us this land, they gave us a paper and we sat with this paper, and lived. And they gave us vouchers then. I put mine in some Moscow company. It was invested somewhere, I don’t know where. Yes, we didn’t get anything, these vouchers, they flew away from us and that was it.

Q: When you got the certificate, that meant you owned a land share, right?

A: Well, our share of land. But they should have done land surveying. Here’s your share of land, they should have said: here in this field is your land. They gave us a certificate and that’s it.

Q: And exactly where [your land share was located] was unknown?

A: No [meaning yes]. There was no land surveying [or apportioning].32

The paper entitling Irina to land ownership is equated in her mind with the paper voucher supposedly entitling her to a share in Russia’s industrial wealth. Neither ever really materialized.

Enterprise Bankrupting Schemes

31 Vlad, in his home, Nizhnii, 11/26/07.

32 Irina, in her home, Riazan’, 2/14/08. 165 Several of my interviewees also talked about farm closures being deliberately engineered—a phenomenon that takes some explanation. Sometimes owners or managers deliberately bankrupted enterprises, whether to line their own pockets with what would have been enterprise profits, or because they aimed to control resources such as the land where the enterprise was located and were indifferent or hostile to enterprise profitability. Bankrupting an enterprise was thus one way to take it over. Sometimes making enterprises bankrupt on paper was a strategy to avoid paying taxes, deter outsider investment, or sell the enterprise at low rates to another owner-controlled company, thus cutting out minority shareholders. While some of these machinations seem strangely short-sighted, they made sense during certain stages of the privatization process, when there was incentive to expand owner control over resources but not to maximize organization profits.33

Collective farms were of course not generally big money makers. There couldn’t be much incentive to divert farm profits when there were few profits of which to speak. But equipment, construction materials, animals, and land could still be acquired at negligible prices through initial privatization sales. Bankrupting a farm could also be part of a financial ruse to cancel enterprise debts, using the farm’s resources to run another enterprise with a blank or even positive financial slate, leading to the phenomenon of captured or “stolen” farms.34

Few of my interviewees discussed these bankrupting schemes openly or in extensive detail. When they talked about such schemes, people often took recourse to generality or abstraction, without giving local specifics. I didn’t ask about intentional farm bankrupting. I

33 See Raj Desai and Itzhak Goldberg, “The vicious circles of control: Regional governments and insiders in privatized Russian enterprises,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2287 (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, February 2000) on the economic incentives of owners to steal from their own organizations; or Michael McFaul, “Russia's ‘Privatized’ State as an Impediment to Democratic Consolidation: Part II,” Security Dialogue 29: 3 (1998), 315-322, who writes “Until all state assets have been transferred to the ‘private’ sector, the name of the game is expansion and acquisition, not profit maximization,” 319.

34 Allina-Pisano (2008) 76. See Wegren (2003) on agriculture being a second-stage target of ambitious privatizers, after high profit natural resource industries; also scholars such as McFaul (1998) predicted greater attention would soon turn to agricultural land, which has come to pass in the 2000s, as Allina- Pisano documents and my research corroborates. 166 didn’t really suspect that this occurred or have any sense of its extent until my interviewees mentioned it. People wanted to talk about it and brought up the subject themselves—but still they hesitated to give local details. After a few people told me directly that they suspected foul play in the closure of their sokvhoz, I became more attentive to other people hinting around the issue.

Sometimes people discussed this happening at neighboring farms or in other places in their province, hesitating to name names or point fingers at their current employers. In a few instances, I asked about the circumstances surrounding farm closure and people responded by saying privatization was all fraud and talking about how other types of local enterprises were bankrupted but not going into detail about their farms. In Krasnodar site, eight different interviewees discussed their belief that the local chemical factory had been deliberately bankrupted and taken over by a Moscow businessman; while only a few mentioned their suspicions that their sovkhoz had closed in similar circumstances. These people may have been wary of facing political consequences in their small villages by discussing farm problems openly.

Some villagers may not have known what motivated farm leaders or exactly why farms were going bankrupt.35 The fact that great financial crisis was normal for farms during the period made instances of intentional bankrupting difficult to uncover. Farm failure was a likely scenario in the mid 1990s. That this was sometimes intentional business strategy is tricky to prove. But even if unseen by some interviewees or difficult to quantify, the shadow of these ruses loomed large over the countryside.

With nothing personal at stake and unafraid of employers and neighbors, a Western agricultural consultant working in Russia since the mid-1990s described privatization in unequivocal terms:

There are so many interests involved in farms besides the productivity and economic success of the farms…back then directors had to answer to so many officials and people, it could be in their interest to bankrupt the farms, bleed out the resources so the shareholders lose or give up their stakes…then someone else buys it up…it’s corruption all the way down from the very

35 Bankruptcy was also not fully legislated until the early 2000s, which placed the financial machinations of owners very much in grey economic territory even though locals were clear there was injustice in action. 167 top…and now the game is, they’re starting these 50-year leases for land plots that actually drive down the value of the land, drive away competition of potential buyers and investors…the investors are in it for land or real estate profit and not to grow the farms. Ordinary people got shares theoretically [during privatization] but it wasn’t in the [farm] directors’ interests to let them divide out or to give them good land (the exact land plot was never fixed so this was something easy to manipulate)…because they’d have to do that for everyone. It’s all about control and not so often about just building a farm to raise agricultural products that make you money. It’s not as simple as it is in the US. Farms are not about farming. Everything’s always the opposite of what it sounds like; privatization means gaining control over land, not anything else. People got those shares (or plots), but couldn’t do anything with them; couldn’t sell or buy or use them as collateral or borrow against them…and sure, they could work them but they had nothing with which to start agricultural production, no resources, no equipment….36

Pasha, a former agronomist at a sovkhoz who now works at a prosperous private farm I visited in Krasnodar region, gave a similar account of what commonly happened to farms. “A lot of investors arrived. They promised golden mountains, and frittered away the fixed capital. Like, for example, here next to us we have [kolkhoz Maiakovskii]. They destroyed it. Specially. The purposeful goal was [its] destruction.”37 He didn’t explain the exact mechanism for getting rich quick off a ruined kolkhoz, but presumably it had to do with real estate transactions.

Aleksandr, who’d been a fieldworker in a sovkhoz in Riazan’, also shared with me the observation that he was convinced leaders intentionally let farms go to ruin. He resorted to abstraction in his account: “It was more profitable to sign international contracts and import meat

[than to run farms]…politicians are that way—maybe it’s changed now, please God,” he intoned sarcastically.38

Locals at Nizhnii and Riazan’ sites did not mention suspecting that their farms had been deliberately bankrupted. However as I mentioned, the case was murkier at Krasnodar site, as a few informants discussed, sometimes obliquely. Inna, a middle-aged woman who worked in crop cultivation, thought the last sovkhoz director had “helped” the farm to its end, after which he

36 Frank, meeting in café in Krasnodar, conversation in English, 5/7/08. See Allina-Pisano (2008) for thorough explanation of the mechanisms by which farm directors and government officials consolidated power and gained greater control of farms and land through the privatization process.

37 Pasha, in a car going from Krasnodar to his farm, 5/15/08.

38 Aleksandr, in a car going from Riazan’ to his village, 3/11/08. 168 started his own farm using some of its buildings and materials.39 People implied wrongdoing and a few just barely claimed it had happened out loud. Other accounts were muddled on whether leaders had intentionally ended the two sovkhozes in order to obtain land and equipment for themselves. There was an alternate perspective: Evegniia, who had worked as a sovkhoz accountant, convincingly described the simple economic undoing of both local farms. They had been fully reliant on state subsidy during Soviet times, and when that subsidy was withdrawn they just couldn’t hang on.40 The evidence of shady business practice here is contradictory, meager and anecdotal. But sensitive as the subject could be to locals in small villages, it may also have been the elephant in the room that almost no one discussed. District administrative records discuss various aspects related to closing down the two sovkhozes but don’t detail the circumstances of their closures.41 Whether bankruptcy was contrived by farm leaders remains an open question.

The Farm Just Down the Road

Standing in symbolic contrast to the farms deliberately bankrupted or simply ruined by privatization, the neighboring farm, never reorganized and always prospering, appeared frequently in oral histories. Multiple interviewees told me that collective farms in their district that had not been reorganized were still doing very well—in regretful tones. It became a sort of stock phrase. The unfavorable contrast to their own farms and the positive association with

Soviet style farming were implicit when not stated outright. As Vlad, the 81-year old former tractor brigadier, put it, “if the old chairman had stayed in power, the kolkhoz would still be

39 Inessa, in her sister’s home, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

40 Evgeniia, interview in her home, Krasnodar, 6/30/08.

41For example, the district’s Ispolkom noted the transformation of one of the sokhozes to a (nominally privatized) collective organization on July 29, 1991: (Belorechensk) 4:1:771:143; then a document on closing out the bank account of the no-longer-existent sovkhoz appears on March 30, 1992: (Belorechensk) 50:1:494:1. 169 strong—just like our neighboring kolkhoz, [Krasnii Oktiabr’].”42 The same sentiment was expressed by many low-status farm workers, and some farm managers and local administration officials.

“I can tell you that not all kolkhozes stopped existing,” said Dmitrii, an 85-year old former electrician from one of the most remote villages in my study, in very approving tones,

“some of the former kolkhozes remain kolkhozes and they like it. The workers there like it. Half of the kolkhozes are in the old condition, just like they were in the Soviet Union. They haven’t fallen apart. They continue to exist and they have the old discipline.”43 To him this was clearly positive. In another example, Masha, a secretary-specialist in local administration, after starting to discuss the Nizhnii site privatization, said heatedly, “There are strong kolkhozes that still exist—they are still considered kolkhozes, and they don’t just exist, but live—they are leaders!”

After half an hour of conversation on farm reorganization and the problems successor enterprises faced, she repeated, “We still have kolkhozes that were never reorganized. These are strong kolkhozes. Just like they were, that’s how they are still. It was predicted that they would not survive. Nevertheless kolkhozes [Vozrozhdenie] and [Krasnii Oktiabr’] [in her district] remain just as they were.”44

That the impression spanned the rural socioeconomic spectrum revealed just how pervasive the idea was; unskilled workers, farm managers and local administration officials all repeated the idea. It is tempting to simply conclude that these very different people, who gave divergent accounts of many aspects of their history, must then be accurate in their judgments simply because their stories concurred. Indeed, 21% of all agricultural enterprises retained the

42 Vlad, in his home, Nizhnii, 11/26/07.

43 Dmitrii, outside his home, Nizhnii, 10/6/07.

44 Masha, in her office, Nizhnii, 11/19/07.

170 status of sokvhozi and kolkhozi in 1999.45 Perhaps these had been strong farms that remained resilient and even profitable into the 2000s. But my interviewees never proffered details or explained the mechanisms of how those neighboring farms had survived and profited through perestroika and the economic crisis conditions of the 1990s. They neglected to note that by all records, their own farms were in crisis conditions before reorganization or closure. I suggest that the idea of the strong, never-transformed neighbor farm functioned at a symbolic level. My interviewees did not know or describe these other farms in depth. Their presence served not as goalpost or indicator of what could be accomplished; but rather as reminders of what my interviewees had lost when their collective or state farms ceased to be.

III. Elites Get the Resources

While ordinary farm workers were losing access to formerly collective resources, a few people seemed to be benefiting from privatization at their expense. On the national stage, elites were buying up Russia’s natural resource and industrial wealth for a shoestring through the

“loans for shares” program and rigged auctions.46 Discussion of powerful locals “taking” formerly collective resources through privatization varied at my sites. In Riazan’, no successful private farmers had emerged through kolkhoz privatization (really: re-registration). The farm simply declined and shrank. But I did not hear about particular resentments over the disposal of kolkhoz property.

In Nizhnii people felt that reorganization results favored top kolkhoz leaders. A sense of injustice ran high in accounts in 2007. Yet people did not go so far as to claim the auctions had been rigged—just that they didn’t know what was happening and reorganization was

45 Lylova (2005), 79.

46 See for example Sergei Guriev and Andrei Rachinsky, “The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (Winter 2005), 131-150, on the scandal surrounding the oligarchs obtaining their wealth through the loans-for-shares auctions, 138; as well as Hoffman (2002), 297-317. 171 accomplished very quickly by a few leaders. There seemed to be one small gap in the record of

Pobeda’s privatization, however —notable only because the transformation had been so minutely documented. Mikhail, the very last kolkhoz chairman served as auctioneer when kolkhoz property was sold off to the (pre-arranged) new farm leaders.47 The few locals who mentioned Mikhail reported that he also opened a private farm after reorganization, perhaps in a neighboring district.48 But his name does not appear in any of the official records as a new farmer.49 The man leads the reorganization process, heads the auctions, and disappears from the record. When I questioned them further, interviewees thought he had opened his farm within a year after kolkhoz reorganization. What was he doing before he opened his own farm; and where did he get the capital and resources? The written record is silent; and locals hesitated to say much, too.

There may be nothing at all suspect in this. Much of the interest in the test-case kolkhoz ended once the celebrity politicians left and the kolkhoz was gone. The man could have plausibly slipped through the cracks and opened his farm a year later in perfectly clean circumstances. But it’s the only possibly suspect facet with respect to kolkhoz reorganization that my research uncovered. While in 2007, farm workers were almost unanimously unhappy with reorganization, the process had been transparently effected.

At Krasnodar site, there was again more suspicion of wrongdoing. People discussed events in both general and specific terms, sometimes heatedly and other times as if casually, repeating that commonplace about how privatization worked. Upon first meeting me and hearing about my research, the daughter-in-law of my village host spontaneously began to tell me, “that’s all very clear. The sovkhozes collapsed, people stole stuff—they took [things] for themselves and

47 As seen in copy of televised proceedings of second farm auction, given to me by Dr. Peter Lindner.

48 As discussed in Chapter Two, people were loathe to share the bitter “back-story” to privatization with me, and the man was not remembered fondly. Yana discussed the backstory to privatization in an interview in her office, Nizhnii, 11/7/07; Artum and Olga discussed his private farm and other activities, though they weren’t sure of the exact business profile, during an informal conversation at Olga’s house, Nizhnii, 11/7/07.

49 As per chart of new enterprises in IFC (1995), 88; and a list in records of the regional Department of Agriculture and land Reform, (Nizhnii Central) 3075:7:6129a:44. 172 started ‘farming’. Now they hire people like me to work for them for low wages.”50 Lesia worked part-time picking strawberries for a private farmer. Her mother-in-law quickly quieted her. As the former director of culture for the village (responsible for organizing social and community events, such as movie nights at the club), she had perhaps more Soviet sensibilities about propriety and telling outsiders negative information about local conditions.

Retiree Katia met me on a Sunday bus to her village and started to chat. “About how the sovkhoz ended,” she said, “that was all obman. This is a place where everything is obman. It’s not like that probably in America, right?” Her husband had worked hard and built a great deal with his own hands, “but they took everything away. The leader did it. When the sovkhoz disbanded the ones in power just stole, took, bought everything…it’s hard for peasants here.”51

For Katia and many others, stealing wasn’t too different from buying.

Conversation around the table during a feast and simultaneous group interview (with my recorder in the middle of the table) with five relatives sounded remarkably similar. Farm managers informed people that the sovkhoz would break up and then it happened. People “took and stole” what they could—especially a few who had been at the top of farm administration.

The rest struggled.52 “Those closest to power knew to buy everything up,” when the sovkhoz ended, another informant described, using a slightly different formulation on the theme.53 Buying was thus regarded as outright stealing, when people had special information or other differential access to resources.

The last sovkhoz director at one of the two local farms, whom Katia mentioned, was particularly disliked. He opened his own private farm immediately after sovkhoz bankruptcy.

“He had his faults,” a woman recalled during my joint interview with five relatives in Krasnodar.

50 Lesia, in former director of culture’s home, Krasnodar, 6/14/08.

51 Katia, rural bus, Krasnodar, 6/13/08.

52 Five Relatives, Krasnodar, 6/28/08.

53 Ruslana, interview in home, Krasnodar, 6/14/08. 173 “Then, at the final end he took a garage for himself—somehow, look, one day he had it there for himself!” Speaker Three recounted, “he was slippery like that. He wasn’t a good person. I never liked him.” “Everyone wanted to loot—and they took it all away,” Speaker Two said.54

A handful of people accused one of the tractor brigadiers of taking tractors after the sovkhoz collapsed. Marina, warming to the subject once she got me to turn off the tape recorder directed me to ask the brigadier himself about privatization. “He won’t tell you anything; but go talk to him!” She suggested heatedly, but laughing at the prospect. He had also “helped” the sovkhoz to its end, she thought. He bought the sovkhoz’s equipment and stole a lot. Like Katia and the five relatives in the joint interview, Marina used the words “bought” and “stole” in quick succession. People were unclear whether the brigadier’s purchases were tantamount to theft in themselves, but they thought he also definitely stole equipment. Their resentment was evident.

The brigadier himself used a lot of generalities and abstractions when he talked to me—the classic diversionary tactic in my interviews. He discussed the history of the peasantry in Russia, complained a great deal about money, the high prices of consumer goods and the low prices you got for agricultural products. He talked in fact almost non-stop for an hour and a half. I was barely able to get a word in edgewise and somehow he didn’t answer any questions about how the former sovkhoz ended.55

Vita, a retired fieldworker, went further than others in describing the purchase process as fraudulent or representing just a façade of legitimacy. At a farm site in Krasnodar region I visited for just a few days, my host explained that “the most successful; maybe the only really successful private farmer who struck out on his own and is doing quite well is Yan…who had been a brigadier for the kolkhoz. Between you and me,” she continued in lowered tones, “he stole

54 Five Relatives, 6/28/08.

55 Stas, interview in his home, Krasnodar, 8/6/08. 174 equipment when the kolkhoz was finished. Technically he ‘bought’ it, but really he plundered things for himself and became a farmer. He takes land in rent and is very rich.”56

Did the last sovkhoz director, the tractor brigadier, or the other (of non-specified specialty) brigadier actually have insider knowledge that allowed them to buy up farm equipment before it occurred to anyone else? My interviewees were convinced not only that genuine theft had taken place, but also even “purchases” had been unfair. They somehow faced differential access to formerly shared equipment and resources—if the exact mechanism was never quite specified. (If they knew that, perhaps they would have been able to get tractors themselves in the first place.)

IV. Sites of Contestation

The view that farm privatization was largely fraudulent and exploitative emerged as the broadest, most popular, most frequently repeated sentiment in my oral histories. Yet it was not the only perspective expressed. I found a basic distinction along socioeconomic class lines. Most

“ordinary” farm workers held the popular view that privatization was fraud, while some of the more educated, specialized rural respondents as well as many of my urban, professional contacts articulated different perspectives. I don’t consider “ordinary farm workers” to be an undifferentiated mass here. There are certainly differences in status, wages, and other markers between employees doing various types of work at farms, such as milkmaids, fieldworkers, calf tenders, veterinarians or combine operators; between high and low managers. However the people in my study who articulated fleshed out, alternative perspectives to the privatization as fraud thesis were all significantly higher status in their rural communities. They had more wealth, were more politically connected or themselves employed in governance, enjoyed higher

56 Vita, informal conversation in her home, small village in Krasnodar, 5/5/08. She also mentioned that the kolkhoz had been very rich—a “millionaire”—but was privatized and bought up by an “oligarch”; a “Moskvich.” 175 educational backgrounds, held more specialized or managerial positions, and/or came from cities.

This fact alone was a significant finding of my oral histories.

There was not a complete split along socioeconomic divides, however. Some of the rural

“elites” (by which I mean local administration officials, farm directors or top specialists, and highly prosperous private farmers) also expressed the more popular and common view. So did a few people I’ll call “emerging elites,” people with more “ordinary” origins, who by 2008 had become socially differentiated from their neighbors, such as farmer Olga. So, while I observed a fundamental socioeconomic divide in perspectives, considered closely my oral histories also reflected the growth of inequalities in the countryside of the 2000s.57 Here I describe the differences in opinion that surfaced about several topics and explore some of the implications, including the social functions of people’s speech.

Land Should Not—or Should Only—Be Owned

Some of my interviewees felt that land was a quantity that should not rightfully be owned. The corollary for them was that land should definitely be cultivated. Former kolkhoz fields now unused and overgrown with weeds took on symbolic resonance—visual reminders of the moral bankruptcy of the new economic order. Cutting down forests was a social ill. Turning agricultural land into real estate commodity was similarly tainted.

A small number of people expressed such views directly. For example, Olga, one of the most successful farmers in Krasnodar site--and former sovkhoz agronomist and secretary of the sel’soviet in her mid-50s, was surprisingly emphatic on the issue for someone clearly benefiting from owning land herself. For Olga, private land ownership was a moral wrong. Ending the collective was just not right—even godless, in her telling (she didn’t specify whether she believed

57 As Wegren et al point out, socioeconomic differentiation was slower to grow in the countryside than in urban areas during the 1990s, but in the 2000s different rural classes, including perhaps an “underclass,” are appearing in rural places. Stephen Wegren, David O’Brien and Valeri Patsiorkovski, “Beyond Stratification: The Emerging Class Structure in Rural Russia,” Journal of Agrarian Change 6: 3 (2006), 372-399. 176 in God or this was a figure of speech.) It was worthwhile being part of a collective even if your earnings were meager, Olga thought. She was adamant that working the land as part of a collective was the right way to farm. “We should love and cultivate the land just as we did in kolkhozi and sovkhozi. We had a large collective here, and we could have [kept going]; 100 years could pass, and in another 100 years we could still be cultivating the land collectively just the same…people would stay in the village; we needed to retain the sovkhoz.”

Olga’s negativity was motivated in part by her sense of insecurity about her farm’s future. Although she was currently prospering, she was keenly aware that bad weather or ill health could ruin her entire business in short order. She had two children; both lived in the provincial capital city and she was not sure either would keep her farm going after she no longer could. She discussed the plight of a prospering private farmer who lived 30 km away in worried terms. He was doing very well, with 1200 hectares of land in cultivation. But his son moved to

Moscow, Olga described, “and he can no longer be relied on for anything. If the farmer gets sick tomorrow, he’ll sell his land and that’s it. The farm will end. It will have died. But a sovkhoz would not die, it would continue to exist. The director could change, the collective could change, the generations could change. But the community would have remained, and the land would still be cultivated. Everything was living, and now it’s lifeless. One person in the field is no one.”58

If the common narrative about privatization presented a fairly stark division between the wealthy oppressors and the simple, victimized folk in the countryside, then just about everyone who didn’t overtly challenge the viewpoint would want to identify themselves with the simple people. To some extent, idealizing collective land cultivation distracts attention from the fact that

Olga had recently become significantly wealthier than her neighbors, and let her claim a common identity with them. Repudiating private property in speech while setting a village standard of private farming success served to associate herself at least verbally with her non-wealthy neighbors, the simple people. Olga’s nostalgia for the sokvhoz is a vehicle through which to feel

58 Olga, in former director of culture’s home, Krasnodar site, 6/30/08. 177 herself part of the bygone collective and recreate it in her imagination. Her state farm and historic collegial work teams are gone; but nostalgia unites her with other villagers. Here I build on anthropologist Joma Nazpary’s work showing that Soviet nostalgia became a unifying force for “ordinary people” in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.59 I extend his theory to point out it does not always function literally as a way for people to bond and create social solidarity, but also emotively and imaginatively, and sometimes speakers use nostalgic narratives to make identity claims that their neighbors may not find valid.

In expressing Soviet nostalgia, Olga also makes her story about the soul of the old system, rather than noting that market mechanisms for transferring property to the next generation, selling farms or otherwise ensuring continuity in agriculture are lacking where she lives. Replacement institutions for her sovkhoz have not fully appeared. Olga does not state this explicitly or say whether she expects them to develop over time. Rather I suggest that her nostalgic history also represents her critique of the new ways, couched in the emotions of regret and longing rather than articulated in analytical language.60 Her version of the past makes her stance towards the present crystal clear.

Yet she was far from the only interviewee to decry private land ownership; each with his or her own slant on the issue. Evgeniia the former kolkhoz bookkeeper described, “there [used to be] a workplace for everyone—and then it was over. Now every dachnik looks for a little piece of land, plants strawberries and cuts down the forest. They don’t plant. They just cut it down for wood. They’re selling off the forest—stealing! [They] do whatever [they] want.”61 She was

59 Nazpary (2002).

60 For a parallel in a different context, see Barbara Shircliffe on how nostalgic memories about their segregated past among black people in Tampa represent a critique of their disappointing present. Barbara Shircliffe, “‘We Got the Best of that World’: A Case for the Study of Nostalgia in the Oral History of School Segregation,” The Oral History Review 28, no. 2 (Summer-Autumn 2001), 59-84.

61 Evgenia, in her home, Krasnodar, 6/30/08. 178 indignant. Private land ownership thus became tied to unemployment as well as abuse or exploitation of the natural environment in her mind.

Other people implied sentiments like these when talking about the land sales occurring in the 2000s. These were sources of fear, stress and disapproval for many villagers. For example,

Lidia, chief veterinarian and current deputy director of her reorganized kolkhoz in her fifties, summed up her farm’s privatization in disapproving tones, ending with an implied condemnation of land sales. Her demeanor and tone of voice made clear that this story troubled her. “The kolkhoz became a limited liability partnership and then a private cooperative. But now the title is misleading since we found an owner and we are no longer equal members of a collective… We sold our property shares for a symbolic price: 1000 rubles apiece. Only now is land being sold.

Our shares were 7.4 hectares. When people received their shares they didn’t understand anything. They got a piece of paper but could do nothing with it. No one left the collective to work the land. No farmers emerged here—the few people who tried and the migrants who tried to start something quickly gave it up. Now people are buying up land shares for nothing—15,000 rubles a share, in a one-time deal. In our time it was impossible to buy land.”62 She never stated outright that land should not be sold, but the whole tenor of her narrative was negative. This was a story that clearly disturbed her, if she may have been reluctant to voice unambiguous criticism, especially as deputy director (she also didn’t yet know me well; this was our first interview).

At the same time, some elite and urban interviewees weighed in about the advantages of private land ownership over collective. Ruslan, an investment manager for a Moscow company in his late 20s who was sent to manage a private farm in 2007 maintained that the difference between collective and private farmland was visually inscribed in the countryside. After discussing the economic irrationality of Soviet central agricultural planning, he began to describe,

“literally, even now…you can see kolkhoz land, yes, and there is fermer [private farmer] land.

62 Lidia, in her house, Riazan’, 2/4/08. 179 You can see the difference straightaway. It’s immediately visible. There is clean, clean land; wheat stands with no weeds. Across the road is a kolkhoz field—of a completely different quality. The farmer works for himself, and here they work again for some collective group.”63

Kolia, an engineer in his 70s living in Nizhnii (city), freely disparaged multiple aspects of

“government work” as he described how private farming inevitably runs better than collective on multiple levels. “Having private property makes all the difference,” he asserted. “You can see the difference between private and collective organization and efficiency; you can literally see where there’s a kolkhoz and where there’s a fermer…I used to walk by construction sites in the morning in the city and the workers would be drunk already…when it became private business with discipline, almost overnight you’d walk by construction sites and everyone would be sober, working…Collective farming works with sharing equipment—but it still needs to be private property so that the tractor is taken care of, it’s not just no one in particular's (chuzhoi).”64

Thus in my study it was rural elites and urbanites who idealized the efficiency and rationality of private business and hailed the redemptive power of private ownership. Meanwhile some other rural elites along with ordinary farm workers were watching their agricultural land shares being bought up in the early 2000s—for low prices, by people they didn’t know or trust, whom they suspected of wanting to speculate in real estate while being indifferent to farming. I witnessed a vivid illustration of these fears when Elena and Svetlana, two farm directors who were good friends, got so heated in their discussion of land sales that they began to lament together, disregarding my recorder on the table between them (at one point one waved at it and said to me, “this is not for your recorder” while she continued with her story). They described the efforts they had made to stop villagers from selling their shares. They viewed themselves as trying to protect locals from predation and trying to keep the collective (farm) running. One was shocked at a meeting when one of the most historically decorated milkmaids of the kolkhoz told

63 Ruslan, in his office at farm, Nizhnii, 9/28/07.

64 Kolia, informal conversation in his home, Nizhnii (city), 11/21/07. 180 her in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t care less about the collective and was going to sell her land plot for the cash. The other director, running a farm 30 km outside of Moscow region, had no faith that the new land owner would maintain a farm there after the three years required by law.65 As rural land sales became more fully legislated and began to boom in the early 2000s, peoples’ distrust of private land ownership came to the fore in oral history interviews. To some extent, their wariness about new ownership in the 2000s likely was connected to how they talked about initial land privatization in the 1990s.

Leaders Were to Blame—vs Large, Impersonal Structures to Blame

Across my research sites, farm workers laid most of the blame (and rarely, credit) for farms’ fates squarely on the shoulders of farm chairs and directors. At Nizhnii site, people described the decision to participate in the Model Program in very passive terms, as something that a few farm leaders had brought (especially the last chairman and the chief accountant.) In oral histories people focused on the personalities involved, the politicized disputes, the characteristics and competencies of new farm leaders much more than on the Model Program itself. At the same time, people denied any responsibility in either the elections that brought Mikhail (the last chair) to power, or the popular vote to participate in the program that took place after a year of informational campaigning. For example, Nina, former bookkeeper for the kolkhoz , described the vote to join Project ZERNO thus:

Q: So at the general meeting, kolkhozniki all agreed [to participate]?

She implicitly blamed Mikhail, the last chair, for the choice. Her claim that people didn’t understand what was transpiring was echoed both by other farm managers and less-skilled farm

65 Elena and Svetlana, not main village site, Riazan’, 4/20/08. 181 workers themselves, as I noted in Chapter Four.66 At my other sites the theme of local leader culpability in post-Soviet farm outcomes also threaded through oral histories. At Riazan’ site, people complained about the rapid leader turnover and partially blamed both bad farm directors and the inconsistent leadership of the 1990s for the farm’s poverty and decline, as discussed in

Chapters Two and Four. At Krasnodar site, many interviewees blamed the final sovkhoz leaders for the farm closures of the early 1990s. As I mentioned, one or two leaders (the director and a tractor brigadier) in particular were suspected of deliberately shutting down the farm in order to take farm goods for his own use.

Rank and file farm workers thus held leaders culpable for farm reorganizations, bankruptcies, closures; for withholding land and property from individuals and for giving them second-rate land and property. While farm and administration leaders clearly did restrict villagers’ ownership rights in many cases, workers also blamed the leaders more broadly for farm failures that were likely largely out of their control. At Nizhnii site, my interviewees broadly held

Valentina and Katia (director of the smallest of the three successor farm enterprises) responsible for their farms’ near bankruptcies. They expressed disapproval and disappointment in Valentina while many lauded Vasilii for his successful private farm leadership after reorganization. Yet every private farm but Vasilii’s that succeeded Kolkhoz Pobeda failed at the site.

A minority of interviewees, however, discussed farm decline, reorganization and closure and the challenges facing farm enterprises not in terms of leader culpability, but with reference to broader economic tendencies and structures. These included private farmers or farm directors, urban businessmen, academics, and government officials. Egor, an extremely prosperous middle- aged private farmer in Krasnodar region (not at my main research site) described that the collective and state farm closures started happening late, around 1997 in his district. “It began with the kolkhozi being shaken up from the financial conditions, but then they held on. And then

66 Nina, in her office, Nizhnii, 11/7/07. 182 once again the kolkhozi were pulled into those financial conditions, they went bankrupt: they were receiving disparate prices for agricultural products. The growth of prices for oil products, fertilizer and seeds sharply jumped up—but for grain and sugar beets; barely. It came to the point of bankruptcy, and the farms started giving out land. Generally they collapsed because they were in conditions of bankruptcy, debts…”67

People like Egor’s depictions of farms facing macroeconomic crisis and crippling price disparities are quite accurate. But their focus on macro level explanations also served to minimize their personal advantages and the methods by which they attained their sometimes newly gained high socioeconomic status. For example, Greg, a private farmer (not at one of the three main research sites) took pains to relate his generosity in the rural community and how he offered transportation, meals, tax and educational subsidies to his workers’ families. Late in the conversation he also happened to mention that he was the son of the last kolkhoz chairman. His father’s connections certainly set him up for success in conditions most found impossible.68 My interviewees’ widespread belief that local elites found differential and preferential access to formerly collective resources was based in at least some fact, as I discussed in Chapter Four.

Most of the people who opened private farms at my sites in the 1990s were former farm directors, top managers, or their family members. Rank and file workers remained angry in the 2000s that leaders seemed to close collective farms only to turn around and open their own private farms.

At times elite interviewees seemed to make recourse to the popular discourse about how simple people were victimized by privatization partly in effort to divert attention from their own circumstances, statuses, or actions. Here is Stepan, a local mayor and onetime sel’soviet head who felt that Americans had arrived in Moscow solely to destroy the Russian economy:

Those [politicians] like Chubais, Yavlinskii and their ilk…they accepted your lessons just as they were supposed to, and they ruined the whole economy. They were the biggest thieves, they

67 Egor, in his office, Krasnodar (not at main research site), 5/20/08.

68 Greg, at the lake on his farm grounds, Volgograd (not at a main research site), August 2006 (during preliminary research). 183 robbed our people (narod). There you go…with your help. They hurt simple people. It’s impossible for people to sit at one table—one who has caviar with butter, and the other— buckwheat gruel without jam. This is impossible. In this country they couldn’t have one—a millionaire, and others; beggars. In such a short length of time, it was all concluded. They will sit before a harsh court, there will eventually be justice for them, because they offended the people…and they did it thanks to yours [ie, your people]…They learned from your people, and we ruined with our hands, but with your help, your consultants were here.69

Stepan was clearly grandstanding a bit with his talk about the Russian narod and his alleged concern for ordinary villagers. As soon as he left the room, others started mocking him, describing how selfish and pompous he’d always been. As with the former tractor brigadier who ended up with many tractors after farm closures in Krasnodar, it seemed that complaining about tough village conditions was a diversionary speech tactic. Though the mayor didn’t provide insight about sovkhoz privatization other than to complain that it ever occurred, he too perpetuated the popular view that privatization was fraud and theft—through and through. And perhaps the economic crisis had been deliberately engineered. If he couldn’t plausibly identify with the simple people, as farmer Olga still could, he could at least demonstrate his deep concern for their plight. Perhaps his speech was intended as much for the benefit of the others in the room, his constituency, as for me. In a one-on-one interview three days later, Stepan said less about the simple people, but still offered what I’m calling an alternative perspective on privatization.

Then, Stepan soberly described, “now after all of that, with the kolkhozes destroyed, many people regret that they were suddenly broken and people weren’t ready for such a sudden turnaround. Now if it had been gradual, we could have somehow adapted. But this sharp collapse happened, and industry, and all of the economy was ruined.”70

Other interviewees echoed Stepan’s point that the transformation was much too rapid, and/or conducted at the wrong time—and therefore the social cost was too high. Vadim, the head of local administration in Nizhnii site, made the same criticism. “I say it’s offensive to be

69 Stepan, at former head of culture’s home (my village home base), Krasnodar, 6/27/08.

70 Stepan, at former head of culture home, Krasnodar, 6/30/08. 184 experimental rabbits,” he declared. “…I used to say, even a good thing could be destroyed by unwise actions which take place before their time….”71 Tonia, the rural sociologist who had worked with the Nizhnii Model in the ‘90s, asked me rhetorically, “why did everything collapse in Riazan’? Because they chose to reorganize at exactly the wrong moment! The least successful time economically…”72 Economist Viktor also decried that the reforms took place during economic crisis. “Figuratively speaking,” he described, “the peasants were given land but money was taken from them…previously, to buy a combine, the kolkhoz had to sell fifty tons of grain.

Now, you have to sell 500 tons!”73 He implies that had prices of combines had not shot up relative to grain prices, perhaps privatization would have been fine. People including Stepan,

Vadim, Tonia, and Viktor thus criticized various facets of the implementation of privatization reforms, without necessarily finding fault with their content. Mostly they criticized either the pace of reforms, their timing; or both.

Several interviewees took a longer historical view, opining that switching to market relations must inevitably take a long time and it was still too early in 2008 to pass judgment on privatization. For example, Yura, an urban academic and deputy of land administration for his region who had worked on the Nizhnii Model, made this point to me, saying, “even now this process is not over.”74 Taking a slightly different tone, pointing out that privatization plans had never been completed, another scholar wrote in 2002, “Unfortunately, most recent reforms of

APK [the agro-industrial complex] were much more unsuccessful than victorious: reforms appeared but were mostly not fulfilled.”75 His comments still support the view that privatization would be a long durée of necessity. As other scholars write, “…agrarian reform does not present

71 Vadim, in his office in local administration, Nizhnii, 11/19/07.

72 Tonia, in her office, Moscow, 3/4/08.

73 Viktor, in his office at a university, Nizhnii (city), 9/17/07.

74 Yura, in his office, Nizhnii (city), 9/17/07.

75 M. A. Korobeinnikov, Agrarnaia Reforma: Krest’ianstvo I Vlast’. Istoricheskii Opiit. Analiz. Prognoz. (Moscow: Ekonomicheskaia Literatura, 2002),145. 185 itself at the level of a short term revolutionary transformation. This is a long evolutionary process of integrating the agrarian sector into the system of market relations.”76

“These…transformational processes will still not be complete for a long while,” writes the editor of a compilation on Russian agrarian economics and the village, who also calls the 1990s the

“long (protiazhenii) 1990s, when Communism as the official ideology was dispatched to the past and in its place was suggested the ideology of market liberalism.”77

Dmitrii, a partner in a large Krasnodar firm that imported and distributed farm equipment in the region, suggested that initial privatization in the ‘90s had only begun the process of transforming to market relations:

The turning point happened in the ‘90s. But then at that moment former conditions were falling steeply. People didn’t know whom to go to, what would happen in the end. New owners appeared. However legislative norms still did not match market conditions. But the market already started to appear. This [next] turning point allowed for a more civilized way of conducting business—when the transition started actively happening at the end of the 1990s or start of the 2000s. This turning point was connected to the period when Putin was already re- elected for his second term, and stabilization was occurring.78

The long transformation was happening much more fully at the end of the 90s and continuing in the 2000s.

A few people had unique explanations of privatization in my study. Vladimir the well-traveled, former military man turned teacher turned private farmer, said, “…nobody was destroying the USSR or its agriculture. It’s just that the time had come when a system that used to work just used up its resources. It came to that point.” I had not suggested that anyone had tried to destroy the USSR. He was responding to what he knew was a

76 Regional’nie Problemii Agrarnoi Reformii v Rossii (Saratov: Saratov University Press, 1999), 4.

77 E. S. Stroeva, ed., Mnogoukladnaia Agrarnaia Ekonomika I Rossiiskaia Derevnia (Moscow: Kolos, 2001), 7; or as Chrystia Freeland writes about the economic transformations begun after the Soviet collapse, “Does this unfinished revolution count as victory or defeat? Even now…it is too soon to tell.” Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown Business, 2000), 341.

78 Dmitrii, in his office, Krasnodar (city), 5/22/08.

186 commonly held opinion, for example as articulated above by Stepan.79 Ruslan the investment banker cum farm director had another somewhat singular explanation of the results of privatization. He thought that almost everyone had been “economically illiterate” in the early 1990s, and “…that’s why all the wealth came to be possessed by a limited number of people.”80 No one was to blame; it’s just that a select few managed to gain better financial knowledge and skills than most others. But these kinds of perspectives were still expressed by socioeconomic elites, or in Vladimir’s case, people with unusual backgrounds, experience and high levels of education compared to their neighbors in the village.

Conclusion.

Considered as a whole, then, oral histories reveal a lingering, broadly popular perspective that farm privatization had been fraud. As I’ve demonstrated, this viewpoint is based partially on expectations and senses of morality formed during Soviet years. When

Danil the schoolteacher complained about the bandit capitalism of Yeltsin years and contrasted this to the time when the state took care of simple people, he was angry about state abandonment of social needs as much as about actual criminality. Yet the story he told also reflected how anger over national-level crime became woven into personal memories of the decade.

My interviews further showed that different people understood the economic transformations variously. Expressing alternative perspectives roughly correlated with people’s background and socioeconomic statuses. I detected a basic disparity between the perspectives of academics, urban professionals, and rural elites—and less privileged farm workers. In this way oral histories reflect emerging inequalities in the countryside. I also found that some rural elites

79 Vladimir, in his home, Nizhnii, 11/10/07.

80 Ruslan, in his car, driving between village and city, Nizhnii, 9/20/07. 187 upheld the more popular view that privatization was chiefly characterized by exploitation and duplicity. At the same time, I explored how peoples’ choices in how they set forth explanatory narratives could serve social or political functions.

Interviewees’ feelings of anger and regret over farm privatization are completely understandable. Farm workers across my sites felt cheated for good reasons, and many of them distrusted government officials, farm leaders and international consultants, while they expressed strong nostalgia for Soviet years. This nostalgia makes sense. As I’ve already argued, it is in proportion to the losses and hardships they endured in the 1990s. Yet it also functions as a way to imaginatively and emotively recreate lost social solidarity; and it is the form that their critique of post-Soviet transformations takes.

Understandable though my interviewees’ version is, there could still be multiple ways for people to tell their history and consider their present circumstances. People could have focused on how much better they were faring by 2007-2008 (when most thought that materially much had improved for them). Some might have pointed out, perhaps even with pride, that though they faced terrible challenges, they managed to negotiate dramatic changes rather successfully for themselves and their families. In telling stories of privatization, my interviewees’ cast of important characters centered on people they perceived to have power: the national and local- level government officials, international consultants, and farm leaders who seemed to decide everyone’s fates. Yet they could have also talked about their ongoing relationships with coworkers, neighbors and family members, and how those relationships colored their daily lives, shaped their work days, and formed a core part of their survival strategies.

Instead, the contours of the story shifted from account to account, but some core facets of villagers’ sense of victimization threaded through their stories. This chapter discussed the main features of what villagers’ thought constituted their victimization: that if they received land at all, they didn’t get any benefit from it; that they suffered various frauds and the overall economic policies targeted and exploited them; that elites benefited from privatization at their expense; that 188 they were denied access to formerly communal goods, like personal use of farm equipment; and the fruits of their labor were taken from them. As I’ve shown, the trajectory of this historical narrative starts in the golden 1970s and goes from bad to worse in the 1980s and 1990s. The growing economic stability in the 2000s is credited to Putin’s presidency and not to individual effort or tenacity. Although circumstances appeared to be improving in the 2000s, the narrative does not allow for redemption or a happy ending.81 Oral histories reflect that most of my interviewees were not beneficiaries of farm reform and that they are vulnerable to outsiders wishing to gain control of rural land. At the same time, however, my oral histories do not reflect that people are in fact faring much better economically in the 2000s than they were in the 1990s, and have more goods, conveniences and options than they found in the 1970s. Instead, the future appears threatening, suspect, unknowable and worrisome. This perspective likely bears some unfortunate consequences on the present and future for my interviewees.

The attitude is one likely to keep them part of the underclass that seems to be emerging in the countryside of the 2000s.82 People focus on the oppression out of their control rather than noting the small and large daily choices they make and that can influence their circumstances.

While villagers have found ways to improve their lives over the last fifteen years, this is not part of their narrative. To some extent this may be a Soviet legacy at work: people quietly found ways to work around the system to get what they needed and wanted. But if villagers did recognize the agency they have and not just its limits, their choice and futures might subtly shift. Recent research shows a correlation between mental health, optimism, and success in private farming.

Respondents more optimistic about the future are more likely to take risks, expand their farming

81 A former private farm director at Nizhnii site, one of the more optimistic thinkers in my study, told me happily about the new Moscow investment in her farm and her hopes for the dairy cows they were importing from the Netherlands, telling me brightly, “now your dissertation will have a happy ending!” But even she, possessed of enough confidence both to start her own farm and to eventually find it a “sponsor,” said this in a sarcastic tone, as though mocking the very Hollywood idea of a happy ending and casting doubt on her farm’s future at the same time. Valentina, in farm office, Nizhnii, 9/12/07.

82 See Wegren et al (2006); also Allina-Pisano (2008) on the possibility that former kolkhozniks, dispossessed of their land, will come to be a permanent, wage-working underclass in the Russian and Ukrainian countrysides. 189 operations with investments in equipment, and especially find opportunities to use larger plots of land and hence increase their revenues.83 The popular historical narrative in the countryside at this time is not helping villagers accommodate to the transformed economics of the 21st century.

83 According to longitudinal survey results of Wegren et al. See Stephen Wegren, David O’Brien, and Valeri Patsiokovski, “Why Russia’s Rural Poor Are Poor,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19: 3 (2003), 264-287. 190 Chapter Six: Women at the Top

INTRODUCTION.

This chapter investigates women’s changing roles in the Russian countryside from late

Soviet years into the 2000s. It focuses on the gendered division of labor at farms and in village homes, showing that while women’s positions at farms evolved during Soviet years, more dramatic change occurred in the 1990s at my research sites. Extensive scholarship addresses women’s heightened vulnerabilities during the 1990s, though very little research focuses specifically on rural gender relations during the decade. The small amount of scholarship that does focus on the gendered outcomes of rural reforms stresses the new or worsened position that women faced, including increased wage disparity, as well as losing access to paid employment and having to turn to informal work arrangements. If village population was becoming feminized, as discussed in Chapter Three, rural men were being remunerated in higher numbers and at higher rates for their labor.1

In contrast, I argue that women also found new economic and leadership opportunities, a phenomenon which has gone almost unremarked—particularly in the area of farm leadership.2

1 For example, see Stephen Wegren et al, “Rural Reform and the Gender Gap in Post-Soviet Russia,” Slavic Review 69 (Spring 2010) : 65-92; also Deniz Kandiyoti, “The cry for land: Agrarian reform, gender and land rights in Uzbekistan,” Journal of Agrarian Change 3, nos. 1 and 2 (2003): 225-25.

2 For example Jessica Allina-Pisano describes various problems female farmers face, including discrimination and unequal access to social goods and resources, without stepping back to note that female farm directorship was virtually new at that time. She shows that commercial private farming “created the appearance of women’s participation” as many farms were registered in the names of elite men’s wives, while in reality women faced great obstacles when they wanted to obtain and use land. See Allina-Pisano (2008), 105-107. This was undoubtedly the case; however I argue that the incidence of true female leadership, if harder to quantify due to those diversionary registration practices, still represented a significant and positive development of the 1990s. On a similar note, in 2002, Wegren et al write that rural women were clear “losers” of economic reform and gender inequities increased during the 1990s in the Russian countryside. Stephen K. Wegren, David J. O’Brien, and Valeri V. Patsiorkovski, “Russian Agrarian Reform: The Gender Dimension,” Problems of Post-Communism 49, no. 6 (November/December 2002), 48-57. However by 2010, Wegren writes that gender outcomes of rural reform seem to be mixed, with some women “losing” but some women “winning,” and he points to the 20% rate of women leading private farms and rural individual enterprises as “progress.” I suggest that considered in historical context, 191 While the proportion of female farm directors and chairs in Russia hovered between 1% and 2% in the last decades of the Soviet Union, by the early 2000s up to 21% of private farm enterprise heads were women.3 At my research sites, I found that women both became kolkhoz successor enterprise leaders and opened their own private farm enterprises in significant numbers in the

1990s.

Important in its own right, the story of women’s farm leadership also complicates traditional narratives about Russia’s privatizations, which tend to emphasize that Soviet officials and managers retained power, as I discussed previously. I argue that the phenomenon of women gaining farm directorship posts represents an unrecognized lateral power shift in villages. It wasn’t just that “old” elites stayed in power and the “revolution” was mostly nominal. Instead, women’s increased ascension to farm directorship shows that the rural balance of power also shifted. Some actors became new elites—or some middle or low management moved up, becoming much more elite, if I may put it that way.

I discuss how people talked about gender roles and about more women becoming farm leaders, distinguishing three main recurrent patterns in my interviewees’ speech: 1) essentialist statements about women and gender, 2) self-contradictory statements, revealing ambivalent feelings, and 3) statements about women’s exceptionalism and how they are in fact better

this should rather be seen as remarkable progress. The phenomenon of female farm leadership merits broader scholarly attention and is strangely un- or under-remarked in literature on the countryside.

3 On women’s representation in farm top leadership during Soviet years, see Ethel Dunn, “Russian Rural Women,” in Women in Russia, ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, Gail Lapidus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 167-188, 176; Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet society: Equality, development, and social change (Berkeley: University of California Press,1978), 179; Sue Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women’s roles in rural development in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 79; and Liubov Denisova, who offers statistics from the Soviet period showing that after 1956 about 2% of kolkhoz chairs were women and only 1% of sovkhoz directors. Liubov Denisova, Zhenshchinii Russkikh Selenii: Trudovie Budni (Moscow: Mir Istorii, 2003), 170-200. On the numbers in the 2000s, see for example “Rukovoditeli Sel’skokhoziastvenniikh Organizatsii Po Polu I Vozrastu na 1 Iiulia 2006 g.,” and “Rukovoditeli Krestianskikh (Fermerskikh) Khoziastv I Individualn’niie Predprinimateli Po Polu I Vozrastu na 1 Iiulia 2006 g.,” both in “Zaniatiie v Ekonomike,” in Zhenshchinii i Muzhchinii Rossii (Moscow: Federal’naia Sluzhba Gosudarstvennoi Statistiki, 2010) available online at www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b10_50/IssWWW.exe/Stg/04-12.htm and www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b10_50/IssWWW.exe/Stg/04-13.htm. I discuss further in Section II of this chapter. 192 workers. I profile several female farm directors in greater depth, offering brief synopses of their leadership to provide context for these themes and show how they are interwoven in women’s life stories. I argue that how people talked about women’s changing roles can be seen to mirror how they felt about broader social changes, as well as illuminate the process by which people were constructing new historical narratives to suit the identity needs of the 2000s.

A note about methodology:

I focused most directly on the gendered division of labor at farms and in homes; this is what I chiefly inquired about. I included two gender-related questions in my interview guides: “is there a difference between men and women’s work on the farm?” and, “during the Soviet Union, was there a difference between men and women’s jobs?” In the field I quickly added another question to ask, a few different variations of: “is there any difference between men and women as farm leaders?” I would ask follow-up questions on the spot. Mostly I tried to engage people on the subject and listen to what occurred to them, trying not to guide or lead them too much. I would bring up women’s roles in conversation and remain open to whatever people would say next, for example saying something like, “I heard (or read) that not too many women drove tractors for the kolkhoz,” and wait for a response. I would certainly have gotten different information had I asked other, and perhaps more, questions. But it was also patently evident that gender issues were my interest, something not shared by my interviewees. This in itself was relevant information. Gender division was not a topic people thought to discuss. People sidestepped the question of why more women hadn’t led farms during the Soviet Union, as well as what more women suddenly heading private farms in the 1990s signified for farm management, women’s professional roles, and social and personal life. Discussion in this chapter, then, focuses on analyzing the way people talked about the rural gendered labor division, while pointing to areas where further research would be profitable.

193 I. Historical Context

Peasant culture under the tsars was famously patriarchal, with women assigned subordinate positions in community and domestic life. Historian Christine Worobec describes both women’s victimization and their collusion in maintaining patriarchal rural structures, as they suffered yet simultaneously gained limited power from the traditional arrangements.4 On a personal level, female influence could be exerted in the household on the strength of spousal or maternal authority. On a political level, women occasionally realized a gender advantage in defying the authorities, knowing the reluctance of the latter to respond with the full measure of brutality that defiance perpetrated by men could be expected to bring about. Female resistance of

Bolshevik control in the countryside after the Revolution is one such example.5

The Bolsheviks promised to emancipate women, making women’s rights part of their radical social agenda. If the countryside in general was seen as socially backward, the peasant woman in particular represented the height of backwardness and ignorance. The Bolsheviks feared that peasant women were more socially and politically conservative than men, and would thus resist their rule. At the same time, they believed peasant women needed the most liberation by revolution.6 The symbolism of the backward peasant woman came to constitute some of the justification for strong-arming the countryside and expanding the Union.7

4 Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: family and community in the post-emancipation period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

5 See Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 109 and Barbara Engel, “Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (1992), 309- 321. Women deemed kulaks in the late 1920s and 1930s, however, faced the same ruthless persecution as men, when whole families were exiled.

6 Barbara Clements, “The Birth of the New Soviet Woman,” in Bolshevik Culture, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 221; Beatrice Farnsworth, “Village Women Experience the Revolution,” in Bolshevik Culture, 238; see also Elizabeth Wood, “The Woman Question in Russia: Contradictions and Ambivalence,” in A Companion to Russian History, ed. Abbott Gleason (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), who shows that after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, people became “obsessed” with Russia’s backwardness, and “many of the markers of that backwardness were linked to the female sex: high illiteracy…high infant mortality…high rates of venereal disease…” 194 In revolutionary politics, women’s liberation was admittedly secondary to broader social liberation. For this reason, the Bolsheviks conflicted with Russia’s small (mainly intelligentsia and middle class) feminist movement that emerged in the late 1800s and early 20th century. Once in power, the Bolsheviks created the Women’s Section, or Zhenotdel, to settle the woman question for good.8 The Zhenotdel agitated in the countryside to make rural women revolutionaries, urging them to start communal kitchens and kindergartens, etc, to little effect before being shut down by 1930, Stalin having declared women’s issues solved.9 As the 20th century progressed, however, early promises to socialize childrearing and housework were never fulfilled on a mass scale. Historian Gail Lapidus convincingly argues that the Bolsheviks’ original intent to liberate women fell by the wayside in conditions of war and the pressing necessity to modernize and industrialize.10

356. For extensive discussion of the “baba” and revolutionary politics see Wood’s The Baba and the Comrade (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).

7 Similarly, Elizabeth Wood points out that the Party used women’s liberation as an excuse for “liberating” Central Asia. Wood (2009), 362. For global points of comparison on this theme, see for example Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds. Women, Citizenship and Difference (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1999. They suggest that in the Soviet Union as in national anti-colonial independence struggles, the struggles to gain power were broadly inclusive. But once victory was attained, women and minorities often found their political participation quite constrained. In their account, women are often ambivalently positioned in the politics of citizenship, seen as guardians of culture yet restricted or controlled by normative ideas about gender. 12-15.

8 See Richard Stites, The women's liberation movement in Russia: feminism, nihilism, and bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) on the women’s movement. 9 See Farnsworth(1985); Barbara Clements, “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel,” Slavic Review 51, no. 3 (1992), 485-496; and Richard Stites, “Zhenotdel: Bolshevism and Russian Women, 1917-1930,” Russian history: Histoire russe 3, no. 2 (1976), 174-193 on the Zhenotdel.

10 Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978). See also Alena Heitlinger, Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia (London: Macmillan, 1979) on the Soviet Union’s investment priorities downgrading efforts to eradicate inequities in women’s status. As Boym (1994) writes about the symbolism of communal apartments, “In the house-commune kitchens and children were to be shared, to avoid the burdens of the bourgeois family. One of the slogans of the time was ‘Down with the dictatorship of the kitchen!’ The individual kitchen was the symbolic space of the nuclear family and the cause of women’s enslavement by the daily grind. Although the ‘woman question’ was widely debated in the first years after the Revolution, in practice the division of labor within the family in the communal as in the individual kitchen remained very traditional.” 128.

195 The Soviet gender context thus proved complex and paradoxical. Women were fully mobilized into the labor pool; but also ideologized for their essential task of motherhood.

Scholars point to the inherent tensions and contradictions between these two official needs and the consequent repercussions for women. Historian Barbara Clements describes how beginning in Bolshevik propaganda of the 1930s, “…the new Soviet woman finally became a syncretic creature, a blend of the feminist ideal, which in its individualism was essentially middle-class and liberal, with the socialist ideal, which found liberation in collective endeavor, and the older

Russian ideal, which hallowed women for her ability to serve the family.”11

The “woman question” was repeatedly broached by Soviet ideology (if its significance and the proposed solutions changed over time), yet pronouncements and policies reflected state needs, and used women as mothers in symbolic fashion to gain political capital much more than they considered what actual women needed and wanted.12 As historian Elizabeth Wood discusses, the “woman question” had a long history as a particularly ambivalent issue for

Russia’s intelligentsia. Discussions ostensibly about women really concerned men’s place in society and what the state needed from its citizens.13 Of course men were also considered objects to be mobilized, manipulated, existentially transformed, or sacrificed at will by the authoritarian state. But here I focus on the fact that instrumentalization of citizens occurred in gendered ways, the most obvious example being that women needed not just to produce but to reproduce in order to fulfill their socialist obligations.14 Indeed, scholars show that women’s inevitable and primary

11 Clements (1985), 233.

12 See Michele Rivkin-Fish, “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Toward a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital’,” Slavic Review 69, no. 3 (Fall 2010), 703 on the continuing impact of Soviet pronatalist discourses, also Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) on how state interventions into motherhood and family continue to be sites where state power is deployed and transformed in the post-Soviet period.

13 Wood (2009), 353.

14 See Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomsyslova, “Gender Studies in Post-Soviet Society: Western Frames and Cultural Differences,” Studies in East European Thought 55, no.1 (2003), 51-61 on the social contract 196 domestic role was accepted even by Aleksandra Kollontai, perhaps the standard of early

Bolshevik gender radicalism.15

After Stalin ended discussion of women’s issues, it was not until Khrushchev’s thaw that gender concerns began to be publicly voiced again. “Problems” in women’s lives were officially recognized during Brezhnev’s tenure.16 Concerned about the declining birthrate and growing labor shortages, social scientists and officials began to discuss women’s roles in relation to demographic needs.

Soviet women were nearly universally employed.17 By the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika, women composed 51% of the industrial and office workforce and more than 40% of agricultural laborers.18 But their equal presence in the workforce did not mean equal status at work. Scholarship shows that women tended to work lower-paid, less-skilled jobs, to perform more manual work than men, and to earn noticeably less per capita than men as a whole.19 Their employment status at the bottom of the barrel sometimes exposed them to particularly poor and unhealthy work conditions.20 Meanwhile healthcare was shoddy, abortion used as a means of

between the Soviet state and its citizen-mothers. On Soviet and post-Soviet politics and discourses of reproduction, see among others Rivkin-Fish, “Health Development Meets the End of State Socialism: Visions of Democratization, Women's Health, and Social Well-Being for Contemporary Russia,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 24, no.1 (2000), 75-98 and (2010).

15 See Sarah Ashwin and Tatyana Lytkina, “Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginilization,” Gender & Society 18, no. 2 (2004), 192.

16 Mary Buckley, Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.

17 See Lapidus (1978) and A. Sariban, “The Soviet Woman: Support and Mainstay of the Regime,” in Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union, ed. Tatyana Mamonova, Sarah Matilsky, Rebecca Park, Catherine Fitzpatrick (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 205-213 on Soviet mobilization of women into the workforce, which included renouncing a (partially imagined) western bourgeois gender order.

18 For example, see Buckley (1992), 1.

19 On Soviet wage inequality see for example Robert Stuart, “Women in Soviet Rural Management,” Slavic Review 38, no. 4 (Dec. 1979), 603-613; and Lapidus (1978) 171.

20 For example, see Sarah Ashwin and Elain Bowers, “Do Russian Women Want to Work?” in Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia, ed. Mary Buckley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 197 birth control, and the (almost certainly under-reported) rate of maternal death during childbirth was five times higher than that for American women in the 1980s in central Russia.21

Women were notably absent from top leadership posts in industry and politics.22

Sociologist Sarah Ashwin has written that women were always seen as “special” workers, not taken as seriously professionally as men despite their (almost universal) full-time employment.

As historian Donald Filtzer writes, women were considered second-class citizens at work in the

Soviet Union.23

Women also performed the great majority of housework and childcare. Late Soviet-era social scientists discerned women’s famous, tiring “double burden” or “double shift”, meaning that it was normal for women to have full-time work outside the home and a “second” full-time shift at home, with minimal male participation in cleaning, cooking and childcare. Natalia

Baranskaia’s famous novella “A Week Like Any Other,” published in 1969, fictionally chronicled the exhausting life of a Soviet working wife and mother, responsible for demanding professional as well as all home responsibilities. The narrator’s husband helps at home to an extremely limited extent, saying “maybe I’ve done enough today?” and settling into an armchair when he wants to read.24 The work captivated Western feminist imagination for its seeming

1997), 30-31. See also Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr. Ecocide in the USSR. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 215.

21 Feshbach and Friendly (1992), 207-213.

22 See Stuart (1979); also Theodore Gerber and Michael Hout, “More Shock Than Therpay: Market Transition, Employment and Income in Russia, 1991-1995,” The American Journal of Sociology 104, no. 1 (1998), 1-50 on the persistence of Soviet pattern wage inequity in the post-Soviet period.

23 See Ashwin (2005), 160 and Filtzer (1992).

24 Natalya Baranskaya, A Week Like Any Other: A Novella and Short Stories, trans. Pieta Monks(London: Virago Press,1989) 53-54. As Lahusen writes, “Ol’ga’s time is made up of the absence of it: she keeps running against time. During the short time that Ol’ga spends at home, she is constantly cooking, washing, ironing, putting her children to bed (while her husband reads his professional journal). Lack of time also characterizes the distance between home and her work [her commute takes about three hours a day, she estimates]: the buses that are missed or that do not come on time, the time spent in lines, the rare instants when Ol’ga tries to cheat with time when she reads a couple of pages of a novel (which the others have already read) between two bus stops or metro stations…” Thomas Lahusen, “’Leaving Paradise’ and 198 expose of patriarchy. But in a subsequent interview, Baranskaia claimed that her story “actually portrays the power of love,” and criticized “Western women’s efforts to displace men from their

‘natural’ position of superiority and [their] unfeminine tactics.”25 If Soviet public discussion of the double burden didn’t necessarily signify what observers imagined, the broader issue was that there was plenty of talk about women’s double shift—but nothing changed. As anthropologist

Michele Rivkin-Fish notes, although Soviets were concerned that the double shift de-motivated

(over-tired) women to bear more children, there was almost no discussion about dividing domestic responsibilities differently. Rather, scientific and official discourse centered on other ways to motivate women to produce offspring, in both the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras.26

However public discussion entirely failed to acknowledge that rural women in fact faced a “triple burden,” of having to work at formal jobs, housework and childcare, and also home plot (kitchen garden) cultivation, traditionally a female task.27

Thus in Soviet years, an official ideology of gender equality was coterminous with significant inequities in women’s statuses. For much of the 20th century discussing the inequities was off-limits. Additionally, women were valued as “worker-mothers”, with the “mother” part taking increasing importance as demographics worsened. There was tension and contradiction between the emphasis on both women’s production and reproduction for socialist society.28

Scholars like sociologist Lynne Attwood show that essentialist gender ideas became particularly

Perestroika: A Week Like Any Other and Memorial Day by Natal’ia Baranskaia,” in Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women’s Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1993) 211.

25 Helena Goscilo, “Domostroika or Perestroika? The Construction of Womanhood in Soviet Culture under Glasnost” in Late Soviet Culture: from Perestroika to Novostroika, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Gene Kuperman (1993), 233-4.

26 Rivkin-Fish (2010), 317-18.

27 See Wood (2009), 362 and Liubov Denisova, Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. and transl. Irian Mukhina (New York: Routledge, 2010), 143-150.

28 See Jeni Harden, “Beyond the dual burden: Theorising gender inequality in Soviet Russia,” Critique 30, no. 1 (2002), 43-68.

199 respectable in the 1970s and 1980s as people became gravely concerned with falling birthrates.29

Initial Bolshevik gender radicalism had been much altered by the last decades of Soviet power.

Changes of the 1990s

Gender inequities worsened according to many indicators during the 1990s, while ideologies about gender showed both continuities and reformulation. Political scientist Mary

Buckley notes the renewed discussion of women’s issues inspired by perestroika, when the old

“woman question” was resurrected in somewhat transmuted form. Topics previously taboo could now be publicly discussed, including prostitution, abortion, contraception, and the position of

Muslim women in the Soviet Union. But practically speaking little altered as a result. “Talk of economic reform,” writes Buckley, “had given hope of improved life-styles. But, by 1989, to many women daily life seemed harder than ever before. Glasnost had exposed many problems in need of analysis, but it had not improved the supply of contraceptives nor ended the horrific conditions of abortion clinics. It had created ‘moral panic’ about crime, homelessness and violence, but problems still existed…Many women, worn out by the pressures of daily life, remained indifferent to new discussions of gender roles.”30 Feminism remained negatively viewed and largely taboo to discuss.31 At my case study farms, however, none of my interviewees mentioned that their hopes had been raised by perestroika in general, as covered in

29 See Lynne Atwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

30 Buckley (1992), 7. Abortion was used as a birth control method by Soviet women, other forms of birth control not being reliably available. The proportion of abortions at the end of the 1980s was estimated by researchers to be two abortions per every one live birth, with an average of four abortions per woman. Abortion practices as well as childbirth and maternity ward conditions were impoverished, retrograde and often unhygienic. See Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (New York: BasicBooks, 1992) 208-209.

31 For example, see Wood (2009), 363 on feminism being taboo in the early 1900s. Feminism was associated with state policies that forced women to work early so seemed unattractive to most Russian women in the 20th century, as scholars explain. See for example Susie Jacobs, Gender and Agrarian Reforms (London: Routledge, 2009), 67.

200 Chapter Two, much less about women’s position in society—a minor element in the popular re- evaluation of Soviet history. My interviewees offered little to suggest that the Gorbachevian discourses had engaged or resonated with them.32

After the Soviet Union collapsed, ideologies around gender showed a mix of sometimes competing elements: Soviet norms, traditional Russian values, and new openness to western ideas and fashions. Officially and in popular culture a new fascination with housewives developed— just as men began to fear losing jobs in the transforming economy. Absent Soviet propaganda railing against the bourgeois gender regime, popular culture turned westward, for example mimicking trendy American and European women’s magazines’ focus on fashion, beauty and sex. New cults of femininity prizing women’s appearance, sexuality and domesticity emerged in

Russia. As anthropologist Nancy Ries writes, “archaic gender identities were resurrected as a way of overturning Soviet ideologies about gender equality…”33 At the same time, anti-feminist ideologies proliferated and patriarchal values were reasserted. Women were channeled into secretary, clerk, receptionist, and service work—and could be openly hired on the basis of physical attractiveness or willingness to sleep with the boss, as Russia lacked any legislation about sexual harassment.34

Feminist scholars emphasize that women’s bodies became commodities as in the West at this time. Explicit images in advertising proliferated, pornography flourished, and prostitution as

32 Gorbachev himself made somewhat contradictory statements on the subject, though most generally he encouraged women to return to their true calling—motherhood, and even blamed greater social decline on women’s loss of interest in the family. See Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: HarperCollins, 1987); Ries (1997), 178; White (2005), 434; Denisova and Mukhina (2010), 82; Buckley (1989) on the revival of the Zhensoviets during perestroika having contradictory effects for women.

33 Ries (1997), 178, see also Engel (1992) on the reassertion of traditional notions of gender as a reaction to social change.

34 See Yelena Khanga, “No Matryoshkas Need Apply,” New York Times (November 25, 1991); also Vladimir Shlapentokh, “Social Inequality in Post-Communist Russia: The Attitudes of the Political Elite and the Masses (1991-1998),” Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 7 (1999) 1174, who writes “a job advertisement might run, ‘successful entrepreneur looking for female secretary, long legs, a pretty face, no scruples.’”

201 well as sex trafficking increased—perhaps accompanied by new, “cynical respect for prostitution as a ticket to well-being and social prestige,” as Professor of Russian literature Helen Goscilo claims.35 Such scholars suggest that the explosion of the private advertising business (which had never existed in the Soviet Union) together with the open growth of sex trades helped

“normalize” these trends.36 Official statistics on reported incidences of rape jumped by a factor of five in 1990s, and remained at least three times as high as numbers of the 1980s throughout the decade.37 Meanwhile Russians hesitated to discuss these issues. “The problem of ‘sexual harassment’ remains virtually unresearched as is rarely discussed publicly in Russia,” writes sociologist Irina Tartakovskaia, though one study reports that twenty five percent of women faced sexual harrassment at work in the early 1990s.38 Discourses that did emerge about women’s victimization didn’t necessarily reflect women’s own realities and concerns.

Much scholarship explores women’s special economic vulnerabilities during the 1990s.

As chief household caretakers, women were forced to use their ingenuity to keep their homes running in the economic crisis conditions of the decade.39 They faced inferior labor opportunities and were badly positioned to take advantage of new economic opportunities that privatization

35 Goscilo (1993), 240.

36 For example see scholars like Tartakovskaia (1996), 57-74 on how the sex industry may normalize the marketing of women’s bodies—including in professional settings.

37 Denisova and Mukhina (2010), 109.

38 Tartakovskaia (1996), 62; Denisova and Mukhina (2010), 109-110.

39 See Anna Rotkirch, The Man Question: Loves and Lives in Late 20th Century Russia (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2000), doctoral dissertation, on men’s weak integration in the family; Simon Clarke, “Budgetary Management in Russian Households,” Sociology 36, no. 3 (August 2002), 539-557, on women’s work managing tight household budgets; Burawoy et al (2000) on women’s increased importance for household survival during economic crisis; see also Rogers (2005) on the gendered nature of money usage rurally, which placed women decidedly in charge of household purchases and created the widespread impression that men were subordinate to women in terms of household management.

202 afforded.40 Women were overrepresented among the unemployed, and wage disparity between the sexes actually rose during the 1990s from its prior Soviet level.41

By many indicators, then, gender inequities worsened after the Soviet collapse—while resistance only grew to seeing and discussing those inequities. In Ashwin’s words, “gender difference [remained] relentlessly naturalized” in the 1990s, with men seen as breadwinners (even if they had increasing difficulty fulfilling this role) and women as homemakers.42

In the Countryside

Little scholarship addresses the consequences of agricultural decollectivization on rural gender norms. Scholars do show that women’s workload increased, and in cultivating home plots or family farms they were often left to farm by hand, not having access to formerly collective

40 See Ashwin (2002) and (2005); and Gail Lapidus, “Gender and Restructuring: The Impact of Perestroika and its Aftermath on Soviet Women,” in Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies, ed. Valentine Moghadam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 137-160, on women’s disadvantages in getting shares of privatized businesses; also Theodore Gerber and Olga Mayorova, “Dynamic gender differences in a post-socialist labor market: Russia, 1991-1997,” Social Forces 84: 4 (2006), 2047-2075, on women finding more access to new jobs than men—but finding jobs of lower quality, such as menial service or manual labor positions in the 1990s.

41 See Shlapentokh (1999), also Zoya Khotkina, “Women in the Labour Market: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” in Women in Russia: A New Era in Russian Feminism, ed. Anastasia Posadskaya (New York: Verso, 1994), on women’s high urban unemployment and employment ads asking for young, pretty women “able to wear a mini-skirt,” 98. See Zdravomyslova on the “feminization of unemployment” and its relation to norms and essentialist stereotypes about gender in the 1990s. Elena Zdravomyslova, “Problems of Becoming a Housewife,” in Women’s Voices in Russia Today, ed. Anna Rotkirch and Elina Haavio- Mannila (Brookfield: Dartmouth, 1996) 33-48.

42 Ashwin and Lytkina (2004) 199. See also Humphrey (2002) on the symbolism of the New Russian—in popular imagination, a man with “glamorous female dependents. Advertising directed at New Rusians supposes a penumbra of ‘feminine’ wives, mistreses, and high-class prostitutes, who emphatically do not engage in work or business and whose time is pictured as being spent in consumption homemaking, manicures, self-improvement, and so forth.” 178. White finds hope that that ideas about gender roles may be radically shifting in the 2000s—at least among young, urban university students and particularly women. See A. White, “Gender roles in contemporary Russia: attitudes and expectations among women students,” Europe-Asia Studies 57, no. 3 (2005), 429-455. However evidence is preliminary at this point— and solely urban.

203 equipment.43 As wage inequality in the countryside worsened overall, decollectivization also ushered in a new demographic division: between highly skilled and unskilled women. More educated and skilled women began to do much better than less-skilled—and it was some of the former who began to win more farm management and rural leadership positions.44

The feminization of the countryside begun in late Soviet years increased after the collapse. The 2006 Census showed women making up 52.4% of the rural population, including

48.6% (a smaller proportion) of the population aged 20-39. In 2008, pension-age women composed 29% of the total female population of the countryside, while pension-age men were

13%.45 Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick points out that women composed the bulk of the rural labor pool even in the 1930s.46 However, taking too general a perspective on the overrepresentation of women in the countryside can mask another demographic division: that between younger and older women. During late socialism, younger women gained freedom and mobility to migrate to cities—in the process leaving older women behind in the countryside to farm. Many of the older women left in villages, often living alone after husbands died and children moved away, rapidly fell into poverty in the 1990s. Village households headed by women were more likely to be poor; and single women more likely (than single men) to be poor. Many rural women with families had to cope with their men’s loss of employment or income and men’s increased alcoholism during the early 1990s, worse in the countryside even than in cities.47

43 See Sue Bridger, “The Return of the Family Farm: A Future for Women?” in Women in Russia and the Ukraine, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 241-254; and Wegren (2006.)

44 Wegren (2010).

45 Wegren (2010), 43.

46 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 182.

47 Sue Bridger, “Rural Women and Economic Change,” in Buckley (1997), 38-55. Women’s rates of alcoholism also increased, though they remained much lower than men’s.

204 Rural women’s wages remained lower than men’s and the disparity seems to have increased.48 As Allina-Pisano writes, “the salaries of livestock workers did not increase relative to other workers…Even for relatively high-status rural female professions, labor incentives did not improve significantly with privatization….Women did the work that enabled farms to survive, but over time they were rewarded less and less for their efforts compared with other employees.”49 Further, the glass ceiling on farm leadership proved a serious impediment during the reform period, when top farm managers and directors controlled land and resource distribution. Many women also faced a disadvantage in not having the background, skills, or networks in place to help them run private farms.50

The home plot historically had been mainly considered women’s sphere of activity.

Writing about how village women experienced the revolutions, historian Beatrice Farnsworth points out that the Land Code of 1922 gave women equal ownership rights in the household but considered “their earnings—cash from specifically ‘female activities’ such as selling eggs, mushrooms, and handcrafts, and from weaving and dyeing—were generally separate from common household funds, as had been the case before the Revolution.”51 Cows were typically tended by women, and the activity may have had spiritual connotations.52 While the use and importance of home plots greatly increased in the 1990s, as people relied on their plots for survival as well as the bulk of household income in some years, their status was still low. As sociologist Susie Jacobs writes, “subsistence agriculture has become feminised. In parts of

Russia…this has taken place in the context of reversion to a barter economy…With

48 See Wegren (2006).

49 Allina-Pisano (2008), 153.

50 See Jessica Allina-Pisano, “Land Reform and Social Origins of Private Farmers in Russia and Ukraine,” Journal of Peasant Studies 31, no. 3 (2004), 489-514.

51 Farnsworth (1985), 243.

52 Jacobs (2009), 60.

205 decollectivization, repeasantization often takes place, and women are pushed back into informal, unremunerated work.”53

By contrast, peasant entrepreneurial farming is very much viewed as male. In reality the distinction between private farming and private plot farming is none too clear, as discussed in

Chapter Three. However as Bridger points out, elderly women selling produce in urban markets may still be seen as “money-grubbing peasants” and not adaptive entrepreneurs.54 In practice the line between private plot farming and private entrepreneurial farming can be quite blurry, as I’ve discussed previously. However, symbolically the difference can be large—and gendered.

Yet in addition to facing new challenges, heightened vulnerabilities, and resilient stereotyping, rural women also found new opportunities after the fall of the Soviet Union. No women had ever chaired or directed any of my main research farms. Older villagers at each site could recall one or two women from their district or neighboring districts having led farms between the 1940s and 1960s (in one case retiring in the early 1970s). But while researching from 2007 to 2008, I met eight female farm leaders at my research sites alone—and heard of others. Provincial statistics offices and agricultural department officials confirmed my impression that women began heading farms in new (relatively) high numbers in the 1990s. It seems that the glass ceiling on farm leadership for women cracked open in the economic crisis conditions of the decade. Before exploring the implications, I will elaborate further on the traditional gender division at work at collective farms and how it shifted in the period.55

53 See Jacobs (2009), 65 and 77, also Bridger (1997), 42-43 on how women are more exhausted, working harder at collective farms after privatization.

54 Bridger (1997), 40-49.

55 It should be noted that the proportion of working women doing agricultural labor significantly declined during Soviet years, as women joined the urban and industrial workforce. By 1975 less than a third of working women were farm laborers. See Lapidus (1978), 165 and Dodge (1971).

206 II. The Rural, Gendered Division of Labor

Farm work was typically gender-specific. The basic divisions I will describe here held true across research sites, though some professions were more rigidly gender divided than others.

Milking cows was inevitably women’s work (or sometimes children’s), to pick perhaps the most characteristically gendered example. Some boys, or more rarely, men, milked cows by hand when the mother of the household needed help, but this was clearly “helping” the woman with the duty that was without question her own responsibility). Lapidus writes (in 1978) that women constituted over 90% of milkers, swineherds and poultry tenders, and 80% of vegetable growers, but that at the same time they constituted less than 10% “of workers in traditionally male agricultural activities and in the more mechanized modern sectors.”56

In times of emergency or simply of very heavy work, such as summer harvesting and planting seasons, there might be a little more sharing of responsibilities. Sometimes the whole family would pitch in to mow a field or stock potatoes for the winter. The following is not a catch-all breakdown, but does give the basic outlines of the gendered division of labor at farms.

Some of the categories were firmer than others. For example, only a few interviewees had studied economics or described themselves as working with farm economics, and these were mostly women at my research sites. But “economist” did not carry the same strong gendered association as milking cows (some evidence also indicates that women became economists in larger numbers in late Soviet years because of shortages in what had previously been a more male sphere). While driving a tractor became an early Bolshevik symbol of how women were to be emancipated, with a few notable and much remarked upon exceptions, this was done by men.57

Here is sample of the basic division of various sorts of farm labor during late Soviet years, according to what people told me:

56 Lapidus (1978), 177.

57 See Sue Bridger (1987) on the nearly exclusively male operation of farm machinery by late socialist years. 207

Women’s Work Male Work Shared Work

Animal Director or Chairman Specialists in various technician/veterinarian/breeder fields

Accountant/Bookkeeper Tractor/machine operator Brigadiers (a managerial

position)

Economist (by late Soviet Mechanic Work team/link leaders years) Milkmaid Carpenter/Maintaining and repairing things Animal tender/Calf-tender Cattle-farm/farmyard worker, including cleaning stalls, handling irrigation system, hauling feed & hay Collecting vegetables /other Woodwork/wood fieldwork done by hand processor Agronomist (by late Soviet Plowing years) Potato/other vegetable sorting Sowing and boxing Planting

Mowing

Hauling hay/produce/fertilizer Driving

Shifts Over Time

Some of these certainly represented shifts from early Soviet years. For example, women moved into agronomy in particular in much higher numbers during late socialism.58 This was due to shortages of trained specialists in the countryside, once kolkhozniks gained the freedom to migrate to cities. Even those trained in agriculture would often choose to do different, sometimes less-skilled work in cities instead. Authorities consistently tried to educate and train farm workers ever better and attempt to mechanize farm tasks during late socialism. Rural women

58 See Stuart (1979) on this and other shifting educational and management patterns for women.

208 eventually became better educated and trained then men, though they faced resistance from farm management as well as hostility from colleagues and neighbors when trying to get or keep posts traditionally considered male.59 When jobs were mechanized, they suddenly became men’s work.

Skill and mechanization based job segregation continued for women throughout Soviet years. In the early 1970s, only about 11% of women at state farms operated machines or mechanized equipment—while in some republics 90 to 98% of women performed completely manual labor at farms.60

While very few women chaired or directed farms in late Soviet years, a high proportion of women served as heads of the village councils. In symbolic terms, if the farm chairman was the patriarch or local father figure, the head of the village council stood in as mother.61 The glass ceiling on top farm leadership remained constant throughout the period.62 Many women found lower level management positions at farms but had almost no upward mobility. More women became farm chairs during World War II, but were replaced when men returned. In 1961, 2% of collective farm chairs and 1% of state farm directors were women.63 In 1975 women composed just 1.5% of farm chairs or directors in the Soviet Union.64 And by 1980, still only 1.9% of chairs and 1.5% of directors were women.65

59 Denisova and Mukhina (2010), 24-33, who point out that tractors were even built for male physiques, necessary uniforms such as for mechanics were not made for women, and only a minority of female mechanics managed to keep their positions due to discrimination and hostility, including from farm directors and chairmen.

60 See Norton Dodge and Murray Feshbach “The Role of Women In Soviet Agriculture,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 236-270.

61 As confirmed by a former head of a village council in Riazan’ and Russian anthropologists researching in Krasnodar.

62 See Stuart (1979) and Denisova (2000).

63 Dunn (1977), 176.

64 Lapidus (1978) 179.

65 Bridger (1987), 79. 209 Home tasks were of course also divided:

Women’s Work Men’s Work Shared Work Cooking/Baking/Feeding Gathering wood (or Stockpiling produce and people/Washing dishes buying, bringing home, goods for winter (such as stacking neatly for winter physically transferring use) potatoes to basement) Cleaning Hunting Mushroom picking Spring cleaning Plowing home plot Haying Childcare Harvesting produce from home plot if there was a large quantity Feeding animals Slaughtering animals as Lighting home ovens needed/Killing extra (/heaters) kittens Sewing, knitting, other Woodworking Working on home plot, if domestic arts land was held outside of homestead Planting, tending, Carpentry/Maintaining and harvesting from kitchen Repairing things garden Making salted foods and Driving preserves for winter Heating bania

The division of labor had physical and social consequences at farms. Without extensive mechanization and high tech systems, farm work is inherently physically demanding and labor intensive. But one can also argue that women performing the unmechanized work at farms required particularly high physical demands. In the central village at my Riazan’ site, residents on one street at the edge of the village were almost solely eldery, retired milkmaids who had milked by hand. Their twisted backs, broken bodies, and the canes they needed in order to walk were immediately distinguishable when anyone walked in that part of the village. It was a vivid visual example of the physical consequences of the Soviet gender regime, tangibly inscribed on this generation of women’s bodies.66 Milking became somewhat physically easier over time, as

66 I use the word “milkmaid” in order to preserve its gendered linguistic meaning in Russian—a meaning which was very significant to my interviewees, as will be later discussed.

210 more machinery was slowly introduced and, importantly, the norm shifted from milking three times a day to twice a day in central Russia.

In more positive terms, women tended to socialize with their work groups. All-women brigades could serve to strengthen female social ties. I suggest the gendered Soviet work legacy tied into the much-described strong ties between women in late Soviet and post-Soviet years, which to some extent occurred to the exclusion of female-male ties.67 Thus women’s hard work at farms helped them to develop certain skills and social capital, but it also reflected and reinforced social inequalities that carried into post-socialist years.

As mentioned above, women received better educations and moved into more specialist positions over time at farms. However wage inequity persisted as did women’s lack of access to high management posts and farm directorship—even as the proportion of elderly women working at farms and living in villages increased. Yet, my interviewees didn’t note this gender specificity.

When talking about village demographics , they rather tended to describe the populated, bustling villages of the 1970s, as a contrast to the “dying villages” (a phrase in wide currency both among my interviewees and more broadly in the media) of contemporary times.

III. Speech About Gender

For my Russian interviewees, discussing gender roles was clearly foreign: imposed by my questions but not a category they would otherwise use themselves. No one commented on gender roles per se or without prompting—much less questioned them. This was a subject for which I needed to discern what people omitted from their speech as much as what they included.

When I discussed my research about women as farm directors with Boris in Riazan’ (city), he maintained that I was heading the “wrong” direction. He claimed no one in Russia cared whether or not women led farms. Women could lead farms, but this wasn’t important to people (and by

67 See Rotkirch (2000) on the phenomenon of the weak marriage connection of post-Soviet years, as related to women’s forging stronger bonds of mutual assistance with other women who are family members or friends than with spouses. 211 extension, not worth writing about). I proposed that perhaps women leading farms during 1990s crisis conditions might be comparable to wartime contexts, when women are mobilized to take on new industrial or professional positions typically held by men. Boris agreed with this statement un-problematically and thought there was nothing else to discuss.68 It may well be true that almost no one cares whether women direct farms in Russia; but this disinterest itself reveals the extent to which gender inequities are invisible in the culture, even as it reconstitutes that invisibility.69

Here I will delve into each of the three main ways my interviewees talked about gender, in turn:

Essentialist Statements

Fundamentally, people’s discourse reflected widespread adherence to essentialist ideas about gender and traditional (or neotraditional) notions of women’s proper sphere. My interviewees very often reproduced these old scripts and traditional ideas in speech. Women’s caretaking and homemaking domestic roles were naturalized and taken for granted, a fundamental truth. No one questioned that women were responsible for home and hearth—almost exclusively.

(More research could certainly be done on men’s rural roles, but this is not my focus here.) Even women taking new and demanding professional roles in the 1990s and 2000s simply added these to their domestic responsibilities. As becomes apparent in the profiles of farm directors later, the women sometimes delegated household chores to daughters, and some simply went undone—but the female head of household still remained fully responsible for seeing that the home was tended and people fed. Ultimate domestic responsibility never left their hands even if they found it

68 Boris, informal conversation in café, Riazan’, 3/12/08.

69 See Rivkin Fish (2010) on how “gender-neutral” speech as well as “worker-mother” discourses can serve to erase gender inequalities from public view. 212 impossible to do as much around the house as they used to. Women’s double burden was thriving in post-Soviet villages and essentialist ideas remained unchallenged.

Even people who had adapted quite successfully to the new market relations and seemed relatively progressive in their attitudes generally expressed essentialist notions of gender differences and roles. A forty-eight year old former kolkhoz engineer-mechanic turned lawyer now working in the provincial capital city and helping his wife and mother-in-law with the small family farm commented that it was absurd for a man to see himself as a doiar (milker or milkman). Ilia said sarcastically that there might have been three male milkmen (at least, before mechanization) in the whole country—the rest, “90%”, were women, doiarki. At least this was remedied when farms became mechanized and they started calling a man working there a

“milking machine operator”. “This already sounds interesting,” Ilia commented, “but ‘doiar’ doesn’t suit a man. A male doiar—that’s a rarity. This was a subject for journalists to write about.”70 Ilia was sharp and energetic, interested in history and fun to converse with. When I closed the oral history interview by asking if there was anything else he wanted to say that I didn’t ask, he joked that this wasn’t confession and I’m not a priest. His wife, head of the private family farm, had a sister living in New York. These were talented, educated, ambitious people with contacts in other countries. I would not have expected them to voice Soviet-style propaganda about women’s roles or tout the morality of the old, traditional social or gender order.

A person like Ilia’s comments about the absurdity of men being milkmen served to underscore how deep these ideas ran.

A middle-aged former sovkhoz engineer and newly prosperous businessman running his own building materials shop thought there was a small difference between men and women’s work at the farm. He was giving me a ride from Riazan’ (city) to the village, where he lived. He listed the different types of work that men and women performed—most crucially, that men

70 Ilia, in his home, Nizhnii, 12/4/07.

213 operated tractors and combines and women were dairy workers. “Probably there is not a great difference,” Leo thought. “As far as men or women leading….that depends on the person, not whether it’s a man or woman. Of course, men are tougher,” here he hit the stick shift of his car with a fist for emphasis, “and women are more tender and loyal. That’s all. Otherwise there’s no difference.”71 Leo’s breakdown of gender differences was relatively mild. He noted the work distinctions that existed historically. He was open, even positive about women leading farms

(this may have been shaped by his close friendship with the current farm director’s husband) and just had one, slight stereotypical point to make about how men and women were essentially different and hence their leadership styles inherently diverged.

When he first encountered me in the farm director’s home by chance one evening, Leo had been frankly amazed to meet an American in the village. Disbelieving his eyes and ears, he joked that he himself was from Italy. We kept the joke alive for the duration of my stay, as I referred to him as Italianets and asked him how life was in Italy when I saw him. As in Ilia’s case, he was a relatively young, friendly and curious man, seemingly modern and open, who didn’t seem to harbor many Soviet ideas or values or display the wariness and suspicion some of my elderly interviewees felt. He had adapted well to the changing economics and seemed to be one of the wealthier, perhaps even the wealthiest village resident. I barely recognized him the day he picked me up in his new SUV in Riazan’ after a business meeting, clean-shaven and very well-dressed as compared to his usual, comfortable village look. For people like Ilia the lawyer and Leo the businessman to make mild reductive or essentialist statements about women and gender was meaningful, showing that such ideas remained stable and tenacious even when other mentalities and circumstances were changing. In my experience, people who had adapted quite successfully to new market relations and employment circumstances were not rethinking gender roles or the gendered division of labor.

71 Conversation with Leo in car, Riazan’ region, 2/3/08. 214 All the villagers talked about the division of labor as something natural and inevitable.

Lesia, an 83-year old former field worker simply described how, “men worked with tractors and horses, and we would do everything by hand. They would tell us and show us how to do it and we would do it…We would do whatever they told us.”72

Women’s domesticity was so naturalized that a good husband or son appeared in women’s oral histories as guys who “helped” with their womanly responsibilities. (Again, this is by no means unique to Russia.) Jelina, a sixty-five year old former accountant, then warehouse storekeeper, commented that some men “felt for their wives” and helped with the kitchen garden, but bemoaned that “mine didn’t. He wouldn’t touch anything [around the house/home plot]. He didn’t want to.”73

Or as Elizaveta, a 73-year old former dairy worker put it, she had a good husband: a herdsman who “did everything” if he was home during the day while she was at work; and a son she praised for helping her milk the cows starting when he was in the first class. But

“everything” still didn’t include making dinner. Feeding the family was in her list of a dairymaid’s daily chores, right after the third milking shift of the day:

We [dairy workers] got up at 4 am every day. By the time you get ready, it’s already close to 4:30. You start walking in pairs…arrive and begin to milk, finish milking and head home. At lunch, at 11:30 the pairs again go and start to milk, finish milking and go home. And in the evening again, at 5 the pairs would go to milk. You finish milking and again return home. It’s already 8. You milk there for three hours. And then you go to feed your family…We worked a lot. It’s terrible!...We did everything together, [me and] the old man (ded)—we had a big kitchen garden. And we grew it all together. We went to work and we grew [at home]. With the old man, as a pair.

Chores around the home included caring for their horse, two cows, sheep, geese, pig, calf and goat. Doing everything as a pair, together, meant tending the kitchen garden. It didn’t extend to cooking. She doesn’t mention cleaning or tending all those animals, specifically, so it is unclear

72 Lesia, outside her home, in one of the most remote villages in Nizhnii site, where only a handful of people still lived (and one had died the weekend before I arrived), 10/6/07.

73 Jelina, in her home, Nizhnii, 10/8/07.

215 if her husband assisted. Elizaveta does go on to imply that she controlled all the money. “He was never bad to me. He never in his life knew what money was, he didn’t keep any in his hands.”

This could mean he was a spendthrift, but in context it sounded like praise. She might have meant that he didn’t keep money from his wages to drink—or spend it on the way home, as was a common village complaint and source of argument between rural couples.74 And now he’s sick, he hasn’t drunk or smoked all year. He used to drink a little bit, but now he doesn’t drink or smoke. A good old man…” Elizaveta also mentioned that she earned a little more than he did.

By her account as in many others, a good husband was one who didn’t drink or smoke (at least any more), didn’t care about money or keep it for himself, and helped with the kitchen garden. In answer to the question, “do you think there was a big difference between men and women’s work?” Elizaveta replied, “what difference? A man did his work, and the woman hers.” Here she neatly takes for granted that men and women have different jobs and tasks. It’s not even a matter worth reflection. She went on to list the work that men did, emphasizing that people used to do most everything by hand and it was much harder in the past.75 My question about difference made little sense to her and she focused on the “work” part of my question, describing the hard labor they used to have to do.

Here is an example of a one-time female farm director whose perspective on the work closely fit an “essentialist” point of view:

Ludmila Borisovna

On the subject of women’s work, Ludmila Borisovna was locally reputed to frequently complain, “I was made for love, not [for] work.” Previous chairperson of the district Party committee, Ludmila served as kolkhoz chair and then directed the re-registered kolkhoz successor

74 See Rogers (2005).

75 Elizaveta, her home, Riazan’, 3/12/08.

216 enterprise for just one year, from 1990-91. After the Party committee ceased its existence in

1991, “no one could force me to do it anymore,” she said bluntly. “This is not women’s work,” she continued.76 “It’s not that I didn’t like being chairperson, it’s that it was very hard. Very difficult. A long workday. I got up at 5 am, I had my additional subsidiary plot, there were children, I had to take the girl to school, the boy to preschool. [They] didn’t have a grandmother or grandfather here. This was hard, and this is not women’s work.” She was 30 at the time she became director, with a 3 and a 9 year old child. Difficulties included that the farm was quite large to administer and many of the workers drank, especially after payday. Then she couldn’t find many workers for three or four days. She used to chase around the drunks with a stick, in addition to calling the police on them. People were afraid of her then, though her goal was for them to be respectful, not afraid. Now the retirees reminded her of those days.

In the 1980s as a whole, the top leadership changed very frequently. The year Ludmila became director was when the kolkhoz effectively went bankrupt. For her, she reported, “it turned out to be like a year in hell. You don’t sleep at night, you think about what you have to do tomorrow, who’s coming to work, and who will arrive drunk. You plan one thing, and when you arrive this one’s drunk, that one didn’t come to work, another didn’t spend the night at home— and you don’t know where he is, maybe in the cowshed or the street, where he collapsed.”

Ludmila might have enjoyed her work more if she’d found the men she managed to be more responsible workers, as will be discussed in the section on exceptionalism.

Contradictory Statements

People routinely contradicted themselves on the subject of rural gender roles. Analyzing the content of the contradictions revealed a meaningful pattern. Interlocutors very commonly asserted first that there was no difference between women and men’s roles at the farm or at home.

76 The idea that leadership is not women’s work recurs many times in history and modern days, for example see Mazan, Tat’iana, “Ne zhenskoe eto delo--komandovat’ muzhikami,” Pskovskaia Pravda, 10 October 2001, 4. 217 Next they proceeded to list the different types of work that women and men performed. This happened so many times that I came to expect it.

For example, here is Lesia the fieldworker’s brother Igor, an 85-year old former electrician, head of the carpentry brigade and head of the kolkhoz wood processing shop on the subject: “Actually there was no difference [between men and women’s work during Soviet times]. Men and women were doing the same type of work.” Now Lesia agreed with him, saying, “yes, it was the same” (though above she had said that men worked with tractors and women by hand). Then I asked the leading question, “but women had to do more work related to food and housekeeping?” To which Igor responded, “yes, they had a harder fate.”77 Once pressed, Igor admitted that the traditional labor division affected people, and women might have to work longer and harder than men if you counted their domestic responsibilities. To my interviewees, this was just the way things were: fate.

Tatiana, a 58-year-old woman who had done several different types of farm work (from field worker doing crop cultivation, to calf tender, dairy worker, lab assistant working with artificial insemination and livestock specialist) was characteristically contradictory in her discussion of women’s work and women’s leadership. She began by asserting there was no difference between men and women’s work.

E: What do you think, was there was a difference between men’s and women’s work at the kolkhoz?

Answer: Who knows? It seems to me that there was no difference whatsoever. Men worked hard and women also worked hard. In short, tending animals is very hard work. Being a dairy worker is very difficult in itself. It’s a fact, [you] have to wake up very early. That’s the hardest—[when you have to] get up very early. That’s work itself…In the summer period you usually don’t sleep until 12, you work on your home plot or with the hay or with your cattle until it’s at its very darkest outside. You don’t go to sleep before 12 in the summertime. And you won’t succeed in sleeping in—the alarm clock will ring already and you’ll have to get up. Waking up so early is hard for animal tenders, it seems to me. [They wake up] the earliest. Don’t think of anything else, if you lie down to sleep and think, maybe you lie down, maybe you don’t lie down—now it’s another day. The alarm clock is ringing. Getting up early [all the time].

77 Igor and Lesia, outside their home, Nizhnii, in one of the most remote villages associated with the former kolkhoz where only a handful of people still lived (and one of those had died the weekend before I visited), 10/6/07. 218

Tatiana here does not note that dairy work was almost exclusively the province of women. The terribly early mornings and very hard work she describes were in fact women’s difficulties. But

Tatiana never questions that dairy work is a woman’s job, or whether women are busier than men at work and home in the summers. She simply mentions that dairy workers labored terribly hard, while continuing to assume that all that labor was rightfully women’s work and asserting at the same time that there was no difference between women and men’s labor. Later in the same conversation, however, she began to contradict herself.

…(about half an hour later in conversation)

Q: Do you think there’s a difference when a woman is the leader? Is there a big or small difference between women and men as leaders?

A: Well, who knows?! It seems to me, what’s the big difference?! She shoulders the burden of the farm; the farm burdens her/weighs on her just the same. It should be that the leader should be a man—but it is also [now, at the kolkhoz successor enterprise] carried by a woman. Maybe she can also lead. She finds a common language with working people, and the same with everyone…She [the current farm director] is excellent. Therefore it seems to me there can’t be any difference between women and men. Now, probably, there’s no difference anywhere between men and women. Leadership responsibilities that there are don’t differ on account of this. If she’s capable, then she’s capable and she can do it.78

First Tatiana claims there was no difference between women and men as farm leaders.

Then she declares the leader should rightfully be a man. But next she admits that the current farm director, a woman, is quite good. She finally concludes that while the job responsibilities don’t change, “maybe” a woman can also lead. She also implies a historical contrast with late Soviet years, when men led farms and there was a clear difference between men and women—a contrast by which late Soviet years definitely have a moral advantage.

Just as most interviewees claimed there was no difference between men and women’s work, so many of them claimed it didn’t matter whether the leader was a woman or a man—then often followed up with some description of difference, frequently the very common sentiment that it depended on the woman. This of course put the burden of earning positive assessment and

78 Tatiana, in her home, Riazan’, 4/15/08. 219 respect unequally on the female director. People doubted women’s capabilities to lead, but if a woman managed to prove herself she might be accepted. She was still coded as exceptional in speech, however. The contradictory statements about women leading farms abounded even at

Riazan’ site, where the director found high local approval.

Interviewees like Tatiana the livestock specialist never seemed to notice that they were making contradictory, paradoxical or mutually exclusive statements about women’s roles. I suggest that this strange-seeming discrepancy: first denying difference, then elaborating the differences, to some extent reflected the conflicted gender legacy of the Russian and Soviet past.

Women’s constrained professional opportunities even in the face of wide employment; their lower wages, absolute responsibility for family life, and the discrimination they faced were officially non-existent in public discourse for much of the 20th century. Propaganda that claimed gender parity and the most advanced social relations on earth co-existed with a social reality that assigned women circumscribed roles. People knew that there were significant differences between men and women’s labor, but their initial descriptions of rural life reflected socialist claims to gender parity. Further, their knowledge of gendered divisions of labor did not extend to any consideration of its social implications for women—for example, wage inequalities or different work schedules.

Next I will illustrate some of the effects of women’s disproportionate labor burdens by giving longer profiles of Svetlana and Yulia, two female farm directors I encountered during research:

Svetlana Vladimirovna

Svetlana was born in 1952 in Kazakhstan and moved to Riazanskaia Oblast’ after the breakup of the Soviet Union because she had a relative there. In Kazakhstan she worked as chief accountant in a construction organization in a district capital city. She had no previous experience in agriculture, but when she arrived to visit her sister in Shilovskii district in 1992 she 220 was brought to the collective farm in the village. The farm had lacked an accountant for the previous six months. At first her sister asked her to help out with paperwork informally, but on her second day in the office, after she met the chairman, she stayed. The chairman told her honestly that they owed workers back wages and there was no money. “He didn’t fast-talk me at all,” Svetlana reported, “but I was given an apartment right away.”79 She arrived after the kolkhoz had already been transformed to a limited liability partnership. In 2000 it was reorganized again into a cooperative. (She regretted the reorganization of the kolkhoz, describing that when they divided the land and resources, “they gave everything away and now we can’t understand why or to whom…although they divided all the land, it remained in use by the farm.

And now we don’t know how it will end up.”)

Svetlana worked for 14 years as accountant before becoming director in 2006. “We had tragic circumstances,” she observed, when the previous chairman died of a heart attack in the field, at work one day. In 2007 an investor from Moscow appeared in the raion to buy up everyone’s land shares, but Svetlana was unsure of his intentions for the farm and whether agricultural production was a priority. She and her friend Tatiana (profiled next) discussed together how people were investing in land simply because it was close to Moscow and property values would grow, and not because they were interested in agricultural production or the quality of life of local residents. Svetlana thought that if the last kolkhoz chair had survived, locals would never have sold their land. “There would not be this mess with the land; these women would never have sold. I’m more than 100% sure.” Thus she downplayed her own efficacy and influence, suggesting that matters became dire when the authority of the last kolkhoz chairman was suddenly ended. Denisova writes that such self-disparagement is historically common

79 Interview in farm office, 4/20/08. 221 among Russian female farm leaders.80 It’s telling that Svetlana reported doubting her own authority and credibility although she’d served in a high management position for 16 years.

When asked the difference between men and women as leaders, Svetlana speculated that maybe men are tougher with workers. “It’s physically easier on men,” she went on to say, as

“they don’t have all the responsibilities at home.” Yulia added that Svetlana is supported 120% by her two daughters, without whom it would be much harder. “You have to work twenty hours a day at work and then still do everything at home,” said Yulia, and Svetlana agreed. Svetlana reported that at first she had a negative relationship with workers. She learned how to swear on the job, though she didn’t like the bad language or informality of communication commonplace around the farm. A major difficulty was the shortage of labor she faced; she felt she had no recourse but to put up with drinking and truancy from work. “…even if you yell at someone one day, you’re going to have to bow down to him the next.”

Svetlana reported that she never considered becoming director before it occurred. She liked her own work, sitting with papers all day. It just kind of happened, she described, that they elected her to be chairperson when the old leader died. She kept at it mostly out of a sense of responsibility to her community, she said. She discussed feeling so much responsibility and uncertainty about the future that sometimes she couldn’t sleep at night.

Leadership then had not challenged Svetlana’s assumption that she was properly and fully responsible for domestic life—though she mediated this responsibility by relying on her daughters to do more. The theme of community responsibility was of course a cornerstone for female farm leaders, and very historically resonant. Scholars write that the theme of women’s particular responsibility for the collective occurs in early 19th century intelligentsia writings, and

80 Evidence suggests many women who held farm leadership positions for years still considered it to be men’s work and consistently underestimated their own capabilities—see Lubov Denisova, Zhenshchiny Russkikh Selenii: Trudovie Budni (Moscow: Mir Istorii, 2003) 193. 222 recurs in varied form in propaganda of the 1930s, when appeals to rural female shock workers were framed in these terms.81

Yulia Konstantinovna

Svetlana’s friend Yulia also took over farm directorship under tragic circumstances, when the previous chairman of the kolkhoz died suddenly from heart disease. Yulia was educated in the district capital, trained to be a livestock expert and after earning her degree came to her village for a practicum and to visit relatives. While visiting her mother, she happened to meet her future husband on the street and ended up staying in the village, never returning for the graduate education for which she had been recommended. First she was employed as a specialist, then as deputy director and finally acceded to the directorship herself after seven years. Staff had been suggesting she become director for months, she explained to me, but she hesitated. She was young and not confident she was up to the job. She didn’t necessarily want to face all the pressures. In the end, she agreed to direct only as a stop-gap measure until the group attracted a new person to lead. When I met her, she’d directed for ten years already, and was unsure that she could work again in a position of lower authority. Yet she still had moments when she quite seriously considered throwing in the towel.

“It’s really tough to be a female farm director,” Yulia explained. “If you attend to everything properly at work, you physically won’t succeed in doing anything at home…Or if you do everything at home, you won’t succeed in doing anything [at work]…it’s easier for men, they can come home and relax, or go out, or run around with women.” As quoted at the start of this chapter, when asked whether men’s and women’s work on the farm differs in general, Yulia laughed and said sarcastically, “Women should sit at home, raise children and cook soup

(shchi)…and she should take care of herself. Fitness, cosmetics and clothing.”

81 See Wood (2009), 355 on the men’s ideals for women and the Decembrists’ wives; and Buckley, (2006), 258. 223 Like Svetlana, Yulia felt a large sense of responsibility, both to her farm and to the village population that provided its workforce. “A new private entrepreneur (chastnik) can close his farm at any time; he’s working for himself,” she explained. “But here you know that forty people who need to feed their families are depending on you—even those who drink, who don’t want to work…A private entrepreneur would never work where the profit is small; here there are small profits and big problems…You’re still responsible for everything here, even though 20 want to work and 20 don’t, everyone depends on you and you’re at the top, the one who’s in charge and needs to solve and resolve everything, there’s no one else to go to.” Yulia was quoted in the Shilovskii Vestnik as recently as 2006 saying “don’t write about me, talk about the collective,”82 in discussing how the farm turned around its unprofitable situation. She told me she dreamed of closing her doors and shutting off her mobile phone for two weeks, but acknowledged that this was unlikely to ever happen.

Aside from looking out for the collective, part of what motivated Yulia was concern for her reputation. She didn’t want people later to say that she couldn’t handle the job. She admitted that while she had mixed feelings about becoming director, in part she simply wanted to prove herself.

Ludmila Borisovna, head of administration for the area, was certain that it was because

Yulia’s a woman that she lasted as director as long as she did. “If there weren’t Yulia but a man,

[the leadership] would already have changed several times, I guarantee you. There wouldn’t have been just one leader.”83 Villagers and workers in individual interviews reported high satisfaction with Yulia’s directorship, however ambivalent about female farm leadership they may have felt in general or abstract terms.

82 Galina Viktorova, “Vse Zavisit ot Rukovoditelia,” Shilovskii Vestnik, 7 April 2006, 2.

83 Interview in village administration office, 3/12/08.

224 In personal terms, Yulia gained confidence, economic independence and the resources to buy many things she wanted. She was a recognized presence in her raion, particularly in her role as chair of the local council of deputies. When I spoke briefly with a top official in the

Agricultural Administration of Riazanskaia Oblast’ who knew where I was researching, he knew her by name and praised her as intelligent and capable84. In informal talks, however, Yulia reported being tired by everything and unsure what would be next. In her family, Yulia appeared to be the main breadwinner. She was solely responsible for cooking and cleaning, chores which simply went undone for long periods of time. Yulia milked the family cows twice a day by hand.

Her husband did other work in the homestead, including much construction and renovation. He personally redid the house and built their own sanitation system in a village with no centralized plumbing. From observation when living with them, they seemed to have a happy and supportive relationship, but he did not take on any tasks that would traditionally be considered “women’s work”. Either Yulia or her teenage daughter performed these, or they went undone.

Statements About Women’s Exceptionalism

Some interviewees made a different kind of assertion about women. A small number of women mentioned or complained that women worked harder then men (some men made similar statements as well, such as Igor earlier). This was culturally acceptable to acknowledge. Several people went even further, declaring that women were in fact better workers than men, such as when Ludmila Borisovna talked about Yulia’s success as a farm director depending on her being a woman, or when she later reflected on female farm directorship overall.

When I probed in a third interview about whether women and men differ as farm leaders,

Ludmila replied “It’s hard work. And men: you know, they’re weak people, they can’t stand it for long, only rarely can one endure. Most of them—are weak people. Some of them drank and were driven out by the kolkhozniks…some started to seriously steal and they were also driven

84 Interview in Department of Agricultural Management, Ryazan, 4/28/08. 225 out…Does a female leader differ from a male? Definitely. A woman is a much better leader than a man. A woman is more responsible, worries more, and a woman won’t simply abandon everything, while men….There were such circumstances when a male leader got lost for three days. Where was he? A woman wouldn’t allow herself this.”85

Anna, a seventy-five-year old former milkmaid, voiced the opinion, “men’s work, of course, was easier, and we, well, women really ran everything (vorochali).” She continued to discuss how difficult being a milkmaid really was, how they had to go to the frozen river by sled in the winter and so on. “[I’ve seen or it was] “nothing good,” she described.86 Here she linked the two concepts, joining women’s “harder” work together with their status as the people who actually ran everything.

Jelina the retired kolkhoz accountant, who earlier in the chapter complained that her husband never helped her with their kitchen garden, also felt women worked much harder than men. First, of course, she stated there was “almost no difference” between men and women’s work. “What men were paid, so were women. That’s how it worked. [barely a pause] But women would get more done then men.” With some heavy-handed encouragement from me,

Jelina elaborated.

Q: Someone just told me that women certainly worked more. VA: More, yes. They worked more. [why does she say “they” here? Recourse to abstraction maybe hiding the subtext of her personal stake and bitterness, as though she’s just repeating a fact or telling me agreed-upon history.] Q: Because they worked in the kolkhoz and at home? VA: Yes. You’d get home. The house was full of animals. [Presumably she meant dogs and cats. She might have also been referring to her cow or chickens, though these were typically kept in the yard, not in the part of the house where the people resided.] You’d have to tidy everything up. And [there was the] kitchen/vegetable garden and the farmstead [ogorod and ‘usad’]. You’d always have to plant in the garden, and water, and weed; and you have to clean and cook. And you have to prepare food for your man. And he, when he arrives [her pause and aggrieved tone indicated, what does he do?]? Well, it’s true, he had to mow the hay.87

85 Interview in village administration office, Riazan’, 4/17/08 .

86 Anna, in her home, Riazan’, 4/14/08.

87 Jelina, in her home, Nizhnii, 10/8/07.

226 It was not a large imaginative leap from women working harder to their actually being better workers. Some, like Jelina, didn’t specify exactly how women were better. When interviewees did elaborate, they would claim that women were more responsible than men, sometimes also suggesting that women care more, are more attentive, and more sober, as Ludmila

Borisovna and others claimed.

Mary Buckley describes a “little-recognized” historic discourse about women’s exceptionalism as workers, first used to mobilize women into the workforce during high

Stalinism, while Elizabeth Wood suggests the discourse may date back to pre-Soviet times.88 In any case this trope recurred throughout Soviet years, simultaneous with official emphasis on women’s primary childbearing and childrearing functions, adding contradiction. One female private farmer seemed to take “exceptionalism” in a different, more personal direction, justifying her ambitious choices and business success partly by positioning herself as an exceptional woman:

Natasha

This middle-aged woman, former fieldwork brigadier and agronomist/agro-chemist who opened her own private family farm immediately after kolhoz privatization, herself drove her own

“personal” tractor. There were few female tractor driver-machinists because the work was so hard, she thought (despite having no trouble driving one herself.) But she noted that machine operators and drivers were always more highly valued than other workers. She didn’t even have to note that mechanics and drivers were men—this could be taken for granted in her response to my question:

Q: Was there a difference then between men’s and women’s work at the kolkhoz?

A: Yes. Of course. Machine operators and drivers were always valued more. And women— this was fieldwork.

88 Buckley (1989), Wood (2009). 227 Born in 1954, Natasha attended a sovkhoz tekhnikum in the oblast’, obtaining “middle specialist” education before stopping. She worked as brigadier of the field brigade for the kolkhoz; then as an agronomist/agro-chemist. She was proud of her work term of 45 years in farming. “Along the way” she bore two children as well, she said proudly.

She obtained credit on the preferential terms initially offered to new private farmers in the early to mid 1990s. This enabled her to buy necessary farm equipment. Her farm, which she named “Natasha,” grew grain and potatoes, eventually selling produce in markets in three cities— two in her farm’s district, and also in Nizhnii Novgorod itself.

She stopped working in 2004. Her husband moved into government service, their parents got sick and died and couldn’t help any longer, and she started to have serious health issues and was “post-operation” she told me, without specifying her condition. Now she rented land to the most successful kolkhoz successor enterprise in 2007, for produce in kind.

Natasha spoke with satisfaction about her past. She felt they lived well during kolkhoz years, mentioning the “golden 1970s” and that they didn’t live badly during the 1980s, either.

Yet she was also proud of the private farm she had run with her husband (and family help) for ten years. She was proud that she drove a tractor, and said she continued to drive it (presumably still working her home plot, though not her former farmland) though it had gotten harder due to her health and constitution. She noted that men’s work at the kolkhoz had been better valued—one of the few to mention this. (A few dairy workers thought that dairy work was the most prestigious job at their farm; but maybe they weren’t even comparing their work to men’s work such as tractor driver or machine operator.)89

Thus she initially said that women may have been discriminated against, in that they did low prestige farm work and their work wasn’t valued. Yet she also reproduced traditional discourses about how driving tractors was too hard for women. She could then emerge from her

89 Natasha, in rural post office, Nizhnii, 10/16/07.

228 oral history as unique, a heroine or tough woman—the exception that proves the rule. She otherwise said very little about gender roles.

People of course sometimes used more than one of the above three categories with which to talk about gender—sometimes quite confusingly, using all three. Angelina, the former sovkhoz accountant who was so illuminating about her farm’s closure, distinguished that women at the farm were frequently managers: brigadiers, and work team/link leaders (zvenevie; who were lower than brigadiers in farm hierarchy) but the boss (upravliaiushii) was a man.90 She noted that in her sovkhoz before the collapse, many women were brigadiers and the agronomists were mostly women. When I asked why she thought women didn’t become top farm leaders she mused that women were probably less capable:

Well, maybe they are indecisive, for one thing. For a second, they are uneducated (negramotnie); after all, not everyone can learn. For women, [there’s the] home in any case: children, and this is far from…for those who have children…maybe she can do it if she doesn’t have children yet; or if they’re already grown, maybe there would also be a possibility, but otherwise, women…

Here Angelina has first suggested women don't have the capacity to be farm directors or chairs; then mentioned that actually it's their inevitable domestic responsibilities that prevent them from being able to handle the demands; and immediately after these two propositions she came out with a surprising statement to the effect that women are actually better suited to the job...

Q: Do you think there's a difference when the boss is a woman?

A: I have this feeling that women are much more clever….a man often has a woman—with good sense [behind him].

Did people’s contradictory pronouncements in the 2000s simply replicate the contradictions of official Soviet propaganda? Perhaps also tying in to even older rural ideas about women’s proper role and social status? Yes, but I also suggest that their speech revealed

90 I used the word rukovoditel’ in my initial question to her, which she then repeated, saying women were rukovideteli (translated above as managers) but specifying that the upravliaushii was always a man. Rukovoditel’ is of course not the name of a specific professional post at a farm. 229 fissures in the traditional gender canon and reflected responses to broader social change of the

1990s.91

No recourse to gender discourses

As we have seen, although female farm directors were historical exceptions and still a minority in the 1990s, their statements often mirrored the speech patterns, words and themes of my other interviewees. They stated no intention to challenge the gender status quo. A very few women, however, neither made extensive use of traditional gender ideas nor tried to explain away their work positions. This stance, too, had social consequences, as Valentina’s exceptional life story illuminates:

Valentina Mikhailovna

The former chief accountant of the collective farm who became director of one of its successor enterprises in Nizhegorodksaia Oblast, was much more matter-of-fact and offered significantly less personal and emotional detail than my other informants. Valentina told me mostly about plans, politics and economics and less about what motivated or worried her. She reminisced about meeting a number of famous politicians in the 1990s, when her collective farm was chosen to be one of the first in the country to be privatized according to the new model emerging out of Nizhnii Novgorod. Her farm effectively went bankrupt and was bought out by a new investor in 2006, who sent new management to the site.

The way workers talked about Valentina overall was more negative than how other informants described their leaders. This could reflect anger that the private farm failed, and uncertainty about the future. I wondered whether Valentina related to villagers distantly and

91 Angelina, in her home, Krasnodar site, 7/10/08. See Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova, “Gender Studies in Post-Soviet Society: Western Frames and Cultural Differences, “ Studies in East European Thought 55 (1) (2003), 51-61for more on fissures in the gender canon.

230 condescendingly in general. She warned me more than once about my research, and how simple peasants in remote villages wouldn’t be able to answer my questions. They didn’t understand the process of privatization back when it happened, although they voted for the changes at general meetings, it was “as if they had fog in their heads,” she reported.92 For their part, villagers held her accountable for dismantling the kolkhoz in the first place, and then failing to deliver on promises of what her new private farm could offer. They compared her leadership unfavorably to a neighboring farm director, a former kolkhoz chairman who was opposed to privatization at the time but whose successor enterprise was successfully competing in 2007.

After Valentina’s farm was bought out, new managers appeared on almost a monthly basis from Moscow for several months. Valentina was demoted to chief accountant. In my presence, a new executive director of the farm called her a chatterbox who would babble to me about history, while the new management team, all men, had other business.

When I asked Valentina whether women differed as leaders from men, she insisted that it didn’t matter one bit. “It depends on the person and not whether they’re a man or a woman.

Maybe I just wasn’t so capable,” she said wistfully in one informal discussion outside the potato sorting point. Valentina was the most unequivocally ambitious of my subjects. She never described not wanting to lead or having any mixed feelings about her role as director. Valentina never said a word about the double burden and never acknowledged that a view existed that farm leadership is not women’s work. Was Valentina more harshly judged because she was a woman?

What happened to her was exactly what Tatiana feared: people saying “she couldn’t do it, she wasn’t capable of leading.” It seemed to me that Valentina was an easy target for criticism as a talkative, middle-aged woman. Workers, villagers and managers alike could disparage her freely and doubt her abilities to lead—although many of them chose to join her farm in 1994.93

92 Interview 9/12/07, in cafeteria of local administration in raion capital.

93 Anthropologists studying her farm reported that relations had become strained between management and workers as early as 2002. She was criticized as no longer being as active as in the past. Valentina reported 231 Although Valentina was that rare interviewee who did not articulate or reveal any position on gender difference at the farm and never made excuses or expressed ambivalence about her professional ambitions, she was quite concerned with performing her femininity.94 She baked me a homemade ‘pizza’ one day and told me she planned to get her hair and nails down in town after the potato harvesting and sorting finished in the fall. Perhaps her professional ambition had to be socially balanced by maintaining at least a few traditionally feminine qualities.

She would never give up concern for her appearance. At another level, she seemed to pay for her ambition by falling out of favor with villagers. The rural reality was that almost every farm that succeeded her kolkhoz had already failed! Yet she was compared to the one successful man who directed a farm; not forgiven for the huge structural obstacles she faced in trying to run hers.

The Glass Ceiling Redux?

As the leader profiles show, among the female leaders of reorganized collective farms, one resigned after a year, two were demoted after urban investment (one of whom died young from pneumonia the year after my research), and the fourth anxiously awaited further directives from the very new owner. Yet as I mentioned, official Russian statistics from the 2000s show female farm leadership ranging between 10 and 21% in different years, and for different types of farm enterprises. This is quite an increase from late Soviet years. More research needs to to a researcher then, “you can either be a good director or a good person. I’ve made my choice.” Liesl L. Gambold Miller and Patrick Heady, “Cooperation, Power, and Community: Economy and Ideology in the Russian Countryside,” in The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition, Chris Hann & the “Property Relations” Group (Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2003), 267-269.

94 In her research on urban working women, Tatarkovskaia finds a generational gap in whether women admit to ambition. “…young female managers..do not hide or suppress their ambition and do not fall into careers by chance but pursue them consciously. Among the older generation, however, it is common for women’s careers to come about ‘automatically’ as a result of the absence of male competition.” Irina Tartakovskaia, “Women’s career patterns in industry: a generational comparison,” in Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia, ed. Hilary Pilkington (London: Routledge, 1996), 62. In my case studies and among the very small number of female farm directors I interviewed, the generational gap was not clear. Yulia and Svetlana were in their thirties, while Valentina, who didn’t hide her ambition at all, was in her 50s. Further research could look at more female farm directors in the 2000s and assess the impact of generational differences on their attitudes—and whether this is in fact a point of contrast with urban women’s history. 232 investigate whether these numbers have held steady from the 1990s. Or perhaps my research cases are indicative: perhaps women entered farm directorship in even higher proportions in the

1990s, and their representation in the 2000s is already reduced.

Further research will also need to monitor the farms themselves, metamorphosing in some drastic ways as a result of the new investment, as well as women’s employment and leadership opportunities within them. But I suggest that women’s roles were not simply refashioned along Soviet lines out of whole cloth once the women were demoted. Instead, the

2000s are bringing both new opportunities and new hardships for women’s farms and women’s leadership of farms. Some research suggests modern business is being imagined as very much a male sphere in Russia.95 Yet I suggest the former farm leaders also have new roles as communicators and intermediaries between Moscow and their villages. Valentina and Svetlana both became critical in negotiating with urban capital. They became the local interface for new management. This could be seen as a type of informal or indirect power, perhaps traditionally behind-the-scenes. But I argue that these women still wield more power than they previously found in their chief accountant or chief animal technician, even deputy director positions at the former collectives. More time will tell how they wield that power and what bounds it.

CONCLUSIONS AND AVENUES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Looking at women’s farm leadership provides insight into the broader social and economic transformations underway after the Soviet collapse. As we saw in Chapter Three, generally the “old” local elites remained in power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and farm privatization. Some new actors arrived to villages: in the early years, these tended to be the impoverished or refugees from former Soviet republics. By the 2000s, urban capital had arrived at my research sites, bringing with it new owners and farm managers from cities. But scholarship

95 Aleksei Yurchak, “Muzhskaya Ekonomika: ‘Ne do Glupostei, Kodga Kar’eru Kuesh’,” Neprikosnovennii Zapas no. 5 (19), 2001. 233 does not emphasize that “old” actors also gained new power during the ‘transition.” In some cases these were women who weren’t really elites previously; in others, women who were top managers but would still have never made it to director in any other era, representing more of a lateral power shift. Most—though not all--of the women who led farms in the 1990s had been farm specialists before. No mere milkmaid or field worker was elected private farm director after kolkhoz re-registration. The new heads had been accountants, animal technician specialists, and deputy directors. This was not on the whole a major power reversal at farms. But it exploded the glass ceiling of farm leadership for women. In so doing, it changed their individual and family lives and slightly reshaped farm management and social expectations alike. Since women moving into these positions is a largely unnoticed facet of the story of Russia’s market transitions, the extent and implications of women’s tenure as leaders warrants further research.

Continued research could also be profitable on how ambivalence surrounding the expansion of women’s economic opportunities in the countryside reflects general ambivalence about broader social changes wrought by Russia’s ‘transition’. Scholars have shown that difference of various stripes is ambivalently coded in post-socialist culture. As Humphrey writes,

“Gypsies, Caucasians, Tajik refugees, and many others are subject to intense stereotyping in the shifting matrix of economic-political competition, where images of shady deals intersect with broader categories of ‘race’ and nation.”96 A survey in 1996 showed that many Russians believed that “people have an equal opportunity to succeed,” as Shlapentokh reports. “However, when the issue of equal opportunity is framed around age, gender, and ethnicity, Russians are quite

‘unconcerned’. Only one-third of Russians believe that ‘people from the Caucuses’ ought to have

‘equal rights’. The same percentage support equal rights for homosexuals. At most, 7% believe

96 Humphrey (2002), 177.

234 that gender is a factor in economic discrimination.”97 The invisibility of gender inequities in the culture may make other kinds of discrimination less visible and more tolerable.

Some scholars suggest an inevitable link between discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, race and class. As sociologist Floya Anthias writes, beliefs about both gender and ethnic differences rely on the “..naturalness not only of difference but of inequalities. Both divisions involve practices of exclusion and the structuring of disadvantage in favour of the dominant ethnic and gender group…these supposedly natural differences in capacities and needs on the basis of gender or of ethnicity or race then come to enter into economic relations as legitimizers of inequalities in class positions. It then becomes natural that men should be defined as the major breadwinners and hence should have greater access to high status and well paid full- time work. It also becomes natural that Blacks…should similarly occupy a lower position…since their biology or culture…limits their skills, education, interests, etc.”98 At my field sites, the position of women might be seen as linked to the subordinate positions of the Tajik day laborers or the Meskhetian Turkish refugees, discriminated against at farms and in the villages.

When my interviewees expressed mixed feelings, or slipped between different discourses about gender in speech, it underscored the broader sense of insecurity and ambivalence about the future that many villagers experienced. So much had changed in the 1990s, as I’ve described previously. Many new actors had come through, if not settled, in the villages. Wealthy urbanites were building summer homes in rates to outnumber the local population; less remarked, but also uneasily experienced, former kolkhozniks themselves are becoming differentiated in lifestyles. If women’s roles were coded as an unimportant social topic, still the ambivalent way people talked about women’s positions reflected the unease people felt about the host of quite profound social changes which occurred over time.

97 Shlapentokh (1999), 74-75.

98Floya Anthias, “Connecting Race and Gender,” in Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle, ed. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Routledge, 1992), 111 and 113. 235 People’s speech on gender differences clearly revealed the great resilience and reconstitution of old ideas about gender. Yet they also showed that some attitudes were subtly shifting even at the time of my research, such as when Tatiana comes to admit that her current farm director, a woman, is doing a great job, and just maybe the best person for the job should be hired. Proto-feminist statements by Svetlana the farm director, poking fun at traditional notions of femininity, also showed that traditional canons are slipping and rural attitudes may be changing. Oral histories reflected the competition of influences—archaic, Russian, Soviet, and

Western—on people’s attitudes, as well as the dynamic nature of that contest.

Additionally, we can see in how people discussed gender a little bit of an ongoing cultural negotiation over how to understand their Soviet past and reshape their senses of self.

People to some extent were picking and choosing what elements of Soviet ideology to maintain or discard. This was evident when a few interviewees articulated their retrospective dissatisfaction with the Soviet gender order. “Only here in Russia, probably, in the Union, did women work as road-builders, laying asphalt,” Angelina, the former sovkhoz accountant, commented disparagingly—as though it’s a scandal for women to pave roads.99 We also saw this in reverse form, when people regretted the passing of the old farm order, when men unequivocally directed. The voices decrying Soviet standards co-existed with a few voices declaring that women inevitably make the best farm directors. Gender issues can thus be one lens through which to view the shifting dynamics of how Russians understand, appropriate, and discard or discredit pieces of their Soviet past, as they forge slightly altered contemporary identities.

99 Angelina, in her home, Krasnodar, 6/30/08. 236 Conclusion

The stories that villagers have told me provide original and never before published information about critical eras of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Historians have paid scant attention the countryside during this period. Yet just under one third of the Russian population lives in rural areas. Their experiences are just as important, and arguably more representative, than the stories of the intelligentsia, government and business elites living in Russia’s largest cities, on which scholarship is often based. I have demonstrated that looking at villagers’ experiences and perspectives compels us to reconsider some of our accepted notions of Russia’s history. Taken together, the oral histories pose challenges to traditional periodizations, as well as characterizations of the recent past. At the same time, I dissect people’s narratives to show how their memories are constructed. I expose the constituent elements and explore which personal and social functions memories can serve. My major finding is that despite quite different local histories and personal experiences, people tell a very similar story about the late socialist period and post-Soviet farm privatizations. The historical and historiographical implications are significant. Revealing too is the dynamic process of memory construction.

Chapter One, “Thank You, Comrade Brezhnev, For Our Normal Lives?” shows that, far from the stagnation typically associated with Brezhnev’s rule, the (loosely defined) 1970s were the best time during which to live and work at a Soviet collective or state farm. The countryside received proportionately more state funding than in earlier periods. Soviet leaders also made an implicit “deal” or social contract with farm workers as well as the urban working classes, gaining legitimacy and popular support by improving conditions for those at the bottom of Soviet society.

Kolkhozniks finally enjoyed social benefits equal to other Soviet citizens, and many of my interviewees told satisfied tales about their wages, purchasing power and rising standards of living. They also talked about great social solidarity and cheerfulness, frequently using comparative terms to tell me how much happier village life had been in the ‘70s than ever after. I 237 suggest that traditional historiography about stagnation needs re-evaluation—or at least amplification with social experience to give a fuller account of the period, rather than simply using broad economic indicators which belie the rich social history I uncovered. At the same time, I reveal the makings of a mythology of collective farm life in my interviewees’ speech. In nostalgic accounts, people seemed to mistake the farms for the source of their social good, rather than the state. This mythology suggests the extent and the substance of villagers’ immense losses when the collective farm system was abolished in the 1990s. It further points out the weakness of historiographical explanations of the Soviet collapse that rest on a broad loss of faith in the system. This may have been true for Leningrad intelligentsia; but not for my interviewees.

Chapter Two, “Many Perestroikas,” finds that many perestroikas occurred in rural life from Soviet to post-Soviet years (and even earlier), while Gorbachev’s vaunted perestroika at the end of the 1980s did not figure prominently among them. Little really changed at research farms.

Taking villagers’ perspectives into consideration, it no longer makes sense to talk about

Gorbachev’s perestroika as a distinct period, much less a dramatic rupture with the past. My interviewees understand Gorbachev’s perestroika variously—if for some of them, it came to hold powerful symbolism retrospectively surrounding the horrors of “full collapse.”

Then I turn to the post-Soviet period, tracing state and international plans for farm privatization and showing how reform plans failed as I describe how farms actually transformed—or failed to do so. Chapter Three, “Utopian Transitology,” starts with Yeltsin’s blocked visions for farm privatization and the land market. It details the Nizhnii Model Farm

Reorganization project, designed to be the transformational plan for all of Russia’s farms yet never implemented wholesale. It explains the theoretical underpinnings and assumptions underlying the Model Program. I argue that reformers exhibited ideological, even utopian faith in the power of private property ownership as the panacea for Russia’s faltering agricultural system, even as they prioritized speed over attention to social needs and social cost.

238 Chapter Four, “Privatization Processes at My Farm Sites,” offers local privatization histories at my four farms. Kolkhoz Pobeda at Nizhnii site reorganized using the Model Program, with televised auctions of land and property that featured celebrity privatization politicians and

World Bank spokespeople in attendance. Though hopes for small-time, entrepreneurial capitalist farming ran high among some observers, the Model Program heightened animosity and conflict between farm workers and managers. In the end, locals reverted to an earlier Soviet model of farm and village organization, rather than truly revolutionizing farming. In contrast to Pobeda’s lauded privatization, Kolkhoz Pervoe Maia at Riazan’ site quietly re-registered as a nominally private, limited liability organization in 1992. Farm management and work conditions did not change in the slightest. The farm struggled for years in the tough economic climate of the 1990s, until a Moscow-based “sponsor” appeared to buy up land shares and manage the farm in 2007.

As a third point of contrast, both sovkhozes Plamia and Traktor at Krasnodar site shut down in

1992, and locals successfully supported themselves through their private greenhouse production.

The chapter explains these historical differences even as it shows the experiences that villagers shared in common across research sites. Everyone faced an economic depression, reduced wages and constrained economic choices. People turned to household plots for survival and for income, as the young flocked out of villages searching for work opportunities in cities. My interviewees’ watched much of what they built during Soviet years disintegrate before them, and the commonalities in their experiences surely influenced the strange similarity of their historical accounts about privatization.

Chapter Five, “Perspectives on Privatization,” though, shows some of what went into my interviewees’ privatization narratives besides the experiences they shared in common. Venturing into how people talked about farm transformation, I find that people felt their new land and property ownership had been all but meaningless. In their view, national and local-level privatization had been fraudulently conducted for the enrichment of a few at the expense of the

“simple people.” The chapter shows that some socioeconomic elites as well as urban 239 interviewees held alternative perspectives on ‘90s era developments; yet most of my interviewees’ articulated the view that privatization had been fraud. I find that with these narratives, people could identify themselves with the (mythical) “simple people” at a time when social solidarity had fractured and inequalities were growing in their villages. With nostalgic historical accounts, people could imaginatively recreate social solidarity for themselves even as they criticized economic and social transformations. Their memories were composed of their own experiences, as well as what they watched on television and read in newspapers and heard had happened to their neighbors and Russians in other locales. Their attitudes reflected shared social fears and also the influence of current events, such as new investors coming into the villages to buy land shares in the 2000s. My oral histories revealed how my interviewees were rethinking their Soviet past, in the process reformulating their senses of personal and collective identity.

Chapter Six uses women’s changing roles in the 1990s as a window onto people’s perspectives about social change in the post-Soviet era. I find that the historic glass ceiling on women’s farm leadership shattered in the early 1990s, as women found themselves in new positions of authority in the depopulated, economically depressed countryside. This phenomenon is largely ignored in scholarship on the rural “transition” and merits further study itself. It also poses a new insight into that transition, by showing that the balance of power at farms and in villages did shift to include some new people. Turning to my interviewees’ speech about women’s roles, I find that while essentialist and neotraditional ideas proliferate, looking at gender issues also reveals areas where people are rethinking their Soviet legacies and shaping somewhat transformed identities. People’s accounts show a mix of gender ideologies and influences, which points to the dynamic nature of this process of rethinking.

240 In sum, then, I find that my interviewees’ historical narratives were fashioned out of many elements, including but not limited to their own personal experiences. Oral histories showed my interviewees’ in process of reformulating their perspectives on their history along with their senses of self. The identity most of them claimed was a collective identity, and many of their stories of privatization centered on collective suffering. This is eminently understandable. The story of farm workers’ losing their historic workplaces and the use of common resources, even while international rhetoric vaunted their empowerment, must be included in the history of Russia’s post-Soviet transformations. My interviewees’ nostalgia for the kolkhozes of the 1970s can be read as indicator both of their great losses thereafter—a measure of their disenfranchisment in the new economic order—and also as critique of the economic reforms of the 1990s.

Still, we can see that the idea of belonging to the “simple people” is itself a fiction or myth, which serves particular rhetorical, political, social, personal and emotional purposes. It functions symbolically in people’s accounts, which convey their feelings and beliefs but don’t always convey literal or factual representations of their history. All who claim to be simple are not so, and part of what oral histories (unintentionally) reveal is the increasing socioeconomic differentiation of kolkhozniks in the 2000s. How people discuss their history helps them adjust to and sometimes gloss over these growing disparities, as they claim an imaginative social solidarity with fellow villagers that has in fact been damaged if not lost, to the (perhaps unknowable) extent that it ever existed.

Even further, many of my interviewees’ tales can be seen to fit into a larger context of older global discourses about how enclosing the commons impoverishes rural populations—and how the growth of industrial capitalism sunders social ties. My interviewees were not necessarily directly aware of, say, English critics of the nineteenth century protesting the collateral or direct damage inflicted by the Industrial Revolution on local communities—though some of them may have been. But in (re-) fashioning themselves as collective victims of ‘90s privatizations, my 241 interviewees solidly place themselves in the camp of modernity’s dispossessed. We need to take their losses and disenfranchisment seriously and at the same time attend to the places where their historical narratives falter in explanatory power. This becomes clear when, for example, my interviewees say they never received land even when they did, and are currently successfully farming on that land.

There is an implicit binary in people’s accounts that suggests a competition of social groups and even narratives: the triumphant capitalist “bosses” (in retired fieldworker Galina’s terminology) “fight” (to use her brother Boris the retired carpenter’s word) the “simple people.”

In Chapter Three I discuss the failures of vision of even the sincere reformers, blinded by their ideological faith in private ownership and careless of the social cost of speedy farm reorganization. Their ambitions were nothing short of utopian. The emancipatory rhetoric proved hollow and seemed thus all the more hypocritical to my interviewees after the fact. Yet in order to imagine less ideological and less teleological futures for villagers, it may behoove us to note where both sets of narratives fall short: the capitalist ideologues’ and also the narratives of the dispossessed.

242

Sources Used

Oral History Interviews First-hand interviews with more than 200 people in nine regions of Central European Russia, including: farm workers, managers, and directors; self-employed private farmers; rural service, education, library, and “cultural” workers; government officials at rural, district, and regional levels; and academics; in the summer of 2006, and from summer 2007 to summer 2008.

Archival Sources

Nizhegorod Central Archive (Nizhnii Novgorod). Documents of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform, relating to: Farm history Farm budgets, annual reports, production reports and economic indicators Farm management composition and education District and regional agricultural indicators and statistics Regional agricultural management and reorganization during perestroika and the 1990s Land privatization and farm reorganization plans and progress Planning and implementing the Nizhnii Model Farm Reorganization Program District and regional investment into agriculture Economic and sociological analysis of reorganized (privatized) farms Data about new private farms

Shilovo Municipal Archive (Shilovo, Riazan’ region). Documents relating to: Rural conditions Demographic data, including household and population counts in villages Farm general assembly minutes

Riazan’ Central Archive (Riazan’). Documents relating to: Early Soviet agricultural history and economics Farm histories and reorganizations Farm administration and government decrees Farm economics, including production and sales figures and state investment

Krasnodar Former Party Archive (Krasnodar). Documents relating to: Soviet farm history and economics Regional and district agricultural management

Belorechensk Municipal Archive (Belorechensk, Krasnodar region). Documents relating to: Farm history and economics, including annual reports Farm administration, including state investment and decisions Farm director decisions Farm meeting notes 243 Farm privatizations, insolvencies and closures

Farm Corporate Reports and Documents Including published brochures and unpublished documents relating to farm history, economics, management, and meeting and protocol notes; given to me onsite at multiple farms by management.

Local Administration Documents Including unpublished documents relating to administrative territories, rural management and agricultural and rural conditions printed for me by rural administration at Nizhnii site; and economic indicators printed for me by Department of Agriculture officials in Nizhnii and Riazan’ cities.

Local Histories Including: two volumes locally created on World War II heroes from the villages and farm history at Riazan’ site; a university student’s essay on agricultural history using oral histories with villagers at Riazan’ site; and the kolkhoz “archive” containing photographs, a brief history and newspaper articles at Nizhnii site; copies given to me by locals (or photographed by me onsite).

Other Primary Sources Including historical reports and photographs given to me by Dr. Aleksandr Gavrilov from Shilovo museum (Riazan’ region); Photographs of archival documents on early rural history given to me by Dr. Aleksandr Kondrashev in Shilovo (Riazan’ region); Anthropological rural interview transcripts given to me by Dr.s Aleksandr and Aleksandra Manuylov in Krasnodar; copies of reports and sociological rural interview transcripts made available to me in Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences’ archives; and proprietary project information on Tula agricultural initiative given to me by Lukas Scharer, former head of project.

Economic and Demographic Statistics; Census and Agricultural Data Published by the Federal Statistics Office (Rosstat, Moscow); regional statistics offices in Riazan’ and Krasnodar cities (Riazan’stat and Krasnodarstat); and the district statistics office in Shilovo (Riazan’ region).

Newspapers and Periodicals Agrarnaia Reforma Birzha Plus Svoi Dom Golos (regional) Kommersant Daily Krasnodarskie Izvestiia Literaturnaia Kuban Mezhdunarodnii Zhizn Nizhegorodskaia Pravda Riazanskie Vedemosti Rossiskaia Gazeta Sel’skaia Zhizn Shilovskii Vestnik Sovetskaia Kuban’ The New York Times Vecherniaia Riazan’ Vestnik Privatizatsii Za Kommunisticheskii Trud 244 Zemle Nizhegorodskaia Zemlia i Trud

Video Copy of televised auction proceedings at Nizhnii site, given to me by Dr. Peter Lindner.

Online Sources District government website for Belorechensk (Krasnodar region): http://www.belorechensk.ru/view/all_info/

Regional government website for Nizhnii region: http://www.government-nnov.ru/?id=13726

Regional government website for Riazan’ region: http://www.ryazanreg.ru/economics/agroindustrial/

Regional government website for Krasnodar region: http://www.krasnodar.ru/en/content/565/show/14753/

Statistics from the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, available online through links at home pages: www.mcx.ru and www.gks.ru

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