Reforming the Nation: Law and Land in Post-Soviet Ukraine

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Reforming the Nation: Law and Land in Post-Soviet Ukraine Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f17f37v Author Eppinger, Monica Elizabeth Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Reforming the Nation: Law and Land in Post-Soviet Ukraine by Monica Elizabeth Eppinger A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Laura Nader, Chair Professor Paul Rabinow Professor Alexei Yurchak Professor Robert Cooter Fall 2010 Abstract Reforming the Nation: Law and Land in Post-Soviet Ukraine by Monica Elizabeth Eppinger Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Laura Nader, Chair This dissertation investigates law and land reform in post-Soviet Ukraine, focusing on the period after passage of the 2001 Land Code privatizing agricultural land ownership. The line of inquiry follows how legal reorganization of physical space – namely, the creation of national territory and private property -- reconfigures the social and affects performance of the self in contemporary Ukraine. This inquiry is situated in investigation of speech acts, place, and practice. These, in turn, lend insight into interrelationships between subjectivity, sovereignty, and power. I analyze law, commonly thought of as a genre of “performative utterance,” as an emergent frame of performance in a context defined by rupture. The principal field sites in which I conducted this fieldwork are Parliament, decollectivized collective farms, and urban properties. In tracing the effects of land privatization, I look at an antecedent social form, the collective farm, and find practices adhering to several subsequent social forms arising in its wake: confiscation, provision, and the sovereign; recollectivization and the corporation; self-sufficiency and the family; roaming and the commons. In my analysis of shelter, urban spaces provide the setting for performances of self and sociability. After exploring a Soviet form of friendship, the informal kollektiv, I describe links between its post-Soviet eclipse and certain changed background structures like the state and its legal guarantees, private property, and new experiences of time. In addition to property, I propose several settings for performance of different forms of the self, including: the present as a shelter for the past, and the synthetic future as a shelter for speech acts neither performative nor parasitic, but still creative of a discursive space for a democratic polity. I investigate ways that law and other discursive practices in post-Soviet Ukraine mark boundaries and produce spaces of inclusion and exclusion. The Soviet Union was defined, in part, by common spaces. This dissertation investigates what happened to forms of the social and the self when those common spaces fragmented. 1 Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: Food Chapter 1 The Object of Decollectivization Chapter 2 Khlib: Grain and Wheat, State and Society Chapter 3 Beets: Sweet Corruption Chapter 4 Vegetables: Family Plots and Parcels Chapter 5 Honey, Mushrooms, Berries: The Wild, the Domestic, and the Right to Roam Mobility Part II: Shelter Chapter 7 Informal Kollektiv: Unravelling of a Setting for the Self Chapter 8 The Place of the Past in the Present: Technologies of Remediation Chapter 9 Rule of Law in 2-D: Europe, the Dissolving State, and the Flat-Screen Synthetic Future Conclusion i Preface This dissertation reflects experience and fieldwork in Ukraine at several different times and under different auspices. I first lived in Ukraine from February 1995 to June 1997 working in the United States Embassy as a U.S. diplomat. Ukraine had only become an independent state in December 1991. Most state institutions in foreign affairs were at very formative stages; many institutions of multi-party governance were as well. Ukrainians themselves still seemed generally stunned at the unexpected emergence of an independent polity. It was an exciting time. For the first nine months, I worked in the Consular Section adjudicating travel permission requests. For the rest of my time, fifteen months, I worked in the Political Section, where my primary responsibility was to act as Embassy liaison to the Ukrainian parliament (Rada). At my level, the job is for the most part journalistic. One has a portfolio of institutions and issues to follow and on which to write cables reporting developments back to Washington. I was fortunate. The year that I was the Rada liaison, the Ukrainian parliament drafted and passed Ukraine‟s post-Soviet Constitution, and it was my job to become acquainted with parliamentarians, to find out what they were thinking, to understand their choices and omissions. I chose Ukraine for several reasons. The first was that, the situation in Ukraine seemed very unsettled. It was not clear whether Ukrainians would opt for integration with structures and institutions connecting countries outside of the former Soviet space (from free markets, NATO, the WTO, to educational exchanges), structures usually referred to as “Western” in tacit acknowledgement of going patterns of hegemony; or whether Ukrainians would choose would turn inward and refuse connections outside of their borders; or, stay tightly integrated with Russia, its neighbor to the East whose capital, Moscow, had long governed Ukraine‟s territory, both under the Soviet Union and beforehand in the Russian empire. Of all the former Soviet states outside of the Baltic countries, Ukraine seemed most like the “swing state.” Would the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, reconstitute? That was what was at stake in Ukraine. The second reason, related to the first, was that working in a U.S. Embassy in Ukraine seemed more likely to make a marginal impact on important trajectories than serving at a U.S. Embassy in a country more settled on a track, like Italy or Singapore. Finally, I had trained in Russian language since middle school and anthropology in college, hoping to become a diplomat and work on ameliorating Cold War tensions. The Cold War had ended, leaving in its place an open question. I wanted to investigate, and to play a positive role if I could. I repeat this catalogue of tropes and categories here without much reflection, as an honest representation of the straight-forwardness with which I undertook my analysis then. The most critical thinking applied by that diplomat, making that decision, could be summarized in this: I did not presume I had the knowledge or the right to indicate which way Ukrainians should decide; I went committed not to reform, but to an effort to understand and to report. ii What I found was an open-ended place, really funky, full of surprises, warmth, intelligence, and good humor. I was hooked. I also found lots of U.S. personnel, a few U.S. government employees of USAID and scores of other private citizens, working on lucrative contracts for USAID, who were in Ukraine precisely to reform it. My joke at the Embassy was that, if one wanted to be the smart kid in the room, in response to any question, raise your hand and answer either “Markets” or “Democracy.” Those two were presented as the panacea for all that ailed Ukraine. That, too, fascinated me. It was my first immersion into the culture of American lawyers (and economists). I wondered if the emperor had any clothes. I traveled back to Ukraine a couple of times after my tour of duty ended, once in transit during a work trip to Central Asia and once for a two-week vacation, in 1998. When I left the diplomatic corps in 2001, I left to take up a dual degree in law and anthropology, to follow what happened in Ukraine after it took the path of markets and democracy and to investigate more fundamentally, does the emperor have any clothes? My fieldwork started with three years of legal education at Yale Law School. My fieldwork continued in Ukraine. My second period of relatively long-term residence in Ukraine was a six-week stay, from late May to early July 2002, nine months after the new Land Code passed the parliament privatizing land ownership for the first time since the Soviet Union dissolved. Finally, after some training in anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, I returned to Ukraine for fifteen months of fieldwork from September 2006 – December 2007. That summarizes the periods of residence and inquiry that inform this work. In the course of my last fifteen years‟ engagement with Ukraine, the ambient language of its capital city has slid from Russian to Ukrainian (eroding but not displacing the city‟s indigenous surzhik, a creole which mixes the two). The official designation of the city, transliterated into English, has also switched from the Russian Kiev to the Ukrainian Kyiv. I use both spellings in this dissertation to indicate time, linguistic milieu, or mindset in which an event or conceptualization took place; to mark with some precision the frequency with which identity codes switch in Ukraine these days; and to give the reader lived experience of some amount of the messiness and play involved in emergence and creation of a new place through, in part, speech acts. Regarding human subjects, with only a few exceptions at the express permission of those quoted, I have used pseudonyms throughout. iii iv Acknowledgements This dissertation, a product of discourse, exists thanks to several collective formations, kollektivy, that have been instrumental in its formation. I wish gratefully to acknowledge those organizations that provided financial support for this project. The Olin Program in Law and Social Science of Yale Law School, the Yale Agrarian Studies Program, the Yale European Studies Program, and U.C. Berkeley Program in Eurasian and Eastern European Studies (BPS) contributed summer research grants.

Load more