The Land Needs a Master?: Searching for an ‘Ideal Peasant’ in Post-Soviet Russia

• In Event: Non-Liberation, or "The Tradition of All the Dead Generations Weighs Like a Nightmare on the Brain of the Living"

Abstract

The paper examines the history of post-Soviet land reforms in Russia to uncover the persistent dream of an ‘entrepreneurial peasant,’ a dream that is undergirded by a deep-rooted productivism and expansionism that are at the core of Russia’s land ethic. While the reforms of the early 1990s responded to a general bottom-up call for land redistribution, the state itself had a more specific goal in mind – creating a new class of small landowners and independent farmers. The state repeatedly failed to reach this goal largely due to poorly executed policies, bureaucratic inertia, and the economic hardships of the 1990s. Its agents, however, saw and continue to see these failures as a problem of the ‘human capital:’ the inability of rural residents, corrupted by the socialist experience and its ineffective land management, to set up thriving agricultural businesses. Having lost their faith in the ‘peasants’ within Russia, they decided to look for them abroad and resettle the families of Russian Old Believers – exemplary land stewards and successful farmers – from South America to the Far East. Is it possible for Russia to shake off its centuries-long commitment to productivism? If so, how would its land policies change in response?

Author

• Rusana Novikova, UC Berkeley