Household Production and the Large Farm Sector

Household production varies according to the range of resources available to it; different environments give rise to different types of production, setting limits upon what can be produced. But as we saw in the previous chapter, in order to gain access to the environmental resources they need, households are at the mercy of a variety of gatekeepers that include local authorities, large farm managements, other private landowners, and the community at large. Among the other actors with which rural households have to interact, by far the most important in most regions are the large farms or ‘agricultural enterprises’. In this respect, there is continuity with the Soviet period when the managements of collective and state farms determined the social, cultural, and political character of rural places and the economic welfare of the rural population. Collective and state farms were like ‘company towns’, but with their authority extending over large territories and embracing a number of populated places. Figure 5.1 shows the territorial arrangement typical of a collective farm during the Soviet period. Since 1991, many of their former areas of authority, both formal and informal, have been withdrawn from large farms; they have lost control of land under rural settlements and they have reduced influence over a range of local services where their interventions used to be decisive. To advocates of market reforms, the retreat of large farms from these areas is a welcome rationalization of the agrarian economy and part of the process of redirecting farm activities towards producing agricultural products by the most efficient means possible. But this retreat has often left a gap that cashstrapped local authorities and private enterprise have not yet been able to plug, so that rural people’s experience of the market transition is of the loss of formal employment and a reduction in the level of services they previously enjoyed. In this situation, it is not surprising that rural Russia has been the scene of a muted, but real, contestation of market reform on the part of people intent on defending their access to resources and services to which they still believe they are entitled.