Household Production’s Nearest Neighbours: Small and ependent Farming in the Russian Countryside

The Russian countryside has a rich variety of small and independent farmers, in addition to household producers. While many appear in records, the existence of others is hidden or is misrepresented in official typologies. Like household producers, these other independent producers cover a spectrum from those that are engaged primarily in producing for personal consumption to those that are oriented to the market and may employ hired labour. Their legal status varies; some are formally registered with local authorities as a separate farm, business, or smallholding but others exist within the framework of a larger organization or on the basis of informal contracts. Among the former are peasant farm economies (krestyankie fermskie khozyaistva) hereafter private farms, formed under the provisions of the land reform, small specialized agricultural businesses, and the allotments and smallholdings of urban residents. Among the latter is a rich variety of permanent and temporary businesses that use land under sharecropping and other rental agreements negotiated with larger farms and local authorities. They include the ranches (koshary) and peripatetic teams or rental brigades (arendnie brigady) described in the previous chapter, and more orthodox types of tenant farms. The justification for pulling this mixed bag together into a single chapter is that they either overlap or share some crucial characteristic with household producers: it may be the small scale of their operations or that much of their activity takes place ‘in the shadows’, or that like household producers they can be simultaneously involved in producing for their own consumption and for the market. Their existence suggests the need to examine the ways in which capital is reworking economic and social relationships in rural Russia, inside and outside existing institutions and the formal structures of power. Soviet collective and state farms were not unchanging institutions; their management structure, forms of labour organization, methods of remuneration, and forward and backward linkages evolved over the course of the sixty years after collectivization.

Ethno-cultural Differentiation in Household Production

Russia is a multi-ethnic country with more than two hundred different ‘officially recognized’ ethnic groups. Of these, twenty-seven have been given administrative recognition in the form of national republics, which together with non-ethnically based oblasts and krais (regions and territories) make up the Russian Federation. The Great Russians are numerically the most dominant group accounting for 80 per cent of the population. Next come the Tatars at 5.5 million, or 4 per cent of the total, and then Ukrainians, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Chechens, Armenians, and other much less numerous groups. Soviet nationality policy did much to preserve ethnic identities in Russia, even though these were supposed to be transcended by a higher ‘Soviet socialist’ identity. When the USSR collapsed it did so along ethnic lines, and the post-Soviet Russian government was forced to accept ethnoterritorialism as an organizing principle of the new federal state (Smith, 1990, 1999). The major nationalities are not spatially discrete; many members of the most numerous nationalities live outside their republic and in only a minority of the national republics is the titular ethnic group the majority population. However, at lower scales, the picture is different and spatial segregation along ethnic lines can be marked, especially in rural areas. The southern steppe, describing an arc stretching from the Ukrainian border in the west to the regions beyond the River Volga in the east is, in fact, a veritable ethnic mosaic. Travellers who visited the southern and eastern steppe of European Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries commented upon the variety of national and religious groups of different descent settled in the area. Apart from the Russians who had come south during the protracted conquest of the steppe, people were to be found there of German, Swedish, Armenian, Bulgarian, Serbian,Walachian, Moldavian, Polish, Jewish, and Greek origin together with the descendants of the traditional steppe dwellers, the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Kirghiz, Kalmyks, and Mordvinians. The ethnic diversity of the settlers in the steppe was matched by the diversity of their cultural mores and religions.

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.

The Environmental Resources of Rural People’s Farms

In Fig. 4.1 we show diagrammatically the contrasting relationships and dependencies of rural households in the forested region of European Russia, north of Moscow and in the black earth steppe to the south. In this and the following chapters we analyse the various components making up these food production systems, beginning with the land. At the heart of personal subsidiary farming in rural Russia is the household plot or uchastok; the small parcel of land lying within the boundary of rural settlements on which rural dwellers may grow crops and construct outbuildings. Ever since the translation of Karl Wadekin’s (1973) seminal work, the uchastok has been referred to in English language literature as the ‘private plot’, and ‘personal subsidiary farming’ as ‘private farming’. The underlying conceit of the Western view, which it must be remembered grew out of the Cold War ideological battles between communism and market capitalism, was that the private plot was proof of the efficacy of individualism and private property over collectivism and social ownership. In reality, of course, household plots were not ‘private’ in the neoclassical understanding of property rights, since they could be neither bought nor sold (nor, indeed, was there much protection for their users from their alienation) and the food individuals produced did not originate exclusively from the plot but drew on other environmental resources, access to which was covered by a variety of often ill-defined rights and obligations. Since 1991, there have been some important improvements in property rights for the rural population. In particular, they have acquired title deeds to their plots (although there are size limits and their conveyance has to take place according to normative prices) and the use of other resources has, in some cases, been subject to legal regulation or (re)codified. At the local level, land use often remains governed more by custom than by the provisions of statutes and codes. It thus makes sense when discussing rural people’s access to resources to define ‘property rights’ broadly as a field of public claims and entitlements over a variety of resources, rather than as a bundle of clearly defined rights.

The Geographical Diversity of Rural Household Production

In the first chapter we introduced the reader to a variety of different types of household agricultural producers and we also suggested that the character of production is shaped by specific sets of circumstances that determine what they produce, how they produce it, and how they dispose of the product. In the next four chapters we explore these ‘specific circumstances’ and their interaction to produce distinctive geographies of household production. We begin, in this chapter, with the geographer’s traditional explanatory variables—physical environment, distance from the market, and population resources (see also Nefedova and Pallot, 2002; Pallot and Nefedova, 2003a). The impressive contribution that individual rural households make to domestic food production in the Russian Federation does not fall evenly between regions; were all households to produce the same range and volume of produce, variations in the size and composition of the rural population, the level of urbanization, and the volume of output from other farms would still create a geographical pattern. The importance of this background context is obvious when comparing Figs. 3.1 and 3.2, which are two different ways of representing the regional contribution of the household sector to the Russian domestic food economy. The first figure shows household food production as a percentage share of the value of agricultural output by regions and the second, the per capita output in tons. In the first map, regions with low population densities and/or with a struggling large farm sector, such as in regions in north and east Siberia and the Volga- Urals region, stand out for the size (over 60%) of the contribution the household sector makes. In the middle rank are regions where the household sector might have been expected to make a large contribution to total production because of a favourable physical environment and dynamically growing population, but whose performance is muted because of the productivity of the large farm sector. These include Russia’s main cereal-producing regions in the European south. Finally, a below average contribution (dropping to under 40%) is made in the cluster of oblasts in the ‘old-settled’ European Centre where both large and small farming are struggling to overcome the effects of decades of depopulation and underinvestment in rural infrastructure.

The Practice and Theory of Personal Subsidiary Farming in Soviet and Russian Agriculture

The story the official statistics tell about production in the household sector is remarkable for a country as urbanized and industrialized as the Russian Federation. As Table 2.1 shows, this former industrial giant and major oil producer derives 51 per cent of the value of its agricultural produce from farms that, on average, are under one hectare in size and, according to official land use statistics, occupy just 6.6 per cent of the country’s agricultural land (Sel' skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004: 56). At the end of the Soviet period personal subsidiary farming was responsible for 26 per cent of the USSR’s agricultural output, a smaller share than now but still significant for what was at that time the world’s second largest industrial economy (Agrarnaya reforma v Rossii, 2000: 204). The post-Soviet expansion in the sector’s relative contribution mainly took place in the early 1990s after which it maintained a steady but more modest increase from the second half of the 1990s to 2002. It fell back in subsequent years but in 2004 was still contributing twice as much as before the USSR’s collapse. In West European countries such small-scale agricultural activity supplements production on large farms or it caters to niche markets. In Russia, the pattern is different and small farms are the principal producers of certain staple foodstuffs such as potatoes and vegetables and equal partners in the production of meat and dairy products. This is shown in Table 2.2. In 1990, before the collapse of communism, personal subsidiary farms accounted for 30 per cent of the country’s vegetables and fruit and between 13 and 42 per cent of the beef, pork, and mutton; collective and state farms were also major producers of these products (ibid. 205). The complementarity between large and small farming was thus a feature of the Soviet period, but it has been brought into sharper relief in the post-communist period. As a result, the importance of people’s farms in the agri-food system in the Russian Federation today can be properly understood only within the context of changes in large farming.

Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others

We met Ana Petrovna, an elderly woman in a padded jacket and shawl, on a roadside verge with her goat. She was pleased to pass the time telling her story to the visitors to her village, one hundred miles to the west of Moscow city. Ana Petrovna has been retired from her job as a farm worker for many years and has lived alone since the death of her second husband. She receives a pension of 900 roubles a month (about £20 sterling at 2003 exchange rates) of which just under half goes on paying for utilities and other services. Were it not for the vegetable patch (ogorod) next to her house and her goat Masha, who supplies her with milk, soured cream, and cheese, it would be difficult for Ana Petrovna to live on this income. Her allotment is small—four ‘one-hundredths’ or sotki (where one sotka is 100 sq. m). It is given over mainly to potatoes, but there are also several rows of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and cabbages, two apple trees, raspberry canes, and redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes. On her 400 sq. m Ana Petrovna can produce enough food for the year. In early autumn much of her effort goes into salting and preserving the output of her plot to get her through the winter months, which she adds to the mushrooms and berries, gathered in the forests around her village, that she dried and bottled earlier in the summer. Ana Petrovna rarely eats meat; when she was younger she used to keep a cow and a calf for slaughtering each year, but this is beyond her now. She buys staples that she cannot produce herself in the small village shop: groats, bread, sugar, vegetable oil, and chocolate for an occasional treat. Ana Petrovna has a daughter living in Moscow who comes to the village during the potato-picking season to help with the harvest. She returns to Moscow laden with potatoes and vegetables even though, as she tells her mother, they are not expensive to buy in the city, even for a teacher on a low salary.

Household Food Production—What Next?

The previous chapters have shown how diverse are the patterns of household food production in Russia; most rural households grow a mixture of vegetables, roots, and fruit and might keep some poultry and small and large livestock for personal consumption, but many also have developed one or more branches geared to the market. Specialization is a feature of the post-Soviet ‘personal subsidiary economy’ and it has been associated with a deepening geographical division of labour in the sector. In this concluding chapter, we examine the extent to which the degree of market engagement of households maps onto the patterns of specialization and diversification we have described in the previous pages. The aim is to shed some light on the questions posed at the beginning of this book about the ‘nature’ of household production and its place in Russia’s evolving agri-food economy. It seems to us self-evident that the degree and character of household production’s subsumption to the market is the key to understanding the different directions in which it might be taken in the future. There is still little consensus among theorists of the peasantry about capitalism’s impact on small producers, but few would disagree that the market is the dominant transformative process whether, as in the case of households located in the suburbs of the major cities, it is to bind them ever more tightly into the market nexus or, as in the northern peripheries, its very absence reproduces their marginality. In the villages in which we conducted our surveys we encountered households positioned at different points along a ‘market’ spectrum. At one end there were those that were producing food exclusively to meet their own and their family’s consumption needs. These households sell surpluses, if they have them, in order to earn a money income to buy the staples they cannot produce themselves, but this is not their principal motivation. The noted Russian rural sociologist Vinogradskii (1999), among others, has identified the existence of spontaneous non-monetary networks cooperation developing among rural households aimed at achieving food security, but even in the most remote places we visited, we found that primitive markets did exist.