State marionettes, phantom organisations or genuine movements? The paradoxical emergence of rural social movements in post-socialist Russia

Abstract

Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia today. This sudden burst of civil activity, however, raises questions as to how genuine and independent the emerging organisations are. Our research shows that many rural movements, agricultural associations, farm unions and rural political parties lack constituency, support the status quo and/or are actually counterfeits (what we call ‘phantom movement organisations’). With this analysis, we aim to explain the nature of social movements in the post-Soviet countryside and offer an original contribution to the theory on and practice of rural social movements.

Keywords:

• rural social movement organisations
• state-society relations
• rural development
• land grabbing
• Russia
• post-socialism

The research for this paper benefited from a grant provided by the Land Academy sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Economics and Innovation, as well as from a grant from the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI). We thank Jun Borras, Max Spoor, Gemma van der Haar, Kees Jansen, Marc Edelman and the reviewers for comments on earlier versions.

Notes

¹See Perrie (1972) about rural mobilisation during the Russian Revolution, and Visser (2010) on the present-day mobilisation problems.

²This finding was based on data collected from secondary sources and through in-depth interviews with representatives of rural social movement organisations (RSMOs). In total, this research analysed 30 RSMOs and agrarian political parties. A short summary is presented in Table 1. For a complete dataset please contact the authors.

³The political opportunity structure is defined here as the relative openness or closedness of the institutionalised political system, influenced by state-elite alignments and the state's capacity and propensity for repression (Tarrow 1998a, 1998b).

⁴In 2010, there were 261, 700 private (family) farms, which cultivated 11.4 percent of the agricultural land and contributed 8 percent of the gross agricultural product in Russia, and there were 16 million rural households which cultivated 5 percent of agricultural land and produced 45 percent of the gross agricultural product. The rest (nearly half of the gross agricultural product) was produced by LFEs, which control more than half of all agricultural lands in Russia.

⁵A longitudinal study conducted by O'Brien et al. (2011) indicated that the poverty rate was 49.5 percent in 1999, while the peak of rural poverty occurred in 1993 when 69 percent of the rural population had incomes lower than the subsistence level. The difference in numbers can be explained by various techniques used to define income and subsistence levels.

⁶In the Soviet Union, stealing from collective farms was institutionalised. Humphrey (1983, 136) discovered that the Soviet villagers used the ‘word theft to refer only to stealing from one another’. People presented pilfering at the farm as ‘recovering things that were rightfully theirs, either because they'd worked on those things (harvested corn, pulled potatoes, or collected fruit) for inadequate pay or because they had once owned the land for growing these things and they were not getting enough to live on’ (Humphrey 1983, 136). For an account of how foot-dragging and mediocre work was institutionalised at collective farms, see Nove (1973).

⁷The Agrarian Party of Russia re-emerged in 2012. Its re-emergence was caused by initiatives of some of its former members who did not want to continue the consolidation with United Russia. The newly emerged party refused the former left-wing ideology of agrarian socialism and moved to centrism. Currently, the party represents the interests of the agrarian elite and supports large-scale strong agricultural producers. We do not study this organisation in detail as it does not represent the interests of the rural population.

⁸Foreigners are not officially allowed to acquire agricultural land in Russia. However, they do so by means of their Russian subsidiaries, which are considered Russian domestic companies under the Russian law.

⁹Land grabbing is the large-scale acquisition of land or land-related rights and resources by a corporate, non-profit or public buyer for the purposes of resource extraction geared towards external consumers (whether external means simply off-site or foreign) (White et al. 2012). For more about land grabbing in Russia see Visser and Spoor (2011), Visser et al. (2012). The latter shows that land acquisitions take many forms, from deals within the framework of the law, to clearly illegal deals. See Visser (2013) for a critical examination of the Russian ‘land rush’ which markedly slowed down from 2009 onwards.

¹⁰Many farm enterprises in suburban areas (especially those located close to Moscow and St. Petersburg) were artificially bankrupted and the status of their lands was transformed into land for construction purposes. Investment in land for (sub) urban development brings quick and high profits.

¹¹For example, The Federal Programs: Social Development of the Village Until 2012, 2013, 2014; Sustainable Development of Rural Areas, 2014–2017 and for the Period Until 2020; The National Priority Project for the Development of an Agro-Industrial Complex (launched in 2006).

¹²Interview conducted in March 2011, in Moscow.

¹³In 2010, the authors tried to forge a connection between the Russian interregional social movement Krestyanskiy Front (Peasant Front) and the international peasant movement La Via Campesina in order to generate a knowledge transfer and facilitate the internationalisation of Krestyanskiy Front, which would give the organisation more power in fighting land grabbing and protection of peasants’ rights in Russia. However, the leadership of Krestyanskiy Front showed no interest in collaboration with the international movement, explaining this through the ongoing depeasantisation of the Russian countryside and the lack of rural dwellers who would share peasant values and a desire for food sovereignty and land ownership. The recent study by Spoor et al. (2013) deals with the lack of a discourse of food sovereignty among Russian villagers and the inability of the rural population to see their small-scale subsidiary farming as an alternative to large-scale industrial agriculture. However, the disconnection from international movements is not only caused by the absence of discourse among the Russian rural population or the decisions of the RSMOs’ leadership. The state prevents the internationalisation of social movement organisations. Furthermore, the Russian state is currently actively blocking some of the already internationalised social movements, such as RAIPON (Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North). In November 2012, Russia's Ministry of Justice ordered the closure of RAIPON, because of an ‘alleged lack of correspondence between the association's statutes and federal law’. RAIPON was closed for six months to adjust its statutes, and in March 2013 was revitalised (Staalesen 2013).

¹⁴Interview conducted in village Deulino, Sergiev Posad district, Moscow region, April 2013.

¹⁵Interview conducted in March 2011, in Moscow.

¹⁶Our own experiences in dealing with AKKOR suggest decreased accessibility and increased bureaucratization. For more than half a year, our research group tried to obtain an interview with the head of AKKOR, to no avail.

¹⁷Interview conducted in October 2010, in Moscow.

¹⁸Interview conducted in March 2011, in Dmitrov, Moscow region.

¹⁹Interview conducted in March 2011, in Odintsovo, Moscow region.

²⁰Interview conducted in March 2011, in Moscow

²¹Interview conducted in March 2011, via email.

²²Interview with Larionov, newspaper Klyuch, March 2008.

²³An interest group is virtually any voluntary association that seeks to publicly promote and create advantages for its cause. For more information about the differences between social movements and interest groups, see Meyer and Imig (1993).

²⁴Interview conducted in March 2011, in Odintsovo, Moscow region.

²⁵Interview conducted in March 2011, in Moscow.

²⁶At Russian Election Day, which took place on 8 September 2013, Partiya Vozrozhdeniya Sela was not allowed to participate in regional parliament elections by the Central Election Commission, due to the Party's lack of registered regional offices.

²⁷During the 2010–2012 period, an illegal development was underway at the Borodino museum reserve, where the Russian army fought Napoleon's troops in 1812. This area is considered a national heritage by Russians. The boundaries of the Borodino reserve have never been officially defined or registered due to lack of funds. This has also enabled corrupt officials to manipulate this ‘no man's land’. Nearly 100 private houses were built on the Field of Borodino, a federal-level historical reserve, despite the challenge posed by law enforcement bodies and cultural protection agencies (Visser and Mamonova 2011). In 2013, the court considered two criminal cases against the former head of the Borodino rural settlement, Maya Sklyueva. According to investigators, Sklyueva had taken advantage of her official position and, from January 2007 to March 2008, used forged documents to acquire land in the field of Borodino from the towns of Kosmovo and Old Village. Sklyueva is condemned to five years and six months’ imprisonment. The houses will be demolished.

²⁸Interview conducted March 2011, in Borodino, Mozhaysk district, Moscow region.

²⁹Interview conducted April 2013, in Sergiev Posad, Moscow region.

³⁰Federal Law No. 28-FZ ‘On Amending the Federal Law On Political Parties’, which was adopted in April 2012, has significantly reduced the list of requirements for establishing a political party and simplified the procedure of its registration.

³¹At the same time, taking into account the political indifference of rural dwellers, providing individual economic rewards to staff and participants is perhaps the only method to involve people in social movement activity.

³²‘In the most repressive regimes, resistance is largely limited to the ‘weapons of the weak’, according to O'Brien (1996, 47). We do not want to suggest that this is the case in Russia. There are various important differences from rural protests in China, such as the lack of a clear overarching state ideology that would enable framing the protests in legitimate terms, and the achievement of gradual, but fundamental changes in the system. The authors plan to make these issues, which go beyond the scope of this paper, the subject of another publication.

³³It should be noted that ‘state marionettes’ are not just present in authoritarian regimes and/or a sign of weak civil society. In the Netherlands, for instance, the country's communist party was established during the Cold War by the Dutch secret service to enable the monitoring and control of communist forces in society.

Additional information

Natalia Mamonova is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University, The Netherlands. The focus of her doctoral studies includes land grabbing, territorial conflicts, rural development and rural social mobilisation in the post-Soviet countryside (particularly in Russia and Ukraine). Her doctoral research is part of the project ‘Land grabbing in Russia: large-scale investors and post-Soviet rural Communities’ (20132016, European Research Foundation).

Oane Visser is an assistant professor in the Rural Development, Environment and Population Studies department at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University, The Netherlands. His research focuses on land grabbing, poverty and social movements in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries. Dr. Visser recently won a prestigious European Research Foundation (ERC) starting grant on ‘Land grabbing in Russia: large-scale investors and post-Soviet rural Communities’. Email: [email protected]