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Abstract
The continuous zone of settlement long considered a defining feature of Europe, is undergoing spatial framentation along its eastern periphery. Massive areas of rural depopulation have emerged in many regions of European Russia, including its heartland. As a result of farmland abandonment, no fewer than 20 million hectares of arable land are already deserted in European Russia, and more will be left behind in the foreseeable future. The ongoing spatial fragmentation results in two diverging structures, identified on the basis of a unique district-structured database: an emerging archipelago of commercial farming, and the so-called black holes, the likely loci of soon-to-be-abandoned land. While land abandonment is by no means a uniquely Russian phenomenon, one of its preconditions in Russia is that farmland was extended beyond environmentally reasonable limits. The rural depopulation naturally leads to the contraction of farmland. Because land that is likely to be retained under cultivation is a better match to people's actual ability to cultivate it, fewer resources are going to be wasted, and the overall efficiency of Russia's agriculture is likely to rise as a result.
Acknowledgment
The research leading to this article was funded by the National Science Foundation (Award BCS-0134109). Extremely constructive comments by two anonymous reviewers and by Dr. Donald Dahmann greatly improved the manuscript.
Notes
Source: Based on data provided by D. N. Lukhmanov (Citation Gorod i derevnia 2001, 229–48, 298–302).
Source: Citation Demographic Yearbook of the Russian Federation (1995, Citation19; 2001, 21) and Citation Chislennost' i migratsii (2002, 17).
Calculated by the authors based on the official editions of Goskomstat.
Sources: Citation Sel'skoye khoziaistvo v Rossii (1998, 31, 50) and Citation Sel'skoye khoziaistvo v Rossii (2002, 33, 52).
Source: Calculated by the authors on the basis of Goskomstat's official statistics.
Source: Calculated by the authors on the basis of Citation Narodnoye khoziaistvo RSFSR (1971, Citation161–68); Regiony Rossii (1999, Citation289–92); Sel'skoye Khoziaistvo (2000, Citation201–03); Demographic Yearbook of the Russian Federation (2002).
Source: Calculated by the authors; sample: 43 regions of European Russia (excluded are Komi, Karelia, Ingush, Chechen, and Dagestan Republics and Moscow, Leningrad, and Astrakhan' Regions); coefficients are significant at the 0.05 level.
Source: Calculations by the authors; coefficients are significant at the .05 level.
1. According to the head of the Russian Federal Border Control Service, “the breakup of the USSR has shifted the border back to where it was in the 16th century.”http://www.strana.ru/print/182141.html (accessed 28 May 2003).
2. Terry Jordan considered a dense transportation network to be one of the formative characteristics of Europeanness (CitationJordan-Bychkov and Bychkova-Jordan 2002). Jordan's view can be traced to some major West European (e.g., CitationAlfred Hettner 1907) and Russian (e.g., CitationPiotr Semionov 1892) scholars.
3. This sense of remoteness is poignantly captured in the poetic Russian diminutive “glubinka” (from glubina=depth) reserved for outlying areas. Of course, a sparse network of vibrant urban cores creates this perception in the first place, and the substandard condition of roads and other means of communication adds to it. In Russia, not just Siberia, whose space is torn apart by distances, areas of old colonization and settlement have not been served by an adequate number of urban centers. By “adequate,” we mean able to cast the web of socioeconomic exchange that would integrate the surrounding rural areas.
4. In contrast to Bassin, though, whose main objective was to show that the environmental determinism does not have political identity of its own but just “can be used toward explicit ideological ends” by Marxists and right-wing conservatives alike, we tend to think that exonerating “geographical factors as causative agents” in a geographical publication is much like forcing an open door.
5. Full citation from the English translation: “The development of capitalism in depth in the old, long-inhabited territories is retarded because of the colonization of the outer regions. The solution of the contradictions inherent in, and produced by, capitalism is temporarily postponed because of the fact that capitalism can easily develop in breadth. For example, the simultaneous existence of the most advanced forms of industry and of semi-medieval forms of agriculture is undoubtedly a contradiction. Had Russian capitalism had nowhere to expand beyond the bounds of the territory already occupied at the beginning of the post-Reform period, this contradiction between capitalist large-scale industry and the archaic institutions in rural life (the tying of the peasants to the land, etc.) would have had to lead quickly to the complete abolition of these institutions, to the complete clearing of the path for agricultural capitalism in Russia. But the possibility (for the mill-owner) of seeking and finding a market in the outer regions in process of colonization, and the possibility (for the peasant) of moving to new territory, mitigates the acuteness of this contradiction and delays its solution” (CitationLenin 1956, 653).
6. Comparisons in crop harvesting took into account all cereals, potatoes, and sugar beets; their yields per hectare were attached weights equal to their respective percentage shares in sown area.
7. To calculate integral livestock density, animal unit mouths were used whereby cattle were assigned a statistical weight of 1.0; horses, 1.5; pigs, 0.25; sheep and goats, 0.1.
8. Here is a cognitively similar formula from another work on Russia: “Historians are understandably attracted to the various uprisings and rebellions which took place over the centuries in Russia. These are ‘events’ which left extensive paper trails, while the ordinary, everyday slavishness of Russians constituted a distinct nonevent. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, however, the rule is no less interesting than the exception” (CitationRancour-Laferriere 1995, 11).
9. He also showed that in the USSR the best conditions were in the West (West Ukraine being the very best) and the worst conditions were in fact in parts of Russia. According to Field's thermal (degree-months) and moisture (percentage of potential evapotranspiration) ratings, Moscow is equivalent to Sault Ste. Marie, MI; and Rostov-Don, in the premier agricultural region of Russia, to Pierre, SD (CitationField 1968, 8). Both American locations are relatively marginal in the American agrarian ecumene.
10. The ideologically charged atmosphere of the Cold War may have overemphasized political-economic reasoning at the expense of something as politically neutral and eternal as natural environment. It might be that the stigma of environmental determinism, “this veritable geographic swearword” (Lewthwaite 1966, as cited in CitationBassin 1993, 3), was at fault as well. However, the fight with determinism was conducted within geography, while historians and other social scientists, who for the most part contributed to Sovietology, seem to have remained largely unaffected. For example, CitationRichard Pipes's (1974) hallmark book Russia under the Old Regime, has a very strong environmental streak as conveyed in the book's opening chapter, “The Environment and its Consequences.”
11. Total farmland includes arable land (cropland and fallow), as well as pastures and meadows.
12. The extreme north of European Russia includes Karelia, Komi, Archangel, and Murmansk regions.
13. CitationIoffe and Nefedova (1997b) expressed the view that the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union would not have been successful without the formative communal experience of Russian peasantry. Today the significance of that experience cannot be overemphasized. With peasants now free to move out or join other modes of farming, staying on the collective farm is an opportunity to benefit from a certain safety net.
14. These data have to be taken with caution, as the percentage share of household operations in Russia's gross agricultural output may be significantly exaggerated. Whereas, prior to reforms, there was a tendency to inflate the collective farms' share of output and suppress that of household farming, there is an opposite trend right now. First, household operations are no longer deemed ideologically inappropriate. Second, their combined output record in every district is assessed on the basis of small samples encompassing no more than 0.5 percent of households. Third and most important, in today's Russia, the household farms' output is not subject to taxes, no matter whether the household produces for itself or for market. This, as a matter of fact, artificially suppresses the spread of registered family farms, as their output, just as that of collective farms, is taxed, so there is a proclivity to conceal it.
15. Curiously, in the U. S., John F. Hart acknowledged that the census concept of total cropland is a better measure of effective agricultural land than is total farmland (CitationHart 2001, 525).
16. Hoover Index, 
(CitationLong and Nucci 1997); in this particular case, pi t is the regional proportion of European Russia's land area and ai is the regional proportion of European Russia's cropland. Included in this calculation are all regions of European Russia but the extreme north. Ht=0 would mean perfectly even regional distribution of cropland, while Ht=100 would mean concentration of the entire cropland within one region.
17. About one year after this assessment was first made (CitationIoffe and Nefedova 2001b), it was unexpectedly corroborated by Russian Minister of Agriculture, Alexei Gordeyev, who mentioned that “in Russia there are currently about 20 million hectares of abandoned arable land” (CitationSivkova 2003).
18. While the most salient features of agricultural variance (such as output, specialization, and agricultural resources) are visible through a more generalized lens involving oblasts and ethnic republics that we collectively refer to as “regions,” these are too vast to capture the actual predictors of productivity. In European Russia, the size of the average region is 75,000 sq. km, and most such regions are monocentric, have noticeable internal contrasts in their capital cities' accessibility, and in soil fertility as well. Any data structured by these regions would therefore blur significant contrasts in what proved to be the major predictors of agricultural productivity in Russia. On the other hand, considering 27,000 collective farms with the average size of 5.4 thousand hectares, or 54 sq. km, including 2.5 thousand hectares of cropland, would involve a multitude of factors of largely random nature, including quality of agricultural managers. Therefore, aggregation of the data to the intermediate–district level seems to suit our needs the best.
19. The unique nature of this databank is in that in Russia, there are practically no centralized sources of district-structured data, published or unpublished. The only exception to this rule, a five-volume data book Municipal Russia (CitationLexin and Shvetsov 2001), is deficient in agricultural data. The collection of our data bank on the basis of regional data books was an exceedingly time-consuming and tedious task undertaken by Tatyana Nefedova.
20. Whereas, the “NCZ” is a verbatim translation from the Russian “Nechernozemnaya Zona,” a set toponym denoting what the area in question does not possess (the Chernozem soils), the South is, for us, the most succinct way to label the entirety of the remaining districts.
21. For comparison, the reported 2000 average grain yield in the EU was 5.7 t/ha, 2.8 t/ha in Canada, and 2.5 t/ha in Poland (http://www.fao.org).
22. For comparison, the 2000 average milk yield per cow was 7,332 kg in Canada, 5,918 kg in the EU, and 4269 kg in Poland (http://www.fao.org).
23. On average, the order of neighborhood and physical distance from the respective district center to the regional capital is as follows: The centers of second-order neighbors are 65 km away from the regional capital; for the third-order neighbors, the average respective distance is 116 km; for the fourth-order neighbors it is 173 km; for the fifth-order neighbors the distance is 235 km; for the sixth-order neighbors, it is 300 km; and for the seventh-order neighbors, it is 394 km.
24. Population potential (Vi) is a measure of the nearness or accessibility of a given mass of people to a point; 
, where i # j, Pi is population, in this case, of a city I, and Dij is distance between the cities. On an isopleth map of urban population potential, each rural district was characterized by value of V in its centroid (CitationJohnston et al. 1981, 264–65).
25. This seems to reflect a problem endemic to practical applications of well-known approaches to marginal situations in agriculture. “Perhaps the most commonly accepted definition of a marginal agricultural situation is one which is at the margin of economic viability. Agricultural marginalization could be considered to be a process driven by a combination of social, economic, political, and environmental factors, by which certain areas of farmland cease to be viable under an existing land use and socio-economic structure… Marginalization takes a variety of forms and occurs at different scales, ranging from the individual patch to land to sizeable regions. It could eventually lead to abandonment” (CitationBrouwer et al. 2003). Note that starting out from a steady state (a “marginal agricultural situation”), the above definition then turns out to be process centered. A seemingly effortless metamorphosis becomes a problem when it comes to measurement and forecast.
26. For grain yields, districts receiving below 1 t/ha (that is, barely recovering the physical mass of seeds) were assigned 1; districts with yields in excess of 1 t/ha but below the regional average were assigned 2; those between the regional average and the bioclimatic potential benchmark (explained earlier) were assigned 3; those with yields above both the regional average and the bioclimatic “norm” were assigned 4; finally, 5 was assigned when grain yield was over 2.5 t/ha. Milk yields were estimated accordingly: districts receiving more than 4 t per cow (a technological benchmark) were assigned 5; those below 4 t but in excess of 3 t (which arguably ought to be received if a cow simply doesn't stay hungry and mistreated) were assigned 4; districts with less than 3 t per cow but in excess of Russia's average (2,138 kg) were assigned 3; those below average but in excess of 1.5 t were assigned 2; finally districts with milk yields below 1.5 t per cow were assigned 1. The ordinal scale for decrease in cattle was arranged in such a way: 1, if by 2000 only 20 percent of the 1990 number of cattle had remained; 2, if from 20 percent to 40 percent had been retained (40 percent is Russia's average for collective farms); 3, if 40 percent-60 percent; 4, if 60–100 percent; and 5, if more than 100 percent, i.e., increase in cattle head.
27. A couple of relevant observations develop this theme. During our three-week data collection trip in Kasimov district (Riazan oblast) in the summer of 2000, we could not come across a single adult male after 5 p.m. on a weekday who would not be blind drunk. There are seven collective farms in the district, six of which have been producing at a loss for years and, indeed, decades. These farms, however, are vehicles of collective survival. The chair of district administration acknowledged this when he said, “We cannot disband them because people will go under as there is nothing but farmland around.” During the summer of 2000, 140 rural villages of Pskov Oblast remained without electricity for weeks in a row because the locals pulled down wires and sold them as nonferrous scrap. Russia currently earns $500 million a year from its export. So with foreign trade denationalized, myriad illicit buyers are dispatched to different localities to recruit illicit sellers. In most cases, however, what is being dismantled by local “volunteers” is not crucial for everyday life support. In Pskov, one of the most depopulated Russian regions, they have apparently crossed that line. According to Governor Mikhailov of Pskov, between April and July 2000, as many as 800 people in his region perished pulling down wires! This is at least twice as many as those killed in combat in Chechnya during the same time (CitationIvanov 2000). For something like this to happen, one needs a particular social environment. We tend to think that events like those in Pskov (and they are by no means unique) overshadow much of the ongoing debate over the fate of agrarian reform in Russia, which focuses on the obstacles to reform of a political, legal, managerial, ownership, and fiscal nature. The quality of human capital available for commercial farming, while itself not entirely independent of externally imposed conditions, at any given point in time has the potential to thwart any reform initiative whatsoever.
28. Unlike the ethnic republics of North Caucasus, here, collective farms have not weakened, and the republics managed to retain more cattle than any other region of Russia. This has arguably become possible due to the regional leaders' wresting concessions from the federal government to withhold some lucrative corporate entities (such as oil refineries and automobile factories) in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan from federal taxation. Taxes were instead diverted into the regional funds and could successfully serve local, including rural needs.
29. One such perceived threat is associated with consuming too much imported food (CitationWegren, Belen'kiy, and Patsiorkovski 2003).