Post-socialist agricultural cooperatives in Russia: a case study of top-down cooperatives in the Belgorod region

Abstract

Through a study of agricultural service cooperatives in Russia's Belgorod region, this article addresses two gaps in the literature: first, the dearth of empirical studies on cooperatives in post-socialist Russia; second, the lack of attention to top-down cooperatives in the global literature, and the overly negative approach to the topic in the few extant studies. Whereas state attempts to establish agricultural cooperatives in Russia in a top-down fashion have largely failed, such cooperatives have sprung up widely in Belgorod. The article investigates: (1) what influence the (regional) state exerts on the cooperatives, and how that affects their daily functioning and viability; and (2) to what extent such top-down cooperatives might evolve into less state-led forms, such as classic member-driven or businesslike cooperatives. Introduction: the issue of top-down cooperatives The global literature on agricultural producers' organisations-also referred to as agricultural cooperatives-has a rich tradition of studies in the Global South, as well as in the West. 1 To date, the countries of post-socialist Eurasia, including the former Soviet Union, China and Central Eastern Europe (CEE), have attracted much less attention. In particular, the post-Soviet region-with Russia as its biggest country-has largely been ignored. This is especially remarkable when one considers Russia's rich early history of cooperatives, and the extended literature on Russian cooperatives and family farms, which is generally associated with the work of Chayanov ([1927] 1991) and gained importance in agrarian studies in the 1970s through authors such as Shanin (1971). Agricultural cooperatives flourished in Russia in the pre-Soviet period of the early twentieth century (Bilimovich, [1955] 2005; Kotsonis, 1999; Pallot, 1998). By 1914, the agricultural cooperative movement had become the largest in Europe, with over nine million members (Kotsonis, 1999). However, with the onset of communism and forced collectivisation, voluntary cooperatives were replaced by obligatory membership of collective and state farms. Very few comprehensive studies have been carried out on the fate of cooperatives after the demise of the communist system in 1991, and the subsequent decollectivisation. A

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