Subsistence Farming and the Peasantry as an Idea in Contemporary Russia

What if we start by leaving aside objective definitions of the peasantry and ask instead which people call themselves peasants in Russia today? It is important to realise that 'peasant' has become a fully operational category in post-socialist Russia. The agricultural reforms of the early 1990s aimed to replace the collective and state farms with financially independent small farms. A certain number of these were created all over the country and they were called 'peasant economies' (krest'yanskiye khozyaistvo). Collective and state farms did not totally disappear; but most were dissolved and reconstituted, and these 'privatised' organisations were also termed associations of peasant economies of one type or another. Russia therefore should be full of people who identify themselves as peasants. Yet this is not so. The explanation cannot be simple, for older concepts of the peasantry (krestyanstvo) smoulder behind the new label. This chapter explores why self-identification with the peasantry is so fragile and changeable in contemporary Russia, and it shows how official use of the word 'peasant' masks fundamental contradictions in the agricultural reforms.