The Two Faces of Petr Arkad'evich: Land and Dispossession in Russia's Southwest, ca. 2000

At the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, the Russian imperial and post-Soviet governments pursued large-scale projects to transform land tenure in the countryside. Based on the belief that people would work harder and more productively on land they themselves owned, both reform programs divided collectively-managed land into individual parcels. Post-Soviet land privatization, consciously modeled on the Stolypin-era reforms conducted in early twentieth-century Russia, resulted in the dispossession of much of the rural population. This article examines privatization in a district of Voronezh oblast’ in Russia's southwest, considering contemporary processes through an historical lens. It shows how successful local efforts to adapt to markets and preserve large-scale agriculture nonetheless resulted in rural dispossession.