The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village
Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth

This book explains how the introduction of rural private property rights in Ukraine and Russia generated poverty.

Jessica Allina-Pisano (Author)

9780521709316, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 September 2007

248 pages, 2 tables
22.6 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.34 kg

"In this outstanding political ethnography, Jessica Allina-Pisano penetrates beneath the surface of rural life in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine to show how local officials and farm directors utilized shifting property-rights regimes to assert their control over land. In the process, she brilliantly reveals why social relations in the post-Soviet countryside have come to resemble precisely what reformers had sought to overturn."
Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University

Why does the introduction of private property rights sometimes result in poverty, rather than development? Most analyses of institutional change emphasize the design of formal institutions, but this study of land privatization in the Russia-Ukraine borderlands shows how informal politics at the local level instead can drive outcomes. Local officials in both countries pursued strategies that produced a record of reform, even as they worked behind the scenes to maintain the status quo. The end result was a facade of private ownership: a Potemkin village for the post-Soviet era. Far from creating private property that would bring development to the post-Soviet rural heartland, privatization policy deprived former collective farm members of their few remaining rights and ushered in a new era of state control over land resources. This study draws upon the author's extensive primary research in the Black Earth region conducted over a period of nine years.

Introduction: land reform in post-communist Europe
1. Things fall apart
2. Keeping the collectives
3. The social origins of private farmers
4. A return to regulation
5. The politics of payment
6. The facade
Conclusion: rural proletarians in the Potemkin village.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB], European history [HBJD]