Sub Rosa resistance and the politics of economic reform: Land redistribution in post-Soviet Ukraine

World Politics

Volumn 56, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 554-581

  Allina Pisano, Jessica ^a  

^a Center for Language and Brain   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC REFORM; LANDOWNERSHIP; PRIVATIZATION; TRANSITIONAL ECONOMY;

EASTERN EUROPE; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; EUROPE; UKRAINE; WORLD;

ROSA;

EID: 18044391854     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/wp.2005.0001     Document Type: Review

References (113)

1. Joel S. Migdal reviews literature on this phenomenon in other contexts; Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2. This was less the case in the People's Republic of China than in Central and Eastern Europe. In the latter case, Jeffrey Sachs provided among the most forceful statements of this component of reform, urging governments to "get the planners out of the process"; Sachs, Poland's Jump to the Market Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 46.
3. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
4. Joel S. Hellman, "Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions," World Politics 50 (January 1998).
5. Other work on state capture of the postsocialist reform process by rent-seeking elites includes M. Anne Pitcher, Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6. For a discussion of the nonunitary state in postcommunist settings, see Pauline Jones Luong and Anna Grzymala-Busse, "Reconceptualizing the State: Lessons from Post-Communism," Politics and Society 30 (December 2002).
7. A relevant contrast here is that between large-scale privatization and price liberalization.
8. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
9. Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman argue that a system of rents is necessary to ensure stakeholders' support for reform; Shleifer and Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
10. In this article "state actors" refers to members of the regional and subregional Ukrainian state administration involved in the reform process. These included members of regional and district departments of the agricultural-industrial complex, land surveying and cadastre, economics, and other subdivisions. While there were the normal rivalries among departments with different specializations and between levels of state administration, there was remarkable uniformity in attitudes toward reform.
11. Hellman (fn. 4), 205.
12. It is not the purpose of this article to determine the conditions under which rent seeking may occur. Rather, I wish to establish a range of responses to reform policy that includes more than rent seeking, on the one hand, and inept compliance, on the other.
13. Author interview with members of district farmers' association, Bohodukhivs'kiy district, Kharkiv region, May 27, 2000. The statement was made in response to the author's question: What changed after implementation of the decree?
14. Stephen Wegren has argued that claims about the "cosmetic" character of reorganization ignore the broader transformations that indeed have occurred in the post-Soviet countryside. See Wegren, "Change in Russian Agrarian Reform, 1992-1998: The Case of Kostroma Oblast," in Kurt Engelmann and Vjeran Pavlakovic, eds., Rural Development in Eurasia and the Middle East: Land Reform, Demographic Change, and Environmental Constraints (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
15. Recent work on informal institutions in postcommunist and other contexts includes Keith Darden, "Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma," East European Constitutional Review 10 (Spring-Summer 2001);
16. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, "Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda," Perspectives on Politics 2 (December 2004);
17. Anna Grzymala-Busse, "Informal Institutions and the Post-Communist State" (Manuscript, Department of Political Science, Yale University, April 2004;
18. and Lucan Way, "The Dilemmas of Reform in Weak States: The Case of Post-Soviet Fiscal Reform," Politics and Society 30 (December 2002).
19. This article includes both rules and norms in its view of what institutions are, following Sue Crawford and Elinor Ostrom, "A Grammar of Institutions," American Political Science Review 89 (September 1995).
20. See, for example, Paul D'Anieri, Robert S. Kravchuk, and Taras Kuzio, Politics and Society in Ukraine (London: Westview Press, 1999), chap. 4.
21. The claim of state weakness has often served as the foundation for arguments that in postcommunist polities, state building-rather than the dismantling of state institutions-is required to sustain successful economic reform. An exception to this tendency in the literature is Darden (fn. 14).
22. D'Anieri, Kravchuk, and Kuzio (fn. 16), acknowledging a "distinct lack of precision" in discussions of state capacity, suggest an approach focusing on the management capabilities of state institutions, including the ability to implement economic reforms (p. 96).
23. This has been most clearly illustrated in electoral politics. See Kimitaka Matsuzato, "All Kuchma's Men: The Reshuffling of Ukrainian Governors and the Presidential Election of 1999," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 42, no. 6 (2001);
24. and Darden (fn. 14).
25. For example, Paul Kubicek describes "the relationship between Kolkhoz Council and state as corporatist in content if not in form." Kubicek, "Ukrainian Interest Groups, Corporatism, and Economic Reform," in Taras Kuzio, Robert S. Kravchuk, and Paul D'Anieri, eds., State and Institution Building in Ukraine (London: Macmillan, 1999), 67.
26. Further evidence for the alignment of center-periphery state interests through individual economic incentives is provided by Matsuzato (fn. 18), who has shown that for Ukrainian regional elites under President Leonid Kuchma, job retention was based on loyalty to the executive, not on improvement of regional economic performance.
27. I say "apparent" devolution because there is evidence-including the language of the reform itself-to suggest that state officials at the national level also preferred to create only the appearance of reform. However, local state officials encountered clear signals from the center to implement the formal aspects of reform.
28. Oral testimony, Kharkiv regional farmers' association conference, January 18, 2000. Oral testimony refers to statements made in in my presence and statements made directly to me outside the context of structured interviews.
29. See Allina-Pisano, "Soviet Men into Peasants: Property Rights and Economy in the Black Earth, 1991-2000" (Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 2003).
30. Mykola Puhachov, "Organizational Forms of the New Agricultural Enterprises in Ukraine" (Discussion paper, Institute for Policy Reform, Kiev, Iowa State University Ukraine Agricultural Policy Project, September 2000).
31. This paper was subsequently published as Mykola Pugachov, with Don Van Atta, "Reorganization of Agricultural Enterprises in Ukraine in 2000: A Research Note," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41 (October-November 2000).
32. Population estimates for the region in the late 1990s hovered at about 3,100,000, of whom approximately half live in the city of Kharkiv; Statystychnyi shchorichnyk (Kharkiv: Kharkivs'ke oblasne upravlinnia statystyky, 1997).
33. Calculation based on statistics obtained from the Kharkiv regional department of land-resource management, 1999.
34. Datum obtained from the division of private farms in the Kharkiv regional department of agricultural management, 1999.
35. Near the end of the decade compliance with reorganization policy (in most cases, destatification and the creation of collective [shared] ownership) among agricultural enterprises in Kharkiv region was 99.3 percent. The national average was 91.4 percent. The disparity is explained by outcomes in three administrative regions of Ukraine in which there was no privatization of agricultural enterprises (Ivano-Frankivs'ka, L'vivs'ka, and Kyiv); State Land Committee of Ukraine, "Informatsiinyi biuleten' shchodo reformuvannia zemel'nykh vidnosyn v Ukraiini" (Kiev: Derzhkomzem, 1999).
36. Kuchma issued the decree in the midst of loan negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. The communist opposition in Ukraine made much of this fact, and in mid-December 1999 more than one hundred members of parliament protested the decree by appealing to Ukraine's Constitutional Court, arguing that decollectivization was unconstitutional. "Will Ukraine Abolish Kolkhozes?" Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Report 1, no. 28 (December 14, 1999), www.rferl.org/ reports/pbureport/1999/12/28-141299.asp (accessed November 6, 2004).
37. The decree included a provision that required media coverage of its implementation-"constant illumination of questions of implementation of agrarian reform in Ukraine, including the realization of the provisions of this decree"-on all television channels, radio stations, and newspapers affiliated with regional and district-level state administration. Most of this coverage was, of course, positive.
38. E. Kanevskiy, "Kuchma obeshchaet vvesti chastnuiu sobstvennost' na zemliu i rasformirovat' kolkhozy," Den', December 3, 1999.
39. N. Perstneva, "Vesna prishla! Chinovnik torzhestvuet . . ." Zerkalo nedeli, March 25, 2000, http://www.zerkalo-nedeli.com/nn /show/285/26456/ (accessed November 6, 2004).
40. See also Yu. Kryklyvyi, "Lyudyna kriz' pryzmu reform" Slobids'kyi krai, January 27, 2000, 1-2. Slobids'kyi krai is the newspaper of the Kharkiv regional legislature and state administration.
41. M. Khablak, "Oleh D'omin: ya viru v uspikh reform," Slobids'kyi krai, December 31, 1999, 1.
42. See, for example, M. Mel'nyk, "Chyya zemlya v Rokitnomu?" Slobids'kyi krai, December 25, 1999, 1-2.
43. One of the more obvious examples of this genre is M. Mel'nyk, "Kolhospy svoe vidzhyly-vvazhae deputat oblasnoii rady, holova Velykoburluts'koii raiderzhadministratsii V. O. Kur'ianov," Slobids'kyi krai, January 29, 2000, 2.
44. Yu. Kryklyvyi, "Zemel'na reforma ne lishe dlya sela, a i dlya vs'oho narodu," Slobids'kyi krai, December 21, 1999, 2.
45. Also suggesting that collectively held property was the root of current problems in agriculture is Kryklyvyi, "Zupynka na pivdorozi. Rivnoznachna vidstupovi," Slobids'kyi krai, January 6, 2000, 2.
46. Yu. Kryklyvyi, "Pole svoe i chuzhe," Slobids'kyi krai, December 30, 1999, 2.
47. "Private" refers to meetings closed to the press.
48. This fact distinguishes the situation from standard principal-agent dilemmas, in which the principal's interests are more clearly defined.
49. Previous reforms provided for the reorganization of collective forms of production and the establishment of private (peasant) farms. See, for example, Article 5 of the Land Code of Ukraine; Articles 9 and 10 of the Law of Ukraine "Pro kolektyvne sil's'kohospodars'ke pidpryemstvo" (1992);
50. Article 7 of the Law of Ukraine "Pro orendu zemli";
51. Articles 4 and 7 of the Law of Ukraine "Pro selians'ke (fermers'ke) hospodarstvo" (1993);
52. and the Presidential Decree "Pro nevidkladni zakhody shchodo pryskoriuvannia zemel'noii reformy sferi sil's'kohospodars'koho vyrobnytstva" (1994).
53. By September 2000, ten months after the decree was issued, a total 6,300,000 people had received land-share certificates nationwide. Only 300,000 of these had received state acts. Uriadovyy kur'er, September 29, 2000, 4.
54. Emphasis added.
55. In theory, joint leasing also could describe individuals who remain in the reconstituted former collectives and lease their land back to it.
56. In the case of private-leasing enterprises, "private entities" typically had a single owner: the director of the former collective.
57. Official commentary on the decree also embodied this contradiction. See, especially, the comments of then deputy head of presidential administration Pavlo Haiduts'kyi on the decree, "Kolektyvnu vlasnist' zminyla pryvatna," Uriadovyi kur'ier, December 9, 1999.
58. In the following sections I draw on three meetings at which I was present: at the regional level, in which regional agricultural officials addressed a gathering organized by the regional association of private farmers; a small, closed meeting of district officials and directors of select collectives in a district I have called L'vivs'kyi for the purpose of this article; and a larger meeting in the same district of regional and district officials, directors of collectives, their accountants and agronomists, and members of local (village) councils.
59. Mel'nyk, "Fermery poza reformoiu?" Slobids'kyi krai, January 20, 2000, 1.
60. The deputy head of regional administration urged district administrators to implement the decree saying, "We must sustain this battle. On the side of the president, naturally." Oral testimony, L'vivs'kyi district administration, January 13, 2000.
61. Oral testimony, Kharkiv regional farmers' association conference, December 14, 1999.
62. I b i d.
63. Oral testimony, L'vivs'kyi district administration, January 13, 2000.
64. Oral testimony, L'vivs'kyi district administration, January 8, 2000.
65. Zoria Poltavschyny no. 5, quoted in The Week in Ukrainian Agriculture (University of Iowa Project on Agrarian Policy in Ukraine) 3, no. 16, January 17-23, 2000.
66. See also, from Dnipropetrovs'k region, "Kak kolkhoz ne perekrashivai, tolku ne budet," Dneprovskaia pravda, February 1, 2000;
67. from Zaporizhzhia, Zaporiz'ka pravda, January 20, 2000 (The Week in Ukrainian Agriculture 4, no. 17, January 24-30, 2000);
68. and from Vinnytsia region, Vinnychchyna no. 194 (The Week in Ukrainian Agriculture, December 27, 1999-January 3, 2000).
69. Also M. Saenko, "Reforma po kolesami ochkovtiratel'stva," Dneprovskaia pravda no. 38, April 4, 2000.
70. Quoted in Ohliad presy: Sil's'kohospodars'ki novyny z usikh rehioniv Ukraiiny 3-9 kvitnia 2000 roku (Kiev: University of Iowa Project on Agrarian Policy in Ukraine, 2000).
71. This reassurance may have been little else than good local politics, as agricultural elites held little real power over local state officials.
72. Oral testimony, L'vivs'kyi district administration, January 13, 2000.
73. Resources were so scarce that by April, at least seven collectives in the region had not reorganized because they could not pay for preparation of the necessary documents; Yu. Kryklyvyi, "Kolhospiv uzhe nema, ale iikhni problemy zalyshylysia," Slobids'kyi krai, April 4, 2000.
74. "Na zdiisnennia ahrarnoii reformy," Slobids'kyi krai, January 5, 2000, 1.
75. Oral testimony, Kharkiv regional division of private farms, January 21, 2000.
76. Collectives were to be maintained by establishing leasing arrangements to take the place of membership relations. One head of district administration put it this way: "The process of reforming includes the cessation of membership relations. It assumes transfer to leasing [relationships]. To ensure the preservation of the land mass it is necessary to conclude [leasing] contracts." Oral testimony, L'vivs'kyi district administration, January 8, 2000.
77. "Visti iz Zachepylivshchyny. Zemliu-selianam," Slobids'kyi krai, January 29, 2000, 1.
78. M. Mel'nyk, "Shans dlia fermera," Slobids'kyi krai, December 21, 1999, 1; the article mentions the existence of this phenomenon at the regional level, and Perstneva (fn. 32) mentions it at the national level. In Blyzniukivs'kiy district, the deputy head of agricultural management put it this way: "The tendency is at first to do the reforming, and then allot the land shares." Oral testimony, Blyzniukivs'kiy district administration, March 30, 2000.
79. "Na zdiisnennia ahrarnoii reformy" Slobids'kyi krai, January 5, 2000, 1. A similar logic was applied to the sequence of reform in some districts of Russia.
80. See, for example, V. Pleshkov,"... Pokoi nam tol'ko snitsia," Liskinskie izvestiia, February 13, 1992, 6.
81. Oral testimony, district administration, L'vivs'kyi district, January 8, 2000. Other districts set deadlines for the middle of February. See "Visti iz Zachepylivshchyny. Zemliu-selianam," Slobids'kyi krai, January 29, 2000, 1.
82. Oral testimony, dispatcher's office, division of planned economy, L'vivs'kyi district, January 16, 2000.
83. It should be noted that one of the catalysts for this reversal of the order of operations was the cost of land surveying. It simply was impractical, illogical, and unaffordable for the vast majority of collective enterprises to conduct extensive surveying, only to lose that land. That the central state provided inadequate support for this process may also be understood as a sign of ambivalence.
84. A private farmer who later took over an entire collective remarked, "It's the certificates that are partitioned, not the land"; oral testimony, Kharkiv regional farmers' association conference, December 14, 1999. More than four months later, a regional state official working in the division of private farms remarked of a farmer who had attempted to lease land shares in a neighboring collective: "He doesn't know where his land is. It's like that for the majority [of private farmers leasing land]." Oral testimony, Kharkiv regional division of private farms, April 4, 2000.
85. M. Khablak, "Zatsikavlenist' u reformuvanni velychezna," Slobids'kyi krai, January 11, 2000, 1. Figures from the Ministry of Agriculture show that nationwide, nearly one thousand enterprises had concluded leasing contracts between the end of December and the end of February, before there likely had been time to allot land shares in kind.
86. Perstneva (fn. 32). This article also noted that the procedure was being carried out "backward."
87. Yu. Kryklyvyi, "Zemel'na reforma ne lishe dlia sela, a i dlia vs'oho naroda," Slobids'kyi krai, December 21, 1999, 2.
88. It should be noted that in linking incentives to behavior, this argument does not depart from the conventional wisdom circulating among elites in the region at that time. While conducting research in state offices, my queries regarding officials' disapproval of land partition and distribution were most often met with incredulity. The question, for many officials, was not why they privately would oppose dissolution of collectives but why they should support it.
89. References to these ideas with respect to agriculture are far too numerous to discuss here; evidence of the belief that land should not be commodified may be found in the Verkhovna Rada's more than decade-long debate about legalizing the purchase and sale of agricultural land.
90. M. Mel'nyk, "'Vyrobnytstvo-dlia liudei, a ne navpaky': interv'iu z holovoiu derzhadministratsii Kharkivs'koho raionu V. I. Pugachovym," Slobids'kyi krai, May 13, 1999, 2.
91. This sentiment is echoed in hundreds if not thousands of press materials from the late Soviet period and post-Soviet decade in the region. For evidence of normative claims regarding agricultural production in post-Soviet space, see Allina-Pisano (fn. 23).
92. For this and other reasons, commodification of land was not supported by much of the rural population. A random sample survey (n=925) conducted in 1998 by the national land committee in Kharkiv and Volyn regions found that only 12.5 percent of those surveyed reported a positive attitude toward the purchase and sale of land held by agricultural enterprises; 27.1 percent agreed that "the purchase and sale of land must be regulated by the state"; and 57 percent said they were against the commodification of agricultural land. State Land Committee of Ukraine, "Informatsiinyi biuleten' shchodo reformuvannia zemel'nykh vidnosyn v Ukraiini" (Kiev: Derzhkomzem, 1998).
93. Oral testimony, L'vivs'kyi district, January 8, 2000.
94. Because of the cost of feeding draft animals, in the words of one local cliché, "even a horse is a luxury."
95. I have no connection to the IMF. That my interlocutors, whom I had known for several months and with whom I was on good terms, would assume that I did is further suggestive of their suspicions and concerns about foreign involvement in domestic policy. Their suspicions did not emerge in a vacuum: the foreign scholars whom they had previously encountered had in fact been collecting data for international lending and development institutions.
96. Agricultural elites did sometimes provide goods in return. One important means of reciprocity was electoral, in which directors of collective farms could exercise their authority at the local level to deliver votes for the incumbent in presidential elections. However, this still does not suggest a quid pro quo. In this instance, presidential elections had taken place a few months prior to the issuing of the decree. Local officials therefore had no political incentive in spring 2000 to prevent dissolution of collectives.
97. Myriam Hivon provides a convincing case study of this problem in Russia; Hivon, "The Bullied Farmer: Social Pressure as a Survival Strategy?" in Sue Bridger and Frances Pine, eds., Surviving Post-Socialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 1998).
98. In Ukraine low wages in the industrial sector helped maintain urban-rural ties. Urban workers typically assisted rural relatives in household cultivation and received food in return.
99. See, for example, Statystychnyi zbirnyk. Sil's'ke hospodarstvo Ukraiiny 2000 rik (Kiev: Derzhkomstat, 2001).
100. Members of collectives received goods two ways: in lieu of cash wages and as an entitlement. This symbiosis as it functioned in the Russian Federation is documented in Gavin Kitching, "The Revenge of the Peasant? The Collapse of Large-Scale Russian Agriculture and the Role of the Peasant 'Private Plot' in That Collapse, 1991-97," Journal of Peasant Studies 26, no. 1 (1998).
101. For a description of a number of these problems, see Louise Perrotta, "Coping with the Market in Rural Ukraine," in Ruth Mandel and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
102. Work in other Central and East European settings has shown similar patterns of incentives and rural people's behavior. See Mieke Meurs, The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions: A Comparative Study of Post-Socialist Hungary and Bulgaria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001);
103. Carol Scott Leonard, "Rational Resistance to Land Privatization: The Response of Rural Producers to Agrarian Reforms in Pre- and Post-Soviet Russia," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41, no. 8 (2000);
104. and Maria Amelina, "Why Russian Peasants Remain in Collective Farms: A Household Perspective on Agricultural Restructuring," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41, no. 7 (2000).
105. See Jessica Allina-Pisano, "Land Reform and the Social Origins of Private Farmers in Russia and Ukraine," Journal of Peasant Studies 32, no. 4 (2004);
106. and Sergei Nikolsky, "The Treadmill of Socialist Reforms and the Failures of Post-Communist 'Revolutions' in Russian Agriculture: Is There an Alternative?" in Ivan Szelenyi, ed., Privatizing the Land: Rural Political Economy in Post-Communist Societies (London: Routledge, 1998).
107. This was true not only for total production but also for expected yields. Official statistics showed that private farms operated less efficiently than collectives. For example, in Ukraine in 1999 grain yields for private farms were 16.9 centners per hectare while average grain yields for all types of agricultural enterprises were 19.7 centners per hectare. Ukraiina u tsyfrakh 2002: Korotkiy statystychnyi dovidnyk (Ukraine in figures 2002: A short statistical reference) (Kiev: Konsul'tant, 2003), 109, 120.
108. The subjective nature of local understandings of economic conditions is elaborated at length in Yoshiko Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 5.
109. Jacob S. Hacker, "Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States," American Political Science Review 98 (May 2004).
110. Penvenne, in a review of Margaret Hall and Tom Young, Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique since Independence (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997),
111. in International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no. 1 (2000). The author thanks Eric Allina-Pisano for this point.
112. Two well-documented examples of this large genre include Marc Edelman, Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999);
113. and Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001).