Everyday environmentalism: The practice, politics, and nature of subsidiary farming in Stalin's Lithuania

Slavic Review

Volumn 68, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 31-49

  Mincyte, Diana ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 62649145532     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0037677900000073     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. This project draws on actor-network theory to focus on the emergence of specific socioecological configurations in the Soviet landscape. Developed in the 1980s, actor-network theory (ANT) is a poststructuralist and postconstructivist approach that considers material objects as important actors in the processes of constructing institutions, social relations, local geographies, identities, and ideologies. The ANT methodological approach involves a micro-perspective and seeks to explain how human and nonhuman actors interact within a network. By tracing the emergence of networks, ANT exposes the constitution of power mechanisms that are embedded in material objects, technologies, and environments. This approach is critical of purely sociological or human-centered analyses and argues that power relations are constituted both semantically, or socially, and materially. In this article, I use the ANT approach to gain insight into how peasants interacted with the land through their labor and how these interactions informed their relationship to the Soviet state. Key names in actor-network theory are Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar. For an effective critique of actor-network theory, see Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, 1995), 5-9.
2. The primary source of data for this article is twenty-eight oral histories collected in Lithuania during an eleven-month period from 2003 to 2005. I also conducted archival research at the Communist Party Central Committee Archive (CPCCA) under the auspices of the Ypatingasis Archyvas (Particular archive) in Vilnius and the Panevežys Regional Archive. Archival research was supplemented by ethnographies in three villages in central Lithuania that included participant observations, semistructured and formal interviews with local community members, and interviews with former and current administrators and government officials. Additionally, newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, official statistical reports, as well as open-ended conversations with various informants provided important supplemental information.
3. Cf. John Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (New York, 1993);
4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984);
5. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998);
6. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985).
7. See Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington, 1988);
8. Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, 1999);
9. Oleg Ianitskii, Rossiia: Ekologicheskii vyzov (Obshchestvennye dvizheniia, nauka politika) (Novosibirsk, 2002);
10. Oleg Yanitsky, Russian Environmentalism: Leading Figures, Facts, Opinions (Moscow, 1993);
11. John Pickles and Petr Pavlínek, Environmental Transitions: Transformation and Ecological Defence in Central andEastern Europe (London, 2000);
12. Merje Feldman, "Justice in Space? The Restitution of Property Rights in Tallinn, Estonia," Ecumene 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 165-82.
13. Alla Bolotova, "Ekologicheskaia politika povsednevnosti v zapadnykh strannkh i v Rossii," Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost, 26, no. 1 (2002): 81.
14. Richard White, "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? Work and Nature," in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996), 171-85.
15. Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, Nature and National Identity after Communism: Globalizing the Ethnoscape (Pittsburgh, 2006);
16. Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, "'The Occupation of Beauty': Imagining Nature and Nation in Latvia," East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 2 (May 2007): 259-93.
17. For the significance of ordinary lives under socialism, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, "New Perspectives on Stalinism," Russian Review 45, no. 4 (October 1986): 352-73;
18. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999);
19. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Introduction," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), 1-14;
20. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford, 1994);
21. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995);
22. Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton, 2004).
23. On state-building, see Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. (Oxford, 2001);
24. all articles in Kritika 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006), but especially Golfo Alexopoulos, "Soviet Citizenship, More or Less: Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging," 487-528;
25. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005);
26. Katherine Verdery, "The 'Etatization' of Time in Ceauşescu's Romania," What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996), 39-57.
27. On subject-making in the Soviet Union, see Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, trans. Carol Flath (New York, 1995);
28. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006);
29. and Jochen Hellbeck, "Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts," Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001):. 340-59.
30. See Liudas Truska, Lietuva metais, 1938-1940 (Kaunas, 1995);
31. Liudas Truska and Vytautas Kancevičius, Lietuva Stalino ir Hitlerio Sandėrio Verpetuose (Vilnius, 1990).
32. Lietuvos Laisvės Armija (Freedom Army) was a political-military organization established in 1941 to fight the Soviet occupation. Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera argue that about 90,000 men and women were involved in military resistance in the years 1944 through 1956 and draw a comparison to the Viet Cong in South Vietnam where approximately 170,000 fighters and supply runners came from a population of 20 million. Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990 (1983; Berkeley, 1993), 81.
33. The Soviet communication infrastructure was the guerrillas' primary military target. They also aimed at killing members of the Soviet police. Dalia Kuodyte et al., eds., Laisvės Kovu Archyvas (Kaunas, 1996), 122.
34. Notably, the Lithuanian resistance movement was much more organized and forceful than the movements in neighboring Latvia and Estonia. This may have been due to the role of the Catholic Church, which supported the resistance in Lithuania. Dalia Kuodyte, "Lietuvos Pasipriešinimo Sajūdis 1944-1953m," in Arvydas Anušauskas et al., eds., Lietuva 1940-1990: Okupuotos Lietuvos Istorija (Vilnius, 2005), 308-49.
35. A very similar resistance movement was taking place in western Ukraine: Nijole Gaškaite-Žemaitiené, "Lietuvos Laisvės Kovos Sajūdžio Strategija," Genocidas ir Rezistencija 19, no. 5 (1999).
36. Julius Tamošiunas, Lietuvos Žemės Ūkis Raida ir Jos Problemos: Kapitalizmo ir Socializmo Epocha (Vilnius, 1974);
37. J. Tamošiunas, Tarybinio Darbuotojo Vadovas (Vilnius, 1948);
38. J. Tamošiunas, Tarybu Lietuvos Valstietija (Vilnius, 1979);
39. Vytautas Tininis, "Stalininio Laikotarpio Pabaiga," in Anušauskas et al., eds., Lietuva 1940-1990, 399-406;
40. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants.
41. Tininis, "Stalininio Laikotarpio Pabaiga."
42. Liudas Truska, "ŪkinėLictuvos Aneksija," in Anušauskas et al., eds., Lietuva 1940-1990, 106-22;
43. Truska, Lietuva metais, 1938-1940;
44. Petras Vasinauskas, Kolūkiu Sunkmetis (Vilnius, 1989). In this sense, the spatial organization in the three Baltic states posed managerial problems similar to those involved in the collectivization of the nomadic tribes of Siberia. See the work of Caroline Humphrey, Piers Vitebsky, and Bruce Grant, among others.
45. For an extensive discussion of definitions of the term peasantry in the Soviet system, see Theodor Shanin, Defining Peasants: Essays concerning Rural Societies, Explorary Economics, and Learning from Them in the Contemporary World (Oxford, 1990).
46. For a discussion of this term, see Lietuviu Kalbos Žodynas at www.lkz.lt/autl.htm (last consulted 30 November 2008).
47. Truska, "ŪkinėLietuvos Aneksija," 110.
48. F. Khiliuk, "Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo naseleniia i ego rol'v proizvodstve sel'skokhoziaistvennykh produktov," Ekonomika Sovetskoi Ukrainy 1 (1966): 60,
49. quoted in Karl-Eugen Wadekin, The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture, trans. Keith Bush, ed. George Karcz (Berkeley, 1973), 2.
50. In spite of this open hostility towards the peasantry, Soviet leaders were aware that the fate of the young Soviet state depended on the peasants' ability to transform nature into food. Driven by this recognition, in the years following the famine of 1921-1922, the Soviet state made major concessions to the peasantry and briefly reinstated land inheritance laws. The reforms went so far as to allow hiring wage-labor - the very practice that was considered the source of inequalities in rural communities - on individual farms. Although these policies were soon discredited as counterrevolutionary and were abolished by 1929, they established a precedent in Soviet history for the strategic use of individual peasants' skills and resourcefulness. By so doing, they tested the grounds for developing a more or less consistent political methodology for extracting private labor from the peasantry.
51. For an analysis and interpretation of the laws regulating subsidiary lots in the 1930s, see Stefan Hedlund, Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union (London, 1989), 14-25;
52. Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. Irene Nove (London, 1968);
53. Naum Jasny, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR: Plans and Performance (Stanford, 1949);
54. Vladimir Borisovich Ostrovskii, Kolkhoznoe krestianstvo SSSR (Saratov, 1967);
55. Vladimir Ostrovskii, ed., Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh agropromyshlennoi integratsii (Moscow, 1988);
56. Robert W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980);
57. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, 1986).
58. "Del Kolūkiu Organizavimo Lietuvos TSR," Lietuvos TSR Aukščiausiosios Tarybos ir Ministru Tarybos Žinios 10, no. 56 (1948): 12.
59. In addition to land, peasants were also allowed to keep livestock: one cow (two cows in Lithuania), two calves, one sow with young or two sows with young in cases where collective farm authorities decided it was necessary, ten sheep and/or goats, an unlimited amount of poultry and rabbits, and up to twenty beehives.
60. Although often "invisible" in scholarly work on socialist agriculture, the small subsidiary plots were enormously productive. Occupying less than 7 percent of all agricultural land in USSR, subsidiary farms produced more than half the key agricultural output - even in the times of decline due to Nikita Khrushchev's anti-allotment politics. Considering that Lithuanian subsidiary farms were twice as large as the average in the Soviet Union, the proportion of produce collected from subsidiary farms must have been even higher there. Indeed, in Lithuania, the official reports show that in 1958, 12.8 percent of all cultivated land was used for subsidiary farming. On these plots, peasants produced 73 percent of the meat, 69.5 percent of the milk, and 95 percent of the eggs produced in all of Lithuania. See Lietuvos TSR Liaudies Ūkis 1960Metais (Vilnius, 1962), 85-88, 143-94;
61. Tarybu Lietuvos Dvidešimtmetis: Statistiniu Duomenu Rinkinys (Vilnius, 1960), 143-47, 180-82, 192, 194.
62. It should be noted, however, that data on exactly what proportion of Soviet agricultural outputs were produced in the subsidiary sector before Leonid Brezhnev's tenure is scarce and contradictory. For example, according to Gelii I. Shmelev, Personal Subsidiary Farming under Socialism (Moscow, 1986)
63. and Gelii I. Shmelev, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo: Vozmozhnosti i perspektivy (Moscow, 1983), 35.6 percent of all the agricultural output in 1960 was produced on subsidiary farms, while another authority on the subject, Vladimir Ostrovskii in Kolkhoznoe krestianstvo SSSR, argues that in 1958, this proportion constituted only 16 percent.
64. For an in-depth analysis and estimation of the official statistics under Khrushchev, see Karl-Eugen Wadekin, "Soviet Rural Society," Soviet Studies 22, no. 4 (April 1971): 512-38.
65. Misiunas and Taagepera, The Baltic States;
66. Kuodyte et al., eds., Laisvės Kovu Archyvas.
67. Woman whose family used to live near the forest, interview, Anykščiai, 1 August 2004.
68. Kuodyte, "Lietuvos Pasipriešinimo Sajūdis 1944-1953m."
69. Woman whose family was one of the last to join the collective farm, interview, Traupis, 12 January 2005.
70. Man who used to work as tractor operator for the collective farm, interview, Marijampolė, 14 July 2004.
71. Woman who became a nurse, interview, Vilnius, 2 January 2005 (emphasis added).
72. The Stakhanovite movement was based on the mythology built up around Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old miner who hewed record amounts of coal in Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1930s. Similar stories of heroic labor involved the Soviet peasant-citizen who fought for the Soviet state by plowing more land than required, harvesting more produce than anybody else, and exceeding all production quotas when working on collective and state farms. The milkmaids Nadezhda Persiantseva, Maria Epp, and Ekaterina Nartova; combine harvesters and tractor operators Praskovia (Pasha) Angelina, Fedor Kolesov, Konstantin Borin, and Petr Gusev; pig-rearing specialists Vladimir Zuev and Tat'iana Daeva; potato field heroines Anna Masonova and Klavdia Epkhina; and famous sugar beet producer Maria Demchenko were woven into motivational speeches by the collective farm chairmen, state farm directors, and Communist Party members. As an ideological tool, posters depicting these models occupied an important place in collective farm administrative offices or on the trucks delivering workers to the collective farm fields.
73. Former milkmaid, interview, Taujėnai, 28 December 2005.
74. Older male state farm worker, interview, Tanjėnai, 29 December 2005.
75. Man who used to work as tractor operator for the collective farm, interview, Marijampolė, 14 July 2004.
76. Older male state farm worker, interview, Taujėnai, 29 December 2005.
77. Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago, 1995).
78. For examples, see Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Soviet Russia (New York, 1989);
79. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1993);
80. Václav Havel, Living in Truth: Twenty-Two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel, ed. Jan Vladislav (London, 1986).
81. In the 1980s, cultural historians criticized this binary model of socialist spaces, and more recently a new generation of scholars have suggested that it is impossible to draw lines between the private and the public realms because the Soviet state is embodied in the everyday practices of its citizens. See Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, "Introduction," in Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, 2000), 3-20;
82. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006);
83. and Alexei Yurchak, "Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was For Ever Until It Was No More," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (July 2003): 480-510.
84. George Konrad, Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (San Diego, 1984), 200-201.
85. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001);
86. also Amir Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory in Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism," American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (June 1999): 1114-55;
87. and Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: 20th Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2003).
88. See Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford, 1989);
89. William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1347-76;
90. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995);
91. Schwartz, Nature and National Identity after Communism.
92. For the significance of social rituals, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever;
93. Susan Gal, "Language and the 'Arts of Resistance,'" Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (August 1995): 407-24.
94. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, examines participation in industrialization and enlightenment as a way of building consensus in post-World War II Soviet Union.
95. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind,
96. and Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003) trace the emergence of Soviet subjectivities through the analysis of diaries.
97. See Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York, 2007) for an important critique of Hellbeck's work.
98. Shmelev, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo;
99. Gelii Shmelev, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo i ego sviazi s obshchestvennym proizvodstvom (Moscow, 1971).
100. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, "Introduction," in Suny and Martin, eds., A State of Nations, 8.