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The Moral Economy of the Kolkhoz Worker, Or Why the Protest Movement in Belarus Does Not Seem to Concern the Collectivized Countryside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2021

Ronan Hervouet
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Abstract

The mass protests that have shaken Belarus since August 9, 2020 are occurring not only in the capital but also in provincial towns and even in smaller municipalities in Belarus. The protest does not seem to be affecting the countryside, however. This article, based on an ethnographic survey conducted in rural Belarus between 2006 and 2013, analyzes the roots of the attachment to Lukashenka's regime in these territories. The article describes the moral economy of kolkhozes, that is, the normative bases on which these social worlds are founded: equality, solidarity, and dignity. At the same time, the analysis reveals the figures of the moral offenders that rural inhabitants identify as posing a threat to their worlds: the profiteer, the idler, and the moralist. This defines the expectations toward politics that can be identified in the countryside, which essentially boil down to the conversion or punishment of these “moral offenders.”

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: The Sociology of Protest in Belarus—Social Dynamics, Ideological Shifts, and Demand for Change
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 61 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1. I interviewed around forty people in different parts of the Belarusian countryside. I met some of them several times over the years. My sample covers a range of age cohorts (between the ages of twenty and eighty), comprising both working-age people and retirees, and includes kolkhoz workers, self-employed individuals, and teachers in agricultural high schools. The interviews were occasionally conducted in a structured manner and recorded on tape, but were usually carried out informally. I often initiated discussions in everyday situations (family meals, discussions about someone’s working day, comments about the neighborhood, chats over a shared bottle of homemade wine or vodka, while relaxing in abania, etc.). See Hervouet, Ronan, “A Political Ethnography of Rural Communities under an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Belarus,” Bulletin de méthodologie sociologique / Bulletin of Sociological Methodology 141, no. 1 (2019): 85–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus. “Sel΄skoe khoziaistvo Respubliki Belarus΄” (Agriculture in the Republic of Belarus). 2014.

3. Contrary to decollectivization in the rest of the former USSR and eastern Europe. See Chris Hann, ed., The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and Rural Condition (Münster, 2003). The Soviet system of collective farms and state farms has stayed largely intact in Belarus. See Ronan Hervouet, Alexandre Kurilo and Ioulia Shukan, “Socialisme de marché et gouvernement des campagnes en Biélorussie,” Revue d’Etudes comparatives Est-Ouest 48, no. 1–2 (2017): 85–120.

4. National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus. “Sel΄skoe khoziaistvo Respubliki Belarus΄” (Agriculture in the Republic of Belarus, 2014).

5. In the Soviet case, this perspective maintains that the legitimacy of the authoritarian regime was based on a form of contractual exchange between the citizens and the authorities, with the former accepting reduced freedoms in exchange for the fulfillment of their material needs. See Stephen White, “Economic Performance and Communist Legitimacy,” World Politics 38, no. 3 (1986): 462–482. In the Belarusian context, it is sometimes used to explain the perpetuation of Aleksandr Lukashenka’s regime. See Kirill Gaiduk, Elena Rakova, and Vitalii Silitskii, eds., Sotsial’nye kontrakty v sovremennoi Belarusi (Minsk, 2009).

6. I defend the idea of there being a moral economy specific to the world of kolkhozes (the moral economy of the kolkhoz worker), as characterized by James Scott in the context of Southeast Asia: the moral economy of the peasant. See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976).

7. Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, Mass, 2000), 6.

8. These practices are illustrations of the “institutionalized theft” observed by Gerald W. Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (University Park, 1998), 197; the “manipulable resources” analyzed by Caroline Humphrey, Marx Went Away—But Karl Stayed Behind: Updated Edition of Karl Marx Collective—Economy, Society, and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Ann Arbor, 2001), 221; and the “sovkhoism” conceptualized by Yulian Konstantinov, Conversations with Power: Soviet and Post-Soviet Developments in the Reindeer Husbandry Part of the Kola Peninsula (Uppsala, Sweden, 2015).

9. Yulian Konstantinov, “‘The Magic ‘Tablecloth’: Personal Property and Sovkhoism in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 9, no. 1 (2020): 8.

10. Take the example of participation in subbotniki, the days of voluntary work organized on certain Saturdays of the year—a legacy of the “Communist Saturdays” introduced by Lenin in 1919. See Ronan Hervouet and Alexandre Kurilo, “Travailler ‘bénévolement’ pour la collectivité: Lessubbotniki en Biélorussie postsoviétique,” Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire 78, no.1 (2010): 87–104. Participating in thesubbotnik is a way to avoid causing problems for the local organizer of the event. If the activities are not carried out satisfactorily by a sufficient number of people, the person in charge may indeed be punished. As a consequence, he or she becomes indebted to the participants, and in return will allow the participants to obtain material benefits from the event, gain access to specific services, or take advantage of certain concessions in the organization of work. For these reasons, subbotniki can be seen as the embodiment of a form of solidarity, asserting the existence of an “us,” i.e. a group of individuals who are highly interdependent at the local level. This is the sense in which participation in subbotniki is mentioned discursively as a duty that relates to a practical sense of everyday solidarity.

11. “Those actions which appear to mix instrumental and affective relations, goal oriented and gift exchanges, and ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ institutional ties.” See Nicolette Makovicky and David Henig, “Introduction: Re-imagining Economies (after Socialism): Ethics, Favors, and Moral Sentiments,” in Nicolette Makovicky and David Henig, eds., Economies of Favour after Socialism (Oxford, 2017), 3.

12. This echoes Alena Ledeneva’s analysis of the emotions aroused by practices ofblat in the Soviet era, which enable people to express their intelligence, efficiency, and creativity—their “ability to get things done.” She concludes that when workers manage to “beat the system,” they take control of their destiny, and the rewards they can gain are not only monetary: Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998), 56–58 and 162. In communist Poland, Janine Wedel also notes the “satisfaction” of successfully bending the rules of the system. See Janine R. Wedel, The Private Poland: An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (New York, 1986), 31. In Belarus today, resourcefulness and cunning are also valued qualities.

13. This situation is linked to the Belarusian authoritarian context. In other post-communist countries, research shows that rural dwellers explicitly express their own opinions and views on politics. For example, see: Malewska-Szałygin, Anna, Social Imaginaries of the State and Central Authority in Polish Highland Villages, 1999–2005 (Cambridge, Eng., 2017)Google Scholar.

14. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, 9.

15. This remoteness from formal politics (work of political parties, influence of associative life on social movements, etc.) is obviously not a specificity of the kolkhoz workers’ attitudes toward politics. Generally speaking, one of the aims of political ethnography is precisely to observe and analyze everyday politics in various national and social contexts. See Benzecry, Claudio E. and Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, “What is Political about Political Ethnography? On the Context of Discovery and the Normalization of an Emergent Subfield,” Theory and Society 46, no. 3 (2017): 229–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the Belarusian context, it can also be hypothesized that the recent forms of urban dwellers’ politicization also have their origins in everyday politics, and not only in deliberations on formal politics.

16. Reflecting on the food riots in seventeenth-century England, Edward P. Thompson describes “a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor,” Thompson, Edward P., Customs in Common (London, 1991), 188Google Scholar.