Dispersed Dispossession

Collective Goods, Appropriation, and Agency in Rural Russia

Alexander Vorbrugg author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Georgia Press

Published:1st Jul '25

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Dispersed Dispossession cover

An examination of the paradoxical concurrence of agricultural revival and rural decline in Russia

This book provides an analysis of rural change in Russia during the 2010s, a crucial and formative phase marked by the consolidation of agricultural companies, large land deals, soaring exports, and failures of investment projects. It contextualizes complex and ambivalent empirical realities within historical and political-economic frameworks.

This book provides a nuanced analysis of rural change in Russia during the 2010s, a crucial and formative phase marked by the consolidation of giant agricultural companies, large land deals, soaring exports, and spectacular failures of investment projects. It contextualizes complex and often ambivalent empirical realities within historical and political-economic frameworks.

Through extensive fieldwork, Alexander Vorbrugg gives rare insights into the operations of large agricultural companies and reveals how the deterioration of material infrastructures, social arrangements, government and local supports, and collective goods erode the conditions of rural inhabitants’ well-being and agency. Vorbrugg introduces “dispersed dispossession,” a concept that helps to relate gradual degradation to appropriation and agency. The concept captures losses that have been accumulated across Soviet, reform, and state-capitalist phases and stick to places, persons and potentialities. These losses are perpetuated and exploited by businesses and politicians and have profound implications for the conditions for resistance, shaping the range of conceivable alternatives. They are part of a history that is not fully past.

Dispersed Dispossession is an insightful and ambitious study that documents the dramatic transformation in post-Soviet Russia. The book is deeply sensitive to local specificities of rural change but does not shy away from broader claims about forms of land dispossession that enrich broader theoretical debates on rural change in Russia and beyond. Indeed, few studies accomplish this dual feat.

-- Susanne Wengle * author of Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food *

Following in the footsteps of the great Russian theorists of the Soviet agrarian question, Alexander Vorbrugg’s outstanding book brings the story of Russian agriculture into the Putin Period. Based on rich ethnographic fieldwork, Dispersed Dispossession is an original and compelling contribution to our understanding of both post-socialist transitions and the contemporary agrarian question.

-- Michael Watts * Class of '63 Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley *

In his groundbreaking ethnography of agrarian change in rural Russia, Alexander Vorbrugg introduces the concept of agrarian dispossession as a complex and dispersed process spanning the period of state-socialist collectivization, the post-Soviet years of decollectivization, and the more recent context of large-scale domestic and foreign investment in farmland in Russia. Not only does Vorbrugg’s work contribute brilliantly to debates on agrarian dispossession through a historical ethnography of the state-capital-rural community nexus, it also fills a significant gap in the literature on this topic. As critical geographical research has largely overlooked contemporary Russia, his work also serves as a call to geographers everywhere to engage with the economic transformations taking place in this country and the wider region. The merit of this book lies in its ability to operate across historical phases and political-economic systems in an attempt to make us rethink processes of dispossession, devaluation, rural crisis and structural transformation on a large scale.

-- Stefan Ouma * professor of economic geography, University of Bayreuth *

Specialists on Russia are likely to benefit greatly from the author’s unique perspective. General theorists on rural transformation will also find the book informative.

-- Stephen Wegren * Russian Revi

ISBN: 9780820363899

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

212 pages