The Great Divide: Contested Issues of Post-Soviet Viliui Sakha Land Use

Abstract

THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THIS ARTICLE is to inform the larger discourse on post-Soviet property rights by discussing the land issues of agropastoralist Viliui Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Russia. I argue that Viliui Sakha are struggling to find a place in the drastically changed post-privatisation context not by accessing land through the official allocations made after state farms were dissolved but by pooling land with kin in their home and adjacent villages. I begin with an overview of Viliui Sakha subsistence and land use from pre-Soviet to Soviet and now to post-Soviet times. I next describe how local actors decided the post-Soviet land allocations of the Elgeeii state farm sector when that farm disbanded. I then illustrate with case studies the three central Sakha modes of post-Soviet food production: the private household, the kin-based smaller baahynai khahaaiystyba (S.–peasant farming operation) 1 (hereafter BKh) and the larger BKh .I conclude by explaining how a return to ancestral lands or the sale of land would actually work to disadvantage most inhabitants and that perhaps there is hope in new laws to encourage collective or common property land regimes, depending on how they are translated on a local level. 2 Two moments come to mind as I reflect on the local land issues of Viliui Sakha villages. The first was on 13 April 1993, when, at 9 a.m., as I sat down to tea with my host family, the Petrovs, the Elgeeii village land specialist knocked at our door. He came to speak with Kolya, the Petrov’s eldest son, to solicit his help in dividing up the Kuol Elgeen fields, one of the former state farm tracts adjacent to the village centre, into hay allotments for village households. The village administration wanted Kolya to oversee the allotting because ‘everyone trusted him’. We reached the Kuol Elgeen fields at 10 a.m. to find a gathering of inhabitants standing ready to stake out their 1.5-hectare claims. Kolya, the land specialist and the household members worked diligently to measure and stake out the plots. I later learned that this was one of the final former state farm areas to be divided up as pai (R.—shares) into household allotments for hay to fodder privately and collectively owned cattle and horses. What struck me was the sense of desperation as the inhabitants vied for Kolya’s attention to give them the biggest and best plots. The second moment was a few months later, during the summer haying season, in which I was participating as a fictive member of Kolya’s extended family. We had already cut, stacked and secured the hay from the various plots his kin group uses