GeoJournal 54: 549–556, 2001.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Adapting capitalism: Household plots, forest resources, and moonlightingin post-Soviet Siberia1

Katherine R. MetzoDepartment of Anthropology, Indiana University, 130 Student Building, 701 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405,U.S.A. (E-mail: kmetzo@indiana.edu)

Key words: agriculture, exchange networks, forest management, households, labor

Abstract

Economic reform in post-Soviet Russia has proceeded unevenly, resulting in broad variation between rural and urban areas.In the case study presented here, I examine how Communism’s ‘economy of favors’ has been transformed into a localizedquasi-capitalist economy, which predominantly operates outside the national market economy. Using data from two villagesin Tunkinskij Raion of the Buriat Republic in Russia, I look at how people at a micro-sociological level have adapted tocurrent economic conditions. In particular I examine the relationships between informal networks and the ability to intensifyagricultural production on household plots, to gain access to a variety of forest resources, and to find seasonal, part-time, orone-time work outside the household and the formal labor market.

Introduction

Since the fall of the centrally planned command economyin the Soviet Union, its successor states have been strug-gling to build new economic institutions to take its place.Despite a brief history with private enterprises and capital-ist policies during the 1920s New Economic Policy (NEP),democracy and capitalism have been a harsh adjustment formost of the successor states. Woodruff (1999) suggests thatthis reality is rooted in the inability of the Russian govern-ment to control the monetary system. Market reforms since1991 seem to have reached only urban centers, which havealready benefited from foreign and domestic investment andimproved infrastructure. Likewise, much US reporting onthe economic transition to a market economy in Russia fo-cuses on macro-level reforms and urban issues. However,macro-level, state reforms have little saliency with actors atlocal levels and outside urban centres. The national econ-omy is in some ways a small-scale phenomenon representingthe interests and behaviors of a small, urban, elite subsetof the population.2 Of course, as the papers in this col-lection repeatedly emphasise, although most post-socialistcitizens live their lives outside the urban metropoles, thereare as yet relatively few studies of transformation as it af-fects lives in the rural hinterland. Moreover, as Burawoyand Verdery (1999) and others have emphasised scholarlyability to successfully theorise about macro-sociologicaland macro-economic processes in transition will ultimatelydepend upon a better, more thorough understanding ofmicro-sociological and micro-economic conditions. There-fore, local level studies are necessary for understanding theeconomic structures and practices that have emerged in thepost-Soviet period. This is especially true in the case study I

present in which local level activities are sharply separatedfrom interactions with state level actors. Local residents nei-ther cooperate nor come into conflict with the state, ratherthey go about their daily business selectively ignoring newstate policies in favor of informal local institutions that havegrown out of the post-Soviet rubble.

In contrast to growing prosperity in urban areas, ruralareas are marked by poverty, deteriorating living conditions,and incomplete integration into national and global mar-kets. Taking a closer look, however, reveals that in spiteof poverty and weak economic foundations for capitalistmarket reforms, entrepreneurial activities are part of every-day existence for rural residents. Not surprisingly, peoplehave intensified production on household plots, increasednumbers of domestic livestock as well as working multiplewage jobs, where available – a process Luttrell (this volume)calls ‘livelihood diversification’. Beyond this, people har-vest and use traditional land resources (e.g. water, firewood,mushrooms etc.) whilst also adapting new resources forcommodity and non-commodity use (e.g. dung, jams, etc.),alongside continued barter and use of informal networks.Based on eleven months of research in Tunkinsky Raion, arural region in south central Siberia, I examine how Com-munism’s ‘economy of favors’ has been transformed intoa localized quasi-capitalist economy, which predominantlyoperates outside the national market economy. The regionis populated by Russians and indigenous Buriats, most ofwhom are engaged in the agricultural sector. While manyactivities do not fall within the guidelines for Russian capi-talism or market reform, informal exchanges and innovativeapproaches to labor display an entrepreneurial impulse. I ar-gue that these activities are rooted in Soviet-era local kinshippractices, creating a localized market economic structure

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that resembles, but is not directly tied to national-level mar-ket reforms. Instead, the informal institutions that I willdescribe seem to bypass reforms, though the structures thathave been produced reflect and may eventually integratesuccessfully with capitalist markets.

Economy of scarcity

Russia’s Soviet era economy has been justifiably termed an‘economy of scarcity’. An inattention to consumer needs andinefficient appropriation of raw materials brought about de-ficiencies in marketable consumer goods (Campbell, 1992;Treml and Alexeev, 1994). Yet centralized planning was amisnomer in the Soviet period; on the contrary, the economywas negotiated rather than planned. Because raw materialswere not distributed effectively, barter, dual account books,and hoarding became essential components of the ‘economyof scarcity’ that characterized Eastern European socialist andcommunist regimes in the second half of the twentieth cen-tury (Verdery, 1996; Humphrey, 1998; Woodruff, 1999).Negotiations between firms resulted in reappropriation ofhoarded goods through informal exchange networks. Caro-line Humphrey’s ethnography of a Soviet-era collective farmdescribes the dual economy showing that each collectivefarm (or each firm) managed one set of books for the centralgovernment where quotas were usually met and occasionallysurpassed, but always without major surpluses. Another setof books was kept within the collective farm itself to docu-ment the true values of transactions, inputs and productionlevels (Humphrey, 1998, 1983). Commonly, the reappropri-ation of goods and the complex accounting systems associ-ated with it became known as the second economy or the‘shadow’ economy. The second economy exacerbated short-ages and contribute to the collapse of the Soviet economicsystem (Treml and Alexeev, 1994; Woodruff, 1999).

It should surprise no one that exchanges of goods andservices between residents of the Soviet Union also existed‘off the books’. Within the economy of scarcity barter be-came a basic skill, and manipulation of complex personalnetworks became a common strategy at all levels of soci-ety. In fact, barter took on a unique character marked byexchange of services and indirect repayment of favors, aphenomenon that Alena Ledeneva terms Russia’s ‘economyof favors’ (1998). Blat’ is the colloquial term used for suchinformal economic transactions. Blat’ is distinguished fromordinary barter in that it is the careful cultivation of strategicrelationships, which is common in both second and thirdworld settings (see Cellarius and Moran (this volume) aswell as Rocheleau et al. (1996)). The modern origins of thiseconomy of favors were in the shortages that came to theSoviet Union as early as the 1930s (Ledeneva, 1998). Overtime, people built up extensive networks of kin, friends, col-leagues, and classmates to fulfill economic needs not met bythe command economy. People were constantly added to thenetwork because favors had a habit of becoming indirect;that is, returning a favor by doing a favor for someone’scousin or classmate. These additions established new rela-tionships and another layer to the network. The larger the

network, the larger and more complex the debt and repay-ment could become, because as new members were addedinto the circle covering all the basic needs from produce tohealth care to education, transactions became delayed andindirect, tying the members of the networks more closelytogether (Ledeneva, 1998; see also, Humphrey, 1998, 1983).

Many blat’ related transactions were in the gray area be-tween legal and illegal. For example, a woman working ina grocery store sets aside butter, meat, chocolates, wine orother shortage goods for those in her network. These peopleare then obliged to repay her, though repayment may comemuch later and indirectly. Thus the sales woman’s formerclassmate may be the departmental chair in the biology de-partment of the local university. She returns this favor (or aseries of such favors) by giving the sales woman’s son aneasier question on his entrance exam to the university, thusensuring him a place in a competitive department. Alterna-tively, another friend may return this favor by introducing thesales woman to a relative that can help her skip to the head ofa line of patients for allergy treatments. Thus, a new personis introduced into the network. Of course small tokens, likea bottle of vodka for a man, and chocolates or flowers for awoman, were often exchanged for major favors in the short-term, with the implicit understanding that the debt wouldbe repaid at an appropriate time in the future. In this exam-ple, there is a spectrum between legal and illegal – settingaside perishable goods is more legal than pre-arranging anexam question or subverting waiting lists for medical treat-ment. Yet most people engaged in such arrangements todaydeclare, ‘How else were we to get by?’ The same logicthat necessitates the development of blat’ relations betweenindividuals also applies to larger collectivities such as house-holds and firms, which equally could not have gotten byotherwise.

That the economy of favors has a legacy in post-SovietRussia is quite natural. To a degree, this system can becharacterized as ‘quasi-capitalist’ since the transactions em-bedded within it are competitive and often profitable. Forexample, blat’ that once operated between firms (trading rawmaterials) is replaced by exchanges of insider information ata basic level (see Ledeneva, 1998) as well as by an extensiveIOU system. Veskels, which are essentially IOUs, have beentraded for goods and services, bought out by investors andtraded like stock for most of the last decade (Andrews, 1997;McChesney, 2000). One of the challenges of this system isits lack of regulation and, therefore, the difficulty of guar-anteeing that businesses eventually pay back their debts. Inmost pre-capitalist contexts difficulties with ensuring settle-ments are handled through appeal to extra-judicial ‘mafia’processes (cf. Staddon, 1999). Though such activities arequite illegal, and indeed immoral, they nevertheless providethe necessary security for the transition economy to functionat all. The Russian economy in the 1990s is a classic ex-ample of this. Journalists characterize these transactions asbeing very capitalist and in 2000 Russia’s Federal SecuritiesCommission took steps to regulate the system, pulling it intothe official economy (McChesney, 2000).

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At the village level barter also continues, grounded inthe blat’ relationships established during the Soviet period.Most of the people in my study preferred to use cash if avail-able, but would engage in barter transactions several times amonth. In many cases, such as going to markets to sell agri-cultural products, they would barter gasoline or agriculturalproducts for transportation. Others would barter surplus foodproducts for more scarce food products, such as blueberriesfor strawberries, or mushrooms for meat. Longer term ex-changes would predominately occur between relatives andwould often be termed ‘gifts’. In discussions with villagers,however, it was made clear that sending meat, potatoes, andother agricultural products to relatives in the city obligatedurbanites to providing future assistance. Assistance couldtake the form of labor during the next harvest or sale of aportion of goods for higher cash values in urban markets, orhousing rural children hoping to attend university.3 It is im-portant to note here that the blat’ networks in the rural Buriatvillages that I will discuss are founded on kin relationshipsand that the ‘gifts’ are often more about the social relationsthat are reinforced than they are about the actual gift thatchanges hands.

The case study

Tunkinskij Raion, (which I will refer to as Tunka, its localname) where I conducted dissertation research, is comprisedof more than one million hectares of forest, mountains and avalley with sections of agricultural and residential lands oneither side of the Irkut river, one of the many rivers whichflows into Lake Baikal. Administratively, the borders of theregion are coterminous with the borders of Tunkinsky Na-tional Park, founded in 1991 and operational since 1994. Therelationship between conservation, agricultural, and indus-trial interests is often uneasy because of differing incentivesand values. Furthermore, since 1991 there has been little out-side interest and even less investment in the area. One of thefew remaining industries in the region is the bottling of thelocal medicinal mineral water, ‘arshan’. Arshan, the Buriatword for spring water, has come to be used as the formalRussian name of a particular set of springs in the foothills ofthe Sayan mountains. While park officials make attempts toengage the local population in conservation efforts, includ-ing discussions of ecological and cultural heritage tourism,and a growing number of farmers have become vocal aboutland reform, there has been little concrete activity as a re-sult. The tourist season, for example, is very short and whilemany families benefit financially from visitors who lodge attheir homes or purchase their agricultural goods, they areoften skeptical of the development of tourism as a viableeconomic alternative for the majority of the population.

The two villages that are I discuss in this paper are Toryand Kyren. Tory, a predominantly Buriat village of less than3000 people along the main highway and close to the east-ern most border of the region is dominated economically byagriculture, with several shops and a secondary school. Inthe Soviet era, the primary employer was the collective farm,which dissolved in 1995. During the 18th and 19th centuries,

Tory was the rural administrative center for the Buriats ofthis region. There was a separate administrative village forethnic Russians. The Buriats in this area were and for themost part remain shamanic and several major cult sites (arock formation and mineral springs) are located near thevillage. These cult sites are also important for the sizeableBuddhist population (also predominantly Buriat) in otherparts of Tunka region. Tory also has the oldest secondaryschool in the region and many of its students have gone onto posts at the regional and republic level governments.

Kyren, with almost 8000 people, is also located alongthe main highway, but approximately an hour to the westof Tory. This is important, as to the west of Tunka regionthe highway ends in the mountainous Oka region. Kyren iscurrently the administrative center and has been for almost acentury, but prior to 1917, the Russian administrative centerwas in the village of Tunka. While Kyren is predominantlyRussian, there is also a high percentage of Buriats. Justoutside of Kyren there are several collective farms in neigh-boring villages. Most people in Kyren work for one of thefollowing organizations: village and regional administration,park administration (which took over the space of the Kyrenforest district (leskhoz)), medical clinic, regional public li-brary or other cultural venue, or commercial stores. Thereis also a Russian Orthodox Church and a Buddhist temple.While there are several apartment buildings, the most com-mon home is a single-family dwelling that usually includesa garden. Most families, however, also depend on the localcollective farms, whether or not they are actual members, fora slightly larger plot for growing potatoes.

Agriculture dominates the local economy and plays animportant role in daily life. While “tradition” is a trickymoment to pinpoint, in the Buriat Republic of Russia, itis generally thought of as the moment of contact betweenRussian migrants and the indigenous Buriat population inthe sixteenth century. Such criteria define ‘traditional’ Buriatsubsistence as nomadic pastoralism, which included hunt-ing, fishing, and some agriculture (Humphrey, 1998, 1983;Forsyth, 1992; Tokarev, 1958).4 What agriculture there wasconsisted of producing fodder for livestock. Russians mov-ing into the area from the west (Cossack border guards,political and religious exiles) brought with them their ownagricultural practices. The new neighbors learned from eachother, as evidenced in changes in diet and adoption ofeach others’ pastoralist and agricultural traditions. The ex-tent to which any of these strategies were used dependedon micro-variations in location and climate. The harsh lo-cal climate means a very short growing season. In Tunka,women usually plant seeds in late February or early March,growing them on windowsills until mid-May if they havegreenhouses, or sometime in early June if not. Hay andpotato harvests take place from July through August andkilling frosts begin as early as mid-September. Soviet col-lectivization drives had a devastating effect on the landscape,damaging pastures through cultivation and deforestation (seeHumphrey and Sneath, 1999; Humphrey 1998, 1983). Agri-cultural inputs today are more benign than during the Sovietperiod if only because of lack of money for widespread

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use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and heavyfarming machinery.

Household production

Household, or ‘dacha’ plots have long been the most pro-ductive component of the agricultural sector in Russia (seeHumphrey, 1998). Already a site of intensive cultivation of awide variety of household vegetables, people’s dependenceon their household plots has increased since 1991. Althoughevery type of food imaginable seems to be available instores, unemployment and low wages make non-essentialstore purchases a luxury. In discussions and informal inter-views with local residents, almost all reported an increaseddependence on subsistence food production. Several areplanting a broader variety of vegetables while others are fo-cusing on increasing the volume of relatively fewer stapleproducts, such as potatoes and onions. Many, if not all, havealso attempted to change the spatial layout of their plots insome way, making their land under cultivation larger. Com-monly, people eliminate perimeters and walkways to planttheir household plot edge to edge; others take advantage ofthe somewhat fluid lot lines, not clearly marked by roadsor sidewalks, to encroach on adjacent areas. Those whocannot afford to construct a greenhouse will improvise, us-ing the bottoms of plastic oil bottles to protect individualseedlings or using raised beds to ensure the soils exposureto sunlight, thereby keeping roots warmer on cold springevenings. Occasionally, as in the summer of 2000, somefamilies were able to cut grasses for fodder twice, however inTory there was a locust infestation, so harvesting even oncewas difficult. Another way to intensify cultivation is to usean enclosed porch or sunny window to begin seedlings earlyin order to sell extra seedlings to neighbors after a frost orunexpected damage from livestock or domestic animals.

Under the Soviet regime collective farms allotted eachhousehold a certain amount of grain or feed annually. Whilethe amount varied by collective farm, people were certainto get something. Additional supplies could be purchasedand many people had small fields where they produced fod-der (clovers, rye grasses, etc) for animals in the winter.The collective farm in Tory collapsed in 1995, producingmass unemployment, however the farm legally still exists.Kolkhozniki, or collective farm workers, do not have accessto the collective farm fields or its equipment, leaving themto manually intensify their small allotments. Conversely,other farms have reorganized and continue to operate on asmaller scale, such as in Dalaxai, a neighboring village toTory. There are also several entrepreneurial farmers, includ-ing several in and around Tory, who have set up small farms.In general, most collective farms in Tunka no longer providefree fodder, though some will sell fodder to people who arenot members of the collective, as the Dalaxai collective doesto villagers from Tory.

Fodder is, however, still difficult to come by unless onehas connections among the employees of the collective farm.Some people try to harvest grasses twice in summer ratherthan once. One family told me that they ‘scavenge’, cleaning

up fields (up to a 1 12 hour drive away) after the collectives

have harvested hay. Fodder for wintering animals has alsobeen a serious concern for local people looking to maintainor expand herd size. January and February 2001 were partic-ularly devastating for residents of Tory. A locust infestationin the summer of 2000 reduced harvests significantly andmany people lost at least one head of cattle to starvation.This was less damaging to some households than to oth-ers. While some large farms have as many as 100 head, theaverage herd size in Tory is around 7, though usually 1–2head less than that during the winter months. Some peasantfarmers had rented extra fields and purchased fodder fromfarms in neighboring regions of Irkutsk Oblast’ in order toestablish a buffer against what they knew would be a difficultwinter.

In general, expanding herd size is seen as a natural andrelatively easy way to increase wealth. Labor inputs in-crease, but in the end, profits are more reliable and do notsuffer as much from inflation as savings. Many wage earnerscontinue to receive their salaries irregularly and back paydoes not take into account inflation rates between when itis earned and when it is actually paid out (up to 6 monthslater). Furthermore, banks are distrusted because many peo-ple who banked savings during the Soviet era lost theirsavings in 1991 and those who invested after 1991 becamevictims of devaluation in 1998. Banks are also inconvenientin rural areas where the bus ride to the nearest bank takesa full hour, meaning that even routine transactions take halfa day. Cow and pigs, on the other hand, are seen as liq-uid assets, available at the precise moment when demandarises. Studies in Tory during the early 1990s also pointedto cattle as “wealth on the hoof” with many smallholdersviewing their animals in terms of their potential equivalenceswith particular consumer commodities, such as a television,VCR, or refridgerator (Meshcheryakov, 1996). My researchin that village, which included many of the same villagers,suggests that the emphasis now is not on household com-modities, but on education and transportation. Many aspiringfarmers hoped to buy a truck or tractor so that they wouldnot have to rely on former colleagues from the collectivefarm. Smallholders often talked about buying or repairinga car in order to take their goods to more lucrative mar-kets in Irkutsk Oblast’. Transport is a critical issue also inmanaging the spatially extensive blat’ obligations for somehouseholds and moving between areas of restricted accesssuch as forests to common property areas, such as pastures.Moran (this volume) discusses how the enduring blat’ re-lations with the leshkozi have been especially important interms of facilitating access to the leshkozi’s robust off-roadtrucks.

Forest resources

In addition to intensification of household production, fami-lies continue to rely on forest resources to supplement theirdiet and provide for basic needs. Collecting berries andmushrooms has always been an integral part of supplement-ing the winter diet, but in the post-Soviet period, people

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report increased gathering. While a primary goal is still tosupplement family diet, people also gather forest productsto sell at urban markets, exchange with friends, and sellfresh along roadsides. Exchanges with friends, as I alludedto above, focus on using a surplus of one type of berry, forexample, to acquire another type of berry, or mushrooms(in order to reduce the number of trips needed for a vari-ety of species), or dairy products. Forest products are alsocommonly exchanged for services such as transportation,veterinary services, and so on. Medicinal herbs and plantsare collected for household needs and less commonly forsale in an informal market at Arshan, a resort town wherevisitors from around Russia and Europe come for medicaltreatments, including medicinal mineral water. A numberof rare plants are illegal for collection, but enforcement isweak. Despite Tunka’s status as a national park, gatheringactivities are not necessarily illegal. Firewood and timbermust be paid for, but each household is allowed to gathera certain volume of each berry and mushroom variety anda number of plant species, but their use is not limited to thehousehold. Nevertheless, the informal herb market in Arshanis not legal, and staying within the household quotas is vol-untary. Hunting is another activity, but is not as common asgathering because wage labor and household activities takeup much of people’s time.

The standard of living in Tunka continues to be low, withelectricity, but no plumbing or central heating in homes. Out-side municipal buildings, there is very little use of coal, sofirewood is the primary form of heating. People apply forand purchase forest vouchers from the national park officein Kyren. Vouchers entitle the bearer to a certain number ofcubic meters of firewood to be harvested from a particularlocation (cf. Moran, this volume). Several people admit-ted to purchasing a ticket for an amount they could afford,but then cutting down as much as they needed. These con-fessions are supported by calculations of how many foresttickets were sold in comparison to the amount of firewoodthat the average household uses in a winter (Tolmachev, per-sonal communication, 2001). Another predictable problemin this transitional period is the illegal cutting and exportof ‘delovoj les’ or construction-quality timber. Again, tick-ets are purchased for less than the amount of timber thatis extracted. In some cases, no ticket is purchased at all orpeople obtain falsified documents. Despite negative press inthe local newspaper, this ‘poaching’ of timber continues.

Four leskhoz were combined to make up the NationalPark and the foresters (lesniki) and game wardens (egeri) aresome of the poorest paid employees of the park. Therefore,there is high incentive for graft. While a few admitted topoaching wild game, the majority of those whom I inter-viewed, lamented the gradual destruction of their forests,which they see as a primary reason for the frequency offorest fires and the flooding of the Irkut river. They clearlyunderstand the ecological impacts of deforestation. Further-more, they understand that the profits from illegal timbersales go primarily to the middlemen who sell it at the closesttrain station or at the border with China. During my staysin 2000 and 2001, the lesniki, together with local police,

arrested several illegal timber harvesters. Nevertheless, thelesniki are important people to have in one’s blat’ networkbecause of their access to heavy trucks and their knowledgeof the forest. They can also help friends and family by get-ting both firewood and timber vouchers at a discount or whenthey are scarce because of logging quotas (see also Moran,this volume).

Multiple jobs

It goes without saying that every household member main-tains a certain set of labor obligations within the household.Women carry the primary burden of tasks within the home,regardless of whether or not they also work outside thehome. In addition to gardening, milking and feeding ani-mals, cooking, and cleaning, some women also help theirchildren with schoolwork or tend to the health needs of theirlivestock. Men help with gardening, but not on a regularbasis – they usually till the soil and harvest. Men also dorepair work, additional construction (usually with severalother male neighbors and relatives), and preparation of fire-wood. Setting cows out to graze and bringing them in formilking seems to be a task shared by both men and women.In addition to household labor, many people work outsidethe home. As in Soviet times, finding jobs today dependsvery much upon the extent of one’s personal blat’ networks.

There are a number of differences in labor opportu-nities between the two villages where I collected data.Kyren, the regional center (population approximately 7500),has diverse wage labor opportunities. There is a marketwhere shuttle traders and local farmers sell their wares (seeHumphrey, 1999 for a discussion of shuttle trading in Buri-atia). Both the regional administration and the national parkprovide work for at least 200 people each. The regional andrepublic police also employ a number of people as do localshops and the public school and medical systems. With anaverage household size of 4 people, 1.6 people per house-hold were working in 2000. All the same, unemploymentwas high; calculating an accurate unemployment rate is dif-ficult because most unemployed do not report their status,as compensation is very low and filling out paperwork timeconsuming. Tory (population approximately 2900) on theother hand, had relied much more heavily on the collectivefarm for employment before the dissolution of the SovietUnion. Based on figures from the village soviet, householdsize calculates to 3.1 per household, but this figure is skewedby the number of abandoned households and the growingnumber of pensioners. Pensioners often have children orgrandchildren living with them for extended periods of time,who are not registered as residents of the village. Accordingto my own survey, conducted in 2000, average householdsize was 4.8 people with only 1.2 people per householdemployed. Some Tory residents, primarily women, were oc-cupied as teachers or store clerks prior to 1991 and manyof these jobs remain. Indeed, at the end of the 1999–2000school year, the federal government announced the addi-tion of a twelfth grade to public schools in Russia. Thisprovided an opportunity for teachers wanting to come out

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of retirement to help earn an income to support their fami-lies and for young teachers wanting to return to the villagefrom Ulan-Ude. Rather than engaging in wage labor, mostTory residents are relying more on expanding subsistenceactivities.

It is difficult to obtain accurate unemployment figures forTunka. Official statistics for rural Buriatia in general cite anincrease from 2.6% of the total population in 1993 to 9.1%in 1998 (RSA 1999). At the same time, the popular impres-sion of unemployment is that it hovers somewhere around70%. The discrepancy raises several questions. How manyof those who are officially employed receive an adequatesalary to provide for their families? Shall we include peoplewho have expanded or intensified production on their small-holdings as employed if they are not working according totheir ambitions or training? In my own estimate, I tried toapproximate unemployment based on those without officialwork, without regular unofficial work, and with smallhold-ings that meet only the needs of their immediate family.Therefore, I estimated the unemployment rate for Tory ataround 30%.

Moonlighting

Finding jobs within the formal economy is not possiblefor most people. Very few people who work in the infor-mal economy receive regular wages, if they receive anycash at all. Most informal economic labor, or ‘kalym’5 inRussian, is secondary to wage labor or household subsis-tence activities. That is, most people would prefer wagelabor, even if salaries are received irregularly, and a mem-ber of a household can only take on ‘kalym’ work if thereare enough other household members to manage householdsubsistence activities. It is also characterized by being out-side the arena of official, or reported, income. Thus, I use theterm ‘moonlighting’ to describe these informal economic ac-tivities that are practiced to supplement household incomesand production.

Though it is quite rare, there are cases of people whomake a living off of informal labor. In fact, most local peoplehave developed diversified livelihood strategies which mixformal and informal employment together with subsistenceactivities (see Luttrell, this volume). For example over thecourse of three months, Marina6 worked for other familiesin the village, helping with planting and harvest, remodel-ing, and other domestic activities. One family gave her acash advance, but that was not very common. Most peoplepaid her at the end of a day of work. For 43 work days, shereceived in kind payment (potatoes, flour, milk, sugar, andother staples) on 19 days, cash payment on 5 days, and acombination of cash and in kind payment on 19 days. Whenshe doesn’t work, she often goes gathering in the forest, laterselling or trading mushrooms and berries for meat, cassettetapes, and other commodities.

Moonlighting takes on a variety of forms and contributesto household budgets in varying degrees. Common formsof moonlighting included driving or renting out vehicles.People with trucks often helped relatives and friends haul

firewood from the forests, taking gasoline and a portion offirewood as payment. Store owners who travel to Irkutskto make purchases often take passengers to help defray thecosts of gasoline on the trip from the villages to the city.Others make a living off of driving as a chauffeur. Some areregistered, others not, but most will accept some form ofbarter in exchange for payment. Hunting is not as commonthese days, however, since many people cannot spare thetime to go into the forests after fulfilling obligations at workor in the home. Moreover unlike gathering, hunting requireslonger trips beyond the edges of the forests. While muchhunting takes place during the Autumn and Winter huntingseasons, it is not uncommon to be served wild game in sum-mer, making it clear that poaching occurs and is not regardedas morally wrong. Summer is a time when meat is scarce andpeople who poach claim that their families would not get byif they did not hunt.

Other forms of moonlighting are much rarer than thosementioned above, but are worth noting in order to illustratethe variety of economic activities in which people engage.Production of traditional arts and crafts occurs on a smallscale, primarily because there is not a high demand. Onerelatively more common craft is making unty, traditionalBuriat fur and felt boots, of elk and reindeer hides. Theboots are almost as expensive as machine-made leather bootsimported from China and one man told me that he tends torepair older boots for people because they do not have the furfor new boots. He implied that this is because people do nothave the time to hunt anymore. Woodworking is common,primarily as decorative gift items for the home. The nationalpark is attempting to establish relationships with local ar-tisans to create souvenirs for tourists to the region, so artsand crafts may begin to play a more prominent role in theeconomy of the region. There is already a steady, if small,flow of tourists into the region during the summer months,so the park administration is trying to appeal to less commoninternational as well as more common local tourists by cre-ating tour packages and including a variety of services, suchas homestays, cultural performances and souvenirs in orderto provide direct tourism-related income opportunities to abroader sector of the population.

Perhaps one the most unusual form of moonlighting thatI heard of was in June, 2000. Walking through Tory one daywith a companion, we observed people on the roof of thehigh school. Though this initially seemed odd, June is thetime when teachers and students work on cleaning and re-painting classrooms. My companion assumed that someonehad been assigned to do maintenance work on the roof. Laterthat week when we stopped by the village chairman’s hometo discuss his visit with the President of Buriatia, he told usthat these people were actually scraping pigeon droppingsoff the roof. They also had agreements with the village hos-pital to collect droppings off their roof. A firm in Baikalsk(a 4-hour drive by bus or truck) was offering 150 rubles perfifty kilogram sack of pigeon droppings. It was unclear whatthe end product would be other than, perhaps, some kind offertilizer.

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Adapting capitalism

Rural areas in Russia are not well-integrated into the nationalmarket economy. Markets do exist and government agenciesand private firms do employ people, however, even withinthese official realms unofficial activities take place. This canbe seen as a legacy of Soviet-era blat’ connections. There area number of small stores in each village which sell tea, flour,rice, bread, vegetables, lightbulbs, candy, shampoo andother commodities. Yet within these capitalist enterprises,sales clerks run tabs for longtime residents and relatives.Though credits are entered into a log book in alphabeticalorder, this practice is unofficial and therefore not extendedto all. Several times when walking home with someone else,we avoided certain stores in order to put off paying backdebts. In one of the stores where the clerks came to knowme quite well, I asked about repayment of these credits. Thesales woman told me that for the most part people are honestand will pay back debts when they receive their salaries. Sheattributed the honesty to the fact that everyone is acquaintedor related and that it is socially uncomfortable for peoplenot to pay back debts. Additionally, store clerks are oftenpaid in goods rather than cash so that they always receivetheir salaries on time. Other businesses, such as sawmills orlumber middlemen, exist, but to a much smaller degree.

Most entrepreneurial activity takes place outside formalmarkets. While someone may sell berries along the road-side for cash, a very market-style activity, if the transactiontakes place outside a regulated environment, it goes un-recorded. These unrecorded activities I have termed informaleconomic transactions. Rural areas lack formal markets.People drive to urban areas to sell agricultural goods notbecause they prefer this time consuming alternative, but be-cause their produce would go to waste in villages. Nothinghas adequately replaced the command economy’s subsidizedtransport of rural agricultural goods. Some women have setup a mini-cooperative so that they can take turns driving tothe city to sell milk and dairy products. Others have optedto sell meat or animals to middlemen from Irkutsk, who paysignificantly less per pound than what people would receivein the city. However, as several women remarked, ‘I wouldhave had to spend the entire day away from home’. They un-derstand the trade-offs involved and more than one woman(particularly women over 50) has told me that she finds itwasteful to produce more than her family needs and thatselling berries or medicinal plants or milk is selfish. She im-plied that these goods are basic staples that should be sharedwidely.

Kinship ties were at the core of personal networks in theSoviet era and Caroline Humphrey discusses kin relations inthe Soviet era as being an important continuation of tradi-tional Buriat practices as well (Ledeneva, 1998; Humphrey,1998, 1983). Examining data that I gathered in Tunka, kin-ship relations continue to be at the core of post-Socialistnetworks. People often receive jobs at the firms or depart-ments of relatives, they help relatives in times of need andwith routine labor requirements, such as haymaking. Indi-rect networking in Tunka, seems to be limited to information

gathering, as Ledeneva (1998) suggested would be the casefor all network ties. However direct networking and favorscontinue to occur between relatives and, in Tory, betweenvery close friends, usually classmates and friends sincechildhood. Very often these transactions take the form ofimmediate barter, as I discussed above, but such transactionscan also include loans for university application fees, grainor fodder in spring for meat during the following autumn, orother arrangements, usually negotiated in advance. Moneyis always returned as money, though small favors may helpsomeone offset any tensions that may arise due to delays inrepayment.

Ledeneva (1998) has argued that with market economicreforms in Russia, blat’ networks would lose their valueand eventually die out. As countless examples in this paperdemonstrate, this is clearly not the case. While in the Sovietperiod, the emergence of blat’ networks was based on the‘economy of scarcity’, its maintenance in post-Soviet ruralareas can be attributed, at least in part, to economic uncer-tainty. Blat’ networks are one of the many ways that peopleare able to practice the ‘livelihood diversification’ that Lut-trell (this volume) talks about. The networks appear to havecondensed around kin, particularly in Buriatia where kin net-works are large and historically important. Even subsistenceactivities rely on the ability of households to mobilize oc-casional labor reserves and realize exchanges for surplusesof milk and meat, particularly if there is no other sourceof cash income. Furthermore, forest resources are essentialfor subsistence, but require transportation or permission toutilize. Since most post-socialist citizens live in rural areas,understanding the local conditions as well as the complexityand diversity of local responses to uncertainty is crucial inorder for effective economic reform.

Taken as a whole, the informal economic institutions Ihave described make up a sort of localized market economicstructure. National statistics show Tunka to be quite poor inrelation to other regions in Buriatia and even more so in com-parison to other regions in the rest of Russia. However, manyof the transactions I have discussed above are not reflectedin these national level statistics. The economic activities thathave come to dominate in the post-Soviet period, are rootedin both the personal informal networks of the Soviet era aswell as the traditional importance of kin relations. These setsof largely informal relations contribute to a policy context inwhich reforms also become uncertain because informal insti-tutions have superceded national level policies and in manycases preempt reforms. Currently, these institutions bypassthe national level economy and keep rural areas separatedfrom it. I mention this not to suggest that the economy ofTunka is strong. In fact, the unpredictability of the economyis evident in the continued inflation and the inability of firmsto pay for labor. Indeed, the reason for this division betweennational and local levels is due to the inefficiency of currenteconomic reforms. If we examine the types of transactionsthat occur in Tunka, however, they reflect an interest incapitalist or market-style transactions and give reason to beoptimistic about the potential success of market reforms. Anexamination of local practices in livelihood diversification

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also suggests that capitalism continue to be adapted to suitlocal conditions and constraints.

Notes

1The research for this paper was funded through an Indi-vidual Advanced Research Opportunity grant from IREX,a dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren Foun-dation, and a Research-in-Aid Fellowship from IndianaUniversity-Bloomington. I am grateful to Julie Zimmer forcomments on an earlier draft.2For example, Janine Wedel’s (1998) book, Collision andCollusion, offers an ethnography of Western aid practiceswhich favored an elite population, perpetuating the politicalcliques of the Soviet period as do Eyal, Szelenyi and Towns-ley (1998) in their Making Capitalism without Capitalists.3Creating the situation where, as Gerald Creed (1998) putsit, ‘the villages feed the cities’.4Recent studies have problematized this interpretation,pointing to remote sensing data that indicates a shift to dif-ferent forms of pastoralism and agriculture over time thatresulted in the steppe landscape that Buriatia is known for(Humphrey and Sneath, 1999; Gomboev, 1996). Anotherauthor uses historical documents on residence patterns andtrade to argue that Buriats were indeed more sedentary andspecialized than scholars had previously thought (Zhimbiev,2000).5From the Kazakh word for ‘bridewealth’.6Name has been changed. Marina was part of a small groupof households which recorded all economic transactionsover the course of three months in the summer and earlyautumn of 2000.

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