ABSTRACT
Rural Russia is undergoing changes in its agrarian economy and in its social and economic structure more generally in ways that differ greatly across the country’s numerous regions. This is due to both internal transformations of the last decades of post-Soviet transition and external causes related to processes of globalisation. The most visible of these changes is the growing concentration of large-scale agribusiness landholdings. This concentration is transforming rural–urban linkages, intensifying rural–urban migration and leading to the disappearance of smallholders, family farmers and even entire rural settlements. This paper considers key aspects of contemporary reciprocity between rural and urban Russia through the analytical lens of the utopian models of rural development proposed by Russian economist and sociologist A.V. Chayanov in the early twentieth century. We argue that Chayanov’s models of social development provide an optimal conceptual frame within which to understand the contemporary contradictions between town and village, industry and agriculture, the peasantry and the capitalist state.
