What is the relationship between the historical Soviet countryside and the post-Soviet present both for the scholars who study them and for the population that inhabits them? Together Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village; Jessica Allina-Pisano, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth; and Douglas Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals create a rich, nuanced portrait of contemporary rural life in parts of the former Soviet Union. When one reads the three books together, one finds evidence of interesting continuity alongside dynamism and change that varies depending on the region and on the questions that motivated the researcher. The three works ask in varied ways how individuals in post-Soviet society perceive their world and attempt to live in it. The three studies extend far and wide across the territory of the former Soviet Union: Solovyovo, three hundred miles north of Moscow; the Black Earth, more than four hundred miles to the south; and Sepych, about one thousand miles to the east.

While lived experience is at the forefront of each of the works under review here—Paxson and Rogers, both anthropologists, and Allina-Pisano, a political scientist with an interest in ethnography—all three authors share a keen interest in history.

What broader questions are raised by these three works that would make them relevant for historians generally, and for historians of the “under-classes” specifically? One of the links among these monographs is their focus on the relationship between history and the contemporary circumstances in which the agriculturalists of the former Soviet Union find themselves. What do we call today's rural heirs of Stalin's policies of collectivization? This linguistic choice alone provides insight into the broader debates and the particular approach of each author. For Paxson, they are “villagers,” tapped into a longue durée of village life, identity, and culture. Rogers writes of an historical process whereby, the “residents” of his locale “have been, by turns, serfs on a feudal estate, peasants in a thriving merchant town, exemplary Soviet farmers, and shareholders in a struggling post-Soviet agricultural enterprise”(xi). Allina-Pisano identifies and traces a new dynamic as agricultural workers in Southern Russia and across the border in Ukraine became “sharecroppers on their own land” (147). These three books show different understandings and interpretations of history by non-historians that both reflect and shape the position from which the scholar approached his or her subject. These understandings of history and the role they play in shaping each individual author's research agenda and analysis are the focus of this review. What do they tell us about the post-Soviet village?

For the historian of the Soviet Union, these works leave one with an uneasy sense of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, not in the sense of a longue durée, necessarily—because there is evidence of dynamism and change, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the region—but in the sense of the majority of the former Soviet Union's rural inhabitants still being on the losing end of relations with power. They are still “peasants” if one accepts Teodor Shanin's definition of peasant, or perhaps even worse as in the Black Earth case, sharecroppers. Shanin wrote, “Peasantry consists of small agricultural producers who, with the help of simple equipment and the labour of their families, produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fulfillment of obligations to the holders of political and economic power.”Footnote ¹ Many of the post-Soviet Union's worker citizens were transformed into peasants, and in the areas where land was profitable, collective farmers were transformed into sharecroppers. It is difficult to say whether or not the post-Soviet countryside is worse or better than its Soviet predecessor. The authors' emphasis on historical memory strongly suggests that villagers perceive the situation to be worse. They feel they have lost a certain identity, a certain community, and a certain equality. As a friend said to me as we drove toward the village/collective farm of his birth, “Back then we all had no shoes. But at least all of us had no shoes. We were the same.” Did the Soviet Union's peasants dream of a new “chernyi peredel,” or “black repartition,” when they would all have their own land to farm again? I doubt it. These people know what farming entails, and they understand the modern world. They know that individual farms would not be enough in the twenty-first century. A few brave, strong individuals fought for the right to be peasants and not sharecroppers, but anyone who needed schools, access to medical care, and so on, knew that losing the collective farms meant losing a vital social support system. So much so, that they had to support the rebuilding of the same forms in new guises.

Margaret Paxson's Solovyovo, the name she gives to the village at the heart of her study, concentrates on a community with a total permanent population of thirty people. Solovyovo is located almost midway between Moscow and Arkhangel'sk and some three hundred miles east of St. Petersburg. There is a map of the region included in the book, but the village itself is not directly placed on the map, which contributes to its almost mythical feel. Solovyovo is the most ethereal of the three books and is written in a more poetic style. The book makes wonderful reading for anyone planning to travel to the Russian countryside, especially to a Northern region. The nonacademic could easily skip the more scholarly introduction. For the researcher who plans to visit a Russian village, the work is an excellent reference for the meaning of holidays, gift exchange, hospitality, and networks of work, kin, and friendship. Or, one can visit a village through the book itself without the mosquitoes and lack of running water. A lover of Russian literature would find the material on holidays, festivals, healing, and belief a useful guide to these backdrops of nineteenth-century literature in particular.

Paxson's poetic, lyrical, literary style may alienate some readers and attract others; she is upfront in seeing this style as part and parcel of her approach and her position on the village. As she concludes the introduction, “There is no other way to write it: From earth, to foot, from hand and eye, to sky, and story, and song, and lament.” Paxson lays out her approach in chapter one, alongside the “lexicon” for her analysis. She sketches “seven features of memory's landscape”—landmarks, pathways, circles, vector fields, verticality and horizontality, interdimensionality, and layers—which will “texture” the work. In the isolation of the first chapter the lexicon is a bit of a challenge to sort out; however, the remaining chapters are accessible as the concepts become clear in their application to concrete, human examples. Moreover, what is interesting here for the historian is the role that history plays in informing Paxon's study.

In fact, the aim of Paxson's project, as she first conceived it, was to study “the historical imagination,” which she defines as “the various overlapping discursive formations that contribute to the telling of the past.” (153–154 n. 1) When Paxon began observing healing practices in Solovyovo, she noticed that some forms and kinds of healing through sorcery continued to exist, and some disappeared.Footnote ² It was the “pastiche of memory and forgetting” that led her to extend her topic to “social memory” more broadly (154). I would argue that, for the historian, the aspects of Paxson's project that emerge from her original goal are the most interesting and revealing.

Paxson makes a major contribution for historians, particularly historians interested in oral history, through her central focus on identifying, contextualizing, and analyzing repeated narratives that have historical origins. One outstanding example is her analysis, in chapter four, of the meaning of the repeated recollection of a “radiant past.” The Bolsheviks built the Soviet Union on the promises of a “radiant future,” but the people of the empire turned the promises on their heads, much as Lenin turned the promises of revolution on theirs. Instead of remembering the past in terms of working for the radiant future, memories focused on stories of the radiant past. People looked back to a better, more stable time that had a stronger, more resolute ruler—whether it was the Tsar or Stalin—a time that stood in stark contrast to the unsettled present. Yet, recollections of the radiant past could be punctuated comfortably with unsettling memories that lay unquestioned side by each. For example, “How we lived better then! How we were joyous! One wrong word and they could take you away in the middle of the night. We lived in friendship and generosity! Remember how they took away that woman—for one little rhyme—she never came back” (109). In my own experiences of talking to former Soviet citizens I found these seeming contradictions were often repeated. Making sense of them would go a long way toward a better understanding of Soviet identities.

Paxson is also concerned with the question, as it arose among villagers especially in connection with work and mutual aid, of “how to live a moral life” (44), an idea that directly connects this aspect of her study to Rogers. Like Rogers she provides rich descriptions of what labor needed to be done in Solovyovo and the division of labor. She discusses how decision-making worked within a household in Solovyovo, and much of what she notes resonates with the historical record with some changes, especially in regard to the increase in decision-making power for women. The difficult situation of the new daughter-in-law, who is still expected to join her husband's household, resonates with work done by historians like Beatrice Farnsworth and Christine Worobec.Footnote ³ There is a tendency, however, in Paxson to treat “history” as a kind of amorphous mass with far more consensus assumed on a given issue than actually exists. She writes for example, “According to historians, the attitude of villagers towards the tsar was a warm one; he was a fatherly khozian-figure—a protector and bearer of otherworldly powers” (75). Historians, however, debate to what degree this view was in fact the dominant view in the pre-revolutionary countryside. Daniel Field's work, in particular, made a sharp challenge to the notion of absolute peasant faith or belief in the fatherly Tsar. In his nuanced analysis, peasants and local authorities used the “myth” of the Tsar father to their own advantage.Footnote ⁴ Generally, in her use of historical works, Paxson would have found more traction with historians such as Barbara Engel, Esther Kingston-Mann,Footnote ⁵ and more of Farnsworth and Worobec, rather than the older, more traditional works of James Billington, Robert Conquest, and Richard Pipes, which she uses to build a historical portrait of the countryside.

Jessica Allina-Pisano captures the incredibly unsettled present-day reality of the decollectivizaton process in the Black Earth region across the Ukraine-Russian border. She focuses on the regions of Kharkiv in Ukraine and Voronezh in southern Russia. Her aim is to understand what actually occurred on the ground when land privatization was legislated from above after the fall of the Soviet Union. She finds the process that unfolded was remarkably similar across the border of the two countries despite different time lines and varying administrative and institutional contexts. In both cases, millions of new landholders were created, on paper, from the lands of the former state and collective farms; in reality, however, “privatization was a process through which most agricultural workers lost the means to extract value from the land” (3, emphasis in original). Allina-Pisano discovered that for most people in the Black Earth property rights remained bits of paper that they never laid eyes on; land was not surveyed, and lots were not marked or assigned and therefore could not be accessed.

Allina-Pisano argues that the way in which land privatization took shape was not rooted in a longue durée of Romanov rule and/or Soviet land policy. Very similar outcomes regarding land redistribution occurred across the former Soviet bloc and in other developing nations facing similar challenges. “The machinery of Soviet politics and society did not persist in the Black Earth countryside as before. Rather, local state officials used pathways laid in the Soviet era to produce new norms and rules for distribution” (18). Powerful local players adapted to new conditions in new ways using all of the resources they had at hand. On the one hand, the argument makes sense; on the other hand, the historian may ask to what degree other developing nations shared aspects of Soviet history that fed into similar outcomes? One's analysis also depends on how one defines “history.” When does something become history?

Are the changes associated with early perestroika history yet? If they are, then Allina-Pisano's story covers an interesting period in history and land development. In the late 1980s, as the Soviet state became increasingly decentralized, its traditional system of distribution began to break down. Supply chains were fragile and utterly interdependent. If, for example, spare parts could not be sent to fix machinery, then tractors could not be repaired in time to seed crops at the optimal moment. There was a kind of domino effect, as poorly functioning machinery used more fuel, fuel then ran short, and overburdened machinery broke down even more. Allina-Pisano deftly and graphically captures the multitude of inter-related factors that worked against smooth and efficient agricultural production. State farms, however, began to repair “broken supply chains” on their own “through reciprocal arrangements with local factories and providing land and young animals for factory workers' household production in exchange for machinery, labor, and infrastructure repairs for farms” (51). There is much room here for comparative economic-historical studies of how local structures respond to economic crises and a weak central power when left on their own. How unique is the post-Soviet experience and the experiments of Soviet history? This question could motivate research projects that would draw Soviet studies into more comparative historical contexts as well as more cross-disciplinary debate.

The introduction of land distribution policies after 1991 ended this brief period of experimentation and adaptation. As Allina-Pisano writes, “Just as collective farms had begun to adapt to emerging market conditions and had started to withdraw from the web of state control and incentives that characterized late Soviet life, reorganization policy brought the state back into the village” (53). Local officials responsible for implementing the new land system were cautious for fear of making decisions that would raise the ire of new powers at the center if the political tides changed. Allina-Pisano found a “façade of compliance with the law” as farm directors “sacrificed the rights of members of collectives to short-term profit and consolidation of their own power” (66). Their actions and decisions were not based in ideological opposition to markets or to economic reform as such, but rather on the desire to protect and promote their positions and retain the only organizations that existed, the collectives, upon which to base development. Here is a marked departure from the history of collectivization. In contrast, in the 1930s, powerful local officials and farmers who spoke out against state policy were removed from the countryside.

Moreover, as the author points out, no brigades were sent from the center to oversee and implement the land policies of the 1990s as they had been during the collectivization drives of the 1930s. The responsibility for land distribution in the 1990s lay entirely with local officials. Yet, the historical legacy of the collectivization drive was never far away. As Allina-Pisano points out, the new decollectivization policy was introduced in Russia on December 27, 1991, the anniversary of Stalin's “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” speech in 1929. Moreover, the new land policy was consciously modeled on Petr Stolypin's prerevolutionary land program aimed at building a class of stable, conservative, land owners in Russia (56–59). Thus the Romanov past raised its head considerably in the reform projects, as they were conceived in the early post-Soviet reform years.

Allina-Pisano importantly touches on issues of race and gender. In Voronezh the targets of racist comments were people from the Caucasus, while in Kharkhiv racist attitudes were typically directed at Roma. The experiences of women farmers were significantly different from that of men. Women reported threats of sexual violence and beatings over land and farming. By the end of the 1990s, women's wages relative to men, while never equal, were now significantly lower than ever. Historians have been strangely silent on the issue of race in both Soviet and prerevolutionary history with a few rare exceptions.Footnote ⁶ Historians need to ask themselves why the issue of race can be discussed more easily in reference to the contemporary period (although there is still a lot of work to be done on present-day racism in the former Soviet bloc) while the issue of racial discrimination is virtually taboo in historical work. Historians engage in semantic caution, hiding behind the notion of “ethnic violence” and avoiding the implications that “racism” and issues of “race” bring to the historical moment.

The logistics of partition on the ground were immensely complicated. Allotments had to be carved out of former collective lands, and Allina-Pisano presents a picture of what that could mean: private plots sown with crops that needed to be tended by hand, literally spread throughout former collective land, which had been sown with industrial crops farmed with heavy, large machinery. To get to their fields, private cultivators would have to walk across and potentially damage the crops in the larger field (65). There was, therefore, incredible incentive to hobble and hinder the private allotments at every turn. Moreover, the deck was heavily stacked against an individual farmer. Those who tried to farm on their own could find themselves cut off from social services still linked in some ways to the former collectives, such as schools or medical transport. Individual farmers also could not get credit; only well-established members of the local power elite were good risks for the kind of capital required to make a go of the farming enterprise.

Allina-Pisano discovered that those who did manage to become successful “private farmers” in the Black Earth region were former farm directors, top engineers, vets, and agronomists; people who held formerly prestigious positions on the farms; local government officials; and retired army or security officers. These men were well placed because they were part of the “apparatus that oversaw distribution,” and if an individual found himself in more than one category, he was especially well placed (95–96). These people had both financial and social capital and received land allotments far above legal limits, which enabled them to establish profitable farms. Here again historical questions and issues are never far away. Many of the types of individuals who came out on top in the 1990s were targeted for repression in the 1930s. It is interesting to think about this targeting in light of a Bolshevik commitment to collective agriculture. In the 1930s, those individuals who had positions of power in the village and used those positions to question the value, ethics, or efficacy of collectivization were targeted for repression. For example, those members of the rural soviet who believed that they were the villagers' elected representatives and that they owed it to that constituency to protect them, or agronomists, teachers, and veterinarians who challenged the collectivization policies were all targeted for repression. For the Bolsheviks, those who dared to imagine, much less attempt to create, an alternate economic and political structure were the enemies of collective agriculture.

As if the situation could not get worse, most farmers had to pay taxes on the land they never used. Increasingly, former collectives were registered as private farms under the former farm director's leadership; the powerful men who controlled land resources then “sold” the land to a banker and became salaried employees/managers of the private farm. Often, land would be sown with crops like sunflowers, which brought quick and easy profit, but which depleted the soil at an alarming rate.Footnote ⁷ Land also became occupied by “the summer homes of the newly wealthy. Villagers, compelled by circumstances to work longer and harder than before and newly isolated in their daily lives as local transportation infrastructure deteriorated beyond repair, saw the land that had been promised to them occupied by others” (186). In the Black Earth, weekend gardeners clashed, sometimes violently, with the farmers of the region. And the historical record is extremely relevant here, for the Black Earth has always been coveted and thus troubled. It was the most turbulent region under serfdom in terms of peasant unrest. During the Emancipation settlements landowners in this region were much more resistant to providing land to peasants than those of the more northern, less fertile regions, and the struggles between peasants and traditional landowners continued through the unrest of 1905 and 1917. Peasant clashes with the Bolsheviks dragged on in the Central Black Earth region into the 1920s, and it was here that collectivization proved most violent and contested. The value of Black Earth land forced the agricultural toilers of this region to be at the center of all land conflicts of the last century and a half, and it forced them to confront the modern world and modern state in sharper ways than the villagers of the north.

The inhabitants of Sepych too are somewhat protected in their distant locale. The town of Sepych is “an easy twenty-minute walk from end to end” (19), located in the province of Perm, in the Upper Kama region of the Urals. As a “town” in the Soviet period, many of Sepych's population turned away from the land and obtained positions in an increasingly sprawling civil service. But many had to turn back to the land in the 1990s to pay taxes and to replace the income lost from state positions that no longer paid salaries on a regular or predictable basis. As Rogers nicely articulates the situation, (and once again history is in dialogue with the present), teachers, hospital employees, and other civil servants “rapidly overcame their Soviet-era disdain for milking cows” (197). The same scenario played out in other less fertile and contested areas of the former Soviet Union. All through the 1990s one would be extremely hard-pressed to make ends meet if one did not have some kind of access, either directly or through family, neighbors, or friends, to a plot of land that helped to put food on the table. And in many places, outside of the Black Earth, it could be relatively easily arranged as we see in both Sepych and Solovyovo.

Like Allina-Pisano, Rogers sees ethical practices continuing, or not, “for specific, identifiable reasons, not out of simple historical inertia, tradition, or some essential attribute of a peasantry” (298). Rogers undertakes a very ambitious project. He engages in an “historical ethnography of ethics,” based on the study of an Old Believer community from the late-seventeenth century to the present. A potential challenge for the reader when reading The Old Faith and the Russian Land is that one has to accept Rogers's definition of ethics before one can accept the book's arguments and move through time with him. His definitions are broad and perhaps overqualified, but I would argue that the readers who do put their trust in him and give him both the benefit of the doubt and the intellectual space he needs to develop and lay out his findings, are well rewarded. Rogers does seem to be constantly anticipating criticism, and the book may have been even stronger if he were less cautious.

Rogers understands “ethics to indicate a field of socially located and culturally informed practices that are undertaken with at least somewhat conscious orientation toward conceptions of what is good, proper, and virtuous” (11). He chooses to focus on “ethics” over “culture” to try and avoid the “associations and echoes” that a study of “culture” invokes like timelessness or a romantic, static portrayal. He is very aware of the persistence of the “liberal subject” in western understandings of subjectivity as “autonomous, choosing, individualized.” And he maintains that his study of “ethics” “must hold open the possibility of different subjectivities shaped through different modalities of power in different times and places” (14). Paxson, too, provides good analysis of an understanding of “freedom” that was prevalent in Solovyovo where freedom was not conceived of in the liberal western sense but rather in the sense of a lack of order (116).

Rogers explains how and why he engages ideas of “history.”Footnote ⁸ History is vital to Rogers's study of Sepych for a host of reasons. First, because of the region's Old Believer past there had been much ethnographic and archeographical study of the region. Russian scholars in the 1970s were eager to find a pure Russian national past in the community itself and in the books and manuscripts treasured, and thus preserved by the faithful. The studies of these late-Soviet scholars filled archival shelves. Second, the citizens of the Sepych were themselves constantly wrestling with “history.” They were engaged in archival investigations, commemorations, and reflections on the nature and meaning of change over time in the region. Rogers offers “an account of history and ethics based in Sepych that moves between the historical sensibilities of townspeople and the standard conventions of professional ethnography and historiography … with an eye toward advancing an engagement between history and anthropology …” (28). The depth and extent of Rogers's fieldwork, as well as his work in the archives are tireless. And he embraces some of the disjuncture between fieldwork and the archival record rather than trying “to iron such diverse materials into a seamless narrative” (29). As Rogers notes, “Identifying an easy, unifying narrative in the archives and fieldwork would thus help to eliminate the contradictions and complexities that I aim to bring to the fore” (29). Historians may do well to internalize such instincts; a good researcher listens and is not afraid of difference and contradictions, the understanding, and contextualizing, of which are essential to the study of everyday life. All three of these scholars spent a great deal of time listening to the people who inhabit the areas they study and in Rogers's case, especially, listening to the historical record as well.

Going back in time with Rogers, he traces the historical roots of a “moral community” in Sepych. He claims that he did not find “an authentic pre-Nikonian Orthodoxy in the early decades of Old Belief” but rather “the dawn of a centuries-long series of inventions, modifications, and reinventions of what it meant to be a Christian—and an ethical subject more broadly …” (38). Rogers provides accessible and important historical background on priestly and priestless Old Believer communities. He nicely illustrates the centrality of agricultural work to the belief systems and identities of the people of Sepych. He traces continuities in the ways in which its inhabitants dealt with outside pressures. Under Nicholas I, for example, there was increased pressure for couples to have formal Orthodox marriages, which they did. Yet this seeming acceptance of state pressure did not stop individuals within Sepych from becoming elders of Old Belief in later life. Similarly, in the twentieth century accepting a socialist marriage did not prohibit people from joining the elders in their retirement years.

In his assessment of the impact of the emancipation of 1861 on the former serfs of Sepych, Rogers contributes a keen analysis of local archival materials that illustrate how post-emancipation land settlement played out on the ground. His explanation of the split within the Upper Kama Old Believer community, which began in 1866, contributes to a broader understanding of village life. By drawing out what was important and contested, he makes a significant contribution to the history of rural life in the second-half of the nineteenth century. He locates aspects of the split in the different economic transformations experienced by the towns of Sepych and Dëmino. Sepych itself experienced a post-emancipation economic boom that in turn influenced local understandings and interpretations of Old Belief. Rogers suggests that the economic boom experienced within Sepych pushed believers to delay the withdrawal from the world, associated with Old Belief, to later life. Women became more involved in local spiritual authority in Sepych while in Dëmino, elders defended patriarchy and tradition.

Rogers begins his study of the Soviet period in Sepych with an uprising in August 1918. He skillfully reconstructs the uprising in Sepych from a varied source base capturing well the violence and the complexities of the civil-war conflict. He asks a vital, yet elusive question regarding how communities “regenerate themselves in the wake of acts of violence exacerbated by the complicity of their own members” (109). I applaud him for asking this crucial question, although I am not sure how complete his answer is, or can be. Here again though, a scholar “outside” of the historical discipline raises a vital and productive question for the historian.Footnote ⁹

Rogers contends that “the primary way in which Soviet socialism transformed local expectations in Sepych was by widening and hardening generational distinctions. In Sepych, young dedicated collective farmers of the 1940s often became, later in life—and to the continued surprise of higher-level party organs—ascetic elders in the 1970s” (113). And he finds that this trajectory fit with expectations that went far back into Sepych's pre-Soviet past in that one could live a life in the outside world in one's younger life and turn to a devout religious life in one's later years. Rogers manages to blend longue durée elements with evidence and ideas of dynamism, change, resistance, and accommodation.

He provides an excellent discussion of how labor and payments worked on the collective and state farms over time. He maintains that administrators used “material incentives” in the era of collective farming (1930–1965) and “moral incentives” in the era of state farming (1965–1991) to promote as efficient a working of the collective-farm system as possible. By “moral incentives,” Rogers means close and powerful connections among state farm chairmen and local administrators that made successful use of socialist festivals, recognition, and competition to create a successful farm and community. Moreover, these “material” and “moral” incentives are part of a

Here Rogers is able to make a sophisticated argument about patterns and cycles in one region that appear in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times.

In another significant contribution, The Old Faith and the Russian Land reveals a rich scholarly world that existed in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev illustrating the degree to which the last years of the Soviet Union were far from stagnant both culturally and intellectually. These findings are important for the historian because there has been a tendency to dismiss a good deal of Soviet scholarship from these years. Rogers's work asks that we engage with this scholarship and understand the role it plays in an understanding of late-Soviet society. In the 1970s, archaeographers went to the Upper Kama, drawn to the rare books preserved in Old-Believer communities. Rogers traces the nuanced, and not uncomplicated, relationship that developed between Old-Believers and scholars who came to the area looking for a useable Russian past. Although wary at first, over time, religious elders “found archaeographers to be confidants and powerful patrons” (166). In turn these scholars fought battles with university administrations to teach courses on religion and the rediscovered texts, thus playing a role in the unraveling of the strictures of Soviet scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰

If, as Rogers argues, “socialism congealed into a more or less stable configuration of ethical practices, materials of ethics, and moral communities …”, then post-Soviet life is characterized by “ongoing uncertainty” (197). New understandings of gender emerged in Sepych in the post-Soviet period and its concurrent demonetization during which moonshine became a kind of currency. Women were the ones who took cash for moonshine whereas men were more likely to drink with friends to secure their assistance at some future date. Thus a sense developed in the post-Soviet period that women had control of material resources within the household. Rogers provides a fascinating study and insight into relations among labor, moonshine, production, gender, money, and the new social and moral relations that emerged among the inhabitants of Sepych (197–202).

All three works emphasize the interconnectedness of agricultural work and understandings of the self and identity in three diverse regions. Very early on in her book, Paxson captures for the modern-urban reader what it means to have a family farm oriented toward subsistence. “In 40 years, Iuliia and her husband took only one vacation together, to distant Leningrad for 10 days. That was it. How could they leave their farm? How would they leave their cow that had to be milked three times a day?” (2). The villagers of Solovyovo are Paxson's focus and the reader rarely sees much of the local officialdom who plays such a significant role in the other two studies. The shady former farm directors appear for a moment, early on, as Paxson briefly describes how the former cattle of the collective farm were slaughtered and the meat sold so that powerful local figures could “concentrate on selling off the wood of the rich forests of the region” (3). After this short back story, Paxson turns to her real focus, the people of Solovyovo, in particular the couple that she lived with over the long periods that she stayed in the village. The inhabitants of Solovyovo are able to stay “under the radar” in a way that the farmers of the Black Earth never could. Solovyovo's inhabitants are still able to hunt, fish, forage, and work the land with, it seems from Paxson's account, little interference so far. We get much more of a “sense” of the Russian countryside there as we know it from Russian literature—fields of wheat, birch trees, mushroom picking—in many ways this locale is more “eternal” than the bitterly disputed (forever) Black Earth region, or even Sepych. And this view of the village is likely rooted in Paxson's longue durée sympathies regarding the historical actor.

Allina-Pisano's work shows the degree to which relations as they developed between the powerful and the former collective farmers played a huge role in the creation of the new order. Leaving the collective was like rejecting “one's patron” (84 n. 137). Allina-Pisano sees the present, and likely this historical past, as one of struggle. And it is the struggle itself that is at the forefront of her book. Patronage, conflict, domination, resistance, and accommodation are what we find in the Post-Soviet Potemkin Village. Allina-Pisano's portrayal of local power structures works very well with the individual study provided by Rogers of the former director of State Farm Sepych, Andrei Petrovich. The members of State Farm Sepych voted to become a “closed joint stock company” (AOZT) and was renamed AOZT Sepych. Allina-Pisano found that such forms of organization, ones that mostly closely mirrored the former collective farm, were most often chosen. And these “closed forms of ownership, allowed directors to avoid potential outside interference” (69). In an AOZT, former and current members of the state farm were the only ones who could hold shares in the company. And in Sepych, Andrei Petrovich was overwhelmingly elected to be the closed stock company's new director (196). Rogers tracks the ways in which Andrei Petrovich's “vast web of connections” allowed him to become the leader in the construction of post-Soviet Sepych and to play a significant role in the creation of its citizens' new post-socialist identity. His AOZT was the “single most important and most visible patron” in the construction of a church in Sepych because it had a virtual monopoly on the machinery and the labor that could be used to move materials and to build. Rogers argues that

Wrestling with the correlation between the old Soviet community leaders and the new is another of Rogers's important contributions. In my own work I have observed how local-party activists became religious scholars and activists, or how a man, once a prominent local-party member, became a devout Muslim making the trip by car from Bishkek to Mecca. I think Rogers's analysis of this phenomenon is sound; those who wanted to serve their communities before, and who wanted careers, continued to want them. Paxson lived with Iuliia and Mikhail Alekseevich, as they are known through her study, and they are the people to whom the work is dedicated. Mikhail Alekseevich had been a “loyal Party member” and was now a “faithful Christian” (47) and the village healer. Paxson's work contributes significantly to the issue by showing how religious images, belief, and symbols fit comfortably with Soviet ones, and we get a good sense of how spiritual worlds and political worlds can sit and operate alongside each other (229–237). Here again the historian can learn something key about the tensions of Soviet existence, identities, and loyalties.

These three works illustrate what detailed regional studies can contribute to our understanding of the post-Soviet countryside. For historians, they are intriguing as a way to witness how an author's understanding of history shapes his or her study as well as linking the past and the present in ways that can raise new questions for the historian. Together the three monographs provide a vivid portrait of land and labor over time. All three authors were exhaustive in pursuit of their particular focus, tireless in their research, and well integrated into local communities. They spent endless hours living with the people of those towns and villages, talking with them, working alongside them, and gaining a measure of acceptance. Allina-Pisano and Rogers reflect on what it means to be an outsider and on what being a researcher from far away, and from another culture, meant for their research. Paxson feels that she became an “insider” in the village of Solovyovo, and this status of belonging, of being “svoi,” is perhaps the key concept of her book. I am not sure whether or not this kind of belonging is possible. Still, her feeling of belonging may make her book more readable and accessible to a wider public. Together these three works suggest that crossing the lines that divide disciplines and engaging in focused, regional research produces rich, thoughtful studies that contribute a great deal to what we know about both rural history as well as contemporary rural life. They also raise so many new questions and directions for research that they serve to remind us that we still have a great deal to learn about both the Soviet and the post-Soviet countryside.