‘Semi-urban farmers’ and ‘Chinese gardeners’: post-kolkhoz rent in suburban informal economy

The article analyzes the development of informal economic practices in the non-institutionalized suburban space. The central question consists in how the kolkhoz past influences the development of the post-Soviet suburban economy. The research has been conducted as a case study and draws on a series of semi-structured interviews taken in 2016, as well as on field observations done in the suburbs of Irkutsk in 2009-16; it revealed that underlying the local residents’ informal economic activity is the legacy of kolkhozes which the author has termed ‘post-kolkhoz rent’. The case study identifies several variants of this rent: a transition to absolutely illegal economic activity; a move away from market principles toward reciprocity in economic relations; and the use of the post-kolkhoz rent by means of the contemporary administrative rent. The post-kolkhoz rent also underlies transnational migrants’ business practices associated with the suburban informal economy. Despite the differences in these strategies, sustainable reproduction of informal economic relations as a basis of activity is what all of them have in common. Thus, the system of previous relationships (i.e., the ones that had existed in the kolkhozes) constitutes one of the major factors in the reproduction of informal business practices in the Irkutsk suburbs today.

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