Private Property and Collective “Comradeship”: Property Regimes and Social Relationships in Garden Non-Profit Associations (“Comradeships”), Leningrad Region, the Early 2000s.

Abstract

The paper is focused on the issue of how the relations on the microlevel in the Russian society have been adjusting to the market economy introduced in the early 1990s. It represents the results of the research conducted in several garden cooperatives of the region around St. Petersburg in the period of 2007-2012, applying methods of field ethnography. Garden cooperative (“garden comradeships”) is an institution inherited from the state socialism and bearing certain traits hardly compatible with an ideal model of market economy that was introduced in Russia after 1991. In the paper I am discussing the two areas in garden cooperatives where the issue of adjusting to the new economic model proved to be most visible: the relationships between neighbors concerning their common borders and the relationships in the community in general concerning its common property. The results show that along with an obvious atomization trend, new forms of social solidarity and order are searched for in current garden cooperatives, enabling both new capitalist and old socialist mechanisms and norms. Old norms, especially those regulating common property relations, in the current situation are often illegal. The contemporary law about garden cooperatives implies a possibility of complete liquidation of this institution. However, as my research shows, garden cooperatives are able to perform effectively under certain conditions and serve as an important form of urbanites land use. Probably a more detailed and well-written legislation about common property management could help to save and develop this form of land use organization.