Trajectories in peoples farming in Moscow oblast during the post-socialist transformation

The importance of personal food production to the reproduction of rural households in the Russian countryside has been widely acknowledged in the literature on the post-communist transition, but the variety of forms this mode of food production takes has not been explored. The authors show that there is a complicated microgeography to the pattern of production on the allotments allocated to rural inhabitants that is related to a variety of geographical and historical factors, and to the nature of the relationship that exists between large and small farm sectors in post-communist Russia. Under certain circumstances, allotment production has become highly commercialised and has occupied the niche reserved in post-communist land reform legislation for private farms.