## Negotiations and performances

Although development actors lament the confusion created by the ambiguous statements and actions of the Kyrgyzstani government, in the present chapter I have shown that the promotion of cooperatives by development actors is not a coherent unitary project either. Rather, it, like every development programme (see Mosse 2005; Olivier de Sardan 2005) is a set of situated, ambiguous or even contradictory, practices. In their encounter with a European social scientist, development actors negotiate their legitimacy through the performance of a discourse that values a specific knowledge and a specific idea of cooperative. I interpret the fact that I am prevented from observing their performances in other contexts (in particular in the framework of the training sessions on cooperatives provided to farmers) as an indication that, in other contexts and with other audiences, the same actors might perform a different discourse – maybe increasingly valuing the experiences of the specific audience to which they talk. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that, in practice, CUK accepts ex-Soviet farms turned into production cooperatives as its members and supports existing cooperatives that do not correspond to the ideal model.

This performance is always situated in the particular personal trajectories of individual development workers. On the one hand, their subjectivities are constituted in the specific context of the development sector, whose dominant discourse shapes their aspirations and knowledge references. On the one hand, through their performances, these actors legitimise both the dominant developmentalist discourse and their own personal position as development workers in the sector. Their specific discursive practices shape at the same time the context of the development sector and its discourse.

These observations are valid also for governmental actors, who equally negotiate their legitimacy – and the legitimacy of the Kyrgyzstani government and state more generally – through specific reinterpretations and performances. By navigating different discourses, they can sometimes attract foreign resources in the country or in their village. At the same time, however, by outsourcing the implementation of measures to promote cooperatives to external actors, they weaken their own legitimacy, making themselves – or rather the “state” more generally – even more invisible. Also in their case, their performances are always situated in their personal trajectories. They adapt their performances to their specific audience to increase their legitimacy as competent and active civil servants or governmental representatives. At the same time, they negotiate their aspirations within this specific context. Remember the case of Nurlan pulling out what for me were random flyers of private sellers of agricultural machinery: for Nurlan, the selection of flyers was probably not as random as for me, but partially represented his ideal of development and modernity.

## Promoting cooperatives in the context of post-independence economic liberalisation

The practices and discourses discussed above all take place in the specific context of post-independence Kyrgyzstan. In this context, international institutions have promoted reforms aimed at the liberalisation of the national economy, paralleled by the dismantling of the centralised state in favour of state withdrawal from economic activities. Although of course post-independence economic liberalisation is not a coherent
unitary project but rather a series of situated practices that can be ambiguous and even contradictory, I argue that this particular context offers the conditions for the emergence of a discourse on cooperatives as presented in this chapter and provides a legitimation framework for this discourse. The scholarly work on cooperatives in the Central Asian region is both a product and a constituent of this specific framework. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Cold War, Western knowledge and experience is valued over local ones: this is a consequence of the idea that Western capitalism has won over Soviet socialism and at the same time it contributes to reinforcing this idea.

In this context, the type of cooperative that can be legitimised most easily is the model (already promoted in other countries of the Global South) of service cooperatives that can support the emergence of a new class of peasant farmers – and thus contribute to the establishment of a market economy system. Also, the kind of subjectivity that can find more legitimacy within this context is one linked to economic rationality and individuality (see §3.3). In fact, the promotion of the service cooperative model is based on the ideal of the peasant farmer as an autonomous entrepreneur – and at the same time it contributes to its emergence. When Lerman and Sedik (2009b, 16) affirm that the benefits of cooperation are “self-evident” in transition economies, they assume a purely economic rationality driving individual behaviour.

Similarly, when development actors explain the advantages for farmers to join a cooperative to me, they list exclusively direct economic benefits such as access to credit and leases. Only on one occasion did I hear about a broader emancipatory role of cooperatives, during the Forum on Cooperatives organised by CUK and ICA-Asia and Pacific in Bishkek. One of the invited guests, an Indian woman who represents ICA-Asia and Pacific, affirmed: “We have to consider not only the economic gains but also the social goods brought by cooperatives” (Indira, ICA, 30.06.17). She referred in particular to the potential of cooperatives for the emancipation of women – one of the favoured points made by cooperative promoters to further promote cooperatives in the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (see ILO/ICA n.d., also §2.1.2). Also in this case, however, the emancipation of women is based on their role as active entrepreneurs who can gain autonomy through economic activities within a market economy. As Fraser (2015) would phrase it,<fnref n="11" /> such an emancipation is linked to marketisation but does not consider broader politics of redistribution – and is therefore compatible with, and easily legitimised within, the context of post-independence Kyrgyzstan.

In this framework, we have seen that the Kyrgyzstani government – and its representatives and civil servants – is hardly able to find its legitimacy. The dominant discourse on economic liberalisation also implies the partial dismantlement of the centralised state. When governmental actors attempt to gain legitimacy by reproducing the dominant discourse – for instance by performing “grand statements” about their plans to support cooperatives or the private sector – they contribute at the same time to their delegitimation, especially if, because of limited budget possibilities, these statements are not followed by concrete actions.

<footnote n="11">¹¹ I am thankful to Bruno Meeus for pointing out this relation to Fraser’s work.</footnote>
## Pasts and futures

Different to what authors have observed for other international initiatives for local cooperation in Kyrgyzstan (see §3.2.2), it seems that the discourse on cooperatives does not include the mobilisation of representations of past (pre-Soviet) cooperation traditions to foster cooperation in the present. On the contrary, the only reference to past experiences of cooperation is the Soviet farm – and this reference is always strongly negative. The lack of references to the pre-Soviet past is probably due to the fact that it does not offer examples of formalised cooperation among producers as individual entrepreneurs or peasant farmers. On the other hand, the mobilisation of the Soviet farm as a negative reference is understandable within the dominant discourse discussed in this section, where legitimacy is gained through the reference to Western experience and the devaluation of local (Soviet) experiences. At the same time, however, the repeated and emphasised mobilisation of the Soviet referent (even if in the negative) might also contribute to its persistence – and certainly contributes to its essentialisation – making it more real than it would be otherwise.

The discourses on cooperatives analysed in the present chapter are also projected into the future. They all promote some sorts of ideals: of cooperatives as “pure” service cooperatives, of development as the emergence of private small farming within a market economy free of “imperfections”, or of modernity as the establishment of large agri-business. These ideals can be considered “fantasies” in the Lacanian sense as interpreted by Byrne and Healy (2006; see also Healy 2010 and §4.3.1) because, in fact, they can never be realised in their fullness and, at the same time, they produce the conditions for which they cannot be realised. The different “lacks” which actors identify as the causes of cooperative failure, in fact, are scapegoats that are produced through the narrative of failure itself. In particular, the “confusion” and the “lack of understanding” lamented by development actors are (also) consequences of the latter’s discourse.

I am not arguing here for one or the other cooperative or development model (but I have drawn attention to the risks related to land concentration). My point is rather – following Healy and Byrne (2006) and Gibson-Graham (2006a, see also §2.1.3 and §4.3) – that the current discourses on and practices of the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan, by focusing their aspirations to a projected ideal future, foreclose the possibility to engage more openly with existing relations and practices of cooperation that are imperfect but at least exist in the here and now. For instance, they prevent scholars, development practitioners and farmers from engaging in more concrete reflections on how existing ex-Soviet production cooperatives like Oktjabr could transform their internal governance in a more democratic way or how farmers could expand the collective activities – related both to production and to services – of their existing cooperatives.
7 MAKING SENSE OF COOPERATIVE EXPERIENCES IN THE ISSYK-
KUL REGION AND IN PJAK

To reach the region surrounding the lake Issyk-Kul (Fig. 2) from Bishkek, the traveller leaves the western bus station by bus or shared taxi and goes up the Chuy Valley following the river along the Kazakh border. After a relatively comfortable two-to-three-hour ride on the brand new, Chinese-sponsored route,<fnref n="1" /> she reaches the pass that separates the Chuy province from the Issyk-Kul province and she enters the hydrographical basin of the Issyk-Kul lake, one of the world's largest. The first impression of the region is far from the idyllic postcards one can find in Bishkek, with the deep blue lake surrounded by green mountains with snow-capped peaks (Fig. 4). The traveller instead has to pass through the industrial ruins of Balykchy – the town at the western edge of the lake once well connected by rail to Bishkek. It is only a bit further on the shore of the lake that her gaze finally meets the astonishing blue of the lake and, if weather allows, reaches the white peaks embracing the lake (Fig. 5). This particular place moves me every time I travel from Bishkek, as I feel the grandiosity of the landscape opening my chest with a sense of belonging.

Traces of populations in the Issyk-Kul region date back to as early as the stone age. The first agricultural activities appeared around 1000 BC by groups of Scythian and Turkic origins (Benfield 1998: 56–8). Although the basin of the lake is surrounded by high mountains, passes connect it to what today corresponds to the Xinjiang autonomous region, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan’s Naryn province, plus the already mentioned connection to the Chuy Valley. For almost 1500 years after the birth of Christ, the region was traversed by the routes connecting Eastern Asia and Europe known as the Silk Road. Until the nineteenth century the region was inhabited by various groups of different origins (from the Turks of South Siberia to the Kalmaks of West Mongolia) and with different types of livelihoods (from the Kyrgyz/Kazakh nomadic herders to the sedentary and Islamised Kalmaks). Settlements were mainly near the lake shores, yet not directly at the lake to avoid flooding – for instance in Karakol, Barskoon and Balykchy (Benfield 1998, 55–72; Levi 2007). With the discovery of new, especially naval, trade routes in the fifteenth century and the consequent diminished importance of the region as a connection between East and West, the population on the territory of today’s Kyrgyzstan mainly stabilised: different groups lived in separated areas under the control of regional Khanates (Benfield 1998, 67–70; Levi 2012).

With the occupation of Central Asian territories by the Russian Empire in the second half of the
nineteenth century, sedentarisation in what is today northern Kyrgyzstan accelerated (see Benfield 1998,
73–80; Brower 2003). First, a flow of Slavic peasants from Russia and Ukraine settled on the land most
suited for agriculture: around the Issyk-Kul, particularly the alluvial lowland between Kyzyl-Suu
(formerly Pokrovka), Karakol and Tyup and later the alluvial fans on the northern shore as well as the
drier land in the west (Benfield 1998, 75). A second sedentarisation flow was started by the migrant

<footnote n="1">¹ The Chinese government sponsored the repair of the road connecting Bishkek to Balykchy in the early 2010s. Between 2016 and 2018 further work was done on the road between Balykchy and Karakol on the northern shore of the lake; previously, the two towns were connected only by partially unpaved and always bumpy roads on both the northern and southern shores.</footnote>
Dungan (Chinese Muslim) population fleeing Chinese repression after their rebellion in 1877; these
groups settled close to but separate from existing Slavic settlements (id. 78). Until the beginning of the
twentieth century, Kyrgyz groups remained mainly nomadic, although they had established forms of
winter settlements. With the outbreak of the First World War, the Russian Empire urged contributions to
its warfare efforts (in the form of food and money) from all its provinces: this provided the impulse to the
forced sedentarisation of Kyrgyz groups (id. 80).

After the October Revolution in 1917 and the establishment of Soviet rule over the territory of today's
Kyrgyzstan, settlement structure and agricultural activities in the region of the Issyk-Kul did not change
much initially, except for the establishment of a few small collective farms (id. 99). A more radical – and
violent – process of collectivisation started only later, after Lenin's death in 1924 and with Stalin's
accession to power (id. 99–102; Pianciola 2001; Loring 2008; 2014). As of 1935, private property and
individual agriculture or animal husbandry were abolished and substituted with collective farms, while
rural settlements were restructured to serve their new functions as centres of the new collective farms and
to absorb the new wave of migrants from the rest of the Soviet Union. The industrial plants of Balychky
and Karakol were established in response to the threat to industrial activities in western Soviet Union
during the Second World War (Benfield 1998, 103; Florin 2016). After the War, the extensive expansion
of agricultural activities to the mountainsides and in the remaining dry lands around the lake further
transformed the landscape of the region; later, from the 1960s into the 1970s, smaller collective farms
were merged into larger state farms to exploit economies of scale and advance mechanisation (Benfield
1998, 103–6).

Today, cultivation mostly concentrates in the humid planes on the eastern and north-eastern sides of the
lake (Fig. 6 and 7, see KHMI et al. 2006), where the climate is milder and more humid than in the drier
west and south-west. Grain crops occupy almost half of the arable surface of the province; forage crops
and potatoes occupy the rest.<fnref n="2" /> Since Soviet times, the northern shore of the lake and its resorts have
attracted tourists from Bishkek and other urban regions of the FSU; more recently, a new category of
tourists – backpackers from Western Europe – has been attracted by the region, especially by the trekking
region around Karakol (Kantarci, Uysal, and Magnini 2014).

In the present chapter, I describe my journey in the Issyk-Kul region to meet cooperatives of different
types and discuss the narratives of failure that emerged through my interactions with their members. After
an exploration in the Issyk-Kul region (§7.1), I focus on Pjak, on the cooperative Ak-Bulut and, more
marginally, on the cooperative Kara-Jer. I first describe and discuss how members of both cooperatives
introduced their cooperative to me (§7.2) and how, later, they admitted and explained the decline (or
“failure”) of Ak-Bulut (§7.3). The chapter describes my failed attempt to find a functioning cooperative –
and even to find a cooperative as a defined object *tout court*. The chapter therefore concludes (§7.4) by
showing how villagers assemble meanings and practices around the concept of cooperative – a concept
that is fluid and undetermined and that escapes my attempts to fix it in clear boundaries and categories.

<footnote n="2">² See http://www.stat.kg/en/opendata/category/2371/ (accessed 24.09.2019).</footnote>
# 7.1 Approaching cooperatives in the Issyk-Kul

## 7.1.1 Meeting Oktjabr

When I step out of the bus in Karakol for the first time, in August 2014, I stumble upon a talkative Peace Corps volunteer<fnref n="3" /> who brings me to the local American Corner<fnref n="4" /> in order to find some useful contacts for my research. As soon as I mention my interest in agriculture, the librarian immediately suggests that I visit the cooperative Oktjabr, the biggest farm in the province: Cheken is not far and a friend of hers lives there. I do so and stay there for three days, during which I meet Oktjabr's director Stanislav and some of its members.

In the early 1990s, the Soviet state farm Krasnyi Oktjabr (literally Red October) dropped the adjective and was transformed in the cooperative Oktjabr. The cooperative was able to maintain collective production and a good part of the farm's assets during the process of asset distribution (see Fig. 7). Also thanks to several foreign investments – including from development projects and private investors – the cooperative managed to acquire new assets, in particular some big, modern irrigation machines, of which Stanislav proudly shows me a picture. After the crisis of production in the early 1990s, Oktjabr could re-establish its reputation as a seed breeding farm in the Issyk-Kul region; besides its specialisation on potatoes and grain seeds, it is also active in fodder production and animal breeding.

Despite this success, the number of cooperative members is constantly decreasing. After Kyrgyzstan's independence, many ethnic Slavs left the country: regions like Cheken, Karakol, or the northern Issyk-Kul, which were widely inhabited by ethnic Slavs, suffered a significant decrease of their population (Bandey and Rather 2013). Several of the ex-workers of Krasnyi Oktjabr thus left the town; the ones who remained are aging and the cooperative has difficulties finding new members. Despite these difficulties, Stanislav and the other members I meet are hopeful for the future and express their pride in having been able to preserve the cooperative and to “stay together” despite the profound changes of the last three decades. Stanislav in particular emphasises that he and his colleagues are still in the cooperative not only for the economic gains it brings but also for their willingness and pleasure to work together.

I go back to Cheken in July 2015 to propose to Oktjabr's members to focus my research on their cooperative. I am hopeful because I believe that a collaboration with an external researcher could be useful for Oktjabr: for instance, I could investigate the reasons why young farmers are not interested in joining the cooperative and help rethink a strategy to acquire new members. In a meeting with Stanislav, I explain the plan for my research and my ideas for collaboration. A long discussion with Stanislav

<footnote n="3">³ The Peace Corps is a US governmental programme that enrolls young volunteers for missions abroad, usually targeting social and economic development activities. Volunteers should stay in the same assignment for two years and are encouraged to learn the local language and integrate in local communities. According to the official website, there are currently 88 volunteers in Kyrgyzstan, who mostly work as English teachers in villages (https://www.peacecorps.gov/kyrgyz-republic/ accessed 25.09.2019). The figure of the Peace Corps *volontier* is well-known by residents of the province and certainly shapes the way villagers perceive me.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Similarly to the Peace Corps programme, the American Corner programme is part of the US “soft power” strategy worldwide (Quigley and Rieffel 2008). American Corners are public libraries whose purpose is to provide “comprehensive and up-to-date information about the United States, and thus promoting mutual understanding between the American and Kyrgyz people” (https://kg.usembassy.gov/education-culture/american-corners/ accessed 25.09.2019).</footnote>
follows, during which he constantly repeats the expression *"nemnogo ponyatno"* ("I didn't understand everything" or "I understand very little"). Stanislav does not see the point of my research; he does not see the benefits either for me or for them. After two hours, he announces that in any case he cannot decide alone about my proposition: the management board should give the final answer. As one could expect after the discussion with Stanislav and his *nemnogo ponyatno*, the board's answer is negative: its members do not see any benefit in the proposed collaboration, either.

### 7.1.2 Looking for other cooperatives

In the following days, my interpreter Elzada approaches the situation in what she calls "the Kyrgyz way": she starts from the few contacts we have and makes phone calls nonstop asking for further contacts and information. Stanislav gave us the number of the CUK director, which helps us get the names of five cooperatives (ex-Soviet farms) in the Issyk-Kul and Chuy provinces but the phone number of only two of them. Our other contact is a friend of a friend of a friend of Elzada who works in a bank that had a special loan scheme for cooperatives: we add to our list some other cooperatives who took a credit from the bank. We also visit some local administration offices, where we find lists of cooperatives, yet mostly without a phone number or contact person. Out of the 30 phone numbers of cooperative members on our list, only few still work, probably because SIM-card turnover is very high in Kyrgyzstan. We collect mostly negative answers: our interlocutors explain that they are not linked to any cooperative; there is no cooperative in the village; the cooperative does not exist anymore or does not carry out any activities at the moment – often they add that, in any case, they do not have time for us to visit. One man invites us to visit him in his village, but when we arrive there are no traces of him nor of the cooperative: he does not reply to our phone calls, and nobody in the village can give us any useful information.

In the end, we can visit only three cooperatives in the province. The first cooperative, Nurdeen, specialised in animal breeding, has a similar story to Oktjabr: the cooperative was also created from a Soviet farm in the early 1990s, inheriting its workers and assets. The reaction of Nurdeen's director is also similar to the one of Stanislav: he does not seem enthusiastic about my proposition and says that, in any case, it is the management board that should decide. Also in this case, the board's decision is negative.

The second cooperative, Jemish, in Ak-Korgon, is of a different type: it was created in the wake of a development project in the 2000s. Residents of Ak-Korgon have specialised in the production of apricots, which make up most of their cash income. A group of about 30 villagers registered as Jemish in order to access a facilitated credit schemes for cooperatives promoted by GIZ. Its chairwoman is currently in contact with CUK for a prospected trial with a drop irrigation system. According to the woman, Jemish's main aim is to unite apricot producers to achieve better marketing prices; however, when I visit the village in mid-July during the peak of apricot ripening, this seems not to work. The private traders who have come to Ak-Korgon with their lorries agree among them to offer a very low price for the apricots. They speak with a village leader, who agrees with the price also because, as rumours denounce, he will
receive a commission on each box of apricots the traders buy. Tension rises and several villagers gather around the leader's house, trying in vain to negotiate higher prices. For what I can observe in these days, Jemish members also suffer under the pressure from traders and have to agree, like everybody else, to the ridiculous prices offered by traders. Jemish's chairwoman does not explicitly refuse my proposition for collaboration, but she is not enthusiast either: she says it is up to me to decide and she does not mention any management board or member consultation.

The third cooperative is Ak-Bulut in Pjak: the cooperative is similar to Jemish in that it was created in 2005 with the support of a rural development project. As we will see in much more detail later, my first interactions with Kumbat, Ak-Bulut's chairman, give me the impression of an active and successful service cooperative – an impression disproven by my further observations in the village. Contrarily to all other directors or chairpersons, Kumbat and his family are very welcoming.

During my visits in Kyrgyzstan in the following years, I meet members of other cooperatives. In general, the stories I collect are very similar to the four examples presented above. Ex-Soviet farms have difficulties in maintaining their members. Younger cooperatives have difficulties in maintaining their activities and finding financial resources: often, after registering for a punctual material benefit, these cooperatives do not pursue collective activities and exist, therefore, only on paper (see Chapter 6). Even Kara-Jer, a cooperative established in 2016 with the strong support of CUK's director, who provided them contact with a Japanese firm interested in buying medical herbs from members, seems to have already stopped its activities in 2017, since the Japanese firm did not renew the trade agreement (see §7.2.3/4).

### 7.1.3 Discussion: failed cooperatives in the Issyk-Kul?

The results of this first overview of cooperatives in the Issyk-Kul region seem in fact to confirm the idea that experiments to promote cooperatives have mostly failed. First, the institutions (especially CUK and local administrations) that are supposed to promote cooperatives in the region cannot even provide a simple list of registered cooperatives and a contact number. Second, the activities of the cooperatives established through the support of development projects seem to strongly depend on this external support. Ak-Bulut, Jemish and Kara-Jer have been able to organise collective activities with the support of foreign or local agencies; however, they have not been able to continue such activities since these agencies stopped their support. Something similar probably happened to the several cooperatives whose contact persons told Elzada on the phone that their cooperative did not exist anymore. Third, the only cooperatives that seem to conduct collective activities are ex-Soviet farms that maintain collective production; however, also these cooperatives seem to suffer from shrinking membership, which also means a reduction of land pooled in the collective plots.

Finally, a suspicious attitude towards a foreign social scientist interested in local cooperatives seems very common, with the only exceptions of Ak-Bulut's chairman, one member of Kara-Jer and few members of other cooperatives. Needless to say, this fact cannot be taken alone as an indicator of the “failure” of
cooperatives: several other factors probably play a role in people's attitudes towards my research and my person. Certainly, the proposition of a stranger to spend several months in a village asking questions about one's business is something few would agree to accept without reservations. My proposition of collaboration also implied a certain investment of time for cooperative members to answer my questions, discuss my research and take care of a stranger in their village – an investment that probably many considered excessive or useless. Indeed, Stanislav's repeated *nemnogo ponyatno* suggest that members can hardly picture what benefits a collaboration with me could bring to them.

Whereas this suspicious attitude might in part be due to my limited persuasion skills or to the vagueness of my research ideas at that time, I suggest that it is also inscribed in a broader discourse that valorises a certain kind of knowledge (and therefore also some disciplines) over others. Oktjabr has already collaborated with foreign institutions, and Stanislav shows me several business cards of foreigners who have passed by his office in the last years: he explains that these were development workers looking for project partners, private businessmen looking for business partners, and also natural scientists interested in developing new sorts of locally adapted crops or in experimenting with animal breeding techniques. Stanislav explicitly expresses his astonishment in seeing a European researcher coming to Kyrgyzstan to *learn* how cooperatives work here; usually, he continues, foreign researchers come here to *teach* something, or at least to bring some material resources. Stanislav concludes that if my aim is to learn about cooperatives I should go back to Europe, especially to Germany: the Germans are indeed those who came to Kyrgyzstan to teach their long tradition with cooperatives.

We see here how Stanislav, in line with the developmentalist discourse emerged in Chapter 6, reproduces the separation between Europeans, who have the “right” knowledge about cooperatives, and Kyrgyzstanis, who lack this knowledge and should therefore learn it from Europeans. This hierarchisation also concerns academic disciplines and their objects: the technical agronomic expertise of natural sciences counts more than the knowledge produced by social sciences. At the same time, the material presented in this section reinforces the hypothesis, which emerged in Chapter 6, that the reticence of development actors to open their training sessions for cooperatives to my observation might be linked to their (conscious or unconscious) will to perform a certain kind of subjectivity in their relation to me. Cooperative members, similarly, might be unwilling to openly reveal their cooperative practices to me: they know well that these practices do not correspond to the ideal model propagated by development workers and, therefore, they also think that their practices do not correspond to what they imagine I (as a not clearly definable European researcher, development worker or *volontier*) expect.

## 7.2 Performing cooperatives in Pjak

My prolonged stay in Pjak allowed me to dig deeper into the processes discussed in the previous section. In particular, my observations in the village in 2015 suggest that villagers perform a specific idea, or ideal, of cooperation in our encounters: they attempt to present me with an image of a cooperative that
could correspond to what they assume is my own ideal of a cooperative, rather than explaining their own ideal of, or experience with, cooperatives to me.

### 7.2.1 Encountering the cooperative Ak-Bulut

Elzada finds Kumbat's phone number at the bank in Karakol (see above); when she calls him, he invites us to his house right away. Elzada and I jump in a taxi and go to Pjak. Over two hours, we sit with Kumbat in his living room. His wife, Dinara, sits with us serving tea, but also runs from the kitchen to the living room bringing more bread, more jam or some eggs, insisting repeatedly that we drink and eat more. Both are very friendly and hospitable. Kumbat and Dinara know Elzada already: they met a couple of times when Elzada was working as an interpreter for some development projects in the region; last time, she accompanied some representatives of an aid agency who wanted to visit Ak-Bulut's warehouse to evaluate whether the cooperative was suited to receive a loan for its renovation. Having lost any confidence in my ability to deal with locals after Oktjabr's refusal, I let Elzada lead the conversation. She quickly introduces me and my research, underlines my interest in agricultural cooperatives and explains what just happened with Oktjabr. Kumbat tells some quick information about Ak-Bulut and comments on Oktjabr's refusal, but Elzada avoids asking further questions on these topics. Kumbat and Dinara ask some general questions about Switzerland and about me; then start remembering with Elzada the time she visited the village while working for a development project. The conversation turns to funny anecdotes about the several expat workers who visited Pjak in the past. Before leaving, Dinara insists that we can come back whenever we want, that I can live in their house however long I need, and that I can even marry her youngest son.<fnref n="5" />

I come back to Pjak some days later and explain to Kumbat and Dinara that I need to collect some more information about Ak-Bulut before deciding where to settle down for the following months of fieldwork. During the three days I stay at their place, they show again their hospitality and warm welcome: Dinara cooks the potatoes they grow in their household plot and prepares delicious salads with the tomatoes from the greenhouse in their garden. We spend a lot of time eating, drinking tea, and chatting about Switzerland, expats in the village, their children and grandchildren and Kumbat's career as an agronomist.

Kumbat also organises moments to formally present the cooperative to me. First, after Dinara has cleaned up the table, we stay in the living room while Kumbat takes out bunches of papers, files and folders from the shelves. Looking confusedly for some more papers in further shelves, Kumbat comments, laughing, that this is Ak-Bulut's office. We spend the afternoon reading and commenting on the papers, which include Ak-Bulut's registration act, minutes of meetings, documentation of training sessions, but also a lot of random papers of other projects and institutions. Then, the next day, Kumbat organises a meeting

<footnote n="5">⁵ In Kyrgyzstan, it is common to offer one's own relative or friend (a daughter, cousin, brother, or others) as a spouse to young unmarried strangers (women or men, foreigners or locals) after a short interaction. This practice is usually a way to express appreciation for a person one has just met rather than a serious marriage proposal. As a practice that is revealing of a very normative approach to marriage, however, it can be disturbing.</footnote>
with two men he presents as members of Ak-Bulut. One is about the same age of Kumbat (who was born
in 1949); the other is younger and works in the local administration. Both men wear nice suits and the
traditional Kyrgyz hats for special occasions. We speak shortly about Ak-Bulut, what happened with
Oktjabr, general ideas of cooperation, my person and history. In the afternoon, we visit another member
of Ak-Bulut in the nearby village, an old friend of Kumbat, with whom we have an informal chat in his
garden. Finally, Kumbat shows us Ak-Bulut's warehouse: a big building dating back to the Soviet time.

As anticipated, the impression I have after the three days in Pjak is of a well-functioning service
cooperative with eight branches in the five villages of the Kok-Bulak ayil. Kumbat is the chairman of the
mantel structure of these branches, each consisting of five to ten households. It is only the mantel
structure that was officially registered in 2005 as the Ak-Bulut cooperative, with about 20 members. The
official organs are the board and the council (each composed of three persons) and the member assembly.
The membership fee was initially set at 1000 soms (15 USD)/year, but later was increased to 4000 soms
(58 USD)/year, as reported in the minutes of meetings. Members do not meet on a regular basis but rather
whenever there is an issue to discuss; minutes are taken for every meeting, and a fee is applied for
members who arrive late.

The following activities emerge from Kumbat's papers and explanations: the cooperative buys
agricultural inputs such as oil, seeds and fertilizers in bulk, then resells them to members; it purchases and
breeds new sorts of seeds (potatoes especially, but also wheat) and resells them to members and non-
members; it organises training sessions about farming techniques; it owns a tractor, available for
members and non-members (but cheaper for the former); it owns a warehouse, where members can store
their potatoes. Through the cooperative, members have facilitated access to credit: they received loans to
buy the tractor, renovate the warehouse and buy new seeds. Most of these activities were initiated by the
development projects that were active in the village in the late 1990s and 2000s. Through the cooperative,
these projects were able to introduce new seed varieties to the village, organise trials for new local
varieties and provide further agricultural inputs or infrastructure to farmers. For instance, the glasshouse
in Kumbat's garden was built by a development organisation for a trial with potato seeds. Kumbat and the
other members underline that, since when the projects stopped their activities, Ak-Bulut reduced some of
its activities, but continues most of them successfully. They also emphasise that the cooperative allows
individual farmers to minimise costs by joining with others for some specific activities, while maintaining
individual cultivation.

7.2.2 Performing Ak-Bulut: a double developmentalist narrative

The cooperative I described in the previous section corresponds well to the model of service cooperative
promoted by development actors. After the two brief visits to Pjak, I decide to settle in the village to
engage with Ak-Bulut for the rest of my fieldwork. I tell Kumbat that I would like to meet other members
of the cooperative. Kumbat gives me a list of persons: in the next days, Elzada and I walk around Pjak
and the nearby villages to meet these “members”. The quotation marks are imperative here since, when I
ask them about their role in the cooperative, many of these persons deny to be members; others confirm that in the past they participated to some activities of Ak-Bulut but add that there have been no activities for several years; only one defines himself as current active member, while others, like Ulan, simply observe: "Of course I'm a member of Ak-Bulut! But only on paper... The cooperative exists only on paper, we don't have collective activities" (Ulan, 28.07.2015).

As foreshadowed in the Introduction chapter of this dissertation, this first tour to meet Ak-Bulut’s “members” leaves me with a strong sense of frustration and disorientation: the cooperative presented by Kumbat a few days before seems not to exist; “members” affirm that now they conduct all their agricultural activities alone, and the cooperative seems to have no relevance – if it ever did – in their everyday. Ak-Bulut’s past activities were supported by some development projects, which organised training sessions and distributed agricultural inputs in the village through already existing groups of farmers that had emerged after the dismantlement of the local state farm. Some project workers suggested that Kumbat and his friends register as a formal cooperative to profit from facilitated loan schemes for cooperatives. When the project finished, however, most of Ak-Bulut’s activities stopped.

I realise that what I saw in my first brief visits in Pjak was a performance, by Kumbat and the other members, of a specific idea of cooperative in the specific situation of their encounter with me. In order to understand this performance, it is important to consider first of all the positionality of the “actors” who take part to it, including especially Elzada and me. Elzada already knew Kumbat and Dinara from having worked as an interpreter for foreign aid agencies. Kumbat and Dinara have long experience in welcoming expat workers in their house. More in general, the foreigners who end up in Pjak or in other villages in the region (like the ones who ended up in Stanislav’s office) have usually a specific profile: whoever passes by and asks about agricultural activities and livelihoods is either a development worker looking for a suitable context to start some project or a tradesman looking for business or investment opportunities; more rarely, some volontior (e.g. Peace Corps volunteer) settles down in a village to teach English in the local school. Given this background, although Elzada insists that I am not linked to any institutions other than my university and that I am not here to start a project or a business, villagers probably make at least an unconscious link between me and their image of expat workers. Indeed, during these first days, Kumbat and the other members point time and again to specific material needs of their cooperative: for instance, it would need funding to organise further training sessions or money to renovate the half of the warehouse that could not be renovated with the previous loan. While noting these “wishes”, they also underline that, today, nobody supports them as farmers and as a cooperative.

Kumbat is familiar with expat workers and their idea of cooperatives: when meeting me, maybe following a conscious strategy or, more probably, an unconscious habit, he tries to offer me (or perform for me) an image of his cooperative that he knows I will like. This performance includes the formality of the meeting with the two members, both dressed up with suits and hats, or the display of official documents with seals and signatures, minutes of meetings and colourful flyers. The performance also includes two specific narratives. The first narrative emerges in relation to Oktjabr. Kumbat seems to know that Oktjabr is not what expat workers consider a “true” cooperative; in addition, Elzada tells him about our negative
experience with Oktjabr. Kumbat and the other members comment that Oktjabr's refusal of my proposition is a sign of its shady practices and corrupt management, which steals land from the old people who are not able to cultivate it or who moved back to Russia. While pointing to the problems of Oktjabr, they underline that Ak-Bulut is different, better: Oktjabr members cultivate the land together, whereas Ak-Bulut's members cultivate their land individually; Oktjabr's management is top-down, whereas Ak-Bulut is managed democratically; Oktjabr's leaders keep its profit for themselves, whereas Ak-Bulut's members keep their own profit from their individual land cultivation. Kumbat sums all this up, stating that Oktjabr tries to keep the old Soviet system, whereas Ak-Bulut has successfully adapted to capitalism. As I mentioned in Chapter 6 and above, in other occasions people in the region (and also Kumbat and the members I meet in these first days) mention Oktjabr as an example of a successful farming enterprise. My suspicion is therefore that in our first meetings, Kumbat and the other members insist on marking a distinction between Ak-Bulut and Oktjabr in the same way as development workers in Chapter 6 exaggerated the distinction between “modern” and “old” cooperatives – as a way to produce a clear divide between “right” and “wrong” knowledge and to legitimise themselves as possessing the “right” one.

The second narrative emerges in relation to my being Swiss. It must be noted that several of the expat workers who visited the village in the past years worked for a Swiss agency: in fact, Ak-Bulut was registered as cooperative in the framework of a Swiss-funded development programme. Kumbat therefore notes:

> It was Peter Schmidt<fnref n="6" /> who explained us what it means to be in a cooperative. The several times he came in the village, giving training sessions and drinking tea with us, he explained us that being in a cooperative means that you produce privately but then buy together seeds and oil and you can also have for instance a camion in common, or a tractor. (Kumbat, 14.07.2015)

In this quotation, we see the developmentalist discourse perfectly reproduced: the European expat *knows* about cooperatives and comes to the village to *explain* and *teach* the true meaning of cooperatives (i.e. the specific model of Western service cooperatives). More in general, in the mentioned meeting, Kumbat and the other two members underline that “the Swiss”<fnref n="7" /> played an important role in supporting farmers in the difficult time of the 1990s and 2000s. They ask several questions about agricultural production and organisation in Switzerland; their questions reveal their idea that in Switzerland everything works well and depict Switzerland as a model for agricultural development. The idea that Switzerland is a model for Kyrgyzstan, or that Kyrgyzstan is a “second” Switzerland that one day will reach the “first” Switzerland in terms of development (as expressed literally by a former president of Kyrgyzstan), recurs throughout my conversations in Pjak and in the whole country during my visits.

<footnote n="6">⁶ Peter Schmidt (original name) was a development worker of the mentioned Swiss programme (see Schmidt 2012). Kumbat and Dinara often mention his name in our chats. I have the impression, however, that they use his name – a common German name that is very easy to remember – to refer in general to any expat worker who visited the village.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Again, “the Swiss” is probably a synecdoche to refer to expat workers more generally. In their narration, villagers tend to mix up different projects and expat workers: when speaking with me (a Swiss), they probably emphasise the role of the Swiss as a way to honour and please their interlocutor.</footnote>
In the “performance” of Kumbat and the other members during our first encounters in Pjak, they thus not only reproduce the separation between the “modern” cooperative ideal as the only “true” one and the “old” Soviet model as a “wrong” one. They also reproduce the specific developmentalist hierarchy of knowledge. In this sense, especially Kumbat acts as a “development broker” who is able to navigate different representations and to translate the meaning of a project (or an ideal of cooperative) into different languages (Mosse 2004, 647; see also Bierschenk, Chauveau, and Olivier de Sardan 2002; Olivier de Sardan 2005). In his encounter with me, Kumbat is able to speak the language he imagines I am more at ease with and to reproduce the representations about cooperatives and development that he imagines I am expecting to find. Although I am not a development worker and do not have the same representations, nor interests, that a development worker would have in the same context, Kumbat’s performance in the end is successful: I decide to settle down in Pjak because I think that Ak-Bulut is a successful cooperative.

### 7.2.3 Encountering the cooperative Kara-Jer

Aisha, a woman in her forties, is the only member of the cooperative Kara-Jer in Pjak. I meet her by chance in 2015 while looking for Nurbek, whom Kumbat indicated to me was member of Ak-Bulut. Instead of Nurbek, I find Aisha sitting with his wife in the kitchen, who invites me to have tea. Aisha is very talkative and monopolises the conversation, asking questions about Switzerland and my research and telling stories about the village and her engagement in different groups and projects. The next year, as I visit Mirislam for a session of oral history, I meet Aisha again, sitting in the kitchen chatting with Mirislam's daughter-in-law. We have tea together and Aisha, again, monopolises the conversation. This time she asks a lot of questions about cooperatives in Switzerland. She explains that she is part of a group of farmers from different villages of the Issyk-Kul region and that this group is thinking about establishing a new cooperative, which they will call Kara-Jer. They had already some meetings with Sezim, the CUK director, who explained the advantages of joining a cooperative to them. Aisha summarises the advantages of cooperatives as Sezim explained them to her:

> Sezim explained these advantages. Usually farmers sell their produce by themselves, there is a variation in price. For example, last year it was 90 soms [1.3 USD] for potatoes, now only 5 [0.07 USD]! But with the cooperative you can have a fix price. [...] Also, with the cooperative we could have access to cheaper machines, for example for ploughing. You can have access to cheaper loans with a lower interest rate at the bank. (Aisha, 15.04.2016)

As a further advantage of joining the Kara-Jer cooperative, Sezim mentioned that a Japanese company is interested in investing in the construction of a starch plant in the region: members of the future cooperative could sell their potatoes to the plant, which would be managed by the Japanese company but would offer job opportunities to the local population. Despite these advantages, Aisha is not convinced about the necessity to join a cooperative. She wonders:

> I don't see any advantage in being a cooperative. For example there is the ADK [Aiyldyk Den sooluk Komitet: Village Health Committee], which gives advice for free. There is a
committee and its members explain for free, for example, how to treat sicknesses of animals,
and so on. Why should we be in a cooperative where we have to pay and where it's not clear
where the money goes, like in Ak-Bulut, if there are other groups that do things for free?
(Aisha, 15.04.2016)

ADKs are local groups of volunteers who conduct health-related activities such as prevention campaigns or hygiene advice. They usually receive financial support from the local administration, foreign donors or private companies. If the aim of a cooperative is to give advice to farmers, she does not understand why farmers should pay for this advice when other organisations such as ADK are giving advice for free.

Some months later Aisha decides to join Kara-Jer, which is officially registered as a cooperative in June 2016, counting at that moment around 150 members in the whole Issyk-Kul province. Aisha is now enthusiast about the cooperative and was able to convince her husband to pay the annual membership fee of 10,000 soms (146 USD).<fnref n="8" /> I ask her what made her change her mind; she explains that it is because of the possibility to sell easily her produce. With the same group of farmers that now is registered as Kara-Jer, last year she could sell the valerian plants she grows in her garden for 60,000 soms (876 USD): they had stipulated an agreement with the same Japanese buyer who is now interested in buying more medical plants through the cooperative. Aisha concludes that 10,000 soms are not much if paying the membership fee means being able to stipulate further contracts with buyers like that one.

Batma is Kara-Jer's chairwoman. She is an ethnic Kyrgyz in her fifties from a nearby village and has a long experience as a development worker in the country. She explains the reasons for establishing the cooperative:

> With the cooperative we investigate the demand in the market, the market needs and the needs of customers. Then we tell the producers what is needed in the market, the price and amount, and we market the things together. The common use here is the opposite: first you produce and then you look for customers. But sometimes you won't find customers and won't be able to sell. Or you sell through several intermediaries, but this is not profitable. [...] With the cooperative we want to show a new model. The customers define the price and the volume, then you plant. But now people are blindly planting things, without considering the needs of the customers. (Batma, 30.07.2016)

Batma also underlines that her main role as chairwoman is to look for partners and stipulate trade agreements to secure the purchase of members' produce. Like Aisha, Batma thus focuses in particular on the possibility for farmers to adapt their production to the demand of the market, thereby increasing the gains they can extract from the marketing of their products and at the same time reducing their dependency on volatile market prices and demand. For Batma, this is a structural change in the way agricultural production is organised: she underlines repeatedly that promoting this change is what motivates her to engage in the Kara-Jer project.

<footnote n="8">⁸ This is a considerable amount: an average pension in the village amounts to about 5,000 KGS (73 USD)/month and the average salary countrywide is about 15,000 KGS (219 USD)/month.</footnote>
7.2.4 Performing Kara-Jer: defining the “true” cooperative

When speaking of Kara-Jer, Aisha and Batma focus on the collective marketing of products cultivated individually by members. They both also emphasise that a cooperative should emerge from the will of its members, not be imposed from above. They explicitly compare the new cooperative, Kara-Jer, with other cooperatives they know in the region, especially with Ak-Bulut. They define Kara-Jer in opposition to Ak-Bulut, thereby building a dichotomy between the “true” cooperative Kara-Jer and the “fictive” or “failed” cooperatives Ak-Bulut. First, Aisha criticises the lack of transparency about Ak-Bulut’s accounts. Nobody knows where the money generated through the warehouse and the tractor goes: Aisha suspects that Kumbat’s family is enriching itself with these businesses. She insists that this will be different for Kara-Jer: the accounts will be transparent and members will discuss how to handle the revenues. Second, both Aisha and Batma point to Ak-Bulut’s top-down and centralised management. Aisha even suggests that the cooperative has fallen apart because Kumbat had too much power and started giving orders to the other members, who then left the cooperative because they did not want to take orders from him. Kara-Jer, on the contrary, they underline, will be managed democratically by its members. Third, more generally, Batma, criticises what she calls “family cooperatives” (in which she includes Ak-Bulut), implying those cooperatives that are created by some members of the same family just to get access to grants and credit.

For Batma, a true cooperative is based on “people’s will”, not on the will of one person like Kumbat.

Kara-Jer is different, she insists:

Kara-Jer was really formed from the will of people. These are people who are active, who go to the training sessions and the gatherings. These people are willing to work together, they are ready to work together. These people are now part of the cooperative. [...] For these people now it makes sense to work together. There is a change in awareness. They understand that it is important to go to the gatherings and that if they don’t participate there will be a fine.<fnref n="9" /> I think this change in awareness is the greatest achievement of my work. People are now reaching the level of understanding that allows them to work together!
(Batma, 30.07.2016)

Batma reproduces the narrative of the “lack of understanding” to explain the failure of cooperatives – a failure in the sense that most of the registered cooperatives are not “true” ones. She defines her own cooperative in opposition to this and as the result of a “change in awareness” that is, in turn, the result of her hard work as a development worker. She insists on the neat demarcation between the “true” cooperatives that emerge from the will of “active people” and the “fictive” cooperatives that are registered by one person just to have access to some resources. Both Ak-Bulut’s members and Kara-Jer’s members, therefore, reproduce the divide between “right” and “wrong” cooperatives, presenting their own cooperative in opposition to negative examples of “fictive” cooperatives.

<footnote n="9">⁹ The fact that members are fined if they do not participate to meeting makes me wonder if their participation is as spontaneous and voluntary as Batma affirms.</footnote>
7.2.5 Discussion: “Don’t write this in your thesis”: performing development

Although I become good friend of Aisha, and despite my insistence, I will never be invited to Kara-Jer's meetings and I will never be able to observe the cooperative in the making. It seems as if nobody involved in a cooperative was willing to open it up to my direct observation. It is important to insist that I am not suggesting that Kumbat or other persons "lie" to me when they perform a particular kind of cooperative, or that they "betray" me and pursue their hidden interests. Rather, I suggest that they probably try to please me as their interlocutor (whom they associate with an expat development worker) and at the same time to embellish themselves by presenting something they think will correspond to my own ideal of cooperative. I also suggest that this performance is not necessarily conscious, but rather an automatism, a habit developed through several similar situations – of encounters with expat workers who transmitted a specific idea of cooperative.

My reading here is further strengthened by another recurrent practice during my whole stay in Pjak and in
Kyrgyzstan more generally. Sometimes, when telling me about some behaviour they seem to judge as
shameful, my interlocutors add: “Don’t write this in your thesis!”<fnref n="10" /> This concerns, for instance, tales
about drunkenness, bribery, or quarrels between family members. In parallel to this, some villagers insist
on what I *should absolutely* write in my thesis, especially activities or habits of which they are
particularly proud, for instance Kyrgyz hospitality, Kyrgyz traditions, the beauty of the landscape or the
taste of local food. For instance, whenever I visit Aisha, she usually prepares a table full of bread, jams,
candies, honey and meat and often observes that, in this way, she wants to show me the hospitality of
Kyrgyz people so that I will write “only good things” about them in my thesis. Once, I share with her my
puzzlement after having collected several positive accounts of water management in the village, which
contrast with a few very negative accounts that revealed major conflicts and discriminations. Aisha’s
comment explicitly confirms my reading above:

People don't want to tell you negative things. They don't want to give you a negative image of the country. There was once a project that did a survey in the village and found out that things here weren't working so well. So they decided to do the project somewhere else because here things weren't working well enough. So, in general people prefer to tell strangers that everything is fine! (Aisha, 31.08.2017)

Although they do not express this explicitly, it is therefore very probable that, when villagers tell me
about the activities of Ak-Bulut or other cooperatives, they select for their narrations events and activities
that they perceive as “good” and “honourable”, while avoiding mention of issues of which they are less
proud. In this sense, I argue that the performance of Ak-Bulut (or Kara-Jer) as a successful cooperative is
a way of villagers, and especially of Kumbat, to convey an image of their activities that I will judge as
positive and honourable: the image of a “modern” cooperative that corresponds to the ideal they have
learned from expat workers. This is a way to perform a status as developed in two senses: economically
(the activities are successful) and culturally (they have learned the meaning of cooperative/development).

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Some other times, they tell these stories to my interpreter in Kyrgyz, asking her not to translate them to me. I cannot say how many of these stories were then actually translated to me and how many were not.</footnote>
7.3 Explaining the decline of Ak-Bulut

In my discussions with villagers<fnref n="11" /> in Pjak, many praise the past activities of Ak-Bulut and underline its
contribution in supporting their individual agricultural activities. Often, also, they remember how Ak-
Bulut was well known not only in the village, but also in the district and in the province. Why, then, have
its activities declined? Why do villagers not try to revive these activities, if they consider them so
beneficial? More generally, if they consider cooperatives important for supporting their activities, why
there are no active cooperatives in the village? This section presents the answers villagers gave me when
directly asked. My main aim here is not to understand *why* Ak-Bulut's activities declined, but rather, how
villagers explain this decline. I focus specifically on the decline of Ak-Bulut's activities as explained both
by villagers involved in these activities and also by others who were not. It is important to note that, as
explained above, despite the initial enthusiasm of its members, Kara-Jer stopped most of its activities one
year after its establishment since the Japanese enterprise did not renew the trade agreement with the
cooperative. In summer 2017, Batma laments that, although she is running all the time to find buyers for
the cooperative, her quests are fruitless. In the meantime, understandably, several members refused to pay
the expensive membership fee.

Ak-Bulut was mainly active in the second half of the 2000s. At that time, it mainly served as a reference point for development projects active in the region, which used the structure of the cooperative to channel and distribute resources to farmers. These resources consisted in particular of seed, other agricultural inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, oil) and knowledge about cultivation techniques. At the same time, thanks to the material support and technical advice of projects, the cooperative<fnref n="12" /> was also able to conduct seed breeding activities: it imported new seed material, reproduced it and sold the new seeds in the village and in the province. These activities were mainly managed by Kumbat first and later by his son Tuman (an agronomist like his father) and relied on the support of development agencies. When asked about the decline of Ak-Bulut's activities, villagers explain that when the external support by these agencies stopped, the cooperative was not able to continue its activities as before. Also, meanwhile Kumbat (born in 1949) became a *pensionier*, as he describes himself: he turned 60 in the late 2000s and suffered of several health issues which have limited its mobility (since an operation in 2015, he cannot ride his horse nor drive a car). Tuman took over several of his father's activities in their private plots, in the household as well as in the cooperative. However, after a big investment gone wrong, in 2014 Tuman decided to leave with his wife for Russia, where he hopes to collect enough money to pay back the huge debt he contracted.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Sections 7.3 and 7.4 are mainly based on conversations conducted in 2015 with villagers whom Kumbat indicated as members of Ak-Bulut. Since the concept of “member” is very fuzzy, I prefer to speak of “villagers” instead of “members”.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² For the moment, I refer to “the cooperative” as an entity with unity and agency; I will problematise this later (§7.4).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ I never met Tuman, although every year Kumbat and his wife repeated that “next spring he will come back!” In 2018, he finally extinguished his debt and came back to Pjak – only to leave few months later for Kazakhstan, where salaries are higher. Tuman’s unlucky investment consisted of sowing potatoes in a big plot of un-irrigated land. He lost his money because of a particularly dry and hot summer. Tuman’s story also exemplifies the dramatic consequences of the extremely high interest rates in the credit sector and of the lack of any insurance mechanism (see also Chapter 9).</footnote>
The reasons for the decline of Ak-Bulut’s activities seem thus to rely quite banally on external and very material factors: the end of project support, the decline of Kumbat’s health and the onset of Tuman’s debt. This reveals Ak-Bulut’s dependence on external resources and on individual persons, which limited its sustainability in the long term. This seems to confirm what was already discussed in Chapter 6 about donors’ focus on establishing new cooperatives and their neglect of their long-term sustainability. However, when discussing the story of Ak-Bulut with villagers, and the possibility to join/create a cooperative more generally, other explanations emerge.

### 7.3.1 Lack of support by the state

Villagers very often complain that the state does not support them. Statements such as “the government doesn’t do anything”, or “the government doesn’t support us” are recurrent when speaking with people in the whole country. In particular, farmers expect the government to facilitate access to credit for them; to provide access to agricultural inputs, agricultural machines (including repairs) and information (for instance about market prices); and to directly purchase their produce or stipulate international trading agreements to facilitate its export. Farmers formulate these complaints and expectations in general when referring to the agricultural sector but also specifically when asked about cooperatives; however, they rarely formulate specific expectations about how the government should support cooperatives. They usually vaguely state that the government should “show farmers the advantages of working together” by supporting cooperatives: only in this way farmers would finally understand the importance of working together and join a cooperative.

Villagers see the inactivity of the government as caused by its lacking political will and interest for their everyday material struggles but also by its corruption. They often complain that the government is only good at collecting taxes, whose revenues are then diverted into the pocket of ministries and civil servants. Sometimes, they make a distinction between the central and the local government: they perceive the central government to be very far from the village, composed of elites who sit in the “White House” in Bishkek and do not care about village life. Although villagers complain about the taxes they have to pay to the local government, they also sometimes recognise that the local government itself has been “abandoned” by the central government in that it does not receive the necessary budget that would allow it to be more active. In these complaints, villagers often refer back to the role of the state in Soviet time: they compare the inactivity of the contemporary government with the Soviet state, which “provided everything” – education, health, employment, and agricultural inputs.

Nazira (born in 1958) is the director of the kindergarten in Pjak and Kumbat’s neighbour. Every time I meet her in the street, she explains how busy she is: the kindergarten commission is visiting and she is preparing *borsoki* to welcome them; she has a meeting in Karakol with a foreign organisation that supports schools in Kyrgyzstan; she is going to the *aiyl okmotu* to ask for money for the annual *remont* of the kindergarten building. In short, Nazira seems to be always busy looking for funds to guarantee the basic functions of the kindergarten: it is not about extra expenses, she explains, it is about the coal to heat
the classrooms in winter, or about the meals children are supposed to receive in the kindergarten. Nazira often compares the current situation to Soviet times when, according to her memories, everything was provided to schools and kindergartens; now, instead, she even has to run around to find money even for the cleaning products for toilets.

According to Nazira, her husband was active member of Ak-Bulut until he died several years ago. Since then, Nazira has not been active in the cooperative, but she still thinks that cooperatives are very important for farmers. However, she notes, Ak-Bulut has failed because the government did not support it: “the lack of support by the government made people passive; they are not motivated to engage in the cooperative anymore” (Nazira, 18.08.2015). Nazira praises Tuman for sharing his knowledge with villagers and helping them with their agricultural activities through the cooperative. However, she laments:

> If we would have at least some attention from the government! At least a gratitude letter!
> 
> [...] Tuman would be cheered up. Probably it is because of this that he lost his interest [in the cooperative]: there was not even gratitude from the government. (Nazira 18.08.2015)

For Nazira, thus, the problem is not only the lack of material support to cooperatives from the government, but also the lack of recognition for the deeds of people who engage for the cooperative or in the community. She remembers with nostalgia the Soviet state, which not only provided material support to farms (and kindergartens), but also rewarded the effort of workers with medals and certificates.

### 7.3.2 Lack of understanding among farmers

Kumbat identifies another reason for the lack of success of cooperatives in general and of Ak-Bulut in particular. During one of our chats, he starts drawing on a piece of paper and making calculations of how much land gets lost through the land plot fragmentation. His conclusion is that, on a plot of fifty hectares, at least five hectares are lost to borders between the small plots, additional irrigation channels, streets for cars and walking paths. Moreover, it is more efficient to work on bigger plots with tractors than on smaller plots, which require more time and oil. Bigger plots also allow a proper rotation of crops, which helps in maintaining soil quality. Although Kumbat finds that the benefits of joining agricultural activities – in the sense of joining agricultural production on larger plots – are evident, he repeatedly states that “people don’t understand the value of working together”.

Kumbat has also an explanation for this “lack of understanding” among his fellow villagers. He traces back the reason to the organisation of Soviet agriculture, where the production process was fragmented and each worker was responsible – and thus aware – of only a small part of the production process. Only few people on the Soviet farms, including Kumbat as the chief agronomist, had the overview over the entire process and were aware of its complexity and specificities. Simple farm workers were not aware, for instance, of the importance of crop rotation. When they later received individual plots, they started cultivating them without a specific knowledge of the cultivation process and thus without understanding the benefits of a joint production on larger plots.
For Kumbat, the fragmented knowledge over the production process in Soviet farms also produced a fragmented sense of responsibility among workers over the collective property of the farm. This was evident when Soviet farms were about to be dismantled and farmers could use their machines on their individual plots. At that time, Kumbat remembers, “people were using the machines of the kolkhoz without caring, without paying; they just used the machines and left” (Kumbat, 04.09.2015). Kumbat laments that this attitude has remained among villagers and brings the example of Ak-Bulut’s tractor as evidence of this. The cooperative bought a tractor, facilitated by a leasing scheme for cooperatives. The initial idea was to manage it collectively among the members. However, conflicts soon emerged about the prioritisation of use among individual members and about the responsibility for maintenance and lease payment. Members thus decided to “privatise” the tractor: Nurbek took over the responsibility for maintenance and for the leasing payment; since then he uses the tractor privately, selling its services to Ak-Bulut’s members as well as to other villagers.

Kumbat concludes that, given the situation and “mentality”, private responsibility is better and more efficient than shared responsibility in this specific context. But this is not the optimal solution, which, for him, is the collectivisation of the agricultural process, especially of production. When expressing these ideas, Kumbat does not hide his frustration for his fellow villagers’ lack of interest – and understanding – about cooperatives. He was used to discuss this frustration with expat workers, who comforted him by noting that changes in mentality cannot happen from one day to the next. In Switzerland, Kumbat adds, people have been working in cooperatives for 200 years. “Maybe Kyrgyzstan will become like Switzerland one day and people will be able to work together”, he concludes (Kumbat, 04.09.2015).

Batma and Aisha also give similar judgement to farmers' competence and understanding. In their case, however, their complaint about the lack of understanding among farmers is directed not to their own “colleagues” at Kara-Jer, but to the members of other cooperatives (in particular Ak-Bulut) and to farmers more generally. In the quotation above, Batma laments the common habit of farmers to produce “blindly” without looking in advance for buyers; she underlines how she sees her task as a development worker and cooperative chairwoman to make farmers' practices more “modern” and better. When comparing Kara-Jer with Ak-Bulut, Batma and Aisha also imply that Ak-Bulut's members, and Kumbat in particular, have not understood the “true” meaning of a cooperative.

### 7.3.3 “Kyrgyz mentality”: laziness and passivity

Nazira's complaints about farmer passivity above suggests that this is the other widespread explanation for the limited success of cooperatives. Villagers blame a “Kyrgyz mentality” that renders farmers passive, lazy and risk-averse. For instance, Nurbek complains:

> I am in the cooperative. But the problem is that other people of the cooperative are passive, they are only watchers. They have doubts about the cooperative, so they just watch. This is our mentality in Kyrgyzstan. Outsiders only watch the situation passively, they watch the evolution and think: 'If the evolution is ok, then I'm with you; if the evolution isn't ok, then I'm out'. (Nurbek, 02.08.2015)
When blaming this mentality, usually villagers do not speak of themselves but of their fellow villagers, like Nurbek in the quotation. Sometimes, however, they also include themselves as influenced by the "Kyrgyz mentality". For instance, Nazira, while praising Tuman for his engagement in the cooperative, laments with a sense of fatalism that herself, like the other villagers, is not able to be as active as Tuman: the "Kyrgyz mentality" here seems rather a justification for the status quo and for her inactivity. In other cases, villagers lament the lack of leaders who are able to mobilise them in collective activities. Adis, for instance, notes:

Adis: After the land reform, all were focused on the private, but now we start understanding the profit of being together [pooling land to cultivate together].

Ottavia: Do you have some plan to come together with other people, to organise together?

Adis: For the moment there is no strong person who can lead and gather people, who could serve as a gathering person. There is no person who can bring together people and explain to us how to be together. (Adis, 01.08.2015)

In this case too, Adis externalises the responsibility for the lack of collective activities, for which he thinks a “strong person” is needed, a person who can guide and “explain” how to organise in a collective. Similarly to Kumbat, Adis and other villagers hope that one day “Kyrgyzstan will be like Switzerland”, i.e. that farmers can work together in cooperatives. However, like Kumbat, they lament that more time is needed to change the “mentality” that currently prevents them to realise this hope. For Batma, this change in “mentality” (or “awareness”, as expressed in her quotation above) has already happened for some (few) farmers, also thanks to her own engagement in explaining another, better and more modern, way of organising agricultural activities. Batma also implicitly suggests that the persisting old mentality (implying laziness and passivity) limits in general the opportunities of farmers and in particular the success of cooperatives.

### 7.3.4 Establishment of markets and loss of solidarity

When villagers speak about the decline of Ak-Bulut, they also refer to the gradual establishment of markets in the village, which have rendered cooperative activities partially superfluous. Baktigul (born in 1954) comments on the evolution of collective activities in the village and on the history of Ak-Bulut:

> When the cooperative started in 2007¹⁴ people were poor, they were looking for support and they were open to everything to receive support. It was difficult to have seeds, oil, fertilisers, everything. Many people didn’t cultivate their land because of the lack of these inputs. Therefore people were really open to start a cooperative. With the cooperative it was easier to get the needed inputs: we could buy them together and have cheaper prices. With a juridical face it is also easier to get credits. And now? I don’t know what happened… maybe everybody has become wealthy? There is no interest in organising in the community

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Note that the cooperative officially registered two years earlier in 2005; however, as we will see later, the same group of farmers was already involved in the activities of at least two rural development projects since the late 1990s. Note also that the highest point of production crisis in the village (when it was most difficult for farmers to find agricultural inputs) was earlier than 2007. However, what is more important than the exact date for Baktigul here is the reference to a remembered past when villagers were in a precarious economic situation but supported each other by joining in collective activities.</footnote>
anymore. People prefer to work privately than in group. Before people didn't have the cash.
Now everyone has cash in his pocket. [...] People before had no seeds, now they buy what
they need. [...] Before there was poverty and the tendency was to get together. Now there is
wealth and we are pulled apart. (Baktigul, 29.08.2015)

We can read Baktigul's statement as the account of a gradual process of marketisation of economic activities in the village. After the crisis in the 1990s and early 2000s, villagers adapted to the new structural conditions and transformed into relatively wealthy peasant farmers managing their private agricultural activities individually and without the support of the cooperative. This account seems to confirm the idea of some agricultural economists (e.g. Deininger 1995, see §2.1.2) that agricultural cooperatives can be used as a tool to support farmers in the "transition" from a planned economy to a market economy – a tool that becomes superfluous once a "fully functioning" market system has been established. Indeed, other villagers besides Baktigul suggest that the establishment of markets is one of the reasons for the decline of Ak-Bulut's activities. Adis for instance explains:

> When Ak-Bulut started ten years ago there were no other people breeding seeds and providing new sorts. Since then many private producers saw that it was profitable to deal with seeds and new sorts, they saw that there was some profit. Nowadays there are more than 100 small entrepreneurs who deal with seeds. [...] This is the natural law of competition. There are many competitors and only the strongest stay. And Ak-Bulut is not one of the strongest. [...] Business is business. [...] You must organise correctly, organise the accounts, you need economists, agronomists, et cetera, to run the business. (Adis 27.08.2015).

Here, Adis suggests that Ak-Bulut could be successful as a seed breeding company in a context without competition; however, when competition increased with the expansion of markets, it failed to adapt to the new context – lacking entrepreneurial business skills – and thus suffered under the “natural law of competition”. Daniar and Sultanbek, two well-off farmers, confirm this idea when they note that Ak-Bulut and other similar cooperatives are destined to disappear since farmers gradually understand that it is better to produce on their own and, thanks to the expansion of markets, can find the necessary inputs outside the cooperatives.

### 7.3.5 Discussion: “pseudo-cooperatives” and their affects

#### *An example of failed cooperative?*

If observed through the lenses of the institutionalist approaches discussed in Chapter 2 (§2.1.2 and §2.2.1), Ak-Bulut can be easily interpreted to be a typical “pseudo-cooperative”. Its failure in this sense is quite banal and can be easily explained with its non-compliance with Ostrom’s (2000) principles of cooperation. First of all, the boundaries of the group are not clearly defined: it is not clear who are its members and, even the ones who are officially registered in its documentation state that they have little or no connection to the cooperative (see also §7.4.1). Second, there are no clear rules in place that define the roles and responsibilities of members, financial participation in the cooperative or share of revenues.
Third, there is no clear definition of democratic governance processes in the management of the cooperative. Finally, since membership is loose and responsibilities of members are not defined, there are also no monitoring of activities, no sanction mechanisms and no formal mechanisms to solve disputes and conflicts.

Ak-Bulut's failure parallels the examples of other cooperation initiatives in Kyrgyzstan and in other ex-socialist countries in CEE and the FSU, whose success, according to several scholars, has been limited by "an inherited behaviour promoting a pseudo-implementation of rules and organizations" (Theesfeld 2019, 354, see §2.2.1 and §6.1). Other factors hampering cooperation seem to resonate with what has been observed by institutionalist scholars in the mentioned contexts (e.g. Theesfeld 2019). In particular, we see a discrepancy between formal structures (existing only on paper) and informal behaviour. Also, a deterioration of social capital (expressed in villagers' narrative as the loss of solidarity), as noted for instance by Theesfeld (2019), Kaminska (2010) or Gerkey (2013), seems also to be at the basis of villagers' decreasing interest in collective activities. Furthermore, there seems to be among farmers a longing for a form of agricultural organisation that reminds the governance of the Soviet farm, where (according to villagers' memories) a centralised management took care of production and marketing, but also of workers. It seems also probable that these expectations, projected onto the cooperative, limit farmers' active engagement in its activities, thereby increasing their and the cooperative's dependence on external support or individual leaders.

In order to increase the effectiveness of cooperation initiatives, institutionalist scholars suggest to pay more attention to their adaptation to the specific local context and to provide more information about the formal structures proposed (see §2.2.1 and §6.1.2). Concerning the second point, there is certainly confusion among villagers about the cooperative model proposed by development projects. At the same time, however, the performance of “modern” cooperatives discussed in the present section shows that (at least some) villagers know quite well this model – and indeed perform it in their encounter with a European researcher. Concerning the adaptation of the model proposed to the local context, there is certainly a discrepancy between the notion of formality implied in the model and the largely informal relations that structure life in the village. However, the reconstruction of Ak-Bulut’s history reveals that the cooperative was registered with the support of a development project specifically as a way to access facilitated credit schemes and not necessarily as a way to transform farmers’ agricultural practices. From its beginnings, therefore, the formalisation of the cooperative seems to have been mainly a strategy to access specific resources through a “stamp” on paper. This strategy can also be seen as a way to adapt the model of cooperative to the local context, as scholars recommended. In fact, the formalisation of the cooperative allowed to renovate a warehouse, buy a tractor and give farmers access to a credit to renovate their seed material. In this regard, the strategy was successful. At the same time, however, the fact that during its first years of activity the cooperative served mainly as a structure to distribute project resources probably reinforced its dependence on external support; it is not surprising, then, that when the flux of these external resources stopped, the activities of the cooperative declined.
The narrative of failure and its affects

Baktigul’s quotation in Section 7.3.4 reveals a sense of loss as well as a sense of disorientation in finding herself in a context she can only partially understand. “And now?” she grieves, “I don’t know what happened...”. This same sense of disorientation is often expressed in villagers’ accounts of the current situation:

> I don't know how to describe it. [...] We [members of Ak-Bulut] are not active anymore. Maybe it is because everyone became wise and knows already everything, or everyone became rich and we don't need these things [Ak-Bulut's training sessions] anymore. Yes, at the beginning we were active. And now? I don't know... Everybody has become an academician and knows everything so that nobody needs training sessions? I don't know...
> 
> (Nazira, 18.08.2015)

Above, we have seen that when villagers lament the inactivity of the government, they often do so while comparing the current situation with their memories of the Soviet state. In this comparison, references to the past are not mobilised with the intention to say something about the past itself, but rather as a way to express something about the present – to express a perceived *loss*. We have also heard Adis lamenting the lack of leaders in the village – leaders who would be able to bring farmers together into a cooperative. Later when remembering his experience as a worker in the local Soviet farm, Adis (born in 1969) comments that, at that time, there were leaders who knew about the cultivation process and organised villagers to work together. Also in this case, the reference to the past reveals a perceived loss in the present: a loss of leaders and leadership.

A similar mechanism emerges from villagers' memories about past cooperation and solidarity. In the quotations from Baktigul and Nazira, we see how they mobilise the reference to a recent past (when villagers were poor but *together* and cooperated and supported each other) as a way to emphasise that, in the present, farmers work individually and have lost the value of working together and helping each other. Nazira observes, with a note of scorn and irony, the arrogance of villagers who consider themselves “academician”, who think that, they know everything and do not need the support of others. Baktigul’s observation that people are now rich reveals a similar scorn, not without a note of irony: Baktigul knows that villagers are not rich, but highlights the arrogance of those who, being a bit better-off than before, think they can handle everything by themselves, without cooperating with or helping others. Nazira, Baktigul and many other villagers express nostalgia for the loss of cooperation and solidarity caused, according to them, by the gradual individualisation and monetisation of economic and social activities. Several villagers indeed complain that “now you have to pay for everything”, whereas they were previously used to nonmonetized exchanges and to helping each other without the mediation of money. Baktigul concludes with a lapidary statement that summarises the sense of loss of a past that consisted of
stronger social relations and solidarity: “Democracy<fnref n="15" /> made people cold, support to each other was left behind” (Baktigul, 29.08.2015).

Through the mobilisation of nostalgic memories, villagers express a sense of abandonment in relation to the role of the state in structuring their lives and securing their well-being. They voice a sense of nostalgia for a past in which, in their recollection, the state cared for agricultural production but also for villagers themselves, securing their jobs and livelihoods. The activities of development projects in the village have in part substituted the state in the provision of some resources; however, this support has mostly stopped today. Villagers express a similar sense of abandonment when they lament that Ak-Bulut’s activities have declined because of the lack of external support, by the state or whatever other institution. Villagers also express a sense of abandonment in relation to the perceived decline of sociality and mutual support and their substitution through market relations. This sense of abandonment is accompanied by a sense of disorientation but also of fatalism, which underlies villagers’ narrations of the past, the present and the future. While lamenting the loss of solidarity, they note at the same time that, in the current specific context, “private is better” – not because it is better in the absolute sense, but because, they insist, “people’s mentality” today does not allow for an alternative. They lament that “others” are too lazy, or lack the right knowledge or understanding, for cooperatives to succeed.

## 7.4 Assembling Ak-Bulut as a cooperative (or as something else?)

It has become clear throughout the previous sections that Ak-Bulut is difficult to grasp as a formal cooperative: a formally bounded institution with clear membership boundaries and internal organisation. During my fieldwork in 2015, I had the impression that the object of a cooperative escaped my observations: every time I thought I grasped it, it dissolved, revealing a new, unexpected facet. It seemed, indeed, that Ak-Bulut (white cloud in Kyrgyz) dissolved each time I tried to touch it and that the only thing I was able to observe was some indirect light reflected on one of its facets. In this concluding section I present some of these reflections and facets: connections, links, references or allusions that emerge, implicitly or explicitly, when I speak with villagers about cooperatives in general or Ak-Bulut in particular. The section maintains the messiness to mirror the confusion provoked by the fleeting and always partial reflections produced by the multiple facets of Ak-Bulut. Neither I, nor the development workers who have visited Pjak nor villagers themselves, can fully grasp the “object” of Ak-Bulut: we can only observe its reflections and conclude that such an “object” does not have a single essence. Rather, its multiple and sometimes contradictory fragments are assembled again and again, in an always transient way, into something that sometimes resembles a cooperative and sometimes something else.

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Here, “democracy” refers in general to the new socio-politico-economic system introduced with reforms after Kyrgyzstan’s independence, not to the specific political organisation of the newly independent republic. Villagers refer to the present historical period as “democracy” or “capitalism”, often interchangeably.</footnote>
7.4.1 Personal networks and membership on paper

While speaking with villagers whom Kumbat (or other villagers) indicated as Ak-Bulut’s “members”, it becomes clear that the definition of “membership” is not linked to a formal registration or to the regular payment of a membership fee. Rather, Kumbat indicates as members villagers who are part of his networks of relatives, neighbours and friends and with whom he collaborates, in different ways, in agricultural or other activities. Other villagers indicate as members persons who they know are close to Kumbat or who have participated at least once in one of the training sessions provided by any development project through the mediation of Kumbat. On the other hand, formal registration as a member does not necessarily mean collaboration with Kumbat or “the cooperative” in practice. I start chatting with Batyr while walking in the village: he is not part of Kumbat’s networks and nobody ever related him to Ak-Bulut. I ask him whether he knows Ak-Bulut and he answers: “Of course I know Ak-Bulut. Maybe I am even a member, maybe they put my name on the paper [laughing]! But actually I don’t have anything to do with them” (Batyr, 29.08.2015). Formal membership – intended as the official registration on a paper – is thus rather the fulfilment of a formal procedure without concrete consequences. What counts more, in practice, seems to be the inclusion within personal networks that exist beyond the formalised membership of the cooperative.

We saw in Chapter 6 that several development workers complain that farmers register in cooperatives only as a way to have a formal status that allows them to access specific credit schemes and facilitations. It seems, indeed, that this is the case at least for Ak-Bulut: several villagers affirm that being or not in a cooperative does not change anything for their agricultural practices. Remember Nadyrbek's plan to merge his cooperative (Tüshün) with Ak-Bulut (§6.4.1): when he explains this plan to me, I am surprised, since nobody in Pjak, even not Kumbat, ever mentioned this when I asked about the cooperative and its activities. After having met Nadyrbek, I ask Kumbat about this merger; he explains: "They won't do any activity, it's just a merger on paper. You know, they are just some thoughts of Nadyrbek: he wants to buy a tractor later, but for the moment these are just thoughts" (Kumbat, 04.09.2015). When I ask him whether he thinks that the merger is a good idea, he replies: "Yes, I think it's a good thing. And anyway it is harmless: it won't change anything!" (Kumbat, 04.09.2015). It seems indeed that the formal structure of the cooperative is emptied of its meaning and that it remains just a stamp on paper.

7.4.2 What counts as working together?

Villagers often lament the difficulties they face as farmers today: in particular, they point to the fragmentation of land plots and limited financial resources as the causes of a persistent crisis. They (not only Kumbat, as he claims above) lament that the small size of plots limits the possibilities for proper crop rotation to maintain soil quality. Soil productivity is further reduced by the limited use of fertilisers, which are too expensive. Better seed material could improve productivity, but again good seeds are expensive and hardly affordable. Moreover, most farmers cannot afford to purchase agricultural machines, which would anyway not be profitable on small plots. Marketing small amounts of agricultural
goods limits the possibility to establish agreements with buyers and exposes farmers to the volatility of market prices. In sum, farmers complain about the low profit they can get from their agricultural activities in comparison with the high expenses they face, consisting mainly in the land tax and in the purchase of agricultural inputs. They describe themselves as trapped in a vicious circle of low productivity and limited access to financial resources, which in turn limits their access to better quality inputs and thus leads to a further decline in productivity; all this in a context of volatile market prices for their produce but inflation in prices of consumption goods.

When farmers think of agricultural cooperatives, they focus on the advantages of collective production on bigger plots, which, according to them, would solve several of the problems just mentioned. They see the advantages of cooperatives mainly in the opportunity to increase plot size and thus to increase soil productivity through proper crop rotation. Indeed, they sometimes mention Oktjabr as a successful example of cooperative: since it cultivates big plots of land, it can avoid the aforementioned problems of plot fragmentation. Referring to cooperatives, farmers mention only secondarily the advantages of collective marketing and the facilitated access to credit and leasing; other advantages – such as better access to information – are only mentioned incidentally. Furthermore, usually farmers state that today they “work individually”, although in fact they cooperate informally with other farmers, for instance exchanging seeds or labour in the fields (see Chapter 9). When they speak of “working together” or of “cooperatives”, farmers seem thus to intend specifically collective production: they seem not to consider as “cooperation” other collective activities that might occur, formally or informally, in the village.

At the same time, when they speak specifically of the cooperative Ak-Bulut, villagers mobilise another idea that does not necessarily match the idea of joint production – and thus their ideal of cooperative. “Members” of Ak-Bulut refer to the cooperative usually in the third person (rather than in the first person as “we” or “our”) as an external institution that supports them in different ways, but in which members themselves do not actively engage. Ak-Bulut is not a framework in which to “work together” or to engage; it is rather a separate entity that, for instance, provides seeds, training sessions, or, simultaneously, a private seed breeding company that sells (or rather, was used to sell) good seeds in the region. This is not the case for Aisha and Batma, who describe Kara-Jer as a typical service (mainly marketing) cooperative: they make clear that production remains individual and that members join the cooperative looking for better marketing opportunities. Aisha usually speaks in the first person plural when referring to Kara-Jer: she includes herself *actively* in the cooperative and explains for instance that she helps organising the meetings of the cooperative, which sometimes she hosts in her house, where she prepares food and tea for participants. It seems thus that for Aisha, Kara-Jer is not a separate entity that supports her private activities, but something in which she sees herself as an active part.

### 7.4.3 The Soviet referent and Oktjabr

When hearing some of the statements by villagers presented in this chapter, it seems straightforward that their direct referent for cooperatives is the Soviet farm: a farm with strong leaders and joint production. In
fact, the Russian term for cooperative (*kooperativ*, also used in Kyrgyz) is the same used to refer to Soviet farms. However, if one delves a bit deeper into these statements, she will note that, when villagers *explicitly* refer to the Soviet farm, they usually do so to emphasise a distinction between current cooperatives and Soviet *kooperativs*. This distinction is centred on land ownership. As Adis notes, "Pooling our land together, as Oktjabr does, wouldn't mean to go back to *kolkhoz* time. This is impossible, because land now is private, and the state cannot take it!" (Adis, 01.08.2015). For Adis, as for other villagers, it is clear that a production cooperative like Oktjabr is not the same as a Soviet farm. When they imagine to join production on collective plots, farmers therefore do not intend a return to the Soviet farm model – at least not in terms of land ownership.

In the previous quotation, Oktjabr is again mentioned as an example of successful cooperative. Adis elaborates:

> Oktjabr has machines, big land. They can make profit from this. They have the opportunity to buy new machines. And the members are provided with bread and work. I have only two hectares, how can I do rotation on only two hectares? Oktjabr, they have big land, and they can do the rotation. (Adis, 01.08.2015)

Indeed, villagers, who often complain about the few and old machines available in Pjak, can admire one of Oktjabr's big irrigation machines every time they pass it on the street from or to Karakol. What counts for Adis, as for several other farmers, in his definition of success is the size of land plots and the endowment with agricultural machines. This vision resonates not only with the one of Oktjabr's director but also with the one of governmental actors discussed in Chapter 6. I argued there that such vision emerges from ideas of development and modernity that relate to the model of both Soviet agriculture and Western agri-business.

Whereas sometimes villagers praise Oktjabr's management for its economic achievements, they also express suspicion about its managers' practices. Common in Kyrgyzstan is the idea that the management of cooperatives like Oktjabr is top-down and not transparent in the best case, or involved in illegal practices and corruption in the worst. This idea is also reinforced by the media coverage of cases of corruption and other scandals concerning this kind of cooperatives. Therefore, many villagers are not surprised that Oktjabr refused to collaborate with me: they are sure this is due to its illegal practices, which its managers do not want to open to the scrutiny of an external person. Adis too expresses these suspects in some occasions, but other times, as in the quotation above, praises Oktjabr for its economic success and sees it as an example of farm enterprise to which he aspires.

### 7.4.4 Farmer unions during reforms

When villagers refer to Soviet farms in relation to current cooperative experiments, they underline the different regimes of property of Soviet farms in comparison to current cooperatives. However, they mobilise also another more recent past referent: the groups of farmers that emerged in the early 1990s. When villagers received individual shares of land, they initially formed groups of four to five households
to carry out agricultural production collectively; these “farmer groups”, however, did not last long, and
most of them separated within one or two years. When I meet Kairat (born in 1951) the first time, I
explain to him that Kumbat indicated him as a member of Ak-Bulut and that I would like to ask him some
questions about his activities in the cooperative – for instance about the training sessions they organised
or the agricultural inputs they bought together. While we are still standing in his yard, he answers: “I
don’t have anything to do with Ak-Bulut. I do all my agricultural activities alone and I don’t buy anything
from the cooperative. I didn’t have any training sessions with them” (Kairat, 27.07.2015). After an
awkward initial moment, in which I insist that Kumbat told me that he was an active member and Kairat
reiterates that he has no relation to Ak-Bulut, he invites us in his house. While chatting over tea, he
explains his position:

At the time of the first land reform, I convinced my fellow villagers to keep our land
together and work as a cooperative. But people were really lazy, they didn't do anything,
they didn't work. I had to do it all alone with my family. But at the time of harvesting the
others wanted the profit. I tried to keep the cooperative together, but it was very difficult
because people didn't want to engage, they didn't want to work. So I decided to dismantle
the cooperative, we divided our land and each of us started working alone. There were so
many problems with the cooperative, so many headaches! So I decided to say "thank you
and goodbye!" As soon as the others got their own land, they started working hard, sending
all the members of the family to work in the fields. [...] It's really a pity that we are not
working together anymore. I've tried to keep people together but nobody really understood
the sense of working together, they were just lazy and didn't want to work! Therefore I
abandoned all projects of cooperatives and I'm not involved in Ak-Bulut or similar things. I
just work for myself and things are going well. Probably Kumbat told you my name because
I was the leader of the cooperative after the first land reform. But after this I didn't have
anything to do with cooperatives. (Kairat 27.07.2015)

Kairat's initial reticence in the yard and his later explanations reveal his frustration for the failed experiment with cooperatives in the 1990s. We can also sense a certain rancour towards his fellow villagers who, according to him, were responsible for the failure of this experiment because of their laziness and lack of understanding of the “sense of working together”. Kairat draws a direct and explicit relation between the failure of these experiments and his current unwillingness to engage in collective activities with other farmers. This explicit reference is not uncommon among villagers, especially among those who have never been involved in Ak-Bulut’s activities. It seems therefore that, if there is a “psychological resistance” to cooperation as suggested by some scholars (see §2.2.1 and §6.1.), this resistance is due to villagers’ experience with farmer groups in the 1990s rather than to their experience within Soviet farms.

**7.4.5 Farmer groups in the framework of development projects**

When development projects started their activities in the village, as in the case of Ak-Bulut, they often
built on existing groups of farmers, like the ones just mentioned. The group that registered as Ak-Bulut
was not the only one in the village. Indeed, when speaking about cooperatives, villagers often mention the
activities of development projects. For instance, when I first meet Aziza (born in 1952), we initially have
an awkward moment of misunderstanding. We arrive to her house in a nearby village because Kumbat
had given us the name of Aziza's husband, Zamir, as the leader of Ak-Bulut's local branch. Zamir,
however, tells us that it is his wife, who is active in community activities, and suggests we speak with her.
When we ask Aziza about her role in Ak-Bulut, however, she does not understand what we are talking
about. She starts telling about other groups in which she is active. There was a women's group in the
village, which received training sessions on how to grow vegetables organised by an enterprise that was
selling vegetable seeds. She participated to several other training sessions, organised by different
organisations and on different subjects: cooking vegetables, pruning fruit trees, producing dairy products,
etc. She adds that she was, or maybe she still is, the chairwomen of one women's group: maybe Kumbat
confused Ak-Bulut with this group, she suggests. She explains that the position as chairwoman did not
imply much work; the group just needed a name to put on a paper and she was the only one who accepted
to give her name. When I ask about the activities of Ak-Bulut, several other villagers similarly start
telling about other groups in the past and in the present – groups that are usually initiated and supported
by development agencies and that often last only for the duration of their projects.

7.4.6 Cooperatives as private businesses

Rather than collective activities, those that are sometimes presented as “Ak-Bulut’s activities” by Kumbat or other villagers are in fact private activities of Kumbat, his sons (especially Tuman, before he left for Russia) or others. For instance, what some refer to as “Ak-Bulut’s tractor” is now Nurbek’s private property (and business); Nurbek himself considers this activity as part of the cooperative and himself as one of its few active members. Ak-Bulut’s warehouse is registered as Kumbat’s private property; his sons manage the warehouse, including its revenues, which, according to Kumbat, are barely enough to cover the expenses for the use and maintenance of the building. Also, Ak-Bulut’s seed breeding activities were in fact mostly managed by Kumbat with the support of the international projects (through training sessions and in the form of seeds and other material such as the glasshouse that now stands in his garden). When I first meet Adis and ask him about Ak-Bulut’s activities, he briefly states that “Ak-Bulut gives support at the district but also at the province and republic levels. Ak-Bulut breeds potato seeds and in this way it gives support at all these levels” (Adis, 01.08.2015). In our next conversation, I ask him what he meant with that statement. He explains:

There was a moment when in the province, we needed potato seeds. Ak-Bulut planted seeds on 0.15 hectares and sold the products in the whole district and also in the province. The support is in the sense that Ak-Bulut developed new sorts of potatoes and sold them in other districts in the province. (Adis, 27.08.2015).

It seems thus that villagers mobilise Ak-Bulut as a way to refer to Kumbat’s private activities; or conversely, they label Kumbat’s private activities as activities “of the cooperative”. If cooperatives have some concrete meanings beyond the “stamp” on paper, they seem to indicate rather the private activities of whom are defined as their leaders. This is also the case for Nadyrbek’s Tüshün Cooperative mentioned above. Although Nadyrbek explains to me that the cooperative is composed of eight families who carry
out joint production, it turns out later that, for instance, there are no official meetings of members to decide about the merger with Ak-Bulut: what Nadyrbek calls the cooperative Tüshün is in fact his own private business.

This is the case also for other cooperatives. Remember Jemish, one of the cooperatives I visited before settling down in Pjak (§7.1). The chairwoman's daughter bought the former local Soviet farm warehouse but did not have enough money to renovate the building. By joining the cooperative in 2011, she could receive a credit (taken in the name of Jemish) to renovate the building. As far as I could understand in the few days I stayed in Ak-Korgon, the woman is now managing the warehouse privately: she is the owner of the building, and villagers (members and non-members) pay to store their products there. The woman is also trying, through the cooperative, to gain the support of development agencies to start other activities in the warehouse; in particular she plans to establish a small fruit processing activity, which she would, again, manage privately.

A similar case is the Tokoi cooperative in a village nearby Pjak. Sultanbek, Tokoi's chairman, tries to convince me to do my research on his cooperative since, he insists, Ak-Bulut is destined to disappear. According to Sultanbek, Tokoi is a cooperative that deals with wool: it has a cleaning point for wool and a workshop for the production of carpets. Sultanbek explains that the cooperative is the intermediary between members and buyers: whenever there is a demand for a carpet, members organise to use the facilities of the cooperative to clean their wool and produce what is demanded. Sultanbek illustrates the cooperative as an important business in the village which offers to villagers employment and the opportunity to process their wool. However, when I try to investigate more about the organisational structure of the cooperative – for instance the difference between members and employees, the role of members or the governance structure – it turns out that Tokoi is rather a form of private business owned and managed by Sultanbek for which he employs villagers as wage labourers.

In the quotation above, Adis describes what actually was Kumbat's private business of seed breeding not primarily as a business intended as an economic activity aimed to generate material profit for its owner (which indeed it was and did) but rather as an activity that offers support to others and provides a benefit for the broader community. The overlapping concepts of cooperative, private business or community-supporting activity – or rather the non-relevance of their distinction – is confirmed by a meeting with Daniar, a deputy of the local council in Kok-Bulak. When I explain to him my interest in cooperatives, he proposes to accompany me on a “tour” to visit some examples of successful cooperatives in the village. I am quite surprised to hear that there are several other cooperatives in Kok-Bulak. Besides Tokoi, Daniar shows me a small brick plant installed in the yard of a well-off family and an artificial pond where people pay a fee to catch fish. Both, like Tokoi, are rather small family businesses, neither registered as cooperatives nor organised as a member-owned enterprise. Certainly, Daniar’s “cooperative tour” can also be read as a performance of development as discussed above: he organises this tour to show to the foreign stranger the “best” activities in the village, regardless of whether these are part of formal cooperatives.
7.4.7 Cooperatives as substitutes of the government

Finally, in rarer occurrences, villagers link Ak-Bulut or cooperatives in general to an idea of local government. When asked explicitly to list some of the activities of Ak-Bulut, they sometimes mention the community meetings that are regularly organised by the local government as part of their official tasks. During one of our chats, Kumbat explains that for him, Ak-Bulut’s activities (for instance the distribution of agricultural inputs, the breeding of locally adapted seeds or the attempts to unite farmers in a collective) also represent a way to compensate for the enervating inactivity of the local government. In this sense, Ak-Bulut seems to have taken over some of the tasks of the local government, or at least the tasks villagers expect from it.

7.5 Conclusion: rethinking Ak-Bulut, rethinking the economy

It has become clear throughout the chapter that the boundaries not only of Ak-Bulut as a cooperative, but
also the concept itself of a cooperative, are all but fixed, rigid and unambiguous. Ak-Bulut (or
cooperatives in general) is not a defined object, or an object that can be defined as such. It is rather a
particular idea *towards which* some practices and some representations sometimes converge (and
sometimes not); it is also a particular idea *from which* some practices and representations sometimes
emerge (and sometimes not). These ideas, practices and representations all contribute to constitute Ak-
Bulut – but always in a transient, fluid and never determined way. The rigid and narrow definitions
commonly assumed and promoted by scholars and development practitioners (discussed in Chapter 2 and
Chapter 6) do not allow to grasp this complexity and therefore, I argue, are at best inadequate for
engaging with farmers and their agricultural activities. At worst, they are dangerous because they
underpin narratives of failure – of cooperatives in Kyrgzystan but also, more broadly, of entire societies
to achieve “development” or “modernity”. These narratives become part of a hegemonic discourse that is
reproduced at different scales – from the central offices of FAO in Rome to the kitchens of villagers in
Pjak – and that produces disempowering affects of failure, inadequacy and abandonment.

This hegemonic discourse also assumes and simultaneously produces a neat distinction between the
economic sphere and other spheres (e.g. society, politics, environment): both institutionalist scholars and
development practitioners assume that some activities (e.g. joining a cooperative) are purely economic
and are based on a specific kind of economic rationality (i.e. I maximise my profit by joining a
cooperative). At least since Karl Polanyi's *The Great Transformation* (2001 [1944]), however, scholars
have made clear that the separation between the economy and other spheres – or the disembedding of
markets from economic institutions and social relations – is a historical, socio-political process that
started not earlier than the Industrial Revolution. Edward P. Thompson (1991, 260–61; see also 1966;
1971) showed, for instance, that popular riots during the Industrial Revolution were aimed at protecting
“a paternalist model of food marketing” (based on patronage relations) from the advancement of markets.
Whereas many scholars have interpreted Polanyi's and Thompson's analyses as suggesting that markets – or market economy more generally – are a form of economic organisation disembedded from moral and social relations (e.g. Götz 2015), others have instead argued that Polanyi's and Thompson's analyses show that markets are *always* embedded in social relations and moralities or, even, that markets per se *are* social and moral constructs (e.g. Krippner 2001; Narotzky and Besnier 2014; Palomera and Vetta 2016; see also Thompson's own clarification of his first conceptualisation of moral economies, 1991, especially p. 271). It is not markets that are separated from social, moral or political relations or that are disembedded from these relations: it is a particular kind of economic theory, especially the one inspired by Friedrich von Hayek, that models markets as a separated and disembedded entity. Nor are these models themselves disembedded from social, moral and political relations: they emerge in specific historical contexts and they promote and produce specific social, moral and political relations in their turn (see e.g. Thompson 1991, 268–69; Narotzky and Besnier 2014).

It becomes therefore secondary (or actually pointless) to analyse how markets become disembedded – for instance how markets “penetrated” a Kyrgyzstani village and substituted previous forms of solidarity and cooperation. The relevant question concerns instead the political and material consequences of modelling the disembeddedness of markets since, as Narotzky and Besnier (2014, 12) summarise, “models are instruments for the exercise of power. In short, models are attempts to control a messy reality through abstraction: control through knowledge production and epistemic dominance and control of human action through the performative force of not only the designs themselves but also the relations they privilege.” In the context of transformation after socialism, the economic models that informed neoliberal reform programmes conceptualise markets as disembedded autonomous entities. The policies and recommendations based on these models could only pursue the deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation of the economy and the parallel roll-back of the state; other possibilities and alternative approaches were impossible, and even unimaginable, on the basis of these models (ibid., see also Stenning et al. 2010; Pavlovskaya 2004). Even the institutionalist approaches reviewed in Chapter 2 – which emerged as a critique to classic economic theory – assume a separation between the economic sphere and other dimensions: therefore, their recommendations cannot extend beyond a limited repertoire of “rules-in-use”, economic incentives and sanction mechanisms (see especially Singh 2015; §2.2.2).

In his illuminating analysis of twentieth-century Egypt, Mitchell (2002, 4) showed that the separation between the spheres of economy, society and state as we know it today is the result of specific situated policies, material practices and political interests and that the *discipline* of economics played a crucial role in this process (id. 118, drawing on Callon 1998). Similarly, *Çalışkan* and Callon (2009; 2010) showed that “the economy” is a construct constituted through a series of practices, discourses and devices that include also, and especially, the models and theories produced by economists (see also MacKenzie et al. 2007). The two authors therefore suggest to shift our attention from “the economy” to the process of *economisation*, intended as the process that constitutes “the economy” as commonly intended – or of *marketisation* in the particular case of “market economy” (*Çalışkan* and Callon 2010). This brings us back to Gibson-Graham’s (2006b) project to rethink the economy “as we knew it” and build a new
language that can allow to imagine other forms of economic practices – where these practices are to be
intended as intrinsically social, moral and political.

In this chapter, we have seen that villagers link the concept of cooperative to a series of institutions and activities that cut across the spheres of economy, society and the state and include the realms of private farming, economic entrepreneurship, solidarity and mutual support, state responsibility and non-profit institutions. This observation invites us to abandon the common understanding of economy promulgated by both classical and institutionalist economic theory and instead to embrace the reflections of the scholars mentioned here above towards an understanding of the economy as an inherently social, moral and political construct – an understanding that allows simultaneously to interrogate the political and material consequences of hegemonic economic models. Before going back to Pjak with this renewed perspective in Part IV, however, I will discuss and summarise the main reflections emerged in the two chapters composing Part III.
Hegemonic discourse and subjection process

The analysis in the two chapters composing Part III has revealed that the narrative of failed cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan is part of a broader hegemonic discourse that produces a hierarchy of knowledges and experiences – a developmentalist discourse like the one denounced by postdevelopment scholars (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995). Part III revealed in particular two manifestations of this discourse at different levels: from scholars and development workers to governmental actors and villagers. First of all, the hegemonic discourse manifests in narrow and biased definitions of what a “true” cooperative is. Scholars, development workers and, to a lesser extent, governmental actors argue that the “Western” service cooperative is the only “true” cooperative because it is the only that complies with the “genuine” principles of cooperation; villagers in Pjak underline that “true” cooperatives are the ones with a democratic and transparent governance and that emerge from bottom-up from the “will of people”. All these actors reinforce their definition of “true” cooperatives by comparing the “true” model with examples of “fictive” cooperatives: many insist that Soviet farms, but also existing production cooperatives in the country, are not “true” cooperatives. Kumbat defines Ak-Bulut (which he considers a “true” cooperative) in opposition to Oktjabr (which he considers a “fake” cooperative); in her turn, Aisha defines Kara-Jer as a “true” cooperative in opposition to Ak-Bulut as a “fake” cooperative.

Second, the hegemonic discourse manifests in actors’ implicit or explicit references to a broader teleological vision of development and modernity. The ideal of a particular kind of development emerges from governmental strategies or project documents but also in personal encounters with a European researcher. It emerges for instance when Nurlan shows me the brochures of modern agricultural machines, when a GIZ employee explains his vision for a modern agro-industrial sector, when villagers hide practices they consider problematic or “backward”, or when Kyrgyzstani in general wish that “Kyrgyzstan will become like Switzerland one day”. In this case too, the ideal of development and modernity is defined through its comparison with a backward Other, which can consist, for instance, in the “Kyrgyz mentality” of laziness, in persistent practices of corruption, or in villagers’ “lack of understanding”.

The hegemonic discourse thus typically produces dichotomous categories (e.g. true/fake cooperatives, developed/backward subjects or places, those who know and teach/those who don't know and are taught) that it ascribes either to a positive pole of fullness (e.g. Economy, Development) or to a negative pole of lack (e.g. non-Economy, non-Development) (see Gibson-Graham 2003). The hegemonic discourse thus produces a hierarchy that values as universal a specific kind of subject, knowledge or experience while devaluing other possible or existing subjects, knowledges and experiences. This happens through processes of othering, like the ones just mentioned, or for instance when villagers express their admiration for Switzerland because there, contrarily to Kyrgyzstan, people have learned how to be in a cooperative and now are prospering; when Dinara and Kumbat remember how “Peter Schmidt” taught
villagers to be in a cooperative, but then note that they have not learned so well; or when Stanislav is genuinely surprised and disoriented by hearing that I came to Kyrgyzstan to study its cooperatives and he suggests that, if I want to study how cooperatives work, I should go back to Germany. These processes of othering create dichotomies at different scales, from the local and regional (big/small cooperatives), to the global (agro-industrial enterprises/small farming, Switzerland/Kyrgyzstan, Europe/Central Asia).

I have argued, at the end of Chapter 6, that the hegemonic discourse provides a legitimation framework for policies, representations, practices and also for individual subjects. This legitimation framework is specific to the particular historical context of contemporary Kyrgyzstan discussed in Chapter 3 – a context also shaped by the end of the Cold War, which proclaimed the victory of the West – with its model of development, knowledge and expertise – and the defeat of the East – with its alternative (but maybe even not so alternative, see Gibson-Graham 2006b) model (see Verdery 2002; Hörschelmann and Stenning 2008). In this context, development programmes have shared the assumptions of structural reform programmes – assumptions concerning in particular a specific kind of subject with a specific kind of economic rationality; a teleological vision of a specific kind of development; and a specific separation of the economy from other spheres (see Chapter 3). The type of cooperative that can find legitimacy within this specific context has been indeed the service cooperative model intended as a tool to support the establishment of a market economy.

I argue here that this legitimation framework also determines a process of subjection that makes some subject positions available while precluding others (see e.g. Gibson-Graham 2006a, 23–52) and that concerns not only villagers but also governmental actors, local and foreign development workers and any person who enters in relation with this specific context (including a Swiss researcher). Development projects or initiatives to promote cooperatives are in this sense governmentality devices within this subjection process (see e.g. Watts 2003). In the context of the promotion of the Western model of service cooperative, subjects are assumed to be, and *should* be, simultaneously, individual producers (peasant farmers) who act as entrepreneurs to maximise their economic profit and do not wait passively for the help of the state or other institutions – they should be *biznesmans* (Pétric 2013); and citizens attuned to the mechanisms of representative democracy and democratic management – they should be *demokrats* (*id.*). The value of these subjects is defined according to their position, or “stage”, within a specific (determined and linear) trajectory of development towards the establishment of a market economy freed of “imperfections”, where individuals-entrepreneurs can finally achieve well-being, and of a liberal democracy freed of pre-modern patrimonialistic practices, where individuals-citizens can make their voice heard. In this vision, the key for this evolution towards well-being and emancipation is the economic sphere (see Fraser 2013).

Subjects who do not comply with subject positions made available by the hegemonic discourse are devalued and dismissed as Other and as lacking something – they are for instance the “unempowerable” subjects observed by Kim et al. (2018). Subjects are not devalued and dismissed “by” the hegemonic discourse as a superposed external entity but they integrate themselves the hierarchies and categories of the hegemonic discourse and frame according to these hierarchies and categories their own
representations – of cooperatives, agriculture, development or themselves. What results, since what these
subjects observe corresponds rarely to the ideal of the hegemonic discourse, is a sense of inadequacy,
frustration and powerlessness that concerns not only individuals but also entire generations, population
groups and places in Kyrgyzstan as well as throughout ex-socialist countries of CEE and the FSU (see
e.g. Humphrey 2002).

***Discontinuities of power and intervals for contestation***

I have mainly spoken here above of a hegemonic discourse as if it were a unitary and coherent structure. However, as I discussed in Chapter 4, discourses – like processes of subjection and power itself – are never fully accomplished, fixed or stable: in their contradictions and discontinuities, intervals are available that leave productive space for contestation and individual agency (e.g. Gibson-Graham 2006a, 24). Neglecting these intervals and spaces would mean to fall in the trap of “strong theory” and to essentialise contingent processes while obfuscating individual agency and the plurality of local practices and subjectivities (see Gibson-Graham 2014). The empirical material presented in Part III offers some glimpses into the contradictions and discontinuities of the hegemonic discourse and into the alternative aspirations, subjectivities and practices that emerge in its intervals.

We have seen that the “project” of the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan is far from being coherent and linear but consists instead of a series of situated, fragmented and sometimes contradictory negotiations, reinterpretations and performances. Governmental actors, because of their scarce budget, cannot implement all the measures they promise; development actors act within the constraints of limited project timeframes and depend on donor funding for their implementation; activities of CUK are often limited to “doing *remont*” because of its limited financial and human resources. As a consequence, the concrete measures for the promotion of cooperatives are often fragmentary and uncoordinated and produce themselves that same confusion that some of these actors lament referring to villagers’ understanding of cooperatives.

In this fragmented context, individual development workers and governmental actors sometimes express – explicitly or implicitly – doubts about the definition of “true” cooperatives and about the kind of cooperation that should be promoted; they also reinterpret the goals of their agencies’ programmes according to their own aspirations and ideals of modernity (see also Féaux de la Croix 2013). Governmental actors are also able to navigate different narratives and assume what seem contradictory positions as a way to attract precious foreign resources while maintaining their own ideals of development and modernity. I have shown, however, that this strategy can be also damaging for governmental actors since, by outsourcing the implementation of concrete measures for development promotion, they further reduce their own visibility, credibility and legitimacy among citizens.

Many villagers are more aware of the representations of cooperatives underpinning development projects than development workers (and villagers themselves) suggest. We have seen that Kumbat and some “members” of Ak-Bulut, as well as Aisha and Batma, are able to perform a “true” cooperative when they
meet me, and that their performance can last several days: a timeframe that is often long enough (and was already enough in past situations) to convince a development agency or a private investor to start a project with them. We have also seen that villagers reinterpret and reassemble the formal framework of cooperatives according to their practices, representations and needs: in this way, the group of farmers that coagulated around Kumbat was able to access credit, seeds and other important resources. This kind of processes of reinterpretation and renegotiation are well known by anthropologists and geographers in Kyrgyzstan (e.g. Dörre 2015; Kim et al. 2018) as well as worldwide (e.g. Mosse 2005; Olivier de Sardan 2005; Hörschelmann and Stenning 2008, see §3.3)

Villagers express and reproduce the sense of inadequacy and lack discussed above; however, they also contest that they are themselves responsible for this lack. Whereas, on the one hand, villagers perceive themselves in a position of lack, they also attempt to justify this position by externalising the responsibility for their inadequacy onto structural conditions for which they cannot be held responsible. This is the case when they blame the “Kyrgyz mentality” as an essentialised external structure that determines their own behaviour; or when they blame a generalised lack of understanding (by others or even by themselves) that prevents them from working together with others. This strategy, however, is problematic because, first, it does not question the assumptions and categorisations that underpin the definition of this lack in the first place and, second, it produces an additional sense of powerlessness since it evacuates not only responsibility but also agency from individuals.

Memory as an instrument of rule and memory as contestation

I argue that the processes discussed above (the reproduction of the hegemonic discourse and the individual agency that emerges in the intervals of this discourse) are particularly well visible in the ways in which actors mobilise different temporalities in their narratives: references to the past, or memories, but also projections into the future. Scholars agree that memory is always a situated and contingent process of reinterpreting the past in the present (see Legg 2007). First, memory can be an “instrument of rule” through which powerful “individuals and groups recall the past not for its own sake, but as a tool to bolster different aims and agendas” (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004, 349). We have seen that this is the case in the narrative of failed cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan and in the hegemonic discourse in which this narrative is inserted. Scholars and development actors define their ideal of “true” cooperative in opposition to Soviet farms, which they frame as “fictive” cooperatives; they blame the persistence of this “wrong” model for farmers’ “lack of understanding” of “true” cooperatives; and they argue that farmers’ negative experience with Soviet “fictive” cooperatives generates a “psychological resistance to cooperation”. Villagers blame the “Kyrgyz mentality” for the failure of cooperatives: although they intend this mentality as originating in a far and undefined past, they argue that the Soviet experience – where, according to their memories, the government “provided everything” to its citizens and this provision did not depend on the actual work effort one performed – exacerbated the laziness and passivity that were already part of the “Kyrgyz mentality”. Kumbat summarises this idea when he sometimes notes that “the Soviet Union taught us laziness and corruption”.
These framing and evaluation of the Soviet past indeed reinforce the dichotomous categories of the hegemonic discourse and therefore the process of othering discussed above. They also reinforce the idea of a path dependency determining the trajectories of entire populations and regions (see §2.2.1), which in turn strengthens villagers’ fatalism and powerlessness by further evacuating agency from individuals, who are seen as trapped in this dependency and in structures that are resistant to change. I have noted above that villagers, by mobilising the idea of a “Kyrgyz mentality”, shift the responsibility for their inadequacy or lack away from themselves and onto an external structure they cannot control. Their reference to the Soviet experience as exacerbating this “mentality” further evacuates responsibility from individuals and shifts it onto an essentialised past. Similarly, Féaux de la Croix (2017, 154–67) has noted that her Kyrgyz informants, when referring to historical events or to their own biography, tend to project onto individual figures (of heroes or anti-heroes) the agency to shape history, while silencing their own individual agency to shape their own lives. Although this strategy is counterproductive because it reinforces villagers’ actual and/or felt powerlessness, it is also a way to cope with the disheartening effects of the hegemonic discourse on villagers’ sense of self.

Second, memory can also be a tool for contestation and resistance, in a regressive, conservative or progressive sense (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Legg 2007; Karner and Weicht 2016; Meeus, Devos, and De Blust 2016). Villagers’ strategy to evacuate onto the Soviet past the responsibility for their inadequacy or lack is also a way to counter the dominant narrative that blames them for this inadequacy. Villagers also contest this narrative in another way. They suggest that, even more than the “Kyrgyz mentality” exacerbated by the Soviet experience, what made them inadequate for cooperatives and cooperation today are more recent experiences: the establishment of markets after independence made villagers individualist and “cold”; their unsuccessful experience with farmer groups during decollectivisation in the 1990s made them sceptical towards cooperative experiments; their abandonment by the state made them even more passive. Also, with the narrative of lost solidarity and cooperation, villagers implicitly contest the definitions of cooperation and community solidarity that development actors and many scholars present as universal definitions. By stating that in the past they were, indeed, cooperating and supporting each other in the community, villagers refuse the idea (promoted by development actors and many scholars) that their communities have always lacked an understanding of cooperation and have always been inadequate for cooperatives: villagers suggest implicitly that these lack and inadequacy concerns a specific kind of cooperation and solidarity and thus reveal that the definitions proclaimed universal are in fact only partial.

The narrative of loss is one example of how villagers’ memories of the Soviet past are often positive and nostalgic: in this sense, villagers produce alternative memories to the dominant ones (see Brockmeier 2002). By lamenting the loss of state support and recognition, job security and social security on the one hand and, on the other, of solidarity and cooperation in their community, villagers produce the memory of a (Soviet) past where these elements were provided. In this way, villagers also contest the teleological vision of development of the hegemonic discourse: they suggest that their trajectory is not a linear progression towards a higher stage of development but it is rather an involution back to a lower stage that
implies the loss of past achievements. Simultaneously, the narrative of loss is also a way for villagers to contest the present: they point to what they miss in the present and to what they wish for the future. Karner and Weicht (2016, 21) note that such forms of nostalgia entail “feelings of loss and decline in the face of societal change [and] rest on a longing for a better situation and a perceived ideal which, discursively, is tied to the past”.

Conclusion: traversing fantasies

Karner and Weicht (id. 22) further note that, “while nostalgia is a longing for another time and space that evade modernity’s pressures and challenges, it also includes an element of recognition of the impossibility of this endeavour”. Indeed, villagers in Pjak contest a present they feel they cannot shape through a retrenchment in nostalgic accounts of the past. They build their wishes for the future either on nostalgic memories of the Soviet past or to the far-away present of Europe, North America but also Russia and Kazakhstan (from where they see images of modern agro-industrial businesses exploiting the infinite expanses of the steppe). What these referents have in common, however, is that they are *distant*, either in time or in space.

I have already argued at the end of Chapter 6 that development workers in Kyrgyzstan, as well as agricultural economists who study agrarian transformation in the region, are caught in the mechanisms of Lacanian fantasy (as intended by Byrne and Healy 2006, §4.3.1); here, I argue that also villagers are caught in the same mechanisms. On the one hand, we have the objects of desire. Besides those just mentioned, we see that, for what concerns cooperatives specifically: Kumbat dreams of joining production with other farmers and establishing a big farm enterprise; Aisha dreams of a cooperative that can empower women by improving their economic autonomy; Stanislav, like others, yearns for modern machines and large fields. On the other hand, we have the symptoms – the scapegoat-obstacles that prevent the realisation of the desire but that are produce by the fantasy itself: a broad series of “lacks” and “losses” or the “Kyrgyz mentality”. I thus argue that, like Byrne’s and Healy’s (id.) fantasmatic subjects, the villagers, development workers and governmental actors we have encountered in Part III tend to project the responsibility for their condition onto others (actors, structures, pasts), and are thus often unable to assume on themselves the conscious responsibility that would allow them to pass to the act and act ethically (in the sense discussed in §4.3.1).

Scholars, certainly, are not immune to the mechanisms of fantasy (see Healy 2010). I have already argued that classical or institutionalist economists, as well as several political scientists of postsocialism, reproduce unrealisable objects of desire (e.g. an ideal cooperative but also a perfect and disembedded market economy) and their obstacles as symptoms (see §2.1.3.). I am certainly not immune myself: when I started studying cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan, my (partially conscious and partially unconscious) aspiration was to find clear forms of resistance to the “penetration” of neoliberal markets in villages. I realised only later, and gradually, that this aspiration was based on an essentialist understanding of economy as a separate and autonomous sphere and of transformation after socialism as the conquest, by
neoliberalism, of realms that were previously outside the influence of the market or even outside the
economic sphere. My personal journey through the “failed” cooperatives of the Issyk-Kul – but also in a
*banja* in Pjak (see Introduction) – allowed me first of all to become aware of this essentialist
understanding and, then, to start developing a different, more fluid and open, understanding of
cooperatives, cooperation, development and economy.

Developing and applying this alternative understanding in the analysis of past and present agricultural
practices in Pjak is the aim of Part IV. In particular, we will be able to better understand the
renegotiations, representations, practices and relations that existed before the registration of Ak-Bulut and
how they have shaped, and have been shaped by, the formalisation of the cooperative. We will also be
able to understand more clearly villagers’ representations and practices of cooperation and how their
representations and practices relate to those of other actors. Finally, we will be able to better understand
how individual actors contest the hegemonic discourse and how alternative subjectivities and practices
emerge in its intervals.
Part IV – Re-reading cooperative experiences in Pjak

When I started my fieldwork in Pjak in 2015, my aim was to investigate the practices of the cooperative Ak-Bulut. I thus focused my interactions with villagers on Ak-Bulut and on other cooperative experiences, approaching “the cooperative” as a defined and bounded object that could be observed and grasped. I quickly had to admit, however, that my attempts to grasp Ak-Bulut were unsuccessful and, in a first moment, I identified the cause of this failure in the failure of Ak-Bulut itself. Later, thanks to my encounter with Gibson-Graham’s work, I realised that my initial failure was probably mainly due to the inadequacy of the conceptual understandings underpinning my attempts to make sense of Ak-Bulut’s experience – understandings about formal cooperatives but also about cooperation and economy more generally. In Part III, I deconstructed these understandings and showed that the categorisations they assume are often not relevant for villagers or other actors I encountered during my fieldwork, and therefore are useless for making sense of these actors’ practices.

Now, we are thus ready to re-read cooperative experiences in Pjak: we can overcome the fixation with cooperatives intended as bounded objects and instead look at how existing local representations, practices and social relations reconfigure the meanings and practices of external initiatives for the promotion of cooperatives as well as how, simultaneously, these initiatives reconfigure local lifeworlds. With this aim, the next two chapters engage with the analysis of agricultural practices in Pjak in the last decades (Chapter 8) and today (Chapter 9) through the lenses of diverse economies following in particular Marianna Pavlovskaya’s (2004) and Smith and Stenning’s (2006) application of Gibson-Graham’s framework in postsocialism.
# 8 DIVERSE ECONOMIES OF AGRICULTURE IN PJAK: HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS

This chapter presents and discusses the transformation of agricultural practices in Pjak in the last century and focuses especially on the last six decades. The first section provides a general overview of the geographical situation and history of the village, based on existing literature and on the narration of villagers.<fnref n="1" /> Section 8.2 presents the conceptual framework for the analysis of diverse economies. The following sections dig into the diverse economies of agriculture in Pjak in the late Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (§8.3) and in the decade following the independence of the country (§8.4); Section 8.5 focuses on the role of international development projects in this last period.

## 8.1 General situation and history of Pjak

### 8.1.1 Arriving in Pjak

From Karakol, the easiest way to reach Pjak is to go to the town bazaar. Buses to Pjak leave from there, but their schedule is irregular and you can end up waiting several hours. A quicker option is to find a shared taxi at the corner in front of the bus station, where drivers from Pjak gather. You will find a couple of them there, depending on the time of the day. Smoking a cigarette, chatting, or drinking *jarma* if it is hot, they wait their turn to pick up clients and fill their cars before leaving for the village. Your fellow travellers in the taxi will be mostly villagers from Pjak. If you purchased heavy or cumbersome goods at the bazaar, you can negotiate with the driver to bring you in front of your house; you can also ask him<fnref n="2" /> to stop at the seed shop to pick up your purchases there. If you are a foreigner, you will quickly make some friends during the ride. Most of the Western foreigners who visit Karakol and its region are tourists attracted by trekking routes on the Tian Shan. Tourists never stop in Pjak, where there are no guesthouses, no restaurants, no bazaars, no touristic attractions. When your fellow travellers understand that you are really going to stop in Pjak, they will finally also understand that you are not a trekking tourist and will ask you if you are a *volontier* – intended as the development workers (paid or unpaid) of international organisations that sometimes visit the region.

The road from Karakol to Pjak runs along the foothill of the mountains. On one side, non-irrigated fields of hay and clover cover the mild slopes of the mountains; on the other side, the irrigated fields sloping down until the bed of the river are cultivated with potatoes, wheat, barley, clover, hay and in some rare cases with vegetables (Fig. 8). Pjak, as most of the settlements in the region, consists of few regular

<footnote n="1">¹ These narrations stem mainly from the oral histories collected among villagers in Pjak. As I will hint to in several occasions, the selection of narrators (mainly elderly villagers and other villagers in their sixties and seventies) as well as the particular setting of our oral history sessions surely shaped the content of the narrations collected. A deeper discussion of these biases would be, however, too complex to fit in this manuscript and would require additional empirical research, in particular among younger villagers.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² I have never met a female taxi driver in Karakol.</footnote>
blocks of houses built around the main road. The centre of the village is marked by the victory park, the building of the local administration, the recent mosque. The building that once housed the offices of the Soviet farm also faced the main road, but it was demolished in 2016 to make space for two private houses. A few small shops on the main road sell goods of daily use such as food, clothes and kitchenware, but make most of their revenues from vodka and cigarettes.

8.1.2 Early settlements in the region

The alluvial lowland around Karakol and stretching eastwards from it presents favourable conditions for agriculture due to its fertile soil and good water availability; it was also one of the first areas of the Issyk-Kul region to be occupied by Russian settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 7). Vast parts of the area, however, remained unsuitable for cultivation until Soviet infrastructural interventions to guarantee their irrigation. Before these interventions, a large part of the territory of today's Pjak consisted mostly of swamps, and, contrarily to other nearby villages, no Slavic people established settlements in Pjak. Its population has remained pretty homogeneously ethnic Kyrgyz until today, with the exception of some specialists that, since the 1930s, were sent from other parts of the Soviet Union to work on the local farms.

Before the arrival of the Slavic settlers, the local population in northern and central Kyrgyzstan lived mostly from animal husbandry in a transhumant system organised according to family lineage: several families constituted separate groups according to patrilineal descent (Judith Beyer 2016, 21–24). These groups were organised in *aiyls* (in this case “encampments”) that moved from semi-permanent settlements in lower altitudes in winter to the summer pastures in higher altitudes, through the spring and autumn pastures. These movements were not without conflicts: competition for the best pastures provoked grievances and fights between different clans (Benfield 1998, 61; see also Jacquesson 2010). Beyer (2016, 21) notes that “Kyrgyz society was highly stratified before the Russians arrived”: not only there were important differences in the wealth and power of different groups, but also within the same group authority was distributed in a strongly hierarchical way. Each group referred to one or more internal leaders (*aksakals, biis or manaps*) and leaders similarly headed larger clan formations; under the rule of different hordes and khanates in the region, local clans responded to an overarching leader (*ibid*.).

In the mid-nineteenth century, the groups based in the Issyk-Kul fought against subjugation by the Khanate of Kokand. They were the first on the current territory of Kyrgyzstan to initiate negotiations with Russian delegations in order to gain protection against the Khanate (id. 24). These negotiations resulted in the establishment of the Governorate-General of Turkestan (covering part of the current territories of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) under Tsarist control in 1864 and the consequent establishment of Slavic settlers in the region (id.). This political change mostly did not modify the economic practices of local groups, which maintained their transhumant system of animal husbandry with increasing competition – and consequent conflicts, also violent – for grazing land around winter settlements on lowlands (Benfield 1998, 64). Tsarist law and administration was superposed to existing local structures
of governance, which were mostly maintained in their hierarchical organisation and partially reinforced with their incorporation into the tsarist administrative structure (Judith Beyer 2016, 28).

### 8.1.3 The advent of Soviet rule and collectivisation

After the October Revolution in 1917, the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established in 1918. It covered a territory larger than the former Governorate-General of Turkestan, including also parts of today's territories of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan (Abazov 2008, 35). In the 1920s the territory of Soviet Turkestan was subdivided in autonomous regions that were supposed, in principle, to follow ethnic/national lines.<fnref n="3" /> The Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was established in 1926 on the territory of today's Kyrgyzstan; it acquired the status of Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) in 1936 (id. 38). The first collective farms were established in the Issyk-Kul region in 1918, but their number remained limited initially (Benfield 1998, 99). In the meantime, Kyrgyz groups were forced to settle down in their winter encampments and to abandon transhumance, often to work on the Slavic peasant farms (id. 98, Judith Beyer 2016, 29). It is only after Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's ascension to power that a vaster, more radical and more violent process of collectivisation began – a process that in the Kyrgyz ASSR started officially in 1930 but protracted throughout the decade (Benfield 1998, 100). Keres (born in 1951) explains to me: “Collectivisation started from the West, touching first the two shores of the Issyk-Kul. Therefore here in Pjak it came a bit later” (Keres, 11.05.2016). In Keres' representation, collectivisation was a force spreading from the capital and investing gradually the whole territory of the Kyrgyz ASSR.

The collectivisation process meant first of all the creation of collective farms (*kolkhozes*) based in the existing Slavic settlements and the semi-permanent winter encampments of Kyrgyz transhumant groups; the groups that were still transhumant were forced to join the new farms (Benfield 1998, 100). Beyer (2016, 48–51) notes that in Talas province, the sedentarisation process consisted initially in the establishment of *artels* (teams), i.e. working units composed of a few households of the same descent line (*uruu*), which managed common land but maintained private animals. Between 1936 and 1938, *artels* were grouped into larger *birikmes* (associations), in which families pooled their private animals. It is only a few years later that *birikmes* were joined into *kolkhozes*. Each of these groups (from *artels* to *kolkhozes*) had a hierarchical governance with similar forms of leadership that reproduced the role of *manaps* and *biis* in pre-collectivisation times (id. 51). Although I was not able to collect detailed information about working unit formations in the early stages of collectivisation in Pjak, villagers' narrations about that period confirm that, in general, sedentarisation followed existing groupings of families that previously moved together in their transhumant practices.

Collectivisation also meant the confiscation of the possessions of the richest local leaders, who were labelled as *kulaki* and repressed as remnants of the old nomadic feudalism the Bolshevik revolution aimed

<footnote n="3">³ The process of nation-building in Soviet Central Asia was highly complex and shaped, among others, by local nationalist movements and economic and political interests of Moscow's central power (see e.g. Haugen 2003; Bustanov 2015).</footnote>
to erase (id. 29). While several of these leaders were killed or forced to exile and some managed to flee to China, others – especially *aksakals* (who had a more limited power than *manaps* and *biis*) in the initial phases of collectivisation – were integrated in the new governance structure of *kolkhozes* and their working units (Benfield 1998, 101). Keres’ grandfather Omar was a powerful leader in the Issyk-Kul region. Keres narrates that, when the first Slavic groups settled in the region, he dissuaded the local population to fight the newcomers and convinced it to collaborate with them. Omar died few years after the advent of Soviet rule, before the beginning of systematic collectivisation. Keres explains that he supported the Bolsheviks and helped forge consent for them in the local community. She insists that “Omar *ata* turned his sons into communists. He was saying to them: ‘you should sing the song of the age in which you are living, not stay stuck in the past’” (Keres 11.05.2016). Some of Omar’s own sons became leaders in the new Soviet governance structure and supported the process of early collectivisation and sedentarisation. Two of his sons, on the contrary, opposed this process and flew to China. Keres’ father was one of the former, but, when the process of collectivisation became increasingly violent and intolerant towards powerful rich local leaders, he had to flee to China too.

The few villagers who can still remember that time – and the ones who narrate secondary memories about it – usually avoid mentioning the violent dispossession of *kulaki* or the forced sedentarisation of previously mobile groups. Even Keres, after having told in minute detail her grandfather’s story and her father’s exile, dwells on the improvements the Soviet regime brought in the life of the local population and refers in particular to the large alphabetisation campaign, the improvement of medical services and the expansion of solid houses built with Russian techniques. She also emphasises the regime’s ideals of equality and solidarity, insisting that these ideals corresponded to Omar’s values.

### 8.1.4 The time of “hardship”

At the end of the collectivisation process in the 1930s, the territory of today's *aiyl Kok-Bulak* was subdivided in several *kolkhozes*. Production focused on animal breeding and the cultivation of forage crops and wheat. The outbreak of the Second World War imposed a dramatic pressure on local production, which was mainly directed at providing resources (in particular grains and wool) to the war front. Numerous young men left the village to join the Red Army. The oldest villagers, who experienced in first person the war and post-war periods, vividly recall the hardship of those times. In particular, they narrate that little flour was left in the village after most of the production was sent to the front, or that women knitted clothes for the soldiers. This hardship continued also in the aftermath of the war, when the village population was still missing its young males and agricultural production was carried out mainly manually.

The village experienced an important change in agricultural production in 1952, when opium cultivation was introduced in the region and the local *kolkhozes* specialised in its production. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Krushev launched a campaign to expand cultivation into formerly uncultivated land; at the same time, an effort to increase productivity led to the establishment of larger farms through the merging of
kolkhozes (Benfield 1998, 103). On today's territory of Kok-Bulak there were five newer kolkhozes, corresponding approximately to the current division of villages constituting the ayil today. Drainage works and new irrigation infrastructures expanded the arable land available to the kolkhozes, and new buildings (e.g. warehouses, animal stalls) appeared in the village. Despite the general increase of agricultural production in the region (id. 104, Abazov 2008, 39), villagers remember the 1950s as still a period of hardship. Although the availability of food had improved, villagers recall their hard work in the opium fields, which required much manual work (performed at that time mainly by women).

### 8.1.5 The time of “abundance”

Although the general growth of production slowed or even stagnated since the 1960s in the region as in the rest of the Soviet Union (Benfield 1998, 104–5; Abazov 2008, 39), villagers remember the Soviet decades since the 1960s as a time of abundance. In particular, agricultural production was increasingly mechanised, which reduced at least in part the hardship of work in the fields. Consumption opportunities were increasing, also thanks to the expanding black market for opium. To curb this expansion, opium cultivation was officially abolished in 1972. An important turning point in the region was the earthquake of June 1970, whose epicentre was not far from Pjak, which destroyed or damaged most kolkhoz buildings and private houses. This natural event coincided with a period of galloping mechanisation and efforts to increase productivity through the further merging of former kolkhozes into larger state farms (sovkhozes). A new sovkhoz was established on the ruins left by the earthquake and included the whole territory of today's Kok-Bulak. New, bigger buildings, including large garages for the new agricultural machines, were constructed especially in Pjak, which had become the centre of the sovkhoz.

Having abandoned opium production, the sovkhoz focused on the traditional agricultural specialisation of the region: animal breeding for the production of milk, meat and wool and the cultivation of fodder crops (including perennial grasses, barley, maize and sugar beets), wheat and potatoes (Benfield 1998, 122–23). This change also meant a shift in the type of labour required by the sovkhoz. In particular, a higher number of families were spending a part of the year on pastures. This change concerned especially women: whereas they previously worked in women brigades in the fields close to the village, they now followed their husbands to the summer pastures, fulfilling household tasks there and cooking for the herders.

Villagers remember the years of the sovkhoz (until 1991) as a period of prosperity and abundance; this corresponds to the governmental rhetoric of the time and to the image of technological and cultural progress propagated through large and prestigious projects throughout the territory of the Soviet Union at that time (Abazov 2008, 39). In particular, villagers recall the modern tractors and combines that drove in the fields, the abundance of animals, the “scientificity” of agriculture led by the specialists of the sovkhoz, the increasing consumption possibilities, but also the general sense of progress intended as progression forward, towards an even brighter future.
### 8.1.6 The “time of chaos”

Despite the signs of economic decline and the political unrests especially in the Western part of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s (ibid.), the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Kyrgyz Republic came to villagers as a (tragic) surprise. Villagers refer to the period that followed as “the time of chaos” (vremja bardaka) to underline the volatile and uncertain nature of that period, when they lost the certainties provided by the Soviet system and were catapulted in an extremely insecure present with an unpredictable future. In Pjak, as in the rest of the country, agricultural production dropped dramatically in the early 1990s and recovered only at the turn of the millennium (see §3.1). Many agricultural activities were privatised, which resulted in small family farms cultivating in average between two and six hectares of land each. Agricultural production today focuses, as before, on animal breeding, fodder crops (barley and perennial grasses), wheat and potatoes. Besides live animals and meat, farmers mainly sell potatoes. They cultivate wheat to sustain household consumption and as fodder crop to feed their animals. Vegetable and fruit production is mostly relegated to household plots; the produce serves mainly for household consumption but also represents a useful, even if limited, additional source of cash. As in the rest of the country, migration is an increasingly important livelihood strategy:<fnref n="4" /> almost every family in the village has at least one member who works in Bishkek and/or abroad, especially in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Today, the village reflects its history. The buildings of the ex-sovkhoz are abandoned and partially dismantled; they confer materiality to the sense of abandonment expressed by villagers (see Chapter 7). At the same time, each time I go back to the village after some months, I observe several new foundations for private houses; the houses that were in construction the previous year have some new walls or even expanded up to the roof.<fnref n="5" /> During my stay in the village in 2016, after a particularly good year for potato prices, I observe the proliferation of remont (renovation work) on or expansion of existing houses, which made the village appear shiny and new, at least for few months.

## 8.2 Diverse economies: analytical framework

Gibson-Graham has denounced the capitalocentrism of dominant representations of the economy (§4.1.1). With her “diverse economies iceberg” (Fig. 9), she denounces the bias of these representations, which defines as “the economy” mainly formalised and monetised activities (the upper part of the iceberg) while neglecting other activities, especially informal, nonmonetised ones (the lower part of the iceberg). Gibson-Graham insists that economies are diverse. Pavlovskaya (2004) has applied Gibson-Graham’s

<footnote n="4">⁴ During Soviet times, some specialists and kolkhoz workers were sent to the village from other parts of the country or of the Soviet Union. Once the Union collapsed, these “outsiders” usually went back to their original villages or towns. Since no early Slavic settlement was established in Pjak, the village, contrary to several villages in the region, did not experience the massive outmigration of Slavic descendants after 1991.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ House building in the village is a lengthy process. Usually families are able to collect enough money only for one phase of construction: the foundations, the first floor, the second floor (if planned), the roof, the internal works. Thus, it is not uncommon to see half-built houses that wait for the next tranche of capital (often raised abroad by seasonal migrants).</footnote>
diverse economies framework to socialist and ex-socialist economies and has noted the same bias in their common representations: what is most studied and discussed about socialist economies is the formal state economy and its application in socialist enterprises. Pavlovskaya (id. 337) draws a parallel between economic theories of capitalism and socialism and argues that “the market economy and the centrally planned economy are constructed as respective formal economies of these social formations. As such, they are seen as the essential, dominant, and legitimate economic practices within each system, encompassing all employment and production of goods and services”.

Whereas it is unquestionable that Soviet enterprises were important institutions regulating and structuring economic activities and everyday life during Soviet times, many scholars agree in noting that their formal activities represented only a part of the economic activities unfolding in the everyday life of Soviet citizens. It is well known, for instance, that food produced privately on household plots made up a good part of household consumption (Humphrey 1998, 289–99; Lindner 2008, 84–96; for the Issyk-Kul region Benfield 1998, 123); that production within Soviet farms depended on favours within personal networks often at the edge of legality (Kornai 1980; Verdery 1991; Ledeneva 1998); or that the private use or appropriation by villagers of the resources of the Soviet farm often exceeded the legal limits and importantly contributed to household’s livelihoods (Humphrey 1998, 136; Verdery 2003, 65–69).

Despite this evidence, little research has overcome the (often implicit) dichotomy between the two parts of the iceberg or the essentialisation of centrally planned economy as the main determinant of economic (and social) life in socialism. Pavlovskaya (2004, 337) has noted that, as a consequence, when socialist regimes in CEE and the FSU ended, public discourse and policy design were able to develop only a specific vision of transition: “following this simplified vision of socialism and capitalism, transition theory presents the economic transformation as a binary shift from the Soviet formal economy [...] to the capitalist formal economy”. She has further noted that this bias manifested in the focus of reform policies, which have almost exclusively targeted the reduction of the formal role of the state in economic production and welfare provision and the expansion of formal private economy (id.).

For her analysis of “diverse transitions” in Moscow, Pavlovskaya (2004) applies a matrix with four dimensions, each composed of two opposed poles: formal/informal, state/private, monetised/nonmonetised, taking place in the public/private sphere (Fig. 10). Following Gibson-Graham, Pavlovskaya argues that dominant accounts view these categories as hierarchical dichotomies, privileging one of the two poles of each dimension while delegitimising other. First, formal economic practices (i.e. those activities included in official accounts) are usually best documented and quantified and, therefore, scholars can investigate these activities (in the past and in the present) more easily. Despite the vast scholarly tradition on informal economies (e.g. De Soto 1989; Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989; Sassen 1993; Polese et al. 2017; in postsocialism Morris and Polese 2013; 2015), the latter are usually defined in opposition to the formal economy. Often, informal economic practices are represented or theorised as remnants of primitive societies – remnants that are supposed to disappear in more “advanced” and “developed” societies.
Second, theories and applications of socialism clearly privilege economic practices that are performed by the state: socialist revolution is conceived basically as the shift from (formal) private economy to (formal) state economy. On the other hand, as discussed, reforms in ex-socialist countries were mainly conceived as the opposite shift: from (formal) state economy to (formal) private economy. Third, monetised activities are usually privileged in research and in definitions of economy, also because such activities are easier to quantify and to document. Especially feminist economists have combated this vision at least since the 1980s (e.g. Barret 1980; Mackenzie and Rose 1983; see also Gibson-Graham 2006b, 33–35; Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003) and have pointed to the colossal amount of unpaid work performed especially by women to sustain household livelihoods. Although the topic of unpaid care work has acquired prominence in both scholarly research (see the review in Rummery and Fine 2012) and public discourse, it remains marginal in mainstream economic accounts, as its exclusion from GDP calculations demonstrates. Finally, common accounts of economy usually focus on formal and monetised economic activities that take place in the public sphere, intended as the sphere of production opposed to the private sphere of reproduction in the household (see e.g. McDowell 1983; Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003). Most activities within the private sphere in fact pertain to the unprivileged poles of the previous dualities: they are mainly nonmonetised and informal and therefore also difficult to document and quantify.

Pavlovskaya uses these dimensions as analytical tools to identify the multiple economic practices that made up the everyday life of inhabitants of Moscow during the Soviet regime. These dimensions are in no way to be intended as ontological categories. Pavlovskaya (2004, 336) insists that the point of her analysis is to show exactly the opposite: that these dualistic categorisations hide the complex relations between different types of economic activities but also that, more importantly, these categories have no ontological essence, they “are not antithetical but continuous, and properties of multiple economies are interconnected and overlapping”.

In the next two sections, I apply Pavlovskaya’s matrix as support to identify and analyse diverse economic practices of agriculture in Pjak, first in the late Soviet decades (§8.3) and then in the decade following independence (§8.4). As for Pavloskaya and Gibson-Graham, my aim is not to produce a taxonomy of such practices, but rather to show how multiple economic activities enmesh and overlap beyond every attempt of categorisation. In fact, it is not always easy to ascribe a practice to a specific category, and often the practices I describe below could pertain to several categories simultaneously. The reader should understand the below divisions in sections (and categories) not as rigid ontological differentiations but rather as a pragmatic way to structure the presentation of my empirical material.

## 8.3 Diverse economies of Soviet agriculture

This section provides an analysis of the diverse economies of Soviet agriculture in Pjak. For this analysis I draw in particular on the oral histories collected in the village in 2016, complemented by numerous anecdotes and spontaneous recalling shared by villagers over teas between 2015 and 2017. I focus specifically on the last three decades of the Kyrgyz SSR, starting from the 1960s and covering thus in
particular the period of “abundance” discussed above; this represents the period most accessible through
villagers’ primary memories at the time of fieldwork. I also include some rarer primary and secondary
memories of earlier decades. Certainly, my account of Pjak’s Soviet diverse economies does not have the
ambition to be exhaustive: I focus on the main economic practices that have emerged from villagers’
narrations and include, in addition, some practices that are well recognised in scholarly literature on
Soviet farms. As noted above, this account is forcibly partial, since it includes mainly the voices of
elderly villagers as well as of villagers in their sixties and seventies, while it does not dig into the
secondary memories of younger villagers.

8.3.1 Formal state economies: the Soviet farm

Since the 1930s the Soviet farm was indeed the main formal institution organising and regulating
agricultural activities as well as social life, in Pjak as in the rest of the Soviet rural space (see e.g.
Humphrey 1998; Lindner 2008; for Central Asia see Khan and Ghai 1980). As explained, initially there
were several *kolkhozes* on the current territory of Kok-Bulak *aiyl*; these were later merged in five
separated *kolkhozes*, which, after the earthquake in 1970, were in turn merged into a unique *sovkhoz*. At
their origins, the two forms of farming enterprise presented distinct characteristics (see Humphrey 1998,
3–4, 13–14). *Sovkhozes* were direct continuations of national administration and Party’s institutions and
were direct subsidiaries of the Ministry of Agriculture; the farms and their assets were thus direct
property of the Soviet state. Collective farms (*kolkhozes*), on the contrary, owned the farm’s assets and
had their own administration which was, at least on paper, autonomous; in practice, however, it was
dependent on the decisions of the Ministry and the Party. Humphrey (id. 13–14) notes that the distinction
between *kolkhozes* and *sovkhozes* was more relevant in the early decades of the Soviet Union. When
*kolkhozes* started to be merged into *sovkhozes* in the Kyrgyz SSR in the 1960s – and even more when the
*sovkhoz* in Pjak was established in 1970 – the distinction was thus mostly irrelevant in practice: also the
privileges conceded to *sovkhozes* in terms of state support and financialisation were mostly equalised for
*kolkhozes* at that time (ibid.).<fnref n="6" />

It is not surprising, then, that villagers in Pjak use the two terms (*kolkhoz* and *sovkhoz*) as synonyms.
When directly asked about the difference between the two, they mostly do not understand the question, in
a similar way as Nurlan or Nadyrbek do not understand my questions about the different types of
cooperatives (§6.4.1). The few villagers who acknowledge a difference between the two terms insist that
this difference was not translated in practice. Bolot (born in 1941, ex-specialist in the *sovkhoz*) explains:

There were no differences between the *kolkhoz* and the *sovkhoz*. They were managed in the
same way. There was the Party and the Party was controlling and giving the plan and the
tasks to do and saying how much harvest the *kolkhoz* or the *sovkhoz* had to collect and give
to the government. If the plan was not fulfilled, there was a first alarm given to the heads of

<footnote n="6">⁶ This does not mean, however, that some differences did not persist between the two forms of farm organisation, in particular concerning their financialisation and state support. For instance, Bichsel (personal communication) notes that in her field site in the Ferghana Valley, damaged infrastructures or assets were “moved” from *kolkhozes* to *sovkhozes* as a way to shift their costs from the collective to the state (see Bichsel 2009).</footnote>
the *sovkhoz* or of the *kolkhoz*. If the plan wasn't fulfilled a second time, the heads risked losing their position. (Bolot, 03.07.2016).

Bolot's quotation, besides confirming the equation of *kolkhozes* and *sovkhozes* in practice, also summarises the functioning of Soviet farms<fnref n="7" /> (see in general Humphrey 1998). Soviet farms were integrated in the international socialist economic system and were strongly supported by the state, to which they had to deliver a fixed part of their produce as defined by the five-year plan Bolot refers to. The farms had access to subsidised inputs and sold their produce to the state for a fixed price. The governance and administration of the farm were organised in a rigid hierarchy (see Steimann 2011, 106; also Humphrey 1998, 228–66): the farm's director or chairman responded to a management board and a Party commission. Directly under him (or, more rarely, her), the chief specialists (agronomist, animal breeding specialist, engineer, economist, accountant) controlled each a sector of production or administration and the related working units (brigades). Each brigade had a head (a brigadier) controlling and responding for the work of brigade members. Orders and tasks were transmitted through the several levels of the hierarchy from the top to the bottom. Villagers who were simple workers or brigadiers insist that they were just fulfilling (or transmitting, in the case of brigadiers) the tasks they received from above. As mentioned by Kumbat in Section 7.3.2, agricultural tasks were thus highly fragmented: the individual worker was alienated from the production process as a unity and was responsible – and aware – of only a little cog in the wheel of agricultural production.

All employees of the farm received each month a salary proportional to the hours they worked that month and, in case production exceeded the plan, an additional bonus at the end of the year. Since the 1970s, the salary was usually paid at least partially in cash, whereas previously cash payments were rarer. Also, after the 1970s, salaries and especially bonuses usually included in-kind payments of farm products (especially flour, but also fodder for private animals, see below). Villagers had also access to subsidised food and basic goods through the shop managed by the farm. In addition to these forms of labour remuneration, villagers had also access to a range of monetised or nonmonetised transfers from the state, among others: state allowances for children, veterans or ill people; pensions; health services; education; housing and leisure activities. Of the latter, villagers like to tell about the holidays organised by the *sovkhoz* as a prize for workers in resorts around the Issyk-Kul lake or in other Soviet Republics. Kumbat can spend hours recalling anecdotes and showing pictures of his trips abroad to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other Soviet cities: as a specialist of the *sovkhoz*, he was regularly invited to participate to these travels in winter, during the quiet agricultural period. In addition to material benefits, workers also received from the farm or the Soviet state what could be seen as a “symbolic remuneration”: awards, prizes or medals that certificated the effort of good workers.

As a way to balance the accounts and keep up with the production goals set by the state, it was common for farms throughout the Soviet Union to employ “voluntary” work (Humphrey 1998, 302–5). This

<footnote n="7">⁷ Because of the missing distinction between *sovkhozes* and *kolkhozes* by villagers, I generally prefer to use the general term “Soviet farm”, which includes both. I make exceptions when the term is used explicitly by villagers or when I refer to the specific Soviet farm in Pjak before 1970 (*kolkhoz*) or after 1970 (*sovkhoz*).</footnote>
concerned for instance “youth brigades” of schoolchildren that were mobilised for so-called *subbotniki*, i.e. forms of community work conducted mainly on Saturdays (*subbota*). Whereas in principle *subbotniki* focused on cleaning public spaces or helping *sovkhoz* workers in peak moments, Humphrey notes that they were used also to fulfil other everyday tasks within the farm (id. 303). Villagers recall especially the moment of harvest in autumn, where not only youth brigades, but also teachers and office workers of the *sovkhoz*, were sent to the fields or to the warehouses to help out with the harvesting process.<fnref n="8" />

### 8.3.2 Informal state economies

*Shortage economics and exchange networks*

Kornai’s (1980) theorisation of an “economics of shortage” has been widely used to understand the mechanisms of planned economies (see Verdery 1991). Kornai coined the expression “economics of shortage” to described the Hungarian planned economy in the 1980s. He advanced the idea that socialist enterprises are regulated by “soft budget constraints”: since they can be bailed out by the state in the case they have losses, it is not their first goal to make the highest gains. Neither is this, according to Kornai, the objective of the state: the state’s main aim is not to have efficient and effective enterprises, but to sustain specific social values through them, in particular symbolic and ideological values. Socialist enterprises (including farms) thus have an incentive to hoard material and labour resources through bargaining over production plans, whereby they tend to ask for more inputs than necessary while negotiating less output than required. They even have an incentive to hide excess resources (inputs or outputs) in order to avoid having to give them back or receiving less the next year. The result is an even greater shortage of resources, since many are frozen in enterprises that do not use them.

Because of these constraints, Verdery (1991; 2003) emphasises that it was very difficult, if not impossible, for socialist enterprises to reach the production goals only with official formal procedures for the access to the necessary production inputs. She notes:

> Collective farm chairmen and their technicians had to cultivate immense and far-flung networks in order for their farms to function. They needed to induce the AMSs [Agricultural Machinery Stations] to work for them at the optimum time, to obtain inputs when these were hard to find, to anticipate and adapt to changes in the county political environment, to influence the people at the state warehouse not to apply rigorous standards to the quality of the crops they delivered, and so forth. (Verdery 2003, 62)

Verdery, drawing on Kornai’s shortage economics theory, argues thus that informal exchange “out of the books” (sometimes monetised but mostly nonmonetised) was an indispensable practice for managers of Soviet enterprises – a practice that constituted informal horizontal trading networks. She further notes that “filling each such need incurred social debts that had to be honored” and concludes that “this far-flung

<footnote n="8">⁸ This practice was common during the Soviet Union and has persisted until today in some contexts, in particular in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector (e.g. McGuire and Laaser 2018).</footnote>
system of exchange involving gifts and favors justifies seeing socialism as a complex form of gift economy, one in which the aim was to collect followers, supporters, and allies – in other words, to *accumulate people* on whom one could rely in moments of needs" (ibid.).

Probably because of the unofficial, and often illegal, nature of these practices, they rarely emerge from
villagers' accounts of Soviet agriculture in Pjak. However, we will see below that Kumbat drew on his
personal "far-flung" networks, which he built during his activities as chief agronomist in the *sovkhoz*, for
his private needs. After independency, he used these networks to bring resources in the village. Based on
these accounts by Kumbat and on the widespread evidence of the importance in the Soviet space of the
practices just described (e.g. Hare 1989; Humphrey 1991; Johnson et al. 1997), I assume that such
unofficial exchanges between farm managers constituted a crucial practice within the *sovkhoz* in Pjak.

Benefits and privileges for specialists

Several scholars have added to the “second economy” in socialist countries (i.e. the unofficial and often illegal economic practices paralleling the “first economy” of socialist enterprises; see Sampson 1987; Shelley 1990) practices of bribing, intended as “the use of public office for private gains” (S. Lovell, Ledeneva, and Rogachevski 2000). Villagers often highlight the existence of widespread corruption both during the Soviet time and, even more, in the present. Although they do not necessarily condemn these practices as immoral, they complain about having to face high “bribing” costs if they want to access a specific (usually public) service. Such costs were mostly paid in-kind in the past but are increasingly monetised today.

Beyond the specific meaning of “corruption” (whose discussion is too complex to include here), it
emerges clearly from villagers’ accounts that people in elite positions had access to a number of
privileges in Soviet time. Kumbat explains the privileges he had through his position as specialist in the
*sovkhoz*:

Life was good for the specialists. We could have access to many things. The government really cared for the specialists and provided a lot of things for free. For instance, from time to time they [the government] were bringing coal or other things to your house with a big lorry. You didn't have to ask for it and also if you didn't need it the lorry was coming and brought you the stuff. They were also distributing meat and many other goods to the specialists. [...] For the specialists there was always money. Well, we had to work hard during the agricultural season, but we were actually enjoying life. For instance we had the car of the *sovkhoz* which was consuming a lot of petrol. If there was rain and we couldn't work we took the car and we drove around for our business, visiting friends and relatives, driving around... and of course we weren't paying for the oil! We were enjoying life like this. (Kumbat, 03.06.2016).

Some of the privileges of specialists were officially part of their remuneration and work benefits, like the
trips abroad, better housing conditions, or the free provision of goods mentioned in Kumbat’s quotation.
At the same time, other privileges were unofficial: sometimes these were openly accepted (as in the case
of the private use of the farm's car), other times they were at the edge of legality or were plainly illegal
and had thus to be carefully hidden (see below).

### 8.3.3 Private formal economies

In a socialist economy, formal private economic activities are generally limited. Nonetheless, every rural household was endowed with a small plot of land annexed to the house in Soviet times (in Pjak each of about 0.25 hectares). Despite its formal marginality within the socialist system, private food production (including animal breeding) on household plots constituted a crucial part of household consumption throughout the Soviet Union, with productivity rates per hectare even exceeding those of Soviet farms (Humphrey 1998, 289–99; Lindner 2008, 84–96; for the Issyk-Kul region Benfield 1998, 123, see above). Villagers produced especially fruits, vegetables and wheat for flour, but also hay and fodder for their private animals, whose number was legally limited, and meat.

The production on household plots was in part supported by in-kind transfers from the Soviet farm. As seen above, a part of salaries and bonuses consisted in a share of the produce of the Soviet farm (such as seeds or forage), which could be used on household plots. Villagers often insist that, although the formal payments (in cash or in kind) to farm workers were small, they were enough to cover their basic needs. This was possible not only because of subsidised goods, state allowances and free services (e.g. education, housing or healthcare), but also because households were able to cover an important part of their food needs through private production on the household plots. In this sense, the two forms of production – within the Soviet farm and on household plots – were in a symbiotic relationship, where neither could have lasted long without the existence of the other (e.g. Verdery 2003, 266–69).

### 8.3.4 Private informal economies

**Private production on the household plot**

Production on household plots was formally allowed but had legal limitations. Surplus production from the household plot was also sold or exchanged among neighbours or on local markets – a practice that, although not formally allowed, was widespread and tolerated. Furthermore, some families continued to use land plots at the edge of the village as grazing land or for the production of hay for their private animals. These plots somehow escaped the official mapping of arable land – a complex process of mapping that took several decades after the establishment of the first collective farms.

**“Taking” from the Soviet farm**

The symbiotic relationship between the Soviet farm and household production was strengthened even more through practices of appropriating farm resources to be used on the household plot or for direct consumption. During her fieldwork in postsocialist Romania, Verdery found numerous narrations of how
farm workers were used to taking resources from the farm (Verdery 2003, 65–69). Villagers in her field site recalled these practices as funny anecdotes, often coloured with pride. Villagers in Pjak, on the contrary, rarely share similar stories where they are protagonists, but they recognise that it was common that other villagers took things from the farm. In particular, they insist that this was the case especially for people in good positions within the farm hierarchy: some complain about this practice as a form of corruption. The few villagers who share stories about *themselves* taking things from the farm are the ones with whom I could develop closer contact. I therefore suspect that, like in Verdery’s village, these practices were also widespread in Pjak but, since they were illegal, villagers are reticent to tell about them to an outsider. Like in Verdery’s case, the few who share with me stories of illegally taking resources from the farm tell these stories as funny anecdotes over a cup of tea.

I do not have evidence of the extent of practices of “taking” from the farm by simple workers in Pjak. From the few accounts I could collect, it is probable, however, that this practice was also common for simple workers, who could take collective resources by paying a small bribe (often in the form of a bottle of vodka) to the one in charge of controlling them. It is clear, however, that farm employees in higher position had more possibilities to appropriate these resources, as Kumbat explains:

> It was very easy for people in good positions in the *sokvhoz* to take the things they needed. For instance we had a method to take out some of the content of the sacks at the warehouse with a little pipe. Of course we weren’t taking out too much, so that nobody could see it. The sacks were never weighed, so it was not a problem. My son was working there and I was responsible for the inventory, so we could take the content of the sacks because he was working there. (Kumbat, 03.06.2016).

For people in good positions (like Kumbat), it was easy to access resources of the *sokkhoz* for private use not only because they had a *direct* access to them, but also because they entertained reciprocity relations with other people in good positions, in the village as well as in other Soviet farms of the region. Here is one example given by Kumbat:

> There were many ways of taking what you needed from the *sokkhoz*, or of changing the accounts. For instance, Zamir [a good friend of Kumbat’s] was an accountant. If we needed money… actually not only we, but also the other people in good positions in the *sokkhoz*, we could go to him and ask for some money. There was a lot of money in the *sokkhoz*, so it was easy to take it. So we were in debt with Zamir. When the debt was getting too big, Zamir asked for the money back, but we didn’t have it. So we were just asking to modify the accounts so that it resulted that the money wasn’t lost. This was very common. (Kumbat, 03.06.2016)

During this narration, which emerged spontaneously while having tea with Kumbat and Dinara, the couple gives several other examples of how they could take meat, money, flour, or other resources from the farm through their personal relations. They further explain how this appropriation worked through exchanges:

> With the chiefs we could exchange many things. For instance the chief of the warehouse had access to the flour, the chief accountant to the money, the chief of the shepherds to the
animals... you could take some stuff from your sector and exchange with the others. We
were helping each other. In these terms, life was good. (Kumbat, 03.06.2016)

This account resonates with Verdery’s observations of unofficial exchanges among farm leaders and the “gift economies” that emerged through these exchanges. In these quotations, Kumbat refers to exchanges of resources for private use, but it is probable that, like in the case of Verdery and of the other researchers quoted above, this system of exchanges was used also for resources that served for official production within the farm itself.

Kumbat and Dinara describe a system in which local elites were connected with each other through informal exchanges and favours. This system of exchange could last because each person was “helping” the others, reciprocating the favours received through new favours and covering the illegal practices of the others. Kumbat and Dinara underline that the system was based on a specific ethic of sufficiency. The individual actors of this system were careful not to appropriate too much. Certainly, taking too much could increase the risk of being caught by the controlling authorities and the consequent sanctions. In addition to this, Kumbat also notes:

> Sometimes there were also specialists who didn't want to share with the others. They were hiding the resources just for themselves. They had so many things they didn't share that the things were getting spoiled in their houses, because they had too many. (Kumbat, 03.06.2016)

Kumbat here suggests that such behaviour – taking too much and not sharing – was considered by the other specialists as unfavourable. It would likely lead to a partial exclusion from further favours. It is important to note that what was usually taken was food for private consumption, some luxury goods for special occasions (especially meat), or agricultural inputs for the household plot and fodder for the private animals. In this sense, the aim of such practices for most specialists was not to accumulate resources and savings for the future, but rather to acquire some privileges that would allow them to enjoy life at best in the moment. As Dinara specifies, "at that time there was no concept of saving money or resources. Everything was given in abundance, so we didn't have an idea of saving the things, we were just using them" (Dinara, 03.06.2016).

Reproduction within the household

Part of the Soviet project of building a new type of person, the *homo sovieticus*, was also the emancipation of women through their inclusion in the formal economy. Indeed, the women we have encountered throughout this manuscript until now all had a formal employment on the Soviet farm or in local schools. The economic activities in the production sphere were paralleled by reproduction activities within the household. Since the latter were mainly performed by women, several scholars have spoken of a “double burden” falling on Soviet women, who had to take over formal employment in the public sphere while maintaining their responsibility for reproduction tasks in the private sphere (see e.g. Northrop 2003; Edgar 2006; Kamp 2007). Children, especially girls, supported women in both spheres: