Abstract

When discussing privatisation and farm reorganisation in rural Russia, a divide tends to be drawn between the temperate agricultural zones of southern and European Russia versus the tundra and taiga zones of Siberia (in the centre of the Russian Federation) and the Far North (at the eastern end of the Russian Federation). The former is often taken to represent “Russia” in its essence, while the latter tends to be exoticised as something distant and more akin to the rest of the circumpolar Arctic than to Russia.