Oligarchs, megafarms and land reserves: understanding land grabbing in Russia
textabstractThis paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in
post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries,
nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the
1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with
regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is
available, unused or even unpopulated. With rapid economic growth, capital of