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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
Russian oligarchs in search of new frontiers, and the 2002 land code allowing land
sales, land began to attract investment. Land grabbing expands at a rapid pace and in
some cases, it results in dispossession and little or no compensation. This paper
describes different land acquisitions strategies and argues that the share-based land
rights distribution during the 1990s did not provide security of land tenure to rural
dwellers. Emerging rural social movements try to form countervailing powers but
with limited success. Rich land owners easily escape the implementation of new laws
on controlling underutilized land, while there is a danger that they enable eviction
with legal measures of rural dwellers. In this sense Russia appears to be a ‘normal’
case in the land grab debate.
