I would like to thank Zsuzsa Gille, Mark D. Steinberg, Andrew Pickering, Eugene Avrutin, Christopher Henke, Andy Bruno, Peter Asaro, Neringa Klumbyte, and my anonymous reviewer, as well members of the University of Illinois Kruzhok, the University of Chicago Russian and East European Studies Workshop, and the Slavic Review staff for their helpful suggestions and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. I gratefully acknowledge funding support from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for the Dissertation Research Grant and Dissertation Writing Fellowship. Many thanks to my informants for sharing their time and experiences and teaching me about farming, nature, and everyday life under Stalin.

1. This project draws on actor-network theory to focus on the emergence of specific socioecological configurations in the Soviet landscape. Developed in the 1980s, actor-network theory (ANT) is a poststructuralist and postconstructivist approach that considers material objects as important actors in the processes of constructing institutions, social relations, local geographies, identities, and ideologies. The ANT methodological approach involves a micro-perspective and seeks to explain how human and nonhuman actors interact within a network. By tracing the emergence of networks, ANT exposes the constitution of power mechanisms that are embedded in material objects, technologies, and environments. This approach is critical of purely sociological or human-centered analyses and argues that power relations are constituted both semantically, or socially, and materially. In this article, I use the ANT approach to gain insight into how peasants interacted with the land through their labor and how these interactions informed their relationship to the Soviet state. Key names in actor-network theory are Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar. For an effective critique of actor-network theory, see Pickering, Andrew, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, 1995), 5–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. The primary source of data for this article is twenty-eight oral histories collected in Lithuania during an eleven-month period from 2003 to 2005. I also conducted archival research at the Communist Party Central Committee Archive (CPCCA) under the auspices of the Ypatingasis Archyvas (Particular archive) in Vilnius and the Panevežys Regional Archive. Archival research was supplemented by ethnographies in three villages in central Lithuania that included participant observations, semistructured and formal interviews with local community members, and interviews with former and current administrators and government officials. Additionally, newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, official statistical reports, as well as open-ended conversations with various informants provided important supplemental information.

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10. Lietuvos Laisves Armija (Freedom Army) was a political-military organization established in 1941 to fight the Soviet occupation. Romuald Misiūnas and Rein Taagepera argue that about 90,000 men and women were involved in military resistance in the years 1944 through 1956 and draw a comparison to the Viet Cong in South Vietnam where approximately 170,000 fighters and supply runners came from a population of 20 million. Misiūnas, Romuald and Taagepera, Rein, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990 (1983; Berkeley, 1993), 81 Google Scholar. The Soviet communication infrastructure was the guerrillas’ primary military target. They also aimed at killing members of the Soviet police. Kuodytė, Dalia et al., eds., Laisves Kovu Archyvas (Kaunas, 1996), 122 Google Scholar. Notably, the Lithuanian resistance movement was much more organized and forceful than the movements in neighboring Latvia and Estonia. This may have been due to the role of the Catholic Church, which supported the resistance in Lithuania. Dalia Kuodytė, “Lietuvos Pasipriesinimo Sajudis 1944-1953m,” in Arvydas Anušauskas et al., eds., Lietuva 1940-1990: Okupuotos Lietuvos Istorija (Vilnius, 2005), 308-49. A very similar resistance movement was taking place in western Ukraine: Nijolė Gaškaitė-Žemaitienė, “Lietuvos Laisvės Kovos Sajūdžio Strategija,” Genocidas ir Rezistencija 19, no. 5 (1999).

11. Tamošiūnas, Julius, Lietuvos Žemes Ūkis Raida irjos Problemos: Kapitalizmo ir Socializmo Epocha (Vilnius, 1974)Google Scholar; Tamošiūnas, J., Tarybinio Darbuotojo Vadovas (Vilnius, 1948)Google Scholar; Tamošiūnas, J., Tarybu Lietuvos Valstietija (Vilnius, 1979)Google Scholar; Tininis, Vytautas, “Stalininio Laikotarpio Pabaiga,” in Anusauskas, et al., eds., Lietuva 1940-1990, 399–406 Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants.

12. Tininis, “Stalininio Laikotarpio Pabaiga.“

13. Truska, Liudas, “Ūkinė Lietuvos Aneksija,” in Anušauskas, et al., eds., Lietuva 1940-1990, 106-22Google Scholar; Truska, Lietuva metais, 1938-1940; Petrzs Vasinauskas, Kolūkių Sunkmetis (Vilnius, 1989). In this sense, the spatial organization in the three Baltic states posed managerial problems similar to those involved in the collectivization of the nomadic tribes of Siberia. See the work of Caroline Humphrey, Piers Vitebsky, and Bruce Grant, among others.

14. For an extensive discussion of definitions of the term peasantry in the Soviet system, see Shanin, Theodor, Defining Peasants: Essays concerning Rural Societies, Explorary Economics, and Learning from Them in the Contemporary World (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar.

15. For a discussion of this term, see Lietuvių, Kalbos Žodynas at http://www.lkz.lt/autl.htm (last consulted 30 November 2008).

16. Truska, “Ukinė Lietuvos Aneksija,” 110.

17. Khiliuk, F., “Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo naseleniia i ego rol’ v proizvodstve sel'skokhoziaistvennykh produktov,” Ekonomika Sovetskoi Ukrainy 1 (1966): 60 Google Scholar, quoted in Wadekin, Karl-Eugen, The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture, trans. Bush, Keith, ed. Karcz, George (Berkeley, 1973), 2 Google Scholar.

18. In spite of this open hostility towards the peasantry, Soviet leaders were aware that the fate of the young Soviet state depended on the peasants’ ability to transform nature into food. Driven by this recognition, in the years following the famine of 1921-1922, the Soviet state made major concessions to the peasantry and briefly reinstated land inheritance laws. The reforms went so far as to allow hiring wage-labor—the very practice that was considered the source of inequalities in rural communities—on individual farms. Although these policies were soon discredited as counterrevolutionary and were abolished by 1929, they established a precedent in Soviet history for the strategic use of individual peasants’ skills and resourcefulness. By so doing, they tested the grounds for developing a more or less consistent political methodology for extracting private labor from the peasantry.

19. For an analysis and interpretation of the laws regulating subsidiary lots in the 1930s, see Hedlund, Stefan, Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union (London, 1989), 14–25 Google Scholar; Lewin, Moshe, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. Nove, Irene (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Jasny, Naum, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR: Plans and Performance (Stanford, 1949)Google Scholar; Ostrovskii, Vladimir Borisovich, Kolkhoznoe krestianstvo SSSR (Saratov, 1967)Google Scholar; Ostrovskii, Vladimir, ed., Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh agropromyshlennoi integratsii (Moscow, 1988)Google Scholar; Davies, Robert W., The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

20. “Del Kolūkių. Organizavimo Lietuvos TSR,” Lietuvos TSR Aukščiausiosios Tarybos ir Ministry, Tarybos Žinios 10, no. 56 (1948): 12.

21. In addition to land, peasants were also allowed to keep livestock: one cow (two cows in Lithuania), two calves, one sow with young or two sows with young in cases where collective farm authorities decided it was necessary, ten sheep and/or goats, an unlimited amount of poultry and rabbits, and up to twenty beehives.

22. Although often “invisible” in scholarly work on socialist agriculture, the small subsidiary plots were enormously productive. Occupying less than 7 percent of all agricultural land in USSR, subsidiary farms produced more than half the key agricultural output—even in the times of decline due to Nikita Khrushchev's anti-allotment politics. Considering that Lithuanian subsidiary farms were twice as large as the average in the Soviet Union, the proportion of produce collected from subsidiary farms must have been even higher there. Indeed, in Lithuania, the official reports show that in 1958,12.8 percent of all cultivated land was used for subsidiary farming. On these plots, peasants produced 73 percent of the meat, 69.5 percent of the milk, and 95 percent of the eggs produced in all of Lithuania. See Lietuvos TSR Liaudies Ūkis 1960 Metais (Vilnius, 1962), 85-88, 143-94; Tarybų Lietuvos Dvidešimtmetis:Statistiniu Duomenu Rinkinys(Vilnius, 1960), 143-47,180-82, 192, 194. It should be noted, however, that data on exactly what proportion of Soviet agricultural outputs were produced in the subsidiary sector before Leonid Brezhnev's tenure is scarce and contradictory. For example, according to Shmelev, Gelii I., Personal Subsidiary Farming under Socialism (Moscow, 1986)Google Scholar and Shmelev, Gelii I., Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo: Vozmozhnosti i perspektivy (Moscow, 1983)Google Scholar, 35.6 percent of all the agricultural output in 1960 was produced on subsidiary farms, while another authority on the subject, Vladimir Ostrovskii in Kolkhoznoe krestianstvo SSSR, argues that in 1958, this proportion constituted only 16 percent. For an in-depth analysis and estimation of the official statistics under Khrushchev, see Karl-Eugen Wadekin, “Soviet Rural Society,” Soviet Studies 22, no. 4 (April 1971): 512-38.

23. MisiunasandTaagepera, The Baltic States; Kuodytė etal., eds., Laisvės Kovų Archyvas.

24. Woman whose family used to live near the forest, interview, Anykščiai, 1 August 2004.

25. Kuodytė, “Lietuvos Pasipriešinimo Sajūdis 1944-1953m.”

26. Woman whose family was one of the last to join the collective farm, interview, Traupis, 12 January 2005.

27. Man who used to work as tractor operator for the collective farm, interview, Marijampole, HJuly 2004.

28. Woman who became a nurse, interview, Vilnius, 2 January 2005 (emphasis added).

29. The Stakhanovite movement was based on the mythology built up around Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old miner who hewed record amounts of coal in Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1930s. Similar stories of heroic labor involved the Soviet peasant-citizen who fought for the Soviet state by plowing more land than required, harvesting more produce than anybody else, and exceeding all production quotas when working on collective and state farms. The milkmaids Nadezhda Persiantseva, Maria Epp, and Ekaterina Nartova; combine harvesters and tractor operators Praskovia (Pasha) Angelina, Fedor Kolesov, Konstantin Borin, and Petr Gusev; pig-rearing specialists Vladimir Zuev and Tat'iana Daeva; potato field heroines Anna Masonova and Klavdia Epkhina; and famous sugar beet producer Maria Demchenko were woven into motivational speeches by the collective farm chairmen, state farm directors, and Communist Party members. As an ideological tool, posters depicting these models occupied an important place in collective farm administrative offices or on the trucks delivering workers to the collective farm fields.

30. Former milkmaid, interview, Taujėnai, 28 December 2005.

31. Older male state farm worker, interview, Taujėnai, 29 December 2005.

32. Man who used to work as tractor operator for the collective farm, interview, Marijampolė, 14 July 2004.

33. Older male state farm worker, interview, Taujėnai, 29 December 2005.

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39. For the significance of social rituals, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever; Gal, Susan, “Language and the ‘Arts of Resistance,’” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (August 1995): 407-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, examines participation in industrialization and enlightenment as a way of building consensus in post-World War II Soviet Union. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, and Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003) trace the emergence of Soviet subjectivities through the analysis of diaries. See Figes, Orlando, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York, 2007)Google Scholar for an important critique of Hellbeck's work.

40. Shmelev, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo; Shmelev, Gelii, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo i ego sviazi s obshchestvennym proizvodstvom (Moscow, 1971)Google Scholar.

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