Peasant way of life: survival and self-expression in the contemporary Siberian village
In the summer, 2017 the national study was carried out to ascertain changes in the behaviour of agricultural producers in the situation of food embargo. The sociological research in Asino district of Tomsk region was part of that study. It was based on the expert sociological interviewing the focus group of the people involved in agricultural production. The method of a profound semi-structured interview let the researcher obtain 14 relevant stories reflecting some important biographical details, personal experience in both production, organization and analysis. The article presents these materials through the prism of modern concepts of rural development worked out in Peasant Studies. The author attempts to identify the signs of the peasant way (of production, behavior, mentality, etc.) in these people’s stories in order to highlight the remaining value of the traditional peasant mode of production in the current post-Soviet social and economic reality. Modern rural life in Russia in general and in Siberia in particular may seem rather difficult and complicated, though the observer can state, sometimes paradoxically, the signs of structural stability and growth. The nowadays’ search for the ways of developing rural areas in Russia demands special attention to this phenomenon. It is important both in terms of operative administration of rural development and fundamental scientific approach. The analysis of those texts as well as of the respondents’ nonverbal behavior resulted in the following two scientific conclusions. Firstly, the peasant way remains the historical norm of socio- economic development of rural areas even in the post-Soviet rality. The peasant mode of production in the modern village is the result of its forced de-peasantization in the post-Soviet time. Its revival is explained by preservation of explicit and latent peasant way of life and peasant cultural code, which well persisted during the Soviet period. Secondly, the traditional peasant mode of production harmoniously fits into the market system as a separate way of life, as a specific “adaptive module”.