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Russian settler colonialism today: Rusana Novikova, ‘”The land needs a master”: agrarian ideals and settler realities in the Russian Far East’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2026

18May26

Abstract: This article traces the khoziain, the steadfast, self-sufficient land master, as an enduring ideal linking late Soviet agrarian reform, the Hectare program, and the state’s renewed fascination with Old Believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Russian Far East, it shows how this moral figure continues to shape state visions of productivity, settlement, and virtueeven as such projects falter in practice. While the Hectare rearticulates the khoziain through technocratic land distribution and media celebrate Old Believers as exemplary settlers, ethnography shows that land users instead define mastery through care, subsistence, and ecological maintenance rather than market-oriented agricultural production.


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