Not Far from Moscow: Phenomenology of Suburban Farming

Abstract

The article contains an attempt to analyze and understand the practices of agricultural producers working not in the rural Russian hinterland, where their statistical majority is located, but near Moscow. We were interested in the overall picture of the economic practices of farmers working near the metropolis, their motivational and activity energy and, in particular, the “architecture” of their self-organization initiatives. In short, we tried to see and understand what can be called the “phenomenology of farming”. This angle of consideration is somewhat different from the approach popular in modern research campaigns dedicated to farming and having a socio-economic orientation, aimed at the organizational and economic parameters of farmers’ destinies, such as: the role of the state in the development of peasant farms, its state support in the form of attracting public and private investment, increasing the competitiveness of farms, contributing to the development of agricultural cooperation; creation of a system for processing farm products, as well as attracting investment through the creation of agricultural economic zones.

Domestic and foreign researchers studying the forms and practices of self-organization of the rural population, as a rule, consider them through the prism of factors that affect the pace, forms and quality of socio-economic transformations, the material appearance and event dynamics of the country’s non-urban living space. The most effective factors that influence the reconstruction of the social space of rural areas and, in general, the optimization of the rural world include managerial, socio-economic, innovative, urban, environmental, etc. The authors systematize the basic principles of studying the practices of self-organization of representatives of the farming community, which are empirically manifested in their regional and subject-activity specificity. These principles historically develop into a certain genius loci (“spirit of the place”, “genius of the locus”), packaged within the framework of customs and determining the institutional mechanisms for the development and adoption of proactive decisions by the subjects of self-organization. The practices formed in this way first facilitate the transition to a new development trajectory of individual segments of rural society (households, farmer associations, etc.), and then of all its basic elements embodied in the everyday life of rural “localities”.

For citation: Vinogradsky, V., Vinogradskaya, O. (2025). Not Far from Moscow: Phenomenology of Suburban Farming. Russia’s Directions. Vol. 3. No. 3. P. 9–29

Additional Info

Submitted: August 1, 2025

Reviewed: September 10, 2025

Copyright: © Auhtors, 2025

Distribution: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)