| Abstract: | This article examines agrarian relations in post‐Soviet Azerbaijan after redistributive land reforms. We argue that the reforms failed to establish small‐farm capitalism on former collective and state farm land. Commodity production in rural Azerbaijan is characterized by increasing concentration of land and capital, and the recipients of the privatized land shares procure livelihoods not through commercial farming, but through a combination of strategies—including wages, remittances from migrant relatives, and subsistence agriculture. This study is based on the combination of state statistics, government reports, and local ethnography—in‐depth interviews with land reform administrators and with rural residents in six diverse villages from two distinct regions of Azerbaijan. Previous studies of post‐Soviet transition in rural Azerbaijan reported different results of the land reforms. A quantitative account based on the state statistics reported a postreform countryside where small farmers, former collective and state laborers, live off their privatized land shares and increase agricultural productivity. A qualitative account based on local ethnography suggested that the privatized land shares play a marginal role in the livelihoods of local residents. We show how the discrepancy is illusory and stems from an erroneous, legal definition of “small farms” used in the state statistics, which conflates socially distinct categories of land use. When the statistical terms are put into their social context, the quantitative data confirm the qualitative findings. |
