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Abstract

The Right to Labor: Informal Justice and Survival Strategies in Soviet Kolkhozes

This article examines how Chinese Muslim migrants—including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Dungans—who settled in Soviet Central Asia between the 1950s and 1970s developed practical strategies to survive within the constraints of kolkhoz (collective farm) life. Drawing on hundreds of oral history interviews, it highlights the creative and morally grounded responses of these communities to the material and institutional limitations of the Soviet agricultural system. In the kolkhozes, where formal wages were often symbolic or insufficient, survival frequently depended on one’s ability to navigate the blurred boundaries between formal structures and informal practices. Migrants quickly learned to operate within these unwritten systems, where community norms and shared understandings of fairness played a central role in shaping access to resources. The absence of reliable monetary compensation meant that work was often valued through alternate moral logics: labor itself conferred a degree of entitlement to the fruits of production. These informal arrangements were rarely codified but were widely understood and respected. Workers, for instance, might retain a portion of what they helped produce—not out of defiance but as a practical, community-endorsed means of survival. This form of subsistence was shaped by a locally accepted moral economy in which people were expected to take only what was necessary for their families, maintaining a balance that would not trigger conflict or accusations of greed. Such practices were tolerated by kolkhoz administrations, provided boundaries were observed. When limits were respected, these survival strategies were seen as legitimate rather than deviant. They illustrate a parallel economy grounded in mutual recognition, communal consent, and informal justice—particularly among minority communities adjusting to a foreign and often inhospitable system. The study suggests that for many migrants, adaptation to Soviet rural life was not merely about laboring under a rigid regime, but about learning how to survive within its margins. Through everyday practices rooted in collective moral norms, these communities built systems of resilience that were neither fully state-sanctioned nor entirely underground. Their stories offer a nuanced understanding of how informal economies functioned as critical survival mechanisms for locally embedded groups under late socialism.

Keywords: survival strategies, informal economy, kolkhoz, oral history, Soviet Central Asia, migrant adaptation, moral economy