'Accept Costs as an Exception': Social Costs in Soviet Land Management with Reference to Conflicts around the Reconstruction of the Bachatsky Surface Mine in the Late 1960s — 1970s

This article uses the concept of social costs to analyse the features of Soviet land use in the 1960s–1970s. This concept is based on the study of the mechanisms of modern economies, in which shifting costs to society becomes the most important way to increase profits for producers. Resources depletion and environmental pollution are inevitable costs of any economic activity, but they are usually borne not by the manufacturer, but by third parties and society. The concept of social costs makes it possible to carry out a comprehensive analysis and highlight the complex picture of the actors involved in nature management: those who are the source of social costs, who bear them, and who becomes an agent of redistribution. The empirical material in the article is the conflicts around the reconstruction of the Bachatsky surface coal mine. Its expansion and transformation into one of the largest enterprises of the Soviet coal mining in the late 1960s required withdrawal of significant land plots from nearby farms. The study of conflicts around land allotment, reclamation and compensation demonstrates the following dynamics. In different contexts, the coal industry at all its institutional levels acted as a source of social costs: the ministry, the Kuzbasskarierugol trust, and the Bachatsky mine itself. The Ministry of Agriculture and farms, which directly incurred costs due to the expansion of the mine, did not participate in conflicts on their own behalf. Other actors acted as agents of redistribution: first of all, the Kemerovo Regional Executive Committee, as well as regional Soviet authorities and the State Planning Committee of the USSR. At the same time, each of these bodies had its own vision of the volumes and forms in which coal miners had to compensate social costs.