In the post-Soviet transition, economic turbulence led many people to turn to the land, mostly to their ogorod (‘backyard kitchen garden’), for the sustenance of everyday life. This is a well-known pattern and Russian Koreans were no exception, although their cultivation activity appears to have been more successful than many: some Koreans have even managed to develop their cultivation into commercial ventures beyond mere subsistence farming.

In a study of post-socialist economic change in Siberia, Humphrey (2002a) critically examines the applicability of the concept of ‘domestic mode of production’ (DMS, hereafter) proposed by Marshall D. Sahlins (1974) through an example of the Buryats in a collective farm in Siberia. Humphrey criticizes Sahlins’ notion of a subsistence economy for two reasons. First, given the dependence of each household on the state enterprise for material and equipment like fodder and agricultural machinery on a Siberian collective farm in the early 1990s, the application DMS's presumed household self-sufficiency is problematic. In other words, the fact that the domestic economy is forced to retain its connection with the outside world is not given ample consideration in Sahlins’ theory. Second, she criticizes his a priori presumption of equality within the household and his analytical neglect of internal differences such as gender and age that lead to different obligations and rewards. Sahlins’ notion of DMS is largely based on the concept of a natural economy and thereby leads to very functionalist interpretations, which Donald L. Donham (1981) considers to be neoclassical theory.

While I agree with such critiques of Sahlins's (1974) work, in this chapter I want to address the issue of the ‘subsistence’ or ‘independence’ of the Korean household as a moral construction, rather than as an economic reality.