Calling on the State: "Illegal" Gold Mining in the Russian Far East

The practice of "illegal" gold mining in one of Russian Far Eastern settlements is examined. An attempt is made to deconstruct the state as a self-sufficient institution or autonomous actor with the right to regulate, govern, and use force against the population living in a certain territory. It is shown that the bankruptcy of the main enterprise in a particular locality and the feeling of the state's absence in everyday life under the availability of natural resources have not made the territory get out of control. This is manifested in the categorization of informal practices, where there is a reference to the "normal" order: gold mining should be carried out within the framework of tight control, as opposed to the self-will of the gold rush. The discursive formalization of practices makes it possible to see how an imaginary strong state operates across the boundaries of a local place and in what features the cultural specificity of the construct under study is manifested. This article is based on the results of a series of field studies conducted from 2010 to 2017 in the regions of the Russian Far East.