Tag Archives: Corona

Covid field tales – Part Five: The Political Economy of Reopening and Mapping Disorientation

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Interfaces of Moscow reopening. Part 1. https://www.sobyanin.ru/otmena-samoizolyatsii-i-propuskov

This is the fifth and final post of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. Each post is about different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These are based on one long text that appeared in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid dispatches – they are open access –  so please check it out.

The last post discussed care and disposal and sanitary propaganda in the city.

When Le Village magazine asked sergeant Kurakin, who was checking QR codes at the metro, why people disobeyed quarantine – the answer was ‘to work’. Closure and opening of quarantine both draw a labor division. Mobilized doctors, taxi drivers, grocery and utility workers, couriers, bus drivers – these high-risk occupations deemed essential, were never locked down. ‘Partisan’ hairdressers worked clandestinely. Switching to ‘distance working’, people were faced with the hardships of endless digital labor and its invasion of privacy, small and medium business – with the need to pay salaries in the absence of revenue and state support.

Moscow closed more comprehensively than other Russian cities. Reopening, formally based on the topological ‘safety’ ranking of occupations, was multi-step. 12 May – the same time as mandating obligatory masks in shops – construction sites and industry restarted. May 26 government service centres (by appointment) and car-sharing services (partially) returned. Other services were divided into three stages in June, visualized in infographics: first hairdressers and cemeteries, then café verandas and dental clinics, and finally, kindergartens, fitness clubs and restaurants. The city reopening was asynchronous and incomplete, in turn affecting the political and economic in complex and unpredictable ways.

The Moscow government justified priority reopening of industry as ‘least dangerous’ because of the absence of direct contact between producers and consumers. However, no one hid that the resumption of construction work – masked, with a reduction in shift and brigade work – was due to the shared economic interest of lobbying developers and City Hall, and the problems of labour migrants. According to mobile operator data, up to 2.5 million people from Russian regions left Moscow during quarantine. But citizens from the CIS countries, mainly engaged in construction, were locked up in the capital without a livelihood. Moscow officials saw criminal risk in migrants without work, reifying care about them as an interface of profit and biopolitical inequalities.

If the resumption of construction strengthened socio-economic marginalizations existing before quarantine, the partial opening of car sharing produced new inequalities. At the end of May, the renewed service only allowed five-day-plus leases, unaffordable to most. As for mandatory disinfection of the cabin before returning the car, this was another materialization of sharing as a “new dangerous”.

Mapping disorientation

Several years ago, ‘Le Monde Diplomatique’ published an imaginary Palestine map. The occupied territories were represented as the sea; the Authority-controlled ones – as islands of an archipelago. Numerous maps of the pandemic, regularly described in military metaphors, depict the Covid-19 occupation in a different way – not framed through absent space but as more or less filling it, and pushing out of frame alternatives of resistance, coping and co-existence. From maps of pandemic Moscow we can see how the concentration of the virus shifts from the prosperous centre and South-West, where the epidemic began, to the northern, eastern and south-eastern suburbs where those who served the metropolis during self-isolation live (Panin 2020). But we learn nothing from them about changes in the life of the city or its inhabitants.

To think of a large city in quarantine as archipelago is to problematize the qualitative changes in urban life during self-isolation, mapping the diffusion of sociality and following heterogeneities of (non)actualized presence. The implosion of urban imagination, the narrowing of vision and atrophied habitus – all of what creates so much discomfort and inconvenience for city-dwellers – can open new analytical perspectives in how to deal with impoverished forms of dwelling and not be afraid of attending to its fragmentation.

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Fig. 8. My own lockdown archipelago. 1. Island of habitation. My home, where you can find Care in the postbox and meet disinfectors. The playground taped off. Footpaths along which friends walk their puppy. I wave to them from my balcony. Rubbish containers next to the dovecote “Love and doves” that emptied during quarantine. 2. Wine Island, where the store consultant week to week talks about wine from more and more distance. 3. The Island of a closed house museum of Pushkin’s uncle and food, delivered from May with no charge by taxi firm. 4. Island with more cheap food, water and hardcore disinfection. Here I bought my second pack of masks (the first were from the internet at a crazy price). Here my friends live. All springtime we would have drinks and read poetry on Fridays in Whatsapp.5. The far post-office island, 600 meters from home. I went there a couple of times at the end of self-isolation. 6. The far bank island at a distance of 1km from home. 7. The phantom island of work. Humanities campus of “Vyshka”, where I have not been since the middle of March, working at a distance.  Colleagues in fb don’t believe in its existence. I see the building every day from my window and do not believe either. 8. Billboards from our photos. 9. The island-building of ailments, visible from my window, where all April ambulances – the dominant vehicle in the empty city – came time after time. 10. Moscow City, a group of skyscrapers on the horizon, visible with unprecedented sharpness. Usually – and now once again – they are smoggy. Image by Galina Orlova.

Covid field tales – Part Four: ‘Care’ and Disposal, Billboard Afterlifes

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“A special attitude at a special moment”. Pandemic enters the postbox. Image by Galina Orlova.

This is the fourth of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. Each post is about different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These are based on one long text that appeared in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid dispatches – they are open access –  so please check it out.

The last post discussed disinfection and the not-so-smart city.

‘Care’ and Disposal    

A booklet from Ritual, the Moscow funeral service and operator of Moscow cemeteries, dropped into our postboxes on the eve of self-isolation for 65+ (26 March – it lasted until 9 June). The use by a commercial firm of the state services’ design suggests a newly cozy relationship between the traditionally shady funeral business and Russian stateness. Last summer, this convergence took the form of a corruption scandal, linked to the high-profile case of journalist Ivan Golunov, framed for his investigation of murky dealings between Moscow undertakers and state security organs. This spring Ritual prepared inhabitants for death and loss, warned against contacts with “black agents”, informed about prices and social subsidies. What was also on offer was something that in the extreme circumstances of pandemic ordinary people expected but did not receive from the state – care. Care, which remains for Russians one of the most important regimes of affective expectations in political communication with authorities, masks hierarchies and injustice – of deservingness of ‘weak’ objects, of paternal relations (Bogdanova 2005). Elena Bogdanova writing on the Soviet period but extrapolating historically to the present, draws attention to – in the absence of a clear recourse to legal means – the practice of complaints and appeals to ‘care’ and references to promises by the state.

Care certificates from Ritual guarantee the owners, if they died within a year of purchase, burial at the operator’s expense. This offer had the side effect of interpellating tenants as potential victims of the virus.

Yandex informed Muscovites about the preparedness of Ritual, that “will come in handy”, for the pandemic: protective equipment and coffins in ready supply. The Ministry of Health published temporary recommendations – later rescinded – including a prescription to bury infected bodies in sealed coffins. WHO and Russian virologists confirmed that the virus is not transmitted from the dead to the living. Funeral services are not under the authority of the Health Ministry. Nonetheless, the protocol was entrenched: coronavirus victims are sealed in bags, and not released to relatives. Ritual posted a “viral” Instagram burial video: a hazmatsuited funeral team, disinfectant poured into the grave, a clutch of relatives frozen in the distance, the pit fill with fir branches as a natural disinfectant and only completed. The union of ritual workers has spoken out against the use of garbage bags as destructive to the social order and turns funerals from care into disposal.

Billboard afterlifes

Refusing large-scale support for population and business, the authorities compiled lists for selective state aid. The presidential one featured a child allowance. Moscow – supported the newly unemployed. The government made two lists – for 642 system-critical firms (including bookmakers!) along with a dozen industries extremely vulnerable to the effects of the epidemic. The Chair of the Chamber of Commerce proposed including outdoor ads, which would lose up to 70% of revenue in deserted cities, in the second list. Simultaneously, he emphasised the critical role of billboards in informing people about virus protection, the WWII anniversary, and the upcoming plebiscite. Was this transition from the affected to having critical significance a transition from commercial advertising to propaganda? Did this discursive merging tell us more about saving the industry at the expense of state orders? Even in the small section of my self-isolation route, billboard changes perform the symbolic dynamics of quarantine.

At the end of March, the dismantling of outdoor ads from the frozen centre of Moscow gave way to mobilization. From billboards, placed every 15-20 meters, well-known Moscow doctors urged Muscovites to stay home, wear masks and not touch their faces. After April, this template was adapted to enhance affective solidarity and the formation of quarantine communities. Doctors are no longer given voice, they are thanked. And young people are hailed as volunteers. Closer to the Garden Ring sanitary enlightenment is interspersed with posters for Victory Day. In early summer, commercial advertising has returned as a (post)quarantine hybrid – McDonald’s with both hands voting for hand washing. The epidemiological safety and the upcoming voting in this austere carnival of signs do not leave room for Bigmacs yet.

Final post follows.

 

Lockdown propaganda comes into being. 03-06.2020. Images by Galina Orlova.

 

Covid field tales – Part Three: Disinfection and the Smart City

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Disinfection

This is the third of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. Each post is about different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These are based on one long text that appeared in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid despatches – they are open access –  so please check it out. Space in those dispatches is very limited, so here on the blog I will take a little bit more of a circuitous route.

The last post discussed the political economy of lockdown, how City Hall dealt with it and in particular what this reveals about ‘State Capitalism’.

Operation ‘Disinfection’

After the virus transformed the city into a host of hostile surfaces, the Sanitary Service enlightened Muscovites that the infection “can stay in the air for 3 hours, on copper – for 4 hours, up to 24 hours on pulp and paper surfaces (documents, envelopes, folders), for 3-4 days on plastic and metal.” The developing corona-market offers a “cold fog” method of disinfection from 8 roubles per m2. An invitation to the wake of a neighbour dead from Covid, now includes: “Everything is disinfected.”

Public spaces – sidewalks, underpasses, entry-ways – are treated at city expense. The deputy mayor first earmarked 3,500 units of tractor-street sprayers, deploys 4,500. The air hangs with a bleach smell from the long-forgotten Soviet sanitary aromascape while the yellow sanitisers in the metro whiff of the society of consumption and bananas. Muscovites happily use them and discuss whether the big disinfection is comparable to urban beautification programs famous for exorbitant expenses and corruption. And if there isn’t much point in treating open surfaces, as epidemiologists say, should this be recognized as an urban antiviral ritual?

Our entrance-way, which according sanitary doctors remains the most “forgotten place in terms of anti-epidemic measures”, is disinfected twice daily. Bumping into disinfectors in chemical protection suits with spray guns and getting coated by a dose, you realise the danger, and no longer go out without a mask. Someone repeatedly adds in pencil: “unsatisfactory” to the assessment in the disinfection schedule posted by the elevator. The repairman – tired, in a cotton mask slipping down – is also unhappy: the chemicals have damaged electrical contacts, and now the elevator serves only four floors out of twelve. This metonymizes the city in quarantine as an assemblage of relative safety, partial functionality, attempts to reprogram and restore lost connectivity.

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“Unsatisfactory”. Not in focus. Image by Galina Orlova

Not such a smart lockdown  

Maintaining Moscow’s reputation as a ‘smart city’, City Hall placed its bets on the rapid development of digital control over self-isolation. From April any non-hospitalized infected were obliged to stay at home and install a special mobile app – Social monitoring, developed by the city IT Department. From April 15, Muscovites needed sixteen-digit QR codes to make daily work trips, single emergency trips, and twice-weekly trips for personal and private needs. Police, taxi-drivers and transit workers mobilized to check codes using the Transit Department’s Moscow Assistant app. Regimented timetables of walks were dictated via infographics interfaces. Drones and quadcopters for tracking social distancing in re-opened restaurants were Moscow’s moment to jump the shark.

Jung Won Sonn and colleagues, analyzing the effective use of technology to reduce the risks of a pandemic in South Korea with smart city technologies, conclude that Covid-19 is the first epidemic in history for which humanity living in cities has come up with a ready-made response system.  Aggregating mobile operator data, geolocations of bank transactions and transport cards allows the precise contact tracing, avoiding major quarantine. The researchers regret that countries with developed digital infrastructure – with the exception of South Korea and Taiwan – have not made use of this advantage. (Sonn et al. 2020).

Russia, where during crisis the development of a new platform and apps was preferred, entailing large upfront costs, is a special case. While Yandex – Russia’s Google and the co-owner of popular taxi, delivery and mapping apps, – published a “self-isolation index” using its own digital infrastructure and aggregating big data, City Hall chose to develop apps from scratch. Work requiring months was implemented in weeks with many bugs and inefficient decisions. Lacking auto-verification, QR codes turned Moscow assistants into nurses for an infirm technology. Massive queues formed at metro entrances as policemen were forced to manually input codes to their devices. Technical faults were accompanied by social de(trans)formations, compensatory improvisations, and abuses. When Moscow Assistant could not cope with the flood of requests, QR encounters simulated governing. The cancelling of drivers’ codes without explanation led to the use of “service position” and informal connections to obtain permissions. Ordinary Muscovites with Covid-19 paid for geolocation failures, non-stop selfie requirements, multiple disconnections of the Social Monitoring, developed from fragments of code written in ten days for a pilot project to monitor the transport of domestic waste. Heavy fines, the denial of technical errors by City Hall forced the victims of smart lockdown to unite in the FB-community Fined for getting sick and to complain about the app in court and to Google Play.

Techno-political failures of Moscow lockdown are full of heterogeneities. Repressive Social monitoring is the first manifestation of a biosecurity regime replacing biopolitics. While biopolitics featured authorities’ concern with the life of population, biosecurity is built on the responsibility – including legal – of citizens for their health (Agamben 2020). For Muscovites, fined for getting sick, buggy mobile apps became the real punishment. The incoherence of urban mobility monitoring destroyed the technological continuity of the society of control (Deleuze 1992). To check a QR-code through Moscow Assistant, you need a policeman or a taxi driver in person with a mobile citizen. Taxi drivers tell of the discomfort that arose performing these police duties. The mayor’s office sees voluntary assistance and civic duty in them, but just in case, offers numerous sanctions for those who refuse to help. In a country where civil society is supposedly weak, the prosthetics of digital technologies during lockdown risk not so much strengthening the police state but accelerating the emergence of a “police society”.

In our next post we will move on to ‘Care and Disposal’ and the ‘afterlife’ of the consumption city.

Corona in a comparative perspective – will it help ‘restore justice’ in Russia, or show the weaknesses of its incoherent state?

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Civil defence placard in a public building.

Okay, so I had the choice when Covid really started kicking off, of being in Russia, Denmark or the UK. I already had a ticket to the UK, so I went there. But it got me thinking a little about comparisons through the lens of the everyday – yeah, you knew it would!

Apologies if, at some point in the future you’re reading this and thinking it’s in bad taste as survivors huddle round a fire in a post-apocalyptic landscape and someone decides to hand crank up the intertubes. Also apologies for the lumpier than usual writing.

So, what’s clear so far is that Britain is a mess in terms of state capacity for dealing with a major crisis, but also a mess in that there is no herd immunity to panic. Bear with me. I’m not of course talking about bio-immunity. I’m talking about the mythic ‘Blitz’ spirit. First of all, the stoic Blitz spirit myth is unhelpful for many reasons: the UK had an Empire, had the US to its flank, had years to prepare for war etc. Mainly though, it’s unhelpful because there wasn’t so much real social solidarity and grass-roots organisation in WWII. What the UK did have was massive and effective state machinery. That machine, well-oiled and relatively successful in socialising (bridling?) capitalism to non-market ends, was the most effective mobiliser and allocator of scarce resources in modern history.

Now, mobilisation and organisation that’s blind to other interests is usually used to describe the USSR war effort. However, what’s more important here is the long-term effect of the trauma of WWII for Russians, and equally, the continuation of ‘wartime’ elements of lived experience after 1945 in Russia.  So one thing that connects this crisis with my research interests is a ‘cosmology of provisioning’. This is the idea that memories abide of ways of being resourceful and resilient in the face of want – witness the culture of pickling and jamming in Eastern Europe generally (there’s even a verbal construction in Russian to describe the physical process of conserving produce at home: «закрывать или закатывать банки» – link from ‘Kapusta TV’!). But it also relates to practical skills of daily living that clearly many have lost – witness the anecdote from the US of a run on pancake mix while eggs and flour were untouched. I’ve seen panic buying in Russia before (the salt and sugar panics from around 15 years ago). So while Russia is certainly prone to conspiracy theories and the virus of rumour, there are socio-cultural elements of making-do and putting-up-with-little that might put them in better stead.

Another topic is what I call the culture of medicalisation in Russia. It’s an irony that the cultural hypochondria, or obsession with avoiding ailments and pursuit of self-treatment (for ailments that British people just put up with) could actually be a helpful thing in Russia. For various reasons, people are much more aware of disease in Russia as an enemy of bodily well-being in a way that seems obsessive to a British person (but not other Europeans or Americans perhaps). Comparing how many people consider having a thermometer essential equipment for their home ‘aptechka’ (note the origin of the Russian word for ‘medicine cabinet’) could be an interesting indicator.

The link here is the Soviet heritage of the scientific approach to disease and the underlying assumption that many barriers to modernisation were rooted in the genetic weakness of the population. Indeed the extreme ‘sensitivity’ in Russia towards ‘infection’ could be a good thing with a potentially higher ‘lay’ understanding of the need for hygiene and quarantine.  Of course, at the same time there is a very healthy (in both senses) folk medicine tradition that shows no signs of abating. The scientism, in a positive sense, behind even everyday practices is a long-standing referent, as Galina Orlova has noted [same article in Russian]. And in general we could point to a more ‘holistic’ understanding of disease causes and treatment in Russian historically.

And that’s not to mention the remnants of civic defence culture that remain – visible in every village administration or public building in the form of posters. Really the question here is, are the well funded and equipped security services able to ‘think’ in terms of civil defence, or are they too preoccupied with a mindset of punishing wrong-doers? Ironically there’s more signs in the UK that the extremely depleted thin blue line can do little more than stigmatise and bully those breaking quarantine, rather than switch to civil defence.  As Vanessa Pupavac notes in response to the UK police ‘shaming’, lessons from studying authoritarian regimes are that ‘overly-heavy handed interpretation of measures in a situation encourages more flouting of measures and the corrosion of adherence, esp. over time, than if reasonable compliance was fostered allowing citizens to make sensible judgement calls.’

Key here is self-organisation and grass roots initiatives. I’m really impressed with what’s happening both in the UK and Russia, with immediate organisation through social media of support and protection for the most vulnerable. Social media is a boon here, but of course many older people don’t have smart phones or internet. In both countries I see examples of self-organised local pooling of human resources to find the vulnerable people and offer support. Here in the UK in my household we phone an elderly widower every day and bring him groceries – observing a safe distance. I know of similar, well organised things in Russia – micro acts of care or ‘quiet activism’, see in particular the work of Kye Askins and  Laura Pottinger.

Both UK and Russian healthcare systems have been decimated by a fetish of ‘leanness’ and cut-to-the-bone medical capacity. Unlike Germany, which looks like being the most successful European society in dealing with the immediate crisis. Similarly, the fiscal policy response in UK and Russia is belated and inadequate, though in Russia especially it looks like a massive policy failure so far. It’s been extremely stingy and tardy: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/03/26/bankrolling-russia-s-relief-program and also accompanied with what can only described as sneaky measures (tax on ‘high’ levels of savings described as a ‘restoration of justice’ by Putin) to claw back more money the state doesn’t know what to do with. https://mbk-news.appspot.com/byvaet/vosstanovlenie-spravedlivosti/. The point is that the authorities once again have sent an incoherent message and accompanied it with contradictory measures.

Literally the first discussion of measures I saw on Russian TV, albeit a week ago, was a talking head on RBK predicting that it would be a terrible mistake to raid the massive currency reserves or undertake fiscal measures (because of the effect on the rouble and the depletion of firepower to protect it). The new tax on savings (see MBK link above), while affecting only a few people, has panicked people with much smaller deposits. This morning I got a message from a very calm and collected friend (see end of the post), who had withdrawn all his savings from Sberbank and gone to hole up in his village house. Now RBK is hinting at bank problems. Others I spoke to were disgusted, but not surprised, that the government has no plan to support incomes for those furloughed, unlike in many other European countries.

While there will be profiteering by sociopaths, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/world/europe/uk-coronavirus-tests-profiteering.html [paywall] the virus provides an important opportunity to ‘illustrates the centrality of care to social life and the limits of contemporary capitalism’s capacity to enable it’, regardless of what society one lives in. There are signs that society is not completely atomised with half a million people volunteering in serve to the caring state in the UK https://www.goodsamapp.org/NHS. In Moscow vulnerable people can phone to get medicines delivered, but of course, that’s Moscow, not the rest of Russia. It’s unlikely that bodies like the All-Russia People’s Front can really compare in capacity, and capacity to inspire mobilization, with the NHS (the link shows how many cases  they’ve helped among senior citizens and people with reduced mobility during the coronavirus pandemic – it’s tiny). There’s more encouraging news in this article about St Petersburg.

I think the final words should go to Russians themselves. Here are two reactions from today:

“You know, I’m not a fan of the authorities. No. But I wouldn’t just say that they are in a panic or are late. Rather, they are frozen in the headlights in the face of this non-trivial task that is not embedded in their algorithm programs. In Putin’s speech there’s not a single military metaphor, there’s a domestic tone and there’s a general lack of mobilization – just holidays, financial holidays and a few new taxes. Perhaps the refusal to mobilize and use military metaphors, so routine for our country, is a transition to a state of emergency?…” [Muscovite women in 40s]

“So far, it’s only the beginning, all the most interesting will be from Monday. Sentiment in society is not great. The worst thing is that it’s not very clear, is it all for real or is it a bluff. Small and medium-sized businesses will definitely be killed … A doctor I know said that it will be like in Italy, but in 2-3 weeks. Bu the main thing is there’s no leadership, no support – neither in terms of money or getting the healthservice ready. My father is in hospital now with underlying conditions and the doctors have no masks.

… People will continue to take money from accounts, banks can collapse. Gref this morning sent letters to everyone but it’s too late to say ‘chill’…. I advised everyone to take all my money from even Sberbank. There are rumours that cash circulation will be limted, that they will forbid withdrawals from ATMs.  Also that currency exchanges will be closed.” [Man in Kaluga region in 40s]

Addendum:

I’ve just been sent this report from PONARS [pdf opens in a new window] on the way the virus is being tackled in different post-Soviet states. It nicely underlines my idea about an incoherent state response on the part of Russia.