This is the fourth and final post on the legacy of Homo Soveticus. The first one started here. Thanks to Viacheslav Morozov, we enjoyed a really good round table at ICCEES. I am working on getting a copy of the recorded discussion. Ronald Grigor Suny gave a wonderful account of his first visit to the USSR in the 60s and his surprise on discovering a very conservative nation. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova reminded us that Levada’s work emerged from a strongly functionalist approach to the identity of individuals – as a product of a social system and today, the remnants of the Soviet social system. Gulnaz asked the panel how we could develop alternative approaches to studying contemporary identity that are less reductive. She also reminded us that, unfortunately, the Levada portrait is still dominant in social science in Russia, one need only look at the way Lev Gudkov writes.
Greg Yudin gave an impressive historical contextualization of homo soveticus and nicely complemented Gulnaz’s presentation. He gave an account of the simplistic and binary thinking behind the idea of deficient Soviet subjects. This is due to the way Levada took the USA to be an idealized ‘normal’ country. Russian sociology for Greg is still Parsonian (and Weberian – something I touch on below). In Russia opinion polling is sociology – there are no other tools deemed acceptable. Liberal Russians whether in power or opposition share a suspicion of ‘masses’ and their political subjectivity. How to put H-S to rest? We need to supplant the dominant perspective that situates Russia within a particular pathological place in the hierarchy of globality (here my notes are a little vague, so apologies to Greg). How do ideas travel to Russia? Only by tracing intellectual inheritances like Levada’s Parsonian personality sociology can we deconstruct them. In a follow up comment, Greg mentioned the hidden cleavage in Levada’s thinking which masks how the homo soveticus concept initially proposes loyalty to Party, which is quite different to its contemporary ‘authoritarian’ iteration that proposes loyalty to a charismatic leader.
Viacheslav Morozov in a response to ‘what to do’, underlined that we should pay attention to the ‘remainder’ within the Russian experience of modernity and postmodernity that cannot be explained under the global enlightenment narrative. This is ‘History 2’, where as the dominant narrative is ‘History 1’ – the history of capitalism. Questions from the audience came from Peter Rutland, who drew our attention to the importance of Ingelhart’s ‘survival mode’ and argued that we should not discount out of hand the idea of deference to authority as a shared trait or learned response. (This approach is based on the World Values Survey and finds that while Russia is relatively secular rather than conservative, it is also relatively strongly orientated towards ‘survival’ rather than ‘self-expression’). Markku Kivinen reiterated the need to uncover the causes of the H-S trope in the first place and account for its dominance. Paul Robinson argued that social systems do have a measurable psychological impact and that this can then have an effect on shared attitudes. Given the immense changes, what then are these impacts if not those described by homo soveticus. If there is path dependency, what is it? He wrote up his thoughts for this piece for RT.
A final vignette from Kaluga region in the summer of 2021
“The mowers are lazy, they won’t come. They are waiting for the rain to ease off after the weekend. I offered them an extra 5000, over and above the 12,000 I pay for the cutting of the whole plot. How lazy can you get? These people don’t want to help themselves and that’s why Russians will always live badly”, says Yuri, the owner of a large (half-hectare) village plot and the second largest house in the place, a ‘cottage’ of 180m2. Yuri is an unregistered entrepreneur and runs a successful restaurant consultancy business in Moscow. He’s taken Covid to heart and has worked from the village remotely since mid 2020. His work is difficult – he needs to herd a group of CAD designers whom he pays ‘piece rates’. He is a manager now and does no design-work himself. Instead he spends his time learning astrology and planning his next trip to Italy where he has a stake in a vineyard. He likes his grass cut regularly as the plot is close to the forest and gets a lot of horseflies. However, he has to reckon with a shortage of mowers, given that there are few ‘indentured’ Central Asian workers in the village now because of Covid and the sorry state of the Russian economy.
Andrei and Evgeny Bitov are a retired father and son ‘gardening’ team. Evgeny works shifts at the cable turning factory for a pittance, but the shift pattern gives him enough time to cut grass with his father and double their yearly household income. The work can be intense – from late May to late August the country-cottage owners phone them and book slots at short notice. Many do not appreciate that a large plot needs three cuts at least a year, otherwise thick weeks like burdock will appear. They estimate jobs by the area (by ‘sotka’ – a hundredth of a hectare – the average plot here is 20-30 hundredths). But they charge by the ‘actual’ petrol consumption. If the grass is higher than 20cm and wet you can’t use a petrol strimmer effectively (‘trimmer’ in Russian) as the consumption is high, the strain on the motor damaging, and the work miserable. They are frustrated by the shiftiness of the ‘wealthy’ plot owners who want to pay upfront at a ‘fixed’ cost, and don’t understand the contingencies involved. “If you want a Tadzhik to do it, hire one, don’t ask us. That’s the problem with these bloody Muscovites. They’ll ask you to price a job and then pay a n_____ to do it for half the price. You can’t trust them they are ‘khitrye’ – sly. They would rather give a job to an immigrant who’ll do it badly, than pay a Russian to do it properly.”
Later, Yuri the consultant tells me how he doesn’t pay tax and also structures his financing to avoid any risk of legal recourse from his customers if they are dissatisfied (shell company). He has a friend in the tax inspectorate who has advised him on how to structure transactions to avoid scrutiny. Yuri is ‘on holiday’ until October. He had a nice contract from a chain of restaurants in early 2021 and has “enough money to take a break”. It’s important to him not to have too much turnover running through his personal bank account. “You have to pace yourself in this game, otherwise you burn out”, and in any case it’s best not to look too eagerly for clients – they should come to you by word of mouth.
The Bitovs take cash only. Why register (as an ‘IP’ – individual tradesperson) when the state gives us nothing in return? Though Evgeny is thinking of setting up a bespoke furniture workshop and use card-based micro-payments to build up some capital, he’s going to ‘lie low’ until things are more ‘stable’. He will earn enough this mowing season (perhaps 150k after costs) to tide him over until next year. He’s thinking of quitting at the factory to upgrade his turning skills in anticipation of the furniture business. the problem is that he has another business that requires his attention – early in the morning his whole extended family collect chanterelles which they sell for around 750rb a kilo to a middle-man. Over the last year on this other income, Evgeny has purchased a new Renault Duster car.
Who is ‘paternalistic’ minded here (bearing in mind that everyone needs a little protection?) Who is incapable of entrepreneurialism? Who is ‘cunning’ and who is ‘lazy’?
[these portraits are composites of various people and activities I encounter – the usual ethical precautions apply]
Footnote on class: I’m forever encountering criticism that classes in Russia cannot exist without class consciousness, or that the material basis of class differentiation are not pronounced enough, or numerous other arguments. My response is pretty simple. Even if we put aside Marxian approaches, it seems evident to me that we do see an inheritance of a class division in Russia from the Soviet period in a Weberian sense – which has an implicit element of ‘consciousness’ in it: people have a sense of shared specific causal components that dictate life chances; these components correlate strongly with economic interests; these components operate in a society dominated by labour and commodity markets.
In that Weberian sense, Russia’s classes today look a lot like the German society he studied at the end of the C19/beginning C20. Indeed, the skewed weighting in the unevenly yet rapidly modernizing German society between what Weber saw as four classes: the petite bourgeoisie, technical lower-middle class, small working-class, and privileged class is somewhat echoed in Russia today: with its relatively smaller (declining) working-class and p-b (declining?). That Weber’s approach combines class and estate, or ‘Stand/Stände’ is also fortuitous. Essentially one can view Simon Kordonsky’s current work on a state-centric hierarchy of estates in Russia as a reworking of Weber. While Kordonsky makes a few notes on the shared sense of entitlement of the Russia ruling class and their attempts to seal themselves off (signified by regalia, blue sirens, reserved ‘fast-track’ routes though public spaces), in my view we can go further and, unpack from the term ‘bydlo’, shared disgust, bewilderment, and even a little fear among a variety of Russian people that would then mark them out as some kind of ‘middle-class’ even if they themselves do not use this term, and even if they themselves belong to different ‘estates’.
Indeed, the term ‘bydlo’ too is merely a holding term. I don’t actually hear people use this word much. What I do hear is metropolitans talk about Russians who live in small towns and villages in a way that marks them as different and lacking the ‘social esteem’ they denote for themselves. The point is that ‘class’ has a perfectly valid sociological application in today’s Russian society. It’s to do with demonization, incredulity, disgust, projection of blame on the one hand, and in contrast, symbolic co-recognition of worth and worthlessness. There is an incomplete transition to Bourdiesian middle-class ‘dispositions’ which make their incompleteness visible because they try too hard in places: (pour the wine into the carafe, don’t leave it on the table… no we don’t buy Russian wine….we don’t drink out of stakany), and of course the lived experience of material privilege.
As Crompton has argued, if either structure or agency, ‘economic’ or ‘cultural’ explanations of class difference become dominant in analysis this is not necessarily a failure of analysis, just that a society’s circumstances may make one of these approaches more appropriate at a given time. In Russia we could argue, the ‘cultural’ trope of deviant and dangerous lumpen men is still very strong (see Charlie Walker’s work, or in Central Europe that of Alison Stenning), but the economic stratification will, in due course be a better seam to explore.
Marx uses the term “praxis” to refer to the free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates and changes his historical world and himself. As I said earlier. class hatred and authoritarian thinking is arguably more characteristic of the winners of postsocialism. Why might that be? Could it be that so many of the winners cannot cognitively admit that their position is due to luck, networks of ‘blat’, and the impoverishment of the majority? In their largely while-collar world of managing people they also express a will to self-creative activity, but again, I would ask – who out of these two groups expresses more libidinal frustration at the difficulty of remaking the world? Perhaps regardless of privilege this is why Russians are such crazily obsessive gardeners.
Postsocialism 