Tag Archives: inequality

Is Moscow the most liveable global city in the world?

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Quality of Life Ranking for 29 World Cities

A draft of the UN’s global cities prosperity ranking 2022 saw Moscow take first place for ‘liveability’. Cue crowing from RT, who were the only outlet to run the story today. Coverage highlights Moscow’s scores for quality of life and wellbeing, but what does liveability really mean? This was, ironically, one of the concluding points of my book [pdf opens automatically]: that for their inhabitants, many small deindustrializing towns in Russia are highly ‘habitable’, in comparison to the big cities in Russia. [Links to the rest of the book here]

When indices are published about any ‘quality’ of life measure, I’m always sceptical. The question of course is always – liveable for whom? Moscow is even more diverse than ever, and surely that’s a good thing, right? But what if we substitute more ‘unequal’ for ‘diverse’? Far too often the commentary to these reports is made either by ‘expats’ – who have a very skewed view, obviously, or by the urban middle Russian class who have benefitted most from Mayor Sobyanin’s transformations (themselves mainly a supercharged version of the previous governance – see my series of posts on governance from earlier this year).

Let’s have a quick look at the UN report [annoyingly only opens as a pdf]. It has six criteria: Productivity (and I recommend this recent book on that subject by Michael Haynes), Infrastructure, Quality of Life, and Equity, Environment, and Governance. The premise of the index itself is a little misleading, as it only includes 29 cities in the first place, and there is no clear rationale for selection. We get Delhi, but not Karachi. There’s New York, but no Los Angeles. The exercise seems unintentionally set up to flatter metropolises with lots of mass transit urban mobility, well-paid jobs, housing growth, educational attainment, public space. Note that Quality of Life is a measure independent of Social Inclusion and Equity – the latter only includes income equality as a minor measure with ‘women in local government’ getting as much weight. The index draws on existing UN Sustainable Development Goal indicators (I teach a course on this topic) and adds a few more relating to ‘tech’, airports, road congestion (still a notorious problem in Moscow), science and education, culture and recreation, and e-governance.

Unsurprisingly, Moscow does really well on infrastructure and e-governance. For a non-Asian city, its mass transit really is awe-inspiring as are its joined up ‘state-services’ online portal. Overall, it is third placed, behind Singapore and Toronto. RT got their headline because Moscow scored highest for Quality of Life, but low for Environmental Sustainability, and was middling for Equity. (As an aside it was interesting that London scored spectacularly low for Equity, much lower than Moscow or any Global North city). I don’t have time to go more into the details, but here’s my quick take that reiterates some of the themes of this blog over the last few years.

If you have a professional managerial-level job (we can argue about what that means), Moscow has a much higher quality of life than in other European or NA cities. It’s partly because of the capital premium on such salaries that Moscow attracts. But it’s also because service industry jobs are so badly paid by comparison – the people who dry clean your clothes (delivered back to your flat vacuum-wrapped), chauffeur you to work (my friend in a mid-level managerial job for a state corp has his own 24/7 driver), tutor your children in the evening (an acquaintance who owns a not particularly successful medium-sized business employs a cleaner, live-in nanny, cook and three tutors), deliver your groceries, clean your yard and stairway. Then we come to the backbone of Moscow’s growth – housing (and the infrastructure that follows) – dominated by central Asian migrants trapped in a cycle of exploitation and grey-zone legal status, as eloquently explored in the new book by Rustamjon Urinboyev.

a flop house/dosshouse for migrant workers in central Moscow

A much more revealing measure would be to compare the cost of a typical basket of goods for the urban poor and urban rich. In Moscow the contrast is staggering. Again, if you’re in the system and have city residency, you gain benefits not only denied to semi-legal migrant construction workers (who can’t even see a doctor), but denied also to the rest of Russia: subsidized transport and other essential services I wrote about in this post. Discounting components like mass transit, greenspaces and e-governance, this is a story about inequality. A couple of ironies I take away are that the people who live well in Moscow make little use of mass transit, e-governance, or green and public spaces, but their service class does. The wealthy consume a lot, sit in cars in traffic, and leave for the country at the weekend (or even fly abroad). In those senses they don’t differ from those that ‘live well’ elsewhere. I will always be an adoptive Muscovite at heart, although nowadays I spend much more time outside the ring road. Like all other cities I’ve lived in, I have a love-hate relationship with it.  

A much more interesting discussion last week about relative social exclusion and poverty caught my eye because this debate is too often dominated by discussion of money incomes, and not enough space is made for subjective (or what academics call consensual measures of poverty) assessment by a society of ‘enforced lack of necessities’. Like in the rest of Europe, the author of the piece sees social exclusion in the ability to consume things necessary for a ‘normal life’ – high speed internet, access to a computer or smart phone, holidays away from home, extra-curricular activities for school children, savings, access to affordable credit (these are examples the article gives). On these and other measures, 30-40% of Russians are living in poverty. It might be much lower in Moscow, but it’s still significant.

Shall we drink? Vodka, rational utility maximisers and the 1990s Russian mortality crisis

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Covid has prompted a revisiting of the debate on the human (mortality/morbidity) costs of the 1990s in Russia. Scott Gehlbach reflects in a blog on how Covid pushed down hospital admissions in the US. From there he recalls the argument that economic collapse increases mortality – the most significant natural experiment being the transition in ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. Gehlbach rejects this argument – perhaps the strongest proponent of which is Stuckler et al. in a 2009 Lancet article:

Clearly, rapid mass privatisation was not the only determinant of the mortality changes in countries in central and eastern Europe and those in the former Soviet Union; however, these results provide a major explanation of the ultimate determinants of cross-national differences, both within the former Soviet Union, and between countries formerly in the Soviet Union and other central and eastern European countries. Our findings also accord with a substantial body of research on mortality in the post-communist period, which has provided evidence for the effects of several factors, including acute psychosocial stress, reduced access to and decreasing quality of medical care (much provided at workplaces), impoverishment, rapid pace of transition, increased unemployment, rising social inequalities, social disorganisation, heightened corruption, and the erosion of social capital. Although a direct cause and effect relation cannot be ascertained and a detailed discussion of their roles is beyond the scope of this Article, all these findings can be linked, in some way, to mass privatisation programmes.

Gehlbach objects to these conclusions, saying that, roughly: long-term negative trends mean that any correlation with mass privatisation is weak, that mass privatization did not increase unemployment, and that in reality the mortality spike was due to the greater availability of alcohol and its reduction in price after 1991. I tweeted my misgivings about Gehlbach’s keenness to deflect from the impact of economic dispossession on the Russian population last week. I got some interesting replies.

Erica Richardson (who commented at the time of publication on the Lancet article) wrote to me: “It’s both [privatization, unemployment and vodka prices] – the proximal and distal causes are synergistic. It’s not just the price of course, this is just one indicator, alcohol policy is much broader than this – but don’t underestimate how harmful heavy drinking is for population health.” Of course she’s right. She links to a very comprehensive social harm study of alcohol in Russia from 2019 by the WHO. Alcohol policy is shown to have a very strong impact on mortality in Russia since 1990. Taxation and reducing availability were most important.

In an indication of how rashly tweeting one’s immediate reaction can nonetheless bring unforeseen rewards, I then received a link to an article by Michael Haynes from 2013 called “Social Inequality and the Continuing Russian Mortality Crisis”. Haynes argues that social epidemiologists can make a strong link between inequality and death in Russia, but that these should be traced back to significant problems before the transition in the 1990s. Material and psychological stresses result in ‘causation flows’, as do health behaviours – but all of them have social roots in advanced societies. To cut a long story short we should be asking why there is a prior problem in drinking that shows up so strongly in a social pattern. I can’t do full justice to Haynes’ argument, but he makes interesting points about pre-existing social divisions in Soviet society – that there was considerable inequality there and that transition intensified divisions. Further, restructuring ‘disrupted the social base of the economy’. What I like here is that Haynes challenges both the idea that the ‘USSR was unhealthily collectivist’ leading to psycho-social stress in adaptation, and he rejects the idea that Soviet society was full of atomized individuals. There were sources of social resilience and solidarity but these were quickly undercut in the early 1990s so that extremely negative socio-psychological effects (not of ‘culture’, but of transition) reinforced themselves overtime.  

In my own work, I’ve explored ‘socially harmful’ (itself a relative concept) drinking at length. Certainly, I situate propensities among men to engage in harmful drinking in the diminution of men’s social role, which became more and more accented – particularly for working-class men – as the 1990s went on. Nonetheless I find social scientists’ explanation of drinking as ‘escape response’ a bit too close to the rational choice theory of Gehlbach, where lower vodka prices supposedly maximized the utility for self-destruction. I use a more anthropological lens, and consider how drinking mediates social trauma, articulates social suffering and, ironically, becomes incorporated into a meaning of self (which is both defiant and morally recuperating).

This is how I ended the chapter on traumatic dispossession in my 2016 book: “Nearly 30 years ago Mary Douglas noted the inherent normative bias in attempting to label alcohol use as ‘problem drinking’ in other cultures. At the same time, drinking … continues to be culturally marked ‘as a rite of corporate identification’ (ibid: 6), with drinking, work, blue-collar identity, and sociality at the nexus of working-class masculinity. Others have noted the social pressure among working-class men towards drinking as an expression of ‘thriftlessness’ and a display of the ‘equality of interests’ among the marginalized (Mars 1987: 100). Chrzan notes that drinking sees linear time give way to ‘anti-time’—a focus on the event, the moment, ‘authenticity’ of self and social life (2013: 96). While this is perhaps a rather rosy view of hard drinking bouts in the Russian context, it does point to drinking as some form of dealing with contingency nonetheless. Bouts of hard drinking are not so much a badge of honour, as in some working-class communities (Mars 1987), but something almost tangible to hold onto given labour’s subaltern positioning. Drinking is not so much ‘compensation’, as conventionality; Lyova’s everyday way of enduring the present, his way of saying ‘it’s enough’. As inseparable from a sense of class, gender and sociality, drinking is also part of propertizing the self; it belongs to Lyova as part of his habitus, and forms part of his making of the traumatic present habitable.”

Is youth more than just a word? Civic consciousness in Russian youth today

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Russia, Sevastopol, Crimea combined rally and concert in Moscow[A version of this post appeared on Ridl in late May. https://www.ridl.io/en/young-russians-are-not-just-young-and-russian/ A Russian version is also available here. With the ‘strapline’: Молодые россияне чувствуют себя неполноценными гражданами, т.к. в стране установлен персонализированный и патримониальный характер предоставления доступа к возможностям, социальной мобильности и привилегиям. I’ll be revisiting this topic shortly.]

Talk about Russian ’youth’ usually assumes one of two modes: either they are easily mobilised by patriotic rhetoric to support the state, or, on the contrary, about to form a progressive vanguard to bring down a corrupt regime. In each case I take a contrarian position. Not for the sake of it, but on the basis of some very old ideas in social research – the difficulty in even defining youth, and the mistake of thinking in terms of group consensus or even cohesive identity.

Let’s take the first point – is ‘youth’ more than just a word? Let’s turn things around – if you’re in your early 40s, are you middle-aged? You probably don’t feel that way. You’re 60. Are you old? I guess you don’t think so. Why then do we expect people who are 20, or 25 identify as ‘youth’? Or even hold positions or perspectives that are coherently similar or correlating to others in such a ‘cohort’. The label of ‘youth’ is invariably deployed by a more powerful group, as a label of insufficiency, of incompleteness. And yet as a term it is frustratingly lacking in explanatory power.

My ethnographic writing on Russia bears out such scepticism. I researched Russians in their 20s in an industrial town in Kaluga Region in the early 2010s. I have also researched relatively privileged and educated young people from St Petersburg and Moscow as part of collaborative projects with Russian sociologists. The people I speak to differ in some ways and are similar in others. In both ‘cases’ I found both political radicals and conservatives. Moreover, in equal measure I met both ‘individualists’ and ‘collectivists’. The best I can do in terms of commonalities is point to a deep need to express young people’s love for and sense of connection with their country, to engage in some way civically. In most cases, whatever their political stripe, youth are conscious that this is quite difficult, if not impossible in today. As a ‘public institution’ youth are objectified by the state either as a ‘problem’, or as a potential group for mobilisation. In either case, they acutely feel that they are incomplete citizens due to the highly personalised and patrimonial nature of access to opportunities, social mobility and privilege.

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Much has been written in the last few years about the visibility of young people in political and social protests in Russia. Who are these people and where do they come from? Undoubtedly this is a metropolitan phenomenon, despite people – including the young Muscovites I speak to – insisting that mobilisation of youth in places like Omsk is important in showing that protest is not just the preserve of the metro-middle-class. However, when I ask these young people the last time they spent time outside Moscow (where I do most of my research) they stumble. There is a real disconnect here. And while they deny it, these sincere and dedicated youth let slip a sense of moral, intellectual and political superiority. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that they would never really consider the idea of building a coalition with other young people. Their interests are dominated by identity politics dictated by privileged backgrounds. When one young woman told me that her strong and vocal opposition was based on personal experience of suffering, it turned out that what she was referring to was the anti-gay propaganda law.  I probed further – what about inequality of opportunity, about blocked horizons for youth without connections? But my 20-year-old students were quite clear that they personally were not, and would not be affected by these, undeniably real, problems. They still believed they could succeed by merit in Putin’s Russia, without ‘connections’. And while they may be personally right, reality tells a different story. Politically engaged, fervent even in their opposition, they were also naïve. They were already sophisticated operators in the Moscow market for opposition:  ‘Navalnyi is a means to an end. We can go to a rally without endorsing his candidature’. But their sophistication was that of the bubble network of Moscow. These were the children of what Simon Kordonsky calls the genuinely ‘free’ and active middle-class, which only exists in big cities and is a marginal ‘estate’ in the stratified system.  They have the most to lose from further political tightening for they exist in a narrowing niche, which emigration is further eroding (in a small sample, small numbers matter). But most consciously make a choice that emigration, for now, is not for them. Indeed, they say, just as proudly as any, that they are civic patriots and that it is youth that has a responsibility to take personal moral responsibility for its country. In general a sense of ‘belonging’ as an urge is important, but searches in vain to connect to a suitable civic meaning. As one young interviewee in 2013 research commented: ‘I do not feel like a citizen. A citizen is someone connected to the state. The state is formed of power… politics… I would not like to be a citizen… the state is over there somewhere and I am here. We exist separately.’

There are other niches as well, more representative of transition to adulthood in Russia. The most important is in the vast semi-formal and informal economy where permanency of employment is unknown. Many survive in a position of economic precarity due to lack of opportunities or the right connections. These include potential allies of the ‘oppositionist’ minded youth: like the IT programmer I know in his 20s, living from gig to gig. Most however have a lower level of education, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also consciously wary of the state. Earning money in the black economy can carry political meaning. For the plumbers, electricians, taxi-drivers and even underground factory workers of my research, it’s more than a convenience that the state is at arm’s length.  It obviates any necessity to make political compromises. It’s a form of freedom, impoverishing and precarious as it is. They make their own society of ‘opposition’ in the back of ersatz taxi-cabs, in garage blocks, and on the summer village plots. Even for those in nondescript blue- and white-collar employment, there is a sense of apartness from ‘society’ or politics. Is that any different from other countries? Well, no. But, the accelerated entry of these ‘ordinary’ (male) youth to the adult world – through the army and then encountering the ‘system’, where they see first-hand the difference in progression between those with pull and those without, makes them cynical and wary of the oppositionist youth. Young women are a different story – there is more buy-in to the ideal of social mobility through educational achievement, which is sometimes turns out to be real but more often, illusory. Youth divisions in a belief in social mobility, and by extension a belief in the ’system’, would be an interesting topic for sociologists to explore in terms of a gendered conformity/non conformity.

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However, there is a third niche for youth that’s more important than ever given the vast resources apportioned to it, and that is the security apparatus. Here I set aside the marginal projects like the abortive ‘Nashi’ movement or the more recent ‘preventative’ work of the Youth Army. I mean the opportunity given (a job, a salary, maybe even a shortcut to a flat) by an ordinary job in the interior ministry troops or special purpose police. Look at the faces of the policemen next time they’re called out to a rally in Moscow. These are the same future-oriented, optimistic, and probably just as critically thinking youth as those they are arresting. One of the most academically gifted kids I ever met in my research actively chose a career in the security forces (after a stint in the army) as a way of escaping small town life. Was this out of political loyalty? Not at all. However, beyond the job security and opportunity, a sense of ‘belonging’ was certainly important.

Here we return to the common feature of all youth, the question of their subordinated place in the order of things and their need for more or less active citizenship. Even for our invisible citizens, theirs is often an actively ‘negative’ sense of citizenship, avoiding formal jobs and the ordering purview of the state. Throughout Russia’s history the idea of visible, or conscious roleness – of the idea of the active young person becoming a part of change, has been a vexed one. This time is no different.

 

Cheesed off, but not because of sanctions. Immiseration, elite disconnect and neoliberal convergence.

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‘Get this straight, it isn’t even a question of whether you give the cheese up or not…’ (contemporary Russian version of Aesop’s fable 124)

With the constant, confusing and often misinformed media noise around Russia, you would be forgiven for believing a number of unhelpfully distorting half-truths:

That Russia has been a pariah state for a while (connected to sanctions after the occupation of Crimea and intervention in East Ukraine). That Russia is on a kind of lock-down with no outlet for protests and careful management of dissent by the state, or that Putin is so popular that protests are pointless or restricted to a small educated minority.

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‘tyrant-fellating’ gun for hire with former employer

Lastly, you might get the impression that oil money continues to keep the Russians reasonably quiescent – after all, the government spent heavily on social programmes before and after the initial shocks associated with the global financial crisis.

The aim of this piece is not to go into the all too frequent errors, overestimations of Russian efforts ‘against’ the West, the misunderstandings that conflate domestic-orientated actions with those directed outward. Overall, the obsession with a kind of ‘Cold War 2.0’ makes debate all about ‘us’ in the West and obscures or impedes analysis of the increasing similarity of social, economic and political crises in states like Russia and the ‘West’. In this blog post I will present a kind of thought experiment about what could be called provocatively ‘neoliberal globalizing convergence’ by focussing on the forms of elite enrichment and detachment from ordinary people; the impoverishment and precarisation of the majority of citizens; and thirdly, ‘cheese’ (specifically the lack of access to affordable cheese). This is one anthropologically meaningful symbol of the failure of governance for ‘the people’ – the latter a category important in Russians’ understanding of the social state (“why doesn’t the state do more to look after ‘the people’?”).

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An innocent-looking piece of Russian cheese

Elite enrichment is perhaps the one area where the Trump-Russia scandals may actually help us shed light rather than generate heat. As I write, it is emerging that Paul Manafort – who worked as Trump’s campaign advisor and who previously served Ukraine’s deposed president Yanukovych, is alleged to have laundered $75m dollars to avoid US taxes through a Cyprus bank tied to Russia.  The opposition blogger Alexei Navalnyi has long made Russian corruption through offshoring and laundering a mainstay of his political campaigns against the Russian elite. Now today in the US we have a kind of mirror image – albeit in miniscule form – tens of millions is chicken feed compared to the billions alleged to have been offshored by the Russian elite. What’s more, these are the proceeds of crooked state-budget tenders, and the ill-gotten proceeds of privatised, and then asset-stripped, Russian companies – a process stretching back to the 1990s, not the ‘legitimate’ earnings of a ‘tyrant-fellating’ lobbyist like Manafort. The point is, the Manafort revelations are just the latest, and most direct, US-Russia linked examples of elites operating to extract and then protect (otherwise taxable, or ill-gotten) wealth beyond nation-state jurisdictions.

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‘Pre-approval’ presumably refers to how rich you are

More importantly, inter-elite relations between the US and Russia aside, we should be more concerned with the plain fact that despite all the individually targeted sanctions by the US and EU against Russia, the ‘West’ is still the banker for the Russian elite. It is alleged that even the top level Russian political figures supposedly banned from the EU frequently travel to holiday residences incognito, perhaps even via those ‘non-governing nations’ – i.e. British and US sponsored tax havens, such as Gibraltar, or Russian favourites like Cyprus, where their wealth is stored alongside that of the West’s elite. If the global financialization-capitalist moment means anything, it is that public political punishment (sanctions), or national, or even international legal jurisprudence shouldn’t really affect the private flows of expropriated wealth from poorer countries to richer ones.

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As a formerly highly industrialised country that had the neutron-bomb treatment of ‘economic shock therapy’ as Russia did in the 1990s, the re-current ‘capital flight’ which  supports liquidity and financial speculation elsewhere especially after the financial crisis 2008-, has uncanny echoes of that earlier transition period from Communism.  As the global capital accumulation cycle entered a slowing phase, the opening up of the vast resource extraction economy that was the USSR acted as a kind of stimulus to Western economies, flooding the market with cheap industrial commodities while enriching a small group of Communist-party-connected elites. Analyses such as these serve as grist to the conspiracy theory mill within Russia, by presenting these processes as planned by the West, rather than the result of capital in search of assets suddenly arriving in a new market. Opportunism is domestically presented as a foreign directed criminal conspiracy to pauperise Russia.  Certainly, the wholesale asset stripping and under-the-radar export of resources formed the basis of economic and political power for the Russian elite and shifted abruptly a low inequality society to one of the most unequal in the world.  It’s easy to understand the attraction of conspiracies when proponent cite the well-researched work recently done by Thomas Piketty’s team. In reviewing the present position, they baldly state: “there is as much financial wealth held by rich Russians abroad—in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Cyprus, and similar offshore centers—than held by the entire Russian population in Russia itself.” (Novokmet, Piketty, Zucman 2017: 5). In this latest stage of offshoring, the main motor is not privatisation (now around 70% of GDP is produced by state-owned enterprises) or resource sale, but siphoning off state tenders and procurement ‘padding’ to the value of $17bn a year – or twice the state education budget for a country of 144 million people.

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I just love the irony of this British tax-authorities’ poster.

The important thing is that despite lip service paid to the effect of sanctions on Russia and the punishment of reducing Russian access to international money markets, so-called ‘round tripping of capital’ from emerging economies to offshore financial centres (OFCs) and back as foreign direct investment (FDI) remains par for the course in Russia. A parallel process, described by the Guardian’s Luke Harding, protects the incomes and lifestyles of elite individuals named in sanctions. Any celebration of news of the delayed extension of US sanctions applied to military exporters in Russia misses the point. Weapons exporters can get Russian state loans and don’t export rifles or planes to the US. We must leave ‘sanctions busting’ aside as a minor issue, however interesting we find the relabelling of EU and Norway-caught fish to come from Belarus, or the diverting of Scandinavian produce via the Faroe Islands.

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The well-known salmon fisheries located offshore from the Belarus fjords.

While ‘round-tripping’ FDI is not the same thing as ‘real’ FDI (Ledyaeva et al. 2015) which comes from transnational companies continuing investments in plant, production and personnel in the Russian Federation – Volkswagen cars being the example that features in my own research, in reality that ‘real’ FDI is also little effected by sanctions, except for an initial wobble in 2014-15. The ‘sanctions’ regime distracts from the ongoing and more fundamental incorporation of Russian economy and employment into the global capital systems – albeit with Russia forced into adopting a model of the low-cost manufacturing and relatively low-added value production activities – ice cream from Unilever, consumer automobiles from Hyundai, building insulation from Danish Rockwool. Gurkov and Saidov (2017) note two other more important points here – the MNCs produce in Russia for the domestic market, but now also for export, and increasingly move towards localisation of production – meaning that various parts of the supply chain – milk for ice cream, for example – are sourced from Russian suppliers.

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‘Gold Standard’ ice-creams. A Russian brand belonging to Unilever. Advertised as the ‘tasty pride of Russia’.

The point is not that sanctions should be targeting the jobs and livelihoods of ordinary Russians. That would be even worse than the status quo, which gives a veneer of political punishment, but leaves the game the same. The point is that the incorporation of Russia into the global economy has actually intensified under sanctions – not to the benefit of ordinary people, who increasingly face the same progressive deterioration in their living standards as elsewhere. If anything it is the ‘sameness’ of social suffering in comparison to other states that we should be more attentive to when studying Russia – rather than the obvious differences (such as political regime and ‘human rights’).

So it is here I want to move on to the second and more ethnographically informed part of this post: A parallel process to the preservation of capital for the elite in Russia is the progressive immiseration of ordinary Russians. Initially the general disruption in Russian-West trade due to the Russian embargo on EU produce led to many food staples becoming much more expensive and of dubious providence (including cheese). In addition, the difficulty in planning any investment in such a political environment led to increases in unemployment, indebtedness, wage arrears and underemployment among Russians. Finally, the continuing economic crisis was an easy excuse for the Russian government to further restrict welfare provision and other social budget items while ratcheting up the xenophobic rhetoric – ‘your pension isn’t inflation indexed, the rouble has crashed, but Crimea is ours, and look at Gayropa!’.

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A parody election poster referring to Medvedev’s comments to Crimean pensioners

The realities of everyday insecurity, impoverishment and long-term woe for many Russians pre- and post-date the sanctions regime, as Novokmet’s and Piketty’s research neatly summarises.  In this section I to focus on the 2009-present moment. Why 2009? Because it was that year that marked the end of a decade of real improvements in all Russians’ living standards. It was also the year I started doing my research on the Russian working poor in small industrial communities. There was one consumer staple that for me came to symbolise ongoing ‘everyday precarity’ of Russians’ lives: dairy products – or rather their recategorisation from affordable staple to out-of-reach luxury. Why focus on dairy? Elsewhere I’ve written about the symbolic significance of meat, beer, and other foods for Russians (Morris 2014). But milk and in particular, cheese, cuts to the core of Russians sense of the present as ‘not normal’, and in turn to unwelcome realisations about elite cynicism and disdain for ordinary people, or ‘cattle’ as some Moscow intellectuals like to call them.

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The common or garden Russian pensioner. Laser-focus on price tags

In the late Soviet period, cheese had become a familiar food staple – ‘Russian (rossiiskii) cheese’ was an affordable, if bland, standard dairy product. Despite the hyperinflation, destruction of savings, devaluations and other dislocations affecting Russians in the 1990s, ‘Russian cheese’ did not disappear from the shelves or diets of the urban consumers.   When I started ethnographic work in 2009, for most of my research participants, cheese, along with red meat had been consigned to the ‘occasional luxury’ category of their mental shopping lists. Indeed, I recall being quite annoyed that milk, cheese and salami were never bought at all by my first host family, until I was able to better appreciate the fact that despite having two salaries coming in from the public sector, they lived significantly below the poverty line (even giving up their domestic telephone). Our staples were macaroni and tinned fish, with chicken also a ‘luxury’. I recall well the disgust of my host when I bought some fruit juice – ‘what a waste of money – for chemical water and flavouring!’

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Cheese for me, but not for thee.

My experience is borne out by fine-grained survey research in Russia. Combining numerous data sources and taking a national overview, Strzelecki (2017, 10) notes that ‘the number of individuals who declare that they have too little money to buy enough food and those who cannot afford to buy clothes […] amounted to around 40% of the population. The low paid workers in some regions are now spending up to 80% of their pay on basic food staples [pdf link!](TsEPR: 2016, 5).

If poor Russian had long given up on being able to live a ‘normal’ consumer existence, with cheese and salami excluded from their diet, the sanctions regime suddenly gave the ‘middle class’ a taste of this experience. Because so many products, from dairy to fruit and vegetables, were imported, even the better off urban Russians in office jobs were suddenly faced with much higher prices as the Russian economy shrank by 5% percent in just half a year in 2015 and the rouble crashed. At the same time the state set about publicly destroying (bulldozing and then burning) tonnes of confiscated cheese and apple imports, refusing even to redistribute them to the needy. The shortages in imported staples coincided with the shrinking of the economy which meant that many ’better off’ Russians’ incomes were affected for the first time since the late 1990s. Only a small fraction of the metropolitan (Moscow and St Petersburg) middle-class have incomes ’indexed’ to Euros.

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If we bury this now, in a hundred years we will have a beautiful Parmesan orchard

Four years after the beginning of the sanctions, cheeses are back on the shelves, but the market now even more clearly reflects the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, with many more now in the ‘have-nots’ pile. In supermarkets forlorn packets of unbranded ‘Russian cheese’ sweat in cling-film alongside neatly packaged ‘President’ Brie (domestically produced by French subsidiaries – to avoid counter-sanctions).  A relatively protected group like Moscow pensioners (with numerous social benefits and a higher, inflation-indexed pension) would struggle to buy either product. Even a ‘lucky’ pensioner might live on only 250 Euros a month – from which they will have to pay for utilities, as well as food. The suspicious-looking and almost tasteless ‘Russian cheese’ now costs six Euros a kilo, the ‘branded’ President, over 12 Euros. Why ‘suspicious’? Because stories real and imagined abound of how cheese has becomes a ‘dark story’ of Russian autarky after sanctions, with all kinds of fly-by-night producers rushing to fill the gap with ‘surrogate’ products containing palm oil, or in some cases bulkers not fit for human consumption. By some measures up to 25% of cheese is not what it seems, by others, up to 80% of cheese is counterfeit. You might not have considered this before but cheese is a ‘secondary’ product of milk production, and requires over 15 litres of milk per kilo of cheese. Milk producers’ costs have doubled since 2012. It’s telling that milk production and consumption today in Russia is still 40% below the late Soviet-period figures; a lot of milk production is small-scale and doesn’t enter commercial distribution networks. Long distances preclude distribution, production is inefficient and imports play a significant role in the market.

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‘Something approximating cheese’

Of course there are other measures of the continuing downward spiral of Russians’ economic well-being – the 20-fold increase in consumer credit at punitive rates, the resultant delinquent loans and epidemic of aggressive debt collecting being one. But as an everyday ‘simple’ pleasure of the table, cheese can perhaps more starkly show how badly ordinary Russians live, how little an obscenely wealthy elite cares about them, and how large and increasing is the gap between them. More than that it shows how Russia is dominated by both very visible real disparities as well as the open secret of the counterfeit.  Adulteration substitutes for the real; and the longed-for ‘normal’ remains out of reach (what could be more a sign of normality than a bland holed triangular chunk of cheese). There are many parallels in the counterfeit political sphere of course – not least its rubber consistency and lack of aroma.

However, in a different sense, Russia is just a ‘normal’ country, just not in the mildly optimistic sense the political scientists Daniel Treisman and Andrei Shleifer (2005) predicted: a middle-income country facing typical developmental challenges. Instead, I would contend that Russia is ‘normal’ in a different way: the dominant politics of ‘austerity’ (I prefer the concept of a continuously residualizing social state); real income falls over protracted time periods; the end of upwards social mobility and the privatising of educational opportunity; the expansion of indebtedness and precarity ever more widely in the population; the strengthening of multinational corporations’ clout and the intensification of their role in the economy (a process actually accelerated by sanctions – see Gurkov et al. 2017). All these represent Russia as converging with the ‘West’, regardless of the media focus on authoritarianism and the ‘new cold war’.

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‘Time to fend off the debt collectors again’

[This post was written for the Focaal blog, associated with Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/focaal/. A slightly different version was published there 16 November 2017: http://www.focaalblog.com/. Thanks to Don Kalb and others at Berghahn Press]

 

References
Igor Gurkov & Zokirzhon Saidov (2017) Current Strategic Actions of Russian Manufacturing Subsidiaries of Western Multinational Corporations, Journal of East-West Business, 23:2, 171-193.
Igor Gurkov, Alexandra Kokorina, Zokirzhon Saidov. (2017) The cul-de-sac of foreign industrial investments to Russia. Post-Communist Economies 29:4, pages 538-548.
Ledyaeva, S., Karhunen, P., Kosonen, R. and Whalley, J. (2015), Offshore Foreign Direct Investment, Capital Round-Tripping, and Corruption: Empirical Analysis of Russian Regions. Econ. Geog., 91: 305–341. doi:10.1111/ecge.12093
Morris, J. 2014. ‘The Warm Home of Cacti and other Soviet Memories: Russian Workers on the Socialist Period.’ Central Europe 12(1): 16-31.
Novokmet, F, T. Piketty, G. Zucman. 2017. From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia, 1905-2016. Working Paper 23712 August 2017 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Cambridge, MA http://www.nber.org/papers/w23712
Strzelecki, J. 2017, ‘Painful adaptation The social consequences of the crisis in Russia’, Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich im. Marka Karpia, Centre for Eastern Studies, no. 60, Warsaw, Poland.
Treisman, Daniel, and Andrei Shleifer. 2005. “A Normal Country: Russia after Communism.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (1): 151-174.
TsEPR [Tsentr Ekonomicheskikh i politicheskikh reform – trans. Centre for Economic and Political Reform], 2016, ‘Kak vyzhivaiut rossiskie sem’i’ [trans. ‘How Russian Families Survive’], Available online: http://cepr.su last accessed 31 March. Direct PDF link: http://cepr.su/2016/12/21/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C-%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BE-%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0/ Summary in English here:  http://cepr.su/2017/05/17/low-standard-of-living-in-present-day-russia/