Tag Archives: middle-class

Challenging the view that Russians are ‘passive’.

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uncollected rubbish

uncollected rubbish from a designated municipal site.

 

In a previous post I talked about the phrase: ‘people are Russia’s replacement oil’ as representing a new extractive shift to harvesting economic rents in more intensively from ordinary people. In this post I want to talk about liberal pundits’ interpretation of this turn of events. A much truncated version of what I wrote below was part of a short piece for Ridl.io

But before that just a quick recap on the reality of ‘making ends meet’ for many Russians that I talked about previously. Ordinary people are suffering from a decade-long decline in their living standards putting them in a position of extreme want. Published average incomes may look survivable, but the reality is that, like in other unequal countries, such statistics are misleading not least because of the distorting effect of a small number of very high incomes. In 2018 average gross wages were 40000 rubles a month or $560. Whether this figure is fiddled or not, in any case it ignores the large effect of lower informal (undeclared) incomes, and the imbalance between big city state company employment and the rest.  Independent polling indicates that the ‘real’ average pay was less than 20000 rubles ($305). $300 is not even a subsistence wage. Even adding to it a lower secondary wage, a family is left virtually nothing for clothing, medicines, travel or spending on children. When trying to measure relative poverty a robust measure is how much a family spends on food and other essentials. The open acknowledgement of the extreme poverty in which many Russians life can be seen in political events like the strange passing of a law allowing Russians to collect fallen trees, ‘for their own needs’.

Influential independent political observers like Valerii Solovei and Vladislav Inozemtsev draw pessimistic conclusions about the ‘extractive turn’. Mostly they view their fellow citizens as passive and lacking any agency, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary – the massive informal economy that sustains livelihoods and habitability above the bare subsistence level and is seriously disruptive to the state. Solovei paints a vivid picture of Russians as passive sponges to be wrung dry in any way possible by an emboldened state – where can people hide from taxes on fuel and cigarettes? (I guess you can anticipate my answer to him – in both cases it’s in the interstices of the informal economy). To be fair to him, he at least strikes a warning note: history shows that eventually people get fed up and social strife is the result. However, his remedy is predictably unimaginative, a bourgeois democratic revolution (without any messy involvement of ordinary people) such as what ‘could have been’ in 2011-12. But how realistic is political change without the engagement of people beyond metropolises? And how would a bourgeois democracy he envisage address the enormous structural inequalities and imbalances Russia faces? Doesn’t this approach just reproduce a ‘two Russias’ perspective so criticized by other observers such as Ilya Matveev? We can see traces of this stigmatizing perspective everywhere: the assumption that a ‘lack of culture’ or an ‘authoritarian personality’ prevents the ‘other’ Russians from seeing the light. On the latter, Carine Clement has recently taken this idea to task. In particular, she rejects the ‘mythical apoliticism of Russians’ and asks the question – if Russians’ ‘authoritarian’ thinking includes a strong element of critique of the existing social order, then to what degree is it really authoritarian?

Inozemstev’s approach is more interesting. He starts with the notion of popular disenchantment and elite indifference, but then links this to a more general pessimism.  Noting that the ‘new oil’ trope indicates people have awareness of how costly the elites are to them he despairs that ‘the authorities realise quite how broken the Russian population’s willingness to resist really is, from mass protests to even small-scale acts of dissent.’ Does this view make the mistake that only ‘open’ protest is a mark of resistance? Elsewhere Inozemstev actually hints at what is in plain sight: the informal economy as a bulwark against complete penury for many. He notes that even the Russian government openly acknowledges that 38 million people’s work and income is opaque at best to the state. I agree with him that most Russians want to hold down a legitimate employment in the formal economy. However, given such pessimism, even this is increasingly questioned by some of the already most vulnerable. The qualifying period for an old age pension will soon increase from 6 to 15 years, the social rights that accrue to a formally employed person are losing their value due to the erosion of the health system in general.  All in all Inozemstev proposes some incremental reforms that can be characterised as too little too late (tax free allowances on low incomes, assistance schemes like food stamps), which are regressive (increasing VAT) or even defeatist (corruption should be limited to the resource sector). Overall it looks like a kind a pale Fabianism with little scope for taking root.

In his latest piece Inozemstev is closer to some of the points I make in my previous post – detailing what the increasing in indirect taxation will mean to ordinary people – a real rise of around 10% in petrol costs and the real fall in incomes since 2008. Interestingly, given the ongoing ‘rubbish disposal’ protests, he points to the very large increase in household bills for waste disposal. This increase – a doubling has not gone unnoticed by ordinary people and they are up in arms about it – especially in places like the town I study which has been repeatedly the victim of fly-tipping of Moscow rubbish and which recently saw its head of the council’s environmental services jailed for taking bribes to allow such tipping.

Ekaterina Shulman uses the questionable assumptions and methodology of the World Values Survey data to address the topic of ‘turning the screws’ on ordinary people. She first argues that a shift in Russian values from ‘superatomisation’ characteristic of the 1990s to ‘conservative’ is somewhat positive as it facilitates collective action and sociality. A notable effect is the strengthening of weak ties and broadening of the scale of interpersonal trust especially among the young and dynamic. On the other hand, she sees in Russia the continuing legacy of totalitarianism: ‘secular, atomised society’ that produces the lonely distrustful individual with atrophied social skills.  Homo soveticus is very much still with us in her view. Consequently, she greets the shift in public opinion from ‘political security’ to ‘social security’ with some surprise (in reality this aspect of public opinion has always been there).

The beef I have with approaches like these is that the ordinary Russians who daily make decisions about how to live are presented as an undifferentiated mass – suffering from ‘learned helplessness’ (a phrase used by Ekaterina Shulman but also by Carine Clement) or as an unruly source of social unrest – the word ‘revolt’ (bunt) is reserved for them. At worst this ‘by-the-numbers’ approach gives the impression that ‘we’, the addressed middle-class audience of these pundits, should fear the ‘other’ Russia.  Solutions presented ring hollow – they are either a form of gradualism or legalism (vote, even if the field is rigged; use your right to agitate against a bad candidate; if only we just adhered to the Constitution; wait for those nostalgic old people to die). In my final post on this topic, I’ll make use of James Scott’s ideas of infrapolitics to talk more about everyday forms of resistance to the extractive turn.

 

The neoliberal compact and the loss of autonomy for Russia’s middle class

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milton

Milton: “…I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire… “

This is my third and final post about the papers presented as part of a panel on Class formation in Russia at the BASEES Uppsala conference, Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956.

The third paper in this troika is by Mikhail Chernysh on ‘The structure of the Russian middle class’. Chernysh begins by examining the Russian government’s development programme “On the concept of the social and economic development 2008-2020” which aims to increase “the intensity of growth of the human capital and the middle class”. The policy paper is useful to get an idea of the government’s way of defining a middle class. These are individuals with incomes over six times the minimum. On this measure the ‘middle’ rises from 30% in 2010 to 52-55% by 2020. Chernysh remarks that it is symptomatic that the self-employed or small and medium entrepreneurs don’t really figure in this equation. The middle class is defined mainly by improved consumption linked to income.

It is striking here how modest this definition is in money terms. If ‘minimum income’ here refers to the МРОТ, then a ‘middle-class’ income equates to around 60,000 Rubles per month or 750 Euros a month. Here’s a discussion of the ‘minimum’: https://www.gazeta-unp.ru/articles/51943-mrot-v-rossii-s-1-yanvarya-2018-goda-qqq-17-m08. Going back to Markku Kivinen’s paper on linking middle-class to the classical idea of a propertied bourgeoisie, it is interesting that this amount is not enough to build assets over any meaningful period in most circumstances in Russia. People (including dual-income couples with no, or one, child) on this income typically resort to micro and meso short-term loans and mortgages. There are many stories of bad debt, ruined relationships and moonlighting among this segment of the so-called ‘middle-class’. In this income bracket I see people give up or downgrade their automobiles (to Russian or second-hand models bought for cash), whereas in the ‘noughties’ they bought new on credit. Similarly, while people nudging 1000 Euros, or so, could previously holiday now and then in Europe, now they are turning to domestic destinations, or those in the CIS (witness the boom in Armenia/Georgia tourism).

Chernysh then reports on an interesting discourse analysis by E. Balobanova which examines how Russian presidents have used the phrase ‘middle-class’. [E. Balobanova 2011.  Analiz ponyaita “srednii klass” v poslaniakh presidenta Federalnomu sobraniu RF. Political Linguistics. 2(36). For Yeltsin this phrase meant primarily ‘the bureaucracy’, echoing discussion in other papers about the ‘state’-focus of class and caste. Under Putin and Medvedev there was rather inconsistent rhetoric about raising what we might call the neglected technical intelligentsia up to the middle class. It’s interesting that again, entrepreneurs are nowhere in sight and neither are the ‘core’ intelligentsia of teachers and lecturers.

work

Chernysh then traces the controversial debates in sociology about the middle-class – from being seen as a myth, to the current (politicized?) promotion of Russia-specific ways of counting a middle-class that would produce figures higher than 10% or 20% (see my previous post). Chernysh remarks that this led to the rather unconvincing result of an income of 220 Euros-equivalent allowing entry to the middle class – 44% of the population!

Chernysh then goes on to discuss what he sees as the neoliberal compact in Russian society – particularly with regard to its effect on the state-sector middle class. In return for large increases in salaries, doctors, teachers and others had to sacrifice job security (austerity cut backs) and autonomy (increased monitoring, loss of control over job processes). This strongly parallels my findings among working-class cohorts in the same period. Also important for Chernysh is the actual intensification of work for these groups. The positive part of the deal – increased pay – is at least partly illusory. This is because of intensification but also because much of the pay increase is based on discretionary awards – premiia/nadbavka, etc. This also finds strong echoes in my work with caregivers like teachers and kindergarten employees. They complained after 2009 that they weren’t really better off as so much of their pay was subject to these ‘tricks’ (see p. 62, 64). Chernysh speculates that these factors may influence the current negative evaluation of the government by these groups.

Based on a number of datasets, particularly focusing on responses to questions about what people struggle to afford (durables, more expensive purchases like cars, etc), Chernysh finds that coupled with an occupation approach, the Russian middle-class is less than 20% of the population and more likely less than 15%.

Following Erik Olin Wright’s definition of the middle class as those working in jobs where autonomy is possible, Chernysh analyses autonomy as a variable in a group of respondents with middle class consumption patterns and a university degree.  He finds a significant fall since the 1990s in this category. This is important in the historical context of the necessity, even under totalitarianism, of a ‘moderate level of work autonomy’ in Soviet professions. (I argue, along with the sociologist A. Temnitskii, that this was true of blue-collar workers as well).

Chernysh concludes by drawing parallels with H. Balzer’s Russia’s missing middle class : ‘Middle class consciousness is contradictory, it is not only critical, but also individualistic, showing limited capability of concerted action in defense of group’s rights and class positions. It looks like a revival of historical pattern dating back to the pre-revolutionary times. Balzer’s analysis of the tsarist Russia middle class showed that it was too small and disorganized to effect tangible influence and possibly revert the negative tendencies that weaken existing economic and social institutions’.

Returning to the panel as a whole, the organizer, Jouko Nikula, recently published an interpretive summary based on a broad survey dataset ‘Social Distinctions in Modern Russia’ (SDMR), which some of the papers also made use of.

Nikula points out the ‘decreased opportunities employees have to influence their working pace or work tasks’, particularly among professionals and in the public sector, with a narrowing too of flexibility on working hours. Unemployment has been low despite the two recessions endured by the country – one in 2009, the second in 2014. This because of a persistence of the Soviet practice of labour hoardings and paternalism, at the cost of low wages and furlough, as well as the foregoing of bonuses, which as we discussed earlier, make up an increasing proportion of the real take-home wage.

All in all then, a provocative set of papers from the Uppsala conference. To conclude I would ground them in the reality of my ethnographic fieldwork (albeit partial and unrepresentative). I note the following from my own fieldwork: the least satisfied people from my research were always those that experienced the least autonomy (or a perceptible fall in it over time) – but this was true both of working-class (forklift drivers, packers and sorters in the carplant), and middle-class jobs (teachers and child-psychologists, whose work became increasingly monitored by metric evaluations over the 2010s). Who was most ‘satisfied’? Those with the most or least – well-paid entrepreneurs in high-barrier-to-entry areas like data-gathering and bespoke services, and at the other end, those informal taxi-drivers and grifters who answered to no one and could always ‘withdraw’ to the burrow of the garden plot (at least in the summer) and other strategies of informality.

Is the nature of precarity in Russia different? Melin’s view

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This is my second post about the papers presented as part of a panel on Class formation in Russia at the BASEES Uppsala conference, Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956.

The second paper I want to discuss is Harri Melin’s “Working life and the myth of precariat in Russia.”

Melin interrogates the applicability of the ‘precarity’ concept to Russia using survey data about jobs. Following Guy Standing, Melin presents precarity as a process: ‘to be precaritised is to be subject to pressures and experiences that lead to a precariat existence, of living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle’ (Standing, 2011: 16). For Melin, Standing’s work shows that the precariat lack a work- or occupational-based identity. However, Melin cites his own and others’ work in Finland as an example that shows the rise of insecure and temporary work is, in his view, not the case.

Melin is interested in O. Shkaratan’s concept of etacratism to understand Russia’s social structure.  Just as Soviet society was not really socialist but form even approaching state capitalism (insert your own caveats here!), contemporary Russian society is a direct continuation of this etacratic tradition (Radaev & Shkaratan 1992). This approach influenced S. Kordonsky about whom I’ve written recently.

Melin’s survey data tell a story about an absolute and relative growth in ‘skilled working-class’ jobs in Russia, at the cost of unskilled work and ‘nominal’ managerial positions. To collect data Melin used Erik O. Wright’s class typology (Wright 1978, 1997) and to triangulate that with precarity Melin’s respondants are sorted into 1) unemployed, 2) fixed-term labor contracts 3) part-time jobs. The data is from the European Social Survey 2010 set. Precarity is defined as ‘several unemployments, part-time or fixed time employments’. By this measure women in Russia are much less precarious than men, who are more similar to Northern European counterparts. Perhaps more interestingly, Melin counts a very small Russian middle-class – barely 20%. The high number of Nordic youth he counts as precarious is compensated for by the more comprehensive social protections in those countries.

Melin then moves on to subjective measures of precarity: “While in the Nordic countries 55 % of the skilled workers feel that they can live comfortably with their income … in Russia, only 5 % of skilled workers feel living comfortably.” Melin finishes by drawing attention to what I consider a ‘symptom’ of high subjective precarity: my and Sarah Hinz’s work on high labour turnover in the Kaluga Volkswagen factory where relatively well-paid blue-collar jobs there should mean less job ‘churning’. Melin notes how this could be related to precarization and the increase in the use of short-term labour contracts.

It might be worth thinking about the agency of workers in making the above ‘necessity’ of turnover into a virtue. ‘Bad jobs’ leading to turnover, leading to making of turnover into a form of skilling up (or ‘trying out’ of different skills pathways – as the very least). At least within the limits of one’s ‘profession’. This also calls back Markku Kivinen’s point in his paper about the conundrum of high inequality yet lack of class-based polarisation. Partly this can be explained because of the remarkable turnover – ‘exit’ as the only viable strategy.  There’s a lot in my book about the final destination of workers who ‘churn’ – it’s an equally precarious existence in the informal economy.  This is why there are so many male unregistered taxi-drivers. The Russian state has declared ‘war’ on this type of informal income recently.

We could also here take some issue with the blanket position of Harri – that the etacratic system provides more stable and safe employment to workers. My gut feeling is that this is being severely eroded for a number of reasons – corruption leading to the replacement of ‘meritorious’ workers by clients, and welfare state residualisation/austerity meaning the laying off of many workers. Mikhail Chernysh’s paper takes this up. I will discuss his paper in my next post.

 

 

 

 

What makes a Russian (or Chinese) middle-class?

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Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears

The discreet charm of the late-Soviet petite bourgeoisie, or rather the ‘protected’ technical managerial class, as seen in the film ‘Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears’.

This autumn I was asked by colleagues to discuss a panel of papers on Class formation in Russia at the BASEES Uppsala conference, Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956.

The three papers were Markku Kivinen, ‘Specificities of Middle-class Structuration in Russia’; Mikhail Chernysh, ‘The structure of the Russian middle class’, and Harri Melin, ‘Working life and the myth of precariat in Russia’.

All the papers are part of a book project. I’ll try to summarise them in turn, starting with Markku Kivinen.

Kivinen sees a lack of clearly identifiable class interests in Russia, and therefore a commensurate lack of class-based action or agency. Interestingly, he takes his discussion back to the very idea of what we mean when we talk about a ‘bourgeoisie’: “After more than 60 years, entrepreneurial groups have been revived with the process of privatization. The discussion here focuses on the middle class which in the West is traditionally known as the new middle class (managerial and profes­sio­nal groups), but which in Russia is ‘old’ in the sense that it has inherited its locations from the Soviet era”, writes Kivinen. Suspicious of bare structural accounts, Kivinen argues for class ‘situation’ as well as ‘structure’. This entails some kind of shared rationality or consciousness. From here Kivinen observes that in Russia there is still only a small middle-class in terms of professional wage earners and that corresponding professional organisations are weak. So for him such a class lacks the ‘autonomy’ of a middle class in the West.

Kivinen hypothesises that micro politics of labour control have grown during transition. Given that in the past the ‘inheritance’ of economic resources was insignificant (i.e. even among the elite there was an unwritten rule about limiting the ‘leg up’ effect, and the material intergenerational transmission of resources was not widespread), today, in contrast to economic differences, cultural distinctions of class probably remain important.

Here I’m not sure I completely agree with Kivinen. Part of the ideological breakdown of consensus in the late Soviet period entailed the scramble for position, and the re-writing of those rules to enable the more savvy, including lower level insiders, to position themselves and their kids. To give an example, a 40-year-old Muscovite woman I know has never required a waged income because her parents (1980s Komsomol functionaries) were able to leverage Soviet structural position (partiinye posty) into post-Soviet position (state-org functionaries), then use the access to those state resources to accumulate capital (a private business run through the ‘front’ of a state job and resources) and then in turn into property assets. Now this family has a modest portfolio of flats rented out, allowing a significant consumption lifestyle without requiring anyone in the family to have a meaningful wage income. However, culturally, I don’t see any particular difference between this family and their working-poor neighbours. Both aspired to own a Mitsubishi Lancer and some questionable American kitchen interior design in the late naughties, and that was about it. The working-poor had to get credit for it. The ex-Komsomol bought for cash.

Combining class analysis with the sociology of work, Kivinen proposes a relationship between professional autonomy and mental labour in defining middle-classness.  This is in distinction to his view of working-classes who are always alienated due to a lack of autonomy (control over processes and planning). Then Kivinen engages with Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley, particularly on the different forms of capitalism that emerged in Eastern Europe (more cautious diffused institutional capitalism without ‘capitalists’), versus Russian nomenklatura take-over of resources (capitalists without capitalism – see my ‘petty bourgeoisie’ example above), and ‘entrepreneurial’ capitalism from below in China. Based on survey data, Kivinen concludes that there has been a major expansion in absolute terms of the middle class (from less than 40 percent in 1998 to now over 50 percent). From the data presented in the paper, it’s not clear what definition is being used of entry to the middle class (I am sure in the book it will be well covered). Interestingly, one aspect Kivinen links to this rise is the continuing propensity of all Russians to change their jobs frequently, known as ‘churn’, and something I’ve written about. Likewise, I’ve written a lot about autonomy among working-class people. (See the discussion from p. 72 in particular). The desire for autonomy cuts across classes, and niches are carved out in the most unlikely places.

Overall, my gut response is that a ‘counting’ approach to class remains problematic and perhaps even counter-productive (excuse pun). I’m sure Kivinen’s figures are robust, but how meaningful is it to say 50% of Russians are middle-class when certainly average disposable incomes, however counted, are tiny in comparison even to other middle-income countries? We will see this criticism repeated in my reading of the other papers.

But here I’ll end with a heuristic example: The average wage in Russia is, after tax, around 34,000 Roubles. That’s barely 500 USD. The same article linked to here is a good treatment, acknowledging that in Moscow the average wage probably is around 500 USD (but anyone aspiring to have any quality of life there on that wage would be extremely depressed by reality). In addition, the article notes that wages have fallen in real terms for the last 10 years! Outside the big cities (only 30 million inhabitants out of 145m) the ‘real’ average is likely to be around only 20,000 Roubles elsewhere. See here for a similar enumeration. This all chimes exactly with my ‘anecdotal’ research experience – most of my research participants struggle to make more than 20,000 Roubles. And remember this is among economically active people (less than 50% of the population) with full-time wages (a much smaller fraction).

Yes, a household on two average (20k) incomes, with no housing costs, can live better than the urban poor and pensioners, but that’s less than 50% of the population. The 34k income bracket is, for want of a better phrase, ‘upper-middle class’, or ‘affluent’ and seen as anomalous by most of those I research.  More importantly, even this putative middle group is going to severely struggle with unexpected bills, even running an old Russian car will be a stretch. Frequently they will resort to pay-day loans (there’s plenty of evidence of this in my research). Cognitively, they will not be inhabiting the mindset of any middle-class you can imagine. And that’s different from aspiring to own a jeep, go to Cyprus, or own a second home. An instructive comparison can be made with the ‘struggling middle’ in China at the moment (urban dwellers with middle-class aspirations) who on average earn around the same as the real average in Russia ( 3,000 yuan, or 480 USD a month). However, unlike in Russia, meaningful consumption is possible on this income (discretionary spending), including on taxi rides to work, investment in stocks, luxury imports (gourmet cat food!).

And to finish with a thought about autonomy. James Scott, interestingly, also links middle-classness (or rather the classical petite bourgeoisie subsection of it) to autonomy in his book Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Like my former Komsomol leaders, many people in history have aspired to become small property owners due to the perception that this confers autonomy (and social standing). Scott argues that the petite bourgeoisie play a role in the development of a modern capitalism that is socially tolerable in that important social and civil functions are delegated to them (land stewardship, public safety, public action). On the other hand a more conventional leftist tradition would see in ‘middle-classness’ only the reactionary, whether cultural or social. One can see the short distance from here to the debates about civil society in Russia. However, so far I remain to be convinced both in economic and social terms about the meaningfulness of talking about a Russian middle-class.

From unequal Russian youth citizenship to caste- and estate-based perspectives?

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I want to revisit the youth topic of my previous post. There, I offered a mild ‘check your privilege’ criticism of the limited perspectives of Muscovite middle-class youth. Additionally, I offered an ‘apology’ for non-politically active or non-‘civically conscious’ young people. I basically said that Muscovites generally have a limited understanding of the lives of non-Muscovites.

One might object that educated Muscovites travel a lot, not only abroad, but also in Russia and develop friendships and acquaintance with people beyond their Moscow ‘set’. I would agree, but then I would add that this only exacerbates the socio-economic ghettoizing of relations. In that, while my young Muscovites develop friendships with, say, middle-class educated Spanish youth in their travels, their attitudes to ‘deep’ Russia still faintly resemble that of a bygone time. Okay, that’s provocative and unfair, but I was very much reminded of the narodniks when talking to some of the more politically active youth. And I mean that in a negative way – there is no consciousness of the need to connect to the majority of youth who may well see inequality as more important than identity politics. Of course, the narodniks failed, but at least they were aware of the divide between the different Russias (as is today’s Natalia Zubarevich).

As for travel in Russia – for many cosmopolitans, this is very much as a foreign tourist in one’s own land. In one case, I had to explain the workings of the Russian railway timetable, and the ‘local’ inevitability of DIY euthanizing unwanted animals, the reasons for limited consumer choice – ‘there is no fancy stuff in the shops because people are poor!’.

To be fair, some cosmopolitan Russians recognise this split all too well, and even discuss it with me. Indeed some of the more embarrassing moments of my fieldwork are when Muscovite Russians tease me about ‘knowing more about the glubinka’ than they do. Or when I am asked sincerely about ‘what the locals think’. There are sensitive, thoughtful people who are aware of the great social divide and try to bridge it in their lives. However, even in my field-site, the real and metaphorically gated communities grow. Frankly, the more I observe this, the more embarrassing it gets. Moreover, the idea of a class of Russians as foreigners in their own land is not new (Decembrists’ failure, partisan war of 1812, etc).

Narodnik

So, why is this important? In the previous post, I also touched on the research I’ve done with colleagues on the ideas of youth citizenship. The mutual incomprehensibility of different Russian youth is no doubt mainly due to socio-economic background. However it indicates an open secret about inequality of citizenship as well. ‘Affective ideas of belonging’ was one way of looking at how frustrated young urban Russians were with their inability to get involved in the political workings of their country. Turning away from insoluble problems is another response. I’m reminded of one of the first times I presented in my old institution in the UK, a Russian colleague approached me afterwards, and with slight hesitation began to question me. Had I not made a mistake in stating that my factory workers in 2009 were only earning 18,000 roubles a month (230 Euro)? Was I exaggerating how little they earned? Later, on social media, a businessman stated that ‘even shop workers’ earned at a minimum 30,000 roubles a month. Clearly he’d never been to a small town, or even a small provincial city. Finally, a couple of years ago, a very senior professor opened her comments to a roundtable with the observation that there was no economic crisis because people in Moscow continued to holiday in Cyprus.

None of my research interlocutors, bar one owns a ‘zagran’ – a tourist passport. To get one would involve taking at least two days off, and travelling to the oblast centre, possibly early in the morning, which is in any case a considerable distance (previously they could travel to the district centre). If a person has been mainly informally employed or self-employed, they may have trouble (or be wary of) filling out the work history form that is required to get a passport. Is it worth discussing ‘affective citizenship’ when the everyday experience of citizenship is so trammelled, or ‘shrinking’, a term sometimes used in a different context to talk about the limited avenues for democratic participation. Shrinking also has relevance when trying to pin down ordinary meanings of citizenship for these same people. Increasingly, people talk about the town, the district, to the exclusion of the national. Their sense of Russianness is localised. Quite ironic given recent focus on the ‘wholeness of Russia’ and increasing use of ‘Russian’ as an ethnic identity marker.

Загран

Finally, all this reminds me of some really interesting research I’ve recently been engaging with – the first is Simon Kordonsky’s on today’s Russia as a kind of caste-based, rather than class-based society. I recently reviewed his English-language book (previous link) for Europe-Asia Studies. I’m now reading some of his Russian sources with my students.

A snippet from the review here:

“Dividing resources among estates is the core process of social life. Crucially, service not labour is the marker of compensation in this system. Therefore classes cannot fully emerge, instead there are non-titular estates of professionals – Kordonsky enjoys provoking the reader in a running joke that lumps scientists, lawyers, and prostitutes in the same category.  Similarly, persons receive estate rent and ‘pay’ estate ‘taxes’ based on their estate position alone. This is why the visible signs of estate membership are so important (think regalia, uniforms, cars with blue-lights); estates makes themselves known to other estates based on ritualised and symbolic practices, leading to widely accepted notions of ‘distributive’, rather than ‘corrective’ justice.”

Recently too, Anna Kruglova’s work has investigated ‘caste’. Presenting at the EASA in Stockholm this year based on research on industrial communities in the Urals she proposes that increasingly workers “get homogenized and ‘compressed’ back to their sosloviie (caste or estate).

Kordonsky’s perspective is pessimistic. Overall he proposes a static, ‘frozen’ system. Is social mobility possible? Can classes with identifiable interests form? While the democratic, market-based society to which Kordonsky opposes Russia is an ideal type, readers may question so stark a differentiation – after all, in the ‘West’, estate-like phenomena such as the increasing significance of unearned income, professional/estate ‘aristocracies’, barriers to social mobility, differential rights, obligations and inequality before the law also feature to various extents. Is it a step too far to think of Russia as a ‘caste’ society when ignoring how socially differentiated our own societies are?