I just got back from CBEES conference – a really positive experience for me because I was part of a panel that was mainly about Ukraine and which was able to ‘provincialize’ Russia, and Russo-centric approaches to the war. This is the kind of academic practice that I feel scholars should be engaging with. So for example, while my own work remains focused on Russian society, I learnt a lot about civil society at war, authoritarianism, and activism by listening to my colleagues talk about Belarus and Ukraine.
Provincializing Area Studies is an idea from Dipesh Chakrabarty who made famous the concept of ‘provincializing Europe’. It doesn’t have to be the same thing as ‘decolonizing’, but certainly CBEES was successful in the former. Our own panel was called “Exaggerated Structure, Exalted Agency: What Russian and Ukrainian Studies Failed to See before the Invasion” and was planned and led by young Ukrainian scholars. Ukrainian sociologist Anastasiya Ryabchuk of INALCO Paris and Kyiv-Mohyla started us off with a critical view of International Development work on the frontline in Donbas. Among other questions, she asked: “How to continue fieldwork ethically when as researchers we are mainly in safety?” Some groups will be very much over-researched and others invisibilized and this risks doing more violence. It will also be a challenge to rebuilding solidarity after war given divergent experiences of it.
Finnish researcher Emma Rimpiläinen, now based at Uppsala, has done fieldwork with Russian and Ukrainian speakers in Donbas and elsewhere. Her paper was about knowledge production of the war since 2014 and the divergent experiences among IDPs and others. She was able to tracing different types of explanation for war that people use, depending on their experience and their locality: the geopolitical frame; perspectives on Ukraine’s internal politics; The economic frame about the importance of industry in Donbas; Seeing the conflict through a local elite frame; and finally using tropes of ‘purging’ of particular types of identity. Emma adds a new meta-level perspective on ‘conspiracy thinking’: everyone thinks it is others who are ‘zombified’ by propaganda, it is others who have a ‘vatnik‘, or ‘soviet mentality’. In Emma’s research these claims of zombification have classist overtones.
Denys Gorbach of Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics in Paris spoke about the multiple positionings and negotiations of identity that labour activists in E Ukraine use vis-à-vis the now hegemonic ‘national-populist’ position. They both resist and manipulate it to serve their collective struggle for labour rights, for example by leveraging their status as veterans of 2014-15 flighting against Russia. Denys was forthright on the collective narcissism of Ukrainian liberal public sphere in self-mythologizing and how this projects an imaginary unified Ukrainian public. He asks: “What about those who are silenced in the public sphere? How do they relate to the world of the political in a Mouffian sense? In Denys’ view scholars need to challenge the stereotype of ‘apolitical’, ‘slavish’, ‘passive’ – forms of self-orientalizing discourse in East Ukraine when this was place of an immense strike in 2017 and the “fortress of the mobilized workers”. Denys uses a telling turn of phrase that many in Russia would recognize: “the facebook people” to characterize how some Eastern Ukraine unionists view the liberal metropolitan Ukrainians.
Taras Fedirko of Glasgow by way of St Andrews recounted some of his findings about informal and formal organization of armed groups in Ukraine. Once more he challenges the view that conflict and violence can be monolithically grasped. Violence is organised in hybrid ways and the role of nationalist civil society changes under conditions of militarization where once more, there is a divergence in expectations and understandings between ‘civil’ and ‘state’ actors. The nationalist forms do not replace the state, but supplement it resulting in formal-informal coordination in a manner that has long frustrated scholars who labour under a western-centric view of ‘state capacity’ and institution-building.
My paper combined various versions of things I’m writing at the moment. Based on my long-term fieldwork among union organizers and more recent work with socialist and eco-activists I reflected on how the war puts into perspective the nomadism of political activism in Russia and how networks are sustained when they come under different pressures, not least of which is the dispersal of activists away from Russia. Based on Charles Tilly’s use of the ‘catnet’ concept (categoriness = shared ideological framing, and netness = the density of networks). I argue that the ‘experiential entanglement’ of activists is much more ‘elastic’, which should prompt reevaluation of activism as a sociological phenomenon and bring us back to Tilly’s original problematic: what really are common objectives and interests? How to deal with the slippage between ‘collective action’ and ‘collective behaviour’ with regard to political contention?
Finally Volodymyr Artiukh of Oxford took the stage with a high-level analysis and survey of techniques of authoritarian control in Belarus and the new quality of postsocialist authoritarianism. He spoke of the LNR as Belarus’ Guantanamo and the Ryanair hijacking as examples. “Violence works and it is more efficient than we think it is”. Artiukh argues that we need to examine the ‘sociological imagination of reaction’: not casting the war in terms of Russia’s defensive geopolitical considerations based on delusions of elites, but on internal elite reaction that led to aggression. Artiukh’s research makes reference to Steve Reyna – who offered a model on how ‘delusions’ of small elite circle are spread in broader society. First elites talk themselves into war, then inject their delusions into circulating ideologies. ‘Sociological imagination of reaction’ is part of this spreading. This general observation can be extended to the post-socialist context where elites are both rational and irrational, capable of learning, but also burdened with a particular construction of reality. Lukashenka’s Caeserism via passive revolution and preemptive authoritarianism (after Vitaly Silitski) made him the pioneer of authoritarian populism and Putin learned from this. The “Special Military Operation” in his imaginary is exactly that: the suppression of an uprising for countries under ‘Putin’s protection’, hence the attempt to continue the fiction of partial mobilization, and paramilitary action as witnessed in the role, regardless of the reality, imputed to the Vagner Group rather than the Russian Armed Forces, for example.
Our 6-speaker, two part panel was very well attended and audience asked good questions. It was humbling to speak alongside some of the best sociological and anthropological researchers from Ukraine at this time. And also a reminder of why these researchers – now at Oxford, Glasgow, Paris, alongside other Ukrainian researchers, need sustainable sources of support for their work and more than just temporary funding.
Summary. Montenegro. A random company of Russians and Ukrainians goes to make a ‘peresechka’, or visa-run – to cross the border after a month in the country, so as not to violate migration rules. They talk about everything in the world, argue about the war in Ukraine.
Biography of the author. Igor Maslennikov (Moscow). Texts appeared in the magazines “Volga”, “Youth”, “Dactyl”, on “Literary Radio”, etc.
In an eatery at the exit from the Montenegrin village, a group with two children sat at one table, and at another table – an old man in a branded jumpsuit of a gas station. He had worked the night shift and was returning home. The eatery had just opened. There was no one else inside but the old man in overalls and the owner.
The old man was completely gray and with a mustache. Crossing his legs, he smoked a cigarette. He was one of those people who looks good smoking. These people seem to have been born with a cigarette, smoked all their lives, and tobacco smoke never harmed them. While the four adults and two children were waiting for sandwiches and coffee, the old man took three or four puffs, no more. He shook the cigarette over the ashtray and looked at the kitchen, then at the others, then at the road.
Are you Russians? the old man asked the whole company at once. His voice was deep and strong, not old at all. The woman laughed and said that someone was Russian and someone Ukrainian. Dobro, as it should be, said the old man smiling. The war is one thing, and ordinary people another. My family was expelled from Bosnia when the war started there. Then we survived another war. My wife and I have been living here for a long time. The children went somewhere. It’s now a lot of tourists here, and there used to be wilderness. That’s how it should be, politicians do their own thing, ordinary people do their own. And the war is nothing fun, so the old man finished. He spoke half Serbian, half Russian, simple and understandable. He shared his experience. He was not an urban madman, did not bother the company, but simply extinguished the cigarette, wished them do viden’ia and left.
The company was going to make a crossing – each month to cross the border of the nearest country, so as not to violate migration rules, and immediately return. There were six people in the car.
There was a couple from Odessa in the group and their adopted daughter. The husband was driving the car. He had made a deal in Odessa that he couldn’t finish and owed money. The family fled first to Spain, then here. It was all before the war. Now they were renting a part of a house from Montenegrin pensioners, the man was taking people across the border. This time the whole family, except for the small child, had to make a crossing. And they left the child until the evening with the owners of the house.
In the back seat was a young divorced woman from Krasnodar, with her son. She had lived in tropical countries for many years, and she loved being called a digital nomad in conversations, but after her divorce, she didn’t really date anyone, and sometimes she thought that she would continue to wander around the wide world, through beautiful seaside towns, until old age.
A journalist from St. Petersburg was traveling on the front passenger seat. A few days before the war, he flew to Russia to take possession of an apartment that belonged to his deceased father. He died just before the Covid epidemic, and the journalist was only now able to take ownership of the apartment.
The company bought their sandwiches and paid. The car drove to the exit of the village, along a narrow street with empty shops. Dusty windows were covered with children’s fingermarks. The street was divided by a small concrete canal. The driver stopped at the last city traffic lights. On a pedestrian island, a girl with a backpack yawned and blew bubble gum. The bubble burst and covered her lips. The girl sucked it into her mouth, continued to chew lazily. She stood and waited for a traffic light, like the company in the car. She probably was going to school.
Everyone in the car thought about the words of the old man in the overalls. He spoke as if the war was something very ordinary and there was no need to be offended by each other because of it. The war will definitely take place, whether one wants it or not, the old man thought so. Nothing will ever change. If there is no massacre in Montenegro now, it is only because its time has not yet come. The old man is used to war, but they are not. War appeared in their lives for the first time.
A drunk walked along the right side of the highway. He swayed and took a step towards the road. The driver turned the steering wheel sharply to go around him. The drunkard, without turning around, managed to show with his palm: everything is in order. His neck was red. Locals go to cafes in the morning to drink coffee with brandy, the driver said. Cafes for locals had names like “Internationale” or “Elite”. These were located not at the embankments, like cafes for tourists, but at the corners of houses, next to the ordinary entrances. They were small and looked like pubs. Although in both the coffee tasted like a mixture of robusta with ashes and earth. Men and old people began to drink in the morning. They sat in smoky rooms, smoking, watching football and discussing the war. It fascinated them, and the words “Russia”, “Ukraine”, “NATO”, “atomic bomb” were constants. Then they dispersed through the streets or went to work. For the first weeks in cafes, hairdressers and in the market, everyone just talked about the war, but later the topic got stale.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that it all looks like Crimea, the driver said. And you? he asked the journalist. He did not hear. The driver’s wife asked him again. Yes, it seems, the journalist said, these dry mountains, and the color of the sea, are similar in many ways. In my opinion, the sea here is turquoise and more transparent than in the Crimea, the driver’s wife said, even than in Simeiz. We went hiking in these places, said the traveler from Krasnodar, caught four crabs and boiled them with bay leaves. They even had caviar. We also found a cuttlefish on the shore, and she was releasing ink. Either someone caught her and did not take her away, or she herself threw herself ashore, we did not understand, the traveler said. The girl in the back seat was silent all the time.
The car drove through coastal resort villages. They were located on narrow strips of land between the mountains and the sea. There was a thud from under the car. It was tapping at the front left wheel, somewhere at the feet of the driver. The driver stopped at the nearest layby; the passengers went out to warm up. In a busy place on the embankment, where people were already walking, a gypsy boy was singing and drumming on a plastic bucket, and in front of him was a cardboard box of roses for sale. The driver used to see the boy in this place every time he drove people. This is the village of millionaires, said the driver, looking under the wing of the car. Real estate here is very expensive, from a million and more. They probably overpay for exclusivity, said the traveler from Krasnodar. She filmed the gypsy boy on her phone. As for me, it’s nothing special, said the driver’s wife, the village is like a village.
The sun came out that day, and the sky was cloudless. Everyone was in high spirits – as if everything could be done, done in time and corrected.
Before that, it had rained for several days, and it was said that it would continue until the end of the week. The clouds that crawled from the mountains to the village covered the roofs of distant houses and even the top of a tower crane. On the outskirts of the village along the railroad stood dry thickets of last year’s bamboo. In the cloudy twilight, the gray stalks, two or three times tall, looked like ghosts. Because of the rain, the gypsies stopped standing at the doors of the supermarket. Gypsies have always been on their own. Their children played volleyball outside public buildings. Adults stood in a semicircle under a tree and showed each other some things stacked on an electrical cabinet, or two of them rode mopeds, or simply smoked for a long time on the sidelines and looked somewhere. Gypsy old women sat on the pavement and begged in a hoarse voice.
The Petersburg journalist had not been able to sleep last night. He walked along the embankment, and then sat for a long time on an overturned Coke box. To the right was the black silhouette of a large pine leaning over the sea. From the outlines it was clear that it was a pine tree. It was raining over the sea, the sky was covered with a slanting black curtain. The waves rolled and rolled. Since the war started, I can’t be happy about anything, thought the journalist. It’s like when I had covid and stopped smelling. Same thing, only now I don’t feel any joy. In addition, the journalist thought that the lawyers who dealt with the inheritance case wanted to deceive him. Because of this, he was also worried.
The traveler from Krasnodar woke up in the night from some noise, muffled repeated blows. She got up on the bed and saw that the curtained glass door to the balcony was filled with yellow light. She opened her mouth in fear. These are explosions, rocket strikes, the woman thought, and already something is burning. Or is it the warships that I saw on the pier, they shot down something, and it fell and caught fire. This country is part of NATO, which means it is a world war, she thought. Yellow light flickered through the curtain. A minute later she came to her senses. It was a noise from the broken cornice of the neighbors roof upstairs, and the light came from street lamps across the road. The traveler’s son was sleeping on the couch with his laptop on.
The family from Ukraine woke up to their adopted daughter crying in her sleep. She lay in the children’s room and could not explain to them why she was crying. They had taken her from the orphanage before the birth of their son. They resigned themselves to the fact that they would not have their own children, but the woman was able to get pregnant after another IVF attempt. The adopted daughter had a slight disability and did not speak well. After the orphanage, she remained withdrawn and irritable. She did not feel like the daughter of this couple. Rather, they were her older friends, not very affectionate and fair. She felt that they had cooled towards her after they had a child of their own – especially the foster mother. They planned to make money and try IVF again. The woman wanted another child.
The driver walked around the car and shook the wheel with his foot. He didn’t find anything strange. The car went further along the serpentine. The girl in the back seat folded her legs and braced her knees against the front passenger seat. Her knees pressed across the chair onto the journalist’s back. He looked at the girl in the side mirror.
From here, plus or minus, seven hundred kilometers to Venice, said the driver’s wife. We’ve already traveled over a hundred. Croatia, Slovenia – and then Italy. And what about the situation with leaving Ukraine for other countries, the traveler asked. The driver’s wife said that those not liable for military service can leave even with a photograph of any document. It will soon be a month since the war began, she added. Let the politicians figure it out and end this war, the traveler’s son said from the back seat. Politics is when people try to come to an agreement, the driver’s wife said, while we are bombing peaceful cities. We are not politicians or military strategists to decide, the traveler’s son said, it remains to be seen who is right and who is wrong. Everyone thought that the boy was retelling the words he heard from his mother. The traveler from Krasnodar realized this and blushed. If civilians are dying, it can’t be true, the driver’s wife said. This is because the Ukrainian president hides military installations among civilians, the boy continued. He stammered but continued to argue. Is the art school a military facility? the driver asked. He and his wife felt angry, although they did not show it. The perfect aiming weapon has not yet been invented, and the Ukrainian army is also bombing civilians, the boy said. All this will also have a terrible effect on the economy – the traveler from Krasnodar tried to change the topic of conversation.
Again there was a knock from under the bottom of the car. The driver pulled over to the side of the road and the passengers got out to get some air. The journalist stepped aside and leaned on the protective railing in front of the cliff. On an empty beach, a pile of dry branches and debris smoldered. Waves rolled on the pebbles, and the foam extinguished the embers. The pile smoked. The disabled girl stood next to the journalist and also leaned on the railing. The driver took out his phone and called the agency where he rented a car. He asked if the car might be out of order. It recently had an MOT, they told him everything should be fine.
Then the serpentine began again. There were snow caps on the tops of several mountains. Talk about the war did not spoil the cheerful mood. It seemed to everyone that they had been driving along this road for an eternity. The driver was glad that he would earn sixty euros for the trip – unless the customs officers asked for a bribe. The journalist thought: I want peace in Ukraine, but I also want to live in a warm country like this, and not be lonely, and have a girl nearby, and have a more interesting job than I have now. The traveler was thinking about how to exchange phone numbers with the journalist. She examined it while still in the diner. He was a little weird, but nothing really. She wanted to talk to him when he stood at the railing and looked at the sea, but the disabled girl had already approached him.
The boy in the back seat got motion sickness. The driver’s wife offered him an apple, but the boy shook his head. The window was opened for him, and a fresh breeze drove the air-conditioned air out of the cabin. Usually it makes me feel bad, said a traveler from Krasnodar, and then to her son. For the vestibular apparatus, lateral vibrations are the worst, the driver said.
On one hill there was a weather station with a high antenna, and below, in the valley, one could see an ideal farm, divided into plots by a fence. One plot is with olives, another is a sheep pasture, a third is with a barn, and so on. On another hill stood an unfinished three-story concrete box. Goats jumped on the stairs, as if up a cliff. Beyond the next hill the sea appeared again. When the view of the sea opened, everyone’s breath stopped again, although they had seen it a quarter of an hour ago. The driver swerved to the left at a sharp bend. All the nuts that held the front left wheel were sheared off at once. The wheel rolled to the side. The car jumped the barrier and flew off the cliff. It fell on its roof, rolled over on the ground and stopped.
Passengers were killed instantly when the car hit the rocks. The driver, hanging upside down on his harness, unfastened himself, climbed out through the broken windshield and crawled further along the sand, dragging his legs behind him. He turned around, looked indifferently at his wife and other passengers and collapsed.
The car didn’t catch fire or smoke. It was completely invisible from the road. The goats that were grazing between the rocks fled from the roar, but soon grew bolder, sniffing the overturned car, began to pluck the grass and the driver’s shirt. In the evening, the goats themselves, without a shepherd, returned to the pen.
The people from the car were missed only a few days later, and a week later they were found. The mechanic who worked on the car did not fully tighten the nuts on one wheel. As he tightened them with a pneumatic wrench, his phone rang in his pocket. After the conversation, he forgot about the half-tightened nuts and took up another matter.
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’.
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.
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).
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.
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?
I am giving a paper at Malmo University for the second RUCARR conference and this is a great excuse to revisit a topic I wrote about some time ago – Russian everyday nationalism and patriotism since the Ukraine conflict. So this blog post is in lieu of a paper for the conference – I hope I finish it in time!
In that article I talk about my sense of myself as unwilling representative of my origin country during fieldwork, and how, despite the unrelenting media campaign in Russia, most of my encounters that involved political talk were characterised by ‘civility’ and ‘silence’, or the agency of ordinary people in negotiating their way between the strident tones of state propaganda on the one side, and their genuine feelings of patriotism on the other. So the article is something of a contribution to what has been called ‘everyday geopolitics’ or popular geopolitics, but specifically thinking in terms of subjectivities. Therefore I make some use of the term ‘intimacy-geopolitics’, that comes from geographers Pain and Staeheli 2014. Consequently, I think about how ethnographers resemble or don’t resemble diplomats, or are inevitably hailed as representatives of their origin countries’ international policies. The article ends, not by focusing on how media propaganda around the Ukraine conflict activates nationalism in everyday contexts, but on the contrary – TV and internet endless, in-your-face, over-the-top rehearsal of tropes like ‘Kiev’s fascist junta’ and ‘crucified Russophone children’ seems to traumatise my Russian informants. The Russian state does such a ‘good’ job of speaking to the most unpleasant nationalistic perspectives that most people are left mute, bereft of any position of their own. As a consequence, if anything, nationalist discourse is externalised from the subjectivities of my informants – the state performs it for them, thereby replacing them as nationalist subjects.
However, one thing I really wanted to return to was an issue touched on only tangentially in the article – the distinction between patriotism and nationalism and the ‘classed’ nature of discourses around nationalism. Orwell’s 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism was an important reference point here. Orwell sees nationalism as a ‘moral’ failing in modern societies and as present in all individuals. At the same time he makes the case for a kind of positive identity politics of place that does not require an ‘other’ to justify and sustain itself. For him this is patriotism. What starts out looking like a leftist apology for patriotism actually comes closer to a sense of unstructured, yet embedded communitas. I am particularly influenced by Stephen Lutman’s article on Orwell and Patriotism, published in the Journal of Contemporary History in 1967. Not only Lutman has highlighted how Orwell describes patriotism as defensive, originating in a communitarian political posture where one’s origin culture is cherished, but not to the detriment of others. Lutman traces how Orwell’s essay is the culmination of a long process of his thinking about the left’s need to acknowledge the power of patriotism and thus begin to consider how to utilise it in the cause of social change (in 1945 when the essay was written, much of Orwell’s earlier optimism on this count had dissipated – by this point patriotism has been reduced to at best a kind of defence against totalitarianism).
Orwell contrasts patriotism to nationalism, which is often an ideological commitment that is intellectualised, yet not standing up to rational analysis – it is always negative because it is founded upon a commitment to competitive prestige. The most famous quote of the essay, actually relating to a leftist illusion runs as follows: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. ’ Orwell’s vision of patriotism can be compared to the idea of cultural intimacy proposed by Michael Herzfeld. And this may provide us with a way of thinking through Russian nationalism and patriotism today. That both the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects of group loyalty can be simultaneously present and ‘performed’ by people. This resonates with many of my encounters with my Russian research participants, both before and after the Ukraine conflict, and before and after the Russian state-controlled media ratcheted up nationalist rhetoric against the perceived enemies in the West. Ukraine and Ukrainians as an ‘object’ of xenophobia and chauvinism, mainly (although not exclusively) take on a minor aspect of the ‘everyday discourse’ of nationalism, despite the media propaganda’s attempts to the contrary.
I offer three examples (all of which are included in the article) of thinking about nationalism-patriotism in a more nuanced way. Firstly, a long-term low level badgering by a few (the minority) of working-class research participants which I term ‘political testing’. This include provocative statements about Russia’s ‘victimhood’ status in recent history: from accusations about Western delays in opening the second front in WWII, allegations of separate negotiations for peace with the Nazis, to more recent events like the bombing of Belgrade in 1999.
What did I really think about these things? I was prodded repeatedly, although usually in a relatively good-natured way. In the article I mainly focussed on this political talk, not as expressing nationalist views, but as a kind of invitation for acknowledging the traumatic Russian past, the often double-standards of the West in more recent history, and even, ethnographically speaking, asking me to acknowledge a kind of privileged positionality (I talk more about this in the article). Certainly, it does not relate to the now widely discussed ‘whataboutery’ of Russian discourse when presented with criticism (although I encounter a lot of that from some Russians). I’ve largely given up trying to engage with whataboutery – there’s a revealing anecdote about that in the article regarding Obama, Libya and Ukraine.
The second example is related – a kind of generalised resentment about the ‘post-communist compact’ in Russia that has mutated into what certainly looks like negative nationalism as Orwell’s terms it (anxiety about the loss of Russian/Soviet prestige). One informant – Sasha, a factory worker – in particular is frequently fervent in his ‘bury the west’ rhetoric and likes to fantasise about cutting off Russia’s gas supply to the whole of Europe (‘to see how you like it, when you’re begging us for a crust of bread’). Certainly, this fits a classic frame of analysis about nationalism as a response to decline. However, this is the same informant who despises the Russian government and insists on muting the television when any representative, including the president appears – ‘they don’t care about people like us’.
I call this response the ‘national patriot’ reaction to events. But how deeply does it go? One thing I’m interested in is how quickly a lot of analysis of current events seems to readily fall back into an adoption of a kind of uncritical acceptance of the old hypodermic needle effect of nationalistic rhetoric from the media. Sasha wasn’t particularly nationalistic before, so he seems to fit that model. However, he is the tiny minority. Overall, I’d say he, like many of my informants, is a patriot more than he is a nationalist (we’ll come back to Orwell in a moment). His problematic positioning does illustrate Paul Goode’s contention that every patriotism and nationalism are not easily distinguished and that one may easily transform into the other.
Third and final ethnographic example. This is a recent acquaintance and not really an informant. A Professor of Physics from Moscow with whom I had a number of arguments in the summer of 2014. His basic position was that Ukrainians were inferior to Russians and that Ukraine historically had never been a coherent nation, and was in the present undeserving of statehood. This intellectualising, (flawed and false) rationalising of national superiority and inferiority is at the heart of Orwell’s argument. My example nicely illustrates also how class difference may play a role; for Orwell, patriotism is largely unconscious, operating at the level of affect, whereas nationalism is a rationalising force – making it all the more dangerous and unpleasant.
Two further reflections are in order. The first is on the the role of the state as an agent in forming public opinion. The second is on the artefact of polling data. While naturally sceptical of the very concept of public opinion, we can note one thing – states can be effective in amplifying sentiments, but the roots of those sentiments may be diverse – resentment at decline, loss of prestige geopolitically, are perhaps the least problematic ‘nationalist’ levers brought to bear here. However, I’d like to pause for a moment to consider whether it’s really the case that Russians, even after all these amplifying and mobilising efforts, are more ‘nationalist-minded’ than other Europeans, or even Americans. Here I follow the lead taken by Edwin Bacon in his latest book ‘Inside Russian Politics’. There he points to how survey polling reveals very little difference in xenophobic sentiment between different countries. In fact his headline finding is that Russians are far more optimistic about the chances to avoid conflict than those in the West. On the topic of patriotism he also notes that polling reveals people in the US and UK as more strongly patriotic than Russians.
‘There must be a border!’ Danish People’s Party
A further look at some recent polling is even more revealing: Levada finds that in 2017 attitudes towards ‘foreigners living in Russia’ are the most positive since polling on this topic began (albeit only 13 years ago). As a proxy for ‘xenophobia’ this doesn’t sit well with a view on a sustained upsurge in nationalism. 54% think there should be limits on foreigners’ rights to live in Russia (in 2013 it was 81%). In the UK and US these figures are significantly higher. In my own country of residence, Denmark, the second biggest political party believes in a kind of immutable ethnic purity for the Danes, and around 50% of people don’t believe immigrants should enjoy equal rights. Back to Russia, but this time on ‘external enemies’. If in 2014 84% thought Russia had external enemies, now that figure is falling somewhat (in 2016 it was 68%). More encouragingly, 30% of respondents think that ‘talk of enemies is pursued by the authorities in order to frighten people’.
I hesitate to say that polling really tells us much about actually-existing, let alone ‘everyday’ nationalism. Certainly the amplifying effect can be measured, as I’ve said earlier. But what exactly is being amplified? Here I would return, tentatively to the idea that it is as much about a generalised resentment, disillusionment about the whole processes of social and political change in the last three decades in Russia, as it is about nationalism. Yes, some of this can be redirected towards external enemies, and yes, a lot of this resentment can be easily amplified thanks to the real hypocrisy of the ‘West’ in matters geopolitical.
Another way of saying this is to think of ‘nationalism’ as a ‘social fact’ in the same way Durkheim examined suicide. But Durkheim was wrong. His social fact of suicide turned out to be an artefact of different ways of recording deaths, rather than the ‘real’ meaning and causes of suicide itself. It is the same with nationalism – we should be careful of not mistaking state-discourses for ‘everyday’ nationalism and patriotism, which may turn out to be something quite different. (Of course banal nationalism is another story, but something I’ve written about elsewhere).
What I’m not trying to do here is downplay the significance of the increase in nationalist propaganda at all levels propagated by the Russian state – from schools, to television, to the highest level of government itself. Indeed it was that elite-directed signalling that prompted my interest. What I hope to draw attention to is how it is problematic to impute a clear transmission belt effect to so-called ‘ordinary’ Russians, who are usually more than sophisticated enough to see they are being hailed in a particular way. Again, Paul Goode’s focus-group and interview research on this topic back that up. Secondly, I draw attention to a fact that I’m sure my political science colleagues wish to stress themselves – that this is a clearly conscious elite strategy of chauvinism and xenophobia.
Surkov in suitable company
Indeed, there appears to be evidence that a lot of the Ukraine ‘adventure’ and its attendant rhetoric is associated with a particular individual – Vladislav Surkov. A better example of the arrogant intellectual one would struggle to find in Russia today. Recall the Orwellian reference point again: ‘one would have to be an intellectual to believe that…’. Surkov also strikes me as being a good example of the salience of the other point I wish to make – patriotism versus nationalism. Surkov wears his sophistication, dare I say it given the associations of the word, ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a badge of honour. Now, as the chief ‘theatre-maker’ of Russian politics, it’s not difficult to imagine that while having a vivid understanding of the meaning and potential for nationalist rhetoric, he would struggle to understand everyday Russian patriotism, as expressed by the kind of people in my research, and as distinct from nationalism. I can’t help but imagine he would react cynically to my position here. Any maybe that would just prove my point.
‘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.
‘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’?”).
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.
‘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.
No comment
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.
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.
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.
‘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!’.
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.
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!’
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.
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.
‘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’.
‘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.
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.
The result was a conference paper given in St Petersburg in May summarising many of the issues in my three papers on new independent trade unions, co-authored with Sarah Hinz in Post-Communist Economies, The European Journal of Industrial Relations, and forthcoming for Berghahn. I also reworked many ideas for a paper for JWCS which I hope will come out soon. In this post I will try to summarise the main points and the ideas that came out of interacting with union activists and scholars at St Petersburg.
The CfP from the journal asks contributors to evaluate the argument that a global revolt is occurring against establishment systems of governance. Given this is a US-focused journal, I chose to contextualise the Russian working-classes long ‘patience’ in the 1990s, despite disorganised resistance from miners and others against Yeltsin. I used Paul Christensen’s ‘Labor Under Putin’ as an excellent summary to contextualise the difference between Russia and the US over the last 25 years.
‘It is fair to speak of wholesale deindustrialisation; industrial production is still only 85% of its 1990 level and seven million industrial jobs have been lost (Christensen 2016). This is a 16% fall in the industrial labour force, in contrast to the US, where 4.5 million jobs were lost in the same period – or a 5% fall (ibid). It is often thought that the experience of postcommunist transition meant mass unemployment, but it more resembles the slow loss of industrial lifeblood as enterprises used natural wastage or fired women to reduce headcounts (unemployment reached a high only in 1998 at 14%). The massive destruction in the purchasing power of incomes is much more keenly felt in the living memory of working people. People cannot forget the real terms reduction of those incomes as they were left unindexed throughout the high-inflation 1990s and early 2000s, and in some insolvent firms workers were affected by long-term wage arrears. This is important in the present, as Russians face a similar downturn in purchasing power of incomes after the sustained oil price fall in 2014 and other factors such as the Ukraine crisis.’
I concluded this section by comparing the ‘end of patience’ in Russia (people ‘endured’ the 1990s, and felt that ‘waiting’ had ended in the early 2000s) to that described in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on the US context (2016). The rejection of political-business-as-usual has led to Trump’s victory there, but even in Russia, there are limits to the authoritarian state’s capacity to defuse discontent based on injustice and inequality indefinitely, particularly at a time where these issues can only grow worse and become more visible. Patience may be a working-class virtue, but it is not a renewable resource.
The second half of the paper asks whether, given the growing labour protests in Russia since the late 2000s (on which Petr Bizyukov presented and has widely written), these sporadic and unorganised disputes can grow into anything more than annoyances for employers and the government to be picked off, one by one. At first I wrote a draft where I pondered on the existence of an ‘event horizon’, beyond which mass protests at falls in living standards might occur (patience is exhausted). (Bizyukov’s previous data on protest to 2015 is below)
Just like the press in the US and UK, mainstream Russia-watchers largely ignore the ‘pauperisation’ of society, so it’s worth underscoring the kind of poverty many Russians face. I am in debt to a colleague who pointed out some survey data that supports my own ethnographic fieldwork materials: Centre for Economic and Political Reform’s report on living standards in Russia today. I used this data along with others’ to make the claim that today, because of stoppages due to falling demand, and compounded by currency devaluation, many Russian workers are experiencing the worst reduction in standards of living in living memory. Indeed, they are pushed back into almost third-world levels of subsistence. 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 (TsEPR 2016: 5).
In the final draft of the paper, however, I deleted the references to ‘event horizons’ as pompous and difficult to justify. Instead I focused on the likelihood of a ‘coalescence’ of labour, political and social protest leading to regime transformation. This was based on what I heard from union activists and others in St Petersburg, but what does coalescence mean?
The participants noted the maturing of the union movement, where people expect more from employers and employers are correspondingly more responsive to the needs and demands of workers – where there are active unions, of course. Viacheslav Zhuiko stressed the division in workplaces now between those who are experiencing wage arrears and the rest underlining that where unions are present, employers now have to listen to demands. Karine Clément stressed that today we observe a sharper articulation of the distinction between the haves and have-nots in society. Petr Bizyukov highlighted the way labour protests today in Russia are always rooted in the ‘right to dialogue’ of workers.
In her writing Clément notes that many ordinary people who participate in local and less ‘organised’ protests ‘have no previous activist experience, and may even have held negative attitudes towards activism and collective action before becoming involved’ (Clément 2015: 212). The same is true of labour protests such as the long distance truckers’ dispute in 2015 and its ’round two’ this year. This is one meaning of convergence-as-coalescence – the growing politicisation of protest that becomes a virtuous circle as people’s confidence in their right to a dignified life grows as does their realisation that economic and social problems have political roots. Petr Bizyukov illustrated this really well in his talk that touched on the Truckers’ protests, which started out as ‘patriotic’ and avoided blaming Putin, but which rapidly lost its political naiveté.
Another key participant of the conference, Aleksandr Bikbov highlights the common themes of protest in Russia as attempts to activate ‘dignity’ and a sense of ‘collective autonomy’. This also gives cause to think that convergence and coalescence between disparate groups – say political protesters of the Navalnyi ilk, and, say, people protesting the destruction of Soviet-era housing in Moscow (motivated by corruption and private profit), could make common cause.
After I had written the second draft, the UK elections gave me further cause to ponder the appropriateness of the term ‘coalescence’. David Timoney scathingly notes that the UK press were unable to ‘locate Labour voters’ until late in the day. It’s obvious why – there is now a startling disconnect between even the erstwhile centre-left press – represented by The Guardian – and the reality of Britain. It’s very telling that this newspaper spent most of the last two years supporting the line that a moderate leftist set of policies were impossible to sell to the electorate. In the end it seems clear that voters from all over the UK came back to Labour at least partly because of the effects of the Conservative government’s austerity policies on healthcare, education, and other public services. Timoney notes that the ‘meta-story across the country is the return of substantive social and economic policy to the heart of political debate’. Can we see this as a coalescence of the concerns of different generations, classes, even? I would hope the answer is yes. Like in Russia, there is a limit to the degree to which people are willing to see their living standards eroded and essential public services gutted. At the heart of this, I would argue, lie the values of ‘dignity’. When politics assumes that the arrogance and callousness needs no window dressing, sooner or later we get the ‘coalescence’ of affronted dignity that transcends people’s ordinary political prejudices. Perhaps the same is possible in Russia. Without meaningful political party vehicles, activating, channelling and enacting Bibkov’s ‘collective autonomy’ is the hard part.
Petr Bizyukov had another interesting comment to make: in answering a question about revolutionary activity arising from Labour protest, the former tool maker and long-time researcher of labour disputes, said ‘be careful what you wish for. I’ve seen these guys up close and they don’t take any prisoners [referring to the Donbas coal miners’ underground strikes in the 1990s]. As a coda, I strongly recommend Petr’s recent work. He’s written on the increasing rate of ‘impatient’ and spontaneous labour protest, that bear witness to people’s despair. He’s also written comprehensively here about precaritisation through informalisation of employment here.
Postsocialism 