Tag Archives: Shevchenko

Five landmark sociology and anthropology books to help understand Russia

A comment to a previous post asked the question: “Could you please indicate 10 or so best anthropological and/or sociological books which explain the current state of affairs in Russia?”

The question implies a need for books with political insight, which is a matter of debate. In this post I’ll stick to books in English since 2005, and which had a considerable amount of fieldwork behind them (broadly understood). In my view there many other deserving recent books that could make this list. There are also many which are not in English and not characterized by significant fieldwork but which are equally important; they might appear in a further post. The aim here is just a quick and dirty list for readers unfamiliar with this terrain. All these books are, in my view, interesting and accessible to educated general readers and give a diverse flavour of engaged and embedded research carried out in (and sometimes before) the ‘Putin era’.

Georgi M. Derluguian. 2005. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography. Chicago University Press.

Derluguian, by force of intellectual personality, manages to combine micro-level insights with ambitious theorizing and historicizing. Today, his book seems prophetic because it warned of the effects of a dangerous vacuum after the curtain fell on the ‘most successful example of a state-directed effort to industrialize in order to catch up with the West’. After 1991, two reactive strategies were unleashed – corrupt patronage that defeated and demoralized groups who sought to develop civil society and democracy, and secondly, the mobilization of ethnic and religious solidarities as forms of ‘resistance’ from below.

The blurb for this book is unusual for an academic tract in that its promise of a ‘gripping account of the developmental dynamics of Soviet collapse’ is no exaggeration. While ostensibly telling the story of a prominent leader in the Chechen revolution, its portrait of the overlooked underclass of the Soviet project is memorable. Correctly emphasizing the role of employment-related benefits as socially-cohesive in Soviet times, Derluguian details the subproletarians ‘exit’ from society. Rather than take ethnic strife at face value, the author sees this third class as opportunistically mobilized to fight in the many conflicts of the post-Soviet space. At the end of the book he writes:

“How does one operationalize in research the residual category of “no-longer-peasants” that variously goes by the names of “Street,” “marginals,” “subaltern peoples,” “crowds,” “underclass,” “adolescent gangs,” “lumpens,” or, very broadly and negatively, “de-ruralized populations”? Bourdieu’s discussion of the Algerian sub-proletariat demonstrated ways of meaningfully incorporating in our analyses this most awkward of all classes – a class that is increasingly important, both numerically and politically, in the contemporary world.”

For Derluguian, the theory of so-called “ethnic conflicts” formulated in the book centres on class, state, and social networks rather than nationalism or identity: ‘the revived evocation of traditional moral communities tends to scapegoat competing ethnic groups, weak and corrupt local governments, and, increasingly, the common enemy that is American “global plutocracy.”’

Olga Shevchenko. 2009. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

This is a book my students read, and I would recommend to anyone who really wants to get a feel for the sense of insecurity experienced in the 1990s and how it was formative of so many currents in today’s society. Shevchenko’s work is universally praised for capturing a genuine ‘zeitgeist’ of insecurity and uncertainty. ‘Crisis’ is a governing and everyday feeling about life in late 1990s Moscow. Like in Walter Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History, the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. One of the first metaphors used by residents is that of ‘living on a volcano’. Shevchenko focusses on continual efforts of people to cultivate practical autonomy and independence (from each other and from the state). Crisis becomes a symbolic resource for people who default to cynicism.

“one’s capacity to disengage oneself from all things public became a value in itself, a value manifested not only in practical actions of economic self-provisioning, but also in the position postsocialist subjects took on a variety of issues, from media to voting to history. It was through stating this detachment that one could provide evidence of one’s personal evolution by juxtaposing it to one’s substantially more engaged and idealistic reactions a few years earlier”

It’s easy to see how the ‘deterioration’ discourse had long-term effects that are still operative – inhibition towards forms of civic involvement and ‘defensive’ institutions anathema to the ideal of the public sphere; the strength of the message from the centre that only a ‘power vertical’ can ensure a hard won ‘stability’. The book should really be read alongside Shevchenko’s penetrating shorter pieces on post-Soviet subjecthood: “Resisting Resistance” (on internalized neoliberal ideology), and “The politics of nostalgia” (with M. Nadkarni) both from 2015.

Douglas Rogers. 2015. The depths of Russia: oil, power, and culture after socialism. Cornell University Press.

Rogers is something of an undersung hero in Russian Studies because his work is so broad-ranging and interdisciplinary, while retaining an uncompromising anthropological sensibility. In his book on Ural oil companies and the local and regional state, Rogers admits that his story of the success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as part of neoliberal governance will ‘horrify many proponents of civil society building’ because it will be read as ‘co-optation’ and ‘hijacking’ of NGOs into the service of the Putin-era centralization of state building (grant-giving as ‘infrastructure’, the state as a ‘social customer’). Far from accepting this normative framework and interpretation, Rogers provokes the reader to think anthropologically about social organization beyond ‘civil society’ as a loaded and sometimes meaningless symbol. Corporations and state are interpenetrated nowhere more effectively as in social responsibility work by big oil. CSR serves in Russia as a powerful multidimensional metacoordination of society and state, while retaining the informal elements of network clientelism that typify political relationships.

Rogers’ book is also of interest to those interested in the history of Sergey Kiriyenko’s emerging reputation as a so-called political technologist. His success in ‘remaking the policies and procedures of Russian governance for a new, more centralized time’ were laid down during his time as plenipotentiary of the Volga Federal District (which includes Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, and Perm Krai) and are now on display in occupied Ukraine.

Julie Hemment. 2015. Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

How does the state co-opt and incorporate youth in Russia? It must involve more than deception or simply better social advantage for youth participating gin state youth projects. The value of Hemment’s ethnographic engagement with students, educators and project leaders lies in the challenge it presents to binary oppositions like ‘oppression/resistance’, ‘truth/lies’, ‘authentic/inauthentic’ as it pertains to the social and political life of young people.

Projects mobilizing young people and sponsored by the state link to a genuine appeal around reviving the Soviet past, democratic initiatives in the 1990s, and global forms of youth projects today. The book is also a model of the collaborative method between western researchers and Russian colleagues, something that regrettably remains overshadowed by a publishing model that hides, as much as reveals, the dependence by Western-based researchers on Russian academic partners.

“Rather than docile subjects that follow the state line, young people emerge as active agents that adapt participation in these projects to their own ends, showing a range of various motivations to participate and engage with them.” – one review wrote.

Rustamjon Urinboyev 2021. Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia. University of California Press. [open access]

Urinboyev, in this short book covering the period 2014-2018, achieves many things much longer and laborious works do not: he creates an enticingly vivid ethnographic portrait of Central Asian workers’ lives in Moscow in their interactions with each other and Russians; he undertakes an all too rare ‘translocal’ and transnational research project by following money remittances back to Uzbekistan and showing the social, as well as economic consequences of them there, as well as a boomerang effect back to Moscow.

Moreover, the book is also about the gradations of migrant legalization and ‘adaptation’ in Russia, with lively portraits of the difference between ‘fake’, ‘clean fake’, and ‘almost clean’ residence registrations and work permits, as well as the trade in passports. Migrants are co-producers of new forms of legal order and informal governance in Russia – they are not passive. Weak rule of law and corrupt police provide opportunities as much as obstacles. Urinboyev gets up-close and personal to his research subjects and his book is full of humour and humanity.

What do we mean when we talk about studying ‘the everyday’ in Russia?

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contested use of public-space, forms of consumption, strengthening weak-ties – a lot happens in ‘everyday life’.

I have an admission to make. Even though my book was called Everyday Postsocialism, while I was writing it I did not reflect much on the term ‘everyday’.

Part of this is perhaps forgivable. The logic of the book was pretty clear – to understand today’s Russia we should for a moment look away from the ‘big politics’ that dominate research agendas and the media, and turn instead to how ordinary people go about their lives. Fundamentally, my project was, and continues to be: how do we avoid making Russians into passive victims of change? At the same time, their responses should not be reduced to defensive strategies of survival. That’s why I entitled my first article on the topic ‘beyond coping’ [authors version here].

A useful guiding idea came from Michael Burawoy’s complaint here [pdf opens automatically]: “Whereas in their earlier writings they focused on the ingenuity of the subaltern classes in coping with socialism, the way workers and peasants challenged and transformed state socialism in the microprocesses of everyday life, Szelenyi and Stark now turn to the elites engineering embryonic capitalisms. Their analyses exclude subordinate classes, which in effect become the bewildered—silent and silenced—spectators of transformations that engulf them”. This was part of a review on Making Capitalism without Capitalists.

Recently, I was forced to confront the ‘everyday life’ usage a bit more explicitly because I decided to focus in some teaching on ‘everyday life’ with a group of undergraduates preparing for fieldwork and language study in Russia. Preparing for this made the genealogy of my own thinking about the everyday clearer.

Of course, when it comes to informing undergraduates, I thought that it was important to start with a reading of the term byt – a term in Russian for ‘everyday existence’ that has a long and troublesome genealogy. The word helps explain the longstanding Russian intellectual interest in contrasting ‘everyday life’ (as frustratingly meaningless or mundane routines) with more ‘essential’ modes of being and action

Svetlana Boym traced the binary opposition of byt and podvig (‘feat’) in the nineteenth century. This includes the binaries action/sacred/spiritual as opposed to private life/practical achievement. Thus byt as a negative, maps on to (self-orientalising) notions of Russia’s civilizational ‘difference’ (think of the opposition of ‘spirituality’ to Western individualism/rationality). This was easily adapted to the USSR context – ‘feats of labour’, ideologization of everyday life to be always about something ‘bigger’, mobilisation and militarisation of social action, ‘struggle’, ‘storming’, the ideological disapproval of privacy, ‘bourgeois’ personal interest, etc.

As a key reading I asked to students to read in parallel Catriona Kelly’s ‘Byt: identity and everyday life’ in National Identity in Russian Culture, and Olga Shevchenko’s ‘Building Autonomy in Everyday Life’ in her Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. I will come back to these texts in a further post. But for now I want to return to my own pathway towards seeing the everyday as worthy of research.

It starts with my literary studies on a writer, Evgeny Popov, using ‘naturalistic’ depiction of everyday life in the late Soviet Union to work against the grain of ideologically correct meanings of art and literature. At times his focus on the mundane and humdrum, as well as ‘lay existentialism’, for want of a better phrase, borders on the absurd. In some ways there is a debt to Chekhov, and I found both Cathy Popkin’s book, The Pragmatics of Insignificance and Stephen Hutchings’ Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday, really useful in understanding this. Key characteristics in Popov are inconsequential detail (‘incidentality’), natural, earthy speech (a taboo in Soviet literary fiction), the ‘grimy’ and gritty underside of urban life, something like raznochintsy of the late Soviet period (people of indeterminate social standing who struggle to articulate themselves).

It’s perhaps no surprise that my subsequent ethnographic work owes a debt to the dialogue between Chekhov and Popov. A snippet from my book on Popov proves surprisingly predictive of the tension in my ethnographic materials: Chekhov switches attention from ‘the major to the minor in order to bring out the hidden significance of the trivial incident; its rhetoric is still part and parcel of a modernist search for meaning, opting for the possible revelation of truth within the ‘prosaic’. In Popov, the revelatory mode is entirely absent. […] the shift itself from significant to insignificant fails to yield up a narrative perspective that would illuminate the prosaic.’

It’s kind of funny reading that now. The ‘failure to yield a perspective’ chimes with some critical responses I got to my first ethnographic book published 12 years after my literary PhD. Certain ‘big picture’ expectations of ethnographic studies of contemporary Russia proved a problem for the publisher I wanted to go with for Everyday Postsocialism. One MS reader really, really didn’t like my approach, writing rather brutally:

‘The author avers, almost proudly, a lack of a scientific approach for this work, by rejecting the need to work from an hypothesis. That’s ok. Interpretation is still de rigeur in many anthropological circles and his commitment to recounting lived experience in holistic manner is quite reasonable. However, despite this claim, the ms makes frequent and broad theoretical generalizations…. there are no data here.’

The Reader expanded, saying that fundamentally my framing of everyday life in the Russian town as ‘habitability’ added little or nothing new to the literature – essentially it was a mundane observation that was self-evident – people make do in their difficult circumstance. However, I would argue that that was precisely the aim of the book – to bring out and give voice to ordinariness – even the mundaneness but also deeper meaning of quite extreme things like alcoholism, family conflicts, the black economy, and fragile infrastructure (blackouts/heating failures). I hope to come back to other postsocialist treatments of ‘the everyday’ soon and talk about how they uneasily sit with the literature on ‘resistance’ – something Olga Shevchenko writes about.

I chose ‘habitability’ as my master concept precisely because it was the one term that was ‘emic’ – i.e. that ordinary Russian people continuously used themselves via comments like feeling secure and safe in their ‘среда обитания’ or saying ‘нам хватает’. In the book I talked about it as “a hotchpotch of practices made ‘on the fly’, but which are informed by long-standing class-based values and allegiances”. Stressing mundane practices as making life more than bearable was part of a “propertizing of marginal spaces in a way that allows the maintenance and expansion of the horizontal social network”; Habitability was also connected to “expectation of minimal social insurance indirectly though social wages and its post-socialist echo.” My first MS reader really didn’t like all the heavy lifting this term was doing. We could have a long conversation here about the communication difficulties between anthropologists and sociologists! Certainly I was guilty of overuse and under-explanation of various theories.

However, I think ‘habitability’ does work in bringing out what I mean when I use the term ‘everyday’ too. It links the economic to the moral to the social to the ordinary logics of how people go about their everyday business. It also then helps reveal aspects of political culture and how they might change over time. We’re back to the question of passivity. Everyday life in my fieldwork was partly about a kind of ‘always on’, networked class-based sociality – it was a lot of partially unprompted ‘dropping in’ on others and also calling up, and ‘nudge’ social media use. This in turn was strongly linked to developing opportunities in the informal economy to reduce reliance on waged work. The nature of both waged work and the forced informal scrabbling for a dime was linked to ideas about dignity, injustice, state-society relations, governance, taxation, corruption, and so on in melting pot of ordinary thinking through of the nature of Russia’s political economy. And everyday practices were both a response to that, but also examples of agency.

The most enlightening new thing I read in preparing for teaching ‘the everyday’ was by David Ransel. He suggests that to avoid a narrowly reactive ‘tactics of resistance’ approach (something criticised by Olga Shevchenko in the same volume), it might be more useful to think, via the work on Yuri Lotman, of the everyday as not only practices but of the building of a local language to describe reality – a kind of domestication and re-shaping of hegemonic meanings. Ransel ends that section with a useful piece of advice: “everyday life studies must be more than good local history. They have to show how local action modifies our understanding of macrohistorical processes”.