Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

2008-12-17

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Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253002575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

2009

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Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

Everyday Post-Socialism

2016-09-01

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Author: Jeremy Morris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349950890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

Everyday Life in Russia

2015-01-29

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Author: Choi Chatterjee
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253012600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and “a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture” (The Russian Review). In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored. “Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the ‘state of play’ of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia.” —Slavic Review “An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a ‘must’ read for anyone seriously interested in the subject.” —Cahiers du Monde russe

Crises in the Post‐Soviet Space

2018-06-13

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Author: Felix Jaitner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351234447
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

The breakup of the Soviet Union led to the creation of new states and territorial conflicts of different levels of intensity. Scrutinising the post‐Soviet period, this volume offers explanations for both the frequency and the intensity of crises in the region. This book argues that the societies which emerged in the post-Soviet space share characteristic features, and that the instability and conflict-prone nature of the Soviet Union’s successor states can be explained by analysing the post-independence history of the region and linking it to the emergence of overlapping economic, political and violent crises (called 'Intersecting Crises Phenomena’). Transformation itself is shown to be a decisive process and, while acknowledging specific national and regional characteristics and differences, the authors demonstrate its shared impact. This comparison across countries and over time presents patterns of crisis and crisis management common to all the successor states. It disentangles the process, highlighting the multifaceted features of post-Soviet crises and draws upon the concept of crisis to determine the tipping points of post-Soviet development. Especially useful for scholars and students dealing with the Soviet successor states, this book should also prove interesting to those researching in the fields of communist and post‐communist Studies, Eurasian politics, international relations and peace and conflict studies.

The Old Faith and the Russian Land

2016-02-04

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Author: Douglas Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801459192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical-in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities-about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation-have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

Identity and Nation Building in Everyday Post-Socialist Life

2017-07-31

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Author: Abel Polese
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351735438
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

This book explores the function of the “everyday” in the formation, consolidation and performance of national, sub-national and local identities in the former socialist region. Based on extensive original research including fieldwork, the book demonstrates how the study of everyday and mundane practices is a meaningful and useful way of understanding the socio-political processes of identity formation both at the top and bottom level of a state. The book covers a wide range of countries including the Baltic States, Ukraine, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and considers “everyday” banal practices, including those related to consumption, kinship, embodiment, mobility, music, and the use of objects and artifacts. Overall, the book draws on, and contributes to, theory; and shows how the process of nation-building is not just undertaken by formal actors, such as the state, its institutions and political elites.

What Remains

2017-08-29

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Author: Jonathan Bach
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544308
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts. Bach juxtaposes four sites where the stakes of the everyday appear: products commodified as nostalgia, amateur museums dedicated to collecting everyday life under socialism, the "people's palace" that captured the national imagination through its destruction, and the feared and fetishized Berlin Wall. Moving from the local, the intimate, and the small to the national, the impersonal, and the large, this book's interpenetrating chapters show the unexpected social and political force of the ordinary in the production of memory. What Remains offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity, contributing to new understandings of postsocialism and the intricate intersection of material remains and memory.

Saving the Sacred Sea

2018-03-01

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Author: Kate Pride Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190660961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

"Civil society" is a loaded concept in Russia; during the Soviet period, the voices that heralded civil society were the same ones that demanded the Union's dissolution. So, for the Kremlin, civil society is not the guarantor of democracy, but a force that has the power to end governments. This book looks at how civil society negotiates power on a global stage, under Russia's authoritarian regime, and in a particularly isolated and remote part of the world: within environmental activism around Lake Baikal in Siberia. More than a mile deep, Lake Baikal is the oldest, deepest, and most voluminous lake on the Earth, and home to thousands of endemic species. It is also ecologically unique in that it is oxygenated to its maximum depth and supports life even at the lake floor -- a phenomenon occurring nowhere else on the planet. The lake is not just a natural wonder, but home to a strong environmentalist community that works tirelessly to protect the lake from human harm. Environmentalism at Baikal began in the late 1950s, eventually igniting the first national protest in the USSR. They have remained active in some form ever since, across the years of chaos, instability, and crisis, from the opening of Russia to the forces of globalization to the authoritarianism of Putin in the present. This book examines the struggle of Baikal environmentalists to develop a new understanding of civil society under conditions of globalization and authoritarianism. Through extended, historically-informed ethnographic analysis, Kate Pride Brown argues that civil society is engaged with political and economic elites in a dynamic struggle within a field of power. Understanding the field of power helps to explain a number of contradictions. For example, why does civil society seem to both bolster democracy and threaten it? Why do capitalist corporations and environmental organizations form partnerships despite their general hostility toward each other? And why has democracy proven to be so elusive in Russia? The field of power posits new answers to these questions, as Baikal environmental activists struggle to protect and save their Sacred Sea.

Rethinking Class in Russia

2016-04-08

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Author: Suvi Salmenniemi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317064399
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Social differentiation, poverty and the emergence of the newly rich occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union have seldom been analysed from a class perspective. Rethinking Class in Russia addresses this absence by exploring the manner in which class positions are constructed and negotiated in the new Russia. Bringing an ethnographic and cultural studies approach to the topic, this book demonstrates that class is a central axis along which power and inequality are organized in Russia, revealing how symbolic, cultural and emotional dimensions are deeply intertwined with economic and material inequalities. Thematically arranged and presenting the latest empirical research, this interdisciplinary volume brings together work from both Western and Russian scholars on a range of spheres and practices, including popular culture, politics, social policy, consumption, education, work, family and everyday life. By engaging with discussions in new class analysis and by highlighting how the logic of global neoliberal capitalism is appropriated and negotiated vis-à-vis the Soviet hierarchies of value and worth, this book offers a multifaceted and carefully contextualized picture of class relations and identities in contemporary Russia and makes a contribution to the theorisation of class and inequality in a post-Cold War era. As such it will appeal to those with interests in sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, gender studies, Russian and Eastern European studies, and media and cultural studies.