Small-Town Russia: Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities: (Basees Routledgecurzon Series on Russian and East European Studies, 12)

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Small-Town Russia

After providing a detailed overview of economic and social trends in Russia since 1991, and the enormous diversity of experience both across and within Russia’s 89 regions, Small-Town Russia focuses on social change within three communities in different regions. All three towns have been hard hit by unemployment and falling real wages; private sectors are small and inhabitants have a sense of being marooned in the Soviet past, with the fruits of ‘transition’ reserved for neighbouring cities. The book examines the impact of these developments, asking, for example, what types of household are poor; how people survived when they were not paid for months on end; whether Russians have ‘survival strategies’ and, if so, how these are gendered. It discusses why many Russian men die in middle age, exploring the links between economic depression, stress, self-image and social networks. It also investigates whether those networks, and community spirit in general, are weakening; whether there is a new ‘middle class’ emerging in the small towns; whether regional identities are becoming stronger; and how far ethnic Russians have developed a sense of ‘Russianness’ since the creation of the Russian Federation in 1992. The answers to such questions are usually sought from national data or from research among Russian city dwellers. This book is original in that it offers an entirely different perspective, based on 141 interviews in small towns. On a theoretical level, the book’s originality lies in its juxtaposition of the concepts of identities and livelihood strategies. It is intended as a contribution to the small but growing body of literature which emphasizes that even the apparent ‘victims of transition’ maintain identities as coping individuals. Anne White is Senior Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, University of Bath.

BASEES/RoutledgeCurzon series on Russian and East European studies 12 Series editor: Richard Sakwa Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent

Editorial Committee George Blazyca Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley Terry Cox Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Rosalind Marsh Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath David Moon Department of History, University of Strathclyde Hilary Pilkington Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Stephen White Department of Politics, University of Glasgow This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality, research-level work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and social science subjects. 1 Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000 Roman Wolczuk 2 Political Parties in the Russian Regions Derek S. Hutcheson 3 Local Communities and Post-communist Transformation Edited by Simon Smith 4 Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe J.C. Sharman 5 Political Elites and the New Russia Anton Steen 6 Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness Sarah Hudspith 7 Performing Russia – Folk Revival and Russian Identity Laura J. Olson

8 Russian Transformations Edited by Leo McCann 9 Soviet Music and Society Under Lenin and Stalin The baton and sickle Edited by Neil Edmunds 10 State Building in Ukraine The Ukranian parliament, 1990–2003 Sarah Whitmore 11 Defending Human Rights in Russia Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 Emma Gilligan 12 Small-Town Russia Postcommunist livelihoods and identities A portrait of the intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000 Anne White

Small-Town Russia Postcommunist livelihoods and identities A portrait of the intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000

Anne White

First published 2004 by RoutledgeCurzon 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 Anne White All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-44860-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67986-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–33874–3 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of figures List of maps List of tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1

ix xiii xv xvii 1

Socio-economic and demographic trends in Russia and its regions

18

Characteristics of small towns across Russia: sub-regional variation in living standards and population trends

55

3

The fieldwork towns and their regions

76

4

State-sector employees: the new poor

92

5

Livelihood strategies

107

6

The intelligentsia, the ‘middle class’ and social stratification

142

7

Civil society and politics

166

8

Multiple identities: local, regional, ethnic and national

187

Conclusions

203

2

viii

Contents

Appendix 1: the interview schedule Appendix 2: household composition, livelihoods and identities – five case studies

213

Notes Bibliography Index

221 251 269

217

Figures

0.1 1.1

1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19

Percentage of total Russian urban population residing in differently-sized settlements, 2000 Goskomstat calculated revised percentages of population with personal money incomes below subsistence minimum, Russia 1992–2002 Square metres new housing per 1,000 population, 1990–9 Recorded crimes per 100,000 population, 1990–2000 Private sector share in GDP, 1991–9 Real wages, Russian average, 1989–99 Wages as per cent of subsistence minimum, selected sectors, 1999 Survey-based estimated unemployment rate in Russia, 1992–2002 Survey-based estimated unemployment rates in Russia, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver, 1992–2001 Percentage share of Russian agricultural output produced on household plots, 1985 and 2001 Average per capita consumption of foodstuffs in 1999 Rate of natural population increase in Russia, 1990–2001 Birth- and deathrates in Russia, 1990–2001 Life expectancy, 1987–2003 Death from suicides, murders and alcohol poisoning per million population, 1990–2001 Life expectancy in town and village, Tver Region, 1990–2000 Alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 population, Tver Region, 1985–2000 Immigrants into Russia from the Near Abroad, 1990–2001 Components of Russian population change, 1989–2002 Net migration into Russian macroregions, 1979–88 and 1991–6

13

21 24 28 31 32 32 34 35 38 39 40 40 42 42 43 43 44 44 46

x

Figures

1.20 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population, 1990–2001 1.21 Children born to unmarried mothers, as percentage of all births, 1970–2000 1.22 Profiles of three southern and eastern macroregions in 1999/2000, using six demographic indicators, as in Table 1.8 1.23 Profiles of six central European/Ural macroregions in 1999/2000, using six demographic indicators, as in Table 1.8 2.1 Percentage of Russians never using a personal computer 2.2 Percentage of Russians considering ‘moral crisis’ to be among the most serious of Russian social problems 2.3 Percentage of ‘most depressed’ districts in each population band in six regions 2.4 Recorded crimes per 10,000 population, regional averages, capitals and depressed areas, 2000 2.5 Russian towns, banded by size of population: 2000 population as percentage of 1989 2.6 Migration within Russia in 1999: place of origin and destination of migrants from and out of the average region 3.1 Rural population as percentage of total regional population, 2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 3.2 ‘GRP’ per capita, rubles, 2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 3.3 Money incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum, 1999, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 3.4 Percentage of population with personal incomes below the subsistence minimum, 1999, Russia and Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 3.5 Answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Achit 3.6 Positive answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Bednodemyanovsk 3.7 Disparaging answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Bednodemyanovsk 3.8 Town populations, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1989 and 2000 4.1 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Zubtsov, April 1999 4.2 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Bednodemyanovsk, spring-summer 2000 4.3 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Achit, September 2000 4.4 Regional subsistence minimum, Achit average monthly wage and wages by sector, Achit, September 2000

48 48 51 51 57 57 59 67 71 73 77 77 77

80 81 82 82 86 99 99 100 100

Figures xi 5.1

Migration within Sverdlovsk Region, number of changes of residence, 1989–98 5.2 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population in Bednodemyanovsk town, 1990–9 5.3 Divorces per 1,000 population at the beginning and end of the 1990s, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov 5.4 Marriages per 1,000 population at the beginning and end of the 1990s, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov 6.1 Occupations of respondents’ husbands 6.2 Occupations of wives of respondents in intelligentsia/ government jobs 6.3 Occupation of wives labelled ‘intelligentsia’ in Figure 6.2 6.4 Number of visits to theatre and number of professional theatres in Russia, 1985–99 6.5 Number of visits to theatre in Tver and Penza Regions, 1990–8/2000 6.6 Number of ‘cultural and leisure institutions’ (houses of culture, clubs, etc.), Russia, Penza and Tver Regions, 1990–8/1999 7.1 Answers to question ‘Do people participate less in community life?’ 7.2 Print runs of Nash put’ (Achit) Vestnik and Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 1990 and 1999 7.3 Percentage of votes for state farm chair Surov, headteacher Krylov and entrepreneur Shmelev in district head of administration elections, Zubstov District, 1996 7.4 Duma election results by district, December 1993 8.1 The three most ‘outstanding regional personalities’

124 128 129 129 147 147 147 156 156

157 168 176

180 181 193

Maps

0.1 The three small towns and their regions 1.1 Poverty trajectories, 1994–9, central European Russia and Urals 1.2 Regions with stable and growing populations, 1989–2002, central European Russia and Urals 1.3 Total of rankings for 1999 purchasing power, poverty levels and per capita ‘GRP’ in central European/Ural regions 2.1 Most prosperous and depressed locations in Kirov Region 2.2 Most prosperous and depressed locations in Sverdlovsk Region 2.3 Most and least crime-ridden locations in Komi Republic, 2000 2.4 Most and least crime-ridden locations in Sverdlovsk Region, 1999 2.5 Regions with net in-migration in 1999 and stable or growing cities, 1989–2002, central European Russia and Urals

2 22 47 54 61 62 68 69 72

Tables

0.1 Interviewees, by town, sex and occupation 0.2 Percentage of households with amenities in Russia, by type of settlement, 2001 and 1999 1.1 Percentage of population with personal money income below subsistence minimum, top and bottom Russian regions, 1999 1.2 Percentage of population with personal money income below subsistence minimum, 1999, rankings for central European Russian/Ural regions 1.3 Purchasing power (personal incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum), richest and poorest Russian regions, 1999 1.4 Per capita ‘GRP’ in 2000 in central European Russia and Urals, rankings calculated from Goskomstat 1.5 Goskomstat calculations of Russian Gini coefficients, 1992–2001 1.6 Survey-based estimates of unemployment, by Federal Okrug, 2000–1 1.7 Household plot production in 1999 as a percentage of 1989, by macroregion 1.8 Six demographic indicators for Russian macroregions, 1999 1.9 Total of rankings for 1999 purchasing power, poverty levels and per capita ‘GRP’ in central European/Ural regions 2.1 Purchasing power of money incomes, Primore Region, 2000 2.2 Purchasing power of wages in all cities and districts, Komi Republic 2.3 Rankings for purchasing power, measured by money incomes as percentages of subsistence minima, among 78 Russian regions 2.4 Annual retail trade per capita, rubles, 2000, ranges in four regions 2.5 Wages (in rubles), 2000, ranges in six regions 2.6 Cars per 1,000 population, 2000, ranges in four regions 3.1 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: demographic statistics for 2000 3.2 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: the economy and living standards in 1999 and 2000

11 14 21

23

23 30 33 34 38 52 53 63 64 65 66 66 66 78 79

xvi

Tables

3.3 Bus fares to most important local city (Moscow, Penza, Yekaterinburg) 3.4 Populations of fieldwork towns and their associated districts, January 2000 3.5 Zubtsov District income, 1999 4.1 Percentage of different groups in households with per capita money incomes below the subsistence level in 2000, Russian averages 4.2 Senior arts administrator’s household’s monthly sources of income 6.1 Level/upward trajectories of respondents, from CPSU raikom job before 1991 to state managerial job post-1991 6.2 Downward trajectories from CPSU/Komsomol, all caused by failure in private sector 6.3 Percentage of respondents definitely considering themselves intelligentsia/not 6.4 Educational qualifications of respondents, by town 8.1 Birthplaces of respondents

85 86 88

101 104 150 150 152 153 197

Acknowledgements

The book was written with help and support from many people. Above all, I wish to thank the 141 respondents for answering my questions, often at considerable length. I am also grateful to statisticians in Zubtsov, Penza and Achit, and to the headteachers, hospital managers and other administrators, named in the footnotes, who supplied information about their institutions. Newspaper editors generously lent me their archives. Other people whom I would particularly like to thank are: Tamara, Evgenii and Lena Cherepanov; Olga and Vasilii Chernyi; Naomi Connelly; Simon, Katya and Masha Cosgrove; Christina Gibbons; Gregory Ioffe; Olya Kozak; Olga Khoroshailova; Sergei Kotkin; Colin Lawson; Anatolii Loginov; Valentin Manuilov; Tatyana Nefedova; Francine Pickup; Karen Rowlingson; Irina Semenii; Tanya Shmykova; Luba and Volodya Tsurikov; Alla and Boris Tyapkin; Galina Vorobeva; Peggy Watson; Sam Yates; Lyuda Zhukova; and Tolya, Tanya and Natasha Zhupikov. Their ideas, practical support and, in many cases, hospitality were very much appreciated. I am also grateful to Natasha Zhuravkina for help with formulating the interview schedule, and to Dennis Tate, Head of the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, for financial support from the department. Although none of the chapters in Small-town Russia is identical to any of my previously published work, Chapter 8 does, with permission from the editor, overlap with ‘Mother Russia: gender and ethnicity in the Russian provinces’ in Jacqueline Andall (ed.), Gender and ethnicity in contemporary Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2003. I presented papers about the small towns at seminars at the universities of Bath, Birmingham, Cambridge and Oxford, and at annual conferences of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the Study Group on Education in Russia, the Independent States and Eastern Europe. I should like to thank the participants for their stimulating questions and observations. Tama and Lucy White helped with the maps, tolerated my absences with good grace, and themselves made long journeys to paddle in the Volga in Zubtsov, visit a kindergarten in Bednodemyanovsk and make their own friends among smalltown Russian children. Howard White offered constant intellectual, practical and

xviii Acknowledgements emotional support. Without his unfailingly good judgement this book would have been much weaker. I am sure, nonetheless, that mistakes and misrepresentations remain, and, in particular, I would like to apologize in advance to any interviewees who feel that I have misunderstood their situation, or painted an unduly positive or negative picture of the small towns in which they live.

Introduction

Peace, Labour and Happiness (Slogan written on a conspicuous building in Zubtsov, welcoming visitors from the direction of Moscow) In Moscow people and values are different. We have our own way of life, which is – as it were – ‘separate’ from life in the cities. (Zubtsov teacher) Are these intelligentsia hands? A member of the intelligentsia should read, not chop logs. (Achit teacher, showing her own hands)

This book is about how people live in three small towns in Russia, and about how their lives have changed since the collapse of communist rule in 1991. More exactly, it is about how small-town Russians make their livings (livelihoods), how they perceive themselves (identities) and the interconnections between the two. The book contributes to a number of debates about the nature of post-Soviet Russian society, exploring areas such as the nature of poverty and livelihood or ‘survival’ strategies; links between economic crisis, stress and mortality; (un)changing gender roles and relations; the cohesion or breakdown of communities; the transformation of the Soviet class system; the growth of civil and political society; and the evolution and significance of ethnic and territorial identities. The main focus is on the turn of the century. How much ‘peace, labour and happiness’ could the visitor to Zubtsov, Achit or Bednodemyanovsk expect to find in the years 1999–2000? At first glance, the most striking aspects of the towns were their impoverishment and isolation from any benefits of postcommunism. The towns had suffered the full impact of economic collapse in the 1990s. However, interviews also revealed a certain resilience in the communities: neighbours trusted one another, kin networks were strong and recorded crime was surprisingly low, compared with Russian averages. Most of the book is based on 141 semi-structured interviews with professional people, or former professional people, the so-called ‘intelligentsia’. Hence the book is mainly about what might seem to be a rather narrow category. It is, however,

2

Introduction

an important group, because of its role in organizing local community life, including, perhaps, promoting democratization, and because it may be developing into a new ‘middle class’. The book also seeks to overcome the limitations presented by the sample, presenting, as far as possible, a multifaceted account of life in the small town. It does this partly by supplementing the 141 interviews with information supplied by managers of local institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and with newspaper reports and local statistics. The respondents themselves, in their interviews, also shed much light on the life of the whole community. The intelligentsia is not a group apart, but is well integrated into local society, through intermarriage with workers and because of its professional responsibilities. Most of Achit is a cluster of black log cabins, picturesquely situated around a lake in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. It is in Sverdlovsk Region, which has a reputation for being one of Russia’s most thriving, although, as will be illustrated later, this reputation is not entirely deserved. Sverdlovsk Region has many cities and industrial complexes, but Achit District is rural, apart from one glass factory. Achit District has Tatar and Mari as well as Russian villages and the name is said to have been derived from a Tatar word meaning ‘hungry dog’, a reference to the eighteenth-century Russian fortress, which sucked resources from the local population. Achit is in Europe; Asia is Yekaterinburg, the regional capital across the hills, which are low and wooded in this part of the world. Zubtsov is west of Moscow on the banks of the Volga, Vazuza and Sheshma Rivers. An elegant church nestles at the confluence of the Volga and the Vazuza, near a steep tooth-shaped promontory, which gave the medieval town its name (‘of the little teeth’). Some rusting factories spoil the view. Zubtsov is in Tver Region, a region with a middling per capita Gross Regional Product, compared to other central European Russian regions. Zubtsov District, however, borders Moscow Region. Hence, although Zubtsov lost 40 per cent of its jobs in the 1990s,1 the proximity of Moscow’s expanding economy has partly compensated for this disaster. At a distance of 200 kilometres from Moscow, Zubtsov is close

St Petersburg SverdlovsK Region

Tver Region Tver Rzhev Zubtsov Smolensk

Perm

Moscow

Kazan

Ryazan Bednodemyanovsk Tambov

Achit Krasnoufimsk

Nizhnii Novgorod

Saransk

Penza Samara Penza Region

Map 0.1 The three small towns and their regions.

Yekaterinburg

Introduction 3 enough to the capital to place it in the dacha (summer cottage) zone for Muscovites. Interviewees had very different ideas, however, about whether 200 kilometres was actually ‘near’ or ‘far’. The third town, Bednodemyanovsk, is 450 kilometres south-east of Moscow, in rolling open steppe cut by ravines. It lost its river as a result of misguided irrigation projects in the 1980s under Gorbachev’s predecessor, Chernenko. Bednodemyanovsk is a market town, dating from the seventeenth century. Its housing stock consists largely of solid wooden cottages surrounded by kitchen gardens. It has a few working factories and farms, but is located in Penza Region, one of the poorest in European Russia. The town was named Spassk (Church of the Saviour) until 1925, when, on the recommendation of a local communist party conference, it took the name of a Stalinist hack poet, Demyan Bednyi.2 It shed its Christian identity and acquired an ostentatiously Soviet one. Bednyi himself never deigned to visit the place, although, according to locals, his son did pass through and got very drunk. ‘Bednyi’ means ‘poor’. Local inhabitants often refer to their town as ‘Bednyi’, since Bednodemyanovsk is hard to pronounce. The three towns, although all centres of administrative districts,3 were at the small end of the urban spectrum. The populations were 5,400 (Achit), 7,900 (Zubtsov) and 8,200 (Bednodemyanovsk) in January 2000. They were chosen not only because of their size, but also because they were assumed to be relatively isolated from the big city economy, since all were three to four hours’ bus ride from the nearest city. Zubtsov, however, proved to be less isolated than the other towns: Moscow has long tentacles. Unlike British or American small towns, which in some respects are like miniature cities, and which are sometimes more prosperous than inner-city areas, Russian small towns are very different from cities.4 In particular, the transition to a modern market economy – insofar as it has occurred since 1991 – is more visible in the cities. In July 2003, Putin himself, on a visit to a small town, criticized the lack of development in small towns, blaming it on the chronic underfunding of small-town local governments, and the obstacles facing would-be businessmen.5 To understand contemporary Russia, therefore, one needs to know not just about cities, but also about smaller towns and rural areas. Cities, however, are more visible to the Western observer. British and American scholars tend to describe only national or regional-level trends.6 If discussing the national level, they are often basing their arguments largely on information about cities, because cities do much to determine national averages. If they descend to regional level, they present information based on regional averages or about the regional capitals. Western travellers rarely get off the train to explore the streets and squares of those small provincial towns, which – very occasionally – punctuate the rows of pines and birches visible from their carriage window. Russian sociologists based at provincial universities more often study towns in the glubinka, the ‘provincial depths’ which lie beyond the regional capital. This book draws on such Russian research. However, most of the book is based on the fieldwork in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov. Their smallness and

4

Introduction

remoteness combined meant that insofar as social trends in smaller towns are different from those in cities, such differences might be expected to show up especially clearly in these particular towns. The towns are treated as case studies, although some tentative conclusions are also drawn about small Russian towns in general.

Structure of the book: debates and concepts The book divides approximately into two sections, exploring first livelihoods, then identities. However, there are smaller overlaps and cross-references throughout the book, and in many respects livelihoods are inseparable from identities: each has an impact on the other. The Introduction gives a description of the book’s methodology and sources. It continues by discussing some characteristics of Russian towns and villages and the ‘semi-urban’ nature of Russian small towns. It justifies the choice of very small towns as objects of study, and concludes with a brief analysis of centre–regional relations before and after the collapse of the communist regime. This forms the political background to Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is an overview of social and economic trends in postcommunist Russia, drawing mostly on Russian official statistical handbooks. The chapter aims to provide essential background information for readers who are not Russian specialists, to fit changing livelihoods in the small towns into a national context, and to show how various demographic and economic trends developed over the first postcommunist decade. The second aim is to present information about the regional variation which usually lies hidden behind descriptions of national trends. It is a central thesis of this book that Russia is not, as Milan Kundera once asserted, ‘the smallest possible variety in the greatest possible space’.7 For example, in 1999 the official poverty rate was five times higher in Ingushetia than in Tyumen Region.8 Inequality between regions has grown, and economic differences have often become more pronounced during postcommunism than they were in Soviet days. Chapter 2 uses statistical publications from a number of regions to look at differences in living standards between small towns/rural districts and cities. Although readers who are more interested in the qualitative data from the case studies may prefer to skip the main part of this chapter, it addresses questions which are fundamental to the research, and it develops the arguments of Chapter 1. Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk were selected partly because they are in regions with different economic profiles, and this book addresses the question of how much difference it makes to live in a ‘rich’ or a ‘poor’ region. Are the differences between Russian regions, as indicated by socio-economic statistics, mirrored by differences between small towns located in different regions? In other words, is a small town in a poor region very different from a small town in a rich region? Alternatively, are small towns in different regions much the same? This could be true if the apparently richer regions contain greater disparities of wealth than do poorer regions. The bottom line may be the same, but the wealthier

Introduction 5 places – the cities – may be richer in rich regions than in poorer ones. Chapter 2 also explores the issues of how far wealth is concentrated in the regional capital and whether remoteness from that capital, and cities in general, is a significant factor influencing the fate of the glubinka, the ‘provincial depths’. Chapter 3 provides some background information about Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver, the particular regions in which the fieldwork towns are located, to site the towns in their regional contexts, demonstrating the complexity of those contexts. The chapter continues by presenting portraits of the towns themselves, focusing particularly on their economies, and drawing on descriptions given by interviewees, local newspaper articles, and statistical data. The rest of the book is based mostly on the interviews. In the first, ‘livelihoods’, half of the book the anonymity of respondents has been preserved, but in the ‘identities’ section the dramatis personae are allowed to emerge, when interviewees were also public figures, whose doings are described in the local press. A livelihood has been defined by Ellis as ‘the activities, the assets, and the access that together determine the living gained by the individual or household’.9 According to Kanji, it is the ‘wide range of activities that allow individuals to gain and retain access to resources and opportunities, deal with risk and manage social networks and institutions’.10 In other words, it is more than just employment at one’s main place of work. This is particularly important in postcommunist Russia. In 1992 just 35 per cent of New Russian Barometer survey respondents said that they depended only on their wages from a regular job in the first economy; by 1998 this figure had fallen further still, to 14 per cent.11 ‘Assets’ can include human capital – personal characteristics such as health and educational levels of working household members – and social capital. ‘Social capital’ is understood in its simplest definition, as resources which derive from an individual’s connections to the surrounding society, particularly good relationships with, and networks among, other members of the local community. Human and social capital are aspects of identity, hence the overlap between the concepts of identities and livelihoods. Few people in the small towns lived alone, and it is important to place livelihoods within the context of the whole household, not just the earning capacity of the individual. Chapter 4 looks at household livelihoods by examining, in turn, statesector workplaces, unemployment, salaries and poverty. It presents some profiles of different types of household, looking at primary employment of the salaryearners and at household composition, and suggests why some households are more successful than others. However, it also points out that all households among the sample were vulnerable to poverty as soon as they had to intersect with the city economy, for example to purchase education or health care, and that, for most families, even everyday subsistence was hardly feasible on the basis of income from a first job alone, since most local wages were lower than the official poverty line. Chapter 5 therefore addresses the issue of livelihood strategies. Should these be viewed as potential escape routes from poverty, or are they, as Clarke, Pahl and Wallace suggest, a response to opportunity, engaged in by wealthier households?12

6

Introduction

How far are they ‘embedded’ in the local culture, as Pine and Bridger, for example, assert?13 Is it sensible to talk of strategies when opportunities in the small town are so limited?14 Although the neutral term ‘livelihood strategy’ is preferred in this book, the chapter also discusses the term ‘survival’ strategy. What is ‘survival’ in the small-town context? Shevchenko has argued that it is not helpful to label routine practices as if they were reactions to crises,15 but perhaps life in the small town can be viewed as a succession of crises. The 1990s have been seen as a decade of crisis in gender relations,16 although this is disputed by Vannoy et al.17 Changing gender roles are sometimes linked to the gendering of survival strategies, most starkly by Burawoy et al., who suggest that Russian society is being driven ‘into two mutually repelling poles – a male-dominated pole of wealth, integrated into the hypermodern flow of finance and commodities, and a female-dominated underworld, retreating into subsistence and kin networks’.18 Chapter 5 explores both gender relations and the gendering of livelihood strategies, to determine whether such tension and polarization did indeed mark the lives of the small-town respondents. Burawoy et al. use the term ‘involution’ to describe a process of atomization, which has also been mentioned by Ledeneva and by Ashwin, the latter with specific reference to a small town.19 Chapters 3, 5 and 6 look at whether networks were shrinking and trust was declining in the small towns. ‘Survival’ is adopted as a useful term because it can link up different aspects of existence: not just material well-being, but also the survival of the community, and individual emotional and physical health. Given the dramatic fall in male life expectancy which marked the 1990s, it seems particularly important to examine stress, discussing the truth of suggestions made by, for example, Shkolnikov et al. and Shapiro,20 that Russian men were particularly vulnerable to stress, because of their inferior coping mechanisms. The survival of identities and fashioning of new ones is explored in Chapters 6–8. Identity is frequently seen as being in crisis worldwide, but in postcommunist societies there is a double crisis, as globalization and the demands of becoming postcommunist coincide. However, globalization had only lightly touched the small towns. Postcommunism, on the other hand, with its perceived drop in status both for professionals and for small towns, had created new dilemmas. Identity is perceived by postmodernist theorists as multilayered, malleable, elusive and potentially contradictory;21 Small-Town Russia adopts this approach. Moreover, the book emphasizes that identity is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ and is shaped partly by ordinary individuals in response to the circumstances in which they find themselves, not entirely created by intellectuals, the media or politicians and imposed ‘from above’. It might seem more natural to emphasize structure rather than agency, illustrating how small-town Russians are ‘trapped’ in a certain predicament. It is true that in many respects they are indeed trapped, but the victims of postcommunist economic collapse often forge identities for themselves as coping individuals, not as losers. Frances Pine, for example, writing about Poland, has shown how women in a depressed industrial area, forced into depending heavily on home produce, seemed to make a virtue of their new roles: a ‘politicized

Introduction 7 rejection of consumerism’, particularly of foreign consumer goods which symbolized the postcommunist order.22 That identity arises, in Stuart Hall’s words, ‘from the narrativization of the self’,23 is demonstrated in Chapters 6 and 7, which discuss how professional people both adapt their intelligentsia identity to new conditions, and use their understandings of that identity to mould a new civil society. The theme is continued in Chapter 8, which explores the importance of local identities, questioning the truth of assertions that regional leaderships are able to create a new sense of regional identity, and also the relevance for small-town respondents of nation-building projects emanating from Moscow.24 It is important to recognize that many, especially middle-aged and older, Russians do not have a postmodern understanding of identity. They are more essentialist, a characteristic which is not surprising, given their Soviet upbringing, with its rigid stereotypes. People are born with certain traits, which are not susceptible to social conditioning. ‘We’re not Tver folk’, said one woman from Smolensk Region, who had moved to Zubtsov. Women are ‘by nature’ destined to be mothers and chief parents. Other people are ‘born traders’ or, more often, born not to be traders. Perceptions that these identities are inflexible influence people’s choice of livelihood strategies. However, to pursue the maintenance of one’s professional identity can also be a survival strategy in its own right. Chapter 6 asks whether self-perceptions about intelligentsia identity are a barrier or a gateway to success. Do young people feel less ‘encumbered’ by Soviet identities? What is the truth of the common assertion that the intelligentsia is ‘dying’,25 and is the small-town intelligentsia to some extent intertwined with the new entrepreneurial class? (Silverman and Yanowitch have suggested that the new business class is largely drawn from the old intelligentsia.)26 Chapter 7 asks how, if at all, the small-town intelligentsia is creating some kind of modern ‘civil society’. Political scientists often suggest that civil society in contemporary Russia is weak,27 particularly outside the cities, but perhaps, as Simon Smith has suggested, it is precisely in places which are the most Soviet that civil society can put down the firmest roots.28 If this civil society is inward-looking, the local community may be strengthened, but a sense of Russian citizenship and political connectedness to Moscow may be absent. Chapter 8 analyses the ‘love–hate’ relationship between the small towns and the federal capital. Finally, the book’s Conclusions summarize the findings and draw out the similarities and differences between small towns and cities and also between the three towns. They discuss how much change there has been in the small towns since the Soviet period, considering – largely in order to reject – the usefulness of plotting the three towns at different points along a ‘transition path’. Because of its contentious character, the term ‘transition’ is generally avoided in the course of the book. ‘Postcommunism’ is preferred, as a more neutral term than ‘transition’, if communism is understood to imply the actual system of rule by the communist party, not the (non)achievement of a communist utopia. The term ‘transition’ has generated considerable criticism, particularly because of optimistic presumptions that an efficiently functioning market economy and liberal democracy lie at the end of the transition path, and partly because of the

8

Introduction

dubious morality and accuracy of assertions that the path will be relatively short: it is ‘just’ a transition phase. By implication, sacrifices imposed on the population are justified, and their suffering is a temporary experience. In addition to these general criticisms, it can be argued that the term ‘transition’ has more validity with reference to some parts of Russia than to others. The geographer Rodoman suggests that it is wrong to envisage cities and smaller places travelling at different paces in the same direction, towards a market economy. The backwoods are not only not catching up with the capital, but, in many respects, actually moving in the opposite direction. Pre-industrial, pre-market, feudal relations are reviving: subsistence farming, usury, hoarding of valuables, slavery. It seems that the modernization of the centres is taking place at the expense of the archaization of the periphery.29 Richard Rose, however, suggests that ‘pre-modern social capital’ characterizes Russia as a whole.30

Methodology and sources The fieldwork took place in the years 1999 (April, May) and 2000 (April, July and September). I gathered statistical data, read local newspapers and other published material, visited schools, hospitals and other institutions, and interviewed their managers. In Achit and Bednodemyanovsk, I was staying with local families, so I was able to observe the lives of small-town professional people at first hand, as well as having many informal conversations with them and their friends. In Zubtsov, I paid social visits to some of my interviewees and also established friendly relations with the staff of the tiny Submarine Hotel. However, the main part of the work consisted of 141 formal interviews. The interview schedule is reproduced in Appendix 1. The Zubtsov research, conducted in 1999, was based on a pilot interview schedule, which differed slightly from that used for Achit and Bednodemyanovsk in 2000. Since the questions were open-ended, the interviews differed in length and detail. Generally they were forty-five minutes to an hour long, but some were much longer. Most interviews were conducted at workplaces, some in interviewees’ homes or in the homes of my hosts. Respondents were given the interview schedule to read through in advance and they had it in front of them as they answered the questions. Issues of access and sample selection were resolved in different ways in 1999 and 2000. My initial idea was to keep as low as possible a profile, to avoid having obstacles thrown in my way by the local administration. Having consulted the telephone directory and the local newspaper editor, and explored through the snow to check out the location of various institutions, I walked into libraries, schools and the museum unannounced and asked if their directors had time to talk to me and could suggest colleagues who might be available. Only once was I challenged with the good Soviet question ‘Who gave you permission?’ I hope that the technique of arranging interviews on the spot produced spontaneous answers to the interview questions, although obviously it could not remove

Introduction 9 completely the danger of self-censorship on the part of the interviewees. Moreover, the surprise element in Zubtsov was soon lost as word of my arrival spread and little boys were pointing at me in the street, shouting ‘The Englishwoman!’ As my network of acquaintances grew, I was able to arrange interviews with people in other walks of life, such as former teachers who had gone into business: in other words, a ‘snowballing’ approach which was particularly suited to the close-knit world of the small town, and which helpfully illustrated the nature and importance of the informal networks which I was partly studying. It was not only desirable, but also necessary to adopt this method: organizing things in advance is always a problematic endeavour in Russia, given the culture of preferring to arrange things face to face and on the spot, and the propensity of officials to generate as much red tape as possible. In the case of the small towns the obstacles to organization in advance also included poor telephone and postal connections and lack of internet access. Moreover, I never encountered any objections from respondents that snowballing was unethical. Potential respondents naturally had the option of refusing to participate in the survey. Interviews conducted in people’s homes tended to be the most successful, and this prompted me to stay with local families in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. Here my hosts phoned up local institutions on my behalf, but usually just on the eve of the interview day, so the element of spontaneity was preserved. At weekends I interviewed my hosts’ friends and colleagues. Despite the fact that – through want of alternative channels – I had had to arrange my stay in Achit through the local authority, the administration there did not try to interfere in my work, and the district boss (‘head of adminstration’) was an interviewee. I organized my stay in Bednodemyanovsk through an academic colleague in Penza. My heart sank when he arranged for me to arrive in Bednodemyanovsk in an expensive foreign car belonging to the Penza Minister of the Interior, which took me straight to the deputy head of the district administration, the late Nikolai Nozhkin. Nonetheless, after I declined his offer of fixing up the interview appointments on my behalf, Nikolai Ivanovich kindly refrained from interfering, despite the fact that, as Chapter 7 illustrates, his approach to organizing intellectual life in the town was extremely ‘Soviet’. My contact with Bednodemyanovsk officialdom even produced a positive practical result in the form of a layer of asphalt on my hosts’ lane before my second visit. In the end, only two people refused to be interviewed. Several interviewees were, understandably, nervous in advance, supposing in one case that I would grill them about what they knew of Tony Blair, but once they had read through the interview schedule they felt more relaxed about answering the questions. When the interview was actually in progress, the respondents tended to talk at length. A few of the younger and less well-educated interviewees did, however, get stuck on the identities section. It was revealing, for example, that they found it harder to place themselves socially. With the help of my hosts and other local acquaintances I identified and obtained a sample which was loosely representative of the local intelligentsia in three respects: by profession (with a preponderance of teachers); by sex

10

Introduction

(mostly women); and by age, with an intentional slight bias towards younger interviewees, whose views seemed particularly important if it was to be possible to establish how much change was occurring. Managers formed 30 per cent, which unfortunately detracted from the representative quality of the sample, but did have the advantage that I was able to study the professional elite. 116 of the 141 interviews were with what might be termed the ‘core’ intelligentsia of each town, that is, people working in education, the media, culture, the legal service or health. This was 10–15 per cent of the total number of such people in each town. (There were about three hundred core intelligentsia).31 The remaining interviewees were members of what I have termed the ‘fringe’ intelligentsia, typically teachers who had changed jobs and/or local officials. The distinction between the categories is explained in more detail in Chapter 6. Ten interviewees, two Tatars and eight Russians, were migrants from the ‘Near Abroad’: Azerbaidjan, Kazakstan and Central Asia. Only 24 per cent of the sample were men. This was deliberate, given that most of the small-town intelligentsia were women, but in some senses it was a disadvantage, since gender is a theme of this book, and a sample of 34 men was slim basis for drawing conclusions about their experiences. On the other hand, with 107 women interviewees, it did seem possible to suggest at least some tentative conclusions about women’s livelihoods and identities, while recognizing the inadequate basis for comparison. I discussed with some interviewees during the pilot survey in Zubtsov whether the town’s name should be concealed, as well as the names of the respondents, but they did not want it to be. For some respondents it was the expected publicity for their towns which was a motive for participating in the survey. (The newspaper Zubtsovskaya zhizn’ published an article under the headline ‘Europe will hear about Zubtsov’.)32 The quantitative part of the research is based largely on statistics about Russia’s regions produced by Goskomstat, the State Statistics Committee. The probable inaccuracy of many of these statistics is discussed in Chapter 1.33 A fundamental problem is the inadequacy of many population statistics, given the thirteen year gap between the censuses of 1989 and 2002: the 2002 census discovered that the Russian population was nearly 2.8 million larger than had been expected, meaning that per capita economic and other statistics would have to be recalculated.34 Many problems derive from the reluctance of Russians to register their status with official organizations. It is known, for example, that there are more migrants and refugees, or unemployed people, than official registers suggest. There is also, of course, an element of ‘covering up’ on the part of some official agencies and businesses who supply information to Goskomstat. This means, for instance, that the decline in industrial production may have been exaggerated by firms wishing to avoid paying tax. Unfortunately, non-Goskomstat sources like the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey,35 based as they are on samples, were not a substitute for Goskomstat data. They do not cover the regions in the same systematic way as

Introduction 11 Table 0.1 Interviewees, by town, sex and occupation Total (141)

Occupation

Achit f 40

3 2 1 1 1 11 2 1 3 3 2 2 1 6 2 13 51 6 7 1 6 3 1 4 2 3 2 1

Senior local government Prosecution service Senior police Senior hospital manager Employment service, Senior Headteacher Head librarian Museum curator Newspaper editor Arts centre director Children’s home director Kindergarten manager Priest Junior local government Police: passport office Doctor School/college teacher Music teacher Librarian Museum employee Journalist Arts centre employee Electrician Own business Lone entrepreneur Manager, private sector Retired teacher Retired mayor

Bed. m 10 1

f 36

Zub. m 14

f 31

m 10

2

1 1

1 1

3 1

1 1

1 1

2

4 1

1 2

1

1 1 1

1

1 1 2

1 1 1 3

17 2 2 2 1

1

3

3 24 1

1 1

1

1 2 1 2

1 9 3 5 1 1

5

1

1

1

2 2 1

1

1

1

Goskomstat. Goskomstat is also invaluable in that it can provide detailed data on a sub-regional level, and this data was used to make comparisons between the fieldwork towns and small towns in other regions in Russia. Sverdlovsk Goskomstat’s splendidly inaccurate slogan ‘80 years on the information market’ is a reminder of how easy research is today, by comparison with the Soviet period. Qualitative met quantitative research when I interviewed and talked to statisticians working in regional capitals and small towns. They were uniformly helpful. It was striking how most regarded themselves as functionaries who collected raw figures, but did not seek to understand the trends they uncovered. In the small towns, they were not always trained statisticians. Records were kept largely by hand in offices very short of filing cabinets. I found one instance of confusion,

12

Introduction

when I counted the causes of death entries for 1994, the year of the worst mortality statistics, and discovered that in that particular town there were 37 per cent more deaths than published statistics suggested.36

Small towns Characteristics of Russian towns, small towns and villages When in 1999 I made my first phone call, from England, to my first small town, and started to explain my research project, the local woman at the end of the line immediately riposted: ‘Small town? It’s just a big village!’ This was not the last time I was to encounter such a response, although all three towns were district centres, and as such had a distinctly urban population: many of the inhabitants were white-collar workers employed in district-level institutions – local government, police, hospital, vocational schools and colleges, banks, tax inspectorate, library system, etc. What is a small town? Russian geographers and sociologists use exactly this term, malyi gorod, but it is not an official label. In fact, there is no standard definition.37 Khorev suggests that small towns have populations of under 20,000.38 Draganova et al. introduce the concept of the ‘very small town’, with a population of under 7,000.39 In 1958 it was officially stipulated, however, that towns could not be very small: a town should have a population of at least 12,000, and no more than 15 per cent of the population consisting of agricultural workers.40 However, this requirement was not always observed in practice. As this stipulation suggests, if ‘small’ has no official meaning, ‘town’ certainly does. All Russian population centres are classified as either ‘urban’ or ‘rural’. The number of ‘urban’ centres more than doubled during the twentieth century.41 The number of villages nearly halved between 1959 and 1989.42 To some extent urbanization was the result of building new towns and the abandonment of villages officially labelled as being ‘without a future’ in the 1960s and 1970s. However, it also resulted from ‘upgrading’ of villages – including Achit – to urban status. The 1990s witnessed the beginning of a reverse process, with some regional authorities relabelling urban settlements as villages, on the grounds that their populations had declined so far as to disqualify them from urban status.43 Just under a quarter of Russian urban settlements have populations of between five and ten thousand (Figure 0.1).44 The density of small towns varies widely, however, from region to region.45 Although some regions like Moscow and Sverdlovsk are truly ‘urban’ in that they contain many towns and cities of over 20,000, including several metropolises, other regions with a nominally high urban population, such as Kirov and Tver, consist of only a few cities and a multitude of rural districts (sometimes thirty or more), each centred on a small town or village. Often this administrative centre is a tiny ‘town’ of under 5,000 people. Some small towns, like Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk, have histories dating back hundreds of years, to the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. They have therefore always been classed as ‘towns’ (gorod). However, most ‘towns’

Introduction 13 30

26.68 23.2

25 20 15 7.36

10 5

12.74

11.59 11.2 2.51

4.72

+ on

9. 9 1

m

illi

99 0–

50

10

0–

49

9. 9

9. 9 –9

9. 9 50

–4

9. 9

20

–1

9. 9 5–

10

U

nd

er

5

0

Figure 0.1 Percentage of total Russian urban population residing in differently-sized settlements, 2000. Source: Calculated from Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik (RSE) 2000, pp. 74–5. Note Columns represent towns banded by population, in 1,000s.

of under 10,000 are classified as poselok gorodskogo tipa, a phrase meaning ‘settlement of urban type’. (Sometimes such poselki46 are referred to by their Soviet title of ‘workers’ settlements’, but in the 1990s ‘workers’ was a often misnomer.) What is a poselok? The word may imply Soviet-era blocks of flats attached to a factory out in the countryside, but other poselki, like Achit, look like the villages they once were. Medvedkov and Medvedkov describe poselki as ‘semiurban’. To some extent the upgrading of status from village to poselok reflected the actual acquisition of urban features, such as electrification and mains water. The implication of an improvement in amenities is one reason why the change to urban status was definitely perceived as upgrading. It was better not to be a village. Official policy, from the 1960s, was to destroy the smallest villages and invest in urbanizing the larger ones, in a not particularly successful attempt to keep the rural population from fleeing to the cities. The label ‘semi-urban’ suggests that, despite their urban status, many poselki – as indeed many of the smallest ‘towns’ – have a village appearance and, to some extent, like villages, suffer from a lack of amenities. It will be noted from Table 0.2 that, for example, a quarter of poselki do not have sewers. Often, those poselki and small towns which are furthest from the cities have the worst facilities.47 Perhaps the concept of a ‘village appearance’ needs more explanation. British small towns and villages are usually completely urban in appearance, with paved roads and no animals on the streets except cats. Small towns and villages in Russia often consist of mud or sand tracks, roamed by goats, cows, chickens and geese (and cats). Streets are lined by small wooden houses within wooden fences. They are in effect farmsteads, even if they belong to doctors, teachers and government officials. Yards contain piles of logs for heating and are ringed by cowsheds, chicken coops, dog kennels, steam bath houses and outside toilets. The

14

Introduction Table 0.2 Percentage of households with amenities in Russia, by type of settlement, 2001 and (in brackets) 1999

Towns Poselki Villages

Mains water

Sewers

99 (99) 93 (90) 29 (25)

97 (96) 74 (69) 4 (4)

Source: RSE 2002, p. 200.

same rural appearance is presented by the outskirts of many larger towns, or even some inner-city districts. In contrast, most streets in larger towns are usually very urban, with housing consisting of blocks of flats at least five storeys high, usually dating from the 1950s–1980s; these blocks surround courtyards which are often like small parks, with trees and playground equipment, but there are few or no individual flower gardens. Inhabitants of such blocks do, however, often cultivate allotments, located outside the town. These allotments are usually known as dachas (a word which also refers to the shacks or houses built on many plots, for summer use). The rationale for studying small towns It might be objected that it would be more worthwhile to study medium-sized towns, places, with, say, populations of between 20,000 and 50,000 or 100,000. After all, as Figure 0.1 suggests, more Russians live in such towns. However, my starting hypothesis was that there might be a kind of approximate correlation between size of town and type of livelihood, so by studying the small town as the opposite extreme to the city it might be possible to make informed guesses about what happens in between. Local statistical data and Russian sociological studies about medium-sized towns can help corroborate such guesses. By contrast, a study of medium-sized towns would not necessarily give clear hints as to what really goes on out in the backwoods. It would seem logical to assume, for example, that kitchen gardening decreases roughly proportionately to an increase in the size of town, and that, the larger the town, the greater the variety of workplaces and educational institutions, and the larger the proportion of housing with running water, sewers, etc. Obviously, one would want to make all sorts of qualifications and exceptions. For example, the nature of the housing stock in the larger town (cottages or blocks of flats) does much to determine the extent of smallholding, and there are middle-sized company towns with just one major employer and little variety of employment. Small towns and economic depression Many small-town respondents assumed that living standards were higher, the larger the town. They compared their own small towns with neighbouring

Introduction 15 middle-sized towns, which seemed to them to be ‘better’, and with the big city, which was ‘the best’. Chapter 2, using sub-regional Goskomstat statistics, suggests that this is partly true, although it is easier to generalize about the biggest and smallest settlements than about those in the middle. If economic stagnation is a feature of smaller towns, this is to some extent linked to the fact that transition to a market economy is less apparent than in the cities. Sutherland et al. studied the role of ‘agglomeration effects’ and concluded from their case studies of a number of regions that ‘the shift of workers from old to new activities was easier in large cities than in smaller communities. This could perhaps be attributed to the opportunities for new firms to grow in an environment where many different skills and facilities . . . were readily to hand’.48 However, even in the Soviet period small towns were recognized as suffering from unemployment, sluggish trade, poor transport and amenities. Middle-sized towns had some of the same problems, but to a lesser degree.49 There are obviously various factors, in addition to size, which help determine the fate of small towns. It could be argued that in many respects size is the symptom, not the cause. To quote the geographer Khorev: The small cities that have been bypassed by industrial development find themselves, so to speak, ‘off the main road’ . . . The old forms of smallscale industrial production turned out to be uneconomical compared with the larger industrial centres, the material and financial resources of small cities were constrained, and the comforts of life and their beautification inadequate.50 A town grows in population because it is attractive as a result of geographical situation, site, natural resources and various historical factors. In the Soviet context, as is implied in the quotation from Khorev, the creation of industrial plants was a particularly important moment. It is easier for a town to prosper if it has functioning industry, not just because of the wealth that this generates per se, but also because economic success generates political influence in the regional capital and therefore the influx of yet more resources to the industrial town. (Some of this wealth may not, however, reach the pockets of the ordinary inhabitants.) It seems important to stress the distinction between those smaller towns which are based around productive factories and the rest. There are smallish towns which are more industrialized than Achit, Bednodemyanovsk or Zubtsov.51 However, to go back to the size argument, prosperity implies population growth, and it is unlikely that an extremely small town will also be a major industrial power. Causation is obviously complex. However, this recognition does not invalidate the book’s starting assumption, that size is an important variable to consider when seeking to understand the different livelihoods and identities in different towns. Turning now from causes to consequences, the comparative poverty of many small municipalities has many, often rather intangible effects. For example, there is an impact on local identities and self-esteem. People who dislike their names

16

Introduction

often dislike themselves, and the same is true with the names of towns. It is the privilege of larger places to be able to rename themselves, shedding unpleasant or dull Soviet names and recovering their more picturesque pre-revolutionary identities.52 Metropolises, like Petersburg, Samara and Yekaterinburg, have been able to rename themselves, but so have middle-sized cities. For instance, Georgiu-Dej (Voronezh Region), named for a Romanian communist leader, is now Liski, after a referendum in 1990.53 By contrast, poor Bednodemyanovsk has been unable, for financial reasons, to shed its humiliating, difficult to pronounce and, according to some, ungrammatical54 Soviet name.

Russian regions and Kremlin-region relations The Russian Federation consists of 89 republics, oblasts, krais and okrugs. The term ‘region’ will be used to cover all of them, as has become common practice.55 For statistical and planning purposes, Russia was until 2000 also officially divided into eleven macroregions (raiony).56 In 2000, Putin replaced them by seven ‘federal okrugs’. These okrugs were similar in area to the macroregions, although some of the latter were dismembered. The Soviet system, like the Tsarist regime, was highly centralized, with power concentrated at the top. However, in practice it was always impossible to supervise and control completely such a large and diverse empire. The end came when Gorbachev’s introduction of pluralism and multi-candidate elections destroyed the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) as a ‘monolithic’ organization whose members were bound by party discipline to implement the Kremlin’s policies throughout the Soviet Union. At the same time, the revelations of glasnost encouraged Soviet citizens to express complaints about the system of CPSU rule and ‘the Centre’, that is, the federal institutions based in Moscow. In many parts of the USSR – especially the Baltic and Trans-Caucasian republics – nationalist movements gave powerful expression to local grievances, proclaiming first sovereignty and then independence. Centrifugal forces also came to affect Russia itself, with Yeltsin, as leader of Russia from 1990, building a power base there in opposition to Gorbachev, the USSR President and General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Hoping for support from Russian regional leaders, Yeltsin encouraged the regions to take as much sovereignty as they could. All the ‘autonomous republics’ (i.e. non-ethnic-Russian areas) consequently asserted their sovereignty.57 During the August 1991 coup, when the Soviet federal government and CPSU leadership failed to reassert control over the disintegrating USSR, Yeltsin was able to establish beyond doubt his position of superior power vis-à-vis Gorbachev and the communists. He subsequently banned the CPSU and, with the help of the other (non-Russian) republican leaders, destroyed ‘the Centre’ and brought an end to the USSR. However, as leader of independent Russia, Yeltsin had to contain centrifugal forces which he had helped release. A particular problem was posed by nationalism in ethnic minority areas, notably Chechnya and Tatarstan. Yeltsin also had to reckon with the political pretentions of leaders of ethnically Russian regions,

Introduction 17 including Moscow City. It was true that there remained significant centripetal forces, especially the economic dependence of many regions on the federal centre.58 However, in practice Moscow’s power was limited: power was much more devolved to regional level than had been the case in Soviet Russia. Russia’s 1993 constitution and a series of bilateral agreements between Moscow and individual regions gave the latter different, and in some cases substantial, degrees of control over their own economic resources and legislation, creating what has been called an ‘asymmetric federation’. On becoming President in 2000, Vladimir Putin launched a drive to bring the regions back under control, force the payment of tax revenues to the centre and establish the principle of one set of legislation for the whole of Russia. His new okrugs are different from their macroregional predecessors in that they are political units. Each okrug is headed by a presidential envoy with a remit to impose the will of the Kremlin on regional leaders. To some extent Putin did begin to reassert a degree of central control.59 Nonetheless, the ‘damage’ had been done, in the sense that economic liberalization combined with the decentralization of the 1990s had resulted in massive disparities between regions, for many different socio-economic indicators. It is these disparities which are addressed in Chapter 1.

1

Socio-economic and demographic trends in Russia and its regions

The book explores changing livelihoods and identities in three small Russian towns. First, however, it seems helpful to identify changes on a national level, changes which both affect small-town livelihoods and which may also result from the sum of decisions made by households and individuals across Russia. The most striking feature of the small towns was the extensive impoverishment of the population. Chapter 1 therefore examines poverty in Russia, understood both as shortage of money and also as insufficient access to resources such as housing, transport, childcare and education, health care and a safe and crime-free environment. The chapter continues by examining the causes of poverty: the collapse of state industry and agriculture, low and unpaid wages, unemployment and inadequate benefits and pensions. It also considers the uneven development of the private sector as a substitute for state employment, and the role of household plots in compensating both for the collapse of commercial agriculture and for the declining purchasing power of money incomes in individual households. Finally, the chapter examines some of the striking demographic trends of the 1990s, all of which can be linked to some extent, directly or indirectly, to political change and economic crisis in the postcommunist period. These trends are falling birthrates, rising mortality, migration into Russia from other republics of the former USSR, migration out of eastern and northern regions into central European Russia, falling marriage rates, increased divorce and a rise in the proportion of families headed by lone parents. The year 1994 stands out as a year of particular crisis with life expectancy, murders, suicides and divorces all reaching extreme levels, and over one million migrants arriving in Russia from other republics of the former Soviet Union. After 1994 many indicators began to improve, although some dipped in 1999, after the crisis of August 1998, when the ruble was devalued. From the perspective of 2003, the period around the turn of the century has an ambiguous quality. On the one hand, the economy was growing, overall; government spending on benefits increased; and some social trends were positive. The infant mortality rate and unemployment both dropped in 2000 and 2001. Poverty and natural population loss became more extreme in 2000, but seem to have diminished in 2001. On the other hand, some indicators which had taken a turn for the worse after 1998

Russian social trends

19

became worse still in the first two years of the new century: these included male life expectancy and divorce. These national trends, based on the Russian (mean) averages, are interesting as some indication of the net result of a tangle of local and regional trends. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that most Russians live in regions or towns which have indicators very close to national figures, or which have risen or fallen every year with the national figures. Much of the chapter therefore makes comparisons between Russia’s regions and/or macroregions. It indicates the wide range of experiences which national figures tend to obscure.1 Regional variation is partly a consequence of the devolutionary trends described in the Introduction, partly of economic collapse/liberalization.2 It was exacerbated by the ‘dumping of social obligations by the national government in the 1990s’,3 as regions became more responsible for organizing and financing their own health, social security and education. It is true that the USSR was also unequal: provincial Russians made heroic shopping trips by overnight train to buy sausage and oranges in Moscow, and there were also disparities between and within regions. A certain cross-regional standardization of living standards was probably occurring in the late Soviet period. This trend, however, reversed dramatically in the early 1990s.4 By the mid-1990s, according to Klugman and Braithwaite, ‘a high level of regional differentiation [was] apparent for virtually every macroeconomic or demographic indicator, and has increased during the [early] transition period. Indeed, by 1994 the disparities among the oblasts of Russia were far greater than those among the states of the United States.’5 In similar vein, Hanson reports that, in Russia, ‘the inter-regional dispersion of personal incomes was much larger than, for example, the dispersion of per capita GDP across the 183 second-level regions of the European Union . . . in 1993’.6 Disparities between regions have remained great, although they perhaps began to narrow after 2000. The purchasing power of money incomes illustrates these differences. In Moscow City in 1994 the average money income was 669 per cent of the local official poverty line, the subsistence minimum. In Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus, average money income was 57 per cent of the subsistence minimum. In 1999 and 2001 the figures were: Moscow, 548 and 558 per cent; Ingushetia, 44 and 70 per cent.7 Although it is interesting to identify the richest and poorest Russian regions, attempts to do so produce tables which show many places, in Siberia or the North Caucasus, which are far away from the fieldwork sites in Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions. Hence, for some economic indicators in this chapter, I have compared only 42 regions of central European Russia and the Urals. This helps one assess the fieldwork regions in relation to their immediate neighbours. In such comparisons, Moscow City stands out even more clearly as the richest region, seeming to justify the small-town respondents’ perceptions that it was ‘another planet’. Moscow was also substantially privileged, and subsidized by other regions, in the Soviet period.8 However, other regions experienced substantial changes of fortune in the 1990s, with mineral-rich regions like Tatarstan moving

20

Russian social trends

upwards, and some ethnic Russian central European regions, such as Ivanovo and Kirov, plummeting down the ranks.9

Poverty and prosperity Very different levels of poverty in Russia have been suggested by analysts using different methods to measure the phenomenon. There seems to be an agreement, however, that poverty was increasing in the late 1990s; since 2000 it may have fallen slightly.10 For a comprehensive picture of all Russian regions, one has to use the Goskomstat statistics, which tend to show lower numbers of people living in poverty than do other measures, partly because of defects in the survey methodology used to collect data about personal incomes, and partly because of the actual poverty line employed. Goskomstat figures are based on the so-called ‘subsistence minimum’, a measure of absolute poverty first established in November 1992. Goskomstat subsequently revised its calculation method several times, notably in 2000; this last revision led to the establishment of a higher threshold.11 The subsistence minimum is derived from the regional average price of a basket of goods and services. Different minima are calculated for ‘pensioners’ (older/disabled people), workingage people and children. The minima for pensioners in the period 1992–2000 were not very generous, which may be one of the reasons why it seemed that pensioners were not well represented among Russia’s poor. Even after the pensioners’ subsistence minimum had been adjusted upwards, in 2000, it was still small. For example, in September 2000 in Sverdlovsk Region the pensioner’s subsistence minimum was only 697 rubles, when the ordinary minimum was 1,014.12 Subsistence minima vary hugely between regions: regional authorities have an element of discretion in fixing the rates, and prices are very different in different regions.13 As Figure 1.1 shows, poverty was probably highest in 1992, because of high rates of inflation, but it rose steeply again after 1997, apparently to nearly level off in 1999–2000, and then fall. Since Goskomstat compares the subsistence minimum with personal money incomes, it does not take into account the fact that many Russians also have important non-monetary resources, notably home-grown food, which partly compensate for lower money incomes. According to Goskomstat, in 1999, 46.2 per cent of rural households, 40.9 per cent of urban households and 57.6 per cent of households with children under 16 had per capita personal incomes below the subsistence minimum.14 Since some regions are more rural than others, regional differences partly reflect this urban–rural divide, but the range between the richest and poorest regions was much greater than the difference between national urban and rural figures (Table 1.1). Regions such as Tyva and Ingushetia, in East Siberia and the North Caucasus, had large proportions of the population living in poverty throughout the period 1994–2002. What was new at the end of the 1990s was the descent of many central European Russian regions into widespread poverty. (See Map 1.1 and Table 1.2.)

Russian social trends

21

40 33.5

28.9

31.5 28.3

30 22.4 24.7

27.3

23.3 22

25

20.7

20

01

02 20

20

99

98

97

00 20

19

19

95

94

96

19

19

19

93

19

19

19

92

10

Figure 1.1 Goskomstat calculated revised percentages of population with personal money incomes below subsistence minimum, Russia 1992–2002. Sources: RSE 2001, p. 189 and Voprosy statistiki (VS), 6, 2003, p. 69. Note These figures were derived after the method of calculating the subsistence minimum changed in 2000 (hence the disparity with Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Percentage of population with personal money income below subsistence minimum, top and bottom Russian regions, 1999, using unrevised figures Russian mean  29.9 per cent Richest 10 Tyumen Murmansk Komi Moscow City Samara Novgorod Tatarstan Krasnoyarsk Rostov Perm

Poorest 10 17.8 19.8 22.1 23.3 23.4 24.0 24.1 25.1 25.3 25.6

Tver Mordovia Chuvashia Penza Marii El Chukotka Kalmykia Tyva Chita Ingushetia

67.4 68.1 68.2 68.7 69.0 70.9 78.1 78.6 88.8 95.1

Source: Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Rossii (SPUZhNR) 2000, pp. 199–201.

The proportion of poor people in 31 per cent of these regions had grown by more than 30 per cent during the 1994–9 period. Penza and Tver were among these abruptly impoverished regions. With such high percentages of the population living in poverty, it was not surprising that the average purchasing power of incomes in poor regions was very low. In all, 17 per cent of the regions listed in Table 1.2 had average personal incomes below regional subsistence minima in 1999. This had not been true in the

22

Russian social trends

Leningrad

Vologda

Novgorod Pskov Tver

Perm Kostroma

Yaroslavl

Kirov

Sverdlovsk

Udmur Ivanovo Nizhnii tia Marii EI Kurgan NovSmolensk Moscow Chugorod vaChelyaTatarstan shia Kaluga binsk Tula Ryazan Mordovia UlyanovBashkortostan Bryansk sk Orel LipSamara TAM- Penza etsk BOV Kursk ORENBURG Saratov Belgo- Voronezh rod Vladimir

KEY

Volgograd

TAMBOV Region where poverty decreased, 1994–9 Region where poverty increased by 20–30%, 1994–9 Region where poverty increased by >30%, 1994–9

Map 1.1 Poverty trajectories, 1994–9, central European Russia and Urals. Source: RSE 2000, p. 164. Note Moscow City, St Petersburg and Kaliningard are not shown on the map. None fell into the categories listed in the key.

mid-1990s. It was only in 1998 that the figure for average incomes in the bottom region (Marii El) first dropped below 100 per cent of the subsistence minimum. By 2001 some of these poorer regions had recovered, so that average incomes were again above the poverty line, and by 2002 all regions shown on Map 1.1 had incomes above the subsistence minimum.15 Table 1.3 shows the regions at the national extremes for purchasing power. Although the rankings in Tables 1.1 and 1.3 are similar, Moscow, despite containing a greater percentage of poor people than some of the mineral-rich regions, had much the greatest average purchasing power. It held its leading position through the second half of the 1990s and, as far as one can tell from the incomplete data, into the twenty-first century. In general there was not a close correspondence between width and depth of poverty: regions with less widespread poverty could also have quite deep poverty. Moscow, for example, had fewer than average poor people, yet a higher than average proportion of people living in deep poverty. However, the regions with the very greatest number of poor people were also the ones with the highest number in extreme poverty. These were mostly ethnic minority areas on the southern and eastern fringes of Russia, with many children and sometimes, also, refugees.16 Hence, although poverty may have been becoming more extensive in central

Table 1.2 Percentage of population with personal money income below subsistence minimum, 1999, rankings for central European Russian/Ural regions (unrevised figures) 1–21

%

22–42

%

Moscow City Samara Novgorod Tatarstan Perm Lipetsk Belgorod Smolensk Moscow Region Yaroslavl Tambov Bashkortostan Tula Ulyanovsk Chelyabinsk St. Petersburg Voronezh Kursk Orenburg Sverdlovsk Orel

23.3 23.4 24.0 24.1 25.6 25.9 26.9 27.2 27.6 27.7 27.9 30.3 31.2 31.4 32.0 33.2 33.8 35.0 35.6 35.6 35.9

Vologda Kaliningrad Nizhnii Novgorod Kostroma Vladimir Saratov Bryansk Kaluga Udmurtia Pskov Leningrad Ryazan Kurgan Kirov Volgograd Ivanovo Tver Mordovia Chuvashia Penza Marii El

37.3 37.4 38.0 38.1 40.8 43.0 45.0 47.0 49.5 51.2 51.5 52.4 56.5 56.6 58.1 64.9 67.4 68.1 68.2 68.7 69.0

Source: RSE 2000, p. 164. Note Russian mean  29.9 per cent.

Table 1.3 Purchasing power (personal incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum), richest and poorest Russian regions, 1999 (2001 in italics) Richest 10 Moscow City Tyumen Samara Komi Krasnoyarsk Murmansk Tatarstan Perm Irkutsk Rostov

Poorest 10 548 558 291 DNA 233 213 223 261 206 DNA 205 196 197 DNA 193 DNA 185 DNA 181 184

Karachaevo-Cherkes Penza Marii El Mordovia Dagestan Chukotka Kalmykia Tyva Chita Ingushetia

Sources: RSE 2000, pp. 157–8; RSE 2002, pp. 189–90. Notes Russian mean  177 per cent; DNA  data not available.

93 129 93 DNA 91 87 91 131 90 122 88 DNA 80 115 78 109 62 DNA 44 70

24

Russian social trends

European Russia in the late 1990s, life in there was not necessarily as desperate as it was for many people in the North Caucasus and East Siberia. There were exceptions, however: in 2000, 30.7 per cent of the Marii El population had money incomes of under 500 rubles; in Ivanovo, the figure was 20.8.17

Housing Although the total housing stock rose from 16.4 square metres per person in 1990 to 19.7 square metres in 2001,18 the rate of building of new housing declined sharply in the post-Soviet period, as is shown in Figure 1.2. The population has been shrinking, but Russia inherited an acute housing shortage from Soviet days, so the need for new housing remained. In 1999 there were still nearly six million families in the queue to receive state housing, although by 2001 the figure had fallen to under five million.19 However, despite the fact that much less state housing was built than in the late Soviet period, the 1990s saw a substantial increase in individually built private dwellings, which no longer had to conform to Soviet-era restrictions on the number of square metres to which an individual was entitled. Ostentatious villas and smart blocks of flats altered the face, not just of the Moscow, but also of provincial cities like Voronezh and Yekaterinburg. In the countryside, houses built by individuals – judging by interview evidence, not necessarily particularly rich ones – accounted for almost all new housing in the 1990s.20 Even if there were fewer new homes, the proportion of rural housing with utilities seemed to be rising in the 1990s. Indeed, by 2001 twice as many village 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 99 19

98

97

19

96

Urban

19

95

19

94

Russia

19

93

19

92

19

19

91 19

19

90

0

Rural

Figure 1.2 Square metres new housing per 1,000 population, 1990–9. Source: RSE 2000, p. 410.

Russian social trends

25

houses had central heating provided by the local authorities, as opposed to coal or timber-heated stoves, and over 10,000 kilometres of new gas lines had been laid.21 However, some of the ‘improvement’ must derive from the fact that many small towns had been reclassified as villages, bringing their sewers with them into the rural statistics tables.

Travel and transport Another apparent improvement to rural infrastructure in the 1990s was the building of more paved roads, although the problem of bezdorozh’e – ‘roadlessness’ – remained acute in many rural and remote areas. The percentage of rural settlements connected to paved roads rose from 58.7 per cent in 1992 to 66.1 per cent in 2001.22 In Zubtsov district, for example, all villages were said to be connected to paved roads by 1999, whereas previously it had taken whole days for milk deliveries to reach the district centre.23 However, reclassification of urban settlements into villages must partly explain the apparent improvement. There were more roads to facilitate local journeys, but at the same time people travelled less: the 1990s witnessed a gigantic decline in the number of journeys taken by public transport, as subsidies were removed, fares increased and routes discontinued. The number of ‘passenger-kilometres’ in Russia fell by 59 per cent between 1990 and 1999, slightly picking up thereafter.24 Although Zubtsov District, for example, had better roads, by the end of the decade there were hardly any buses, so the roads remained underused. Decreased use of public transport in some regions can be partly attributed to the fact that car ownership increased, by 225.9 per cent from 1990 to 2000. In particular, the number of private cars more than trebled in Moscow during the decade.25 In other places, though, there were still few private cars. In the Central Federal Okrug, for example, 2001 figures ranged from 237 cars per thousand inhabitants in Moscow to just 61 in Bryansk Region.26 Such disparities were, to provincial Russians, a very obvious sign of Muscovites’ superior purchasing power.

Childcare and education Nine million Russian children were in pre-school institutions in 1990, but only 4.2 million in 1999. By 1999, a fifth of the places remained unfilled (two-fifths in rural areas), although take up increased marginally in the new century.27 The decade had also witnessed a decline in the total number of kindergarten and nursery places, because providers could no longer afford to subsidize childcare and because of lack of demand, which was, in turn, linked to the removal of subsidies. Many institutions closed down because enterprises were in financial trouble and had to reduce their infrastructure of social services. Poor local governments find it hard to take over responsibility for child care. The high cost of much of the child care which remains is one reason why couples are reluctant to have more than one child, and the overall child population has fallen. A decline

26

Russian social trends

in the availability of affordable public child care also has implications for mothers’, and sometimes also grandmothers’ careers. The 1990s were a period of reform, experimentation and turmoil in Russian schools.28 Some regions, such as Sverdlovsk, were particularly experimental. Upheavals in teaching philosophies and curricula, which followed on from the political transition, were accompanied by abrupt changes in pupil numbers, the result of demographic trends. First came a bulge in the school population, resulting from the high birthrates of the 1980s. Then, in the school year 1998–9, the number of both teachers and pupils began to decline:29 the first effects of the precipitous fall in birthrates of the 1990s. Economic and political liberalization facilitated increased variety of schooling. Although the norm remained the state ‘general education school’ (obshcheobrazovatel’naya shkola), teaching children from six or seven years old to the age of 17, these were now joined by schools with pre-revolutionary labels: litsei and gimnaziya. The number of private schools increased steadily and by 2001 there were about 700 schools with 65,900 pupils. 30 Private further education colleges also set up, typically preparing students for careers in commerce. By 2001 there were 89 private colleges with 60,400 students.31 Higher education was affected by the same processes. The size of cohorts affected the number of student enrolments. However, the dip in student numbers in the early postcommunist period was widely attributed not to a smaller cohort but to a negative attitude towards education among young people – a feeling that education was unnecessary if one wanted to ‘get rich quick’.32 Such attitudes, insofar as they ever existed, seem to have become less common by the end of the decade. Having a specialist qualification, preferably a degree, was recognized for the asset it was in obtaining employment.33 There were 45 per cent more university teachers in 2001 than in 199034 and the proportion of university students in the population increased very rapidly, especially around the turn of the century. By 2001 the ratio had reached 332 students per 10,000 population (157 per cent of the 1990 figure).35 The number of both state and private universities increased and the number of students at private institutions more than doubled just in the years 1998–2001.36 Subjects such as law and finance were particularly popular, reflecting their new significance in the market economy. However, by 2002 a certain over-provision was observable.37 Nationally, therefore, there was both more choice of types of institution and more availability of places in higher education by the end of the decade, as well as a greater variety of schools. However, the introduction of fees for many places even at state universities, and the intense competition for the remaining ‘free’ places, sometimes involving the payment of bribes, meant that parents and students, except the wealthiest, often had to be prepared to make substantial sacrifices to ensure access to higher education. (In January 2003, 10.6 per cent of respondents in a national survey reported that ‘the impossibility of providing their children with a good education’ was the main factor ‘complicating their family life’.)38 To some sections of the population education came to seem less accessible, not more.

Russian social trends

27

Health Health care has undergone similar upheavals. These are partly linked with marketization: the introduction of a medical insurance system; payments, in state institutions, for aspects of health care which were free in the Soviet period, such as medicines provided in hospital; and the development of a private sector. There have also been philosophical sea changes, notably recognition of the desirability of expanding non-hospital medical treatment and introducing a system of family doctors. Once again, there is an important regional dimension. Indeed, it has been suggested that Russia ‘has 89 different systems of health care’.39 Overall, although some reforms have been introduced quite widely, such as increasing the proportion of outpatient to hospital care, overall progress has been described as ‘mediocre’, although more marked in richer regions.40 Despite the travails of the health system, there have been positive trends, such as the improvement in the infant mortality rate. The rate had increased in the 1970s, leading to the withholding of official statistics. It seems that figures then began to recover, declining from 23.7 deaths of infants under one year old per 1,000 live births in 1975, to 17.4 in 1990. The figure fell still further during the postcommunist period, to 15.3 in 2000 and 14.6 the following year. This improvement occurred despite the upheavals affecting the Russian health service. It is important to bear this point in mind when considering adult mortality, because it suggests that rising adult mortality had causes other than healthcare failings. Figures for infant mortality did, however, vary markedly between regions. The worst rates were in depressed regions of the North Caucasus and East Siberia. In 1999, for example, when the Russian average was 16.9, rates of 34.4 and 36.2 deaths per 1,000 live births were recorded for Ingushetia and Tyva. By contrast, prosperous St Petersburg and Samara, in European Russia, had under 11 deaths per 1,000 births.41 As in the Soviet period, infant mortality is worse in rural areas. However, the gap narrowed after the collapse of communism. In 1999 average infant mortality was 16.1 in Russia’s towns and 18.8 in the villages.42 Despite achievements in reducing infant mortality, health trends also include some extremely worrying tendencies, particularly the increasing number of cases of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. In 1991 there were 84 newly registered cases of HIV. In 1999 there were 20,129.43 HIV/AIDS in Russia is associated mainly with drug abuse: another area of growing concern, and another area for which there are no reliable statistics.44 It seems certain, however, that drug abuse has increased massively since the Soviet period.

Crime Crime figures underestimate the extent of real crime, partly because the police have an interest in maintaining the appearance of high solution rates. For ideological reasons, the Soviet authorities were also eager to mask the real scale of crime. Overall, however, it seems that crime in the USSR was rising significantly faster than population growth through the post-Stalinist period, with a marked

28

Russian social trends 4,000

3,000 2052 2028

1885

2,000

1860 1775

1857 1462

1777 1627 1758

1,000 1240

Russia

99

98

00 20

19

97

19

19

95

94

96 19

19

93

Kurgan

19

19

91

92 19

19

19

90

0

Moscow City

Figure 1.3 Recorded crimes per 100,000 population, 1990–2000. Source: Regiony Rossii 2001, 2, pp. 270–1.

acceleration under Gorbachev, as state controls loosened. In the postcommunist period the crime rate has been even higher than in Soviet Russia, with a particular increase in economic crime.45 As Figure 1.3 illustrates, rates appear to have risen chiefly at the beginning and end of the decade, although different regions had different patterns. By 2000 the average crime rate in Russia was 2,028 recorded crimes per 100,000 population, falling to 1,756 in 2002 (but 2,418 in Kurgan).46 Recorded drug dealing showed an alarming increase. In 2001, there were 241,600 cases of ‘crimes connected to illegal trade in drugs’ (compared with 16,300 in 1990).47 Rates of recorded drug dealing were particularly high in regions with large urban populations like Samara, Novosibirsk and St Petersburg, and particularly low in depressed ethnic minority areas in the Far East and in poor rural Russian regions such as Ivanovo and Kirov.48 Regional breakdowns of crime statistics suggest that the most criminal regions are in the Urals, the Far East or East Siberia. The least criminal are apparently three regions in the North Caucasus. The Central-Black Earth macroregion also has relatively little crime.49 This pattern suggests a certain continuation of Soviet trends. Louise Shelley has observed that, in the Soviet period, too, crime was strongly differentiated regionally, with the most criminal areas being new and /or remote cities with large populations of young male migrants. Cities with more established populations, such as many of those in European Russia, were more law-abiding, and rural areas, depleted of young males, were least criminal of all.50

Russian social trends

29

Inflation, economic decline and growth A defining feature of respondents’ livelihoods was their lack of savings, resulting from the inflation which accompanied relaxing of price controls in the postcommunist period. Inflation had been 1,526.0 per cent in 1992, the year of the most extensive price liberalization; 875.0 per cent in 1993; and 311.4 per cent in 1994. In the second half of the decade inflation declined further, except during 1999, when inflation peaked at 86.1 per cent, following the 1998 financial crisis. In 2000–2002 inflation fell to 20.8, 21.6 and (estimated) 15.7 per cent, respectively.51 Local industrial and agricultural decline was the other major economic factor determining local livelihoods. Local decline to some extent mirrored the national fall in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Russian GDP in 2000 was, according to estimates, a mere 63 per cent of GDP in 1989, although that did represent a substantial improvement since the deep recession of the first half of the 1990s. Real GDP growth 1999–2002 was 5.4, 9.0, 5.0 and (estimated) 4.3 per cent, respectively.52 Industry is estimated to have grown by 11–12 per cent in 1999 and 2000, with growth falling to about 5 per cent in 2001.53 All regions registered growth in 2000, though not in 2001.54 The highest growth in 2000 was in North-West Okrug, based around St Petersburg, and the lowest was in Siberia.55 Agriculture, particularly important in the economies of the three fieldwork districts, also showed signs of improvement after the ruble devaluation of 1998 stimulated the Russian foodprocessing industry, and because of better harvests.56 According to Goskomstat, ‘only’ 51 per cent of commercial farms were loss-making in 2000; the 1998 figure had been 88 per cent.57 Soviet agriculture had never been efficient, and many state and collective farms had been unable to adjust rapidly to market conditions.58 An eerie sight in less fertile areas was acre after acre of abandoned, weed-covered fields. Sown arable land had declined fairly steadily from 112.1 million hectares in 1990 to 69.1 million in 2000.59

‘Gross Regional Product’ (Valovoi regional’nyi produkt) Per capita ‘Gross Regional Product’ (‘GRP’)60 is very different in different regions. At the extremes, the richest regions in 1999–2000 were Moscow City and mineralrich regions in Asia or the extreme north of European Russia; some of the poorest were in the North Caucasus and East Siberia. The rankings in Table 1.4 show only central European Russian and Ural regions. Sverdlovsk is near the top (11), Tver is in the middle (28), and Penza is almost at the bottom (40). Only the top six of these regions in both 1999 and 2000 had figures above the Russian mean. Since the Goskomstat figures do not take into account price differences between regions, they seem to exaggerate the prosperity of expensive regions such as St Petersburg and Sverdlovsk (see Table 1.4 for some corrected figures). The regions with the largest cities are well represented near the top, although Leningrad (surrounding Petersburg) and Moscow Region are not at the very top, as neither is Nizhnii Novgorod. The more agricultural regions tend to be near the bottom.

30

Russian social trends Table 1.4 Per capita ‘GRP’ in 2000 in central European Russia and Urals, rankings calculated from Goskomstat 1. Moscow City (1/1) 2. Tatarstan (5/4) 3. Vologda (3/2) 4. Samara (2/3) 5. Perm (6/5) 6. St Petersburg (4/7) 7. Bashkortostan (7/6) 8. Lipetsk (rural) (10/8) 9. Orenburg (11/10) 10. Chelyabinsk (15/17) 11. Sverdlovsk (8/11) 12. Leningrad (12/13) 13. Udmurtiya (16/15) 14. Yaroslavl (9/9) 15. Moscow Region (13/14) 16. Belgorod (14/12) 17. Novgorod (18/16) 18. Nizhnii Novgorod (17/19) 19. Orel (rural) (19/18) 20. Volgograd (22/26) 21. Kaliningrad (30/33)

22. Smolensk (21/20) 23. Mordovia (rural) (34/34) 24. Tula (29/25) 25. Saratov (24/29) 26. Ryazan (27/23) 27. Kursk (rural) (20/24) 28. Tver (28/27) 29. Kaluga (32/32) 30. Kirov (25/30) 31. Kostroma (23/21) 32. Ulyanovsk (26/22) 33. Vladimir (33/28) 34. Pskov (35/36) 35. Voronezh (rural) (31/31) 36. Tambov (rural) (37/35) 37. Chuvashia (rural) (39/38) 38. Kurgan (rural) (36/37) 39. Bryansk (41/41) 40. Penza (rural) (40/39) 41. Marii El (rural) (38/40) 42. Ivanovo (42/42)

Sources: RSE 2002, pp. 292–3; RSE 2001, p. 293 (AW’s rankings); Granberg and Zaitseva, p. 16, using Goskomstat definition of GRP. Notes The region’s (Goskomstat) ranking in 1999 is shown in brackets, followed by Granberg and Zaitseva’s re-calculated 1999 ranking, taking into account price differences between regions. ‘Rural’  urban population under 65 per cent (Russian mean  73 per cent).

The growth of a private sector Government economists supposed that the privatization of state enterprises and the creation of de novo private firms would compensate for the partial collapse of the state economy. However, despite the overall growth of the private sector in Russia, shown in Figure 1.4, the extent of the sector varies considerably from region to region. The different rates of growth of the new private sector are particularly significant. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggests that the main causes of regional differentiation are ‘urban market infrastructure, the pace of reform and the economic policies of regional and local governments’.61 Simon Clarke (1999) suggests, for example, that in 1998 the new private sector, as opposed to privatized state enterprises, employed 25.5 per cent and 22.0 per cent of respondents, respectively in Moscow and Samara, but only 10.3 per cent of those in Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic.62 Goskomstat figures for ‘small businesses’ and their employees indicate that small businesses are heavily concentrated in Moscow and St Petersburg. In 2000

Russian social trends

31

100

70

70

70

60

50 50

55

40 25 5 0 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Figure 1.4 Private sector share in GDP (per cent), 1991–9. Source: EBRD, Transition Report 2000, p. 204.

16.3 per cent of Muscovites and 13.4 per cent of Petersburgers appeared to be employed in small businesses; the lowest incidence of small business employment was in impoverished Ingushetia (0.3 per cent).63 (These figures do not include self-employed entrepreneurs.) However, Goskomstat may give a misleading impression, as, for example, is indicated by the Samara figure mentioned earlier. Clarke suggests that ‘at least beyond the centre of Moscow . . . the new private sector is as successful in the more dynamic provincial cities as it is in Moscow’.64

Wages Wages in the private sector are often higher than in the state sector, but, despite privatization, the impact of inflation meant that real wages in Russia as a whole had fallen to 38.2 per cent of their 1989 level a decade later (Figure 1.5). Regional differences in wages are considerable. Prices, however, are also so different in different regions65 that it is not helpful to compare wages across regions. The purchasing power figures already mentioned are more useful. Wage differences between regions reflect not just different prices, but also that fact that wages in different sectors vary greatly. Industrial wages were 120 per cent of average wages in 2000, but agricultural wages were only 40 per cent.66 Hence the urban–rural composition of regions is a significant factor in determining regional averages. Moreover, different sectors of industry are very differently rewarded. For example, wages in 2000 for textile workers (mostly women) averaged 1,290.7 rubles, but iron and steelworkers (mostly men) received 6,180.5 rubles.67 In the service sector, administrative and financial employees tended to receive above average salaries, while salaries in education and health (typically women’s sectors) were below average, well below in the case of education.68 Women’s wages nationally were 63 per cent of men’s in 2001, but there was considerable variation from region to region, with gender gaps tending to be smaller in poor regions: as little as 5 per cent in Tyva.69 In some respects differentials between and within sectors were just more exaggerated developments of Soviet patterns.70 However,

32

Russian social trends 109.1 102.4 100 100 68.9 69.1

63.7

52 54.5 47.2

45.9 50

38.2

99

98

19

97

19

96

19

95

19

19

94 19

93 19

92 19

91 19

90 19

19

89

0

Figure 1.5 Real wages, Russian average, 1989–99 (1989  100). Source: UNICEF, A Decade of Transition, p. 181.

739

500

373 156

84

64

93

99

Li

gh

ti

nd

us try Ag ric ul tu re Ed uc at io n H ea lth Fi na nc e

st du

as G

In

du

st

in

ry

(a

ll)

ry

0

Figure 1.6 Wages as per cent of subsistence minimum, selected sectors, 1999. Source: SPUZhNR 2000, p. 181. Notes Wages  take-home pay, including extra bonuses. The subsistence minimum used is that for working-age people. The health sector figure includes wages in ‘sports’ and ‘social security’.

the salaries of administrators and people working in finance have much improved since Soviet days, and agricultural wages are much lower than in 1990, when they are paid at all. (They had been 95 per cent of average wages in 1990.)71 Rising Gini coefficients, as calculated by Goskomstat,72 suggest how much inequality between household incomes increased during the postcommunist period, though it did not increase steadily year by year. See Table 1.5. The increase in inequality was strikingly higher in Russia, as in other CIS states, than in East-Central Europe. Goskomstat does not appear to publish regional Gini coefficients, although individual Goskomstat branches sometimes do so.

Russian social trends

33

Table 1.5 Goskomstat calculations of Russian Gini coefficients, 1992–2001 1992 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

0.289 0.381 0.387 0.401 0.399 0.400 0.399 0.396

Sources: SPUZhNR 2000, p. 159; 2002, p. 187.

Wage arrears Many of the people interviewed for this research project had gone without their salaries for months, supposedly because there was no money in the local administration’s budget. Their experience mirrored that of millions of Russians; in fact, it seems that delays were even longer in the private sector.73 It is sometimes asserted that Russians put up with low wages and arrears in the 1990s because they understood that they were a substitute for mass unemployment, in other words an inevitable concomitant of restructuring.74 Indebtedness seems to have peaked in 1999. It fell in 2000, but still remained high (with 44 thousand million rubles owed at 82,000 enterprises).75

Unemployment ‘Unemployment’ is hard to define. On the one hand, many Russian people have no official primary employment, but do have unofficial earnings, varying considerably in size. On the other hand are workers who are officially recognized as ‘employed’ but in fact are being retained by employers who cannot afford their services. Such employers may place staff on part-time work or long-term ‘administrative leave’. Such practices have, however, been declining.76 Registered unemployment is a poor guide to the scale of the phenomenon. Some registered unemployed people are working. However, judging by the results of unemployment surveys, registered figures actually understate the level of unemployment. Many people do not bother to register, do not consider it worthwhile financially or, if they are villagers, cannot travel easily to register themselves.77 Figure 1.7 suggests that unemployment grew fairly steadily through the 1990s, though nearly levelling off in 1995–6 and 1998–9; it decreased in 1999–2002. Unemployment levels are very different in different parts of Russia: see Table 1.6 (based on unrevised figures).78 In a total of two-thirds to three-quarters of European Russian regions,79 rates were lower than the Russian average throughout the 1990s. However, many

34

Russian social trends 15 13.2

12.4

11.8

9.9

10 9.5

9.7

8.7 8.6

8.1 5

5.9 5.2

02

01

20

00

20

99

20

98

19

97

19

96

19

95

19

94

19

93

19

19

19

92

0

Figure 1.7 Survey-based estimated unemployment rate (per cent) in Russia, 1992–2002. Source: VS, 6, 2003, p. 69. Note Revised figures (hence disparity with RSE).

Table 1.6 Survey-based estimates of unemployment (per cent), by Federal Okrug, 2000–1 Federal Okrug

2001

2000

Southern Siberia Far East Urals Russia Volga North-West Central

13.6 11.3 10.2 9.2 9.1 8.5 7.7 6.3

15.1 12.6 12.3 9.8 10.5 9.6 9.7 7.8

Source: RSE 2002, pp.134–40.

regions crossed above and below the Russian average during this period and it is hard to generalize about unemployment trajectories, except to say that Moscow and St Petersburg improved their situation dramatically, rising from among the worst affected European regions in 1992 to the positions of best and third best in 2000; a number of regions south of Moscow or along the Volga, most of them quite prosperous in other respects, also had fairly low unemployment;80 rates tended to be worst in the far West and in the textile region of Ivanovo; and the

Russian social trends

35

18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

01

00

20

99

20

98

19

97

Penza Sverdlovsk

19

96

19

95

19

94

19

93

19

19

19

92

0

Russia Tver

Figure 1.8 Survey-based estimated unemployment rates (per cent) in Russia, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver, 1992–2001. Sources: RSE 2001, pp. 134–5, 138; RSE 2002, pp. 134–5, 138.

Urals had average or high unemployment. To illustrate the diversity of trajectories, Figure 1.8 compares the different fortunes of Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver. Survey-based estimated unemployment figures suggest that roughly equal numbers of men and women are unemployed, with a slightly higher proportion of men (according to unrevised figures, 10.4 per cent of the male workforce and 9.6 per cent of the female in 2000; 9.4 per cent and 8.7 per cent, respectively, in 2001).81 No regions had a particularly high proportion of unemployed women.82 Though women face discrimination in the workplace, are probably less able to acquire private-sector (especially high quality) employment,83 and may be more willing than men to take menial jobs, assertions that ‘unemployment has a female face’ and that unemployment is women’s ‘number one’ problem in the postcommunist period are usually based on unreliable registered unemployment figures, where women are over-represented.84 Assertions that Russian women have returned en masse to the role of housewife are also belied by the statistics: in November 2001 only 8.55 per cent of working-age women were housewives.85 Education is a more important variable than gender in determining employment status. Although in Moscow and Petersburg in 1999 over a fifth of unemployed people held university degrees,86 this simply reflected the highly educated quality of the local population. It is a myth that unemployment is a particular problem for members of the intelligentsia; indeed, the proportion of graduates in the workforce is rising, from 16.1 per cent in 1992 to 23.8 per cent in 2001. Also in 2001, only 11.1 per cent of unemployed people were graduates.87

36

Russian social trends

The percentage of those aged under 20 years among unemployed people displayed wide variation from region to region. In Russia in 1999, 7.9 per cent of unemployed people were under 20, but in many regions the percentage was much lower.88 On the other hand, some regions with an elderly population also had very high youth unemployment, notably depressed Tver (13.9 per cent of under-20s) and Kirov (15.9 per cent).89

Social insurance and assistance Even in Soviet days, the welfare state had a decentralized administrative structure, indicating its low status in the eyes of the ruling elite. There was no USSRlevel Ministry of Social Security and ‘prior to the break up of the USSR, social spending in some oblasts was as much as four times more per person than in other oblasts.’90 The shortcomings of the Soviet welfare state were criticized loudly during the Gorbachev period, by both clients and journalists; these critiques led to the formation of thousands of non-governmental organizations to lobby and supplement the work of local social security departments.91 The attendant rethinking of the principles of the Soviet welfare state gained new impetus after the collapse of communism. However, overall the state has not responded adequately to the poverty resulting from economic reform. For example, according to Goskomstat, spending on social assistance in 1999 was 71.7 per cent (in real terms) of spending in 1998, despite rising poverty levels. Spending increased, however, in 2000–1 (117.0 per cent and 104.1 per cent of the previous year’s outlay, respectively). In 1999, a huge 32.2 per cent of the benefits budget seems to have remained unpaid, in the form of child benefit debts; by 2001 this had been reduced to 15.2 per cent of the total.92 Overall, Klugman and McAuley conclude that the nature of social protection today helps explain why children are more at risk of poverty than older people. ‘While pension indexation has helped the elderly to cope during the transition, families with children appear to have been relatively neglected, with large numbers of poor and very poor families being practically excluded from state assistance.’93 The post-Soviet transfer of even greater responsibilities to regional and local governments has contributed to inequality. Pensions, for example, are set at different rates in different regions.94 Most regions in 1999 were paying pensions well below the poverty line, the pensioner’s subsistence minimum. The average Russian pension was 78 per cent of the minimum, but the regions were very different, and there was no correlation between wealth of region and generosity of pension. By 2001 the situation had improved and the average Russian pension was 95.1 per cent of the poverty threshold.95 District and municipal governments were often so short of funds that they could not pay benefits; in some places child benefit remained unpaid for years on end. For example, in Kirovgrad (Sverdlovsk) no child benefit had been paid at all between May 1996 and August 2000. Child benefit is often paid in kind by local authorities, who engage in

Russian social trends

37

complicated barter deals with enterprises that owe them taxes. In Sverdlovsk Region in August 2000, parents were offered in lieu of child benefit: a calculator in Irbit, a garage lock in Shalya, and men’s underpants in Bogdanovich. In Rezh they were made to accept chip pans valued at 4,000 rubles, twice the average regional monthly wage.96 As well as benefits in kind, which are supposed to be paid in cash, there is also official social assistance in kind, a continuation of Soviet practices.97 For example, children in poor families may be entitled to free school meals, medicines, etc. Since these concessions are determined locally there is considerable variation from town to town and region to region.98 In general, richer people seem more likely to receive concessions and benefits in kind, a reflection of Soviet practice, when payments in kind were regarded as extra incentives, not supplementary benefit for poorer people.99

Subsistence farming as a survival strategy Farming small private plots is a response to low and sporadic money income. The rural population, 16 million families, doubled its household plot size over the decade, from 0.20 hectares per family in 1990 to 0.39 in 2000 and 0.41 in 2001. More of the urban population also acquired or extended kitchen gardens and allotments.100 According to Goskomstat, 13.6 million families had such household plots in 1990, compared with 20 million in 2000 and 19.3 million in 2001. The average size of plot rose slightly, from 0.07 to 0.09 to 0.1 hectares.101 Interview evidence suggested that increases were not small additions for everybody, but that some people had maintained the standard plot of 0.06 hectares, while others had also rented an extra potato field. Household plots had accounted for a proportion of Soviet agricultural output, which was surprisingly high, in view of the small area of land exploited – that is, small in area by comparison with the big state and collective farms. In the postcommunist period, accompanied as it was by the widespread collapse of state and collective farms, home-grown produce as a proportion of total agricultural output rose dramatically (Figure 1.9). Private commercial farms, by comparison, have proved unable to make much headway. Table 1.7 shows the extent of variation across macroregions. Household plot production increased most not in the fertile North Caucasus and Central-Black Earth macroregions, but instead in the unfavourable Far East and North. This suggests that it is not a commercial response to increased market opportunities, but a survival strategy, of particular urgency in areas that had depended heavily on Soviet supply networks for provisioning.102 (It is perhaps surprising how far north potatoes can be grown if families have an incentive to be self-sufficient. This is illustrated in the Komi Republic, where one can draw a ‘potato line’ at around the Arctic Circle. Goskomstat reports that although, in the city of Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle, just one family had a household plot in 1999, in the cities of Inta and Usinsk, only about fifty kilometres south of the Circle, around as many as 41 per cent and 46 per cent of the population lived in households with smallholdings.)103

38

Russian social trends 100

92.5 79.9 61

57.1

50 25.8 25

0 1985

2001

Potatoes Livestock Other vegetables

Figure 1.9 Percentage share of Russian agricultural output (measured in rubles) produced on household plots, 1985 and 2001. Source: RSE 2002, p. 408.

Table 1.7 Household plot production in 1999 as a percentage of 1989, by macroregion North Far East E. Siberia North-West Central Volga-Vyatka W. Siberia Volga Central-Black Earth North Caucasus Urals

247 246 214 210 197 191 184 179 171 164 152

Source: Calculated from RSE 2000, p. 365.

Macroregions also vary internally. For example, in the Central macroegion, household plots overall yielded nearly twice as much in 1999 as 10 years before, but in depressed Tver Region they yielded almost three times, again suggesting that intensive kitchen gardening is a survival strategy. In the Volga macroregion, prosperous and urban Tatarstan increased its yield by just over half, but in poor Penza yields nearly doubled.104 The importance of subsistence farming in many regions is reflected in statistics about the Russian diet, as illustrated in Figure 1.10. The average inhabitant of

Russian social trends 119

39

118

111 94

100 83

73 60 47

50

35

0 Bread products

Potatoes

Meat products

Russia Moscow City Tver Region

Figure 1.10 Average per capita consumption of foodstuffs in 1999, kilograms per year. Source: SPUZhNR 2000, p. 156.

poor Tver Region consumed nearly double the quantity of potatoes as the average Muscovite, although Tver and Moscow Regions are neighbours.

Demographic causes and consequences of socio-economic change Birthrates and deathrates The 1990s were a decade not only of political and economic upheaval: they also witnessed massive changes in population trends. Most importantly, the 2002 census suggested that Russia had 1.84 million fewer citizens than in 1989; in other words, it had lost 1.3 per cent of its population.105 (The total population did, however, turn out to be larger than expected in pre-census population estimates, so the loss was correspondingly smaller than had been feared.) Population decline resulted from the acceleration of rising deathrates and falling birthrates across Russia. In 1990, deaths first began to outnumber births in the most westerly macroregions, including Moscow and St Petersburg.106 By 1992 Russia overall began to have more deaths than births, although, because of immigration, the total population declined only from 1993. During 1999 there was a particularly sharp decline in the Russian population. Figure 1.11 shows the net overall effect of births and deaths, in other words excluding the immigration factor. In 1990 the population growth rate was 2.2 per 1,000; by 2000, it was 6.7. (However, although birthrates declined everywhere in Russia in the 1990s, even in 2000–1 there were still regions in Siberia and, especially, the North Caucasus, with more births than deaths.)107

40

Russian social trends 5 2.2 0.7 01

00

20

20

99 19

98 19

97

96

19

95

19

94

19

93

19

92

19

91

19

19

19

90

0

–6.4

–6.7 –6.5

–1.5 –5

–5.1 –6.1

–5.7 –5.3

–4.8

–5.2

–10

Figure 1.11 Rate of natural population increase in Russia (per 1,000 population), 1990–2001. Source: RSE 2002, p. 105.

15.6 15.4

16

11.4

15

14.5

12.1 12.2 11.2

14.7

15.7

13.4 10.7

14.2 13.8 13.6 9.6

9.3

9.4

8.9 8.6

9.1

8.8

8.3 8.7 01 20

00 20

99 19

98

97

Deaths

19

96

19

95

19

94

19

93

19

92

19

91

19

19

19

90

8

Births

Figure 1.12 Birth- and deathrates in Russia (per 1,000 population), 1990–2001. Sources: RSE 2000, p. 76; RSE 2002, p. 104.

Birthrate The fertility rate was 1.89 in 1990, as it had been in 1980. By 1999 it had fallen to 1.17, rising to 1.21 in 2000 and 1.25 in 2001 (Figure 1.12).108 Declining birthrates were probably caused largely by the fact that potential parents abstained from or postponed having children, because of declining economic circumstances (see Chapter 5). One strategy could be not to have any children at all. Alternatively, the choice could be to restrict the family to one child only, at least for the time being. This was the practice of many Soviet urban families. However, for the Soviet period, housing constraints are usually considered to be the most

Russian social trends

41

significant factor limiting family size. Now lower income probably often played a more important role. It seems that choosing to have one child may be more common than deciding to have none. In 1994, for example, 24 per cent of childless women did not intend to start a family, while 41 per cent planned to have just one child and 76 per cent of women with one child did not plan to have any more.109 Nonetheless, declining fertility cannot be linked only to the economic crisis in postcommunist Russia. Declining urban birthrates in the Soviet period110 can be seen as a long-term trend linked to modernization. As Perevedentsev points out, ‘a decline in fertility has been typical for the entire developed world’. The trend was interrupted in the 1980s, when birthrates were particularly high, partly in response to government policies.111 However, in the 1990s the modernization process was speeded up by Russia’s sudden exposure to the West. Finally, the cohort of potential parents was smaller in the 1990s: these were the children of people born during Second World War (‘an echo’s echo of the war’).112 Deathrate The high deathrate was caused by more people dying at younger ages. Life expectancy had been falling since 1965, when it reached a high of 69.50 years. By 1980–1 it had fallen to 67.61.113 Although many commentators ignore it, the most reasonable explanation for the fall seems to be linked to greater prosperity after Stalin’s death. This led to a more calorific diet, which for cultural and climatic reasons was high in animal fats.114 This in turn promoted the development of cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, the Soviet health service remained oriented towards the eradication of infectious disease – a task which had in fact been largely completed.115 After an improvement in the figures for the late 1980s, which seemed linked to Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, life expectancy began to plummet, falling from 69.94 in 1987 to a trough of 63.88 in 1994, and remaining very low for the rest of the decade. In 2000 it was 65.27. Figure 1.13 shows life expectancy for men and women. As Figure 1.13 shows, in 1992, men could expect to live to 62.0 years, but by 1994 this figure had fallen by an astonishing four and a half years, to 57.5. In 2000 the figures were 59.0 for men and 72.2 for women. It is estimated that in 1995, for example, more than a third of male Russian deaths were of those under 70.116 The main direct causes of death have been heart disease and strokes, which have particularly risen among middle-aged men. Mark Field compares, for example, the number of men aged 40–45 who died of cardiovascular disease in 1997 in a number of European countries. Per 100,000 men in this age group, 102 died of cardiovascular disease in France, 170 in Greece, but 549 in Russia.117 Accidents/suicides/murders (classed as one category) have overtaken cancer as the second most common cause of death (Figure 1.14). Non-Muslim, rural and/or less well-educated males have particularly low life expectancy.118 In Russia, many hard drinkers fall into one or more of these groups. Many commentators have ascribed the unprecedented drop in male life

74.32

74.56 74.29 73.75

74.29 74.38

71.88 69.94 69.76

70

72.89 72.93

71.7

72.49

72.34 72.04

72.38 72.2

71.18

69.2 69.62 69.01 67.89

67.02 65.93 65.29

66.64 64.87 65.89 64.64 65.14 64.64 64.21 63.77 63.98 63.45 62.02

64.82

65.27

61.3

Women

Both sexes

03 20

01 20

99 19

97 19

19

93 19

91 19

89 19

19

87

57

95

60.75 59.93 59.75 58.91 59 58.96 58.47 58.27 57.59

Men

Figure 1.13 Life expectancy (years), 1987–2003. Sources: A. Vishnevsky and V. Shkol’nikov, ‘Russian Mortality’, p. 60; RSE 2002, p. 125; SPUZhNR 2003, p. 72. 500 421

414

381 378

265

108

354

266

306 228

239 295

262

397 393 298 283

230

285 257

240

176 143

395

309 326 307

310

264

394 376

205

152 191 178 112

Suicides

Murders

20 01

20 00

19 99

19 98

19 97

19 96

19 95

19 94

19 93

19 92

19 91

19 90

0

Alcohol

Figure 1.14 Death from suicides, murders and alcohol poisoning per million population, 1990–2001. Sources: RSE 2000, p. 98; RSE 2002, p. 126.

Russian social trends

43

expectancy – and the resulting huge gap between male and female figures – to alcohol consumption. Given that Russian men traditionally turn to the bottle in time of stress, and also that deaths from strokes, heart attacks, suicide and murder might also result directly from stress, it is tempting to attribute the plummet in male life expectancy in the 1990s to men’s failure to cope adequately with the stresses of the postcommunist period.119 Two charts for Tver Region display examples of striking gaps between urban–rural and male–female mortality rates (Figure 1.15 and 1.16). Tver is an ethnic Russian region.

76 74 72 70 68 66 64 62 60 58 56 54 52 50 1990–1 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Urban women Urban men

Rural women Rural men

Figure 1.15 Life expectancy in town and village, Tver Region, 1990–2000. Source: Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, p. 32.

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1985

1990 Working-age men

1995

2000

Whole population

Figure 1.16 Alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 population, Tver Region, 1985–2000. Source: Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, p. 29.

44

Russian social trends

Migration from the ‘Near Abroad’ (non-Russian republics of the former USSR) Ethnic Russians and other Russified groups such as Tatars had been ‘returning’ to Russia from other parts of the USSR even before the collapse of the communist regime. In the 1990s, migrants came to Russia from war-torn republics (Tadzhikistan, Azerbaidjan, Georgia, Moldova) or from republics where they feared, or had experienced, discrimination from the resident titular nationality – Estonians in Estonia, for example, or Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. Typically, whole extended families uprooted themselves, although not always at one time.120 In the peak year, 1994, immigration from the CIS and Baltics was, according to official records, 1.1 million. However, it then fell year on year, to 186,266 in 2001. (Figure 1.17.) Figure 1.18 shows how migration almost compensated for natural population loss between the two census years of 1989 and 2002.

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1990

1996

1994

1992

1998

2000

Figure 1.17 Immigrants into Russia from the Near Abroad, 100,000s, 1990–2001. Source: RSE 2001, p. 128.

30,000

5,560

20,000 27,940 10,000

20,540

0 Gain Deaths

Loss Births

Net migration

Figure 1.18 Components of Russian population change, 1989–2002, 1,000s. Source: Calculated from figures in ‘Predvaritel’ nye itogi vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya’, p. 3.

Russian social trends

45

Migration within Russia from North and East to South and West The 1990s also witnessed a massive reversal of population movement within Russia itself.121 Siberia was the traditional place of labour camps and exile, but – particularly from about 1970 – it was also the land of opportunity. Drawn by a combination of high wages and state-sponsored romantic spirit, young people migrated from the Urals and central European Russia to Siberia, the Far East and the northern regions of European Russia. In the 1990s, as subsidies were removed, infrastructure collapsed and geologists and soldiers were laid off, they began to come back. However, as in the case of immigration from the Near Abroad, the rate slackened in the second half of the 1990s, since those most mobile and eager to go had already left.122 As Figure 1.19 shows, in all but three macroregions the overall direction of migration was reversed in the 1990s. The absolute numbers are also striking: 719,000 in the Far East, for example, in 1991–6, with individual regions losing up to half their populations. Thanks to in-migration, the populations of eight regions123 in the Urals and central European areas of Russia grew in the period 1989–2002, despite the fact that these regions also had an excess of deaths over births for most years, and some, such as Leningrad, had particularly high deathrates. Fastest growing were Moscow City and the border regions of Kaliningrad and Belgorod. Another 11 regions in central European Russia lost no more than 50,000 of their population. See Map 1.2.124

Marriages and divorces The upheavals so far described might be expected to have had a profound affect on relations between family members. Families were uprooting themselves, sometimes leaving relatives thousands of miles distant, couples were limiting themselves to just one child, even though most Russian women would like more, and so forth.125 It is sometimes asserted that marriages have been one of the victims of postcommunist upheavals, because of the stresses described earlier and also those created by poverty and unemployment. The divorce figures suggest that this is not entirely true. The actual rate of divorce rose only by 0.3 per thousand in the years 1985–2000, from 4.0 to 4.3, admittedly with a small peak at 4.6 in 1994. It is worth remembering that divorce was already high even in the late Soviet period, and rates were rising fast. The rate had increased from 3.0 in 1970 to 4.2 in 1980.126 Some big cities had much higher rates even than this. For example, in Kuybyshev (as Samara was known in Soviet days) divorces increased from 4.4 in 1970 to 5.4 in 1980, while in the same period they increased from 5.1 to 6.3 in Novosibirsk.127 In 1999, the macroregions with the highest divorce rates were Central and North-West, with particularly high rates for Moscow and St Petersburg (5 per 1,000 population), and the Far East. Just as the richest regions tend to have the most divorce, so the regions with the lowest rates are economically depressed ethnic

46

Russian social trends

–719 33

Far East

–94 E. Siberia 4 182 81

W. Siberia

330

Urals –56

741

N. Caucasus

5 610

Volga –2 Central Black Earth –14

418

157

Volga-Vyatka –23

714

Central

North-West

99 128 44

–211 North 4 –1,000

0 1979–88

1,000 1991–6

Figure 1.19 Net migration into Russian macroregions, 1979–88 and 1991–6, 1,000s. Source: Calculated from Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, ‘Recent Migration Trends in Russia’, p. 124.

minority areas: Ingushetia had only 0.3, and was closely followed by Dagestan and Tyva.128 Thus it seems unwise to jump to conclusions about divorce resulting from the stresses of postcommunist economic change. Moreover, the divorce rate appears to have risen abruptly in 2000–1, just when the economy seemed to be recovering. (In 2001 it stood at 5.3 per 1,000.)129

Russian social trends

Leningrad

47

Vologda

Novgorod

Perm Yaroslavl

Pskov Tver

Kostroma

Kirov

Sverdlovsk

Ivanovo Nizhnii Udmur tia Marii EI Kurgan Nov- ChuChelyagorod vaTatarstan Kaluga shia binsk Tula Ryazan Mordovia UlyanovBashkortostan Bryansk sk Orel Samara Lip- TAM- Penza etsk BOV Kursk ORENBURG Saratov BELGO- Voronezh ROD Smolensk

Moscow

Vladimir

KEY BELGOROD Population growth of 10% or over

Volgograd

Population loss of 2

9 –1

9.

9 15

–1

4.

9 10

9. 5–

50% moves from local area having destination in same region TATARSTAN Region with population growth, 1989–2002 Smolensk Region with net out-migration

Map 2.5 Regions with net in-migration in 1999 and stable or growing cities, 1989–2002, central European Russia and Urals. Source: Predvaritel’nye itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya 2002 goda’; SPUZhNR 2000, pp. 46–7; Regiony Rossii, 2, pp. 68–9. Note Numbers refer to the number of cities (of over 100,000) which either grew in population between the census years or remained stable; these include Kaliningrad City.

Characteristics of small towns across Russia

73

and villages in the same region. Within-region migration is the most common type of migration in Russia. Column 1 of Figure 2.6 shows, for example, that 47.8 per cent of all migration into settlements in the average region originated from other places in that region, and 51.1 per cent of migration out of local settlements was to other settlements in the same region. Only 13.3 per cent of in-migration was from foreign countries. Almost all Russian regions conformed to the ‘average’ pattern, with most migration occurring within the region itself. As illustrated on Map 2.5, the exceptional regions are Leningrad, Moscow Region and a ring of regions around Moscow.58 Perhaps this is because, rather than mill about inside a depressed region like Ivanovo or Tver or Leningrad, it is tempting to move to find employment in neighbouring Moscow or Petersburg; inhabitants of Moscow and Leningrad regions are presumably also drawn to the same cities. (Such migration certainly happened in Zubtsov, where Moscow, in the neighbouring region, seemed to be more of a magnet than the regional capital, Tver.) By contrast, particularly high levels of within-region migration are found in regions with many large cities, where there are presumably more points of attraction. To conclude: Chapters 1 and 2 have contained quite a lot of indirect evidence that people are moving around Russia in search of better opportunities. However, scholarly opinion seems to be divided about how much/how significant such economic migration really is.59 Klugman et al., emphasize the difficulties: it may not be so easy to up and go, for example, because of housing shortages, or because workers may not have the necessary capital.60 On the other hand, as Simon Clarke points out, ‘there is a relatively high level of inter-regional mobility, with around three million people a

60

51.1

All migration (%)

47.8

40.8 38.9

40

20

13.3

8.1

0 From/to same region

Other region

In-migration

Foreign country

Out-migration

Figure 2.6 Migration within Russia in 1999: place of origin and destination of migrants from and out of the average region. Source: Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 68.

74

Characteristics of small towns across Russia

year moving within Russia’ – the main motivations being employment and education. Clarke concludes that there is no evidence that there are significantly more barriers to regional mobility than are usual in any comparable capitalist country . . . In fact, because of the very high level of forced and economic migration in the Soviet Union and the continued strength of kinship ties it is very likely that Russians have better connections in distant places, which give them more opportunity for geographical mobility than most workers in established market economies.61 Commander and Yemtsov suggest that young males are the most likely group to move.62 Smirnov, after ranking all regions according to a number of Goskomstat indicators, concludes that ‘the better the social situation in a region, the higher the in-migration, and vice versa’.63 The regions with the most inmigration were Moscow (City and Region); Leningrad and St Petersburg; Belgorod; and a number of regions along the lower Volga and in the Urals. (See Map 2.5.) Most of these do seem to be prospering regions, by central European Russian standards.

Conclusions It seems that, if the level of economic development in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk appeared very different to that in their regional capitals, this was not unusual for small towns in Russia. Small towns naturally do also differ from one another, and one reason for this is that regions divide into sub-regions, with prosperity tending to be more concentrated in and around larger towns. All three of the fieldwork towns were fairly remote, compared to many settlements in the same region, so, once again, it would not be surprising to find that they were more depressed than other towns and districts, from which it was more feasible to travel regularly into cities and where the level of dacha owning by city dwellers was higher. Given what has been stated about migration patterns, it would also not be surprising to find that many small-town residents – particularly younger ones – attempted to relocate themselves in the region’s cities. Nonetheless, crime rates also seem to be lower in more peripheral regions, so there are advantages to remoteness. Small, remote towns in richer regions may suffer from a particular disparity vis-à-vis their regional capital. Average and even rich regions in European Russia and the richer parts of the Far East sometimes contain a range of living standards fully corresponding to the range among Russian regions. Some cities in these regions occasionally even exceed Moscow standards, at the top of the scale, and there are rural districts whose predicament mirrors that of regions such as Tyva and Dagestan at the bottom. When retail trade, car ownership and wages were compared across four/six regions, the poorest region in the sample had the narrowest range; the richer regions tended to have wide ranges, suggesting (very

Characteristics of small towns across Russia

75

provisionally, since this is a small sample and a blunt instrument) that within-region disparities might be greatest in rich regions. Some regions have more depressed districts than others. Achit, for example, has particular reason to feel aggrieved, since there are relatively few Sverdlovsk districts in the same position. By contrast, Tver, Penza, Kirov and Voronezh contain a higher proportion of small towns based on depressed rural districts. The chapter also drew attention to sub-regional population trends, showing that here too there is wide variation. In districts based on smaller towns, marriage rates are often lower than in the cities, partly because of age structures: there are more pensioners. However, birthrates are higher in rural districts and often very low in cities, especially capital cities, despite the fact that these typically have somewhat younger populations. This suggests that factors such as the local culture, and space constraints, continue to play an important role in determining birthrates. The lower incidence of divorce in small towns and rural areas is intriguing, in view of the fact that these are also the most economically depressed areas, where the population might be expected to be most stressed. Chapter 5 explores the connection between economic depression and family stability in the three small towns.

3

The fieldwork towns and their regions

Introduction Chapter 3 describes Sverdlovsk, Tver and Penza Regions and then focuses on the three small towns. It looks at how respondents characterized their towns and compares the towns’ historical and economic development. It also discusses social problems such as crime and drugs. The conclusions look ahead to the rest of the book, making some tentative initial distinctions between the three towns.

The three regions: Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Figures 3.1–3.3 illustrate that Sverdlovsk is the richest and most urban of the three regions, and Penza is the poorest and most rural. More statistics about the regions are provided, for reference, in Tables 3.1 and 3.2.1 Sverdlovsk is not only urban, but also large, being about the same size and shape as England. The capital, Yekaterinburg, is Russia’s fifth largest city, with an international airport. Sverdlovsk’s population, of over four and a half million, makes it one of the most populous of regions. Its size, in addition to its wealth of industrial plants and mineral resources, contributed to Sverdlovsk’s ranking as fifth among Russian regions in terms of overall GRP in 1999. Sverdlovsk’s particular contribution to the Russian economy is in the production of non-ferrous metals, cement and timber products.2 Place names such as Emerald, Platinum, Asbestos and Cement testify to its heavy industrial profile. It is also a particularly polluted region. It spans the Ural ‘Mountains’, which in most places are really wooded hills. Soils in the south are fertile and the region produces the second to third highest potato harvest of all Russian regions.3 Ethnically, Sverdlovsk is mainly Russian, but there are Tatar villages in the south. Sverdlovsk’s population tends to remain within the region; most migration is within regional boundaries. Sverdlovsk is a ‘donor region’ to the federal centre, and its governor for most of the postcommunist period, Eduard Rossel, has done much to raise its economic profile and create the impression that this is a thriving region. For example, he organized at least three national congresses of manufacturers and one international arms fair.4 Nonetheless, the region suffers from high unemployment, including youth unemployment. Moreover, its high ranking in terms of total GRP

40

35.7 26.6

20 12.6

0 Penza

Sverdlovsk

Tver

Figure 3.1 Rural population as percentage of total regional population, 2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions. Source: Regiony Rossii 2001, vol.2, pp. 34–5. Note Russian average  27.1 per cent. 36,056

40,000 30,000

24,338 17,961

20,000 10,000 0

Penza

Sverdlovsk

Tver

Figure 3.2 ‘GRP’ per capita, rubles, 2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions. Source: RSE 2002, pp. 292–3. Note Russian average  43,306. 148

155

130

105

100

93

80 Penza

Sverdlovsk

Tver

Figure 3.3 Money incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum, 1999, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions. Source: RSE 2000, p. 157. Note Russian average  177.

78

The fieldwork towns and their regions

Table 3.1 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: demographic statistics for 2000

Territory, sq. km. Population density (people per sq. km) Population, 1,000s Population of capital, 1,000s % ethnic Russians % Tatars % Mordvin % urban pop. % pension-age pop. Pensioners per 1,000 working-age Migration rate, per 10,000 pop. Rate of natural pop. increase, per 1,000, 1980 Rate of natural pop. increase, per 1,000, 2000 Deaths per 1000 pop. Deaths per 100,000 pop. from: cancer cardiovascular disease accidents/violence Children as % total pop. Children per 1,000 working-age pop. Births per 1,000 pop. Weddings : divorces per 1,000 pop. Life expectancy, years Infant mortality per 1,000 live births

Penza

Sverdlovsk

Tver

Russia

43,200 35.4

194,800 23.6

84,100 19.0

17,075,400 8.5

1,530.6 532.2 86.2 5.4 5.7 64.6 23.3 401 8 3.1

4,602.6 1266.3 88.7 3.9 — 87.5 20.7 344 16 4.7

1,594.9 454.9 93.5 — — 73.7 25.3 444 11 2.3

145,559.2

73.0 20.7 350 15 4.9

9.3

8.1

13.5

6.7

16.6

16.4

20.8

15.4

212.1 1018.5 205.5 18.5

208.2 851.3 249.5 19.2

236.0 1281.5 278.2 17.7

205.0 815.7 206.1 20.0

318 7.3 6.1 : 4.1 66.29

320 8.3 5.7 : 4.3 63.94

311 7.3 5.9 : 4.0 62.81

336 8.7 6.2 : 4.3 65.27

12.1

15.0

17.0

15.3

Sources: RSE 2000 and 2001; Regiony Rossii 2000 and 2001; SPUZhNR 2000. Note Data for ethnic composition is for 1989, data on causes of death is for 1999.

is not reflected in high living standards among the local population. The purchasing power of wages is only just above the Russian mean and poverty levels, though below the Russian median, are above the mean. As Figure 3.4 shows, poverty levels rose and fell roughly in accordance with overall Russian trends. Rossel has tried, but failed, to address regional economic problems by striving for greater economic autarky – including the printing of ‘Urals francs’ to compensate for the shortage of rubles and wage arrears in the region.5 Recorded crime is considerably higher than the Russian average (see Table 3.2). Tver6 is about half the size of Sverdlovsk, making it one of the largest regions in European Russia. Although it is Moscow Region’s immediate neighbour, Tver is quite different in many ways. It is sparsely populated, for example, like other infertile regions south of Petersburg. Although three-quarters of the population is labelled ‘urban’, in 2000, 44.4 per cent of the population lived in villages or small

The fieldwork towns and their regions

79

Table 3.2 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: the economy and living standards in 1999 and (italicized) 2000 Penza Total GRP, % sum of Russian GRPs GRP per capita, rubles % working-age population employed in small businesses Ind. production, % Russian total Agric. production, % Russian total Exports, % of Russian total Purchasing power of average wage Cars per 1,000 population Price of basket of basic goods, rubles Average subsistence minimum Money incomes as % sub. min. % pop. with incomes below sub. min. Of these, % in extreme poverty Estimated unemployment rate, % Youth unemployment, % Diet: kg bread per annum Diet: kg potatoes per annum Diet: kg meat per annum Children in kindergartens, 1990 Children in kindergartens, 1999 Recorded crime, per 100,000 pop.

Sverdlovsk

1.1 3.4 12,816.7 26,684.9 8.68 5.30

Tver

Russia

1.2 100 17,307.6 28,546.9 6.18 4.52

0.5 1.2

4.2 2.5

0.7 1.2

0.1 100 101.2 511.5 821 93 68.7 18.6 11.2 2.3 124 118 40 64.5 44.1 1,040

2.1 158 97.2 511.5 897 148 35.6 14.3 10.0 11.9 116 101 40 79.6 63.0 2,538

0.3 121 113.6 530.8 824 100 67.4 20.5 9.4 13.9 119 118 35 71.0 60.1 1,891

100 100 100 156 132.4 908 177 29.9 18.0 10.5 7.9 111 94 47 66.4 54.9 2,028

Sources: RSE 2000 and 2001; Regiony Rossii 2000 and 2001; SPUZhNR 2000. Note Figures for children in kindergartens include nurseries, and are percentages of children of the relevant age group.

towns of under 20,000 people. Tver was the only real city, with a population of 450,000. Tver Region is not a significant political player. In the mid-1990s Tver could be regarded in many ways as an ‘average’ region, but since then some indicators have slipped alarmingly. The region has one of the most elderly populations in Russia. Its population was declining even in 1970 and since then the rate of decline has accelerated. By 2000 natural population loss was twice the Russian average. Life expectancy is just below average. The population is overwhelmingly Russian. Migration is most commonly to and from other Russian regions (probably Moscow), not within Tver. Tver – to a greater extent than Sverdlovsk or Penza – has also received thousands of Russian speakers from other CIS countries, notably Azerbaidjan, Kazakstan, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Tver was by far the largest Russian linen grower in 1991. By 1999 production was 14 per cent of the 1990 figure. There was a parallel decline in cloth production, so that by the end of the decade both agriculture and industry were in dire straits. Only 61 per cent of arable land in use in 1990 was cultivated a decade

80

The fieldwork towns and their regions 70 65 60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 1994

1995

1996

Penza Sverdlovsk

1997

1998

1999

Tver Russia

Figure 3.4 Percentage of population with personal incomes below the subsistence minimum, 1999, Russia and Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions. Source: RSE 2000, p. 164.

later. Nonetheless, there were some signs of hope towards the end of the 1990s; the percentage of loss-making agricultural enterprises began to fall from 1998, and the linen industry began to recover in the new century.7 In 1994 Tver had lower than average poverty, but in 1998 the figure was just above the Russian average. It seems that Tver was hit especially hard in the aftermath of the August 1998 crisis: in 1998–9 poverty levels suddenly soared (Figure 3.4). By 1999 Tver had the tenth poorest population in Russia, making it worse off than Dagestan. The average money income in Tver in 1999 was identical to the subsistence minimum. Infant mortality was above average, untypical for the Central macroregion. Unemployment was low, but youth unemployment was very high. Penza, like Tver, had about 20 per cent of the population in poverty in 1994 and nearly 70 per cent just five years later. In 1999 Penza had the most widespread poverty of any ethnic Russian region. Penza can be identified as the southernmost of a band of depressed regions stretching north across the Volga and comprising Mordovia, Chuvashia, Marii El and Kirov. Penza’s main industrial contribution to the Russian economy is shoe production. Its arms industry declined badly in the 1990s. Money incomes in Penza are extremely low, probably because of the sizeable agricultural sector. In 1999 incomes averaged just 93 per cent of the subsistence minimum. Penza has, however, some natural advantages: fertile soil and a relatively southern latitude. Although it belongs to the Volga Okrug, it is not actually on the Volga River, and it shares more features with some of the Black Earth regions than with the wealthy industrial/oil regions of the Volga. These similarities include not only a primarily ethnic Russian and agricultural profile, but also a tradition of voting communist: Penza definitely used to be part of the ‘Red Belt’.

The fieldwork towns and their regions

81

Penza is quite a small region in territory – about half the size of Tver, but twice as densely populated. In this respect it is fairly average for this part of Russia. The regional capital, Penza, is about the same size as Tver and, like Tver, is by far the largest city in the region. About 50 per cent of the Penza Region population lives in villages or small towns of under 20,000; most districts are centred on tiny towns, poselki or villages. According to the 1989 census, 86.2 per cent of the population were ethnic Russians; the main minorities were Mordvin and Tatars. Mordovia is Penza’s northern neighbour. Penza’s health indicators are good: infant mortality is lower and life expectancy higher than the Russian average. The population, while fairly elderly, is younger than Tver’s, and the death rate and population loss are not so extreme. Recorded crime is among the lowest in Russia. Migration tends to be within the region. Penza has slightly lower than average unemployment and very low youth unemployment.

The three towns: Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov This section will begin by exploring how the 141 respondents characterized their towns.8 Respondents in Zubtsov, the location of the pilot survey, were asked only if they were proud of Zubtsov; most said they were. They characterized Zubtsov as being attractive, having friendly people, being of historic significance, unpolluted, quiet and safe. As Figures 3.5–3.7 illustrate, these were also qualities associated with Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. Interviewees here were posed the open question of how their home town differed from other places. In response, they were most fulsome on the topic of how friendly people were: they greeted each other on the street, had time to chat, etc. Observation suggested that this was true. It was hard to take a quick walk across any of the towns. Young people who had been born in the small town were often among the most enthusiastic respondents. (‘I love my town, my street, my house,’ gushed a teacher in Zubtsov.)

15 10

12 10

10

10 8

8

6

6 5

rie nd ly

id y

r

nt U

nf

U

Po o

ui et Q

e Sa f

llu Be te au d tif ul na tu re

np o

U

Fr

ie nd l

y

0

Figure 3.5 Answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Achit (percentage respondents naming each attribute, if over 2 per cent).

82

The fieldwork towns and their regions 24

25 20 15

12 10

10

8 6

6 4

5

ic H is t

or

ad m

Th

ea

O

n

tri ca

lt

ra

ai n

ro

di tio

n

ty et Pr

Sa

fe

dl y ie n Fr

Q

ui et

0

Figure 3.6 Positive answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Bednodemyanovsk (percentage respondents naming each attribute, if over 2 per cent).

15

14

14

14

10

10

10

6 4

5

4

4

du

Po st Po ry or or l ei /h su ig r h un e Fa em rf p’ ro t m Pe nz a N o fo re Ba st d ad m in N . o ra ilw U ay ni nf or m ed

N

o

in

U

nt

id

y

0

Figure 3.7 Disparaging answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Bednodemyanovsk (percentage respondents naming each attribute, if over 2 per cent).

The more negative interviewees tended to be people of all ages from big cities, such as Dushanbe, Baku and Leningrad. They also included young, especially childless people, who were frustrated by the lack of leisure opportunities, or respondents who seemed to be depressed for a range of other reasons. The four

The fieldwork towns and their regions

83

women who complained of local people being unpleasant (zlye) were all fairly recent arrivals. Even they were not completely negative. For example, one of these women also described Bednodemyanovsk as ‘a little island [of security] in a hard world’. Interviewees who were generally positive about the small towns were most likely, if they complained, to comment on the industrial slump, since they viewed industrial production as the main motor and indicator of prosperity. However, more unexpectedly, they almost as often complained about the town’s untidiness: pavements blocked with piles of timber and the odd cowpat, roads with potholes, or broken streetlamps. ‘There used to be more rubbish bins, benches and flowerbeds,’ said one woman in Bednodemyanovsk. Another complained of the ruined condition of the children’s playground. The decline was a particular comedown for Bednodemyanovsk, which had won a ‘best-kept’ competition in the 1980s. The Achit responses had a noticeably ‘Urals’ element, with mentions of the attractive landscape, and a contrast being made between Achit’s cleanliness and safety and the crime and pollution which were seen to characterize Sverdlovsk cities where the interviewees had also lived, such as Yekaterinburg and Asbest. It was striking that crime was not seen as a major problem in the small towns, despite the fact that the local newspapers regularly publish details of crimes. In Zubtsov District, the August 1998 crisis was said by the police to have had an immediate impact, with an ‘epidemic of stealing other people’s property, drunkenness at home and brutal woundings’. Nonetheless, recorded crime rates in the district, as in the other small towns, remained below regional and national levels. The Zubtsov rate was 187.2 per 10,000 population for 1998. In Achit, the figure was similar, 196.7 for 1999, and in the first eight months of 2000 it declined by 4.5 per cent.9 In Bednodemyanovsk the rate in 1999 was 76.8, about three-quarters of the regional average. It was still a tiny 85.4 in 2000.10 Penza, as noted earlier, was a particularly low-crime region. Zubtsov parents and teachers were worried about drugs, which were said to be readily available at local schools. Zubtsov’s relative proximity to Moscow is no doubt a factor here. In Achit several women also expressed their fears about drugs, one of them linking her anxiety to the presence of the main road to Yekaterinburg, a city with a serious drugs problem. The newspaper also attributed the drugs problem to the main road, said, in addition, to be responsible for a mass influx of illegal vodka. The police knew of five locations where drugs could be bought in the town.11 One HIV-positive person had already been registered in Achit District and 6 per cent of local children were said to have experimented with drugs.12 However, it was striking that in Bednodemyanovsk – more remote from a city, or even a medium-sized town – only two parents, both doctors, said they worried about drugs. The local police have found only a few instances of drug possession and despite articles in the local newspaper by doctors about the dangers of drugs, parents do not seem particularly concerned yet. Teenage drinking is a more immediate problem. Newspaper articles in Bednodemyanovsk and Achit convey some idea of other areas of public concern in the towns. Reporting a visit by Penza Governor

84

The fieldwork towns and their regions

Bochkarev to Bednodemyanovsk in August 2000, the local newspaper noted that he received complaints about ‘late payment of child benefit, lack of jobs, rising prices for municipal services, rising food prices, lethargy of the local police regarding thefts from vegetable gardens, home brewing, etc.’13 In Achit, the editor of the local paper, interviewing the head of administration in 1999, identified the most widespread concerns as being the illegal cutting of trees and their export out of the district; the threatened closure of local kindergartens; the nontransmission of Yekaterinburg television; stray dogs; unsupervised teenagers; and the tax on potato plots.14 An important part of Zubtsov’s identity is determined by its wartime experience. Zubtsov itself was occupied by the Nazis from October 1941 to August 1942 and the local area was the scene of fierce battles (the Rzhev Front). Zubtsov’s large modern housing estate, tucked away on the plateau above the historic town centre, is named Victory Street; a memorial tank stands beside the Moscow-Riga road; and there is an impressive war memorial. Achit, by contrast, commemorates most noticeably the Civil War: not such an unequivocally glorious part of Soviet history. The main street is named for a local commissar, Krivozubov. The towns were similar in that their profiles were to some extent determined by their links with prisoners. No doubt the same could be said of many Russian towns. Achit originated as a fortress on the Siberian road, along which generations of exiles tramped to Siberia.15 Under Stalin, Bednodemyanovsk housed many actor convicts, who had built the Moscow–Penza highway, but also brought the town its theatrical tradition. This continued into the late Soviet period, and contemporary drama enthusiasts are trying to revive it. Zubtsov, located on the border of Moscow Region, has been a traditional settling place for ex-prisoners refused permission to settle closer to Moscow. Convict labour was also used to build the nearby Vazuza Reservoir in the 1970s. Some Zubtsov professionals have a fearful and distant attitude to the local population, especially the rural population, which is they see as consisting largely of former convicts, violent and heavy-drinking. In Achit district, Russians formed 79.8 per cent of the district’s population, Tatars 10.8 per cent and Mari 6.7 per cent. In Bednodemyanovsk town 89 per cent of citizens were ethnic Russians, 9.2 per cent were Mordvin, and Tatars, Ukrainians, Chuvash and ‘others’ each constituted less than 1 per cent. Zubtsov had no sizeable ethnic minorities. Its Jews were said to have largely emigrated by 1999, but there were some Ukrainians, Armenians and Chechens. (The last were not refugees.)16 All three towns are located on major trunkroads, which gave some respondents the sense of being ‘on the way to somewhere’, but led others to feel ‘a long way from anywhere’. The nearest cities are Yekaterinburg and Perm (Achit); Penza, Ryazan and Saransk (Bednodemyanovsk); and Moscow and Tver (Zubtsov). (See Map 0.1.) Each of the three small towns is roughly equidistant from these cities, hence further from any city than many neighbouring small towns. Table 3.3 shows some bus fares, with the regional subsistence minimum at about the same

The fieldwork towns and their regions

85

Table 3.3 Bus fares to most important local city (Moscow, Penza, Yekaterinburg), in rubles

Return bus fare Monthly regional subsistence minimum

Zubtsov, spring 1999

B’k, spring/summer 2000

Achit, Sept. 2000

80 824

90/130 933

190 1,015

period.17 Local wages were often well below the subsistence minimum, so it was expensive to travel to the city. Cheap train services which used to run from Achit District to Yekaterinburg have been discontinued. Commuting daily to a big city, therefore, is not very feasible. More accessible are the middle-sized towns of Krasnoufimsk (pop. 46,000) and Rzhev (pop. 69,000). Bednodemyanovsk is not within easy commuting distance of any middle-sized town. In January 2000 there were 83.0 cars per 1,000 population in Bednodemyanovsk District, below the regional average, though no doubt the percentage was higher in the town.18 In 1999 there were 133.0 in Zubtsov town, above the regional average.19 Observation suggested that Zubtsov had the busiest roads of the three towns, while still being very quiet. There is no public transport within the towns, so that some interviewees were walking half an hour or more to work. (The populations are small, but settlement is not particularly dense, since so many houses are individual small farmsteads.) Because of shortage of buses, travel around the district can also be a major problem everywhere. With the growth in car ownership and prosperity in the big cities, the 1990s saw the spread of dacha holdings for dozens, sometimes hundreds of kilometres around cities like Moscow or Yekaterinburg. Dachas in this sense are often country cottages for holidays rather than smallholdings used for subsistence farming. Some Yekaterinburg residents own dachas in Achit District and three families from Moscow were said to have bought land in Bednodemyanovsk. However, only Zubtsov is truly within the big city (Moscow)’s exurbia, as is discussed later. Thanks to a high birthrate in Achit and to in-migration in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk, the populations of the three towns rose in the early 1990s and, although they subsequently declined, they were not much different at the end of the decade than they had been at the beginning (see Figure 3.8 and Table 3.4). The three towns are the largest in their districts, but in each there is one other relatively sizeable settlement. Dubrovki (Bednodemyanovsk) is a large village. Pogoreloe Gorodishche (Zubtsov) is also a village, but has a military base and is a cultural centre in its own right, partly on the strength of its annual Pushkin festivals. Pogoreloe was once visited by the poet Alexander Pushkin, and has the further distinction of being burned down by one of Pushkin’s ancestors in 1617.

86

The fieldwork towns and their regions 10 8.3

8.2 7.9

7.6

5.5

5.2

0 1989 Achit

2000 Bedn.

Zubtsov

Figure 3.8 Town populations, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1,000s, 1989 and 2000.

Table 3.4 Populations of fieldwork towns and their associated districts, January 2000

Achit Bednodemyanovsk Zubtsov

de jure population

de facto population

de jure district population

5,200 8,200 7,900

5,400 8,200 7,900

21,200 15,100 21,300

Source: Chislennost’ naseleniya Rossiiskoi Federatsii 2000.

In Achit, the neighbouring settlement of Ufimka is only slightly smaller than Achit and in some respects better developed: it has a factory, a glassworks employing 800 people in 2000, and municipally-provided hot water. Achit is the most agricultural of the three districts, despite its location in Sverdlovsk. However, 27.8 per cent of supposedly arable land remained unsown in 2000,20 and many local livestock herds had been sold off. The area devoted to grain production in 1998 was 42 per cent of the 1977 figure.21 The local foodprocessing industry had completely collapsed: there was no bakery, dairy or meat processing plant in the district. Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk had been more industrialized than Achit in the Soviet period and despite the closing of some factories – such as sewing workshops – industry, including machine repairs and foodprocessing, was still somewhat functioning, but usually at a loss. In 1998, two-thirds of industrial enterprises were said to be loss-making in Bednodemyanovsk,22 as were all but one, the machine repair factory, in Zubtsov.23 Around Bednodemyanovsk, local farms in theory produced grain, sugar beet and fruit,24 but many had ceased to do

The fieldwork towns and their regions

87

so. A fruit wine producing state farm did make a profit. Zubtsov District was full of abandoned land. It is impossible to tell from registered unemployment figures how much real unemployment exists, but respondents suggested that it was considerable, especially among young people. Zubtsov District had lost ‘5,600 workplaces over the last few years’ – suggesting that about 40 per cent of the working population had been made unemployed during this time.25 Zubtsov has also unemployed former soldiers from the Baltic Republics. Estimated unemployment figures for Achit District in 2000 were very different, but high in both cases: 15.4 per cent and 27 per cent.26 Women had been particularly vulnerable at first, when two-thirds of the livestock farms were disbanded, but towards the end of the 1990s farms also began firing male drivers and tractor operators.27 The records of the Employment Service in Achit showed that for the period January–June 2000, 17 people had been made redundant, 15 in the state sector, with the largest single group (5) being in finance. 230 manual workers and 50 white-collar workers were registered unemployed. Among the white-collar workers, the largest groups were book-keepers (7), cashiers (5), vospitateli (teachers with pastoral duties, probably kindergarten teachers) (5), agronomists (4). The service had sent thirty people on courses to learn to be private farmers, and provided training for a further 70 people for nine types of job: book-keeper, secretary/clerical worker, office manager, hairdresser, sewing machine operator, driver, welder and bulldozer operator. The last were said to be useful qualifications for people wishing to work part-time in oil-rich Tyumen, across the Urals. The most urgent vacancy in the town was that of English teacher.28 Retail trade turnover in Achit District for the first nine months of 2000 was just 273 rubles a month per head of population. This implies fewer transactions even than in the poorest district in poor Kirov Region (see Chapter 2).29 The telephone book published in 1995 lists just nine shops in Achit town.30 By 2000, Achit District, where the retail sector was three-quarters private (unlike Zubtsov’s half), had just over 100 shops,31 as well as a few little stalls in the town centre selling shoddy Chinese clothing and shampoo. Trade is somewhat livelier in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk, which have large markets on the outskirts of town. Zubtsov District had about 200 retail outlets, including 100 private shops and kiosks, mostly selling food and drink.32 In spring 1999 there were said to be about 350 shuttle traders, many bringing in goods from Moscow. Most were, apparently, doing badly.33 In Soviet days rural districts were encouraged to be as self-sufficient as possible, because of the limitations of the command economy and the poor condition of roads and transport: each town would have a bakery, dairy, etc. Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk maintained this local food distribution and production service,34 even if not always very efficiently, and in 1999–2000 were trying to expand and develop it.35 Local people could sell their surplus produce, whereas in Achit they had no official outlets to do so. They could also buy milk and bread fairly cheaply, whereas in Achit many people made their own bread and cheese rather than rely on relatively expensive products ‘imported’ from neighbouring towns.

88

The fieldwork towns and their regions Table 3.5 Zubtsov District income, 1999 Source District taxes Regional subsidy Federal subsidy Total

Rubles 13,791,000 4,302,000 2,080,000 20,173,000

Source: N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet raiona utverzhden’, ZubZh, 16 April 1999.

Considering that the district economies function so poorly, it is not surprising that the districts are in debt. The Zubtsov local newspaper explained, for example, that the district budget for 1999 was supposedly constituted as in Table 3.5. The district hoped to spend 30.7 million rubles in 1999, giving an annual deficit of 34 per cent of expenditure, incurred just in 1999. However, it was carrying a 30 per cent deficit from 1998, caused by shortfalls in all three constituent parts of its income. This deficit was expressed in the form of 3.3 million rubles wage arrears and 3.6 million rubles child benefit arrears.36 (Bednodemyanovsk had a roughly equivalent child benefit debt at the same time.)37 Just as local people suffered from non-payment of wages and benefits, so Zubtsov District administration was forced to subsist for months on end with no support from Tver. In January 1999, for example, the district had received no subsidies from Tver for six months and had been entirely ‘living off its own money’ during that time.38 Local leaders seemed to assume that the shortage of cash would continue. For example, Penza Governor Bochakarev, on a visit to Bednodemyanovsk, could only counsel local people to put still more effort into tending their household plots.39 This was regional policy, and in 2000 the district had a detailed plan for output of different foodstuffs from household plots and had created a special local government department to coordinate their activities and provide support.40 The head of Zubtsov Finance Department told schools that they must become at least partly self-sufficient, and rebuked them for not growing enough vegetables.41 The cash shortage led to many absurd and wasteful contortions of the local economy. For example, in Bednodemyanovsk the ambulance service, police and district administration constantly ran up debts for their petrol, obtained at local petrol stations – eventually forcing at least one of these stations out of business.42 In November 1999 the Bednodemyanovsk administration agreed to cancel debts owed by local state and collective farms if they would repair the district hospital. Children’s Home No. 2 had also done its bit to help the hospital by donating a tonne of beetroot, presumably grown by the children.43 The editor of the district newspaper in Achit sat in an office swimming with other Sverdlovsk Region newspapers. The post office gave them to her because, despite having collected newspaper subscriptions from the local population, it had then spent this money on something else, was in debt and unable to pay the editor in money. The deputy head of

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Achit District, Yurii Vedernikov, incurred considerable suspicion among the local population because he was suspected of profiting from illegal timber felling – a major local issue. Vedernikov excused his involvement on the grounds that it was the only way to get timber for repairing state institutions.44 In some respects, therefore, the towns’ names – meaning ‘poor’,‘tooth’ and ‘hungry dog’ – seemed appropriate.45 The head of administration in Zubtsov referred to ‘an emergency situation in all spheres of life’.46 To add insult to injury, both Achit and Zubtsov were under threat of elimination as district centres, and a number of institutions in both had already been transferred to more economically viable neighbouring districts centred on larger towns. District liquidation would imply massive unemployment, since district institutions like hospitals, as well as the district administrations, were expected to be closed or dismembered.47 It would be wrong, however, to suppose the towns to be completely poverty stricken. Sticking out like proverbial sore thumbs are one or two pieces of ostentatious modern architecture: a garish bank in Zubtsov and the tax inspectorate in Achit (situated, with sad symbolic resonance, next to the decrepit 1960s house of culture). These intrusions from another world remind one of the regional capital and its modern economy. Zubtsov, in particular, has somewhat compensated for industrial decline by participating indirectly in Moscow’s prosperity. In the postwar years villagers had flocked out of Zubtsov District to Rzhev, Tver, Moscow and Leningrad, leaving dozens of depopulated villages, as is not uncommon in this part of Russia. In the 1990s ‘dacha owners from Moscow began to come as far as Zubtsov District, bought up all the vacant houses and moreover, began intensively to build new dachas. This export of Moscow money and creation of new jobs somewhat helps to soften the crisis in the district, but does not solve it completely.’48 It was impossible for the district administration to tax adequately this sector of the economy, but at least it provided workplaces in construction and wood-processing companies, and custom for local shops. The Zubtsov newspaper editor claimed that the population ‘doubled’ in the summer. Petrol stations were another area of growth in the late 1990s. Eventually, more petrol stations were built around both Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov than the traffic on the roads would really support, even if the roads did lead to Moscow. Of the three towns, Zubtsov was by far the best provided with new housing. For example, it housed more demobilized soldiers than any district or city of Tver Region,49 in two blocks of flats built with American money and opened in 1996. It was able to set aside a staircase for Chernobyl victims in a new high-rise block. (Both Chernobyl refugees interviewed, a librarian and a journalist, were from Bryansk Region.)50 Zubtsov also had a whole block built by the Magadan Gold Company for its retired employees and their families. These assets meant that, earlier in the 1990s, Zubtsov had been able to attract well-qualified, often young and middle-aged incomers. For example, in 1996, 246 people had moved into the town, 113 of them from the ‘Near Abroad’, while only 72 had moved out. By 1998 net growth from migration was down to seven, but many of the specialists who had moved into the town earlier in the decade remained.51

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One has to be wary of taking too literally people’s complaints that they lived better in the old days and that the 1990s have seen only decline. It may be that respondents and local journalists, in their more negative characterizations of local life, were exaggerating to some extent. As food for thought, here is a characterization of Zubtsov in 1999 by a migrant who arrived in 1990. ‘The town was dead in 1990, grey and depressed. There were lots of drunks and swearing on the streets. Now it is tidier and people seem more respectable. They are more urban.’

Conclusions Sverdlovsk is clearly the most prosperous of the three regions, although living standards do not live up to the regional leadership’s carefully cultivated image of economic prosperity. Achit, as will be shown in the next chapter, does benefit from regional funding. It also has a relatively large private retail sector. However, as has already been mentioned, total retail trade is extremely low. The predominance of the private sector does not reflect a healthy increase in the number of new businesses, but rather the near collapse of the state food retail network. Moreover, unemployment was high and industrial production in the district continued to decline in 2000. Chapter 4 also illustrates that wages are very low in Achit. In terms of lack of subsidy from the regional centre, Zubtsov may well be the poorest of the three districts. However, Zubtsov has a fairly strong informal economy, thanks to its location on the fringes of Moscow’s ‘exurbia’. Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have at least some functioning factories and, as Chapters 6–8 will illustrate, they have a more ‘intellectual’ profile and more flourishing community life. Although impossible to quantify, the atmosphere was more confident in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk: respondents seemed to feel more urban than people in Achit. This is not just because of larger populations and ‘town’ status. Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have had more renewal of their populations by urban migrants. These more subjective impressions, gathered from the interviews, suggest that Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have more clear-cut and attractive self-images. They have histories which are a source of pride, for example, and they have landmarks. Achit has no landmarks.52 Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk possess churches, unlike Achit, where most of the church has been converted into a children’s arts centre and it has no cupola. In Zubtsov, proximity to Moscow means that there is some sense of ‘connectedness’ to the capital. Bednodemyanovsk, by contrast, is stranded in the middle of nowhere, since the nearest really large cities, Moscow and Samara, are very far down the road in either direction. However, its isolation in the middle of the steppe, both from big cities and even from small ones, does confer certain benefits: the almost complete absence of a drugs problem, for example. As Table 3.2 shows, Penza in general enjoys very low crime statistics and high life expectancy. Even though Penza has a relatively high number of people in extreme poverty (e.g. as compared to Sverdlovsk), there was less evidence of social problems in Bednodemyanovsk than in the other towns. It was indicative that teachers in

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Bednodemyanovsk, with one exception, never complained about how difficult it was to teach children who came from very deprived backgrounds, whereas such angst was commonplace among teachers in both Zubtsov and Achit. In Zubtsov teenage crime had risen by 136 per cent from 1997 to 1998.53 The number of children in residential care in Bednodemyanovsk is shrinking, not growing as it is in the other towns. More interviewees in Bednodemyanovsk gave the impression of enjoying their jobs. (‘Being with students cheers you up’ was one comment.) To return to the quotation (‘peace, labour and happiness’) with which the book opened: rather paradoxically, given Penza’s low status in the economic indicator rankings, there seemed to be more ‘peace and happiness’ here than elsewhere. Labour is a problem everywhere, a theme which is addressed in Chapter 4.

4

State-sector employees The new poor

The majority of teachers are chronically ill and cannot dress themselves in keeping with their professional status; often they and their families survive on bread and salt. S. Kotkin1

Introduction The previous chapter concluded with gloomy portraits of the economies of the small towns. The above quotation, from the editor of Zubtsov’s newspaper, serves to confirm that impression. He illustrated his point with a photograph of hungry teachers on strike. Kotkin knew about teachers, particularly since his wife was one, but perhaps he was exaggerating for effect? This chapter describes in more detail some aspects of respondents’ lives and livelihoods, as background to analysis of their livelihood strategies (Chapter 5) and changing identities (Chapters 6–8). It begins by discussing working conditions in state institutions, including the impact on workplaces of new recruits, often replacements for staff who had left the schools and hospitals in pursuit of personal livelihood strategies. The chapter also considers the interviewees’ worries about unemployment, both for themselves and in the wider community, and what their actual experiences of unemployment had been. The second half of the chapter looks at poverty. Most of the sample could be described as poor, in the sense they earned salaries which were less than the official subsistence minimum, and many had also experienced extreme poverty in the 1990s, either on a long-term or a temporary basis. It briefly examines the most evident indicators of poverty and prosperity among the sample. The discussion then turns to the causes of poverty and extreme poverty, first low incomes and then household composition. Some examples of local salaries and wages are provided and compared with the subsistence minimum. Profiles of different types of household composition illustrate the ingredients for success or failure. Finally, state pensions and benefits are considered as extra sources of income, which did not usually, however, pull respondents out of poverty. Chapter 5 complements and continues Chapter 4, since it looks at how people pull themselves out of extreme poverty – their ‘survival strategies’, including

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finding employment in the private sector. It also addresses those causes of and/or solutions to poverty which are more intangible than low incomes and household composition. These assets are human, professional and social capital, in the form of cooperative relations between family members and with neighbours and colleagues, and personal resources such as skills, health and time.

Professional jobs in the state sector: workplaces Working conditions are primitive in most institutions. The Soviet press had plenty of stories about the poor condition of houses of culture and schools deep in the provinces: roofs which leaked, or fell in when the audience clapped, etc.2 Little has changed – leaky roofs still leak. Rooms are cramped and there is little equipment. In Zubtsov Library catalogue cards were forms for filing divorces, donated by the registery office. Larger items, like typewriters, photocopiers and pianos, are also in short supply; fax machines and computers are rare indeed, except in some local government offices. School cupboards are full of Soviet-era textbooks and there is little money to buy new ones. Teachers bear the main responsibility for the annual repainting of desks and classrooms during the summer holidays. They beg materials from acquaintances.3 For instance, in Achit, the husband of one teacher was head of the road maintenance office; he gave paint for school redecoration. Specifically post-Soviet problems and solutions include the cost of utilities and the presence of a local business community. When I visited the vocational college in Achit its telephone had been cut off. The head of the local education department claimed that telephones, power and water were ‘systematically’ cut off at schools within the district because the local authority could not pay the bills.4 The Perm Circus cancelled a visit to Achit because the house of culture was in darkness; no weddings could be held in the registery office for the same reason.5 Headteachers in all three towns are told by the local authorities that there is no money for extras. In cities it is more possible for state institutions like schools to survive by renting out their premises,6 but this option is not available in the small towns. Headteachers are forced to beg for help from entrepreneurs, for example, to sponsor school trips or even for school meals. Some headteachers complained that they wasted enormous quantities of time running around pleading for aid from businessmen. However, this should not be seen as a complete innovation, since in the Soviet period it was customary for state enterprises to sponsor cultural and educational institutions – an inefficient way of remedying for the fact that culture and education were financed on the ‘leftover principle’: always the last items on central and local budgets. At least, though, the Soviet arrangement was more formalized, even if commitments by the patron enterprise were not always honoured. There were a few exceptions to these tales of woe, notably in Achit, suggesting that Achit does actually benefit sometimes from its location in a comparatively wealthy region. School No. 1 had won special regional-level funding for a 1.3 million ruble renovation. In fact all but one educational institution in the

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district had received some sort of central Sverdlovsk funds for repairs in 2000.7 Zubtsov hospital has modern medical technology and a new intensive care ward, as of 1996, thanks to the efforts of the hospital manager and her personal links, through a dacha dweller, to the presidential hospital centre in Moscow.8 If the quality of working conditions often makes state institutions difficult places to work, there is quantity to compensate – a typically Soviet situation. As a district administrative centre, each small town offered jobs in the local administration, ubiquitously known as the ‘White House’, in ironic reference to the Moscow, not Washington equivalent. Each town also had a nearly complete range of Soviet-era health, educational and cultural facilities. It was true that some kindergartens had shut in all three towns, as had local radio stations and cinemas in two. Overall, however, at least during the 1990s, there were still probably slightly over three hundred ‘intelligentsia’ working in education, culture and health in each town, as well as nurses, nannies and various auxiliary staff. Hence these institutions were significant local employers. School No. 1 (the biggest) in each town could, in particular, be viewed as a kind of centre of the local community. The town of Zubtsov, for example, possessed a hospital with 100 beds,9 and, as is customary in Russia, a separate environmental health and vaccination centre (sanepidemstantsiya); a biweekly newspaper; a radio station; three arts centres (a house of culture,10 which was, however, under repair and barely functioning; a children’s arts centre and a ‘music and art school’ where children paid just 30 rubles a month for tuition); three town public libraries, including a separately housed children’s library; a local history museum; three schools; one vocational college; five kindergartens; a children’s home; and a hospital. In the 1990s a bookshop, a cinema and three kindergartens had closed, but there had also been growth – the opening of a new school, to cope with the flood of 1980s babies, and the expansion of the music school, which not only offered art lessons by a professional artist but also organized many concerts and other events for the local population. Bednodemyanovsk, just slightly larger than Zubtsov, had nearly the same range of institutions. It was true that, being more compact, it had one school and library fewer than Zubtsov; the history museum was incorporated within one of the schools; it had also lost its local radio station. On the other hand, School No. 2 had recently expanded, to provide teaching for 15–17-year-olds (classes 10 and 11), to cope with the large numbers of children born in the mid-1980s. Bednodemyanovsk was also the only one of the three towns to provide more than secondary-level education, since it boasted a further education college. This was an ‘agricultural technical college’ which drew students from outside the district. Bednodemyanovsk also had two children’s homes, one of which had traditionally been for prisoners’ children, with 80 children apiece. Achit, despite its smaller size, had the same administrative centre status and therefore much the same range of institutions; in fact it also possessed a children’s sports school, for after-school training, and a functioning cinema. One of the two schools was a special needs school. The number of pupils at the special school rose from 56 in 1985 to 116 in 2000.11 There was no museum or children’s home, but there was a well-used children’s shelter. A children’s home had recently opened in the district.

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Professional jobs in the state sector: the quality of new recruits The interviewees who were still employed in the state sector were, in almost all cases, not planning to leave their jobs, although colleagues had done so. The quality of recently recruited staff varied strikingly between the different towns. New staff in most institutions in Achit and in the vocational school in Bednodemyanovsk were distinctly underqualified; new staff in Zubtsov often considered themselves vastly overqualified.12 Several respondents had a sense of upward mobility. For example, one man ran the district Automobile Association until it collapsed, but then got a job organizing arts events at the agricultural college, which he found more satisfying, though very poorly paid. A canteen worker who had become a librarian was enjoying a feeling of enhanced social status. She felt that in the canteen everyone assumed you were stealing food, but librarians were respected. Several young teachers in Achit had moved into the town from surrounding villages, with only a vocational diploma from the college in nearby Krasnoufimsk. By contrast, very highly qualified specialists, moving into Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk from cities in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Far East, had found jobs as doctors, teachers and directors of cultural institutions, but mourned what they left behind. Moreover, by the end of the 1990s it was not always easy for highly qualified people to find jobs, as some of these migrants found when their relatives followed in their footsteps. There was said to be intense competition for jobs in the arts in Bednodemyanovsk. The opposite was true in Achit, with no such flood of incomers, where the house of culture director claimed that ‘no one wants to work in culture’.

Worries about unemployment State-owned factories and local government had shed jobs locally and, while respondents themselves, because of the nature of the sample, were almost all employed, many friends and, sometimes, engineer or worker husbands had lost their jobs. Not surprisingly, moods were frequently deeply pessimistic. Interviewees talked about fear of unemployment as a major source of stress locally, making comments such as ‘people talk about it all the time; you can’t help worrying about it for yourself and your family’. In Zubtsov the situation seemed to be particularly acute and it was asserted that you could not even get a cleaning job paying 100 rubles a month. Respondents were much concerned about the psychological effects of unemployment on the local community. They contrasted the survivable and usually short-term poverty of the majority with the ‘degradation’ of long-term unemployed manual workers and peasants. Gordon and Klopov have described this phenomenon as ‘stagnant unemployment, typical to some extent of the urban social depths’.13 Respondents were particularly anxious about the prospects for vocational school-leavers. Young men often go straight into the army, so the immediate problem was in finding jobs for women, who often studied economics/accounting, but

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ended up working in shops. In Zubtsov it was said to be pointless even to train as a cook, because factories had closed their canteens. In the other two towns, there were catering jobs in the private sector. Local boys could get jobs as tractor drivers or mechanics, but other manual jobs were not in much demand. Some people considered bee-keeping to be the most useful course at the Bednodemyovsk college: not only could professional bee-keepers find jobs, but also bee-keeping was a good source of extra earnings. A particular problem in Achit was the fate of children at the special needs school. When the school opened in 1985, pupils were trained as seamstresses and carpenters, but by 2000 the school had decided that the only sensible approach was to train them to work their families’ household plots.14 Did women feel particularly threatened by unemployment? It is often suggested that Russian employers are more ready to shed female labour, although, as Chapter 1 pointed out, overall national figures show that a slightly higher proportion of men are unemployed. I asked directly in the pilot survey whether women who had been made unemployed at some stage in their careers felt that this had happened partly because they were women. For the main survey I dropped the question, because it had puzzled interviewees and the moment of misunderstanding created a hitch in the interview. It was evident that interviewees did not think in gender terms. Nonetheless, those few women respondents who had lost their jobs did, in some cases, think that they had been victimized because they were women. For example, a former teacher believed that had she been a man she might not have been fired, and she emphasized that this was an opinion based on experience, not an ideological position. ‘Of course I’m not a feminist,’ she explained quickly. A few other women interviewees had similar stories to tell. For example, an economics lecturer was supporting an eight-year-old daughter and a mechanic husband who worked on a state farm and was paid only in kind. She had been fired twice: first from her job as an economist with the local authority, because she went on maternity leave, then from a post as head accountant to an insurance company. After a spell of registered unemployment, she worked in the hospital as an accountant before acquiring a lectureship. She wanted another child but was afraid of being fired again if she went on a second maternity leave. Overall, however, in the 1990s, men seemed to be more at risk of unemployment. Respondents’ male relatives who were engineers or manual workers had often lost their jobs. Engineers usually had to change profession. Not having a university degree was a factor which people felt could doom you to unemployment. A physical education teacher in Achit, for example, said that she was scared that someone with a degree would ‘take her job away from her’. However, having specialist qualifications which were not needed locally was equally a problem, although it did not always prevent respondents from eventually finding other professional jobs, for which they had not been trained. One respondent graduated with a first-class degree as a kindergarten educational theorist, was unemployed, got a job as a village schoolteacher, left because of the poor housing, was unemployed again, then ‘by chance’ was appointed to teach history in a vocational college. One man had recently acquired a law diploma and

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had been unemployed for a year before getting a job as a journalist. A legal consultant was teaching history in a village school and a scenery painter was working part-time as an art teacher. All these people might have been able to get jobs using their specialist skills in a city, but they could not afford to move, in most cases because they were financially dependent on their parents. Among people who were employed and using their professional qualifications, some were much more jittery about unemployment than others. Occupation and seniority seemed to be the most important factors engendering a sense of security or danger. Journalists, librarians and arts workers everywhere tended to feel insecure. Doctors and teachers of foreign languages usually felt secure, since there are vacancies in these professions. In particular, doctors are like gold dust in Achit, where two-thirds of posts in the local hospital remain empty.15 In Bednodemyanovsk, too, there are vacant places where doctors have departed for Penza and Moscow.16 In Achit, there was no language teacher in a third of the district’s schools, although a language is a compulsory part of the school curriculum and needed in order to graduate from school.17 In Achit town’s School No. 1, an English teacher was commuting from Krasnoufimsk to give paid lessons to a few children. In Zubtsov at least one English teacher was employed without a degree in English. Chapter 1 mentioned the somewhat ambiguous quality of the years 1999–2000 on a national level. (What sort of turning point was the end of the Yeltsin era? Was it really going to make a difference to people’s lives and livelihoods?) In the small towns, particularly in the schools, the same years marked a kind of hiatus. In the earlier 1990s business had seemed more tempting, but by the late 1990s there was a better appreciation of the risks and disadvantages of the private sector and the comparative security of state employment. (In Achit, however, the outflow continued: 70 teachers in the district left their jobs in 1998–9 alone.)18 By 2000, the situation felt more comfortable in the schools because, on the whole, salaries were being paid. A market trader even in Achit returned to her teaching job in order to qualify for maternity benefits. On the other hand, teachers realized that this was a kind of ‘calm before the storm’. Although in 1999–2000 the schools were packed, because of high birthrates in the 1980s, over the next decade they would become much emptier. Many younger teachers were quite anxious about this prospect.19 Younger schoolteachers were especially worried. So too were their colleagues in the agricultural college and in vocational schools. Nationally, vocational education was in crisis and in fact the Bednodemyanovsk agricultural college had nearly been axed very recently, on the grounds that Penza Region was oversupplied with such colleges.20 Interviews suggested that the flight of the intelligentsia in Achit had been much more pronounced than in the other towns, hence there was less pressure on remaining jobs.

Poverty and prosperity Signs of particular poverty among respondents included: monthly salaries which were spent within a week, so that the rest of the month was spent borrowing from

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relatives and friends; inability to receive guests, or make social visits, because of the impossibility of reciprocation;21 and relying on one’s household plot for 90 per cent or more of the food one ate, which meant going hungry in spring, after preserves and potatoes ran out, and before the new harvest. By contrast, signs of prosperity – found in just a very few families – included foreign holidays, home computers, satellite television and the wife staying at home.22 Other indicators are more problematic to interpret. For example, paying for higher education might seem like a luxury, indicative of riches, but it characterized even fairly poor families – who might well feel that that it was a sacrifice worth making, as an investment for the future. Conversely, some relatively wealthy families seemed to be wealthy because they had escaped paying tuition fees: they had student children on scholarships, either because they were particularly bright or because their parents had good connections. Spending a lot of time gardening might also seem like an indicator of poverty. How, then, to explain why the head of administration in Achit spent three to four hours a day tending plots totalling a quarter of a hectare (four times the normal size), or why the new procurator in Bednodemyanovsk had built himself a mansion surrounded by a potato field? ‘Poverty’ is a term with many definitions and a vast literature. It is most satisfactory to understand poverty in a broad sense, as lack of access not only to material resources but also to goods such as education and health and various kinds of social capital. As will already be apparent, the small-town environment is conducive to just such a poverty of opportunity. This is amply illustrated in following chapters. However, in this section the discussion will focus on lack of money income. The causes of poverty will be examined under two headings: earnings and household composition. Some profiles of different household types will then be provided, to illustrate how different types of primary income and household composition promote different standards of living in the small town. However, the topic cannot be understood in static terms. Life was precarious, and descents into poverty were common. Hence the chapter also discusses poverty flows. To avoid running ahead with my argument, however, I have not discussed the role of ‘survival strategies’ in enabling ascents out of poverty. As Chapter 5 and Appendix 2 illustrate, it is in fact these strategies (or their absence), which do much to determine the fate of individual households. However, basic earnings and household composition are fundamental. Low incomes Probably the most significant poverty trend in Russia is ‘a vast swelling in the ranks of the working poor’.23 In other words, people are usually poor in postcommunist Russia not because they are unemployed, but because wages are low. Most households in the sample could be considered ‘new poor’. Soviet teachers and doctors, even if relatively badly paid by comparison with miners or steelworkers, still had not been absolutely ‘poor’ in the sense that they became poor in

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the 1990s. Salary arrears in the 1990s had created periods of particularly intense hardship for many families, with teachers, librarians and doctors not being paid for six months or more at a time, and even some local government officers and police employees being affected by shorter wage arrears. 1999 was a bad year, but by 2000 most interviewees were making ends meet, although a handful were in more extreme poverty.24 Figures 4.1–4.3 give some examples of local salaries and wages. It is clear that households consisting of a single adult employed in health, education or culture, or a couple where both spouses were so employed, were likely to be living below the poverty level even if they had no dependants at all. Figure 4.1 shows salaries for the editor of the district newspaper, a middle-aged teacher and museum director, with higher education, and a middle-aged librarian with a librarian’s qualification from a vocational college (‘specialized secondary’ education).25 Worse off still than the urban professional people whose salaries are shown in Figures 4.1–4.3 were people in the agricultural sector. In 1998, most local state

750

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Editor

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Figure 4.1 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Zubtsov, April 1999 (rubles).

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Figure 4.2 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Bednodemyanovsk, spring-summer 2000 (rubles). Source: For subsistence minimum (August): A. Sedov, ‘Subsidii: problemy bez resheniya’.

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Figure 4.3 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Achit, September 2000 (rubles). Source: For subsistence minimum (August): Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, yanvar’-iyul’ 2000 goda, p. 99.

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Figure 4.4 Regional subsistence minimum, Achit average monthly wage and wages by sector, Achit, September 2000 (rubles). Source: For subsistence minimum (August): Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, yanvar’-iyul’ 2000 goda, p. 99.

and collective farms paid their employees in food, as in Stalinist times.26 Bednodemyanovsk interviewees in 2000 reported that their husbands and parents who worked on local farms had not been paid in money for 7 or 10 years. One said her husband never got paid, except for ‘the occasional sack of flour’.27 Achit respondents also reported that their husbands who worked on state farms either did not get paid at all or got paid in kind.

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Household composition and dependants: introductory comments Appendix 2 gives case studies of five different types of household, showing some examples of the impact of household composition on living standards and livelihood strategies. The range of possible permutations in household composition and the multi-dimensional quality of poverty makes it hard to generalize about the links between the two, and the analysis which follows, in this chapter, should be supplemented by reading the more complex stories given in the Appendix. The Goskomstat figures given in Table 4.1 show that children are the group most likely to be in poverty, a conclusion which studies of poverty in contemporary Russia regularly confirm. Even before the 1990s, in fact, children were particularly at risk.28 ‘Old age seems to be far less of a risk factor for poverty than during the Soviet period’29 but there are pockets of extreme poverty among old age pensioners, such as particularly old women living alone,30 and, as Chapter 1 suggested, poverty among older people is probably understated in Goskomstat statistics. Although figures for Russia nationally suggest that younger children are more likely to be poor, this did not seem to be true among the sample. Perhaps it was just a peculiarity of this particular group, but the interviewees who seemed to be the most poor commonly had adult children who were studying or unemployed. Sometimes, however, the latter had their own small children. A number of interviewees were supporting daughters who were lone parents. Pensioner household members contributed their pensions, but rarely worked as well. Opportunities to do so were very limited. In Achit District, for example, only 7.3 per cent of pensioners had paid employment.31 The profiles below suggest some of the more common types of link between household composition and standard of living.32 ‘Successful’ families About half-a-dozen households seemed genuinely prosperous. They were those in which the main breadwinner had a senior local government job or was a thriving Table 4.1 Percentage of different groups in households with per capita money incomes below the subsistence level in 2000, Russian averages Children under 6 6 –15-year-olds 16–30-year-olds Women, 31–54 years Men, 31–59 years Women over 54 Men over 59 Source: RSE 2001, p. 189.

30.3 40.3 27.9 35.0 28.0 19.6 15.3

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businessman; there were no dependent older relatives; there were no more than two school-age children or the children were grown up and independent; everyone was healthy; and there had been no change of housing. As it happened, in most of these families the wife did not work for money, but spent much time gardening.

‘Unexpectedly’ struggling families with both spouses in well-paid intelligentsia jobs Families in which both spouses were employed in senior intelligentsia jobs (such as headteacher or children’s home director) would, a priori, seem likely candidates for the ‘successful’ label. However, in almost all cases there was some disqualifying factor. One partner had been ill; adult children were living at home, often with grandchildren; children were studying or working in the city and could not make ends meet on their own; housing was being improved and large debts incurred. These problems could drag down even couples who both had well-paid jobs and no dependent elderly parents.

Worker-plus-professional couples vulnerable to descents into poverty Professional couples were not the norm, however. Often, in the sample, the husband was or had recently been a worker. Combinations included, for example, senior lawyer and labourer, headteacher and watch repairman, headteacher and handyman, head of municipal services and ex-driver turned college arts organizer. (See the case of ‘Kira’ in Appendix 2.) Many of the husbands were not well paid. Even if the wife was in a senior intelligentsia position, there had also to be good health and no more than two school-age or younger children for the families to live at a reasonable level. It may seem curious that women had higher-status jobs than their husbands. This is partly because of the nature of the sample, with its high proportion of professional women, but it also says something about the small town and its limited range of marriage opportunities, meaning that not all professional women could find partners of equal social status. (It was striking that intelligentsia men were often married to intelligentsia women: see Chapter 6.)

Poorest families A handful of families had three dependent children and they were all poor. The poorest seemed to be those where one or more of the children were studying. A family with twins seemed particularly poor, presumably because clothes had to be bought in double quantities and could not be handed down. Another poor category were young teachers who had come from the villages. Their fathers commonly did not get paid in money and their own starting salaries were only 300 rubles.

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The most common type of poor family, however, were those, which depended on a single, always female breadwinner. (See the cases of ‘Sonya’ and ‘Tanya’ in Appendix 2.) Often the breadwinner worked ‘in culture’, as a librarian or in an arts centre, where salaries were tiny (see Table 4.2 below). Many types of household fell into this category. The breadwinner could be divorced or widowed, or her husband might be unemployed, semi-employed or retired. Children were schoolage; studying; unemployed or on small salaries and living at home; or struggling to make ends meet in the city. Often there were health problems and sometimes also dependent parents or siblings and/or disabled family members: sometimes a whole string of family members who could not make a full contribution to the household’s survival strategies. Flows in and out of poverty Flows in and out of poverty seem to have been quite common in the small towns. People had lost their savings in 1992 and 1998 and they were vulnerable to sudden losses of income or major expenses. For most people, descents into deep poverty were primarily linked to not being paid for months on end. Obviously, this was a particular hazard if two breadwinners worked in the same profession: for example, married couples consisting of two teachers or doctors. Ill health was also dangerous. One couple, for example, a middle-aged doctor and teacher with just one child, seem to have had a reasonable standard of living most of the time, but when the husband spent a year in hospital the wife had to cope with major financial problems. Since higher education usually lasts five years in Russia, studying implied a long spell of penury for households with adult children. In some cases parents had failed to keep the children at university: they had dropped out because of a sense of humiliation, contrasting their own modest possibilities with the lifestyles of some of their urban fellow-students. However, if they came home they were often equally a burden to their parents. Unemployed graduate children were also living with respondents. Adult children who found jobs as teachers in the small town or village schools in the district seemed to be in an intermediate position. Their salaries were so low that they still needed some parental support. There were longer-term descents into poverty caused by widowhood, divorce, or tense and uncooperative relations within households – often connected to drinking – which restricted survival strategies. Sometimes these tensions were occurring in families, which were trying to educate older children, and the suspicion must be that the stress of so doing was so great that it was partly responsible for rifts between the family members. However, a husband’s unemployment, new, low-status employment or early retirement was often blamed for the occurrence of this kind of deterioration. Substantial poverty flows have also been noted for Russia as a whole, although this is partly because, with many wages just above or below the subsistence minimum, small adjustments in the latter (e.g. because of regional variations in the price of food), can throw large numbers of extra people below the poverty line.

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State-sector employees: the new poor Table 4.2 Senior arts administrator’s household’s monthly sources of income Rubles Own salary Husband’s early retirement pension Child benefit total for 3 children Total

530 780 174 1,484

Commander et al., suggest that 8–12 per cent of households remained below the subsistence minimum from 1992 through the mid-1990s.33

State provision: pensions, benefits and residential care Interviewees complained regularly about child benefits, particularly their tiny size and irregular and bizarre payment in kind.34 Retirement pensions could make more of a contribution to the family budget. One woman described her income as in Table 4.2: more than half the household’s tiny monthly income of under 300 rubles a head derived from a pension. A divorced head librarian, who lived with her child and elderly father, said that she also relied on her father’s pension to keep the household going. Benefits for ‘loss of breadwinner’ and disability benefits were less than half the subsistence minimum, but still made a difference in very low-income families. A widowed librarian who had a salary of 450 rubles received 350 rubles for her son (‘loss of breadwinner’ benefit). Hence their monthly income for two people was 800 rubles, while the subsistence minimum for one person was 933 rubles. A junior librarian earned 300 rubles and had a disabled daughter with a pension of 240 rubles. When the librarian had not been paid for six months, they lived entirely off this 240 ruble disability pension. Some disability benefits were more worth having than others, however. The headteacher of the Achit special school suggested that a good survival strategy for her former pupils was to get registered as Category II disabled. This would produce a benefit of 505 rubles, as opposed, for example, to a wage of 230 rubles as a cleaner. Attempting to tackle the problem of children in care, the head of administration in Achit issued a decree in 2000 raising benefits for foster-parents and guardians from 200 to 700 rubles. This brought the total income per foster child to about 1000 rubles a month, in other words about the same as the subsistence minimum and above the average local wage.35 Subsidized or free utilities were another form of social assistance, although, as Chapter 1 suggested, they did not always benefit the poorest people. One quite well-off family had its electricity bills paid because the husband was a ‘hero of labour’. Nor were the promised benefits always available in reality. For example, pensioners in Achit were entitled to free false teeth, but the local administration could not afford to pay for them. In Bednodemyanovsk 590 households – in a town

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of 8,200 people – were entitled to reductions on their utilities bills in summer 2000. However, the local administration, being perilously short of money itself, was said to have taken to shortening the list by crossing off the names of customers who ran up debts.36 Chapter 1 mentioned the small scale of residential care for older people in Russia. Achit was the only one of the three districts to provide such residential care. There were 55 places, compared with a total pensioner population of 4,440. In one village home there were shortages of heating and food, and no telephone. The staff of district residential homes were described as having to ‘beg’ from sponsors and the surrounding population.37

Conclusions State institutions in the three towns were not easy places to work, although working conditions had often also been poor in Soviet days. The rising cost of electricity and telephones created new stresses. In terms of technology, these institutions were sometimes going backwards, as the outside world experienced a technological revolution. As in Soviet days, local enterprises had to be approached for extra funding, although these enterprises were now individual businessmen, often shopkeepers, rather than factories. Achit seemed to benefit more than the other towns from regional-level funding for its schools – an indication that it was useful to be located in a wealthier region. These were communities beset by high unemployment. Respondents’ male relatives, employed as engineers or in manual occupations, had been particularly vulnerable to unemployment, and it was a topic of general concern, particularly with reference to the future of young people. The small towns were seen as offering no opportunities to the younger generation, and even young people with degrees could find themselves unemployed or working in jobs for which they had not been trained. This was sometimes because they had trained for professions which existed in cities only, but they were unable to stay in the city after graduation. However, at least most educational, health and cultural institutions had survived in the small towns, and schools had even expanded in the 1990s, although they were facing redundancies in the near future as a consequence of the falling birthrate. Hospitals and, to some extent, schools were not only islands of job security in the 1990s, but actually faced the opposite problem, of experiencing vacancies for qualified staff. Again, this was a traditional problem for rural areas in Russia, but one exacerbated by postcommunist economic problems. It was not surprising that staff left state institutions, given the tiny size of salaries. Poverty in the small towns, as in Russia generally, was largely attributable to low wages; usually respondents earned less than the subsistence minimum. If they had husbands or other relatives employed in agriculture, these family members often received no cash at all. Others were unemployed. The poorest families were those which depended on a single female breadwinner and/or contained three children. However, even families where both spouses were in senior

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and by local standards well-paid professional jobs, and where there were no more than two children, were vulnerable to poverty as soon as they incurred expenses for higher education, health or housing. The most common cause of short-term flows into extreme poverty was non-payment of salaries, which had affected almost all respondents. The poorest respondents were identifiable chiefly by their extreme dependence on subsistence farming. Indicators of wealth – found in only a very few households – included the wife staying at home and the possession of a home computer. Pensions often constituted an important element of the household income, but were small in absolute terms and could not rescue families from poverty. Child benefit frequently remained unpaid. Hence, respondents were forced to consider adopting ‘survival strategies’. These are the subjects of Chapter 5.

5

Livelihood strategies

Introduction This chapter discusses the livelihood strategies on which respondents embarked in an attempt to combat poverty. After a discussion of the terms and debates, a number of strategies are described. Particular attention is focused on growing vegetables, as the main available strategy, and on entering the private sector, which might often be the most rewarding strategy in a larger town or city, but is often inaccessible in the small towns. Migration out of the small town is also considered as a potential, but not always realisable strategy. The second part of the chapter is about the gendering of strategies.1 Women and men may possess different assets (time, health, skills, etc.) and there will be different expectations about what are considered appropriate spheres of activity for either sex. Moreover, if the household is to function as a unit, it must depend on cooperative relations between its members. The divorce statistics in postcommunist Russia suggest that such cooperative relations cannot always be taken for granted. After considering strategies promoting material survival, the chapter dwells particularly on the issue of stress, as a major health threat. (It will be recollected that stress has been blamed for Russia’s rising postcommunist male mortality rate.) The third and final section of the chapter looks briefly beyond the household, at its wider cooperative relations: networks of relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues. These, too, are essential to survival, and strategies can only be mapped out within the context of such networks.

‘Strategies’ The word ‘strategy’ is attractive because it stresses agency. Although expressions such as ‘survival strategy’ or ‘household strategy’ are often used with reference to the activities of very poor people, often for women (in societies around the world), the use of the word ‘strategy’ implies that such people are more than the helpless victims of circumstances. ‘Strategy’ also implies that, given some ingenuity, ways can be found to circumvent obstacles in the form of low-paid jobs or unemployment. In other words, it focuses attention on less visible aspects of livelihoods such as the informal economy.

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The term ‘strategy’ is controversial, however, and its various problems can be illustrated with reference to the livelihoods of the small-town respondents. An important caveat is that the use of the word ‘strategy’ should not imply the application of some universal criterion of rationality. Different plans appear ‘rational’ in different cultural contexts. Pine and Bridger argue that survival strategies are not necessarily ‘economically rational’ according to models of supply, demand and efficient self-interest. However, in terms of cultural meaning, local knowledge and understanding, and within the context of social relationships and networks, they are often the best and most sensible responses people can make.2 Survival strategies in small towns can only be understood in their cultural contexts. In Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov there are various facets of the local culture that impinge strongly on survival strategies, if such they are. For example, although no one feels able to afford a large family, most of the younger married respondents and their female relatives had had one child, strongly suggesting that traditional Soviet attitudes (young women should be mothers) live on, even while birthrates are declining more rapidly in the cities. No doubt it would be more economically rational to postpone childbirth altogether, if necessary until one’s 30s, in the hope of better days to come. Only once, however, did I hear of childbirth being completely postponed because of poverty. Another strong social pressure is to grow potatoes and other vegetables. It will be argued later that growing vegetables may also be a rational economic choice, but this is just part of the story. One teacher mentioned the incredulity of her neighbours about the fact that only flowers grew in front of her flat. (She did also grow potatoes behind the house.) A woman who had a disabled husband and a second who had migrated from Baku, the capital city of Azerbaidjan, claimed, respectively, that they could not and did not want to grow vegetables. However, when I happened to mention these claims to their acquaintances, I was immediately contradicted: the claims were inconceivable. Perhaps the women did not have much land, but they must be exaggerating to say they grew nothing at all. It is, no doubt, irrational to refuse to grow vegetables if the price you pay is for the neighbours to think you are crazy. The goodwill of neighbours is an important part of social capital. ‘Strategy’ also suggests freedom of manoeuvre. Is there room for manoeuvre? Clarke has argued that ‘it is more plausible to think about household members... taking advantage of such opportunites as may present themselves within the framework of a very limited range of opportunities and quite restrictive constraints’.3 Burawoy et al. challenge Clarke on this score, arguing that Clarke’s research methods blind him to the presence of strategies, and that qualitative and longitudinal research does reveal real strategies.4 Perhaps, however, the argument is between people looking at opposite sides of the same coin: survival depends on how much one consciously takes advantage of available opportunities and it is often difficult to quantify the proportion of proactive behaviour involved.

Livelihood strategies 109 For example, changing profession would seem a clear example of a strategy, but a teacher who joins the police when her husband already is a policeman is probably responding more to opportunity – perhaps even to her husband’s suggestion – than a teacher who decides to train in massage. Another woman decided to supplement her income by breeding coypu. She would seem to have adopted more of a strategy than her neighbour who merely sold the traditional autumn piglets. On the other hand, the coypu farmer was the mayor’s daughter, and perhaps she had more start-up capital. Remembering Pine and Bridger’s point about cultural embeddedness, one could also argue that breeding coypu was a wild idea rather than a strategy, while rearing a piglet was appropriate in the cultural context. ‘Strategy’ also suggests long-term planning. Wedel, for example, writes that it might seem rational for households to plan that ‘one member of the family would be employed in the more stable state sector while another would work in the private sector, which provided more opportunities but at greater risk’.5 While there may have been elements of planning in some households in the small towns, there were plenty of other examples of people going into the private sector in response to sudden shocks, typically non-payment of wages. In one mother and adult daughter household, both women had been teachers, but the mother decided that she had to become a market trader after a four-month period in which neither was paid. In yet another family, a couple, both teachers, had three adult or school-age children to support. They decided that this situation was intolerable and both went business; after this failed, the wife became a small trader. In several cases, husbands had been engineers, but they had been made redundant, or effectively redundant, even if their factory was nominally working. They, too, had little choice but to go into business. If some households had clearly sat down to plan their strategies, others seemed to have more haphazard approaches, based more, perhaps, on chance opportunities which presented themselves. Claire Wallace, citing Warde, distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ strategies to label these different approaches.6 In the end, the most important point is probably that made by Clarke: opportunities to find new livelihoods are limited, especially in the context of a very small town. This is probably the main point of contrast with the city, although even in the city not everyone has access to second jobs, etc. Nonetheless, despite the constraints imposed by their place of residence, all respondents were actively seeking exits from their predicament of extreme lack of cash, often quite consciously. Hence it does seem important to use a term which stresses agency. The chapter will continue to use the word ‘strategy’, therefore, but only in the sense of making coping plans within the context of limited options, including cultural constraints.

‘Livelihood strategies’ and ‘survival strategies’ Livelihood strategies are sometimes described in the literature as ‘household strategies’ or ‘work strategies’, but these narrow the applicability of the term. ‘Livelihood strategies’ is an attractive term because it is broader. It is also, perhaps, preferable to the common term ‘survival strategies’. A particular hazard of using the term ‘survival’ in the postcommunist context is the common implication that

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people have to ‘survive’ postcommunism, whereas they did not have to survive the Soviet period: they merely ‘lived’. There are lines of continuity, however, between Soviet and post-Soviet strategies. Most significantly, small-town professional people such as teachers always kept cows and dug potatoes, whereas many city teachers only acquired land in or after the Gorbachev period. Lines of continuity are perhaps more obvious in small towns than in the cities, although some continuity in social behaviour is naturally evident everywhere in Russia. Poverty and inadequate infrastructure are hardly new phenomena, so it is not surprising that many current coping mechanisms have Soviet antecedents. For example, in all types of settlement younger pensioners regularly found paid employment, often to support their children and grandchildren; adult children commonly lived with their parents or parents-in-law; and informal networks based on exchange of favours (the use of social capital) were highly developed. Nonetheless, the sharp decline in the purchasing power of money wages, and their irregular payment, have in some respects created a qualitatively new situation, as has the general atmosphere of change and instability which promotes stress and ill health and creates new dangers to physical survival. Sudden shocks such as complete stoppages of cash income into households constitute crises, with the threat of descent into deep poverty, hence ‘survival’ may be considered an appropriate term, just because of its ‘connotation of exceptionality and extremity’, to quote Olga Shevchenko.7 Shevchenko criticizes the use of the term because she feels that survival strategies are often not responses to exceptional situations, but become ‘routine and normative activities’ in the postcommunist period. It is hard, though, to distinguish between ‘routine’ and ‘exceptional’. Shevchenko’s account of her own respondents, in Moscow, implies that they felt their lives were routinely exceptional,8 and the same was true for the small-town respondents, who experienced unpredictable but frequent financial emergencies, at least during the period when salaries were regularly in arrears. ‘Livelihood’ strategies might also be preferred because it does not raise awkward questions about the objective of the strategies. On the other hand, it is hard to understand the phenomenon without considering the objectives, and using the term ‘survival’ forces one to confront this issue. Are people merely trying to avoid starvation, or have they grander plans? This issue is discussed below. ‘Survival’ is an attractive term, moreover, because it can be used to link together different aspects of livelihoods. Physical survival is about both money and health, health is about physical and emotional health, emotional health is linked to the survival of professional identity, etc. The term ‘survival strategy’ can therefore be used as a structuring device to explore the various facets of survival, and their inter-relationship.

Range and types of strategy in cities and small towns Natalya Tikhonova found that the most common strategies in her sample as a whole, in percentages, were casual secondary employment (44); growing food (41);

Livelihood strategies 111 and working in several jobs (23). Among the poorest respondents, they were growing food (36); casual secondary employment (34); using up savings, selling property and hiring out their labour (all 32); and borrowing money (30).9 These respondents lived in Moscow, St Petersburg and Voronezh. In my sample there was little distinction in strategies between the poorer and richer respondents, except that the former were perhaps more likely to mention borrowing small sums of money from friends and relatives. Growing food was universal, or nearly universal. Casual secondary employment was welcomed by almost all types of respondent, but was usually very insignificant in scale. Using up savings, selling property and hiring one’s labour were never mentioned. The possibilities of doing any of these three were presumably limited. Moreover, regular second jobs are almost impossible to come by in the small town. Working in several places was mentioned by just two interviewees. Working on several shifts, on the other hand, was often a very successful strategy. All these types of strategy are explored in more detail later in the chapter. Lyudmila Belyaeva divided her respondents’ strategies into three types, ‘active’, ‘passive’ and neutral. Not surprisingly, her most prosperous respondents were the ones with the most active strategies.10 Other analysts have employed similar distinctions: for example, Burawoy et al. distinguish between ‘minimalist’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ strategies. ‘Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy . . . while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamic sector of trade and services.’11 The more active, entrepreneurial strategies can still be ‘survival’ strategies, for example, if they occur in response to complete stoppage of money income, because both spouses are subject to salary arrears. In other situations, the aims of active livelihood strategies are more ambitious: to retrieve something of the family’s Soviet status, for example, by buying higher education, something which is unattainable on a postcommunist teacher’s or librarian’s salary plus subsistence farming. It could be argued that this is still a type of ‘survival’. Although both the more and the less active types of strategy may have similar objectives, the distinction between minimalist and entrepreneurial strategies still seems a helpful one, and it will be used in slightly extended form later. Even less than minimalist strategies were ‘negative’ strategies, in other words abstinence, and it is this category which will be considered first. ‘Negative’ strategies: abstinence Abstinence is a central strategy. Respondents abstained from certain foods, such as meat, fish, cheese, oranges and bananas, and sweets, as well the purchase of consumer goods, medicine, travel, long-distance telephone calls to relatives and even the telephone in general if it had been cut off for non-payment of bills. In some cases, parents stinted themselves so that they could feed their children properly, making comments like ‘I buy them bananas and oranges on pay day’ or ‘I don’t buy meat and fruit myself, only for my son’. Some interviewees baked their own bread – if they had a slow ‘Russian oven’ rather than a gas one – and even

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milled their own flour; some Achit children went without school dinner, although interviewees did not say that this was true of their own children. Interviewees in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked how often they and their families went to the doctor. Those who often did were either seriously ill or else relatively prosperous. The great majority, however, said they would not go except as a last resort. ‘You crawl to the doctor on your knees,’ as one put it. Much the most common reason given was expense, particularly of medicines. However, if their children were ill, respondents said they would definitely take them to a doctor. In some cases they drew a contrast with their own deliberate self-neglect in this regard. Limiting family size is another negative strategy in circumstances of economic hardship and one which was mentioned by most interviewees, either with reference to themselves or to other family members. Chapter 1 noted the national fall in the birthrate, and women’s expectations of having no more than one child. Regional statistics for Sverdlovsk in the period 1989–98 also suggest that the proportion of one-child families is growing in both town and village. In 1989, 47.2 per cent of all births were first children, while in 1998 this figure had jumped to 62.4 per cent.12 However, some couples in the small towns do have two or more children, born since 1991, and Achit in particular, as Chapter 3 suggested, had a rather high birthrate. This might be linked to the ‘semi-rural’ culture of the small town, and also perhaps, in the case of Achit, to the non-ethnic Russian identity of some of the population. The intelligentsia sample sometimes dismissively equated large families with feckless behaviour, idleness and unemployment. While there is an element of prejudice and snobbery in such remarks, it may also be true that the intelligentsia, as the most ‘urban’ members of the ‘semi-urban’ small-town community, did have different attitudes to family planning from those of their more ‘rural’ neighbours. The fact that richer families continue to have two or more children might be considered corroborating evidence that if families are limiting themselves to one child, this is because of financial constraints. Among this sample from the small towns, the more prosperous families normally had two children. Larger (twoplus) families were also typical of richer people, for example, in a sample from Yektaterinburg;13 they were the norm (among ethnic Russians) in the rich gas town of Novoe Urengoe (Tyumen).14 ‘Minimalist’ strategies Consolidating households Chapter 1 mentioned Zbarskaya et al.’s suggestion that the number of extended families had increased as a response to economic hardship.15 If grandparents move in to a household, this cuts their costs and, for their adult children, saves on childcare expenses. In some cases, too, it can raise capital because of the sale of the grandparent’s flat or house. A study in Nizhnii Novgorod Region in the late 1990s found that at least a half of older women were living with their children and

Livelihood strategies 113 grandchildren. Three-quarters of older people with children lived either in the same household or locally.16 In the small-town sample, many households also contained three generations, but when I asked respondents whether they had invited parents to live with them because of financial pressures arising from the circumstances of the 1990s, they had done so very rarely. Normally the invitation, if it occurred, had been made in circumstances which were simply connected with the health and age of the parent who needed care. However, in the small town, where older parents commonly live close to their children, care (either by grandparents of children or by adult children of their own parents) can still take place even if family members are not living in the same house. Both happened in the respondents’ households. Younger grandmothers would come round during the day to look after children while parents were at work. Older grandparents would be visited after work, sometimes with gifts of food. Middle-aged women were sometimes therefore cooking for two households, as well as working full-time. Stealing local resources The interviewees did not state that they engaged in theft, but it is a commonplace local survival strategy, on the old communist-era principle that everyone’s property is no one’s property. Interviewees and the local press complain bitterly about such irresponsibility. The favourite targets, as, it seems, elsewhere in Russia, are wire and wood. Power cable, in particular, is stolen to sell as scrap metal: a rather hazardous means to promote ‘survival’. In the first eleven months of 1998, 24 kilometres of power cable were stolen in Zubtsov District. 50 kilometres went from Achit in 1999.17 Scrap metal collecting was described as a ‘cottage industry’ by the Zubtsov local newspaper, reporting on a fire which started in the basement of a block of flats, when children tried to melt plastic off metal.18 The newspaper suggested that unemployed people and schoolchildren were the perpetrators of most of this ‘collecting’. (In Soviet days children were encouraged to collect scrap metal as part of their environmental education, so there was a line of continuity.) One boy in Zubtsov even stole the iron railing from around a grave in the municipal churchyard.19 Typical prices at Achit District illegal collection points were only 36 rubles for a kilogram of copper and 30 rubles for a kilogram of aluminium, so major items had to be stolen to make the activity qualify as ‘entrepreneurial’.20 Illegally hacking off branches and felling trees can be a minimalist strategy, since wood is needed by local people for heating houses and hot water where central heating and hot water are not laid on by the municipal authorities. Timber can also be sold outside the district: an ‘entrepreneurial strategy’. Many people are said to have their own chainsaws in Achit District.21 ‘Wherever you go in the district local people always want to discuss the forest first: this is the most agonizing and urgent problem.’22 The forest is, in fact, seen as a resource by everyone, something which ought to be on one’s doorstep in abundant quantities, not depleted in the interests of outsiders. In Bednodemyanovsk respondents were upset by the fact that the forest

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was receding – one had to drive to the forest, over the border to Mordovia, for example. Respondents in all three towns frequently mentioned picking mushrooms, berries and medicinal herbs in the forest. This was not just a leisure occupation, as it often is for city dwellers. Small loans and gifts Although some interviewees said that nowadays they could exchange only emotional support with colleagues, many mentioned that they helped each other out with small loans, as was customary in Soviet days. This seemed to happen at all types of state institution, although there was also variation within institutions. Teachers working at the same school, in particular, could have quite different experiences from each other. These are such big ‘collectives’ that they split into smaller groups of friends with different customs. As well as giving money, colleagues also made each other presents such as seedlings, medicines and old children’s clothes. One teacher, married to a senior official, had a car and used it to convey her colleagues to the forest. Household plots Tending a household plot could be an entrepreneurial strategy if food were produced for sale, but there was little evidence of this, so vegetable gardens are best treated under the ‘minimalist’ heading. Around 99 per cent of the sample farmed, or at least contributed occasionally to the family farming, even if they left most of the work to their partners or spouses. Younger, single people might not have their own land, but they all helped their parents and grandparents who did. They did not shop for vegetables. One woman said of the time before she had her own plot, ‘I used to go to my parents for every onion’. The majority of respondents, particularly those with children, described the primary purpose of the allotment as being to secure the immediate survival of their families, in situations where money incomes were small and undependable. A small minority of families had only a few rows of vegetables in front of a block of flats, but most had a patch of 0.06 hectares, the standard size. This would be a kitchen garden, if they lived in a cottage, or a separate allotment, often known as a ‘dacha’, if they had a flat. Often, especially in Bednodemyanovsk and Achit, they also rented an extra potato field, usually on the outskirts of town. The yield differed: the soil seemed to be least fertile in Zubtsov and most fertile in Achit, where people regularly reported having an over-abundance of produce. Many interviewees kept livestock, most commonly hens, but also goats, a piglet or even a cow. Is growing vegetables a survival strategy or just a way of life? Simon Clarke and his colleagues have, in a number of publications, disputed the ‘myth of the urban peasant’, suggesting that it is no more than a journalistic cliché to visualize the whole Russian population ‘surviving’ a shortage of money income by digging potatoes on their dachas. However, Clarke et al. conducted their research

Livelihood strategies 115 in cities, where, they point out, it is not a survival strategy because people do not save money if they grow vegetables which can be bought very cheaply.23 Francine Pickup’s study of Yekaterinburg also indicates that for poor city dwellers the dacha is not seen as a survival strategy. It is much too expensive.24 Still, they may receive potatoes from rural relatives. In exceptionally urban Sverdlovsk Region in 1999 only 16 kilograms of potatoes per capita a year were actually bought, while 67 kilograms per capita were consumed from household plots.25 Clarke does suggest that ‘domestic agricultural production is more significant for rural dwellers and the inhabitants of small towns’.26 In the small towns, tending a household plot makes economic sense. Little capital is needed to grow vegetables. Family, friends, neighbours and colleagues can supply seedlings, etc., and many people do not even spend money on pesticide, preferring to pick the Colorado beetles off the potato plants by hand. City dwellers may waste money travelling to their distant dachas, but in a small town, land is on one’s doorstep. Moreover, not just root vegetables are produced, but also more expensive products like tomatoes and berries. Far from gardening for sentimental or cultural reasons, like the city dwellers described by Clarke, small-town respondents worked out which farming activites were worthwhile. For example, a number had given up keeping cows, on the grounds that they were too expensive to feed during the long winter months when they ‘sat at home’ in the barn. Interviewees with access to a car did, however, often gather hay to feed cattle.27 That growing one’s food saved money is suggested by the fact that the poorer respondents emphasized how very dependent they were on their vegetable plots.28 Most interviewees claimed that half or more of their family diet derived from their own subsistence farming; the poorest families said ‘90 per cent’ or even ‘99 per cent’. Not surprisingly, the poorest respondents also reported that a high proportion of their diet came from mushroom picking and livestock rearing. Conversely, richer respondents sometimes explained that now they relied less on their plots. One interviewee had recently been promoted to a managerial post in his hospital. Before the promotion, his family grew 90 per cent of their own foodstuffs: now it was more like 40 per cent. Obviously, if families were large, it was hard to survive on 0.06 hectares. One family, for example, had just this amount to feed four adults and a teenager. The interviewee estimated that this provided about a quarter of the food needed. In May and June the family ‘went hungry’. The proportion of the family diet constituted by home-grown produce, although it was rarely estimated at constituting less than 50 per cent, varied according to the wealth of the interviewee. However, the amount of time spent farming was not a good guide to the wealth of the respondent. Most interviewees said that they devoted a great deal of time to their vegetable plots. Even the richest interviewees, such as a successful entrepreneur, could spend three hours an evening in the summer. For the less poor respondents, this seems to be considered worthwhile because survival is not just a question of filling one’s stomach, but also of eating a vitamin-rich and ‘ecologically pure’ range of produce which will promote good health. Moreover, not all such produce is readily available in the

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local shops, which do not expect to have many customers for vegetables. However, this is not really a problem when it is simple to buy food from a neighbour. If only a small proportion of respondents’ diet came from the vegetable plot, this meant that they had excess, which they usually threw or gave away. Just a few richer respondents did not spend a lot of time dealing with their gardens. For example, in one family a huge marrow lay on the porch for several days. The owner kept looking at it and saying ‘I must get round to chopping it up, but I don’t really feel like it’. Meanwhile her poorer colleague across the yard was frantically boiling enormous pans of mushrooms. Clearly, as was suggested earlier in this chapter, it is impossible to fully understand the phenomenon of vegetable farming without taking into account the local culture, which both pressurizes the individual to conform and facilitates the success of the strategy by providing the necessary back-up of informal networks. Observation suggested, for example, that it was common to request time off work to harvest potatoes; workplaces in Achit seemed to run on a skeleton staff in early September. In April, office windowsills in Zubtsov were occupied by pots of seedlings. Managers understood the situation: they grew vegetables too. Emotional support was also important. One neighbour, chatting to another, would ask ‘Did you manage to get your potato harvest in before it started raining?’ and add consolingly, ‘We didn’t either’. Despite the significant lines of continuity with the Soviet past, there are important ways in which survival is, in the postcommunist period, more dependent on smallholdings. Apart from the wiping out of savings and the reduced purchasing power and irregular payment of wages, the collapse of the state and collective farms and local food processing industries encourages people to keep their own livestock. This is chiefly for meat, milk and eggs although, especially in Achit, where even the municipal dairy has closed, people often make their own cheese and yoghurt. For example, my landlady in Achit was a very overworked teacher, yet she still made her own cheese. Some interviewees claimed that they had farmed just as much in Soviet days, but others disagreed, pointing out that they had not had extra potato fields in the 1980s, or grown their own fruit trees. ‘Life forced us,’ said several. A number of Central Asian migrants from big cities were farming for the first time. Other respondents new to farming included the head of the hospital in one town and her husband, the only anaesthetist – both exceptionally busy people. Similarly, a school headteacher and her husband, a senior official, had previously bought their vegetables from neighbours, but had now acquired a large field and had begun growing potatoes and carrots, although in this case the purpose was not strictly survival but to pay back a mortgage to the local authority. (The vegetables were supplied to children in care and conscripts.)29 Producing one’s own food was also useful for barter operations with neighbours, an important feature of life in the small town where there is little cash, and, in Achit, for purchasing watermelons from ‘Southerners’, also described as ‘Azerbaidjanis’, who arrived in lorries in September to swap their watermelons for potatoes.

Livelihood strategies 117 Some families were able to sell surplus potatoes for money if there was a good harvest. Especially in fertile Achit, this could, under other circumstances, have been a profitable entrepreneurial livelihood strategy. In practice it was a haphazard and undependable one, given the collapse of the official local system for buying up and selling food produce. It was not always simple to find a purchaser. An Achit headteacher expressed her anguish at the fact that, after her pupils had produced a really good harvest on the school garden, they had sent a van with the produce all over the region and been unable to sell it anywhere. Clearly, not only the lives of individual cheese-making teachers but also Achit’s economy could be improved considerably, if food processing and purchasing could be organized properly on a municipal/district level. The fact that people throw away produce seems to call into question the suggestion that dacha farming is motivated by – not necessarily rational – fear of future shortage.30 I only encountered one woman who clearly expressed such a view. She had migrated to Achit from the less fertile northern part of the region. I interviewed her just after she had screwed on the lid of the five hundredth jar of preserves, and she kept enough in her cellar for two years of rainy days. Families with student children had a special reason to grow food. They felt compelled to supply their children in the cities, although this is not a new phenomenon. My student room-mates from rural parts of Voronezh Region in the early 1980s survived largely on massive jars of jam, plus occasional eggs, from home. However, now that the cost of living in the city is so very much higher than in the small town, providing food for student children takes on an extra imperative. In one family at least the parents were also supplying the student’s landlady with potatoes, which they took by car to a rather distant city in a neighbouring region. In another family, a mother travelled by bus to see her student daughters in the regional capital, twice a month, laden with potatoes. One couple, who were both senior managers, worked busily on their 0.02 hectare household plot and an extra potato field 5 kilometres distant almost entirely to feed their teacher daughter and granddaughter, who lived in a city on the other side of the region and ‘didn’t have time to garden’. Small-town citizens with more distant relatives in the cities keep them, too, supplied with food.31 For example, one woman in Achit said that ‘half’ their produce went to relatives who lived in Yekaterinburg, Krasnoufimsk and Achit. Village parents maintaining adult children in the small town had, in one sense, an easier time than their small-town counterparts, since the children tended to go home every weekend to help on the smallholding. However, as Chapter 1 mentioned, villagers tend to have plots twice the size of the average urban household plot, so tending them is a particularly serious endeavour.32 As Chapter 4 suggested, the interviewees’ village relatives had in most or perhaps all cases received wages only in kind in recent years. There were villages where the big farms were producing absolutely nothing and paying nothing in either money or kind, so that people were thrown back entirely on their own plots for survival.33

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More active/entrepreneurial strategies Additional earnings and favours According to Aleksandr Galkin, one of the main dividing lines within the intelligentsia is between those fortunate people with second jobs and those without.34 However, secondary employment comes in many guises, and there is a difference between lucrative extra earnings and small unrewarding ones. A Muscovite with a dead-end job in a library who also translates articles for an international journal is in a very different situation from a teacher in Achit who knits a jumper for an acquaintance. In the first case, as seems to be common in cities, the ‘second’ job is actually the more interesting and creative, as well as better paid. In the second case, the knitting commission is just an episode, a way of scraping together more cash. Commander and Yemtsov write that ‘secondary work does not necessarily enable escape from poverty’.35 Lyudmila Belyaeva, citing her own and VTsIOM surveys, suggests that secondary employment peaked in the mid-1990s and that more recently people have acquired steady, decently paid jobs which remove the necessity for additional earnings.36 However, in the small towns there are hardly any new types of job and additional earnings are still welcome. Small-town interviewees with special skills were keenly aware of the fact that opportunities were limited in their towns. They made wistful comments like ‘in Tver you can do private medical practice as well’ or ‘when I lived in Petropavlovsk I was always in demand as a translator’. Klopov’s data also suggests that people in smaller towns have more limited opportunities than those in cities for steady secondary income,37 and the interviews completely bore this out. Additional earnings were almost always casual, one-off or short-term earnings. In Zubtsov in 1999 there was said to be a single firm which sometimes required translating work, but by 2000 it had collapsed. Journalists sometimes helped produce election propaganda. One journalist gave technical advice to computer owners – though these are not commonplace in the small town. Art teachers could find occasional commissions, and a number of music teachers gave private lessons, accompanied choirs and dance groups or played at weddings. The majority of teachers, however, rarely reported paid extra work: most local parents could not afford to pay for tutoring for their children.38 The clearest point to emerge from the small towns was that some professions offered more opportunities than others. For example, as a chemistry teacher, it is difficult to hold private lessons without your own laboratory, a problem not faced by a mathematics or English teacher. Some types of coaching are more in demand, although there is a certain fluctuation as individual professions rise or fall in status. Zubtsov probably provides the most potential custom of the three towns, since it may well contain the greatest number of reasonably well-off businesspeople who profit from the informal construction industry. The most successful, and highly exceptional, respondent was a Zubtsov mathematics teacher who earned enough by coaching, before the financial crash of 1998, to afford a holiday in

Livelihood strategies 119 Thailand. By 2000 she was hoping she might find a new job if a private college opened to coach children for university entrance; however, this college was still an idea, not a reality. Additional earnings could also be derived from work which had nothing to do with one’s professional qualifications. For example, bypassing Achit was the main road connecting Perm and Yekaterinburg, which had spawned a number of cafes and hotels. One interviewee, who had a rich husband and a particularly large house, operated an occasional bed and breakfast service if her friend with a motel had an excess of visitors. Another sold mushrooms by the roadside. Children from a school in Achit District were said to have sold enough mushrooms in summer 2000 to buy their school clothes for the coming academic year. Interviewees also hinted at prostitution along the road. By contrast, the highways around Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk seemed relatively uncommercialized, although when I travelled to Penza I saw many children’s bicycles for sale; presumably some bicycle factory workers had been paid in kind. Elections were a time of particular opportunity, a time when rich people from the cities noticed the small towns and came visiting with pockets full of rubles. People could make 1,000 rubles, for example, as election agents for a particular candidate in Achit in 1999. This was more than most people’s monthly salary, and therefore money not to be sneezed at. One pensioners’ choir toured the local district giving concerts in aid of a rather unsavoury candidate who was suspected of wanting to be a deputy to escape prosecution. I was told that the women had not actually voted for him. Other interviewees also expressed a rather cynical attitude towards such activities. They would take money to stick up posters but not vote for the candidate. I had the impression that this was a way of paying back the city politicians for their usual neglect of the small towns. Tikhonova and Shkaratan found that in the city 40 per cent of respondents were doing jobs such as knitting, sewing, house repairs and car maintenance, often unpaid, for acquaintances, as a mixture of additional earnings and mutual favours network.39 Interviewees in the small towns occasionally mentioned odd jobs such as knitting or repairs. For example, ‘When I was a schoolteacher I used to survive by doing carpentry jobs for the school and for acquaintances.’An electrical engineer supplemented a tiny regular income by fixing electrical problems for New Russians. Other jobs were more minor and irregular. The unpaid aspect of some of these odd jobs, or their ‘symbolic’ payment in the form of a box of chocolates or a jar of honey, is significant: they buy social capital, the right to a future favour in exchange. Within the local community certain members enjoy particular social capital by virtue of their usefulness and/or influence: teachers and doctors obviously fall into the category of people to be propitiated.40 Doctors and teachers do not necessarily need to seek secondary work if they receive a lot of ‘presents’, and this is often mentioned as a reason why Russians are willing to become doctors despite the pitiful salaries. In the small town grateful patients and parents cannot usually be in a position to give much. I did not question my respondents about

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presents, but sometimes they made revealing comments, as in the case of the hospital director who ‘could always find someone to mend her car’. (She sat in an office plastered with huge and expensive birthday cards.) Some parents in Zubtsov did up their children’s classroom, which delighted the teacher, who described it as a ‘present’. One doctor, talking about her friendship with local entrepreneurs, mentioned how this made her uncomfortable. She could never be sure how disinterested the friendship really was. However, the fact that doctors and teachers are working huge quantities of overtime suggests that they cannot actually depend on presents to supplement their incomes sufficiently. Working overtime on a regular basis is both an accessible and a socially acceptable way of earning extra income, and, if one is a specialist in short supply, a method for doing a service to one’s workplace and local community. The interviewees who worked overtime were all doctors or teachers. In Achit, the head of the education department suggested that half the teachers were working more than one and a half times their contract hours apiece,41 for example, by teaching remedial classes in the afternoons or simply cramming their free periods with extra teaching. The three male doctors interviewed in Achit were all working 2–3 ‘shifts’; two senior women doctors in Bednodemyanovsk, with young children and unemployed/absent husbands, were each working 1.5. One young and unmarried female music teacher, now on 2 shifts, had begun her career on 4.5 times her contract hours. This extra work clearly contributed significantly to some respondents’ family finances. A senior teacher in Achit on double hours earned 2,000 rubles – a respectable salary by local standards and enough to contribute towards university tuition fees for her daughter. Another teacher, working one and a half times her contract hours in Bednodemyanovsk, and probably earning about 1,100 rubles, was able to support her househusband, school-age daughter and disabled son. The husband had been offered a job at a local college, but his, presumably single salary, would not have covered the cost of a nanny for the disabled child. Improving qualifications Given the cost of university education, retraining was a large financial commitment. Nonetheless, in Achit, where many teachers did not have degrees, seven teachers were studying for extra-mural degrees.42 Those I interviewed were primary teachers, intending to requalify as secondary schoolteachers. They hoped that, when mass redundancies hit the schools, teachers with university degrees would be safe. Schoolteachers in Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov almost all had degrees, so re-training was no protection. Joining local government or the police force For those who could achieve it, becoming an official offered a completely Soviet and, in most respects, comfortable ‘survival strategy’. A newspaper editor in Achit claimed that the local government offices were full of female ex-teachers and doctors. The local government employees interviewed in the three towns were

Livelihood strategies 121 generally satisfied with their career move, although one pointed out that there was a gulf between the ordinary employees and the bosses. Only the latter were really feathering their nests, while the ordinary staff were paid only slightly more than their old colleagues in the schools and cultural institutions, which meant ‘five to six times less’ than senior officials. One teacher observed that the soaring of senior local government salaries had affected her family life. In Soviet days she and her husband, an official, had been equal, but now he took advantage of his status as main breadwinner and expected her to do all the housework. One newly prestigious career was the police. It was mentioned a number of times as an attractive career for school-leavers, partly because wage arrears had not been so bad as in some other sectors, and also because it offered a gateway to legal training in a police college. The interviewees included three policewomen, all ex-teachers, and all glad to have made the move. One was working as a detective, despite the fact that she had given up studying for her law degree. The other two worked in the passport office. Working as an employee in the private sector Some unemployed parents, spouses and siblings of interviewees had found jobs in the private sector/shadow economy, as builders, drivers and shop assistants. Most of these jobs did not seem to be particularly rewarding. There were only two interviewees with senior and apparently well-paid jobs in the private sector, one in a construction company in Zubtsov and the other on a fruit wine farm in Bednodemyanovsk. Such jobs are very scarce. Setting up a business ‘If you don’t have relatives to depend on, going into business is sometimes the only thing to do’, said one young woman in Zubtsov. A number of respondents also pointed out that ‘people who tried to go into business got their fingers burned’. The interviewees’ stories illustrated both the sense of ‘no choice’, which determined decisions to set up as an entrepreneur and the high failure rate. The two businesswomen interviewed were both ex-teachers in Achit. One sold toiletries in the market and said that she thought she probably earned about as much as her husband, a senior teacher. The goods were purchased in Yekaterinburg, although before August 1998 she had travelled to Moscow. The second woman said she did massage, although other local people described her as a faith healer. This at least had the merits of originality in Achit, although it may not be a path to success in Moscow where local newspapers are full of advertisements by people ‘with magic powers’. She was able to maintain an extended family. Both women, however, were bitter and depressed. The three successful businessmen kept foodshops in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk. Two were former teachers, whose wives had been threatened with redundancy at the same time as teachers’ salaries had become small and uncertain; the third was a teacher’s son who had worked as an electrician and got tired

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of trying to live on his tiny wage. The three men were all very positive and their businesses seemed to be flourishing. Two were able to keep their wives at home, while the third, who was unmarried, had recently bought his mother a house. Four women interviewed, who were married to businessmen (a former sailor, lawyer, driver, and surveyor) seemed to live much better than their colleagues, as they themselves tended to comment. However, the handful of success stories should be seen against a backdrop of many failed attempts to set up small businesses. Sillaste, citing nation-wide opinion polls, suggests that as many as 11 per cent of Russian women had tried to set up a business, but only a quarter had succeeded. She suggests that in the provinces it is hard for such businesses to survive more than 5 or 6 years.43 Another study found that a third of people who had been unemployed had tried to set up in business, but only one in ten had successes – often because of the impossibility of getting credit.44 A study in rural areas of Nizhnii Novgorod Region found that 4.7 per cent of respondents had tried to go into business, but only 1.9 per cent had succeeded. The Nizhnii sample mentioned as the most important reasons, in descending order of frequency, high taxes, racketeering on the part of government officials, lack of demand (because of local poverty) and the difficulty of getting credit.45 These were precisely the problems mentioned by respondents in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk. Credit, for example, was a pressing problem.46 The only interviewees who mentioned having big loans currently were both senior managers and both were using the money for improving their living conditions, not business. One failed businesswoman who had had a loan had had to pay 120 per cent interest. Lack of connections in the right places is another cause of failure. In all three towns the person labelled by several or many respondents as the town’s leading businessperson was a former party official or other nomenklaturist.47 People without good connections could have a sense of hostility surrounding them. ‘They forced us to shut down,’ said one respondent, who had tried to go into business with her husband and ended up as a poorly paid journalist instead. The need to raise money for tuition fees was the most common reason given for entrepreneurial endeavours in the small towns. For example, one doctor’s wife, a part-time music teacher, had traded at the market, despite finding this very distasteful, only in order to obtain a place on a prestigious Moscow course for their daughter. Another respondent, a former teacher, and her husband, a former engineer, had purchased a village shop, despite also much disliking trade: they felt compelled to continue because they had two student daughters and a grandson. According to Marta Bruno, writing about Moscow, it is women, rather than men, who are more likely to become traders because of their greater sense of family responsibility, including their desire to educate their children.48 In the small town, however, both spouses shared the same motivation. As these examples, suggest, the obstacles to success in business included psychological barriers, connected to entrenched identities and/or prejudice that involvement in business was somehow unbecoming. Interviewees in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov claimed to feel squeamish about going into business: one response was

Livelihood strategies 123 ‘I couldn’t possibly trade; I’m embarrassed even to sell some of my spare sour cream.’Another, older interviewee, referring to making extra money on the side, said ‘That’s dirty work, I don’t want to get mixed up in it.’ Interviewees tended to justify their reluctance to be involved in commerce by falling back on an essentialist argument, saying that trading was not ‘for them’. Whether you went into business depended on an innate predisposition: the ‘trading streak’ (torgovaya zhilka). That this business personality could even be inherited was suggested by a teacher, who explained that her mother-in-law had even in Soviet days displayed the trading streak, hence the teacher’s husband had always yearned to be a tradesman, and had eventually opened his own shop. Migration 49 Economic migration out of the small town seems to be mostly by young people. One young doctor in Zubtsov, for example, said that two of his friends had already moved to Moscow Region and he was planning to follow in their footsteps. A young Zubtsov librarian mentioned the same phenomenon – her friends had gone to Moscow or Tver. Local managers encourage school leavers to leave the district. One children’s home in Bednodemyanovsk sent most of its older children to a vocational college in the city of Penza, to become cooks, seamstresses and construction workers. The college was obliged to find them work after graduation, presumably in Penza. The director of Zubtsov Children’s Home tours round Tver Region, scouting for jobs for his older pupils outside Zubtsov District. The head of the vocational college in Achit said that almost all the girls who had graduated in 2000 had left Achit, for Krasnoufimsk, Perm, Yekaterinburg or even the Far East, while the boys had gone into the army.50 Interviewees mentioned young men leaving to become security guards in the regional capital. Despite all the difficulties involved, some small-town children do still become university students. The headteacher of School No. 1 in Zubtsov, for example, said that 35 per cent of school-leavers went on to higher education, mostly in Tver. The figure was only about 15 per cent in Achit.51 However, this does not guarantee permanent exit. As already mentioned, respondents’ unemployed children, in all three towns, often returned to the small town after graduating. For example, one 62-year-old woman was still working as a teacher to support her son, an unemployed engineer in his thirties. She was sure that there was work available in Penza, but he could not afford to live there. Research in Orenburg uncovered the same phenomenon. Students came to the teachers’ training college in Orenburg (a regional capital) hoping to work in the city, but had to return to their villages after graduation because of housing problems in Orenburg.52 Overall, the statistics for Sverdlovsk indicate that migration within the region has declined rather abruptly in the 1990s, suggesting a closing of opportunities (Figure 5.1). In the small towns, it seemed that about 2–3 per cent of the population moved out each year, according to the official statistics. In 1998, 2.6 per cent of the population of Bednodemyanovsk town moved out; the figure for Zubtsov town was

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98 19

97 19

96 19

95 19

94 19

93 19

92 19

91 19

90 19

19

89

95,000 90,000 85,000 80,000 75,000 70,000 65,000 60,000 55,000 50,000

Figure 5.1 Migration within Sverdlovsk Region, number of changes of residence, 1989–98. Source: Sverdlovskaya oblast’: demograficheskaya situatsiya v poslednem desyatiletii XX veka, pp. 78–9.

2.1 per cent. Unfortunately, I have no figures for Achit town, but 3.1 per cent of people in Achit District changed their place of residence in 1998. However, since people were also coming into the three small towns – or perhaps moving back after an unsuccessful attempt to flee the district – the net effect of migration flows was very small compared to the overall population figure. Achit lost most overall, no doubt because it was less successful at attracting incomers. Still, in Achit the net loss was only about 0.5 per cent of the total population.53 The figures include all migration, although, as was suggested in Chapter 2, in Sverdlovsk and Penza most migration is actually within the region, not to/from further afield. It may be assumed that migration was actually higher, perhaps considerably higher than the official figures suggest, since, as Chapter 2 described, the 2002 census revealed that passport offices across Russia had massively underestimated the scale of the phenomenon. When people in the small towns said that they would like to move but could not, their most frequent explanation was the difficulty of finding housing. Temporary migration is more favoured and feasible. A new high-risk ‘survival’ strategy in Russia in 1999–2000 entailed joining the police and volunteering to serve in Chechnya. I was told by an employment service official that in three months the volunteers earned over a hundred thousand rubles – enough to buy a flat. Other forms of temporary/part-time migration are more traditional. For example, in Soviet days, too, men from small towns in the regions surrounding Moscow would go to the capital to labour on building sites. In 1999 ‘up to a hundred’54 Zubtsov men were said to commute to Moscow weekly or monthly, to work as drivers or in construction. Another respondent was under the impression that ‘most’ men in Zubtsov worked in Moscow. Men in Achit often travel to Tyumen Region, across the Urals, where a welder or asphalt layer can earn many times what he could hope to receive in Achit. The four respondents, described in Appendix 2, who were completely dependent on small-town pay packets all had significant financial worries. Much more fortunate was ‘Raya’, whose father and brother worked in Moscow.

Livelihood strategies 125 The system of commuting weekly or monthly does not seem to be an option open to women. Some women do try to set up individual arrangements, whereby they live partly in the city and partly in the small town. For example, one 26-year-old interviewee thought that this was quite common among her generation. She mentioned that her sister, having found a job in the city, had deposited her child with its grandmother in Zubtsov. The sister returned to visit the child more and more rarely. The cost of travel between small town and city is so high that on a normal salary it is hardly cost-effective, as an individual, to commute. Men have the advantage of being more mobile than women, particularly given the almost ubiquitous assumption that women must be the main child-rearers.

Gender and livelihood strategies The gendering of material livelihood strategies The origins of the concept ‘survival strategy’ are linked to gender difference. In Clarke’s words, the introduction of the term with reference to Third World economies was an attempt to move ‘away from the narrow perspective of the wageearning breadwinner supporting a dependent family that is associated with a onesided view of the young, the old and women as dependants on the wages of men’.55 The applicability of the concept in the Russian context is complicated by the fact that, since the 1930s, almost all women have been employed in full-time paid work. It can be used only if one subsumes paid employment under the heading of a ‘survival strategy’, as has already been done in this chapter. Kiblitskaya, Burawoy et al. and Clarke all put forward the hypothesis that survival strategies are indeed largely part of the woman’s sphere. Burawoy et al., for example, write that, ‘if women often dominated the household economy during the Soviet era, now they assume even greater importance, as men, with limited access to the rewards of employment, become increasingly superfluous.’56 Kiblitskaya documents the depression men feel when they lose their ‘breadwinner status’, and their tendency to turn to the bottle. ‘The more the wife did, the less the husband did (and the more he drank).’57 By contrast, Kiblitskaya suggests, women are more responsible and flexible, more ready to take on ‘any job’.58 Arseeva agrees that ‘women are less fussy than men: they will accept any work, even low-skilled and badly paid, and take on temporary or part-time work’.59 Wedel cites the example of the city of Tula, where the men continued to work in their factory jobs while their wives became shuttle traders.60 Among the interviewees in the three small towns, small market traders were often women, as is common in Russia. In two cases they were respondents’ mothers. More ambitious attempts at entrepreneurship, however, might be based on partnership between spouses. There were three families in which both partners had set up in business together, although they had all failed. The collapse of local industry provides plenty of cause for male marginalization in the small towns. However, in all three towns there was plenty of evidence of men, not just new businessmen, busily involved in various survival strategies.

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Male interviewees and husbands of interviewed women almost always laboured heavily in the vegetable garden and potato field. The shadow economy in the towns, especially Zubtsov, with its emphasis on timber felling and house and dacha building, seemed to be very much a man’s world. However, it should be noted that both construction and gardening are seasonal work. Men were sometimes sitting at home during the winter, a situation which could create its own stresses. Studies of secondary employment sometimes comment on the fact that men more often have additional earnings. However, in the small-town sample the gender distinction, at least with reference to ‘intellectual additional earnings’, was not observable. There were both men and women who claimed that they did not have time for extra work; respondents of both sexes often said they wished they did have extra work; and a minority of both men and women had occasional secondary jobs. The obvious reason why men may seem to be advantaged is the perception that involvement in business automatically entails some contact with crime in contemporary Russia. Hence it is important to be able to defend oneself physically and in general to ‘fit’, in what is perceived as a male culture of threats and violence. By contrast, Sillaste suggests, women feel ‘alienated by hard-headed businessmen and come up against male competition which takes violent and even illegal forms’.61 However, perhaps violent crime is more often associated with big business in the cities; the small town atmosphere is rather different. Although respondents mentioned the burden of paying racketeers, as mentioned earlier, they tended to blame high taxes and excessive regulation for their failure to succeed in business, rather than the threat of violent crime. In general these were not perceived as violent communities, although in 2000 the apparently most flourishing Zubtsov businessman, who had in fact amassed substantial debts, was seriously beaten up and hospitalized as a result. It should be said that the successful businessmen in the sample were obviously highly intelligent and very hard-working, and were held up by a number of other interviewees as examples of how not all entrepreneurs were criminals. Finally, in both Zubtsov and Achit the business elite, such as it was, did include highly successful women shop-owners, suggesting perhaps that the more peaceful climate of the small town is favourable for women to succeed in business, unlike the more violent streets of the big city. Is it an appropriate survival strategy for women to stay at home? If the cost of child care is very high, perhaps. Pascall and Manning suggest that a process of ‘familialization’ may be occurring in postcommunist societies, as the state reduces childcare support and throws more of the burden onto families, which in practice means women.62 However, in the small town child care was not usually a problem, since most families have relatives nearby. Since people in the towns tend to trust each other and because there is very little traffic, even tiny children wander about unsupervised, so there is less perceived need for child care than would be normal in the United Kingdom, for example. If child care is required, kindergartens are still quite cheap, much cheaper than in the city. For example, in Bednodemyanovsk, Kindergarten No. 1 cost parents

Livelihood strategies 127 4 rubles a day in summer 2000, although the ‘real’ cost was said to be 40 rubles.63 The price was the same in Zubtsov and Achit (in 1999 and 2000, respectively, though). In Achit, kindergarten fees were halved for lone parents. Even some of the poor respondents sent their children to kindergarten, although one young teacher, paying tuition fees to improve her prospects, did say it was ‘too expensive’. In Zubtsov there had been a decline of the kindergarten population in the 1990s from 650 to 318 children64 and the story was similar in the other towns. A fall of just over half is the Russian average, as Chapter 1 suggested. For New Russians, it may be part of a man’s ‘entrepreurial strategy’ to have a wife sitting at home, as a kind of status symbol, perhaps aping television images of New Russians and their wives in Moscow. However, it could be argued that it is equally a part of women’s survival strategies to keep working, for psychological reasons. Jobs were important because they were seen as lines of continuity with the past, a stable part of the women’s identity. Many women made comments like ‘I can’t imagine myself without work’ and said how frustrated they had felt while unemployed or on maternity leave. ‘Work is necessary. Domestic cares suck the energy out of you.’ ‘Women should work.’ Even though some women complained about the actual working conditions, not a single interviewee said she would rather be at home. There is plenty of evidence supporting the view that most Russian women prefer to have paid employment.65 Only a handful of small-town respondents even had the option of staying at home, but all had chosen to work. Of these, one was working part-time; another had gone back to work, which she enjoyed, after a spell at home when ‘her family’ decided that it would be better for her to be a full-time mother and housewife; two others had taken on extra work over the objections of their husbands, a relatively prosperous businessman and a senior official, who would have preferred them not to work at all. Two businessmen and a male manager in a profit-making farm had, however, persuaded their wives to stay at home once they were making enough money to keep them. (‘I asked her to stay at home,’ said one. ‘I left her at home,’ said another, even more revealingly.) Finally, household strategies could include the redistribution of domestic labour between family members, for example, to allow women to access profitable secondary employment. Given that many of the interviewees lived in households where the wife was more highly qualified than her husband, it might seem rational for him to make certain concessions so that she, for example, could work more overtime. However, almost all respondents stated that the roles, whether more or less equally distributed, were ‘just the same as before’: they had not varied this pattern as a response to the pressures of the 1990s. Occasionally, there were temporary changes, as in the case of the husband who, when unemployed, even learned how to plait his twin daughters’ hair for kindergarten, an achievement which his wife saw as surprising. These changes could be reversed when the man went back to work. Moreover, some unemployed husbands still refused to do housework, a refusal which naturally did not improve relations in the household, particularly if the wife was working overtime. As other studies have also shown, gender roles are fairly traditional in Russia, though the distribution of housework is not completely unequal. In particular,

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there are men who are prepared to cook meals, although washing clothes, for example, is definitely women’s work.66 The small-town interviewees had similar divisions of responsibility to Russians surveyed in other studies. A majority of respondents claimed that the wife did more of the housework, but a large minority said that roles were distributed equally. Further questioning of the type ‘And who washes the floor?’ tended to reveal that the distribution was not quite so equal. ‘Only a woman can wash a floor properly,’ claimed one man. Perhaps most importantly, however, it was the women of the house, wives, grandmothers and daughters, who had the task of processing the harvest, presumably often without any mechanical help. An interviewee who did possess an electric mixer mentioned it specially, with particular glee.67 Only one woman, who seemed to have a particularly equal relationship with her husband, described how they chopped up the food together while watching television. Respondents were also asked about how they conceptualized ‘Mother Russia’,68 and their answers revealed much about their essentialist attitude to gender. Russia was a mother because she was long-suffering and because she was attentive. Men (like the Russian state) were stricter and more distant. The impact of livelihood-related stress on gender relations It might be supposed that the strains of life so far described would lead to enormous tension between spouses and in many cases to divorce. Nationally, however, as Chapter 1 suggested, the divorce rate only rose slightly over the 1990s, although it did increase more sharply both at the beginning of the 1990s and at the end. Local populations are so small that it is not surprising if rates fluctuate considerably from year to year, and it is rather meaningless to try to determine trends. Figures 5.2–5.4 should therefore be treated with some caution.

8.8

8.1 6.9

7

8.4 7.7

6

6.9

6.1 6.1 4.5 3.1

Marriages

19 96

19 95

19 94

19 93

19 92

2

2.3

19 99

3.2

3.8

19 98

3.4

19 97

3.3 2.4 2.1

19 91

19 90

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Divorces

Figure 5.2 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population in Bednodemyanovsk town, 1990–9. Source: Goskomstat officials, Penza.

Livelihood strategies 129 10 7.5 5.5 5 2.4

4.1

3.3 2.3

0 1989/90 Achit

1998 Bed.

Zubtsov

Figure 5.3 Divorces per 1,000 population at the beginning and end of the 1990s, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov. Source: Goskomstat officials, Penza and Zubtsov; Sverdlovskaya oblast’: demograficheskaya situatsiya, p. 60. Note 1989 figure is for Achit. 12

11.3 8.6 7

7 6.1

6 3.6

0 1989/90 Achit

1998 Bed.

Zubtsov

Figure 5.4 Marriages per 1,000 population at the beginning and end of the 1990s, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov. Source: Goskomstat officials, Penza and Zubtsov; Sverdlovskaya oblast’: demograficheskaya situatsiya, p. 60. Note 1989 figure is for Achit.

All the towns followed the Russian trend of declining marriages, but in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk divorce actually declined as well, though only from 2.4 to 2.3 in the latter town, to rise in 1999. Without knowing more about the age structures in the towns year by year, it is impossible to make meaningful comparisons. Achit, which had high birthrates in the 1990s, almost certainly had a large number of people in the relevant cohorts, which probably does more to explain the higher figures than do the economic fortunes of the town in the postcommunist period.69

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In their book Marriages in Russia, Vannoy et al. express surprise at their own findings. ‘The straightforward relationships we found are fairly remarkable at this time of nationwide disruption and economic deprivation.’70 I began my research with similar expectations: surely families must either have fragmented or adapted quite substantially in order to survive the problems of the economic transition. In fact, with a few exceptions, I found little evidence of change. Among the sample, just a few women had divorced or separated in the last few years for reasons which may have been partly connected to the economic pressures of the transition period, such as unemployment and the perceived necessity for men to seek work in another town. For example, one teacher complained about the attitude of her husband who was not, by her account, doing too badly as a teacher, with karate lessons on the side. Nonetheless, he felt ‘useless’ and constantly depressed, particularly at the prospect that they could not afford to give their daughter higher education. He had therefore recently found a job in a private firm in another ex-Soviet republic; she, however, was reluctant to uproot the family and join him. Some respondents complained about their husbands’ depression and drinking habits. A ramification of the drink problem is the impossibility of planning what to do with monetary income: how can you have a strategy for making the kopecks stretch when your husband takes your money for vodka? One woman explained that this was why, at the time of the interview, she did not have a single ruble. Husbands who could not fufil the role of ‘breadwinner’ seemed to be increasingly dependent on their wives, to the detriment of relationships within the family, creating the kind of vicious circle which Kiblitskaya described. One clear finding was that male marginalization was particularly a problem in families where household work was distributed very conventionally. For instance, a woman who had quite a high-status job and the possibility of extra professional earnings was unable to find time for these: her husband, an ex-farm manager, whom she described as being very depressed at his downward social mobility, refused to contribute to the housework. They were supporting two children and an unemployed son-in-law; her monthly salary covered their expenses for no more than a week, so that she had to constantly seek loans from her parents and parents-in-law. Clearly, in order for the wife to pursue a more entrepreneurial survival strategy, the couple would have had to have agreed on a new strategy for dividing the domestic chores. However, it would probably be unfair to blame the problems of these dysfunctional families entirely on the ‘transition’, except insofar as the general environment of poverty exacerbated tensions. More often that not, the husband had not lost his job because of economic liberalization, but had simply retired, because he was over sixty, or because he had been entitled to early retirement as a soldier, radiographer, etc; or had been fired for his weakness for alcohol. In general, interviewees tended to present the household unit as a united one, with both spouses involved in ‘survival strategies’. Perhaps one reason for this is that husbands, wives and – to a lesser extent – older children are forced by circumstances to pool their labour on the family garden, spending their ‘leisure time’ in a cooperative effort to secure their physical survival. A number of people mentioned how important it was that this was a family activity, and in cases where

Livelihood strategies 131 the woman had become the main or only breadwinner the husband did usually labour hard on the garden. Women reported arrangements such as ‘My husband digs, I plant, Granny waters’; ‘My son digs, and I plant and do the preserves’; or ‘My mother and I work on the plot by the house, my father and brother work on the potato field.’71 Another woman said: ‘I do the housework and he does the gardening and that’s how it should be.’ Vannoy et al. suggest that male pride, though smarting at loss of breadwinner status, is somewhat assuaged by work on the vegetable plot. ‘At least around Pskov, the role of a man earning bread outside the family has been transformed into his creating bread inside the family by working in the garden. Consequently, the “space” of earning and of housekeeping are combined. Although this situation many inspire illusions about egalitarianism, it does not alter the fundamental structure of gender consciousness.’72 If most husbands did not help in the kitchen, neither did sons: it was considerably easier to be a mother of daughters. Children also helped in other ways; for example, in one family the 8-year-old daughter went out to the forest on her bicycle to pick mushrooms for her family to eat and sell. In some cases there were strained relations with adult children living at home, or their partners. This could relate to failure to put in their fair share of work on the vegetable garden. Adult children who tried to live separately, after quarrelling with parents, still needed other relatives to help them manage. One young pregnant woman who was estranged from her mother relied on her grandmother, for example, to supply her with milk, ‘for me and my cat’. As this story illustrates, other relatives living locally are an important asset, chiefly for extra food and land. In the small towns most people do have relatives locally, and those who do not are very much disadvantaged. The gendering of human assets Time Time and health are needed if survival strategies can be implemented. Both are essential personal resources in the small town. However, they can often be in short supply, particularly for women. (If men do engage in secondary work more often than women, it may well be because they have more time than women.) Women’s lack of time is not a new phenomenon. Russian women were forced to orient their thoughts towards the survival of the household throughout the Soviet period, when they commonly spent hours queuing for food and, in addition to their paid jobs, got up first thing in the morning to make the dinner in advance and spent the evening washing clothes by hand and doing other labour-intensive tasks. Hence their ‘double burden’ was often accompanied by sleep deprivation, as is illustrated very strikingly in, for example, Baranskaya’s novella A Week Like Any Other.73 In the countryside, livestock and household plots put even more pressure on women. The problem of lack of time remains acute. Respondents complained most bitterly about the household plot. ‘It consumes all our free time’ or ‘I tend it before

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work, after work, at weekends.’ Women who had livestock to milk and feed, and/or were regularly working overtime, were particularly hard-pressed. One teacher, for example, described her survival strategy as ‘sleeping less’. She was supporting her husband and two young children. The family had a large garden – 15 per cent of a hectare, cows and a hayfield. Even though the teacher’s husband did much of the housework, she described her regime as being non-stop work from six in the morning to midnight every day. Other respondents, as has already been mentioned, were working as much as three times their contract hours on a regular basis. Physical health Lack of time may imply neglect of health, although good health is also an essential asset for the pursuit of survival strategies. A librarian expressed what was probably a common attitude. ‘Of course, in this complicated “transition” period the problem of one’s own health is not the most important. I’m busy trying to work out how to feed my family, how to clothe my daughter, how and where to buy cheap household goods.’ ‘I’ve no time to look after my health,’ said a woman education official bluntly. A study of attitudes to health in the cities of St Petersburg, Pskov and Samara concluded that women were much more likely than men to visit the doctor, a finding which corresponds to trends in other countries.74 However, among the (small) sample of interviewees in these very poor small towns, there seemed to be general reluctance to use doctors, among both men and women. Hence it seems that insofar as the average respondent survives, it is not by drawing on professional medical help, which is seen as too expensive. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that they are not looking after themselves, since many use home remedies, gathering herbs in the surrounding countryside. It is an advantage that the forest is relatively close by. They also read magazines about health, which are held in local libraries, and to which they subscribe. In Achit, for example, despite an overall drop in periodicals subscriptions, subscriptions to health magazines were increasing.75 A number of male respondents in their forties already had heart problems and were pursuing rational behaviour strategies to avoid joining the mortality statistics. I did also encounter some more stereotypical male attitudes. One man who had been to the hospital and taken the prescription to the chemists had been so shocked by the price of the medicine that he went and bought some homebrew instead. Emotional health The postcommunist period in Russia is commonly seen as being abundant in stressors (causes of stress), for both men and women.76 Of course, there were also plenty of stressors during the Soviet period. There seems little point in sterile arguments about which period was ‘worse’, but it is perhaps worth mentioning Judith Shapiro’s suggestion that ‘in the past, Soviet Russian life might have been miserable, but it was less stressful, because it required a citizen to be rather fatalist’.77 In other words, it is crucial to bear in mind not only the nature of individual new

Livelihood strategies 133 stressors since 1991, but also the general environment of unpredictability and frequent change, which makes life so different from that in the Soviet period. Although numerous stressors were discussed during the interviews, by far the most common response to the direct question about stressors was ‘money’ (64 per cent), and specifically non-payment of salaries in the public sector. Naturally, this led not only to hardship but also to acute insecurity and anxiety about whether next month’s salary would be paid or not. In interview, the women in particular often expressed their stress at the impossibility of managing on such low and undependable money incomes. One woman burst into tears as she reported how her son had reproached his teacher father: ‘You have two degrees and yet you come to me cadging cigarettes.’ Another described her panic when her telephone was disconnected for non-payment of bills. Shkolnikov et al. show that Russian divorced women live longer than married women, and, referring to Dobrovolskaya, suggest that they ‘live in better conditions than married women, because they do not carry the burden of looking after a husband’.78 None of the small-town sample had adopted divorce as a survival strategy, although there was plenty of evidence that husbands created stress. Demographic trends can in themselves be stressful. It is not comfortable to live in a society where so many middle-aged men are dying – either for men themselves, or for their family members. By far the most common family stressors were not, however, husbands, but children, and more specifically, worries about education, especially higher education. Of course, this was a sample of professional people, so perhaps this is hardly surprising, although when mothers of six-year-olds worry about higher education it seems clear that it is a topic of considerable local concern. Higher education stood out as the most common response when interviewees were asked what worried them most, thinking about their children’s future. Military service was also often mentioned, particularly the fear that sons might be sent to Chechnya. The extent of financial and family stressors was indicated by the contrast drawn between family life and work. Following a number of comments in Zubtsov along the lines of ‘At work we have a rest from everyday life’, ‘an escape from the family and housework’, the 2000 questionnaire invited respondents in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk to comment on whether work could be seen as a ‘rest’ from domestic cares. Just 25 of the 100 interviewees disagreed with this statement. Eight were men, in some cases with wives ‘sitting at home’, and eleven were women with no children, or grown-up children. On the other hand, most interviewees – notably the mothers – fully sympathized with the statement that work could be a rest from domestic cares. To some extent they made comments which could be made by working parents anywhere, but their remarks also pointed up how hard it was to manage at home under current conditions in the small town. They made comments like ‘teaching is more interesting than housework . . . Things are hard at work, but at home it’s even worse’; ‘you forget yourself at work’; ‘housework is unending, so, yes, work is a rest’. One respondent, mentioning the migraines which afflicted her when her debts began to mount, pointed out that in this situation she usually tried to divert

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her thoughts: work was the first destination. Other women quoted without irony the Soviet phrase ‘Going to work is a holiday’. Ashwin and Bowers’ research on women workers found the same attitudes and even language.79 The workplace could, of course, be in itself a source of stress. Managers felt this particularly strongly. Another highly stressed group were teachers in Achit, partly, no doubt, because so many were working overtime, but also because of the particular pressures of being a teacher in Sverdlovsk Region. Zheleznyakova, writing about teachers in Nizhnii Tagil, the second city of Sverdlovsk Region, reported that 41 per cent complained of ‘psychological and nervous overload’. 80 The head of the education department in Bednodemyanovsk said that she felt the main reason teachers there were ‘at a loss’ was because of frequent changes in the syllabus and the absence of the old Soviet-era framework. Doctors were another stressed group, perhaps partly, again, because most of them were working overtime. However, a paediatrician also said that she felt more stressed nowadays because parents, having only one child, invested such emotional attachment into that relationship that doctors felt more anxious than ever before about not making mistakes. Interviewees in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked directly about whether their lives had become more stressful in recent years and, if so, whether this was connected to the reforms of the 1990s and the greater insecurity of life which resulted. Only one, a young woman, said that she felt less stressed today: she explained this by contrasting her life in peaceful Achit with the anxieties of her student years in a violent quarter of Yekaterinburg. Seven other women said they did not feel particularly or at all stressed: all were younger women, aged 19–32. (The fact that the younger women felt less stressed might derive from their greater sense of control over their own lives, as suggested by New Russian Barometer data.)81 A few, also younger, women said that stress derived chiefly from personal problems, unconnected to the economic reforms. However, most respondents agreed wholeheartedly that life had become more stressful because of its greater uncertainty. They were often quite forceful in their responses, claiming, for example, that life consisted of ‘nothing but stress’. Middle-aged and older women were perhaps more likely to agree with the statement that life had become more stressful because they had clearer memories of the Soviet period. It was harder for younger women to make meaningful comparisons with the past. However, it may also be that the middle-aged and older women actually experience more stressors, either as mothers of older children (with higher education and military service looming or actual realities), or because of their sense of downward social mobility. There was a clear gender divide. Only two of the male respondents were under 30, and both admitted to feeling stressed, perhaps being less inhibited about admitting it than were older men. Older men were much less likely than women to admit to feeling stressed. Displaced people were particularly vulnerable to stress. Migrants from major cities in the Near Abroad had a particular sense of the danger of losing a part of their identity. As Hilary Pilkington points out in her book on Russian migrants,

Livelihood strategies 135 they form a ‘distinct socio-cultural group’, prone to a ‘superiority complex . . . vis-à-vis the local Russian population’.82 Pilkington also suggests that women find it particularly hard to adapt to Russian rural life; this was certainly true of two women doctors from Central Asia, who ‘did nothing but cry’ after their first arrival, while their menfolk soon came to enjoy the local culture of fishing and hunting. A former lecturer, now a local government employee, explained that she and her husband only realized what cultural life they had enjoyed in Dushanbe when they moved to Zubtsov. Two artists from Dushanbe spoke of their curious feeling of being less linked to European culture in Zubtsov than in Tadzhikistan (where they had been devotees of smuggled English rock music in the Soviet period). A similar situation affected a piano teacher from Baku, who was dreaming of retiring to Moscow to live with her son and go to concerts. The faith healer from Kazakstan most bitterly expressed a sense of downward social mobility and having become stuck in a provincial hole: ‘We moved from a city to a town, from a town to a village (Achit), and next we’ll be living in the forest.’ One woman who arrived in Zubtsov from Dushanbe in 1990, and completely opted out of community life in the small town, said that she felt the whole decade had been ‘wasted’. Seeking to explain women’s higher life expectancy in postcommunist Russia, Shkolnikov et al. refer to women’s superior coping mechanisms, which serve to buffer them from the effects of stressors. They draw on stereotypes of Russian women as being particularly strong and maternal. ‘Women, who because of economic causes are also drawn into public employment, usually have a traditional sphere of concerns: domestic duties, the family, children, a husband and parents. These imbue their life with a sense of purpose and a feeling of responsibility which up to a certain point serve as a defence from social stress and may compensate for its consequences.’83 Although one should be suspicious about the assumption that Russian women can put up with anything, these observations do ring true. Peggy Watson argues a similar case for explaining the gendering of survival in Eastern Europe.84 On the other hand, the responses mentioned earlier suggest that Shkolnikov’s assumption should to some extent be reversed: the family (particularly in the senses of its attendant material problems, and the amount of domestic labour it generates) may be the chief stressor. In this case the survival strategy, for mothers, is to assert one’s role in the public (professional) sphere. Whether they are located in the family or the workplace, however, healthy coping mechanisms are essential to warding off physical damage from stress. Drawing on social support (defined by Cockerham as ‘feelings of being loved, accepted, cared for, and needed by others’) is a particularly effective way of guarding against damage from stressors. Cockerham suggests that ‘the evidence is overwhelming that people with the strongest level of social support have fewer health problems’.85 When asked to identify their own individual coping mechanisms, the women interviewees most often mentioned socializing with family and friends, particularly women friends and colleagues. Other solaces were gardening, reading, walking in the woods, fishing, listening to the church choir, playing the piano,

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painting, knitting, rolling naked in the snow (presumably after a steam bath), ‘three cats and a dog’ and even ‘shopping’.86 By contrast, in the (small) sample of men, only a quarter mentioned positive coping mechanisms, such as prayer, fishing, spending time with children – seen as a leisure activity – or playing cards. Two mentioned drink. The other men either did not seem enthusiastic about discussing the topic of stress in detail, or made comments along the lines of ‘I use my willpower’ or ‘I am a relaxed person’. (In the case of this particular respondent, the explanation was unconvincing.) In conclusion, the pattern of gendered coping mechanisms seemed rather as the mortality statistics might suggest: women were relying more on social support and men were not using helpful coping mechanisms, or at least not reporting them. However, both men and women do have certain coping mechanisms in common. Many respondents claimed to at least somewhat enjoy gardening: it was not only a stressor, but also a welcome change from indoor work, and a creative occupation. Being intellectuals, interviewees often had flats well stocked with books about plants. The other very important benefit which men and women shared was supportive relations at work, at least within the particular intelligentsia institutions studied. ‘The hospital is a refuge from a local society ridden with envy and hostility’ said one male doctor. (Husbands of interviewees who were drivers or entrepreneurs may have felt more isolated than the male interviewees.) Research in Nizhnii Novgorod Region – not just among professional people – also found a strong sense of good relations between colleagues.87 Professional people in the small towns did not bond with their colleagues (and sometimes their colleagues’ families) by any particularly intellectual pursuits. As already suggested, they swapped seedlings and children’s clothes, and made small loans. They also celebrated festivals and birthdays together, even if this meant just eating some cabbage and potatoes – though other respondents did mention cake and champagne. One local government official said that things had improved in the sense that nowadays no one minded if you drank alcohol at work. Teachers often sang together in teachers’ choirs and performed in amateur theatricals with their pupils. ‘It cheers us up,’ said one. Even the senior administrators in one town put on their tracksuit bottoms and went berry picking together. Friends and families took steam baths at their dachas. Drinking, singing and bathing are effective devices for bringing people together. The head of the special school in Achit claimed that this sense of solidarity had been maintained even during the long months when salaries were not paid, although teachers in the main school in Achit said that relations had soured because of arguments about whether to go on strike. Obviously, in a small town it is easier to reinforce such bonds, since one’s colleagues are also one’s neighbours, the people with whom one swaps spare sugar and sour cream. One could also expect negative relations to be more intense in the small town and for there to be more backbiting and gossip, but, then, in a situation where informal networks are so important, it makes sense to keep up good relations, and, as Chapter 3 suggested, most respondents did feel a sense of good will and trust in their neighbours.

Livelihood strategies 137 However, is this the end of the story? Can one be complacent that coping mechanisms in the small town, particularly women’s coping mechanisms, will ensure their survival? Research by Gurko into the lives of Russian single mothers suggested that 48 per cent of the sample were suffering from stress. Most were coping, chiefly by drawing on their families, their own internal resources and, more rarely, religion; however, 10 per cent were in a state of ‘crisis’.88 Some of the smalltown respondents also seemed to be in crisis, saying that they had no coping mechanisms: ‘you sit at home with your grief’; ‘you get upset by trifles’; ‘I used to knit, but now I shout’. Just over half the women said that they felt their health was suffering because of stress. They complained of headaches, high blood pressure, heart and stomach problems, and also of losing weight and premature grey hairs. One ex-teacher had been hospitalized after ‘her legs failed’ when she was fired from the police; another woman, who had worked in a short-stay children’s refuge, developed what she described as a ‘form of epilepsy’. In both cases doctors attributed the illness to stress. Extended families, networks and social capital Social capital, particularly the use of networks, is a resource which many scholars have noted to be particularly important in contemporary Russia. On the one hand, using networks to bypass formal channels is lamented, because it is seen as a relic of Soviet days, hindering the creation of a rule-bound, ‘modern’ society. On the other hand, networks are also seen as a valid response to the uncertainties and imperfections of Russia’s new ‘market economy’: both useful and appropriate to the cultural context.89 Ledeneva has suggested, however, that some networks are contracting, and that, among her respondents, from a range of Russian cities, the nature of informal networking was changing. ‘Considerations of self-interest and mutual profit’ are replacing the ‘rhetoric of friendship’, and there is a greater tendency to rely on family members, not neighbours or friends.90 This part of the chapter examines whether such processes characterized the networks of small-town interviewees. Colleagues, friends and neighbours The importance of colleagues has already been noted, for relieving stress, making small loans, donating old children’s clothes, etc. Cooperative relations with colleagues are important in many situations. For example, women market traders in Achit would keep an eye on each other’s stalls if they went home to feed their pigs. In emergencies, colleagues could be a vital source of support. For example, a kindergarten teacher, explaining that all her savings had been wiped out in the 1990s, thanked her colleagues for helping her son to receive medical treatment in Moscow. A schoolteacher, who went to Yekaterinburg to buy a fur coat and had her purse stolen, was able to buy one eventually because her colleagues clubbed together and raised the money. Family funerals were also mentioned as appropriate occasions for colleagues to help out.

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Neighbours and friends were still significant resources for some respondents. Interviewees were both customers and providers of paid services/favours such as dressmaking commissions, sales/swaps of sugar and honey, etc. Networks could extend beyond the limits of the local town. For example, one woman gave birth in a neighbouring city, where a friend was a doctor; at the same time, the family got a cheap television through the doctor’s colleague. Networks of former classmates can be durable: a 46-year-old man in Zubtsov was intending to attend a school reunion in Murmansk Region; a woman who had moved to Zubtsov from Petrozavodsk via Vladivostok remarked that ‘It’s much easier in life if you stay in one place, the place where your schoolfriends are.’ Relatives The research, however, suggested the pre-eminent role, as social capital, of good standing with relatives, rather than friends or neighbours, or access to community organizations. ‘You can’t manage without relatives in Russia today,’ as one respondent put it. This is nothing new; for example, Soviet pensioners regularly helped their children, as still happens. ‘In most cases, research indicates that pensioners, although close to or below the poverty line, often provide wealth transfers in cash and kind to impoverished adult children and their families.’91 Even the poorest respondents did tend to have some support from family and relatives, and this is crucial to their survival. In the small town extended family networks are perhaps even more important than in the city because farming to provide over half of a household’s food needs requires considerable input of time and labour – often more than can be spared by the typical nuclear family with both parents in full-time work. Family members shared land with relatives who lived in hostels or flats. Some respondents spoke of ‘sharing’ a piglet or a bull with relatives. It was interesting that in Bednodemyanovsk four quite ‘ordinary’ respondents had built their own houses recently, or were in the process of doing so. Often they could only build with considerable support from relatives. This typically rural custom did not seem to be an option open to ordinary interviewees in Achit: there, only four of the richest were building or improving their housing.92 In Zubtsov more housing in blocks of flats had become available in the 1990s. However, one apparently rather poor family of migrants from Central Asia – presumably with comparatively restricted networks – had been struggling for ten years to build a house in Zubtsov. In a society where relatives and friends are so important, hospitality is crucial. Of course it is easier to be hospitable if you are rich. A well-heeled respondent, married to a shopkeeper, said ‘I have about thirty friends and we always have guests in the house.’ It made sense for everyone, if possible, to take part in birthday celebrations and weddings, wakes and the various mourning ceremonies at the appropriate intervals after a death. This was the course followed by one not particularly wealthy couple, a teacher and an engineer, with two children and a large extended family. They had a car and were constantly travelling around

Livelihood strategies 139 their relatives, supplying their many urban kinfolk with food, or digging their potato patch in an in-law’s village. They would borrow money if necessary to go to a wedding. The very poor households had stopped seeing friends and relations. One librarian interviewee had not even been able to make the trip from Zubtsov to Karelia to her mother’s funeral. A petty trader expressed her sorrow that she could not visit her sick mother-in-law in the neighbouring region; her teacher husband and daughter had had to borrow money to go and see her. Another teacher and her retired husband could not afford weddings for their two children, a situation which may help to explain why so many more children are born outside marriage in Russia today. However, not meeting up with one’s relatives and friends condemn people to a spiralling downward cycle of deprivation: if they cannot give, they will not receive. Burawoy et al. use the term ‘domestic involution’ to describe the closing-in of poor households in Syktyvkar.93 Shirokalova writes about the ‘domesticization’ of leisure time.94 In some ways such terms do seem to describe the situation of at least the poorest and most depressed respondents, who increasingly identified themselves only as members of their immediate families and whose thoughts were focused largely on the household plot and other ‘minimalist’ survival strategies. On the other hand, in the small town involution cannot be total: it is difficult to avoid being at least to some extent engaged in the life of the local community. Moreover, as already suggested, jobs and workplaces remained very significant to people’s identities.

Conclusions This chapter has argued that the respondents did pursue survival strategies, if strategies are understood very modestly as coping plans made within the context of limited options, including cultural constraints. By contrast, survival should be understood broadly. It does encompass avoiding starvation, in cases where families had no cash income, because of wage arrears, and were almost completely dependent for short periods on their own farming efforts. Usually, however, ‘survival’ strategies are pursued not just to avoid starvation, but also for the sake of other types of survival, notably trying to maintain a standard of living more nearly approximating that which was enjoyed before the decline in purchasing power of salaries which marked the 1990s. Survival is about survival of one’s self-esteem, which is an important reason why the small-town women continued to pursue their professional careers. Sometimes strategies have still more ambitious goals – notably the survival of the family’s intelligentsia identity, by purchasing higher education. Survival also has a health dimension. Growing one’s own vegetables is seen as providing nutritious food and as a remedy for stress. Stress is a major threat to Russians today, but women in particular seemed to have well-developed coping mechanisms to help them survive the stress generated by family and financial worries. In particular, they drew on social support from family, friends and colleagues.

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Men, especially older men, seemed less ready to acknowledge and guard against stress, which may help explain their greater susceptibility to heart disease and other stress-related illness. In many respects the survival strategies of intelligentsia respondents were no different from other small-town residents. They limited themselves to just one child per family, ate modestly and tended their plots, usually just to feed their own family, with no intention of selling the produce. They made and received small loans. Interviewees’ husbands went off to Moscow or Chechnya, and they themselves picked up odd additional earnings unconnected with their professional skills. Only a few types of profession opened the possibility of skilled secondary employment: the range of opportunities was limited compared with that in the city. Most additional professional earnings were derived from overtime. Respondents distinguished between respectable survival strategies and others. Market trading was not seen as respectable by many. Less acceptable still than trading were ‘strategies’ which destroyed the local environment, such as theft of timber and power lines. There are so many permutations of household composition, primary employment and survival strategy that it is hard to generalize about the ingredients of successful or failing survival strategies in the small towns. Everyone depends on their household plot to some extent, but for poorer families it is central to survival. In the more prosperous households either one spouse had gone into business or local government/police, or there were better opportunities for extra shifts at work. However, to attempt to go into business carried a high risk of failure. This chapter has emphasized the important additional (perhaps ‘fundamental’) factor of good, cooperative relations between household members and with the wider circle of family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. Strategies depended upon exchanging favours with an extended network of relatives, friends and acquaintances. The cultivation of good relations with neighbours, friends and colleagues seemed to characterize the small towns and this made their networks seem more ‘Soviet’ (in the sense of being based on a rhetoric of friendship) than the city networks analysed by Ledeneva. Nonetheless, the role of relatives was pre-eminent, and this was one reason why households often did better if they were based on a couple, with two sets of relatives. City relatives could be a burden in that they often required supplying with food produced on the household plot, though no doubt favours were offered in return. The poorest households were often those which felt unable to make visits, receive guests or travel: in other words, they were retreating out of networks, which left them still more vulnerable to extreme poverty. In poorer families, where there was often only one, female breadwinner, it was much harder for her to find time for entrepreneurial survival strategies. In such families, if there was still a husband, he had often suffered a decline in status, and where the household division of labour was gendered in traditional fashion, this could lead to tension. However, even in families which seemed to be under strain, the husband was usually described as labouring on the garden. The need to have at least two adults involved in running the household plot must be a powerful reason

Livelihood strategies 141 keeping families together. As Vannoy et al. suggest, it may be that if the husband dug the garden this was partly an acceptable substitute for doing more around the house. However, men rarely carried full responsibility for the garden. Women, in particular, processed the harvest, even if they were also the main or only breadwinners. Other material survival strategies are also gendered to some extent. Only men seemed to work for informal construction companies (despite the fact that Soviet women were often builders). Temporary out-migration is much better organized for men, particularly to part-time manual jobs in rich Moscow or Tyumen. Women, with their heavy domestic responsibilities, have little time for extra work. On the other hand, perhaps strategies are less gendered in the small town than in the city. There is no point in women staying at home to look after the children if cheap or free child care is still accessible. Moreover, the lower crime rates in the small towns may make business seem more attractive to women. Achit and Zubtsov both contained conspicuous examples of successful businesswomen. Becoming a boss was a traditional Soviet entrepreneurial strategy, and one which was not closed to women. In Achit the local government offices were said to be staffed largely by women, and, as Chapter 7 suggests, in both Achit and Zubtsov most of the managers of intelligentsia institutions were also women. Overall, however, it was hard for most respondents to find entrepreneurial strategies. The very limited development of the private sector in these small towns, and the constraints on its development, are the main factors limiting the implementation of entrepreneurial survival strategies. This is why, as Chapter 4 suggested, so few families seem to be secure from falling into poverty as soon as they are faced with expenses such as higher education or extended medical treatment.

6

The intelligentsia, the ‘middle class’ and social stratification

I am a thoroughly urban person and all I want to do is play the piano. (Migrant from Baku, explaining her refusal to grow vegetables) The intelligentsia in Bednodemyanovsk has an enormous significance. We bring culture to the people. (House of culture employee) If teachers were paid 5,000 rubles a month I could be a member of the intelligentsia. (Deputy headteacher)

Introduction Chapter 1 illustrated that, in the course of the 1990s, Russian society became more unequal, both vertically, if measured by incomes and Gini coefficients, and in terms of geographical disparities. The proportion of poor people increased considerably. Why did this happen? The question can be answered on the level of government policy and macroeconomic trends, but it can also be answered on a micro-level by examining individuals and their readiness to change and take advantage of the new situation or, conversely, their passivity and tendency to ‘lose out’. Opinion surveys often try to establish how many Russians have ‘adapted’ to postcommunism. Nonetheless, there remains a strong perception that what has happened is ‘unjust’: the scale of poverty has little to do with the merits or efforts of individuals, who frequently feel that the cards are stacked against them. This is despite the fact that in the late Soviet period, too, the link between merit and prosperity was not particularly clear-cut, and social mobility was declining. However, the mythology was different.1 Sentiments of injustice are often expressed in discussions about whether, if at all, a new middle class is forming in Russia. On the one hand is the old Soviet intelligentsia, in other words, people with higher education and professional skills, who might be expected to ‘merit’ inclusion in a new middle class, but who,

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because of poverty and lack of political influence, feel themselves socially excluded. On the other hand is a tiny section of society whose living standards do perhaps approximate to those of middle-class Westerners, but which is less well educated than the first group and widely considered to be more criminal. To enhance the divide between the majority of the intelligentsia and the New Russians, the latter live in Moscow and other big cities.2 Balzer argues that it is not necessary to confine the label middle class to those Russians with Western lifestyles; consequently, he is able to argue that the middle class is more sizeable than is often assumed. However, though Balzer mentions the need to include provincial people, he really only considers inhabitants of cities.3 Russian sociologists have tried to understand the process of stratification which took place in the 1990s4 and to count and identify the new middle ‘stratum’, which some argue cannot be glorified by the label ‘class’.5 A recent book by sociologist Lyudmila Belyaeva, for example, looks at Russians who identify themselves as middle-class. She suggests that about 9.4 per cent of the population might be labelled as such and 3.4 per cent had living standards which approximated to those of Western middle-class people, while 6 per cent were making ends meet but could not be described as prosperous. In both groups, young and younger middle-aged men were especially well represented, as were city dwellers. The richer group contained more Muscovites and more people without a university degree, possessing only a vocational (‘secondary specialist’) diploma. A further 11.4 per cent of respondents considered that they had a middling standard of living, but could not really be called a middle class. Belyaeva terms them a ‘middling mass’. In this group there were more women, more people without university degrees, and more inhabitants of smaller towns.6 Is ‘middling mass’ a good description for small-town professionals? What has happened to the intelligentsia – has it simply merged into one with other middleincome sections of the population? Is it too poor to have achieved even this? Is it, as is often asserted, ‘dying’: a Soviet anachronism? It is tempting to steer clear of debates about the intelligentsia and middle class in Russia because they are plagued by normative (ethnocentric, romantic elitist, anti-intellectual, anti-Soviet, ageist, etc.) positions.7 There are a number of common assumptions. There ‘should’ be a Western-style middle class if Russia is to become a ‘normal’/’civilized’ country with a real ‘transition’. Members of the intelligentsia are the most deserving members of society and businessmen are criminals. Members of the intelligentsia have only themselves to blame if they cannot adapt. The intelligentsia is an obsolete concept anyway, because it means so much more than just professional people: it suggests a certain intellectual baggage (including hostility to business), which needs to be thrown overboard. Young people are better adapted to postcommunism and it is only a matter of time before the Soviet intelligentsia (by implication those born before 1965–70) will die out. While there is an element of truth in most or all of these assertions, they are also highly complex and ambiguous. All sorts of issues are at stake. If, on the one hand, they seem similar to issues connected with globalization and social development in non-Western countries generally, they also have roots in Russian history and

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culture: the classic nineteenth-century arguments of ‘fathers and children’ and Slavophiles and Westernizers, and the old question of ‘Who is to blame?’8 When the ingredients ‘Moscow versus the provinces’ and ‘big town/small town’ are added, a heady potion is concocted. Interviewees often became quite stressed when the interview reached the point of discussing the intelligentsia. Since Small-Town Russia is looking at the obstacles and opportunities, which determine how far people can adapt their livelihoods and identities to survive postcommunism, it has to engage with such assumptions and issues. For example, to return to the problem, discussed in Chapters 4–5, of who survives and succeeds in the small town: are self-perceptions about intelligentsia identity a barrier or a gateway to success? Do young people feel less ‘encumbered’ by Soviet identities? Is it really true that there are no points of contact between the intelligentsia and the New Russians or is the small-town intelligentsia to some extent intertwined with the new entrepreneurial class? What does this imply about stratification in the small town: how fixed are the boundaries between strata? Is it true among this sample, as among the city dwellers studied by Ledeneva, that ‘everyone is strongly attracted to their own strata’ and ceasing to associate with others?9 How, if at all, is the intelligentsia fostering civic consciousness and creating some kind of modern ‘civil society’? Chapter 7 will look at what the intelligentsia does for the local community, and whether ‘civil society’ is emerging in the small town. Chapter 6, after some introductory comments about the development and perceived decline of the Russian intelligentsia, looks at the small-town intelligentsia’s family links to the rest of the local community and at its perceptions about intelligentsia identities and roles. It examines the issue of how far there is an overlap between the communist, intelligentsia and business elites, and discusses relations between the intelligentsia and the business community. The focus in this chapter will be on how far the intelligentsia has been changing and adapting successfully. This seems a more fruitful approach than to define ‘middle class’ using some Western definition and to measure the small-town intelligentsia against such a definition.

The intelligentsia before the collapse of communism To be an intelligent in the nineteenth century was to define oneself as different from both the ruling elite and the masses, the narod. Towards the elite, the attitude was one of criticism and, in the case of revolutionaries, active opposition. Towards the masses, the attitude was one of guilt and the desire to assuage this guilt by service, bridging the cultural and material gap between narod and intelligentsia. The Soviet intelligentsia was officially a sociological catch-all category of nonpeasants and non-workers, but, despite rhetoric about a harmonious society, some sense of gap and otherness persisted. This was despite the extinction of the old intelligentsia under Stalin. The new Soviet intelligentsia was overwhelmingly conformist, at least outwardly, but the regime continued to view it with suspicion, and this attitude seemed retrospectively justified when, during the Gorbachev period, the intelligentsia elite, in both capital and provinces, took on the mantle

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of its pre-revolutionary predecessors, leading and directing a wave of criticism against the Soviet regime. Identification with the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and those persecuted under Soviet power was strengthened by glasnost-era publications of hitherto banned masterpieces by writers such as Mandelstam and Pasternak. The peak of intelligentsia influence came with the election of thousands of professional people to parliaments and local councils in multicandidate elections in 1989–90. Being a ‘democratic’ professor or historian seemed a passport to political influence.10

The death of the intelligentsia Writing about how Russian society has changed since the end of the communist regime, Russians often claim that the intelligentsia is ‘dying’ or ‘dead’11 – but what does this really mean? Shrinking numbers are, supposedly, a part of the story. The number of people working in traditional intelligentsia occupations is asserted to have declined because of redundancies and resignations. For example, more than 2.2 million people are said to have left academia in the 1990s (of whom just over half were researchers).12 Those who argue that numbers are falling also refer to the ‘brain drain’ of talented mathematicians, physicists and other scholars to university jobs abroad, especially from Moscow and Petersburg.13 However, it is not clear that, apart from among researchers, numbers really have shrunk. Certainly, this is not suggested by the national statistics. For example, as Chapter 1 pointed out, there were 45 per cent more university teachers in 2001 than in 1990.14 If one considers just the percentage of the workforce with university degrees, it is obvious that the intelligentsia, defined very narrowly, is growing in size, from 16.1 per cent in 1992 in 21.6 per cent in 2000.15 As Chapter 1 suggested, the fall in student numbers in the first part of the 1990s was a short-lived phenomenon. Schoolchildren today are enthusiastic about going into higher education.16 Another aspect of the supposed decline is that talented young people are said not to want to go into traditional state intelligentsia occupations, such as teaching. In the school year 1999–2000 there were 5,400 vacancies for teachers of foreign languages and 1,200 for history, law and social studies.17 With a foreign language, for example, it is tempting to work in the private sector as a translator or interpreter.18 However, even if these people do manage to escape teaching and get private sector jobs – which is not always easy – they are still professionals. Many Russian sociologists comment on the declining social status of the intelligentsia.19 The political influence of the intelligentsia elite is much reduced since the glasnost period and the first years of Yeltsin’s regime. Declining status is seen, too, as being a much wider phenomenon, related to an influx of materialist values, which mean that people do not value intellectual labour. There is a large dose of political rhetoric in many of these arguments, which are essentially anticapitalist; however, this does not necessarily mean that they are untrue, and evidence is adduced, for example, from surveys of schoolchildren’s career choices. However, such surveys do tend to put medicine near the top of the list,

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although teaching is often further down.20 The low pay of people actually working in intelligentsia occupations is obviously an important factor, too, in determining children’s choices and popular perceptions of these professions. Another argument concerns the changing identities of people who were fully fledged members of the intelligentsia in the Soviet era, but have found that the experience of the postcommunist period has changed their outlook and values. It is asserted that ‘the Russian intellectual class is rapidly losing its intelligentsia identity’.21 For example, it is pointed out that professionals who keep their state jobs often take on secondary employment, which may weaken their intelligentsia identity. They develop business skills and adopt new attitudes, losing some old Soviet intelligentsia assumptions.22 Moreover, where they find non-intellectual second jobs like taxi-driving, this may lead to deskilling.23 These particular claims about changing identity seem to be based only on the experience of the city intelligentsia. As Chapter 5 suggested, paid secondary employment is so limited in the small towns that it is hardly likely to have an impact on respondents’ identities. On the other hand, their unpaid secondary employment – growing vegetables and raising livestock – might be expected to have a large impact on identities. Chopping logs instead of reading books was the complaint with which this book began.

Who are the intelligentsia? The intelligentsia defined by occupation This first section will adopt, as a working definition, the idea that the core of the intelligentsia is simply a group of highly qualified people in health, education and the arts: doctors (but not nurses), teachers, journalists, librarians, administrators of museums and arts centres, artists and writers. In Russian they are often known as the ‘humanities intelligentsia’ (gumanitarnaya intelligentsiya). As well as the ‘core’ intelligentsia, there is a more hazy category of what might be labelled ‘fringe intelligentsia’. Engineers, who fall within this group, could be classed as ‘technical intelligentsia’ (tekhnicheskaya intelligentsiya); accountants or local government employees are traditionally more likely to class themselves by the Soviet term sluzhashchie (‘services workers’).24 However, among the small-town residents some of these services workers, particularly specialists such as education experts and statisticians employed by the local authority, did identify themselves as intelligenty. The police has increasingly provided legal higher and secondary specialist education for its staff, and police employees, too, could consider themselves to be intelligenty.25 A separate stratum? Class boundaries in the local community If we understand intelligentsia in the narrow sense just mentioned, the local intelligentsia was not a group apart in the small-town community. Figures 6.1–6.3 below are not intended to suggest that the sample was, in detail, typical of all

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Figure 6.1 Occupations of respondents’ husbands (N  62). Notes ‘Workers’ includes collective farmers; ‘managers’ includes managers of intelligentsia institutions like schools; ‘business’ includes commercial farmer; ‘pensioners’ includes disabled people.

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Figure 6.2 Occupations of wives of respondents in intelligentsia/government jobs (N  22).

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Figure 6.3 Occupation of wives labelled ‘intelligentsia’ in Figure 6.2 (N  16).

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small-town members of the intelligentsia. The charts merely illustrate the tendency for husbands of intelligentsia women to be chosen from a wide range of occupations and different social groups. Male members of the core intelligentsia, who are fewer on the ground, are more likely to have intelligentsia spouses. Three businessmen and a priest all had wives without paid employment. This particular intelligentsia sample obviously felt well integrated into the local community, sometimes stressing the social variety within their families. (e.g. ‘My husband is a Worker with a capital W’). However, one or two interviewees with fewer intelligentsia credentials were more sceptical about whether intelligentsia people were free of a superiority complex; one referred to a traditional ‘gulf ’ between the intelligentsia and the masses, another to the derogatory label ‘Mr White Hands’. As Chapter 5 suggested, different social groups are bound together by favour networks and leisure activities. The latter is particularly true in Zubtsov, where many people live in flats. Household plots are therefore allotments just outside the town, and shopowners, doctors, teachers and manual workers labour side by side. On the other hand, leisure activities in the small town are often arranged within the workplace, promoting intelligentsia exclusivity. One sense in which some intelligentsia members are ‘outsiders’ is that they actually come from outside the local area, often having been sent to work in the small town after graduation, under the Soviet system of job placements for graduates. However, if they stayed for life in the small town it was usually because they married local people; usually this was a case of intelligentsia women marrying local men. Some of these outsiders were very highly qualified people who still constitute part of the town’s intelligentsia elite, insofar as such an elite can be said to exist. An intelligentsia elite? One could define the local intelligentsia elite as consisting of people with degrees from prestigious universities, particularly in Zubtsov, where several interviewees had graduated from institutions in Moscow and Leningrad. In Bednodemyanovsk much of the town’s most lively cultural life was organized by two musicians who had graduated from Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod) Conservatoire, one with a first prize. Another definition of elite might be an intellectual/artistic elite of practising musicians, artists and writers. For example, Achit had its own socialist realist short story writer, Nikolai Zakharov, often held up as the town’s chief intelligent.26 In Zubtsov, Andrei Kurbanov is a professional artist, although he finds it harder to sell his paintings now than when he was working in Dushanbe.27 Lyudmila Volodina, the curator of Zubtsov’s museum, tries to rewrite local history by, for example, publicizing new figures about losses on the Rzhev Front (a million on either side) and showing exhibits documenting the experience of the German soldiers. An important role in both Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov is played by migrants from Central Asia, Kazakstan and Azerbaidjan. Volodina was an early migrant from Kazakstan; Kurbanov is from Dushanbe. Often these migrants had

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held responsible positions in capital cities. Migrants who were interviewed, and their family members, included three English teachers – a scarce and very valuable commodity – from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Kazakstan; a senior policeman from Tadzhikistan; his wife, a university lecturer, now working as a government official; a family of three artists from Tadzhikistan, working at a children’s art and music school; a piano teacher from Azerbaidjan; a family of doctors from Samarkand, including the head of a medical institute; a faith healer, once a teacher, from Kazakstan; and the deputy manager of a Tashkent Park of Culture and Rest, now employed at the district house of culture. One Zubtsov teacher, a local woman, claimed ‘The Russian intelligentsia is coming home’. Achit’s shortage of housing was probably partly responsible for its failure to attract highly qualified migrants. Achit’s shortage of musicians, for example, was said to be caused by the fact that there was nowhere for them to live. On the other hand the local authority was ready to make an effort to recruit doctors by finding them new housing, and had just employed a young surgeon by giving him a flat. Managers, such as editors, headteachers and hospital managers (‘head doctors’), might be considered another elite. As Chapter 7 suggests, for political purposes some managers of cultural and educational institutions did think of themselves as a coherent elite, at least in Zubtsov. In Achit and Zubtsov these managers shared at least one common feature, their female sex – 85.7 per cent were women. In Bednodemyanovsk the proportions were half and half.28 In each town the managers overlapped with a group of people who had formed the Soviet elite. Among respondents, these people were now aged 38–70. In Soviet days they had been the local bosses. They served in the communist party and Komsomol (Young Communist League) district committees (raikoms), or in jobs whose occupants were appointed by the regional or local communist party committees. Such so-called ‘nomenklatura’ appointments in the sample were an ex-mayor, a head of administration, headteachers and heads of a library service and local education department. The party bosses among this group had usually been second-rung: second secretaries and/or heads of department. There were also two first secretaries of Komsomol raikoms. Frequently, these people had begun their careers as teachers, but joined the party apparatus when they were still young. They were well known locally, and a sense of being on a nomenklatura list may have persisted. As one respondent remarked, ‘I’ll never have problems finding a job because everyone knows me here’. This was a group of intelligent and talented middle-aged local people who still seemed to have much to contribute to the survival of postcommunist local institutions, often as their directors. One interviewee, as it were excusing his CPSU background, pointed out that in small towns Soviet party officials had just got on with the job of trying to improve local conditions; they had not seen their role as being political. Conversation with various ex-nomenklatura respondents suggested the same: these were not people aspiring to become General Secretary or to build communism. They had had more modest aims. Tables 6.1 and 6.2 show only those respondents who had held party or Komsomol jobs, omitting people like collective farm chairs, who were merely

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The intelligentsia and middle class Table 6.1 Level/upward trajectories of respondents, from CPSU raikom job before 1991 to state managerial job post-1991 Female, 48 years old CPSU 2nd sec.a Male, 57 years old CPSU 2nd sec. Female, 39 years old CPSU junior official Female, 44 years old CPSU unspecified Male, 41 years old CPSU head of ‘control’ commissiona Male, 54 years old CPSU unspecified, mayor in 1980s

Unemployed  Education Department  editor of district newspaper State farm chair  deputy head of police  deputy head of Employment Centre School head Head of library service since 1986 Detective, prosecution service  chief detective School head

Note a  Left raikom in 1991 (just before or as consequence of banning of CPSU).

Table 6.2 Downward trajectories from CPSU/Komsomol, all caused by failure in private sector Male, 42 years old CPSU head of general dept Female, 50 years old 1st sec. Komsomol raikom Female, 38 years old 1st sec. Komsomol raikoma Male, 49 years old Komsomol sec. in college

Village headteacher  manager in private firm  Goskomstat employee Teacher  private baker  market trader Entrepreneur  journalist on district newspaper Petrol station manager  entrepreneur

Note a  Left raikom in 1991 (just before or as consequence of banning of CPSU).

appointed by the CPSU. These respondents can be divided between ‘successes’ and ‘failures’. The ‘successes’ had had level or upward career trajectories since the 1980s. The ‘failures’ had experienced downward trajectories. It is noteworthy that all the ‘successful’ nomenklaturists had worked in the CPSU, not the Komsomol raikom. Less fortunate were four interviewees who had tried to make a transition into the private sector but had all gone bankrupt or been employed by businesses that went bankrupt. Three of the four had Komsomol backgrounds. In other words, they had generally been more junior than the first group in the late Soviet period. The failed baker mentioned in Table 6.2 was married to a former senior CPSU raikom official, a highly educated person who worked as a schoolteacher both before and after the bakery episode. Another downward trajectory, not caused by business failure, was that of an electrical engineer who had been head of the CPSU raikom propaganda department

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until 1990. He then, in succession, edited the district newspaper; lectured in the agricultural college; and found work as head technician in the Savings Bank, where he earned 560 rubles in 2000 and had to make ends meet by doing electrical repairs for New Russians. It should not be supposed, however, that ex-nomenklaturists could succeed only in managerial, state-sector jobs, not business. It was striking that the person whom respondents most often mentioned as being the most successful local entrepreneur was, in all three towns, a former nomenklatura appointment: a CPSU raikom boss, teacher and newspaper editor in Achit; a state farm manager in Zubtsov; and, in Bednodemyanovsk, a former headteacher, local government head of department and head of village administration. (The first was a woman.) ‘New boy networks’ existed, as well as old ones. In Achit, some of the professional, business and local government elite – ‘men in their 30s and 40s’ – cemented their friendship by going on fishing holidays together in Sverdlovsk Region; back in Achit, they were able to help each other out. The ‘semi-intelligentsia’: less well-qualified people in intelligentsia jobs In all three towns there were institutions which were staffed largely by people with only vocational diplomas. These included libraries, houses of culture and music/art schools, kindergartens and children’s homes. These were places which traditionally had always had a mix of graduates and vocational diploma-holders, although directors complained that the number of graduates was decreasing. More significant was the number of secondary teachers with only a vocational diploma, both at School No. 1 in Achit and in the vocational school in Bednodemyanovsk. Only 5/8 teachers at Achit’s School No. 1 had university degrees.29 Besides people who were underqualified in the sense of not being university graduates, there were also respondents, particularly in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk, who were not doing the job for which they had been trained at university. This would not cause comment in Britain, but in Russia a university education is ‘higher vocational education’ and, in Soviet days in particular, was definitely intended as a professional qualification which would determine the graduate’s entire career. Employees who did not work according to their professional qualification were contemptuously referred to as ‘chance people’ (sluchainye lyudi). Soviet newspapers, for example, carried many stories of chance people employed in houses of culture. In Soviet days, though, it was probably much more rare to meet a chance person teaching in an urban school. Some of these ‘chance people’ were overskilled migrants; the following list counts only natives of the small town. In Achit both newspaper offices were entirely staffed by non-journalists; three former teachers were interviewed in the police; a kindergarten teacher worked in the social services department as an accountant; a kindergarten head had only a school-leaver’s certificate, as did the director of the house of culture. In Bednodemyanovsk, journalists included a former teacher and a law graduate. In Zubtsov, the radio and newspaper were run by ex-teachers. In

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all three towns, teachers were teaching subjects for which they had not been trained, particularly languages and history. Self-identification There is no point pretending that the intelligentsia is anything but a highly subjective and elusive concept. Some Russian sociologists prefer to not use it for this reason.30 Klopov, for example, suggests that it may sometimes be no more than a sentimental cliche. ‘The question is whether there really was an “intelligentsia”, “a moral example, the people’s conscience” … ? Or was it just a name [i.e. the official Soviet label] for a group of professional people employed in intellectual labour? If the latter is true, it is senseless to speak of the loss of its specific role and even more so of the “death” of the intelligentsia.’31 If ‘intelligentsia’ is used by people indulging in lazy, muddled or wishful thinking, this is a problem for the sociologist. It does not mean, however, that the term can be ignored. It has meaning. In fact, its meaning is particularly interesting and worthy of exploration just because it opens avenues into the mentality of former Soviet citizens: the ideological double binds which marked their Soviet-era consciousness and their confusions arising from glasnost and the introduction of the postcommunist political regime.32 Many interviewees saw membership of the intelligentsia as an ideal to which they aspired: an intelligent was ‘ideal in every respect’. One woman said that she had dreamed of joining the intelligentsia since childhood, conceptualizing the intelligent as ‘clever, polite, tidy and unselfish’. Respondents used spacial metaphors such as ‘I’ve been a teacher all my life so I suppose I’m somewhere close’. On the other hand, they could also say ‘I’m moving further away from it’ since they were becoming increasingly disqualified for various reasons described later. The fact that the ideal and the real were so mixed up in people’s thinking (perhaps a hallmark of Soviet consciousness) contributed to the difficulty of categorizing the responses. In general, however, the problem with analysing answers to the question ‘Do you consider yourself and your family to belong to the intelligentsia?’ was that the responses were so thoughtful: measured, rather than confused. This was often the longest answer in the interview, as interviewees explored various dimensions of the term, sometimes with considerable emotion. Hence Table 6.3 is to be considered indicative only. In Bednodemyanovsk there

Table 6.3 Percentage of respondents definitely considering themselves intelligentsia/not

Achit Bednodemyanovsk Zubtsov

Definitely

Definitely not

46 46–52 63.4

32 22 6.8

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Table 6.4 Educational qualifications of respondents, by town (%)

Achit Bednodemyanovsk Zubtsov

Higher

Vocational diploma

School diploma

60 84 78

36 16 22

4 0 0

were three interviewees who were so nearly in the ‘definite’ category that they have been provisionally included, hence the 46–52 per cent band. It might be supposed that the high number of negative responses in Achit, and positive ones in Zubtsov, corresponded to the level of qualification of the interviewees. Table 6.4 shows that the Achit sample was less well qualified as well as less confident about its intelligentsia identity. A few respondents did claim that they could not be considered intelligentsia because they did not have university degrees. However, only for a handful did this seem to be a deciding factor. Moreover, qualifications do not correlate with self-identification for Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov. The Bednodemyanovsk sample was slightly better educated, but also less confident about its identity. It might be suggested that the Zubtsov sample had a more elite intelligentsia complexion: they were rather better travelled, had more prestigious degrees, etc. This probably is a factor. However, overall, occupation, family background and behaviour were the most important defining characteristics of a member of the intelligentsia. Where occupation was concerned, there was one absolutely clear-cut correlation: all the businesspeople denied their intelligentsia status, while in several cases mourning its loss. The single priest – until quite recently an engineer – also denied membership. Intelligentsia was a ‘worldly’ category. In other responses there was enormous variation, however. The most unlikely interviewees were positive that they belonged to the intelligentsia, while the most intellectual, middle class and considerate people, in classic intelligentsia jobs, often denied membership. A young woman with a vocational diploma who liked going out drinking in the evening, whose mother was a tax inspector and who was married to a refrigerator repairman, felt that she was definitely intelligentsia because she had got a job, for which she was underqualified, in a local government office. The head of administration in Achit, a former state farm chairman, was absolutely positive that he was a member of the intelligentsia, although he spent all his spare time gardening and although his criterion for intelligentsia membership was that he relayed instructions from the government to the masses. On the other hand, an erudite senior teacher with a career of doing good works in the local community said that she did not qualify because she did not know enough about art and music. Another woman, with a degree from the Moscow Institute of Culture, said that she was not a member of the intelligentsia, because she did not feel like one: a member of the intelligentsia should be unmaterialistic, sincere and generally perfect. Perhaps rather predictably, it was often the most intellectual interviewees (in the English sense of the word) who had

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such complex and idealistic images of the intelligentsia that they disqualified themselves from belonging to it. How could they match up to the likes of Likhachev, Sakharov and Akhmatova?33 However, if denying their own claims to match up to the ideal they sometimes referred to a friend or colleague who more nearly did. One doctor described an elderly Jewish friend in Moscow, an excellent musician with lots of general knowledge, as a real member of the intelligentsia. What personal qualities were implied when respondents used the word? The description just given contains some of the classic constituents. Only two respondents mentioned Jews, but many conveyed the idea of being from a former time, talented, artistic, with specialist qualifications but also with a good general knowledge. This is just a more sophisticated encapsulation of the little girl’s daydreaming, mentioned earlier, of the intelligent as ‘clever, tidy, polite and unselfish’. The ‘past’ and ‘future’ location of the ideal characterize its present unattainability. The reference to the past does not necessarily invalidate the ideal as being anachronistic, although many respondents did express their doubts as to whether it was possible for such ideal people to exist in postcommunist society. The adjective intelligentnyi, in its simplest sense of ‘well-behaved’, ‘with nice manners’, also entered into this definition, but it was not used just as a synonym for ‘polite’ (vezhlivyi) on its own with no further dimensions. ‘Polite behaviour’ was connected in people’s minds with social status and education, even if they raised the issue in order to deny the link, making statements like ‘not all professors are polite’ or ‘ministers are criminals’. One doctor said, playing on the double meaning of the word, ‘I’ve become less intelligentnyi and more bad-tempered’.34 Those respondents who often categorically denied that they were members of the intelligentsia tended to do so on the grounds that they often lost their tempers. ‘I’m not really a member of the intelligentsia because I swear.’ ‘I shout at the children.’ This brings the argument back to stress, discussed in previous chapters. It was often the most stressed respondents who denied their intelligentsia status. ‘Life is nothing but stress,’ said one such 62-year-old woman in poor health. ‘I’m a nervous person; I was in and out of hospital all last year,’ said another. Typical examples included very poor women with more than two children and/or unhappy relationships with their mothers, husbands or children; and/or migrants who had not really settled in the small town; and/or interviewees who were very bitter about the political situation (voting against all the candidates, in one case, making racist remarks in another). These interviewees tended to have quite poor self-images and, if forced to define themselves, could only do so by their job. It might be objected that it was not stress, but poverty which was making these respondents deny that they belonged to the intelligentsia. However, they never made the connection ‘intelligentsia  money’, which would in any case be senseless, given that almost all their colleagues are also poor. Insofar as poverty was the cause of their stress, it has only an indirect link to the intelligentsia concept. Simon Smith, drawing on the ideas of the Czech J. Kabele, has suggested that people in ‘transition’ societies need to construct narratives of which they are the heroes, if they are to find a sense of direction.

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They need to ‘restabilize’ the social meaning of their original lifeworld if they are to be able to act consistently with respect to other actors, and on a psychological level they need to ‘repersonify’ the narrative world they (continuously, habitually) create and inhabit so as to render the lifeworld not only more probable but also more desirable – a world of which they can see themselves its ‘narrators and heroes’.35 Where does the intelligentsia concept fit into this picture? Paradoxically, given the traditional angst of the Russian intelligentsia, it might seem from the case studies of Appendix 2 and the discussion in this chapter, that to label oneself an intelligent is to state that one has a positive, coping self-image. It would be stretching a point to apply this conclusion to all the respondents studied, but it has considerable validity, particularly in reverse. In other words, the minority who were emphatic that they were not intelligenty were, if they were not businesspeople, often the most stressed of respondents. (See, for example, the stories of ‘Dasha’ and ‘Tanya’ in Appendix 2.) A coping member of the intelligentsia, on the other hand, could rise above the tribulations of the moment, finding comfort in various worlds which were disconnected from purely material concerns, worlds in which they were ‘narrators and heroes’. (In Appendix 2, ‘Raya’, ‘Kira’ and, especially, ‘Sonya’ would all fit into this category, even though, on the face of things, Sonya’s life was among the hardest described.) When they related the intelligentsia concept to themselves, the interviewees tended to focus on three aspects. On a personal level, the concept included the survival of their own individual identity as thinking people with time and opportunity for personal development. On a professional level, the survival was of their professional identities and institutions. On a community level, the intelligentsia concept was relevant to the survival of a local society in which professionals have a certain ‘leading role’,36 ‘bringing enlightenment to the masses’ according to the classic Soviet formulation. Personal development and leisure It is difficult to maintain an intellectual lifestyle today and provide it for one’s children, plus husbands who may themselves have become de-classed. In particular, many respondents mentioned their disappointment that the high price of periodicals subscriptions had forced them to curtail drastically the number of newspapers and journals they received. ‘From twenty to two,’ one claimed. Books were another problem. In Tver, the demise of the district book retail network was blamed for the closure of Zubtsov’s bookshop, creating a situation in which books were for sale only in kiosks or at the market at higher prices than in Moscow.37 Neither of the other towns had bookshops, though Achit did have a book section in a small department store. However, reading was a key component of respondents’ self-identity: it defined them as members of the intelligentsia. A woman who had a particularly serious identity crisis, and was suffering from depression, reported that she and her husband had entirely given up reading serious literature. Everyone thirsted for travel, mentioning nostalgically how they used to visit theatres and exhibitions in the big cities. In 1999–2000 only a few of the more

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prosperous were able to make long-distance trips; the rest had a powerful sense of being stuck in their backwater. Although a few respondents found solace in artistic and scholarly leisure pursuits, others complained that they had no time or concentration for them. Statistics about the fall in visits to cultural institutions in regional capitals must partly reflect the decreased possibilities of visitors from districts outside the city. (Of course, city dwellers do not spend all their time on cultural pursuits, either. A study of Nizhnii Novgorod found that about seventy per cent of respondents never went to the theatre, concerts or sporting events.)38 Moreover, all over Russia, not just in the big cities, the number of lesser cultural institutions (houses of culture/clubs, i.e. arts centres) has declined considerably. Figures 6.4–6.6 give an indication of the trends in Russia and in Tver and Penza Regions. (The two 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 1985

1990

1995

Visitors x 100,000

1999 Theatres

Figure 6.4 Number of visits to theatre (in 100,000s) and number of professional theatres in Russia, 1985–99. Source: RSE 2000, p. 230.

1000 800 600 400 200

00

99

20

98

19

97

19

96

19

95

Tver

19

94

19

93

19

92

19

91

19

19

19

90

0

Penza

Figure 6.5 Number of visits to theatre (in 1,000s) in Tver and Penza Regions, 1990–8/2000. Source: Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, p. 69; Uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Penzenskoi oblasti, p. 159.

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150

157

145 121 102

97

100

73 55

50 0 Tver

Penza 1990

Russia

1998 /9

Figure 6.6 Number of ‘cultural and leisure institutions’ (houses of culture, clubs, etc.), in 1,000s, Russia, and in 10s, Penza and Tver Regions, 1990–8/1999. Source: RSE 2000, p. 231; Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, p. 69; Uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Penzenskoi oblasti, p.158. Note 1998 figure is for Penza.

regions have almost identically-sized populations, so their theatre-going habits are obviously rather different.) A number of Russian sociologists have noted the decline in organized leisure activities for provincial people, including visits from regional and national-level performers (see Chapter 7). The vegetable garden was often the biggest humiliation and consumer of leisure time. Respondents had a sense that they were turning into peasants. A doctor with two children, whose husband was unemployed and who kept pigs, rabbits and chickens, described herself as an intellectual-peasant ‘mongrel’; another doctor used the same term. ‘A member of the intelligentsia reads literature, does intellectual work, while we work in the vegetable garden,’ was a common refrain. ‘My grandmother is a teacher, my parents are both paediatricians, we are all educated, but by lifestyle we are not members of the intelligentsia.’A headteacher complained that because of work on the allotment she had lost half her intellectual identity. A librarian ‘couldn’t derive pleasure from intellectual pursuits while worrying about how to get a loaf of bread’. ‘An intelligent has a sense of having been sent to achieve something,’ said a music teacher. ‘There are no intelligentsia in this sense of the word in Bednodemyanovsk: everyone has a vegetable garden and animals.’ Professional identities Some Russian sociological research has uncovered evidence of weakening professional identities. For instance, Rybtsova (writing about Perm) suggests that women in particular are becoming more centred on their families. Klimova comes to the same conclusion about both sexes and different social groups (engineers, students, brokers, workers) and cites other research to the same effect. Shirokalova uncovered very negative attitudes to work in Nizhnii Novgorod Region. Certainly one might expect that the trials and tribulations of postcommunism would lessen people’s

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enthusiasm for work. Respondents in the small towns complained that they sometimes found it hard to concentrate when they were worrying about how to feed their families, ‘always with arithmetic in your head’. ‘When I didn’t get paid, it was hard to feel motivated,’ explained one local government official. ‘People didn’t feel like working when they weren’t paid, although they kept going,’ said a teacher. The ‘romance had departed’ from their intellectual occupations, said a librarian. When the move out of an intelligentsia occupation had been a successful one, as in the case of the three policewomen mentioned in Chapter 5, there sometimes seemed little sense of regret. However, as should be evident from the above discussion of leisure preferences, in general respondents treasured their professional identities and, when asked whether work occupied a central place in their lives, only a handful (male and female) disagreed. In fact, the interviewees seemed to worry about losing their identities more than they perhaps actually did lose them. Moreover, several expressed a strong sense that professional identities would always be an asset, even if society were changing. ‘Good doctors will always be respected.’ ‘A true professional will always be respected.’ If professional identities are valued, changing professions creates anxiety. To some extent the idea of trading seemed feared not just because of practical obstacles, but also because it clashed with respondents’ self-images as members of the intelligentsia – a hostility towards commerce with long roots in Russian political culture. Even younger people could feel that there was a clash between their intelligentsia identities and the personality traits needed in the successful businessperson. A piano teacher’s businessman son apparently liked to complain, ‘Mum, this isn’t me’. A librarian, aged 25, asserted that you could never succeed in business if, like her, you were a librarian through and through.39 A doctor who had worked for a while as a shipping agent went back to medicine. Two former teachers, now employed as managers in the private sector, hankered after their old jobs: teaching was their vocation. A man who had been a defence engineer now worked six days a week in his village shop to support his daughters and grandson, but he spent Sundays with his former colleagues at their makeshift laboratory, keeping up their professional skills. A woman engineer who had become a shuttle trader described her unhappiness in the local newspaper.40 A number of interviewees with creative jobs said that they felt fulfilled just because of the nature of the job. Others had more negative interpretations of the statement that work occupied a central place in their lives. For example, they argued that the limiting of leisure opportunities, such as travel, meant that one concentrated one’s energies more into one’s work. People with tense relations in the household often found relief in work and treated it as a motor to keep them going. Interviewees tended to emphasize not so much how they enjoyed their work, but how conscientious they were: classes demanded extensive preparation, newspaper and managerial jobs kept them working overtime, etc. They liked to project the image of a hardworking professional person. Research into teachers in Sverdlovsk Region also suggests that a sense of professionalism persists strongly, despite dissatisfaction with the actual conditions of the job.41

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Many interviewees kept up their professional knowledge by reading and in many cases, going to the expense of subscribing to professional journals, even if they did not get these subscriptions paid as an addition to their salary (to which some were in theory entitled). Interviewees felt that they lived on intellectual ‘islands’ and, as was suggested in Chapter 5, were emphatic about the importance of the emotional support they received from their colleagues. Associating at work and discussing professional matters also helped them maintain their professional identities, sometimes, for example, by swapping professional literature. Interviewees with degrees were proud of their higher education and one who, because she had got married, had not been able to pursue her chosen course of study and gain a degree, expressed her lifelong sense of regret at this missed opportunity. Several interviewees mentioned their sense of achievement when they embarked on their professional careers and began to feel themselves to be members of the ‘intelligentsia’. Research into the motivation of student teachers supports the view that the school staffroom is seen as a ‘cultural sphere’; the desire to be part of such a world was the most common motivating factor mentioned in one survey.42 One woman, describing her childhood ambition to teach, said that that in a small village the teacher had been viewed as ‘inhabitant number one’. Another teacher had actually, in the Soviet period, taught in a village school, and was nostalgic about the respect she had enjoyed. Since many respondents did not come from intelligentsia families, they had a particular reason to cherish their professional identities, often acquired with considerable effort, and not bought by paying tuition fees, as they could see happening today. Community service The intelligentsia traditionally bears responsibility for welding together the local community, through its educational and information-transmitting roles, and also through the organization of entertainments and local festivals. The museum curator in Zubtsov, for example, spoke of her desire to ‘enlighten’ people. The head of the Zubtsov vocational school emphasized her belief in the softening power of culture, suggesting that her pupils, hitherto fed on a diet of American films, became ‘kinder’ after their contacts with ‘good’ culture at school concerts and shows. ‘The intelligentsia takes part in everything that happens in town’, said a teacher in Bednodemyanovsk. ‘The intelligentsia is the most conspicuous social group and has a good influence on the town,’ said an Achit headteacher. ‘Only a few individuals are active in public life, but without them things would be really dull,’ said another woman in Achit. In general, it seemed that Zubtsov interviewees were the most idealistic and community-spirited, and the Achit interviewees the least, despite, as Chapter 8 shows, being more local in origin than the Zubtsov cohort. The Zubtsov group were more likely to feel that they had respect from local adults, although they also complained more than the others about cheeky children who questioned their authority. (Perhaps, being close to Moscow, the children feel themselves more sophisticated than do their equivalents

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in Sverdlovsk and Penza.) Several of the Achit managers – including all three headteachers – did feel sure that they had some level of influence; in fact, one headteacher thought that the intelligentsia was more influential today, apparently because of democratization. Other Achit respondents disagreed. Bednodemyanovsk interviewees seemed to be the most discouraged about their influence, although other evidence would suggest that this is the most harmonious of the three communities. Perhaps their dislike of the local administration played a role here. Chapter 7 explores community service in practice, and the differences between the towns, in more detail. Draganova et al. suggest that there are two theories about what makes for a strong community spirit. One is that the smaller the community, the stronger that spirit is likely to be. The second is that more highly educated people have a stronger community spirit, because they are more involved in community affairs. In the case of the intelligentsia of these three small towns both factors come together.43 Levicheva, however, bemoans the tendency for intelligentsia members to become more focused on local preoccupations, and Magaril suggests that there is a chasm between the intelligentsia of the major cities and the provincial doctors and teachers.44 ‘I wouldn’t pass for a member of the intelligentsia in a city,’ said a highly intelligent and well-educated lawyer in Achit. Two of her fellow interviewees made the same comment in Achit. In the other towns there was no evidence of the same inferiority complex. Chapter 8 examines parochial tendencies and their implications. District-level intelligentsia also had a sense of responsibility for their village colleagues. Many respondents had either worked in village schools or grown up in villages. Managers were responsible for medical, educational and cultural facilities throughout the district. Because of the high level of unemployment and the shortage of wage-paying jobs in rural areas, positions such as librarian were sought after despite the tiny wages, though not necessarily by qualified applicants. Libraries, schools and houses of culture everywhere faced the prospect of extinction, although only a few schools had actually closed so far. Managers were trying to find ways of keeping them going. Librarians, educational specialists, etc., agonized about the difficulty of gathering together village colleagues for seminars in the district centre. When considering positive attributes of their intelligentsia identity, respondents sometimes pointed to the fact that at least they lived in the district centre, not out in the sticks.

Younger respondents and intelligentsia identity Yurii Petrov, having surveyed student teachers in Nizhnii Tagil, Sverdlovsk Region, found that they had a complex understanding of intelligentsia identity; he concluded that it was still very much a topical issue.45 Levicheva, in Moscow, came to the same conclusion about her students, who seemed to have much the same opinions as their lecturers: ‘no “fathers and children” conflict here’.46 Some of the concept’s most ardent advocates in the small towns were people under 30 years old. However, a few younger interviewees did have trouble with identifying themselves,

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or defining ‘intelligentsia’. ‘Very serious people,’ said one physical education teacher, laughing. Their confusion may have been caused partly by not having clearcut opinions in general – perhaps just because of the age they were, rather than as any kind of sign of the times. The same interviewees sometimes found it hard to describe their region. Although opinion polls show that young people are less likely to wish for a return to the Soviet system than are their elders, it is difficult to generalize about ‘young people’, in Russia in general, as in the small town. Lukov, for example, concludes from his panel survey of young Russians that there is no pattern between one year’s results and another’s, and that the extent of social stratification and regional differentiation in Russia make youth an exceptionally difficult category to analyse.47 The younger interviewees were no more likely than their elders to have sympathetic attitudes to local businessmen, or to make different assessments of social stratification in the small town.

Intelligentsia attitudes towards local social change and perceptions of stratification This chapter has already considered the extent to which core intelligentsia respondents were linked by marriage with other sections of local society. The following section will examine how they conceptualized that society and in particular whether they perceived a gulf between themselves and the rest of the local community. Interviewees were asked whether they ‘associated with local entrepreneurs’. It seems that attitudes to businessmen in Russia may have changed during the 1990s: in the early 1990s many Russians had a ‘rather positive’ attitude towards businessmen, but by the late 1990s this attitude was reversed and in 1997, 49 per cent regarded entrepreneurs as ‘harmful’.48 This change in views would coincide with the disappointment of many would-be entrepreneurs who had started the postcommunist period full of optimism but then seen their businessness collapse, if they had ever got off the ground at all, and correspondingly could be expected to feel more sour about the entire business world, with its injustices and racketeering. Certainly, the question about business acquaintances provoked some hostile comments. Business people were ‘sharp customers’ (krutye), they had fail marks at school and were not qualified to become doctors and teachers like decent people, etc. They were grasping, ruthless, dishonest, profiteers. Half-a-dozen respondents (of different ages and backgrounds) adopted the position that they wouldn’t touch a businessman with a bargepole. However, most respondents did not characterize businesspeople like this. They said that they either had friends among the local businesspeople or would not mind having friends among them, if by chance such acquaintances had not been formed. ‘A businessman is a human being too. They are just ordinary people whom life has turned into businessmen.’ ‘I’d do the same if I had the capital.’ It was the businesspeople themselves who were seen as having a tendency either to stand aloof from the rest of local society or, more commonly, to stand out from the rest of society by their opulent lifestyles.

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Those who argued that business people kept their distance said, for example, that ‘entrepreneurs have no interest in associating with people like me’; ‘they work twenty-four hours a day’; ‘entrepreneurs and local government officials are different from the rest of society: they don’t use the library’; ‘they try to keep out newcomers’. Several interviewees felt that ‘they stick together’. Plenty of examples were given of how the new rich stood out: foreign cars and plush villas were the most often mentioned attributes.49 Others were maids and pianos (in Zubtsov); home computers for children and buying property in Penza and Moscow (Bednodemyanovsk); going to sanatoria, having two homes and buying a flat in Perm so children could be educated privately and get into university (Achit). Whether the business class stands out or stands aloof is obviously an important distinction. Almost everybody agreed that they stood out, but not everyone believed that this was because they were deliberately creating a gap between themselves and the rest. In fact, several respondents said that it was only the very richest businessmen who kept their distance. Ordinary entrepreneurs fitted in, sponsoring competitions in local schools, buying petrol and food for schools, subsidizing the police force and the house of culture, paying medical expenses for a poor boy who needed treatment in Penza, coming to concerts, etc. Such activities were particularly often mentioned in Bednodemyanovsk and least frequently in Achit. In any case, said some respondents, although there might be a handful of truly rich businessmen, the average entrepreneur was not much richer than the rest of the population. One respondent in Achit thought that the young entrepreneurs, in particular, were constructive and hard-working. The number of prosperous independent businesspeople in the sample was tiny, only three. One, although he said he could do any kind of work, hankered after the school where he used to teach, still socialized with his old colleagues and organized sporting events at the school. Another, however, said he sometimes felt uncomfortable with his old colleagues, and preferred to meet other entrepreneurs. They used to meet in his office (for want of other premises), but their attempt to form an Entrepreneurs’ Association a few years ago had failed because they had ‘too many different approaches’. The third businessman used to socialize with his fellow entrepreneurs at the gym. Respondents were also asked whether they thought that local society was becoming more stratified. Some argued that it was not: there had been stratification in the Soviet period too. More often, they denied that the town today was really stratified. ‘The mass of the people live poorly’ was a common refrain. Class distinctions were less visible nowadays – it was harder to tell which social group was which. Attitudes were also said to be held in common. ‘We all have common interests’ and ‘people still want to know each other’ were comments made in Bednodemyanovsk. Society in both Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov was not really becoming more divided, according to such interviewees. ‘Entrepreneurs and teachers are the same kind of people,’ stated one interviewee. In Achit some people also said that everyone behaved the same, but their comments were less flattering: ‘People aren’t so polite anymore’.

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Another reason why stratification was not happening was that the rich were not really a stratum. Several respondents claimed that they were just a small group, a ‘handful’, ‘twenty families’. (The numbers quoted did not seem to be consistently different for the three towns; they were all obviously rough estimates.) Whether or not they agreed that the rich constituted a real social layer, respondents, with three exceptions,50 did feel that there were rich people in the town. The town therefore consisted of at least two groups, rich and poor. The rich were not necessarily entrepreneurs: they could also be government officials or, more precisely, bosses (especially in Achit). Some interviewees in Achit pointed out that the winning combination was to be an entrepreneur and a boss. Tax inspectors, policemen and security service officers were also mentioned as rich groups in Achit. The respondent almost always located himself or herself in the ‘poor’ layer, if the town was seen as divided between rich and poor, or the middle, if it was divided into three. A few officials and businessmen modestly refrained from claiming membership of any richer group. The large poor section of the population was characterized as being poor through no fault of its own: ‘modest, not pushy’. It included both white- and blue-collar workers and, for some respondents, also the small businessmen. Most commonly, respondents saw the town as divided into three layers. The bottom group was often referred to as ‘unemployed’. Teachers were the most specific about other characteristics of this group, which they saw at school, particularly poorly dressed children, sometimes hungry and suffering from physical abuse. Other respondents characterized the underclass as alcoholics. Drug addicts were occasionally added to the list in Achit and Zubtsov. Occasionally, they were ‘people without household plots’. According to the head of the special school in Achit, parents of children at the school had always lived in the same way, stealing other people’s potatoes to exchange for vodka. A journalist in Bednodemyanovsk added large families, single elderly people and disabled people to the list, but he was rather rare in mentioning such ‘respectable’ reasons for being poor. The three towns are different from one another. In Zubtsov, some professionals feel a particular gulf between themselves and the urban underclass. It was sometimes hard, though, to gauge exactly what they meant when they talked about this gulf, and to translate sentiments such as: ‘we mix with a degraded narod: they’ve all turned to drink’. Narod could imply ‘people’ in general; or specifically nonprofessionals (narod as the antithesis of intelligentsia); or peasants. Perhaps there is a conflation between the urban underclass and the surrounding rural masses. Stories about drunken unmarried couples on the edge of town burning to death in their wooden cottages,51 or unemployed urban people stealing potatoes from the fields surrounding the town just reinforce (spacially) this image of an uncivilized (social) exurban area. Hostility toward/fear of the narod seemed to be somewhat less marked in Achit than in Zubtsov and least marked in Bednodemyanovsk. Interviewees never seemed to entertain the idea that they might fall into the underclass; they were, after all, intelligentsia, the respectable poor. Respondents had modest aspirations, though, and they never said that they wanted to join the

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rich group. Their modesty tallies with the findings of Russian sociologists. For example, Tsukerman, writing about Chelyabinsk Region, suggests that stateemployed intelligentsia members and people who do not live in the regional capital are less likely to wish to ‘live better than most people’.52 National opinion surveys confirm that it is only senior officials, and to a lesser extent businessmen, who really want to stand out from the crowd.53 Where, then, was the middle class in the small town? The above descriptions of stratification, with a large layer of ‘respectable’ poor in the middle, remind one of Belyaeva’s characterization of the ‘middling mass’. However, if respondents described themselves as belonging to some kind of middle group, it was middling only in terms of income relative to the top and bottom groups. Although it varied considerably in absolute income, most interviewees were living below the subsistence minimum. In terms of lifestyle, this middling group, with its cows and goats, bore little resemblance to a Western middle class or even to the Russian middle class identified by Balzer in the cities. However widely one stretches the term ‘middle class’, it seems impossible to divorce it completely from the attainment of at least some approximation to a comfortable standard of living. Hence only the handful of officials and entrepreneurs’ households, identified by respondents as ‘rich’, can really be considered candidates for the label. Young people who had recently graduated with specialized commercial and legal training were in the small town, sitting in their parents’ homes, or doing standard, low-paid intelligentsia jobs. Had they been able to set up in the cities, they might have become middle class. Although respondents seemed to place themselves in this middle-income group, we have also seen that they classed themselves as intelligentsia. Who then defined themselves as middle class (srednii) rather than intelligentsia? Respondents were asked to choose a definition for themselves if they denied their intelligentsia status. They preferred to use old Soviet categories, like ‘worker’ or ‘services worker’. ‘I’m a labouring person’ said one, using the terminology of Soviet-era party congresses. Galkin suggests that the official Soviet social classification system ‘remains an important element in social consciousness and form of self-identification for a significant proportion of the population’.54 No one in Zubtsov said they were ‘middle class’. In Bednodemyanovsk, there were four men who chose the term: a prosperous middle-aged former engineer, now managing a fruit wine farm; a fairly well-off prosecution service detective; an apparently rather poor young journalist; and a very poor young college teacher. In other words, they were all completely different from one another in terms of income and occupation. In Achit, a middle-aged and quite well-off female government offical used the word ‘average’ (srednyaya); a teacher, married to a fairly prosperous shopowner, described herself as ‘ordinary’ (obychnaya).55

Conclusions Respondents felt most certain of their intelligentsia identity vis-à-vis the district: they were not rural dwellers. Workplaces were a further source of security. Most

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interviewees seemed to feel confident that they were professional people, and they valued both their work and their colleagues. They were less confident that they enjoyed status as members of the intelligentsia when they thought about themselves in the context of the small towns. They tended to feel that members of the intelligentsia had lost status because of their declining salaries, and because they grew potatoes like everyone else and were condemned by lack of money to spend their time in the small town with the rest of the local population, not visiting the Hermitage, the Pushkin Museum or other Russian intelligentsia haunts. On the other hand, in each town there were also intelligenty who retained a prominent role in organizing local community life and ‘bringing culture to the masses’. Insofar as one can generalize about the intelligentsia in the three towns, traces of both ‘death’ and ‘life’ are visible. The intelligentsia might perhaps be described as ‘dying’ in that: professional people spent more time farming and less on intellectual pursuits; the core intelligentsia was not always being adequately replenished with new recruits, especially in Achit; engineers were unemployed and often declassed; and especially stressed and poor people felt that they had lost their intelligentsia identity. Signs of ‘life’ included the facts that most interviewees preserved a sense of intelligentsia identity, at least as an aspiration; aspired to spend time on intellectual pursuits; had a sense of collective local intelligentsia identity, though less so in Achit; were closely linked to the local community and had social capital (see Chapters 5 and 7). If one can generalize from the very limited evidence about the emergence of a new business class, one can draw the following conclusions: nomenklatura connections are important; former teachers (often senior teachers) are prominent; women are not excluded, and may be prominent; businesspeople continue to sponsor community life to some extent, as did Soviet enterprises. For all four reasons, businesspeople can put down roots locally, despite the hostility with which they are often regarded in the abstract. The intelligentsia and businesspeople are linked on many levels: as family members, friends, acquaintances, dacha neighbours, former colleagues, sponsors, etc. However, business people can be viewed as being too entwined with local officialdom, especially if the latter is seen as corrupt.

7

Civil society and politics

Without the intelligentsia the town would be just a bunch of little nonentities (kuchka lyudishek). (Bednodemyanovsk laboratory technician)

Introduction: civil society This chapter addresses the issue of whether the small towns have a civil society. Chapter 6 suggested that professional people in the small towns had traditionally, from the nineteenth century, felt a responsibility for organizing and improving local community life. They were certainly expected to do so by the Soviet regime, which relied on such people to socialize the remainder of the population into regime-approved values. As has been shown, a number of the 1980s communist elite are still in responsible positions in the small towns and have not changed their views about their responsibilities. Nor have many regular teachers, arts workers, librarians and doctors. It is often asserted that ‘civil society’ could not exist in a Soviet-type regime. The phrase implies public activity independent of the state, something which was not supposed to occur under the communist system. However, as the Introduction to this book suggested, despite the totalizing aspirations of the communist party leadership, it could never actually control everything that happened in the USSR, particularly given the huge size of the country, and particularly after the death of Stalin and the end of the Terror.1 Moreover, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in any society may exist in a condition of some tension vis-à-vis government, and conflicts about the extent of state control over the voluntary sector are common in mature democracies. Hence, it seems unrealistic to completely write off as not being ‘civil society’ embryonic independent organizations which managed to exist even in Soviet days. There is simply a spectrum: communist-era citizens’ groups were mostly towards the unfree end, NGOs in democracies are comparatively free, but there are no absolutely unfree or free organizations. Similarly, in Russian small towns today, NGOs may not be entirely free from local authority control, but this does not mean that they have no claim to constitute a kind of civil society.

Civil society and politics 167 Moreover, where freedom of association is somewhat circumscribed, it is impossible to draw a distinct line between ‘organizations’ and ‘friendship networks’. Although definitions of civil society sometimes exclude informal networks,2 the rationale for including the latter is strong, if they help to strengthen the local community as well as serving individual selfish interests. Civil society is important on the local level because it develops both individual potential and community spirit. ‘The idea of civil society . . . embodies for many an ethical ideal of the social order, one that, if not overcomes, at least harmonizes, the conflicting demands of individual interest and social good.’3 Civil society has been justly criticized, as a concept, for this ‘having your cake and eating it’ quality, solving at a blow the traditional tensions between freedom and equality. Yet, if one looks at real Soviet community activities, on the ground, not in party speeches, one can see that in a curious fashion they did sometimes, somewhat, conform to the notion of a civil society. Teachers who organized schoolchildren in Achit to collect genuine (waste, not stolen) scrap metal for recycling or build bird boxes were not doing anything very political, but they were fulfilling their own personal need to do something useful, and being helpful to the local community at the same time. As Theodore Friedgut, for example, has illustrated, there was some genuine civic consciousness in the Soviet period.4 There was also plenty of cynicism, but it does not seem far-fetched to argue that there was probably more cynicism about organized participation in the big city, where people had a smaller personal stake in their environment.5 The size and strength of civil society in postcommunist Russia is difficult to determine, though most commentators tend to emphasize its weaknesses.6 The desirable role for civil society in the period of democratic consolidation is also unclear and disputed.7 On the one hand, some writers suggest that it should recede and let the new regime build democratic institutions undisturbed, top down. Alternatively, it is argued that civil societies are crucial for developing those skills and values, such as compromise and respect for the views of minorities, which are needed for democracies to consolidate. Experience in NGOs can also provide training for future politicians and NGOs may themselves develop into political parties, creating a healthy overlap between ‘political’ and ‘civil’ society. ‘The civility that makes democratic politics possible can only be learned in the associational networks.’8 It is because civil society is perceived as crucial for democratization that international organizations such as the European Union invest in developing NGOs in Russia. Given that Russia has such a weak party system and, overall, an acute problem of ‘gap’ between ordinary voters and government, civil society is the logical way of overcoming that gap. The efforts of Western donor organizations to develop civil society in postcommunist and developing countries provoke much controversy, yet this phenomenon is almost irrelevant to the small towns, where aid does not percolate, except in the form of some library books, or toys for children in care given by the very occasional American missionary. How does civil society work in the small town, without Western money and influence? Is small-town civil society more ‘Soviet’ in form than in the city, and

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is it stronger or weaker than in Soviet days? What are the links between civil society and politics?

Civic engagement and atomization Chapter 3 described respondents’ annoyance at the untidiness of their towns, and Chapter 5 mentioned the widespread theft of communal resources such as electric cable and timber. Many interviewees expressed their disappointment that nowadays there was less sense of civic responsibility and participation in community affairs. Such participation could include voluntary work, writing for the local press, music, art and sports activities, or attendance at local festivities such as Shrove Tuesday (‘Farewell to Winter’) or Town Day. In the pilot survey, Zubtsov respondents, when asked about their own activism as members of the intelligentsia, sometimes pointed a contrast with the perceived passivity of much of the ordinary population. Respondents in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were therefore asked directly whether they thought people participated less in community life. They tended to agree (Figure 7.17). 23 per cent of respondents said that there was more atomization today. ‘People are too engrossed in survival’; ‘people go straight home after work to tend their gardens’; ‘people grow more vegetables and watch more soap operas’; ‘we’ve started to exist in our own little micro-world’; ‘there’s less interest in life’; ‘people are atomized in Achit, compared with the villages’; ‘people think only about their families; they don’t think about their neighbours any more’. The problem

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Figure 7.1 Answers to question ‘Do people participate less in community life?’ (percentages giving each response).

Civil society and politics 169 was most often seen as a general mood of apathy, though being busy, particularly because of gardening responsibilities, was mentioned by a number of respondents, and a few blamed television. Some people added poverty as a reason for nonparticipation. For example, one teacher excused her lack of attendance at town festivals by commenting ‘You can’t afford to buy your child an ice cream.’ However, this was not the end of the story. In Achit the most common reason given for thinking that participation had declined was not demand, but supply. (26 per cent blamed supply, and only 16 per cent atomization). Local citizens would go to concerts and festivals if they were properly organized and financed. They used to be done better. People still went eagerly if good performers came to town. In Bednodemyanovsk only three people criticized the supply of events. If people did not go, it was because they were absorbed in their own affairs. (30 per cent of respondents mentioned atomization as a problem.) Most interviewees seemed to feel that there was still plenty on offer. Moreover, 40 per cent of interviewees were adamant that people still did participate, and a further 8 per cent gave undecided, ‘yes and no’ answers. Almost all the teachers and cultural workers felt that people did participate; it was doctors and businessmen who were more sceptical. These respondents had less reason to attend events and therefore perhaps had a poorer impression of their general popularity. Newspapers, too, quite often carried reports suggesting that at least some events were well attended, in both Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. In Zubtsov, too, although the local newspaper reported a disappointing turnout for Victory Day celebrations in 1999, it also carried stories about how people had sat for hours in the unheated library and cinema, with snow whirling outside, to listen to local poets and singer-songwriters.9 It is impossible to be precise about the extent of withdrawal from public occasions, or the decline since the Soviet period, but it does seem that Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov have more events than Achit. On the topic of atomization, it should be noted that withdrawal from publicly organized cultural activities was a post-Stalinist, not just a post-Soviet development. Since the death of Stalin it had been harder for the authorities to enforce participation10 and the collapse of communism merely exacerbated this trend. By 1999–2000, local authorities could not get people out onto the streets even to the extent that they had done in late Soviet days. ‘People are more independent today,’ pointed out one woman in Achit. However, this was less true in Bednodemyanovsk, where one head of a cultural institution suggested that ‘all the former structures [of compulsion] are still in place’. Other people in Bednodemyanovsk did not completely agree with her: people attended more, said one journalist, just because there was no compulsion. On the whole Bednodemyanovsk interviewees, like those in Achit, seemed to feel that local inhabitants were glad of opportunities to take part in entertaining/useful events. However, one woman who said that people were more ‘independent’ went on to add, ‘You can’t tell your neighbour off for quarrelling with his wife’. In other words, it was not just that official levers had been removed, but also that the surrounding culture had changed. Some of the ‘neighbourhood watch’ element of Soviet life had gone: the regular petty, informal interference in other people’s

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affairs, such as older people telling off younger ones for behaving inappropriately in the street. This could be seen as liberating, on a personal level, but, since municipal services had not improved much if at all since Soviet days, the practical need still remained for extra policing, cleaning up the town, especially after the spring thaw, etc. As a result of this practical need for public participation in solving community problems, some kinds of Soviet civic participation still existed or had been revived in the small towns. They included the subbotnik, a day of ‘unpaid labour’ and mass spring cleaning which used to coincide with celebrating Lenin’s birthday on 22 April, but was now just an occasion for tidying away all the litter which had collected under the snow, painting doors and gates, and so forth. Achit, rather astonishingly, even revived its people’s militia. In 1999 it had 88 members and worked 1,617 hours, but by March 2000 only four members remained.11 There were some still functioning or recently resurrected ‘block of flats councils’ and ‘street committees’, where local activists nagged their neighbours to remove logs from the pavement and generally keep the place tidy. Children also had community responsibilities. For example, children at School No. 1 in Zubtsov are still responsible for keeping the war memorial tidy.

The intelligentsia and ‘cultural enlightenment’ As Chapter 6 explained, the Soviet intelligentsia was seen, and saw itself, as having a duty to ‘bring culture to the masses’. This duty was institutionalized in a system of ‘cultural-enlightenment work’ based on houses of culture and clubs, but also involving libraries, schools, newspapers and any organization which had a responsibility for socializing the population into correct values, as defined by the communist leadership. Despite, and to some extent because of the atomization among the general population described earlier in this chapter, the intelligentsia in all three small towns did, it seemed, still participate more in community life than their fellow citizens. They still had a clear sense of duty for providing children with leisure activities, and many children participated in free or heavily subsidized arts, crafts and sport. Teachers, even at the same school or arts centre, differed in their opinion of the social background of participating children, but the total number of children was so great that they must have come from a range of social groups.12 The particular influence of the music/art school in Zubtsov was illustrated by the fact that it had been able to move into the former CPSU district committee building, after intensive lobbying. The Dushanbe artists who had extended the old music school were praised in the local press for their ‘high level of professionalism, morality, intellect and talent’.13 Interviewees in all towns felt that children’s leisure was well-organized, and this was one of the reasons why parents of school-age children seemed to feel fairly secure about their safety and well-being, as compared to the anxieties occasioned by late teenage and adult children. Children themselves presumably gained a sense of local community by participating in concerts and festivals.

Civil society and politics 171 In Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, enthusiastic art and music teachers had turned the children’s facilities into concert halls for adults. In Zubtsov, locals cultivated Moscow holiday makers and persuaded them to perform.14 In Bednodemyanovsk, the music teachers put on their own shows. Although only a few dozen adults, perhaps up to 50, came to such performances, those who did felt that they were important, not just because they were entertaining but also because they brought local people together. In Bednodemyanovsk there were concerts approximately once a week. Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk had held exhibitions by local painters in spring 1999. The Bednodemyanovsk exhibition drew over 1,500 visitors in one month.15 The Zubtsov exhibition, by Andrei Kurbanov from Dushanbe, was also well-attended, and was even the occasion of some rhyme by a local poet: Only superlatives will do Since, for Zubtsov, it’s all so new.16 Libraries in all towns also serve as settings for clubs and lectures and have massive readerships – half to two-thirds of the local population.17 As in Russia nationally, readership had been increasing in the 1990s.18 According to local librarians, this is partly as a result of unemployment, partly because of the number of people taking extra-mural degrees.19 To conclude: considering their small size, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk did have a remarkably active cultural intelligentsia. In both towns they reached out to the rest of the intelligentsia through concerts and shows. All three small towns also provided leisure activities for a large constituency of children, through arts centres and for most of the adults, through libraries. However, there were two major problems in both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk. The first was the acute shortage of leisure activities for young people, of whom there were many, since the vocational schools and agricultural college had student boarders from outside the town. Each town had a bar and occasional discos, and the Bednodemyanovsk music school also tried to help out,20 but this was seen as insufficient. ‘There aren’t any clubs!’ complained one young graduate of Penza University. Her elders bemoaned the absence of ‘cultured leisure’. The other problem was that local authorities in both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk behaved as if the communist party still ruled, which in a sense it did, on a local level. They, and particularly deputy head of administration Nikolai Nozhkin in Bednodemyanovsk, harassed the ‘cultural workers’ in libraries and houses of culture to put on activities which were rather Soviet in style. (Nozhkin, as second in command, was responsible for ‘social affairs’ (just as the second secretary on communist party committees had been in charge of ideology).)21 In Zubtsov in 1999 cultural events focused largely on the Second World War and Pushkin – which had both national and local significance and could be seen as meaningful to ordinary people.22 However, the quantity could seem excessive to those responsible for organizing them. One librarian complained that such programmes were ‘voluntary but still somehow compulsory’. The Zubtsov administration also set

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up a special charity bank account and tried to stir up local support for the Serbs in the Kosovo War.23 In Bednodemyanovsk, there was an even more consistently ideological approach. The following are some examples of events in 1999. In January, shortly before the Kosovo War, at a time of heightened anti-Western feeling, the administration tried to make houses of culture focus more on folk art and a conference of cultural workers addressed the local population in Soviet rhetoric: ‘Nowadays our young people, submerged by a wave of imitation western culture, hardly ever sing folksongs . . . Only by opposing this alien ideology will we be able to return to our ancient Russian roots . . .’24 In February, houses of culture and libraries had to concoct events around the theme ‘I love you, my army, my youth’,25 in an attempt to make boys and their parents more willing to accept conscription. In November, an October Revolution demonstration in Bednodemyanovsk drew 50–60 attenders, and was followed by a concert organized by the Veterans’ Council and house of culture.26 In November and December schools were collecting food parcels to send to soldiers in Chechnya.27 The same type of programme continued through 2000, leading the house of culture director to feel rushed off her feet and resentful. Achit was different. It did have some features of a Soviet community life – for example, a big Victory Day celebration with fireworks,28 and its local authority could organize campaigns for collective celebrations of important days. Mother’s Day and Older People’s Day, for example, were run by the local social security department.29 On the whole, however, Achit tended to lack both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ sides of Soviet-style cultural enlightenment, reflecting what appeared to be a less Soviet approach on the part of its culture department and deputy head of administration. Its two cultural assets, mentioned by a number of respondents, were a children’s dance group, attached to School No. 1, and Sudarushka, a choir of retired teachers and doctors attached to the Veterans’ Council. There were no ‘salons’ where the cultural elite could gather, except perhaps at school concerts. Nor was there the same degree of pressure on libraries and houses of culture to provide ‘ideological work’. The district house of culture director stated categorically: ‘The house of culture has no influence.’ She was a woman in her twenties without even a vocational diploma. She said she did consult often with the head of the District Culture Department, but did not have to accept orders from him. When she organized something, the administration seemed not to care. Only the head of administration, for example, came to the Town Day celebrations in 2000. The programme could not have been more dissimilar to events in Bednodemyanovsk or Zubtsov. Some sports events were followed by an accordion competition and a flower arranging competition, won by journalists from the local newspaper with some compositions, made from gladioli, satirizing government officials and Duma deputies (for example, with big heads).30 On another occasion, the house of culture staged a ‘Supergranny Competition’.31 One had the impression that events in Achit could be quite fun, but were sporadic and sometimes poorly attended. The house of culture earned money by holding regular discos, although it had a problem with drunken teenagers.

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Churches Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have well-established churches which functioned even in Soviet days. Achit’s church was transformed into a children’s arts and sports centre, and reopened only in 1996, in a cramped wing at the back of the building. Individual interviewees stressed the importance of their own personal faith as a way of surviving the stresses of postcommunist daily life, and some also linked the concepts of the intelligentsia and Christianity. Women in particular were keen to talk about the church. Although only a handful defined themselves as believers, others welcomed religious toleration as a general principle, which could, by implication, help democratize local society. Divisive ethnic issues were not mentioned at all in connection with Orthodoxy, nor did any of the non-ethnic Russian respondents criticize the restoration of churches and the increased status of Russian Orthodoxy. (One of them, a Bashkir, pointed to the parallel increasing visibility of Islam in Achit.) Rather, churches tended to be appreciated as a welcome manifestation of increased freedom of choice in everyday life. They were also praised for beautifying the local landscape, but in this connection within-region justice and the rights of small towns and villagers were also an issue: a number of respondents said that it was important for all churches to be restored, not just the showcase cathedrals but also all the little village ruins. Churches were also welcomed for providing the opportunity to sing and hear uplifting music, and generally exerting a positive influence on the local community. Young people, in particular, were said to benefit from involvement in church activities, which often seemed to be viewed as a way of keeping youngsters out of trouble, counteracting ‘false values’ and helping young people develop a sense of personal responsibility. Respondents mentioned that services in all three towns were well attended and some also stressed the social diversity of church congregations. Churches are important gathering places, therefore, for the towns. Although they do not constitute opportunities for people to organize real civil society organizations, the churches all have Sunday schools, so they also reach out to the local community. Local newspapers publish calendars of church events and information about saints and architectural monuments, so providing channels of information for the local population to increase their knowledge of Orthodox Christianity. (Other forms of Christianity are not publicized.) Local newspapers can also be used for dialogue between priests and congregations: to answer readers’ questions about religion, for example, or to print sermons encouraging the development of nonmaterialist outlook as a survival strategy.32 There is a potential tension, however, between the claims of the Church and those of secular cultural organizations. In particular, Achit was witnessing a protracted struggle between the Church and the Culture Department for complete control over the church premises. The congregation had lobbied widely at the regional level, but they blamed the district administration as the main obstacle (claiming that in neighbouring Perm Region all churches had been restored and reopened, and that heads of administration were the chief movers in this process).33 The

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struggle over the fate of the church divided opinion in the local community and led to negative assessments of the Church from some respondents. The second settlement of Zubtsov District, Pogoreloe Gorodishche, was faced with a similar dilemma: should the ruined church be used as a cinema or a church? The head of the village administration ended up by backing the restoration of the church, which was accepted by a majority of villagers at a local meeting.34 In Zubtsov, local priests thwarted the activities of the music and art school by instructing parents to keep their children away from lessons on church holidays.

Newspapers A free media and public opinion are an essential part of civil society. The district newspapers had all renamed themselves in the spirit of the times, shedding names such as ‘Lenin’s Path’ and ‘Ray of Communism’.35 In Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk the newspapers could not be completely free, given the attitude of the local administration already described. All the newspapers were particularly vulnerable to pressure because they lacked advertizing revenue and, being very short of money, depended financially on the local administrations.36 In any case, the editor in Bednodemyanovsk and the subeditor in Zubtsov still had a ‘communist’ approach. In Zubtsov, however, Sergei Kotkin, the editor, was a liberal who tried to make the newspaper lively and even critical. He was proud that he had published articles criticizing the local administration, although they had been received very unfavourably.37 The newspaper publicized scandals, such as those surrounding the market, or the misuse of pension funds, though it was careful to report the local authorities’ point of view as well as the allegations.38 Kotkin tried to promote local history and encouraged readers to send in their own materials, believing that interest in the history of the community could ‘unite people’. Kotkin encouraged local poets, and felt that good poetry was one of Zubtsov’s cultural hallmarks. He himself was proud to be a descendant of Alexander Pushkin. The newspaper offices also functioned as a kind of unofficial citizens’ advice bureau.39 Kotkin tried to encourage people to vote and believed that high turnouts in local elections might be partly thanks to his influence. Vestnik, in Bednodemyanovsk, was very traditional by comparison, with a heavy focus on milk yields at local farms, the generosity of Penza Region social services, and Soviet-type festivals and competitions. Vestnik suffered from the extra handicap of obsolete technology and it was difficult to read because the ink was faint and the lines uneven. In December 2000 it began to be produced in a neighbouring town and acquired a more modern appearance, if not content. The extent to which it was divorced from local realities was revealed by the fact that, apart from listing candidates, it hardly mentioned the election campaign for the local council that same autumn, and failed to mention a struggle for the mayorship which was surely newsworthy. Achit was different, yet again, since it had two newspapers, both of which were factual and entertaining: not very ‘Soviet’. A measure of how they differed from Vestnik and Zubtsovskaya zhizn’ was that, whereas the latter continued to publish

Civil society and politics 175 ritual birthday greetings and condolences to and from the adult population, often on behalf of the local government, both the Achit newspapers carried love messages from local teenagers. On the one hand, Achit had its district newspaper, Nash put’, inherited from the Soviet era and edited by a former member of the district party committee. It could be quite critical of the local council, for instance posing awkward questions to the deputy head of administration about his business activities, and publicizing the drunken and violent behaviour of a member of the youth committee.40 It was also sometimes humorous; for example, over several issues in 2000 it ran a competition with photographs to be identified of different bits of the faces of well-known local people, such as just a moustache. This seemed a good indication of how well local people knew one another. On the other hand was a competitor newspaper, Gorodok, which was based in Krasnoufimsk, but had an office and an editor in Achit. Gorodok had a youth page, more frivolous items and was sometimes accused of being shoddily researched. Nash put’ was accused of being ‘communist’ and hence not always objective. Not surprisingly, interviewees had very different opinions about the two newspapers, and the editors were not particularly friendly towards each other. The element of choice and competitiveness could be seen as a step forward for civil society, although the conflicts also weakened it. Local people felt strongly about ‘their’ newspapers in all three towns and many of the intelligentsia wrote articles. Doctors, for example, explained about the dangers of drugs, AIDS and mushroom poisoning. Schoolteachers were frequent contributors. It seemed expected of the most prominent members of the intelligentsia that they would contribute, just as in Soviet days. In March 2000, for example, particularly noteable figures contributed articles praising Putin, presumably because it was supposed that their advice would carry weight with the local population.41 The newspapers did not normally carry letters from ordinary readers, however. The editor of Vestnik commented on how this distinguished the paper today from its Soviet predecessor.42 In all three towns, this was a rather striking difference between Soviet and postcommunist newspapers, mirroring the decline in letterwriting to city and national newspapers. In a curious way, public opinion was better developed in Soviet days, when newspapers were encouraged to print readers’ letters, albeit censored. It seems odd that the newspapers in the postcommunist small town did not serve as a forum for local debate, even on relatively trivial topics (as tends to happen in British local newspapers, for example, and still occurs in some of the Russian small-town press). Almost every respondent in every town read a local newspaper. Sometimes, particularly in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk, it was the only newspaper they read. Interviewees were not just buying a cheap paper for the television schedule. This was proved by the fact that in Achit people often read and compared both. Their comments on the local press showed that they read critically, making remarks such as that it was too subservient to the local administration (in Bednodemyanovsk), not always accurate, or too full of advertisements, most of which were from the regional capital and could seem irritatingly irrelevant. They often

176

Civil society and politics 8,000 6,900 6,000 4,000

5,000 3,600 1,700 1,700 1,800

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Figure 7.2 Print runs of Nash put’ (Achit) Vestnik and Zubstovskaya zhizn’, 1990 and 1999. Note 1999 figure is for Zubtsov.

mentioned how eagerly they awaited the paper’s appearance. ‘I read it from cover to cover, and then wonder why I bothered,’ as one put it. A number of respondents explicitly mentioned how important the paper was to their identity, saying, for instance, ‘It’s my own (rodnaya): how could I not read it?’ or ‘It’s ours.’ Overall, it seemed that people agreed with Zubtsovskaya zhizn’’s claim that ‘without a district newspaper a district isn’t a district, just a territory with an atomized population’.43 Perhaps the intelligentsia sample was particularly likely to read the press. It was hard to tell how many local people altogether read the newspapers: print runs are not an entirely helpful guide, because many people, including respondents, seemed to borrow the newspaper from friends or the library. In all towns, the print run had fallen below 2000 and the editors considered the newspaper to be in a precarious position (Figure 7.2). The fact that respondents displayed such interest in the local newspaper suggests that a base exists for local public opinion. Even the tiny handful of respondents who did not read a local newspaper normally claimed that though it was not worth reading, they nonetheless knew everything that went on just by virtue of their occupations and living in the town. In other words, they still made the point that they cared to know what happened in the local community, and to form a view on events.44

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) The three towns all had veterans’ councils, which united not only war veterans but also ‘veterans of labour’, in other words, people in receipt of retirement pensions. The councils played quite a conspicuous part in local life and were closely linked to

Civil society and politics 177 the communist party.45 In Zubtsov they organized a major demonstration (see below). In Bednodemyanovsk they were particularly known for their choir, directed by a migrant from Central Asia. In Achit the veterans were led by the local historian and intelligentsia activist P. Sysolyatin. Sysolyatin also set up a charity, the Veteran Fund, to supplement local government social assistance to targeted poor pensioners. (Enterprises and entrepreneurs were particularly invited to contribute.)46 Branches of the Russian Society of Disabled People organized events for their members, such as a chess tournament in Zubtsov,47 but did not seem to play a public role, except in Achit, where they were closely connected with the veterans. The Achit disabled people organized an ‘agronomists’ club’ and charitable events such as sales of second-hand clothes, and also lobbied the local council to provide proper premises for the town’s voluntary organizations.48 Zubtsov had lost its other organizations: a women’s council (which existed from the 1960s to about 1992), a football team, a bibliophiles’ society and the Knowledge Society, which provided adult education. Bednodemyanovsk had lost football and volleyball teams and a branch of the Automobile Association.49 Apart from teachers’ organizations, there remained one ‘authentic’ civil society organization, and one which was a puppet of the local administration. The authentic organization was an association of local artists which Anatolii Zhupikov, a prominent member of the local intelligentsia, spent long months organizing in 1999–2000. It proved both expensive and complicated to deal with the associated paperwork.50 By contrast to Zhupikov’s travails, a women’s council (zhensovet), headed by Valentina Surovatkina, a mathematics teacher whose son had served in Chechnya, enjoyed the patronage of the local administration. This patronage ensured it publicity, though not resources.51 The zhensovet was to some extent the brainchild of Nikolai Nozhkin, deputy head of the local administration. It was useful when the administration needed a female face, whether this was to publish birthday greetings to the hospital director, distribute food aid from the Red Cross to poor families or, most importantly, make sure that conscription was effective. Because of the latter role, the zhensovet was often referred to as the ‘soldiers’ mothers’ committee’. It had nothing in common with the genuine and militant NGOs, which went under the same name in the big cities, but was not dissimilar to other smalltown committees. The Moscow-based Union of Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committees believes, however, that this type of committee, however inadequate, is to be encouraged as a foundation stone for more genuine civil society organizations.52 The zhensovet gave emotional support to parents and sons and also advice about how to write and send parcels.53 Its members visited the barracks where local soldiers served and reported that they were spick and span.54 The council also helps individual mothers, for example, mothers with large families who want to send their children to summer camps, and intercedes with the local administration on behalf of mothers who complain about child benefit (or protects the administration from having to deal with mothers directly). In May 1999 the district’s Social Protection Fund and the zhensovet invited local managers and citizens to give money to support district children in need.55 The zhensovet was

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definitely a mothers’ organization, not for ‘parents’. When asked why, Surovatkina said, ‘Well, a mother is a mother.’ It is not a ‘women’s’ organization either: no woman had ever approached it on her own behalf.56 Sverdlovsk Region had a particularly lively civil society in the Gorbachev period57 and still spawns many highly individual social and political organizations. Achit District had a flourishing Tatar cultural life and some women activists, though not really a ‘women’s movement’. The town’s liveliest organization was a club and choir for retired women, Sudarushka, formed in association with local veterans and the Society of Disabled People.58 The members of Sudarushka (‘Young Lady’) were described by respondents as being mostly former teachers and doctors, who sang, did aerobics and went on rambles. Sudarushka definitely constituted a collective feminine survival mechanism. The same could not be said for the policewomen’s club in Achit, which did the cooking for police station birthday celebrations. Another women’s organization, Mothers against Drugs, seems never to have got off the ground.59 In spring 1999 Tatyana Konstantinova, kindergarten head in the village of Zarya, created an Association of Achit District Women. It was intended to help women set up businesses; provide family planning advice; and support families and young people.60 In September it seems to have transformed itself into a branch of the Association of Urals Women. It was introduced promisingly in the newspaper under the headline ‘Women of the district, unite!’ and its aim was said to be the ‘revival of the women’s movement for social rights’.61 More specifically, the aims of the movement were to promote: women’s employment and especially female entrepreneurship; health; culture; and political skills. However, it subsequently turned into a branch of an organization created in Yekaterinburg under the auspices of Governor Rossel. It benefited Achit to the extent that the head of the district Organizational Department was able to attend a ‘leadership school for women from small towns’.62 In November 1999 it celebrated Mother’s Day by gathering at the children’s refuge – not, however, with any of the children’s mothers, who were described as ‘callous women’. One of the members made a speech about how she had withstood her husband’s demands that she give up work.63 However, by September 2000 the Association was rather passive. One member said that if they had money she would like to be able to ‘help local families’: in other words, this sounded much like a zhensovet. The political movement Women of Russia did better in Achit than in the other two small towns in 1993 (see below). Nonetheless, the number of votes were still small, suggesting that women’s issues were not a major political issue locally. Women of Russia picked up only 53 votes in Achit town in December 1999.64 Quite probably the women’s association was handicapped partly by the fact that Konstantinova did not live in Achit, but in a neighbouring village. Civil society is bound to be splintered when there is such poor transport between different towns and villages within each district. Achit District did, however, have a flourishing Tatar village culture, partly sponsored at the regional level and somewhat bypassing Achit town and its administration. In 1999 a cultural centre opened in Azigulovo, one of the district’s Tatar villages, which already possessed a mosque.

Civil society and politics 179 Governor Rossel attended the opening. (The centre, like the district’s NGO, Tatar National Cultural Autonomy, was run by a woman.) The centre was intended to serve not only local residents, but also those from the neighbouring district.65 Other villages also held Tatar cultural events. For example, in summer 1999 local villagers, the Tatar Autonomy organization, Rossel’s political party, Urals Transformation and Mayor of Yekaterinburg Chernetskii’s party, Our Home, Our Town, jointly organized a Sabantui (post-ploughing) festival in another Achit village. The festival was Tatar-Bashkir in origin, but was also attended by local Maris and ethnic Russians. The Tatar activist who described the events for the local newspaper pointed out that, despite the participation of guests from the regional capital, none of the District Administration attended. This was a shame, she said, since they could have learned something about how to organize local society.66

Politics In Soviet days, members of the local intelligentsia were expected to exert their influence on behalf of the single candidate, and often themselves to serve on local soviets. In the 1990s, too, members of the intelligentsia were regularly chosen to serve on electoral committees, which typically consisted largely of government officials, doctors and teachers.67 Intelligenty were also elected to local councils. For example, in March 2000 a doctor received the highest number of votes in the local council elections in Achit; the head of School No. 1 came third.68 In December 2000 the head of School No. 2 in Bednodemyanovsk was elected to the council and narrowly missed becoming mayor. Several interviewees had been deputies, but many of them had felt rather frustrated by their powerlessness in this position. Nonetheless, the intelligentsia continued to be active in other aspects of local political life in the 1990s. Bednodemyanovsk’s head of administration was appointed in Penza, but head of administration elections generated considerable passions in Achit and Zubtsov. The heads of administration were, respectively, Anatolii Kolotnin and V. Surov, both old-style managers and former state farm chairmen. In Zubtsov’s election campaign of 1996, the former head of School No. 1, Nikolai Krylov, had been campaigned for by many local professionals, partly out of a sense of intelligentsia solidarity. He came a close second to Surov (see Figure 7.3). Staff at the museum, who nominated Krylov, wrote to the local newspaper pointing out that in a neighbouring district a journalist had won the elections – it was not a vain hope to wish that a member of the intelligentsia would be successful. Krylov himself, they said, was a true intelligent.69 Krylov came ahead not only of two old-style bureaucrats but also of Vyacheslav Shmelev of Promkomservis, Zubtsov’s most successful businessman and an employer of 200, who came last of the five candidates. The contrast between the fortunes of Krylov and Shmelev is interesting, although a year later, when both men stood for election to the regional parliament, Shmelev did much better than Krylov, gaining 30 per cent of the vote.70

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Civil society and politics 40 29 26 20 9 0 Surov

Krylov

Shmelev

Figure 7.3 Percentage of votes for state farm chair Surov, headteacher Krylov and entrepreneur Shmelev in district head of administration elections, Zubstov District, 1996. Source: ‘Vybory sostoyalis’, ZubZh, 10 December 1996, p. 1.

A similar situation occurred in Achit. Here the main contenders for the post of head of administration in 1996 were the state farm chair Kolotnin and a teacher at the special needs school, Aleksei Shestyakov, former district party official and deputy mayor in the 1980s. Shestyakov did not do quite as well as Krylov had done in Zubtsov, but this was said to be because the opposition had revealed the fact that he had been the subject of a criminal investigation, though not conviction. In contrast to the headteacher in Zubtsov, Shestyakov was not particularly presented as an intelligent. Indeed, when his colleagues wrote to the newspaper in his support, they adduced as a fact in his favour that he ‘keeps a large smallholding’. Perhaps this is extra evidence for the suggestion made in Chapter 6, that an intelligent has more status in Zubtsov than in Achit, hence intelligentsia identity carries more political capital. The election resulted in Kolotnin’s receiving 32 per cent of the votes and Shestyakov, 17 per cent.71 Perhaps it was not surprising if conservative farm chairmen won elections, since none of the three districts was a democratic stronghold, as is illustrated by national election results. Figure 7.4 illustrates, for example, what happened in 1993. DeBardeleben and Galkin suggest that the electoral geography of Russia is best understood in terms of four zones with different economic and geographical profiles. The Urals area, for example, like other regions with many primary industries, was supportive of Yeltsin and democratization at the outset of the postcommunist period but then became very disheartened. Achit, predictably, given its untypical character within Sverdlovsk, does not entirely conform to this pattern and presents a rather mixed picture. The government party gained only 11 per cent in both 1993 and 1995 elections, where the highest number of votes went to the Agrarians and Communists, respectively. However, Yeltsin won the presidential elections comfortably in 1996, and Unity won comfortably in both the national parliamentary elections of 1999 and the regional parliamentary elections of March 2000.72 Penza and perhaps also Tver fall within DeBardeleben and

Civil society and politics 181 39

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Figure 7.4 Duma election results by district (per cent), December 1993. Sources: Kak golosovali zubchane’, ZubZh, 18 December 1993, p. 1; Vybor sdelan’, Nash put’, 18 December 1993, p. 1; Konstantin Ulanov, ‘Elektorat Penzenskoi oblasti’, pp. 196, 199. Notes Agrarian  moderate left-wing party, allied to Communists; Communists (KPRF)  successor party to CPSU, moderate left-wing party; Liberal Democrats (LDPR)  extreme nationalist party; Russia’s Choice  main government party; Yabloko  westernizing, liberal party. I have selected only the most popular parties, plus Yabloko, traditionally the party of the ‘democratic’ intelligentsia.

Galkin’s mixed industrial and agricultural zone. These regions had enjoyed fairly comfortable standards of living in Soviet days and tended to be more conformist politically. Zubtsov did tend to vote more conservatively than Achit. For example, in 1995, although the Communists did better than any other party in Achit, they only received 15 per cent of the vote, whereas in Zubtsov the figure was 29 per cent, plus an extra 4 per cent for the extreme left-wing communist party Labouring Russia. However, Zubtsov also had twice the number of Yabloko supporters: 4 per cent compared with Achit’s 2 per cent.73 The Black Earth region, which Bednodemyanovsk borders and with which it can be identified politically, has a particularly well-marked political identity. Many observers have noted its especially communist sympathies.74 Penza had initially been supportive of Yeltsin (notably in the presidential election of 1991), but voters then changed their minds, partly because of regional political developments. This led to a decisive rejection of the 1993 constitution (by over 58 per cent of the electorate in 26 out of the 37 Penza constituencies; Bednodemyanovsk was one of the 26). The protest vote was also manifested in high levels of support for the Liberal Democrats (LDPR) in the parliamentary elections of December 1993. They came first, with 32 per cent of the vote in the region as a whole, 33 per cent in Penza city and 39 per cent in Bednodemyanovsk. In six districts of Penza

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Region the LDPR vote was even higher.75 Bednodemyanovsk was also typical of the region in choosing Agrarians and Communists second and third in 1993, and parties of the left had considerable success in Bedmodemyanovsk through the rest of the decade. Even in the December 1999 parliamentary elections, the Communists scored 37 per cent in Bednodemyanovsk, as opposed to Unity’s 29.5 per cent;76 37 per cent was a particularly high vote for the Communists, since they averaged only 32 per cent in the Black Earth macroregion as a whole, and 27 per cent in the Volga macroregion.77 Only in 2000 did Bednodemyanovsk put the communists second, electing Putin with 55.7 per cent against Zyuganov’s 36.3 per cent.78 (Here Bednodemyanovsk was less communist than the Black Earth average. However, the Communists were no longer the preferred party of the local authorities, so, as in other more conservative parts of Russia, their poor showing in 2000 does not indicate any decline in conformism among the electorate and/or power of local authorities to influence voting outcomes.)79 More generally, rural areas in Russia have, since the Gorbachev period, traditionally tended to vote for parties on the left. However, in regions such as Sverdlovsk which are more radical overall, the rural factor can be overridden by wider regional voting dynamics.80 The three small towns generally conformed to this pattern. While they all tended to favour Communists and Agrarians, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk more consistently voted for the parties on the left in the 1990s than did Achit, or, in at least some cases, than did larger towns and cities in Penza and Tver regions.81 The configuration of voting within Zubtsov District showed, however, that even within a single district voting patterns could be complex and unpredictable. Although the district centre was the only ‘urban’ settlement it was also one of the most conservative. Zubtsov town voted for the communist presidential candidate Zyuganov in 1996, as well as the local communist Surov, whereas the district’s largest village, Pogoreloe Gorodishche, chose Yeltsin and Krylov. Seven villages voted for Yeltsin, six for Zyuganov.82 Although all three towns were said to be largely apolitical, and to liven up politically only at election time, Achit had the most interesting political life of the three. This was largely because regional politics is so much livelier in Sverdlovsk than in Penza or Tver. Achit was not a Rossel stronghold. In the August 1999 gubernatorial elections the town voted for the rival candidate, Burkov (42 per cent as opposed to Rossel’s 22 per cent).83 This suggested Achit’s disenchantment with the regional leadership, but also indicated an identification with other poor areas of Sverdlovsk. Rossel’s platform was to present Sverdlovsk as strong and rich, an industrial power, but, as Chapter 8 will suggest, this could be irritating for depressed parts of the region like Achit. Burkov’s party, May, was founded in spring 1999, when a group calling themselves The Movement to Defend the Rights of Working People appeared in Karpinsk. (Karpinsk, a coal mining centre, was a particularly depressed larger town in Sverdlovsk Region; one interviewee’s teacher daughter and engineer son-in-law in Karpinsk had not been paid for 2 years and were living off potatoes and carrots.) The protesters held the Karpinsk mayor hostage, demanding the payment of

Civil society and politics 183 local salaries.84 May instantly spread to other towns and cities in Sverdlovsk. Its newspaper was named Europe  Asia, emphasizing that the movement spanned boths halves of the region. In August 1999, the month of the gubernatorial elections, Achit had received May’s travelling exhibition, of items offered by Sverdlovsk social security departments in lieu of benefit – coffins and candles for terminally ill people, barbecues instead of child benefit, etc.85 May obviously appealed to an outraged sense of social justice among Achit voters. Overall, Sverdlovsk Region contains many unique political groupings, and is perhaps more politicized than most other regions. This feature is sometimes linked to Rossel, but it is also a result of Sverdlovsk’s identity as a region of cities. With 47 towns, 34 of which have the status of administrative districts, and five of which have populations over 100,000, the region resembles a huge family, with cities jostling for resources and pestering Yekaterinburg. Hence politics partly revolves around a ‘centre-provinces’ tension, where the ‘provinces’ are Sverdlovsk minus Yekaterinburg. Although Achit is in the position of weakest sibling in this family, its voters are obviously susceptible to anti-centrist appeals. Hence there is even some support for the north Sverdlovsk movement Factory and Mining Urals.86 In the 2000 election campaign for the regional parliament, Factory and Mining Urals appealed to Achit voters with a promise to ensure ‘equal opportunities for all inhabitants of the region’. ‘After all, it is no secret that there is a huge gulf between incomes, education and access to culture in the cities and the provincial depths (glubinka).’87 A part of the intelligentsia in both Achit and Zubtsov was active in regional and national elections, as well as those for district head of administration. However, regional and national issues were understood from a local point of view. In Achit the district library turned into a campaign headquarters for mayor of Yekaterinburg Chernetskii’s party ‘Our Home, Our Town’. The chief librarian, Nina Stakheeva, who had been on the CPSU district committee in the mid-1980s, was attracted by the fact that Chernetskii’s movement, like Factory and Mining Urals, promoted the interests of districts and towns against the regional centre. The other librarians supported her, to the discomfort of the district administration. Stakheeva’s activists toured the district, distributing information in both Russian and Tatar.88 In fact, as just described, the most popular candidate in Achit was populist ‘ordinary people’s’ candidate Burkov, whose party was not so obviously supported by the local intelligentsia. Still less popular than Chernetskii was the liberal Yavlinskii and his party Yabloko. The editor of Gorodok used his office as a campaign headquarters for Yabloko, but this was a lost cause in Achit.89 In Zubtsov a number of teachers stood unsuccessfully for the regional parliament. It was, however, women working in the museum who, as in 1996, played a major role in organizing local political life for the elections in 1999. One of the museum workers, like Stakheeva, had been on the party committee (as ideology secretary) in the 1980s. With the sub-editor of Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, the chief librarian and some bureaucrats and farm chairmen, the museum staff formed a branch of Fatherland, the movement led by Mayor of Moscow Yurii Luzhkov.

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The Zubtsov group presented themselves as the mouthpiece of the local intelligentsia, inter alia working out a programme to rescue local cultural and educational institutions. They deliberately emphasized the probity, sobriety and good organization of participants. In other words, these were the moral features of the ideal intelligent.90 However, some of their colleagues found it hard to treat them seriously, referring to them as ‘communists’ and pointing out that they had been active in Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s ‘Our Home is Russia’. In other words, this intelligentsia establishment was suspect because it was seen as being as much establishment as intelligentsia.

Protests and legal action Zubtsov and Achit had been the scene of various disputes and industrial action. In Zubtsov, for example, kindergarten teachers took the local authorities to court over their delayed pay, and won.91 The most spectacular action had occurred when pensioners in Zubtsov had staged a large demonstration in the town square and marched to one of the bridges over the Vazuza, blocking it to traffic. (A kindergarten manager later regretted that they had not joined forces.) While I was in Achit in September 2000 the boiler workers were striking because of wage arrears, refusing to put central heating apparatus in readiness for the winter cold. Fortunately, the strike was settled at the very beginning of autumn.92 Both Achit and Zubtsov had experienced several93 teachers’ strikes, which were prompted by non-payment of salaries. For example, the January 1999 strike in Achit was prompted by a 10-month salary delay: a debt which was said to be worse than that in neighbouring districts.94 Achit teachers also tried to involve all local health and arts employees in their campaign against non-payment of salaries.95 In addition, the strikers raised other grievances, such as the abolition of free school meals. Teachers have been militant all over Russia, though not in Bednodemyanovsk. However, those teachers I asked about the strikes in both Achit and Zubtsov tended to have a sense of achieving very little, and losing a lot; they were not feeling so militant now. The Zubtsov schoolteachers had gone on strike in 1998 and 1999. The strike in January 1999 achieved just the payment of one month’s salary and a free bun for the pupils at break.96 The teachers’ strikes in Achit were said to have created divisions and a sense of betrayal among the staff, and the strikes had also cost teachers respect among parents. This created fractures in the networks so essential for emotional and material survival in the local community.

Conclusions Civil society organizations in all the towns were weak. Moreover, all three towns were run by communists or former communists. The towns had this in common. However, in other ways they were very different from each other. Bednodemyanovsk had a thriving cultural life, for mature adults and children, although not for young people; it had only one, embryonic independent civil society association. Its festivals seemed to be better attended than those in the other

Civil society and politics 185 towns. Zubtsov and Achit were probably more atomized and certainly more political. They contained some ex-communist professional people who were prepared to oppose the local administration and indeed to ‘play the intelligentsia card’, trying to turn their local social capital into political capital. Both Achit and Zubtsov had newspapers whose editors were liberals and who tried to provide a lively, alternative voice, though not always successfully. Other civil society organizations were weak or non-existent, apart from veterans’ and disabled people’s organizations, which to some extent lacked credibility because of ties to the communists; Tatar organizations (which had financial help from the regional centre); and the women’s group Sudarushka. The Tatar culture was an important part of life for a number of Achit District villages, but it did not impinge on civil society in the district centre. However, in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk there was at least a strong sense of community spirit among the local intelligentsia, particularly its elite, an overlapping group of creative incomers and managers of cultural and educational institutions. Moreover, they formed a kind of ‘critical mass’ and had a collective identity, as was evident from their political activities in Zubtsov. In Bednodemyanovsk professionals kept in touch with former members of the local intelligentsia now in Moscow, and indeed had a reunion there in the late 1990s. Bednodemyanovsk artists had their own association. They at least were genuinely creative, so, even if certain aspects of cultural life – those provided by houses of culture and libraries – were often determined by the local administration, the public also had the opportunity of seeing more ‘authentic’ and interesting productions and exhibitions in the arts/music schools. Given the creative quality of the intelligentsia elite in both towns, it can be said that it was genuinely ‘intellectual’. This term has been deliberately avoided until now, because it is not a synonym for intelligentsia, but it is a component of intelligentsia identity which is particularly important for democratization. Both towns experienced a kind of clash between this more questioning and imaginative approach on the part of certain members of the intelligentsia and the very Soviet administration. (‘If only we had different authorities . . .’ said the intelligentsia.) Simon Smith has asked whether ‘organizational continuity at the micro-level [is] necessarily a barrier to social transformation. An alternative hypothesis pays more attention to the cultural capital which institutionalized collective practices represent, on the assumption that actors embedded in stable social networks are more likely to have the skills and confidence to participate in and ‘appropriate’ social transformation agendae’.97 Much the same point was made by the Moscow Soldiers’ Mothers leader who pointed out that even groups of soldiers’ mothers under the thumb of local administrations in small provincial towns must be encouraged, because they might eventually grow into fully fledged civil society organizations. More broadly, one can perhaps take encouragement from the fact that the small towns are largely guided by middle-aged ex-Soviet intellectuals with a rather traditional sense of responsibility for the moral health of the community, but at the same time a commitment towards providing an entertaining and interesting cultural life. By building on traditional Soviet cultural practices they can create a more ‘authentic’ local culture than was possible in the Soviet era.

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A focus on binding together the community is found among members of the intelligentsia in all three towns, but in Achit relations are more conflictual/distant (rivalry between newspapers, arts/sports centre battle with Church, rifts because of teachers’ strikes). The intelligentsia, or at least its ethnic Russian majority, has less self-confidence, partly perhaps because it is less well-educated. Intellectual life is probably liveliest in School No. 1, which, as the only regular school in the town, serves as a particular focus for the community. The headteacher, Nadezhda Platonova, unlike the directors of the house of culture or music/arts school, appeared to be a classic intelligentka in all senses. Her lessons were described by colleagues in typical ‘intelligentsia’ terms: ‘works of art . . . a ray of light in a colourless, cultureless local life.’98 The role of individuals is obviously very significant in all the towns. As we have seen, for example, one probable reason why attempts to create a women’s movement in Achit floundered was because it was the brainchild of one activist, Tatyana Konstantinova, who was not based in Achit. Deputy head of administration Nikolai Nozhkin, with his particularly proactive stance in Bednodemyanovsk, did much to channel local community life in a Soviet direction. There are other, structural factors, which have damaged the quality of community life in Achit. For example, housing is important if there is to be in-migration. One Achit teacher, who had been active in public life in the 1970s and 1980s, also blamed specifically overwork among teachers in the 1990s for low levels of participation. The teachers in Achit were particularly stressed by pressures from the Education Ministry and by volume of work. Achit has certain advantages over the other two towns in that there is regional funding for some kinds of NGOs, and that there is a certain Sverdlovsk culture of activism. Civil society organizations therefore do get set up ( people’s militia, anti-drugs group, Achit women’s association, Veteran Fund) – but often only to disappear soon after. Rather paradoxically, considering the relative political passivity of Penza and Tver as regions, it is in Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov that committed members of the intelligentsia been sufficiently active and united to create a more long-lasting collective ‘survival strategy’ for small towns which feel increasingly isolated vis-à-vis the wider world. This sense of isolation is explored in greater detail in the following chapter.

8

Multiple identities Local, regional, ethnic and national

I don’t think about the region. It’s hard enough to work out what’s happening here. (Achit music teacher) I feel like I’m in prison. (Newspaper editor)

Introduction How meaningful is regional autonomy and identity for Russians who live not in the regional capital, but in the glubinka, the provincial depths? What has been the effect of the political and economic changes of the postcommunist period on how provincial Russians perceive their regional identities? Perhaps, despite the attempts of regional leaders to emphasize the region, more overarching, ‘Russian’ identities have become more significant in the postcommunist period, the effect of attempts at Russian state building, or ethnic cultural revival. Alternatively, perhaps, local identity has become increasingly salient, as poverty inhibits mobility. Chapter 6 mentioned how the intelligentsia has been charged with becoming ‘parochial’ and Chapter 7 documented the intelligentsia’s efforts to organize and unite the local community. As already mentioned, Burawoy et al., use the term ‘involution’ to describe how households in the postcommunist period focus inwards and increasingly become autonomous economic units.1 Perhaps involution is also a suitable term for describing the increasingly parochial views of provincial Russians. Rodoman suggests that while the new Russian elite expands its horizons, travelling frequently to the West, ‘the lower classes experience a decline in social and geographic mobility, they become more attached to their places of residence and their plots of land, they lose interest in and respect for Moscow; their consciousness of being Russian is supplemented and overshadowed by local patriotism’.2 This chapter examines whether the interviewees in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk shared this perspective. The chapter looks first at the region-enhancing project from the point of view of the regional authorities, and at the different tools they use for building up regional identities. After suggesting why such efforts might or might not be

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successful, the chapter continues with an analysis of respondents’ answers to questions about their regional identity. It explores whether small-town citizens felt that their region had a marked identity, and if so, what were its main components – did it conform to the image which the regional authorities were trying to project? What was the place of the governor and the regional capital in personifying the region? Having dealt with perceptions of whether/how the region and the small town were linked, the chapter then looks at actual ‘physical’ links – travel for business and pleasure. Since the main conclusion is that respondents are to a large extent marooned in their small towns, in other words agreeing with Rodoman’s contention, the chapter then continues by examining the opposite side of the coin: whether local identities and patriotism are becoming enhanced. This picks up on themes in Chapter 7, about the local community and ‘community spirit’, but it extends the argument by relating local identity to ethnic and national identities. (If there is a certain alienation from the regional level, this does not negate the possibility that other more abstract levels of identity, such as being Russian, are still important – in fact, they could be strengthened just because of complaints against the regional authorities.)

Projects to boost regional identity The assertion by regional elites of greater independence from Moscow, and Moscow’s response, is the subject of scholarly attention in both Russia and the West.3 However, other aspects of enhanced autonomy are perhaps less familiar. Regional leaders have sought new ways of enhancing regional patriotism and maintaining distinct identities for their regions. Such identity changes may be symbolic, for example, the redesigning of crests or renaming of cities, or the adoption of slogans by governors, such as Rossel (Sverdlovsk) ‘The State Can Depend on the Urals’ or Bochkarev (Penza): ‘Down to Work!’ Rossel has the most consistent and elaborate regional ideology, propagated by his own political party, Urals Transformation, and symbolized by the rebuilding of the monastery in Verkhoture. The list of ‘new’ cultural values is quite traditional: the Orthodox faith, collective repentance for the bloody excesses of the Soviet past, the mobilization of youth for the arts and cultural events, and the creation of an authentic Ural culture.4 Lapina and Chirikova describe among ‘typical technologies of the struggle for power’: ‘the active formation, through the media, of a positive image of the authorities and their efforts to ensure the flourishing of the region; and the formation of a regional mythology’. Lapina and Chirikova also point out that the basis of the mythology used to be anti-Moscow sentiment (Moscow doesn’t care, only we achieve things), but with Putin’s advent to power regional leaders might have to find an alternative mythology.5 Rossel is an extreme example of this tendency. He has made numerous anti-Moscow populist gestures, such as threatening not to pay taxes to Moscow in the aftermath of the August 1998 financial crisis.6

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The blossoming of regional media has been a notable feature of the postcommunist period.7 Sverdlovsk Region is said to be comparable to Moscow and Petersburg, with over 200 periodicals and 12 television stations.8 In poorer Penza, where the media are less well developed, the Institute of Regional Politics nonetheless produced a list of 15 Penza newspapers of different political complexions; 11 of these were said to have a region-wide distribution.9 Moreover, there is also regional television in both Penza and Tver and in Rzhev, the town nearest to Zubtsov, there is a local cable channel. To some extent the regional media is the tool of the local leadership, or is seen by the leadership as such, and this has led to human rights abuses and violence in some regions. However, the regional media is not all pro-governor. In Sverdlovsk, for example, various political groupings also publish their own newspapers. Nonetheless, the governor’s propaganda newspaper, Oblastnaya gazeta, is particularly widely available, with, for example, 50 copies being supplied free to the local library in Achit. Attempts to enhance regional identity are also aimed at children. They include the introduction of new courses in the school curriculum which emphasize the history and geography of the region. In Bednodemyanovsk, where the library was receiving fewer than twenty new books a year, the only regular source of supply was local history books from Penza Region library. The education department, too, was supplied with regional history materials, such as the journals Zemstvo and Guberniya.10 The children’s arts centre was busy implementing regional policy to revive interest in Penza folklore. Children in the last few years have travelled round villages in Bednodemyanovsk District, interviewing older people about local rituals and artforms.11 The district administration’s Culture Department has also tried to make houses of culture pay more attention to local folklore.12 Regional capitals themselves have changed in outward appearance: new, modern architecture conveys a sense of progress and a smart ‘face’ for the region, even in lesser capitals such as Penza or Tver, still more so in the biggest cities, such as Yekaterinburg or Samara. The presence of Western and Western-style shops and restaurants, Western organizations, refashioning of airports to receive direct flights from abroad, etc., all suggests an opening to the wider world, as do travel agencies offering tours to Cyprus and Thailand.

The success and failure of projects to enhance regional identity How successful are projects to enhance regional identities? Lapidus and Walker write of the existence of a ‘relatively strong and growing identification of Russians with their regions and regional leaders rather than with the nation as a whole or central leaders in Moscow’.13 However, for a number of reasons this seems unlikely in the small towns. One problem is that people in the glubinka realize that power is located only in the regional capital. Whatever the claims about democratization since 1991, there is no necessary connection between more power for the regional government and more say for the local population. Regional leaders may be ‘hoarding’ power at their own level rather than sharing it downwards. Rossel is the best example here, since he has attempted to run

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Sverdlovsk as a centralized state, although not with complete success. (Perhaps, however, Rossel’s efforts are just particularly conspicuous because his task is so difficult, given that he has so many powerful cities to control. Penza is actually more centralized, with heads of administration appointed by the governor.) Geographical size and within-region diversity also inhibit identification with the region. Sverdlovsk is huge, the size of England, and finding features in common between a south-western rural area like Achit and a northern industrial city like Serov is not easy. Moreover, where towns are a long way from the regional centre it is harder for that centre to serve as a focus of identity. As has already been described, at three to four hours bus journey from the nearest city, all three fieldwork towns are quite deep into the ‘provincial depths’. In order to measure the success of projects to enhance regional identity, I tried to find out whether small-town respondents had a strong sense of regional identity and whether their perceptions of the region matched the images projected by regional leaders. Respondents in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked how their region differed from other regions. Overall, the contrast between Penza and Sverdlovsk could be encapsulated in the phrases, used by some interviewees, ‘oblast’ literaturnaya’ and ‘oblast’ eksperimental’naya’. Penza was the region of nineteenth-century country estates, most famously, Lermontov’s, and twenty-first century agricultural depression. Sverdlovsk was the region of proud tradition in Soviet engineering firsts and wayward postcommunist educational policies and politics. (Nobody, however, mentioned the short-lived Urals Republic of 1993.) Sverdlovsk had a more sharply defined identity than did Penza. Just one, very negative interviewee, claimed that it ‘was absolutely no different’ from other regions; 11 made the opposite point, that Sverdlovsk was ‘very different’: ‘they treat us like guinea pigs’; ‘we have our own way of doing things’; ‘it lives by its own rules’. This could be seen as a definite success for Rossel, who is nothing if not proactive and idiosyncratic, but probably he builds on a pre-existing feeling of Sverdlovsk identity. (Yeltsin, after all, epitomized the same tendency.) There was also a definite Urals identification. When Sverdlovsk was compared with other regions, these were its Urals neighbours, Perm, Chelyabinsk and Bashkortostan. In Penza, no one claimed that the region was very different from others, and the points of comparison were more wide-ranging. Penza could be viewed as part of the Black Earth, agricultural area encompassing, for example, Tambov and Voronezh: traditional communist strongholds. In Bednodemyanovsk, 16 per cent of respondents identified the region by its quality as ‘conservative’ or ‘Red Belt’ until the March 2000 elections. Most often, Penza was described as part of the Volga area, perhaps because it was, officially, part of the Volga macroregion and is currently within the Volga Federal Okrug. Samara was the most often-mentioned ‘nearby’ region, although it does not neighbour Penza. Perhaps perceptions were shaped by the higher media profile of the biggest and wealthiest provincial cities, such as Samara, Yekaterinburg and Perm, while smaller cities were not particularly in people’s minds as comparators. It was revealing that it occurred to no one at all to compare Penza or Sverdlovsk with Moscow. This was not part of the same world (see below).14

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In Britain, regional identities are possibly most often felt with reference to football or rugby teams in the local cities. Sport was most certainly not such an identifying feature in my sample. It was almost never mentioned, although one interviewee supported Manchester United. Instead, responses suggested that the region was first and foremost perceived an economic unit – agricultural, poor and depressed (Penza) or industrial, prospering and ‘functioning’ (Sverdlovsk). ‘Sverdlovsk region is densely populated and industrial, like England,’ declared the head of administration of Achit District. To some extent respondents also made comments about their own local section of the region – for example, ‘in Sverdlovsk Region industry is doing well, but agricultural areas like Achit are neglected’. Nonetheless, interviewees usually presented a picture of the overall economic status of the region. They identified developments and trends – pointing out, for example, in Penza, that industry had been heavily defence-based in the Soviet era, had suffered a great decline in the 1990s, but now might be picking up again. Overall, respondents probably had an over-positive view of their regions, suggesting some success for the regional leaders’ propaganda. The prosperity rankings discussed in Chapters 1 and 3 do not support the view that Sverdlovsk is an outstandingly rich region, or Penza anything but an extremely depressed one, although it is true that in 2000 the Bednodemyanovsk newspaper was busy publishing Goskomstat statistics showing that the economy might be picking up. The point of comparison with other regions was almost always made in economic terms, often not very favourably to the home region. For example, people in Achit, bordering on Perm Region, presented a portrait of Perm as a region where salaries were paid on time, agriculture had not been ruined by re-organization and underfunding, and child benefit was paid in money, not porridge past its use-by date. Chapter 1 suggested that living standards in Perm and Bashkortostan were indeed better than in Sverdlovsk, judging by Goskomstat statistics, but this habit of comparing local and other people’s standard of living is also traditional in Russia – generated by the shortages and regional inequalities of the command economy and the Soviet media focus on comparing output between factories, farms, milkmaids, etc. In Soviet days, the first question of a provincial Russian to a traveller was often, ‘And what’s the food supply like in your town?’ At least, though, respondents did seem to identify with the region in that they were genuinely concerned about its economic standing and prospects. When asked what type of media reports about their region they found most interesting, the interviewees overwhelmingly mentioned socio-economic themes. A preoccupation with the region’s economic health is particularly understandable in postcommunist conditions, when people are constantly wondering whether their salary will be paid next month. Interviewees were also hoping that the industrial enterprises in their local district might experience a revival in their fortunes, and that this would help to rescue the district from its predicament of being dependent on highly inadequate subsidies from the regional centre. It is important to note the rather minimalist aspirations of the interviewees for the regional economy. Governors may have grand ambitions for their regions, but in the small town people just want to be paid, the local fields to be sown and the

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factories to provide more employment. There was never a suggestion that the future was likely to be more prosperous than the Soviet past. Governors were in a dangerous position, since they personally were expected to promote economic growth. In Bednodemyanovsk, for example, some interviewees enthusiastically repeated the assurances of the regional media that Bochkarev was busy improving things, such as attracting British investment, or building more roads. Others were more hesitant to believe what might just be propaganda, but they did feel that this was what Bochkarev should be doing. Rossel was criticized for ‘wasting’ money on his showpiece, the Verkhoture monastery, at the other end of the region from Achit. As Startsev points out, district authorities can excuse themselves on the grounds that economic crisis is really the business of the governor, but the governor has to accept responsibility.15 Actual details of politics in the regional capital were not interesting to people in the small town. Only one respondent, a male doctor, mentioned politics as the most interesting kind of regional news. He identified ‘the power struggle’ in Yekaterinburg. When asked to characterize their region, only a minority of interviewees did so in political terms, generally to complain. In Achit, 18 per cent of respondents criticized ‘bad’ politicians and policies (especially non-payment of salaries) and 12 per cent mentioned crime and corruption. The 100 interviewees in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked to name the ‘personalities’ in their region in an attempt to find out who personified it: was it the governor? The Russian term, yarkaya lichnost’, ‘shining personality’, is somewhat ambiguous, since it can be understood to imply only virtuous characteristics: a yarkaya lichnost’ cannot shine with notoriety. This prompted some musings – could the governor really be a ‘shining’ personality? – and comments along the lines of ‘we haven’t had any shining personalities since Lenin’ or ‘there are no personalities of the calibre of Richter, Rostropovich or Lermontov’.16 Most interviewees, however, did not aspire to name Richters or Rostropoviches, and considered that the term was neutral and applicable to lesser stars. Governors Bochkarev and Rossel could take some comfort from the fact that they were named far more frequently than any other local bigwig, by 60 and 64 per cent of interviewees, respectively (Figure 8.1).17 Nevertheless, the way in which Bochkarev and Rossel were named did not always suggest unqualified admiration, and the merits of face-to-face interviewing as opposed to the use of written questionnaires were nicely illustrated. Faces expressed varying degrees of doubt, irony and cynicism, and there were comments along the lines of ‘I suppose it can only be Bochkarev’ or ‘I didn’t vote for Rossel, but he is the most obvious person’. The governors’ rivals, mayors of Penza and Yekaterinburg Kalashnikov and Chernetskii, were quite often mentioned second; it was not surprising that Chernetskii was the better known, since he heads the Sverdlovsk region-wide political movement, Our Home, Our Town, which had some active supporters in Achit. The only other figures mentioned fairly often were of local as well as regional significance. In Achit, head of the regional administration Vorobev was actually in the town when the interviews were conducted, on a fact-finding/inspection visit, and therefore in the front of

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16 0

B’k

12 60

0 22 22

Achit

64 0

70 Regional minister of Interior Head of regional government Mayor of regional capital Governor

Figure 8.1 The three most ‘outstanding regional personalities’ (percentage of interviewees naming each, N  100).

people’s minds, while in Bednodemyanovsk Penza Minister of Interior Gulyakov was a local hero who still acted as a patron to his home town. Gulyakov’s role is a fascinating one. Bednodemyanovsk had been lucky to achieve such a patron: a local boy who rose to the top despite the fact that, according to interviewees, he was ‘a real member of the intelligentsia’. His mother was a librarian. According to respondents, he had achieved his high position through hard work and merit: a Cinderella/Soviet-style fairytale career. This was a comforting story for a small town which so far had had few positive experiences of postcommunism. More often it is the big towns which have political clout in the capital. Although there were clearly elements of irrationality and wishful thinking here, there was also hard-headed realism. First, Gulyakov could bring them practical assets, like a photocopier from Bochkarev for the school.18 Second, he could be ‘their man’ in the regional capital. The only other regional public figures named by respondents were their bosses in the regional capital, for example, the head of the regional library network or the Minister of Education. Generally they did not have much to say about these characters – and sometimes these were the responses of interviewees who seemed to have little idea what to say, not being able to think of anyone apart from the governor. Sverdlovsk Minister of Education Nesterov was most often cited, by 12 per cent of respondents, but not always very enthusiastically (to put it politely). Teachers disliked the proactive, experimental and ‘meddling’ approach of the ministry. It was curious, given the intelligentsia complexion of the sample, that so few interviewees were able to name leading lights of the cultural world. Scholars and

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performers in the region’s capital were not well known by name. One music teacher commented, for example, ‘We don’t know the musicians now because we don’t go to concerts. If we have to be in Yekaterinburg on business we can’t afford to go out in the evening.’ Some others suggested that they were not even interested in reading the cultural news in the regional press, since they could not go to see the plays or hear the concerts described. Perhaps, though, if people are not well informed about the regional capital it is because they do not have information? This may seem a curious suggestion in view of what has been said about the efforts of regional leaders to project a positive image of themselves and control the media. First, however, the appearance of access to the regional media can be deceptive, and although most of the Zubtsov interviewees claimed to follow the regional media, in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk the proportion was only half. In all three towns there were problems with television reception, which meant that many people could not watch regional broadcasts. Moreover, since few could afford to replace Soviet televisions and radios, they could find themselves without access to broadcast media if their equipment broke. In 1999, only 69.7 per cent of the Russian population was said to be able to receive three or more television channels.19 However, this figure probably includes places like Achit and the Volga/Vazuza/Sheshma valleys in Zubtsov, which formally do receive all the main channels, but where the transmission quality is in fact poor. Radio is more accessible. Often respondents did not feel able to buy regional newspapers, confining themselves to the town’s own newspaper(s), although the latter did frequently carry reprints from the regional press. The 50 free copies of Rossel’s propaganda paper were snapped up by ‘pensioners who wanted a television schedule’, according to a librarian. People were quite sceptical about the veracity of the regional media, although some interviewees suggested that if you read two or more papers with different angles you could form a reasonably accurate picture of life in the region. They often mentioned that they had better sources of information, such as phone calls to friends, or conversations with colleagues from other towns at (rare) regional-level seminars. The deputy head of the prosecution service in Achit pointed out that she had her own, reliable in-house information channel. Second, perhaps regional leaders do not care so much about what small-town people think of them. (If they did, they might invest more in television transmitters.) Both Chernyshov and Lapina and Chirikova suggest that political efforts are increasingly confined to the regional centre and one or two big towns.20 This was the assumption of people in the small town – that the capital forgot about them – and this is the strongest reason for believing that regional-level attempts to instil a sense of regional identity are not working well. In return, small-town respondents were not very interested in the regional capital.21 Local people commonly defined the region in terms of a capital, which was different from their town, a capital which was seen as being prioritized by the regional authorities. A few interviewees felt proud of the capital, remarking on how nice it looked now it had been done up, and a number were nostalgic for their

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student days in the city. However, comments about the regional capital today tended to stress its distance and strangeness. In the case of Yekaterinburg, interviewees also mentioned drugs and violent crime, contrasting it to the relative safety of Achit. Penza and Tver were seen as less threatening than was Yekaterinburg, but often also remote. Comments about regional capitals included: ‘a well-fed person can’t understand a hungry one’; ‘the centre doesn’t try’; ‘the centre doesn’t care’; ‘they don’t want to know us’; ‘Penza is a different world’, ‘the state stops at Tver’. The latter remark, while perhaps partly an ironic reference to the terminology of the 1993 constitution,22 mostly referred to the extent to which Zubtsov was thrown back on its own resources for financing the local budget. A similar point was made about Achit: ‘The state hardly exists at district level. The municipality has been given power – but with empty pockets.’23 Even when the local press reported visits from the regional capital, the language used sometimes conveyed the impression that the regional authorities had a purely instrumental attitude towards the small towns. When reporting that Governor Bochkarev had promised that Bednodemyanovsk would receive more investment to improve its appearance, the local newspaper immediately added that the town was seen as the ‘gateway to Penza Region’.24 (It is the westernmost Penza town on the Moscow–Samara highway.) Despite such occasional visitations, people in the small town felt that the centre was not really interested in their particular economic survival, and as we have seen, partly blamed it for the depressed state of the local economy, although they also criticized their local administrations. There was a perception, particularly in Achit, that the regional centre only showed a political interest in the district in the run-up to elections. Interviewees also deplored the cultural dimension of neglect. A typical comment was ‘We used to have lots of visiting performers, but now we live on a desert island’. This neglect had resulted from the disintegration of Soviet official networks, such as obligatory patronage (shefstvo) by urban institutions (e.g. Sverdlovsk Philharmonia’s over School No. 1 in Achit or Tver Philharmonia’s over School No. 1 in Zubtsov). Respondents in all three towns were asked to comment on a quotation from sociologist Leonid Kogan that ‘links between the centre and the regions have ruptured today even more in the affective/cultural sphere than in politics or economics’.25 They almost all agreed, reminiscing fondly about visits, in Soviet days, by national stars such as the folksinger Zhanna Bichevskaya, and complaining bitterly about how high-quality performers no longer visited the town. It was true that a few commercial circuses and zoos passed through, and, in Achit, that there was a flurry of concerts before elections, sponsored by hopeful candidates from Yekaterinburg. However, the second-rate and/or cynical nature of these activities meant that they did not count as real culture in the eyes of respondents.

Travel Senior officials in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk, in particular, travelled to Tver and Penza, and the head of the education department in Bednodemyanovsk even

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said that she felt that her links with the Ministry of Education in Penza were stronger than they had been with the Regional Education Department of Soviet days. Librarians in Zubtsov had a sense of being closely in touch with Tver, and Zubtsov Museum had received exhibits from Tver. There is a regional council of hospital directors in Tver. It was striking, however, that in Achit the school headteachers and some other senior officials – such as the assistant procurator and head librarian – were no longer travelling to Yekaterinburg on business: subsidized business trips had been cut and no official cars were available. Even in Bednodemyanovsk the head of School No. 1 said he was travelling much less often than before. The strong ties with Penza seemed to be only at a very senior level. For example, ordinary officials in the education department were not even allowed to make long-distance telephone calls, although they had previously been accustomed to phoning Penza for advice. The house of culture had not taken any amateur performers to Penza since 1998. There was still participation by local schools in regional level competitions, which induced a sense among some teachers that links to the regional capital persisted. However, teachers bemoaned the fact that children were not being taken on cultural trips to the regional capital as often as they had been in Soviet days, or that, when such trips were organized, they were too expensive for many pupils. Travel for personal reasons such as holidays, theatre-going or football matches was becoming less feasible for most interviewees, apart from some of the richer ones – those in managerial positions or married to businessmen and senior officials. Now, for most of the year, sometimes for years on end, many small-town inhabitants are stranded in their local area. The problem is partly the cost of staying in the regional capital or other cities, and also of cinema and theatre tickets. Fares are also an issue. For many interviewees, the bus fare for a 300 or 400 kilometre round trip to the region capital was equivalent to about a week’s salary. (Prices were indicated in Chapter 3.) At least in Penza and Sverdlovsk regions there were regular bus services, although in Bednodemyanovsk drivers of private cars undermined the bus depot, which was heavily in debt, by gathering in the bus station just before the Penza bus was due to depart and offering rides to Penza.26 Zubtsov had just one daily service to Moscow, recently reduced from two. In fact most respondents either had a car or could borrow one, but these cars were frequently described as being too ancient and decrepit to be used for any journey further than the forest or hayfield. The price of petrol was mentioned as another reason for lack of travel. A final problem was time: during the growing season, the garden consumes all spare time, and winter is not the best season for travel in Russia. The constraints on travelling far meant that, for many interviewees in Zubtsov and Achit, travel was limited to occasional shopping trips to the nearby towns of Rzhev and Krasnoufimsk. Even the bus fares to these towns were beyond the means of a few people.27 In Bednodemyanovsk there is no large town within easy distance.28 The problem of travel even around the district was an acute one, although, by Russian standards, none of the districts was wild or remote. For example, the head

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librarian in Bednodemyanovsk said that because of petrol prices she could not get round all the local libraries in this very small district even in the course of a year; village librarians were invited to seminars in Bednodemyanovsk at their own expense.

Identification with the local area For a handful of interviewees, including some highly educated ones, Kogan’s ‘centre’ was the district centre, the small town, and the links which had broken were with remote villages. For these people the district boundaries seemed to constitute the limits of their everyday consciousness. They were not, however, necessarily people who had always lived in the small town, just people whose everyday jobs brought them into contact with the district. As can be seen, the samples varied quite considerably as to how many interviewees had been born locally, or even within the local area. (Table 8.1.)29 However, given what has been said about community life in the three towns and the role of incomers, it seems impossible to argue that communities are stronger if more people have been born there. Of the Achit sample, 92 per cent were from the Urals – the Central Urals, in fact – and yet if anything the town had the weakest identity. Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk owed much of their community life to non-locals, although other active people were locally born. It seemed common for respondents who had come into the small town, even if it was from a village not much different, to preserve a sentimental attachment to their birthplaces. One librarian in Zubtsov, for example, was still grieving for her home village in Smolensk Region, which had been bulldozed after classification as a ‘village without a future’. ‘We’re not Tver folk,’ she explained. Despite such nostalgia and rather essentialist approach – denying the possibility of changing from a ‘Smolensk person’ to a ‘Tver person’ – most respondents did seem to have at least partly adopted an identity as a citizen of Achit, Bednodemyanovsk or Zubtsov. Almost all had positive things to say about the people who lived there (see Chapter 3). Their affectionate attitude was encapsulated in their identification of the local area with the word ‘mother’. The Russian word for ‘homeland’ or ‘motherland’ (rodina) is ambiguous: it can include the concept of the ‘little’ motherland (malaya rodina) or local area. When asked what they thought of when they heard the words ‘motherland’ or ‘Mother Russia’, many respondents said things like ‘the little corner where I live’, ‘my family’, ‘my garden’, ‘my house, my bread, my children’,

Table 8.1 Birthplaces of respondents (in per cent)

Achit Bednodemyanovsk Zubtsov

In the small town/district

Outside local macroregion

44 62 39

8 12 34

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‘where I live and am respected’, ‘local nature’ or ‘where my mother is’. Research in other Urals towns, such as Krasnoufimsk and Orenburg, backs up the impression that people locate themselves primarily in their ‘little’ motherland.30 Even some quite influential and politicized local figures expressed such narrow concepts. They included, for example, a senior woman in Achit who claimed not to think about Russia as a whole except while watching the news. Mother Russia, for her, meant ‘her woods, weeds and litter, the place where I live’. It was not important who was president or governor. She said she had not felt this local identification so strongly twenty years ago. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in Zubtsov in spring 1999, several prominent members of the local intelligentsia were attempting to establish a branch of the nation-wide organization Fatherland (Otechestvo). However, although Fatherland was commonly viewed as a powerbase for its leader, Mayor of Moscow Yurii Luzhkov, in Zubtsov it was a local movement of the intelligentsia, intent on improving local conditions as a result of greater power over decision-making at local level. On, the other hand, as the last chapter described, some local people were consciously trying to expand local horizons, and they explicitly stated their intention of overcoming the barriers between themselves and the outside world. One music teacher in Bednodemyanovsk pointed out that the reason she and her colleague had made a conscious decision to enliven the community with weekly concerts, often with an educational element, was: ‘Since we can’t travel or read so much, we have to make life interesting here’. Also in Bednodemyanovsk, a kebab seller on the Moscow road had opened a computer club with Internet access (possibly the first in the town), aimed at young people. Although he was doing well selling kebabs, he explained his motivation as the desire to do something useful by linking Bednodemyanovsk to the rest of the world. ‘I got fed up with living on a desert island.’31 So far this book has argued that people in the small town often feel quite disconnected from the regional capital, but retain an involvement in the affairs of their local community, an involvement which in some cases has been strengthened precisely because of the weakening of links with the regional capital. How do these trends link up to developments on a ‘higher’ level – in ethnic and national consciousness?

Being Russian Ethnicity for most respondents meant being Russian. The towns studied are predominantly ethnic Russian and most of the interviewees were Russian.32 The non-Russians’ answers to questions about Russia did not differ from those of the ethnically Russian respondents. Vera Tolz has identified five main types of definition of the Russian nation in late 1990s intellectual debates: 1 2

‘Union identity: the Russians defined as an imperial people or through their mission to create a supranational state.’ ‘The Russians as a nation of all eastern Slavs’ (i.e. including Belorussians and Ukrainians).

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‘The Russians as a community of Russian speakers, regardless of their ethnic origin.’ ‘The Russians defined racially.’ ‘A civic Russian (rossiiskaya) nation, whose members are all citizens of the Russian Federation, regardless of their ethnic and cultural background, united by loyalty to newly emerging political institutions and its constitution.’33

It would seem that in some respects most of the small-town interviewees adhered to the ‘civic nation’ model. Their answers suggested that they were committed to democratic values such as freedom of speech and free elections, and they also believed in the multi-ethnic state. However, Tolz suggests that for the ‘civic nation’ model to function, citizens should also be ‘united by loyalty to newly emerging political institutions and its constitution’. Citing national poll data, she suggests that ‘as far as the broad public in the Russian Federation is concerned Russian identity is largely subjective (identification with Russia as a homeland and self-identification as a Russian are key characteristics); and it is also linguistic and cultural. The question of citizenship is far less significant’.34 My research indicated that this was indeed true of the small towns. Zubtsov respondents were asked whether they felt proud of being Russian. Some were embarrassed by the question, saying that they were afraid of succumbing to ‘patriotism from habit’ ( privychnyi patriotizm), as officially inculcated. Most interviewees said, however, that they were ‘proud’, often justifying that pride with references to Russian culture (‘Pushkin was Russian, Dostoevsky was Russian’). The other common justifications were Russian history, particularly the victory in the Second World War, and the long-suffering quality of the Russian people. Even the most cynical and depressed respondents cheered up as they warmed to this theme. Respondents in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were invited to comment on the significance for them personally of the building of the Russian state since 1991 and the greater accessibility of Russian culture. It was clear that the towns were not intellectual communities ripped by fierce debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers or proponents of Tolz’s five models. People did not make prescriptions for Russia’s future. They did not talk about Russia as a superpower or an empire. In fact most respondents did not even mention nationalism or issues connected with multi-ethnicity. Only 12 people made comments which could be labelled as Russian nationalist. Most of these comments were to the effect that before 1992 Russia did not have a proper identity of its own, because people did not talk about Russia as a separate nation and it did not have its own institutions. Thirteen people said that they did not think that Russia had really become more Russian since 1991, some on the grounds that Russians still lacked a clear identity, others saying that Russia was, as before, multi-ethnic. Overarching issues connected with national consciousness were not at the forefront of most people’s minds when they read the question about Russian identity:35 instead, they were more interested in talking about their direct personal experience, what they liked about the Russian cultural revival. Of the respondents,

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65 per cent chose to talk about how they welcomed the publication of new history books, the availability of literary texts banned by the Soviet regime or the restoration of Orthodox churches. Although there were some comments to the effect that ‘people ought to know their own history’ most people did not problematize these trends. They ‘liked’ reading history or watching historical programmes on television: history was ‘interesting’. The only caveats tended to be practical ones: resentment that they could not afford to buy books or travel to museums, and regret that they could not receive the Culture Channel on television. (In this latter respect most of Zubtsov was better off than the other towns.) Several respondents made comments about how they valued being able to read a greater variety of Russian literature, and teach it: it was more fun to teach Bulgakov than Gorky. However, like many people outside Russian small towns, they were also bewildered by the inaccessibility of contemporary Russian culture, especially if they remembered the excitements of the glasnost period. They complained about the ‘silence’ of favourite authors and the shortage of ‘nice’ films: this contributed to their sense of cultural isolation. Respondents were concerned about both their own children and also local children in general: they had not seen the art and architectural treasures of Moscow and St Petersburg, and had therefore missed out on something very important. Moscow, however, arouses very contradictory emotions – something which was illustrated one day when I visited the library in Zubtsov. One librarian was radiant because a well-known writer, on holiday nearby, had visited the library; her colleague looked utterly dismissive and said ‘they are here on holiday, but we have to work all summer’. (She also claimed that even her Moscow relations did not understand people in Zubtsov.) A few people dismissed Moscow with blanket statements such as ‘I don’t like Moscow or Muscovites.’ Others justified their dislike: Moscow is variously seen as different; indifferent; hostile/greedy; and immoral. 1

2 3

4

Moscow was described as ‘a different state’; ‘another continent’; ‘like England’. Moscow had ‘employment and prestigious educational institutions’. ‘Moscow lives its own life.’ ‘Moscow isn’t part of a spiritual whole with Russia.’ ‘Moscow doesn’t need the regions, just like the regions don’t need the districts.’ ‘The political elite doesn’t know anything about what goes on at the grassroots.’ ‘Moscow was never on good terms with the provinces and always exploited them.’ ‘People hate Moscow because it sucks up all the resources.’ ‘The provinces were always left to stew in their own juice.’ ‘People are more moral in small towns than in Moscow and Petersburg.’ ‘Russia will be resurrected thanks to the provinces, where some spirituality still resides.’ ‘The best people are in the provinces.’

The interview schedule further asked people how significant they found it for their sense of identity that ‘Russia had its own president, army, etc.’ Apart from a handful of positive comments about Putin, hardly anyone found anything to say about these state institutions. Cultural aspects of Russification, with their personal and local impact, were clearly much more meaningful for the respondents than any

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institutions in Moscow. Zubtsov respondents, who were asked whether they thought they could influence Moscow politics, were in almost complete agreement that this was impossible: ‘we are midges’, as one of them put it. In Zubtsov, where people usually interpreted Kogan’s statement to refer to links with Moscow, they tended to agree that links with the capital had snapped. Zubtsov is only 200 kilometres from Moscow, but the people most bitter about the gap between Zubtsov and the capital seemed to be those who had most direct contact with Moscow – for example, because their husbands or fathers commuted there to work on a weekly basis. In Bednodemyanovsk and, particularly, Achit, interviewees often did not think of Moscow as being implied in Kogan’s statement. When asked about Moscow, these respondents made comments such as ‘Moscow the centre? Oh, that’s a long way away for us’. One woman even stated ‘I never think about Moscow at all.’ If they disagreed that links had become worse, it was usually because they felt that there had never been very strong connections anyway. People also criticized the national media, which one might suppose to constitute the one remaining link to Moscow. There were too few programmes about the glubinka; ‘TV doesn’t show our lives’. In general, Moscow television was seen as presenting Russian life as being better than it actually was for provincial people. Most respondents were suspicious of the reliability of the national media. Zubtsov respondents who said they were ashamed of Russia uniformly mentioned the government and parliament. Since the survey was conducted in 1999, this reflected disgust with Yeltsin in particular. In Bednodemyanovsk and Achit in 2000, when it had already become clear that the war in Chechnya was going to drag on and claim many more victims, a number of people talked about their dislike of the state’s warmongering and their horror at the thought that their sons might have to serve in Chechnya. By September 2000, in the aftermath of the sinking of the submarine Kursk, there was also huge mistrust of the naval authorities. In 1999, a few respondents defined being Russian as an alternative to being European: this was during the war in Kosovo. However, in general respondents did not relate their identity to the wider world. Although a number had been to East European countries as tourists during the Soviet period, very few had been abroad recently, and only two to the West. They did not have access to the internet and globalization was not really a phenomenon which had much meaning in the small town, except perhaps in the form of Hollywood films. There are no McDonalds in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk or Zubtsov.

Conclusions ‘Malo kto doezzhaet’ – ‘few people make it [to Moscow]’ was the wistful comment of one teacher, expressing the mood of frustration among the intelligentsia in the small town. ‘We find it hard to sit in one place,’ said another. Interviewees had strong self-images as people who travelled and whose children ought to be familiar with the major cities of their country. They also had an enhanced sense of Russian ethnic identity, a common cultural and historical heritage. Hence involution was the result not of choice, but of economic necessity. Aleksei Chernyshov refers to the

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glubinka and the regional capitals as ‘spinning away’ from one another.36 This was certainly the perception of inhabitants of the small towns, suspicious as they were of the regional media and politics and persuaded that the fruits of transition were reserved for the cities.37 They were equally suspicious of Moscow. It is tempting to add a sixth model to Vera Tolz’s five. This would be a model created not by Moscow intellectuals but by many teachers and doctors in small provincial towns. It might be even more applicable to their children. Mother Russia  the ‘little motherland’ could be the name of this model. In this model, Russia as an entire geographical entity, and the Russian state, seem to become more and more distant. The provincial depths become deeper. ‘We’ve started to live in our own little micro-world’, as one headteacher expressed it. Memories of Moscow and other Russian cities are still strong and people still read history, but in the world of today, based as it is around subsistence agriculture, the ‘soil which feeds us’ is the most commonly experienced aspect of Mother Russia.

Conclusions

The concepts of ‘livelihoods’ and ‘identities’, and their overlap, run, as the Russian phrase has it, ‘like a red thread’ through this book. These conclusions summarize the main findings of the book, discussing livelihoods and identities in turn, in the context of wider scholarly debates about Russian society, and showing how physiological and emotional ‘survival’ are intertwined. Preserving or reinterpreting one’s identity is often essential to a successful livelihood strategy. As well as explaining certain findings which may be typical of contemporary Russian small towns in general, the conclusions also pull out some of the main differences between the three towns, and examine whether it was significant that the towns were located in different regions. Finally, the Conclusions suggest some thoughts about the ‘transition’ and the significance of agency, as opposed to structures, in determining livelihoods, identities and the nature of postcommunist Russia more generally.

Livelihoods and social change Chapters 1 and 3 illustrated the extent of regional diversity within Russia, even inside the central European/Urals area. For example, the regions in which the small towns were located, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver, had very different crime rates, life expectancy, deathrates and economic indicators. It is problematic, however, to define a rich or poor region: whenever the kaleidoscope is turned to another indicator the regions rearrange themselves into slightly new patterns. Taking per capita GRP, for example, Tver seemed quite average for European Russia in 1999, and far wealthier than Penza, but poverty levels were exceptionally high in both regions. Both regions were within particularly depressed zones, the north-west (Pskov, Leningrad, Tver) and the stripe running through the eastern part of European Russia from Kirov down to Penza. Sverdlovsk, which scored well for per capita GRP within European Russia, and had one Russia’s highest total GRPs, also had above average poverty. The coexistence of high GRPs and high poverty levels suggests an unequal division of resources within these regions. The regional pie is not divided equally between all inhabitants, certainly not on a geographical basis. Chapter 2 illustrated the extent of sub-regional diversity, with many cities being, apparently,

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much richer than small or even middle-sized towns. This diversity can be partly attributed to the extent of self-financing expected of local governments. Zubtsov, for example, was expected to raise 68 per cent of its own revenue in 1999. The three fieldwork towns, located as they were in economically depressed districts with tiny tax revenues, were much more similar to one another than might be expected, given Sverdlovsk’s superior GRP. Lack of regional investment in the small-town economies was seen by many interviewees as the defining factor in determining local livelihoods. Local people felt that if money were to be put into dolomite quarrying in Zubtsov, ceramics and folk art in Bednodemyanovsk or livestock and tourism in Achit, then district economies might be revived, but they tended to be pessimistic about the prospect of revival. Chapter 2 also found evidence of different demographic trends in cities and in rural areas/small towns, with fewer births and more divorce in the cities. There is also migration from smaller towns to cities, particularly of younger people and men; but many do not manage to remain in the city. Interviewees commonly had to support adult children, who had trained in city universities and colleges for careers which might have ensured a comfortable middle-class existence in a city, but could not afford to settle there after graduation. Instead, they took on poorly paid intelligentsia jobs in the small town and lived the same life as their parents. Chapters 3 and 4 discussed livelihoods in the three small towns, indicating how these differ from city livelihoods. Almost the entire sample lived below the official poverty line. Even wealthier inhabitants were prone to plummets into poverty if they needed to purchase housing, health care or higher education. Moreover, poverty was not confined to families with young children; adult children were often at least as much of a financial burden to their parents. Chapter 5 examined livelihood strategies as potential escape routes from poverty. It illustrated the truth of Pine and Bridger’s comments about the cultural embeddedness of strategies, particularly vegetable growing. It also suggested that households display varying degrees of planning: some have more consciously thought-out (‘stronger’) strategies than others. None of this is special to the small town. The distinguishing feature of small-town livelihood strategies is limited choice. There are many more strategies available to educated and skilled people in the city. In the three small towns, the near absence of a private sector and the impoverishment of the local population meant that entrepreneurial strategies were hard to put into effect. Just a few of the more fortunate respondents had been able to make new careers in business, or to find reasonably substantial additional earnings. In Zubtsov, some men worked as drivers or builders in Moscow. The limited availability of strategies in the small towns would seem to confirm Wallace and Pahl’s suggestion that strategies are engaged in as a response to opportunity, not need. However, this is only partly true. In the three small towns, respondents did all have livelihood strategies, because they needed them – they really were escape routes from poverty. Interviewees adopted whatever strategies were to hand, which for most meant growing vegetables and fruit. Unlike Wallace and Pahl’s respondents on the Isle of Sheppey, or Clarke’s Russian city dwellers, the poorest respondents in the small towns were the most self-provisioning, in that

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they claimed to depend on their household plots for most of their food, and on the forest for their medicines. Livelihood strategies are often referred to as ‘survival’ strategies and, while recognizing that this term can have unfortunate connotations – suggesting a sharp break with Soviet practices – the book also argues that ‘survival’ is a useful concept because it conveys the sense of lives punctuated by sudden crises (chiefly non-payment of salaries in households where savings have been wiped out by inflation) and because it can be used to link professional, emotional and physical survival, as well as the the survival of the community. For example, educating one’s children is about giving them the chance to escape from the small town and earn a salary in the city, benefiting from its prosperity, so it is about livelihoods: a material survival strategy. At the same time, however, it is about maintaining the family’s social status and intelligentsia identity. Chapters 5 and 6 showed the special importance, among these interviewees, of keeping professional identities, as a way of maintaining self-esteem. In particular, the interviews demonstrated that women wanted to work and offered no evidence to support assertions to the contrary which are sometimes made by Russian sociologists and politicians. Colleagues and friends were found to be important sources of social support, especially for women – lending support to the thesis, put forward by Shkolnikov, Shapiro and others, that male mortality may be linked to Russian men’s inferior ability to buffer themselves from stress. Families are a key source of stress, and there was evidence of the sort of strains documented by Kiblitskaya and Burawoy et al., where unemployed husbands felt marginalized and wives became increasingly overworked. However, in general, family relations in the sample seemed characterized by a high degree of cooperation, and in this the sample was similar to the couples in the three regions analysed by Vannoy et al. Even unemployed and retired husbands at least contributed to household vegetable-growing efforts. It was difficult to manage a household plot without the input of at least two family members, and the contribution of in-laws and other relatives was often also important. The divorce rate had even fallen during the 1990s in Achit, although it had risen in Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov (where men were more often living away from home). Gender relations in the small towns are usually traditional Soviet ones. Women are expected to have paid employment. It was not a survival strategy for women to stay at home. Child care was not a problem for many, since families usually had relatives living locally, because kindergartens were cheaper than in the cities, and because young school-age children were expected to be quite independent. Women usually also did most of the housework and almost all preserving of home-grown produce. As elsewhere in Russia, businessmen did display ‘new’, that is, pre-revolutionary, attitudes to gender roles, with businessmen’s wives being encouraged to stay at home. In general, survival strategies were not noticeably gendered, except for migration. The sharp contrast drawn by Burawoy et al., and Kiblitskaya, with men going into business and women focusing on the household or menial low-paid employment, was not really apparent. Women in the small towns do go into business, and

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also into local government, which is probably the most secure and profitable survival strategy; male respondents accepted menial, casual secondary employment: sticking up election posters, for example, or carpentry jobs. Burawoy et al., use the term ‘involution’ to refer to the tendency of households to retreat into themselves and into a primitive subsistence economy. The term seems very appropriate to describe the poorest households in the sample, which were pursuing a counter-productive survival strategy of abstaining from social contacts with neighbours and kin and becoming locked in a vicious circle of deprivation. There was some evidence of atomization generally in the small towns, particularly in Achit, where 80 per cent of respondents believed that people participated less than before in community events. Ledeneva suggests that, among her city sample, safer, kin-based ties were replacing wider Soviet networks.1 Sarah Ashwin described a similar phenomenon in ‘Vishnovka’, a depressed mining town in Kemerovo Region. In Vishnovka, moreover, people were scared of gangs of young men and would not walk alone at night. Old community structures had broken down and holidays were not celebrated collectively. People had become ‘closed and aggressive’.2 Ashwin attributes these developments to factors which were very evident in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk: poverty, a local administration in financial crisis, run-down infrastructure (such as street lighting and children’s playgrounds), and a sense of missing out on the political fruits of postcommunism. Most respondents in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk, however, did not seem to be ‘involuted’ or atomized. They described collective socializing among colleagues and neighbours; making and receiving small loans; high levels of trust in neighbours, described as ‘nice’ and ‘friendly’; and a general sense of security. The small town was characterized as an ‘island of safety in a harsh world’. One middleaged vocational schoolteacher, who walked home from one fringe of the town to the other, said ‘Why should I be afraid of youths? They are my own students!’ Ashwin is writing about 1994, which, as Chapter 1 suggested, could claim to be the most miserable year of the postcommunist period. By the late 1990s the economy had normalized to some extent in Russia and life was perhaps becoming more bearable. Putin’s advent to power was a significant moment here. (Respondents in Zubtsov in 1999, not surprisingly, seemed more hostile to the national government than did interviewees in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk in 2000.) The sense of returning normality might also be a consequence of the fact that survival strategies had become routine, as suggested by Olga Shevchenko. Moreover, Soviet forms of community participation were actually revived in the three small towns, and new holidays created. Other ways in which Vishnovka is different is that it is larger (11,500) and nearer to a big city. Moreover, mineworkers could well have less sense of community organization than members of the intelligentsia, particularly the intelligentsia elite. Nonetheless, the impression still remains that Vishnovka really was very different from the towns studied in this book. This serves as a reminder of the danger of generalizing about ‘small towns’. A number of Russian sociologists have suggested that stratification – rather than atomization – is what is increasing in Russia, but it was not clear that this

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was true in the small towns. Barriers between different social groups did exist, but there was also a sense of solidarity among the mass of the population, connected to their sense of having shared impoverishment as a common fate. Belyaeva’s term, the ‘middling mass’, seems appropriate here, and it was used by several interviewees to characterize the vast majority of their local citizens. In general social support still seemed to be strong, and there was evidence of continued involvement in community affairs. Political scientists tend to lament the weak development of civil society in Russia, but, while it was true that in many respects civil society seemed undeveloped in the small towns, with few NGOs and, in Bednodemyanovsk, a very ‘Soviet’ style newspaper and little local democracy, there were also contrary trends. Achit and Zubtsov both have lively newspapers and local election campaigns which are opportunities for at least some of the intelligentsia to club together and play a leadership role in the community. Differences between the regions are important here: Penza has a less democratic constitution; the creation of Fatherland (Otechestvo) in Zubtsov was linked to its emergence in Tver Region; Sverdlovsk has comparatively many lively civil society and political organizations, which may serve as an inspiration in general and also play a direct role in Achit affairs, for example, by promoting the women’s movement or the Tatar cultural revival. On the other hand, one could argue that Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov have a better-developed civil society than Achit, despite the very Soviet-style administration in Bednodemyanovsk. In both towns dedicated local musicians, actors and artists organized popular events independently of the administration. A structural factor which promoted civil society was housing availability and migration. Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk had attracted more, often very talented migrants. More intelligentsia members seemed to have left their jobs in Achit. The intelligentsia elite in Achit seemed to lack the drive and confidence which characterized much of the elite in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk. The role of charismatic individuals was exceptionally important in both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk. The old communist elite, as managers of cultural institutions, also played a role in organizing cultural life in all three towns. However, it is important not to underestimate the extent to which Soviet small-town intelligentsia communists had always seen their loyalties as lying primarily with the local community, rather than the Kremlin. Hence, if today they are interested in building civil society locally, this does not necessarily represent a sea change since Soviet days.

Identities Identities have been in flux in Russia since the Gorbachev years, when glasnost and democratization turned upside down many citizens’ ideas about Soviet politics and society, and ethnic identities were suddenly brought to the fore. Economic reforms, decentralization and social change in the 1990s have compounded the confusion. Small-town citizens were like people all over Russia in that they had to go through the uncomfortable process of questioning, or responding to question, about their old assumptions and status, and sometimes also to

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take on new jobs and domestic roles. However, the nature of identity change in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk was rather different from that in the city. Most importantly, the small towns were thrown back on their resources to an even greater extent than they had been in Soviet days. Respondents reported feeling ‘marooned on desert islands’. As members of the intelligentsia, respondents felt particularly acutely the rupture of cultural links with the cities. The intelligentsia had been responsible for imparting urban characteristics to the small towns. Now they were out of touch with the city, and moreover, forced to devote even more energy than in the past to cultivating their vegetable plots. They were ‘turning into peasants’ and this could imply that the rural side of small-town existence was overwhelming them. However, as Simon Smith has noted, people have come to terms with postcommunism by creating narratives of which they are the ‘narrators and heroes’. Respondents had used their often rather rigid understandings of their own identities as survival strategies, to fight back the pressures for change. An extreme case was that of the piano teacher from Baku who refused to grow vegetables on the grounds that she was a ‘thoroughly urban person’ even though she lived in a village in Zubtsov District. Most interviewees had to adapt their lifestyles at least to some extent, but some could also try to mould their environments to find an outlet for their creative energies and maintain their self-images as intellectuals. Chapter 8 quoted another music teacher who explained: ‘Since we can’t travel or read so much, we have to make life interesting here’. In particular, although migrants from Central Asian capital cities may have ‘sat and cried for two years’ after they arrived in their new home in European Russia, later some tried to recreate, at least in miniature, the ‘more cultured’ worlds they had left behind. A few interviewees had embraced completely new identities, as entrepreneurs. These were, at first glance, identities ‘in transition’. Perhaps ‘embraced’ is not the right metaphor, however, since some respondents were reluctant to shed old identities and values. One librarian mused: should she bring up her son to be good or to be tough? Other respondents or their family members had gone into business and then dropped out, feeling it ‘wasn’t for them’, although it might be argued that they were falling back on excuses connected with identities to explain failures with more prosaic causes. At least they maintained their ‘heroic’ status if they had lost out because of intelligentsia principles. However, for many interviewees, to become an entrepreneur did not imply a proposed complete change in identity: local businessmen were not a race apart but just ‘ordinary people’. Though Russian entrepreneurs in general were often written off as unpleasant exploiters, the small-town businessmen were frequently also cast in the role of sponsors for state institutions and sometimes elected to the local council. The sponsoring and politically powerful enterprise manager was an old, not a new identity. Moreover, neighbours and families still saw businessmen from intelligentsia backgrounds as being members of the intelligentsia, even if the men themselves denied that the label was appropriate. Silverman and Yanowitch note the apparent paradox that many entrepreneurs come from the intelligentsia, yet the Russian business world is hardly seen as ‘civilized’.3 However, it did seem possible for

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a handful of ‘civilized businessmen’ (and women) to survive in the small towns. It would be an exaggeration to speak of an emerging middle class, but middle-class individuals did exist. The emergence of entrepreneurs did not imply that the ‘intelligentsia’ had become an anachronism, and assertions about the ‘death of the Russian intelligentsia’ do not seem applicable to these particular small towns. Respondents, even young ones, still felt that intelligentsia status was relevant, if only as an aspiration. It says much about the complex and paradoxical quality of postcommunism that those respondents who seemed more adapted to postcommunist circumstances were also more likely to choose to describe themselves by the Soviet label ‘intelligentsia’, suggesting continuity with the past. This suggests that they had both responded to the new conditions (creating a more genuine local civil society) and adapted those new conditions to themselves, seeing them as a continuation of the traditional intelligentsia ethic of service to the community. Interviewees who denied themselves the label ‘intelligentsia’ often seemed to be those with failing material livelihood strategies. They could not see themselves as ‘heroes and narrators’ of transition because they could not feed their families and, often, because they were overwhelmed by stress, were more ‘involuted’ and had less social support. The term ‘involution’ can most fruitfully be applied to the small towns with reference to their increasing isolation vis-à-vis the surrounding region, and Russia as a whole. It is sometimes asserted that regional identities are becoming more pronounced in the postcommunist period, and plenty of evidence can be adduced about regional capitals to suggest that this is true. Chapter 8 indicates that smalltown respondents also often accepted the officially endorsed regional identity, and were prone to name the governor as the region’s most important personality. However, they were often less than enthusiastic about these governors, and they doubted whether they particularly had the interests of small towns at heart. Regional identities, as presented officially, were viewed almost as foreign identities: the region was not the same as the small town, but was often identified with the regional capital. ‘They don’t want to know us’ was a common attitude. The regional capital was linked up to the federal centre, from which it derived much of its prosperity, but this cosy relationship (as perceived by small-town residents) excluded the small town. ‘The state stops at Tver’ said one. Similarly, respondents had a love–hate relationship with Moscow. Even more, it seemed, than in the past, the small-town professionals identified ‘Mother Russia’ with the local area, not with the country as it appears on maps, and certainly not with the Kremlin. Moreover, state-building efforts by the federal centre did not seem to have had much of an impact on their sense of Russianness. They did feel more Russian than in the Soviet period, but the main reason was their improved access to Russian culture. This should not necessarily be seen as a small-town attribute; for example, it ties in with Piirainen’s findings about teachers in Petersburg.4 The important point is, however, that ‘culture’ for these small-town respondents was often the culture of the local community: its church, their own Russian literature classes, etc. Russian identity was something

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constructed by them, not offered on a plate by politicians or intellectuals in Moscow.

The influence of the region It has already been suggested that the political complexion of the region did have an impact on civil and political society in the small towns, although the evidence presented in Chapter 7 also suggested that they often failed to vote in the same way as the regional capitals. How much does the region and the regional capital shape livelihoods in the small towns? Some benefits did trickle down in ‘rich’ Sverdlovsk, such as a better bus service and, in 2000, the promise of extra funding to maintain local schools. Local government in Zubtsov, by contrast, had to survive for months without any subsidies from impoverished Tver, and had a poor bus service: a considerable problem for local inhabitants. However, the relative proximity of a very big city could be more important than regional policies and wealth. Cities such as Moscow and Yekaterinburg have larger hinterlands than Penza or Tver. Moscow, in particular, was important to Zubtsov, partly because local men travelled to work in Moscow but also because of the role of Moscow holiday makers. They not only stimulated the economy (rescued it, according to the local historian quoted in Chapter 3), but also contributed to local cultural life. Moreover, the hospital had been modernized thanks to personal links between its manager and a Muscovite dacha owner. Achit was also partly within Yekaterinburg’s dacha zone, but to respondents at least this seemed to have less of an impact than did the presence of a busy roads linking Yekaterinburg with prosperous west Urals regional capitals. Both Zubtsov and Achit had drugs problems and higher crime than Bednodemyanovsk, features which were often linked to the influence of Moscow and Yekaterinburg. By contrast, Bednodemyanovsk seemed to have little to do with Penza city, which was itself a poor and apparently low-crime regional capital. Bednodemyanovsk had no drugs problem and very little crime, by national standards.

The ‘transition’ path When considering the differences between the small towns, it is tempting to plot them at different points along a transition path. It could be argued, for example, that Vishnovka had travelled ‘further’ from the Soviet past than Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk. On the other hand, it could equally well be suggested that the latter three towns were more advanced on the road towards a civil society, if civil society is understood to include trust, good neighbourly relations and a sense of community. In these respects, Achit seemed to trail behind Zubtsov and even further behind Bednodemyanovsk. Nonetheless, if civil society is defined more narrowly as civil society organizations and institutions, Achit seems more ‘postcommunist’ and Bednodemyanovsk very Soviet indeed. This should remind us that civil society is only meaningful if it is defined quite precisely. It is somewhat possible to assess progress with democratization, while recognizing the ‘old but new’ quality of aspects of community participation. Transition

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is, therefore, a partly meaningful term to apply to the process. It is much harder to assess progress in economic transition. The economic transition can only be understood as ‘really existing transition’, just as in Soviet days a distinction was drawn between the socialist ideal and really existing socialism. Really existing transition includes the loss of steady jobs (engineers becoming seasonal construction workers), the growth of crime, drugs, etc. Hence progress is a label hard to apply to much of what was occurring in the two towns. Moreover, there were also many examples of what Rose terms ‘pre-modern networks’ and the ‘archaization’ mentioned by Rodoman. Take, for example, the contrast between the private sectors in Achit and Zubtsov. At first glance it seems as though Achit was more advanced on the road to a market economy, since three-quarters of its retail sector was private, as opposed to half in Zubtsov. However, this was because in Achit the old district food supply organization had been largely destroyed, leaving little in its place. Trade in Achit seemed far less lively than in Zubtsov, and was only 273 rubles per month per capita. Local inhabitants, such as teachers, felt forced to engage in time-consuming food production (milling flour, making cheese) because the bakery and dairy had closed and food imported from outside the district was considered to be too expensive. The most important aspect of changed livelihoods was the reduced significance of income from respondents’ primary jobs. This was, of course, not a particularly small-town phenomenon: the purchasing power of wages declined everywhere in Russia. In the city, however, it was more possible to abandon one’s old job and set up a business, or at least become a private sector employee. Since options to do so were very limited in the small towns, survival strategies acquired a much more prominent role in respondents’ livelihoods. A completely new survival strategy was for policemen to serve in Chechnya. However, in most cases survival strategies changed only in the sense that there was an intensification of old Soviet practices, particularly reliance on relatives and other informal networks, more farming (the acquisition of a potato field as well as a kitchen garden), or more overtime, for doctors and teachers. Migration to the city is also a Soviet strategy, but the need to educate children and ensure their exit from the depressed small town has given migration a new urgency, even while it probably becomes less attainable. None of these four strategies is conducive to creating a more equitable and prosperous local economy.

Livelihood strategies, identities and agency Russian history is replete with examples of rulers who denied the possibility of any agency other than their own. The ideology of the Soviet regime was a Marxism which asserted the fundamental role of economic structures. Today, many observers deny that Russia is a democracy, pointing to the powers of federal and regional leaders and to the gulf between them and the electorate. The respondents themselves frequently expressed a sense of their own powerlessness. One woman suggested that ‘everyone had lost their sense of direction’. Rather than marching along a clearly signposted path to middle-class lifestyles in a modern market economy, the

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professional people interviewed for this book had a sense of going nowhere, being marooned on an ‘island’ in the middle of the Eurasian land mass. Trapped in this classically stressful situation, it would seem that the only certain prospect was to join the mortality statistics. However, as this book has suggested, it is impossible to understand Russia from the top down. The deeper one digs, the more variety is uncovered, at regional, district and even sub-district level. (The countryside surrounding the small towns, with its unpaid rural workers and villages devoid of telephones and powerlines, was quite different in many ways from the towns themselves.) In three tiny towns, 141 individual respondents existed in a micro-world of his or her own household’s making, where the choice of livelihood strategies usually ensured ‘survival’ on at least a basic level. Usually, however, survival was more than a minimum level of physical survival: it included the survival of professional, family and ethnic identities, and the moulding of those identities to fit changing conditions and permit the respondent to see him or herself as a ‘narrator and hero’ of transition. The sum of these decisions is a factor helping to explain the survival of the communities as whole, and ultimately, of Russia. While not denying the role of structures and of decisions made in Moscow, this book has emphasized the role of agency, which is ascribed an important place both by the livelihood strategies approach and in contemporary understandings of identity. A particular merit of this approach is that it allows for focus on ordinary Russian citizens, as well as politicians, and on women as well as men. It is not enough to understand the actions of male politicians in Moscow. Women and men in Zubtsov, Achit and Bednodemyanovsk also contribute to the shaping of postcommunist Russia.

Appendix 1 The interview schedule

The final interview schedule, as used in Bednodemyanovsk and Achit, is translated in the following section. These were the questions which were shown to the respondents. There were also follow-up questions. (For example, if a woman stated that she had been made unemployed, she was asked whether she felt that this was because she was a woman.) Respondents were also asked about their place and date of birth, ethnic identity, current occupation and level of education. The pilot schedule, used in Zubtsov, was similar, although it did not have a section on health and the national identity section was briefer.

A portrait of the small-town intelligentsia Aims and methodology The purpose of the research is to study social change in the Russian provinces, especially the fate of the intelligentsia. How have they survived the 1990s? Three small towns in different regions will be studied. Bednodemyanovsk is the second/ Achit is the third. Fifty respondents will be interviewed in the town. The book and articles based on the research will respect the anonymity of respondents. The research will also include discussions with the heads of the main local institutions where members of the intelligentsia are employed.

Part 1: family and employment 1. Family 1.1 What effect did the political and economic changes of the 1990s have on the composition of your household and the number of breadwinners? For example: ●

● ●

did you or your relatives put off having children because of the difficult economic situation? did relatives come to live with you? was anyone in your family unemployed?

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1.2

Did men’s and women’s roles change, for example, with regard to the distribution of housework? 1.3 If you are a parent, what worries you most, when you think about your children’s future? 2. Main workplace: colleagues 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Where did you work in the 1990s and in what capacity? Has work come to occupy a more central place in your life? If you were without work for a certain period, why and when was this? Are you and your colleagues threatened by unemployment? How do you and your colleagues support one another, materially and emotionally? 2.6 Do you celebrate special occasions together? 2.7 Do you feel that work is, in a certain sense, a ‘rest’ from everyday cares? 3. Health 3.1

3.2 3.3

Have stresses increased in your life over the last few years? If so, would you say that this was connected with the reforms of the 1990s, in the sense that life has become more unpredictable? Does your health suffer from the stresses of everyday life? Have you and your family come to use doctors less?

4. Gardening and additional earnings 4.1

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

You probably have a household plot. (If not, why not?) If you do have a plot, who in the household does most of the work on it and who preserves the harvest? How much time does this take? Does your harvest last until the following year? What proportion of your household’s diet consists of home-produced food? How do you feel about working on your plot? Do you have or have you ever had any additional earnings?

Part 2: identities and attitudes to social change 5. Do you consider yourself to be a member of the intelligentsia and would you describe your family as an intelligentsia one? 5.1 If you are a member of the intelligentsia, when did you become one? 5.2 What do you understand by the term ‘intelligentsia’? 5.3 Do you think that the term is losing its significance in the post-Soviet period?

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5.4 5.5

What influence can the intelligentsia have on a local level? If the term ‘intelligentsia’ is losing significance, is this connected to a lessening of opportunities to spend leisure time on cultural pursuits? 5.6 Perhaps, conversely, there is more access to culture, because the media are freer and more varied than in Soviet days? 5.7 How often do you manage to read professional literature? 5.8 If you do not consider yourself a member of the intelligentsia, to what social group do you belong (if any?) 6. The town 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

How is Bednodemyanovsk/Achit different from other towns? Do you like the town? If you moved here from somewhere else, do you miss your home area? (When did you move to Bednodemyanovsk/Achit?) Do you read the local newspaper or listen to local radio? Do you take part in community life (e.g. at festivities; in voluntary organizations; on electoral commissions)? Do you think that people have started to participate less in community life? Do you think that local society is becoming more stratified and fragmented? Are certain professions gaining or losing status in the town? Do you socialize with local entrepreneurs?

7–8. The region and Russia Since the disintegration of the USSR, both Russia and its regions have acquired new status and, to a certain extent, new identities as well. I am interested in how ordinary Russians experience these changes on the level of their own identity, and also in the components of that identity. 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

8.1

How is Penza/Sverdlovsk Region different from other regions? To what extent are your impressions of the region drawn from the regional media? What kind of regional news interests you most? Have you started travelling more rarely around the region? (Do you have your own car?) Who are the outstanding personalities of Penza/Sverdlovsk Region today? Please comment on Professor Leonid Kogan’s assertion that ‘links between the centre and the regions have ruptured today even more in the cultural sphere than in politics or economics’. If you are not among the youngest respondents, you used to be a citizen of the USSR. You became a citizen of the Russian Federation. Now Russia has its own president, its own army, etc. Russia has also become more ‘Russian’ in culture: for example, there are more publications about Russian history,

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8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

churches have been restored, etc. Which of these and similar changes have the most significance for you? Which media give the most accurate representation of Russian reality? Over the last decade, have you started travelling more rarely around Russia? Have you been abroad? How do you understand the expression ‘Mother Russia’?

Appendix 2 Household composition, livelihoods and identities – five case studies

Chapter 4 presented brief profiles of prospering and poor households in the small towns, focusing on household composition and income. Chapters 5 and 6 discussed coping mechanisms and survival strategies, looking at both economic and health aspects of survival. Survival, as has been shown, is multifaceted, and the interplay of different aspects of survival, and types of strategy, can only really be understood by exploring some households in detail. This appendix, therefore, considers five case studies. The five are not intended to typify all the rest. Nor do I wish to exaggerate the uniquely Russian or ‘small-town’ character of many of the problems described. The respondents were all working in intelligentsia occupations. One was from Zubtsov and two from each of the other towns. The names have been changed but, in case the respondents might, all the same, be recognized, I have glossed over some of their family problems, where these were described to me.

Raya Raya’s household contained no dependants. A single woman, she lived with her mother, a kindergarten teacher. Her father, a driver, had been working in Moscow for six years, although he also spent time at home. Her brother worked in Moscow. Her grandparents lived in a nearby village, and presumably were in a position to help with food. Raya and her parents all worked their small vegetable plot; they grew just enough for their own needs, and had no reason to sell. The combination of money income, including money earned in Moscow, and selfgrown food was sufficient for the three wage-earners, with no dependants, to live comfortably and to spend their leisure time in interesting ways. They travelled ‘a lot’, for example, to the theatre, or to friends in the nearby larger town, and had time to read. Raya claimed not to need to borrow money from her colleagues and to be for most purposes self-sufficient, although her parents helped her sometimes. She also had additional income from writing articles for the newspaper and helping write documents for other people. Raya claimed that their family life had changed little since Soviet days, although she did comment that she liked the fact that there was more individual freedom. Although in Raya’s own interpretation the 1990s had not been a period

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of great upheaval and struggle for survival, nonetheless her father’s move to Moscow does represent a rather drastic survival strategy. The story also illustrates the importance of having a car, to maintain family and social contacts and keep up one’s intelligentsia leisure pursuits.

Kira If Raya’s family conformed to the ‘male breadwinner’ type, and depended mainly on her father’s entrepreneurial strategy for its prosperity, Kira was the main breadwinner and ‘brain’ (golova) in her own family. She did not have a ‘survival strategy’, but earned a reasonable salary at her particularly demanding and stressful managerial job. Her status entitled her to a 10,000 ruble bank loan to move from a wooden cottage into a flat, a loan which she was paying off without any apparent difficulty. Kira suffered from hayfever, which meant that she left her husband to do most of the work on the garden. She also said that she had no time to do it, whereas her husband enjoyed it. She processed mushrooms herself, but she did not like doing the other pickles and jams, so her daughter took care of these. Kira’s husband was her own employee, a handyman. That they got on well was suggested by the fact that she relieved the stress of her demanding job by pouring out her problems to him. They had to support their grandchild and daughter, who lived with them. The daughter, in her third year of unemployment, had a specialized business degree which was useless in the small town. She had tried to set up her own business in the regional centre, but had lacked both capital and good connections in the city. Kira had health problems, but claimed that she was feeling much better after a stay in a sanatorium the year before: a privilege accorded to only one other person in my sample, although there were a number of complaints that the Soviet system of sanatorium holidays had collapsed. It may be concluded that Kira’s status had purchased her goods – a bank loan and elite health care – which were beyond the reach of most of the people interviewed, and also that a happy marriage helped her to survive the stresses of her demanding job. She was well-off by local standards. However, she was not wealthy enough to provide for her daughter in the city.

Sonya Sonya was an equally positive interviewee with an even more onerous burden, a divorced woman supporting her teenage son, pensioner mother and disabled father on an uncertain salary. One of her younger sisters had died; the other was a local teacher with a husband who had been unemployed for five years but had now found a precarious job as a security guard. Sonya seemed to bear some responsibility for maintaining her sister’s family as well as her own. Sonya was an intellectual with more experience of the world than Raya or Kira. She had travelled to the West and widely within the former USSR; had lived and worked in a major city while she was still with her husband; and now, if she managed to get to the regional capital, would save up in advance so as to be able to

Appendix 2

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buy books. In the small town, she kept up an archive of newspaper cuttings and her interest in current affairs, about which she had strong views. For example, she wished she could join a Pacifist Party, and described her main concern as being to find a way to stop her son having to do military service. She was also a believer. Sonya found her work a comfort when she was feeling depressed; she felt that she was a prop for her colleagues, who would come to complain about their husbands and cry on her shoulder. Sonya, who as the eldest of the three sisters had been treated since childhood as a substitute ‘son’, did all the heavy work about the house and was chiefly responsible for the vegetable garden. She baked bread and claimed that the family bought hardly any food. Her friends gave her milk in exchange for Sonya’s own produce. In the past, she had had some secondary employment, sewing and knitting or tutoring schoolchildren. Although all her family had medical problems, she tried as far as possible to avoid the expense of doctors, reading up on home cures and practising her first aid skills. She took part in various community events and sang in a choir. That Sonya was able to maintain such an exhausting regime seemed connected to her positive self-image as an intellectual and a strong person, her sense that ‘other people need me’. The risk of this survival strategy was that she would nonetheless eventually collapse from exhaustion.

Dasha Dasha was equally energetic and equally burdened, but much more bitter, including on the subject of men. ‘Everything depends on women, although the people in power are always men.’ Her recipe for change was to get more women into power. Dasha had been headhunted for her quite senior job because she had the appropriate professional qualification, in fact, quite rarely for this particular small town, a degree from a Moscow institute. Until the early 1990s, Dasha had been a housewife in the Far East; she did not reveal her husband’s job, but the indications were that he was an army officer. The family had presumably been comfortably off. When he retired back to his native village, she found a job as head of the village kindergarten. However, this closed down and the family moved to the small town, although the husband spent the summer with his parents in the village tending their land. She commuted weekly, by foot, carrying bags of food on her back to process at home in the town. Dasha’s problems included an unrewarding job and three school-age daughters. Dasha presented a picture of the family as being extremely poor. Her chief worry about her daughters was how to clothe them; the eldest would have to study at a local technical college, because no other option was affordable; the family could not afford to buy medicine or visit Dasha’s sisters in nearby towns. The only source of additional income was selling spare potatoes, if any were left over. She had no time for secondary employment. Although Dasha’s arrival was welcomed by the local community, she perceived the move as having entailed a drop in status; this situation, the result of a mismatch

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of expectations, seemed, as has already been suggested, quite common among incomers from the Far East or Central Asia. Although the family was fortunate in having access to land in a village – enough land to feed seven people and have some to spare – and a family member who could devote himself full-time to farming it, the location of the land was only rendered tolerable by Dasha’s being willing to cart the food home on her back. In addition to the heavy physical load, caused largely by the absence of a car, she had the psychological load of worries about her family. Despite her large build, she was painfully thin, a fact which she commented on, attributing it to overwork. She said she was not a member of the intelligentsia and the intelligentsia was indeed disappearing, as ‘everyone thinks only about how to feed themselves’. This was someone with a poor self-image who seemed to be coping only at the expense of her own health.

Tanya Tanya was a junior manager with a demanding job in an educational institution who, like Dasha, had a husband who had retired early and was evidently a source of stress. She complained that he had always treated her as a workhorse. Their combined money income was below the subsistence minimum. They lived with their daughter, her (third) common-law husband and a school-age grandchild. Both the daughter and her partner were in semi-intelligentsia jobs. A son and his parter had manual jobs in the city, but no housing and therefore no children. Tanya was upset because she could not supply her son with money or help him buy a flat, but she and her family did feed the son and his partner from their 14 per cent of a hectare in the small town. (In return, he came to help with the harvest.) The family was self-sufficient in vegetables and eggs and also kept cows and pigs. Tanya claimed that all they bought, apart from cattle feed, was flour and sugar on paydays. The family had built their own wooden cottage in the small town, an endeavour on which Tanya felt she had ‘wasted her health’. As an additional survival strategy, the son had considered going back to Chechnya, where he had served as a conscript, but Tanya had persuaded him not to do this. Tanya’s dream livelihood strategy was to keep bees, but she felt that she would have to retire before she could do this. Tanya complained that in Soviet days she had been able to buy consumer goods as well as food on her hundred ruble salary. Now, to buy consumer goods, ‘you have to go hungry’. She was still wearing her Soviet-era clothes. Medicine was expensive and they only used doctors in emergencies. Tanya did, however, visit a village teacher (‘with higher education’) who massaged her bad back. Tanya’s still felt nostalgic for her home village, where her parents had been peasants. Like many other respondents, she said she had become a teacher because the teacher was the most respected figure in the Soviet village. However, she denied that she was a member of the intelligentsia: she did too much manual labour for that to be true.

Notes

Introduction 1 Calculated from N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet raiona utverzhden – s defitsitom 34 protsenta!’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 16 April 1999, p. 6. 2 See V. Godin and A. Miroshkin, Bednodem’yanovsk, Saratov: Privolzhskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1980, pp. 22–3. 3 The district (raion) is a sub-regional administrative unit. 4 Of course, there are also economically depressed small towns in the West; see, for example, P.V. Schaeffer and S. Loveridge (eds), Small Town and Rural Economic Development: A Case Studies Approach, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. 5 ‘Introductory words at the meeting on problems of developing small towns in Russia’ and ‘Excerpts from a meeting on problems of developing small towns in Russia’, Johnson’s Russia List, 7257, 16–17, 20 July 2003, [email protected], accessed 21 July 2003, quoting Putin’s official website, www.president.kremlin.ru, 17 July 2003. Putin’s short stay in a small town was described by the national newspaper Kommersant as a visit ‘to the aborigines’, illustrating the gulf between the capital and the provinces. Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Sel’skii chas Vladimira Putina’, Kommersant, 18 July 2003. 6 Exceptions include S. Ashwin, ‘ “There’s no joy anymore”: the experience of reform in a Kuzbass mining settlement’, Europe–Asia Studies, 47, 8, 1995; Moran and Pallot’s studies of forestry settlements in northern Perm Region (see Bibliography for four titles); and P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change in Russia, Cheltenham: Elgar, 2000, which looks within regions to some extent. 7 M. Kundera, ‘A kidnapped West, or culture bows out’, Granta, 11, 1984, p. 99. 8 RSE 2000, Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000, p. 164. 9 F. Ellis, Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 231. See also pp. 7–10 for discussion of different definitions of ‘livelihoods’ within the poverty/rural development literature. 10 N. Kanji, ‘Trading and trade-offs: women’s livelihoods in Gorno–Badakhshan, Tajikistan’, Development in Practice, 12, 2, 2002, p. 140. 11 R. Rose, Modern, Pre-Modern and Anti-Modern Social Capital in Russia, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1999, p. 28. 12 S. Clarke, New Forms of Employment and Household Survival Strategies, Coventry: University of Warwick, Centre for Comparative Labour Studies and Moscow: ISITO, 1999, with reference to vegetable growing in Russian cities; R.E. Pahl and C. Wallace, ‘Household work strategies in economic recession’, in N. Redclift and E. Mingione (eds), Beyond Employment: Household, Gender and Subsistence, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, with reference to self-provisioning on the Isle of Sheppey. 13 F. Pine and S. Bridger (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses, London: Routledge, 1998, Introduction.

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14 M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Involution and destitution in capitalist Russia’, Ethnography, 1, 1, 2000; Clarke, op. cit. 15 O. Shevchenko, ‘ “Between the holes”: emerging identities and hybrid patterns of consumption in post-socialist Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 54, 6, 2002. 16 See, for example, M. Kiblitskaya, ‘Russia’s female breadwinners’, in S. Ashwin, Gender, State and Society in Post-Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 2000. 17 D. Vannoy et al., Marriages in Russia: Couples During the Economic Transition, Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999. 18 Burawoy, Krotov and Lytkina, op. cit., p. 61. 19 A.V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Ashwin, op. cit. 20 V. Shkol’nikov, E. Andreev and T. Maleva, Neravenstvo i smertnost’ v Rossii, Moscow: Carnegie Centre, 2000; J. Shapiro, ‘The Russian mortality crisis and its causes’, in A. Aslund (ed.), Russian Economic Reform at Risk, London: Pinter, 1995. 21 See, for example, R. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, Chapter 1. 22 F. Pine, ‘Retreat to the household: gendered domains in postsocialist Poland’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 96, 106. 23 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage, 1996, p. 4. 24 See, for example, G.W. Lapidus and E.W. Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and federalism: center-periphery relations in post-communist Russia’, in G.W. Lapidus (ed.), The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, Boulder: Westview, 1995; V. Tolz, ‘Forging the nation: national identity and nation building in post-communist Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies 50, 6, 1998. 25 See, for example, M. Gessen, Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism, London: Verso, 1997, and a vast Russian literature, some of which is mentioned in the notes to Chapter 6. 26 B. Silverman and M. Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism (expanded edition), Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, Chapter 6. 27 For example, M.A. Weigle, Russia’s Liberal Project: State–Society Relations in the Transition from Communism, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000; G. Gill and R. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 28 Simon Smith, ‘Civil society formation in post-communist East-Central Europe as narrativisation’, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference, Cambridge, April 7–9, 2001. 29 V.V. Rodoman, ‘Prostranstvennaya polyarizatsiya i pereorientatsiya’ in T. Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial’noi sfery i sotsial’naya politika, Moscow: Delo, 1998, pp. 179–80. 30 Rose, op. cit. 31 Calculations based mostly on information about numbers of staff from managers of the institutions concerned. 32 S. Aleksandrov, ‘O Zubtsove uslyshit Evropa’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 13 April 1999, p. 1. 33 For detailed criticism of the economic statistics, see, for example, J. Klugman and J.D. Braithwaite, ‘Introduction and overview’, in J. Klugman (ed.), Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997 and, on poverty in particular, Nataliya Rimashevskaya, ‘Poverty trends in Russia: a Russian perspective’, in ibid. 34 ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya 2002 goda’, Voprosy statistiki, 5, 2003, p. 3 and ‘Internet-konferentsiya predsedatelya Goskomstata Rossii V.L. Sokolina’, Voprosy statistiki, 6, 2003, p. 55. A micro-census was conducted in 1994.

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51

52 53 54

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In summer 2003, when the final version of this manuscript was typed, Goskomstat had released only the most basic population statistics from the 2002 census. This meant, for example, that there was no up-to-date information about what percentage of the local populations had higher education, hence it was impossible to use this method to identify the intelligentsia. RLMS is conducted by the Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology, Moscow, with assistance from the University of North Carolina. I went over the figures with one of the staff, who did her best to find out the reason for the discrepancy, but remained unable to explain it. J.P. Cole, Geography of the Soviet Union, London: Butterworth, 1984, p. 277. B. Khorev, ‘The problems of small cities and the policy of stimulating small-city growth’, Soviet Geography Review and Translation, 15, 5, 1974, pp. 263–73, cited by Cole, op. cit., p. 277. M. Draganova, P. Starosta and V. Stolbov, ‘Sotsial’naya identifikatsiya zhitelei sel’skikh poselenii i malykh gorodov Vostochnoi Evropy’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2002, p. 58. M. Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1972, p. 25. Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 74–5. Data for villages is given only from 1959. See ibid., p. 76. Reclassification (known as ATP, administrativno-territorial’nye preobrazovaniya) accounted for about 7 per cent of urban growth in 1969–89. (Calculated from Yu. Simyagin, ‘Sootnoshenie gorodskogo i sel’skogo naseleniya v Rossii (1991–1997 gg.)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 2000, p. 66. See RSE 1998, pp. 132–3. The figure includes poselki. Some idea can be gained from the relative numbers of districts, towns and poselki, listed in RSE 2000, pp. 26–7. Although normally I have tried not to burden the English-speaking reader with Russian plurals, the anglicized plural poseloks is so ugly that I have used the Russian form. In the context of this discussion about types of town, it seems important, for the purposes of precision, not to translate poselok as ‘small town’, although in later chapters I have done so. ‘Settlements’ gives the wrong impression. G. Ioffe and T. Nefedova, ‘Rural Population Change and Agriculture’, in G.J. Demko, G. Ioffe and Z. Zayonchkovskaya (eds), Population under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia, Boulder: Westview, 1999, p. 236. The regional statistical handbooks used in Chapter 2 tended, on the whole, to confirm Ioffe and Nefedova’s conclusion. D. Sutherland, M. Bradshaw and P. Hanson, ‘Regional dynamics of economic restructuring across Russia’, in P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw (eds), op. cit., p. 68. Matthews, op. cit., p. 29. Khorev, op. cit., cited in Cole, op. cit., p. 278. For example, Verkhnyaya Sinyachikha (pop. 11,200) in central Sverdlovsk Region, was held up as an example of a flourishing industrial town by governor Eduard Rossel. The woodprocessing factory had been revived, and in September 2000 exported all its produce to the United States. E. Rossel’, ‘Sama zhizn’ podgotovila menya k rabote gubernatora’, Ural’skaya zhizn’, 9–15 September 2000, p. 2. See J. Murray, Politics and Place-Names: Changing Names in the late Soviet Period, Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2000. G. Luchterhandt, S. Ryzhenkov and A. Kuz’min, Politika i kul’tura v rossiiskoi provintsii, Moscow/St Petersburg: IGPI/Letnii Sad, 2001, p. 74. See Murray, op. cit., p. 22. During the debates on renaming which took place under Gorbachev, ‘Bednodemyanovsk’ was criticized on linguistic grounds, since it was held inadmissable to place a surname before a first name in this fashion (distorting the surname as well).

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55 In this general sense, ‘region’ in English reproduces the Russian word region. Oblast, krai and okrug are just different labels for ‘administrative unit’; ‘republic’ has more politically pretentious connotations. The different terms indicate an area’s ethnic composition. The 50 oblasts are usually overwhelmingly ethnically Russian (including the uniquely titled Jewish ‘autonomous oblast’ of Birobidzhan); the 21 republics, 10 ‘autonomous okrugs’ (AO) and six krais have larger non-Russian populations than do the oblasts. A krai has a very ethnically mixed population. Okrug and ‘republic’ usually denote a region with one large non-Russian ethnic group, which gives the region its name. Except for Chukotka, opposite Alaska, the okrugs are all incorporated within larger oblasts. Russians were, at the time of the 1989 census, the largest single group in all but 11 of these 32 units named for non-Russian groups. (Dagestan, which lacks any large group, is included in the 11.) The cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg also have the status of independent regions and are separate from Moscow and Leningrad oblasts. 56 Raion also means a rural district or city borough. 57 See, for example, Lapidus and Walker, op. cit., p. 83. 58 On their complicated relationship, see, for example, P. Hanson et al, ‘Federal government responses to regional economic change’, in P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw, op. cit. 59 See P. Reddaway and R.W. Orttung (eds), The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Federal-Regional Reforms, vol, 1, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. For a recent discussion of the literature on regional politics, see also V. Gel’man, Politics Beyond the Ring Road: Rethinking the Soviet Experience, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2002. 1 Socio-economic and demographic trends in Russia and its regions 1 Most of this chapter discusses those regions which are independent administrative units; in practice this means 78 not 79, since there is little data on Chechnya. The only autonomous okrug (AO) defined as a separate region, and discussed as such, is Chukotka, which is not incorporated within a wider region. The remaining AOs, ethnic minority areas which are constituent parts of wider regions, frequently have extremely poor indicators. Excluding the two AOs in Tyumen Region, which have tiny non-Slav/Tatar populations, average infant mortality in the AOs in 1999 was 23.1 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 19.1 for the regions as a whole. (19.1 is a figure which includes both the more and the less Russian parts of the AOs, so the areas with a more Russian population had a rate lower than 19.1 deaths per 1,000.) In 1999, 70 per cent of the AO populations lived below the official poverty line, as compared with 29.9 per cent in Russia nationally (using the unadjusted figures published in 2000) and 42.1 per cent in the wider regions. Several AOs had worse indicators than those in Russia’s poorest regions, such as Tyva and Ingushetia. Infant mortality was 40.3 in Evenk and 96.8 per cent of the population of Aga Buryat AO lived below the official poverty line. Aga Buryat AO could claim to be the ‘worst’ region. Poverty here was the deepest in Russia and long-term unemployment particularly widespread. Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Rossii 2000, Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000, pp. 48–50, 60–2, 199–201; Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000, pp. 52–3; RSE 2000, Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000, pp. 106–11, 159–60. ‘Tendentsii na rynke truda v 2001 godu’, Voprosy statistiki, 9, 2002, p. 11. 2 For discussion of why some regions prosper more than others, problems with the data, and how to identify richer and poorer regions, see, for example, P. Hanson, ‘Regional income differences’, in B. Granville and P. Oppenheimer (eds), Russia’s PostCommunist Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change in Russia, Cheltenham: Elgar, 2000; and S.N. Smirnov, Regional’nye aspekty sotsial’noi politiki, Moscow: Gelios ARV, 1999. M. Karyshev, ‘Sotsial’naya bezopasnost’ Rossii: regional’nyi aspekt statisticheskoi

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3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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otsenki’, Voprosy statistiki, 2, 2003, gives averages and coefficients of variation for 19 indicators in 2002. Vladimir Gel’man, Politics Beyond the Ring Road: Rethinking the post-Soviet Experience, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2002 (studies in Public Policy 367), p. 24. O. Dmitrieva, Regional Development: The USSR and After, London: University College Press, 1996, chs 3 and 5; J. Klugman and J.D. Braithwaite, ‘Introduction and Overview’, in J. Klugman (ed.), Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997. Ibid., p. 7. Hanson, op. cit., p. 419. RSE 2000, pp. 157–8; RSE 2002, pp. 189–90. Dmitrieva, op. cit., p. 32, produces figures which suggest that ‘the whole country [the USSR] was a colony of Moscow city’. Compare the the regional groupings at the end of this chapter with those for 1988 in Dmitrieva, op. cit., pp. 81–5. Other substantial displacements, in the Urals/central European area, were Volgograd, Saratov and Penza (down) and Moscow Region, Tyumen, Perm and Bashkortostan (up). World Bank, Making Transition Work for Everyone: Poverty and Inequality in Europe and Central Asia, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000, pp. 38–40, explains the different approaches used to calculate poverty in Russia and the respective merits of Goskomstat and the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, and presents various different sets of figures, all of which show an increase towards the end of the decade. On methodological issues, see also various works on poverty by Klugman listed in the Bibliography. Goskomstat figures are in RSE 2002, p. 190. RSE 2001, p. 204, explains the new methodology. ‘K svedeniyu’, Gorodok (Krasnoufimsk), 1 September 2000, p. 9. In 1999 the subsistence minimum ranged from 748 rubles in southern Kalmykia to 3,098 in Chukotka; prices are higher in the Far East, and Chukotka, opposite Alaska, is a long way from sources of the cheap vegetables which do much to fill the baskets on which the minima are largely based. (RSE 2000, pp. 159–60.) No data for regional purchasing power or poverty levels was available for 2000. In 2001 the highest and lowest subsistence minima listed in Goskomstat’s incomplete table were again in the the Far East: (Kamchatka); and the South (Karachaevo–Cherkess Republic): 3,050 and 1,212 rubles, respectively. RSE 2002, p. 190. RSE 2000, p. 163. RSE 2000, pp. 157–8; Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Rossii 2003, pp. 160–1. Sotsial’noe polozhenie . . . naseleniya Rossii, 2000 op. cit. p. 199. Regiony Rossii 2001 (Goskomstat 2001), 2, pp. 130–1. RSE 2002, p. 200. 59 per cent and 49 per cent of the 1990 figure, respectively. Calculated from RSE 2002. RSE 2000, p. 410. RSE 2002, pp. 201–2. The years of comparison are 1993 for heating and 1990 for gas. RSE 2002, p. 202. N. Podvoiskii, ‘Vsemu nachalo – golova’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 February 1999, p. 1. Calculated from RSE 2002, p. 459. Calculated from RSE 2001, pp. 193–4. RSE 2002, p. 194. Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 181–2 and RSE 2002, p. 209. In 1990 there had been 108 children to every 100 places; in 2001 there were 83. See S.L. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. RSE 2000, p. 186. RSE 2002, p. 209.

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31 RSE 2002, p. 209. These colleges provided a full vocational (srednee spetsial’noe) education, not the ‘primary’ vocational education offered by the vocational school (professional’noe uchilishche (PU)) as an alternative to the final classes of the general education school. 32 For example, Leont’eva, writing in 1994, concluded that ‘the pointlessness of getting an education has become a well-entrenched social stereotype’. V. Leont’eva, ‘Obrazovanie kak fenomen kul’turotvorchestva’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 1995, p. 139. 33 L. Rubina and S. Airepetova, ‘Mozhet li sotsiologiya pomoch’ v formirovanii sotsial’nogo zakaza na obrazovanie?’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 2000, p. 83, and S. Clarke, New Forms of Employment and Household Survival Strategies, Coventry: University of Warwick, Centre for Comparative Labour Studies and Moscow: ISITO, 1999, p. 48, conclude that employers in the private sector prefer to take on highly qualified workers even for unskilled jobs. 34 Calculated from RSE 2000, p. 204; RSE 2002, p. 232. 35 RSE 2002, p. 209. 36 629,500 students were enrolled in 387 private universities and 4,797,400 in 621 state universities. RSE 2002, p. 209. 37 G. Rudenko and A. Savelov, ‘Spetsifika polozheniya molodezhi na rynke truda’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 2002, p. 106. 38 ‘Informatsiya: Rezul’taty oprosov’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, March–April 2003, p. 98. 39 J.L. Twygg, ‘Russian health care reform at regional level: status and impact’, PostSoviet Geography and Economics, 42, 3, 2001, p. 202. 40 Ibid., pp. 211–12. 41 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 52–3; RSE 2002, p. 127. 42 Sotsial’noe polozhenie . . . naseleniya Rossii, op. cit., pp. 32–3. 43 UNICEF, A Decade of Transition, Florence: UNICEF, 2001, p. 146. 44 See C. Williams, AIDS in Post-Communist Russia and its Successor States (sic), Aldershot: Avebury, 1995; D.E. Powell, ‘The problem of AIDS’ and J.M. Kramer, ‘Drug abuse in Post-Communist Russia’, both in M.G. Field and J.L. Twigg (eds), Russia’s Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare During the Transition, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. 45 L. Shelley, ‘Crime and corruption’ in S. White, A. Pravda and Z. Gitelman (eds), Developments in Russian Politics 5, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 46 Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Rossii 2003, pp. 415–6 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 260; RSE 2000, p. 243. 47 RSE 2002, p. 273; A. Zhandarov, ‘Analiz vzaimosvyazei pokazatelei prestupnosti v regionakh Rossii’, Voprosy statistiki, 8, 2002, p. 59. 48 ‘O narkoprestupnosti i narkomanii v Rossii’, Voprosy statistiki, 12, 2002, p. 60; Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 439–41. Figures for 2000 were, per 100,000 population: Samara 322.7, Novosibirsk 301.4, St. Petersburg 300.3, Chukotka 11.3, Kirov 49.5, Ivanovo 52.0. 49 Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’zhizni naseleniya Rossii 2003, pp. 415–7 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 260–1; Zhandarov, op. cit., p. 59. 50 L. Shelley, ‘Urbanization and crime: the Soviet experience’, in H.W. Morton and R.C. Stuart (eds), The Contemporary Soviet City, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984, p. 124. 51 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Transition Report 2001, p. 61 and Transition Report update, May 2003, London: EBRD, p. 79. 52 Ibid., pp. 59, 2001 and 79, 2003. 53 RSE 2002, p. 344. 54 Of the eight which failed to do so, four were in central European Russia, two in Siberia and one each in the Urals and the Far East. RSE 2002, pp. 344–5. 55 RSE 2001, pp. 338–9. In 2001, eight regions, and the whole Far Eastern Okrug, failed to grow industrially. The Southern Okrug became the fastest growing. RSE 2002, pp. 344–5. 56 OECD Economic Surveys 2001–2: Russian Federation, Paris: OECD, 2002, pp. 29, 32.

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57 RSE 2002, p. 408. In 2001 the percentage was 46 per cent. 58 See, for example, C.S. Leonard and E. Serova, ‘The reform of agriculture’ in Granville and Oppenheimer, op. cit. 59 RSE 2002, p. 408. In 2001 it was 66.4 million. 60 For a discussion of the problems connected with calculating ‘GRP’, and its incomplete nature, see A. Granberg and Yu. Zaitseva, ‘Mezhregional’nye sopostavleniya valovogo regional’nogo produkta v Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Voprosy statistiki, 2, 2003. 61 OECD, op. cit., p. 78. 62 Clarke, op. cit., p. 23. 63 Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 54–5 (populations); RSE 2001, pp. 321–2 (numbers of employees). 64 Clarke, op. cit., p. 24. 65 See Regiony Rossii, 1 (individual regional entries); for discussion, see Granberg and Zaitseva, op. cit., pp. 10–11. 66 RSE 2002, p. 187. In 2001 the percentages were 124 per cent and 40 per cent. 67 Ibid., p. 188. In 2001 the figures were: textile workers, 1,993 rubles, iron and steelworkers, 8,091 rubles. 68 Ibid., p. 187. 69 Zhenshchiny i muzhchiny Rossii 2002, Moscow: Goskomstat, 2002, pp. 105–8. 70 On inequality in the Brezhnev period, see, for example, M. Yanowitch, Social and Economic Inequality in the Soviet Union, London: Martin Robinson and New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1977. 71 J. Klugman and S. Marnie, ‘Poverty’, in Granville and Oppenheimer, op. cit., p. 462. 72 For Gini coefficients higher than Goskomstat’s, in 1994–8, see OECD, The Social Crisis in the Russian Federation, Paris: OECD, 2001, p. 35. (0.623 before social transfers, 0.531 after, in 1998.) 73 Clarke, op. cit., p. 97. 74 See D. Javeline, Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 75 Sotsial’noe polozhenie . . . naseleniya Rossii 2000, op. cit., p. 111. 76 For figures, see RSE 2002, p. 161. For discussion of why enterprises and workers behave in this, at first glance, distinctly odd manner, see, for example, Walter Connor, ‘New world of work: employment, unemployment and adaptation’ in Field and Twigg, op. cit. 77 Comments on the problems of villagers from E. Cherepanov, Achit Employment Office. 78 The coefficient of variation for survey-based unemployment estimates, according to M. Karyshev, ‘Sotsial’naya bezopasnost’ Rossii: regional’nyi aspekt statisticheskoi otsenki’, Voprosy statistiki, 2, 2003, p. 42, was 0.41 in the first half of 2002 (for 77 (actually 76?) regions, excluding worst case Dagestan and Ingushetia). 79 As in Map 1.1, the North Caucasus (including Astrakhan) has been excluded; so have Tyumen and the far northern regions, except Vologda. Only in 1994 did as many as half of the European regions have unemployment at or above the Russian average. 80 Belgorod, Lipetsk, Tula, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Tatarstan and Nizhnii Novgorod. 81 RSE 2002, p. 134. 82 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 88. 83 See Clarke, op. cit., New Forms of Employment and Household Survival Strategies, pp. 35–7, p. 52. 84 For example, this is the starting assumption in L. Babaeva, ‘Zhenshchiny: aktual’nye napravleniya sotsial’noi politiki’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7, 1997. 85 Calculated from data in ‘Tendentsii na rynke truda v 2001 godu’, Voprosy statistiki, 9, 2002, pp. 5, 8, 10. In the same month, 8.5 per cent of working-age women were unemployed (ibid.). 86 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 91.

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87 RSE 2002, pp. 145, 147. 88 Under 5 per cent in seventeen regions. Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 89–90. RSE 2002, p. 146, gives the figures 7.0 per cent for 1999 and 2000, and 8.6 per cent for 2001. 89 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 89. 90 M.C. Foley and J. Klugman, ‘The impact of social support: errors of leakage and exclusion’, in Klugman, op. cit., p. 191. 91 For discussion of how this system was extended and made more responsive to need during perestroika, see A. White, Democratization in Russia under Gorbachev: The Birth of a Voluntary Sector. 92 Calculated from RSE 2002, pp. 199–200; RSE 2000, p. 170, has different figures. 93 J. Klugman and A. McAuley, ‘Social policy for single-parent families: Russia in transition’, in J. Klugman and A. Motivans (eds), Single Parents and Child Welfare in the New Russia, Basingstoke: Palgrave and UNICEF, 2001, p. 144. 94 For explanation of the causes, see C. Buckley and D. Donahue, ‘Promises to keep: pension provision in the Russian Federation’, in Field and Twigg, op. cit., p. 265. 95 For example, Moscow City pensions were only 55 per cent of the subsistence minimum in 1999, rising to 67.5 per cent in 2002. RSE 2000, pp. 161–2; RSE 2002, p. 189. 96 K. Mazur, ‘Krem dlya nog na zavtrak’ (‘Footcream for Breakfast’), EvropaAziya, 14–20 August 2000. 97 See A. White, op. cit. 98 For utility bills subsidies, for instance, see Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Rossii 2000, op. cit., pp. 249–51. Rich regions were paying much more widespread subsidies than poor ones. 99 See, for example, the result of household budget surveys reported in Uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Penzenskoi oblasti, Penza: Goskomstat, 1999, p. 108; Itogi obsledovaniya domashnikh khozyaistv za 1997–1999 gody, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 2000, p. 41; Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Voronezhskoi oblasti 2001, Voronezh: Goskomstat, 2001, pp. 59, 67. For similar conclusions, based on Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey data, see S. Missikhina, ‘Sotsial’nye posobiya, l’goty i vyplaty v Rossiiskoi Federatsii’ (Moscow: TACIS, 1999), reported in OECD, The Social Crisis in the Russian Federation, Paris: OECD, 2001, p. 21. 100 The term dacha implies an allotment separate from the main dwelling, often containing a summer house or shack. In some regions, the term is used only for elite summer houses, not smallholdings. 101 RSE 2002, p. 409. 102 For example, this is the situation in northern Perm Region. J. Pallot, ‘Forced labour for forestry: the twentieth-century history of colonisation and settlement in the north of Perm’ Oblast’ ’, Europe–Asia Studies, 54, 7, 2002. 103 Calculated from Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie gorodov i raionov Respubliki Komi, Syktyvkar: Goskomstat, 2001, p. 187. 104 Calculated from RSE 2000, p. 365. 105 ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya’, Voprosy statistiki, 5, 2003, p. 3. Readjustment of the earlier figures, in the light of the census data, has been promised for 2004. ‘Internet-konferentsiya predsedatelya Goskomstata Rossii’, Voprosy statistiki, 6, 2003, p. 55. Most of this section is based on unadjusted figures published in RSE. 106 North-West, Central and Central-Black Earth. See RSE 2000, pp. 76–97. 107 RSE 2002, pp. 109–24. 108 Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’zhizni naseleniya Rossii, op. cit., p. 44; RSE 2002, p. 125. 109 I. Zbarskaya, ‘Child and family welfare in Russia: trends and indicators’, Background paper prepared for UNICEF Regional Monitoring Report no. 8, A Decade of Transition, Florence: UNICEF, 2001, p. 6. 110 See P.H. Juviler, ‘The urban family and the Soviet state: emerging contours of a demographic policy’, in Morton and Stuart, op. cit., on urban–rural differences.

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111 V. Peredeventsev, ‘The demographic situation in post-Soviet Russia’, in G.J. Demko, G. Ioffe and Z. Zayonchkovskaya (eds), Population under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia, Boulder: Westview, 1999, pp. 25–7. 112 Ibid. 113 RSE 2000, p. 97. 114 Vella also points out the connection with ‘Soviet planning policies that promoted an increase in production and consumption of meat and dairy products.’ V. Vella, ‘Health and nutritional aspects of well-being’, in Klugman, op. cit., p. 97. 115 W.C. Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe, London: Routledge, 1999. p. 91. Cockerham, unlike Vella, does not emphasize rising prosperity as a factor. 116 M.G. Field, ‘The health and demographic crisis in Post-Soviet Russia’, in Field and Twigg, op. cit., p. 25. 117 Ibid., p. 35. 118 V. Shkol’nikov, E. Andreev and T. Maleva, Neravenstvo i smertnost’ v Rossii, Moscow: Carnegie Centre, 2000. 119 Ibid., p. 99; J. Shapiro, ‘The Russian mortality crisis and its causes’ in A. Aslund (ed.), Russian Economic Reform at Risk, London: Pinter, 1995; M. Bobak et al., ‘Socioeconomic factors, perceived control and self-reported health in Russia’, in M. Bobak et al., Surveying the Health of Russians, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1998, p. 6. Bobak et al. refer to G. Cornia’s finding, based on geographical analysis, of ‘a strong correlation between the deline [in] life expectancy and increase in “psychosocial stress” ’. (G.A. Cornia, Labour Market Shocks, Psychosocial Stress and the Transition’s Mortality Crisis. Research in Progress 4 Working Paper (sic). (Helsinki, United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, 1997).) 120 For a full study, see H. Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in PostSoviet Russia, London: Routledge, 1998. 121 For details, see T. Heleniak, ‘Internal migration in Russia during the economic transition’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 38, 2, 1997; J. Burke, ‘Internal migration: a civil society challenge’ in Field and Twigg, op. cit.; Z. Zayonchkovskaya, ‘Recent migration trends in Russia’ in Demko, Ioffe and Zayonchkovskaya, op. cit. 122 For analysis of this situation in Perm, see articles by Moran and Pallot listed in the Bibliography. 123 As defined earlier in the chapter: see note 79. 124 Calculated from RSE 2002, pp. 84–6 and ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi’, op. cit., pp. 5–7. 125 See, for example, S. Zakharov, ‘Fertility, nuptiality, and family planning in Russia: problems and prospects’, in Demko et al., op. cit., p. 49. 126 RSE 2000, p. 99. 127 Juviler, op. cit., p. 97. 128 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 62–3. 129 RSE 2002, p. 127. 130 See, for example, Perevedentsev, op. cit., ‘The demographic situation in Post-Soviet Russia’, on modernization. The trend towards more informal and non-standard family structures is naturally the subject of considerable (often anti-Western) rhetoric. For an interesting angle on the impact of popular culture on the family, see O. Lebed’, Yu. Dudina and E. Kulikova, ‘Imidzh sem’i v sovremennykh pesnyakh’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 4, 2002, pp. 121–3. 131 RSE 2002, p. 125. 132 A. Motivans, ‘Family formation, stability and structure in Russia’ and other chapters in Klugman and Motivans, op. cit.. 133 RSE 2000, pp. 599–600. 134 RSE 2000, pp. 62–3. The regions were Kamchatka, Chukotka, Magadan, Taimyr, Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets. The handbooks consulted for Chapter 2 showed that

230

135 136 137 138 139

140

Notes men outnumbered women in most cities/districts in Primore, and in Komi, in nearly half. Sotsial’naya sfera gorodov i raionov Primorskogo kraya, Vladivostok: Goskomstat, 2001, p. 11; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie . . . Komi, op. cit., pp. 14–64. Sotsial’noe polozhenie . . . naseleniya Rossii 2000, p. 45. ‘Osnovnya itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya 2002 goda’, Voprosy statistiki, 1, 2004, p. 9. Zbarskaya, op. cit., p. 8. RSE 2002, p. 255. RSE 2002, p. 212. More indicators are considered for the rankings in Smirnov, op. cit.; Karyshev, op. cit.; Zykova et al., ‘Analiz reitingovoi otsenki regionov Privolzhskogo federalnogo okruga 2000, 2001 gg.’, Voprosy statistiki, 3, 2003 (though Karyshev and Zykova fail to consider GRP and poverty levels, perhaps for lack of data). I have confined my calculations to the most basic indicators, on the grounds that others are too hard to interpret: is population growth, for example, ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Unemployment rates have been excluded, because they are quite inconsistent from year to year. These are not exact quartiles. It seemed more sensible to draw the lines where there were larger gaps in the numbers.

2 Characteristics of small towns across Russia: sub-regional variation in living standards and population trends 1 T. Nefedova and A. Treivish, ‘Dinamika i sostoyanie gorodov v kontse XX veka’, in T. Nefedova, P. Polyan and A. Treivish, Gorod i derevnya v Evropeiskoi Rossii:sto let, Moscow: OGI, 2001. (Electronic copy supplied by T. Nefedova.) 2 Ibid., p. 14; P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change in Russia, Conclusions, Cheltenham: Elgar, 2000, p. 252. By ‘real income’ Hanson and Bradshaw mean money income as a percentage of the price of a basket of foodstuffs used by Goskomstat to monitor local price variation. 3 S. Clarke, The Formation of a Labour Market in Russia, Cheltenham: Elgar, 1999, pp. 40–1. 4 A.B. Evans, Jr., ‘Economic resources and political power at the local level in postSoviet Russia’ Policy Studies Journal, 28, 1, 2000, pp. 126–7. 5 V. Gel’man, Politics Beyond the Ring Road: Rethinking the post-Soviet Experience, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2002, p. 24, citing L. Gil’chenko, Kompetentsiya mestnogo samoupravleniya: samostoyatel’nost v tochno ustanovlennykh predelakh. Paper presented at the seminar of the Center for Strategic Development (sic) (www.scr.ru/conferences/gil.htm.). 6 ‘Introductory words at the meeting on problems of developing small towns in Russia’ and ‘Excerpts from a meeting on problems of developing small towns in Russia’, Johnson’s Russia List, 7257, 16–17, 20 July 2003, [email protected], accessed 21 July 2003, quoting Putin’s official website, www.president.kremlin.ru, 17 July 2003; Evans, op. cit., p. 114. 7 Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, yanvar’-iyul’ 2000 goda, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 2000, pp. 118–9. 8 N. Volodina, ‘Detskie posobiya: naznachenie i vyplata’, Vestnik, 7 April 2000, p.1. Child benefit had been paid from the regional budget until January 1997. Bednodemyanovsk owed 809 rubles per child in January 1999. (Ibid., pp. 1–2.) On the economies of the indebted small towns, see Geograficheskii atlas Penzenskoi oblasti, Penza and Moscow: Penza Region Education Department et al., 1998, pp. 32, 43–4. 9 Tverskaya oblast v tsifrakh, Tver: Tver Statistical Committee, 2001, p. 110; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, op. cit., pp. 112–3. 10 My selection is determined by what statistical handbooks I was able to purchase in Voronezh, Moscow and Yekaterinburg. The Sverdlovsk data were very limited.

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11 Methodological note: Ideally, for differently sized towns within a given region, it would be possible to produce tables like Tables 3.1 and 3.2, which look at Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions across a range of indicators. Then one could compare towns across the same range of indicators as those offered for comparison of regions in national handbooks. This cannot be done. There are various reasons why the regionally produced data are less useful than the national handbooks: for example, regionally published data hardly ever refer to smaller towns within districts; much information is available only for the region as a whole, since it is drawn from regional surveys; and regional handbooks often confine themselves to reproducing raw numbers. Closed cities complicate the picture. Regional statistical handbooks generally give only scanty demographic information about them, or ignore them completely. Such cities may be quite large, and although they may also be somewhat isolated from the local economy, they are not irrelevant, since, for example, they may serve as magnets for in-migration from within the wider region. (On closed cities, see R.H. Rowland, ‘Russia’s secret cities’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 37, 7, 1996.) In view of the imperfections of the data what follows is intended only as a sketch. 12 Different regions presented different indicators. Those available included registered, but not survey-based estimates of unemployment, which I have used, reluctantly. I excluded indicators which seemed likely to overlap. For example, I never included both new housing and out-migration – although there is not an exact correlation between fewer houses and more population loss. Primore was the only region to provide data on expenditure; this bore so little relation to money income that both were included. The indicators were: Arkhangelsk: infant mortality, dilapidated housing, wages, out-migration; Khabarovsk: infant mortality, new housing, wages, car ownership, retail trade, industrial growth; Kirov: infant mortality, new housing, wages, car ownership, retail trade, unemployment, suicides; Komi: infant mortality, new housing, industrial growth, wages, car ownership, retail trade, unemployment; Primore: infant mortality, new housing, money income, expenditure, social transfers, retail trade; Sverdlovsk: infant mortality, new housing, unemployment, industrial growth; Voronezh: infant mortality, new housing, industrial growth, wages, car ownership. The sources were: Ekonomika i sotsial’naya sfera Arkhangel’skoi oblasti 1999–2000: raionnyi razrez, Arkhangelsk: Goskomstat, 2001; Kirovskaya oblast’ v 2000 godu: Chast’ III: goroda i raiony, Kirov: Goskomstat, 2001; Pokazateli ekonomicheskogo i sotsial’nogo razvitiya gorodov i raionov Voronezhskoi oblasti, Voronezh: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’naya sfera gorodov i raionov Primorskogo kraya, Vladivostok: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie gorodov i raionov Khabarovskogo kraya, 1990–2000gg: statisticheskii sbornik, Khabarovsk: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie gorodov i raionov Respubliki Komi, Syktyvkar: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, op. cit. 13 This indicated which districts and towns had poor scores relative to the rest of the region, not to the Russian average. For example, a poor unemployment score in Sverdlovsk is 2.7–5.1 per cent; in Kirov it is 6–13.6 per cent; in Komi, 6.9–8.2 per cent. 14 Nefedova and Treivish, op. cit., pp. 10–11. 15 However, if the margins allowed for ‘most flourishing’ status are slightly widened, several of the biggest cities in Sverdlovsk, such as Yekaterinburg and Pervouralsk, do make it into the top category. 16 Kemerovo and Vologda (as of 2002). In the seven regions studied, the capital contained about 25–40 per cent of the total regional population. 17 A. Chernyshov, ‘Stolichnyi tsentr, region, provintsiya’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 7, 1999, p. 115. 18 The exception is Komi Republic, where trade is highest in Usinsk, the most important industrial city, with the highest wages and prices. Komi, op. cit., p. 233.

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19 Whereas Kirov had 77.7 doctors per 10,000 population in 2000, Lebyazhe (one of the ‘most depressed’ districts) had just 13.2. Kirovskaya oblast’, op. cit., pp. 14, 49. 20 Moreover, Yekaterinburg’s boroughs vary considerably as regards wages, housing conditions, etc. See Ekaterinburg na rubezhe stoletii, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 1999. 21 Nefedova and Treivish, op. cit., p. 16. 22 See Komi, op. cit., pp. 96–7. 23 Jeremy Smith (ed.), Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1999, p. 7. 24 Bednodemyanovsk was about as far as is possible to get from Penza, within Penza Region. In the interests of comparability, as well as practicality, it made sense to research towns at a similar distance from the capital, although it was tempting to fix on a much more remote town than Achit in huge Sverdlovsk Region. For a portrait of some very remote districts in northern Perm Region, see the works by Moran, Pallot and Pallot and Moran listed in the bibliography. 25 V. Rodoman, ‘Prostranstvennaya polyarizatsiya i pereorientatsiya’, in T. Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial’noi sfery i sotsial’naya politika, Moscow: Delo, 1998, pp. 179–81. For example, Komi Republic, most of which is very remote, had lost about a fifth of its postboxes in the years 1995–2000. Komi, op. cit., p. 216. 26 They lost their utilities because electric cable and other metal was stolen. See, for example, L. Leshukova, ‘Voram u nas ponravilos’ ’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 1, about a village which had lost its electricity four times, so local people heated their water over bonfires, and A. Shakirova, ‘Dve nedeli so slomannoi rukoi’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 1. 27 Ioffe and Nefedova’s indicators were: the output per unit of land, the density and dynamics of rural population, the ratio of agricultural output of the public sector to that of subsidiary farms, and indicators of rural infrastructure (percentage of houses with plumbing; paved roadways density, and so on). Each of these indicators is typically a descending function of accessibility to an urban center, so on each province’s map based upon constituent districts’ averages, the spatial gradients invariably showed up. G. Ioffe and T. Nefedova, ‘Rural population change and agriculture’, in G.J. Demko, G. Ioffe and Z. Zayonchkovskaya (eds), Population under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia, Boulder: Westview, 1999, pp. 236–40. 28 In Komi and Arkhangelsk the depressed small towns also tended to be remote from the cities. In Voronezh (a densely populated region with no ‘remote’ areas) there is a different pattern, a north–south divide. All the poor districts are in the north, although this is where the regional capital is also located. One of the reasons for the divide may be that, despite the overall more agricultural profile of the south, there are some southern industrial towns which are doing well. The two Far Eastern regions in the sample are complex. In Primore, there is a poor area in the inner southern part of the region, the Khanka basin, and some of the surrounding highland. In Khabarovsk, the poorer areas are either agricultural (south), and not very far from the capital, or very remote indeed (north). 29 J. Startsev, ‘Gubernatorial politics in Sverdlovsk oblast’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15, 4, 1999, p. 352. 30 As explained in Chapter 1, these percentages indicate purchasing power, because the subsistence minimum is based on the local price of a basket of goods. Figures in Primore include data for all the cities. Unfortunately, however, only two districts are included; both are near the Chinese border. Pozharskoe District, centred on

Notes

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42

43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

233

Luchegorsk (pop. 23,700) has high money incomes and exceptionally high wages. Khanka has low wages and high dependence on social transfers, although it did not quite qualify for ‘depressed’ status. Presumably, some or all of the ‘most depressed’ districts have even lower purchasing power than Khanka. The ‘food basket’ is that used by Goskomstat to monitor prices. Arsenev is an industrial centre somewhat remote from the cluster of southern prosperous cities. Sotsial’naya sfera, op. cit., pp. 28, 69. Two other ‘most depressed’ towns (Koslan and Troitsko-Pechorsk) are in the middle. As Table 2.2 suggests, using the price of the food basket produces higher figures, but nowhere near the order of magnitude of 832 rubles higher. RSE 2000, p. 159; RSE 2002, p. 189. 1999 figures have been used for this comparison, because 2000 national figures were not available. RSE 2001, p. 193; Komi, op. cit., p. 211; Pokazateli, op. cit., p. 83. Falenki in Kirov. Komi, op. cit., p. 211; Kirovskaya oblast’, op. cit., p. 128. The number of cars partly reflects greater availability, not just local wealth. (The border regions of Kaliningrad and Primore have particularly high figures for car ownership.) Unfortunately, none of the indicators used in Tables 2.5–2.7 was available for Sverdlovsk. The sources for these tables are Ekonomika i sotsial’naya sfera, op. cit., p. 31; Kirovskaya oblast’, op. cit., pp. 66–7, 128, 136; Pokazateli, op. cit., pp. 21–2, 83; Sotsial’naya sfera, op. cit., pp. 28, 69; Polozhenie . . . Khabarovskogo kraya, 1990–2000gg, op. cit., pp. 55, 206, 211; Komi, op. cit., pp. 84, 211, 233. In Voronezh, by contrast, it was the more depressed places which seemed more crimeridden; in fact, they were often near the top of the ranking. As mentioned earlier, Voronezh depressed districts were rather special, in that they were relatively near the city of Voronezh. It will be recalled that in the other sample regions the most depressed districts tended to be far from the regional capital. It could, therefore be their distance, rather than their depressed nature, which help ‘protect’ them from crime. Yekaterinburg, which has a reputation for crime, came only fourteenth out of 51 regional administrative units. Perhaps the publicity attached to crime in Yekaterinburg – connected as it often is to business battles – gives the city a more ‘crime-ridden’ image than it actually deserves. All capitals except Voronezh were above the regional (mean) average. In all five regions for which data was available, the capital city had a proportion of pensioners below the regional average. RSE 2001, p. 104. However, the Komi capital Syktyvkar had the highest birthrate in the republic. Komi, op. cit., p. 68. It should be noted that although Komi Republic is mostly ethnic Russian (57.7 per cent in 1989), it has a partly Komi population (23.3 per cent), and this may explain demographic divergences from the Russian norm. RSE 2000, p. 65. However, Voronezh City, though below the regional average in 1998, was above it in 1999 and 2000. Pokazateli, op. cit., p. 10. For example, the Solovets Islands had 10 per cent infant mortality in 1999, and 0 per cent in 2000. Ekonomika i sotsial’naya sfera, op. cit., p. 21. Whenever possible I averaged figures for several years in a row to come to the conclusions presented in this paragraph. Asbest, for example, had a rate of 24 in 1998. Sverdlovskaya oblast’: demograficheskaya situatsiya, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 1999, p. 43. Several large cities in other regions exhibited the same tendency. Calculated from ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi’, op. cit., p. 4; RSE 2000, p. 53. Yu. Simyagin, ‘Sootnoshenie gorodskogo i sel’skogo naseleniya v Rossii (1991–1997 gg.)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 2000, p. 69. See also H. Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 1998.

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51 Calculated from ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi’, op. cit., p. 4; RSE 2002, p. 82. 52 For discussion of numbers, causes and comparison with Soviet trends, see Richard H. Rowland, ‘Patterns of dynamic urban population growth in Russia, 1989–1996’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 38, 3, 1997. 53 Simyagin, op. cit., p. 69. 54 G. Luchterhandt, S. Ryzhenkov and A. Kuz’min, Politika i kul’tura v rossiiskoi provintsii, Moscow/St Petersburg: IGPI/Letnii Sad, 2001, p. 69. 55 Unfortunately, no other information was available at time of writing. 56 The million-plus growing cities were Moscow, Kazan, Rostov and Volgograd. ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi’, op. cit., pp. 7–11. Only 64 cities grew according to the innaccurate pre-census data in RSE 2002, pp. 98–9. 57 ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi’, op. cit. 58 In the same category are Ulyanovsk, where the neighbouring regions of Samara and Tatarstan are richer; and Kursk, near Moscow. 59 See, for example, S. Commander and R. Yemtsov, ‘Russian unemployment: its magnitude, characteristics and regional dimensions’ in J. Klugman (ed.), Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997; T. Heleniak, ‘Internal migration in Russia during the economic Transition’ Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 38, 2, 1997, 81–104; J. Burke, ‘Internal migration: a civil society challenge’, in M.G. Field and J.L. Twigg (eds), Russia’s Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare During the Transition, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000; Clarke, op. cit; and J. Klugman. J. Micklewright and G. Redmond, Poverty in the Transition: Social Expenditures and the Working-age Poor, Florence: UNICEF, 2002. 60 Ibid., Section 4.2, citing S. Guriev and G. Freibel, ‘Should I stay or should I go? Worker attachment in Russia’ (Stockholm: Institute for Transition Economics, unpublished paper). 61 Clarke, op. cit., pp. 40–1. 62 Commander and Yemtsov, op. cit., p. 182. 63 Smirnov, op. cit., p. 66.

3 The fieldwork towns and their regions 1 According to O. Dmitrieva, Regional Development: The USSR and After, London: University College Press, 1996, pp. 31–2, 82–3, in 1988 Sverdlovsk was a donor region with low living standards, Tver was a donor region with somewhat ‘lower than medium’ living standards, and Penza had ‘a relative equilibrium of budget transfers’ and ‘medium’ living standards. 2 RSE 2000, Moscow: Goskomstat, pp. 310–1. Sverdlovsk produced over 5 per cent of the Russian total. 3 RSE 2000, pp. 378–9, RSE 2001, pp. 412–3. 4 J. Startsev, ‘Gubernatorial politics in Sverdlovsk oblast’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15, 4, 1999, pp. 339–40. 5 Ibid., p. 339. 6 Except where indicated, all socio-economic information except poverty data, which is from RSE 2000, is from Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, Tver: Tver Statistical Committee, 2001. 7 RSE 2002, p. 416. 8 The survey is described in the Introduction and the interview schedule is reproduced, in translation, in Appendix 1. 9 L. Burdina, ‘Prestupnost’ rastet god ot goda’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 January 1999, p. 4; Sverdlovskaya oblast’ v 1995–1999 godakh, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 2000, p. 54; A. Sal’nikova, ‘Khuliganil? Arest’, Nash put’, 29 September 2000, p. 4. 10 P. Ryzhov, ‘Kriminal’naya obstanovka ukhudshaetsya’, Vestnik, 12 January 2001, p. 1.

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11 G. Vorob’eva, ‘Na narkomaniyu nado nastupat’ so vsekh storon’, Nash put’, 9 April 1999, p. 2. 12 L. Gladkova, ‘Kovarnaya bolezn’ dobralas’ do Achita’, Nash put’, 21 April 2000, p. 4; L. Sungatova, ‘Za kruglym stolom’, Nash put’, 15 January 1999, p. 1. 13 A. Barykin, ‘Vizit konstruktivnyi i vazhnyi’, Vestnik, 11 August 2000, p. 1. 14 G. Vorob’eva, ‘Mestnaya vlast’ derzhit otchet’, Nash put’, 19 March 1999, p. 3. 15 It is mentioned by Alexander Radishchev in Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790). See P. Sysolyatin, Na vodorazdele Priural’ya: Achitskii raion, Yekaterinburg: OOO ‘IRA UTK’, 1999, p. 8. 16 Interviews; information from staff at Penza and Achit Goskomstat. 17 Rising prices were linked to the price of petrol, but also said to result from the government’s failure to compensate bus companies for pensioners who travelled free. See ‘Vosem’desyat rublei 40 kopeek’, Gorodok, 15 September 2000, p. 3, on fares between Yekaterinburg and Krasnoufimsk. 18 Calculated from data from Goskomstat staff, Penza. 19 Calculated from data from Goskomstat staff, Zubtsov. 20 ‘Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Achitskogo raiona v yanv.-sent. 2000 g.’, Nash put’, 3 November 2000, p. 2. 21 Sysolyatin, op. cit., p. 37. 22 Z. Larina, ‘Itogi 1998-go goda’, Vestnik, 26 March 1999. 23 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raionnaya administratsiya ob itogakh minuvshego goda’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 January 1999, p. 1. 24 ‘Khozyaistvui na zemle umelo’, Vestnik, 19 January 1999, p. 2. 25 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet raiona utverzhden – s defitsitom 34 protsenta!’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 16 April 1999, p. 6. 26 I converted gross figures (both estimates) of 2,000 and 3,500 into percentages of the working-age population, taking the Sverdlovsk average working-age population, since district figures are not available. The lower estimate is from G. Vorob’eva, ‘A nuzhen li Achitskii raion? – reshat’ vam’, Nash put’, 27 October 2000, p. 7, the higher from an unpublished report by the Achit Employment Centre, ‘Otchet o rabote Achitskogo Territorial’nogo Otdela Departamenta FGSZN po Sverdlovskoi oblasti za pervoe polugodie 2000 goda’ (no pagination). 27 ‘Po svedeniyam Achitskogo Territorial’nogo Otdela Zanyatosti Naseleniya’, Nash put’, 22 January 1999, p. 1. 28 E. Cherepanov, ‘Informatsiya – klyuch k uspekhu v trudoustroistve’, Nash put’, 11 August 2000; ‘Otchet’, op. cit. 29 The annual figure, at this rate, would be 4,432 rubles in Achit. 30 Spisok abonentov Achitskoi telefonnoi seti, Achit: Ministry of Communications and Uraltelekom, 1995, p. 60. 31 The state food distribution network accounted for only 7 per cent of trade turnover in the district in 1999. ‘Nash raion segodnya’, Nash put’, 26 November 1999, p. 1. 32 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raionnaya administratsiya’, op. cit. The travails of the local food supply and processing system are described in N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raipo: chto den’ gryadushchii nam gotovit?’, Zubtsovskaya, 16 March 1999, p. 2. 33 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet’, op. cit., and information directly from Nikolai Podvoiskii (deputy editor of Zubtsovskaya). 34 Raionnoe potrebitel’skoe obshchestvo (normally abbreviated to raipo): ‘District Consumer Society.’ 35 P. Ryzhov, ‘Put’ k vyzhivaniyu’, Vestnik, 22 May 2000, p. 1; N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raipo’, op. cit. 36 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet’, op. cit. 37 2.5 million rubles for a district approximately three-fourth the size of Zubtsov. N. Volodina, ‘Detskie posobiya: naznachenie i vyplata’, Vestnik, 7 April 2000, p. 2. 38 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raionnaya administratsiya’, op. cit.

236 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Notes A. Barykin, ‘Vizit’, op. cit. P. Ryzhov, ‘Put’ k vyzhivaniyu’ (‘Survival Strategy’), op. cit. N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet’, op. cit. Information from petrol station manager, Anatolii Zhupikov. A. Sedov, ‘Problemy resheny, no ne vse’, Vestnik, 2 November 1999, p. 3. G. Vorob’eva, ‘Glavnoe – sokhranit’ vse, chto znachimo, polezno dlya raiona’, Nash put’, 23 April 1999, p. 1. See Introduction for discussion of the names. N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raionnaya administratsiya’, op. cit. G. Vorob’eva, ‘A nuzhen li’, op. cit. The district had had a chequered history and had existed inside its current borders only since 1967. Sysolyatin, op. cit., p. 4. S.E. Kuteinikov, Nasha zubtsovskaya zemlya, Zubtsov [no publisher named], 1996, pp 34, 37. Sotsial’noe polozhenie gorodov i raionov Tverskoi oblasti, Tver: Goskomstat, 1998, p. 115. One said she had ‘about twenty-five’ Bryansk acquaintances in Zubtsov. Information from Zubtsov Goskomstat. The lake is out of sight of the town centre. L. Burdina, ‘Prestupnost’’, op. cit.

4 State-sector employees: the new poor 1 Sergei Kotkin, ‘Kontrol’naya dlya vlastei’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 January 1999, p. 1. 2 For more on the provision of cultural institutions in the Soviet period – and attempts to expand the network in small towns and villages even as late as 1986 – see A. White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89, London: Routledge, 1990. 3 Interview information in Zubtsov and Achit; T. Barykhina, ‘V usloviyakh bezdenezh’ya’, Vestnik, 27 July 1999, p. 2; A. Sedov, ‘Uchebnyi god novyi, a problemy – starye’, Vestnik, 25 August 2000, p. 3. 4 V. Men’shikova, ‘Vozmozhnosti uchrezhdenii obrazovaniya raiona kak usloviya dostizheniya sotsial’noi kompetentnosti obuchayushchikhsia’, Nash put’, 8 September 2000, p. 2. The college is the responsibility of the region, not the district; it would seem that this is no guarantee of stable superior funding, although it does have a new building. 5 A. Shakirova, ‘Kuda uekhal tsirk?’, Nash put’, 5 November 1999, p. 1. 6 Information from Institute of Regional Politics, Penza, April 2000. 7 Yu. Vedernikov, ‘Ministerstvo daet dobro, a pravitel’stvo oblasti – den’gi’ (interview), Gorodok, 1 September 2000, p. 21. 8 Interview with hospital director T. Sokolova; S. Kotkin, ‘Ot zubchan – spasibo’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 11 January 1997, p. 4; I. Zhuchkova, ‘Nadezhdu ne teryaem’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 28 December 1996. 9 Achit had 140 for a similar-sized district; Bednodemyanovsk had 125 for a smaller district. 10 It had been renamed as a ‘socio-cultural association’ and still had 15 employees. 11 A. Kolomiets, ‘Radost’ skvoz’ grust’ ’ (interview), Nash put’, 6 October 2000, p. 7. 12 For statistics about the qualifications of staff, and details of how many people were not professionally qualified for their current jobs, see Chapter 6. 13 They contrast the plight of long-term unemployed people with the fate of those who are unemployed for shorter periods, and may live quite well. L. Gordon and E. Klopov, ‘Sotsial’nye effekty i struktura bezrabotitsy v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 2000. 14 S. Efimov, ‘Putevka v zhizn’ poluchena, no gde s nei primut?’ (interview), Nash put’, 14 April 2000, p. 7.

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15 There are 17 doctors and 140 beds. Information from Dr A. Desyatkov. That mobility among doctors is very high is suggested by the fact that 5 of these doctors had been recruited only in 1999 (one from Kazakstan and four from other parts of Sverdlovsk Region). ‘Popolnenie v TsRB’, Nash put’, 17 December 1999, p. 8. 16 Interview with hospital director, A. Druzhinina, April 2000. 17 M. Egorova, ‘Poluchayut li nashi deti kachestvennoe obrazovanie?’, Nash put’, 1 October 1999, p. 2. 18 T. Uabekova, ‘Neprazdnichnye razdum’ya’, Nash put’, 1 October 1999, p. 2. 19 Rubina and Airepetova suggest, however, that such fears may be misplaced, since there are relatively few new recruits to the teaching profession, at least in Sverdlovsk/Tyumen, and the process of natural wastage of teachers will match the declining numbers of children. L. Rubina and S. Airepetova, ‘Mozhet li sotsiologiya pomoch’ v formirovanii sotsial’nogo zakaza na obrazovanie?’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 2000, p. 88. 20 It had passed an inspection and been reprieved for a further five years. The director’s daughter said, ‘[Prime Minister] Kirienko wanted to abolish us, but [Prime Minister] Primakov stopped the decree. 21 In Russia, ‘to pay a social visit’ (idti v gosti) traditionally implies sitting down to a hearty meal, whatever the time of day. 22 This was not a household budget survey, nor was the sample representative of local society. Hence there will be no attempt to present statistical conclusions about how many people fell into which category, or to define these categories with greater precision. For a more detailed and quantitative approach to poverty indicators, see, for example, N. Tikhonova, ‘Bednye: obraz zhizni i strategii vyzhivaniya’, in T. Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial’noi sfery i sotsial’naya politika, Moscow: Delo, 1998. 23 J.D. Braithwaite, ‘The Old and New Poor in Russia’, p. 57, in J. Klugman (ed.), Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses,Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997. 24 See, for example, L. Gladkova, ‘80 let s klyatvoi Ippokrata’, Nash put’, 18 June 1999, p. 2, or Sergei Kotkin, ‘Kontrol’naya’, op. cit. 25 Information on subsistence minimum from N. Podvoiskii, 6 April 1999; salaries as reported by interviewees. 26 Z. Larina, ‘Itogi 1998-go goda’: Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie raiona’, Vestnik, 26 March 1999. On the historical background, see M. Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1972, pp. 62–3. 27 P. Ryzhov, ‘Novaya metla – metet po-novomu’, Vestnik, 11 July 2000, p. 1 mentions a local farm where no wages at all had been paid in recent years, and most arable land had lain unploughed for 5 years. 28 Braithwaite, op. cit., p. 63. 29 Ibid., p. 57. 30 V.A. Velkoff and K. Kinsella, ‘Russia’s aging population’, M.G. Field and J.L. Twigg (eds), Russia’s Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare During the Transition, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p. 246. 31 Calculated from ‘Ostanovit’sya, oglyanut’sya’, Nash put’, 29 September 2000, p. 2. 32 For some other situations see, for example, the cases of ‘Raya’ and ‘Dasha’ in Appendix 2. 33 S. Commander, A. Tolstopiatenko and R. Yemstov, ‘Channels of redistribution: inequality and poverty in the Russian Transition’ (The William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan Business School, Working Paper 42, 1997), cited in J. Klugman and S. Marnie, ‘Poverty’, in B. Granville and P. Oppenheimer (eds), Russia’s Post-Communist Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p.456. 34 See, for example, ‘Agitpoezd v puti’, Vestnik, 14 July 2000, p. 1. 35 His decision was based on a national government decree of 1992. A. Sal’nikova, ‘Ob opekunstve’, Nash put’, 1 September 2000, p. 1.

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36 A. Sedov, ‘Subsidii: problemy bez resheniya’, Vestnik, 15 August 2000, p. 3. 37 ‘Ostanovit’sya, oglyanut’sya’, op. cit.; A. Alikin, ‘Chtoby chutochku zhilos’ legche’, Nash put’, 29 September 2000, p. 2.

5 Livelihood strategies 1 For a discussion of the gender implications, see Chapter 7 of F. Ellis, Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 2 F. Pine and S. Bridger (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: local strategies and regional responses, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 11. 3 S. Clarke, Do Russian Households Have Survival Strategies?, Coventry: University of Warwick, Centre for Comparative Labour Studies, 1999, p. 2. 4 M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Involution and destitution in capitalist Russia’, Ethnography, 1, 1, 2000, p. 62. 5 J.R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989–1998, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 68. 6 C. Wallace, ‘Household strategies: their conceptual relevance and analytical scope in social research’, Sociology, 36, 2, 2002, p. 278, referring to A. Warde, ‘Household work strategies and forms of labour: conceptual and empirical issues’, Work, Employment and Society, 4, 4, 1990. 7 O. Shevchenko, ‘ “Between the holes”: emerging identities and hybrid patterns of consumption in Post-Socialist Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 54, 6, 2002, p. 844. 8 Ibid. 9 N. Tikhonova, ‘Bednye: obraz zhizni i strategii vyzhivaniya’, in T. Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial’noi sfery i sotsial’naya politika, Moscow: Delo, 1998, p. 205. 10 L. Belyaeva, Sotsial’naya stratifikatsiya i srednii klass v Rossii, Moscow: Akademia, 2001, p. 117. 11 Burawoy et al., op. cit., p. 43. 12 Sverdlovskaya oblast’: demograficheskaya situatsiya v poslednem desyatiletii XX veka, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 1999, pp. 67–8. 13 F. Pickup, ‘Local level responses to new market forces in a city in the Russian industrial Urals’, PhD, London School of Economics, 2002. 14 A. Artyukhov, ‘Semeinaya politika na rossiiskom severe: effektivnost’ i rezervy’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 2001, p. 81. 15 I. Zbarskaya, ‘Child and family welfare in Russia: trends and indicators’, Background paper prepared for UNICEF Regional Monitoring Report no. 8, A Decade of Transition, Florence: UNICEF, 2001, p. 8. 16 Z. Saralieva and S. Balabanov, ‘Pozhiloi chelovek v tsentral’noi Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 12, 1999, pp. 54–65. 17 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raionnaya administratsiya ob itogakh minuvshego goda’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 January 1999, p. 2; N. Aleksandrova, ‘Skol’ko verevochke ne veisya’, Nash put’, 26 November 1999, p. 2. For cable stories in Bednodemyanovsk, see, for example, ‘Krim-inform’, Vestnik, 25 May 1999, p. 3. 18 S. Aleksandrov, ‘I vnov’ pozhar v Zubtsove. Pogibla zhenshchina’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 26 March 1999, p. 1. 19 ‘Krim-inform yanvarya’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 20 February 1999, p. 3. 20 A. Loginov, ‘Okhrana provodov – delo vsekh i kazhdogo’, Gorodok, 1 September 2000, p. 23. 21 G. Vorob’eva, ‘Mestnaya vlast’ derzhit otchet’, Nash put’, 19 March 1999, p. 3. 22 A. Sal’nikova, ‘Kogda zakonchitsya bespredel v nashikh lesakh?’, Nash put’, 25 May 2000, p. 2.

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23 S. Clarke, New Forms of Employment and Household Survival Strategies, Coventry: University of Warwick, Centre for Comparative Labour Studies and Moscow: ISITO, 1999, ch. 7. 24 Pickup, op. cit. 25 Itogi obsledovaniya domashnikh khozyaistv za 1997–1999 gody, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 2000, p. 17. 26 Clarke, Do Russian Households, op. cit., p. 18. 27 On the impact of rising prices for feed on rural smallholdings, see G. Shirokalova, ‘Gorozhane i selyane v rezul’tate reform 90-x godov’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2002. 28 Clarke, New Forms, op. cit. and H.T. Seeth et al., ‘Russian poverty: muddling through economic transition with garden plots’, World Development, 26, 9, 1998, suggest that the very poorest households do not have land. Small-town interviewees agreed that absolutely destitute families did not farm, but they asserted that it was because they did not farm (prefering to drink) that they were destitute. They suggested that ‘anyone who wants to can get some land and grow their own potatoes’. 29 Just one respondent – a successful entrepreneur – mentioned that the household had recently given up an allotment, though the family still had a plot behind their house. 30 Clarke, New Forms, op. cit., p. 182, writing, however, about cities. 31 Pickup found the same phenomenon in her study of Yekaterinburg. Pickup, op. cit. 32 For example, Rodionova and Shurkhovetskaya found that household plots were the main means of subsistence for the rural respondents they surveyed in 1997; about 50 per cent also worked extra rented fields. The reason they needed to do this was because wages from the farms were often in the form of food products, although the respondents naturally wanted cash. Village pensioners, however, often derived their main subsistence from their pensions and did less extensive farming. G. Rodionova and G. Shurkhovetskaya, ‘Izmeneniya v strukture dokhodov sel’skikh zhitelei’, in Zaslavskaya (ed.), op. cit., pp. 230–1. 33 See, for example, P. Ryzhov, ‘Zhivut kak v tunnele’, Vestnik, 22 August 2000, p. 2. 34 A. Galkin, ‘Tendentsii izmeneniya sotsial’noi struktury’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 10, 1998, p. 86. 35 S. Commander and R. Yemtsov, ‘Characteristics of the unemployed’, in J. Klugman (ed.), Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997, p. 179. 36 Belyaeva, op. cit., pp. 87–8. 37 E. Klopov, ‘Vtorichnaya zanyatost’ kak forma sotsial’no-trudovoi mobil’nosti’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 1997. 38 U. Borisova, ‘Sotsial’nyi portret uchitelya Respubliki Sakhi’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 1998, p. 85, reports similarly that in Sakha only 4 per cent of teachers surveyed had a secondary income. 39 N. Tikhonova and O. Shkaratan, ‘Rossiiskaya sotsial’naya politika: vybor bez al’ternativy?’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 3, 2001, p. 28. 40 See, for example, A.-M. Salmi, ‘Health through networks? Teachers, doctors and informal exchange’, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference, Cambridge, April 7–9, 2001. 41 V. Men’shikova, ‘Vozmozhnosti uchrezhdenii obrazovaniya raiona kak usloviya dostizheniya sotsial’noi kompetentnosti obuchayushchikhsya’, Nash put’, 8 September 2000, p. 2, 7. 42 N. Platonova, ‘Malen’kii ostrovok otnositel’noi bezopasnosti’, Nash put’, 2 February 2000, p. 2. 43 G. Sillaste, ‘Izmeneniya sotsial’noi mobil’nosti i ekonomicheskogo povedeniya zhenshchin’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 5, 2000, p. 32. 44 Tikhonova and Shkaratan, op. cit., p. 27. 45 Shirokalova, op. cit., p.73.

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46 Tikhonova and Shkaratan, op. cit., p. 27. 47 Nomenklaturist: someone whose appointment (to a responsible post) had been decided by a party committee, for example, headteacher, factory or farm manager, newspaper editor, head of local government department. See Chapter 6 for more detail on their careers. 48 M. Bruno, ‘Women and the culture of entrepreneurship’, in M. Buckley (ed.), Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 69. 49 Emigration abroad was not usually considered an option, although one doctor in Zubtsov was toying with the idea of moving to Tunisia, to pay for higher education for a child in Russia. 50 Interview with N. Zlobin, September 2000. 51 Calculated from Platonova, op. cit. 52 T. Pankova, ‘Zhiznennye plany vypusknikov pedagogicheskogo kolledzha i ikh realizatsiya’, Sotsiologicheskiie issledovaniya, 1, 1996. 53 The net effect of comings and goings was, at least according to official statistics, to leave Achit District with 103 fewer people, Bednodemyanovsk with 6 fewer, and Zubtsov with 7 more. Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Penzenskoi oblasti, p. 169; information from staff at Zubtsov and Achit Goskomstat. 54 Information from Sergei Kotkin, editor of Zubtsovskaya zhizn’. 55 Clarke, ‘Do Russian Households’, op. cit., p. 1. 56 Burawoy et al., op. cit, p. 60. 57 M. Kiblitskaya, ‘Russia’s female breadwinners’, in S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Post-Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 65. 58 Ibid. 59 T. Arseeva, ‘Gendernye razlichiya v pokazatelyakh urovnya zhizni naseleniya v regionakh Privolzhskogo Federal’nogo okruga’, Voprosy statistiki, 8, 2002, p. 67. 60 Wedel, op. cit., p. 168. 61 Sillaste, op. cit., p. 32. 62 G. Pascall and N. Manning, ‘Gender and social policy: comparing welfare states in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union’, Journal of European Social Policy, 10, 3, 2000. 63 Interview with kindergarten director, Mrs Tyapaeva, July 2000. 64 Information from Zubtsov Statistics Department, May 1999. 65 See, for example, S. Ashwin and E. Bowers, ‘Do Russian women want to work?’ in Buckley, op. cit.; Shirokalova, op. cit., p. 79 (suggesting that only one in six women in Nizhnii Novgorod Region would definitely like to be a housewife); E. Zdravomyslova, ‘Problems of becoming a housewife’, in A. Rotkirch and E. HaavioMannila (eds), Women’s Voices in Russia Today, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, suggesting that middle-aged and older women in Petersburg find it very difficult to adapt to not working (though it is easier for younger women); I.I. Chernova, ‘Zhenshchiny i rabota: mneniya rossiyan i kanadtsev’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 12, 1999, p. 111, suggesting that over 90 per cent of Russians think women should work to support their families. 66 See, for example, D. Vannoy et al., Marriages in Russia: Couples During the Economic Transition, Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999; Chernova, op. cit., p. 110. 67 She had acquired it in lieu of child benefit: a really useful benefit in kind, for once. 68 See A. White, ‘Mother Russia: changing attitudes to ethnicity and national identity in Russia’s regions’ in J. Andall (ed.), Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2003. 69 Achit’s population in 1998 was identical to its population in 1989, although it fell afterwards. It had a healthy 14.2 births per 1,000 in 1998 (cf. Bednodemyanovsk’s 8.2).

Notes

70 71 72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94

241

In 1989 the Achit figure had been a very high 21.6. Sverdlovskaya oblast’, op. cit., pp.18, 49. Vannoy et al., op. cit., p. 176. Just one woman reported that she did the digging, but she seemed to feel that this unusual arrangement required some excuse. She said it was good exercise. Vannoy et al., op. cit., p. 70. When the story was published in 1969, Baranskaya received hundreds of letters from readers who identified completely with her overworked heroine. See S. Kay, introduction to N. Baranskaya, Nedelya kak nedelya (A Week Like Any Other), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993. E. Fomin and N. Fedorova, ‘Strategii v otnoshenii zdorov’ya’, p. 37, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 11, 1999. A. Gladkova, ‘Itogi podpiski’, Nash put’, 9 July 1999, p. 1. However, V. Shkol’nikov, E. Andreev and T. Maleva, Neravenstvo i smertnost’ v Rossii, Moscow: Carnegie Centre, 2000, p. 23, argue that men experience more stressors, because they are more involved in public life. They do not argue, however, that women are less exposed to stressors, only that they have better coping mechanisms (see later). J. Shapiro, ‘Health and health care policy’, in S. White, A. Pravda and Z. Gitelman (eds), Developments in Russian Politics 4, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 180. Shkol’nikov et al., op. cit., p. 47. Ashwin and Bowers, op. cit. S. Zheleznyakova, ‘Sotsiokul’turnye orientatsii uchitelei’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 2000, p. 101. R. Rose, How Much Does Social Capital Add to Individual Health?, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2000 (Studies in Public Policy 329). Pilkington, op. cit., pp. 21, 169. Shkol’nikov et al., op. cit., p. 23. P. Watson, ‘Explaining rising mortality among men in Eastern Europe’, Social Science and Medicine, 41, 7, 1995. W.C. Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 106. This last came from a younger interviewee in Bednodemyanovsk, who presumably had the market in mind. There are very few shops in the town. Shirokalova, op. cit., p. 74. T. Gurko, ‘Transformatsiya instituta sovremennoi sem’i’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 10, 1995, p. 98. Contrast, for example, R. Rose, Modern, Pre-Modern and Anti-Modern Social Capital in Russia, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1999, especially pp. 28–31, and C. Hann, ‘Introduction’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London: Routledge, 1996, as well as many contributions to the same volume. A.V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 195–200. C. Buckley and D. Donahue, ‘Promises to keep: pension provision in the Russian Federation’, in Field and Twigg, op. cit., p. 263. However, the number of individual home builders had increased dramatically in the district, from 18 in 1997 to 92 in 1999. A. Sal’nikova, ‘Kto platit, tot zakazyvaet muzyku’, Nash put’, 5 February 1999, p. 1. M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Domestic involution: how women survive in a North Russian city’ in V.E. Bonnell and G.W. Breslauer (eds), Russia in the New Century: Stability or Disorder?, Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 2001. Shirokalova, op. cit., pp. 76, 78.

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6 The intelligentsia, the ‘middle class’ and social stratification 1 On social mobility see, for example, M. Yanowitch, Social and Economic Inequality in the Soviet Union, London: Martin Robinson and New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1977. On myths, see S. Barsukova, ‘Modeli uspekha zhenshchin sovetskogo i postsovetskogo periodov: ideologicheskoe mifotvorchestvo’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001, 75–82. 2 See L. Belyaeva, Stratifikatsiya i srednii klass, Moscow: Akademia, 2001, Chapter 1. 3 H. Balzer, ‘Russia’s middle classes’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 14, 2, 1998. 4 See, for example, A. Galkin, ‘Tendentsii izmeneniya sotsial’noi struktury’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 10, 1998. 5 G. Zdravomyslov, ‘Rossiiskii srednii klass – problema granits i chislennosti’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2001, 5, surveys the various theories and statistics. For a regional study covering the whole decade, see S. Grishaev, ‘Dinamika sotsial’noi struktury Krasnoyarskogo regiona’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001. Among other recent analyses, see, for example, M. Gorshkov, ‘Nekotorye metodologicheskie aspekty analiza srednego klassa v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 3, 2000. Gorshkov argues, p.11, that the only definitely middle-class occupations are business and government service. 6 Belyaeva, op. cit., pp. 158–76. 7 The issue of the fate of the intelligentsia particularly concerns many Russian sociologists and is, for example, the subject of national conferences. See, for example, O. Kozlova, ‘Sposobna li samoopredelit’sya rossiiskaya gumanitarnaya intelligentsia?’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 2001. Some of the many articles on the topic in the journal Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya appear in references below. 8 Fathers and Children and Who is to Blame?: nineteenth-century novels by Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen, respectively. 9 A.V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 199. 10 For detailed studies of the Soviet intelligentsia, see S.V. Volkov, Intellektual’nyi sloi v sovetskom obshchestve, Moscow: Fond ‘Razvitie’ and Institut nauchnoi informatsii po obshchestvennym naukam RAN, 1999, and L.G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: an Essay on the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Intellectuals during the 1960s, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. For a discussion of the intelligentsia within a wider survey of Russian social structure and social change, see M. Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1972. 11 As in M. Gessen, Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism, London: Verso, 1997. 12 I. Ushkalov and I. Malakha, ‘ “Utechka umov” kak global’nyi fenomen i ego osobennosti v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 3, 2000, p. 112. Goskomstat figures suggest the total number of researchers fell by 384,000, 1992–9. RSE 2000, p. 481. 13 See, for example, Ushkalov and Malakha, op. cit.; Galkin, op. cit., p. 87; F. Sheregi and V. Kharcheva, ‘Sotsial’nye problemy vuzovskoi nauki’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 1996, p. 76; G. Pirogov and S. Pronin, ‘The Russian case: social policy concerns’, in Y. Atal (ed.), Poverty in Transition and Transition in Poverty, New York and Oxford: Berghahn and Paris: UNESCO, 1999. 14 Calculated from RSE 2000, p. 204; RSE 2002, p. 232. 15 RSE 2000, p. 117; RSE 2001, p. 146. 16 L. Rubina and S. Airepetova, ‘Mozhet li sotsiologiya pomoch’ v formirovanii sotsial’nogo zakaza na obrazovanie?, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 2000, p. 82. 17 RSE 2000, p. 192. ‘Social studies’ here refers to the school subject variously known as obshchestvovedenie or obshchestvoznanie. 18 See, for example, T. Kovaleva, ‘Rossiiskoe studenchestvo v usloviyakh perekhodnogo perioda’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 1995, p. 143.

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19 For example, Galkin, op. cit. 20 This was a favourite topic for Soviet sociologists, who tended to find that schoolleavers aspired to intelligentsia occupations. See Churchward, op. cit., p. 77. There are also numerous examples of surveys about career choices for the 1990s. See, for example, A. Gendin and M. Sergeev, ‘Proforientatsiya shkol’nikov’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 1996, pp. 66–71 (finance and accounting first in Krasnoyarsk, comparable findings in Moscow); B. Ruchkin, ‘Molodezh i stanovlenie novoi Rossi’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 1998, pp. 93–4 (lawyers first, doctors third, teachers and mafia boss equal, engineers last); Rubina and Airepetova, op. cit., p. 84 (business came first by a long way in Noyabrsk (Tyumen Region) – even though, as the authors point out, this is unrealistic in the context of the local economy). 21 N. Pokrovskii, ‘Goryachee dykhanie vlasti’, in Na pereput’e (Novye vekhi), Moscow: Logos, 1999, p. 63. 22 See, for example, E. Meshkova, in Sotsiologicheskiie issledovaniya, 6, 1997, reviewing K. Razlogov and I. Butenko, (eds), Kul’turnaya politika Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’ (GIVTs Minkul’tury, 1996), p. 141. 23 See, for example, L. Ionin, ‘Kul’tura i sotsial’naya struktura’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 3, 1996, p. 33; L. Belyaeva, ‘ “Novye srednie” v Rossii’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 7, 1998, p. 33. 24 Golenkova et al., ‘Sotsial’naya stratifikatsiya gorodskogo naseleniya’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 1995, p. 99 report that in Irkutsk more than 60 per cent of the ‘humanities intelligentsia’ (in culture, education and the media) considered themselves intelligentsia, as did medical workers. Only 15 per cent of engineers, technicians, accountants and economists classed themselves as such. Around 60 per cent of the latter labelled themselves services workers. For more on definitions and substrata, see Churchward, op. cit., Chapters 1 and 2, and Matthews, op. cit., pp. 141–9. 25 See, for example, A. Deryabin, ‘Kadry reshayut vse’, Gorodok, 15 September 2000, p. 22. In 1995 only two people in the Achit police had law degrees and diplomas; by 2000 the figure was 18. 26 Zakharov’s published collections of short stories are listed in the bibliography. 27 I had discussions with both Zakharov and Kurbanov, but they are not included in the sample because they did not go through the interview schedule in detail. 28 I refer to the managers of the local newspapers, hospital, Schools No. 1 and 2 (i.e. special needs school in Achit), library, vocational schools and agricultural college (Bednodemyanovsk). All managers have been included, not just respondents. 29 N. Platonova, ‘Malen’kii ostrovok otnositel’noi bezopasnosti’, Nash put’, 2 February 2000, p. 2. 30 See, for example, Z. Golenkova and E. Igitkhanyan, ‘Srednie sloi v sovremennoi Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7, 1998. 31 E. Klopov, ‘Iz pervykh opytov issledovaniya sotsial’noi struktury sovremennogo rossiiskogo obshchestva’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 1996, p. 140. 32 For a useful collection of articles exploring various dimensions of the problem of ideology and late Soviet consciousness, see S. White and A. Pravda (eds), Ideology and Soviet Politics, London: SSEES and Macmillan, 1988. 33 Outstanding literary scholar, dissident physicist and poet, respectively. 34 Ya stal menee intelligentnym, bolee zlym. 35 S. Smith, ‘Civil society formation in post-communist East Central Europe as narrativisation’, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference, Cambridge, April 7–9, 2001, p. 3, referring to J. Kabele (1998) Prerody – principy socialniho konstruovani (Prague, Karolinum). 36 On their self-identification as a ‘leading stratum’ in Irkutsk see Golenkova et al., op. cit. 37 Interviews; personal communication from employee at second-hand bookshop, ul. Sovetskaya, Tver.

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38 G. Shirokalova, ‘Gorozhane i selyane v rezul’tate reform 90-x godov’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2002, p. 78. (The year was presumably 1997.) 39 Michael Walker discusses a similar ‘mental block’ against trading affecting professional people in Lugansk. ‘Survival strategies in an industrial town in East Ukraine’, in S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 195. 40 ‘Pochemu ya stala chelnokom’ (anon.), Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 11 January 1997, p. 2. 41 See, for example, L. Rubina, ‘Professional’noe i sotsial’noe samochuvstvie uchitelei’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6, 1996, p. 69; S. Zheleznyakova, ‘Sotsiokul’turnye orientatsii uchitelei’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 2000, p. 101. 42 See, for example, L. Rubina, ‘Professional’noe i sotsial’noe samochuvstvie uchitelei’, pp. 66, 70. 43 M. Draganova, P. Starosta and V. Stolbov, ‘Sotsial’naya identifikatsiya zhitelei sel’skikh poselenii i malykh gorodov Vostochnoi Evropy’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2002, p. 53. 44 V. Levicheva, ‘Gumanitarnaya intelligentsia: osnovaniya korporativnoi identichnosti’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001, p. 58; S. Magaril, ‘Grazhdanskaya otvetstvennost’ intelligentsii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001, p. 51. 45 Yu. Petrov, ‘Problema intelligentnosti v ponimanii studentov’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001. 46 Levicheva, op. cit., p. 58. 47 V. Lukov, ‘Problema obobshchayushchikh otsenok polozheniya molodezhi’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 1998. 48 V.E. Bonnell, ‘Russia’s new entrepreneurs’, in V.E. Bonnell and G.W. Breslauer (eds), Russia in the New Century: Stability or Disorder, Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 2001, p. 177. 49 Humphrey suggests that it is commonplace for New Russians to be identified with their villas in Russia. C. Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 175. 50 Most interestingly, the Achit head of administration claimed that there were really no rich people. Working people lived slightly worse than in the past, and people who were poor were poor because they were lazy. 51 S. Aleksandrov, ‘I vnov’ pozhar v Zubtsove. Pogibla zhenshchina’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 26 March 1999, p. 1. 52 V. Tsukerman, ‘Sotsiokul’turnye predpochteniya v Chelyabinskoi oblasti’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 10, 1997, p. 105. 53 N. Plotnikov, ‘Monitoring’, Sotsiologicheskiie issledovaniya, 2, 2001. 54 Galkin, op. cit., p. 85. 55 Perhaps, however, more respondents would have hit on the answer ‘middle class’ if this question had come before the discussion about the intelligentsia. 7 Civil society and politics 1 See A. White, Democratization in Russia under Gorbachev: The Birth of a Voluntary Sector, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, Chapter 3, for examples of pre-Gorbachev independent civil society groups. 2 For example, M. Howard, Free Not to Participate: The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2000, p. 5. 3 A. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. x. 4 T. Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

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5 See A. White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control Over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, London: Routledge, 1990, and Democratization in Russia, op. cit. In these two previous books, I probably overestimated the extent of cynicism: the result of focusing too much on cities, and on the very late Soviet period. My own experience of living among students in the city of Voronezh at the end of the Brezhnev era also gave me the impression that cynicism was commonplace. 6 See, for example, G. Gill and R. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, or M. Weigle, Russia’s Liberal Project: State-Society Relations in the Transition from Communism, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. 7 See, for example, A. Arato, ‘Civil society, transition and consolidation of democracy’, in A. Braun and Z. Barany (eds), Dilemmas of Transition: The Hungarian Experience, Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 8 M. Walzer, ‘The concept of civil society’, in M. Walzer (ed.), Toward a Global Civil Society, Oxford: Berghahn, 1995, p. 24. 9 ‘Den’ Pobedy v gorode i raione’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 14 May 1999, p. 1; L. Burdina, ‘Tvorcheskie vstrechi s chitatelyami’, ibid., 20 February 1999, p. 4; S. Aleksandrov, ‘Pod perebor gitarnykh strun’, ibid., 4 February 1999, p. 1. 10 This is the central argument in A. White, De-Stalinization, op. cit. 11 A. Vatolin, ‘A ty zapisalsya dobrovol’tsem v narodnuyu druzhinu?’, Nash put’, 25 February 2000, p. 12; A. Sal’nikova, ‘Na raznykh polyusakh’, ibid., 17 March 2000, p. 1. 12 Clubs in children’s arts centres are still free, although children have to bring their own materials for crafts activities. 350 children were involved in Bednodemyanovsk and a neighbouring village; 917 in Zubtsov; and 150 in Achit (with a further 120 at the house of culture across the road). Achit also had a ‘sports school’, another afterschool club for children. ‘Music and arts schools’ provided highly subsidized tuition for children: 150 children in Zubtsov, for example, and 100 in Achit. The houses of culture in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk were shut for repairs/rebuilding, although some activities did continue in the town, and the district house of culture was responsible for supervizing events throughout the district. 13 L. Burdina, ‘Sochetanie nravstvennosti, intellekta i talanta, ili neskol’ko slov ob odnom khudozhnike’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 February 1999, p. 4. 14 See, for example, S. Aleksandrov, ‘Pamyat’ Mariny Tsvetaevoi’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 24 September 1998, p. 4; N. Savitskaya, ‘Rodniki prekrasnogo’, ibid., 27 February 1999, p. 4. 15 A. Zhupikov, ‘Mir spaset krasota’, Vestnik, 3 June 1999, p. 2. 16 G. Cherednyakh, ‘Andreyu Kurbanovu’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 16 March 1999, p. 4. The Russian is: I zdes’, na vystavke, vysokoparnykh Ya ne boyus’ segodnya slov. V foie tak neobychno, stranno, Ved’ dlya Zubtsova eto – nov’. 17 Information from Culture Department, Zubtsov, and District Libraries, Bednodemyanovsk and Achit. 18 The libraries were very short of books, although Zubtsov had received part of a grant from the Soros Foundation, and Achit had had a 5,000 ruble grant from the Sverdlovsk administration: again, a sign that sporadically the town does benefit from its location in this ‘richer’ region. However, in the first nine months of 2000 it had received only four new books. Curiously, city libraries are more short of books per capita than those

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19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Notes in small towns, perhaps because of population decline in the latter. This is clear from the statistical handbooks mentioned in Chapter 2. Inter-library loan was used, but it was too expensive for many people in the small towns. (It cost 60 rubles a book in Bednodemyanovsk in April 2000.) Meshkova suggests that library use has increased in Russia for purely practical reasons – people are studying more, or need specific factual information from reference books. E. Meshkova, reviewing K. Razlogov and I. Butenko (eds), Kul’turnaya politika Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’ (GIVTs Minkul’tury, 1996) in Sotsiologicheskiie issledovaniya, 6, 1997, p. 142. A. Sedov, ‘Spasenie utopayushchikh – delo ruk samikh utopayushchikh’, Vestnik, 21 July 2000, p. 3. One interviewee pointed out that the structure of the district administration was identical to that of the old party committee. See, for example, O. Ivanyutina, ‘Itogi konkursa bibliotek’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 26 March 1999, p. 1. ‘Pomozhem brat’yam yugoslavam’, ibid., 13 April 1999, p. 4. ‘Obrashchenie uchastnikov raionnoi konferentsii rabotnikov kul’tury k zhitelyam Bednodem’yanovskogo raiona’, Vestnik, 5 February 1999, p. 2. ‘Kaleidoskop kul’turnoi zhizni’, ibid., 26 February 1999, p. 2. ‘Na mitinge’, ibid., 12 November 1999, p. 1. A. Sedov, ‘Posylka na voinu’, ibid., 23 November 1999, pp. 1, 3. ‘Otsalyutovali pobede’, Nash put’, 19 May 2000, p. 2. L. Petrovskikh, ‘26 noyabrya – Den’ materi. Tematicheskie vechera, konkursy, vystavki’, ibid., 17 November 2000, p. 7; A. Sal’nikova, ‘Vstretili dostoino Den’ pozhilykh lyudei’, ibid., 22 September 2000, p. 7. A. Loginov, ‘Achitu – 265 let’, Gorodok, 1 September 2000, p. 22. ‘Babushka – znachit molodaya!’, Nash put’, 8 October 1999, p. 7. D. Smirnov, ‘Radi slavy bozhiei’, Vestnik, 4 July, p. 2. ‘A voz i nyne tam…’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 2. S. Kuteinikov, ‘Skhod reshil: tserkvi byt’!’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 20 February 1999, p. 1. Lenin’s Path (Leninskii put’) became Zubtsov Life (Zubtsovskaya zhizn’); Ray of Communism (Luch kommunizma) became The Herald (Vestnik); and October Path (Put’ Oktyabrya) became Our Path (Nash put’). The newspapers were sometimes known by the affectionate Russian colloquial term for a district newspaper, raionka. In Achit the newspaper had to temporarily suspend production in spring 1999 because it had no money to buy paper. G. Vorob’eva, ‘Uvazhaemye chitateli’, Nash put’, 2 April 1999, p. 1. S. Kotkin, ‘Kazhdyi narod dostoin togo pravitel’stva, kotoroe imeet’ (on local election results), Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 November 1996, p. 2; S. Kotkin, ‘Kontrol’naya dlya vlastei’ (on a teachers’ strike), ibid., 30 January 1999, p. 1. L. Burdina, ‘ I opyat’ pro pensii’, 27 February 1999, p. 4; N. Podvoiskii, ‘Skandal – atribut rynka’, ibid., 14 May 1999, pp. 2–3. Interview with Kotkin and observation of him at work. G. Vorob’eva, ‘Glavnoe – sokhranit’ vse, chto znachimo, polezno dlya raiona’, Nash put’, 23 April 1999, p. 1; ‘Imeet li pravo rabotat’ s det’mi i v administratsii?’, ibid., 20 October 2000, p. 1. This happened in both Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. In at least one case, there was pressure from above. Interview, July 2000. ‘Nachalas’ podpiska na gazetu “Zubtsovskaya zhizn” ’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 26 March 1999, p. 8. In Zubtsov a radio station, based at the post office, broadcast for 40–50 minutes two evenings a week. It had roughly 7,000 listeners and only one journalist, a young former teacher with a style reminiscent of Young Communist League activists in Soviet days.

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45 For example, the veterans had 6,476 members in Achit District. A Sal’nikova, ‘Veteranov bespokoit sud’ba raiona’, Nash put’, 26 November 1999, p. 12. 46 P. Sysolyatin, ‘S miru po nitke’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 7. 47 See announcement ‘Vnimaniyu invalidov goroda’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 January 1999, p. 4. 48 A. Trofimov, ‘Miloserdie zhivet’, Nash put’, 7 January 2000, p. 2. On Bednodemyanovsk, see e.g. ‘V interesakh invalidov’, Vestnik, 23 May 2000, p. 1. Achit also apparently had a club for veterans of Afghanistan, but they did not seem to play a public role. They, and the attempt to get common premises, are mentioned in M. Mityukhlyaeva, ‘Vsegda gotovy podderzhat’ drug druga’, Nash put’, 28 May 1999, p. 2. 49 Soyuz avtomobilistov. 50 Anatolii Zhupikov was a college lecturer turned petrol station manager. 51 It was based in the agricultural college. 52 Personal discussion with Valentina Men’shikova, Russian Union of Soldiers’ Mothers, Brussels, December 2001. 53 Surovatkina interview, July 2000; A. Aleksandrov, ‘Materi soldatskie’, Vestnik, 5 March 1999, p. 2. 54 L. Nechaeva, M. Volkova and I. Nozhkina, ‘Za muzhei spokoino’, Vestnik, 15 August 2000, p. 2. 55 ‘Povernis’ litsom k detyam’, ibid., 28 May 1999, p. 1. 56 Surovatkina interview, July 2000. 57 G. Luchterhandt, S. Ryzhenkov and A. Kuz’min, Politika i kul’tura v rossiiskoi provintsii, Moscow/St Petersburg: IGPI/Letnii Sad, 2001, pp. 162–7. 58 It was formed in November 1998 and still going strong in September 2000. See ‘Dushu “lechat” pesni’, Nash put’, 5 March 1999, p. 2. 59 G. Vorob’eva, ‘Na narkomaniyu nado nastupat’ so vsekh storon’, ibid., 9 April 1999, p. 2. 60 L. Andreeva, ‘Sozdana Assotsiatsiya Zhenshchin Achitskogo raiona’, ibid., 16 July 1999, p. 1. 61 N. Aleksandrova, ‘Zhenshchiny raiona, ob”edinyaites’!’, ibid., 17 September 1999, p. 1. 62 L. Petrovskikh, ‘Pobyvali v tsentre Ural’skoi Assotsiatsii Zhenshchin’, ibid., 27 October 1999, p. 7. 63 Sergeeva, op. cit. 64 ‘Itogi golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona po vyboram deputatov Gosudarstvennoi Dumy’, Nash put’, 24 December 1999, p. 7. 65 T. Timkanova, ‘Otkrytie tsentra tatarskoi kul’tury’, ibid., 9 April 1999, p. 2. 66 T. Timkanova, ‘Ai da Sabantui’, ibid., 16 July 1999, p. 1. 67 An Achit journalist said she thought that the fact that members were now paid increased the popularity of such service. 68 ‘Itogi golosovaniya po vyboram deputatov raionnogo soveta’, Nash put’, 31 March 2000. 69 Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 23 November 1996, p. 2 (letter); L. Volodina, ‘Vybor svoi sdelala’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 21 November 1996, p. 2; M. Telegina, ‘V organy vlasti – molodykh’, ibid., 3 December 1996, p. 2. Krylov was a former CPSU raikom official, but in 1996 was associated with the then Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s party Our Home is Russia, so the battle for the district leadership had a ‘government versus communists’ dimension, but this was never made apparent in the press. The editor of Zubtsovskaya zhizn’ said that that party affiliations had not really played a part in the local election, although interview evidence suggests that Surov’s communist sympathies were antipathetic to some voters. 70 ‘Rezul’taty golosovaniya po vyboram deputata Zakonodatel’nogo sobraniya’, ibid., 18 December 1997, p. 1. Krylov may have compromized himself by continuing to work in the local administration. 71 ‘Vybory glavy m. o. Achitskii raion’, Nash put’, 15 December 1996, p. 4.

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72 ‘Vybor sdelan’, ibid., 18 December 1993, p. 1; ‘Rezul’taty golosovaniya v raione po vyboram deputatov Gosudarstvennoi Dumy’, ibid., 23 December 1995, p. 1; ‘Svodnaya tablitsa ob itogakh golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona vo vtorom ture golosovaniya’, ibid., 10 July 1996, p. 1; ‘Itogi golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona’, ibid., see Bibliography for the various reports of election results with the same title. 73 ‘Kak golosovali zubchane’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 December 1993, p. 1; ‘Rezul’taty golosovaniya po vyboram deputata Zakonodatel’nogo sobraniya’, ibid., 18 December 1997, p. 1. 74 J. de Bardeleben and A. Galkin, ‘Electoral behavior and attitudes in Russia: do regions make a difference or do regions just differ?’, J. Stavrakis, J. de Bardeleben and L. Black (eds), Beyond the Monolith: the emergence of regionalism in Post-Soviet Russia, Washington DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 75 K. Ulanov, ‘Elektorat Penzenskoi oblasti: politicheskie predpochteniya’, Zemstvo, 2, 1994. 76 ‘Vybory-99’, Vestnik, 24 December 1999, p. 2. 77 M. Wyman, ‘Elections and voters’, in S. White, A. Pravda and Z. Gitelman (eds), Developments in Russian Politics5, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 81. 78 Penza Institute of Regional Politics database. 79 See Wyman, op. cit., p. 82. 80 Clem and Craumer warn against assuming too simple a link (rural  conservative). It was true that they found that in 1993 ‘support for Yeltsin and the reform parties is highest in the largest cities … and declines through medium-sized to small cities and merges into the trend that runs through the rural rayons by degree of ruralness’. However, in 1995, their sample small towns were unexpectedly supportive of non-left candidates. They also point out the substantial regional differences. Rural districts in Sverdlovsk were more likely to support Yeltsin than were the capital cities of some other regions. R.C. Clem and P.R. Craumer, ‘Urban-rural voting differences in Russian elections, 1995–1996: a rayon-level analysis’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 38, 7, 1997. 81 See Ulanov, op. cit., who shows that in regional and national elections in the early 1990s Penza and most of the big towns (though not Kuznetsk) voted less on the left than did districts centred on smaller towns. On Tver, see ‘Tak golosovali goroda i raiony oblasti’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 25 June 1996, p. 1. 82 ‘Vybory Prezidenta RF sostoyalis’’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 June 1996, p. 1; Kotkin, ‘Kazhdyi narod’, op. cit. 83 Calculated from ‘Itogi golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona po vyboram gubernatora Sverdlovskoi oblasti’, Nash put’, 3 September 1999, p. 2. In the second round, reported in the newspaper on 17 September, one half of the town voted narrowly for Rossel, but the other ward still chose Burkov. 84 L.D. Nelson and I.Y. Kuzes, ‘Elites and institutions in Russian economic transformation: the case of Sverdlovsk’, in D. Lane (ed.), The Legacy of State Socialism and the Future of Transformation, Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 85 V. Demidova, ‘Vmesto posobii – groby i kuvaldy’, Nash put’, 20 August 1999, p. 1. 86 Gornozavodskoi Ural. See J. Startsev, ‘Gubernatorial politics in Sverdlovsk oblast’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15, 4, 1999. 87 A. Il’yin, ‘Valyuta provintsial’koi Merzlyakovoi’, Nash put’, 3 March 2000. 88 N. Stakheeva, ‘V interesakh raiona’, ibid., 15 January 1999, p. 2. 89 For example, Yabloko scored just 1.6 per cent in the Sverdlovsk parliamentary elections of March 2000, compared with 23.8 per cent for Unity – and 8.7 per cent ‘against all candidates’. (District results.) See ‘Itogi golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona po vyboram deputatov Oblastnoi Dumy’, Nash put’, 31 March 2000, p. 1. 90 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Za derzhavu obidno’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 April 1999, p. 2, and interviews. 91 N. Savitskaya, ‘Vor v zakone’, ibid., 26 March 1999, p. 7. 92 ‘Zabastovku vremenno priostanovili’, Nash put’, 22 September 2000, p. 1.

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93 My respondents remembered four in Achit and two in Zubtsov. 94 A. Sal’nikova (no title), ‘Pedagogi 17 shkol Achitskogo raiona…’, Nash put’, 22 January 1999, p. 2. 95 This was in 1996. ‘Obrashchenie kollektiva Achitskoi srednei shkoly’, Nash put’, 22 November 1996, p. 1. 96 S. Kotkin, ‘Kontrol’naya’, op. cit.; S. Kuteinikov, ‘Estestvennyi otbor v bor’be za vyzhivanie’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 January 1999, p. 4; interview information. 97 S. Smith, ‘Civil society formation in post-communist East Central Europe as narrativisation’, BASEES annual conference, Cambridge, April 7–9, 2001, p. 14. 98 Platonova interview and ‘Direktor shkoly’, Nash put’, 29 September 2000, p. 1. 8 Multiple identities: local, regional, ethnic and national 1 M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Involution and destitution in capitalist Russia’, Ethnography, 1, 1, 2000. 2 V. Rodoman, ‘Prostranstvennaya polyarizatsiya i pereorientatsiya’, in T. Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial’noi sfery i sotsial’naya politika, Moscow: Delo, 1998, p. 182. 3 For a detailed bibliography, see M. Mendras, ‘How regional elites preserve their power’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15, 4, 1999. 4 J. Startsev, ‘Gubernatorial politics in Sverdlovsk oblast’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15, 4, 1999, p. 345. 5 N. Lapina and A. Chirikova, ‘Regional’naya vlast’ i reforma rossiiskogo federalizma’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 2001, pp. 20, 22. 6 Startsev, op. cit. 7 R. Rose, Getting Things Done With Social Capital, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1998, pp. 32–4; V. Shlapentokh, R. Levita and M. Loiberg, From Submission to Rebellion: The Provinces Versus the Center in Russia, Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1999, p. 216. 8 D. Strovskii, ‘Yekaterinburg media struggle to remain financially viable’, EastWest Institute, Russian Regional Report, 5, 30, 2 August 2000. 9 Penza Institute of Regional Politics, Press-karta: reitingovye SMI. 10 Published and edited in the 1990s by V. Manuilov, Penza. 11 Information from House of Pioneers, Bednodemyanovsk, April 2000. 12 N. Khokhlova, ‘Kul’tura segodnya i zavtra’, Vestnik, 2 February 1999. 13 G. Lapidus and E. Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and federalism: center–periphery relations in post-communist Russia’, in G.W. Lapidus (ed.), The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, Boulder: Westview, 1995, p. 106. 14 In Zubtsov, however, which neighbours Moscow Region, this was normally the point of comparison, especially since salaries were much higher over the border. No one thought of comparing Tver specifically with, say, Pskov, although they have much in common. 15 Startsev, op. cit., p. 348. 16 This comment was made by a musician who had migrated from a Central Asian capital city, and personally known Shostakovich. 17 For the results of some other surveys about Bochkarev, see V. Manuilov (ed.), Kto est’ kto v Penze, Penza: Institute of Regional Politics, 1999, pp. 11–2. 18 N. Nechaeva, ‘Uchebnyi god nachalsya’, Vestnik 3 September 1999, p. 1. 19 RSE 2000, p. 438. 20 A. Chernyshov, ‘Stolichnyi tsentr, region, provintsiya’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 7, 1999; Lapina and Chirikova, op. cit. 21 However, that a survey of citizens of Yekaterinburg also found that Yekaterinburgers were not well informed about the doings of the city authorities; the authors blamed those authorities for not doing more to get people involved. E. Zaborova, ‘Uchastie grazhdan v upravlenii gorodom’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2002.

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22 Regional governments, but not local ones, are described as ‘organs of state power’. See A.B. Evans, Jr., ‘Economic Resources and Political Power at the Local Level in Post-Soviet Russia’, Policy Studies Journal, 28, 1, 2000, p. 115. 23 P. Sysolyatin (local historian), ‘S miru po nitke’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 7. 24 A. Barykin, ‘Vizit konstruktivnyi i vazhnyi’, Vestnik, 11 August 2000, p. 1. 25 L. Kogan, ‘Dukhovnyi potentsial provintsii vchera i segodnya’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 1997. (The Russian word dukhovnyi, literally ‘spiritual’, implies everything that is non-material: hence perhaps ‘affective’ or ‘cultural’ are the best translations in this context, though ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ are other candidates.) 26 Interview information and N. Belov, ‘Obshchestvennyi transport’, Vestnik, 8 October 1999. The unofficial taxis would charge just 5 rubles more than the bus fare. 27 For example, 22 rubles return Achit-Krasnoufimsk, September 2000. 28 The nearest, Nizhnii Lomov, is half-way to Penza; one respondent complained that she never saw her sister there, because she could not afford the fare. 29 ‘Outside macroregion’ has been chosen for Table 8.1, rather than ‘outside region’ since all three towns were in border zones and it was not surprising if people in Zubtsov came from Smolensk or, in Achit, from Perm or Chelyabinsk regions. In Achit in particular people had indeed commonly crossed borders. Conversely, nearly all the Bednodemyanovsk respondents who were born in the macroregion actually came from Penza. 30 Kogan, op. cit., and T. Pankova, ‘O stanovlenii nravstvennykh i grazhdanskikh pozitsii shkol’nikov’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 2002, p. 113. That this was true elsewhere in provincial Russia was confirmed to me by Penza sociologist Valentin Manuilov, Penza, April 2000. 31 A. Sedov, ‘Spasenie utopayushchikh – delo ruk samikh utopayushchikh’, Vestnik, 21 July 2000, p. 3. 32 The non-Russians were: 5 Tatars, 2 Ukrainians, one Bashkir, one Mari, two halfUkrainians, one half-Pole, one half-Chuvash and one half-Mordvin. All the ‘halves’ were predominantly or entirely Russian-speaking. One respondent claimed to be Russian, without qualification, but another respondent said that the person concerned was Mordvin. 33 V. Tolz, ‘Forging the nation: national identity and nation building in post-communist Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50, 6, 1998. 34 Ibid., p. 1015. 35 Possibly they did not want to talk about these more political topics to a foreigner. However, the same people did discuss political issues in response to other questions. 36 Chernyshov, op. cit, p. 115. 37 Of course, their perceptions were not necessarily entirely accurate, particularly in view of the fact that regional leaders and mayors of regional capitals are often at loggerheads. On the economic plight of Tver city, for example, see B. Goubman, ‘Blackouts shut down much of Tver’, EastWest Institute, Russian Regional Report, 5, 30, 2 August 2000 and ‘Tver governor proposes declaring capital bankrupt’, ibid., 6, 9, 7 March 2001. Conclusions 1 A.V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 194–9. 2 S. Ashwin, ‘ “There’s no joy anymore”: the experience of reform in a Kuzbass mining settlement’, Europe–Asia Studies, 47, 8, 1995. 3 B. Silverman and M. Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, p. 117. 4 T. Piirainen, ‘The fall of an empire, the birth of a nation: perceptions of the new Russian identity’, in C.J. Chulos and T. Piirainen, The Fall of an Empire, The Birth of a Nation: National Identities in Russia, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, p. 193.

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Index

abstinence as survival strategy 111–12, 132 Achit District and Town: introductory description 2–3, ch. 3 additional earnings see employment administration, local see local government agency 6, 107–9, 211–12 agglomeration effects 15 Agrarian Party 180–2 agriculture 29, 31, 37, 60, 76, 79–80, 86–7, 100, 190 aid, Western 167 Akhmatova, A. 154 alcohol see drinking amateur art, drama and music 84, 136, 170–3, 177 archaization 8 Arkhangelsk City and Region 58–9, 65 Armenians 84 army see military service Arsenev 63 arts workers see houses of culture and clubs Asbest 83 Association of Achit District Women 178 Association of Urals Women 178 atomization 6, 168–70, 176 autonomous okrugs: social conditions 224n1 Azerbaidjan 10 Azigulovo 178

Bednodemyanovsk Agricultural College see colleges of further education Bednodemyanovsk District and Town: introductory description 2–3, ch. 3 Bednyi, D. 3 Belgorod Region 45, 74 benefits in kind 37, 104–5, 127; see also child benefit, social assistance and insurance Bichevskaya, Zh. 195 birthplaces of respondents 197 birthrates 40–1, 69–70, 108, 112; see also population size and growth Black Earth area 181–2, 190 Bochkarev, V. 84, 88, 188, 192–3, 195 bookshops 94, 155 Borisoglebsk 71 borrowing from family/friends 98, 111, 114 Bryansk Region 25, 89 Burkov, A. 182 businesses 30–1; difficulties of establishing in small towns 3, 97, 121–3, 125–6 businessmen: intelligentsia links and perceptions 3, 123, 143, 158, 161–2; small-town successes 93, 101–2, 118, 121–2, 151 businesswomen 125–6 byudzhetniki see public sector workers

Baltic Republics 87 Baranskaya, N. 131 barter arrangements, local government 36–7, 88–9, 116 Bashkirs 179 Bashkortostan 190–1 baths, steam 136

cardiovascular disease 41–3 car ownership 25, 65–6, 85, 196 casual earnings see employment census (2002) 10, 39 Central Asia 10, 116, 135, 177 Central-Black Earth macroregion 51–2 Central Federal Okrug 25, 28

270

Index

Central macroregion 38, 45, 51–2, 80 charity 177 Chechens 84 Chechnya 16, 52, 124, 133, 172, 201, 220 Chelyabinsk Region 164, 190 Chernenko, K. 3 Chernetskii, A. 179, 183, 190, 192 Chernobyl refugees 89 Chernomyrdin, V. 184 child benefit 36–7, 56, 84, 88, 104, 191 child care 25–6, 84, 93, 126–7 children 20, 41, 47, 101–3, 113, 130, 163, 170; born outside marriage 47–8; in care 49, 94, 104, 137, 167, 178 Chukotka 65 churches 173–4, 200 Chuvashia 80 Chuvash (people) 84 cinemas 94, 174 CIS see ‘Near Abroad’ cities 3, 14, 61, 114–15, 167 civic engagement (of small-town inhabitants) 168–70 civil society 7, ch. 7 colleagues 136–8, 219 colleges of further education (uchilishcha) 26, 94, 97 communists and communist party 16, 80, 171, 175, 180–4 community service and spirit (of intelligentsia) 159–60, 170–2, 175; see also civic engagement computer ownership 57, 98 conscription see military service construction industry 89, 100, 118, 126 coping mechanisms (economic) see livelihood strategies coping with stress 135–6 core intelligentsia 10, 146 CPRF, CPSU see communists and communist party credit 122, 218 crime 27–8, 66–8, 78, 81, 83, 84, 113–14, 126 cultural enlightenment see community service and spirit, houses of culture and clubs culture (arts) in small towns see houses of culture and clubs, museums culture/way of life in small towns 1, 6, 108–9, 116

dachas: citydwellers’ country cottages 3, 14, 74, 85, 89, 94, 114–15, 200, 228n100; small-town allotments see household plots Dagestan 46, 64, 80 deathrates 41–3, 69–70; see also population size and growth democracy 167 deprivation see abstinence as survival strategy de-urbanization (reclassification of towns as villages) 71 devolution of power/responsibilities to regions 16–17, 19, 56 diet 38–9, 111–12, 115, 217–20 disabled people 20, 104, 163, 177–8 discotheques 171–2 divorces and divorced people 45–8, 68–9, 103, 128–30, 133 doctors 97–100, 103, 119–20, 134, 149, 175; see also health and health care, hospitals in small towns donor regions 76 drinking 41–3, 104, 125, 130, 132, 136, 163; see also vodka, illegal drug abuse and dealing 27–8, 83, 178 Dubrovki 85 Dushanbe 71 Eastern Europe 201 East Siberia 24, 27, 29, 51–2 earnings, additional see employment economy, informal see informal economy education and students 9, 25–6, 35, 98, 102–4, 117, 122–3, 133, 171, 217–20; see also colleges of further education, schools elderly dependency ratios 52, 69 elections 119, 174, 179–84, 195 electric cable theft 113 elites, small town 148–51 employment: combining two or more jobs (po sovmestitel’stvu) 111; with regular overtime (working more than one shift) 111, 120; secondary 110–11, 118–19, 126, 146, 217, 219; see also unemployment and unemployed people Employment Service 87 engineers 95, 99 essentialism 7, 123 Europe 201

Index 271 Factory and Mining Urals (Gornozavodskoi Ural ) party 183 familialization 126 Far East 28, 37, 45, 51–2, 89 Fatherland (Otechestvo) 183–4, 198 federal okrugs (administrative units) 16–17 fertility rates 40–1, 70, 108, 112 festivals and holidays 136, 168–70, 179 fieldwork description 8–10 folk culture 172, 189 food, homegrown see household plots foodprocessing and distribution, local 86–7, 116–17 football 177, 191 forests (as source of berries, mushrooms, timber) 84, 113–14, 119 fringe intelligentsia 10, 146 gardening see household plots Gari 58 gender difference, relations and roles 10, 219; family roles 157, 218–20; health 41–3, 128–37; livelihoods 6–7, 31, 74, 101–3, 107–8, 122, 125–8, 143, 148–9; unemployment 35, 87, 95–6; women’s organisations 177–8 gifts (in return for favours) 118–20 Gini coefficients 32–3 globalization 201 glubinka (provincial depths) 3, 5, 8, 60, 183 Gorbachev, M. 16 Gornozavodskoi Ural 183 Gorodok 175–6, 183 Goskomstat 10–12, 20, 29, 31–2 government, local see local government governors, regional 192 grandparents 112–13, 130, 217–20 Gross Domestic Product 29 Gross Regional Product 29–30, 76 Gulyakov, A. 193 heads of administration, district 179–80 headteachers see teachers health and health care 6, 27, 41–3, 98, 102–4, 112, 132–7, 217–20 higher education see education and students history, local 174, 177 HIV/AIDS 27, 83 Hollywood films 201 home area, attachment to 197–8

homebrew see vodka, illegal hospitals in small towns 88, 94; see also doctors, health and health care hotels and cafes 119 household plots 20, 37–9, 84, 88, 98, 108, 110–11, 114–17, 125, 130–2, 136, 138, 148, 157, 217–20 households 5, 49; composition and size 49, 99–103, 112–13, 217–20 household strategies see livelihood strategies houses of culture and clubs 89, 93–5, 97, 99, 103, 157, 170–2 housewives 35, 98, 102, 127, 178 housework 127–8 housing and amenities (sewers, etc.) 13, 24–5, 84, 89, 102, 124, 138, 149 identity and identities 5–6, chs. 6, 7, 8, 217–20 incomes and income inequality 19–24, 63, 65, 80, 98–104, 217–20 industry and industrial growth 15, 29, 31, 76, 79–80, 83, 86, 100, 125, 190 infant mortality 27, 51, 70, 81 inflation 20, 29, 84 informal economy 89, 107 Ingushetia 4, 19–20, 27, 31, 46, 70 Inta 37 intelligentsia 1, 7, 10, 93, 97, 101–2, 140, ch. 6, 218–20; and politics 179–86 internet access 198 interviewees (sample description) 1–2, 8–11 involution 6, 139, 168–70 Ioshkar-Ola 72 Islam 173 Ivanovo Region 20, 28, 34 Izhevsk 72 Izhma 64–5 Jews 84, 154 journalists see newspapers, magazines and journalists Kalashnikov, A. 192 Kaliningrad Region 45 Karpinsk 62, 182 Kazakstan 10 Khabarovsk City and Region 65, 67 Khanka District 63–4 kindergartens see child care

272

Index

Kirov City and Region 12, 20, 28, 36, 59–61, 65, 69, 72, 75, 80 Kirovgrad 36 Kolotnin, A. 179 Komi Republic 37, 58, 60, 64–5, 68 Komsomol 149–50 Konstantinova, T. 178 Kosovo 172, 201 Kostroma City 72 Kotkin, S. 92, 174 Krasnoufimsk 85, 97, 175, 196, 198 Krylov, N. 179–80, 182 Kurbanov, A. 148, 171 Kurgan Region 28 Kursk (submarine) 201 Kushva 56 Labouring Russia (Trudovaya Rossiya) 181 legal action 184 leisure facilities 82, 94, 157, 170–2 Lenin, V. 192 Leningrad Region 29, 73–4 Lermontov, M. 190, 192 Lesozavodsk District 63 Liberal Democratic Party of Russia 181–2 libraries and librarians 93–5, 97, 99–100, 103, 170–1, 183, 189, 197 life expectancy 6, 41–2, 52, 79, 81, 135 Likhachev, D. 154 livelihoods: definition 5, 14 livelihood strategies 5–6, ch. 5, 217–20 loans see borrowing from family/friends local government 3, 25, 36, 56, 88–9, 94, 99, 101–2, 120–1, 172–5, 177, 179; see also elections lone parents 48, 101, 103, 127, 137, 218–19 Luzhkov, Yu. 183, 198 macroregions: definition 16 Magadan Gold Company 89 malaya rodina 197–8 managers 101–3, 149–51 manual workers 87, 99, 102 Marii El 22, 80 Mari (people) 2, 84, 179 markets see shops and shopping marriages 45–8, 68–9, 128–9 May (political party) 182–3 metal, scrap 113 methodology 8 middle class 142–4, 164

migrants and migration 52; to cities 70–4, 76, 81, 89, 123–5, 217; from Far East and North 45, 219; from Near Abroad 10, 44, 79, 134–5, 138, 148–9, 177 military service 95, 133, 172, 219 money shortage and transactions in kind see barter arrangements, local government ‘moral crisis’, perceptions of 57 Mordovia 80 Mordvin (people) 81, 84 Moscow City 1–3, 7, 17, 19, 22, 25, 29–31, 34–5, 39, 45, 53–4, 59, 65, 73–4, 85, 89, 97, 110–11, 122, 124, 143, 160, 188, 190, 200–1, 217 Moscow Region 12, 29, 54 Mother Russia 128, 197–8, 202 Mothers against Drugs 178 mothers and stress 134–5 municipal services 84 murders 41–3 museums 94, 99, 179, 183 Nakhodka 60, 63–4 Nash put’ 174–6 nationalism 199 nature 83 ‘Near Abroad’ 44, 70–1, 79, 89 networks 6, 98, 110, 119, 137–9, 151, 167, 217–20 New Russian Barometer 5 New Russians 127, 143 newspapers, magazines and journalists 94, 97, 99, 118, 155, 170, 173–6; see also regional media Nizhnii Novgorod Region 29, 112, 122, 136, 156–7 Nizhnii Tagil 160 nomenklaturists 122, 149–51 non-governmental organizations 36, 166–7, 176–9 North Caucasus 24, 27–9, 39, 51–3 Northern macroregion 37 North-West Federal Okrug 29 North-West macroregion 45, 51–2 Novoe Urengoe 112 Novosibirsk 28, 45 Nozhkin, N. 9, 171, 177 nurseries see child care Oblastnaya gazeta 189, 194 October Revolution anniversaries 172

Index 273 older people see grandparents, pensioners and pensions, residential care Orenburg 198 Orthodoxy see religion Otechestvo 183–4, 198 Our Home, Our Town 179, 183, 192 Our Home is Russia 184 participation in local celebrations and events 168–70 pensioners and pensions 20, 36–7, 69, 101, 104–5, 110, 138, 163, 176–7, 184 Penza City and Region 3, 29, 35, 38, 49, 56, 72, 75, 80–1, 85, 97, 179–82, ch. 8 people’s militia 170 Perm City and Region 157, 173, 190–1 petrol stations 88–9 Platonova, N. 186 Pogoreloe Gorodishche 85, 174, 182 police 84, 88, 99, 121, 124, 137, 146, 178 politicians, critical/cynical attitudes to 172, 192, 195, 201 politics in small towns 179–84 pollution levels 83 poor people see poverty and poor people population size and growth 10, 12–13, 39–45, 51, 79, 81; in the small towns 85–6, 89; urban/rural differences 68–70 poselok gorodskogo tipa: definition 13 postcommunism 7 poverty and poor people 20–4, 36–7, 51, 80, 97–104, 110–18, 133, 218–20; extreme poverty 139, 163 Preobrazhenie Urala see Urals Transformation pre-school institutions see child care presidential envoys 17 Primore 60, 63, 65, 67 prisoners 84 private sector 30–1, 121; see also businesses professional identities 7, 157–9 professional qualifications of small-town intelligentsia 95–7, 120, 151–3 Promkomservis 179 Pskov City and Region 72, 130, 132 public opinion 175 public sector workers 87, ch. 4 Pushkin, A. 171 Putin, V. 3, 16–17, 56, 175, 182, 188 radio 94 Red Belt 80, 181, 190

regional capitals 5, 58–9, 67, 69–70, 123, 164, 189–90, 194–5 regional identity building projects 188–95 regional media 188–9, 194 regions: differences between 4, 17, ch. 1 (especially 19–20, 50–4), 191, 210; differences within 4, ch. 2, 183 relatives as social capital 138–9, 217–20 religion 136–7, 173–4, 188 remoteness and economic depression 5, 60–2, 90 re-naming (geographical) 16 residential care 49, 94, 105 retail trade see trade and traders Rossel, E. 76, 78, 178–9, 182–3, 188–90, 192, 194 Rossosh 65 rural areas see villages Russian identity, patriotism, cultural revival 198–201 Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey 10 Russian Society of Disabled People 178 Ryazan City 72 Rzhev 84–5, 89, 148, 189, 196 Sabantui festival 179 Saint Petersburg 27–31, 34–5, 45, 74, 89, 111, 132, 200 Sakharov, A. 154 salaries see wages Samara City and Region 27, 28, 30, 45, 49, 54, 132, 190 savings 103, 111 school curriculum: regional patriotism 189 schools (in small towns) 93–4, 170–2; see also education and students, teachers Second World War 84, 148, 171, 199 semi-intelligentsia 151–2 Serbs 172 servicemen, retired 87, 89 Severouralsk 58, 62 sex ratios 49 Shestyakov, A. 180 Shmelev, V. 179–80 shops and shopping 87, 126 shuttle traders see trade and traders Siberia 29, 39, 45, 53, 84; see also East Siberia

274

Index

single parents see lone parents small business see businesses small towns, general comments 3–4, 12–16, ch. 2, 136, 167 social assistance and insurance 36–7, 104–5, 177 social capital 5, 98, 119, 136–9, 185 socialising see networks social support 135–9, 218–20 sociological research, Russian 3 soldiers’ mothers’ committees 177 Soviet identities and practices 7, 100, 110, 116, 143, 152, 169–71, 175 special needs school 94, 96, 104 sport 191 Stakheeva, N. 183 state sector workers see public sector workers statistics: reliability 10–12, 231n11 stratification, social 161–4 stray dogs 84 street committees 170 stress 6, 43, 95, 104, 128–37, 154–5, 218–20 strikes 136, 184 students see education and students subbotnik 170 subsistence farming see household plots subsistence minima 20–3, 85, 99–100, 104 Sudarushka 172, 178 suicides 41–3 Sunday schools 173 Surov, V. 179–80, 182 Surovatkina, V. 177–8 survival 6, 109–110 survival strategies see livelihood strategies Sverdlovsk Region 2, 12, 20, 26, 29, 35, 37, 56, 58, 62, 68, 70, 75–9, 93, 112, ch. 8; politics 178, 182–3 Syktyvkar 30, 139 Sysolyatin, P. 177 Tatar National Autonomy 179 Tatars 2, 76, 81, 178–9 Tatarstan 16, 19, 38, 54 taxes and tax inspectors 89, 126 teachers 9, 87, 92–5, 97–100, 102–3, 118–20, 133–4, 145, 159, 175, 184 television 84, 169; see also regional media theatre visits 156 time (as resource) 131–2, 186 trade and traders 7, 87, 97, 116–7, 121–2, 125; volume of retail trade 63–4, 87

transition 7, 210–11 travel and transport 25, 60, 85, 98, 119, 155–6, 195–7 Trudovaya Rossiya 181 trust 206 tuberculosis 27 Tula City 125 Tver City and Region 2, 12, 29, 35–6, 38–9, 56, 73, 75, 77–9, 84, 89, 180–2, ch. 8 Tyumen Region 4, 87, 124 Tyva 20, 27, 31, 46, 70 Ufimka 86 Ukrainians 84 unemployment and unemployed people 33–6, 76, 80–1, 84, 87, 95–7, 104, 113, 127, 130, 218–20; small-town underclass 163 Unity 180, 182 Urals 2, 28, 35, 51–4, 74, 76, 184, 190 Urals Republic 190 Urals Transformation 179, 188 urbanization (reclassification of villages as towns) 12–13 urban settlements, population size and growth 13 Usinsk 37, 60, 64 Ust-Kulom 65 utility bills 93, 104–5, 133; see also housing and amenities Vedernikov, Yu. 88–9 Verkhoture monastery 188, 192 Vestnik 174–6 veterans’ councils 172, 176–8 villages 12–14, 20, 25, 27, 31, 47–8, 69–70, 89, 100, 102, 112, 117, 160, 163; voting 182 ‘Vishnovka’ 206 Vladivostok 63 vodka, illegal 83–4 Volga area 51–2, 74, 80, 190 Volodina, L. 148 voluntary sector 36, 166–7, 176–9 Vorkuta 37 Voronezh City and Region 60, 65, 70–1, 75, 111 wages 31–2, 63–4, 66, 78, 98–103, 110, 217–20; arrears 33, 56, 99, 110, 133; in kind 100, 117 war memorials 170 Week Like Any Other 131

Index 275 welfare state see social assistance and insurance widows 48, 103 wolves 60 women see gender difference, relations and roles, housewives Women of Russia 178 women’s council 177–8 work (paid): attitudes to 127, 133–4, 157–9, 178 workers see manual workers working conditions 93 workplaces and social support 136, 148 work strategies see livelihood strategies Yabloko 181, 183 Yaroslavl Region 54

Yavlinskii, G. 183 Yekaterinburg 59, 68, 72, 83, 85, 112, 178, 183, 192, 195 Yeltsin, B. 16, 180–2, 190, 201 young people 9, 36, 76, 80–2, 84, 101–2, 110, 123, 130, 134, 143, 160–1, 164, 170–3 Zakharov, N. 148 Zarechnyi 56 Zarya 178 zhensovet 177–8 Zhupikov, A. 177 Zubtsov District and Town: introductory description 2–3, ch. 3 Zubtsovskaya zhizn’ 174–6 Zyuganov, G. 182