The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism

294 Pages·2002·52.505 MB·English

by  Caroline Humphrey

J[~~-------------­
U_NMAKI_N_G __
Of_ _S _OVlEI __ _
LIFE
CULTURE&SOCIETY
AFTER SOCIALISM
A SERIES EDITED RY
BRUCE GRANT&NANCY RIES
THE
~OJfM~AKIN~G~~~~
S_O_VI_E_T__ ___ _
_Q_f __
_______________________ _
~][_f_E
CAROLINE HUMPHREY
Cornell University Press Ithaca & London
Copyright © 2002 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this
book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher. For information,
address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street,
Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2002 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2002
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Humphrey, Caroline.
The unmaking of Soviet life : everyday economies after socialism I
Caroline Humphrey.
p. em. - (Culture and society after socialism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8014-3981-7 (cloth: alk. paper)-ISBN o-8014-8773-0 (pbk.
: alk. paper)
1. Russia (Federation)-Economic conditions-1991- . 2.
Post-communist-Russia (Federation) 3. Russia (Federation)-Social
conditions---1991- . 4· Mongolia-Economic conditions. 5.
Post-communism-Mongolia-Social conditions. I. Title.
II. Series.
HC340.12 .H86 2002
330.947---dc21 2001005841
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible
suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the
publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based,
low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally
chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further
information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vtt
Foreword: The Shifting Fields of Culture and Society after Socialism tx
Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries
Note on Transliteration xiii
Abbreviations and Terms xv
Introduction xvii
Part I: The Politics of Locality in an Unstable State
1
1. "Icebergs;' Barter, and the Mafia in Provincial Russia 5
2. Mythmaking, Narratives, and the Dispossessed in Russia 21
3. Creating a Culture of Disillusionment:
Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times 40
Part II: Strategies beyond the Law 65
4· Traders, "Disorder;' and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Russia 69
s. Russian Protection Rackets and the Appropriation of Law and Order 99
6. Rethinking Bribery in Contemporary Russia 127
Part III: Rethinking Personhood 147
7· Avgai Khad: Theft and Social Trust in Postcommunist Mongolia 153
8. The Domestic Mode of Production in Post-Soviet Siberia? 164
9· The Villas of the "New Russians":
A Sketch of Consumption and Cultural Identity
in Post-Soviet Landscapes 175
10. Shamans in the City 202
Notes 223
Bibliography 247
Index 259
VI) CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Closed club at Karl Marx Collective Farm, Selenga, Buriatia, 1996. 10
2. Rusting farm machinery in the Buriat countryside, 1996. 11
3· Economic differentiation in the postsocialist collective, Buriatia, 1996:
the wealthy build themselves comfortable log houses. 23
4· Economic differentiation in the postsocialist collective, Buriatia, 1996:
the poor and dispossessed are reduced to living in huts. 24
5. A street stall in Moscow, 1997. 53
6. "Disorderly" pavement traders in front of a state store, Moscow, 1997. 94
7· The creation of order: market traders in rows of identical kiosks,
Ulan-Ude, Buriatia, 1996. 95
8. The sacred stone of Avgai Khad in 1992. 154
g. Another version of the sacred stone of Avgai Khad in 1992. 155
10. Avgai Khad in 1996. 156
n. A splendid new villa at Nikolina Gora near Moscow, architects
Velichkin and Golovanov. 187
12. A go-percent finished "cottage" near Ulan-Ude, Buriatia, in the
winter of 2000. 188
13. A team of Buriat builders hired on a contract basis for new private
housing, Ulan-Ude, Buriatia, in the summer of 2000. 189
14. The shaman Nadia in performance in a city apartment, Ulan-Ude,
Buriatia, 1997. 213
15. The shaman Batu-Dalai makes a libation of vodka to the ancestors,
Kizhinga village, 1997. 214
Note: All photographs are by the author unless otherwise noted in legend.

The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest-growing and theo
retically challenging areas in the humanities and social sciences. With pere
stroika and its legacies, the very contours of field studies after socialism are
being fundamentally reshaped. In anthropology, for example, where field
work has always been the flagship, the former Soviet Union was all but closed
to ethnographic research and regular scholarly exchanges from the early
1930s onward. The opening of borders in the 1990s brought a heady atmo
sphere of new possibilities: sustained conversations with specialists from
across the socialist world, a return to more engaged field studies, and new ac
cess to archives. But the very drama of events also created a certain breath
lessness, as the challenges of mapping such change overwhelmed more tradi
tionally grounded historical and cultural analysis.
Over a decade later, we can begin to chart the topography of a diverse
realm of new scholarship, built on the theoretical and methodological foun
dations of cross-disciplinary work. "Culture and Society after Socialism"
looks to present the very best of this body of writing. Providing close-up per
spectives on the lived experience of socialism and its aftermath, this series
advances innovative work that fundamentally rethinks the cultural projects
of socialist states and their outcomes. Through detailed readings of historical
and cultural contexts, these works bridge the study of power systems and
cosmologies, material practices and social meanings, political economies
and the mythic forces that sustain them.
We see new work in and about the formerly socialist world as a vital op
portunity to reconsider the analytical boundaries of area studies and their
respective scholarly traditions. For example, whether Russia and its eastern
European neighbors may one day be reclassified as "Western" seems less
compelling than asking how communist cultural projects came to dialogue
so provocatively with European enlightenment discourses of progress, sover
eignty, and modernism and how that dialogue shifted and twisted during the
Soviet era. Or, to move away from European frames, we might ponder the
extent to which Slavic Studies can encourage greater intellectual porosity
among the many world traditions under its banner. To speak of"North Asia"
or "West Asia" seems almost oxymoronic under the confines of conventional
areal divides, given the dominance of East and Southeast in Asian Studies.
Yet millions of former Soviet citizens come from Asias North, West, and
Central. By one logic, Uzbekistan may be "Central" to Asia, but not neces
sarily to Asian studies. By another logic, the country is too far west to be part
of the "Middle East," somehow an entirely separate world area despite a well
documented shared history driven by centuries of Islam and Silk Road trade.
Historically, most of us are trained to look for the "modern" at the thresh
old of Renaissance Europe. Yet, as Ernest Gellner (1981) and many others
have pointed out, Islam's orthodox visions of egalitarianism, literacy, and
transnational fellowship made it one of modernism's earliest harbingers.
Where and when, then, does the modern begin? By inviting fresh perspec
tives that challenge these kinds of analytical and spatial boundaries, we gain
a richer sense of socialism's pasts and futures. Might the postsocialist condi
tions of today be conceived, for example, as postcolonial? And if so, how
might this reconfigure our now-conventional guides to the postcolonial con
dition? These are only a handful of questions that follow from mapping a
world that has been always in flux.
Historically, socialist area studies have been expert at chronicling what
Hegel called simply, "difference" -not the "blank pages" of everyday life but
revolutions and state refracted through a focus on political and economic
change. In the former Soviet Union, for example, this has led to tremen
dously rich coverage of 1917, the avant-garde experiments of the 1920s and
1930s, and the horrors of Stalinism and World War II. But scholars have had
far less to say about the implied "blank pages" of post-Stalinist life in general
or Brezhnev-era late socialism in particular. Was the vremia zastoia, or "time
of stagnation" -the phrase so commonly associated with the late socialist
era-really so stagnant after all? Only the briefest look at the shifts in popu
lar culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the sexual and consumer revolutions of
that era, ongoing environmental and social engineering, agro-industrial ex
periments, and nationalist movements suggest not. Yet scholarship is only
X) FOREWORD