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

Small-Town Russia

After providing a detailed overview of economic and social trends in Russia since1991, and the enormous diversity of experience both across and within Russia’s89 regions, Small-Town Russia focuses on social change within three communi-ties in different regions. All three towns have been hard hit by unemployment andfalling real wages; private sectors are small and inhabitants have a sense of beingmarooned in the Soviet past, with the fruits of ‘transition’ reserved for neigh-bouring cities. The book examines the impact of these developments, asking, forexample, what types of household are poor; how people survived when they werenot 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 socialnetworks. It also investigates whether those networks, and community spirit ingeneral, are weakening; whether there is a new ‘middle class’ emerging in thesmall towns; whether regional identities are becoming stronger; and how far eth-nic Russians have developed a sense of ‘Russianness’ since the creation of theRussian Federation in 1992.

The answers to such questions are usually sought from national data or fromresearch among Russian city dwellers. This book is original in that it offers anentirely different perspective, based on 141 interviews in small towns. On a the-oretical level, the book’s originality lies in its juxtaposition of the concepts ofidentities and livelihood strategies. It is intended as a contribution to the small butgrowing body of literature which emphasizes that even the apparent ‘victims oftransition’ maintain identities as coping individuals.

Anne White is Senior Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, Universityof Bath.

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

Editorial CommitteeGeorge BlazycaCentre for Contemporary European Studies, University of PaisleyTerry CoxDepartment of Government, University of StrathclydeRosalind MarshDepartment of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of BathDavid MoonDepartment of History, University of StrathclydeHilary PilkingtonCentre for Russian and East European Studies, University of BirminghamStephen WhiteDepartment of Politics, University of Glasgow

This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association forSlavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality,research-level work by both new and established scholars on all aspects ofRussian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and socialscience subjects.

1 Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000Roman Wolczuk

2 Political Parties in the Russian RegionsDerek S. Hutcheson

3 Local Communities and Post-communist TransformationEdited by Simon Smith

4 Repression and Resistance in Communist EuropeJ.C. Sharman

5 Political Elites and the New RussiaAnton Steen

6 Dostoevsky and the Idea of RussiannessSarah Hudspith

7 Performing Russia – Folk Revival and Russian IdentityLaura J. Olson

8 Russian TransformationsEdited by Leo McCann

9 Soviet Music and Society Under Lenin and StalinThe baton and sickleEdited by Neil Edmunds

10 State Building in UkraineThe Ukranian parliament, 1990–2003Sarah Whitmore

11 Defending Human Rights in RussiaSergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003Emma Gilligan

12 Small-Town RussiaPostcommunist livelihoods and identitiesA portrait of the intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000Anne White

Small-Town RussiaPostcommunist livelihoods and identitiesA portrait of the intelligentsia in Achit,Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000

Anne White

First published 2004by RoutledgeCurzon2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby RoutledgeCurzon270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

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 orutilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writingfrom the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0–415–33874–3

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-44860-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67986-5 (Adobe eReader Format)(Print Edition)

Contents

List of figures ixList of maps xiiiList of tables xvAcknowledgements xvii

Introduction 1

1 Socio-economic and demographic trends inRussia and its regions 18

2 Characteristics of small towns across Russia:sub-regional variation in living standardsand 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’ andsocial stratification 142

7 Civil society and politics 166

8 Multiple identities: local, regional, ethnic and national 187

Conclusions 203

viii Contents

Appendix 1: the interview schedule 213Appendix 2: household composition, livelihoods and

identities – five case studies 217

Notes 221Bibliography 251Index 269

Figures

0.1 Percentage of total Russian urban population residing indifferently-sized settlements, 2000 13

1.1 Goskomstat calculated revised percentages of population with personal money incomes below subsistence minimum, Russia 1992–2002 21

1.2 Square metres new housing per 1,000 population, 1990–9 241.3 Recorded crimes per 100,000 population, 1990–2000 281.4 Private sector share in GDP, 1991–9 311.5 Real wages, Russian average, 1989–99 321.6 Wages as per cent of subsistence minimum, selected

sectors, 1999 321.7 Survey-based estimated unemployment rate

in Russia, 1992–2002 341.8 Survey-based estimated unemployment rates

in Russia, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver, 1992–2001 351.9 Percentage share of Russian agricultural output

produced on household plots, 1985 and 2001 381.10 Average per capita consumption of foodstuffs in 1999 391.11 Rate of natural population increase in Russia, 1990–2001 401.12 Birth- and deathrates in Russia, 1990–2001 401.13 Life expectancy, 1987–2003 421.14 Death from suicides, murders and alcohol poisoning

per million population, 1990–2001 421.15 Life expectancy in town and village, Tver Region,

1990–2000 431.16 Alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 population,

Tver Region, 1985–2000 431.17 Immigrants into Russia from the Near Abroad,

1990–2001 441.18 Components of Russian population change,

1989–2002 441.19 Net migration into Russian macroregions,

1979–88 and 1991–6 46

1.20 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population, 1990–2001 48

1.21 Children born to unmarried mothers, as percentage of all births, 1970–2000 48

1.22 Profiles of three southern and eastern macroregions in 1999/2000, using six demographic indicators, as in Table 1.8 51

1.23 Profiles of six central European/Ural macroregions in 1999/2000, using six demographic indicators, as in Table 1.8 51

2.1 Percentage of Russians never using a personal computer 572.2 Percentage of Russians considering ‘moral crisis’ to be

among the most serious of Russian social problems 572.3 Percentage of ‘most depressed’ districts in each population

band in six regions 592.4 Recorded crimes per 10,000 population, regional averages,

capitals and depressed areas, 2000 672.5 Russian towns, banded by size of population: 2000

population as percentage of 1989 712.6 Migration within Russia in 1999: place of origin and

destination of migrants from and out of the average region 733.1 Rural population as percentage of total regional population,

2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 773.2 ‘GRP’ per capita, rubles, 2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and

Tver Regions 773.3 Money incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum,

1999, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 773.4 Percentage of population with personal incomes below the

subsistence minimum, 1999, Russia and Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions 80

3.5 Answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Achit 81

3.6 Positive answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Bednodemyanovsk 82

3.7 Disparaging answers to the question ‘How is your town different from other towns?’, Bednodemyanovsk 82

3.8 Town populations, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1989 and 2000 86

4.1 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Zubtsov, April 1999 99

4.2 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Bednodemyanovsk, spring-summer 2000 99

4.3 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum, Achit, September 2000 100

4.4 Regional subsistence minimum, Achit average monthly wage and wages by sector, Achit, September 2000 100

x Figures

Figures xi

5.1 Migration within Sverdlovsk Region, number of changes of residence, 1989–98 124

5.2 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population in Bednodemyanovsk town, 1990–9 128

5.3 Divorces per 1,000 population at the beginning and end of the 1990s, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov 129

5.4 Marriages per 1,000 population at the beginning and end of the 1990s, Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov 129

6.1 Occupations of respondents’ husbands 1476.2 Occupations of wives of respondents in intelligentsia/

government jobs 1476.3 Occupation of wives labelled ‘intelligentsia’ in Figure 6.2 1476.4 Number of visits to theatre and number of professional

theatres in Russia, 1985–99 1566.5 Number of visits to theatre in Tver and Penza Regions,

1990–8/2000 1566.6 Number of ‘cultural and leisure institutions’ (houses of culture,

clubs, etc.), Russia, Penza and Tver Regions,1990–8/1999 157

7.1 Answers to question ‘Do people participate less in community life?’ 168

7.2 Print runs of Nash put’ (Achit) Vestnik and Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 1990 and 1999 176

7.3 Percentage of votes for state farm chair Surov, headteacher Krylov and entrepreneur Shmelev in district head ofadministration elections, Zubstov District, 1996 180

7.4 Duma election results by district, December 1993 1818.1 The three most ‘outstanding regional personalities’ 193

Maps

0.1 The three small towns and their regions 21.1 Poverty trajectories, 1994–9, central European Russia and Urals 221.2 Regions with stable and growing populations, 1989–2002,

central European Russia and Urals 471.3 Total of rankings for 1999 purchasing power, poverty levels

and per capita ‘GRP’ in central European/Ural regions 542.1 Most prosperous and depressed locations in Kirov Region 612.2 Most prosperous and depressed locations in

Sverdlovsk Region 622.3 Most and least crime-ridden locations in Komi Republic, 2000 682.4 Most and least crime-ridden locations in Sverdlovsk

Region, 1999 692.5 Regions with net in-migration in 1999 and stable or growing

cities, 1989–2002, central European Russia and Urals 72

Tables

0.1 Interviewees, by town, sex and occupation 110.2 Percentage of households with amenities in Russia, by type

of settlement, 2001 and 1999 141.1 Percentage of population with personal money income below

subsistence minimum, top and bottom Russian regions, 1999 211.2 Percentage of population with personal money income below

subsistence minimum, 1999, rankings for central European Russian/Ural regions 23

1.3 Purchasing power (personal incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum), richest and poorest Russianregions, 1999 23

1.4 Per capita ‘GRP’ in 2000 in central European Russia and Urals,rankings calculated from Goskomstat 30

1.5 Goskomstat calculations of Russian Gini coefficients, 1992–2001 331.6 Survey-based estimates of unemployment, by Federal

Okrug, 2000–1 341.7 Household plot production in 1999 as a percentage of 1989,

by macroregion 381.8 Six demographic indicators for Russian macroregions, 1999 521.9 Total of rankings for 1999 purchasing power, poverty levels and

per capita ‘GRP’ in central European/Ural regions 532.1 Purchasing power of money incomes, Primore Region, 2000 632.2 Purchasing power of wages in all cities and districts,

Komi Republic 642.3 Rankings for purchasing power, measured by money incomes

as percentages of subsistence minima, among 78 Russian regions 652.4 Annual retail trade per capita, rubles, 2000, ranges in four regions 662.5 Wages (in rubles), 2000, ranges in six regions 662.6 Cars per 1,000 population, 2000, ranges in four regions 663.1 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: demographic statistics

for 2000 783.2 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: the economy and living

standards in 1999 and 2000 79

xvi Tables

3.3 Bus fares to most important local city (Moscow, Penza, Yekaterinburg) 85

3.4 Populations of fieldwork towns and their associated districts, January 2000 86

3.5 Zubtsov District income, 1999 884.1 Percentage of different groups in households with per capita

money incomes below the subsistence level in 2000, Russian averages 101

4.2 Senior arts administrator’s household’s monthly sourcesof income 104

6.1 Level/upward trajectories of respondents, from CPSU raikomjob before 1991 to state managerial job post-1991 150

6.2 Downward trajectories from CPSU/Komsomol, all caused by failure in private sector 150

6.3 Percentage of respondents definitely considering themselves intelligentsia/not 152

6.4 Educational qualifications of respondents, by town 1538.1 Birthplaces of respondents 197

Acknowledgements

The book was written with help and support from many people. Above all, I wishto thank the 141 respondents for answering my questions, often at considerablelength. I am also grateful to statisticians in Zubtsov, Penza and Achit, and to theheadteachers, hospital managers and other administrators, named in the footnotes,who supplied information about their institutions. Newspaper editors generouslylent me their archives.

Other people whom I would particularly like to thank are: Tamara, Evgenii andLena Cherepanov; Olga and Vasilii Chernyi; Naomi Connelly; Simon, Katya andMasha Cosgrove; Christina Gibbons; Gregory Ioffe; Olya Kozak; OlgaKhoroshailova; Sergei Kotkin; Colin Lawson; Anatolii Loginov; ValentinManuilov; Tatyana Nefedova; Francine Pickup; Karen Rowlingson; IrinaSemenii; Tanya Shmykova; Luba and Volodya Tsurikov; Alla and Boris Tyapkin;Galina Vorobeva; Peggy Watson; Sam Yates; Lyuda Zhukova; and Tolya, Tanyaand Natasha Zhupikov. Their ideas, practical support and, in many cases, hospi-tality were very much appreciated. I am also grateful to Natasha Zhuravkina forhelp with formulating the interview schedule, and to Dennis Tate, Head of theDepartment of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, forfinancial support from the department.

Although none of the chapters in Small-town Russia is identical to any ofmy previously published work, Chapter 8 does, with permission from the editor,overlap with ‘Mother Russia: gender and ethnicity in the Russian provinces’ inJacqueline 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 BritishAssociation for Slavonic and East European Studies and the Study Group onEducation in Russia, the Independent States and Eastern Europe. I should like tothank the participants for their stimulating questions and observations.

Tama and Lucy White helped with the maps, tolerated my absences with goodgrace, and themselves made long journeys to paddle in the Volga in Zubtsov, visita kindergarten in Bednodemyanovsk and make their own friends among small-town Russian children. Howard White offered constant intellectual, practical and

emotional support. Without his unfailingly good judgement this book would havebeen much weaker.

I am sure, nonetheless, that mistakes and misrepresentations remain, and, inparticular, I would like to apologize in advance to any interviewees who feel thatI have misunderstood their situation, or painted an unduly positive or negativepicture of the small towns in which they live.

xviii Acknowledgements

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, whichis – as it were – ‘separate’ from life in the cities.

(Zubtsov teacher)

Are these intelligentsia hands? A member of the intelligentsia should read, notchop logs.

(Achit teacher, showing her own hands)

This book is about how people live in three small towns in Russia, and about howtheir lives have changed since the collapse of communist rule in 1991. Moreexactly, it is about how small-town Russians make their livings (livelihoods), howthey perceive themselves (identities) and the interconnections between the two.The book contributes to a number of debates about the nature of post-SovietRussian 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 commu-nities; the transformation of the Soviet class system; the growth of civil and polit-ical 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 andhappiness’ could the visitor to Zubtsov, Achit or Bednodemyanovsk expect to findin the years 1999–2000? At first glance, the most striking aspects of the townswere 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: neigh-bours trusted one another, kin networks were strong and recorded crime wassurprisingly low, compared with Russian averages.

Most of the book is based on 141 semi-structured interviews with professionalpeople, or former professional people, the so-called ‘intelligentsia’. Hence the bookis mainly about what might seem to be a rather narrow category. It is, however,

Introduction

an important group, because of its role in organizing local community life,including, perhaps, promoting democratization, and because it may be developinginto a new ‘middle class’. The book also seeks to overcome the limitations pre-sented by the sample, presenting, as far as possible, a multifaceted account of lifein the small town. It does this partly by supplementing the 141 interviews withinformation supplied by managers of local institutions, such as schools andhospitals, and with newspaper reports and local statistics. The respondentsthemselves, in their interviews, also shed much light on the life of the wholecommunity. The intelligentsia is not a group apart, but is well integrated intolocal society, through intermarriage with workers and because of its professionalresponsibilities.

Most of Achit is a cluster of black log cabins, picturesquely situated arounda lake in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. It is in Sverdlovsk Region, whichhas a reputation for being one of Russia’s most thriving, although, as will be illus-trated later, this reputation is not entirely deserved. Sverdlovsk Region has manycities and industrial complexes, but Achit District is rural, apart from one glassfactory. 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 resourcesfrom the local population. Achit is in Europe; Asia is Yekaterinburg, the regionalcapital 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 SheshmaRivers. 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 TverRegion, a region with a middling per capita Gross Regional Product, compared toother central European Russian regions. Zubtsov District, however, bordersMoscow Region. Hence, although Zubtsov lost 40 per cent of its jobs in the1990s,1 the proximity of Moscow’s expanding economy has partly compensatedfor this disaster. At a distance of 200 kilometres from Moscow, Zubtsov is close

2 Introduction

St Petersburg

Rzhev

ZubtsovAchit

Bednodemyanovsk

SmolenskMoscow

RyazanSaransk

Samara

TverRegionTver

SverdlovsKRegion

Nizhnii Novgorod

Perm

Kazan

Tambov Penza

Penza Region

Krasnoufimsk

Yekaterinburg

Map 0.1 The three small towns and their regions.

enough to the capital to place it in the dacha (summer cottage) zone forMuscovites. Interviewees had very different ideas, however, about whether 200kilometres was actually ‘near’ or ‘far’.

The third town, Bednodemyanovsk, is 450 kilometres south-east of Moscow, inrolling open steppe cut by ravines. It lost its river as a result of misguided irriga-tion projects in the 1980s under Gorbachev’s predecessor, Chernenko.Bednodemyanovsk is a market town, dating from the seventeenth century. Itshousing stock consists largely of solid wooden cottages surrounded by kitchengardens. 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 ofthe Saviour) until 1925, when, on the recommendation of a local communist partyconference, it took the name of a Stalinist hack poet, Demyan Bednyi.2 It shed itsChristian identity and acquired an ostentatiously Soviet one. Bednyi himselfnever deigned to visit the place, although, according to locals, his son did passthrough and got very drunk. ‘Bednyi’ means ‘poor’. Local inhabitants often referto their town as ‘Bednyi’, since Bednodemyanovsk is hard to pronounce.

The three towns, although all centres of administrative districts,3 were at thesmall end of the urban spectrum. The populations were 5,400 (Achit), 7,900(Zubtsov) and 8,200 (Bednodemyanovsk) in January 2000. They were chosen notonly because of their size, but also because they were assumed to be relativelyisolated from the big city economy, since all were three to four hours’ bus ridefrom the nearest city. Zubtsov, however, proved to be less isolated than the othertowns: Moscow has long tentacles.

Unlike British or American small towns, which in some respects are likeminiature cities, and which are sometimes more prosperous than inner-cityareas, Russian small towns are very different from cities.4 In particular, the tran-sition to a modern market economy – insofar as it has occurred since 1991 – ismore 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 chronicunderfunding of small-town local governments, and the obstacles facing would-bebusinessmen.5

To understand contemporary Russia, therefore, one needs to know not justabout cities, but also about smaller towns and rural areas. Cities, however, aremore visible to the Western observer. British and American scholars tend todescribe only national or regional-level trends.6 If discussing the national level,they are often basing their arguments largely on information about cities, becausecities do much to determine national averages. If they descend to regional level,they present information based on regional averages or about the regional capi-tals. Western travellers rarely get off the train to explore the streets and squares ofthose small provincial towns, which – very occasionally – punctuate the rows ofpines and birches visible from their carriage window.

Russian sociologists based at provincial universities more often study townsin the glubinka, the ‘provincial depths’ which lie beyond the regional capital.This book draws on such Russian research. However, most of the book is basedon the fieldwork in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov. Their smallness and

Introduction 3

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

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 through-out 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. Itcontinues by discussing some characteristics of Russian towns and villages andthe ‘semi-urban’ nature of Russian small towns. It justifies the choice of verysmall towns as objects of study, and concludes with a brief analysis ofcentre–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 postcommunistRussia, drawing mostly on Russian official statistical handbooks. The chapteraims to provide essential background information for readers who are not Russianspecialists, to fit changing livelihoods in the small towns into a national context,and to show how various demographic and economic trends developed over thefirst postcommunist decade. The second aim is to present information about theregional variation which usually lies hidden behind descriptions of nationaltrends. It is a central thesis of this book that Russia is not, as Milan Kundera onceasserted, ‘the smallest possible variety in the greatest possible space’.7 For exam-ple, in 1999 the official poverty rate was five times higher in Ingushetia than inTyumen Region.8 Inequality between regions has grown, and economic differ-ences have often become more pronounced during postcommunism than theywere in Soviet days.

Chapter 2 uses statistical publications from a number of regions to look atdifferences in living standards between small towns/rural districts and cities.Although readers who are more interested in the qualitative data from the casestudies may prefer to skip the main part of this chapter, it addresses questionswhich are fundamental to the research, and it develops the arguments of Chapter 1.Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk were selected partly because they are inregions with different economic profiles, and this book addresses the question ofhow much difference it makes to live in a ‘rich’ or a ‘poor’ region. Are the differ-ences between Russian regions, as indicated by socio-economic statistics, mir-rored by differences between small towns located in different regions? In otherwords, is a small town in a poor region very different from a small town in arich region? Alternatively, are small towns in different regions much the same?This could be true if the apparently richer regions contain greater disparities ofwealth than do poorer regions. The bottom line may be the same, but the wealthier

4 Introduction

places – the cities – may be richer in rich regions than in poorer ones. Chapter 2also explores the issues of how far wealth is concentrated in the regional capitaland whether remoteness from that capital, and cities in general, is a significantfactor influencing the fate of the glubinka, the ‘provincial depths’.

Chapter 3 provides some background information about Penza, Sverdlovsk andTver, the particular regions in which the fieldwork towns are located, to site thetowns in their regional contexts, demonstrating the complexity of those contexts.The chapter continues by presenting portraits of the towns themselves, focusingparticularly 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 intervieweeswere also public figures, whose doings are described in the local press.

A livelihood has been defined by Ellis as ‘the activities, the assets, and theaccess 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 gainand retain access to resources and opportunities, deal with risk and manage socialnetworks and institutions’.10 In other words, it is more than just employment atone’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 thatthey depended only on their wages from a regular job in the first economy; by1998 this figure had fallen further still, to 14 per cent.11

‘Assets’ can include human capital – personal characteristics such as health andeducational levels of working household members – and social capital. ‘Socialcapital’ is understood in its simplest definition, as resources which derive from anindividual’s connections to the surrounding society, particularly good relation-ships with, and networks among, other members of the local community. Humanand social capital are aspects of identity, hence the overlap between the conceptsof identities and livelihoods.

Few people in the small towns lived alone, and it is important to place livelihoodswithin the context of the whole household, not just the earning capacity of theindividual. Chapter 4 looks at household livelihoods by examining, in turn, state-sector workplaces, unemployment, salaries and poverty. It presents some profilesof different types of household, looking at primary employment of the salary-earners and at household composition, and suggests why some households aremore successful than others. However, it also points out that all householdsamong the sample were vulnerable to poverty as soon as they had to intersect withthe city economy, for example to purchase education or health care, and that, formost families, even everyday subsistence was hardly feasible on the basis ofincome from a first job alone, since most local wages were lower than the officialpoverty line.

Chapter 5 therefore addresses the issue of livelihood strategies. Should thesebe viewed as potential escape routes from poverty, or are they, as Clarke, Pahl andWallace suggest, a response to opportunity, engaged in by wealthier households?12

Introduction 5

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 townare so limited?14 Although the neutral term ‘livelihood strategy’ is preferred inthis book, the chapter also discusses the term ‘survival’ strategy. What is ‘sur-vival’ in the small-town context? Shevchenko has argued that it is not helpful tolabel routine practices as if they were reactions to crises,15 but perhaps life in thesmall town can be viewed as a succession of crises.

The 1990s have been seen as a decade of crisis in gender relations,16 althoughthis is disputed by Vannoy et al.17 Changing gender roles are sometimes linkedto the gendering of survival strategies, most starkly by Burawoy et al., who sug-gest that Russian society is being driven ‘into two mutually repelling poles – amale-dominated pole of wealth, integrated into the hypermodern flow of financeand commodities, and a female-dominated underworld, retreating into subsis-tence and kin networks’.18 Chapter 5 explores both gender relations and the gen-dering of livelihood strategies, to determine whether such tension and polarizationdid indeed mark the lives of the small-town respondents. Burawoy et al. use theterm ‘involution’ to describe a process of atomization, which has also been men-tioned by Ledeneva and by Ashwin, the latter with specific reference to a smalltown.19 Chapters 3, 5 and 6 look at whether networks were shrinking and trustwas declining in the small towns.

‘Survival’ is adopted as a useful term because it can link up different aspectsof 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 lifeexpectancy which marked the 1990s, it seems particularly important to examinestress, discussing the truth of suggestions made by, for example, Shkolnikov et al.and Shapiro,20 that Russian men were particularly vulnerable to stress, because oftheir 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 postcommunistsocieties there is a double crisis, as globalization and the demands of becomingpostcommunist coincide. However, globalization had only lightly touched thesmall towns. Postcommunism, on the other hand, with its perceived drop in statusboth 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 isshaped partly by ordinary individuals in response to the circumstances in whichthey find themselves, not entirely created by intellectuals, the media or politiciansand imposed ‘from above’. It might seem more natural to emphasize structurerather than agency, illustrating how small-town Russians are ‘trapped’ in a certainpredicament. It is true that in many respects they are indeed trapped, but the vic-tims of postcommunist economic collapse often forge identities for themselves ascoping individuals, not as losers. Frances Pine, for example, writing about Poland,has shown how women in a depressed industrial area, forced into dependingheavily on home produce, seemed to make a virtue of their new roles: a ‘politicized

6 Introduction

rejection of consumerism’, particularly of foreign consumer goods whichsymbolized the postcommunist order.22 That identity arises, in Stuart Hall’swords, ‘from the narrativization of the self’,23 is demonstrated in Chapters 6 and 7,which discuss how professional people both adapt their intelligentsia identity tonew conditions, and use their understandings of that identity to mould a new civilsociety. The theme is continued in Chapter 8, which explores the importance oflocal identities, questioning the truth of assertions that regional leadershipsare able to create a new sense of regional identity, and also the relevance forsmall-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 moreessentialist, a characteristic which is not surprising, given their Soviet upbringing,with its rigid stereotypes. People are born with certain traits, which are not sus-ceptible to social conditioning. ‘We’re not Tver folk’, said one woman fromSmolensk Region, who had moved to Zubtsov. Women are ‘by nature’ destinedto be mothers and chief parents. Other people are ‘born traders’ or, more often,born not to be traders. Perceptions that these identities are inflexible influencepeople’s choice of livelihood strategies. However, to pursue the maintenance ofone’s professional identity can also be a survival strategy in its own right.

Chapter 6 asks whether self-perceptions about intelligentsia identity are a barrieror a gateway to success. Do young people feel less ‘encumbered’ by Soviet iden-tities? 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 thenew entrepreneurial class? (Silverman and Yanowitch have suggested that the newbusiness 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 soci-ety’. Political scientists often suggest that civil society in contemporary Russia isweak,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 downthe firmest roots.28 If this civil society is inward-looking, the local communitymay be strengthened, but a sense of Russian citizenship and political connected-ness to Moscow may be absent. Chapter 8 analyses the ‘love–hate’ relationshipbetween the small towns and the federal capital.

Finally, the book’s Conclusions summarize the findings and draw out thesimilarities and differences between small towns and cities and also between thethree towns. They discuss how much change there has been in the small townssince the Soviet period, considering – largely in order to reject – the usefulness ofplotting the three towns at different points along a ‘transition path’.

Because of its contentious character, the term ‘transition’ is generally avoidedin the course of the book. ‘Postcommunism’ is preferred, as a more neutral termthan ‘transition’, if communism is understood to imply the actual system of ruleby the communist party, not the (non)achievement of a communist utopia. Theterm ‘transition’ has generated considerable criticism, particularly because ofoptimistic presumptions that an efficiently functioning market economy and lib-eral democracy lie at the end of the transition path, and partly because of the

Introduction 7

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 populationare 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 geog-rapher Rodoman suggests that it is wrong to envisage cities and smaller placestravelling at different paces in the same direction, towards a market economy.

The backwoods are not only not catching up with the capital, but, in manyrespects, actually moving in the opposite direction. Pre-industrial, pre-mar-ket, feudal relations are reviving: subsistence farming, usury, hoarding ofvaluables, slavery. It seems that the modernization of the centres is takingplace at the expense of the archaization of the periphery.29

Richard Rose, however, suggests that ‘pre-modern social capital’ characterizesRussia as a whole.30

Methodology and sources

The fieldwork took place in the years 1999 (April, May) and 2000 (April, Julyand September). I gathered statistical data, read local newspapers and other pub-lished material, visited schools, hospitals and other institutions, and interviewedtheir managers. In Achit and Bednodemyanovsk, I was staying with local fami-lies, so I was able to observe the lives of small-town professional people at firsthand, 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 establishedfriendly relations with the staff of the tiny Submarine Hotel.

However, the main part of the work consisted of 141 formal interviews. Theinterview schedule is reproduced in Appendix 1. The Zubtsov research, con-ducted in 1999, was based on a pilot interview schedule, which differed slightlyfrom 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 inthe homes of my hosts. Respondents were given the interview schedule to readthrough 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 1999and 2000. My initial idea was to keep as low as possible a profile, to avoid hav-ing obstacles thrown in my way by the local administration. Having consulted thetelephone directory and the local newspaper editor, and explored through thesnow 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 talkto me and could suggest colleagues who might be available. Only once was Ichallenged with the good Soviet question ‘Who gave you permission?’

I hope that the technique of arranging interviews on the spot produced sponta-neous answers to the interview questions, although obviously it could not remove

8 Introduction

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 arrivalspread and little boys were pointing at me in the street, shouting ‘TheEnglishwoman!’ As my network of acquaintances grew, I was able to arrangeinterviews with people in other walks of life, such as former teachers who hadgone into business: in other words, a ‘snowballing’ approach which was particu-larly suited to the close-knit world of the small town, and which helpfully illus-trated the nature and importance of the informal networks which I was partlystudying. It was not only desirable, but also necessary to adopt this method:organizing things in advance is always a problematic endeavour in Russia, giventhe culture of preferring to arrange things face to face and on the spot, and thepropensity of officials to generate as much red tape as possible. In the case ofthe small towns the obstacles to organization in advance also included poor tele-phone and postal connections and lack of internet access. Moreover, I never encoun-tered any objections from respondents that snowballing was unethical. Potentialrespondents naturally had the option of refusing to participate in the survey.

Interviews conducted in people’s homes tended to be the most successful, andthis 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 theeve of the interview day, so the element of spontaneity was preserved. At week-ends I interviewed my hosts’ friends and colleagues. Despite the fact that –through want of alternative channels – I had had to arrange my stay in Achitthrough the local authority, the administration there did not try to interfere in mywork, and the district boss (‘head of adminstration’) was an interviewee. I organ-ized my stay in Bednodemyanovsk through an academic colleague in Penza. Myheart sank when he arranged for me to arrive in Bednodemyanovsk in an expen-sive foreign car belonging to the Penza Minister of the Interior, which took mestraight to the deputy head of the district administration, the late Nikolai Nozhkin.Nonetheless, after I declined his offer of fixing up the interview appointments onmy behalf, Nikolai Ivanovich kindly refrained from interfering, despite the factthat, as Chapter 7 illustrates, his approach to organizing intellectual life in thetown was extremely ‘Soviet’. My contact with Bednodemyanovsk officialdomeven produced a positive practical result in the form of a layer of asphalt on myhosts’ lane before my second visit.

In the end, only two people refused to be interviewed. Several intervieweeswere, understandably, nervous in advance, supposing in one case that I would grillthem about what they knew of Tony Blair, but once they had read through theinterview schedule they felt more relaxed about answering the questions. Whenthe interview was actually in progress, the respondents tended to talk at length. Afew of the younger and less well-educated interviewees did, however, get stuck onthe identities section. It was revealing, for example, that they found it harder toplace themselves socially.

With the help of my hosts and other local acquaintances I identified andobtained a sample which was loosely representative of the local intelligentsiain three respects: by profession (with a preponderance of teachers); by sex

Introduction 9

(mostly women); and by age, with an intentional slight bias towards youngerinterviewees, whose views seemed particularly important if it was to be possibleto establish how much change was occurring. Managers formed 30 per cent,which unfortunately detracted from the representative quality of the sample, butdid 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, cul-ture, the legal service or health. This was 10–15 per cent of the total number ofsuch 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 ‘NearAbroad’: Azerbaidjan, Kazakstan and Central Asia.

Only 24 per cent of the sample were men. This was deliberate, given that mostof the small-town intelligentsia were women, but in some senses it was a disad-vantage, since gender is a theme of this book, and a sample of 34 men was slimbasis for drawing conclusions about their experiences. On the other hand, with107 women interviewees, it did seem possible to suggest at least some tentativeconclusions about women’s livelihoods and identities, while recognizing theinadequate basis for comparison.

I discussed with some interviewees during the pilot survey in Zubtsov whetherthe 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 publicityfor their towns which was a motive for participating in the survey. (The newspaperZubtsovskaya zhizn’ published an article under the headline ‘Europe will hear aboutZubtsov’.)32

The quantitative part of the research is based largely on statistics about Russia’sregions produced by Goskomstat, the State Statistics Committee. The probable inaccuracy of many of these statistics is discussed in Chapter 1.33 A fundamentalproblem is the inadequacy of many population statistics, given the thirteen yeargap between the censuses of 1989 and 2002: the 2002 census discovered that theRussian population was nearly 2.8 million larger than had been expected, mean-ing 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 withofficial organizations. It is known, for example, that there are more migrants andrefugees, or unemployed people, than official registers suggest. There is also, ofcourse, an element of ‘covering up’ on the part of some official agencies and busi-nesses who supply information to Goskomstat. This means, for instance, that thedecline in industrial production may have been exaggerated by firms wishing toavoid paying tax.

Unfortunately, non-Goskomstat sources like the Russian LongitudinalMonitoring Survey,35 based as they are on samples, were not a substitute forGoskomstat data. They do not cover the regions in the same systematic way as

10 Introduction

Goskomstat. Goskomstat is also invaluable in that it can provide detailed data ona sub-regional level, and this data was used to make comparisons between thefieldwork towns and small towns in other regions in Russia. SverdlovskGoskomstat’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 statisti-cians working in regional capitals and small towns. They were uniformly helpful.It was striking how most regarded themselves as functionaries who collected rawfigures, but did not seek to understand the trends they uncovered. In the smalltowns, they were not always trained statisticians. Records were kept largely byhand in offices very short of filing cabinets. I found one instance of confusion,

Introduction 11

Table 0.1 Interviewees, by town, sex and occupation

Total Occupation Achit Bed. Zub.(141)

f m f m f m40 10 36 14 31 10

3 Senior local government 1 22 Prosecution service 1 11 Senior police 11 Senior hospital 1

manager1 Employment service, 1

11 Senior Headteacher 3 1 1 2 42 Head librarian 1 11 Museum curator 13 Newspaper editor 1 1 13 Arts centre director 2 12 Children’s home director 1 12 Kindergarten manager 1 11 Priest 16 Junior local government 1 1 1 32 Police: passport office 2

13 Doctor 3 3 1 1 551 School/college teacher 17 24 1 96 Music teacher 2 1 37 Librarian 2 51 Museum employee 16 Journalist 2 1 1 1 13 Arts centre employee 1 21 Electrician 14 Own business 2 1 12 Lone entrepreneur 23 Manager, private sector 2 12 Retired teacher 1 11 Retired mayor 1

when I counted the causes of death entries for 1994, the year of the worst mortalitystatistics, and discovered that in that particular town there were 37 per cent moredeaths 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 lineimmediately riposted: ‘Small town? It’s just a big village!’ This was not the lasttime I was to encounter such a response, although all three towns were districtcentres, and as such had a distinctly urban population: many of the inhabitantswere white-collar workers employed in district-level institutions – local govern-ment, police, hospital, vocational schools and colleges, banks, tax inspectorate,library system, etc.

What is a small town? Russian geographers and sociologists use exactly thisterm, malyi gorod, but it is not an official label. In fact, there is no standard def-inition.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 popula-tion of under 7,000.39 In 1958 it was officially stipulated, however, that townscould not be very small: a town should have a population of at least 12,000, andno 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’. Thenumber of ‘urban’ centres more than doubled during the twentieth century.41 Thenumber of villages nearly halved between 1959 and 1989.42 To some extenturbanization was the result of building new towns and the abandonment of vil-lages officially labelled as being ‘without a future’ in the 1960s and 1970s.However, it also resulted from ‘upgrading’ of villages – including Achit – tourban status. The 1990s witnessed the beginning of a reverse process, with someregional authorities relabelling urban settlements as villages, on the grounds thattheir populations had declined so far as to disqualify them from urban status.43

Just under a quarter of Russian urban settlements have populations of betweenfive 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 andSverdlovsk are truly ‘urban’ in that they contain many towns and cities of over20,000, including several metropolises, other regions with a nominally high urbanpopulation, such as Kirov and Tver, consist of only a few cities and a multitudeof 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 datingback hundreds of years, to the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively.They have therefore always been classed as ‘towns’ (gorod). However, most ‘towns’

12 Introduction

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 Soviettitle 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 fac-tory out in the countryside, but other poselki, like Achit, look like the villages theyonce were. Medvedkov and Medvedkov describe poselki as ‘semiurban’.

To some extent the upgrading of status from village to poselok reflected theactual acquisition of urban features, such as electrification and mains water. Theimplication of an improvement in amenities is one reason why the change tourban status was definitely perceived as upgrading. It was better not to be a vil-lage. Official policy, from the 1960s, was to destroy the smallest villages andinvest in urbanizing the larger ones, in a not particularly successful attempt tokeep the rural population from fleeing to the cities.

The label ‘semi-urban’ suggests that, despite their urban status, many poselki – asindeed 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, forexample, a quarter of poselki do not have sewers. Often, those poselki and smalltowns which are furthest from the cities have the worst facilities.47

Perhaps the concept of a ‘village appearance’ needs more explanation. Britishsmall towns and villages are usually completely urban in appearance, with pavedroads and no animals on the streets except cats. Small towns and villages inRussia often consist of mud or sand tracks, roamed by goats, cows, chickens andgeese (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 gov-ernment officials. Yards contain piles of logs for heating and are ringed by cow-sheds, chicken coops, dog kennels, steam bath houses and outside toilets. The

Introduction 13

2.514.72

7.36

11.59 11.2

26.68

12.74

23.2

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Under

55–9.

9

10–1

9.9

20–4

9.9

50–9

9.9

100–49

9.9

500–

999.

9

1 m

illion

+

Figure 0.1 Percentage of total Russian urban population residing in differently-sizedsettlements, 2000.

Source: Calculated from Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik (RSE) 2000, pp. 74–5.

NoteColumns represent towns banded by population, in 1,000s.

same rural appearance is presented by the outskirts of many larger towns, or evensome inner-city districts.

In contrast, most streets in larger towns are usually very urban, with housingconsisting of blocks of flats at least five storeys high, usually dating from the1950s–1980s; these blocks surround courtyards which are often like small parks,with trees and playground equipment, but there are few or no individual flowergardens. Inhabitants of such blocks do, however, often cultivate allotments,located outside the town. These allotments are usually known as dachas (a wordwhich 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-sizedtowns, 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, mystarting hypothesis was that there might be a kind of approximate correlationbetween size of town and type of livelihood, so by studying the small town as theopposite extreme to the city it might be possible to make informed guesses aboutwhat happens in between. Local statistical data and Russian sociological studiesabout medium-sized towns can help corroborate such guesses. By contrast, astudy of medium-sized towns would not necessarily give clear hints as to whatreally goes on out in the backwoods.

It would seem logical to assume, for example, that kitchen gardening decreasesroughly proportionately to an increase in the size of town, and that, the largerthe town, the greater the variety of workplaces and educational institutions, andthe 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) doesmuch to determine the extent of smallholding, and there are middle-sized companytowns 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

14 Introduction

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

Mains water Sewers

Towns 99 (99) 97 (96)Poselki 93 (90) 74 (69)Villages 29 (25) 4 (4)

Source: RSE 2002, p. 200.

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, sug-gests that this is partly true, although it is easier to generalize about the biggestand smallest settlements than about those in the middle. If economic stagnationis a feature of smaller towns, this is to some extent linked to the fact that transi-tion to a market economy is less apparent than in the cities. Sutherland et al. stud-ied the role of ‘agglomeration effects’ and concluded from their case studies ofa number of regions that ‘the shift of workers from old to new activities was easierin large cities than in smaller communities. This could perhaps be attributed to theopportunities for new firms to grow in an environment where many differentskills and facilities . . .were readily to hand’.48

However, even in the Soviet period small towns were recognized as sufferingfrom unemployment, sluggish trade, poor transport and amenities. Middle-sizedtowns had some of the same problems, but to a lesser degree.49

There are obviously various factors, in addition to size, which help determinethe 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 findthemselves, so to speak, ‘off the main road’ . . .The old forms of small-scale industrial production turned out to be uneconomical compared withthe larger industrial centres, the material and financial resources of smallcities were constrained, and the comforts of life and their beautificationinadequate.50

A town grows in population because it is attractive as a result of geographical sit-uation, 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 aparticularly important moment. It is easier for a town to prosper if it has func-tioning industry, not just because of the wealth that this generates per se, but alsobecause economic success generates political influence in the regional capital andtherefore the influx of yet more resources to the industrial town. (Some of thiswealth may not, however, reach the pockets of the ordinary inhabitants.)

It seems important to stress the distinction between those smaller towns whichare based around productive factories and the rest. There are smallish townswhich 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 industrialpower.

Causation is obviously complex. However, this recognition does not invalidatethe book’s starting assumption, that size is an important variable to consider whenseeking to understand the different livelihoods and identities in different towns.

Turning now from causes to consequences, the comparative poverty of manysmall municipalities has many, often rather intangible effects. For example, thereis an impact on local identities and self-esteem. People who dislike their names

Introduction 15

often dislike themselves, and the same is true with the names of towns. It is theprivilege of larger places to be able to rename themselves, shedding unpleasant ordull Soviet names and recovering their more picturesque pre-revolutionary iden-tities.52 Metropolises, like Petersburg, Samara and Yekaterinburg, have been ableto rename themselves, but so have middle-sized cities. For instance, Georgiu-Dej(Voronezh Region), named for a Romanian communist leader, is now Liski, aftera referendum in 1990.53 By contrast, poor Bednodemyanovsk has been unable, forfinancial reasons, to shed its humiliating, difficult to pronounce and, according tosome, 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 dividedinto eleven macroregions (raiony).56 In 2000, Putin replaced them by seven ‘federalokrugs’. These okrugs were similar in area to the macroregions, although some ofthe latter were dismembered.

The Soviet system, like the Tsarist regime, was highly centralized, with powerconcentrated at the top. However, in practice it was always impossible to super-vise and control completely such a large and diverse empire. The end came whenGorbachev’s introduction of pluralism and multi-candidate elections destroyedthe CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) as a ‘monolithic’ organizationwhose members were bound by party discipline to implement the Kremlin’s poli-cies throughout the Soviet Union. At the same time, the revelations of glasnostencouraged Soviet citizens to express complaints about the system of CPSU ruleand ‘the Centre’, that is, the federal institutions based in Moscow. In many partsof the USSR – especially the Baltic and Trans-Caucasian republics – nationalistmovements gave powerful expression to local grievances, proclaiming first sov-ereignty and then independence. Centrifugal forces also came to affect Russiaitself, with Yeltsin, as leader of Russia from 1990, building a power base there inopposition to Gorbachev, the USSR President and General Secretary of the CPSUCentral Committee. Hoping for support from Russian regional leaders, Yeltsinencouraged the regions to take as much sovereignty as they could. All the‘autonomous republics’ (i.e. non-ethnic-Russian areas) consequently assertedtheir sovereignty.57 During the August 1991 coup, when the Soviet federal gov-ernment and CPSU leadership failed to reassert control over the disintegratingUSSR, Yeltsin was able to establish beyond doubt his position of superior powervis-à-vis Gorbachev and the communists. He subsequently banned the CPSU and,with the help of the other (non-Russian) republican leaders, destroyed ‘theCentre’ and brought an end to the USSR.

However, as leader of independent Russia, Yeltsin had to contain centrifugalforces which he had helped release. A particular problem was posed by national-ism in ethnic minority areas, notably Chechnya and Tatarstan. Yeltsin also had toreckon with the political pretentions of leaders of ethnically Russian regions,

16 Introduction

including Moscow City. It was true that there remained significant centripetalforces, especially the economic dependence of many regions on the federal cen-tre.58 However, in practice Moscow’s power was limited: power was much moredevolved to regional level than had been the case in Soviet Russia. Russia’s 1993constitution and a series of bilateral agreements between Moscow and individualregions gave the latter different, and in some cases substantial, degrees of controlover their own economic resources and legislation, creating what has been calledan ‘asymmetric federation’.

On becoming President in 2000, Vladimir Putin launched a drive to bring theregions back under control, force the payment of tax revenues to the centre andestablish the principle of one set of legislation for the whole of Russia. His newokrugs are different from their macroregional predecessors in that they are politi-cal units. Each okrug is headed by a presidential envoy with a remit to imposethe will of the Kremlin on regional leaders. To some extent Putin did begin toreassert a degree of central control.59 Nonetheless, the ‘damage’ had been done, inthe sense that economic liberalization combined with the decentralization of the1990s had resulted in massive disparities between regions, for many differentsocio-economic indicators. It is these disparities which are addressed in Chapter 1.

Introduction 17

1 Socio-economic and demographictrends in Russia and its regions

The book explores changing livelihoods and identities in three small Russiantowns. First, however, it seems helpful to identify changes on a national level,changes which both affect small-town livelihoods and which may also result fromthe sum of decisions made by households and individuals across Russia. The moststriking feature of the small towns was the extensive impoverishment of the pop-ulation. Chapter 1 therefore examines poverty in Russia, understood both asshortage of money and also as insufficient access to resources such as housing,transport, childcare and education, health care and a safe and crime-free environ-ment. The chapter continues by examining the causes of poverty: the collapse ofstate industry and agriculture, low and unpaid wages, unemployment and inade-quate benefits and pensions. It also considers the uneven development of the pri-vate sector as a substitute for state employment, and the role of household plotsin compensating both for the collapse of commercial agriculture and for thedeclining purchasing power of money incomes in individual households. Finally,the chapter examines some of the striking demographic trends of the 1990s, all ofwhich can be linked to some extent, directly or indirectly, to political change andeconomic 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 familiesheaded 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 millionmigrants 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 perspec-tive 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 onbenefits increased; and some social trends were positive. The infant mortality rateand unemployment both dropped in 2000 and 2001. Poverty and natural popula-tion loss became more extreme in 2000, but seem to have diminished in 2001. Onthe 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 malelife expectancy and divorce.

These national trends, based on the Russian (mean) averages, are interesting assome indication of the net result of a tangle of local and regional trends. It wouldbe wrong, however, to suppose that most Russians live in regions or towns whichhave indicators very close to national figures, or which have risen or fallen everyyear with the national figures. Much of the chapter therefore makes comparisonsbetween Russia’s regions and/or macroregions. It indicates the wide range ofexperiences which national figures tend to obscure.1

Regional variation is partly a consequence of the devolutionary trendsdescribed in the Introduction, partly of economic collapse/liberalization.2 It wasexacerbated by the ‘dumping of social obligations by the national government inthe 1990s’,3 as regions became more responsible for organizing and financingtheir own health, social security and education.

It is true that the USSR was also unequal: provincial Russians made heroicshopping trips by overnight train to buy sausage and oranges in Moscow, andthere were also disparities between and within regions. A certain cross-regionalstandardization of living standards was probably occurring in the late Sovietperiod. This trend, however, reversed dramatically in the early 1990s.4 By themid-1990s, according to Klugman and Braithwaite, ‘a high level of regional dif-ferentiation [was] apparent for virtually every macroeconomic or demographicindicator, and has increased during the [early] transition period. Indeed, by 1994the disparities among the oblasts of Russia were far greater than those among thestates of the United States.’5 In similar vein, Hanson reports that, in Russia, ‘theinter-regional dispersion of personal incomes was much larger than, for example,the dispersion of per capita GDP across the 183 second-level regions of theEuropean Union . . . in 1993’.6 Disparities between regions have remained great,although they perhaps began to narrow after 2000. The purchasing power ofmoney incomes illustrates these differences. In Moscow City in 1994 the averagemoney income was 669 per cent of the local official poverty line, the subsistenceminimum. In Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus, average money income was57 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 NorthCaucasus, which are far away from the fieldwork sites in Penza, Sverdlovsk andTver Regions. Hence, for some economic indicators in this chapter, I have com-pared only 42 regions of central European Russia and the Urals. This helps oneassess the fieldwork regions in relation to their immediate neighbours.

In such comparisons, Moscow City stands out even more clearly as the richestregion, seeming to justify the small-town respondents’ perceptions that it was‘another planet’. Moscow was also substantially privileged, and subsidized byother regions, in the Soviet period.8 However, other regions experienced substan-tial changes of fortune in the 1990s, with mineral-rich regions like Tatarstan moving

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

Poverty and prosperity

Very different levels of poverty in Russia have been suggested by analysts usingdifferent methods to measure the phenomenon. There seems to be an agreement,however, that poverty was increasing in the late 1990s; since 2000 it may havefallen slightly.10 For a comprehensive picture of all Russian regions, one has touse the Goskomstat statistics, which tend to show lower numbers of people livingin poverty than do other measures, partly because of defects in the surveymethodology used to collect data about personal incomes, and partly because ofthe actual poverty line employed.

Goskomstat figures are based on the so-called ‘subsistence minimum’, a meas-ure of absolute poverty first established in November 1992. Goskomstat subse-quently revised its calculation method several times, notably in 2000; this lastrevision led to the establishment of a higher threshold.11 The subsistence mini-mum is derived from the regional average price of a basket of goods and services.Different minima are calculated for ‘pensioners’ (older/disabled people), working-age people and children. The minima for pensioners in the period 1992–2000were not very generous, which may be one of the reasons why it seemed that pen-sioners were not well represented among Russia’s poor. Even after the pension-ers’ subsistence minimum had been adjusted upwards, in 2000, it was still small.For example, in September 2000 in Sverdlovsk Region the pensioner’s subsis-tence minimum was only 697 rubles, when the ordinary minimum was 1,014.12

Subsistence minima vary hugely between regions: regional authorities have anelement of discretion in fixing the rates, and prices are very different in differentregions.13

As Figure 1.1 shows, poverty was probably highest in 1992, because of highrates of inflation, but it rose steeply again after 1997, apparently to nearly leveloff in 1999–2000, and then fall.

Since Goskomstat compares the subsistence minimum with personal moneyincomes, it does not take into account the fact that many Russians also haveimportant non-monetary resources, notably home-grown food, which partlycompensate for lower money incomes.

According to Goskomstat, in 1999, 46.2 per cent of rural households, 40.9 per centof urban households and 57.6 per cent of households with children under 16 had percapita personal incomes below the subsistence minimum.14 Since some regions aremore rural than others, regional differences partly reflect this urban–rural divide,but the range between the richest and poorest regions was much greater than thedifference between national urban and rural figures (Table 1.1).

Regions such as Tyva and Ingushetia, in East Siberia and the North Caucasus, hadlarge proportions of the population living in poverty throughout the period1994–2002. What was new at the end of the 1990s was the descent of many centralEuropean Russian regions into widespread poverty. (See Map 1.1 and Table 1.2.)

20 Russian social trends

The proportion of poor people in 31 per cent of these regions had grown by morethan 30 per cent during the 1994–9 period. Penza and Tver were among theseabruptly impoverished regions.

With such high percentages of the population living in poverty, it was not sur-prising that the average purchasing power of incomes in poor regions was verylow. In all, 17 per cent of the regions listed in Table 1.2 had average personalincomes below regional subsistence minima in 1999. This had not been true in the


2527.3

28.928.3

23.3

20.722

24.722.4

31.533.5

10

20

30

40

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

Figure 1.1 Goskomstat calculated revised percentages of population with personalmoney incomes below subsistence minimum, Russia 1992–2002.

Sources: RSE 2001, p. 189 and Voprosy statistiki (VS), 6, 2003, p. 69.

NoteThese figures were derived after the method of calculating the subsistence minimum changed in2000 (hence the disparity with Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Percentage of population with personal money income below subsistence minimum, top and bottomRussian regions, 1999, using unrevised figures Russian mean � 29.9 per cent

Richest 10 Poorest 10

Tyumen 17.8 Tver 67.4Murmansk 19.8 Mordovia 68.1Komi 22.1 Chuvashia 68.2Moscow City 23.3 Penza 68.7Samara 23.4 Marii El 69.0Novgorod 24.0 Chukotka 70.9Tatarstan 24.1 Kalmykia 78.1Krasnoyarsk 25.1 Tyva 78.6Rostov 25.3 Chita 88.8Perm 25.6 Ingushetia 95.1

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

mid-1990s. It was only in 1998 that the figure for average incomes in the bottomregion (Marii El) first dropped below 100 per cent of the subsistence minimum.By 2001 some of these poorer regions had recovered, so that average incomeswere again above the poverty line, and by 2002 all regions shown on Map 1.1 hadincomes 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 con-taining a greater percentage of poor people than some of the mineral-rich regions,had much the greatest average purchasing power. It held its leading positionthrough the second half of the 1990s and, as far as one can tell from the incom-plete data, into the twenty-first century.

In general there was not a close correspondence between width and depth ofpoverty: regions with less widespread poverty could also have quite deep poverty.Moscow, for example, had fewer than average poor people, yet a higher than aver-age proportion of people living in deep poverty. However, the regions with thevery greatest number of poor people were also the ones with the highest numberin extreme poverty. These were mostly ethnic minority areas on the southern andeastern fringes of Russia, with many children and sometimes, also, refugees.16

Hence, although poverty may have been becoming more extensive in central


Leningrad

Novgorod

Vologda

PskovTver

Smolensk Moscow

Kaluga

BryanskOrel

Kursk

Belgo- rod

Voronezh Saratov

Volgograd

TAM-BOV

PenzaLip-etsk

Tula Ryazan

Vladimir

Ivanovo

Yaro-slavl

Kostroma Kirov

Nizhnii

Nov-gorod

Chu-va-shia

Tatarstan

UdmurtiaMarii EI

Mordovia

Samara

Ulyanov-sk

Bashkortostan

ORENBURG

Chelya- binsk

Kurgan

SverdlovskPerm

KEY

TAMBOV Region wherepoverty 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.


NoteMoscow City, St Petersburg and Kaliningard are not shown on the map. None fell into the categorieslisted in the key.

Table 1.2 Percentage of population with personal money income below subsis-tence minimum, 1999, rankings for central European Russian/Uralregions (unrevised figures)

1–21 % 22–42 %

Moscow City 23.3 Vologda 37.3Samara 23.4 Kaliningrad 37.4Novgorod 24.0 Nizhnii Novgorod 38.0Tatarstan 24.1 Kostroma 38.1Perm 25.6 Vladimir 40.8Lipetsk 25.9 Saratov 43.0Belgorod 26.9 Bryansk 45.0Smolensk 27.2 Kaluga 47.0Moscow Region 27.6 Udmurtia 49.5Yaroslavl 27.7 Pskov 51.2Tambov 27.9 Leningrad 51.5Bashkortostan 30.3 Ryazan 52.4Tula 31.2 Kurgan 56.5Ulyanovsk 31.4 Kirov 56.6Chelyabinsk 32.0 Volgograd 58.1St. Petersburg 33.2 Ivanovo 64.9Voronezh 33.8 Tver 67.4Kursk 35.0 Mordovia 68.1Orenburg 35.6 Chuvashia 68.2Sverdlovsk 35.6 Penza 68.7Orel 35.9 Marii El 69.0


NoteRussian mean � 29.9 per cent.

Table 1.3 Purchasing power (personal incomes as percentage of subsistenceminimum), richest and poorest Russian regions, 1999 (2001 in italics)

Richest 10 Poorest 10

Moscow City 548 558 Karachaevo-Cherkes 93 129Tyumen 291 DNA Penza 93 DNASamara 233 213 Marii El 91 87Komi 223 261 Mordovia 91 131Krasnoyarsk 206 DNA Dagestan 90 122Murmansk 205 196 Chukotka 88 DNATatarstan 197 DNA Kalmykia 80 115Perm 193 DNA Tyva 78 109Irkutsk 185 DNA Chita 62 DNARostov 181 184 Ingushetia 44 70

Sources: RSE 2000, pp. 157–8; RSE 2002, pp. 189–90.

NotesRussian mean � 177 per cent; DNA � data not available.

European Russia in the late 1990s, life in there was not necessarily as desperateas it was for many people in the North Caucasus and East Siberia. There wereexceptions, however: in 2000, 30.7 per cent of the Marii El population had moneyincomes 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 1990to 19.7 square metres in 2001,18 the rate of building of new housing declinedsharply in the post-Soviet period, as is shown in Figure 1.2.

The population has been shrinking, but Russia inherited an acute housingshortage from Soviet days, so the need for new housing remained. In 1999 therewere 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, despitethe fact that much less state housing was built than in the late Soviet period, the1990s saw a substantial increase in individually built private dwellings, which nolonger had to conform to Soviet-era restrictions on the number of square metresto which an individual was entitled. Ostentatious villas and smart blocks of flatsaltered the face, not just of the Moscow, but also of provincial cities like Voronezhand Yekaterinburg. In the countryside, houses built by individuals – judging byinterview evidence, not necessarily particularly rich ones – accounted for almostall new housing in the 1990s.20

Even if there were fewer new homes, the proportion of rural housing with util-ities seemed to be rising in the 1990s. Indeed, by 2001 twice as many village


0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

Russia Urban Rural

Figure 1.2 Square metres new housing per 1,000 population, 1990–9.


houses had central heating provided by the local authorities, as opposed to coal ortimber-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 smalltowns had been reclassified as villages, bringing their sewers with them into therural statistics tables.

Travel and transport

Another apparent improvement to rural infrastructure in the 1990s was the build-ing of more paved roads, although the problem of bezdorozh’e – ‘roadlessness’ –remained acute in many rural and remote areas. The percentage of rural settle-ments connected to paved roads rose from 58.7 per cent in 1992 to 66.1 per centin 2001.22 In Zubtsov district, for example, all villages were said to be connectedto paved roads by 1999, whereas previously it had taken whole days for milkdeliveries to reach the district centre.23 However, reclassification of urban settle-ments into villages must partly explain the apparent improvement.

There were more roads to facilitate local journeys, but at the same time peopletravelled less: the 1990s witnessed a gigantic decline in the number of journeystaken by public transport, as subsidies were removed, fares increased and routesdiscontinued. The number of ‘passenger-kilometres’ in Russia fell by 59 per centbetween 1990 and 1999, slightly picking up thereafter.24 Although ZubtsovDistrict, for example, had better roads, by the end of the decade there were hardlyany buses, so the roads remained underused.

Decreased use of public transport in some regions can be partly attributed to thefact that car ownership increased, by 225.9 per cent from 1990 to 2000. In partic-ular, 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 FederalOkrug, for example, 2001 figures ranged from 237 cars per thousand inhabitantsin Moscow to just 61 in Bryansk Region.26 Such disparities were, to provincialRussians, a very obvious sign of Muscovites’ superior purchasing power.

Childcare and education

Nine million Russian children were in pre-school institutions in 1990, but only4.2 million in 1999. By 1999, a fifth of the places remained unfilled (two-fifthsin 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 andnursery places, because providers could no longer afford to subsidize childcareand because of lack of demand, which was, in turn, linked to the removal ofsubsidies. Many institutions closed down because enterprises were in financialtrouble and had to reduce their infrastructure of social services. Poor local gov-ernments find it hard to take over responsibility for child care. The high cost ofmuch of the child care which remains is one reason why couples are reluctant tohave more than one child, and the overall child population has fallen. A decline


in the availability of affordable public child care also has implications formothers’, and sometimes also grandmothers’ careers.

The 1990s were a period of reform, experimentation and turmoil in Russianschools.28 Some regions, such as Sverdlovsk, were particularly experimental.Upheavals in teaching philosophies and curricula, which followed on from thepolitical transition, were accompanied by abrupt changes in pupil numbers, theresult of demographic trends. First came a bulge in the school population, result-ing from the high birthrates of the 1980s. Then, in the school year 1998–9, thenumber of both teachers and pupils began to decline:29 the first effects of theprecipitous fall in birthrates of the 1990s.

Economic and political liberalization facilitated increased variety of schooling.Although the norm remained the state ‘general education school’ (obshcheobra-zovatel’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 andgimnaziya. The number of private schools increased steadily and by 2001 therewere about 700 schools with 65,900 pupils. 30 Private further education collegesalso set up, typically preparing students for careers in commerce. By 2001 therewere 89 private colleges with 60,400 students.31

Higher education was affected by the same processes. The size of cohortsaffected the number of student enrolments. However, the dip in student numbersin the early postcommunist period was widely attributed not to a smaller cohortbut to a negative attitude towards education among young people – a feeling thateducation 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 thedecade. Having a specialist qualification, preferably a degree, was recognized forthe asset it was in obtaining employment.33 There were 45 per cent more univer-sity teachers in 2001 than in 199034 and the proportion of university students inthe 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 centof the 1990 figure).35 The number of both state and private universities increasedand the number of students at private institutions more than doubled just in theyears 1998–2001.36 Subjects such as law and finance were particularly popular,reflecting their new significance in the market economy. However, by 2002 acertain over-provision was observable.37

Nationally, therefore, there was both more choice of types of institution andmore availability of places in higher education by the end of the decade, as wellas a greater variety of schools. However, the introduction of fees for many placeseven at state universities, and the intense competition for the remaining ‘free’places, sometimes involving the payment of bribes, meant that parents andstudents, except the wealthiest, often had to be prepared to make substantialsacrifices to ensure access to higher education. (In January 2003, 10.6 per cent ofrespondents in a national survey reported that ‘the impossibility of providingtheir children with a good education’ was the main factor ‘complicating theirfamily life’.)38 To some sections of the population education came to seem lessaccessible, not more.


Health

Health care has undergone similar upheavals. These are partly linked with mar-ketization: the introduction of a medical insurance system; payments, in stateinstitutions, for aspects of health care which were free in the Soviet period, suchas medicines provided in hospital; and the development of a private sector. Therehave also been philosophical sea changes, notably recognition of the desirabilityof expanding non-hospital medical treatment and introducing a system of familydoctors. Once again, there is an important regional dimension. Indeed, it has beensuggested that Russia ‘has 89 different systems of health care’.39 Overall,although some reforms have been introduced quite widely, such as increasing theproportion 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, suchas the improvement in the infant mortality rate. The rate had increased in the1970s, leading to the withholding of official statistics. It seems that figures thenbegan to recover, declining from 23.7 deaths of infants under one year old per1,000 live births in 1975, to 17.4 in 1990. The figure fell still further during thepostcommunist period, to 15.3 in 2000 and 14.6 the following year. This improve-ment occurred despite the upheavals affecting the Russian health service. It isimportant to bear this point in mind when considering adult mortality, because itsuggests that rising adult mortality had causes other than healthcare failings.Figures for infant mortality did, however, vary markedly between regions. Theworst rates were in depressed regions of the North Caucasus and East Siberia. In1999, for example, when the Russian average was 16.9, rates of 34.4 and 36.2deaths per 1,000 live births were recorded for Ingushetia and Tyva. By contrast,prosperous St Petersburg and Samara, in European Russia, had under 11 deathsper 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 averageinfant mortality was 16.1 in Russia’s towns and 18.8 in the villages.42

Despite achievements in reducing infant mortality, health trends also includesome extremely worrying tendencies, particularly the increasing number of casesof tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. In 1991 there were 84 newly registered cases ofHIV. In 1999 there were 20,129.43 HIV/AIDS in Russia is associated mainly withdrug abuse: another area of growing concern, and another area for which there areno reliable statistics.44 It seems certain, however, that drug abuse has increasedmassively since the Soviet period.

Crime

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


acceleration under Gorbachev, as state controls loosened. In the postcommunistperiod the crime rate has been even higher than in Soviet Russia, with a particu-lar increase in economic crime.45

As Figure 1.3 illustrates, rates appear to have risen chiefly at the beginning andend of the decade, although different regions had different patterns. By 2000 theaverage 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 were241,600 cases of ‘crimes connected to illegal trade in drugs’ (compared with16,300 in 1990).47 Rates of recorded drug dealing were particularly high inregions with large urban populations like Samara, Novosibirsk and St Petersburg,and particularly low in depressed ethnic minority areas in the Far East and in poorrural Russian regions such as Ivanovo and Kirov.48

Regional breakdowns of crime statistics suggest that the most criminal regionsare in the Urals, the Far East or East Siberia. The least criminal are apparentlythree regions in the North Caucasus. The Central-Black Earth macroregion alsohas relatively little crime.49 This pattern suggests a certain continuation of Soviettrends. Louise Shelley has observed that, in the Soviet period, too, crime wasstrongly differentiated regionally, with the most criminal areas being newand /or remote cities with large populations of young male migrants. Cities withmore established populations, such as many of those in European Russia, weremore law-abiding, and rural areas, depleted of young males, were least criminalof all.50


20282052

175816271777

1860

1775

1885

18571462

1240

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

Kurgan Russia Moscow City

Figure 1.3 Recorded crimes per 100,000 population, 1990–2000.

Source: Regiony Rossii 2001, 2, pp. 270–1.

Inflation, economic decline and growth

A defining feature of respondents’ livelihoods was their lack of savings, resultingfrom the inflation which accompanied relaxing of price controls in the postcom-munist period. Inflation had been 1,526.0 per cent in 1992, the year of the mostextensive 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. In2000–2002 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 factordetermining local livelihoods. Local decline to some extent mirrored the national fallin Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Russian GDP in 2000 was, according to esti-mates, a mere 63 per cent of GDP in 1989, although that did represent a substantialimprovement since the deep recession of the first half of the 1990s. Real GDPgrowth 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, withgrowth falling to about 5 per cent in 2001.53 All regions registered growth in2000, though not in 2001.54 The highest growth in 2000 was in North-WestOkrug, based around St Petersburg, and the lowest was in Siberia.55 Agriculture,particularly important in the economies of the three fieldwork districts, alsoshowed signs of improvement after the ruble devaluation of 1998 stimulated theRussian foodprocessing industry, and because of better harvests.56 According toGoskomstat, ‘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 effi-cient, and many state and collective farms had been unable to adjust rapidly tomarket conditions.58 An eerie sight in less fertile areas was acre after acre of aban-doned, weed-covered fields. Sown arable land had declined fairly steadily from112.1 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 mineral-rich regions in Asia or the extreme north of European Russia; some of the poorestwere in the North Caucasus and East Siberia. The rankings in Table 1.4 show onlycentral European Russian and Ural regions. Sverdlovsk is near the top (11), Tver isin the middle (28), and Penza is almost at the bottom (40). Only the top six of theseregions in both 1999 and 2000 had figures above the Russian mean.

Since the Goskomstat figures do not take into account price differences betweenregions, they seem to exaggerate the prosperity of expensive regions such as StPetersburg and Sverdlovsk (see Table 1.4 for some corrected figures).

The regions with the largest cities are well represented near the top, althoughLeningrad (surrounding Petersburg) and Moscow Region are not at the very top,as neither is Nizhnii Novgorod. The more agricultural regions tend to be near thebottom.


The growth of a private sector

Government economists supposed that the privatization of state enterprises and thecreation of de novo private firms would compensate for the partial collapse of thestate 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 toregion. The different rates of growth of the new private sector are particularly sig-nificant. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)suggests that the main causes of regional differentiation are ‘urban market infra-structure, the pace of reform and the economic policies of regional and local gov-ernments’.61 Simon Clarke (1999) suggests, for example, that in 1998 the newprivate sector, as opposed to privatized state enterprises, employed 25.5 per centand 22.0 per cent of respondents, respectively in Moscow and Samara, but only10.3 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


Table 1.4 Per capita ‘GRP’ in 2000 in central European Russia andUrals, rankings calculated from Goskomstat

1. Moscow City (1/1) 22. Smolensk (21/20)2. Tatarstan (5/4) 23. Mordovia (rural) (34/34)3. Vologda (3/2) 24. Tula (29/25)4. Samara (2/3) 25. Saratov (24/29)5. Perm (6/5) 26. Ryazan (27/23)6. St Petersburg (4/7) 27. Kursk (rural) (20/24)7. Bashkortostan (7/6) 28. Tver (28/27)8. Lipetsk (rural) (10/8) 29. Kaluga (32/32)9. Orenburg (11/10) 30. Kirov (25/30)

10. Chelyabinsk (15/17) 31. Kostroma (23/21)11. Sverdlovsk (8/11) 32. Ulyanovsk (26/22)12. Leningrad (12/13) 33. Vladimir (33/28)13. Udmurtiya (16/15) 34. Pskov (35/36)14. Yaroslavl (9/9) 35. Voronezh (rural) (31/31)15. Moscow Region (13/14) 36. Tambov (rural) (37/35)16. Belgorod (14/12) 37. Chuvashia (rural) (39/38)17. Novgorod (18/16) 38. Kurgan (rural) (36/37)18. Nizhnii Novgorod (17/19) 39. Bryansk (41/41)19. Orel (rural) (19/18) 40. Penza (rural) (40/39)20. Volgograd (22/26) 41. Marii El (rural) (38/40)21. Kaliningrad (30/33) 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.

NotesThe region’s (Goskomstat) ranking in 1999 is shown in brackets, followedby Granberg and Zaitseva’s re-calculated 1999 ranking, taking into accountprice differences between regions. ‘Rural’ � urban population under 65 per cent (Russian mean � 73 per cent).

16.3 per cent of Muscovites and 13.4 per cent of Petersburgers appeared to beemployed in small businesses; the lowest incidence of small business employmentwas in impoverished Ingushetia (0.3 per cent).63 (These figures do not includeself-employed entrepreneurs.) However, Goskomstat may give a misleadingimpression, as, for example, is indicated by the Samara figure mentioned earlier.Clarke suggests that ‘at least beyond the centre of Moscow. . . the new private sec-tor 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, despiteprivatization, the impact of inflation meant that real wages in Russia as a wholehad fallen to 38.2 per cent of their 1989 level a decade later (Figure 1.5). Regionaldifferences in wages are considerable. Prices, however, are also so different in dif-ferent regions65 that it is not helpful to compare wages across regions. The pur-chasing power figures already mentioned are more useful. Wage differencesbetween regions reflect not just different prices, but also that fact that wages indifferent sectors vary greatly. Industrial wages were 120 per cent of averagewages in 2000, but agricultural wages were only 40 per cent.66 Hence theurban–rural composition of regions is a significant factor in determining regionalaverages. Moreover, different sectors of industry are very differently rewarded.For example, wages in 2000 for textile workers (mostly women) averaged 1,290.7rubles, but iron and steelworkers (mostly men) received 6,180.5 rubles.67 In theservice sector, administrative and financial employees tended to receive aboveaverage salaries, while salaries in education and health (typically women’s sec-tors) were below average, well below in the case of education.68 Women’s wagesnationally were 63 per cent of men’s in 2001, but there was considerable variationfrom region to region, with gender gaps tending to be smaller in poor regions: aslittle as 5 per cent in Tyva.69 In some respects differentials between and withinsectors were just more exaggerated developments of Soviet patterns.70 However,


5

70707060

555040

25

0

50

100

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.


156

739

84 64 93 99

373

0

500

Indu

stry (

all)

Gas in

dustr

y

Light

indu

stry

Agricu

lture

Educa

tion

Health

Financ

e

Figure 1.6 Wages as per cent of subsistence minimum, selected sectors, 1999.

Source: SPUZhNR 2000, p. 181.

NotesWages � take-home pay, including extra bonuses. The subsistence minimum used is that forworking-age people. The health sector figure includes wages in ‘sports’ and ‘social security’.

100

38.2

47.254.55245.9

63.769.168.9

102.4109.1

0

50

100

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

Figure 1.5 Real wages, Russian average, 1989–99 (1989 � 100).

Source: UNICEF, A Decade of Transition, p. 181.

the salaries of administrators and people working in finance have much improvedsince Soviet days, and agricultural wages are much lower than in 1990, when theyare 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 muchinequality between household incomes increased during the postcommunistperiod, 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 CISstates, than in East-Central Europe. Goskomstat does not appear to publishregional Gini coefficients, although individual Goskomstat branches sometimesdo so.

Wage arrears

Many of the people interviewed for this research project had gone without theirsalaries for months, supposedly because there was no money in the local admin-istration’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 sometimesasserted that Russians put up with low wages and arrears in the 1990s becausethey understood that they were a substitute for mass unemployment, in otherwords an inevitable concomitant of restructuring.74 Indebtedness seems to havepeaked in 1999. It fell in 2000, but still remained high (with 44 thousand millionrubles owed at 82,000 enterprises).75

Unemployment

‘Unemployment’ is hard to define. On the one hand, many Russian people haveno official primary employment, but do have unofficial earnings, varying con-siderably 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 theirservices. Such employers may place staff on part-time work or long-term ‘admin-istrative leave’. Such practices have, however, been declining.76

Registered unemployment is a poor guide to the scale of the phenomenon. Someregistered unemployed people are working. However, judging by the results ofunemployment surveys, registered figures actually understate the level of unem-ployment. Many people do not bother to register, do not consider it worthwhilefinancially 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 rateswere lower than the Russian average throughout the 1990s. However, many


Table 1.5 Goskomstat calculations ofRussian Gini coefficients,1992–2001

1992 0.2891995 0.3811996 0.3871997 0.4011998 0.3991999 0.4002000 0.3992001 0.396

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

regions crossed above and below the Russian average during this period and it ishard to generalize about unemployment trajectories, except to say that Moscowand St Petersburg improved their situation dramatically, rising from among theworst affected European regions in 1992 to the positions of best and third best in2000; a number of regions south of Moscow or along the Volga, most of themquite prosperous in other respects, also had fairly low unemployment;80 ratestended to be worst in the far West and in the textile region of Ivanovo; and the


Table 1.6 Survey-based estimates ofunemployment (per cent), byFederal Okrug, 2000–1

Federal Okrug 2001 2000

Southern 13.6 15.1Siberia 11.3 12.6Far East 10.2 12.3Urals 9.2 9.8Russia 9.1 10.5Volga 8.5 9.6North-West 7.7 9.7Central 6.3 7.8

Source: RSE 2002, pp.134–40.

8.68.79.9

12.411.8

9.7

8.1

5.95.2

9.5

13.2

0

5

10

15

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

Figure 1.7 Survey-based estimated unemployment rate (per cent) in Russia,1992–2002.

Source: VS, 6, 2003, p. 69.

NoteRevised figures (hence disparity with RSE).

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 equalnumbers of men and women are unemployed, with a slightly higher proportion ofmen (according to unrevised figures, 10.4 per cent of the male workforce and9.6 per cent of the female in 2000; 9.4 per cent and 8.7 per cent, respectively, in2001).81 No regions had a particularly high proportion of unemployed women.82

Though women face discrimination in the workplace, are probably less able toacquire private-sector (especially high quality) employment,83 and may be morewilling than men to take menial jobs, assertions that ‘unemployment has a femaleface’ and that unemployment is women’s ‘number one’ problem in the postcom-munist period are usually based on unreliable registered unemployment figures,where women are over-represented.84 Assertions that Russian women havereturned en masse to the role of housewife are also belied by the statistics: inNovember 2001 only 8.55 per cent of working-age women were housewives.85

Education is a more important variable than gender in determining employ-ment status. Although in Moscow and Petersburg in 1999 over a fifth of unem-ployed people held university degrees,86 this simply reflected the highly educatedquality of the local population. It is a myth that unemployment is a particularproblem for members of the intelligentsia; indeed, the proportion of graduates inthe workforce is rising, from 16.1 per cent in 1992 to 23.8 per cent in 2001. Alsoin 2001, only 11.1 per cent of unemployed people were graduates.87


0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

Penza RussiaSverdlovsk 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.

The percentage of those aged under 20 years among unemployed people dis-played wide variation from region to region. In Russia in 1999, 7.9 per cent ofunemployed people were under 20, but in many regions the percentage was muchlower.88 On the other hand, some regions with an elderly population also had veryhigh 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 struc-ture, indicating its low status in the eyes of the ruling elite. There was no USSR-level Ministry of Social Security and ‘prior to the break up of the USSR, socialspending in some oblasts was as much as four times more per person than in otheroblasts.’90 The shortcomings of the Soviet welfare state were criticized loudlyduring the Gorbachev period, by both clients and journalists; these critiques ledto the formation of thousands of non-governmental organizations to lobby andsupplement the work of local social security departments.91 The attendantrethinking of the principles of the Soviet welfare state gained new impetus afterthe collapse of communism.

However, overall the state has not responded adequately to the poverty result-ing from economic reform. For example, according to Goskomstat, spending onsocial 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 percent 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 theform of child benefit debts; by 2001 this had been reduced to 15.2 per cent of thetotal.92

Overall, Klugman and McAuley conclude that the nature of social protectiontoday 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 largenumbers of poor and very poor families being practically excluded from stateassistance.’93

The post-Soviet transfer of even greater responsibilities to regional and localgovernments has contributed to inequality. Pensions, for example, are set at dif-ferent rates in different regions.94 Most regions in 1999 were paying pensions wellbelow the poverty line, the pensioner’s subsistence minimum. The averageRussian pension was 78 per cent of the minimum, but the regions were very dif-ferent, and there was no correlation between wealth of region and generosity ofpension. By 2001 the situation had improved and the average Russian pensionwas 95.1 per cent of the poverty threshold.95 District and municipal governmentswere often so short of funds that they could not pay benefits; in some placeschild benefit remained unpaid for years on end. For example, in Kirovgrad(Sverdlovsk) no child benefit had been paid at all between May 1996 and August2000. Child benefit is often paid in kind by local authorities, who engage in


complicated barter deals with enterprises that owe them taxes. In SverdlovskRegion in August 2000, parents were offered in lieu of child benefit: a calculatorin Irbit, a garage lock in Shalya, and men’s underpants in Bogdanovich. In Rezhthey were made to accept chip pans valued at 4,000 rubles, twice the averageregional monthly wage.96

As well as benefits in kind, which are supposed to be paid in cash, there is alsoofficial social assistance in kind, a continuation of Soviet practices.97 For exam-ple, children in poor families may be entitled to free school meals, medicines, etc.Since these concessions are determined locally there is considerable variationfrom town to town and region to region.98 In general, richer people seem morelikely to receive concessions and benefits in kind, a reflection of Soviet practice,when payments in kind were regarded as extra incentives, not supplementarybenefit for poorer people.99

Subsistence farming as a survival strategy

Farming small private plots is a response to low and sporadic money income. Therural population, 16 million families, doubled its household plot size over thedecade, 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 andallotments.100 According to Goskomstat, 13.6 million families had such house-hold 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 every-body, 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 post-communist period, accompanied as it was by the widespread collapse of state andcollective farms, home-grown produce as a proportion of total agricultural outputrose dramatically (Figure 1.9). Private commercial farms, by comparison, haveproved unable to make much headway.

Table 1.7 shows the extent of variation across macroregions. Household plotproduction increased most not in the fertile North Caucasus and Central-BlackEarth macroregions, but instead in the unfavourable Far East and North. This sug-gests that it is not a commercial response to increased market opportunities, but asurvival strategy, of particular urgency in areas that had depended heavily onSoviet supply networks for provisioning.102 (It is perhaps surprising how far northpotatoes can be grown if families have an incentive to be self-sufficient. This isillustrated in the Komi Republic, where one can draw a ‘potato line’ at around theArctic Circle. Goskomstat reports that although, in the city of Vorkuta, north of theArctic Circle, just one family had a household plot in 1999, in the cities of Inta andUsinsk, only about fifty kilometres south of the Circle, around as many as 41 percent and 46 per cent of the population lived in households with smallholdings.)103


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 suggestingthat intensive kitchen gardening is a survival strategy. In the Volga macroregion,prosperous and urban Tatarstan increased its yield by just over half, but in poorPenza yields nearly doubled.104

The importance of subsistence farming in many regions is reflected in statis-tics about the Russian diet, as illustrated in Figure 1.10. The average inhabitant of


Table 1.7 Household plot productionin 1999 as a percentage of1989, by macroregion

North 247Far East 246E. Siberia 214North-West 210Central 197Volga-Vyatka 191W. Siberia 184Volga 179Central-Black Earth 171North Caucasus 164Urals 152

Source: Calculated from RSE 2000, p. 365.

25

92.5

61

79.9

57.1

25.8

0

50

100

1985 2001

Other vegetablesPotatoes Livestock

Figure 1.9 Percentage share of Russian agricultural output (measured in rubles)produced on household plots, 1985 and 2001.


poor Tver Region consumed nearly double the quantity of potatoes as the averageMuscovite, 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 alsowitnessed massive changes in population trends. Most importantly, the 2002 cen-sus suggested that Russia had 1.84 million fewer citizens than in 1989; in otherwords, it had lost 1.3 per cent of its population.105 (The total population did, how-ever, turn out to be larger than expected in pre-census population estimates, so theloss was correspondingly smaller than had been feared.) Population declineresulted from the acceleration of rising deathrates and falling birthrates acrossRussia. In 1990, deaths first began to outnumber births in the most westerlymacroregions, including Moscow and St Petersburg.106 By 1992 Russia overallbegan to have more deaths than births, although, because of immigration, the totalpopulation declined only from 1993. During 1999 there was a particularly sharpdecline in the Russian population.

Figure 1.11 shows the net overall effect of births and deaths, in other wordsexcluding the immigration factor. In 1990 the population growth rate was 2.2 per1,000; by 2000, it was �6.7. (However, although birthrates declined everywherein 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


111

94

47

83

60

73

119 118

35

0

50

100

Breadproducts

Potatoes Meatproducts

Russia Moscow City

Tver Region

Figure 1.10 Average per capita consumption of foodstuffs in 1999, kilograms per year.

Source: SPUZhNR 2000, p. 156.

Birthrate

The fertility rate was 1.89 in 1990, as it had been in 1980. By 1999 it had fallento 1.17, rising to 1.21 in 2000 and 1.25 in 2001 (Figure 1.12).108 Decliningbirthrates were probably caused largely by the fact that potential parents abstainedfrom 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 leastfor 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


–6.5–6.7–6.4

–4.8–5.2–5.3–5.7

–6.1

–5.1

–1.5

0.7

2.2

–10

–5

0

5

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

Figure 1.11 Rate of natural population increase in Russia (per 1,000 population),1990–2001.


15.615.4

14.7

13.613.814.215

15.714.512.2

11.411.2

10.7

12.1

13.4

9.49.6

8.88.68.99.38.3 8.7

9.1

8

16

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

Deaths Births

Figure 1.12 Birth- and deathrates in Russia (per 1,000 population), 1990–2001.

Sources: RSE 2000, p. 76; RSE 2002, p. 104.

significant factor limiting family size. Now lower income probably often playeda more important role.

It seems that choosing to have one child may be more common than decidingto have none. In 1994, for example, 24 per cent of childless women did not intendto start a family, while 41 per cent planned to have just one child and 76 per centof women with one child did not plan to have any more.109

Nonetheless, declining fertility cannot be linked only to the economic crisis inpostcommunist Russia. Declining urban birthrates in the Soviet period110 can beseen 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 trendwas interrupted in the 1980s, when birthrates were particularly high, partly inresponse to government policies.111 However, in the 1990s the modernizationprocess was speeded up by Russia’s sudden exposure to the West. Finally, thecohort of potential parents was smaller in the 1990s: these were the children ofpeople 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. Lifeexpectancy 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, themost reasonable explanation for the fall seems to be linked to greater prosperityafter Stalin’s death. This led to a more calorific diet, which for cultural and cli-matic reasons was high in animal fats.114 This in turn promoted the developmentof cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, the Soviet health service remained ori-ented towards the eradication of infectious disease – a task which had in fact beenlargely completed.115 After an improvement in the figures for the late 1980s,which seemed linked to Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, life expectancybegan to plummet, falling from 69.94 in 1987 to a trough of 63.88 in 1994, andremaining very low for the rest of the decade. In 2000 it was 65.27. Figure 1.13shows life expectancy for men and women.

As Figure 1.13 shows, in 1992, men could expect to live to 62.0 years, but by1994 this figure had fallen by an astonishing four and a half years, to 57.5. In 2000the figures were 59.0 for men and 72.2 for women. It is estimated that in 1995, forexample, 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, whichhave particularly risen among middle-aged men. Mark Field compares, for exam-ple, the number of men aged 40–45 who died of cardiovascular disease in 1997in a number of European countries. Per 100,000 men in this age group, 102died of cardiovascular disease in France, 170 in Greece, but 549 in Russia.117

Accidents/suicides/murders (classed as one category) have overtaken cancer asthe second most common cause of death (Figure 1.14).

Non-Muslim, rural and/or less well-educated males have particularly low lifeexpectancy.118 In Russia, many hard drinkers fall into one or more of thesegroups. Many commentators have ascribed the unprecedented drop in male life


73.75

71.88 72.04

67.89

65.1464.64 64.82

63.45

62.02

58.9158.27 58.47

72.34

74.32

74.29

74.56

74.38

74.29

71.18

71.7

72.49

72.8972.93

72.3872.269.94

69.76

69.6269.2

69.01

63.98

65.8966.64

67.0265.93

65.27

65.29

59.7559.93

58.9659

61.3

60.75

57.59

63.7764.2164.64

64.87

57

70

1987

1989

1991

1993

1995

1997

1999

2001

2003

Women Both sexes 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.

397381

310

265264

421414

394 376354

395393

298307266

239230

262283

326

306228

152143

295

240

191 178205

257

285

378

309

176

112108

0

500

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

Suicides Murders Alcohol

Figure 1.14 Death from suicides, murders and alcohol poisoning per millionpopulation, 1990–2001.

Sources: RSE 2000, p. 98; RSE 2002, p. 126.

expectancy – and the resulting huge gap between male and female figures – toalcohol consumption. Given that Russian men traditionally turn to the bottle intime of stress, and also that deaths from strokes, heart attacks, suicide and mur-der might also result directly from stress, it is tempting to attribute the plummetin male life expectancy in the 1990s to men’s failure to cope adequately with thestresses of the postcommunist period.119

Two charts for Tver Region display examples of striking gaps betweenurban–rural and male–female mortality rates (Figure 1.15 and 1.16). Tver is anethnic Russian region.


5052545658606264666870727476

1990–1 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

Urban women Rural women

Urban men Rural men

Figure 1.15 Life expectancy in town and village, Tver Region, 1990–2000.

Source: Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, p. 32.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

1985 1990 1995 2000

Working-age men Whole population

Figure 1.16 Alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 population, Tver Region, 1985–2000.

Source: Tverskaya oblast’ v tsifrakh 2000, p. 29.

Migration from the ‘Near Abroad’ (non-Russian republicsof 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 commu-nist regime. In the 1990s, migrants came to Russia from war-torn republics(Tadzhikistan, Azerbaidjan, Georgia, Moldova) or from republics where theyfeared, or had experienced, discrimination from the resident titular nationality –Estonians in Estonia, for example, or Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. Typically, wholeextended families uprooted themselves, although not always at one time.120 In thepeak year, 1994, immigration from the CIS and Baltics was, according to officialrecords, 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 naturalpopulation loss between the two census years of 1989 and 2002.


0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000

Figure 1.17 Immigrants into Russia from the Near Abroad, 100,000s, 1990–2001.


20,54027,940

5,560

0

10,000

20,000

30,000

Gain Loss

Deaths 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.

Migration within Russia from North and East to South and West

The 1990s also witnessed a massive reversal of population movement withinRussia 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 acombination of high wages and state-sponsored romantic spirit, young peoplemigrated from the Urals and central European Russia to Siberia, the Far East andthe northern regions of European Russia. In the 1990s, as subsidies wereremoved, infrastructure collapsed and geologists and soldiers were laid off, theybegan to come back. However, as in the case of immigration from the NearAbroad, the rate slackened in the second half of the 1990s, since those mostmobile and eager to go had already left.122

As Figure 1.19 shows, in all but three macroregions the overall direction ofmigration 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 losingup to half their populations.

Thanks to in-migration, the populations of eight regions123 in the Urals andcentral European areas of Russia grew in the period 1989–2002, despite the factthat these regions also had an excess of deaths over births for most years, andsome, such as Leningrad, had particularly high deathrates. Fastest growing wereMoscow City and the border regions of Kaliningrad and Belgorod. Another11 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 affecton relations between family members. Families were uprooting themselves,sometimes leaving relatives thousands of miles distant, couples were limitingthemselves 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 vic-tims of postcommunist upheavals, because of the stresses described earlier andalso those created by poverty and unemployment. The divorce figures suggest thatthis is not entirely true. The actual rate of divorce rose only by 0.3 per thousandin the years 1985–2000, from 4.0 to 4.3, admittedly with a small peak at 4.6 in1994. It is worth remembering that divorce was already high even in the lateSoviet period, and rates were rising fast. The rate had increased from 3.0 in 1970to 4.2 in 1980.126 Some big cities had much higher rates even than this. For exam-ple, in Kuybyshev (as Samara was known in Soviet days) divorces increased from4.4 in 1970 to 5.4 in 1980, while in the same period they increased from 5.1 to6.3 in Novosibirsk.127

In 1999, the macroregions with the highest divorce rates were Central andNorth-West, with particularly high rates for Moscow and St Petersburg (5 per1,000 population), and the Far East. Just as the richest regions tend to have themost divorce, so the regions with the lowest rates are economically depressed ethnic


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


4

44

99

5

81

4

33

–211

128

714

157

418

610

741

330

182

–94

–719

–23

–14

–56

–2

–1,000 0 1,000

North

North-West

Central

Volga-Vyatka

Central BlackEarth

Volga

N. Caucasus

Urals

W. Siberia

E. Siberia

Far East

1979–88 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.

As Figure 1.20 illustrates, by the late 1990s the real victim of postcommunismseemed to be the rate of marriage, rather than marriage survival, although by2001 the marriage rate had recovered to 6.9 marriages per thousand population.Marriage rates fell partly because of the smaller size of the cohort of young peo-ple. Other explanations have also been suggested. For example, in the currenteconomic climate young people hesitate to take on the financial commitments ofmarriage, especially since it has been customary in Russia to have children withina few years of marriage. The increase in cohabitation also reflects the generaldeformalization of social relations which has marked the post-Soviet era.130 Thedecade was also marked by a sudden growth in the number of children born out-side marriage, from 16.04 per cent of births in 1991 to 28.76 per cent in 2001(30.94 per cent rural, 27.83 per cent urban).131 However, before leaping to con-clusions about modernization, one should note that more children are born out-side marriage in rural areas – not the more ‘Westernized’ cities. Figure 1.21indicates that, in this area, postcommunism just accelerated, albeit massively, alonger-term trend. As was suggested earlier in this chapter, life expectancy anddeclining birthrates show the same pattern, of a Soviet trend which suddenlybecame much more pronounced in the 1990s.


Leningrad

Novgorod

PskovTver

Vologda

Yaro-slavl

Smolensk Moscow

Kaluga

BryanskOrel

Kursk

Tula Ryazan

Lip-etsk

BELGO-ROD

Voronezh

TAM-BOV

Volgograd

Saratov

Penza

Ulyanov-sk

Samara

Mordovia

Nov-gorod

ORENBURG

Bashkortostan

Tatarstan

Marii EIUdmur

tia

Chu-va-shia

Nizhnii

Kostroma

Ivanovo

Vladimir

Kirov

PermSverdlovsk

Kurgan

Chelya-binsk

KEY

BELGOROD Population growth of10% or over

Population loss of <50,000

Population growth

Map 1.2 Regions with stable and growing populations, 1989–2002, central EuropeanRussia and Urals.

Source: ‘Predvaritel’ nye itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya 2002 goda’.

NoteMoscow City and Kaliningrad also grew in population, by over 10 per cent.

The number of lone mothers increased in the 1990s, not just because womenwere not marrying, but also because 40- and 50-year-old husbands were dyingfrom heart attacks and accidents, and because of divorce. Most divorces occurredin families with children.132


6.96.26.3

5.8

6.3

5.9

7.37.47.5

7.1

8.68.9

5.3

4.33.73.4

3.83.84.54.64.54.343.8

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

Marriages Divorces

Figure 1.20 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population, 1990–2001.


13.8

29.78

16.5

13.4

9.6

27.19

12.2

9.6

0

10

20

30

1970 1980 1990 2000

Rural Urban

Figure 1.21 Children born to unmarried mothers, as percentage of all births, 1970–2000.


Sex ratios, household size and residential care

In Russia as a whole, women outnumbered men by 53.1 :46.9 in 2000. This wasquite a high proportion of women by global standards – for example, the Britishratio in 1998 was 50.8 :49.2.133 With the reverse pattern were six regions, all inthe north, which had more men than women.134 This probably reflects the con-centration of workers in male-dominated extractive industries.

According to the 1994 microcensus, the average household size was 2.84,falling to 2.7 in 2002.135 Zbarskaya et al. suggest that the 1990s saw an increasein the number of extended families, which is ‘probably connected with the socio-economic background of the transition period’, with grandparents moving to jointheir children as part of a livelihood strategy.136 It should be noted that the num-ber of people living in homes for older and/or disabled people (often combined)remained almost at its 1991 level: just 203,000 people in 1999, rising to 209,000in 2001, compared with 213,000 in 1990.137 As in the Soviet period, residentialcare was not an option for the vast majority of older people. Hence the prevalenceof extended family households – although the latter is also a cause of the lack ofresidential care. Residential homes were undersubscribed, suggesting that theywere not in demand. This was linked to their poor reputation.

Children’s homes had received even greater negative publicity in the glasnostperiod and experts realised the need to develop new kinds of fostering arrange-ments to replace children’s homes, for example, in Samara and Penza Regions.However, nationwide the decade witnessed an increase of more than 50 per centof children in residential homes and the construction of new institutions to copewith the influx. This was partly just because there were more children in the1990s, thanks to the high birthrates of the 1980s, but the size of the increase sug-gests that it was also a response to the stresses of the postcommunist decade. In1990 there were 564 children’s homes with 42,400 residents. By 2000 the figureswere 1,244 and 72,300, respectively, rising to 1,265 and 73,700 in 2001.138 Otherchildren were housed in newly constructed ‘refuges’; the refuge ( priyut) isintended as a more temporary alternative to a children’s home.

Conclusions

This chapter has outlined some of the main socio-economic trends in postcommunist Russia. It showed that, in the 1990s, certain demographic tendenciesof the late Soviet period became more pronounced. Male life expectancy declinedfurther, as did birthrates. The rate of natural population increase slowed to a haltand became negative. Divorce continued to rise, as did the number of childrenborn out of wedlock. Russians, who already had been returning to Russia fromother republics of the USSR in the 1980s, began to flood back in the 1990s.However, despite their roots in the Soviet period, these trends also had moreimmediate causes connected to postcommunism: stress (mortality, divorce); eco-nomic hardship (birthrates, migration); fear of discrimination in newly independ-ent non-Russian republics (migration). In some cases, such as life expectancy,


suicide, murder and divorce, rates reached their worst point around the middle ofthe decade, but improved in the latter part of the 1990s, sometimes to worsenagain after 1998, an apparent reflection of the August 1998 economic crisis.

Social immobility and increasing stratification had become hallmarks of theBrezhnev era. The 1990s saw inequality increase sharply and wage differentialswiden between different sectors. Economic reform brought novelties such a legalprivate sector and unemployment, which was, however, falling by the end of thedecade and into the new century, as Russia seemed to begin to overcome the mas-sive slump which characterized the early and mid-1990s. Declining purchasingpower because of inflation in 1992 led to a surge in poverty levels. During the1990s real wages continued to fall, and, moreover, often remained unpaid. Alsounpaid were many child benefits and, sometimes, pensions. The welfare state wasunable to compensate for the income shortage experienced by many households,and the late 1990s were characterized by steeply rising poverty, although thesituation seemed to improve slightly in the twenty-first century.

Public transport became too expensive for many Russians, and the number ofjourneys decreased considerably, although, once again, there was a slightimprovement in 2000–1. Though much of the population was immobilized, carownership did, however, increase.

As a response to economic hardship, the population acquired more land andsmallholdings accounted for a much increased proportion of total agriculturalproduction. Those who could, invested in higher education; student numbers rosedramatically, as did the number of institutions, and a private sector emerged.Health presents a mixed picture. On the one hand, an insurance-based system wasintroduced and some indicators – notably infant mortality – improved. On theother hand, much of the health system remained in chaos, and Russia had to cometo terms with a number of dangerous epidemics, notably HIV/AIDS and tubercu-losis. Life also became less safe as crime increased.

Most of these national developments are well known. Less familiar – andsometimes almost impossible to chart coherently – are the regional dimensions ofsocio-economic change. Some overarching causes of regional differentiation areclimate (migrants flow to areas with longer summers); ethnic composition (eth-nic Russian areas tend to have worse male mortality, more divorce and fewerbirths); whether a region is in a border area (attracting more migration and illegaltrade); urban–rural complexion (agriculture is a particularly problematic part ofthe economy and agricultural wages are particularly low); and other aspects ofthe economy inherited from the Soviet era (such as the extent of the localmilitary–industrial complex). Given that there are so many possible permutationsof these factors – as well as many others, such as political leadership – it is notsurprising that regions vary so much from one another, even when they are neigh-bours. Several contrasts, for example, have already been drawn between neigh-bouring Tver and Moscow. It is therefore extremely problematic to attempt topresent conclusions about groups of regions. However, some patterns are dis-cernable, and this chapter finishes with a very provisional attempt to categorizemacroregions, considering first demographic, then economic factors.


Since ethnic and climatic factors, common across much of each officialmacroregion, do much to explain demographic trends, macroregional demo-graphic profiles have a certain validity. (Federal Okrugs, which replaced macrore-gions in 2000, are larger and less geographically coherent.) A portrait of eachmacroregion is presented schematically with shaded blocks in Figures 1.22 and1.23 and with numbers in Table 1.8. For example, Figure 1.22 shows the twomacroregions which tend also to have the worst economic indicators, the NorthCaucasus and East Siberia. (The Far East has also been included, because it hasthe same demographic profile as East Siberia.) Figure 1.22 indicates that bothNorth Caucasus and East Siberia/Far East have higher than average natural pop-ulation increase, and higher than average infant mortality, partly causing/reflect-ing the extensive and deep poverty which characterizes a number of regions inthese areas. North Caucasus is, however, very different from the Far East, in that


Highurbanpopulation

Highelderlypopulation

High malelifeexpectancy

Highnaturalpopulationincrease

Highinfantmortality

High netout-migration

North CaucasusEast SiberiaFar East

Figure 1.22 Profiles of three southern and eastern macroregions in 1999/2000, using sixdemographic indicators, as in Table 1.8.

Sources: Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 32–3; SPUZhNR 2000, pp. 60–2, 51–3, 46–7.

NoteShaded box � above Russian average.

Highurbanpopulation

Highelderlypopulation

High malelifeexpectancy

Highnaturalpopulationincrease

High infantmortality

High net out-migration

UralsNorth-WestCentralVolga-VyatkaC. Black EarthVolga

Figure 1.23 Profiles of six central European/Ural macroregions in 1999/2000, using sixdemographic indicators, as in Table 1.8.

Sources: Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, 32–3; SPUZhNR 2000, pp. 60–2, 51–3, 46–7.

NoteShaded box � above Russian average.

male life expectancy is better, indeed very much better in the Caucasus than inthe Far East, and also because, while people are flocking out of eastern regions ofRussia, most North Caucasus regions are net recipients of migration – admittedlyoften at the expense of another North Caucasus region, Chechnya.

Respondents in the fieldwork regions could not remain unaffected by the warin Chechnya or by the exodus of Russians from the Far East; indeed, several ofthe respondents had come to the small towns from Far Eastern regions. However,central European Russia and the Urals share certain demographic characteristicswhich make them very different from the macroregions illustrated in Figure 1.22.

These European macroregions are characterized by net in-migration and lowerthan average infant mortality, and therefore unlike the Caucasian and easternmacroregions already discussed. Except in the Urals, there is a particularly largeolder population, relative to the number of working-age adults. The more urbanmacroregions tend to have lower male life expectancy, although the Volgamacroregion, perhaps because of its substantial Muslim populations, has higherthan average male life expectancy.

The paucity of economic data about macroregions, and the extent of economicdiversity within macroregions, make it both less feasible and less sensible toattempt to create diagrams for economic indicators similar to the macroregionaldemographic profiles drawn above. However, it is possible to identify groups ofregions, which do not correspond exactly to the official macroregions.


Table 1.8 Six demographic indicators for Russian macroregions, 1999

Urban Male life Elderly Nat. Net Infant(%) expectancy, dependency pop. migration, mortality

years ratio increase 1,000s rate

North 75.9 59.46 276 �5.5 �33.6 15.5NW 86.7 59.88 383 �10.3 23.5 11.9Central 83.2 59.62 414 �9.9 114.4 15.3Volga-Vyatka 70.6 60.33 383 �7.8 14.6 15.5CBE 62.6 60.67 438 �9.5 34.0 15.7Volga 73.1 60.50 358 �6.2 45.3 15.6NC 54.9 61.92 362 �3.1 12.8 18.8Urals 73.6 59.73 337 �5.2 37.6 16.6W. Siberia 71.1 60.26 288 �3.8 �5.1 16.8E. Siberia 71.5 56.58 265 �4.0 �22.7 22.8Far East 75.9 58.92 226 �3.1 �69.9 20.1Russia 73.0 59.93 350 �6.4 154.6 16.9

Sources: Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, pp. 32–3; SPUZhNR 2000, pp. 46–7, 51–3, 60–62.

NotesCBE � Central Black Earth.NC � North Caucasus.Figures for urban population and for elderly dependency ratio (per 1,000 working-age adults) are forJanuary 2000. Natural population increase and infant mortality figures are rates per 1,000.

At the top, Moscow City stands out as the most prosperous part of Russia,according to many indicators. New businesses, cars and housing are particularlyconspicuous to provincial visitors and reinforce feelings that Moscow has bene-fited disproportionately from economic reform. Overall population growth of17 per cent 1989–2002 (despite low birthrates) suggests that many migrants areflocking to Moscow. Other wealthy areas are mineral-rich regions in the north ofEuropean Russia and in Siberia – although the southern fringe of Siberia containssome of the poorest regions, with the highest unemployment levels. Poverty andunemployment also characterize the less Russian regions in the North Caucasus.These areas of extremity are all somewhat remote from the central European/Uralregions where the small towns were located. However, although rarely matchingthe extremes of wealth and poverty found in Siberia and the North Caucaus, cen-tral European Russia and the Urals do themselves contain considerable economicdisparity. Taking just three of the most basic indicators,139 Table 1.9 and Map 1.3suggest that particularly depressed areas140 include a swathe of regions just within


Table 1.9 Total of rankings for 1999 purchasing power, poverty levels and per capita‘GRP’ in central European/Ural regions

Total Overall ranks 1–21 Total Overall ranks 22–42combined combinedrankings rankings

3 Moscow City 64 Tula 6 Samara 66 Voronezh

12 Tatarstan 74 Kostroma15 Perm 76 Kaliningrad21 Lipetsk 76 Saratov25 Bashkortostan 79 Udmurtia29 Belgorod 87 Vladimir29 Moscow Region 90 Kaluga29 Yaroslavl 91 Ryazan33 Novgorod 94 Volgograd35 St Petersburg 95 Kirov41 Chelyabinsk 96 Bryansk42 Smolensk 98 Pskov44 Sverdlovsk 98 Leningrad49 Vologda 100 Kurgan51 Orenburg 103 Tver54 Ulyanovsk 115 Mordovia57 Tambov 117 Chuvashia58 Kursk 118 Ivanovo58 Nizhnii Novgorod 121 Penza59 Orel 121 Marii El

Sources: Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 157–8, 164 and RSE 2001, p. 293.

NotesMinimum possible score � 3, maximum possible � 126. Top and third groups, as shown on Map 1.3,are italicized.

the Urals, stretching from Kirov down to Penza, plus some western regions,including Tver. By contrast, Moscow City, Moscow Region and Yaroslavl form apocket of prosperity, as do Tatarstan/Samara. Of the more average regions, manyof those in the Black Earth and Urals seem wealthier, on the whole, compared toother regions. Sverdlovsk, however, despite its Urals identity, lags behind its veryprosperous, oil-rich neighbours, Perm and Bashkortostan.


Leningrad

Novgorod

PskovTver

Vologda

YARO-SLAVL

SmolenskMOS-COW

KALUGA

BryanskOrel

Kursk

TULA RYAZAN

LIP-ETSK

BELGO-ROD

VORO-NEZH

Tam-bov

Volgograd

SARATOV

Penza

Ulyanov-sk

SAMARA

Mordovia

Nov-gorod

Orenburg

BASHKOR-TOSTAN

TATARSTAN

Marii EI

UD-MURTIA

Chu-va-shia

Nizhnii

KOSTROMA

Ivanovo

VLADI-MIR

Kirov

PERMSverdlovsk

Kurgan

Chelya-binsk

KEY1–9: shaded, capitals

31–42: white22–30: white, capitals10–21: shaded

Map 1.3 Total of rankings for 1999 purchasing power, poverty levels and per capita ‘GRP’in central European/Ural regions.

Sources: Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 157–8, 164; RSE 2001, p. 293.

NoteMoscow City is in the most prosperous group; St Petersburg is the second; and Kaliningrad in thethird.

Introduction

This chapter provides some context for the statistical information given aboutAchit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk in Chapter 3, by looking at remote smalltowns as a category, in a number of Russian regions. The aim is to present some‘hard’ evidence to confirm the truth of the suggestion that such towns are likelyto be economically depressed, if they are located in districts which are mostlyrural. This hypothesis feels right, on the basis of what has already been said aboutthe problems of small towns in the Soviet period and low non-industrial wages inthe postcommunist era, but it needs some kind of substantiation beyond the evi-dence gathered in the three fieldwork towns. If the hypothesis can be shown tohave a certain validity, it would suggest that the three towns are at least to someextent typical of others, making them more worthy of study. Two further hypothe-ses, based on evidence from these three particular small towns, is that small townscan be very similar despite being in regions with different economic profiles, andthat living standards in small towns may often be greatly inferior to those in theregional capitals. This chapter attempts to assess whether these too are phenom-ena found in different regions across Russia. However, I do not wish to exagger-ate the hardness of the evidence, even if it is in the form of numbers. The sourceswere far from adequate in many respects. It was not the purpose of this particu-lar research project – which is primarily qualitative in character – to gather sta-tistical information at first hand. Fortunately, however, although little has beenwritten about this subject, Russian geographers Nefedova and Treivish haverecently arrived at conclusions very similar to my own.1

Chapter 1 demonstrated the enormous differences between socio-economicindicators for different regions. It was suggested, therefore, that mean averagesfor Russian socio-economic phenomena should not be assumed to represent somekind of standard Russian reality. Instead, they are merely a convenient statisticalway of summarizing a jumble of very different experiences. Unfortunately,Chapter 2 muddies the waters further, since it shows that regional averages them-selves conceal great diversity within regions.

According to Nefedova and Treivish, differences in living standards betweentowns and within regions are probably even greater than inter-regional differentiation;Hanson and Bradshaw suggest that, by 1998, ‘inequalities amongst regional

2 Characteristics of small townsacross RussiaSub-regional variation in living standards and population trends

averages. . .were dwarfed by inequalities of real income within regions’.2 SimonClarke concludes, similarly, that ‘wage inequality within each region is substan-tially greater than inequality between regions’.3 Hanson and Bradshaw and Clarkeare writing about inequality generally, not just geographically ( particularly inequal-ity within and between sectors), but it comes to much the same thing, since a smalltown dependent on state-sector jobs paid out of the local budget and surrounded bycollapsed farms is likely to have wages at the bottom end of the scale.

The poverty of small-town inhabitants is exacerbated by the fact that, although,as already noted, national government has ‘dumped’ responsibilities for organiz-ing health, social security, etc., onto regional authorities, in practice much of theresponsibility for paying for these services is in turn dumped (by federal law)onto local governments. In 1997 a new law enhanced the financial autonomy oflocal governments.4 Municipal and district governments were supposed to covertheir expenditures – 75 per cent of which were on education, health, social secu-rity and housing subsidies – from revenue they collected themselves.5 Given thevery different tax income available in different locations, it was to be expectedthat there would be considerable inequality between the spending powers of dif-ferent local governments, and hence their ability to pay out the wages and bene-fits to which local citizens were entitled. Moreover, the poverty of many districtsmade them dependent on ‘handouts’ from the regional centre and increased theirpolitical vulnerablity; Alfred Evans has suggested that this does much to explainwhy ‘local government has been unable to attain the degree of independenceostensibly granted to it by the Constitution and laws of Russia’.6 Recognizing theproblems, by 2003 Putin had adopted a policy of reducing the financial autonomyof local governments, but in 1999–2000 it was Yeltsin’s 1997 law that shaped thepredicament of Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov.

Wage arrears can serve as an example of the size of the gulf between cities anddistricts in Sverdlovsk Region. In the first six months of 2000, the regional aver-age was a debt of 280 rubles per person, but the unhappy inhabitants of Kushvawere owed, on average, 1,916 rubles apiece.7 Benefits, too, are subject to very dif-ferent levels of arrears. In Penza Region, there were no child benefit arrears at allin the industrial city of Zarechnyi, neighbouring Penza, and in one borough ofPenza city in January 1999; the region’s other cities were also paying most of theirbenefits on time. By contrast, 6 districts (5 of them centred on small towns heav-ily dependent on food processing industries) owed benefit totalling over 1,200rubles per child.8

Chapter 1 mentioned that, according to Goskomstat, all Russian regions expe-rienced industrial growth in 2000, and if this were true of all local areas then per-haps there would be some hope that everywhere local revenues would improve.Naturally, however, industrial growth is far from ubiquitous on a sub-regionallevel. In Tver, for example, 22 districts and cities grew, but 15 continued todecline. In industrial Sverdlovsk, by contrast, only one district (Achit) continuedto decline in 1999–2000.9

How extreme are within-region disparities? Moreover, where are the extremes?Are they, generally speaking, the capital city (best indicators) and districts centred

56 Characteristics of small towns across Russia

on small towns and villages (worst)? Are the indicators, in absolute terms,roughly the same for small towns across different regions and, if so, are within-region disparities greatest in rich regions, because the top is so much higher?Turning to the question of why some small towns are worse off than others, howmuch does remoteness from the regional capital and other big cities play a role?Do people leave small towns in favour of cities and what is the effect of migra-tion on the fortunes of differently sized population centres within a single region?

Some national survey data reveals aspects of small-town existence, as forexample, the information from a poll conducted in 2003, presented in Figures 2.1and 2.2.

However, despite the often revealing quality of such incidental survey evidence,this chapter mostly draws on official statistical data. The poorest districts andtowns in seven Russian regions were identified,10 to discover whether they areindeed those centred on villages and small towns, remote from the regional capital.

Characteristics of small towns across Russia 57

67.4 73.8 80.1 82.890.2

0

50

100

Mos

cow/

Peter

sbur

g

Other

city

Midd

le-

sized

town

Small

town

Village

Figure 2.1 Percentage of Russians never using a personal computer.

Source: ‘Informatsiya: Rezul’taty oprosov’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya,March–April 2003, p. 99.

24.9

19.1 20

11.8 13.1

0

25

Mos

cow/

Peter

sbur

g

Other

city

Midd

le-

sized

town

Small

town

Village

Figure 2.2 Percentage of Russians considering ‘moral crisis’ to be among the mostserious of Russian social problems.

Source: ‘Informatsiya: Rezul’taty oprosov’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya,March–April 2003, p. 97.

The concept of remoteness is also discussed in general terms. The location of thericher areas in the region is then examined, and the standing of capital cities relativeto other cities is assessed.

The chapter continues by comparing indicators inside the sample regions withindicators for Russia as a whole, to assess the range of living standards withinregions. Tables for retail trade, wages and car ownership are presented to illustratewhether wealthier regions contain wider ranges. The chapter also considers theuneven distribution of crime within regions. Finally, I discuss demographic trendssuch as birthrates, divorce and migration, to see if population trends varymarkedly between cities and small towns.11

Links between size of population and living standards

For each of the seven regions, districts and cities with the status of districts wereranked according to the most useful available indicators, including: infant mor-tality, dilapidated housing, new housing, wages, out-migration, car ownership,retail trade, industrial growth, unemployment, suicides, money income, expendi-ture and social transfers. These have been used selectively.12 Usually, there was adiscernible bottom or top band for each indicator, with some towns and districtsbeing markedly worse or better than the rest, from which they were separated bya distinct gap. Towns/districts were given a mark according to how often they fellinto this band and this was used to label the extreme cases as being ‘mostdepressed’ or ‘most flourishing’.13

In Sverdlovsk, perhaps partly because this is an exceptionally industrializedregion, there were some flourishing middle-sized and even smallish towns. Thethree most depressed areas in Sverdlovsk were a wholly rural district, Gari, Achitand the city of Severouralsk ( pop. 57,000).

Consistently, with prediction, in the other six regions all of the most depressedareas were districts centred on towns of under 20,000, with sluggish trade, highunemployment, etc. See Figure 2.3.

Conversely, in the same six regions all of the most prosperous areas weredistricts centred on towns of over 20,000, or were major cities, with the status ofdistricts.

Nefedova and Treivish in their study of the whole of European Russia, usingslightly different indicators, also conclude that ‘there is a connection between thesize of the town and its well-being’, with cities of over 500,000 scoring particu-larly well and small towns particularly badly (except on pollution).14

In my sample, too, most large cities were rich compared to middle-sized towns.In Primore there were only two cities over 65,000 which did not make it into themost prosperous group, and in Komi and Arkhangelsk, one each. In all the otherregions except Sverdlovsk, all cities over 65,000 fell within the clearly mostprosperous group.15

The standing of the regional capital is of particular interest. The regional capi-tal, in all but two of the 79 regions of Russia, is the largest city, as well as its polit-ical centre.16 Aleksei Chernyshov, using the term ‘provinces’ to denote thedistricts outside the regional capital, claims that ‘the regional centre often turns


out to be the final destination both for investment from the federal centre and forinnovations in the fields of technology, communications and education . . . every-thing which arrives in the region from Moscow remains in the city . . .The regionis most definitely not a single entity; the centrifugal tendency of the provinces tospin away from the region’s main city is even more powerful than that pulling theregion away from the Moscow.’17

Chapter 8 explores respondents’ views on regional identities and shows howthey often share Chernyshov’s resentments. The published statistics tend to con-firm Chernyshov’s assertion that much wealth is indeed concentrated in theregional capital. Regional capitals are almost always in the top quartile for allindicators, and in the most conspicuous areas (cars on the street and bustlingshops) they do particularly well. Indeed, in all but one of the seven regions stud-ied the ruble volume of retail trade was greatest in the capital city.18 Turning fromeconomic wealth to more general indicators of well being, it is clear that capitalcities tend to be particularly well supplied with doctors. This is partly a legacy ofSoviet planning and the natural effect of regional facilities being located in thecapital. However, there have also been disproportionate increases since 1990. InKirov City, for example, the numbers of doctors per head of population grew by55 per cent over the decade.19

Despite the good showing of most regional capitals in the sample,Yekaterinburg and Arkhangelsk did not quite make it into the ‘most flourishing’category for their regions,20 and in some other regions there are flourishingcities/districts which have more investment and better pay than the capitals.(Nefedova and Treivish suggest that in 60 per cent of Russian regions living stan-dards in other cities can compete with those in the regional capital.)21 These other


23

108

30 30

00

5

10

15

20

25

30

Rural <5

5–9.9

10–1

4.9

15–1

9.9

>20

Towns banded by population of district centre, 1,000s

Per

cent

age

of ‘

mos

t dep

ress

ed’

dist

ricts

in e

ach

popu

latio

n ba

nd

Figure 2.3 Percentage of ‘most depressed’ districts in each population band in sixregions.

NoteTotal number of districts � 40.

cities may be important commercial centres and/or ports, such as Nakhodka inPrimore’s Free Economic Zone, or areas where extractive industries are located,like the oil town of Usinsk in the Komi Republic. Such cities may also have bettereducational resources than the regional capitals.22 Hence, one should be carefulto distinguish rhetoric from fact in assertions that regional capitals monopolizeregional wealth. Nonetheless, in the more agricultural regions in the sample,Voronezh and Kirov, bereft of an array of cities, the capitals did seem especiallywealthy relative to other local towns.

The implications of remoteness

If regional capitals and cities are particularly prosperous, does remoteness fromsuch cities help to condemn districts and towns to ‘most depressed’ status?Although this study cannot pretend to examine in detail all the factors which influ-ence the fate of smaller and larger towns, it seems important to say a few wordsabout remoteness. A recent book about concepts of space in Russia opens with thesentences ‘Russia is big. Very big indeed.’23 Although this may seem trite, it isnonetheless a crucial factor in defining the country’s identity and determining itsproblems and potential. Similar comments might be made about countries such asthe United States. It is partly just the distance of some small towns from big conur-bations in general which helps to create their identity. The fieldwork towns werechosen partly because they were equally remote from big cities, although obvi-ously not remote in the sense that towns may be remote in the North and Siberia.24

The Russian geographer Rodoman divides the country into three ‘zones oftransport accessibility’. He contrasts the ‘provincial depths’ (glubinka) defined asall places more than 2 kilometres from a surfaced road (i.e. at least 2/3 of Russia)with the ‘centres’ (cities with international airports and consulates). The middlearea he labels ‘the provinces’ ( provintsiya). Rodoman claims that even in theprovintsiya many bus and train routes have gone, river traffic has dried up and ferries are disappearing, especially on administrative borders. However, this is asnothing compared to

the catastrophe cutting off the glubinka from civilization . . . the increase incost and disappearance of regular passenger river transport and local airtravel . . .The ordinary telephone still has not reached most villagers, whilethe system of local radio transmissions is dying out, postmen do not servedistant places, more and more people cannot repair and buy televisions.

Cultivated land is becoming overgrown with weeds and ‘the wolf populationhas soared’.25

Interviews and observation in the small towns provided many examples to back up Rodoman’s thesis. Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk are all in hisintermediate ‘provincial’ category; in fact the towns are located on or bypassedby major inter-city trunkroads (Perm–Yekaterinburg, Riga–Moscow, Moscow–Samara–Chelyabinsk). Nonetheless, interviewees felt that insufficient or


expensive transport were extremely important determinants of their livelihoods,particularly if they lived or worked outside the district centre. Out in AchitDistrict, there were villages which existed for months with no water, no electric-ity and no telephones, places where one could be trapped by snow for two weekswith a broken arm before being able to reach a hospital.26

Ioffe and Nefedova, in their study of four north-western regions in EuropeanRussia, were able to differentiate between three different zones encircling thecities: exurbia (20 per cent of land in the region), semi-periphery (36 per cent)and periphery (44 per cent). Quality of infrastructure, human resources and agri-cultural productivity all increased the closer one travelled from the periphery tothe city. Moreover, size of city counts.

In Russia, it makes a huge difference what kind of urban center ‘presides’over the neighbouring countryside. An urban concentration of around 50,000people brings to its nearby countryside a heightened agricultural land-useintensity . . .Larger cities produce more land-use intensity gradients that aresteeper or stretch over larger chunks of countryside.27

The poorest districts in my sample, too, were usually centred on small towns inthe ‘periphery’, far from a large city and, often, even from a small one. This seemsto be particularly clear in four of the seven regions. Kirov was the clearest exam-ple: the only two cities (defined as towns of over 50,000 people) formed the entire‘most prosperous’ category, and the depressed areas all centred on small towns ofunder 20,000, far from the cities: see Map 2.1.28


KEYProsperouscityDepressed smalltown

Kirov

Map 2.1 Most prosperous and depressed locations in Kirov Region.

Source: Calculated from Kirovskaya oblast’ v 2000 godu.

NoteCity � town of over 50,000; small town � under 20,000.


KEY

Depressed small townDepressed mediumtownProsperous medium townProsperous cityOther cityCapital city (notamong richest)

AchitY’g

Map 2.2 Most prosperous and depressed locations in Sverdlovsk Region.

Source: Calculated from Sotsial’no–ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, yanvar’-iyul’2000 goda.

NoteCity � town of over 50,000; small town � under 20,000.

Where cities were concerned, in most regions those remote from the regionalcapital did not seem to be particularly poorer than others, except in Sverdlovsk.Here, as Map 2.2 shows, the cities of the south, nearer to the regional capital andthe main road and rail arteries, did better according to the selected indicators.Some cities in the far north, like Severouralsk and Karpinsk, seemed particularlydepressed. According to Startsev, ‘the cities of the south and the regional centercontrol the developing economic ties and a diversified economy. . .The cities ofthe north and east make up a district that is dominated by mining and factories.Most of these concerns exist primarily on the strength of state subsidies.’29

The range of socio-economic disparity within regions

Vast ranges are found across a range of indicators in the different regions. Themost useful indicators for assessing local standards of living are perhaps thosewhich indicate the purchasing power of wages, always supposing, of course, thatwages are paid. Unfortunately, of the sample regions, Komi and Primore were the

only ones to provide data which cast light on within-region differences in the costof living, giving information about both incomes and prices.

Primore provided the best type of data – personal money incomes as percent-ages of the local subsistence minima.30 The wide range of living standards withina single region is clearly illustrated (Table 2.1).

Clearly wages are lower, but prices are higher, in the capital, Vladivostok, thanin Primore’s second city, Nakhodka. Nakhodka would seem to be the more flour-ishing of the two cities. Incomes vary markedly across the region, far more thando prices. In Khanka District people are nearly ‘three times poorer’ than in richNakhodka. However, the simple small town/city contrast is rather spoiled byArsenev’s place as joint last with Khanka, reminding us, as in the case ofSverdlovsk, that there can be depressed industrial cities.31

Given that prices do not vary much across Primore Region, differencesbetween towns in the annual volume of retail trade per capita, measured in rubles,must be caused mostly by the number and size of transactions, not by price dis-parities. Compare the extremes: Vladivostok: 19,679; Lesozavodsk District:1,205. In other words, about 16 times more is spent in Vladivostok. InLesozavodsk District, it would seem, people spend no more than 100 rubles amonth. (Lesozavodsk District also has the lowest wages in the region.)32

The Komi handbook is less detailed, but it provides details of wages and of theprice of the same basket of foodstuffs (used by Goskomstat for monitoring prices)in all district centres (Table 2.2).

Komi’s eight cities (in capital letters) are at the top of the table; the republicancapital is eighth. Komi’s three very ‘most depressed’ district centres (italicized)


Table 2.1 Purchasing power of money incomes, Primore Region, 2000

Cities and districts Money Money Money Subsistence Price ofincome income income, minimum foodas % as % food rubles basket,sub. min. basket rubles

Nakhodka (2) 243.7 358.3 2,963 1,216 827.0Vladivostok (1) 202.8 284.4 2,570 1,267 903.6Pozharskoe District 185.2 262.2 2,072 1,119 793.3Spassk-Dalnii (7) 148.3 216.7 1,535* 1,035 708.5Artem (4) 146.0 206.2 1,756 1,203 851.7Dalnegorsk (6) 140.9 209.5 1,586 1,126 757.2Dalnerechensk (10) 123.3 177.3 1,367* 1,109 771.1Ussuriisk (3) 105.3 — 1,205* 1,144 —Arsenev (5) 92.3 132.3 1,036 1,122 783.3Khanka District 87.5 133.9 979 1,119 731.1

Source: Sotsial’naya sfera gorodov i raionov Primorskogo kraya, p. 24, 33, 71.

Notes* Figures include data for surrounding district.Brackets indicate population ranking of city, for example, (1) � city with largest population in region.

are at the bottom.33 Wages can buy four times as much food in the oil city ofUsinsk as in rural Izhma (ten baskets, not two and a half ), an even wider rangethan was observed in Primore.

It is revealing to compare within-region figures with highs and lows acrossRussian regions. If Usinsk were a region, it would be ahead of Moscow, wherepurchasing power, using the subsistence minimum as a yardstick, not the food-basket,34 was said to be 168 per cent of the average wage in 1999 and 229 per centin 2001.35

If Nakhodka were a region, it would be in fifth highest place in Russia forincome as a percentage of the subsistence minimum. Khanka would be sixth fromthe bottom – near Dagestan.36


Table 2.2 Purchasing power of wages inall cities and districts, KomiRepublic

Average wagesas % price offood basket

USINSK 1,000SOSNOGORSK 709UKHTA 685VORKUTA 649PECHORA 592VUKTYL 541INTA 541SYKTYVKAR 505Aikino 452Koigorodok 388Koslan 321Troitsko-Pechorsk 308Vizinga 302Obyachevo 300Emva 299Kortkeros 296Vylgort 291Ust-Kulom 289Ust-Tsylma 282Izhma 246

Source: Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozheniegorodov i raionov Respubliki Komi, p. 84, 245.

NotesCities in capital letters, centres of ‘very mostdepressed’ districts in italics.

Wages are given for the entire district, but, as is customary in Goskomstat data, prices are recorded only for towns.

The same story, of vast sub-regional variation, is found with regard to car own-ership. There were 34 cars per 1,000 population in Izhma and Ust-Kulom, Komidistricts at the bottom of Table 2.2, placing them second to bottom on the Russianregional scale. (Only Chukotka has fewer cars, among Russian regions.) On theother hand, in 2000 there were 243 cars per 1,000 population in Rossosh District,Voronezh, location of a flourishing chemical plant. The figure for Moscow Citywas lower than this, at 224.37

Disparities within rich regions compared withdisparities in poor regions

Obviously it is not within the scope of this study to provide a full answer to thequestion of whether disparities are greatest in regions with the more favourableregional averages. It does seem important, though, to find some statistical evidenceabout whether depressed small towns in a rich area – say Komi – are better off thanin a poor region – say Kirov. The regional handbooks can shed some light on thisby, for example, telling us that 34 cars per 1,000 population was the minimumfigure in both Komi and Kirov. In other words, the bottom line was exactly the same.38

Table 2.3 uses money incomes as a percentage of the subsistence minimum torank six39 of the sample regions, providing some sense of ‘real incomes’ in eachregion. There is a wide range, with Komi appearing to have citizens among thevery wealthiest in Russia, and Kirov ranking among the poorest.

In Tables 2.4–2.6 the rankings in Table 2.3 are given in brackets, and regionsare compared according to the most useful available indicators. It is the rangesacross each region’s cities and districts, rather than the actual figures, which arethe main point of comparison.40

The ranges within each indicator lend some support to the thesis that the richerthe region, the more unequal (in terms of disparities between cities and smalltowns/villages) it is likely to be. Kirov, the poorest region, clearly has the nar-rowest range for all three indicators, while Komi, the richest region, has the


Table 2.3 Rankings for purchasing power, measuredby money incomes as percentages ofsubsistence minima, among 78 Russianregions

Purchasing power rank, 1999

Komi 4Khabarovsk 17–18Voronezh 30–31Primore 38Arkhangelsk 54–6Kirov 62–3

Source: RSE 2000, pp. 157–8 (AW’s rankings).

widest range for two and the second/third widest for the third. It would be absurdto expect an exact correlation, given the very different geographical and other features of the regions considered.

Crime

Crime was not included as an indicator when defining rich and poor dis-tricts, because it seemed ambiguous. On the one hand, poorer areas (e.g. in the


Table 2.4 Annual retail trade per capita, rubles, 2000,ranges in four regions

Range Top Bottom

Komi (1) 19,904 25,371 5,467Primore (3) 18,474 19,679 1,205Khabarovsk (2) 16,723 18,971 2,248Kirov (4) 8,597 13,029 4,432

Source: Goskomstat regional handbooks.

NoteNumbers in brackets refer to region’s rank in Table 2.3.

Table 2.5 Wages (in rubles), 2000, ranges in six regions

Range Highest Lowest

Komi (1) 5,916 7,312 1,396Khabarovsk (2) 5,272 6,889 1,617Arkhangelsk (5) 3,853 5,066 1,213Primore (4) 2,688 3,604 916Voronezh (3) 2,284 2,919 635Kirov (6) 1,539 2,209 670



Table 2.6 Cars per 1,000 population, 2000, ranges infour regions

Range Highest Lowest

Voronezh (3) 169 243 74Komi (1) 116 150 34Khabarovsk (2) 116 163 47Kirov (4) 79 113 34



United Kingdom) often suffer particularly from crime. On the other, Russia’s current crime problem is often linked to the emergence of a market economy andthe opportunities it provides: business and crime are linked. There is not muchbusiness in the small towns. Crime, however, is obviously worth considering,albeit separately. It has an impact on livelihoods, identities and even survival.

Figure 2.4 suggests that in four of the five regions41 for which figures wereavailable, the depressed districts did suffer less crime. Often they had rates ofunder 200 per 10,000. Conversely, capital cities had particularly high rates, reach-ing 300 and more in the Far East.42

When recorded crime levels were plotted on a map, to test whether remotenessfrom the regional capital was indeed a factor promoting lower crime rates, theyproduced two patterns: in the Far East, no obvious geographical distribution; butelsewhere, a pattern of crime being worse nearer, if not always in, the regional


0 100 200 300

Khab. R.

Khab. City

Khab. Depr

Komi

Syktyvkar

Kom. Depr.

Primore

Vladivostok

Prim. Dep.

Sverdlovsk

Y’burg

Sv. Depr.

Vor. R.

Vor. City

Vor. Depr.

Figure 2.4 Recorded crimes per 10,000 population, regional averages, capitals anddepressed areas, 2000.


NoteSverdlovsk figures are for 1989.


Syktyvkar

KEY

High-crime cityHigh-crime small townMedium-crime cityLow-crime small town

Map 2.3 Most and least crime-ridden locations in Komi Republic, 2000.

Source: Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie gorodov i raionov Respubliki Komi.

NotesCities/centres of districts with highest (1–5) and lowest (16–20) crime rates. Highest and lowestrate (per 10,000 population): 1 � 296, 20 � 82.

capital. Recorded crime rates were lower in distant places, even if these distantplaces were cities. Maps 2.3 and 2.4 illustrate the situation in Komi andSverdlovsk. The pattern is more distinct in Komi, but even in Sverdlovsk none ofthe least criminal areas are in the very urban, central southern part of the regionaround Yekaterinburg.

Sub-regional demographic variation

Population trends in districts with high rural populations, centred on small townsor villages, are different from those in the cities. Small towns (at least in mostlyethnic Russian areas, like the sample regions) tend to have more pensioners andhigher deathrates, but also – less predictably – higher birthrates and thus morechildren, than do many cities.

Almost everywhere in the sample regions, cities had marriage and divorce ratesabove the regional averages. The places with the lowest marriage and divorcerates are often the smallest, most remote, rural, and economically depressedareas. Variation is extreme. Divorce rates are below 1.5 per 1,000 population in anumber of districts centred on small towns, but often above five, or even six, intowns and cities. Some cities also have very high numbers of weddings. The low

divorce rates in the most depressed areas suggest the intriguing possibility thatmarriages may be more stable there – a theme which will be explored in Chapter 5.However, the overall trend towards more marriages and divorces in the cities is,of course, partly related to age structures. The regional capital, as a large city, hada smaller proportion of pensioners than the rest of the region,43 although the veryyoungest places are other big cities or autonomous areas/districts with mining oroil drilling. The range within regions is, yet again, very striking. If one considerselderly dependency ratios, the number of people of pension age to 100 working-age adults, the extremes are most marked within Kirov Region: 15.9 and 66.5.Once again, the range within a single region is greater than that among Russia’sregions.

Average birthrates and deathrates in Russia in 2000, per 1,000, were birthrates(urban) 8.4 and (rural) 9.9, and deathrates (urban) 14.7 and (rural) 17.0.44 Hence thedifference between urban and rural rates would appear to be only about 2–3 per1,000. However, the rural averages derive from places with quite opposite popula-tion trends: European Russian areas with large elderly populations and southern


KEY

High-crime city/city district, medium or small town (1–10)

Low-crime medium or small town/district (42–51)

Medium-crime city, capital city

Achit Y’g (14)

Map 2.4 Most and least crime-ridden locations in Sverdlovsk Region, 1999.

Source: Calculated from Sverdlovskaya oblast v 1995–1999 godakh.

NoteHighest and lowest rates (per 10,000 population): 1 � 398, 51 � 129.

republics with large child populations. Looking at national figures, one mightassume that the countryside in central European Russia is not much different fromthe city, whereas in fact the difference can be great, especially with regard todeathrates. For example, among cities and districts in Voronezh Region the lowestand highest birthrates in 2000 were 6.7 and 10.1 per 1,000, while the lowest andhighest deathrates were 9.1 and 25.4. Voronezh was fairly typical. In the sampleseven regions, the average range for deathrates across districts and cities in theregion was 10.0, with rural areas typically towards the top of the scale. The capitalcities had a deathrate which was towards the lower end of the regional scale and infive of the seven regions the capital city also had the lowest birthrate.45 Lowbirthrates, combined with a relatively large working-age population, suggest thaturban young people, though perhaps just poorer young people, are abstaining fromhaving children – more so than in the depressed rural districts where, at least amongsome sections of the population, it is traditional to have larger families.

Infant mortality statistics in most regions were, predictably, often better in thecities, with their greater prosperity, and often worst in rural districts.46 It is diffi-cult to give useful figures to illustrate the range, because some of the smallest dis-tricts had very few births, making for wildly fluctuating figures.47 All regionscontained areas with figures much worse than the Russian and regional averages –often above 20 per 1,000 live births, and sometimes even worse than the averagesfor the worst regions, Ingushetia and Tyva. In Sverdlovsk, there were a numberof cities with particularly high rates, perhaps because they are particularlypolluted.48 Overall, however, even in Sverdlovsk the cities tended to have lowerinfant mortality than did smaller towns.

Migration from towns to villages and back again

In 1989, 26.6 per cent of Russia’s population was rural; by the 2002 census thefigure had risen slightly – but still surprisingly – to 26.7 per cent. Russia’s totalrural population actually rose from 1992 to 1995, subsequently falling, by 2002,to 99.1 per cent of its 1989 level.49 The sudden increase in rural dwellers – by overa million people – was an odd development, in view of the until then continuousdecline in the rural population since the 1920s. The rural population grew partlybecause of an exodus of city dwellers during a period when the countrysideseemed – deceptively, perhaps – to be a safe haven from the havoc in Russiancities. Some in-migrants, too, were from the Near Abroad. In the early 1990s theycame mainly to rural areas. However, Russian speakers from the Near Abroadwere mostly city dwellers who preferred to settle in towns whenever possible, andthey tended to do so after 1994 – notwithstanding official policy of using them torepopulate depressed rural areas.50

Overall, the urban population declined by 1.4 per cent 1989–2002. Pre-censusestimates were 2.7 per cent: the census showed considerably more Russians liv-ing in cities than had been assumed.51 The average figures for population declinemask the very different fates of different sizes of town; many towns actuallyincreased in population over this period, as Figure 2.5 suggests.52


Simyagin claims that, between 1991 and 1997, downgrading of small towns tovillage status was responsible for three-quarters of urban population loss.53 Thisdoes much to explain the fact that the rural population grew, while the populationof small towns and poselki dipped so dramatically.

Figure 2.5 sugggests that as soon as towns reach the 10,000 barrier, the situa-tion improves considerably: all bands of towns larger than 10,000 lost under10 per cent of their population. The 50–100,000 band of towns did particularlywell; they declined by just 0.1 per cent, despite the dramatic fall in Russia’s over-all population. Here one sees the effect of migration, including from Northernand Eastern regions of Russia, and from the Near Abroad. Often these towns weremore accessible than the cities, which were more likely to impose residencerestrictions, and where the cost of living was highest. Migrants could have a hugeimpact on individual towns. For example, Borisoglebsk (pop. 65,000), inVoronezh Region, received thousands of migrants from Dushanbe inTadzhikistan.54

The deeper one digs, the more variation is uncovered. For example, Figure 2.5showed that average population loss for each band of cities of over 100,000,according to pre-census figures, was between 5 and 10 per cent. However, judg-ing by census results for cities over 100,000,55 four of the thirteen cities of over


22.3

16.9

6.57.5

0.1

5.3

9.37.8

0

5

10

15

20

25

<55–9

.9

10–1

9.9

20–49

.9

50–9

9.9

100–49

9.9

500–9

99.9

1 m

illion

+

Towns, banded by population in 1,000s

Pop

ulat

ion

loss

(%

)

Figure 2.5 Russian towns, banded by size of population (in 1,000s): 2000 populationas percentage of 1989.

Source: Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 74–5.

NoteTotal Russian urban population loss � 1.9 per cent.

a million grew in population in 1989–2002, and 80 cities of 100,000–999,999 alsogrew. 56 Most of these burgeoning cities were in regions which were also growingas the result of a favourable combination of migration and/or high birthrates (seeChapter 1). The remarkable point is, however, that 27 cities in central EuropeanRussia (but none in the Urals) maintained or increased their populations over theyears 1989–2002, despite the fact that their region, on average, was losing popu-lation.57 This suggests, for these regions, an intense contrast between the decliningsmallest settlements and a flourishing city or number of cities.

It seems that a number of quite average-sized regional capitals in not particu-larly prosperous or even poor regions grew in population: for example, Kostroma,Ryazan, Kirov and Ioshkar-Ola. Moreover, other regional capitals lost less than 1per cent of their population, both in fairly prosperous regions (e.g. Yekaterinburg)and in poor ones (e.g. Izhevsk, Penza or Pskov). While this may be partly becausesuch cities attract the most migrants from outside the region, their growth maywell also be thanks to people moving into such capital cities from smaller towns


LENINGRAD

Novgorod

PskovTver

Vologda 2

Yaro-slavl

Smolensk Moscow 7

Kaluga2

1

11

3

2

2

3

41

BryanskOrel

Kursk

Tula Ryazan

Lip-etsk

BELG’D Voronezh

Tam- bov

VOLGOGRAD

Saratov 2

2

Penza

Ulyanov-sk

Samara

Mordovia

Nov-gorod

ORENBURG

BASHKORTO-STAN

4

TATARSTAN

M. El 1

Udmurtia

Chu.2

Nizhnii

Kostroma 1

Ivanovo

Vladimir

Kirov 1

PermSverdlovsk

Kurgan

Chelya-binsk

KEY

Smolensk Region with net out-migrationTATARSTAN Region with population growth, 1989–2002

Kaliningrad Region with >50% moves from local area having destination in same region

Region with net in-migration of 5,000–9,999 including

Region with net in-migration of >10,000 including Moscow CitySt Petersburg

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.

NoteNumbers refer to the number of cities (of over 100,000) which either grew in population between thecensus years or remained stable; these include Kaliningrad City.

and villages in the same region. Within-region migration is the most commontype of migration in Russia.

Column 1 of Figure 2.6 shows, for example, that 47.8 per cent of all migrationinto 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 inthe same region. Only 13.3 per cent of in-migration was from foreign countries.

Almost all Russian regions conformed to the ‘average’ pattern, with mostmigration occurring within the region itself. As illustrated on Map 2.5, the excep-tional regions are Leningrad, Moscow Region and a ring of regions aroundMoscow.58 Perhaps this is because, rather than mill about inside a depressedregion like Ivanovo or Tver or Leningrad, it is tempting to move to find employ-ment in neighbouring Moscow or Petersburg; inhabitants of Moscow andLeningrad regions are presumably also drawn to the same cities. (Such migrationcertainly happened in Zubtsov, where Moscow, in the neighbouring region,seemed to be more of a magnet than the regional capital, Tver.) By contrast, par-ticularly high levels of within-region migration are found in regions with manylarge cities, where there are presumably more points of attraction.

To conclude: Chapters 1 and 2 have contained quite a lot of indirect evidencethat people are moving around Russia in search of better opportunities. However,scholarly opinion seems to be divided about how much/how significant sucheconomic 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 thenecessary capital.60 On the other hand, as Simon Clarke points out, ‘there is arelatively high level of inter-regional mobility, with around three million people a


47.8

38.9

13.3 8.1

51.1

40.8

0

20

40

60

From/to sameregion

Otherregion

Foreigncountry

All

mig

ratio

n (%

)

In-migration Out-migration

Figure 2.6 Migration within Russia in 1999: place of origin and destination ofmigrants from and out of the average region.

Source: Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 68.

year moving within Russia’ – the main motivations being employment andeducation. Clarke concludes that

there is no evidence that there are significantly more barriers to regionalmobility than are usual in any comparable capitalist country . . . In fact,because of the very high level of forced and economic migration in the SovietUnion and the continued strength of kinship ties it is very likely that Russianshave better connections in distant places, which give them more opportunityfor geographical mobility than most workers in established marketeconomies.61

Commander and Yemtsov suggest that young males are the most likely groupto move.62 Smirnov, after ranking all regions according to a number ofGoskomstat 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 in-migration were Moscow (City and Region); Leningrad and St Petersburg;Belgorod; and a number of regions along the lower Volga and in the Urals. (SeeMap 2.5.) Most of these do seem to be prospering regions, by central EuropeanRussian standards.

Conclusions

It seems that, if the level of economic development in Achit, Zubtsov andBednodemyanovsk appeared very different to that in their regional capitals, thiswas not unusual for small towns in Russia. Small towns naturally do also differfrom 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. Allthree of the fieldwork towns were fairly remote, compared to many settlements inthe same region, so, once again, it would not be surprising to find that they weremore depressed than other towns and districts, from which it was more feasible totravel regularly into cities and where the level of dacha owning by city dwellerswas higher. Given what has been stated about migration patterns, it would also notbe surprising to find that many small-town residents – particularly younger ones –attempted to relocate themselves in the region’s cities. Nonetheless, crime ratesalso seem to be lower in more peripheral regions, so there are advantages toremoteness.

Small, remote towns in richer regions may suffer from a particular disparityvis-à-vis their regional capital. Average and even rich regions in European Russiaand the richer parts of the Far East sometimes contain a range of living standardsfully corresponding to the range among Russian regions. Some cities in theseregions occasionally even exceed Moscow standards, at the top of the scale, andthere are rural districts whose predicament mirrors that of regions such as Tyvaand Dagestan at the bottom. When retail trade, car ownership and wages werecompared across four/six regions, the poorest region in the sample had thenarrowest range; the richer regions tended to have wide ranges, suggesting (very


provisionally, since this is a small sample and a blunt instrument) that within-regiondisparities 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 Sverdlovskdistricts in the same position. By contrast, Tver, Penza, Kirov and Voronezh con-tain a higher proportion of small towns based on depressed rural districts.

The chapter also drew attention to sub-regional population trends, showing thathere too there is wide variation. In districts based on smaller towns, marriagerates are often lower than in the cities, partly because of age structures: there aremore pensioners. However, birthrates are higher in rural districts and often verylow in cities, especially capital cities, despite the fact that these typically havesomewhat younger populations. This suggests that factors such as the local cul-ture, and space constraints, continue to play an important role in determiningbirthrates. The lower incidence of divorce in small towns and rural areas isintriguing, in view of the fact that these are also the most economically depressedareas, where the population might be expected to be most stressed. Chapter 5explores the connection between economic depression and family stability in thethree small towns.


Introduction

Chapter 3 describes Sverdlovsk, Tver and Penza Regions and then focuses on thethree small towns. It looks at how respondents characterized their towns and com-pares the towns’ historical and economic development. It also discusses socialproblems such as crime and drugs. The conclusions look ahead to the rest of thebook, 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 thethree regions, and Penza is the poorest and most rural. More statistics about theregions 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 andshape as England. The capital, Yekaterinburg, is Russia’s fifth largest city, with aninternational 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 ofindustrial plants and mineral resources, contributed to Sverdlovsk’s ranking asfifth among Russian regions in terms of overall GRP in 1999. Sverdlovsk’s par-ticular contribution to the Russian economy is in the production of non-ferrousmetals, cement and timber products.2 Place names such as Emerald, Platinum,Asbestos and Cement testify to its heavy industrial profile. It is also a particularlypolluted region. It spans the Ural ‘Mountains’, which in most places are reallywooded hills. Soils in the south are fertile and the region produces the second tothird highest potato harvest of all Russian regions.3

Ethnically, Sverdlovsk is mainly Russian, but there are Tatar villages in thesouth. Sverdlovsk’s population tends to remain within the region; most migrationis within regional boundaries.

Sverdlovsk is a ‘donor region’ to the federal centre, and its governor for mostof the postcommunist period, Eduard Rossel, has done much to raise its economicprofile and create the impression that this is a thriving region. For example, heorganized at least three national congresses of manufacturers and one interna-tional arms fair.4 Nonetheless, the region suffers from high unemployment,including youth unemployment. Moreover, its high ranking in terms of total GRP

3 The fieldwork towns and theirregions

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.

NoteRussian average � 27.1 per cent.

35.7

12.6

26.6

Penza Sverdlovsk Tver

0

20

40

Figure 3.2 ‘GRP’ per capita, rubles, 2000, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions.

Source: RSE 2002, pp. 292–3.

NoteRussian average � 43,306.

17,961

24,338

36,056

Penza Sverdlovsk Tver0

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

Figure 3.3 Money incomes as percentage of subsistence minimum, 1999, Penza,Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions.


NoteRussian average � 177.

93

148

100

Penza Sverdlovsk Tver80

105

130

155

is not reflected in high living standards among the local population. The pur-chasing 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 forgreater economic autarky – including the printing of ‘Urals francs’ to compensatefor the shortage of rubles and wage arrears in the region.5 Recorded crime isconsiderably higher than the Russian average (see Table 3.2).

Tver6 is about half the size of Sverdlovsk, making it one of the largest regionsin European Russia. Although it is Moscow Region’s immediate neighbour, Tveris quite different in many ways. It is sparsely populated, for example, like otherinfertile regions south of Petersburg. Although three-quarters of the population islabelled ‘urban’, in 2000, 44.4 per cent of the population lived in villages or small

78 The fieldwork towns and their regions

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

Penza Sverdlovsk Tver Russia

Territory, sq. km. 43,200 194,800 84,100 17,075,400Population density 35.4 23.6 19.0 8.5(people per sq. km)

Population, 1,000s 1,530.6 4,602.6 1,594.9 145,559.2Population of capital, 1,000s 532.2 1266.3 454.9% ethnic Russians 86.2 88.7 93.5% Tatars 5.4 3.9 —% Mordvin 5.7 — —% urban pop. 64.6 87.5 73.7 73.0% pension-age pop. 23.3 20.7 25.3 20.7Pensioners per 1,000 working-age 401 344 444 350Migration rate, per 10,000 pop. 8 16 11 15Rate of natural pop. 3.1 4.7 �2.3 4.9increase, per 1,000, 1980

Rate of natural pop. �9.3 �8.1 �13.5 �6.7increase, per 1,000, 2000

Deaths per 1000 pop. 16.6 16.4 20.8 15.4Deaths per 100,000 pop. from:

cancer 212.1 208.2 236.0 205.0cardiovascular disease 1018.5 851.3 1281.5 815.7accidents/violence 205.5 249.5 278.2 206.1

Children as % total pop. 18.5 19.2 17.7 20.0Children per 1,000 working-age pop. 318 320 311 336

Births per 1,000 pop. 7.3 8.3 7.3 8.7Weddings :divorces per 1,000 pop. 6.1 :4.1 5.7 :4.3 5.9 :4.0 6.2 :4.3Life expectancy, years 66.29 63.94 62.81 65.27Infant mortality per 1,000 live births 12.1 15.0 17.0 15.3

Sources: RSE 2000 and 2001; Regiony Rossii 2000 and 2001; SPUZhNR 2000.

NoteData for ethnic composition is for 1989, data on causes of death is for 1999.

towns of under 20,000 people. Tver was the only real city, with a population of450,000. Tver Region is not a significant political player. In the mid-1990s Tvercould be regarded in many ways as an ‘average’ region, but since then someindicators have slipped alarmingly.

The region has one of the most elderly populations in Russia. Its populationwas declining even in 1970 and since then the rate of decline has accelerated. By2000 natural population loss was twice the Russian average. Life expectancy isjust below average. The population is overwhelmingly Russian. Migration is mostcommonly to and from other Russian regions (probably Moscow), not withinTver. Tver – to a greater extent than Sverdlovsk or Penza – has also received thou-sands 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 productionwas 14 per cent of the 1990 figure. There was a parallel decline in cloth produc-tion, so that by the end of the decade both agriculture and industry were in direstraits. Only 61 per cent of arable land in use in 1990 was cultivated a decade

The fieldwork towns and their regions 79

Table 3.2 Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions: the economy and living standards in 1999and (italicized) 2000

Penza Sverdlovsk Tver Russia

Total GRP, % sum of Russian GRPs 1.1 3.4 1.2 100GRP per capita, rubles 12,816.7 26,684.9 17,307.6 28,546.9% working-age population employed 8.68 5.30 6.18 4.52in small businesses

Ind. production, % Russian total 0.5 4.2 0.7 100Agric. production, 1.2 2.5 1.2 100% Russian total

Exports, % of Russian total 0.1 2.1 0.3 100Purchasing power of average wage 100 158 121 156Cars per 1,000 population 101.2 97.2 113.6 132.4Price of basket of basic goods, rubles 511.5 511.5 530.8Average subsistence minimum 821 897 824 908Money incomes as % sub. min. 93 148 100 177% pop. with incomes below sub. min. 68.7 35.6 67.4 29.9Of these, % in extreme poverty 18.6 14.3 20.5 18.0Estimated unemployment rate, % 11.2 10.0 9.4 10.5Youth unemployment, % 2.3 11.9 13.9 7.9Diet: kg bread per annum 124 116 119 111Diet: kg potatoes per annum 118 101 118 94Diet: kg meat per annum 40 40 35 47Children in kindergartens, 1990 64.5 79.6 71.0 66.4Children in kindergartens, 1999 44.1 63.0 60.1 54.9Recorded crime, per 100,000 pop. 1,040 2,538 1,891 2,028

Sources: RSE 2000 and 2001; Regiony Rossii 2000 and 2001; SPUZhNR 2000.

NoteFigures for children in kindergartens include nurseries, and are percentages of children of the relevantage group.

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 justabove the Russian average. It seems that Tver was hit especially hard in the after-math 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, makingit worse off than Dagestan.

The average money income in Tver in 1999 was identical to the subsistenceminimum. Infant mortality was above average, untypical for the Central macro-region. Unemployment was low, but youth unemployment was very high.

Penza, like Tver, had about 20 per cent of the population in poverty in 1994 andnearly 70 per cent just five years later. In 1999 Penza had the most widespreadpoverty of any ethnic Russian region. Penza can be identified as the southernmostof a band of depressed regions stretching north across the Volga and comprisingMordovia, Chuvashia, Marii El and Kirov. Penza’s main industrial contribution tothe Russian economy is shoe production. Its arms industry declined badly inthe 1990s. Money incomes in Penza are extremely low, probably because of thesizeable agricultural sector. In 1999 incomes averaged just 93 per cent of thesubsistence minimum.

Penza has, however, some natural advantages: fertile soil and a relatively south-ern latitude. Although it belongs to the Volga Okrug, it is not actually on the VolgaRiver, and it shares more features with some of the Black Earth regions than withthe wealthy industrial /oil regions of the Volga. These similarities include not onlya primarily ethnic Russian and agricultural profile, but also a tradition of votingcommunist: Penza definitely used to be part of the ‘Red Belt’.


Figure 3.4 Percentage of population with personal incomes below the subsistenceminimum, 1999, Russia and Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver Regions.


1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Penza TverSverdlovsk Russia

10152025303540455055606570

Penza is quite a small region in territory – about half the size of Tver, but twiceas densely populated. In this respect it is fairly average for this part of Russia. Theregional capital, Penza, is about the same size as Tver and, like Tver, is by far thelargest city in the region. About 50 per cent of the Penza Region population livesin villages or small towns of under 20,000; most districts are centred on tinytowns, poselki or villages. According to the 1989 census, 86.2 per cent of the pop-ulation 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 expectancyhigher than the Russian average. The population, while fairly elderly, is youngerthan Tver’s, and the death rate and population loss are not so extreme. Recordedcrime is among the lowest in Russia. Migration tends to be within the region. Penzahas 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 theirtowns.8 Respondents in Zubtsov, the location of the pilot survey, were asked onlyif they were proud of Zubtsov; most said they were. They characterized Zubtsovas being attractive, having friendly people, being of historic significance, unpol-luted, quiet and safe. As Figures 3.5–3.7 illustrate, these were also qualities asso-ciated with Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. Interviewees here were posed the openquestion of how their home town differed from other places. In response, theywere most fulsome on the topic of how friendly people were: they greeted eachother 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 hadbeen 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.)


10 108

6

12

86

10

Friend

ly

Unpoll

uted

Beaut

iful n

atur

eSaf

eQuie

t

Poor

Untidy

Unfrie

ndly

0

5

10

15

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).

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


24

1210

86 6

4

Quiet

Friend

lySaf

e

Pretty

Theat

rical

tradit

ion

On m

ain ro

ad

Histor

ic

25

0

5

10

15

20

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

14 14 14

10 10

6

4 4 4

Untidy

No ind

ustry

Poor l

eisur

e

Poor/h

igh u

nem

p’t

Far fr

om P

enza

No fo

rest

Bad a

dmin.

No ra

ilway

Uninfo

rmed

0

5

10

15

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

women who complained of local people being unpleasant (zlye) were all fairlyrecent arrivals. Even they were not completely negative. For example, one ofthese women also described Bednodemyanovsk as ‘a little island [of security] ina hard world’.

Interviewees who were generally positive about the small towns were mostlikely, if they complained, to comment on the industrial slump, since they viewedindustrial production as the main motor and indicator of prosperity. However, moreunexpectedly, they almost as often complained about the town’s untidiness: pave-ments blocked with piles of timber and the odd cowpat, roads with potholes, orbroken streetlamps. ‘There used to be more rubbish bins, benches and flowerbeds,’said one woman in Bednodemyanovsk. Another complained of the ruined condi-tion of the children’s playground. The decline was a particular comedown forBednodemyanovsk, which had won a ‘best-kept’ competition in the 1980s.

The Achit responses had a noticeably ‘Urals’ element, with mentions of theattractive landscape, and a contrast being made between Achit’s cleanliness andsafety and the crime and pollution which were seen to characterize Sverdlovskcities 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. InZubtsov District, the August 1998 crisis was said by the police to have had animmediate impact, with an ‘epidemic of stealing other people’s property, drunken-ness at home and brutal woundings’. Nonetheless, recorded crime rates in the dis-trict, as in the other small towns, remained below regional and national levels. TheZubtsov rate was 187.2 per 10,000 population for 1998. In Achit, the figure wassimilar, 196.7 for 1999, and in the first eight months of 2000 it declined by 4.5per cent.9 In Bednodemyanovsk the rate in 1999 was 76.8, about three-quarters ofthe regional average. It was still a tiny 85.4 in 2000.10 Penza, as noted earlier, wasa particularly low-crime region.

Zubtsov parents and teachers were worried about drugs, which were said to bereadily available at local schools. Zubtsov’s relative proximity to Moscow is nodoubt a factor here. In Achit several women also expressed their fears aboutdrugs, one of them linking her anxiety to the presence of the main road toYekaterinburg, a city with a serious drugs problem. The newspaper also attributedthe drugs problem to the main road, said, in addition, to be responsible for a massinflux of illegal vodka. The police knew of five locations where drugs could bebought in the town.11 One HIV-positive person had already been registered inAchit District and 6 per cent of local children were said to have experimentedwith drugs.12 However, it was striking that in Bednodemyanovsk – more remotefrom a city, or even a medium-sized town – only two parents, both doctors, saidthey worried about drugs. The local police have found only a few instances ofdrug possession and despite articles in the local newspaper by doctors aboutthe dangers of drugs, parents do not seem particularly concerned yet. Teenagedrinking is a more immediate problem.

Newspaper articles in Bednodemyanovsk and Achit convey some idea of otherareas of public concern in the towns. Reporting a visit by Penza Governor


Bochkarev to Bednodemyanovsk in August 2000, the local newspaper noted thathe received complaints about ‘late payment of child benefit, lack of jobs, risingprices for municipal services, rising food prices, lethargy of the local policeregarding thefts from vegetable gardens, home brewing, etc.’13 In Achit, the edi-tor of the local paper, interviewing the head of administration in 1999, identifiedthe most widespread concerns as being the illegal cutting of trees and their exportout of the district; the threatened closure of local kindergartens; the non-transmission 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 experi-ence. Zubtsov itself was occupied by the Nazis from October 1941 to August1942 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 thehistoric town centre, is named Victory Street; a memorial tank stands beside theMoscow-Riga road; and there is an impressive war memorial. Achit, by contrast,commemorates most noticeably the Civil War: not such an unequivocally gloriouspart 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 determinedby their links with prisoners. No doubt the same could be said of many Russiantowns. Achit originated as a fortress on the Siberian road, along which genera-tions of exiles tramped to Siberia.15 Under Stalin, Bednodemyanovsk housedmany actor convicts, who had built the Moscow–Penza highway, but also broughtthe town its theatrical tradition. This continued into the late Soviet period, andcontemporary drama enthusiasts are trying to revive it. Zubtsov, located on theborder of Moscow Region, has been a traditional settling place for ex-prisonersrefused permission to settle closer to Moscow. Convict labour was also used tobuild the nearby Vazuza Reservoir in the 1970s. Some Zubtsov professionals havea fearful and distant attitude to the local population, especially the rural pop-ulation, which is they see as consisting largely of former convicts, violent andheavy-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 centof citizens were ethnic Russians, 9.2 per cent were Mordvin, and Tatars,Ukrainians, Chuvash and ‘others’ each constituted less than 1 per cent. Zubtsovhad no sizeable ethnic minorities. Its Jews were said to have largely emigrated by1999, but there were some Ukrainians, Armenians and Chechens. (The last werenot refugees.)16

All three towns are located on major trunkroads, which gave some respondentsthe sense of being ‘on the way to somewhere’, but led others to feel ‘a long wayfrom 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 thesecities, hence further from any city than many neighbouring small towns. Table 3.3shows some bus fares, with the regional subsistence minimum at about the same


period.17 Local wages were often well below the subsistence minimum, so it wasexpensive to travel to the city.

Cheap train services which used to run from Achit District to Yekaterinburghave been discontinued. Commuting daily to a big city, therefore, is not very fea-sible. More accessible are the middle-sized towns of Krasnoufimsk (pop. 46,000)and Rzhev (pop. 69,000). Bednodemyanovsk is not within easy commutingdistance of any middle-sized town.

In January 2000 there were 83.0 cars per 1,000 population in Bednodem-yanovsk District, below the regional average, though no doubt the percentage washigher in the town.18 In 1999 there were 133.0 in Zubtsov town, abovethe regional average.19 Observation suggested that Zubtsov had the busiest roadsof the three towns, while still being very quiet.

There is no public transport within the towns, so that some interviewees werewalking half an hour or more to work. (The populations are small, but settlementis not particularly dense, since so many houses are individual small farmsteads.)Because of shortage of buses, travel around the district can also be a majorproblem everywhere.

With the growth in car ownership and prosperity in the big cities, the 1990s sawthe spread of dacha holdings for dozens, sometimes hundreds of kilometresaround cities like Moscow or Yekaterinburg. Dachas in this sense are often coun-try cottages for holidays rather than smallholdings used for subsistence farming.Some Yekaterinburg residents own dachas in Achit District and three familiesfrom 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 andBednodemyanovsk, the populations of the three towns rose in the early 1990s and,although they subsequently declined, they were not much different at the end ofthe 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 otherrelatively sizeable settlement. Dubrovki (Bednodemyanovsk) is a large village.Pogoreloe Gorodishche (Zubtsov) is also a village, but has a military base and isa cultural centre in its own right, partly on the strength of its annual Pushkinfestivals. Pogoreloe was once visited by the poet Alexander Pushkin, and has thefurther distinction of being burned down by one of Pushkin’s ancestors in 1617.


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

Zubtsov, spring B’k, Achit, Sept.1999 spring/summer 2000

2000

Return bus fare 80 90/130 190Monthly regional 824 933 1,015subsistence minimum

In Achit, the neighbouring settlement of Ufimka is only slightly smaller thanAchit and in some respects better developed: it has a factory, a glassworksemploying 800 people in 2000, and municipally-provided hot water.

Achit is the most agricultural of the three districts, despite its location inSverdlovsk. However, 27.8 per cent of supposedly arable land remained unsownin 2000,20 and many local livestock herds had been sold off. The area devoted tograin production in 1998 was 42 per cent of the 1977 figure.21 The local food-processing industry had completely collapsed: there was no bakery, dairy or meatprocessing plant in the district.

Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk had been more industrialized than Achit in theSoviet period and despite the closing of some factories – such as sewing work-shops – industry, including machine repairs and foodprocessing, was still some-what functioning, but usually at a loss. In 1998, two-thirds of industrialenterprises were said to be loss-making in Bednodemyanovsk,22 as were all butone, the machine repair factory, in Zubtsov.23 Around Bednodemyanovsk, localfarms in theory produced grain, sugar beet and fruit,24 but many had ceased to do


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

5.5 5.2

8.3 8.27.6 7.9

1989 20000

10

Achit Bedn. Zubtsov

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

de jure de facto de jurepopulation population district population

Achit 5,200 5,400 21,200Bednodemyanovsk 8,200 8,200 15,100Zubtsov 7,900 7,900 21,300

Source: Chislennost’ naseleniya Rossiiskoi Federatsii 2000.

so. A fruit wine producing state farm did make a profit. Zubtsov District was fullof abandoned land.

It is impossible to tell from registered unemployment figures how much realunemployment exists, but respondents suggested that it was considerable, espe-cially among young people. Zubtsov District had lost ‘5,600 workplaces over thelast few years’ – suggesting that about 40 per cent of the working population hadbeen made unemployed during this time.25 Zubtsov has also unemployed formersoldiers 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 partic-ularly 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 tractoroperators.27 The records of the Employment Service in Achit showed that for theperiod January–June 2000, 17 people had been made redundant, 15 in the statesector, with the largest single group (5) being in finance. 230 manual workers and50 white-collar workers were registered unemployed. Among the white-collarworkers, 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 qualifica-tions 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 just273 rubles a month per head of population. This implies fewer transactions eventhan in the poorest district in poor Kirov Region (see Chapter 2).29 The telephonebook published in 1995 lists just nine shops in Achit town.30 By 2000, AchitDistrict, 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 sellingshoddy Chinese clothing and shampoo. Trade is somewhat livelier in Zubtsov andBednodemyanovsk, which have large markets on the outskirts of town. ZubtsovDistrict 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 350shuttle 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 ofroads and transport: each town would have a bakery, dairy, etc. Zubtsov andBednodemyanovsk maintained this local food distribution and production serv-ice,34 even if not always very efficiently, and in 1999–2000 were trying to expandand develop it.35 Local people could sell their surplus produce, whereas in Achitthey had no official outlets to do so. They could also buy milk and bread fairlycheaply, whereas in Achit many people made their own bread and cheese ratherthan rely on relatively expensive products ‘imported’ from neighbouring towns.


Considering that the district economies function so poorly, it is not surprisingthat 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 annualdeficit of 34 per cent of expenditure, incurred just in 1999. However, it wascarrying a 30 per cent deficit from 1998, caused by shortfalls in all three con-stituent parts of its income. This deficit was expressed in the form of 3.3 millionrubles wage arrears and 3.6 million rubles child benefit arrears.36 (Bednode-myanovsk had a roughly equivalent child benefit debt at the same time.)37 Just aslocal people suffered from non-payment of wages and benefits, so ZubtsovDistrict administration was forced to subsist for months on end with no supportfrom Tver. In January 1999, for example, the district had received no subsidiesfrom Tver for six months and had been entirely ‘living off its own money’ duringthat time.38

Local leaders seemed to assume that the shortage of cash would continue. Forexample, Penza Governor Bochakarev, on a visit to Bednodemyanovsk, couldonly counsel local people to put still more effort into tending their householdplots.39 This was regional policy, and in 2000 the district had a detailed plan foroutput of different foodstuffs from household plots and had created a special localgovernment department to coordinate their activities and provide support.40 Thehead of Zubtsov Finance Department told schools that they must become at leastpartly self-sufficient, and rebuked them for not growing enough vegetables.41 Thecash shortage led to many absurd and wasteful contortions of the local economy.For example, in Bednodemyanovsk the ambulance service, police and districtadministration constantly ran up debts for their petrol, obtained at local petrol sta-tions – eventually forcing at least one of these stations out of business.42 InNovember 1999 the Bednodemyanovsk administration agreed to cancel debtsowed 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 tonneof beetroot, presumably grown by the children.43 The editor of the district newspa-per in Achit sat in an office swimming with other Sverdlovsk Region newspapers.The post office gave them to her because, despite having collected newspapersubscriptions from the local population, it had then spent this money on some-thing else, was in debt and unable to pay the editor in money. The deputy head of


Table 3.5 Zubtsov District income, 1999

Source Rubles

District taxes 13,791,000Regional subsidy 4,302,000Federal subsidy 2,080,000

Total 20,173,000

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

Achit District, Yurii Vedernikov, incurred considerable suspicion among the localpopulation because he was suspected of profiting from illegal timber felling – amajor local issue. Vedernikov excused his involvement on the grounds that it wasthe 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 Zubtsovreferred 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, anda number of institutions in both had already been transferred to more economi-cally viable neighbouring districts centred on larger towns. District liquidationwould imply massive unemployment, since district institutions like hospitals, aswell as the district administrations, were expected to be closed or dismembered.47

It would be wrong, however, to suppose the towns to be completely povertystricken. Sticking out like proverbial sore thumbs are one or two pieces of osten-tatious modern architecture: a garish bank in Zubtsov and the tax inspectorate inAchit (situated, with sad symbolic resonance, next to the decrepit 1960s house ofculture). These intrusions from another world remind one of the regional capitaland its modern economy. Zubtsov, in particular, has somewhat compensated forindustrial 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 notuncommon in this part of Russia. In the 1990s ‘dacha owners from Moscowbegan to come as far as Zubtsov District, bought up all the vacant houses andmoreover, began intensively to build new dachas. This export of Moscow moneyand creation of new jobs somewhat helps to soften the crisis in the district, butdoes not solve it completely.’48 It was impossible for the district administration totax adequately this sector of the economy, but at least it provided workplaces inconstruction and wood-processing companies, and custom for local shops. TheZubtsov newspaper editor claimed that the population ‘doubled’ in the summer.Petrol stations were another area of growth in the late 1990s. Eventually, morepetrol stations were built around both Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov than thetraffic 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. Forexample, it housed more demobilized soldiers than any district or city of TverRegion,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 fromBryansk Region.)50 Zubtsov also had a whole block built by the Magadan GoldCompany for its retired employees and their families. These assets meant that,earlier in the 1990s, Zubtsov had been able to attract well-qualified, often youngand middle-aged incomers. For example, in 1996, 246 people had moved into thetown, 113 of them from the ‘Near Abroad’, while only 72 had moved out. By1998 net growth from migration was down to seven, but many of the specialistswho had moved into the town earlier in the decade remained.51


One has to be wary of taking too literally people’s complaints that they livedbetter in the old days and that the 1990s have seen only decline. It may be thatrespondents and local journalists, in their more negative characterizations of locallife, were exaggerating to some extent. As food for thought, here is a characteri-zation of Zubtsov in 1999 by a migrant who arrived in 1990. ‘The town was deadin 1990, grey and depressed. There were lots of drunks and swearing on thestreets. 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 livingstandards do not live up to the regional leadership’s carefully cultivated image ofeconomic prosperity. Achit, as will be shown in the next chapter, does benefitfrom regional funding. It also has a relatively large private retail sector. However,as has already been mentioned, total retail trade is extremely low. The predomi-nance of the private sector does not reflect a healthy increase in the number ofnew businesses, but rather the near collapse of the state food retail network.Moreover, unemployment was high and industrial production in the district con-tinued to decline in 2000. Chapter 4 also illustrates that wages are very low inAchit. In terms of lack of subsidy from the regional centre, Zubtsov may well bethe poorest of the three districts. However, Zubtsov has a fairly strong informaleconomy, thanks to its location on the fringes of Moscow’s ‘exurbia’. BothZubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have at least some functioning factories and, asChapters 6–8 will illustrate, they have a more ‘intellectual’ profile and moreflourishing community life. Although impossible to quantify, the atmosphere wasmore confident in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk: respondents seemed to feelmore urban than people in Achit. This is not just because of larger populationsand ‘town’ status. Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have had more renewal of theirpopulations by urban migrants.

These more subjective impressions, gathered from the interviews, suggest thatZubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have more clear-cut and attractive self-images.They have histories which are a source of pride, for example, and they have land-marks. Achit has no landmarks.52 Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk possesschurches, unlike Achit, where most of the church has been converted into a chil-dren’s arts centre and it has no cupola. In Zubtsov, proximity to Moscow meansthat there is some sense of ‘connectedness’ to the capital. Bednodemyanovsk, bycontrast, 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, itsisolation in the middle of the steppe, both from big cities and even from smallones, does confer certain benefits: the almost complete absence of a drugs prob-lem, for example. As Table 3.2 shows, Penza in general enjoys very low crimestatistics 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 inBednodemyanovsk than in the other towns. It was indicative that teachers in


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


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

S. Kotkin1

Introduction

The previous chapter concluded with gloomy portraits of the economies of thesmall towns. The above quotation, from the editor of Zubtsov’s newspaper, servesto confirm that impression. He illustrated his point with a photograph of hungryteachers on strike. Kotkin knew about teachers, particularly since his wife wasone, but perhaps he was exaggerating for effect? This chapter describes in moredetail some aspects of respondents’ lives and livelihoods, as background to analysisof their livelihood strategies (Chapter 5) and changing identities (Chapters 6–8).It begins by discussing working conditions in state institutions, including theimpact on workplaces of new recruits, often replacements for staff who hadleft the schools and hospitals in pursuit of personal livelihood strategies. Thechapter also considers the interviewees’ worries about unemployment, both forthemselves and in the wider community, and what their actual experiences ofunemployment had been.

The second half of the chapter looks at poverty. Most of the sample could bedescribed as poor, in the sense they earned salaries which were less than the offi-cial subsistence minimum, and many had also experienced extreme poverty in the1990s, either on a long-term or a temporary basis. It briefly examines the mostevident indicators of poverty and prosperity among the sample. The discussionthen turns to the causes of poverty and extreme poverty, first low incomes andthen household composition. Some examples of local salaries and wages are pro-vided and compared with the subsistence minimum. Profiles of different types ofhousehold composition illustrate the ingredients for success or failure. Finally,state pensions and benefits are considered as extra sources of income, which didnot usually, however, pull respondents out of poverty.

Chapter 5 complements and continues Chapter 4, since it looks at how peoplepull themselves out of extreme poverty – their ‘survival strategies’, including

4 State-sector employeesThe new poor

State-sector employees: the new poor 93

finding employment in the private sector. It also addresses those causes of and/orsolutions to poverty which are more intangible than low incomes and householdcomposition. These assets are human, professional and social capital, in theform of cooperative relations between family members and with neighbours andcolleagues, 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 plentyof stories about the poor condition of houses of culture and schools deep in theprovinces: roofs which leaked, or fell in when the audience clapped, etc.2 Littlehas changed – leaky roofs still leak. Rooms are cramped and there is little equip-ment. In Zubtsov Library catalogue cards were forms for filing divorces, donatedby the registery office. Larger items, like typewriters, photocopiers and pianos,are also in short supply; fax machines and computers are rare indeed, except insome local government offices. School cupboards are full of Soviet-era textbooksand there is little money to buy new ones. Teachers bear the main responsibilityfor the annual repainting of desks and classrooms during the summer holidays.They beg materials from acquaintances.3 For instance, in Achit, the husband ofone teacher was head of the road maintenance office; he gave paint for schoolredecoration.

Specifically post-Soviet problems and solutions include the cost of utilities andthe presence of a local business community. When I visited the vocational collegein Achit its telephone had been cut off. The head of the local education depart-ment claimed that telephones, power and water were ‘systematically’ cut off atschools within the district because the local authority could not pay the bills.4 ThePerm Circus cancelled a visit to Achit because the house of culture was in dark-ness; 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 nomoney for extras. In cities it is more possible for state institutions like schools tosurvive by renting out their premises,6 but this option is not available in the smalltowns. Headteachers are forced to beg for help from entrepreneurs, for example,to sponsor school trips or even for school meals. Some headteachers complainedthat they wasted enormous quantities of time running around pleading for aidfrom businessmen. However, this should not be seen as a complete innovation,since in the Soviet period it was customary for state enterprises to sponsor cul-tural and educational institutions – an inefficient way of remedying for the factthat culture and education were financed on the ‘leftover principle’: always thelast items on central and local budgets. At least, though, the Soviet arrangementwas more formalized, even if commitments by the patron enterprise were notalways honoured.

There were a few exceptions to these tales of woe, notably in Achit, suggestingthat Achit does actually benefit sometimes from its location in a comparativelywealthy region. School No. 1 had won special regional-level funding for a1.3 million ruble renovation. In fact all but one educational institution in the

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 difficultplaces to work, there is quantity to compensate – a typically Soviet situation.As a district administrative centre, each small town offered jobs in the local admin-istration, ubiquitously known as the ‘White House’, in ironic reference to theMoscow, not Washington equivalent. Each town also had a nearly complete rangeof Soviet-era health, educational and cultural facilities. It was true that somekindergartens had shut in all three towns, as had local radio stations and cinemasin two. Overall, however, at least during the 1990s, there were still probablyslightly over three hundred ‘intelligentsia’ working in education, culture and healthin each town, as well as nurses, nannies and various auxiliary staff. Hence theseinstitutions were significant local employers. School No. 1 (the biggest) in eachtown 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 iscustomary 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 rublesa month for tuition); three town public libraries, including a separately housed chil-dren’s library; a local history museum; three schools; one vocational college; fivekindergartens; a children’s home; and a hospital. In the 1990s a bookshop, a cinemaand three kindergartens had closed, but there had also been growth – the opening ofa new school, to cope with the flood of 1980s babies, and the expansion of the musicschool, which not only offered art lessons by a professional artist but also organizedmany concerts and other events for the local population.

Bednodemyanovsk, just slightly larger than Zubtsov, had nearly the same rangeof institutions. It was true that, being more compact, it had one school and libraryfewer than Zubtsov; the history museum was incorporated within one of theschools; it had also lost its local radio station. On the other hand, School No. 2had 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 thansecondary-level education, since it boasted a further education college. This wasan ‘agricultural technical college’ which drew students from outside the district.Bednodemyanovsk also had two children’s homes, one of which had traditionallybeen for prisoners’ children, with 80 children apiece. Achit, despite its smallersize, had the same administrative centre status and therefore much the same rangeof institutions; in fact it also possessed a children’s sports school, for after-schooltraining, and a functioning cinema. One of the two schools was a special needsschool. The number of pupils at the special school rose from 56 in 1985 to 116 in2000.11 There was no museum or children’s home, but there was a well-usedchildren’s shelter. A children’s home had recently opened in the district.

94 State-sector employees: the new poor

Professional jobs in the state sector: the quality of new recruits

The interviewees who were still employed in the state sector were, in almost allcases, not planning to leave their jobs, although colleagues had done so. The qual-ity of recently recruited staff varied strikingly between the different towns. Newstaff in most institutions in Achit and in the vocational school in Bednode-myanovsk were distinctly underqualified; new staff in Zubtsov often consideredthemselves vastly overqualified.12 Several respondents had a sense of upwardmobility. For example, one man ran the district Automobile Association until itcollapsed, but then got a job organizing arts events at the agricultural college,which he found more satisfying, though very poorly paid. A canteen workerwho had become a librarian was enjoying a feeling of enhanced social status. Shefelt that in the canteen everyone assumed you were stealing food, but librarianswere respected. Several young teachers in Achit had moved into the town fromsurrounding villages, with only a vocational diploma from the college in nearbyKrasnoufimsk.

By contrast, very highly qualified specialists, moving into Zubtsov andBednodemyanovsk from cities in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Far East, hadfound jobs as doctors, teachers and directors of cultural institutions, but mournedwhat they left behind. Moreover, by the end of the 1990s it was not always easyfor highly qualified people to find jobs, as some of these migrants found whentheir relatives followed in their footsteps. There was said to be intense competi-tion 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, whilerespondents themselves, because of the nature of the sample, were almost allemployed, many friends and, sometimes, engineer or worker husbands had losttheir jobs. Not surprisingly, moods were frequently deeply pessimistic. Inter-viewees 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 helpworrying about it for yourself and your family’. In Zubtsov the situation seemedto be particularly acute and it was asserted that you could not even get a cleaningjob paying 100 rubles a month. Respondents were much concerned about the psy-chological effects of unemployment on the local community. They contrasted thesurvivable and usually short-term poverty of the majority with the ‘degradation’of long-term unemployed manual workers and peasants. Gordon and Klopov havedescribed this phenomenon as ‘stagnant unemployment, typical to some extent ofthe urban social depths’.13

Respondents were particularly anxious about the prospects for vocationalschool-leavers. Young men often go straight into the army, so the immediate prob-lem was in finding jobs for women, who often studied economics/accounting, but


ended up working in shops. In Zubtsov it was said to be pointless even to train asa cook, because factories had closed their canteens. In the other two towns, therewere catering jobs in the private sector. Local boys could get jobs as tractor driv-ers or mechanics, but other manual jobs were not in much demand. Some peopleconsidered bee-keeping to be the most useful course at the Bednodemyovskcollege: not only could professional bee-keepers find jobs, but also bee-keepingwas a good source of extra earnings.

A particular problem in Achit was the fate of children at the special needsschool. When the school opened in 1985, pupils were trained as seamstresses andcarpenters, but by 2000 the school had decided that the only sensible approachwas to train them to work their families’ household plots.14

Did women feel particularly threatened by unemployment? It is often suggestedthat Russian employers are more ready to shed female labour, although, as Chapter1 pointed out, overall national figures show that a slightly higher proportion ofmen are unemployed. I asked directly in the pilot survey whether women who hadbeen made unemployed at some stage in their careers felt that this had happenedpartly because they were women. For the main survey I dropped the question,because it had puzzled interviewees and the moment of misunderstanding createda hitch in the interview. It was evident that interviewees did not think in genderterms. Nonetheless, those few women respondents who had lost their jobs did, insome cases, think that they had been victimized because they were women. Forexample, a former teacher believed that had she been a man she might not havebeen fired, and she emphasized that this was an opinion based on experience, notan ideological position. ‘Of course I’m not a feminist,’ she explained quickly.

A few other women interviewees had similar stories to tell. For example, aneconomics lecturer was supporting an eight-year-old daughter and a mechanichusband who worked on a state farm and was paid only in kind. She had beenfired twice: first from her job as an economist with the local authority, becauseshe went on maternity leave, then from a post as head accountant to an insurancecompany. After a spell of registered unemployment, she worked in the hospital asan accountant before acquiring a lectureship. She wanted another child but wasafraid 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 unemploy-ment. Respondents’ male relatives who were engineers or manual workers hadoften lost their jobs. Engineers usually had to change profession.

Not having a university degree was a factor which people felt could doom youto unemployment. A physical education teacher in Achit, for example, said thatshe was scared that someone with a degree would ‘take her job away from her’.

However, having specialist qualifications which were not needed locally wasequally a problem, although it did not always prevent respondents from eventu-ally finding other professional jobs, for which they had not been trained. Onerespondent graduated with a first-class degree as a kindergarten educationaltheorist, was unemployed, got a job as a village schoolteacher, left because of thepoor housing, was unemployed again, then ‘by chance’ was appointed to teachhistory in a vocational college. One man had recently acquired a law diploma and


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 wasworking part-time as an art teacher. All these people might have been able to getjobs using their specialist skills in a city, but they could not afford to move, inmost 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 andseniority seemed to be the most important factors engendering a sense of securityor danger. Journalists, librarians and arts workers everywhere tended to feel inse-cure. Doctors and teachers of foreign languages usually felt secure, since there arevacancies 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 Bednode-myanovsk, too, there are vacant places where doctors have departed for Penzaand Moscow.16 In Achit, there was no language teacher in a third of the district’sschools, although a language is a compulsory part of the school curriculum andneeded in order to graduate from school.17 In Achit town’s School No. 1, an Englishteacher 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 1999–2000on a national level. (What sort of turning point was the end of the Yeltsin era? Wasit really going to make a difference to people’s lives and livelihoods?) In the smalltowns, particularly in the schools, the same years marked a kind of hiatus. In theearlier 1990s business had seemed more tempting, but by the late 1990s there wasa better appreciation of the risks and disadvantages of the private sector and thecomparative security of state employment. (In Achit, however, the outflow con-tinued: 70 teachers in the district left their jobs in 1998–9 alone.)18 By 2000, thesituation felt more comfortable in the schools because, on the whole, salarieswere being paid. A market trader even in Achit returned to her teaching job inorder to qualify for maternity benefits. On the other hand, teachers realized thatthis was a kind of ‘calm before the storm’.

Although in 1999–2000 the schools were packed, because of high birthrates inthe 1980s, over the next decade they would become much emptier. Many youngerteachers were quite anxious about this prospect.19 Younger schoolteachers wereespecially worried. So too were their colleagues in the agricultural college and invocational schools. Nationally, vocational education was in crisis and in fact theBednodemyanovsk agricultural college had nearly been axed very recently, on thegrounds that Penza Region was oversupplied with such colleges.20

Interviews suggested that the flight of the intelligentsia in Achit had been muchmore pronounced than in the other towns, hence there was less pressure onremaining jobs.

Poverty and prosperity

Signs of particular poverty among respondents included: monthly salaries whichwere spent within a week, so that the rest of the month was spent borrowing from


relatives and friends; inability to receive guests, or make social visits, because ofthe impossibility of reciprocation;21 and relying on one’s household plot for90 per cent or more of the food one ate, which meant going hungry in spring, afterpreserves and potatoes ran out, and before the new harvest. By contrast, signs ofprosperity – found in just a very few families – included foreign holidays, homecomputers, satellite television and the wife staying at home.22

Other indicators are more problematic to interpret. For example, paying forhigher education might seem like a luxury, indicative of riches, but it character-ized even fairly poor families – who might well feel that that it was a sacrificeworth making, as an investment for the future. Conversely, some relativelywealthy families seemed to be wealthy because they had escaped paying tuitionfees: they had student children on scholarships, either because they were particu-larly bright or because their parents had good connections. Spending a lot of timegardening might also seem like an indicator of poverty. How, then, to explain whythe head of administration in Achit spent three to four hours a day tendingplots totalling a quarter of a hectare (four times the normal size), or why the newprocurator in Bednodemyanovsk had built himself a mansion surrounded by apotato field?

‘Poverty’ is a term with many definitions and a vast literature. It is mostsatisfactory to understand poverty in a broad sense, as lack of access not only tomaterial resources but also to goods such as education and health and variouskinds of social capital. As will already be apparent, the small-town environmentis conducive to just such a poverty of opportunity. This is amply illustrated in fol-lowing chapters. However, in this section the discussion will focus on lack ofmoney income. The causes of poverty will be examined under two headings:earnings and household composition. Some profiles of different household typeswill then be provided, to illustrate how different types of primary income andhousehold composition promote different standards of living in the small town.However, the topic cannot be understood in static terms. Life was precarious, anddescents into poverty were common. Hence the chapter also discusses povertyflows. To avoid running ahead with my argument, however, I have not discussedthe role of ‘survival strategies’ in enabling ascents out of poverty. As Chapter 5and Appendix 2 illustrate, it is in fact these strategies (or their absence), which domuch to determine the fate of individual households. However, basic earnings andhousehold composition are fundamental.

Low incomes

Probably the most significant poverty trend in Russia is ‘a vast swelling in theranks of the working poor’.23 In other words, people are usually poor in post-communist Russia not because they are unemployed, but because wages are low.Most households in the sample could be considered ‘new poor’. Soviet teachersand doctors, even if relatively badly paid by comparison with miners or steel-workers, still had not been absolutely ‘poor’ in the sense that they became poor in


the 1990s. Salary arrears in the 1990s had created periods of particularly intensehardship for many families, with teachers, librarians and doctors not being paidfor six months or more at a time, and even some local government officers andpolice employees being affected by shorter wage arrears. 1999 was a bad year, butby 2000 most interviewees were making ends meet, although a handful were inmore extreme poverty.24

Figures 4.1–4.3 give some examples of local salaries and wages. It is clear thathouseholds 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 belowthe poverty level even if they had no dependants at all. Figure 4.1 shows salariesfor the editor of the district newspaper, a middle-aged teacher and museumdirector, with higher education, and a middle-aged librarian with a librarian’squalification from a vocational college (‘specialized secondary’ education).25

Worse off still than the urban professional people whose salaries are shown inFigures 4.1–4.3 were people in the agricultural sector. In 1998, most local state


660600 600

450

300

SM Editor Teacher Museumdirector

Librarian

0

250

500

750

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

993

600400

660450

560370

SM

Avera

ge

teac

her

Junio

r

docto

rSen

ior

docto

rChie

f

libra

rian

Electri

cal

engin

eer

Cultur

al

worke

r

0

250

500

750

1,000

1,250

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’.

and collective farms paid their employees in food, as in Stalinist times.26

Bednodemyanovsk interviewees in 2000 reported that their husbands and parentswho worked on local farms had not been paid in money for 7 or 10 years. Onesaid her husband never got paid, except for ‘the occasional sack of flour’.27 Achitrespondents also reported that their husbands who worked on state farms eitherdid not get paid at all or got paid in kind.


1,015

868 882 877 862

675

0

250

500

750

1,000

1,250

SM

Loca

l AW

Constr

uctio

n

Loca

l bud

get

Indu

stry

Farm

s

Figure 4.4 Regional subsistence minimum, Achit average monthly wage and wagesby sector, Achit, September 2000 (rubles).

Source: For subsistence minimum (August): Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenieSverdlovskoi oblasti, yanvar’-iyul’ 2000 goda, p. 99.

1,000

350500

300 300

1,015

SM

Senior

teac

her

New

teac

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Libra

rian

House

of

cultu

re

emplo

yee Ju

nior

docto

r

0

250

500

750

1,000

1,250

Figure 4.3 Professional monthly salaries and the regional subsistence minimum,Achit, September 2000 (rubles).

Source: For subsistence minimum (August): Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenieSverdlovskoi oblasti, yanvar’-iyul’ 2000 goda, p. 99.

Household composition and dependants: introductory comments

Appendix 2 gives case studies of five different types of household, showing someexamples of the impact of household composition on living standards and liveli-hood strategies. The range of possible permutations in household compositionand the multi-dimensional quality of poverty makes it hard to generalize about thelinks between the two, and the analysis which follows, in this chapter, should besupplemented by reading the more complex stories given in the Appendix.

The Goskomstat figures given in Table 4.1 show that children are the groupmost likely to be in poverty, a conclusion which studies of poverty in contempo-rary Russia regularly confirm. Even before the 1990s, in fact, children were par-ticularly at risk.28 ‘Old age seems to be far less of a risk factor for poverty thanduring the Soviet period’29 but there are pockets of extreme poverty among oldage pensioners, such as particularly old women living alone,30 and, as Chapter 1suggested, poverty among older people is probably understated in Goskomstatstatistics.

Although figures for Russia nationally suggest that younger children are morelikely to be poor, this did not seem to be true among the sample. Perhaps it wasjust a peculiarity of this particular group, but the interviewees who seemed to bethe most poor commonly had adult children who were studying or unemployed.Sometimes, however, the latter had their own small children. A number of inter-viewees were supporting daughters who were lone parents. Pensioner householdmembers contributed their pensions, but rarely worked as well. Opportunitiesto do so were very limited. In Achit District, for example, only 7.3 per cent ofpensioners had paid employment.31

The profiles below suggest some of the more common types of link betweenhousehold composition and standard of living.32

‘Successful’ families

About half-a-dozen households seemed genuinely prosperous. They were those inwhich the main breadwinner had a senior local government job or was a thriving


Table 4.1 Percentage of different groups inhouseholds with per capita moneyincomes below the subsistencelevel in 2000, Russian averages

Children under 6 30.36–15-year-olds 40.316–30-year-olds 27.9Women, 31–54 years 35.0Men, 31–59 years 28.0Women over 54 19.6Men over 59 15.3


businessman; there were no dependent older relatives; there were no more thantwo school-age children or the children were grown up and independent; every-one was healthy; and there had been no change of housing. As it happened, inmost of these families the wife did not work for money, but spent much timegardening.

‘Unexpectedly’ struggling families with both spouses in well-paidintelligentsia jobs

Families in which both spouses were employed in senior intelligentsia jobs (suchas headteacher or children’s home director) would, a priori, seem likely candidatesfor the ‘successful’ label. However, in almost all cases there was some disquali-fying factor. One partner had been ill; adult children were living at home, oftenwith grandchildren; children were studying or working in the city and could notmake ends meet on their own; housing was being improved and large debtsincurred. These problems could drag down even couples who both had well-paidjobs 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, thehusband was or had recently been a worker. Combinations included, for example,senior lawyer and labourer, headteacher and watch repairman, headteacher andhandyman, head of municipal services and ex-driver turned college arts organ-izer. (See the case of ‘Kira’ in Appendix 2.) Many of the husbands were not wellpaid. Even if the wife was in a senior intelligentsia position, there had also to begood health and no more than two school-age or younger children for the familiesto 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 pro-fessional women, but it also says something about the small town and its limitedrange of marriage opportunities, meaning that not all professional women couldfind partners of equal social status. (It was striking that intelligentsia men wereoften married to intelligentsia women: see Chapter 6.)

Poorest families

A handful of families had three dependent children and they were all poor. Thepoorest seemed to be those where one or more of the children were studying. Afamily with twins seemed particularly poor, presumably because clothes had to bebought 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 salarieswere only 300 rubles.


The most common type of poor family, however, were those, which dependedon a single, always female breadwinner. (See the cases of ‘Sonya’ and ‘Tanya’ inAppendix 2.) Often the breadwinner worked ‘in culture’, as a librarian or in anarts centre, where salaries were tiny (see Table 4.2 below). Many types of house-hold fell into this category. The breadwinner could be divorced or widowed, or herhusband might be unemployed, semi-employed or retired. Children were school-age; studying; unemployed or on small salaries and living at home; or strugglingto make ends meet in the city. Often there were health problems and sometimesalso dependent parents or siblings and/or disabled family members: sometimes awhole string of family members who could not make a full contribution to thehousehold’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 sud-den losses of income or major expenses. For most people, descents into deeppoverty were primarily linked to not being paid for months on end. Obviously, thiswas a particular hazard if two breadwinners worked in the same profession: forexample, married couples consisting of two teachers or doctors. Ill health wasalso dangerous. One couple, for example, a middle-aged doctor and teacher withjust 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 majorfinancial problems.

Since higher education usually lasts five years in Russia, studying implied along spell of penury for households with adult children. In some cases parentshad failed to keep the children at university: they had dropped out because of asense of humiliation, contrasting their own modest possibilities with the life-styles of some of their urban fellow-students. However, if they came home theywere often equally a burden to their parents. Unemployed graduate children werealso living with respondents. Adult children who found jobs as teachers in thesmall 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 todrinking – which restricted survival strategies. Sometimes these tensions wereoccurring in families, which were trying to educate older children, and the suspi-cion must be that the stress of so doing was so great that it was partly responsi-ble for rifts between the family members. However, a husband’s unemployment,new, low-status employment or early retirement was often blamed for the occurrenceof this kind of deterioration.

Substantial poverty flows have also been noted for Russia as a whole, althoughthis is partly because, with many wages just above or below the subsistence min-imum, small adjustments in the latter (e.g. because of regional variations in theprice of food), can throw large numbers of extra people below the poverty line.


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

State provision: pensions, benefits and residential care

Interviewees complained regularly about child benefits, particularly their tinysize and irregular and bizarre payment in kind.34 Retirement pensions could makemore of a contribution to the family budget. One woman described her income asin Table 4.2: more than half the household’s tiny monthly income of under300 rubles a head derived from a pension. A divorced head librarian, who livedwith her child and elderly father, said that she also relied on her father’s pensionto keep the household going.

Benefits for ‘loss of breadwinner’ and disability benefits were less than half thesubsistence minimum, but still made a difference in very low-income families. Awidowed 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 was800 rubles, while the subsistence minimum for one person was 933 rubles. A jun-ior librarian earned 300 rubles and had a disabled daughter with a pension of240 rubles. When the librarian had not been paid for six months, they livedentirely off this 240 ruble disability pension.

Some disability benefits were more worth having than others, however. Theheadteacher of the Achit special school suggested that a good survival strategy forher former pupils was to get registered as Category II disabled. This would producea 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 administra-tion in Achit issued a decree in 2000 raising benefits for foster-parents andguardians from 200 to 700 rubles. This brought the total income per foster childto about 1000 rubles a month, in other words about the same as the subsistenceminimum and above the average local wage.35

Subsidized or free utilities were another form of social assistance, although, asChapter 1 suggested, they did not always benefit the poorest people. One quitewell-off family had its electricity bills paid because the husband was a ‘hero oflabour’. Nor were the promised benefits always available in reality. For example,pensioners in Achit were entitled to free false teeth, but the local administrationcould not afford to pay for them. In Bednodemyanovsk 590 households – in a town


Table 4.2 Senior arts administrator’s household’smonthly sources of income

Rubles

Own salary 530Husband’s early retirement pension 780Child benefit total for 3 children 174

Total 1,484

of 8,200 people – were entitled to reductions on their utilities bills in summer2000. 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 customerswho ran up debts.36

Chapter 1 mentioned the small scale of residential care for older people inRussia. Achit was the only one of the three districts to provide such residentialcare. 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’ fromsponsors and the surrounding population.37

Conclusions

State institutions in the three towns were not easy places to work, although workingconditions had often also been poor in Soviet days. The rising cost of electricityand telephones created new stresses. In terms of technology, these institutionswere sometimes going backwards, as the outside world experienced a technologicalrevolution.

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 fromregional-level funding for its schools – an indication that it was useful to belocated in a wealthier region.

These were communities beset by high unemployment. Respondents’ malerelatives, employed as engineers or in manual occupations, had been particularlyvulnerable to unemployment, and it was a topic of general concern, particularlywith reference to the future of young people. The small towns were seen as offer-ing no opportunities to the younger generation, and even young people withdegrees could find themselves unemployed or working in jobs for which they hadnot been trained. This was sometimes because they had trained for professionswhich 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 sur-vived in the small towns, and schools had even expanded in the 1990s, althoughthey were facing redundancies in the near future as a consequence of the fallingbirthrate. Hospitals and, to some extent, schools were not only islands of job secu-rity in the 1990s, but actually faced the opposite problem, of experiencing vacan-cies for qualified staff. Again, this was a traditional problem for rural areas inRussia, but one exacerbated by postcommunist economic problems.

It was not surprising that staff left state institutions, given the tiny size ofsalaries. Poverty in the small towns, as in Russia generally, was largely attributa-ble to low wages; usually respondents earned less than the subsistence minimum.If they had husbands or other relatives employed in agriculture, these familymembers often received no cash at all. Others were unemployed. The poorestfamilies were those which depended on a single female breadwinner and/or con-tained three children. However, even families where both spouses were in senior


and by local standards well-paid professional jobs, and where there were no morethan two children, were vulnerable to poverty as soon as they incurred expensesfor higher education, health or housing. The most common cause of short-termflows into extreme poverty was non-payment of salaries, which had affectedalmost all respondents.

The poorest respondents were identifiable chiefly by their extreme dependenceon subsistence farming. Indicators of wealth – found in only a very few house-holds – included the wife staying at home and the possession of a home computer.Pensions often constituted an important element of the household income, butwere small in absolute terms and could not rescue families from poverty. Childbenefit frequently remained unpaid. Hence, respondents were forced to consideradopting ‘survival strategies’. These are the subjects of Chapter 5.


Introduction

This chapter discusses the livelihood strategies on which respondents embarkedin an attempt to combat poverty. After a discussion of the terms and debates, anumber of strategies are described. Particular attention is focused on growingvegetables, as the main available strategy, and on entering the private sector, whichmight often be the most rewarding strategy in a larger town or city, but is ofteninaccessible in the small towns. Migration out of the small town is also consideredas a potential, but not always realisable strategy.

The second part of the chapter is about the gendering of strategies.1 Women andmen may possess different assets (time, health, skills, etc.) and there will be differ-ent expectations about what are considered appropriate spheres of activity for eithersex. Moreover, if the household is to function as a unit, it must depend on cooper-ative relations between its members. The divorce statistics in postcommunist Russiasuggest that such cooperative relations cannot always be taken for granted. Afterconsidering strategies promoting material survival, the chapter dwells particularlyon the issue of stress, as a major health threat. (It will be recollected that stress hasbeen 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 andcolleagues. These, too, are essential to survival, and strategies can only bemapped out within the context of such networks.

‘Strategies’

The word ‘strategy’ is attractive because it stresses agency. Although expressionssuch as ‘survival strategy’ or ‘household strategy’ are often used with reference tothe 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 helplessvictims of circumstances. ‘Strategy’ also implies that, given some ingenuity, wayscan be found to circumvent obstacles in the form of low-paid jobs or unemploy-ment. In other words, it focuses attention on less visible aspects of livelihoods suchas the informal economy.

5 Livelihood strategies

The term ‘strategy’ is controversial, however, and its various problems can beillustrated with reference to the livelihoods of the small-town respondents. Animportant caveat is that the use of the word ‘strategy’ should not imply the appli-cation 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 tomodels of supply, demand and efficient self-interest. However, in terms ofcultural meaning, local knowledge and understanding, and within the contextof social relationships and networks, they are often the best and most sensibleresponses people can make.2

Survival strategies in small towns can only be understood in their culturalcontexts. In Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov there are various facets of thelocal culture that impinge strongly on survival strategies, if such they are. Forexample, although no one feels able to afford a large family, most of the youngermarried respondents and their female relatives had had one child, strongly sug-gesting that traditional Soviet attitudes (young women should be mothers) live on,even while birthrates are declining more rapidly in the cities. No doubt it wouldbe more economically rational to postpone childbirth altogether, if necessary untilone’s 30s, in the hope of better days to come. Only once, however, did I hear ofchildbirth being completely postponed because of poverty.

Another strong social pressure is to grow potatoes and other vegetables. It willbe 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 herneighbours about the fact that only flowers grew in front of her flat. (She did alsogrow potatoes behind the house.) A woman who had a disabled husband and asecond 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 immedi-ately contradicted: the claims were inconceivable. Perhaps the women did nothave much land, but they must be exaggerating to say they grew nothing at all. Itis, no doubt, irrational to refuse to grow vegetables if the price you pay is for theneighbours to think you are crazy. The goodwill of neighbours is an importantpart 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 frame-work 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 meth-ods blind him to the presence of strategies, and that qualitative and longitudinalresearch does reveal real strategies.4 Perhaps, however, the argument is betweenpeople looking at opposite sides of the same coin: survival depends on how muchone consciously takes advantage of available opportunities and it is often difficultto quantify the proportion of proactive behaviour involved.


For example, changing profession would seem a clear example of a strategy, buta teacher who joins the police when her husband already is a policeman is proba-bly responding more to opportunity – perhaps even to her husband’s suggestion –than a teacher who decides to train in massage. Another woman decided to sup-plement her income by breeding coypu. She would seem to have adopted more ofa strategy than her neighbour who merely sold the traditional autumn piglets. Onthe other hand, the coypu farmer was the mayor’s daughter, and perhaps she hadmore start-up capital. Remembering Pine and Bridger’s point about culturalembeddedness, one could also argue that breeding coypu was a wild idea ratherthan a strategy, while rearing a piglet was appropriate in the cultural context.

‘Strategy’ also suggests long-term planning. Wedel, for example, writes that itmight seem rational for households to plan that ‘one member of the family wouldbe employed in the more stable state sector while another would work in the privatesector, which provided more opportunities but at greater risk’.5 While there mayhave been elements of planning in some households in the small towns, there wereplenty of other examples of people going into the private sector in response to sud-den shocks, typically non-payment of wages. In one mother and adult daughterhousehold, both women had been teachers, but the mother decided that she had tobecome a market trader after a four-month period in which neither was paid. In yetanother family, a couple, both teachers, had three adult or school-age children tosupport. 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 beenengineers, but they had been made redundant, or effectively redundant, even if theirfactory 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 seemedto have more haphazard approaches, based more, perhaps, on chance opportuni-ties which presented themselves. Claire Wallace, citing Warde, distinguishesbetween ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ strategies to label these different approaches.6

In the end, the most important point is probably that made by Clarke: opportu-nities to find new livelihoods are limited, especially in the context of a very smalltown. This is probably the main point of contrast with the city, although even in thecity not everyone has access to second jobs, etc. Nonetheless, despite the con-straints imposed by their place of residence, all respondents were actively seekingexits 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 willcontinue to use the word ‘strategy’, therefore, but only in the sense of makingcoping plans within the context of limited options, including cultural constraints.

‘Livelihood strategies’ and ‘survival strategies’

Livelihood strategies are sometimes described in the literature as ‘householdstrategies’ 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 usingthe term ‘survival’ in the postcommunist context is the common implication that

Livelihood strategies 109

people have to ‘survive’ postcommunism, whereas they did not have to survive theSoviet period: they merely ‘lived’. There are lines of continuity, however, betweenSoviet and post-Soviet strategies. Most significantly, small-town professional peoplesuch as teachers always kept cows and dug potatoes, whereas many city teachersonly acquired land in or after the Gorbachev period. Lines of continuity are per-haps more obvious in small towns than in the cities, although some continuity insocial behaviour is naturally evident everywhere in Russia. Poverty and inadequateinfrastructure are hardly new phenomena, so it is not surprising that many currentcoping mechanisms have Soviet antecedents. For example, in all types of settle-ment younger pensioners regularly found paid employment, often to support theirchildren and grandchildren; adult children commonly lived with their parents orparents-in-law; and informal networks based on exchange of favours (the use ofsocial capital) were highly developed.

Nonetheless, the sharp decline in the purchasing power of money wages, andtheir irregular payment, have in some respects created a qualitatively new situa-tion, as has the general atmosphere of change and instability which promotesstress and ill health and creates new dangers to physical survival. Sudden shockssuch as complete stoppages of cash income into households constitute crises, withthe threat of descent into deep poverty, hence ‘survival’ may be considered anappropriate 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 strate-gies are often not responses to exceptional situations, but become ‘routine andnormative activities’ in the postcommunist period. It is hard, though, to distin-guish between ‘routine’ and ‘exceptional’. Shevchenko’s account of her ownrespondents, in Moscow, implies that they felt their lives were routinely excep-tional,8 and the same was true for the small-town respondents, who experiencedunpredictable but frequent financial emergencies, at least during the period whensalaries were regularly in arrears.

‘Livelihood’ strategies might also be preferred because it does not raise awk-ward questions about the objective of the strategies. On the other hand, it is hardto understand the phenomenon without considering the objectives, and using theterm ‘survival’ forces one to confront this issue. Are people merely trying to avoidstarvation, or have they grander plans? This issue is discussed below.

‘Survival’ is an attractive term, moreover, because it can be used to linktogether different aspects of livelihoods. Physical survival is about both moneyand health, health is about physical and emotional health, emotional health islinked to the survival of professional identity, etc. The term ‘survival strategy’ cantherefore 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 asa whole, in percentages, were casual secondary employment (44); growing food (41);


and working in several jobs (23). Among the poorest respondents, they weregrowing food (36); casual secondary employment (34); using up savings, sellingproperty and hiring out their labour (all 32); and borrowing money (30).9 Theserespondents lived in Moscow, St Petersburg and Voronezh. In my sample therewas little distinction in strategies between the poorer and richer respondents,except that the former were perhaps more likely to mention borrowing small sumsof money from friends and relatives. Growing food was universal, or nearly uni-versal. Casual secondary employment was welcomed by almost all types ofrespondent, but was usually very insignificant in scale. Using up savings, sellingproperty and hiring one’s labour were never mentioned. The possibilities of doingany of these three were presumably limited. Moreover, regular second jobs arealmost impossible to come by in the small town. Working in several places wasmentioned 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 inmore detail later in the chapter.

Lyudmila Belyaeva divided her respondents’ strategies into three types,‘active’, ‘passive’ and neutral. Not surprisingly, her most prosperous respondentswere the ones with the most active strategies.10 Other analysts have employedsimilar distinctions: for example, Burawoy et al. distinguish between ‘minimalist’and ‘entrepreneurial’ strategies. ‘Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive dom-estic economy. . .while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamicsector of trade and services.’11 The more active, entrepreneurial strategies canstill be ‘survival’ strategies, for example, if they occur in response to completestoppage of money income, because both spouses are subject to salary arrears. Inother situations, the aims of active livelihood strategies are more ambitious: toretrieve something of the family’s Soviet status, for example, by buying highereducation, something which is unattainable on a postcommunist teacher’s or librar-ian’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 similarobjectives, the distinction between minimalist and entrepreneurial strategies stillseems a helpful one, and it will be used in slightly extended form later. Even lessthan 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, suchas meat, fish, cheese, oranges and bananas, and sweets, as well the purchase ofconsumer goods, medicine, travel, long-distance telephone calls to relatives andeven the telephone in general if it had been cut off for non-payment of bills. Insome cases, parents stinted themselves so that they could feed their children prop-erly, making comments like ‘I buy them bananas and oranges on pay day’ or ‘Idon’t buy meat and fruit myself, only for my son’. Some interviewees baked theirown bread – if they had a slow ‘Russian oven’ rather than a gas one – and even


milled their own flour; some Achit children went without school dinner, althoughinterviewees did not say that this was true of their own children. Interviewees inAchit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked how often they and their families wentto the doctor. Those who often did were either seriously ill or else relatively pros-perous. 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 commonreason given was expense, particularly of medicines. However, if their childrenwere ill, respondents said they would definitely take them to a doctor. In somecases they drew a contrast with their own deliberate self-neglect in this regard.

Limiting family size is another negative strategy in circumstances of economichardship and one which was mentioned by most interviewees, either with refer-ence to themselves or to other family members. Chapter 1 noted the national fallin 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 theproportion 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 hadjumped to 62.4 per cent.12

However, some couples in the small towns do have two or more children, bornsince 1991, and Achit in particular, as Chapter 3 suggested, had a rather highbirthrate. This might be linked to the ‘semi-rural’ culture of the small town, andalso perhaps, in the case of Achit, to the non-ethnic Russian identity of some ofthe population. The intelligentsia sample sometimes dismissively equated largefamilies with feckless behaviour, idleness and unemployment. While there is anelement of prejudice and snobbery in such remarks, it may also be true that theintelligentsia, as the most ‘urban’ members of the ‘semi-urban’ small-town com-munity, 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 beconsidered corroborating evidence that if families are limiting themselves to onechild, this is because of financial constraints. Among this sample from the smalltowns, the more prosperous families normally had two children. Larger (two-plus) families were also typical of richer people, for example, in a sample fromYektaterinburg;13 they were the norm (among ethnic Russians) in the rich gastown of Novoe Urengoe (Tyumen).14

‘Minimalist’ strategies

Consolidating households

Chapter 1 mentioned Zbarskaya et al.’s suggestion that the number of extendedfamilies had increased as a response to economic hardship.15 If grandparents movein to a household, this cuts their costs and, for their adult children, saves on child-care expenses. In some cases, too, it can raise capital because of the sale of thegrandparent’s flat or house. A study in Nizhnii Novgorod Region in the late 1990sfound that at least a half of older women were living with their children and


grandchildren. Three-quarters of older people with children lived either in thesame household or locally.16 In the small-town sample, many households also con-tained three generations, but when I asked respondents whether they had invitedparents to live with them because of financial pressures arising from the circum-stances of the 1990s, they had done so very rarely. Normally the invitation, if itoccurred, had been made in circumstances which were simply connected with thehealth and age of the parent who needed care. However, in the small town, whereolder parents commonly live close to their children, care (either by grandparentsof children or by adult children of their own parents) can still take place even iffamily members are not living in the same house. Both happened in the respon-dents’ households. Younger grandmothers would come round during the day tolook after children while parents were at work. Older grandparents would be visitedafter work, sometimes with gifts of food. Middle-aged women were sometimestherefore 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 commonplacelocal survival strategy, on the old communist-era principle that everyone’s prop-erty is no one’s property. Interviewees and the local press complain bitterly aboutsuch irresponsibility. The favourite targets, as, it seems, elsewhere in Russia, arewire and wood.

Power cable, in particular, is stolen to sell as scrap metal: a rather hazardousmeans to promote ‘survival’. In the first eleven months of 1998, 24 kilometres ofpower cable were stolen in Zubtsov District. 50 kilometres went from Achit in1999.17 Scrap metal collecting was described as a ‘cottage industry’ by the Zubtsovlocal newspaper, reporting on a fire which started in the basement of a block offlats, when children tried to melt plastic off metal.18 The newspaper suggestedthat unemployed people and schoolchildren were the perpetrators of most of this‘collecting’. (In Soviet days children were encouraged to collect scrap metal aspart of their environmental education, so there was a line of continuity.) One boyin Zubtsov even stole the iron railing from around a grave in the municipal church-yard.19 Typical prices at Achit District illegal collection points were only 36 rublesfor a kilogram of copper and 30 rubles for a kilogram of aluminium, so majoritems 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 cen-tral heating and hot water are not laid on by the municipal authorities. Timber canalso be sold outside the district: an ‘entrepreneurial strategy’. Many people aresaid to have their own chainsaws in Achit District.21 ‘Wherever you go in the districtlocal people always want to discuss the forest first: this is the most agonizing andurgent problem.’22

The forest is, in fact, seen as a resource by everyone, something which oughtto be on one’s doorstep in abundant quantities, not depleted in the interests of out-siders. In Bednodemyanovsk respondents were upset by the fact that the forest


was receding – one had to drive to the forest, over the border to Mordovia,for example. Respondents in all three towns frequently mentioned pickingmushrooms, berries and medicinal herbs in the forest. This was not just a leisureoccupation, as it often is for city dwellers.

Small loans and gifts

Although some interviewees said that nowadays they could exchange only emo-tional support with colleagues, many mentioned that they helped each other outwith small loans, as was customary in Soviet days. This seemed to happen at alltypes of state institution, although there was also variation within institutions.Teachers working at the same school, in particular, could have quite differentexperiences from each other. These are such big ‘collectives’ that they split intosmaller groups of friends with different customs. As well as giving money,colleagues also made each other presents such as seedlings, medicines and oldchildren’s clothes. One teacher, married to a senior official, had a car and used itto convey her colleagues to the forest.

Household plots

Tending a household plot could be an entrepreneurial strategy if food were pro-duced for sale, but there was little evidence of this, so vegetable gardens are besttreated under the ‘minimalist’ heading.

Around 99 per cent of the sample farmed, or at least contributed occasionallyto the family farming, even if they left most of the work to their partners orspouses. Younger, single people might not have their own land, but they all helpedtheir parents and grandparents who did. They did not shop for vegetables. Onewoman said of the time before she had her own plot, ‘I used to go to my parentsfor every onion’.

The majority of respondents, particularly those with children, described the pri-mary purpose of the allotment as being to secure the immediate survival of theirfamilies, in situations where money incomes were small and undependable. Asmall minority of families had only a few rows of vegetables in front of a block offlats, but most had a patch of 0.06 hectares, the standard size. This would bea kitchen garden, if they lived in a cottage, or a separate allotment, often knownas 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 dif-fered: the soil seemed to be least fertile in Zubtsov and most fertile in Achit, wherepeople regularly reported having an over-abundance of produce. Many intervieweeskept 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 Clarkeand his colleagues have, in a number of publications, disputed the ‘myth of theurban peasant’, suggesting that it is no more than a journalistic cliché to visual-ize the whole Russian population ‘surviving’ a shortage of money income bydigging potatoes on their dachas. However, Clarke et al. conducted their research


in cities, where, they point out, it is not a survival strategy because people do notsave money if they grow vegetables which can be bought very cheaply.23 FrancinePickup’s study of Yekaterinburg also indicates that for poor city dwellers thedacha is not seen as a survival strategy. It is much too expensive.24 Still, they mayreceive potatoes from rural relatives. In exceptionally urban Sverdlovsk Region in1999 only 16 kilograms of potatoes per capita a year were actually bought, while67 kilograms per capita were consumed from household plots.25

Clarke does suggest that ‘domestic agricultural production is more significantfor rural dwellers and the inhabitants of small towns’.26 In the small towns, tend-ing a household plot makes economic sense. Little capital is needed to grow veg-etables. Family, friends, neighbours and colleagues can supply seedlings, etc., andmany people do not even spend money on pesticide, preferring to pick theColorado beetles off the potato plants by hand. City dwellers may waste moneytravelling 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 prod-ucts like tomatoes and berries. Far from gardening for sentimental or cultural rea-sons, like the city dwellers described by Clarke, small-town respondents workedout which farming activites were worthwhile. For example, a number had givenup keeping cows, on the grounds that they were too expensive to feed during thelong winter months when they ‘sat at home’ in the barn. Interviewees with accessto 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 poorerrespondents emphasized how very dependent they were on their vegetable plots.28

Most interviewees claimed that half or more of their family diet derived fromtheir own subsistence farming; the poorest families said ‘90 per cent’ or even‘99 per cent’. Not surprisingly, the poorest respondents also reported that a highproportion of their diet came from mushroom picking and livestock rearing.Conversely, richer respondents sometimes explained that now they relied less ontheir plots. One interviewee had recently been promoted to a managerial postin his hospital. Before the promotion, his family grew 90 per cent of their ownfoodstuffs: now it was more like 40 per cent.

Obviously, if families were large, it was hard to survive on 0.06 hectares. Onefamily, for example, had just this amount to feed four adults and a teenager. Theinterviewee estimated that this provided about a quarter of the food needed. InMay 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, variedaccording to the wealth of the interviewee. However, the amount of time spentfarming was not a good guide to the wealth of the respondent. Most intervieweessaid that they devoted a great deal of time to their vegetable plots. Even the richestinterviewees, such as a successful entrepreneur, could spend three hours anevening in the summer. For the less poor respondents, this seems to be consideredworthwhile because survival is not just a question of filling one’s stomach, butalso of eating a vitamin-rich and ‘ecologically pure’ range of produce which willpromote good health. Moreover, not all such produce is readily available in the


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 neigh-bour. 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 gar-dens. 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, butI don’t really feel like it’. Meanwhile her poorer colleague across the yard wasfrantically boiling enormous pans of mushrooms.

Clearly, as was suggested earlier in this chapter, it is impossible to fully under-stand the phenomenon of vegetable farming without taking into account the localculture, which both pressurizes the individual to conform and facilitates the suc-cess of the strategy by providing the necessary back-up of informal networks.Observation suggested, for example, that it was common to request time off workto harvest potatoes; workplaces in Achit seemed to run on a skeleton staff in earlySeptember. In April, office windowsills in Zubtsov were occupied by pots ofseedlings. Managers understood the situation: they grew vegetables too.Emotional support was also important. One neighbour, chatting to another, wouldask ‘Did you manage to get your potato harvest in before it started raining?’ andadd consolingly, ‘We didn’t either’.

Despite the significant lines of continuity with the Soviet past, there are impor-tant ways in which survival is, in the postcommunist period, more dependent onsmallholdings. Apart from the wiping out of savings and the reduced purchasingpower and irregular payment of wages, the collapse of the state and collectivefarms and local food processing industries encourages people to keep their ownlivestock. This is chiefly for meat, milk and eggs although, especially in Achit,where even the municipal dairy has closed, people often make their own cheeseand 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 the1980s, or grown their own fruit trees. ‘Life forced us,’ said several. A number ofCentral Asian migrants from big cities were farming for the first time. Otherrespondents new to farming included the head of the hospital in one town and herhusband, the only anaesthetist – both exceptionally busy people. Similarly, aschool headteacher and her husband, a senior official, had previously bought theirvegetables from neighbours, but had now acquired a large field and had begungrowing potatoes and carrots, although in this case the purpose was not strictlysurvival but to pay back a mortgage to the local authority. (The vegetables weresupplied 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.


Some families were able to sell surplus potatoes for money if there was a goodharvest. Especially in fertile Achit, this could, under other circumstances, havebeen a profitable entrepreneurial livelihood strategy. In practice it was a haphazardand undependable one, given the collapse of the official local system for buyingup and selling food produce. It was not always simple to find a purchaser. AnAchit headteacher expressed her anguish at the fact that, after her pupils had pro-duced a really good harvest on the school garden, they had sent a van with theproduce all over the region and been unable to sell it anywhere. Clearly, not onlythe lives of individual cheese-making teachers but also Achit’s economy could beimproved considerably, if food processing and purchasing could be organizedproperly on a municipal/district level.

The fact that people throw away produce seems to call into question the sug-gestion that dacha farming is motivated by – not necessarily rational – fear offuture shortage.30 I only encountered one woman who clearly expressed sucha 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 ofpreserves, 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 feltcompelled to supply their children in the cities, although this is not a new phe-nomenon. My student room-mates from rural parts of Voronezh Region in theearly 1980s survived largely on massive jars of jam, plus occasional eggs, fromhome. However, now that the cost of living in the city is so very much higher thanin the small town, providing food for student children takes on an extra impera-tive. In one family at least the parents were also supplying the student’s landladywith potatoes, which they took by car to a rather distant city in a neighbouringregion. In another family, a mother travelled by bus to see her student daughtersin the regional capital, twice a month, laden with potatoes.

One couple, who were both senior managers, worked busily on their 0.02 hectarehousehold plot and an extra potato field 5 kilometres distant almost entirely to feedtheir teacher daughter and granddaughter, who lived in a city on the other side ofthe 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’ theirproduce went to relatives who lived in Yekaterinburg, Krasnoufimsk and Achit.

Village parents maintaining adult children in the small town had, in onesense, an easier time than their small-town counterparts, since the childrentended to go home every weekend to help on the smallholding. However, asChapter 1 mentioned, villagers tend to have plots twice the size of the averageurban household plot, so tending them is a particularly serious endeavour.32 AsChapter 4 suggested, the interviewees’ village relatives had in most or perhapsall cases received wages only in kind in recent years. There were villages wherethe big farms were producing absolutely nothing and paying nothing in eithermoney or kind, so that people were thrown back entirely on their own plots forsurvival.33


More active/entrepreneurial strategies

Additional earnings and favours

According to Aleksandr Galkin, one of the main dividing lines within theintelligentsia is between those fortunate people with second jobs and those without.34

However, secondary employment comes in many guises, and there is a differencebetween lucrative extra earnings and small unrewarding ones. A Muscovite witha dead-end job in a library who also translates articles for an international journal isin a very different situation from a teacher in Achit who knits a jumper for anacquaintance. In the first case, as seems to be common in cities, the ‘second’ jobis actually the more interesting and creative, as well as better paid. In the secondcase, the knitting commission is just an episode, a way of scraping together morecash. Commander and Yemtsov write that ‘secondary work does not necessarilyenable escape from poverty’.35

Lyudmila Belyaeva, citing her own and VTsIOM surveys, suggests that sec-ondary employment peaked in the mid-1990s and that more recently people haveacquired steady, decently paid jobs which remove the necessity for additionalearnings.36 However, in the small towns there are hardly any new types of job andadditional earnings are still welcome.

Small-town interviewees with special skills were keenly aware of the fact thatopportunities were limited in their towns. They made wistful comments like ‘in Tveryou can do private medical practice as well’ or ‘when I lived in Petropavlovsk I wasalways in demand as a translator’. Klopov’s data also suggests that people insmaller towns have more limited opportunities than those in cities for steady sec-ondary income,37 and the interviews completely bore this out. Additional earn-ings were almost always casual, one-off or short-term earnings. In Zubtsov in1999 there was said to be a single firm which sometimes required translatingwork, but by 2000 it had collapsed. Journalists sometimes helped produce elec-tion propaganda. One journalist gave technical advice to computer owners –though these are not commonplace in the small town. Art teachers could findoccasional commissions, and a number of music teachers gave private lessons,accompanied choirs and dance groups or played at weddings. The majority ofteachers, however, rarely reported paid extra work: most local parents could notafford to pay for tutoring for their children.38

The clearest point to emerge from the small towns was that some professionsoffered more opportunities than others. For example, as a chemistry teacher, it isdifficult to hold private lessons without your own laboratory, a problem not facedby 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 sta-tus. Zubtsov probably provides the most potential custom of the three towns, sinceit may well contain the greatest number of reasonably well-off businesspeoplewho profit from the informal construction industry. The most successful, andhighly exceptional, respondent was a Zubtsov mathematics teacher who earnedenough by coaching, before the financial crash of 1998, to afford a holiday in


Thailand. By 2000 she was hoping she might find a new job if a private collegeopened to coach children for university entrance; however, this college was still anidea, not a reality.

Additional earnings could also be derived from work which had nothing to dowith one’s professional qualifications. For example, bypassing Achit was themain road connecting Perm and Yekaterinburg, which had spawned a number ofcafes and hotels. One interviewee, who had a rich husband and a particularly largehouse, operated an occasional bed and breakfast service if her friend with a motelhad an excess of visitors. Another sold mushrooms by the roadside. Children froma school in Achit District were said to have sold enough mushrooms in summer2000 to buy their school clothes for the coming academic year. Interviewees alsohinted at prostitution along the road.

By contrast, the highways around Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk seemedrelatively uncommercialized, although when I travelled to Penza I saw manychildren’s bicycles for sale; presumably some bicycle factory workers had beenpaid in kind.

Elections were a time of particular opportunity, a time when rich people fromthe 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 particularcandidate in Achit in 1999. This was more than most people’s monthly salary, andtherefore money not to be sneezed at. One pensioners’ choir toured the local dis-trict giving concerts in aid of a rather unsavoury candidate who was suspected ofwanting to be a deputy to escape prosecution. I was told that the women had notactually voted for him. Other interviewees also expressed a rather cynical attitudetowards such activities. They would take money to stick up posters but not votefor the candidate. I had the impression that this was a way of paying back the citypoliticians for their usual neglect of the small towns.

Tikhonova and Shkaratan found that in the city 40 per cent of respondents weredoing jobs such as knitting, sewing, house repairs and car maintenance, oftenunpaid, for acquaintances, as a mixture of additional earnings and mutual favoursnetwork.39 Interviewees in the small towns occasionally mentioned odd jobs suchas knitting or repairs. For example, ‘When I was a schoolteacher I used to surviveby doing carpentry jobs for the school and for acquaintances.’An electrical engineersupplemented a tiny regular income by fixing electrical problems for NewRussians. Other jobs were more minor and irregular. The unpaid aspect of someof these odd jobs, or their ‘symbolic’ payment in the form of a box of chocolatesor a jar of honey, is significant: they buy social capital, the right to a future favourin exchange.

Within the local community certain members enjoy particular social capital byvirtue of their usefulness and/or influence: teachers and doctors obviously fallinto the category of people to be propitiated.40 Doctors and teachers do not nec-essarily need to seek secondary work if they receive a lot of ‘presents’, and thisis often mentioned as a reason why Russians are willing to become doctorsdespite the pitiful salaries. In the small town grateful patients and parents cannotusually be in a position to give much. I did not question my respondents about


presents, but sometimes they made revealing comments, as in the case of thehospital director who ‘could always find someone to mend her car’. (She sat inan office plastered with huge and expensive birthday cards.) Some parents inZubtsov did up their children’s classroom, which delighted the teacher, whodescribed it as a ‘present’. One doctor, talking about her friendship with localentrepreneurs, mentioned how this made her uncomfortable. She could never besure how disinterested the friendship really was. However, the fact that doctorsand teachers are working huge quantities of overtime suggests that they cannotactually depend on presents to supplement their incomes sufficiently.

Working overtime on a regular basis is both an accessible and a socially accept-able way of earning extra income, and, if one is a specialist in short supply, a methodfor doing a service to one’s workplace and local community. The interviewees whoworked overtime were all doctors or teachers. In Achit, the head of the educationdepartment suggested that half the teachers were working more than one and a halftimes their contract hours apiece,41 for example, by teaching remedial classes in theafternoons or simply cramming their free periods with extra teaching. The threemale doctors interviewed in Achit were all working 2–3 ‘shifts’; two senior womendoctors in Bednodemyanovsk, with young children and unemployed/absenthusbands, 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 extrawork clearly contributed significantly to some respondents’ family finances. Asenior teacher in Achit on double hours earned 2,000 rubles – a respectable salaryby local standards and enough to contribute towards university tuition fees for herdaughter. Another teacher, working one and a half times her contract hours inBednodemyanovsk, and probably earning about 1,100 rubles, was able to supporther househusband, school-age daughter and disabled son. The husband had beenoffered a job at a local college, but his, presumably single salary, would not havecovered the cost of a nanny for the disabled child.

Improving qualifications

Given the cost of university education, retraining was a large financial commit-ment. Nonetheless, in Achit, where many teachers did not have degrees, seventeachers were studying for extra-mural degrees.42 Those I interviewed were pri-mary teachers, intending to requalify as secondary schoolteachers. They hopedthat, when mass redundancies hit the schools, teachers with university degreeswould be safe. Schoolteachers in Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov almost all haddegrees, 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 Sovietand, in most respects, comfortable ‘survival strategy’. A newspaper editor inAchit claimed that the local government offices were full of female ex-teachersand doctors. The local government employees interviewed in the three towns were


generally satisfied with their career move, although one pointed out that there wasa gulf between the ordinary employees and the bosses. Only the latter were reallyfeathering their nests, while the ordinary staff were paid only slightly more thantheir old colleagues in the schools and cultural institutions, which meant ‘five tosix times less’ than senior officials. One teacher observed that the soaring ofsenior local government salaries had affected her family life. In Soviet days sheand her husband, an official, had been equal, but now he took advantage of hisstatus as main breadwinner and expected her to do all the housework.

One newly prestigious career was the police. It was mentioned a number oftimes as an attractive career for school-leavers, partly because wage arrears hadnot been so bad as in some other sectors, and also because it offered a gateway tolegal 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 detec-tive, despite the fact that she had given up studying for her law degree. The othertwo worked in the passport office.

Working as an employee in the private sector

Some unemployed parents, spouses and siblings of interviewees had found jobsin 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 twointerviewees with senior and apparently well-paid jobs in the private sector, onein a construction company in Zubtsov and the other on a fruit wine farm inBednodemyanovsk. Such jobs are very scarce.

Setting up a business

‘If you don’t have relatives to depend on, going into business is sometimes theonly thing to do’, said one young woman in Zubtsov. A number of respondentsalso pointed out that ‘people who tried to go into business got their fingersburned’. The interviewees’ stories illustrated both the sense of ‘no choice’, whichdetermined decisions to set up as an entrepreneur and the high failure rate.

The two businesswomen interviewed were both ex-teachers in Achit. One soldtoiletries in the market and said that she thought she probably earned about as muchas her husband, a senior teacher. The goods were purchased in Yekaterinburg,although before August 1998 she had travelled to Moscow. The second woman saidshe did massage, although other local people described her as a faith healer. This atleast had the merits of originality in Achit, although it may not be a path to successin Moscow where local newspapers are full of advertisements by people ‘with magicpowers’. She was able to maintain an extended family. Both women, however, werebitter and depressed.

The three successful businessmen kept foodshops in Zubtsov and Bednode-myanovsk. Two were former teachers, whose wives had been threatened withredundancy at the same time as teachers’ salaries had become small and uncer-tain; the third was a teacher’s son who had worked as an electrician and got tired


of trying to live on his tiny wage. The three men were all very positive and theirbusinesses 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. Fourwomen interviewed, who were married to businessmen (a former sailor, lawyer,driver, and surveyor) seemed to live much better than their colleagues, as theythemselves tended to comment.

However, the handful of success stories should be seen against a backdropof many failed attempts to set up small businesses. Sillaste, citing nation-wideopinion polls, suggests that as many as 11 per cent of Russian women had triedto set up a business, but only a quarter had succeeded. She suggests that in theprovinces 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 toset up in business, but only one in ten had successes – often because of the impos-sibility of getting credit.44 A study in rural areas of Nizhnii Novgorod Regionfound 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 importantreasons, in descending order of frequency, high taxes, racketeering on the part ofgovernment officials, lack of demand (because of local poverty) and the difficultyof getting credit.45

These were precisely the problems mentioned by respondents in Achit, Zubtsovand Bednodemyanovsk. Credit, for example, was a pressing problem.46 The onlyinterviewees who mentioned having big loans currently were both senior man-agers and both were using the money for improving their living conditions, notbusiness. One failed businesswoman who had had a loan had had to pay 120 per centinterest. Lack of connections in the right places is another cause of failure. In allthree towns the person labelled by several or many respondents as the town’s lead-ing businessperson was a former party official or other nomenklaturist.47 Peoplewithout 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 busi-ness 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 givenfor 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 dis-tasteful, only in order to obtain a place on a prestigious Moscow course for theirdaughter. Another respondent, a former teacher, and her husband, a former engi-neer, had purchased a village shop, despite also much disliking trade: they feltcompelled 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 familyresponsibility, 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 psycho-logical barriers, connected to entrenched identities and/or prejudice that involvementin business was somehow unbecoming. Interviewees in Achit, Bednodemyanovskand Zubtsov claimed to feel squeamish about going into business: one response was


‘I couldn’t possibly trade; I’m embarrassed even to sell some of my spare sourcream.’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 byfalling back on an essentialist argument, saying that trading was not ‘for them’.Whether you went into business depended on an innate predisposition: the ‘tradingstreak’ (torgovaya zhilka). That this business personality could even be inheritedwas suggested by a teacher, who explained that her mother-in-law had even inSoviet days displayed the trading streak, hence the teacher’s husband had alwaysyearned to be a tradesman, and had eventually opened his own shop.

Migration49

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 alreadymoved to Moscow Region and he was planning to follow in their footsteps. Ayoung Zubtsov librarian mentioned the same phenomenon – her friends had goneto 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 avocational college in the city of Penza, to become cooks, seamstresses and con-struction workers. The college was obliged to find them work after graduation,presumably in Penza. The director of Zubtsov Children’s Home tours round TverRegion, scouting for jobs for his older pupils outside Zubtsov District. The headof the vocational college in Achit said that almost all the girls who had graduatedin 2000 had left Achit, for Krasnoufimsk, Perm, Yekaterinburg or even the FarEast, while the boys had gone into the army.50 Interviewees mentioned young menleaving to become security guards in the regional capital.

Despite all the difficulties involved, some small-town children do still becomeuniversity 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 inTver. The figure was only about 15 per cent in Achit.51 However, this does notguarantee permanent exit. As already mentioned, respondents’ unemployed chil-dren, in all three towns, often returned to the small town after graduating. Forexample, one 62-year-old woman was still working as a teacher to support herson, an unemployed engineer in his thirties. She was sure that there was workavailable in Penza, but he could not afford to live there. Research in Orenburguncovered the same phenomenon. Students came to the teachers’ training collegein Orenburg (a regional capital) hoping to work in the city, but had to return totheir villages after graduation because of housing problems in Orenburg.52

Overall, the statistics for Sverdlovsk indicate that migration within the regionhas 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 movedout each year, according to the official statistics. In 1998, 2.6 per cent of the pop-ulation of Bednodemyanovsk town moved out; the figure for Zubtsov town was


2.1 per cent. Unfortunately, I have no figures for Achit town, but 3.1 per cent ofpeople in Achit District changed their place of residence in 1998. However, sincepeople were also coming into the three small towns – or perhaps moving backafter an unsuccessful attempt to flee the district – the net effect of migration flowswas very small compared to the overall population figure. Achit lost most over-all, no doubt because it was less successful at attracting incomers. Still, in Achitthe net loss was only about 0.5 per cent of the total population.53 The figuresinclude all migration, although, as was suggested in Chapter 2, in Sverdlovsk andPenza most migration is actually within the region, not to/from further afield. Itmay be assumed that migration was actually higher, perhaps considerably higherthan the official figures suggest, since, as Chapter 2 described, the 2002 censusrevealed that passport offices across Russia had massively underestimated thescale of the phenomenon.

When people in the small towns said that they would like to move but couldnot, 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 toserve in Chechnya. I was told by an employment service official that in threemonths the volunteers earned over a hundred thousand rubles – enough to buy aflat. Other forms of temporary/part-time migration are more traditional. Forexample, in Soviet days, too, men from small towns in the regions surroundingMoscow would go to the capital to labour on building sites. In 1999 ‘up to ahundred’54 Zubtsov men were said to commute to Moscow weekly or monthly,to work as drivers or in construction. Another respondent was under the impres-sion that ‘most’ men in Zubtsov worked in Moscow. Men in Achit often travel toTyumen Region, across the Urals, where a welder or asphalt layer can earn manytimes what he could hope to receive in Achit. The four respondents, described inAppendix 2, who were completely dependent on small-town pay packets all hadsignificant financial worries. Much more fortunate was ‘Raya’, whose father andbrother worked in Moscow.


1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

50,00055,00060,00065,00070,00075,00080,00085,00090,00095,000

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.

The system of commuting weekly or monthly does not seem to be an optionopen to women. Some women do try to set up individual arrangements, wherebythey live partly in the city and partly in the small town. For example, one 26-year-oldinterviewee thought that this was quite common among her generation. She men-tioned that her sister, having found a job in the city, had deposited her child withits grandmother in Zubtsov. The sister returned to visit the child more and morerarely. The cost of travel between small town and city is so high that on a normalsalary it is hardly cost-effective, as an individual, to commute. Men have the advan-tage of being more mobile than women, particularly given the almost ubiquitousassumption 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. InClarke’s words, the introduction of the term with reference to Third Worldeconomies was an attempt to move ‘away from the narrow perspective of the wage-earning breadwinner supporting a dependent family that is associated with a one-sided 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 thefact that, since the 1930s, almost all women have been employed in full-time paidwork. It can be used only if one subsumes paid employment under the heading ofa ‘survival strategy’, as has already been done in this chapter.

Kiblitskaya, Burawoy et al. and Clarke all put forward the hypothesis thatsurvival strategies are indeed largely part of the woman’s sphere. Burawoy et al.,for example, write that, ‘if women often dominated the household economy dur-ing the Soviet era, now they assume even greater importance, as men, with lim-ited access to the rewards of employment, become increasingly superfluous.’56

Kiblitskaya documents the depression men feel when they lose their ‘breadwin-ner status’, and their tendency to turn to the bottle. ‘The more the wife did, theless the husband did (and the more he drank).’57 By contrast, Kiblitskaya sug-gests, women are more responsible and flexible, more ready to take on ‘anyjob’.58 Arseeva agrees that ‘women are less fussy than men: they will accept anywork, even low-skilled and badly paid, and take on temporary or part-timework’.59 Wedel cites the example of the city of Tula, where the men continued towork in their factory jobs while their wives became shuttle traders.60

Among the interviewees in the three small towns, small market traders wereoften women, as is common in Russia. In two cases they were respondents’ mothers.More ambitious attempts at entrepreneurship, however, might be based on part-nership between spouses. There were three families in which both partners had setup in business together, although they had all failed.

The collapse of local industry provides plenty of cause for male marginaliza-tion in the small towns. However, in all three towns there was plenty of evidenceof men, not just new businessmen, busily involved in various survival strategies.


Male interviewees and husbands of interviewed women almost always labouredheavily in the vegetable garden and potato field. The shadow economy in thetowns, especially Zubtsov, with its emphasis on timber felling and house anddacha building, seemed to be very much a man’s world. However, it should benoted that both construction and gardening are seasonal work. Men were some-times sitting at home during the winter, a situation which could create its ownstresses.

Studies of secondary employment sometimes comment on the fact that menmore often have additional earnings. However, in the small-town sample the gen-der distinction, at least with reference to ‘intellectual additional earnings’, was notobservable. There were both men and women who claimed that they did not havetime for extra work; respondents of both sexes often said they wished they did haveextra 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 thatinvolvement in business automatically entails some contact with crime in con-temporary Russia. Hence it is important to be able to defend oneself physicallyand in general to ‘fit’, in what is perceived as a male culture of threats and vio-lence. By contrast, Sillaste suggests, women feel ‘alienated by hard-headed busi-nessmen and come up against male competition which takes violent and evenillegal forms’.61 However, perhaps violent crime is more often associated with bigbusiness in the cities; the small town atmosphere is rather different. Althoughrespondents mentioned the burden of paying racketeers, as mentioned earlier,they tended to blame high taxes and excessive regulation for their failure to suc-ceed in business, rather than the threat of violent crime. In general these were notperceived as violent communities, although in 2000 the apparently most flour-ishing Zubtsov businessman, who had in fact amassed substantial debts, wasseriously beaten up and hospitalized as a result.

It should be said that the successful businessmen in the sample were obviouslyhighly intelligent and very hard-working, and were held up by a number of otherinterviewees as examples of how not all entrepreneurs were criminals. Finally, inboth Zubtsov and Achit the business elite, such as it was, did include highlysuccessful women shop-owners, suggesting perhaps that the more peaceful cli-mate of the small town is favourable for women to succeed in business, unlike themore violent streets of the big city.

Is it an appropriate survival strategy for women to stay at home? If the cost ofchild care is very high, perhaps. Pascall and Manning suggest that a process of‘familialization’ may be occurring in postcommunist societies, as the statereduces childcare support and throws more of the burden onto families, which inpractice means women.62 However, in the small town child care was not usuallya problem, since most families have relatives nearby. Since people in the townstend to trust each other and because there is very little traffic, even tiny childrenwander about unsupervised, so there is less perceived need for child care thanwould be normal in the United Kingdom, for example.

If child care is required, kindergartens are still quite cheap, much cheaper thanin the city. For example, in Bednodemyanovsk, Kindergarten No. 1 cost parents


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 ofthe poor respondents sent their children to kindergarten, although one youngteacher, paying tuition fees to improve her prospects, did say it was ‘too expen-sive’. In Zubtsov there had been a decline of the kindergarten population in the1990s 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 wifesitting at home, as a kind of status symbol, perhaps aping television images of NewRussians and their wives in Moscow. However, it could be argued that it is equallya 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’timagine myself without work’ and said how frustrated they had felt while unem-ployed or on maternity leave. ‘Work is necessary. Domestic cares suck the energy outof you.’ ‘Women should work.’ Even though some women complained about theactual 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 pre-fer to have paid employment.65 Only a handful of small-town respondents evenhad the option of staying at home, but all had chosen to work. Of these, one wasworking part-time; another had gone back to work, which she enjoyed, aftera spell at home when ‘her family’ decided that it would be better for her to be afull-time mother and housewife; two others had taken on extra work over theobjections of their husbands, a relatively prosperous businessman and a seniorofficial, who would have preferred them not to work at all. Two businessmen anda male manager in a profit-making farm had, however, persuaded their wives tostay at home once they were making enough money to keep them. (‘I asked her tostay at home,’ said one. ‘I left her at home,’ said another, even more revealingly.)

Finally, household strategies could include the redistribution of domesticlabour between family members, for example, to allow women to access prof-itable secondary employment. Given that many of the interviewees lived in house-holds where the wife was more highly qualified than her husband, it might seemrational for him to make certain concessions so that she, for example, could workmore overtime. However, almost all respondents stated that the roles, whethermore or less equally distributed, were ‘just the same as before’: they had notvaried 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 kinder-garten, an achievement which his wife saw as surprising. These changes could bereversed when the man went back to work. Moreover, some unemployed hus-bands still refused to do housework, a refusal which naturally did not improverelations 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,


there are men who are prepared to cook meals, although washing clothes, forexample, is definitely women’s work.66 The small-town interviewees had similardivisions of responsibility to Russians surveyed in other studies. A majority ofrespondents claimed that the wife did more of the housework, but a large minoritysaid that roles were distributed equally. Further questioning of the type ‘And whowashes 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 impor-tantly, however, it was the women of the house, wives, grandmothers and daugh-ters, who had the task of processing the harvest, presumably often without anymechanical help. An interviewee who did possess an electric mixer mentioned itspecially, with particular glee.67 Only one woman, who seemed to have a partic-ularly equal relationship with her husband, described how they chopped up thefood together while watching television.

Respondents were also asked about how they conceptualized ‘MotherRussia’,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 enor-mous 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 atthe end. Local populations are so small that it is not surprising if rates fluctuateconsiderably from year to year, and it is rather meaningless to try to determinetrends. Figures 5.2–5.4 should therefore be treated with some caution.


7 6.1

7.78.1

6.96

8.8

6.96.1

8.4

4.5

2.33.13.83.23.43.3

22.12.4

0123456789

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

Marriages Divorces

Figure 5.2 Marriages and divorces per 1,000 population in Bednodemyanovsk town,1990–9.

Source: Goskomstat officials, Penza.

All the towns followed the Russian trend of declining marriages, but in Achitand Bednodemyanovsk divorce actually declined as well, though only from 2.4 to2.3 in the latter town, to rise in 1999. Without knowing more about the age struc-tures 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 numberof people in the relevant cohorts, which probably does more to explain the higherfigures than do the economic fortunes of the town in the postcommunist period.69


5.5

7.5

2.32.4

4.13.3

0

5

10

1989/90 1998

Achit 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’: demograficheskayasituatsiya, p. 60.

Note1989 figure is for Achit.

11.3

3.6

6.177

8.6

0

6

12

1989/90 1998

Achit 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’: demograficheskayasituatsiya, p. 60.

Note1989 figure is for Achit.

In their book Marriages in Russia, Vannoy et al. express surprise at their ownfindings. ‘The straightforward relationships we found are fairly remarkable at thistime of nationwide disruption and economic deprivation.’70 I began my researchwith similar expectations: surely families must either have fragmented or adaptedquite substantially in order to survive the problems of the economic transition. Infact, with a few exceptions, I found little evidence of change.

Among the sample, just a few women had divorced or separated in the last fewyears for reasons which may have been partly connected to the economic pressuresof the transition period, such as unemployment and the perceived necessity for mento seek work in another town. For example, one teacher complained about the atti-tude of her husband who was not, by her account, doing too badly as a teacher, withkarate lessons on the side. Nonetheless, he felt ‘useless’ and constantly depressed,particularly at the prospect that they could not afford to give their daughter highereducation. He had therefore recently found a job in a private firm in anotherex-Soviet republic; she, however, was reluctant to uproot the family and join him.

Some respondents complained about their husbands’ depression and drinkinghabits. A ramification of the drink problem is the impossibility of planning whatto do with monetary income: how can you have a strategy for making the kopecksstretch when your husband takes your money for vodka? One woman explainedthat 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 increas-ingly dependent on their wives, to the detriment of relationships within the family,creating the kind of vicious circle which Kiblitskaya described. One clear findingwas that male marginalization was particularly a problem in families where house-hold work was distributed very conventionally. For instance, a woman who hadquite a high-status job and the possibility of extra professional earnings was unableto find time for these: her husband, an ex-farm manager, whom she described asbeing very depressed at his downward social mobility, refused to contribute to thehousework. They were supporting two children and an unemployed son-in-law; hermonthly salary covered their expenses for no more than a week, so that she had toconstantly seek loans from her parents and parents-in-law. Clearly, in order for thewife to pursue a more entrepreneurial survival strategy, the couple would have hadto have agreed on a new strategy for dividing the domestic chores.

However, it would probably be unfair to blame the problems of these dysfunc-tional families entirely on the ‘transition’, except insofar as the general environ-ment of poverty exacerbated tensions. More often that not, the husband had notlost his job because of economic liberalization, but had simply retired, because hewas 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 isthat husbands, wives and – to a lesser extent – older children are forced by cir-cumstances to pool their labour on the family garden, spending their ‘leisuretime’ in a cooperative effort to secure their physical survival. A number of peoplementioned how important it was that this was a family activity, and in cases where


the woman had become the main or only breadwinner the husband did usuallylabour hard on the garden. Women reported arrangements such as ‘My husbanddigs, 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 onthe potato field.’71 Another woman said: ‘I do the housework and he does thegardening and that’s how it should be.’

Vannoy et al. suggest that male pride, though smarting at loss of breadwinnerstatus, is somewhat assuaged by work on the vegetable plot. ‘At least aroundPskov, the role of a man earning bread outside the family has been transformedinto his creating bread inside the family by working in the garden. Consequently,the “space” of earning and of housekeeping are combined. Although this situationmany inspire illusions about egalitarianism, it does not alter the fundamentalstructure of gender consciousness.’72

If most husbands did not help in the kitchen, neither did sons: it was consider-ably easier to be a mother of daughters. Children also helped in other ways; forexample, in one family the 8-year-old daughter went out to the forest on her bicy-cle to pick mushrooms for her family to eat and sell. In some cases there werestrained relations with adult children living at home, or their partners. This couldrelate to failure to put in their fair share of work on the vegetable garden. Adultchildren who tried to live separately, after quarrelling with parents, still neededother relatives to help them manage. One young pregnant woman who wasestranged from her mother relied on her grandmother, for example, to supply herwith 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 relativeslocally, 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 areessential personal resources in the small town. However, they can often be in shortsupply, particularly for women. (If men do engage in secondary work more oftenthan women, it may well be because they have more time than women.) Women’slack of time is not a new phenomenon. Russian women were forced to orient theirthoughts towards the survival of the household throughout the Soviet period, whenthey 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 theevening washing clothes by hand and doing other labour-intensive tasks. Hencetheir ‘double burden’ was often accompanied by sleep deprivation, as is illustratedvery strikingly in, for example, Baranskaya’s novella A Week Like Any Other.73 Inthe countryside, livestock and household plots put even more pressure on women.

The problem of lack of time remains acute. Respondents complained mostbitterly about the household plot. ‘It consumes all our free time’ or ‘I tend it before


work, after work, at weekends.’Women who had livestock to milk and feed, and/orwere regularly working overtime, were particularly hard-pressed. One teacher, forexample, described her survival strategy as ‘sleeping less’. She was supporting herhusband and two young children. The family had a large garden – 15 per cent of ahectare, cows and a hayfield. Even though the teacher’s husband did much of thehousework, she described her regime as being non-stop work from six in the morningto midnight every day. Other respondents, as has already been mentioned, wereworking 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 anessential asset for the pursuit of survival strategies. A librarian expressed whatwas 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 try-ing to work out how to feed my family, how to clothe my daughter, how and whereto buy cheap household goods.’ ‘I’ve no time to look after my health,’ said a womaneducation official bluntly.

A study of attitudes to health in the cities of St Petersburg, Pskov and Samaraconcluded that women were much more likely than men to visit the doctor, a find-ing 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 generalreluctance to use doctors, among both men and women. Hence it seems that inso-far as the average respondent survives, it is not by drawing on professional medicalhelp, which is seen as too expensive. It would be wrong to suppose, however, thatthey are not looking after themselves, since many use home remedies, gatheringherbs in the surrounding countryside. It is an advantage that the forest is relativelyclose 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 peri-odicals subscriptions, subscriptions to health magazines were increasing.75

A number of male respondents in their forties already had heart problems andwere pursuing rational behaviour strategies to avoid joining the mortality statistics.I did also encounter some more stereotypical male attitudes. One man who hadbeen to the hospital and taken the prescription to the chemists had been so shockedby 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 instressors (causes of stress), for both men and women.76 Of course, there were alsoplenty of stressors during the Soviet period. There seems little point in sterile argu-ments about which period was ‘worse’, but it is perhaps worth mentioning JudithShapiro’s suggestion that ‘in the past, Soviet Russian life might have been miser-able, 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


stressors since 1991, but also the general environment of unpredictability andfrequent change, which makes life so different from that in the Soviet period.

Although numerous stressors were discussed during the interviews, by farthe 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 anxietyabout whether next month’s salary would be paid or not. In interview, the womenin particular often expressed their stress at the impossibility of managing on suchlow and undependable money incomes. One woman burst into tears as shereported how her son had reproached his teacher father: ‘You have two degreesand yet you come to me cadging cigarettes.’ Another described her panic whenher telephone was disconnected for non-payment of bills.

Shkolnikov et al. show that Russian divorced women live longer than marriedwomen, and, referring to Dobrovolskaya, suggest that they ‘live in better condi-tions than married women, because they do not carry the burden of looking aftera husband’.78 None of the small-town sample had adopted divorce as a survivalstrategy, although there was plenty of evidence that husbands created stress.Demographic trends can in themselves be stressful. It is not comfortable to livein a society where so many middle-aged men are dying – either for men them-selves, or for their family members. By far the most common family stressorswere not, however, husbands, but children, and more specifically, worries abouteducation, especially higher education. Of course, this was a sample of profes-sional 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 con-siderable local concern. Higher education stood out as the most commonresponse when interviewees were asked what worried them most, thinking abouttheir children’s future. Military service was also often mentioned, particularly thefear that sons might be sent to Chechnya.

The extent of financial and family stressors was indicated by the contrastdrawn between family life and work. Following a number of comments inZubtsov along the lines of ‘At work we have a rest from everyday life’, ‘an escapefrom the family and housework’, the 2000 questionnaire invited respondents inAchit and Bednodemyanovsk to comment on whether work could be seen as a‘rest’ from domestic cares. Just 25 of the 100 interviewees disagreed with thisstatement. Eight were men, in some cases with wives ‘sitting at home’, and elevenwere women with no children, or grown-up children.

On the other hand, most interviewees – notably the mothers – fully sympa-thized with the statement that work could be a rest from domestic cares. To someextent 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 cur-rent conditions in the small town. They made comments like ‘teaching is moreinteresting than housework . . .Things are hard at work, but at home it’s evenworse’; ‘you forget yourself at work’; ‘housework is unending, so, yes, work is arest’. One respondent, mentioning the migraines which afflicted her when herdebts began to mount, pointed out that in this situation she usually tried to divert


her thoughts: work was the first destination. Other women quoted without ironythe Soviet phrase ‘Going to work is a holiday’. Ashwin and Bowers’ research onwomen workers found the same attitudes and even language.79

The workplace could, of course, be in itself a source of stress. Managers feltthis particularly strongly. Another highly stressed group were teachers in Achit,partly, no doubt, because so many were working overtime, but also because of theparticular 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 themain reason teachers there were ‘at a loss’ was because of frequent changes in thesyllabus and the absence of the old Soviet-era framework.

Doctors were another stressed group, perhaps partly, again, because most ofthem were working overtime. However, a paediatrician also said that she felt morestressed nowadays because parents, having only one child, invested such emo-tional attachment into that relationship that doctors felt more anxious than everbefore about not making mistakes.

Interviewees in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked directly aboutwhether their lives had become more stressful in recent years and, if so, whetherthis was connected to the reforms of the 1990s and the greater insecurity of lifewhich 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 ofher student years in a violent quarter of Yekaterinburg. Seven other women saidthey did not feel particularly or at all stressed: all were younger women, aged19–32. (The fact that the younger women felt less stressed might derive from theirgreater sense of control over their own lives, as suggested by New RussianBarometer data.)81 A few, also younger, women said that stress derived chieflyfrom personal problems, unconnected to the economic reforms. However, mostrespondents agreed wholeheartedly that life had become more stressful becauseof 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 thestatement that life had become more stressful because they had clearer memoriesof the Soviet period. It was harder for younger women to make meaningful com-parisons with the past. However, it may also be that the middle-aged and olderwomen actually experience more stressors, either as mothers of older children(with higher education and military service looming or actual realities), orbecause of their sense of downward social mobility.

There was a clear gender divide. Only two of the male respondents were under30, and both admitted to feeling stressed, perhaps being less inhibited aboutadmitting it than were older men. Older men were much less likely than womento admit to feeling stressed.

Displaced people were particularly vulnerable to stress. Migrants from majorcities in the Near Abroad had a particular sense of the danger of losing a part oftheir identity. As Hilary Pilkington points out in her book on Russian migrants,


they form a ‘distinct socio-cultural group’, prone to a ‘superiority complex . . .vis-à-vis the local Russian population’.82 Pilkington also suggests that womenfind it particularly hard to adapt to Russian rural life; this was certainly true oftwo women doctors from Central Asia, who ‘did nothing but cry’ after their firstarrival, while their menfolk soon came to enjoy the local culture of fishing andhunting. A former lecturer, now a local government employee, explained that sheand her husband only realized what cultural life they had enjoyed in Dushanbewhen they moved to Zubtsov. Two artists from Dushanbe spoke of their curiousfeeling of being less linked to European culture in Zubtsov than in Tadzhikistan(where they had been devotees of smuggled English rock music in the Sovietperiod). A similar situation affected a piano teacher from Baku, who was dreamingof retiring to Moscow to live with her son and go to concerts.

The faith healer from Kazakstan most bitterly expressed a sense of downwardsocial 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 theforest.’ One woman who arrived in Zubtsov from Dushanbe in 1990, and com-pletely opted out of community life in the small town, said that she felt the wholedecade 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 tobuffer them from the effects of stressors. They draw on stereotypes of Russianwomen as being particularly strong and maternal. ‘Women, who because of eco-nomic causes are also drawn into public employment, usually have a traditionalsphere of concerns: domestic duties, the family, children, a husband and parents.These imbue their life with a sense of purpose and a feeling of responsibilitywhich up to a certain point serve as a defence from social stress and may com-pensate for its consequences.’83 Although one should be suspicious about theassumption that Russian women can put up with anything, these observations doring true. Peggy Watson argues a similar case for explaining the gendering ofsurvival in Eastern Europe.84 On the other hand, the responses mentioned earliersuggest that Shkolnikov’s assumption should to some extent be reversed: the fam-ily (particularly in the senses of its attendant material problems, and the amountof domestic labour it generates) may be the chief stressor. In this case the survivalstrategy, for mothers, is to assert one’s role in the public (professional) sphere.

Whether they are located in the family or the workplace, however, healthycoping 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 ofguarding against damage from stressors. Cockerham suggests that ‘the evidenceis overwhelming that people with the strongest level of social support have fewerhealth problems’.85

When asked to identify their own individual coping mechanisms, the womeninterviewees most often mentioned socializing with family and friends, particu-larly women friends and colleagues. Other solaces were gardening, reading,walking in the woods, fishing, listening to the church choir, playing the piano,


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) sampleof 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 dis-cussing the topic of stress in detail, or made comments along the lines of ‘I usemy willpower’ or ‘I am a relaxed person’. (In the case of this particular respon-dent, the explanation was unconvincing.) In conclusion, the pattern of genderedcoping mechanisms seemed rather as the mortality statistics might suggest:women were relying more on social support and men were not using helpfulcoping 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 onlya stressor, but also a welcome change from indoor work, and a creative occupation.Being intellectuals, interviewees often had flats well stocked with books aboutplants. The other very important benefit which men and women shared was sup-portive relations at work, at least within the particular intelligentsia institutionsstudied. ‘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 entrepre-neurs may have felt more isolated than the male interviewees.) Research in NizhniiNovgorod Region – not just among professional people – also found a strong senseof good relations between colleagues.87

Professional people in the small towns did not bond with their colleagues (andsometimes their colleagues’ families) by any particularly intellectual pursuits. Asalready suggested, they swapped seedlings and children’s clothes, and made smallloans. They also celebrated festivals and birthdays together, even if this meant justeating some cabbage and potatoes – though other respondents did mention cakeand champagne. One local government official said that things had improved inthe sense that nowadays no one minded if you drank alcohol at work. Teachersoften sang together in teachers’ choirs and performed in amateur theatricals withtheir pupils. ‘It cheers us up,’ said one. Even the senior administrators in one townput on their tracksuit bottoms and went berry picking together. Friends and familiestook steam baths at their dachas. Drinking, singing and bathing are effective devicesfor bringing people together.

The head of the special school in Achit claimed that this sense of solidarity hadbeen maintained even during the long months when salaries were not paid,although teachers in the main school in Achit said that relations had souredbecause of arguments about whether to go on strike.

Obviously, in a small town it is easier to reinforce such bonds, since one’s col-leagues are also one’s neighbours, the people with whom one swaps spare sugarand 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 asituation where informal networks are so important, it makes sense to keep upgood relations, and, as Chapter 3 suggested, most respondents did feel a sense ofgood will and trust in their neighbours.


However, is this the end of the story? Can one be complacent that copingmechanisms in the small town, particularly women’s coping mechanisms, willensure their survival? Research by Gurko into the lives of Russian single motherssuggested that 48 per cent of the sample were suffering from stress. Most were cop-ing, chiefly by drawing on their families, their own internal resources and, morerarely, religion; however, 10 per cent were in a state of ‘crisis’.88 Some of the small-town respondents also seemed to be in crisis, saying that they had no coping mech-anisms: ‘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 suf-fering because of stress. They complained of headaches, high blood pressure, heartand 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 thepolice; another woman, who had worked in a short-stay children’s refuge, developedwhat she described as a ‘form of epilepsy’. In both cases doctors attributed theillness to stress.

Extended families, networks and social capital

Social capital, particularly the use of networks, is a resource which many scholarshave 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 relicof Soviet days, hindering the creation of a rule-bound, ‘modern’ society. On theother hand, networks are also seen as a valid response to the uncertainties andimperfections of Russia’s new ‘market economy’: both useful and appropriate to thecultural 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 net-working was changing. ‘Considerations of self-interest and mutual profit’ arereplacing the ‘rhetoric of friendship’, and there is a greater tendency to rely onfamily members, not neighbours or friends.90 This part of the chapter examineswhether such processes characterized the networks of small-town interviewees.

Colleagues, friends and neighbours

The importance of colleagues has already been noted, for relieving stress, makingsmall loans, donating old children’s clothes, etc. Cooperative relations with col-leagues are important in many situations. For example, women market traders inAchit 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 the1990s, thanked her colleagues for helping her son to receive medical treatment inMoscow. A schoolteacher, who went to Yekaterinburg to buy a fur coat and hadher purse stolen, was able to buy one eventually because her colleagues clubbedtogether and raised the money. Family funerals were also mentioned as appropriateoccasions for colleagues to help out.


Neighbours and friends were still significant resources for some respondents.Interviewees were both customers and providers of paid services/favours such asdressmaking commissions, sales/swaps of sugar and honey, etc. Networks couldextend beyond the limits of the local town. For example, one woman gave birth ina neighbouring city, where a friend was a doctor; at the same time, the family gota cheap television through the doctor’s colleague. Networks of former classmatescan be durable: a 46-year-old man in Zubtsov was intending to attend a schoolreunion in Murmansk Region; a woman who had moved to Zubtsov fromPetrozavodsk via Vladivostok remarked that ‘It’s much easier in life if you stay inone place, the place where your schoolfriends are.’

Relatives

The research, however, suggested the pre-eminent role, as social capital, of goodstanding with relatives, rather than friends or neighbours, or access to communityorganizations. ‘You can’t manage without relatives in Russia today,’ as onerespondent put it. This is nothing new; for example, Soviet pensioners regularlyhelped their children, as still happens. ‘In most cases, research indicates thatpensioners, although close to or below the poverty line, often provide wealthtransfers in cash and kind to impoverished adult children and their families.’91

Even the poorest respondents did tend to have some support from family andrelatives, and this is crucial to their survival. In the small town extended familynetworks are perhaps even more important than in the city because farming toprovide over half of a household’s food needs requires considerable input of timeand labour – often more than can be spared by the typical nuclear family withboth parents in full-time work. Family members shared land with relatives wholived in hostels or flats. Some respondents spoke of ‘sharing’ a piglet or a bullwith relatives.

It was interesting that in Bednodemyanovsk four quite ‘ordinary’ respondentshad built their own houses recently, or were in the process of doing so. Often theycould only build with considerable support from relatives. This typically ruralcustom 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 Zubtsovmore housing in blocks of flats had become available in the 1990s. However, oneapparently rather poor family of migrants from Central Asia – presumably withcomparatively restricted networks – had been struggling for ten years to build ahouse 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 haveguests in the house.’ It made sense for everyone, if possible, to take part in birth-day celebrations and weddings, wakes and the various mourning ceremonies atthe appropriate intervals after a death. This was the course followed by one notparticularly wealthy couple, a teacher and an engineer, with two children anda large extended family. They had a car and were constantly travelling around


their relatives, supplying their many urban kinfolk with food, or digging theirpotato patch in an in-law’s village. They would borrow money if necessary to goto a wedding.

The very poor households had stopped seeing friends and relations. One librar-ian interviewee had not even been able to make the trip from Zubtsov to Kareliato her mother’s funeral. A petty trader expressed her sorrow that she could notvisit her sick mother-in-law in the neighbouring region; her teacher husband anddaughter had had to borrow money to go and see her. Another teacher and herretired husband could not afford weddings for their two children, a situationwhich may help to explain why so many more children are born outside marriagein Russia today.

However, not meeting up with one’s relatives and friends condemn people toa spiralling downward cycle of deprivation: if they cannot give, they will notreceive. Burawoy et al. use the term ‘domestic involution’ to describe the closing-inof poor households in Syktyvkar.93 Shirokalova writes about the ‘domesticiza-tion’ of leisure time.94 In some ways such terms do seem to describe the situationof at least the poorest and most depressed respondents, who increasingly identi-fied themselves only as members of their immediate families and whose thoughtswere focused largely on the household plot and other ‘minimalist’ survival strate-gies. On the other hand, in the small town involution cannot be total: it is difficultto avoid being at least to some extent engaged in the life of the local community.Moreover, as already suggested, jobs and workplaces remained very significantto people’s identities.

Conclusions

This chapter has argued that the respondents did pursue survival strategies, ifstrategies are understood very modestly as coping plans made within the contextof limited options, including cultural constraints. By contrast, survival should beunderstood broadly. It does encompass avoiding starvation, in cases where fami-lies had no cash income, because of wage arrears, and were almost completelydependent 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 othertypes of survival, notably trying to maintain a standard of living more nearlyapproximating that which was enjoyed before the decline in purchasing power ofsalaries 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 pursuetheir professional careers. Sometimes strategies have still more ambitious goals –notably the survival of the family’s intelligentsia identity, by purchasing highereducation.

Survival also has a health dimension. Growing one’s own vegetables is seen asproviding nutritious food and as a remedy for stress. Stress is a major threat toRussians today, but women in particular seemed to have well-developed copingmechanisms to help them survive the stress generated by family and financial wor-ries. In particular, they drew on social support from family, friends and colleagues.


Men, especially older men, seemed less ready to acknowledge and guard againststress, which may help explain their greater susceptibility to heart disease andother stress-related illness.

In many respects the survival strategies of intelligentsia respondents were nodifferent from other small-town residents. They limited themselves to just onechild per family, ate modestly and tended their plots, usually just to feed their ownfamily, with no intention of selling the produce. They made and received smallloans. Interviewees’ husbands went off to Moscow or Chechnya, and they them-selves picked up odd additional earnings unconnected with their professionalskills. Only a few types of profession opened the possibility of skilled secondaryemployment: the range of opportunities was limited compared with that in thecity. 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 thantrading were ‘strategies’ which destroyed the local environment, such as theft oftimber and power lines.

There are so many permutations of household composition, primary employ-ment and survival strategy that it is hard to generalize about the ingredients ofsuccessful or failing survival strategies in the small towns. Everyone depends ontheir household plot to some extent, but for poorer families it is central to sur-vival. In the more prosperous households either one spouse had gone into busi-ness or local government/police, or there were better opportunities for extra shiftsat 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 thewider circle of family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. Strategies dependedupon exchanging favours with an extended network of relatives, friends andacquaintances. The cultivation of good relations with neighbours, friends and col-leagues seemed to characterize the small towns and this made their networksseem more ‘Soviet’ (in the sense of being based on a rhetoric of friendship) thanthe city networks analysed by Ledeneva. Nonetheless, the role of relatives waspre-eminent, and this was one reason why households often did better if they werebased on a couple, with two sets of relatives. City relatives could be a burden inthat they often required supplying with food produced on the household plot,though no doubt favours were offered in return. The poorest households wereoften those which felt unable to make visits, receive guests or travel: in otherwords, they were retreating out of networks, which left them still more vulnerableto extreme poverty.

In poorer families, where there was often only one, female breadwinner, it wasmuch harder for her to find time for entrepreneurial survival strategies. In suchfamilies, if there was still a husband, he had often suffered a decline in status, andwhere the household division of labour was gendered in traditional fashion, thiscould 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 atleast two adults involved in running the household plot must be a powerful reason


keeping families together. As Vannoy et al. suggest, it may be that if the husbanddug the garden this was partly an acceptable substitute for doing more aroundthe house. However, men rarely carried full responsibility for the garden. Women,in particular, processed the harvest, even if they were also the main or onlybreadwinners.

Other material survival strategies are also gendered to some extent. Only menseemed to work for informal construction companies (despite the fact that Sovietwomen were often builders). Temporary out-migration is much better organizedfor 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 inthe city. There is no point in women staying at home to look after the children ifcheap or free child care is still accessible. Moreover, the lower crime rates in thesmall towns may make business seem more attractive to women. Achit andZubtsov both contained conspicuous examples of successful businesswomen.Becoming a boss was a traditional Soviet entrepreneurial strategy, and one whichwas not closed to women. In Achit the local government offices were said to bestaffed largely by women, and, as Chapter 7 suggests, in both Achit and Zubtsovmost of the managers of intelligentsia institutions were also women.

Overall, however, it was hard for most respondents to find entrepreneurialstrategies. The very limited development of the private sector in these smalltowns, and the constraints on its development, are the main factors limiting theimplementation of entrepreneurial survival strategies. This is why, as Chapter 4suggested, 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 medicaltreatment.


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 bringculture to the people.

(House of culture employee)

If teachers were paid 5,000 rubles a month I could be a member of the intelli-gentsia.

(Deputy headteacher)

Introduction

Chapter 1 illustrated that, in the course of the 1990s, Russian society becamemore unequal, both vertically, if measured by incomes and Gini coefficients, andin terms of geographical disparities. The proportion of poor people increasedconsiderably.

Why did this happen? The question can be answered on the level of governmentpolicy and macroeconomic trends, but it can also be answered on a micro-level byexamining individuals and their readiness to change and take advantage of the newsituation or, conversely, their passivity and tendency to ‘lose out’. Opinion surveysoften 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 individ-uals, who frequently feel that the cards are stacked against them. This is despitethe fact that in the late Soviet period, too, the link between merit and prosperitywas not particularly clear-cut, and social mobility was declining. However, themythology was different.1

Sentiments of injustice are often expressed in discussions about whether, if atall, a new middle class is forming in Russia. On the one hand is the old Sovietintelligentsia, in other words, people with higher education and professionalskills, who might be expected to ‘merit’ inclusion in a new middle class, but who,

6 The intelligentsia, the ‘middleclass’ and social stratification

The intelligentsia and middle class 143

because of poverty and lack of political influence, feel themselves sociallyexcluded. On the other hand is a tiny section of society whose living standards doperhaps approximate to those of middle-class Westerners, but which is less welleducated than the first group and widely considered to be more criminal. Toenhance the divide between the majority of the intelligentsia and the NewRussians, the latter live in Moscow and other big cities.2 Balzer argues that it isnot necessary to confine the label middle class to those Russians with Westernlifestyles; consequently, he is able to argue that the middle class is more sizeablethan is often assumed. However, though Balzer mentions the need to includeprovincial people, he really only considers inhabitants of cities.3

Russian sociologists have tried to understand the process of stratificationwhich took place in the 1990s4 and to count and identify the new middle ‘stra-tum’, which some argue cannot be glorified by the label ‘class’.5 A recent bookby sociologist Lyudmila Belyaeva, for example, looks at Russians who identifythemselves as middle-class. She suggests that about 9.4 per cent of the populationmight be labelled as such and 3.4 per cent had living standards which approxi-mated to those of Western middle-class people, while 6 per cent were makingends meet but could not be described as prosperous. In both groups, young andyounger middle-aged men were especially well represented, as were city dwellers.The richer group contained more Muscovites and more people without a univer-sity degree, possessing only a vocational (‘secondary specialist’) diploma.

A further 11.4 per cent of respondents considered that they had a middlingstandard of living, but could not really be called a middle class. Belyaeva termsthem a ‘middling mass’. In this group there were more women, more people with-out university degrees, and more inhabitants of smaller towns.6

Is ‘middling mass’ a good description for small-town professionals? What hashappened to the intelligentsia – has it simply merged into one with other middle-income 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 classin Russia because they are plagued by normative (ethnocentric, romantic elitist,anti-intellectual, anti-Soviet, ageist, etc.) positions.7 There are a number of com-mon assumptions. There ‘should’ be a Western-style middle class if Russia is tobecome a ‘normal’/’civilized’ country with a real ‘transition’. Members of theintelligentsia are the most deserving members of society and businessmen arecriminals. Members of the intelligentsia have only themselves to blame if theycannot adapt. The intelligentsia is an obsolete concept anyway, because it meansso much more than just professional people: it suggests a certain intellectual bag-gage (including hostility to business), which needs to be thrown overboard. Youngpeople are better adapted to postcommunism and it is only a matter of time beforethe 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 alsohighly 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 developmentin non-Western countries generally, they also have roots in Russian history and

culture: the classic nineteenth-century arguments of ‘fathers and children’ andSlavophiles and Westernizers, and the old question of ‘Who is to blame?’8 Whenthe ingredients ‘Moscow versus the provinces’ and ‘big town/small town’ areadded, a heady potion is concocted. Interviewees often became quite stressed whenthe interview reached the point of discussing the intelligentsia.

Since Small-Town Russia is looking at the obstacles and opportunities, whichdetermine how far people can adapt their livelihoods and identities to survive post-communism, it has to engage with such assumptions and issues. For example, toreturn to the problem, discussed in Chapters 4–5, of who survives and succeeds inthe small town: are self-perceptions about intelligentsia identity a barrier or a gate-way to success? Do young people feel less ‘encumbered’ by Soviet identities? Is itreally true that there are no points of contact between the intelligentsia and the NewRussians or is the small-town intelligentsia to some extent intertwined with the newentrepreneurial 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 amongthe city dwellers studied by Ledeneva, that ‘everyone is strongly attracted to theirown strata’ and ceasing to associate with others?9 How, if at all, is the intelligentsiafostering civic consciousness and creating some kind of modern ‘civil society’?

Chapter 7 will look at what the intelligentsia does for the local community, andwhether ‘civil society’ is emerging in the small town. Chapter 6, after some intro-ductory comments about the development and perceived decline of the Russianintelligentsia, looks at the small-town intelligentsia’s family links to the rest of thelocal community and at its perceptions about intelligentsia identities and roles. Itexamines the issue of how far there is an overlap between the communist, intelli-gentsia and business elites, and discusses relations between the intelligentsia andthe business community.

The focus in this chapter will be on how far the intelligentsia has been chang-ing and adapting successfully. This seems a more fruitful approach than to define‘middle class’ using some Western definition and to measure the small-townintelligentsia 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 fromboth the ruling elite and the masses, the narod. Towards the elite, the attitude wasone of criticism and, in the case of revolutionaries, active opposition. Towards themasses, 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 non-peasants and non-workers, but, despite rhetoric about a harmonious society, somesense of gap and otherness persisted. This was despite the extinction of the oldintelligentsia under Stalin. The new Soviet intelligentsia was overwhelminglyconformist, at least outwardly, but the regime continued to view it with suspicion,and this attitude seemed retrospectively justified when, during the Gorbachevperiod, the intelligentsia elite, in both capital and provinces, took on the mantle

144 The intelligentsia and middle class


of its pre-revolutionary predecessors, leading and directing a wave of criticismagainst the Soviet regime. Identification with the pre-revolutionary intelligentsiaand those persecuted under Soviet power was strengthened by glasnost-era publi-cations of hitherto banned masterpieces by writers such as Mandelstam andPasternak. The peak of intelligentsia influence came with the election of thou-sands of professional people to parliaments and local councils in multicandidateelections in 1989–90. Being a ‘democratic’ professor or historian seemed apassport to political influence.10

The death of the intelligentsia

Writing about how Russian society has changed since the end of the communistregime, Russians often claim that the intelligentsia is ‘dying’ or ‘dead’11 – butwhat does this really mean?

Shrinking numbers are, supposedly, a part of the story. The number of peopleworking in traditional intelligentsia occupations is asserted to have declinedbecause of redundancies and resignations. For example, more than 2.2 millionpeople are said to have left academia in the 1990s (of whom just over half wereresearchers).12 Those who argue that numbers are falling also refer to the ‘braindrain’ of talented mathematicians, physicists and other scholars to university jobsabroad, especially from Moscow and Petersburg.13 However, it is not clear that,apart from among researchers, numbers really have shrunk. Certainly, this is notsuggested by the national statistics. For example, as Chapter 1 pointed out, therewere 45 per cent more university teachers in 2001 than in 1990.14 If one consid-ers just the percentage of the workforce with university degrees, it is obvious thatthe intelligentsia, defined very narrowly, is growing in size, from 16.1 per cent in1992 in 21.6 per cent in 2000.15 As Chapter 1 suggested, the fall in student num-bers in the first part of the 1990s was a short-lived phenomenon. Schoolchildrentoday are enthusiastic about going into higher education.16

Another aspect of the supposed decline is that talented young people are saidnot to want to go into traditional state intelligentsia occupations, such as teach-ing. In the school year 1999–2000 there were 5,400 vacancies for teachers of for-eign languages and 1,200 for history, law and social studies.17 With a foreignlanguage, for example, it is tempting to work in the private sector as a translatoror interpreter.18 However, even if these people do manage to escape teaching andget private sector jobs – which is not always easy – they are still professionals.

Many Russian sociologists comment on the declining social status of the intel-ligentsia.19 The political influence of the intelligentsia elite is much reduced sincethe glasnost period and the first years of Yeltsin’s regime. Declining status isseen, too, as being a much wider phenomenon, related to an influx of materialistvalues, which mean that people do not value intellectual labour. There is a largedose of political rhetoric in many of these arguments, which are essentially anti-capitalist; however, this does not necessarily mean that they are untrue, andevidence is adduced, for example, from surveys of schoolchildren’s careerchoices. However, such surveys do tend to put medicine near the top of the list,

although teaching is often further down.20 The low pay of people actually workingin intelligentsia occupations is obviously an important factor, too, in determiningchildren’s choices and popular perceptions of these professions.

Another argument concerns the changing identities of people who were fullyfledged members of the intelligentsia in the Soviet era, but have found that theexperience of the postcommunist period has changed their outlook and values. Itis asserted that ‘the Russian intellectual class is rapidly losing its intelligentsiaidentity’.21 For example, it is pointed out that professionals who keep their statejobs often take on secondary employment, which may weaken their intelligentsiaidentity. They develop business skills and adopt new attitudes, losing some oldSoviet intelligentsia assumptions.22 Moreover, where they find non-intellectualsecond jobs like taxi-driving, this may lead to deskilling.23

These particular claims about changing identity seem to be based only on theexperience of the city intelligentsia. As Chapter 5 suggested, paid secondary employ-ment is so limited in the small towns that it is hardly likely to have an impact onrespondents’ identities. On the other hand, their unpaid secondary employment –growing vegetables and raising livestock – might be expected to have a large impacton identities. Chopping logs instead of reading books was the complaint with whichthis 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 theintelligentsia is simply a group of highly qualified people in health, education andthe arts: doctors (but not nurses), teachers, journalists, librarians, administratorsof museums and arts centres, artists and writers. In Russian they are often knownas the ‘humanities intelligentsia’ (gumanitarnaya intelligentsiya).

As well as the ‘core’ intelligentsia, there is a more hazy category of what mightbe labelled ‘fringe intelligentsia’. Engineers, who fall within this group, could beclassed as ‘technical intelligentsia’ (tekhnicheskaya intelligentsiya); accountantsor local government employees are traditionally more likely to class themselvesby the Soviet term sluzhashchie (‘services workers’).24 However, among thesmall-town residents some of these services workers, particularly specialists suchas education experts and statisticians employed by the local authority, did iden-tify themselves as intelligenty. The police has increasingly provided legal higherand secondary specialist education for its staff, and police employees, too, couldconsider 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 localintelligentsia was not a group apart in the small-town community. Figures 6.1–6.3below are not intended to suggest that the sample was, in detail, typical of all


75 5

2 1

7

11

24

0

10

20

Wor

kers

Inte

lligen

tsia

Man

ager

s

Busine

ss

Police

Vet, n

urse

House

husb

and

pens

ioner

s

Figure 6.1 Occupations of respondents’ husbands (N�62).

Notes‘Workers’ includes collective farmers; ‘managers’ includes managers of intelligentsia institutionslike schools; ‘business’ includes commercial farmer; ‘pensioners’ includes disabled people.

16

3111

Cook

Lab

assis

tant

Inte

lligen

tsia

Pensio

ner

Mat

ernit

y lea

ve

0

10

20

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

3

5

32

3

Docto

r

Schoo

l teac

her

Mus

ic te

ache

r

Educa

tion

dept

Man

ager

0

2

4

6

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


small-town members of the intelligentsia. The charts merely illustrate the ten-dency for husbands of intelligentsia women to be chosen from a wide range ofoccupations 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 thelocal community, sometimes stressing the social variety within their families.(e.g. ‘My husband is a Worker with a capital W’). However, one or two intervie-wees with fewer intelligentsia credentials were more sceptical about whetherintelligentsia people were free of a superiority complex; one referred to a tradi-tional ‘gulf ’ between the intelligentsia and the masses, another to the derogatorylabel ‘Mr White Hands’.

As Chapter 5 suggested, different social groups are bound together by favournetworks and leisure activities. The latter is particularly true in Zubtsov, wheremany people live in flats. Household plots are therefore allotments just outsidethe town, and shopowners, doctors, teachers and manual workers labour side byside. On the other hand, leisure activities in the small town are often arrangedwithin the workplace, promoting intelligentsia exclusivity.

One sense in which some intelligentsia members are ‘outsiders’ is that theyactually come from outside the local area, often having been sent to work in thesmall town after graduation, under the Soviet system of job placements for grad-uates. However, if they stayed for life in the small town it was usually becausethey married local people; usually this was a case of intelligentsia women marry-ing local men. Some of these outsiders were very highly qualified people whostill constitute part of the town’s intelligentsia elite, insofar as such an elite can besaid to exist.

An intelligentsia elite?

One could define the local intelligentsia elite as consisting of people with degreesfrom prestigious universities, particularly in Zubtsov, where several intervieweeshad graduated from institutions in Moscow and Leningrad. In Bednodemyanovskmuch of the town’s most lively cultural life was organized by two musicians whohad graduated from Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod) Conservatoire, one with a firstprize. Another definition of elite might be an intellectual/artistic elite of practisingmusicians, artists and writers. For example, Achit had its own socialist realist shortstory writer, Nikolai Zakharov, often held up as the town’s chief intelligent.26 InZubtsov, Andrei Kurbanov is a professional artist, although he finds it harder to sellhis 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, pub-licizing new figures about losses on the Rzhev Front (a million on either side) andshowing exhibits documenting the experience of the German soldiers.

An important role in both Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov is played bymigrants from Central Asia, Kazakstan and Azerbaidjan. Volodina was an earlymigrant from Kazakstan; Kurbanov is from Dushanbe. Often these migrants had


held responsible positions in capital cities. Migrants who were interviewed, andtheir family members, included three English teachers – a scarce and very valu-able commodity – from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Kazakstan; a senior police-man from Tadzhikistan; his wife, a university lecturer, now working as agovernment official; a family of three artists from Tadzhikistan, working at a chil-dren’s art and music school; a piano teacher from Azerbaidjan; a family of doc-tors 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 ofCulture and Rest, now employed at the district house of culture. One Zubtsovteacher, a local woman, claimed ‘The Russian intelligentsia is coming home’.

Achit’s shortage of housing was probably partly responsible for its failure toattract highly qualified migrants. Achit’s shortage of musicians, for example, wassaid to be caused by the fact that there was nowhere for them to live. On the otherhand the local authority was ready to make an effort to recruit doctors by findingthem new housing, and had just employed a young surgeon by giving him a flat.

Managers, such as editors, headteachers and hospital managers (‘headdoctors’), might be considered another elite. As Chapter 7 suggests, for politicalpurposes some managers of cultural and educational institutions did think ofthemselves as a coherent elite, at least in Zubtsov. In Achit and Zubtsov thesemanagers shared at least one common feature, their female sex – 85.7 per centwere women. In Bednodemyanovsk the proportions were half and half.28

In each town the managers overlapped with a group of people who had formedthe Soviet elite. Among respondents, these people were now aged 38–70. InSoviet days they had been the local bosses. They served in the communist partyand Komsomol (Young Communist League) district committees (raikoms), or injobs whose occupants were appointed by the regional or local communist partycommittees. Such so-called ‘nomenklatura’ appointments in the sample were anex-mayor, a head of administration, headteachers and heads of a library serviceand local education department. The party bosses among this group had usuallybeen second-rung: second secretaries and/or heads of department. There werealso two first secretaries of Komsomol raikoms. Frequently, these people hadbegun their careers as teachers, but joined the party apparatus when they were stillyoung. They were well known locally, and a sense of being on a nomenklatura listmay have persisted. As one respondent remarked, ‘I’ll never have problemsfinding a job because everyone knows me here’.

This was a group of intelligent and talented middle-aged local people who stillseemed to have much to contribute to the survival of postcommunist local insti-tutions, often as their directors. One interviewee, as it were excusing his CPSUbackground, pointed out that in small towns Soviet party officials had just got onwith the job of trying to improve local conditions; they had not seen their role asbeing political. Conversation with various ex-nomenklatura respondents sug-gested the same: these were not people aspiring to become General Secretary orto build communism. They had had more modest aims.

Tables 6.1 and 6.2 show only those respondents who had held party orKomsomol jobs, omitting people like collective farm chairs, who were merely

appointed by the CPSU. These respondents can be divided between ‘successes’and ‘failures’. The ‘successes’ had had level or upward career trajectories sincethe 1980s. The ‘failures’ had experienced downward trajectories.

It is noteworthy that all the ‘successful’ nomenklaturists had worked in theCPSU, not the Komsomol raikom. Less fortunate were four interviewees who hadtried to make a transition into the private sector but had all gone bankrupt or beenemployed by businesses that went bankrupt. Three of the four had Komsomolbackgrounds. In other words, they had generally been more junior than the firstgroup in the late Soviet period.

The failed baker mentioned in Table 6.2 was married to a former senior CPSUraikom official, a highly educated person who worked as a schoolteacher bothbefore and after the bakery episode.

Another downward trajectory, not caused by business failure, was that of an elec-trical engineer who had been head of the CPSU raikom propaganda department


Table 6.1 Level/upward trajectories of respondents, from CPSU raikom job before1991 to state managerial job post-1991

Female, 48 years old Unemployed � Education Department �CPSU 2nd sec.a editor of district newspaper

Male, 57 years old State farm chair � deputy head of police �CPSU 2nd sec. deputy head of Employment Centre

Female, 39 years old School headCPSU junior official

Female, 44 years old Head of library service since 1986CPSU unspecified

Male, 41 years old Detective, prosecution service�chiefCPSU head of ‘control’ commissiona detective

Male, 54 years old School headCPSU unspecified, mayor in 1980s

Notea �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 inprivate sector

Male, 42 years old Village headteacher � manager in privateCPSU head of general dept firm � Goskomstat employee

Female, 50 years old Teacher � private baker � market trader1st sec. Komsomol raikom

Female, 38 years old Entrepreneur � journalist on district1st sec. Komsomol raikoma newspaper

Male, 49 years old Petrol station manager � entrepreneurKomsomol sec. in college

Notea �Left raikom in 1991 ( just before or as consequence of banning of CPSU).


until 1990. He then, in succession, edited the district newspaper; lectured in theagricultural college; and found work as head technician in the Savings Bank, wherehe earned 560 rubles in 2000 and had to make ends meet by doing electrical repairsfor New Russians.

It should not be supposed, however, that ex-nomenklaturists could succeed onlyin managerial, state-sector jobs, not business. It was striking that the personwhom respondents most often mentioned as being the most successful localentrepreneur was, in all three towns, a former nomenklatura appointment: aCPSU raikom boss, teacher and newspaper editor in Achit; a state farm managerin Zubtsov; and, in Bednodemyanovsk, a former headteacher, local governmenthead 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 profes-sional, business and local government elite – ‘men in their 30s and 40s’ –cemented their friendship by going on fishing holidays together in SverdlovskRegion; 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 withonly vocational diplomas. These included libraries, houses of culture and music/artschools, kindergartens and children’s homes. These were places which traditionallyhad always had a mix of graduates and vocational diploma-holders, althoughdirectors complained that the number of graduates was decreasing. More signifi-cant was the number of secondary teachers with only a vocational diploma, bothat School No. 1 in Achit and in the vocational school in Bednodemyanovsk. Only5/8 teachers at Achit’s School No. 1 had university degrees.29

Besides people who were underqualified in the sense of not being universitygraduates, there were also respondents, particularly in Achit andBednodemyanovsk, who were not doing the job for which they had been trainedat university. This would not cause comment in Britain, but in Russia a universityeducation is ‘higher vocational education’ and, in Soviet days in particular, wasdefinitely intended as a professional qualification which would determine thegraduate’s entire career. Employees who did not work according to their profes-sional qualification were contemptuously referred to as ‘chance people’(sluchainye lyudi). Soviet newspapers, for example, carried many stories ofchance people employed in houses of culture. In Soviet days, though, it was prob-ably much more rare to meet a chance person teaching in an urban school. Someof these ‘chance people’ were overskilled migrants; the following list counts onlynatives of the small town. In Achit both newspaper offices were entirely staffedby non-journalists; three former teachers were interviewed in the police; a kinder-garten teacher worked in the social services department as an accountant; akindergarten head had only a school-leaver’s certificate, as did the director of thehouse of culture. In Bednodemyanovsk, journalists included a former teacher anda law graduate. In Zubtsov, the radio and newspaper were run by ex-teachers. In

all three towns, teachers were teaching subjects for which they had not beentrained, particularly languages and history.

Self-identification

There is no point pretending that the intelligentsia is anything but a highly sub-jective and elusive concept. Some Russian sociologists prefer to not use it for thisreason.30 Klopov, for example, suggests that it may sometimes be no more than asentimental 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. theofficial Soviet label] for a group of professional people employed in intellectuallabour? If the latter is true, it is senseless to speak of the loss of its specific roleand even more so of the “death” of the intelligentsia.’31

If ‘intelligentsia’ is used by people indulging in lazy, muddled or wishful think-ing, this is a problem for the sociologist. It does not mean, however, that the termcan be ignored. It has meaning. In fact, its meaning is particularly interesting andworthy of exploration just because it opens avenues into the mentality of formerSoviet citizens: the ideological double binds which marked their Soviet-eraconsciousness and their confusions arising from glasnost and the introduction ofthe postcommunist political regime.32

Many interviewees saw membership of the intelligentsia as an ideal to which theyaspired: an intelligent was ‘ideal in every respect’. One woman said that she haddreamed of joining the intelligentsia since childhood, conceptualizing the intelli-gent as ‘clever, polite, tidy and unselfish’. Respondents used spacial metaphorssuch as ‘I’ve been a teacher all my life so I suppose I’m somewhere close’. On theother hand, they could also say ‘I’m moving further away from it’ since they werebecoming increasingly disqualified for various reasons described later.

The fact that the ideal and the real were so mixed up in people’s thinking (per-haps a hallmark of Soviet consciousness) contributed to the difficulty of catego-rizing the responses. In general, however, the problem with analysing answers tothe question ‘Do you consider yourself and your family to belong to the intelli-gentsia?’ was that the responses were so thoughtful: measured, rather than con-fused. This was often the longest answer in the interview, as intervieweesexplored 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 consideringthemselves intelligentsia/not

Definitely Definitely not

Achit 46 32Bednodemyanovsk 46–52 22Zubtsov 63.4 6.8


were three interviewees who were so nearly in the ‘definite’ category that theyhave been provisionally included, hence the 46–52 per cent band.

It might be supposed that the high number of negative responses in Achit, andpositive ones in Zubtsov, corresponded to the level of qualification of the intervie-wees. Table 6.4 shows that the Achit sample was less well qualified as well as lessconfident about its intelligentsia identity. A few respondents did claim that theycould 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, qual-ifications do not correlate with self-identification for Bednodemyanovsk andZubtsov. The Bednodemyanovsk sample was slightly better educated, but also lessconfident about its identity.

It might be suggested that the Zubtsov sample had a more elite intelligentsia com-plexion: they were rather better travelled, had more prestigious degrees, etc. Thisprobably is a factor. However, overall , occupation, family background and behaviourwere the most important defining characteristics of a member of the intelligentsia.

Where occupation was concerned, there was one absolutely clear-cut correla-tion: all the businesspeople denied their intelligentsia status, while in severalcases mourning its loss. The single priest – until quite recently an engineer – alsodenied membership. Intelligentsia was a ‘worldly’ category.

In other responses there was enormous variation, however. The most unlikelyinterviewees were positive that they belonged to the intelligentsia, while the mostintellectual, middle class and considerate people, in classic intelligentsia jobs,often denied membership. A young woman with a vocational diploma who likedgoing out drinking in the evening, whose mother was a tax inspector and whowas married to a refrigerator repairman, felt that she was definitely intelligentsiabecause she had got a job, for which she was underqualified, in a local govern-ment office. The head of administration in Achit, a former state farm chairman,was absolutely positive that he was a member of the intelligentsia, although hespent all his spare time gardening and although his criterion for intelligentsiamembership 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 inthe local community said that she did not qualify because she did not knowenough about art and music. Another woman, with a degree from the MoscowInstitute of Culture, said that she was not a member of the intelligentsia, becauseshe did not feel like one: a member of the intelligentsia should be unmaterialis-tic, sincere and generally perfect. Perhaps rather predictably, it was often themost intellectual interviewees (in the English sense of the word) who had

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

Higher Vocational diploma School diploma

Achit 60 36 4Bednodemyanovsk 84 16 0Zubtsov 78 22 0

such complex and idealistic images of the intelligentsia that they disqualifiedthemselves from belonging to it. How could they match up to the likes ofLikhachev, Sakharov and Akhmatova?33

However, if denying their own claims to match up to the ideal they sometimesreferred to a friend or colleague who more nearly did. One doctor described anelderly Jewish friend in Moscow, an excellent musician with lots of generalknowledge, as a real member of the intelligentsia.

What personal qualities were implied when respondents used the word? Thedescription just given contains some of the classic constituents. Only two respon-dents mentioned Jews, but many conveyed the idea of being from a former time,talented, artistic, with specialist qualifications but also with a good generalknowledge. This is just a more sophisticated encapsulation of the little girl’s day-dreaming, mentioned earlier, of the intelligent as ‘clever, tidy, polite andunselfish’. The ‘past’ and ‘future’ location of the ideal characterize its presentunattainability. The reference to the past does not necessarily invalidate the idealas being anachronistic, although many respondents did express their doubts as towhether it was possible for such ideal people to exist in postcommunist society.

The adjective intelligentnyi, in its simplest sense of ‘well-behaved’, ‘with nicemanners’, also entered into this definition, but it was not used just as a synonymfor ‘polite’ (vezhlivyi) on its own with no further dimensions. ‘Polite behaviour’was connected in people’s minds with social status and education, even if theyraised the issue in order to deny the link, making statements like ‘not all profes-sors are polite’ or ‘ministers are criminals’. One doctor said, playing on the doublemeaning of the word, ‘I’ve become less intelligentnyi and more bad-tempered’.34

Those respondents who often categorically denied that they were members of theintelligentsia tended to do so on the grounds that they often lost their tempers. ‘I’mnot 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 wasoften the most stressed respondents who denied their intelligentsia status. ‘Life isnothing but stress,’ said one such 62-year-old woman in poor health. ‘I’m a nervousperson; I was in and out of hospital all last year,’ said another. Typical examplesincluded very poor women with more than two children and/or unhappy relation-ships with their mothers, husbands or children; and/or migrants who had not reallysettled in the small town; and/or interviewees who were very bitter about the polit-ical situation (voting against all the candidates, in one case, making racist remarksin another). These interviewees tended to have quite poor self-images and, if forcedto define themselves, could only do so by their job.

It might be objected that it was not stress, but poverty which was making theserespondents deny that they belonged to the intelligentsia. However, they nevermade the connection ‘intelligentsia�money’, which would in any case be sense-less, given that almost all their colleagues are also poor. Insofar as poverty wasthe 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 thatpeople in ‘transition’ societies need to construct narratives of which they are theheroes, if they are to find a sense of direction.



They need to ‘restabilize’ the social meaning of their original lifeworld if theyare to be able to act consistently with respect to other actors, and on a psycho-logical level they need to ‘repersonify’ the narrative world they (continuously,habitually) create and inhabit so as to render the lifeworld not only moreprobable but also more desirable – a world of which they can see themselvesits ‘narrators and heroes’.35

Where does the intelligentsia concept fit into this picture? Paradoxically, given thetraditional angst of the Russian intelligentsia, it might seem from the case studies ofAppendix 2 and the discussion in this chapter, that to label oneself an intelligent isto state that one has a positive, coping self-image. It would be stretching a point toapply this conclusion to all the respondents studied, but it has considerable validity,particularly in reverse. In other words, the minority who were emphatic that theywere not intelligenty were, if they were not businesspeople, often the most stressedof 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 tribu-lations of the moment, finding comfort in various worlds which were disconnectedfrom purely material concerns, worlds in which they were ‘narrators and heroes’. (InAppendix 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 intervieweestended to focus on three aspects. On a personal level, the concept included thesurvival of their own individual identity as thinking people with time and oppor-tunity for personal development. On a professional level, the survival was of theirprofessional identities and institutions. On a community level, the intelligentsiaconcept was relevant to the survival of a local society in which professionals havea certain ‘leading role’,36 ‘bringing enlightenment to the masses’ according to theclassic Soviet formulation.

Personal development and leisure

It is difficult to maintain an intellectual lifestyle today and provide it for one’schildren, plus husbands who may themselves have become de-classed. In partic-ular, many respondents mentioned their disappointment that the high price ofperiodicals subscriptions had forced them to curtail drastically the number ofnewspapers and journals they received. ‘From twenty to two,’ one claimed. Bookswere another problem. In Tver, the demise of the district book retail network wasblamed for the closure of Zubtsov’s bookshop, creating a situation in which bookswere 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 sectionin a small department store. However, reading was a key component of respon-dents’ self-identity: it defined them as members of the intelligentsia. A womanwho 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 visittheatres and exhibitions in the big cities. In 1999–2000 only a few of the more

prosperous were able to make long-distance trips; the rest had a powerful senseof being stuck in their backwater.

Although a few respondents found solace in artistic and scholarly leisure pur-suits, others complained that they had no time or concentration for them.Statistics about the fall in visits to cultural institutions in regional capitals mustpartly 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. Astudy of Nizhnii Novgorod found that about seventy per cent of respondentsnever went to the theatre, concerts or sporting events.)38 Moreover, all overRussia, not just in the big cities, the number of lesser cultural institutions (housesof culture/clubs, i.e. arts centres) has declined considerably. Figures 6.4–6.6 givean indication of the trends in Russia and in Tver and Penza Regions. (The two


200

300

400

500

600

700

800

1985 1990 1995 1999

Visitors x 100,000 Theatres

Figure 6.4 Number of visits to theatre (in 100,000s) and number of professionaltheatres in Russia, 1985–99.


0

200

400

600

800

1000

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

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2000

Tver 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.


regions have almost identically-sized populations, so their theatre-going habitsare obviously rather different.)

A number of Russian sociologists have noted the decline in organized leisureactivities for provincial people, including visits from regional and national-levelperformers (see Chapter 7).

The vegetable garden was often the biggest humiliation and consumer of leisuretime. Respondents had a sense that they were turning into peasants. A doctor withtwo children, whose husband was unemployed and who kept pigs, rabbits andchickens, described herself as an intellectual-peasant ‘mongrel’; another doctorused the same term. ‘A member of the intelligentsia reads literature, does intellec-tual work, while we work in the vegetable garden,’ was a common refrain. ‘Mygrandmother is a teacher, my parents are both paediatricians, we are all educated,but by lifestyle we are not members of the intelligentsia.’A headteacher complainedthat because of work on the allotment she had lost half her intellectual identity. Alibrarian ‘couldn’t derive pleasure from intellectual pursuits while worrying abouthow to get a loaf of bread’. ‘An intelligent has a sense of having been sent to achievesomething,’ said a music teacher. ‘There are no intelligentsia in this sense of theword in Bednodemyanovsk: everyone has a vegetable garden and animals.’

Professional identities

Some Russian sociological research has uncovered evidence of weakening profes-sional identities. For instance, Rybtsova (writing about Perm) suggests that womenin particular are becoming more centred on their families. Klimova comes to thesame conclusion about both sexes and different social groups (engineers, students,brokers, workers) and cites other research to the same effect. Shirokalova uncoveredvery negative attitudes to work in Nizhnii Novgorod Region. Certainly one mightexpect that the trials and tribulations of postcommunism would lessen people’s

145121

73

102 97

55

Tver Penza Russia

1990 1998 /9

0

50

100

150

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 naseleniyaPenzenskoi oblasti, p.158.

Note1998 figure is for Penza.

enthusiasm for work. Respondents in the small towns complained that they some-times found it hard to concentrate when they were worrying about how to feed theirfamilies, ‘always with arithmetic in your head’. ‘When I didn’t get paid, it was hardto feel motivated,’ explained one local government official. ‘People didn’t feel likeworking when they weren’t paid, although they kept going,’ said a teacher. The‘romance had departed’ from their intellectual occupations, said a librarian. Whenthe move out of an intelligentsia occupation had been a successful one, as in thecase of the three policewomen mentioned in Chapter 5, there sometimes seemedlittle sense of regret.

However, as should be evident from the above discussion of leisure preferences,in general respondents treasured their professional identities and, when askedwhether work occupied a central place in their lives, only a handful (male andfemale) disagreed. In fact, the interviewees seemed to worry about losing theiridentities more than they perhaps actually did lose them. Moreover, severalexpressed a strong sense that professional identities would always be an asset,even if society were changing. ‘Good doctors will always be respected.’ ‘A trueprofessional will always be respected.’

If professional identities are valued, changing professions creates anxiety. Tosome extent the idea of trading seemed feared not just because of practical obsta-cles, but also because it clashed with respondents’ self-images as members of theintelligentsia – a hostility towards commerce with long roots in Russian politicalculture. Even younger people could feel that there was a clash between their intel-ligentsia identities and the personality traits needed in the successful busi-nessperson. A piano teacher’s businessman son apparently liked to complain,‘Mum, this isn’t me’. A librarian, aged 25, asserted that you could never succeedin business if, like her, you were a librarian through and through.39 A doctor whohad worked for a while as a shipping agent went back to medicine. Two formerteachers, now employed as managers in the private sector, hankered after their oldjobs: teaching was their vocation. A man who had been a defence engineer nowworked 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 shuttletrader described her unhappiness in the local newspaper.40

A number of interviewees with creative jobs said that they felt fulfilled justbecause of the nature of the job. Others had more negative interpretations of thestatement that work occupied a central place in their lives. For example, theyargued that the limiting of leisure opportunities, such as travel, meant that oneconcentrated one’s energies more into one’s work. People with tense relations inthe household often found relief in work and treated it as a motor to keep themgoing. Interviewees tended to emphasize not so much how they enjoyed theirwork, but how conscientious they were: classes demanded extensive preparation,newspaper and managerial jobs kept them working overtime, etc. They liked toproject the image of a hardworking professional person. Research into teachers inSverdlovsk Region also suggests that a sense of professionalism persists strongly,despite dissatisfaction with the actual conditions of the job.41



Many interviewees kept up their professional knowledge by reading and inmany cases, going to the expense of subscribing to professional journals, even ifthey did not get these subscriptions paid as an addition to their salary (to whichsome were in theory entitled).

Interviewees felt that they lived on intellectual ‘islands’ and, as was suggestedin Chapter 5, were emphatic about the importance of the emotional support theyreceived from their colleagues. Associating at work and discussing professionalmatters also helped them maintain their professional identities, sometimes, forexample, 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 ofstudy and gain a degree, expressed her lifelong sense of regret at this missedopportunity. Several interviewees mentioned their sense of achievement whenthey embarked on their professional careers and began to feel themselves to bemembers of the ‘intelligentsia’. Research into the motivation of student teacherssupports the view that the school staffroom is seen as a ‘cultural sphere’; thedesire to be part of such a world was the most common motivating factor men-tioned 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 num-ber one’. Another teacher had actually, in the Soviet period, taught in a villageschool, and was nostalgic about the respect she had enjoyed. Since many respon-dents did not come from intelligentsia families, they had a particular reason tocherish their professional identities, often acquired with considerable effort, andnot bought by paying tuition fees, as they could see happening today.

Community service

The intelligentsia traditionally bears responsibility for welding together the localcommunity, through its educational and information-transmitting roles, and alsothrough 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 thesoftening power of culture, suggesting that her pupils, hitherto fed on a diet ofAmerican films, became ‘kinder’ after their contacts with ‘good’ culture at schoolconcerts and shows. ‘The intelligentsia takes part in everything that happens intown’, said a teacher in Bednodemyanovsk. ‘The intelligentsia is the most con-spicuous social group and has a good influence on the town,’ said an Achit head-teacher. ‘Only a few individuals are active in public life, but without them thingswould be really dull,’ said another woman in Achit. In general, it seemed thatZubtsov interviewees were the most idealistic and community-spirited, and theAchit interviewees the least, despite, as Chapter 8 shows, being more local in ori-gin than the Zubtsov cohort. The Zubtsov group were more likely to feel that theyhad respect from local adults, although they also complained more than the othersabout cheeky children who questioned their authority. (Perhaps, being close toMoscow, the children feel themselves more sophisticated than do their equivalents

in Sverdlovsk and Penza.) Several of the Achit managers – including all threeheadteachers – did feel sure that they had some level of influence; in fact, one head-teacher thought that the intelligentsia was more influential today, apparentlybecause of democratization. Other Achit respondents disagreed. Bednodemyanovskinterviewees seemed to be the most discouraged about their influence, althoughother evidence would suggest that this is the most harmonious of the three commu-nities. Perhaps their dislike of the local administration played a role here. Chapter 7explores community service in practice, and the differences between the towns, inmore detail.

Draganova et al. suggest that there are two theories about what makes for a strongcommunity spirit. One is that the smaller the community, the stronger that spirit islikely to be. The second is that more highly educated people have a stronger com-munity spirit, because they are more involved in community affairs. In the case ofthe intelligentsia of these three small towns both factors come together.43

Levicheva, however, bemoans the tendency for intelligentsia members tobecome more focused on local preoccupations, and Magaril suggests that there isa chasm between the intelligentsia of the major cities and the provincial doctorsand teachers.44 ‘I wouldn’t pass for a member of the intelligentsia in a city,’ saida highly intelligent and well-educated lawyer in Achit. Two of her fellow inter-viewees made the same comment in Achit. In the other towns there was no evi-dence of the same inferiority complex. Chapter 8 examines parochial tendenciesand their implications.

District-level intelligentsia also had a sense of responsibility for their villagecolleagues. Many respondents had either worked in village schools or grown upin villages. Managers were responsible for medical, educational and culturalfacilities throughout the district. Because of the high level of unemployment andthe shortage of wage-paying jobs in rural areas, positions such as librarian weresought after despite the tiny wages, though not necessarily by qualified appli-cants. Libraries, schools and houses of culture everywhere faced the prospect ofextinction, although only a few schools had actually closed so far. Managers weretrying to find ways of keeping them going. Librarians, educational specialists,etc., agonized about the difficulty of gathering together village colleagues forseminars in the district centre. When considering positive attributes of their intel-ligentsia identity, respondents sometimes pointed to the fact that at least theylived 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 con-cluded that it was still very much a topical issue.45 Levicheva, in Moscow, came tothe same conclusion about her students, who seemed to have much the same opin-ions as their lecturers: ‘no “fathers and children” conflict here’.46 Some of the con-cept’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,



or defining ‘intelligentsia’. ‘Very serious people,’ said one physical educationteacher, laughing. Their confusion may have been caused partly by not having clear-cut opinions in general – perhaps just because of the age they were, rather than asany kind of sign of the times. The same interviewees sometimes found it hard todescribe their region.

Although opinion polls show that young people are less likely to wish for areturn 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 patternbetween one year’s results and another’s, and that the extent of social stratifica-tion and regional differentiation in Russia make youth an exceptionally difficultcategory to analyse.47 The younger interviewees were no more likely than theirelders to have sympathetic attitudes to local businessmen, or to make differentassessments 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 respon-dents were linked by marriage with other sections of local society. The followingsection will examine how they conceptualized that society and in particular whetherthey perceived a gulf between themselves and the rest of the local community.

Interviewees were asked whether they ‘associated with local entrepreneurs’. Itseems that attitudes to businessmen in Russia may have changed during the 1990s:in the early 1990s many Russians had a ‘rather positive’ attitude towards busi-nessmen, but by the late 1990s this attitude was reversed and in 1997, 49 per centregarded entrepreneurs as ‘harmful’.48 This change in views would coincide withthe disappointment of many would-be entrepreneurs who had started the post-communist period full of optimism but then seen their businessness collapse, ifthey had ever got off the ground at all, and correspondingly could be expected tofeel more sour about the entire business world, with its injustices and racketeering.

Certainly, the question about business acquaintances provoked some hostilecomments. Business people were ‘sharp customers’ (krutye), they had fail marksat school and were not qualified to become doctors and teachers like decent peo-ple, etc. They were grasping, ruthless, dishonest, profiteers. Half-a-dozen respon-dents (of different ages and backgrounds) adopted the position that they wouldn’ttouch a businessman with a bargepole.

However, most respondents did not characterize businesspeople like this. Theysaid that they either had friends among the local businesspeople or would notmind having friends among them, if by chance such acquaintances had not beenformed. ‘A businessman is a human being too. They are just ordinary peoplewhom 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 tendencyeither to stand aloof from the rest of local society or, more commonly, to standout from the rest of society by their opulent lifestyles.

Those who argued that business people kept their distance said, for example,that ‘entrepreneurs have no interest in associating with people like me’; ‘theywork twenty-four hours a day’; ‘entrepreneurs and local government officials aredifferent from the rest of society: they don’t use the library’; ‘they try to keep outnewcomers’. Several interviewees felt that ‘they stick together’.

Plenty of examples were given of how the new rich stood out: foreign cars andplush villas were the most often mentioned attributes.49 Others were maids andpianos (in Zubtsov); home computers for children and buying property in Penzaand Moscow (Bednodemyanovsk); going to sanatoria, having two homes andbuying a flat in Perm so children could be educated privately and get into univer-sity (Achit).

Whether the business class stands out or stands aloof is obviously an importantdistinction. Almost everybody agreed that they stood out, but not everyonebelieved that this was because they were deliberately creating a gap betweenthemselves and the rest. In fact, several respondents said that it was only the veryrichest businessmen who kept their distance. Ordinary entrepreneurs fitted in,sponsoring competitions in local schools, buying petrol and food for schools, sub-sidizing the police force and the house of culture, paying medical expenses for apoor boy who needed treatment in Penza, coming to concerts, etc. Such activitieswere particularly often mentioned in Bednodemyanovsk and least frequently inAchit. In any case, said some respondents, although there might be a handful oftruly rich businessmen, the average entrepreneur was not much richer than the restof 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 afterthe school where he used to teach, still socialized with his old colleagues andorganized sporting events at the school. Another, however, said he sometimes feltuncomfortable 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 toform an Entrepreneurs’ Association a few years ago had failed because they had‘too many different approaches’. The third businessman used to socialize with hisfellow entrepreneurs at the gym.

Respondents were also asked whether they thought that local society wasbecoming more stratified. Some argued that it was not: there had been stratifica-tion in the Soviet period too. More often, they denied that the town today wasreally stratified. ‘The mass of the people live poorly’ was a common refrain. Classdistinctions were less visible nowadays – it was harder to tell which social groupwas which. Attitudes were also said to be held in common. ‘We all have commoninterests’ and ‘people still want to know each other’ were comments made inBednodemyanovsk. Society in both Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov was not reallybecoming more divided, according to such interviewees. ‘Entrepreneurs and teach-ers are the same kind of people,’ stated one interviewee. In Achit some people alsosaid that everyone behaved the same, but their comments were less flattering:‘People aren’t so polite anymore’.



Another reason why stratification was not happening was that the rich were notreally a stratum. Several respondents claimed that they were just a small group, a‘handful’, ‘twenty families’. (The numbers quoted did not seem to be consistentlydifferent for the three towns; they were all obviously rough estimates.)

Whether or not they agreed that the rich constituted a real social layer, respon-dents, with three exceptions,50 did feel that there were rich people in the town. Thetown therefore consisted of at least two groups, rich and poor. The rich were not nec-essarily entrepreneurs: they could also be government officials or, more precisely,bosses (especially in Achit). Some interviewees in Achit pointed out that the winningcombination was to be an entrepreneur and a boss. Tax inspectors, policemen andsecurity service officers were also mentioned as rich groups in Achit.

The respondent almost always located himself or herself in the ‘poor’ layer, ifthe town was seen as divided between rich and poor, or the middle, if it was dividedinto three. A few officials and businessmen modestly refrained from claimingmembership of any richer group. The large poor section of the population wascharacterized as being poor through no fault of its own: ‘modest, not pushy’. Itincluded both white- and blue-collar workers and, for some respondents, also thesmall businessmen.

Most commonly, respondents saw the town as divided into three layers. Thebottom group was often referred to as ‘unemployed’. Teachers were the most spe-cific about other characteristics of this group, which they saw at school, particu-larly poorly dressed children, sometimes hungry and suffering from physicalabuse. Other respondents characterized the underclass as alcoholics. Drug addictswere 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 inBednodemyanovsk added large families, single elderly people and disabled peo-ple to the list, but he was rather rare in mentioning such ‘respectable’ reasons forbeing poor.

The three towns are different from one another. In Zubtsov, some professionalsfeel a particular gulf between themselves and the urban underclass. It was some-times hard, though, to gauge exactly what they meant when they talked about thisgulf, and to translate sentiments such as: ‘we mix with a degraded narod: they’veall turned to drink’. Narod could imply ‘people’ in general; or specifically non-professionals (narod as the antithesis of intelligentsia); or peasants. Perhaps thereis a conflation between the urban underclass and the surrounding rural masses.Stories about drunken unmarried couples on the edge of town burning to death intheir wooden cottages,51 or unemployed urban people stealing potatoes from thefields surrounding the town just reinforce (spacially) this image of an uncivilized(social) exurban area. Hostility toward/fear of the narod seemed to be somewhatless marked in Achit than in Zubtsov and least marked in Bednodemyanovsk.

Interviewees never seemed to entertain the idea that they might fall into theunderclass; they were, after all, intelligentsia, the respectable poor. Respondentshad modest aspirations, though, and they never said that they wanted to join the

rich group. Their modesty tallies with the findings of Russian sociologists. Forexample, Tsukerman, writing about Chelyabinsk Region, suggests that state-employed intelligentsia members and people who do not live in the regional cap-ital are less likely to wish to ‘live better than most people’.52 National opinionsurveys 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 ofstratification, with a large layer of ‘respectable’ poor in the middle, remind one ofBelyaeva’s characterization of the ‘middling mass’. However, if respondentsdescribed themselves as belonging to some kind of middle group, it was middlingonly in terms of income relative to the top and bottom groups. Although it variedconsiderably in absolute income, most interviewees were living below the subsis-tence 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 middleclass identified by Balzer in the cities. However widely one stretches the term‘middle class’, it seems impossible to divorce it completely from the attainment ofat least some approximation to a comfortable standard of living. Hence only thehandful 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 andlegal training were in the small town, sitting in their parents’ homes, or doingstandard, 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-incomegroup, we have also seen that they classed themselves as intelligentsia. Who thendefined themselves as middle class (srednii) rather than intelligentsia?Respondents were asked to choose a definition for themselves if they denied theirintelligentsia status. They preferred to use old Soviet categories, like ‘worker’ or‘services worker’. ‘I’m a labouring person’ said one, using the terminology ofSoviet-era party congresses. Galkin suggests that the official Soviet social classi-fication system ‘remains an important element in social consciousness and formof self-identification for a significant proportion of the population’.54 No one inZubtsov said they were ‘middle class’. In Bednodemyanovsk, there were four menwho chose the term: a prosperous middle-aged former engineer, now managing afruit wine farm; a fairly well-off prosecution service detective; an apparently ratherpoor young journalist; and a very poor young college teacher. In other words, theywere 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 theword ‘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



interviewees seemed to feel confident that they were professional people, and theyvalued both their work and their colleagues. They were less confident that theyenjoyed status as members of the intelligentsia when they thought about themselvesin the context of the small towns. They tended to feel that members of the intelli-gentsia had lost status because of their declining salaries, and because they grewpotatoes like everyone else and were condemned by lack of money to spend theirtime in the small town with the rest of the local population, not visiting theHermitage, the Pushkin Museum or other Russian intelligentsia haunts. On theother hand, in each town there were also intelligenty who retained a prominent rolein organizing local community life and ‘bringing culture to the masses’.

Insofar as one can generalize about the intelligentsia in the three towns, tracesof both ‘death’ and ‘life’ are visible. The intelligentsia might perhaps be describedas ‘dying’ in that: professional people spent more time farming and less on intel-lectual pursuits; the core intelligentsia was not always being adequately replen-ished with new recruits, especially in Achit; engineers were unemployed andoften declassed; and especially stressed and poor people felt that they had losttheir intelligentsia identity. Signs of ‘life’ included the facts that most intervie-wees preserved a sense of intelligentsia identity, at least as an aspiration; aspiredto spend time on intellectual pursuits; had a sense of collective local intelligentsiaidentity, though less so in Achit; were closely linked to the local community andhad social capital (see Chapters 5 and 7).

If one can generalize from the very limited evidence about the emergence of anew business class, one can draw the following conclusions: nomenklatura con-nections are important; former teachers (often senior teachers) are prominent;women are not excluded, and may be prominent; businesspeople continue tosponsor community life to some extent, as did Soviet enterprises.

For all four reasons, businesspeople can put down roots locally, despite the hos-tility with which they are often regarded in the abstract. The intelligentsia andbusinesspeople are linked on many levels: as family members, friends, acquain-tances, dacha neighbours, former colleagues, sponsors, etc. However, businesspeople can be viewed as being too entwined with local officialdom, especially ifthe latter is seen as corrupt.

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 improvinglocal 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 intoregime-approved values. As has been shown, a number of the 1980s communistelite are still in responsible positions in the small towns and have not changedtheir views about their responsibilities. Nor have many regular teachers, artsworkers, 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 wasnot supposed to occur under the communist system. However, as the Introductionto this book suggested, despite the totalizing aspirations of the communist partyleadership, it could never actually control everything that happened in the USSR,particularly given the huge size of the country, and particularly after the death ofStalin 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 govern-ment, and conflicts about the extent of state control over the voluntary sector arecommon in mature democracies. Hence, it seems unrealistic to completely writeoff as not being ‘civil society’ embryonic independent organizations which man-aged to exist even in Soviet days. There is simply a spectrum: communist-era cit-izens’ groups were mostly towards the unfree end, NGOs in democracies arecomparatively free, but there are no absolutely unfree or free organizations.Similarly, in Russian small towns today, NGOs may not be entirely free from localauthority control, but this does not mean that they have no claim to constitutea kind of civil society.

7 Civil society and politics

Civil society and politics 167

Moreover, where freedom of association is somewhat circumscribed, it isimpossible to draw a distinct line between ‘organizations’ and ‘friendship net-works’. Although definitions of civil society sometimes exclude informal net-works,2 the rationale for including the latter is strong, if they help to strengthenthe local community as well as serving individual selfish interests.

Civil society is important on the local level because it develops both individualpotential and community spirit. ‘The idea of civil society . . . embodies for manyan 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 hasbeen justly criticized, as a concept, for this ‘having your cake and eating it’ qual-ity, 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 partyspeeches, one can see that in a curious fashion they did sometimes, somewhat,conform to the notion of a civil society. Teachers who organized schoolchildrenin Achit to collect genuine (waste, not stolen) scrap metal for recycling or buildbird boxes were not doing anything very political, but they were fulfilling theirown personal need to do something useful, and being helpful to the local com-munity at the same time. As Theodore Friedgut, for example, has illustrated, therewas some genuine civic consciousness in the Soviet period.4 There was alsoplenty of cynicism, but it does not seem far-fetched to argue that there was prob-ably more cynicism about organized participation in the big city, where peoplehad a smaller personal stake in their environment.5

The size and strength of civil society in postcommunist Russia is difficult todetermine, though most commentators tend to emphasize its weaknesses.6 Thedesirable role for civil society in the period of democratic consolidation is alsounclear and disputed.7 On the one hand, some writers suggest that it should recedeand let the new regime build democratic institutions undisturbed, top down.Alternatively, it is argued that civil societies are crucial for developing those skillsand values, such as compromise and respect for the views of minorities, which areneeded for democracies to consolidate. Experience in NGOs can also providetraining for future politicians and NGOs may themselves develop into politicalparties, creating a healthy overlap between ‘political’ and ‘civil’ society. ‘Thecivility that makes democratic politics possible can only be learned in the associ-ational networks.’8

It is because civil society is perceived as crucial for democratization that inter-national organizations such as the European Union invest in developing NGOs inRussia. Given that Russia has such a weak party system and, overall, an acuteproblem of ‘gap’ between ordinary voters and government, civil society is the log-ical way of overcoming that gap. The efforts of Western donor organizations todevelop civil society in postcommunist and developing countries provoke muchcontroversy, yet this phenomenon is almost irrelevant to the small towns, whereaid does not percolate, except in the form of some library books, or toys forchildren in care given by the very occasional American missionary.

How does civil society work in the small town, without Western money andinfluence? Is small-town civil society more ‘Soviet’ in form than in the city, and

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

Civic engagement and atomization

Chapter 3 described respondents’ annoyance at the untidiness of their towns, andChapter 5 mentioned the widespread theft of communal resources such as elec-tric cable and timber. Many interviewees expressed their disappointment thatnowadays there was less sense of civic responsibility and participation in com-munity affairs. Such participation could include voluntary work, writing for thelocal press, music, art and sports activities, or attendance at local festivities suchas Shrove Tuesday (‘Farewell to Winter’) or Town Day.

In the pilot survey, Zubtsov respondents, when asked about their own activismas members of the intelligentsia, sometimes pointed a contrast with the perceivedpassivity of much of the ordinary population. Respondents in Achit andBednodemyanovsk were therefore asked directly whether they thought peopleparticipated less in community life. They tended to agree (Figure 7.17).

23 per cent of respondents said that there was more atomization today. ‘Peopleare too engrossed in survival’; ‘people go straight home after work to tend theirgardens’; ‘people grow more vegetables and watch more soap operas’; ‘we’vestarted to exist in our own little micro-world’; ‘there’s less interest in life’; ‘peo-ple are atomized in Achit, compared with the villages’; ‘people think only abouttheir families; they don’t think about their neighbours any more’. The problem


80

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


was most often seen as a general mood of apathy, though being busy, particularlybecause of gardening responsibilities, was mentioned by a number of respondents,and a few blamed television. Some people added poverty as a reason for non-participation. For example, one teacher excused her lack of attendance at townfestivals 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 reasongiven for thinking that participation had declined was not demand, but supply.(26 per cent blamed supply, and only 16 per cent atomization). Local citizens wouldgo to concerts and festivals if they were properly organized and financed. They usedto be done better. People still went eagerly if good performers came to town.

In Bednodemyanovsk only three people criticized the supply of events. If peo-ple did not go, it was because they were absorbed in their own affairs. (30 per centof respondents mentioned atomization as a problem.) Most interviewees seemedto feel that there was still plenty on offer. Moreover, 40 per cent of intervieweeswere adamant that people still did participate, and a further 8 per cent gave unde-cided, ‘yes and no’ answers. Almost all the teachers and cultural workers felt thatpeople did participate; it was doctors and businessmen who were more sceptical.These respondents had less reason to attend events and therefore perhaps had apoorer impression of their general popularity.

Newspapers, too, quite often carried reports suggesting that at least someevents were well attended, in both Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. In Zubtsov, too,although the local newspaper reported a disappointing turnout for Victory Daycelebrations in 1999, it also carried stories about how people had sat for hours inthe unheated library and cinema, with snow whirling outside, to listen to localpoets and singer-songwriters.9 It is impossible to be precise about the extent ofwithdrawal from public occasions, or the decline since the Soviet period, but itdoes seem that Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov have more events than Achit.

On the topic of atomization, it should be noted that withdrawal from publiclyorganized cultural activities was a post-Stalinist, not just a post-Soviet develop-ment. Since the death of Stalin it had been harder for the authorities to enforceparticipation10 and the collapse of communism merely exacerbated this trend. By1999–2000, local authorities could not get people out onto the streets even to theextent 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 Bednode-myanovsk, where one head of a cultural institution suggested that ‘all the formerstructures [of compulsion] are still in place’. Other people in Bednodemyanovskdid not completely agree with her: people attended more, said one journalist, justbecause there was no compulsion. On the whole Bednodemyanovsk interviewees,like those in Achit, seemed to feel that local inhabitants were glad of opportunitiesto take part in entertaining/useful events.

However, one woman who said that people were more ‘independent’ went onto add, ‘You can’t tell your neighbour off for quarrelling with his wife’. In otherwords, it was not just that official levers had been removed, but also that the sur-rounding culture had changed. Some of the ‘neighbourhood watch’ element ofSoviet life had gone: the regular petty, informal interference in other people’s

affairs, such as older people telling off younger ones for behaving inappropriatelyin the street. This could be seen as liberating, on a personal level, but, sincemunicipal services had not improved much if at all since Soviet days, the practi-cal need still remained for extra policing, cleaning up the town, especially afterthe spring thaw, etc.

As a result of this practical need for public participation in solving communityproblems, some kinds of Soviet civic participation still existed or had beenrevived 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 birth-day on 22 April, but was now just an occasion for tidying away all the litter whichhad collected under the snow, painting doors and gates, and so forth. Achit, ratherastonishingly, even revived its people’s militia. In 1999 it had 88 members andworked 1,617 hours, but by March 2000 only four members remained.11 Therewere some still functioning or recently resurrected ‘block of flats councils’ and‘street committees’, where local activists nagged their neighbours to remove logsfrom the pavement and generally keep the place tidy. Children also had commu-nity responsibilities. For example, children at School No. 1 in Zubtsov are stillresponsible for keeping the war memorial tidy.

The intelligentsia and ‘cultural enlightenment’

As Chapter 6 explained, the Soviet intelligentsia was seen, and saw itself, as hav-ing a duty to ‘bring culture to the masses’. This duty was institutionalized in asystem of ‘cultural-enlightenment work’ based on houses of culture and clubs, butalso involving libraries, schools, newspapers and any organization which had aresponsibility for socializing the population into correct values, as defined by thecommunist leadership.

Despite, and to some extent because of the atomization among the generalpopulation described earlier in this chapter, the intelligentsia in all three smalltowns did, it seemed, still participate more in community life than their fellow cit-izens. They still had a clear sense of duty for providing children with leisure activ-ities, and many children participated in free or heavily subsidized arts, crafts andsport. Teachers, even at the same school or arts centre, differed in their opinion ofthe social background of participating children, but the total number of childrenwas so great that they must have come from a range of social groups.12 The par-ticular influence of the music/art school in Zubtsov was illustrated by the fact thatit had been able to move into the former CPSU district committee building, afterintensive lobbying. The Dushanbe artists who had extended the old music schoolwere 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 waswell-organized, and this was one of the reasons why parents of school-age chil-dren seemed to feel fairly secure about their safety and well-being, as comparedto the anxieties occasioned by late teenage and adult children. Children them-selves presumably gained a sense of local community by participating in concertsand festivals.



In Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, enthusiastic art and music teachers hadturned the children’s facilities into concert halls for adults. In Zubtsov, locals cul-tivated Moscow holiday makers and persuaded them to perform.14 InBednodemyanovsk, the music teachers put on their own shows. Although only afew dozen adults, perhaps up to 50, came to such performances, those who didfelt that they were important, not just because they were entertaining but alsobecause they brought local people together. In Bednodemyanovsk there were con-certs approximately once a week. Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk had heldexhibitions by local painters in spring 1999. The Bednodemyanovsk exhibitiondrew over 1,500 visitors in one month.15 The Zubtsov exhibition, by AndreiKurbanov from Dushanbe, was also well-attended, and was even the occasion ofsome rhyme by a local poet:

Only superlatives will doSince, for Zubtsov, it’s all so new.16

Libraries in all towns also serve as settings for clubs and lectures and havemassive readerships – half to two-thirds of the local population.17 As in Russianationally, readership had been increasing in the 1990s.18 According to locallibrarians, this is partly as a result of unemployment, partly because of the num-ber of people taking extra-mural degrees.19

To conclude: considering their small size, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk didhave a remarkably active cultural intelligentsia. In both towns they reached out tothe rest of the intelligentsia through concerts and shows. All three small townsalso provided leisure activities for a large constituency of children, through artscentres 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 therewere many, since the vocational schools and agricultural college had student board-ers from outside the town. Each town had a bar and occasional discos, and theBednodemyanovsk music school also tried to help out,20 but this was seen as insuf-ficient. ‘There aren’t any clubs!’complained one young graduate of Penza University.Her elders bemoaned the absence of ‘cultured leisure’. The other problem was thatlocal authorities in both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk behaved as if the commu-nist party still ruled, which in a sense it did, on a local level. They, and particularlydeputy head of administration Nikolai Nozhkin in Bednodemyanovsk, harassed the‘cultural workers’ in libraries and houses of culture to put on activities which wererather Soviet in style. (Nozhkin, as second in command, was responsible for ‘socialaffairs’ (just as the second secretary on communist party committees had been incharge of ideology).)21

In Zubtsov in 1999 cultural events focused largely on the Second World War andPushkin – which had both national and local significance and could be seen as mean-ingful to ordinary people.22 However, the quantity could seem excessive to thoseresponsible for organizing them. One librarian complained that such programmeswere ‘voluntary but still somehow compulsory’. The Zubtsov administration also set

up a special charity bank account and tried to stir up local support for the Serbs inthe 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 theKosovo War, at a time of heightened anti-Western feeling, the administration triedto make houses of culture focus more on folk art and a conference of culturalworkers addressed the local population in Soviet rhetoric: ‘Nowadays our youngpeople, submerged by a wave of imitation western culture, hardly ever sing folk-songs . . .Only by opposing this alien ideology will we be able to return to ourancient Russian roots . . .’24 In February, houses of culture and libraries had to con-coct events around the theme ‘I love you, my army, my youth’,25 in an attempt tomake boys and their parents more willing to accept conscription. In November, anOctober Revolution demonstration in Bednodemyanovsk drew 50–60 attenders,and was followed by a concert organized by the Veterans’ Council and house ofculture.26 In November and December schools were collecting food parcelsto send to soldiers in Chechnya.27 The same type of programme continuedthrough 2000, leading the house of culture director to feel rushed off her feet andresentful.

Achit was different. It did have some features of a Soviet community life – forexample, a big Victory Day celebration with fireworks,28 and its local authoritycould organize campaigns for collective celebrations of important days. Mother’sDay and Older People’s Day, for example, were run by the local social securitydepartment.29 On the whole, however, Achit tended to lack both the ‘good’ andthe ‘bad’ sides of Soviet-style cultural enlightenment, reflecting what appeared tobe a less Soviet approach on the part of its culture department and deputy head ofadministration. Its two cultural assets, mentioned by a number of respondents,were a children’s dance group, attached to School No. 1, and Sudarushka, a choirof 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 toprovide ‘ideological work’. The district house of culture director stated categori-cally: ‘The house of culture has no influence.’ She was a woman in her twentieswithout even a vocational diploma. She said she did consult often with the headof the District Culture Department, but did not have to accept orders fromhim. When she organized something, the administration seemed not to care. Onlythe head of administration, for example, came to the Town Day celebrationsin 2000. The programme could not have been more dissimilar to events inBednodemyanovsk or Zubtsov. Some sports events were followed by an accordioncompetition and a flower arranging competition, won by journalists from the localnewspaper with some compositions, made from gladioli, satirizing governmentofficials and Duma deputies (for example, with big heads).30 On another occa-sion, the house of culture staged a ‘Supergranny Competition’.31 One had theimpression that events in Achit could be quite fun, but were sporadic and some-times poorly attended. The house of culture earned money by holding regulardiscos, although it had a problem with drunken teenagers.



Churches

Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk have well-established churches which functionedeven in Soviet days. Achit’s church was transformed into a children’s arts andsports centre, and reopened only in 1996, in a cramped wing at the back of thebuilding. Individual interviewees stressed the importance of their own personalfaith as a way of surviving the stresses of postcommunist daily life, and some alsolinked the concepts of the intelligentsia and Christianity. Women in particularwere keen to talk about the church. Although only a handful defined themselvesas believers, others welcomed religious toleration as a general principle, whichcould, by implication, help democratize local society. Divisive ethnic issues werenot mentioned at all in connection with Orthodoxy, nor did any of the non-ethnicRussian respondents criticize the restoration of churches and the increased sta-tus of Russian Orthodoxy. (One of them, a Bashkir, pointed to the parallelincreasing visibility of Islam in Achit.) Rather, churches tended to be appreciatedas a welcome manifestation of increased freedom of choice in everyday life. Theywere also praised for beautifying the local landscape, but in this connectionwithin-region justice and the rights of small towns and villagers were also anissue: a number of respondents said that it was important for all churches to berestored, not just the showcase cathedrals but also all the little village ruins.Churches were also welcomed for providing the opportunity to sing and hearuplifting music, and generally exerting a positive influence on the local commu-nity. Young people, in particular, were said to benefit from involvement in churchactivities, which often seemed to be viewed as a way of keeping youngsters outof trouble, counteracting ‘false values’ and helping young people develop a senseof personal responsibility.

Respondents mentioned that services in all three towns were well attended andsome also stressed the social diversity of church congregations. Churches areimportant gathering places, therefore, for the towns. Although they do not consti-tute opportunities for people to organize real civil society organizations, thechurches all have Sunday schools, so they also reach out to the local community.Local newspapers publish calendars of church events and information aboutsaints and architectural monuments, so providing channels of information for thelocal population to increase their knowledge of Orthodox Christianity. (Otherforms of Christianity are not publicized.) Local newspapers can also be used fordialogue between priests and congregations: to answer readers’ questions aboutreligion, for example, or to print sermons encouraging the development of non-materialist outlook as a survival strategy.32

There is a potential tension, however, between the claims of the Church andthose of secular cultural organizations. In particular, Achit was witnessing a pro-tracted struggle between the Church and the Culture Department for complete con-trol over the church premises. The congregation had lobbied widely at the regionallevel, but they blamed the district administration as the main obstacle (claimingthat 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

struggle over the fate of the church divided opinion in the local community and ledto negative assessments of the Church from some respondents. The second settle-ment of Zubtsov District, Pogoreloe Gorodishche, was faced with a similardilemma: should the ruined church be used as a cinema or a church? The head ofthe village administration ended up by backing the restoration of the church, whichwas accepted by a majority of villagers at a local meeting.34 In Zubtsov, localpriests thwarted the activities of the music and art school by instructing parents tokeep their children away from lessons on church holidays.

Newspapers

A free media and public opinion are an essential part of civil society. The districtnewspapers had all renamed themselves in the spirit of the times, shedding namessuch as ‘Lenin’s Path’ and ‘Ray of Communism’.35 In Zubtsov and Bednode-myanovsk the newspapers could not be completely free, given the attitude of thelocal administration already described. All the newspapers were particularlyvulnerable to pressure because they lacked advertizing revenue and, being veryshort of money, depended financially on the local administrations.36 In any case,the editor in Bednodemyanovsk and the subeditor in Zubtsov still had a ‘commu-nist’ approach. In Zubtsov, however, Sergei Kotkin, the editor, was a liberal whotried to make the newspaper lively and even critical. He was proud that he hadpublished articles criticizing the local administration, although they had beenreceived very unfavourably.37 The newspaper publicized scandals, such as thosesurrounding the market, or the misuse of pension funds, though it was careful toreport the local authorities’ point of view as well as the allegations.38 Kotkin triedto 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’scultural hallmarks. He himself was proud to be a descendant of AlexanderPushkin. The newspaper offices also functioned as a kind of unofficial citizens’advice bureau.39 Kotkin tried to encourage people to vote and believed that highturnouts in local elections might be partly thanks to his influence.

Vestnik, in Bednodemyanovsk, was very traditional by comparison, with aheavy focus on milk yields at local farms, the generosity of Penza Region socialservices, and Soviet-type festivals and competitions. Vestnik suffered from theextra handicap of obsolete technology and it was difficult to read because the inkwas faint and the lines uneven. In December 2000 it began to be produced in aneighbouring town and acquired a more modern appearance, if not content. Theextent 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 thelocal council that same autumn, and failed to mention a struggle for the mayor-ship which was surely newsworthy.

Achit was different, yet again, since it had two newspapers, both of which werefactual and entertaining: not very ‘Soviet’. A measure of how they differed fromVestnik and Zubtsovskaya zhizn’ was that, whereas the latter continued to publish



ritual birthday greetings and condolences to and from the adult population, oftenon behalf of the local government, both the Achit newspapers carried love mes-sages 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 thedistrict party committee. It could be quite critical of the local council, for instanceposing awkward questions to the deputy head of administration about his businessactivities, and publicizing the drunken and violent behaviour of a member of theyouth committee.40 It was also sometimes humorous; for example, over severalissues in 2000 it ran a competition with photographs to be identified of differentbits of the faces of well-known local people, such as just a moustache. This seemeda good indication of how well local people knew one another. On the other hand wasa competitor newspaper, Gorodok, which was based in Krasnoufimsk, but had anoffice and an editor in Achit. Gorodok had a youth page, more frivolous items andwas sometimes accused of being shoddily researched. Nash put’ was accused ofbeing ‘communist’ and hence not always objective. Not surprisingly, intervieweeshad very different opinions about the two newspapers, and the editors were notparticularly friendly towards each other. The element of choice and competitive-ness could be seen as a step forward for civil society, although the conflicts alsoweakened it.

Local people felt strongly about ‘their’ newspapers in all three towns and manyof the intelligentsia wrote articles. Doctors, for example, explained about thedangers of drugs, AIDS and mushroom poisoning. Schoolteachers were frequentcontributors. It seemed expected of the most prominent members of the intelli-gentsia that they would contribute, just as in Soviet days. In March 2000, forexample, particularly noteable figures contributed articles praising Putin, pre-sumably because it was supposed that their advice would carry weight with thelocal 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 fromits Soviet predecessor.42 In all three towns, this was a rather striking differencebetween Soviet and postcommunist newspapers, mirroring the decline in letter-writing to city and national newspapers. In a curious way, public opinion was bet-ter developed in Soviet days, when newspapers were encouraged to print readers’letters, albeit censored. It seems odd that the newspapers in the postcommunistsmall town did not serve as a forum for local debate, even on relatively trivial top-ics (as tends to happen in British local newspapers, for example, and still occursin 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. Thiswas proved by the fact that in Achit people often read and compared both. Theircomments on the local press showed that they read critically, making remarkssuch as that it was too subservient to the local administration (in Bednode-myanovsk), not always accurate, or too full of advertisements, most of which werefrom the regional capital and could seem irritatingly irrelevant. They often

mentioned how eagerly they awaited the paper’s appearance. ‘I read it from coverto cover, and then wonder why I bothered,’ as one put it. A number of respondentsexplicitly mentioned how important the paper was to their identity, saying, forinstance, ‘It’s my own (rodnaya): how could I not read it?’ or ‘It’s ours.’ Overall, itseemed that people agreed with Zubtsovskaya zhizn’’s claim that ‘without a districtnewspaper 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. Itwas hard to tell how many local people altogether read the newspapers: print runsare not an entirely helpful guide, because many people, including respondents,seemed to borrow the newspaper from friends or the library. In all towns, the printrun had fallen below 2000 and the editors considered the newspaper to be in aprecarious position (Figure 7.2).

The fact that respondents displayed such interest in the local newspaper sug-gests that a base exists for local public opinion. Even the tiny handful of respon-dents who did not read a local newspaper normally claimed that though it was notworth reading, they nonetheless knew everything that went on just by virtue oftheir occupations and living in the town. In other words, they still made the pointthat they cared to know what happened in the local community, and to form aview on events.44

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)

The three towns all had veterans’ councils, which united not only war veterans butalso ‘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


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Figure 7.2 Print runs of Nash put’ (Achit) Vestnik and Zubstovskaya zhizn’, 1990 and1999.

Note1999 figure is for Zubtsov.


the communist party.45 In Zubtsov they organized a major demonstration (seebelow). In Bednodemyanovsk they were particularly known for their choir, directedby a migrant from Central Asia. In Achit the veterans were led by the local historianand intelligentsia activist P. Sysolyatin. Sysolyatin also set up a charity, the VeteranFund, 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 theirmembers, such as a chess tournament in Zubtsov,47 but did not seem to play apublic role, except in Achit, where they were closely connected with the veterans.The Achit disabled people organized an ‘agronomists’ club’ and charitable eventssuch as sales of second-hand clothes, and also lobbied the local council to provideproper premises for the town’s voluntary organizations.48

Zubtsov had lost its other organizations: a women’s council (which existedfrom the 1960s to about 1992), a football team, a bibliophiles’ society and theKnowledge Society, which provided adult education. Bednodemyanovsk had lostfootball and volleyball teams and a branch of the Automobile Association.49

Apart from teachers’ organizations, there remained one ‘authentic’ civil societyorganization, and one which was a puppet of the local administration. The authen-tic organization was an association of local artists which Anatolii Zhupikov, aprominent member of the local intelligentsia, spent long months organizing in1999–2000. It proved both expensive and complicated to deal with the associatedpaperwork.50

By contrast to Zhupikov’s travails, a women’s council (zhensovet), headed byValentina Surovatkina, a mathematics teacher whose son had served in Chechnya,enjoyed the patronage of the local administration. This patronage ensured it pub-licity, though not resources.51 The zhensovet was to some extent the brainchild ofNikolai Nozhkin, deputy head of the local administration. It was useful when theadministration needed a female face, whether this was to publish birthday greet-ings to the hospital director, distribute food aid from the Red Cross to poor fam-ilies or, most importantly, make sure that conscription was effective. Because ofthe latter role, the zhensovet was often referred to as the ‘soldiers’ mothers’ com-mittee’. It had nothing in common with the genuine and militant NGOs, whichwent under the same name in the big cities, but was not dissimilar to other small-town committees. The Moscow-based Union of Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committeesbelieves, however, that this type of committee, however inadequate, is to beencouraged as a foundation stone for more genuine civil society organizations.52

The zhensovet gave emotional support to parents and sons and also adviceabout how to write and send parcels.53 Its members visited the barracks wherelocal soldiers served and reported that they were spick and span.54 The councilalso helps individual mothers, for example, mothers with large families who wantto send their children to summer camps, and intercedes with the local adminis-tration on behalf of mothers who complain about child benefit (or protectsthe administration from having to deal with mothers directly). In May 1999 thedistrict’s Social Protection Fund and the zhensovet invited local managers andcitizens to give money to support district children in need.55 The zhensovet was

definitely a mothers’ organization, not for ‘parents’. When asked why, Surovatkinasaid, ‘Well, a mother is a mother.’ It is not a ‘women’s’ organization either: nowoman had ever approached it on her own behalf.56

Sverdlovsk Region had a particularly lively civil society in the Gorbachevperiod57 and still spawns many highly individual social and political organiza-tions. Achit District had a flourishing Tatar cultural life and some womenactivists, though not really a ‘women’s movement’. The town’s liveliest organiza-tion was a club and choir for retired women, Sudarushka, formed in associationwith local veterans and the Society of Disabled People.58 The members ofSudarushka (‘Young Lady’) were described by respondents as being mostly formerteachers and doctors, who sang, did aerobics and went on rambles. Sudarushkadefinitely constituted a collective feminine survival mechanism. The same couldnot be said for the policewomen’s club in Achit, which did the cooking for policestation birthday celebrations. Another women’s organization, Mothers againstDrugs, seems never to have got off the ground.59

In spring 1999 Tatyana Konstantinova, kindergarten head in the village ofZarya, created an Association of Achit District Women. It was intended to helpwomen set up businesses; provide family planning advice; and support familiesand young people.60 In September it seems to have transformed itself into abranch of the Association of Urals Women. It was introduced promisingly in thenewspaper under the headline ‘Women of the district, unite!’ and its aim was saidto 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 especiallyfemale entrepreneurship; health; culture; and political skills. However, it subse-quently turned into a branch of an organization created in Yekaterinburg under theauspices of Governor Rossel. It benefited Achit to the extent that the head of thedistrict Organizational Department was able to attend a ‘leadership school forwomen from small towns’.62 In November 1999 it celebrated Mother’s Day bygathering 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 abouthow 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 ifthey 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 didbetter 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 amajor political issue locally. Women of Russia picked up only 53 votes in Achittown in December 1999.64

Quite probably the women’s association was handicapped partly by the fact thatKonstantinova did not live in Achit, but in a neighbouring village. Civil society isbound to be splintered when there is such poor transport between different townsand villages within each district. Achit District did, however, have a flourishingTatar village culture, partly sponsored at the regional level and somewhat bypass-ing Achit town and its administration. In 1999 a cultural centre opened inAzigulovo, one of the district’s Tatar villages, which already possessed a mosque.



Governor Rossel attended the opening. (The centre, like the district’s NGO, TatarNational Cultural Autonomy, was run by a woman.) The centre was intended toserve not only local residents, but also those from the neighbouring district.65

Other villages also held Tatar cultural events. For example, in summer 1999 localvillagers, the Tatar Autonomy organization, Rossel’s political party, UralsTransformation and Mayor of Yekaterinburg Chernetskii’s party, Our Home, OurTown, jointly organized a Sabantui (post-ploughing) festival in another Achit vil-lage. The festival was Tatar-Bashkir in origin, but was also attended by localMaris and ethnic Russians. The Tatar activist who described the events for thelocal newspaper pointed out that, despite the participation of guests from theregional capital, none of the District Administration attended. This was a shame,she said, since they could have learned something about how to organize localsociety.66

Politics

In Soviet days, members of the local intelligentsia were expected to exert theirinfluence on behalf of the single candidate, and often themselves to serve on localsoviets. In the 1990s, too, members of the intelligentsia were regularly chosen toserve on electoral committees, which typically consisted largely of governmentofficials, doctors and teachers.67 Intelligenty were also elected to local councils. Forexample, in March 2000 a doctor received the highest number of votes in the localcouncil elections in Achit; the head of School No. 1 came third.68 In December2000 the head of School No. 2 in Bednodemyanovsk was elected to the council andnarrowly missed becoming mayor. Several interviewees had been deputies, butmany of them had felt rather frustrated by their powerlessness in this position.

Nonetheless, the intelligentsia continued to be active in other aspects of localpolitical life in the 1990s. Bednodemyanovsk’s head of administration wasappointed in Penza, but head of administration elections generated considerablepassions 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 electioncampaign of 1996, the former head of School No. 1, Nikolai Krylov, had beencampaigned for by many local professionals, partly out of a sense of intelligentsiasolidarity. He came a close second to Surov (see Figure 7.3).

Staff at the museum, who nominated Krylov, wrote to the local newspaperpointing out that in a neighbouring district a journalist had won the elections – itwas not a vain hope to wish that a member of the intelligentsia would besuccessful. Krylov himself, they said, was a true intelligent.69 Krylov came aheadnot only of two old-style bureaucrats but also of Vyacheslav Shmelev ofPromkomservis, Zubtsov’s most successful businessman and an employer of 200,who came last of the five candidates. The contrast between the fortunes of Krylovand Shmelev is interesting, although a year later, when both men stood forelection to the regional parliament, Shmelev did much better than Krylov, gaining30 per cent of the vote.70

A similar situation occurred in Achit. Here the main contenders for the post ofhead of administration in 1996 were the state farm chair Kolotnin and a teacherat the special needs school, Aleksei Shestyakov, former district party official anddeputy mayor in the 1980s. Shestyakov did not do quite as well as Krylov haddone in Zubtsov, but this was said to be because the opposition had revealed thefact that he had been the subject of a criminal investigation, though not convic-tion. In contrast to the headteacher in Zubtsov, Shestyakov was not particularlypresented as an intelligent. Indeed, when his colleagues wrote to the newspaperin his support, they adduced as a fact in his favour that he ‘keeps a large small-holding’. Perhaps this is extra evidence for the suggestion made in Chapter 6, thatan intelligent has more status in Zubtsov than in Achit, hence intelligentsia iden-tity carries more political capital. The election resulted in Kolotnin’s receiving32 per cent of the votes and Shestyakov, 17 per cent.71

Perhaps it was not surprising if conservative farm chairmen won elections, sincenone of the three districts was a democratic stronghold, as is illustrated by nationalelection results. Figure 7.4 illustrates, for example, what happened in 1993.

DeBardeleben and Galkin suggest that the electoral geography of Russia is bestunderstood in terms of four zones with different economic and geographicalprofiles. The Urals area, for example, like other regions with many primaryindustries, was supportive of Yeltsin and democratization at the outset of the post-communist period but then became very disheartened. Achit, predictably, givenits untypical character within Sverdlovsk, does not entirely conform to thispattern and presents a rather mixed picture. The government party gained only11 per cent in both 1993 and 1995 elections, where the highest number of voteswent to the Agrarians and Communists, respectively. However, Yeltsin won thepresidential elections comfortably in 1996, and Unity won comfortably in both thenational parliamentary elections of 1999 and the regional parliamentary electionsof March 2000.72 Penza and perhaps also Tver fall within DeBardeleben and


2926

9

Surov Krylov Shmelev

0

20

40

Figure 7.3 Percentage of votes for state farm chair Surov, headteacher Krylov andentrepreneur Shmelev in district head of administration elections, ZubstovDistrict, 1996.

Source: ‘Vybory sostoyalis’, ZubZh, 10 December 1996, p. 1.


Galkin’s mixed industrial and agricultural zone. These regions had enjoyed fairlycomfortable standards of living in Soviet days and tended to be more conformistpolitically. Zubtsov did tend to vote more conservatively than Achit. For example,in 1995, although the Communists did better than any other party in Achit, theyonly 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 LabouringRussia. 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 itcan be identified politically, has a particularly well-marked political identity.Many observers have noted its especially communist sympathies.74 Penza had ini-tially been supportive of Yeltsin (notably in the presidential election of 1991), butvoters then changed their minds, partly because of regional political develop-ments. This led to a decisive rejection of the 1993 constitution (by over 58 percent of the electorate in 26 out of the 37 Penza constituencies; Bednodemyanovskwas one of the 26). The protest vote was also manifested in high levels of supportfor the Liberal Democrats (LDPR) in the parliamentary elections of December1993. They came first, with 32 per cent of the vote in the region as a whole, 33 percent in Penza city and 39 per cent in Bednodemyanovsk. In six districts of Penza

15

811 9

3

39

6 5 4

32

16

3

2116

12

19

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Agrar

ian

Comm

unist

LDPR

Wom

en o

f Rus

sia

Russia

’s Cho

ice

Yablok

o

Achit Bedn. Zubtsov

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.

NotesAgrarian � moderate left-wing party, allied to Communists; Communists (KPRF) � successorparty to CPSU, moderate left-wing party; Liberal Democrats (LDPR) � extreme nationalistparty; Russia’s Choice � main government party; Yabloko � westernizing, liberal party. I haveselected only the most popular parties, plus Yabloko, traditionally the party of the ‘democratic’intelligentsia.

Region the LDPR vote was even higher.75 Bednodemyanovsk was also typical ofthe region in choosing Agrarians and Communists second and third in 1993, andparties of the left had considerable success in Bedmodemyanovsk through therest of the decade. Even in the December 1999 parliamentary elections, theCommunists scored 37 per cent in Bednodemyanovsk, as opposed to Unity’s 29.5per cent;76 37 per cent was a particularly high vote for the Communists, since theyaveraged only 32 per cent in the Black Earth macroregion as a whole, and 27 percent in the Volga macroregion.77 Only in 2000 did Bednodemyanovsk put thecommunists second, electing Putin with 55.7 per cent against Zyuganov’s 36.3 percent.78 (Here Bednodemyanovsk was less communist than the Black Earth aver-age. However, the Communists were no longer the preferred party of the localauthorities, so, as in other more conservative parts of Russia, their poor showingin 2000 does not indicate any decline in conformism among the electorate and/orpower of local authorities to influence voting outcomes.)79

More generally, rural areas in Russia have, since the Gorbachev period, tradi-tionally tended to vote for parties on the left. However, in regions such asSverdlovsk which are more radical overall, the rural factor can be overridden bywider regional voting dynamics.80 The three small towns generally conformed tothis pattern. While they all tended to favour Communists and Agrarians, Zubtsovand Bednodemyanovsk more consistently voted for the parties on the left in the1990s than did Achit, or, in at least some cases, than did larger towns and citiesin Penza and Tver regions.81

The configuration of voting within Zubtsov District showed, however, that evenwithin a single district voting patterns could be complex and unpredictable.Although the district centre was the only ‘urban’ settlement it was also one of themost conservative. Zubtsov town voted for the communist presidential candidateZyuganov in 1996, as well as the local communist Surov, whereas the district’slargest village, Pogoreloe Gorodishche, chose Yeltsin and Krylov. Seven villagesvoted for Yeltsin, six for Zyuganov.82

Although all three towns were said to be largely apolitical, and to liven uppolitically only at election time, Achit had the most interesting political life of thethree. This was largely because regional politics is so much livelier in Sverdlovskthan in Penza or Tver. Achit was not a Rossel stronghold. In the August 1999 guber-natorial elections the town voted for the rival candidate, Burkov (42 per cent asopposed to Rossel’s 22 per cent).83 This suggested Achit’s disenchantment with theregional leadership, but also indicated an identification with other poor areas ofSverdlovsk. Rossel’s platform was to present Sverdlovsk as strong and rich, an indus-trial power, but, as Chapter 8 will suggest, this could be irritating for depressedparts of the region like Achit. Burkov’s party, May, was founded in spring 1999, whena group calling themselves The Movement to Defend the Rights of Working Peopleappeared in Karpinsk. (Karpinsk, a coal mining centre, was a particularly depressedlarger town in Sverdlovsk Region; one interviewee’s teacher daughter and engineerson-in-law in Karpinsk had not been paid for 2 years and were living off potatoes andcarrots.) The protesters held the Karpinsk mayor hostage, demanding the payment of



local salaries.84 May instantly spread to other towns and cities in Sverdlovsk. Itsnewspaper was named Europe � Asia, emphasizing that the movement spannedboths 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 socialsecurity departments in lieu of benefit – coffins and candles for terminally ill peo-ple, barbecues instead of child benefit, etc.85 May obviously appealed to an outragedsense of social justice among Achit voters.

Overall, Sverdlovsk Region contains many unique political groupings, and isperhaps more politicized than most other regions. This feature is sometimeslinked 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 ofwhich have populations over 100,000, the region resembles a huge family, withcities jostling for resources and pestering Yekaterinburg. Hence politics partlyrevolves around a ‘centre-provinces’ tension, where the ‘provinces’ areSverdlovsk minus Yekaterinburg. Although Achit is in the position of weakest sib-ling in this family, its voters are obviously susceptible to anti-centrist appeals.Hence there is even some support for the north Sverdlovsk movement Factory andMining 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 thatthere is a huge gulf between incomes, education and access to culture in the citiesand the provincial depths (glubinka).’87

A part of the intelligentsia in both Achit and Zubtsov was active in regional andnational 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 ofYekaterinburg 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 MiningUrals, 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 Russianand Tatar.88 In fact, as just described, the most popular candidate in Achit waspopulist ‘ordinary people’s’ candidate Burkov, whose party was not so obviouslysupported by the local intelligentsia. Still less popular than Chernetskii was theliberal Yavlinskii and his party Yabloko. The editor of Gorodok used his office asa campaign headquarters for Yabloko, but this was a lost cause in Achit.89

In Zubtsov a number of teachers stood unsuccessfully for the regional parlia-ment. It was, however, women working in the museum who, as in 1996, played amajor role in organizing local political life for the elections in 1999. One of themuseum workers, like Stakheeva, had been on the party committee (as ideologysecretary) in the 1980s. With the sub-editor of Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, the chieflibrarian and some bureaucrats and farm chairmen, the museum staff formed abranch of Fatherland, the movement led by Mayor of Moscow Yurii Luzhkov.

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

Protests and legal action

Zubtsov and Achit had been the scene of various disputes and industrial action. InZubtsov, for example, kindergarten teachers took the local authorities to courtover their delayed pay, and won.91 The most spectacular action had occurred whenpensioners in Zubtsov had staged a large demonstration in the town square andmarched to one of the bridges over the Vazuza, blocking it to traffic. (A kinder-garten manager later regretted that they had not joined forces.) While I was inAchit in September 2000 the boiler workers were striking because of wagearrears, 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 Achitand Zubtsov had experienced several93 teachers’ strikes, which were prompted bynon-payment of salaries. For example, the January 1999 strike in Achit wasprompted by a 10-month salary delay: a debt which was said to be worse than thatin neighbouring districts.94 Achit teachers also tried to involve all local health andarts 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 Zubtsovtended to have a sense of achieving very little, and losing a lot; they were not feel-ing so militant now. The Zubtsov schoolteachers had gone on strike in 1998 and1999. The strike in January 1999 achieved just the payment of one month’s salaryand a free bun for the pupils at break.96 The teachers’ strikes in Achit were saidto have created divisions and a sense of betrayal among the staff, and the strikeshad also cost teachers respect among parents. This created fractures in the net-works so essential for emotional and material survival in the local community.

Conclusions

Civil society organizations in all the towns were weak. Moreover, all three townswere 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 soci-ety association. Its festivals seemed to be better attended than those in the other



towns. Zubtsov and Achit were probably more atomized and certainly more political.They contained some ex-communist professional people who were prepared tooppose the local administration and indeed to ‘play the intelligentsia card’, tryingto turn their local social capital into political capital. Both Achit and Zubtsov hadnewspapers whose editors were liberals and who tried to provide a lively, alterna-tive voice, though not always successfully. Other civil society organizations wereweak or non-existent, apart from veterans’ and disabled people’s organizations,which to some extent lacked credibility because of ties to the communists; Tatarorganizations (which had financial help from the regional centre); and the women’sgroup Sudarushka. The Tatar culture was an important part of life for a number ofAchit 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 senseof community spirit among the local intelligentsia, particularly its elite, an over-lapping group of creative incomers and managers of cultural and educationalinstitutions. Moreover, they formed a kind of ‘critical mass’ and had a collectiveidentity, as was evident from their political activities in Zubtsov. In Bednodemyanovskprofessionals kept in touch with former members of the local intelligentsia nowin Moscow, and indeed had a reunion there in the late 1990s. Bednodemyanovskartists had their own association. They at least were genuinely creative, so, evenif certain aspects of cultural life – those provided by houses of culture andlibraries – were often determined by the local administration, the public alsohad the opportunity of seeing more ‘authentic’ and interesting productions andexhibitions in the arts/music schools.

Given the creative quality of the intelligentsia elite in both towns, it can be saidthat it was genuinely ‘intellectual’. This term has been deliberately avoided untilnow, because it is not a synonym for intelligentsia, but it is a component of intel-ligentsia identity which is particularly important for democratization. Both townsexperienced a kind of clash between this more questioning and imaginativeapproach on the part of certain members of the intelligentsia and the very Sovietadministration. (‘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 paysmore attention to the cultural capital which institutionalized collective practicesrepresent, on the assumption that actors embedded in stable social networks aremore likely to have the skills and confidence to participate in and ‘appropriate’social transformation agendae’.97 Much the same point was made by the MoscowSoldiers’ Mothers leader who pointed out that even groups of soldiers’ mothersunder the thumb of local administrations in small provincial towns must beencouraged, because they might eventually grow into fully fledged civil societyorganizations. More broadly, one can perhaps take encouragement from the factthat the small towns are largely guided by middle-aged ex-Soviet intellectualswith a rather traditional sense of responsibility for the moral health of the com-munity, but at the same time a commitment towards providing an entertaining andinteresting cultural life. By building on traditional Soviet cultural practices theycan create a more ‘authentic’ local culture than was possible in the Soviet era.

A focus on binding together the community is found among members of theintelligentsia in all three towns, but in Achit relations are more conflictual/distant(rivalry between newspapers, arts/sports centre battle with Church, rifts becauseof teachers’ strikes). The intelligentsia, or at least its ethnic Russian majority, hasless self-confidence, partly perhaps because it is less well-educated. Intellectuallife is probably liveliest in School No. 1, which, as the only regular school in thetown, serves as a particular focus for the community. The headteacher, NadezhdaPlatonova, 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 bycolleagues in typical ‘intelligentsia’ terms: ‘works of art . . . a ray of light in acolourless, cultureless local life.’98 The role of individuals is obviously very sig-nificant in all the towns. As we have seen, for example, one probable reason whyattempts to create a women’s movement in Achit floundered was because it wasthe brainchild of one activist, Tatyana Konstantinova, who was not based in Achit.Deputy head of administration Nikolai Nozhkin, with his particularly proactivestance in Bednodemyanovsk, did much to channel local community life in aSoviet direction.

There are other, structural factors, which have damaged the quality of commu-nity 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, alsoblamed specifically overwork among teachers in the 1990s for low levels ofparticipation. The teachers in Achit were particularly stressed by pressures fromthe Education Ministry and by volume of work.

Achit has certain advantages over the other two towns in that there is regionalfunding for some kinds of NGOs, and that there is a certain Sverdlovsk culture ofactivism. Civil society organizations therefore do get set up (people’s militia,anti-drugs group, Achit women’s association, Veteran Fund) – but often only todisappear soon after. Rather paradoxically, considering the relative political pas-sivity of Penza and Tver as regions, it is in Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov thatcommitted members of the intelligentsia been sufficiently active and united tocreate a more long-lasting collective ‘survival strategy’ for small towns which feelincreasingly isolated vis-à-vis the wider world. This sense of isolation is exploredin greater detail in the following chapter.


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 inthe regional capital, but in the glubinka, the provincial depths? What has been theeffect of the political and economic changes of the postcommunist period on howprovincial Russians perceive their regional identities? Perhaps, despite theattempts of regional leaders to emphasize the region, more overarching, ‘Russian’identities have become more significant in the postcommunist period, the effectof attempts at Russian state building, or ethnic cultural revival. Alternatively, per-haps, 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 andunite the local community. As already mentioned, Burawoy et al., use the term‘involution’ to describe how households in the postcommunist period focusinwards and increasingly become autonomous economic units.1 Perhaps involu-tion is also a suitable term for describing the increasingly parochial views ofprovincial Russians. Rodoman suggests that while the new Russian elite expandsits horizons, travelling frequently to the West, ‘the lower classes experience adecline in social and geographic mobility, they become more attached to theirplaces of residence and their plots of land, they lose interest in and respect forMoscow; their consciousness of being Russian is supplemented and overshad-owed by local patriotism’.2 This chapter examines whether the interviewees inAchit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk shared this perspective.

The chapter looks first at the region-enhancing project from the point of viewof the regional authorities, and at the different tools they use for building upregional identities. After suggesting why such efforts might or might not be

8 Multiple identitiesLocal, regional, ethnic and national

successful, the chapter continues with an analysis of respondents’ answers toquestions about their regional identity. It explores whether small-town citizensfelt that their region had a marked identity, and if so, what were its main compo-nents – did it conform to the image which the regional authorities were trying toproject? What was the place of the governor and the regional capital in personi-fying the region? Having dealt with perceptions of whether/how the region andthe small town were linked, the chapter then looks at actual ‘physical’ links –travel for business and pleasure. Since the main conclusion is that respondents areto a large extent marooned in their small towns, in other words agreeing withRodoman’s contention, the chapter then continues by examining the opposite sideof the coin: whether local identities and patriotism are becoming enhanced. Thispicks up on themes in Chapter 7, about the local community and ‘communityspirit’, but it extends the argument by relating local identity to ethnic and nationalidentities. (If there is a certain alienation from the regional level, this does notnegate the possibility that other more abstract levels of identity, such as beingRussian, are still important – in fact, they could be strengthened just because ofcomplaints against the regional authorities.)

Projects to boost regional identity

The assertion by regional elites of greater independence from Moscow, andMoscow’s response, is the subject of scholarly attention in both Russia and theWest.3 However, other aspects of enhanced autonomy are perhaps less familiar.Regional leaders have sought new ways of enhancing regional patriotism andmaintaining distinct identities for their regions. Such identity changes may besymbolic, for example, the redesigning of crests or renaming of cities, or theadoption of slogans by governors, such as Rossel (Sverdlovsk) ‘The State CanDepend on the Urals’ or Bochkarev (Penza): ‘Down to Work!’

Rossel has the most consistent and elaborate regional ideology, propagated byhis own political party, Urals Transformation, and symbolized by the rebuildingof the monastery in Verkhoture.

The list of ‘new’cultural values is quite traditional: the Orthodox faith, collectiverepentance for the bloody excesses of the Soviet past, the mobilization of youthfor the arts and cultural events, and the creation of an authentic Ural culture.4

Lapina and Chirikova describe among ‘typical technologies of the struggle forpower’: ‘the active formation, through the media, of a positive image of the author-ities and their efforts to ensure the flourishing of the region; and the formation ofa regional mythology’. Lapina and Chirikova also point out that the basis of themythology used to be anti-Moscow sentiment (Moscow doesn’t care, only weachieve things), but with Putin’s advent to power regional leaders might have tofind an alternative mythology.5 Rossel is an extreme example of this tendency. Hehas made numerous anti-Moscow populist gestures, such as threatening not to paytaxes to Moscow in the aftermath of the August 1998 financial crisis.6

188 Local, regional, ethnic and national identities

The blossoming of regional media has been a notable feature of the postcom-munist period.7 Sverdlovsk Region is said to be comparable to Moscow andPetersburg, with over 200 periodicals and 12 television stations.8 In poorer Penza,where the media are less well developed, the Institute of Regional Politicsnonetheless produced a list of 15 Penza newspapers of different political com-plexions; 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 townnearest to Zubtsov, there is a local cable channel.

To some extent the regional media is the tool of the local leadership, or is seenby the leadership as such, and this has led to human rights abuses and violence insome 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 particu-larly widely available, with, for example, 50 copies being supplied free to the locallibrary in Achit. Attempts to enhance regional identity are also aimed at children.They include the introduction of new courses in the school curriculum which empha-size the history and geography of the region. In Bednodemyanovsk, where thelibrary was receiving fewer than twenty new books a year, the only regular source ofsupply was local history books from Penza Region library. The education depart-ment, too, was supplied with regional history materials, such as the journals Zemstvoand Guberniya.10 The children’s arts centre was busy implementing regional policyto revive interest in Penza folklore. Children in the last few years have travelledround villages in Bednodemyanovsk District, interviewing older people about localrituals and artforms.11 The district administration’s Culture Department has also triedto make houses of culture pay more attention to local folklore.12

Regional capitals themselves have changed in outward appearance: new, mod-ern 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-styleshops and restaurants, Western organizations, refashioning of airports to receivedirect flights from abroad, etc., all suggests an opening to the wider world, as dotravel 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 Walkerwrite of the existence of a ‘relatively strong and growing identification ofRussians with their regions and regional leaders rather than with the nation asa whole or central leaders in Moscow’.13 However, for a number of reasons thisseems unlikely in the small towns. One problem is that people in the glubinkarealize that power is located only in the regional capital. Whatever the claimsabout democratization since 1991, there is no necessary connection betweenmore power for the regional government and more say for the local population.Regional leaders may be ‘hoarding’ power at their own level rather than sharingit downwards. Rossel is the best example here, since he has attempted to run

Local, regional, ethnic and national identities 189

Sverdlovsk as a centralized state, although not with complete success. (Perhaps,however, Rossel’s efforts are just particularly conspicuous because his task is sodifficult, given that he has so many powerful cities to control. Penza is actuallymore centralized, with heads of administration appointed by the governor.)

Geographical size and within-region diversity also inhibit identification withthe region. Sverdlovsk is huge, the size of England, and finding features in com-mon between a south-western rural area like Achit and a northern industrial citylike Serov is not easy. Moreover, where towns are a long way from the regionalcentre it is harder for that centre to serve as a focus of identity. As has alreadybeen described, at three to four hours bus journey from the nearest city, all threefieldwork towns are quite deep into the ‘provincial depths’.

In order to measure the success of projects to enhance regional identity, I triedto find out whether small-town respondents had a strong sense of regional iden-tity and whether their perceptions of the region matched the images projected byregional leaders. Respondents in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were asked howtheir region differed from other regions.

Overall, the contrast between Penza and Sverdlovsk could be encapsulated in thephrases, used by some interviewees, ‘oblast’ literaturnaya’ and ‘oblast’ eksperimen-tal’naya’. Penza was the region of nineteenth-century country estates, most famously,Lermontov’s, and twenty-first century agricultural depression. Sverdlovsk was theregion of proud tradition in Soviet engineering firsts and wayward postcommunisteducational policies and politics. (Nobody, however, mentioned the short-lived UralsRepublic of 1993.) Sverdlovsk had a more sharply defined identity than did Penza.Just one, very negative interviewee, claimed that it ‘was absolutely no different’ fromother regions; 11 made the opposite point, that Sverdlovsk was ‘very different’: ‘theytreat us like guinea pigs’; ‘we have our own way of doing things’; ‘it lives by its ownrules’. This could be seen as a definite success for Rossel, who is nothing if not proac-tive and idiosyncratic, but probably he builds on a pre-existing feeling of Sverdlovskidentity. (Yeltsin, after all, epitomized the same tendency.) There was also a definiteUrals identification. When Sverdlovsk was compared with other regions, these wereits Urals neighbours, Perm, Chelyabinsk and Bashkortostan.

In Penza, no one claimed that the region was very different from others, andthe points of comparison were more wide-ranging. Penza could be viewed as partof the Black Earth, agricultural area encompassing, for example, Tambov andVoronezh: traditional communist strongholds. In Bednodemyanovsk, 16 per centof 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 FederalOkrug. Samara was the most often-mentioned ‘nearby’ region, although it does notneighbour Penza. Perhaps perceptions were shaped by the higher media profile of thebiggest 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 Sverdlovskwith Moscow. This was not part of the same world (see below).14


In Britain, regional identities are possibly most often felt with reference tofootball or rugby teams in the local cities. Sport was most certainly not such anidentifying feature in my sample. It was almost never mentioned, although oneinterviewee supported Manchester United. Instead, responses suggested that theregion was first and foremost perceived an economic unit – agricultural, poor anddepressed (Penza) or industrial, prospering and ‘functioning’ (Sverdlovsk).‘Sverdlovsk region is densely populated and industrial, like England,’ declared thehead of administration of Achit District. To some extent respondents also madecomments about their own local section of the region – for example, ‘in SverdlovskRegion industry is doing well, but agricultural areas like Achit are neglected’.Nonetheless, interviewees usually presented a picture of the overall economic statusof 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 suf-fered 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 somesuccess for the regional leaders’ propaganda. The prosperity rankings discussed inChapters 1 and 3 do not support the view that Sverdlovsk is an outstandingly richregion, or Penza anything but an extremely depressed one, although it is true that in2000 the Bednodemyanovsk newspaper was busy publishing Goskomstat statisticsshowing that the economy might be picking up.

The point of comparison with other regions was almost always made in eco-nomic terms, often not very favourably to the home region. For example, people inAchit, bordering on Perm Region, presented a portrait of Perm as a region wheresalaries were paid on time, agriculture had not been ruined by re-organization andunderfunding, and child benefit was paid in money, not porridge past its use-bydate. Chapter 1 suggested that living standards in Perm and Bashkortostan wereindeed better than in Sverdlovsk, judging by Goskomstat statistics, but this habitof comparing local and other people’s standard of living is also traditional inRussia – generated by the shortages and regional inequalities of the commandeconomy and the Soviet media focus on comparing output between factories,farms, milkmaids, etc. In Soviet days, the first question of a provincial Russian toa 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 theywere genuinely concerned about its economic standing and prospects. Whenasked what type of media reports about their region they found most interesting,the interviewees overwhelmingly mentioned socio-economic themes. A preoccu-pation with the region’s economic health is particularly understandable in post-communist conditions, when people are constantly wondering whether theirsalary will be paid next month. Interviewees were also hoping that the industrialenterprises in their local district might experience a revival in their fortunes, andthat this would help to rescue the district from its predicament of being dependenton highly inadequate subsidies from the regional centre.

It is important to note the rather minimalist aspirations of the interviewees forthe regional economy. Governors may have grand ambitions for their regions, butin the small town people just want to be paid, the local fields to be sown and the


factories to provide more employment. There was never a suggestion that thefuture was likely to be more prosperous than the Soviet past.

Governors were in a dangerous position, since they personally were expectedto promote economic growth. In Bednodemyanovsk, for example, some intervie-wees enthusiastically repeated the assurances of the regional media thatBochkarev was busy improving things, such as attracting British investment, orbuilding more roads. Others were more hesitant to believe what might just bepropaganda, but they did feel that this was what Bochkarev should be doing.Rossel was criticized for ‘wasting’ money on his showpiece, the Verkhoturemonastery, at the other end of the region from Achit. As Startsev points out, dis-trict authorities can excuse themselves on the grounds that economic crisis isreally 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 peoplein the small town. Only one respondent, a male doctor, mentioned politics as themost interesting kind of regional news. He identified ‘the power struggle’ inYekaterinburg. When asked to characterize their region, only a minority of inter-viewees did so in political terms, generally to complain. In Achit, 18 per cent ofrespondents criticized ‘bad’ politicians and policies (especially non-payment ofsalaries) 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 itthe governor? The Russian term, yarkaya lichnost’, ‘shining personality’, issomewhat ambiguous, since it can be understood to imply only virtuous charac-teristics: a yarkaya lichnost’ cannot shine with notoriety. This prompted somemusings – could the governor really be a ‘shining’ personality? – and commentsalong the lines of ‘we haven’t had any shining personalities since Lenin’ or ‘thereare no personalities of the calibre of Richter, Rostropovich or Lermontov’.16 Mostinterviewees, however, did not aspire to name Richters or Rostropoviches, andconsidered that the term was neutral and applicable to lesser stars. GovernorsBochkarev and Rossel could take some comfort from the fact that they werenamed far more frequently than any other local bigwig, by 60 and 64 per cent ofinterviewees, respectively (Figure 8.1).17

Nevertheless, the way in which Bochkarev and Rossel were named did notalways suggest unqualified admiration, and the merits of face-to-face interview-ing as opposed to the use of written questionnaires were nicely illustrated. Facesexpressed varying degrees of doubt, irony and cynicism, and there were com-ments along the lines of ‘I suppose it can only be Bochkarev’ or ‘I didn’t vote forRossel, but he is the most obvious person’.

The governors’ rivals, mayors of Penza and Yekaterinburg Kalashnikov andChernetskii, were quite often mentioned second; it was not surprising that Chernetskiiwas 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 fig-ures 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 inter-views were conducted, on a fact-finding/inspection visit, and therefore in the front of


people’s minds, while in Bednodemyanovsk Penza Minister of Interior Gulyakov wasa local hero who still acted as a patron to his home town.

Gulyakov’s role is a fascinating one. Bednodemyanovsk had been lucky toachieve such a patron: a local boy who rose to the top despite the fact that, accord-ing to interviewees, he was ‘a real member of the intelligentsia’. His mother wasa librarian. According to respondents, he had achieved his high position throughhard work and merit: a Cinderella/Soviet-style fairytale career. This was a com-forting story for a small town which so far had had few positive experiences ofpostcommunism. More often it is the big towns which have political clout in thecapital. Although there were clearly elements of irrationality and wishful thinkinghere, there was also hard-headed realism. First, Gulyakov could bring them prac-tical assets, like a photocopier from Bochkarev for the school.18 Second, he couldbe ‘their man’ in the regional capital.

The only other regional public figures named by respondents were their bossesin the regional capital, for example, the head of the regional library network or theMinister of Education. Generally they did not have much to say about these char-acters – and sometimes these were the responses of interviewees who seemed tohave little idea what to say, not being able to think of anyone apart from the gover-nor. Sverdlovsk Minister of Education Nesterov was most often cited, by 12 per centof respondents, but not always very enthusiastically (to put it politely). Teachersdisliked the proactive, experimental and ‘meddling’ approach of the ministry.

It was curious, given the intelligentsia complexion of the sample, that so fewinterviewees were able to name leading lights of the cultural world. Scholars and


64

60

22

12

0

16

0

22

0 70

Regional minister of Interior

Head of regional government

Mayor of regional capital

Governor

Achit

B’k

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

performers in the region’s capital were not well known by name. One musicteacher commented, for example, ‘We don’t know the musicians now because wedon’t go to concerts. If we have to be in Yekaterinburg on business we can’t affordto go out in the evening.’ Some others suggested that they were not even interestedin reading the cultural news in the regional press, since they could not go to seethe plays or hear the concerts described.

Perhaps, though, if people are not well informed about the regional capital it isbecause they do not have information? This may seem a curious suggestion in viewof what has been said about the efforts of regional leaders to project a positiveimage 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 regionalmedia, in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk the proportion was only half. In all threetowns there were problems with television reception, which meant that many peo-ple could not watch regional broadcasts. Moreover, since few could afford toreplace Soviet televisions and radios, they could find themselves without accessto broadcast media if their equipment broke.

In 1999, only 69.7 per cent of the Russian population was said to be able toreceive three or more television channels.19 However, this figure probablyincludes places like Achit and the Volga/Vazuza/Sheshma valleys in Zubtsov,which formally do receive all the main channels, but where the transmission qual-ity is in fact poor. Radio is more accessible.

Often respondents did not feel able to buy regional newspapers, confiningthemselves to the town’s own newspaper(s), although the latter did frequentlycarry reprints from the regional press. The 50 free copies of Rossel’s propagandapaper were snapped up by ‘pensioners who wanted a television schedule’, accord-ing to a librarian. People were quite sceptical about the veracity of the regionalmedia, although some interviewees suggested that if you read two or more paperswith different angles you could form a reasonably accurate picture of life in theregion. They often mentioned that they had better sources of information, such asphone calls to friends, or conversations with colleagues from other towns at (rare)regional-level seminars. The deputy head of the prosecution service in Achitpointed out that she had her own, reliable in-house information channel.

Second, perhaps regional leaders do not care so much about what small-townpeople think of them. (If they did, they might invest more in television transmit-ters.) Both Chernyshov and Lapina and Chirikova suggest that political efforts areincreasingly confined to the regional centre and one or two big towns.20 This wasthe 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 instila sense of regional identity are not working well. In return, small-town respondentswere not very interested in the regional capital.21

Local people commonly defined the region in terms of a capital, which wasdifferent from their town, a capital which was seen as being prioritized by theregional authorities. A few interviewees felt proud of the capital, remarking on hownice it looked now it had been done up, and a number were nostalgic for their


student days in the city. However, comments about the regional capital today tendedto stress its distance and strangeness. In the case of Yekaterinburg, interviewees alsomentioned 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 alsoremote. Comments about regional capitals included: ‘a well-fed person can’t under-stand a hungry one’; ‘the centre doesn’t try’; ‘the centre doesn’t care’; ‘they don’twant to know us’; ‘Penza is a different world’, ‘the state stops at Tver’. The latterremark, while perhaps partly an ironic reference to the terminology of the 1993 con-stitution,22 mostly referred to the extent to which Zubtsov was thrown back on itsown resources for financing the local budget. A similar point was made aboutAchit: ‘The state hardly exists at district level. The municipality has been givenpower – but with empty pockets.’23

Even when the local press reported visits from the regional capital, the lan-guage used sometimes conveyed the impression that the regional authorities hada purely instrumental attitude towards the small towns. When reporting thatGovernor Bochkarev had promised that Bednodemyanovsk would receive moreinvestment to improve its appearance, the local newspaper immediately addedthat the town was seen as the ‘gateway to Penza Region’.24 (It is the westernmostPenza town on the Moscow–Samara highway.)

Despite such occasional visitations, people in the small town felt that the centrewas 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 alsocriticized 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-upto elections. Interviewees also deplored the cultural dimension of neglect. A typi-cal comment was ‘We used to have lots of visiting performers, but now we live ona desert island’. This neglect had resulted from the disintegration of Soviet officialnetworks, such as obligatory patronage (shefstvo) by urban institutions (e.g.Sverdlovsk Philharmonia’s over School No. 1 in Achit or Tver Philharmonia’s overSchool No. 1 in Zubtsov).

Respondents in all three towns were asked to comment on a quotation fromsociologist Leonid Kogan that ‘links between the centre and the regions have rup-tured today even more in the affective/cultural sphere than in politics or econom-ics’.25 They almost all agreed, reminiscing fondly about visits, in Soviet days, bynational stars such as the folksinger Zhanna Bichevskaya, and complaining bit-terly about how high-quality performers no longer visited the town. It was truethat a few commercial circuses and zoos passed through, and, in Achit, that therewas a flurry of concerts before elections, sponsored by hopeful candidates fromYekaterinburg. However, the second-rate and/or cynical nature of these activitiesmeant that they did not count as real culture in the eyes of respondents.

Travel

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


said that she felt that her links with the Ministry of Education in Penza werestronger than they had been with the Regional Education Department of Sovietdays. Librarians in Zubtsov had a sense of being closely in touch with Tver, andZubtsov Museum had received exhibits from Tver. There is a regional council ofhospital directors in Tver.

It was striking, however, that in Achit the school headteachers and some other sen-ior officials – such as the assistant procurator and head librarian – were no longertravelling to Yekaterinburg on business: subsidized business trips had been cut andno official cars were available. Even in Bednodemyanovsk the head of School No. 1said he was travelling much less often than before. The strong ties with Penza seemedto be only at a very senior level. For example, ordinary officials in the educationdepartment were not even allowed to make long-distance telephone calls, althoughthey had previously been accustomed to phoning Penza for advice. The house ofculture 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 per-sisted. However, teachers bemoaned the fact that children were not being taken oncultural trips to the regional capital as often as they had been in Soviet days, orthat, when such trips were organized, they were too expensive for many pupils.

Travel for personal reasons such as holidays, theatre-going or football matcheswas becoming less feasible for most interviewees, apart from some of the richerones – those in managerial positions or married to businessmen and senior offi-cials. Now, for most of the year, sometimes for years on end, many small-towninhabitants are stranded in their local area. The problem is partly the cost of stay-ing 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 kilo-metre 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 Penzabus was due to depart and offering rides to Penza.26 Zubtsov had just one dailyservice to Moscow, recently reduced from two.

In fact most respondents either had a car or could borrow one, but these carswere frequently described as being too ancient and decrepit to be used for anyjourney further than the forest or hayfield. The price of petrol was mentioned asanother reason for lack of travel.

A final problem was time: during the growing season, the garden consumes allspare time, and winter is not the best season for travel in Russia.

The constraints on travelling far meant that, for many interviewees in Zubtsov andAchit, travel was limited to occasional shopping trips to the nearby towns of Rzhevand Krasnoufimsk. Even the bus fares to these towns were beyond the means ofa 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, byRussian standards, none of the districts was wild or remote. For example, the head


librarian in Bednodemyanovsk said that because of petrol prices she could not getround all the local libraries in this very small district even in the course of a year; vil-lage 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 brokenwere with remote villages. For these people the district boundaries seemed to con-stitute the limits of their everyday consciousness. They were not, however, neces-sarily people who had always lived in the small town, just people whose everydayjobs brought them into contact with the district.

As can be seen, the samples varied quite considerably as to how many inter-viewees 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 andthe role of incomers, it seems impossible to argue that communities are strongerif more people have been born there. Of the Achit sample, 92 per cent were fromthe Urals – the Central Urals, in fact – and yet if anything the town had the weak-est identity. Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk owed much of their community lifeto non-locals, although other active people were locally born.

It seemed common for respondents who had come into the small town, even ifit was from a village not much different, to preserve a sentimental attachment totheir birthplaces. One librarian in Zubtsov, for example, was still grieving for herhome village in Smolensk Region, which had been bulldozed after classificationas a ‘village without a future’. ‘We’re not Tver folk,’ she explained. Despite suchnostalgia and rather essentialist approach – denying the possibility of changingfrom a ‘Smolensk person’ to a ‘Tver person’ – most respondents did seem to haveat least partly adopted an identity as a citizen of Achit, Bednodemyanovsk orZubtsov. 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 localarea with the word ‘mother’. The Russian word for ‘homeland’ or ‘motherland’(rodina) is ambiguous: it can include the concept of the ‘little’ motherland (malayarodina) or local area. When asked what they thought of when they heard the words‘motherland’ or ‘Mother Russia’, many respondents said things like ‘the littlecorner where I live’, ‘my family’, ‘my garden’, ‘my house, my bread, my children’,


Table 8.1 Birthplaces of respondents (in per cent)

In the small Outside localtown/district macroregion

Achit 44 8Bednodemyanovsk 62 12Zubtsov 39 34

‘where I live and am respected’, ‘local nature’ or ‘where my mother is’. Researchin other Urals towns, such as Krasnoufimsk and Orenburg, backs up the impres-sion that people locate themselves primarily in their ‘little’ motherland.30

Even some quite influential and politicized local figures expressed such nar-row concepts. They included, for example, a senior woman in Achit who claimednot to think about Russia as a whole except while watching the news. MotherRussia, for her, meant ‘her woods, weeds and litter, the place where I live’. It wasnot important who was president or governor. She said she had not felt this localidentification so strongly twenty years ago. As mentioned in the previous chap-ter, in Zubtsov in spring 1999, several prominent members of the local intelli-gentsia were attempting to establish a branch of the nation-wide organizationFatherland (Otechestvo). However, although Fatherland was commonly viewed asa powerbase for its leader, Mayor of Moscow Yurii Luzhkov, in Zubtsov it was a localmovement of the intelligentsia, intent on improving local conditions as a result ofgreater power over decision-making at local level.

On, the other hand, as the last chapter described, some local people were con-sciously trying to expand local horizons, and they explicitly stated their intention ofovercoming the barriers between themselves and the outside world. One musicteacher in Bednodemyanovsk pointed out that the reason she and her colleague hadmade a conscious decision to enliven the community with weekly concerts, oftenwith an educational element, was: ‘Since we can’t travel or read so much, we haveto make life interesting here’. Also in Bednodemyanovsk, a kebab seller on theMoscow road had opened a computer club with Internet access (possibly the first inthe town), aimed at young people. Although he was doing well selling kebabs, heexplained his motivation as the desire to do something useful by linking Bednode-myanovsk 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 discon-nected from the regional capital, but retain an involvement in the affairs of their localcommunity, an involvement which in some cases has been strengthened preciselybecause of the weakening of links with the regional capital. How do these trends linkup to developments on a ‘higher’ level – in ethnic and national consciousness?

Being Russian

Ethnicity for most respondents meant being Russian. The towns studied arepredominantly ethnic Russian and most of the interviewees were Russian.32 Thenon-Russians’ answers to questions about Russia did not differ from those ofthe ethnically Russian respondents.

Vera Tolz has identified five main types of definition of the Russian nation inlate 1990s intellectual debates:

1 ‘Union identity: the Russians defined as an imperial people or through theirmission to create a supranational state.’

2 ‘The Russians as a nation of all eastern Slavs’ (i.e. including Belorussiansand Ukrainians).


3 ‘The Russians as a community of Russian speakers, regardless of their ethnicorigin.’

4 ‘The Russians defined racially.’5 ‘A civic Russian (rossiiskaya) nation, whose members are all citizens of the

Russian Federation, regardless of their ethnic and cultural background, unitedby loyalty to newly emerging political institutions and its constitution.’33

It would seem that in some respects most of the small-town interviewees adheredto the ‘civic nation’ model. Their answers suggested that they were committed todemocratic values such as freedom of speech and free elections, and they alsobelieved in the multi-ethnic state.

However, Tolz suggests that for the ‘civic nation’ model to function, citizensshould also be ‘united by loyalty to newly emerging political institutions and its con-stitution’. Citing national poll data, she suggests that ‘as far as the broad public inthe Russian Federation is concerned Russian identity is largely subjective (identifi-cation with Russia as a homeland and self-identification as a Russian are key char-acteristics); and it is also linguistic and cultural. The question of citizenship is far lesssignificant’.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 suc-cumbing to ‘patriotism from habit’ ( privychnyi patriotizm), as officially incul-cated. Most interviewees said, however, that they were ‘proud’, often justifyingthat pride with references to Russian culture (‘Pushkin was Russian, Dostoevskywas Russian’). The other common justifications were Russian history, particu-larly the victory in the Second World War, and the long-suffering quality of theRussian people. Even the most cynical and depressed respondents cheered up asthey warmed to this theme.

Respondents in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk were invited to comment on thesignificance for them personally of the building of the Russian state since 1991and the greater accessibility of Russian culture. It was clear that the towns werenot intellectual communities ripped by fierce debates between Slavophiles andWesternizers or proponents of Tolz’s five models. People did not make prescrip-tions for Russia’s future. They did not talk about Russia as a superpower or anempire. In fact most respondents did not even mention nationalism or issues con-nected with multi-ethnicity. Only 12 people made comments which could belabelled as Russian nationalist. Most of these comments were to the effect thatbefore 1992 Russia did not have a proper identity of its own, because people didnot 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 moreRussian 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 theforefront of most people’s minds when they read the question about Russianidentity:35 instead, they were more interested in talking about their direct personalexperience, what they liked about the Russian cultural revival. Of the respondents,


65 per cent chose to talk about how they welcomed the publication of new historybooks, the availability of literary texts banned by the Soviet regime or the restora-tion of Orthodox churches. Although there were some comments to the effect that‘people ought to know their own history’ most people did not problematize thesetrends. They ‘liked’ reading history or watching historical programmes on televi-sion: history was ‘interesting’. The only caveats tended to be practical ones: resent-ment that they could not afford to buy books or travel to museums, and regret thatthey could not receive the Culture Channel on television. (In this latter respectmost of Zubtsov was better off than the other towns.)

Several respondents made comments about how they valued being able to reada greater variety of Russian literature, and teach it: it was more fun to teachBulgakov 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 com-plained 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 chil-dren in general: they had not seen the art and architectural treasures of Moscowand St Petersburg, and had therefore missed out on something very important.

Moscow, however, arouses very contradictory emotions – something which wasillustrated one day when I visited the library in Zubtsov. One librarian was radiantbecause a well-known writer, on holiday nearby, had visited the library; her col-league looked utterly dismissive and said ‘they are here on holiday, but we have towork all summer’. (She also claimed that even her Moscow relations did not under-stand people in Zubtsov.) A few people dismissed Moscow with blanket statementssuch as ‘I don’t like Moscow or Muscovites.’ Others justified their dislike: Moscowis variously seen as different; indifferent; hostile/greedy; and immoral.

1 Moscow was described as ‘a different state’; ‘another continent’; ‘like England’.Moscow had ‘employment and prestigious educational institutions’. ‘Moscowlives its own life.’ ‘Moscow isn’t part of a spiritual whole with Russia.’

2 ‘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.’

3 ‘Moscow was never on good terms with the provinces and always exploitedthem.’ ‘People hate Moscow because it sucks up all the resources.’ ‘Theprovinces were always left to stew in their own juice.’

4 ‘People are more moral in small towns than in Moscow and Petersburg.’‘Russia will be resurrected thanks to the provinces, where some spiritualitystill resides.’ ‘The best people are in the provinces.’

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


institutions in Moscow. Zubtsov respondents, who were asked whether they thoughtthey could influence Moscow politics, were in almost complete agreement that thiswas impossible: ‘we are midges’, as one of them put it. In Zubtsov, where peopleusually interpreted Kogan’s statement to refer to links with Moscow, they tendedto agree that links with the capital had snapped. Zubtsov is only 200 kilometresfrom Moscow, but the people most bitter about the gap between Zubtsov and thecapital 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. InBednodemyanovsk and, particularly, Achit, interviewees often did not think ofMoscow as being implied in Kogan’s statement. When asked about Moscow, theserespondents made comments such as ‘Moscow the centre? Oh, that’s a long wayaway for us’. One woman even stated ‘I never think about Moscow at all.’ If theydisagreed that links had become worse, it was usually because they felt that therehad never been very strong connections anyway.

People also criticized the national media, which one might suppose to consti-tute the one remaining link to Moscow. There were too few programmes about theglubinka; ‘TV doesn’t show our lives’. In general, Moscow television was seen aspresenting 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 men-tioned the government and parliament. Since the survey was conducted in 1999,this reflected disgust with Yeltsin in particular. In Bednodemyanovsk and Achit in2000, when it had already become clear that the war in Chechnya was going todrag on and claim many more victims, a number of people talked about their dis-like of the state’s warmongering and their horror at the thought that their sonsmight have to serve in Chechnya. By September 2000, in the aftermath of the sink-ing 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 beingEuropean: this was during the war in Kosovo. However, in general respondentsdid not relate their identity to the wider world. Although a number had been toEast European countries as tourists during the Soviet period, very few had beenabroad recently, and only two to the West. They did not have access to the inter-net and globalization was not really a phenomenon which had much meaning inthe small town, except perhaps in the form of Hollywood films. There are noMcDonalds in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk or Zubtsov.

Conclusions

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


glubinka and the regional capitals as ‘spinning away’ from one another.36 This wascertainly the perception of inhabitants of the small towns, suspicious as they wereof the regional media and politics and persuaded that the fruits of transition werereserved 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 modelcreated not by Moscow intellectuals but by many teachers and doctors in smallprovincial towns. It might be even more applicable to their children. MotherRussia � 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 becomemore and more distant. The provincial depths become deeper. ‘We’ve started tolive in our own little micro-world’, as one headteacher expressed it. Memories ofMoscow and other Russian cities are still strong and people still read history, butin the world of today, based as it is around subsistence agriculture, the ‘soil whichfeeds us’ is the most commonly experienced aspect of Mother Russia.


The concepts of ‘livelihoods’ and ‘identities’, and their overlap, run, as theRussian phrase has it, ‘like a red thread’ through this book. These conclusionssummarize the main findings of the book, discussing livelihoods and identities inturn, in the context of wider scholarly debates about Russian society, and show-ing how physiological and emotional ‘survival’ are intertwined. Preserving orreinterpreting one’s identity is often essential to a successful livelihood strategy.As well as explaining certain findings which may be typical of contemporaryRussian small towns in general, the conclusions also pull out some of the maindifferences between the three towns, and examine whether it was significant thatthe towns were located in different regions. Finally, the Conclusions suggest somethoughts about the ‘transition’ and the significance of agency, as opposed tostructures, in determining livelihoods, identities and the nature of postcommunistRussia more generally.

Livelihoods and social change

Chapters 1 and 3 illustrated the extent of regional diversity within Russia, eveninside the central European/Urals area. For example, the regions in which thesmall towns were located, Penza, Sverdlovsk and Tver, had very different crimerates, life expectancy, deathrates and economic indicators. It is problematic, how-ever, to define a rich or poor region: whenever the kaleidoscope is turned toanother indicator the regions rearrange themselves into slightly new patterns.Taking per capita GRP, for example, Tver seemed quite average for EuropeanRussia in 1999, and far wealthier than Penza, but poverty levels were exception-ally high in both regions. Both regions were within particularly depressed zones,the north-west (Pskov, Leningrad, Tver) and the stripe running through the east-ern part of European Russia from Kirov down to Penza. Sverdlovsk, which scoredwell for per capita GRP within European Russia, and had one Russia’s highesttotal GRPs, also had above average poverty.

The coexistence of high GRPs and high poverty levels suggests an unequaldivision of resources within these regions. The regional pie is not divided equallybetween all inhabitants, certainly not on a geographical basis. Chapter 2 illus-trated the extent of sub-regional diversity, with many cities being, apparently,

Conclusions

much richer than small or even middle-sized towns. This diversity can be partlyattributed 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. Thethree fieldwork towns, located as they were in economically depressed districtswith tiny tax revenues, were much more similar to one another than might beexpected, given Sverdlovsk’s superior GRP. Lack of regional investment in thesmall-town economies was seen by many interviewees as the defining factor indetermining local livelihoods. Local people felt that if money were to be put intodolomite quarrying in Zubtsov, ceramics and folk art in Bednodemyanovsk orlivestock and tourism in Achit, then district economies might be revived, but theytended to be pessimistic about the prospect of revival.

Chapter 2 also found evidence of different demographic trends in cities and inrural areas/small towns, with fewer births and more divorce in the cities. There isalso migration from smaller towns to cities, particularly of younger people andmen; but many do not manage to remain in the city. Interviewees commonly hadto support adult children, who had trained in city universities and colleges forcareers 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 poorlypaid 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 howthese differ from city livelihoods. Almost the entire sample lived below the offi-cial poverty line. Even wealthier inhabitants were prone to plummets into povertyif they needed to purchase housing, health care or higher education. Moreover,poverty was not confined to families with young children; adult children wereoften at least as much of a financial burden to their parents.

Chapter 5 examined livelihood strategies as potential escape routes frompoverty. It illustrated the truth of Pine and Bridger’s comments about the culturalembeddedness of strategies, particularly vegetable growing. It also suggested thathouseholds display varying degrees of planning: some have more consciouslythought-out (‘stronger’) strategies than others. None of this is special to the smalltown. The distinguishing feature of small-town livelihood strategies is limitedchoice. There are many more strategies available to educated and skilled peoplein the city. In the three small towns, the near absence of a private sector and theimpoverishment of the local population meant that entrepreneurial strategieswere hard to put into effect. Just a few of the more fortunate respondents had beenable to make new careers in business, or to find reasonably substantial additionalearnings. In Zubtsov, some men worked as drivers or builders in Moscow.

The limited availability of strategies in the small towns would seem to confirmWallace and Pahl’s suggestion that strategies are engaged in as a response toopportunity, not need. However, this is only partly true. In the three small towns,respondents did all have livelihood strategies, because they needed them – theyreally were escape routes from poverty. Interviewees adopted whatever strategieswere to hand, which for most meant growing vegetables and fruit. Unlike Wallaceand 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

204 Conclusions

they claimed to depend on their household plots for most of their food, and on theforest for their medicines.

Livelihood strategies are often referred to as ‘survival’ strategies and, whilerecognizing that this term can have unfortunate connotations – suggesting a sharpbreak with Soviet practices – the book also argues that ‘survival’ is a useful con-cept because it conveys the sense of lives punctuated by sudden crises (chieflynon-payment of salaries in households where savings have been wiped out byinflation) and because it can be used to link professional, emotional and physicalsurvival, as well as the the survival of the community. For example, educatingone’s children is about giving them the chance to escape from the small town andearn 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 thefamily’s social status and intelligentsia identity.

Chapters 5 and 6 showed the special importance, among these interviewees, ofkeeping professional identities, as a way of maintaining self-esteem. In particu-lar, the interviews demonstrated that women wanted to work and offered no evi-dence to support assertions to the contrary which are sometimes made by Russiansociologists and politicians. Colleagues and friends were found to be importantsources of social support, especially for women – lending support to the thesis,put forward by Shkolnikov, Shapiro and others, that male mortality may be linkedto 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 strainsdocumented by Kiblitskaya and Burawoy et al., where unemployed husbands feltmarginalized and wives became increasingly overworked. However, in general,family relations in the sample seemed characterized by a high degree of coopera-tion, and in this the sample was similar to the couples in the three regions analysedby Vannoy et al. Even unemployed and retired husbands at least contributed tohousehold vegetable-growing efforts. It was difficult to manage a household plotwithout the input of at least two family members, and the contribution of in-lawsand other relatives was often also important. The divorce rate had even fallen dur-ing 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. Womenare expected to have paid employment. It was not a survival strategy for womento stay at home. Child care was not a problem for many, since families usually hadrelatives living locally, because kindergartens were cheaper than in the cities, andbecause young school-age children were expected to be quite independent.Women usually also did most of the housework and almost all preserving ofhome-grown produce. As elsewhere in Russia, businessmen did display ‘new’,that is, pre-revolutionary, attitudes to gender roles, with businessmen’s wivesbeing encouraged to stay at home.

In general, survival strategies were not noticeably gendered, except for migra-tion. The sharp contrast drawn by Burawoy et al., and Kiblitskaya, with men goinginto business and women focusing on the household or menial low-paid employ-ment, was not really apparent. Women in the small towns do go into business, and

Conclusions 205

also into local government, which is probably the most secure and profitable survivalstrategy; male respondents accepted menial, casual secondary employment: stickingup election posters, for example, or carpentry jobs.

Burawoy et al., use the term ‘involution’ to refer to the tendency of householdsto retreat into themselves and into a primitive subsistence economy. The termseems very appropriate to describe the poorest households in the sample, whichwere pursuing a counter-productive survival strategy of abstaining from socialcontacts with neighbours and kin and becoming locked in a vicious circle ofdeprivation. There was some evidence of atomization generally in the smalltowns, particularly in Achit, where 80 per cent of respondents believed that peopleparticipated less than before in community events.

Ledeneva suggests that, among her city sample, safer, kin-based ties werereplacing wider Soviet networks.1 Sarah Ashwin described a similar phenomenonin ‘Vishnovka’, a depressed mining town in Kemerovo Region. In Vishnovka,moreover, people were scared of gangs of young men and would not walk aloneat night. Old community structures had broken down and holidays were not cele-brated collectively. People had become ‘closed and aggressive’.2 Ashwin attrib-utes these developments to factors which were very evident in Achit, Zubtsov andBednodemyanovsk: poverty, a local administration in financial crisis, run-downinfrastructure (such as street lighting and children’s playgrounds), and a sense ofmissing out on the political fruits of postcommunism.

Most respondents in Achit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk, however, did notseem to be ‘involuted’ or atomized. They described collective socializing among col-leagues and neighbours; making and receiving small loans; high levels of trust inneighbours, described as ‘nice’ and ‘friendly’; and a general sense of security. Thesmall town was characterized as an ‘island of safety in a harsh world’. One middle-aged vocational schoolteacher, who walked home from one fringe of the town to theother, 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 tobe the most miserable year of the postcommunist period. By the late 1990s theeconomy had normalized to some extent in Russia and life was perhaps becom-ing more bearable. Putin’s advent to power was a significant moment here.(Respondents in Zubtsov in 1999, not surprisingly, seemed more hostile to thenational government than did interviewees in Achit and Bednodemyanovsk in2000.) The sense of returning normality might also be a consequence of the factthat survival strategies had become routine, as suggested by Olga Shevchenko.Moreover, Soviet forms of community participation were actually revived in thethree small towns, and new holidays created. Other ways in which Vishnovka isdifferent is that it is larger (11,500) and nearer to a big city. Moreover, minework-ers could well have less sense of community organization than members of theintelligentsia, particularly the intelligentsia elite. Nonetheless, the impression stillremains that Vishnovka really was very different from the towns studied in thisbook. This serves as a reminder of the danger of generalizing about ‘small towns’.

A number of Russian sociologists have suggested that stratification – ratherthan atomization – is what is increasing in Russia, but it was not clear that this

206 Conclusions

was true in the small towns. Barriers between different social groups did exist, butthere was also a sense of solidarity among the mass of the population, connectedto their sense of having shared impoverishment as a common fate. Belyaeva’sterm, the ‘middling mass’, seems appropriate here, and it was used by severalinterviewees to characterize the vast majority of their local citizens. In generalsocial support still seemed to be strong, and there was evidence of continuedinvolvement in community affairs. Political scientists tend to lament the weakdevelopment of civil society in Russia, but, while it was true that in many respectscivil society seemed undeveloped in the small towns, with few NGOs and, inBednodemyanovsk, a very ‘Soviet’ style newspaper and little local democracy,there were also contrary trends. Achit and Zubtsov both have lively newspapersand local election campaigns which are opportunities for at least some of theintelligentsia to club together and play a leadership role in the community.Differences between the regions are important here: Penza has a less democraticconstitution; the creation of Fatherland (Otechestvo) in Zubtsov was linked to itsemergence in Tver Region; Sverdlovsk has comparatively many lively civil soci-ety and political organizations, which may serve as an inspiration in general andalso play a direct role in Achit affairs, for example, by promoting the women’smovement or the Tatar cultural revival. On the other hand, one could argue thatBednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov have a better-developed civil society than Achit,despite the very Soviet-style administration in Bednodemyanovsk. In both townsdedicated local musicians, actors and artists organized popular events independ-ently of the administration. A structural factor which promoted civil society washousing availability and migration. Both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk hadattracted more, often very talented migrants. More intelligentsia membersseemed to have left their jobs in Achit. The intelligentsia elite in Achit seemed tolack the drive and confidence which characterized much of the elite in Zubtsovand Bednodemyanovsk. The role of charismatic individuals was exceptionallyimportant in both Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk.

The old communist elite, as managers of cultural institutions, also played a rolein organizing cultural life in all three towns. However, it is important not to under-estimate the extent to which Soviet small-town intelligentsia communists hadalways seen their loyalties as lying primarily with the local community, ratherthan the Kremlin. Hence, if today they are interested in building civil societylocally, this does not necessarily represent a sea change since Soviet days.

Identities

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

Conclusions 207

take on new jobs and domestic roles. However, the nature of identity change inAchit, Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk was rather different from that in the city.

Most importantly, the small towns were thrown back on their resources to aneven greater extent than they had been in Soviet days. Respondents reported feel-ing ‘marooned on desert islands’. As members of the intelligentsia, respondentsfelt particularly acutely the rupture of cultural links with the cities. The intelli-gentsia had been responsible for imparting urban characteristics to the smalltowns. Now they were out of touch with the city, and moreover, forced to devoteeven 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-townexistence was overwhelming them.

However, as Simon Smith has noted, people have come to terms with post-communism by creating narratives of which they are the ‘narrators and heroes’.Respondents had used their often rather rigid understandings of their own identi-ties as survival strategies, to fight back the pressures for change. An extreme casewas that of the piano teacher from Baku who refused to grow vegetables on thegrounds that she was a ‘thoroughly urban person’ even though she lived in a vil-lage in Zubtsov District. Most interviewees had to adapt their lifestyles at least tosome extent, but some could also try to mould their environments to find an out-let for their creative energies and maintain their self-images as intellectuals.Chapter 8 quoted another music teacher who explained: ‘Since we can’t travel orread so much, we have to make life interesting here’. In particular, althoughmigrants 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 torecreate, 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 theright metaphor, however, since some respondents were reluctant to shed old iden-tities and values. One librarian mused: should she bring up her son to be good orto be tough? Other respondents or their family members had gone into businessand then dropped out, feeling it ‘wasn’t for them’, although it might be arguedthat they were falling back on excuses connected with identities to explain fail-ures with more prosaic causes. At least they maintained their ‘heroic’ status ifthey had lost out because of intelligentsia principles.

However, for many interviewees, to become an entrepreneur did not imply a pro-posed complete change in identity: local businessmen were not a race apart but just‘ordinary people’. Though Russian entrepreneurs in general were often written offas unpleasant exploiters, the small-town businessmen were frequently also cast inthe 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 newidentity. Moreover, neighbours and families still saw businessmen from intelligentsiabackgrounds as being members of the intelligentsia, even if the men themselvesdenied that the label was appropriate. Silverman and Yanowitch note the appar-ent paradox that many entrepreneurs come from the intelligentsia, yet the Russianbusiness world is hardly seen as ‘civilized’.3 However, it did seem possible for

208 Conclusions

a handful of ‘civilized businessmen’ (and women) to survive in the small towns. Itwould be an exaggeration to speak of an emerging middle class, but middle-classindividuals did exist.

The emergence of entrepreneurs did not imply that the ‘intelligentsia’ hadbecome an anachronism, and assertions about the ‘death of the Russian intelli-gentsia’ do not seem applicable to these particular small towns. Respondents,even young ones, still felt that intelligentsia status was relevant, if only as an aspi-ration. It says much about the complex and paradoxical quality of postcommu-nism that those respondents who seemed more adapted to postcommunistcircumstances were also more likely to choose to describe themselves by theSoviet label ‘intelligentsia’, suggesting continuity with the past. This suggeststhat they had both responded to the new conditions (creating a more genuine localcivil society) and adapted those new conditions to themselves, seeing them as acontinuation of the traditional intelligentsia ethic of service to the community.Interviewees who denied themselves the label ‘intelligentsia’ often seemed to bethose 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 hadless social support.

The term ‘involution’ can most fruitfully be applied to the small towns withreference to their increasing isolation vis-à-vis the surrounding region, and Russiaas a whole. It is sometimes asserted that regional identities are becoming morepronounced in the postcommunist period, and plenty of evidence can be adducedabout regional capitals to suggest that this is true. Chapter 8 indicates that small-town 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 theydoubted whether they particularly had the interests of small towns at heart.Regional identities, as presented officially, were viewed almost as foreign identi-ties: the region was not the same as the small town, but was often identified withthe regional capital. ‘They don’t want to know us’ was a common attitude. Theregional capital was linked up to the federal centre, from which it derived muchof its prosperity, but this cosy relationship (as perceived by small-town residents)excluded the small town. ‘The state stops at Tver’ said one. Similarly, respondentshad 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 fed-eral centre did not seem to have had much of an impact on their sense ofRussianness. They did feel more Russian than in the Soviet period, but the mainreason was their improved access to Russian culture. This should not necessarilybe seen as a small-town attribute; for example, it ties in with Piirainen’s findingsabout teachers in Petersburg.4 The important point is, however, that ‘culture’ forthese small-town respondents was often the culture of the local community: itschurch, their own Russian literature classes, etc. Russian identity was something

Conclusions 209

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

The influence of the region

It has already been suggested that the political complexion of the region did have animpact on civil and political society in the small towns, although the evidence pre-sented in Chapter 7 also suggested that they often failed to vote in the same way asthe regional capitals. How much does the region and the regional capital shape liveli-hoods in the small towns? Some benefits did trickle down in ‘rich’ Sverdlovsk, suchas a better bus service and, in 2000, the promise of extra funding to maintain localschools. Local government in Zubtsov, by contrast, had to survive for months with-out any subsidies from impoverished Tver, and had a poor bus service: a consider-able problem for local inhabitants. However, the relative proximity of a very big citycould be more important than regional policies and wealth. Cities such as Moscowand Yekaterinburg have larger hinterlands than Penza or Tver. Moscow, in particular,was important to Zubtsov, partly because local men travelled to work in Moscow butalso because of the role of Moscow holiday makers. They not only stimulated theeconomy (rescued it, according to the local historian quoted in Chapter 3), but alsocontributed to local cultural life. Moreover, the hospital had been modernized thanksto personal links between its manager and a Muscovite dacha owner. Achit was alsopartly within Yekaterinburg’s dacha zone, but to respondents at least this seemed tohave less of an impact than did the presence of a busy roads linking Yekaterinburgwith prosperous west Urals regional capitals. Both Zubtsov and Achit had drugsproblems and higher crime than Bednodemyanovsk, features which were oftenlinked to the influence of Moscow and Yekaterinburg. By contrast, Bednode-myanovsk seemed to have little to do with Penza city, which was itself a poor andapparently low-crime regional capital. Bednodemyanovsk had no drugs problem andvery little crime, by national standards.

The ‘transition’ path

When considering the differences between the small towns, it is tempting to plotthem at different points along a transition path. It could be argued, for example,that Vishnovka had travelled ‘further’ from the Soviet past than Achit, Zubtsovand Bednodemyanovsk. On the other hand, it could equally well be suggested thatthe latter three towns were more advanced on the road towards a civil society, ifcivil society is understood to include trust, good neighbourly relations and a senseof community. In these respects, Achit seemed to trail behind Zubtsov and evenfurther behind Bednodemyanovsk. Nonetheless, if civil society is defined morenarrowly as civil society organizations and institutions, Achit seems more ‘post-communist’ and Bednodemyanovsk very Soviet indeed. This should remind usthat civil society is only meaningful if it is defined quite precisely.

It is somewhat possible to assess progress with democratization, while recog-nizing the ‘old but new’ quality of aspects of community participation. Transition

210 Conclusions

is, therefore, a partly meaningful term to apply to the process. It is much harderto 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 andreally existing socialism. Really existing transition includes the loss of steadyjobs (engineers becoming seasonal construction workers), the growth of crime,drugs, etc. Hence progress is a label hard to apply to much of what was occurringin 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 mar-ket economy, since three-quarters of its retail sector was private, as opposed to halfin Zubtsov. However, this was because in Achit the old district food supply organ-ization had been largely destroyed, leaving little in its place. Trade in Achit seemedfar less lively than in Zubtsov, and was only 273 rubles per month per capita. Localinhabitants, such as teachers, felt forced to engage in time-consuming food pro-duction (milling flour, making cheese) because the bakery and dairy had closedand food imported from outside the district was considered to be too expensive.

The most important aspect of changed livelihoods was the reduced signifi-cance of income from respondents’ primary jobs. This was, of course, not a par-ticularly small-town phenomenon: the purchasing power of wages declinedeverywhere in Russia. In the city, however, it was more possible to abandon one’sold job and set up a business, or at least become a private sector employee. Sinceoptions to do so were very limited in the small towns, survival strategies acquireda much more prominent role in respondents’ livelihoods. A completely new sur-vival strategy was for policemen to serve in Chechnya. However, in most casessurvival strategies changed only in the sense that there was an intensification ofold Soviet practices, particularly reliance on relatives and other informal net-works, more farming (the acquisition of a potato field as well as a kitchen gar-den), or more overtime, for doctors and teachers. Migration to the city is alsoa Soviet strategy, but the need to educate children and ensure their exit from thedepressed small town has given migration a new urgency, even while it probablybecomes less attainable. None of these four strategies is conducive to creatinga more equitable and prosperous local economy.

Livelihood strategies, identities and agency

Russian history is replete with examples of rulers who denied the possibility of anyagency other than their own. The ideology of the Soviet regime was a Marxismwhich asserted the fundamental role of economic structures. Today, many observersdeny that Russia is a democracy, pointing to the powers of federal and regional lead-ers and to the gulf between them and the electorate. The respondents themselvesfrequently expressed a sense of their own powerlessness. One woman suggestedthat ‘everyone had lost their sense of direction’. Rather than marching alonga clearly signposted path to middle-class lifestyles in a modern market economy, the

Conclusions 211

professional people interviewed for this book had a sense of going nowhere, beingmarooned on an ‘island’ in the middle of the Eurasian land mass. Trapped in thisclassically stressful situation, it would seem that the only certain prospect was tojoin the mortality statistics.

However, as this book has suggested, it is impossible to understand Russia fromthe top down. The deeper one digs, the more variety is uncovered, at regional, dis-trict 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’smaking, where the choice of livelihood strategies usually ensured ‘survival’ on atleast a basic level. Usually, however, survival was more than a minimum level ofphysical survival: it included the survival of professional, family and ethnic iden-tities, and the moulding of those identities to fit changing conditions and permitthe respondent to see him or herself as a ‘narrator and hero’ of transition. The sumof these decisions is a factor helping to explain the survival of the communitiesas whole, and ultimately, of Russia.

While not denying the role of structures and of decisions made in Moscow, thisbook has emphasized the role of agency, which is ascribed an important placeboth by the livelihood strategies approach and in contemporary understandings ofidentity. A particular merit of this approach is that it allows for focus on ordinaryRussian citizens, as well as politicians, and on women as well as men. It is notenough to understand the actions of male politicians in Moscow. Women andmen in Zubtsov, Achit and Bednodemyanovsk also contribute to the shaping ofpostcommunist Russia.

212 Conclusions

The final interview schedule, as used in Bednodemyanovsk and Achit, is trans-lated in the following section. These were the questions which were shown to therespondents. There were also follow-up questions. (For example, if a womanstated that she had been made unemployed, she was asked whether she felt thatthis was because she was a woman.) Respondents were also asked about theirplace 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 sectionon 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? Threesmall 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 andarticles based on the research will respect the anonymity of respondents. Theresearch will also include discussions with the heads of the main local institutionswhere 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 thecomposition of your household and the number of breadwinners? For example:

� did you or your relatives put off having children because of the difficulteconomic situation?

� did relatives come to live with you?� was anyone in your family unemployed?

Appendix 1The interview schedule

1.2 Did men’s and women’s roles change, for example, with regard to thedistribution of housework?

1.3 If you are a parent, what worries you most, when you think about yourchildren’s future?

2. Main workplace: colleagues

2.1 Where did you work in the 1990s and in what capacity?2.2 Has work come to occupy a more central place in your life?2.3 If you were without work for a certain period, why and when was this?2.4 Are you and your colleagues threatened by unemployment?2.5 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 Have stresses increased in your life over the last few years? If so, would yousay that this was connected with the reforms of the 1990s, in the sense thatlife has become more unpredictable?

3.2 Does your health suffer from the stresses of everyday life?3.3 Have you and your family come to use doctors less?

4. Gardening and additional earnings

4.1 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 theharvest?

4.2 How much time does this take?4.3 Does your harvest last until the following year?4.4 What proportion of your household’s diet consists of home-produced food?4.5 How do you feel about working on your plot?4.6 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 andwould 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?

214 Appendix 1

5.4 What influence can the intelligentsia have on a local level?5.5 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 How is Bednodemyanovsk/Achit different from other towns?6.2 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?)6.3 Do you read the local newspaper or listen to local radio?6.4 Do you take part in community life (e.g. at festivities; in voluntary organi-

zations; on electoral commissions)?6.5 Do you think that people have started to participate less in community life?6.6 Do you think that local society is becoming more stratified and fragmented?6.7 Are certain professions gaining or losing status in the town?6.8 Do you socialize with local entrepreneurs?

7–8. The region and Russia

Since the disintegration of the USSR, both Russia and its regions have acquirednew status and, to a certain extent, new identities as well. I am interested in howordinary Russians experience these changes on the level of their own identity, andalso in the components of that identity.

7.1 How is Penza/Sverdlovsk Region different from other regions?7.2 To what extent are your impressions of the region drawn from the regional

media?7.3 What kind of regional news interests you most?7.4 Have you started travelling more rarely around the region? (Do you have

your own car?)7.5 Who are the outstanding personalities of Penza/Sverdlovsk Region today?7.6 Please comment on Professor Leonid Kogan’s assertion that ‘links between

the centre and the regions have ruptured today even more in the culturalsphere than in politics or economics’.

8.1 If you are not among the youngest respondents, you used to be a citizen ofthe USSR. You became a citizen of the Russian Federation. Now Russia hasits own president, its own army, etc. Russia has also become more ‘Russian’in culture: for example, there are more publications about Russian history,

Appendix 1 215

churches have been restored, etc. Which of these and similar changes havethe most significance for you?

8.2 Which media give the most accurate representation of Russian reality?8.3 Over the last decade, have you started travelling more rarely around Russia?8.4 Have you been abroad?8.5 How do you understand the expression ‘Mother Russia’?

216 Appendix 1

Chapter 4 presented brief profiles of prospering and poor households in the smalltowns, focusing on household composition and income. Chapters 5 and 6 dis-cussed coping mechanisms and survival strategies, looking at both economic andhealth aspects of survival. Survival, as has been shown, is multifaceted, and theinterplay of different aspects of survival, and types of strategy, can only really beunderstood by exploring some households in detail. This appendix, therefore,considers five case studies. The five are not intended to typify all the rest. Nor doI wish to exaggerate the uniquely Russian or ‘small-town’ character of many ofthe problems described.

The respondents were all working in intelligentsia occupations. One was fromZubtsov 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 oversome of their family problems, where these were described to me.

Raya

Raya’s household contained no dependants. A single woman, she lived with hermother, a kindergarten teacher. Her father, a driver, had been working in Moscowfor six years, although he also spent time at home. Her brother worked inMoscow. Her grandparents lived in a nearby village, and presumably were in aposition to help with food. Raya and her parents all worked their small vegetableplot; they grew just enough for their own needs, and had no reason to sell. Thecombination of money income, including money earned in Moscow, and self-grown food was sufficient for the three wage-earners, with no dependants, to livecomfortably 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 hadtime to read. Raya claimed not to need to borrow money from her colleagues andto be for most purposes self-sufficient, although her parents helped her some-times. She also had additional income from writing articles for the newspaper andhelping 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 individualfreedom. Although in Raya’s own interpretation the 1990s had not been a period

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

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

Kira

If Raya’s family conformed to the ‘male breadwinner’ type, and depended mainlyon her father’s entrepreneurial strategy for its prosperity, Kira was the main bread-winner and ‘brain’ (golova) in her own family. She did not have a ‘survival strat-egy’, but earned a reasonable salary at her particularly demanding and stressfulmanagerial job. Her status entitled her to a 10,000 ruble bank loan to move froma wooden cottage into a flat, a loan which she was paying off without any appar-ent difficulty. Kira suffered from hayfever, which meant that she left her husbandto 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 didnot 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 wassuggested by the fact that she relieved the stress of her demanding job by pouringout her problems to him. They had to support their grandchild and daughter, wholived with them. The daughter, in her third year of unemployment, had a special-ized business degree which was useless in the small town. She had tried to set upher own business in the regional centre, but had lacked both capital and good con-nections in the city. Kira had health problems, but claimed that she was feelingmuch better after a stay in a sanatorium the year before: a privilege accorded toonly one other person in my sample, although there were a number of complaintsthat the Soviet system of sanatorium holidays had collapsed. It may be concludedthat 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 ahappy marriage helped her to survive the stresses of her demanding job. She waswell-off by local standards. However, she was not wealthy enough to provide forher daughter in the city.

Sonya

Sonya was an equally positive interviewee with an even more onerous burden, adivorced woman supporting her teenage son, pensioner mother and disabledfather on an uncertain salary. One of her younger sisters had died; the other wasa local teacher with a husband who had been unemployed for five years but hadnow found a precarious job as a security guard. Sonya seemed to bear someresponsibility 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 andworked in a major city while she was still with her husband; and now, if she man-aged to get to the regional capital, would save up in advance so as to be able to

218 Appendix 2

buy books. In the small town, she kept up an archive of newspaper cuttings andher interest in current affairs, about which she had strong views. For example, shewished she could join a Pacifist Party, and described her main concern as beingto find a way to stop her son having to do military service. She was also abeliever. Sonya found her work a comfort when she was feeling depressed; shefelt that she was a prop for her colleagues, who would come to complain abouttheir husbands and cry on her shoulder.

Sonya, who as the eldest of the three sisters had been treated since childhoodas a substitute ‘son’, did all the heavy work about the house and was chieflyresponsible for the vegetable garden. She baked bread and claimed that the fam-ily bought hardly any food. Her friends gave her milk in exchange for Sonya’sown produce. In the past, she had had some secondary employment, sewing andknitting or tutoring schoolchildren. Although all her family had medical prob-lems, she tried as far as possible to avoid the expense of doctors, reading up onhome cures and practising her first aid skills. She took part in various communityevents and sang in a choir.

That Sonya was able to maintain such an exhausting regime seemed connectedto 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 wouldnonetheless eventually collapse from exhaustion.

Dasha

Dasha was equally energetic and equally burdened, but much more bitter, includingon the subject of men. ‘Everything depends on women, although the people inpower 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 appro-priate professional qualification, in fact, quite rarely for this particular smalltown, a degree from a Moscow institute. Until the early 1990s, Dasha had been ahousewife in the Far East; she did not reveal her husband’s job, but the indicationswere that he was an army officer. The family had presumably been comfortablyoff. When he retired back to his native village, she found a job as head of the vil-lage kindergarten. However, this closed down and the family moved to the smalltown, although the husband spent the summer with his parents in the village tend-ing their land. She commuted weekly, by foot, carrying bags of food on her backto 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 worryabout her daughters was how to clothe them; the eldest would have to study at alocal technical college, because no other option was affordable; the family couldnot afford to buy medicine or visit Dasha’s sisters in nearby towns. The onlysource of additional income was selling spare potatoes, if any were left over. Shehad no time for secondary employment.

Although Dasha’s arrival was welcomed by the local community, she perceivedthe move as having entailed a drop in status; this situation, the result of a mismatch

Appendix 2 219

of expectations, seemed, as has already been suggested, quite common amongincomers from the Far East or Central Asia. Although the family was fortunate inhaving access to land in a village – enough land to feed seven people and havesome to spare – and a family member who could devote himself full-time to farm-ing it, the location of the land was only rendered tolerable by Dasha’s being will-ing 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 worriesabout her family. Despite her large build, she was painfully thin, a fact which shecommented on, attributing it to overwork. She said she was not a member of theintelligentsia and the intelligentsia was indeed disappearing, as ‘everyone thinksonly about how to feed themselves’. This was someone with a poor self-imagewho 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 institutionwho, like Dasha, had a husband who had retired early and was evidently a sourceof stress. She complained that he had always treated her as a workhorse. Theircombined money income was below the subsistence minimum. They lived withtheir 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 hisparter 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 himbuy a flat, but she and her family did feed the son and his partner from their14 per cent of a hectare in the small town. (In return, he came to help with theharvest.) The family was self-sufficient in vegetables and eggs and also kept cowsand pigs. Tanya claimed that all they bought, apart from cattle feed, was flour andsugar on paydays. The family had built their own wooden cottage in the smalltown, an endeavour on which Tanya felt she had ‘wasted her health’.

As an additional survival strategy, the son had considered going back toChechnya, where he had served as a conscript, but Tanya had persuaded him notto do this. Tanya’s dream livelihood strategy was to keep bees, but she felt that shewould have to retire before she could do this.

Tanya complained that in Soviet days she had been able to buy consumer goodsas well as food on her hundred ruble salary. Now, to buy consumer goods, ‘youhave to go hungry’. She was still wearing her Soviet-era clothes. Medicine wasexpensive and they only used doctors in emergencies. Tanya did, however, visit avillage teacher (‘with higher education’) who massaged her bad back.

Tanya’s still felt nostalgic for her home village, where her parents had beenpeasants. Like many other respondents, she said she had become a teacherbecause 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 manuallabour for that to be true.

220 Appendix 2

Introduction

1 Calculated from N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet raiona utverzhden – s defitsitom 34protsenta!’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 16 April 1999, p. 6.

2 See V. Godin and A. Miroshkin, Bednodem’yanovsk, Saratov: Privolzhskoe KnizhnoeIzdatel’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 EconomicDevelopment: 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, 17July 2003. Putin’s short stay in a small town was described by the national newspaperKommersant as a visit ‘to the aborigines’, illustrating the gulf between the capital andthe 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 reformin a Kuzbass mining settlement’, Europe–Asia Studies, 47, 8, 1995; Moran andPallot’s studies of forestry settlements in northern Perm Region (see Bibliography forfour titles); and P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change inRussia, 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 defini-tions 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 andC. Wallace, ‘Household work strategies in economic recession’, in N. Redclift andE. 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 RegionalResponses, London: Routledge, 1998, Introduction.

Notes

14 M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Involution and destitution in capitalistRussia’, Ethnography, 1, 1, 2000; Clarke, op. cit.

15 O. Shevchenko, ‘ “Between the holes”: emerging identities and hybrid patterns ofconsumption 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 itscauses’, in A. Aslund (ed.), Russian Economic Reform at Risk, London: Pinter, 1995.

21 See, for example, R. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the NationalQuestion in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, Chapter 1.

22 F. Pine, ‘Retreat to the household: gendered domains in postsocialist Poland’, inC.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 CulturalIdentity, London: Sage, 1996, p. 4.

24 See, for example, G.W. Lapidus and E.W. Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and fed-eralism: 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 AfterCommunism, London: Verso, 1997, and a vast Russian literature, some of which ismentioned in the notes to Chapter 6.

26 B. Silverman and M. Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners andLosers 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 theTransition from Communism, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania StateUniversity 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 asnarrativisation’, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies AnnualConference, 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, onpoverty in particular, Nataliya Rimashevskaya, ‘Poverty trends in Russia: a Russianperspective’, 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.

222 Notes

In summer 2003, when the final version of this manuscript was typed, Goskomstathad released only the most basic population statistics from the 2002 census. Thismeant, for example, that there was no up-to-date information about what percentageof the local populations had higher education, hence it was impossible to use thismethod to identify the intelligentsia.

35 RLMS is conducted by the Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology, Moscow, withassistance from the University of North Carolina.

36 I went over the figures with one of the staff, who did her best to find out the reasonfor the discrepancy, but remained unable to explain it.

37 J.P. Cole, Geography of the Soviet Union, London: Butterworth, 1984, p. 277.38 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 byCole, op. cit., p. 277.

39 M. Draganova, P. Starosta and V. Stolbov, ‘Sotsial’naya identifikatsiya zhiteleisel’skikh poselenii i malykh gorodov Vostochnoi Evropy’, Sotsiologicheskie issle-dovaniya, 2, 2002, p. 58.

40 M. Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press,1972, p. 25.

41 Calculated from RSE 2000, pp. 74–5.42 Data for villages is given only from 1959. See ibid., p. 76.43 Reclassification (known as ATP, administrativno-territorial’nye preobrazovaniya)

accounted for about 7 per cent of urban growth in 1969–89. (Calculated fromYu. Simyagin, ‘Sootnoshenie gorodskogo i sel’skogo naseleniya v Rossii (1991–1997gg.)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 2000, p. 66.

44 See RSE 1998, pp. 132–3. The figure includes poselki.45 Some idea can be gained from the relative numbers of districts, towns and poselki,

listed in RSE 2000, pp. 26–7.46 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 Russianform. In the context of this discussion about types of town, it seems important, for thepurposes of precision, not to translate poselok as ‘small town’, although in later chap-ters I have done so. ‘Settlements’ gives the wrong impression.

47 G. Ioffe and T. Nefedova, ‘Rural Population Change and Agriculture’, in G.J. Demko,G. Ioffe and Z. Zayonchkovskaya (eds), Population under Duress: TheGeodemography of Post-Soviet Russia, Boulder: Westview, 1999, p. 236. The regionalstatistical handbooks used in Chapter 2 tended, on the whole, to confirm Ioffe andNefedova’s conclusion.

48 D. Sutherland, M. Bradshaw and P. Hanson, ‘Regional dynamics of economic restruc-turing across Russia’, in P. Hanson and M. Bradshaw (eds), op. cit., p. 68.

49 Matthews, op. cit., p. 29.50 Khorev, op. cit., cited in Cole, op. cit., p. 278.51 For example, Verkhnyaya Sinyachikha (pop. 11,200) in central Sverdlovsk Region,

was held up as an example of a flourishing industrial town by governor EduardRossel. The woodprocessing factory had been revived, and in September 2000exported all its produce to the United States. E. Rossel’, ‘Sama zhizn’ podgotovilamenya k rabote gubernatora’, Ural’skaya zhizn’, 9–15 September 2000, p. 2.

52 See J. Murray, Politics and Place-Names: Changing Names in the late Soviet Period,Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2000.

53 G. Luchterhandt, S. Ryzhenkov and A. Kuz’min, Politika i kul’tura v rossiiskoi prov-intsii, Moscow/St Petersburg: IGPI/Letnii Sad, 2001, p. 74.

54 See Murray, op. cit., p. 22. During the debates on renaming which took place underGorbachev, ‘Bednodemyanovsk’ was criticized on linguistic grounds, since it washeld inadmissable to place a surname before a first name in this fashion (distortingthe surname as well).

Notes 223

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 morepolitically pretentious connotations. The different terms indicate an area’s ethnic com-position. The 50 oblasts are usually overwhelmingly ethnically Russian (includingthe uniquely titled Jewish ‘autonomous oblast’ of Birobidzhan); the 21 republics,10 ‘autonomous okrugs’ (AO) and six krais have larger non-Russian populations thando 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 theregion its name. Except for Chukotka, opposite Alaska, the okrugs are all incorpo-rated within larger oblasts. Russians were, at the time of the 1989 census, the largestsingle 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 SaintPetersburg also have the status of independent regions and are separate from Moscowand 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 govern-

ment 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. Fora recent discussion of the literature on regional politics, see also V. Gel’man, PoliticsBeyond the Ring Road: Rethinking the Soviet Experience, Glasgow: University ofStrathclyde, 2002.

1 Socio-economic and demographic trends in Russia and its regions

1 Most of this chapter discusses those regions which are independent administrativeunits; in practice this means 78 not 79, since there is little data on Chechnya. The onlyautonomous okrug (AO) defined as a separate region, and discussed as such, isChukotka, which is not incorporated within a wider region. The remaining AOs, eth-nic minority areas which are constituent parts of wider regions, frequently haveextremely poor indicators. Excluding the two AOs in Tyumen Region, which have tinynon-Slav/Tatar populations, average infant mortality in the AOs in 1999 was 23.1deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 19.1 for the regions as a whole. (19.1 isa figure which includes both the more and the less Russian parts of the AOs, so theareas with a more Russian population had a rate lower than 19.1 deaths per 1,000.) In1999, 70 per cent of the AO populations lived below the official poverty line, as com-pared with 29.9 per cent in Russia nationally (using the unadjusted figures publishedin 2000) and 42.1 per cent in the wider regions. Several AOs had worse indicatorsthan those in Russia’s poorest regions, such as Tyva and Ingushetia. Infant mortalitywas 40.3 in Evenk and 96.8 per cent of the population of Aga Buryat AO lived belowthe official poverty line. Aga Buryat AO could claim to be the ‘worst’ region. Povertyhere 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, ‘Regionalincome differences’, in B. Granville and P. Oppenheimer (eds), Russia’s Post-Communist Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; P. Hanson andM. 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

224 Notes

otsenki’, Voprosy statistiki, 2, 2003, gives averages and coefficients of variation for19 indicators in 2002.

3 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.

4 O. Dmitrieva, Regional Development: The USSR and After, London: UniversityCollege Press, 1996, chs 3 and 5; J. Klugman and J.D. Braithwaite, ‘Introduction andOverview’, in J. Klugman (ed.), Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and PrivateResponses, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997.

5 Ibid., p. 7.6 Hanson, op. cit., p. 419.7 RSE 2000, pp. 157–8; RSE 2002, pp. 189–90.8 Dmitrieva, op. cit., p. 32, produces figures which suggest that ‘the whole country [the

USSR] was a colony of Moscow city’.9 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/centralEuropean area, were Volgograd, Saratov and Penza (down) and Moscow Region,Tyumen, Perm and Bashkortostan (up).

10 World Bank, Making Transition Work for Everyone: Poverty and Inequality in Europeand Central Asia, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000, pp. 38–40, explains the dif-ferent approaches used to calculate poverty in Russia and the respective merits ofGoskomstat and the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, and presents variousdifferent 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 theBibliography. Goskomstat figures are in RSE 2002, p. 190.

11 RSE 2001, p. 204, explains the new methodology.12 ‘K svedeniyu’, Gorodok (Krasnoufimsk), 1 September 2000, p. 9.13 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 basketson which the minima are largely based. (RSE 2000, pp. 159–60.) No data for regionalpurchasing power or poverty levels was available for 2000. In 2001 the highest andlowest subsistence minima listed in Goskomstat’s incomplete table were again in thethe Far East: (Kamchatka); and the South (Karachaevo–Cherkess Republic): 3,050and 1,212 rubles, respectively. RSE 2002, p. 190.

14 RSE 2000, p. 163.15 RSE 2000, pp. 157–8; Sotsial’noe polozhenie i uroven’ zhizni naseleniya Rossii 2003,

pp. 160–1.16 Sotsial’noe polozhenie . . .naseleniya Rossii, 2000 op. cit. p. 199.17 Regiony Rossii 2001 (Goskomstat 2001), 2, pp. 130–1.18 RSE 2002, p. 200.19 59 per cent and 49 per cent of the 1990 figure, respectively. Calculated from RSE 2002.20 RSE 2000, p. 410.21 RSE 2002, pp. 201–2. The years of comparison are 1993 for heating and 1990 for gas.22 RSE 2002, p. 202.23 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Vsemu nachalo – golova’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 18 February 1999, p. 1.24 Calculated from RSE 2002, p. 459.25 Calculated from RSE 2001, pp. 193–4.26 RSE 2002, p. 194.27 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 83.28 See S.L. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000.29 RSE 2000, p. 186.30 RSE 2002, p. 209.

Notes 225

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 thegeneral education school.

32 For example, Leont’eva, writing in 1994, concluded that ‘the pointlessness of getting aneducation has become a well-entrenched social stereotype’. V. Leont’eva, ‘Obrazovaniekak fenomen kul’turotvorchestva’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 1995, p. 139.

33 L. Rubina and S. Airepetova, ‘Mozhet li sotsiologiya pomoch’ v formirovanii sot-sial’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 andMoscow: ISITO, 1999, p. 48, conclude that employers in the private sector prefer totake 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’, Post-

Soviet 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 RegionyRossii 2000, 2, p. 260; RSE 2000, p. 243.

47 RSE 2002, p. 273; A. Zhandarov, ‘Analiz vzaimosvyazei pokazatelei prestupnosti vregionakh Rossii’, Voprosy statistiki, 8, 2002, p. 59.

48 ‘O narkoprestupnosti i narkomanii v Rossii’, Voprosy statistiki, 12, 2002, p. 60; RegionyRossii 2000, 2, pp. 439–41. Figures for 2000 were, per 100,000 population: Samara322.7, 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 Rossii2000, 2, pp. 260–1; Zhandarov, op. cit., p. 59.

50 L. Shelley, ‘Urbanization and crime: the Soviet experience’, in H.W. Morton andR.C. Stuart (eds), The Contemporary Soviet City, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984, p. 124.

51 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Transition Report 2001, p. 61and 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.

226 Notes

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 incom-

plete nature, see A. Granberg and Yu. Zaitseva, ‘Mezhregional’nye sopostavleniyavalovogo 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 steel-

workers, 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 socialtransfers, 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 statisticheskoiotsenki’, 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 haveTyumen and the far northern regions, except Vologda. Only in 1994 did as many ashalf 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 wereunemployed (ibid.).

86 Regiony Rossii 2000, 2, p. 91.

Notes 227

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: TheBirth 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 tran-

sition’, in J. Klugman and A. Motivans (eds), Single Parents and Child Welfare in theNew 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 minimumin 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’), Evropa�Aziya,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 morewidespread subsidies than poor ones.

99 See, for example, the result of household budget surveys reported in Uroven’ zhizninaseleniya Penzenskoi oblasti, Penza: Goskomstat, 1999, p. 108; Itogi obsledovaniyadomashnikh 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 RussianLongitudinal 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 contain-ing a summer house or shack. In some regions, the term is used only for elite summerhouses, 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 northof Perm’ Oblast’ ’, Europe–Asia Studies, 54, 7, 2002.

103 Calculated from Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie gorodov i raionov RespublikiKomi, 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 beenpromised for 2004. ‘Internet-konferentsiya predsedatelya Goskomstata Rossii’,Voprosy statistiki, 6, 2003, p. 55. Most of this section is based on unadjusted figurespublished 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 ofTransition, Florence: UNICEF, 2001, p. 6.

110 See P.H. Juviler, ‘The urban family and the Soviet state: emerging contours ofa demographic policy’, in Morton and Stuart, op. cit., on urban–rural differences.

228 Notes

111 V. Peredeventsev, ‘The demographic situation in post-Soviet Russia’, in G.J. Demko,G. Ioffe and Z. Zayonchkovskaya (eds), Population under Duress: The Geodemographyof 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, ‘Healthand 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 prosperityas a factor.

116 M.G. Field, ‘The health and demographic crisis in Post-Soviet Russia’, in Field andTwigg, 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’, inM. 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 “psy-chosocial stress”’. (G.A. Cornia, Labour Market Shocks, Psychosocial Stress and theTransition’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 Post-Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 1998.

121 For details, see T. Heleniak, ‘Internal migration in Russia during the economic tran-sition’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 38, 2, 1997; J. Burke, ‘Internal migra-tion: 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 theBibliography.

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 fam-ily structures is naturally the subject of considerable (often anti-Western) rhetoric. Foran 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’, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniya 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

Notes 229

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.

135 Sotsial’noe polozhenie . . . naseleniya Rossii 2000, p. 45. ‘Osnovnya itogiVserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya 2002 goda’, Voprosy statistiki, 1, 2004, p. 9.

136 Zbarskaya, op. cit., p. 8.137 RSE 2002, p. 255.138 RSE 2002, p. 212.139 More indicators are considered for the rankings in Smirnov, op. cit.; Karyshev, op.

cit.; Zykova et al., ‘Analiz reitingovoi otsenki regionov Privolzhskogo federalnogookruga 2000, 2001 gg.’, Voprosy statistiki, 3, 2003 (though Karyshev and Zykova failto consider GRP and poverty levels, perhaps for lack of data). I have confined my cal-culations to the most basic indicators, on the grounds that others are too hard to inter-pret: is population growth, for example, ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Unemployment rates havebeen excluded, because they are quite inconsistent from year to year.

140 These are not exact quartiles. It seemed more sensible to draw the lines where therewere larger gaps in the numbers.

2 Characteristics of small towns across Russia: sub-regional variation in livingstandards and population trends

1 T. Nefedova and A. Treivish, ‘Dinamika i sostoyanie gorodov v kontse XX veka’, inT. 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 andBradshaw mean money income as a percentage of the price of a basket of foodstuffsused 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 post-Soviet 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, Kompetentsiyamestnogo 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, 17July 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.) Onthe economies of the indebted small towns, see Geograficheskii atlas Penzenskoioblasti, 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 inVoronezh, Moscow and Yekaterinburg. The Sverdlovsk data were very limited.

230 Notes

11 Methodological note: Ideally, for differently sized towns within a given region, itwould 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 comparetowns across the same range of indicators as those offered for comparison of regionsin national handbooks. This cannot be done. There are various reasons why the region-ally produced data are less useful than the national handbooks: for example, regionallypublished data hardly ever refer to smaller towns within districts; much information isavailable only for the region as a whole, since it is drawn from regional surveys; andregional handbooks often confine themselves to reproducing raw numbers. Closedcities complicate the picture. Regional statistical handbooks generally give only scantydemographic information about them, or ignore them completely. Such cities may bequite 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-migrationfrom within the wider region. (On closed cities, see R.H. Rowland, ‘Russia’s secretcities’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 37, 7, 1996.) In view of the imperfec-tions 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. Iexcluded indicators which seemed likely to overlap. For example, I never includedboth new housing and out-migration – although there is not an exact correlationbetween fewer houses and more population loss. Primore was the only region to pro-vide data on expenditure; this bore so little relation to money income that both wereincluded.

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 own-ership, retail trade, unemployment, suicides; Komi: infant mortality, new housing,industrial growth, wages, car ownership, retail trade, unemployment; Primore: infantmortality, 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 oblasti1999–2000: raionnyi razrez, Arkhangelsk: Goskomstat, 2001; Kirovskaya oblast’ v2000 godu: Chast’ III: goroda i raiony, Kirov: Goskomstat, 2001; Pokazateli eko-nomicheskogo i sotsial’nogo razvitiya gorodov i raionov Voronezhskoi oblasti,Voronezh: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’naya sfera gorodov i raionov Primorskogokraya, Vladivostok: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozheniegorodov i raionov Khabarovskogo kraya, 1990–2000gg: statisticheskii sbornik,Khabarovsk: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie gorodov iraionov Respubliki Komi, Syktyvkar: Goskomstat, 2001; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoepolozhenie Sverdlovskoi oblasti, op. cit.

13 This indicated which districts and towns had poor scores relative to the rest of theregion, not to the Russian average. For example, a poor unemployment score inSverdlovsk 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, domake it into the top category.

16 Kemerovo and Vologda (as of 2002). In the seven regions studied, the capital con-tained 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 impor-tant industrial city, with the highest wages and prices. Komi, op. cit., p. 233.

Notes 231

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, housingconditions, 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 toresearch towns at a similar distance from the capital, although it was tempting to fixon a much more remote town than Achit in huge Sverdlovsk Region. For a portrait ofsome very remote districts in northern Perm Region, see the works by Moran, Pallotand 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 isvery 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, forexample, 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 theirwater 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 ofagricultural output of the public sector to that of subsidiary farms, and indicators ofrural infrastructure (percentage of houses with plumbing; paved roadways density,and so on). Each of these indicators is typically a descending function of accessibil-ity 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: TheGeodemography of Post-Soviet Russia, Boulder: Westview, 1999, pp. 236–40.

28 In Komi and Arkhangelsk the depressed small towns also tended to be remote fromthe cities. In Voronezh (a densely populated region with no ‘remote’ areas) there is adifferent pattern, a north–south divide. All the poor districts are in the north, althoughthis is where the regional capital is also located. One of the reasons for the divide maybe that, despite the overall more agricultural profile of the south, there are somesouthern industrial towns which are doing well. The two Far Eastern regions in thesample are complex. In Primore, there is a poor area in the inner southern part of theregion, the Khanka basin, and some of the surrounding highland. In Khabarovsk, thepoorer areas are either agricultural (south), and not very far from the capital, or veryremote 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 thesubsistence minimum is based on the local price of a basket of goods. Figures inPrimore include data for all the cities. Unfortunately, however, only two districts areincluded; both are near the Chinese border. Pozharskoe District, centred on

232 Notes

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 notquite qualify for ‘depressed’ status. Presumably, some or all of the ‘most depressed’districts have even lower purchasing power than Khanka. The ‘food basket’ is thatused by Goskomstat to monitor prices.

31 Arsenev is an industrial centre somewhat remote from the cluster of southern pros-perous cities.

32 Sotsial’naya sfera, op. cit., pp. 28, 69.33 Two other ‘most depressed’ towns (Koslan and Troitsko-Pechorsk) are in the middle.34 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.35 RSE 2000, p. 159; RSE 2002, p. 189.36 1999 figures have been used for this comparison, because 2000 national figures were

not available.37 RSE 2001, p. 193; Komi, op. cit., p. 211; Pokazateli, op. cit., p. 83.38 Falenki in Kirov. Komi, op. cit., p. 211; Kirovskaya oblast’, op. cit., p. 128. The num-

ber of cars partly reflects greater availability, not just local wealth. (The borderregions of Kaliningrad and Primore have particularly high figures for car ownership.)

39 Unfortunately, none of the indicators used in Tables 2.5–2.7 was available forSverdlovsk.

40 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.

41 In Voronezh, by contrast, it was the more depressed places which seemed more crime-ridden; 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 thecity of Voronezh. It will be recalled that in the other sample regions the most depresseddistricts 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.

42 Yekaterinburg, which has a reputation for crime, came only fourteenth out of 51regional 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’ imagethan it actually deserves. All capitals except Voronezh were above the regional (mean)average.

43 In all five regions for which data was available, the capital city had a proportion ofpensioners below the regional average.

44 RSE 2001, p. 104.45 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 ethnicRussian (57.7 per cent in 1989), it has a partly Komi population (23.3 per cent), andthis may explain demographic divergences from the Russian norm. RSE 2000, p. 65.

46 However, Voronezh City, though below the regional average in 1998, was above it in1999 and 2000. Pokazateli, op. cit., p. 10.

47 For example, the Solovets Islands had 10 per cent infant mortality in 1999, and 0 per centin 2000. Ekonomika i sotsial’naya sfera, op. cit., p. 21. Whenever possible I averaged fig-ures for several years in a row to come to the conclusions presented in this paragraph.

48 Asbest, for example, had a rate of 24 in 1998. Sverdlovskaya oblast’: demografich-eskaya situatsiya, Yekaterinburg: Goskomstat, 1999, p. 43. Several large cities inother regions exhibited the same tendency.

49 Calculated from ‘Predvaritel’nye itogi’, op. cit., p. 4; RSE 2000, p. 53.50 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.

Notes 233

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 innac-curate 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 magni-

tude, 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-SovietGeography and Economics, 38, 2, 1997, 81–104; J. Burke, ‘Internal migration: a civilsociety 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 theTransition: 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, unpub-lished paper).

61 Clarke, op. cit., pp. 40–1.62 Commander and Yemtsov, op. cit., p. 182.63 Smirnov, op. cit., p. 66.


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 donorregion with low living standards, Tver was a donor region with somewhat ‘lower thanmedium’ 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 ofthe 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 StatisticalCommittee, 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.

234 Notes

11 G. Vorob’eva, ‘Na narkomaniyu nado nastupat’ so vsekh storon’, Nash put’, 9 April1999, 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 gov-

ernment’s failure to compensate bus companies for pensioners who travelled free. See‘Vosem’desyat rublei 40 kopeek’, Gorodok, 15 September 2000, p. 3, on faresbetween 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, ‘Anuzhen li Achitskii raion? – reshat’ vam’, Nash put’, 27 October 2000, p. 7, the higherfrom an unpublished report by the Achit Employment Centre, ‘Otchet o raboteAchitskogo Territorial’nogo Otdela Departamenta FGSZN po Sverdlovskoi oblasti zapervoe polugodie 2000 goda’ (no pagination).

27 ‘Po svedeniyam Achitskogo Territorial’nogo Otdela Zanyatosti Naseleniya’, Nashput’, 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 sup-

ply 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): ‘DistrictConsumer 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.

Notes 235

39 A. Barykin, ‘Vizit’, op. cit.40 P. Ryzhov, ‘Put’ k vyzhivaniyu’ (‘Survival Strategy’), op. cit.41 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Byudzhet’, op. cit.42 Information from petrol station manager, Anatolii Zhupikov.43 A. Sedov, ‘Problemy resheny, no ne vse’, Vestnik, 2 November 1999, p. 3.44 G. Vorob’eva, ‘Glavnoe – sokhranit’ vse, chto znachimo, polezno dlya raiona’, Nash

put’, 23 April 1999, p. 1.45 See Introduction for discussion of the names.46 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Raionnaya administratsiya’, op. cit.47 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. 4.48 S.E. Kuteinikov, Nasha zubtsovskaya zemlya, Zubtsov [no publisher named], 1996,

pp 34, 37.49 Sotsial’noe polozhenie gorodov i raionov Tverskoi oblasti, Tver: Goskomstat, 1998,

p. 115.50 One said she had ‘about twenty-five’ Bryansk acquaintances in Zubtsov.51 Information from Zubtsov Goskomstat.52 The lake is out of sight of the town centre.53 L. Burdina, ‘Prestupnost’’, op. cit.


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 inthe USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89, London: Routledge, 1990.

3 Interview information in Zubtsov and Achit; T. Barykhina, ‘V usloviyakh bez-denezh’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 dos-tizheniya sotsial’noi kompetentnosti obuchayushchikhsia’, Nash put’, 8 September2000, p. 2. The college is the responsibility of the region, not the district; it wouldseem that this is no guarantee of stable superior funding, although it does have a newbuilding.

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 smallerdistrict.

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 andE. Klopov, ‘Sotsial’nye effekty i struktura bezrabotitsy v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniya, 1, 2000.

14 S. Efimov, ‘Putevka v zhizn’ poluchena, no gde s nei primut?’ (interview), Nash put’,14 April 2000, p. 7.

236 Notes

15 There are 17 doctors and 140 beds. Information from Dr A. Desyatkov. That mobilityamong doctors is very high is suggested by the fact that 5 of these doctors had beenrecruited only in 1999 (one from Kazakstan and four from other parts of SverdlovskRegion). ‘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 chil-dren. L. Rubina and S. Airepetova, ‘Mozhet li sotsiologiya pomoch’ v formirovaniisotsial’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’sdaughter 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 ahearty meal, whatever the time of day.

22 This was not a household budget survey, nor was the sample representative of localsociety. Hence there will be no attempt to present statistical conclusions about howmany people fell into which category, or to define these categories with greaterprecision. For a more detailed and quantitative approach to poverty indicators, see,for example, N. Tikhonova, ‘Bednye: obraz zhizni i strategii vyzhivaniya’, inT. Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial’noi sfery i sotsial’nayapolitika, 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: WorldBank, 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 asreported 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 andSociety 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 mentionsa local farm where no wages at all had been paid in recent years, and most arable landhad 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 inJ. 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.

Notes 237

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.


1 For a discussion of the gender implications, see Chapter 7 of F. Ellis, RuralLivelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000.

2 F. Pine and S. Bridger (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: local strategies and regionalresponses, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 11.

3 S. Clarke, Do Russian Households Have Survival Strategies?, Coventry: Universityof Warwick, Centre for Comparative Labour Studies, 1999, p. 2.

4 M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Involution and destitution in capitalistRussia’, Ethnography, 1, 1, 2000, p. 62.

5 J.R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to EasternEurope 1989–1998, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 68.

6 C. Wallace, ‘Household strategies: their conceptual relevance and analytical scope insocial research’, Sociology, 36, 2, 2002, p. 278, referring to A. Warde, ‘Householdwork 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 ofconsumption 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 indus-

trial 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 ofTransition, 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 neveisya’, 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’, Zubtsovskayazhizn’, 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.

238 Notes

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 issle-dovaniya, 2, 2002.

28 Clarke, New Forms, op. cit. and H.T. Seeth et al., ‘Russian poverty: muddling througheconomic transition with garden plots’, World Development, 26, 9, 1998, suggest thatthe very poorest households do not have land. Small-town interviewees agreed thatabsolutely destitute families did not farm, but they asserted that it was because theydid not farm (prefering to drink) that they were destitute. They suggested that ‘any-one who wants to can get some land and grow their own potatoes’.

29 Just one respondent – a successful entrepreneur – mentioned that the household hadrecently 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; about50 per cent also worked extra rented fields. The reason they needed to do this wasbecause wages from the farms were often in the form of food products, although therespondents naturally wanted cash. Village pensioners, however, often derived theirmain subsistence from their pensions and did less extensive farming. G. Rodionovaand G. Shurkhovetskaya, ‘Izmeneniya v strukture dokhodov sel’skikh zhitelei’, inZaslavskaya (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 issle-

dovaniya, 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 issle-

dovaniya, 8, 1998, p. 85, reports similarly that in Sakha only 4 per cent of teacherssurveyed had a secondary income.

39 N. Tikhonova and O. Shkaratan, ‘Rossiiskaya sotsial’naya politika: vybor bez al’ter-nativy?’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 3, 2001, p. 28.

40 See, for example, A.-M. Salmi, ‘Health through networks? Teachers, doctors andinformal exchange’, British Association for Slavonic and East European StudiesAnnual Conference, Cambridge, April 7–9, 2001.

41 V. Men’shikova, ‘Vozmozhnosti uchrezhdenii obrazovaniya raiona kak usloviya dos-tizheniya sotsial’noi kompetentnosti obuchayushchikhsya’, Nash put’, 8 September2000, p. 2, 7.

42 N. Platonova, ‘Malen’kii ostrovok otnositel’noi bezopasnosti’, Nash put’, 2 February2000, p. 2.

43 G. Sillaste, ‘Izmeneniya sotsial’noi mobil’nosti i ekonomicheskogo povedeniyazhenshchin’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 5, 2000, p. 32.

44 Tikhonova and Shkaratan, op. cit., p. 27.45 Shirokalova, op. cit., p.73.

Notes 239

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, newspapereditor, head of local government department. See Chapter 6 for more detail on theircareers.

48 M. Bruno, ‘Women and the culture of entrepreneurship’, in M. Buckley (ed.), Post-SovietWomen: From the Baltic to Central Asia, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 69.

49 Emigration abroad was not usually considered an option, although one doctor inZubtsov was toying with the idea of moving to Tunisia, to pay for higher educationfor 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 real-

izatsiya’, 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, andZubtsov with 7 more. Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Penzenskoi oblasti, p. 169; infor-mation 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 EuropeanSocial 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 womenin Nizhnii Novgorod Region would definitely like to be a housewife); E.Zdravomyslova, ‘Problems of becoming a housewife’, in A. Rotkirch and E. Haavio-Mannila (eds), Women’s Voices in Russia Today, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, sug-gesting that middle-aged and older women in Petersburg find it very difficult to adaptto not working (though it is easier for younger women); I.I. Chernova, ‘Zhenshchinyi rabota: mneniya rossiyan i kanadtsev’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 12, 1999,p. 111, suggesting that over 90 per cent of Russians think women should work tosupport their families.

66 See, for example, D. Vannoy et al., Marriages in Russia: Couples During theEconomic 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 inRussia’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 fellafterwards. It had a healthy 14.2 births per 1,000 in 1998 (cf. Bednodemyanovsk’s 8.2).

240 Notes

In 1989 the Achit figure had been a very high 21.6. Sverdlovskaya oblast’, op. cit.,pp.18, 49.

70 Vannoy et al., op. cit., p. 176.71 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.72 Vannoy et al., op. cit., p. 70.73 When the story was published in 1969, Baranskaya received hundreds of letters from

readers who identified completely with her overworked heroine. See S. Kay, intro-duction to N. Baranskaya, Nedelya kak nedelya (A Week Like Any Other), Bristol:Bristol Classical Press, 1993.

74 E. Fomin and N. Fedorova, ‘Strategii v otnoshenii zdorov’ya’, p. 37, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniya, 11, 1999.

75 A. Gladkova, ‘Itogi podpiski’, Nash put’, 9 July 1999, p. 1.76 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 stres-sors, because they are more involved in public life. They do not argue, however, thatwomen are less exposed to stressors, only that they have better coping mechanisms(see later).

77 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.

78 Shkol’nikov et al., op. cit., p. 47.79 Ashwin and Bowers, op. cit.80 S. Zheleznyakova, ‘Sotsiokul’turnye orientatsii uchitelei’, Sotsiologicheskie issle-

dovaniya, 4, 2000, p. 101.81 R. Rose, How Much Does Social Capital Add to Individual Health?, Glasgow:

University of Strathclyde, 2000 (Studies in Public Policy 329).82 Pilkington, op. cit., pp. 21, 169.83 Shkol’nikov et al., op. cit., p. 23.84 P. Watson, ‘Explaining rising mortality among men in Eastern Europe’, Social

Science and Medicine, 41, 7, 1995.85 W.C. Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe, London:

Routledge, 1999, p. 106.86 This last came from a younger interviewee in Bednodemyanovsk, who presumably

had the market in mind. There are very few shops in the town.87 Shirokalova, op. cit., p. 74.88 T. Gurko, ‘Transformatsiya instituta sovremennoi sem’i’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya,

10, 1995, p. 98.89 Contrast, for example, R. Rose, Modern, Pre-Modern and Anti-Modern Social Capital

in Russia, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1999, especially pp. 28–31, andC. Hann, ‘Introduction’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: ChallengingWestern Models, London: Routledge, 1996, as well as many contributions to the samevolume.

90 A.V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and InformalExchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 195–200.

91 C. Buckley and D. Donahue, ‘Promises to keep: pension provision in the RussianFederation’, in Field and Twigg, op. cit., p. 263.

92 However, the number of individual home builders had increased dramatically in thedistrict, from 18 in 1997 to 92 in 1999. A. Sal’nikova, ‘Kto platit, tot zakazyvaetmuzyku’, Nash put’, 5 February 1999, p. 1.

93 M. Burawoy, P. Krotov and T. Lytkina, ‘Domestic involution: how women survive ina North Russian city’ in V.E. Bonnell and G.W. Breslauer (eds), Russia in the NewCentury: Stability or Disorder?, Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 2001.

94 Shirokalova, op. cit., pp. 76, 78.

Notes 241

6 The intelligentsia, the ‘middle class’ and social stratification

1 On social mobility see, for example, M. Yanowitch, Social and Economic Inequalityin the Soviet Union, London: Martin Robinson and New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1977. Onmyths, see S. Barsukova, ‘Modeli uspekha zhenshchin sovetskogo i postsovetskogoperiodov: 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 sot-sial’noi struktury Krasnoyarskogo regiona’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001.Among other recent analyses, see, for example, M. Gorshkov, ‘Nekotoryemetodologicheskie aspekty analiza srednego klassa v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issle-dovaniya, 3, 2000. Gorshkov argues, p.11, that the only definitely middle-class occu-pations 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 sociol-

ogists and is, for example, the subject of national conferences. See, for example,O. Kozlova, ‘Sposobna li samoopredelit’sya rossiiskaya gumanitarnaya intelli-gentsia?’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1, 2001. Some of the many articles on thetopic in the journal Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya appear in references below.

8 Fathers and Children and Who is to Blame?: nineteenth-century novels by IvanTurgenev and Alexander Herzen, respectively.

9 A.V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and InformalExchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 199.

10 For detailed studies of the Soviet intelligentsia, see S.V. Volkov, Intellektual’nyi sloi vsovetskom obshchestve, Moscow: Fond ‘Razvitie’ and Institut nauchnoi informatsii poobshchestvennym 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 withina wider survey of Russian social structure and social change, see M. Matthews, Classand 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 osoben-nosti v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 3, 2000, p. 112. Goskomstat figuressuggest 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. Sheregiand V. Kharcheva, ‘Sotsial’nye problemy vuzovskoi nauki’, Sotsiologicheskie issle-dovaniya, 1, 1996, p. 76; G. Pirogov and S. Pronin, ‘The Russian case: social policyconcerns’, in Y. Atal (ed.), Poverty in Transition and Transition in Poverty, New Yorkand 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 sot-

sial’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.

242 Notes

19 For example, Galkin, op. cit.20 This was a favourite topic for Soviet sociologists, who tended to find that school-

leavers aspired to intelligentsia occupations. See Churchward, op. cit., p. 77. There arealso numerous examples of surveys about career choices for the 1990s. See, for exam-ple, A. Gendin and M. Sergeev, ‘Proforientatsiya shkol’nikov’, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniya, 8, 1996, pp. 66–71 (finance and accounting first in Krasnoyarsk, com-parable findings in Moscow); B. Ruchkin, ‘Molodezh i stanovlenie novoi Rossi’,Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 1998, pp. 93–4 (lawyers first, doctors third, teach-ers and mafia boss equal, engineers last); Rubina and Airepetova, op. cit., p. 84 (busi-ness came first by a long way in Noyabrsk (Tyumen Region) – even though, as theauthors 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, review-ing K. Razlogov and I. Butenko, (eds), Kul’turnaya politika Rossii: istoriya i sovre-mennost’ (GIVTs Minkul’tury, 1996), p. 141.

23 See, for example, L. Ionin, ‘Kul’tura i sotsial’naya struktura’, Sotsiologicheskie issle-dovaniya, 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 percent of the ‘humanities intelligentsia’ (in culture, education and the media) consideredthemselves intelligentsia, as did medical workers. Only 15 per cent of engineers, tech-nicians, accountants and economists classed themselves as such. Around 60 per centof the latter labelled themselves services workers. For more on definitions and sub-strata, 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; by2000 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 February2000, p. 2.

30 See, for example, Z. Golenkova and E. Igitkhanyan, ‘Srednie sloi v sovremennoiRossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7, 1998.

31 E. Klopov, ‘Iz pervykh opytov issledovaniya sotsial’noi struktury sovremennogorossiiskogo obshchestva’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 1996, p. 140.

32 For a useful collection of articles exploring various dimensions of the problem ofideology and late Soviet consciousness, see S. White and A. Pravda (eds), Ideologyand 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 narra-

tivisation’, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies AnnualConference, 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.

Notes 243

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 profes-sional people in Lugansk. ‘Survival strategies in an industrial town in East Ukraine’,in S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: Local Strategies andRegional 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 samochuvstvieuchitelei’, pp. 66, 70.

43 M. Draganova, P. Starosta and V. Stolbov, ‘Sotsial’naya identifikatsiya zhiteleisel’skikh poselenii i malykh gorodov Vostochnoi Evropy’, Sotsiologicheskie issle-dovaniya, 2, 2002, p. 53.

44 V. Levicheva, ‘Gumanitarnaya intelligentsia: osnovaniya korporativnoi identichnosti’,Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001, p. 58; S. Magaril, ‘Grazhdanskaya otvet-stvennost’ intelligentsii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2001, p. 51.

45 Yu. Petrov, ‘Problema intelligentnosti v ponimanii studentov’, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniya, 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 withtheir villas in Russia. C. Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: EverydayEconomies After Socialism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 175.

50 Most interestingly, the Achit head of administration claimed that there were really norich people. Working people lived slightly worse than in the past, and people whowere poor were poor because they were lazy.

51 S. Aleksandrov, ‘I vnov’ pozhar v Zubtsove. Pogibla zhenshchina’, Zubtsovskayazhizn’, 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.


1 See A. White, Democratization in Russia under Gorbachev: The Birth of a VoluntarySector, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, Chapter 3, for examples of pre-Gorbachevindependent civil society groups.

2 For example, M. Howard, Free Not to Participate: The Weakness of Civil Society inPost-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 UniversityPress, 1979.

244 Notes

5 See A. White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State ControlOver Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, London: Routledge, 1990, andDemocratization in Russia, op. cit. In these two previous books, I probably overesti-mated the extent of cynicism: the result of focusing too much on cities, and on thevery late Soviet period. My own experience of living among students in the city ofVoronezh at the end of the Brezhnev era also gave me the impression that cynicismwas commonplace.

6 See, for example, G. Gill and R. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? FromGorbachev to Yeltsin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, or M. Weigle, Russia’sLiberal 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 CivilSociety, 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 March2000, p. 1.

12 Clubs in children’s arts centres are still free, although children have to bring their ownmaterials for crafts activities. 350 children were involved in Bednodemyanovsk and aneighbouring village; 917 in Zubtsov; and 150 in Achit (with a further 120 at thehouse of culture across the road). Achit also had a ‘sports school’, another after-school club for children. ‘Music and arts schools’ provided highly subsidized tuitionfor children: 150 children in Zubtsov, for example, and 100 in Achit. The houses ofculture in Zubtsov and Bednodemyanovsk were shut for repairs/rebuilding, althoughsome activities did continue in the town, and the district house of culture was respon-sible for supervizing events throughout the district.

13 L. Burdina, ‘Sochetanie nravstvennosti, intellekta i talanta, ili neskol’ko slov obodnom 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 February1999, 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, vysokoparnykhYa 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 grantfrom the Soros Foundation, and Achit had had a 5,000 ruble grant from the Sverdlovskadministration: again, a sign that sporadically the town does benefit from its locationin this ‘richer’ region. However, in the first nine months of 2000 it had received onlyfour new books. Curiously, city libraries are more short of books per capita than those

Notes 245

in small towns, perhaps because of population decline in the latter. This is clear fromthe statistical handbooks mentioned in Chapter 2. Inter-library loan was used, but itwas too expensive for many people in the small towns. (It cost 60 rubles a book inBednodemyanovsk in April 2000.)

19 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 politikaRossii: istoriya i sovremennost’ (GIVTs Minkul’tury, 1996) in Sotsiologicheskiieissledovaniya, 6, 1997, p. 142.

20 A. Sedov, ‘Spasenie utopayushchikh – delo ruk samikh utopayushchikh’, Vestnik, 21July 2000, p. 3.

21 One interviewee pointed out that the structure of the district administration was iden-tical to that of the old party committee.

22 See, for example, O. Ivanyutina, ‘Itogi konkursa bibliotek’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 26March 1999, p. 1.

23 ‘Pomozhem brat’yam yugoslavam’, ibid., 13 April 1999, p. 4.24 ‘Obrashchenie uchastnikov raionnoi konferentsii rabotnikov kul’tury k zhitelyam

Bednodem’yanovskogo raiona’, Vestnik, 5 February 1999, p. 2.25 ‘Kaleidoskop kul’turnoi zhizni’, ibid., 26 February 1999, p. 2.26 ‘Na mitinge’, ibid., 12 November 1999, p. 1.27 A. Sedov, ‘Posylka na voinu’, ibid., 23 November 1999, pp. 1, 3.28 ‘Otsalyutovali pobede’, Nash put’, 19 May 2000, p. 2.29 L. Petrovskikh, ‘26 noyabrya – Den’ materi. Tematicheskie vechera, konkursy, vys-

tavki’, ibid., 17 November 2000, p. 7; A. Sal’nikova, ‘Vstretili dostoino Den’ pozhilykhlyudei’, ibid., 22 September 2000, p. 7.

30 A. Loginov, ‘Achitu – 265 let’, Gorodok, 1 September 2000, p. 22.31 ‘Babushka – znachit molodaya!’, Nash put’, 8 October 1999, p. 7.32 D. Smirnov, ‘Radi slavy bozhiei’, Vestnik, 4 July, p. 2.33 ‘A voz i nyne tam…’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 2.34 S. Kuteinikov, ‘Skhod reshil: tserkvi byt’!’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 20 February 1999, p. 1.35 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 sometimesknown by the affectionate Russian colloquial term for a district newspaper, raionka.

36 In Achit the newspaper had to temporarily suspend production in spring 1999 becauseit had no money to buy paper. G. Vorob’eva, ‘Uvazhaemye chitateli’, Nash put’, 2April 1999, p. 1.

37 S. Kotkin, ‘Kazhdyi narod dostoin togo pravitel’stva, kotoroe imeet’ (on local electionresults), Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 November 1996, p. 2; S. Kotkin, ‘Kontrol’naya dlyavlastei’ (on a teachers’ strike), ibid., 30 January 1999, p. 1.

38 L. Burdina, ‘ I opyat’ pro pensii’, 27 February 1999, p. 4; N. Podvoiskii, ‘Skandal –atribut rynka’, ibid., 14 May 1999, pp. 2–3.

39 Interview with Kotkin and observation of him at work.40 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.

41 This happened in both Achit and Bednodemyanovsk. In at least one case, there waspressure from above.

42 Interview, July 2000.43 ‘Nachalas’ podpiska na gazetu “Zubtsovskaya zhizn” ’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’,

26 March 1999, p. 8.44 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 youngformer teacher with a style reminiscent of Young Communist League activists inSoviet days.

246 Notes

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 toplay a public role. They, and the attempt to get common premises, are mentioned inM. Mityukhlyaeva, ‘Vsegda gotovy podderzhat’ drug druga’, Nash put’, 28 May1999, 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 prov-

intsii, 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 sde-

lala’, 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 OurHome is Russia, so the battle for the district leadership had a ‘government versuscommunists’ dimension, but this was never made apparent in the press. The editor ofZubtsovskaya zhizn’ said that that party affiliations had not really played a part in thelocal election, although interview evidence suggests that Surov’s communist sympa-thies 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 towork in the local administration.

71 ‘Vybory glavy m. o. Achitskii raion’, Nash put’, 15 December 1996, p. 4.

Notes 247

72 ‘Vybor sdelan’, ibid., 18 December 1993, p. 1; ‘Rezul’taty golosovaniya v raione povyboram deputatov Gosudarstvennoi Dumy’, ibid., 23 December 1995, p. 1; ‘Svodnayatablitsa ob itogakh golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona vo vtorom ture goloso-vaniya’, 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’tatygolosovaniya po vyboram deputata Zakonodatel’nogo sobraniya’, ibid., 18 December1997, p. 1.

74 J. de Bardeleben and A. Galkin, ‘Electoral behavior and attitudes in Russia: doregions make a difference or do regions just differ?’, J. Stavrakis, J. de Bardeleben andL. Black (eds), Beyond the Monolith: the emergence of regionalism in Post-SovietRussia, Washington DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns HopkinsUniversity 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 high-est in the largest cities … and declines through medium-sized to small cities and mergesinto the trend that runs through the rural rayons by degree of ruralness’. However, in1995, their sample small towns were unexpectedly supportive of non-left candidates.They also point out the substantial regional differences. Rural districts in Sverdlovskwere 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 early1990s Penza and most of the big towns (though not Kuznetsk) voted less on the leftthan did districts centred on smaller towns. On Tver, see ‘Tak golosovali goroda iraiony 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 vyboramgubernatora Sverdlovskoi oblasti’, Nash put’, 3 September 1999, p. 2. In the secondround, reported in the newspaper on 17 September, one half of the town voted nar-rowly for Rossel, but the other ward still chose Burkov.

84 L.D. Nelson and I.Y. Kuzes, ‘Elites and institutions in Russian economic trans-formation: the case of Sverdlovsk’, in D. Lane (ed.), The Legacy of State Socialismand the Future of Transformation, Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman andLittlefield, 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 allcandidates’. (District results.) See ‘Itogi golosovaniya na territorii Achitskogo raiona povyboram deputatov Oblastnoi Dumy’, Nash put’, 31 March 2000, p. 1.

90 N. Podvoiskii, ‘Za derzhavu obidno’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 30 April 1999, p. 2, andinterviews.

91 N. Savitskaya, ‘Vor v zakone’, ibid., 26 March 1999, p. 7.92 ‘Zabastovku vremenno priostanovili’, Nash put’, 22 September 2000, p. 1.

248 Notes

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 narra-

tivisation’, 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 capitalistRussia’, 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 theirpower’, 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, FromSubmission 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’, EastWestInstitute, 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: TroubledTransformation, Boulder: Westview, 1995, p. 106.

14 In Zubtsov, however, which neighbours Moscow Region, this was normally the pointof comparison, especially since salaries were much higher over the border. No onethought of comparing Tver specifically with, say, Pskov, although they have much incommon.

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 blamedthose authorities for not doing more to get people involved. E. Zaborova, ‘Uchastiegrazhdan v upravlenii gorodom’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2, 2002.

Notes 249

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 inPost-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’, implieseverything that is non-material: hence perhaps ‘affective’ or ‘cultural’ are the besttranslations in this context, though ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ are other candidates.)

26 Interview information and N. Belov, ‘Obshchestvennyi transport’, Vestnik, 8 October1999. 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 inZubtsov came from Smolensk or, in Achit, from Perm or Chelyabinsk regions. InAchit in particular people had indeed commonly crossed borders. Conversely, nearlyall the Bednodemyanovsk respondents who were born in the macroregion actuallycame from Penza.

30 Kogan, op. cit., and T. Pankova, ‘O stanovlenii nravstvennykh i grazhdanskikh pozit-sii shkol’nikov’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 5, 2002, p. 113. That this was trueelsewhere in provincial Russia was confirmed to me by Penza sociologist ValentinManuilov, Penza, April 2000.

31 A. Sedov, ‘Spasenie utopayushchikh – delo ruk samikh utopayushchikh’, Vestnik, 21July 2000, p. 3.

32 The non-Russians were: 5 Tatars, 2 Ukrainians, one Bashkir, one Mari, two half-Ukrainians, one half-Pole, one half-Chuvash and one half-Mordvin. All the ‘halves’were predominantly or entirely Russian-speaking. One respondent claimed to beRussian, without qualification, but another respondent said that the person concernedwas Mordvin.

33 V. Tolz, ‘Forging the nation: national identity and nation building in post-communistRussia’, 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 shutdown much of Tver’, EastWest Institute, Russian Regional Report, 5, 30, 2 August 2000and ‘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 InformalExchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 194–9.

2 S. Ashwin, ‘ “There’s no joy anymore”: the experience of reform in a Kuzbass miningsettlement’, Europe–Asia Studies, 47, 8, 1995.

3 B. Silverman and M. Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Loserson 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 Russianidentity’, 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.

250 Notes

All references to regional statistical committees (as joint or sole publishers) are abbreviatedto ‘Goskomstat’.

‘A voz i nyne tam…’, Nash put’, 20 October 2000, p. 2.‘Agitpoezd v puti’, Vestnik, 14 July 2000, p. 1.Aleksandrov, A., ‘Materi soldatskie’, Vestnik, 5 March 1999, p. 2.Aleksandrov, S., ‘Pamyat’ Mariny Tsvetaevoi’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 24 September

1998, p. 4.—— , ‘Pod perebor gitarnykh strun’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 4 February 1999, p. 1.—— , ‘I vnov’ pozhar v Zubtsove. Pogibla zhenshchina’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 26 March

1999, p. 1.—— , ‘O Zubtsove uslyshit Evropa’, Zubtsovskaya zhizn’, 13 April 1999, p. 1.Aleksandrova, N., ‘Zhenshchiny raiona, ob”edinyaites’!’, Nash put’, 17 September 1999, p. 1.—— , ‘Skol’ko verevochke ne veisya’, Nash put’, 26 November 1999, p. 2.Alikin, A., ‘Chtoby chutochku zhilos’ legche’, Nash put’, 29 September 2000, p. 2.Andreeva, L., ‘Sozdana Assotsiatsiya Zhenshchin Achitskogo Raiona’, Nash put’, 16 July

1999, p. 1.Arato, A., ‘Civil society, transition and consolidation of democracy’, in A. Braun and

Z. Barany (eds), Dilemmas of Transition: The Hungarian Experience, Lanham, MD andOxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Arseeva, T., ‘Gendernye razlichiya v pokazatelyakh urovnya zhizni naseleniya v regionakhPrivolzhskogo Federal’nogo okruga’, Voprosy statistiki, 8, 2002, pp. 65–8.

Artyukhov, A., ‘Semeinaya politika na rossiiskom severe: effektivnost’ i rezervy’,Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 4, 2001, pp. 80–5.

Ashwin, S., ‘“There’s no joy anymore”: the experience of reform in a Kuzbass miningsettlement’, Europe–Asia Studies, 47, 8, 1995, pp. 1367–82.

—— (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Post-Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 2000.Ashwin, S. and E. Bowers, ‘Do Russian women want to work?’, in M. Buckley (ed.), Post-

Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997.

Avtomobil’nye dorogi Sverdlovskoi oblasti, Yekaterinburg: AssotsiirovannyiKartograficheskii Tsentr, 1999.

Babaeva, L., ‘Zhenshchiny: aktual’nye napravleniya sotsial’noi politiki’, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniya, 7, 1997, pp. 51–9.

‘Babushka – znachit molodaya!’, Nash put’, 8 October 1999, p. 7.Balzer, H., ‘Russia’s middle classes’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 14, 2, 1998, pp. 165–86.

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Bibliography 267

Index

abstinence as survival strategy 111–12, 132Achit District and Town: introductory

description 2–3, ch. 3additional earnings see employmentadministration, local see local governmentagency 6, 107–9, 211–12agglomeration effects 15Agrarian Party 180–2agriculture 29, 31, 37, 60, 76, 79–80,

86–7, 100, 190aid, Western 167Akhmatova, A. 154alcohol see drinkingamateur art, drama and music 84, 136,

170–3, 177archaization 8Arkhangelsk City and Region 58–9, 65Armenians 84army see military serviceArsenev 63arts workers see houses of culture and

clubsAsbest 83Association of Achit District Women 178Association of Urals Women 178atomization 6, 168–70, 176autonomous okrugs: social conditions

224n1Azerbaidjan 10Azigulovo 178

Baltic Republics 87Baranskaya, N. 131barter arrangements, local government

36–7, 88–9, 116Bashkirs 179Bashkortostan 190–1baths, steam 136

Bednodemyanovsk Agricultural Collegesee colleges of further education

Bednodemyanovsk District and Town:introductory description 2–3, ch. 3

Bednyi, D. 3Belgorod Region 45, 74benefits in kind 37, 104–5, 127; see also

child benefit, social assistance andinsurance

Bichevskaya, Zh. 195birthplaces of respondents 197birthrates 40–1, 69–70, 108, 112; see also

population size and growthBlack Earth area 181–2, 190Bochkarev, V. 84, 88, 188, 192–3, 195bookshops 94, 155Borisoglebsk 71borrowing from family/friends 98,

111, 114Bryansk Region 25, 89Burkov, A. 182businesses 30–1; difficulties of

establishing in small towns 3, 97,121–3, 125–6

businessmen: intelligentsia links andperceptions 3, 123, 143, 158, 161–2;small-town successes 93, 101–2, 118,121–2, 151

businesswomen 125–6byudzhetniki see public sector workers

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

Central macroregion 38, 45, 51–2, 80charity 177Chechens 84Chechnya 16, 52, 124, 133, 172,

201, 220Chelyabinsk Region 164, 190Chernenko, K. 3Chernetskii, A. 179, 183, 190, 192Chernobyl refugees 89Chernomyrdin, V. 184child benefit 36–7, 56, 84, 88, 104, 191child care 25–6, 84, 93, 126–7children 20, 41, 47, 101–3, 113, 130, 163,

170; born outside marriage 47–8; incare 49, 94, 104, 137, 167, 178

Chukotka 65churches 173–4, 200Chuvashia 80Chuvash (people) 84cinemas 94, 174CIS see ‘Near Abroad’cities 3, 14, 61, 114–15, 167civic engagement (of small-town

inhabitants) 168–70civil society 7, ch. 7colleagues 136–8, 219colleges of further education (uchilishcha)

26, 94, 97communists and communist party 16, 80,

171, 175, 180–4community service and spirit (of

intelligentsia) 159–60, 170–2, 175; see also civic engagement

computer ownership 57, 98conscription see military serviceconstruction industry 89, 100,

118, 126coping mechanisms (economic) see

livelihood strategiescoping with stress 135–6core intelligentsia 10, 146CPRF, CPSU see communists and

communist partycredit 122, 218crime 27–8, 66–8, 78, 81, 83, 84,

113–14, 126cultural enlightenment see community

service and spirit, houses of culture and clubs

culture (arts) in small towns see houses ofculture 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 seehousehold plots

Dagestan 46, 64, 80deathrates 41–3, 69–70; see also

population size and growthdemocracy 167deprivation see abstinence as survival

strategyde-urbanization (reclassification of towns

as villages) 71devolution of power/responsibilities to

regions 16–17, 19, 56diet 38–9, 111–12, 115, 217–20disabled people 20, 104, 163, 177–8discotheques 171–2divorces and divorced people 45–8,

68–9, 103, 128–30, 133doctors 97–100, 103, 119–20, 134, 149,

175; see also health and health care,hospitals in small towns

donor regions 76drinking 41–3, 104, 125, 130,

132, 136, 163; see alsovodka, illegal

drug abuse and dealing 27–8, 83, 178Dubrovki 85Dushanbe 71

Eastern Europe 201East Siberia 24, 27, 29, 51–2earnings, additional see employmenteconomy, informal see informal

economyeducation 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, 69elections 119, 174, 179–84, 195electric cable theft 113elites, small town 148–51employment: combining two or more jobs

(po sovmestitel’stvu) 111; with regularovertime (working more than one shift)111, 120; secondary 110–11, 118–19,126, 146, 217, 219; see alsounemployment and unemployed people

Employment Service 87engineers 95, 99essentialism 7, 123Europe 201

270 Index

Factory and Mining Urals(Gornozavodskoi Ural ) party 183

familialization 126Far East 28, 37, 45, 51–2, 89Fatherland (Otechestvo) 183–4, 198federal okrugs (administrative units)

16–17fertility rates 40–1, 70, 108, 112festivals and holidays 136, 168–70, 179fieldwork description 8–10folk culture 172, 189food, homegrown see household plotsfoodprocessing and distribution, local

86–7, 116–17football 177, 191forests (as source of berries, mushrooms,

timber) 84, 113–14, 119fringe intelligentsia 10, 146

gardening see household plotsGari 58gender difference, relations and roles 10,

219; family roles 157, 218–20; health41–3, 128–37; livelihoods 6–7, 31, 74,101–3, 107–8, 122, 125–8, 143, 148–9;unemployment 35, 87, 95–6; women’sorganisations 177–8

gifts (in return for favours) 118–20Gini coefficients 32–3globalization 201glubinka (provincial depths) 3, 5, 8, 60,

183Gorbachev, M. 16Gornozavodskoi Ural 183Gorodok 175–6, 183Goskomstat 10–12, 20, 29, 31–2government, local see local governmentgovernors, regional 192grandparents 112–13, 130, 217–20Gross Domestic Product 29Gross Regional Product 29–30, 76Gulyakov, A. 193

heads of administration, district 179–80headteachers see teachershealth and health care 6, 27, 41–3, 98,

102–4, 112, 132–7, 217–20higher education see education and

studentshistory, local 174, 177HIV/AIDS 27, 83Hollywood films 201home area, attachment to 197–8

homebrew see vodka, illegalhospitals in small towns 88, 94; see also

doctors, health and health carehotels and cafes 119household 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 size49, 99–103, 112–13, 217–20

household strategies see livelihoodstrategies

houses of culture and clubs 89, 93–5, 97,99, 103, 157, 170–2

housewives 35, 98, 102, 127, 178housework 127–8housing 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, 81inflation 20, 29, 84informal economy 89, 107Ingushetia 4, 19–20, 27, 31, 46, 70Inta 37intelligentsia 1, 7, 10, 93, 97, 101–2, 140,

ch. 6, 218–20; and politics 179–86internet access 198interviewees (sample description) 1–2,

8–11involution 6, 139, 168–70Ioshkar-Ola 72Islam 173Ivanovo Region 20, 28, 34Izhevsk 72Izhma 64–5

Jews 84, 154journalists see newspapers, magazines and

journalists

Kalashnikov, A. 192Kaliningrad Region 45Karpinsk 62, 182Kazakstan 10Khabarovsk City and Region 65, 67Khanka District 63–4kindergartens see child care

Index 271

Kirov City and Region 12, 20, 28, 36,59–61, 65, 69, 72, 75, 80

Kirovgrad 36Kolotnin, A. 179Komi Republic 37, 58, 60, 64–5, 68Komsomol 149–50Konstantinova, T. 178Kosovo 172, 201Kostroma City 72Kotkin, S. 92, 174Krasnoufimsk 85, 97, 175, 196, 198Krylov, N. 179–80, 182Kurbanov, A. 148, 171Kurgan Region 28Kursk (submarine) 201Kushva 56

Labouring Russia (Trudovaya Rossiya)181

legal action 184leisure facilities 82, 94, 157, 170–2Lenin, V. 192Leningrad Region 29, 73–4Lermontov, M. 190, 192Lesozavodsk District 63Liberal Democratic Party of Russia 181–2libraries and librarians 93–5, 97, 99–100,

103, 170–1, 183, 189, 197life expectancy 6, 41–2, 52, 79, 81, 135Likhachev, D. 154livelihoods: definition 5, 14livelihood strategies 5–6, ch. 5, 217–20loans see borrowing from family/friendslocal government 3, 25, 36, 56, 88–9, 94,

99, 101–2, 120–1, 172–5, 177, 179; seealso elections

lone parents 48, 101, 103, 127,137, 218–19

Luzhkov, Yu. 183, 198

macroregions: definition 16Magadan Gold Company 89malaya rodina 197–8managers 101–3, 149–51manual workers 87, 99, 102Marii El 22, 80Mari (people) 2, 84, 179markets see shops and shoppingmarriages 45–8, 68–9, 128–9May (political party) 182–3metal, scrap 113methodology 8middle class 142–4, 164

migrants and migration 52; to cities70–4, 76, 81, 89, 123–5, 217; fromFar East and North 45, 219; fromNear Abroad 10, 44, 79, 134–5, 138,148–9, 177

military service 95, 133, 172, 219money shortage and transactions in kind

see barter arrangements, localgovernment

‘moral crisis’, perceptions of 57Mordovia 80Mordvin (people) 81, 84Moscow 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, 54Mother Russia 128, 197–8, 202Mothers against Drugs 178mothers and stress 134–5municipal services 84murders 41–3museums 94, 99, 179, 183

Nakhodka 60, 63–4Nash put’ 174–6nationalism 199nature 83‘Near Abroad’ 44, 70–1, 79, 89networks 6, 98, 110, 119, 137–9, 151,

167, 217–20New Russian Barometer 5New Russians 127, 143newspapers, magazines and journalists 94,

97, 99, 118, 155, 170, 173–6; see alsoregional media

Nizhnii Novgorod Region 29, 112, 122,136, 156–7

Nizhnii Tagil 160nomenklaturists 122, 149–51non-governmental organizations 36,

166–7, 176–9North Caucasus 24, 27–9, 39, 51–3Northern macroregion 37North-West Federal Okrug 29North-West macroregion 45, 51–2Novoe Urengoe 112Novosibirsk 28, 45Nozhkin, N. 9, 171, 177nurseries see child care

Oblastnaya gazeta 189, 194October Revolution anniversaries 172

272 Index

older people see grandparents, pensionersand pensions, residential care

Orenburg 198Orthodoxy see religionOtechestvo 183–4, 198Our Home, Our Town 179, 183, 192Our Home is Russia 184

participation in local celebrations andevents 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 170Perm City and Region 157, 173, 190–1petrol stations 88–9Platonova, N. 186Pogoreloe Gorodishche 85, 174, 182police 84, 88, 99, 121, 124, 137, 146, 178politicians, critical/cynical attitudes to

172, 192, 195, 201politics in small towns 179–84pollution levels 83poor people see poverty and poor peoplepopulation size and growth 10, 12–13,

39–45, 51, 79, 81; in the small towns85–6, 89; urban/rural differences 68–70

poselok gorodskogo tipa: definition 13postcommunism 7poverty and poor people 20–4, 36–7, 51,

80, 97–104, 110–18, 133, 218–20;extreme poverty 139, 163

Preobrazhenie Urala see UralsTransformation

pre-school institutions see child carepresidential envoys 17Primore 60, 63, 65, 67prisoners 84private sector 30–1, 121; see also

businessesprofessional identities 7, 157–9professional qualifications of small-town

intelligentsia 95–7, 120, 151–3Promkomservis 179Pskov City and Region 72, 130, 132public opinion 175public sector workers 87, ch. 4Pushkin, A. 171Putin, V. 3, 16–17, 56, 175, 182, 188

radio 94Red Belt 80, 181, 190

regional capitals 5, 58–9, 67, 69–70, 123,164, 189–90, 194–5

regional identity building projects188–95

regional media 188–9, 194regions: 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, 188remoteness and economic depression 5,

60–2, 90re-naming (geographical) 16residential care 49, 94, 105retail trade see trade and tradersRossel, E. 76, 78, 178–9, 182–3, 188–90,

192, 194Rossosh 65rural areas see villagesRussian identity, patriotism, cultural

revival 198–201Russian Longitudinal Monitoring

Survey 10Russian Society of Disabled People 178Ryazan City 72Rzhev 84–5, 89, 148, 189, 196

Sabantui festival 179Saint Petersburg 27–31, 34–5, 45, 74, 89,

111, 132, 200Sakharov, A. 154salaries see wagesSamara City and Region 27, 28, 30, 45,

49, 54, 132, 190savings 103, 111school curriculum: regional patriotism

189schools (in small towns) 93–4, 170–2;

see also education and students,teachers

Second World War 84, 148, 171, 199semi-intelligentsia 151–2Serbs 172servicemen, retired 87, 89Severouralsk 58, 62sex ratios 49Shestyakov, A. 180Shmelev, V. 179–80shops and shopping 87, 126shuttle traders see trade and tradersSiberia 29, 39, 45, 53, 84; see also East

Siberia

Index 273

single parents see lone parentssmall business see businessessmall towns, general comments 3–4,

12–16, ch. 2, 136, 167social assistance and insurance 36–7,

104–5, 177social capital 5, 98, 119, 136–9, 185socialising see networkssocial support 135–9, 218–20sociological research, Russian 3soldiers’ mothers’ committees 177Soviet identities and practices 7, 100, 110,

116, 143, 152, 169–71, 175special needs school 94, 96, 104sport 191Stakheeva, N. 183state sector workers see public sector

workersstatistics: reliability 10–12, 231n11stratification, social 161–4stray dogs 84street committees 170stress 6, 43, 95, 104, 128–37, 154–5,

218–20strikes 136, 184students see education and studentssubbotnik 170subsistence farming see household plotssubsistence minima 20–3, 85, 99–100, 104Sudarushka 172, 178suicides 41–3Sunday schools 173Surov, V. 179–80, 182Surovatkina, V. 177–8survival 6, 109–110survival strategies see livelihood strategiesSverdlovsk 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, 139Sysolyatin, P. 177

Tatar National Autonomy 179Tatars 2, 76, 81, 178–9Tatarstan 16, 19, 38, 54taxes and tax inspectors 89, 126teachers 9, 87, 92–5, 97–100, 102–3,

118–20, 133–4, 145, 159, 175, 184television 84, 169; see also regional

mediatheatre visits 156time (as resource) 131–2, 186trade and traders 7, 87, 97, 116–7, 121–2,

125; volume of retail trade 63–4, 87

transition 7, 210–11travel and transport 25, 60, 85, 98, 119,

155–6, 195–7Trudovaya Rossiya 181trust 206tuberculosis 27Tula City 125Tver 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, 124Tyva 20, 27, 31, 46, 70

Ufimka 86Ukrainians 84unemployment and unemployed people

33–6, 76, 80–1, 84, 87, 95–7, 104, 113,127, 130, 218–20; small-townunderclass 163

Unity 180, 182Urals 2, 28, 35, 51–4, 74, 76, 184, 190Urals Republic 190Urals Transformation 179, 188urbanization (reclassification of villages as

towns) 12–13urban settlements, population size and

growth 13Usinsk 37, 60, 64Ust-Kulom 65utility bills 93, 104–5, 133; see also

housing and amenities

Vedernikov, Yu. 88–9Verkhoture monastery 188, 192Vestnik 174–6veterans’ councils 172, 176–8villages 12–14, 20, 25, 27, 31, 47–8,

69–70, 89, 100, 102, 112, 117, 160,163; voting 182

‘Vishnovka’ 206Vladivostok 63vodka, illegal 83–4Volga area 51–2, 74, 80, 190Volodina, L. 148voluntary sector 36, 166–7, 176–9Vorkuta 37Voronezh 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 170Week Like Any Other 131

274 Index

welfare state see social assistance andinsurance

widows 48, 103wolves 60women see gender difference, relations

and roles, housewivesWomen of Russia 178women’s council 177–8work (paid): attitudes to 127, 133–4,

157–9, 178workers see manual workersworking conditions 93workplaces and social support 136, 148work strategies see livelihood strategies

Yabloko 181, 183Yaroslavl Region 54

Yavlinskii, G. 183Yekaterinburg 59, 68, 72, 83, 85, 112,

178, 183, 192, 195Yeltsin, B. 16, 180–2, 190, 201young people 9, 36, 76, 80–2, 84,

101–2, 110, 123, 130, 134, 143,160–1, 164, 170–3

Zakharov, N. 148Zarechnyi 56Zarya 178zhensovet 177–8Zhupikov, A. 177Zubtsov District and Town: introductory

description 2–3, ch. 3Zubtsovskaya zhizn’ 174–6Zyuganov, G. 182

Index 275

Documents

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