Olga Shevchenko

‘In Case of Fire Emergency’ Consumption, security and the meaning of durables in a transforming society

This article argues that the study of Russian rituals and patterns of consumption reveals the intricate ways in which post-socialist actors deal with economic and political uncertainty, creating and symbolically affirming their identities in a rapidly transforming environment. Far more culturally specific than a simple globalization argument would suggest, and far more creative than simple reproduction of ‘Soviet’ attitudes, post-Soviet practices of consumption represent a complex fusion of global trends and local cultural patterns. As such, they may tell us just as much about the post-socialist condition as about the attitudes that preceded it. This article addresses these issues by exploring the consumption of household durables, the popularity of which can be explained by the fact that they came to embody some of the most profound cultural trends, expectations and fears in a contemporary post-Soviet setting. Decoding the symbolic significance of these objects may thus yield valuable insights into the cultural processes unfolding in the post-Soviet milieu, but also help us raise more general questions of formation and affirmation of identities, groups and coping strategies through consumption.

'Between the Holes': Emerging Identities and Hybrid Patterns of Consumption in Post-socialist Russia

IN THE SUMMER OF 1998 participants of an international social science conference held in one of the leading Russian research institutes in Moscow witnessed the following scene. 1 The speaker, a Russian academic in his 60s, was presenting a paper dedicated to the social and cultural developments that took place in Russia over the past 10 years. Dressed in a grey three-piece suit and holding himself very upright, he spoke slowly and emphatically, and one could see from his looks and demeanour that this was far from the e rst time he was addressing large audiences with his concerns regarding the moral and sociopolitical decline of the country. The rhetoric and presentation of the speaker all worked to suggest the gravity of the events he was assessing, and he frequently used superlatives, such as ‘ unprecedented’ , ‘ ultimate’ and ‘ irreversible’ . ‘ In short’ , the narrator concluded, ‘ the social fabric of Russia is gone. All that we have left is merely the existential holes’ . The audience was silent; while some were deeply impressed and ready to accept the argument, others remained unconvinced. After a few seconds, somebody raised a hand and asked, sceptically: ‘ Well, what is between the holes?’ It took several minutes for the presenter to grasp the point of the question, but as soon as he did, he answered without hesitation: ‘ Between the holes are also holes’ , he said, ‘ but of a different order’. The logic driving this exchange is not too hard to understand. The decade of 1990‐2000 has been a time of dismantling, both physical and conceptual, of many structures and legacies left over after the collapse of the socialist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. Both in the eyes of the local population, and in those of the social scientists and outsider observers, this period presented enormous challenges to the habitual organisation of social life and the constitution of identities and groups in an unstable and risk-ridden setting. Socialised to see and value particular kinds of

Bread and circuses: shifting frames and changing references in ordinary Muscovites' political talk

The debates around the course of the Russian transformation, intensified by the sudden collapse of the Russian economic system in August 1998, typically deal with phenomena and issues involved by analyzing the structure and functioning of political elites, parties and institutions. While all of these provide interesting and revealing data, they fail to pay sufficient attention to everyday lives of the ordinary Russian people who face increasing hardships with endurance and ingenuity. This paper is a part of an ongoing project which focuses on the adaptive strategies developed by ordinary Russians in response to a drastically changing societal environment. This paper presents some early findings pertaining to the shifts adaptive strategies of Muscovites underwent after the economic collapse, and suggests that these shifts may start to explain why, despite the dramatic worsening of the economic situation, no major public protest actions have occurred so far.

Between Elias and Foucault: Discipline, Photography, and the Soviet Childhood

E ven a casual glance at the family album page reproduced on the previous page registers an immediate contrast between the two photos. The amateur snapshot of two laughing boys, seemingly spontaneously caught in action is markedly different from the static and organized kindergarten photo, where uniformed three-year-olds are positioned around a table, facing two authority figures at once—the teacher and the photographer. The opposition of the spontaneous and unmediated versus the set and controlled is almost instant. It is deepened further because the upper image follows immediately familiar visual conventions, while the subject and aesthetics of the bottom picture have little in common with the occasions typically recorded and preserved in the family albums (Spence and Holland 1991). The contrast between the two images is further magnified when one finds out where and when the images were taken: the late 1950s in the Soviet Union. However palpable the contrast of the two images, their physical proximity within a family album, as well as their role in the narratives of self-representation within the family, poses important questions about power and discipline, highlighting the ways in which discipline affects not only the subjects of the photographs, but also its makers and ‘‘consumers.’’ Indeed, the apparent contrast between the two photographs draws on the established construction of ‘‘romantic childhood,’’ defined by Anne Higonnet as a ‘‘visual fiction . . . consolidating the modern definition of childhood’’ largely through the image of innocence perceived as ‘‘an attribute of the child’s body’’ (1998:8–9). Along with the ideological constructions of ‘‘romantic childhood,’’ there is another aspect that informs the relationship a contemporary viewer is likely to see between the two photographs, namely the historiographic tradition that emphasizes the state domination of Soviet society. This tradition is present, albeit with considerable modifications, in the totalitarian paradigm of Russia’s (and the USSR’s) political history (Richard Pipes), in the revisionist readings that shift the emphasis to social history (Sheila Fitzpatrick), and also in the post-revisionist interpretations that emphasize the cultural dimension and private agency in the writings on Soviet history (Jochen Hellbeck, Peter Holquist, Svetlana Boym). In the absence of additional commentary by the makers and/or owners of the images, contemporary visual conventions and historiographic traditions format the interpretations of the image, exercising a tacit ‘‘disciplining’’ power over the eyes of the beholders. The relationship between these two images emerges quite differently if we attend to the stories of the images’ owners. The album was assembled in the mid-1980s by a high-ranking commander in the Soviet Army, Dmitrii Sergeevich, a hard-working, ambitious, and intelligent man whose career trajectory was not uncommon for the period. Son of a peasant, he received a military education right after WWII, joined the

‘Wiggle your Wits!’ Social Restructuring and the Transformation of Entertainment Genres in Today's Russia

Among print genres that soared in popularity after the fall of socialism, crossword puzzles have been prominent, with their monthly sales reported around 36 million copies in 2001–02. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews with crossword readers, traders and publishers, as well as on analysis of the puzzles themselves, I argue that the Russian crossword boom is an instructive case of how forms of popular entertainment are borrowed and re-appropriated to serve distinctively local cultural logics. More specifically, the recent popularity of crossword puzzles has to be viewed in the context of the sweeping changes in the social structure of the Russian society. In the face of multiple dislocations of postsocialism, of frustrated expectations and unfulfilled claims, the changed genre of crosswords, far less high-brow and encyclopaedic than its Soviet predecessor, offered a wide circle of Russians a vocabulary for articulating their claims of cultural competence and, increasingly, of moral worth, and allowed them to imagine themselves as a moral community juxtaposed to the hostility of the surrounding world.

Searching for the Populus in Popular Culture

Notoriously fleeting and short-lived, trends in popular culture appear unlikely sites for building sustainable group identities or formulating political critiques. Certainly, they are not the material political scientists mine in order to investigate the political future of recent democracies. Yet in its very etymology, popular culture begs questions about the populus whose preferences give pop cultural products their status. Unlike the properly political channels of party politics and electoral cycles, popular culture does not promise to address directly, much less resolve, the reigning concerns of the day. Moreover, the highly manufactured character of pop cultural icons makes it easy to dismiss their popularity as the product of successful marketing campaigns. The capacity of such icons to nonetheless strike particularly resonant chords with their audiences can readily be explained away as the result of consumer gullibility and false consciousness. The cultural elites of new postsocialist societies are particularly prone to such a response, disparaging ‘Westernized’ popular phenomena in order to defend a national identity formulated in terms of local high culture. Perhaps the most damning evidence of the insubstantiality of pop cultural phenomena is their evanescence. How accurately can they reflect larger cultural trends when they rise and fade in popularity so quickly? The temporality of these transitory fads seems far better suited to the accelerated schedule of the mass media, with its continual imperative to discover and report upon the new, rather than the sustained in-depth engagement found in ethnography. Yet it is precisely the ephemerality of these phenomena that makes them so suited for the insights of ethnographic research, which attends to the social contexts of production and consumption of meaning, and grounds them in an acute understanding of the historical moment in which the pop cultural encounter takes place. Indeed, in the dynamic context of the former Soviet bloc, where the forms, logic, and temporality of capitalist media and popular culture are still recent, popular culture is a crucial