Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow PDF Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253002575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow PDF Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253002575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

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

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow PDF Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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

Everyday Life in Russia

Everyday Life in Russia PDF Author: Choi Chatterjee
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253012600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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

Everyday Post-Socialism

Everyday Post-Socialism PDF Author: Jeremy Morris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349950890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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

Crises in the Post‐Soviet Space

Crises in the Post‐Soviet Space PDF Author: Felix Jaitner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351234447
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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

The Patriotism of Despair

The Patriotism of Despair PDF Author: Serguei Alex. Oushakine
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457866
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia. In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair. The Patriotism of Despair examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices? Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the "neocoms": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.

After Utopia

After Utopia PDF Author: Larisa Kurtović
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000485552
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
This collection examines how the loss of state socialism as a world-making project and the subsequent failures of postsocialist "civil society building" have impacted new generations of progressive, antinationalist, anarchist, and social-justice oriented activists. How do the histories of state socialism come to shape activist thinking and practice in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? What kinds of political work can and does emerge out of this 30-year-long experience of political, social, and economic transformation? Understanding postsocialism as an intersectional experience and a geopolitically sensitive form of knowledge, this collection of essays seeks to render visible the forms of political activism in the region that are not tied to, or fully determined by, specific moments of street protest and public interruption. Instead, the contributors examine forms of activist effort that endure in the aftermath of protest movements and in the course of lingering crises, in order to capture how our interlocutors seek to enact their desired futures under the conditions of intensifying and shape-shifting pressures of neoliberal governance. The ethnographies that span from Armenia to Ukraine, to Bosnia-Herzegovina to the newly emerging transnational Balkan route that refugees and migrants have created, illuminate how local activists engage with and/or disengage from their socialist inheritance of political imaginaries differently and imagine different futures. Our collection argues for a need for a careful, theoretically nuanced and context-specific analysis across the uneven political landscapes of the former socialist world. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Popular Dictatorships

Popular Dictatorships PDF Author: Aleksandar Matovski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009051571
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.

What Remains

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

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

Saving the Sacred Sea

Saving the Sacred Sea PDF Author: Kate Pride Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190660961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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