Privatisation Face-To-Face
Support Networks And The Former State Enterprise In A Remote
Russian Village
Petia Mankova
Department of Social Anthropology, University
of Tromsø
Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the Cand. Polit. degree
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1
Introduction
Map, showing the location of the field
site
Prologue
- Getting to Krasnoshchel'ye
- Being in Krasnoshchel'ye
- Getting out of Krasnoshchel'ye
Concerns
2 Background And Starting Point
Krasnoshchel'ye And The Cooperative
Informal Relations Under Socialism
The Market Reform Of 1991
Social Networks In The
Present Situation
3 Method And Approach
Method
- Everyday
fieldwork in Krasnoshchel'ye
- Camerawork in Krasnoshchel'ye
- Fieldwork as dialogue and
exchange
Analytical Concepts
4 Support Networks: Structure And Norms
A Model For Networks
Gender And Household
- The
division of labour in the family
- Geographical and social mobility
Family And Kinship
- Aunt Elizaveta
- Aunt Albina
- Aunt Dina
- Fraternal solidarity
Unconditional Support
- The old woman
- Care for the needy
5 Support Networks: Transactions
Monetary Exchanges In The Village
- Buying the malitsa
- Giving away money
Immorality And Criminality
- The vodka resellers
- Pilferers
- Burglars
6 The Cooperative
Values Of Labour
- Alienation
- Cultural capital
- Symbolic capital
Social, Economic And Cultural
Benefits
7 The Reindeer Herding Brigade
'Predatory Pastoralism'
The Reindeer Herding
Brigade As A Work Unit
The Reindeer
Herding Brigade As A Social Network
Informal Practices And Services
8 The Executive Officers
The Expertise Of The Accountants
Holders Of Cultural Capital
9
The Director
Old Obligations And New
Possibilities
Sales, Scale And Meat Market
Private Interests
- Symbolic
power: disinterested and misrecognised
10 Conclusions
Appendix: Structure Of The Cooperative "Olenevod"
In the beginning of October 1999, I arrived at the airport in Murmansk on a flight from Tromsø. I had to fill the customs declaration in twice. Therefore, I was one of the last passengers to go through the pass-control. My invitation, however, did not have any original stamp. Although it had an original signature and was on official letterhead, I knew that it might be a problem, and it was a problem. The woman behind the desk sullenly went out and talked to her boss. The boss came to me. He interrogated me, and I told him everything as it was: that I got the invitation without the stamp and was worried and called the Russian consulate in Kirkenes, and they told me that since my invitation was on official letterhead with a signature, it would be all right.
I had to wait and wondered if something has changed in this country. Everything looked like the movies: the uniforms, the expressionless faces of the border controllers. The boss showed a little bit of sympathy for me; he said he didn't know what to do in order not to breach down trees ['chtoby ne lomat' dereva'], but afterwards I heard his voice behind the glass door: "She does not have any invitation. There is no way to let her in. I have to arrest her. I do not mind if there are new directions. Here, we have only the instruction from 1993."
Then his boss, a captain from the border police, came and interrogated me and the same - a little bit of sympathy but no way to let me in. They had to find the commander or Ivanov(1) to know what to do with me. The ground hostess came and asked me if I had Russian rubles to pay for a week stay in the hotel until there is a flight back to Tromsø. I told her that I had some small change in US Dollars and a VISA credit card. She concluded that I could not pay for a week stay at the hotel without getting out and to Murmansk (the airport lies 30 km from the town). There was no bank terminal, or exchange office at the airport. There was a possibility to change money at the pub, but the exchange rate was too bad… so it was not an option.
The airport was getting empty; the cleaner had cleaned and wanted to go. The ground hostess and the captain went home. A policewoman gave me a comforting wink. I was sitting alone in the hall and waited for some sort of decision about my fate. The customs controllers were inpatient. They came to me, checked the customs declaration and said everything was all right.
Another hour went by and nothing happened. Then the policewoman who had given me the wink suddenly came and told me: "They'll let you in." Nevertheless, I had to wait for the official message. In half an hour the boss came to me, smiled, and said: "Tell your friends that the next time they should use the stamp!" Then he made an excuse for the inconvenience they had caused to me, but he couldn't overlook through the rules. I said I am sorry that I blindly trusted the consulate and came with an invitation without the stamp. We were almost friends at the end. The first barrier was crossed.
Several days later I was in Lovosero in order to take a flight to the village of Krasnoshchel'ye and go on with my fieldwork there. There was no planned flight to the village for the next few days. I did not know many people in Lovosero, and those who I knew were officials. In the municipality administration, I knew the person responsible for the remote villages, at the airport - I knew the director, Smirnov. Therefore, I chose to stay in the nearby town of Revda. There I had some friends at the local museum, and the museum was the only place in the municipality with Internet connection.
In Revda I did not unpack my luggage. Everything was in the bags because I waited for a helicopter to Krasnoshchelie and nobody knew when there would be one. My days in Revda were always the same. In the morning I went to the telegraph or to the museum and made phone calls: first to the administration and asked them if there will be a scheduled flight to Krasnoshchel'ye, then to the airport and asked if there will be any flight to Krasnoshchel'ye. I knew that it might be possible to take either a military, or fire brigade flight, or emergency flight or whatever flight. That's why I was so persistent. The answer was always negative. There was no other option to get to the village.
I had almost given up when Ivan, the director of the museum, told me to prepare my luggage. A helicopter was on the way, because the local police department had asked him to make video recordings on Ploskaia, a place where they once mined amazonite, a mineral used for decoration surfaces. One hour later we were at the airport in Lovosero.
At the airport I met Sasha, a boy from Krasnoshchel'ye I got to know during my previous stay. He had been in Lovosero to visit relatives and was waiting for a flight back. He told me he has been waiting for weeks, but... no flight. He came every day to the airport and waited there. He was not allowed on this flight either.
The helicopter was military and had two guns in the front. The flight was paid for by the local police department. It was loaded with two tons of diesel for the cooperative in Krasnoshchel'ye. Besides the team from the museum who should film, I was the only passenger allowed on board. I didn't pay anything for the trip. A scheduled flight with passengers came to the village of Krasnoshchel'ye six days later.
Krasnoshchel'ye lies in the heart of the tundra on Kola Peninsula on the river Ponoi. It is surrounded by swamps, and the only possible way to get there by land is during the winter when the swamps are frozen. In the winter snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles can drive on the 150 km long tractor track to Lovosero, the nearest village. By air it is accessible all the year round, but the arctic climate quite often challenges the flight routes with storms.
The village has around 100 wooden houses and 675 inhabitants. It is the largest remote(2) village in the municipality of Lovosero. There is a primary school, a kindergarten, a hospital, a library, and a grocery store and the headquarters of the reindeer herding cooperative "Olenevod".
In 1998-99 I spent 7 months there in connection with my fieldwork. Earlier I had been several times in the villages of Lovosero and Sosnovka as a research assistant. At both places I was told that Krasnoshchel'ye is "uncivilised", even that on the streets in the village one could see bears. Ivan from the museum in Revda laughed at this and said that the best is to go and see for myself. He suggested staying in the house of Mikhail (Misha) Kuznetsov, one of his local friends. There is no hotel or other public accommodation in the village. Mikhail was 40 years old and newly separated. He lived with his mother, Aunt Elizaveta. Through them I got to know the people in the village.
There were no bureaucratic hindrances in the village; everything went lightly and silently, ['po tikhonku'], as the villagers used to say. With the help of the network around my hosts, I got help and support everywhere until I had to leave.
At the end of my stay there were no helicopters for weeks, and I got a bit nervous about my departure. I tried to call to Murmansk or Lovosero, to ask if it was possible to charter a helicopter to the village, but there was no long distant call connection. Some of the villagers tried to convince me that there should be a helicopter before the New Year. There were two reasons for it: the bulletins for the elections in December 1999, and the vodka and the champagne for the New Year's Celebration. Others told me that there wouldn't be helicopter because the director of the cooperative couldn't sell the reindeer meat, and there was no money. Everyone made speculations about the pros and cons for a helicopter.
Getting out of Krasnoshchel'ye
However, my host and I kept on calling at the airport everyday. Several times they said that there should be a helicopter, but it didn't come. At the end they said, "It is coming!" We almost had to run to the airport. The airport was crowded. I tried to buy a ticket, but the woman at the desk refused to sell me one. I was a foreigner, and therefore I had to pay the price for foreigners. But they never had issued a ticket for a foreigner in the village. True, foreigners come to the village, but they come with return tickets. That was not my case. And she couldn't help me - I couldn't leave the village with a regular ticket. Aunt Elizaveta was with me and tried to help - the woman at the desk was her niece. At the end she suggested: "You can just ask the pilots, maybe. Nothing can be done here"
The helicopter landed. They unloaded it and started to load the luggage of the passengers. While the woman from the airport was carefully following the passengers and the number of packs loaded in the helicopter, I went to the pilots and asked them if I could travel with them, explaining quickly the problem. They laughed and said "Just get in; we won't leave you here in the tundra..." I asked them about the price; they said I should talk to Smirnov, the director of the airport in Lovosero. When we came to Lovosero, the director said that the cash desk was closed and that it was not necessary to pay after all.
Two days later I was at the airport in Murmansk. There were the same inspectors as when I came. I have not registered with the police. I have tried to do it in Krasnoshchel'ye, but in the administration they said I should do it in the nearest police station, that is Lovosero or Revda. The inspectors smiled and joked that I have to be off my head to go there - in Krasnoshchel'ye. "It was somewhere in the tundra, isn't it?" They let me go, joking that the next time I have to follow the laws, otherwise they'll arrest me.
The hurdles to overcome before getting to the village and getting out of the village, frame the focus of the present thesis: the detachment of Krasnoshchel'ye from the rest of the world and its "attachment" to the rigid rules of present and past bureaucratic systems.
The media image of New Russia as an almost anarchic state where money and corruption overrun the formalities did not correspond to my own experience. It seems that the bureaucratic system was still there, as if it was unchanged, and as if remained strongest in the innermost recesses of the tundra. If there was a slight chance for the border police in Murmansk to turn a blind eye to my papers, and thus neglect some instructions, it appeared that this idea never came across the head of the airport woman. The weighty bureaucratic regulations of the Russian airlines were strictly kept in the village and this fact caused an inconvenient and unexpected experience to me. I never thought that in Krasnoshchelie there could be cases when the bureaucratic system counted more than the personal acquaintances. Later, I became aware that I had observed many such examples. Therefore my attention turned to the reproduction and management of bureaucratic rules in the village - at present, without possibilities for control from outside and above. What makes such systems effective in small places like Krasnoshchelie?
The location of the village in the middle of the tundra is, to put it mildly, unfavourable in any economic aspect. Until 1990, the infrastructure was totally supported by the Soviet state, since then the support has vanished slowly, but surely. Many similar Socialist projects were stifled by the legislative reforms towards market liberalisation, and on this account doomed to decline. Surprisingly, the village didn't follow this direction. On the contrary, people stayed in the village, living and coping with the reality, as if they overlooked this process. What forces kept the village alive after the cut-off of the state support and how? There was no immediate answer to any of these questions and I elaborated on them. In the thesis I give a possible answer. My interests on the Kola Peninsula have been mostly related to the reindeer herding as subsistence, and I had participated in several scientific projects. My main concern both in the previous research projects and in the beginning of my fieldwork was on the restructuring of the collective reindeer herding and if new forms of trust appeared in the old structures. However, in Krasnoshchel'ye I was prompted to see the restructuring of the reindeer herding only as a very small piece of the jigsaw-like relations I encountered on the field. The reindeer herding was an indispensable part of the cooperative in the village, and the cooperative was an indispensable part of the village. All the villagers were kin, friend, or neighbour and any institution as school, kindergarten, or ward was dependent on the others. The kindergarten, for instance, was paid for by the municipality, and as any state subsidised enterprise, got the payments with considerable delays. In the meantime it had to buy services, like heating, from the cooperative. Therefore the cooperative used to subtract from the salaries of its employees who had children in the kindergarten the sum they should pay to the kindergarten. The scope of my research widened, and I sought after all these interdependencies.
In the beginning I told the stories of my getting to and from the village as curiosities and anecdotes. Reading my field notes, looking at my video recordings, and trying to plan a trip to the village, I was prompted to realise that it was difficult not only for me to get there. It was difficult for anyone to get there, and the problem of distance and detachment was a subject of constant discussion. Krasnoshchel'ye was getting more and more difficult to access. People made constant remarks about the present difficulties with the transportation, and evoked good memories from the past when there were flights almost daily. In 1995, when I visited Lovosero for the first time, there was a flight to the remote villages every Wednesday, but in 1999, there was no trace of regularity in the air transport. The people were complaining about not being able to travel and visit friends and relatives, and not being able to buy basic things.
Supply with goods was becoming more and more problematic, and a theme in the local newspapers. In May 2002 "Poliarnaia Pravda", the regional Murmansk newspaper wrote in a small note about Krasnoshchel'ye that: "there was nothing in the store, no products - the money from the municipality administration had been used for buying diesel for the electricity generator in the village." Since both diesel and its transportation got market price, the electricity generator in the village had limited working capacity. In 1999, there was electricity only five-six hours a day(3).
Thus, for the people in Krasnoshchel'ye the implications of market liberalisation were limited possibilities to travel, loss of basic life qualities, restrained consumption, and limited social contacts. They didn't see any gains with the market reform. They rejected the possibilities for private herding or whatever entrepreneurship in accordance with the newly opened market possibilities. The effect of losing didn't end up in the villagers looking for new possibilities to gain what they were losing. The people of Krasnoshchel'ye did not show any anger either. Having seen the rage and anger in 1989 in Romania and the miners' strikes in Russia, having taken part in numerous demonstrations in my home town Sofia, I wondered why I never saw neither rage, nor anger, but everything was 'mute' ['po tikhonku'] as they used to say. "What to do? Nothing can be changed. As it was, so it is now…" [Kak i by'lo tak i est']. The villagers managed to make up for the deficiencies keeping the old structures intact. I believe that they managed to do this by using their social networks both as private persons and as employees at the cooperative. But if so, what is the individual interest to keep the monopoly of the cooperative as collectively owned enterprise in the village? Was it mere economic benefits or was it something else? In the first part of the thesis I focus on social networks as most important asset for the individuals to overcome the shortcomings caused by the withdrawal of the state. In the second part I focus on the work of the employees in the cooperative and how they cope with the process of privatisation. The management of the cooperative is no longer dictated from centralised authorities and political imperatives, and the state does not buy the production any longer. Thus the employees have to find their own way to manage the production and the sales. What resources do they employ? How does the cooperative become economically viable at present?
So far I have considered the remoteness of the village as an important factor of life in Krasnoshchel'ye; I have also suggested to look upon the cooperative not only as a vestige from the past, but as an active response to the market liberalisation. In the next chapter I sketch out how the cooperative as part of the state solved the problem of remoteness in the past, but then again as part of the state prompted changes in the life of the villagers.
The cooperative is of central importance to the village. It is not only the largest employer and the only provider of services such as electricity, housing, building services, carpentry and so on, but it is the reason for the existence of the village. In this chapter I outline the historical evolution of the village and the cooperative and focus on the role of the social networks as recompense for the shortcomings of the past and the present economic order.
Historical accounts show that the existence of Krasnoshchel'ye has been dependent on the existence of the cooperative, and the cooperative administered and controlled the lives of the villagers. The village appeared in 1921 when several Komi reindeer herding families moved from Lovosero with their herds. In 1926 a Special Murmansk Commission of the Workers - Peasants Inspection arrived in the area and concluded that the places around Krasnoshchel'ye were good for reindeer herding: lot of lichens, rivers, swamps, etc. By that time, it was almost impossible to reach the village without a local guide. The Commission concluded that the area was backward and "collectivisation was the only way to develop it"(4). Collectivisation was one of the greatest slogans of that time in Russia. It was the time of transition from agrarian to industrial society. Stalin said that the "Soviet society should become a factory, controlled by the state, and everyone should be employed there". The agriculture should break up with small-scale family farming. Therefore, the authorities guided the establishment of collective farms (kolkhozes) based on the prototype of industrial enterprises. In the autumn of 1927, there were 14,800 collective farms in the Soviet Union; in 1932, they were 211,100. The number of households in the collective farms for the same period increased from 194,700 to 14,968,700 (Kislitsin, 1999: 389-395). The first kolkhoz with 18 reindeer herding families from Krasnoshchel'ye appeared in 1929. It had its headquarters in the village of Ivanovka. During the first year it was called 'Reindeer Herder' ('Olenevod'), the year after it was renamed to 'Red Tundra' ('Krasnaia tundra'). In 1931, the families from Krasnoshchel'ye built their own collective farm with headquarters in the village. They called it 'Krasnoshchel'ye'.
In the early 1950s, the Soviet authorities decided to change the village structure in order to remedy the stagnation in the agriculture. They promoted the idea of agrotowns. The agricultural and the industrial production should be centralised and concentrated in larger production units. The settlements were defined as 'with future' ('perspektivnye') and 'with no-future'. Those 'with no future' were literally moved to those with a future. From the census in 1959 to the census in 1989, 141,137 villages disappeared from the map of the territory of Russia. (Kiselev and Shagin, 1998: 309). The neighbouring village of Ponoi, for instance, was defined one without future and its inhabitants had to move either to Krasnoshchel'ye or to Lovosero. Krasnoshchel'ye was one "with future". Nobody could tell why, and when I asked in the village - the answer was: "Maybe some in the administration had friends among those who decided... but we always have been a good village".
In 1962 the authorities merged kolkhoz 'Krasnoshchel'ye' with the collective farm in Ivanovka. With the generous assistance of the authorities they got an 'Engine and Tractor station' (MTS)(5) [mashino-traktornaia stantsia] and developed other branches besides the reindeer herding: agriculture, dairy farm, etc. The MTS replaced the role of the reindeer as transportation of products to and from the village and modernised life in the village. Two hundred people from Ivanovka and Kanevka migrated to Krasnoshchel'ye. The new farm was named 'In the name of Lenin' ('Imeni Lenina') and had its headquarters in Krasnoshchel'ye. The village of Ivanovka was also moved to the village of Krasnoshchel'ye. In 1971 with a Decision No. 40 of 28.10.1970 of Murmansk County Executive Committee kolkhoz 'In the name of Lenin' merged with the collective farms in the villages of Sosnovka and Ponoi and got a new name - "Memory of Lenin" [Pamiat' Lenina]. 'Memory of Lenin' had its headquarters in Krasnoshchel'ye and opened offices in the villages of Kanevka and Sosnovka. In 1978 it was transformed in state-owned farm - sovkhoz
The sovkhoz built new houses; during the winters the tractors brought new furniture to the village. I was told many stories of how cupboards and sofas, armchairs, and buffets came in the houses. As I mentioned above, the authorities brought a mobile diesel electricity generator and the light was on all the time. Life in the village of Krasnoshchel'ye didn't differ much from life in the other towns. In 1970 a regular flight route to Lovosero was established. The children were sent to secondary and vocational schools in Lovosero and encouraged to pursue higher education.
The Soviet state enterprise was governed by unified plans from the centralised authorities. These plans didn't necessarily correspond to the needs of the population. The share of consumption in GNP in the Soviet Union was only one-third of the share of consumption in the GNPs of Western countries. The Soviet economy was a 'deficit' economy. It was difficult to obtain basic goods, especially in the peripheral rural areas. The main consequence was a growing informal economy. The enterprises and people began to accumulate reserves. Surplus production was kept in the enterprises, and the managers and those who had access to it could exchange it against needed or possibly needed goods and products.
The deficit economy was the stage where the 'blat'(6) networks appeared. The everyday endeavours of the people were often directed towards accumulating available products and goods for the future, keeping and maintaining relations with people that might be important in solving the scarcity problems. My host, Aunt Elizaveta, was not an exception. She had a hoard of clothing, shoes, and so on. For instance, she had two absolute identical winter coats. The first one for everyday use, the second one was used on formal occasions. She told me she bought two because they were nice and didn't cost much; her sister Raisa had fixed it. "Good deal", she said. "Now they cost so much that I never could afford it." When I was there she was wondering if she could find someone to exchange a pair of rubber boots with, or whether she had to give away all of hers that she had in reserve, because she developed a foot deformation and needed a larger pair.
With the deficit economy, the bureaucratic system granted the bureaucrats responsible for the allocation of products and supplies positions with almost unrestrained power, and they used these positions to accumulate reserves of goods and power. Therefore, the differentiation in the Soviet society was growing bigger. The first Soviet leader who decided to do something with this problem was Gorbachev. He introduced two slogans, which in practice were meant to mark the introduction of the market mechanism as a complementary element to the socialist economy ('perestroika') and the freedom to talk about the shortcomings ('glasnost'). However it didn't work, because there were no premises for market mechanism and the crisis deepened. When I asked the director of the cooperative in Krasnoshchel'ye who was to blame for the situation in Russia today, he was categorically clear: "Gorbachev - he tried to put together market and socialism and this is impossible!" Likewise the reindeer herders answered: "Perestroika!"
Further, the glasnost reform made it possible to articulate the shortages of the command economy and the deficits of the present situation. Thus, in the journals from this period and in the media appeared stories and examples of the irrational distribution of resources. In one journal, we could read about a brigade in the tundra, where they expected bread, but from the supply helicopter they got irons instead. What they could do with the irons in their tents remained unclear both for the journalist and the reader. The informal economy was growing bigger and bigger and under Gorbachev its share had been up to 1/3 of the formal economy.
At the end of October 1991, Yeltsin declared a new economic reform: the transition to a real market economy. This would enable people to start up businesses, but the real orientation of the reform was to restructure the huge state enterprises. Profit should now replace the plan fulfilment as indicator of success, and the managers should answer to a board of directors and shareholders instead of the Party and local authorities. The state should no longer control prices or the production plans. Everything should be regulated through the market. The prediction was that after a period of destabilised economy the prices should settle down towards the end of 1992. The predicted growth of prices varied between 3-5 times and 8-10 times. In 1992, the average price for goods increased 36 times what it had been. Many enterprises lost their state subsidies and had to shut down, and unemployment increased. For the sovkhoz in Krasnoshchel'ye the introduction of market economy was accompanied with the fact that the state suspended buying up its production of reindeer meat, the existing state infrastructure for export of meat from the village broke down, and the main source of income stopped. The market for meat shrunk considerably to the nearby towns in Murmansk county(7). New buyers had to be found. In few cases the cooperative made contracts with buyers in advance, but that was a bitter experience with the growing inflation. By the time they were supposed to get paid for the production, the money was half its original worth.
There were no plans to fulfil and the sovkhoz found itself in a situation where they could produce more than they could realise at the market. In the past, exceeding production was delivered to the state in the name of various bonuses. Therefore the consumption of reindeer meat in the village was restricted. In the present, a large percent of the production of reindeer meat could remain in the village. This was a new situation. Once I asked my host Aunt Elizaveta if she could make meat dumplings (pel'meny). She said: "No! How could I learn to make them - there was no meat. Now there is meat, but it is too late to teach myself to cook new things!" Before they got veal, chicken and canned products. I was rather surprised that in the middle of the tundra there had been a scarcity of reindeer meat, but probably lack amidst plenty could also be a part of the definition of the Soviet economy.
In 1992 the sovkhoz was transformed into a limited company (TOO) ['tovarishchestvo']. The changes were initiated from above and in accordance with the administrative requirements. As the local paper "Lovozerskaia Pravda" headed its leading article from March 29th, 1993 "Besides the name nothing changed...." In Krasnoshchel'ye, as the above headline shows, the restructuring process was rather of "superficial" degree(8). The management remained the same. In 1998, the limited company changed its status to an agricultural production cooperative (SKhPK) [sel'skokhoziaistveno-proizvodstvenii kooperativ]. Furthermore it changed its name from "Memory of Lenin" to "Reindeer Herder" ['Olenevod'].
For the people in the village the enterprise was always the same: the institution that gave most of them work, housing, electricity and basic goods and cared for them. They called it at random kolkhoz, sovkhoz, tovarishchestvo, cooperative. In my fieldnotes, I also have used these names randomly. In the thesis I use, however, the word "cooperative" to refer to my direct observations. The other names occur either when I refer to the stages in its historical development or when I refer to histories told by my informants.
Burawoy and Krotov defined the new economic regime in Russia as dominated by "merchant capital" (Burawoy and Krotov, 1993). That is to say, seeking profit was through trade and not transformation of the production. It applied to both newly started enterprises, engaged especially in petty trading and the old state enterprises that tried to survive in the new situation. Humphrey observes, that state money virtually was distributed to people working in key industries as power and communications and further appropriated from the petty traders who concentrated the money in the towns and invested them in enterprises for services of the New Russians (Humphrey 1999). The nearby towns of Revda and Lovosero were getting more and more affected by the changes: a large number of petty traders appeared and offered all possible goods at higher and higher prices. In the village of Krasnoshchel'ye there were no petty traders, and the local store was almost empty.
The villagers in Krasnoshchel'ye landed on the poverty side of this process, being unable to purchase locally such goods as clothing, utensils, cigarettes and alcohol, and they continually refuted the validity of the popular saying from before: "It's better to have 100 friends than 100 rubles" ["Ne imei sto rublei, no imei sto druzei"]. It was no more important to have friends in order to obtain the needed goods. It was important to have money, because as many of them often added - in the village there were friends, relatives and good neighbours. When I asked the villagers what changed, many of them were preoccupied with telling me about the money they had on hand before, and the money they didn't have now. Before they could buy everything but there was a scarcity of goods. Many of the goods were obtained "by blat" or with personal connections based on kinship, friendship, and friends of friends.
All the people I interviewed in the cooperative as employees and as private persons complained of constant lack of money. The real money, banknotes and coins had almost disappeared from the village. In fact, money in the village was used mainly to buy cigarettes and vodka from the local store or from private persons, but these were only a very small part of the transactions and in fact the supplies in the local store were symbolical. The bank office in the village had closed down long ago and in the village money circulated mainly as numbers on paper, in the accountancy of the sovkhoz. Instead of paying monthly salaries to the employees who had to pay them back to the sovkhoz as electricity bill, house rent and so on, these transactions happened only on paper with money as a medium, but as an absent one.
However the market economy brought not only money deficits to the Russian countryside. The consumption possibilities multiplied, and new systems of prestige appeared (see, for instance, Rausing 2002). Hence, to cope with money deficit meant not only to solve the problem of survival, but also to set aside for and get luxury articles. Many scholars have observed that for basic food, individuals rely most on domestic production, exchanges with relatives and forest gathering in Krasnoshchel'ye - fishing and hunting, while luxury goods are purchased on the market, dominated by the international petty traders. Most important, therefore, for the villagers of Krasnoshchel'ye were their interdependencies with the relatives they had in the nearby towns. The total absence of a market in Krasnoshchel'ye as well as the increasing prices of basic food products on the market in town strengthened the interdependence between relatives and friends living in the near towns and the village. From the village, people sent potatoes (from the private plots around the houses) and reindeer meat, from the town they got all of the consumer goods they could not produce themselves and which were not available or affordable for the villagers. Although the value of what was exported from the village probably exceeded what they got from the relatives, the villagers tried to send something to their closest relatives in town every time they had a chance to do it.(9) They had to do it; otherwise, the people in the towns starved, and the villagers felt obliged to help them by sending food.
These new interdependencies I approach and define as support networks. In contrast to the blat networks where the transactions were guided by individual desire, the support networks were guided by altruistic concern for the closest kin. Further they differed from the blat networks in relation to their span - the support networks usually encompassed one's closest relatives and friends, and not the least in relation to the state enterprise, in my case - the cooperative. According to Ledeneva, there are two tendencies to observe: that blat relationships in the present become separated from the institution, but also contributed to the appearance of corporate interest that evolves within the state institution (Ledeneva, 1998: 210). What do we observe in Krasnoshchel'ye: separation or corporate interest?
At first sight, it is easy to conclude that the support networks are separated from the cooperative, but the individuals, both donors and recipients, in the networks, are also part of the cooperative. How do these informal relations coexist with the formal relations in the cooperative? Furthermore, the cooperative shows concern with a larger number of villagers than its employees. For example, the head accountant stated in the above-cited article from the local newspaper, that the Murmansk based company "Rybkop" responsible for the supply of the local store in Krasnoshchel'ye, had sent such expensive butter that the cooperative decided to help the villagers and imported butter at a lower price. Why should an economic and profit oriented enterprise play a social protective role in the village? How is such collective interest maintained and defended in the cooperative at present? One of my main concerns in this thesis is how the cooperative as an institution and economic agent is affected by the support networks and in what direction. In Chapter One, I asked what keeps the village alive in the present situation and the shortest answer and the main argument of the thesis is the cooperative and the support networks. The monopoly of the cooperative over basic services has resulted in the fact that all people in the village are economically dependent on it, while at the same time they are dependent on their social networks. The relationship between these two dependencies is the focus of examination in the following chapters. Having the support networks as a starting point I will try to describe them and see what resources they utilise, but also what resources they mobilise and how they affect the cooperative.
The structure of the thesis is the following: in the next chapter I focus on the fieldwork, my own experience of becoming part of these support/ social networks and the analytical approach. In Chapters Four and Five I discuss some structural and normative characteristics of the support networks. In Chapter Six I focus on basic understandings of 'work' in the village, especially work as employment at the cooperative and outline the terms of production and management in the cooperative. In Chapters 7, 8 and 9, I present three individual examples of how different resources at the cooperative are utilised by the support networks, and how this utilisation becomes regulated. In chapter 10, I summarise my analysis and discuss the possibilities for the future of the village.
In this chapter I describe how I approached the field and found starting points for the analysis. A special feature of the method was the use of video recorder during my stay. This gave me an asset, and I became easily both object and subject of the circulation of goods and communication in the village. Thus exchange became my point of analytical departure.
As I already mentioned, my preliminary intentions were to describe the reindeer herding as traditional subsistence affected by the current social processes and its role in shaping the future perspectives of the people engaged in it. I had chosen two settings in Krasnoshchel'ye: the first one was in the tundra camp of First Reindeer Herding brigade and the second one was the main office ('kantora'). I wrote field notes and tried to film everyday. Whenever I had the opportunity I tried to focus the conversation on relations between the individuals, in order to outline networks and practices, the reasoning around the activities, moral adjustments, and moral judgement (rules and ideas about acting). I shared my video-recordings with all who were interested, and I got immediate feedback. Often I shared my current interpretations with my informants, and in most cases I shared my frustrations. For example, I got three different answers from different herders to the question why the herders left the village three weeks later than planned. The herders told me that actually there were no inconsistencies in the different answers and that everyone was right. It was my task to tell them 'scientifically' why things were the way they were. The inconsistencies in their stories were intriguing, and given the chance, I explored them further: I asked provocative questions and deliberately told what the others had already told me. At the end I had many contradicting stories. My main aim was to strike the right balance between the stories I noted in the field and my own interpretation by finding out to what extent my presence affected these stories. This is a recurrent theme in the thesis, and I come later to it in this Chapter and in Chapter Seven.
Everyday fieldwork in Krasnoshchel'ye
In 1998-99, I spent seven months in Krasnoshchel'ye on three different stays. I got to know many people from the village. Having overcome the difficulties of getting to the village twice, I gained some trust, and it was easier to communicate with the villagers. It was easier to show interest and follow illnesses, educational choices and love affairs and remember stories from my previous stays. Therefore I consider the last time I was in Krasnoshchel'ye - the autumn of 1999 - was the most important for the sake of research. The reason is that, as they used to tell me: "Foreigners come, go, and then never come back".
During my fieldwork my hostess urged me every morning to go to the office and do my job there. My job in the office was considered from the local people research of the archives and the account books from the past years. I tried to suggest the idea of fieldwork and participant observation as anthropological methods, but the villagers had an idea of what ethnographers do, referring to the practices of Russian ethnography. I was supposed to record songs and dances, and research papers and archives on the reindeer herding as traditional and "indigenous" subsistence. Looking at the papers in the office in the beginning, I was most interested in numbers related to the herds and herding in general, but gradually my interest moved towards the efforts to keep the accountancy in the cooperative. It looked as if every single thing was written down and kept in files, while at the same time people told me that things were beyond any control. However, I was given access to some of the documents, but not all of them. On top of that, the oldest archives had been moved to Kiosk, the newer to Murmansk. In the sovkhoz there were only the papers from the past ten years, and I couldn't compare and trace the whole historical development as it was on papers. As to the present, I was eager to understand the work of both economist and accountants, but they were reluctant to explain.
At lunch, I went home like anyone working in the office would and had lunch with Aunt Elizaveta. Afterwards she had forty winks, often interrupted by visits from her grandchildren. I used to read or write my field notes, fetch some water, or chop some firewood. Around three o'clock, when the electricity was switched on in the village, I went back to the office. In the evenings, we used to watch TV, or pay a visit to some of the villagers whom I knew. I used to discuss my observations with Aunt Elizaveta, and she commented on them. She told me about different people I asked about; she was sometimes very critical, sometimes very humble and taught me never to go for open confrontation or open judgements. She was a Christian and believed that one should accept everyone, even those with sins, and I could observe I got more tolerant in her presence.
During my fieldwork I used to record with a video recorder. People felt in different ways about the camera, and I got different responses: there were people who didn't allow me to film them; others said that they didn't want to, but actually didn't have anything against it. Interviews were the most difficult part; no one would say things directly to the camera. Everyone preferred to work or perform in front of the camera.
My videotaped recordings sometimes were distributed in the village. Almost all households in the village had video-players. Many women were interested in copying my recordings. The old women, whom I had filmed celebrating and singing songs, were very eager to discuss their performance watching the video: they could see who was singing how or who was out of tune.
Another aspect of the camera work and my fieldwork was that some people got the possibility to see things they never had seen before. The wives of the herders enjoyed seeing their husbands working in the tundra, also because some of them had never been there.
In addition, the women used my camera to send their husbands short greetings. In November, when the herders hadn't been in the village for almost two months, the evening before I left for the tundra, I filmed most of the wives and the children or the relatives of the herders. They said some words to the camera: what was going on at home and in the family. The herders with pleasure saw the recordings in the small black-and-white viewfinder of the HI8 camcorder in the evening when I arrived at the tundra camp. They knew that I had a limited battery time so that they turned on the electricity generator in the camp so that they could use the camera, and I could charge the battery afterwards.
Fieldwork as dialogue and exchange
In the process of writing, the importance of my involvement in local relationships came to the surface and could be used as a chief source of data. In return for the above mentioned video recordings, I got chocolates in the village and 'sovkhoz oranges' ['sovkhoznye apelsiny'] in the tundra (when I showed the herders the video recordings of their families). These oranges were sent as an added bonus from the management to the herders. I said that the herders needed C-vitamins probably more than me, but I had to take the oranges, peel them and then offer them back to the herders. Then they accepted them. After reflecting over this occurrence then and also in the time after the fieldwork, I became aware of these small examples of giving small gifts of rather symbolical value between the subjects of my research and me. I experienced very few times of feeling like a 'novice' in the field to whom everything had to be explained. Often people expressed respect for my research there, and my general knowledge. They asked me to explain how things were; at the same time they had to help me look into the local relations. In most cases I felt that I fitted in the image of an young and poor student, and I never experienced that they openly showed economic interest in me. There were many who did a lot for me for free, and I tried to give something in return. This was a form of invaluable psychological support.
During my stay there it was important to evoke sameness and shared experiences. They had to pose me within their framework and common categories. "Sameness" between them and me was evoked in the common experience of living in different parts of the former Soviet bloc. Some asked me if Bulgaria was part of the Soviet Union, because people from various republics came to the village before. Even then, there were two teachers from Tajikistan in the village, but they were in fact sent to work here. In the beginning for many of the villagers it was difficult to accept that I had come to Krasnoshchel'ye on my own will, but the last time they concluded that I used all my possibilities to travel, called me the 'frog-traveller' ['liagushka -puteshestvenitsa'], a figure from a Russian fairy-tale, and said that it was probably the main difference between me and them. They no longer had the possibility to travel. However, they seemed interested to hear about my recent trip to the Baltic states and discuss the present state of affairs there, and compare it with how it was ten years ago when they were there. My main surprise came from the fact that my everyday activities became known to everyone instantly. The village was too small to allow anonymity. If for me many villagers remained unknown, people I never had met before knew what I was doing, where I was from, even what I had bought in the store.
To many of my informants I was a student in ethnography, which in the Russian context very much resembles history and folklore science. Thus many of them had ideas about what I was interested in and writing about and tried to help me by telling me stories from the past, especially about the reindeer herders in the village. I tried to explain what social anthropology and long-term fieldwork were about, but I could barely influence their ideas of what was of "ethnographic" interest and in the focus of my study. When I asked questions they considered neither ethnographic, nor everyday questions, but of sociological interest I often got partial and contradictory answers. This is a problem that many scholars working in Eastern Europe have encountered. The usual explanation of this problem points to past experiences. Under the socialist regime the sociologists and ethnographers were part of the dominant power science, which served the needs of the Party and the informants had to give 'politically correct' answers or they could be accused of treason and disloyalty to the Fatherland and Party and get punished by the repressive apparatus of the system. Therefore, I sometimes had the feeling that my informants often used an 'official' code in our conversations, and the answers were made up to fit into their ideas of how things should be according to the official discourse and didn't mirror the present state of affairs. Over time, I learned somehow to ask questions that prompted more genuine answers; however, part of the uneasiness and the formality when they talked to me remained, especially when the camera was on.
I tried to follow the official prescriptions during my stay in the village, but I also had to rely on informal connections and services, for instance my arrival in the village with the cargo helicopter, chartered by the police, and I was rather open for it when my informants directed questions to me. The fact that I also was breaching some rules and prescriptions and the time I spent in the village, made me trustworthier and opened for new sources of information. Therefore in the present thesis I have relied on data with different degree of officiality.
Another source of data became the unarticulated. It encompassed the questions my informants didn't talk about or didn't want to talk about. The "unsaid" remained a part of the dynamics of the dialogue between my informants and me, and I later tried to elaborate on it, with the consciousness that I was touching upon and stepping into a minefield of ethical questions. To solve ethical dilemmas, I tried to share with the people as much as I could from my impressions and thoughts and get responses from them during my stay there. I was writing field-notes every day, and some of the younger reindeer herders tried to decipher them, but they had to admit that my handwriting was "not beautiful". I often suggested interpretations, and they often denied them. This was also a part of our dialogue and it became data for me. Once they asked me right to the point: "Why do you ask so much? You can write about us whatever you want - nobody comes and checks it here!" I had no good answer - only that I wanted to write the 'truth' ['pravda']. Then they laughed, and I had to laugh too, since in my broken Russian, it sounded like that I wanted to write in the newspaper called "Pravda".
When I afterwards was analysing my empirical material, I became aware of how often I was recipient of small gestures, giving, services, etc. They further probably affected other relationships or were part of relationships and on that account were subordinated to some basic "rules" that affected some exchanges in the village. The fact that I lived in the house of Aunt Elizaveta made many of her children and grandchildren give us more than it was usual before. She used to say: "They feed us up". When I came back I thought of how many of the gifts were induced by my presence there. I realised that my hostess got additional attention from her closest relatives. My presence there brought to her additional cash income, but also a new acquaintance that probably could be used in the future and not the least increased to some extent her status as a representative woman in the village.
Small gestures, like the fact that two of the wives of the herders came to me just to thank me with a box of chocolates because I recorded a tape for them with some of my video recordings, the fact that Aunt Albina came with a pair of wool socks every now and then, and I usually got the best piece of meat when we were eating at the tundra camp provided ground for reflection and in fact, influenced my general impression from the stay in the village and from the people there.
Back in town, in Murmansk, when I safe and sound was waiting for the flight back to Tromsø, I used some of my time and money to send packages to some of the people in Krasnoshchel'ye. I felt obliged, and I somehow knew that open requirements for reciprocity were never made, but expected. Most of the visible and methodologically accessible transactions in the village came under this category of exchange, in contrast with the other forms of exchange: centralised redistribution and market exchange (Polanyi 1957).
Gift giving as a form of exchange has been one of the most discussed in the anthropological writings. Gifts are 'total social facts'- they have not only economic aspects but also social value (Mauss 1925). They create obligations and lead to expectations for reciprocity. Reciprocity makes human relationships predictable and makes the social cohesion stronger. According to Sahlins' model of reciprocity - gifts come under generalised reciprocity as long-term relationships, usually between kin in residential proximity, where, and more importantly, the act of giving is more important than the immediate return of profit. There are also a balanced and a negative form of reciprocity (Sahlins 1965). Typical examples of negative reciprocity are the various forms of thefts, but also the market exchange, where both seller and buyer are guided by private interest and calculation. Gifts are, on the contrary, spontaneous, but are they irrational, indeed? There have been many writings and theoretical approaches that aimed to close the gap between gift exchange and commodity exchange, between the irrational primitive man and the calculative modern man. One such theory is Bourdieu's theory of practice (Bourdieu 1977). According to him and in line with Mauss, the act of giving a gift creates indebtedness and an obligation to return the gesture over time. For any individual, at any point there is a sum of such relationships of outstanding indebtedness and gratitude, and these amounts to his or her social capital.
Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition -- or in other words, to membership in a group [11]--which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a "credential" which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. These relationships may exist only in the practical state, in material and/or symbolic exchanges which help to maintain them. (Bourdieu 1985:250)
Social capital, according to Bourdieu is a form of capital derived from economic forms of capital, but its economic or material nature is disguised behind practices of "euphemization". Similar is the case with "cultural capital" as another form of capital. Cultural capital can be defined as a legitimate and scarce competence in a given society. Such competence, to become recognised as cultural capital is to be unevenly distributed in the society. Bourdieu further elaborates on this concept, studying the French middle class, but in his article "The Forms of Capital" he gives the example of being literate in a society where most individuals are illiterates as form of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986: 245). The acquisition of cultural capital costs time and resources, that is to say - economic capital; and cultural capital might be also rewarded in monetary terms (as for instance - higher salary for higher educational qualifications). Thus, both social and cultural capital can be converted to economic capital at the same time as they can be derived from economic capital. There is also a fourth form of capital whose form cannot directly be derived from economic forms - the symbolical capital. This is the most invisible one and the one that encompasses the ideological production or the control of perceiving how things are (the gnoseological order). This form of capital is mediated through long-lasting institutions (e.g. the nation state), while the former forms can be revealed also through individual practices. However, symbolic capital might be derived from forms of cultural and social capital.
Important to note, however, is that for Bourdieu the forms of capital are not only dependent on the individuals. Capital is also dependent on the position individuals have in institutions and more durable structures in the society they live. For him the distribution of capital is thus defined by structural relations, but also by effective relations of exchange. The former operates in permanent and invisible ways and preconditions the latter; the latter is more visible and can be approached through exchanges and conversions between the species of capital.
In the previous chapter I sketched out the importance of the support networks and the cooperative in Krasnoshchel'ye. The support networks are manifestations of the social capital of the individuals. In the next two chapters I approach them, borrowing tools and concepts from network theory(10). In Chapter Four I explore some structural relations that shape the networks and can be seen as preconditions for the social capital. In Chapter Five, I explore some interactional aspects of the networks as mechanisms for regulating the social capital of the individuals, and a particular stress is put on the role of showing "disinterestedness" in the networks.
Earlier I also pointed to the importance of the cooperative as granting basic citizenship rights in the village: from the right to work (as the most abstract) to the right to have electricity and gas in the households (as concrete goods), and stated that it still has full monopoly over these services. In this way the village still resembles a "mini model" of the Soviet society from the past and as such makes it possible to roam invisible, lasting, and mediated forms of domination. In Chapter Six I present the cooperative as a mini variant of the Soviet state, and how it governs different forms of capital.
In the last chapters I explore the structural predispositions for different forms of capital and how they shape the individual strategies. I concentrate on three different positions as granting different forms of capital and how the individuals taking in these positions claim, maintain and accumulate forms of capital. In Chapter Seven I look at the social capital granted to the reindeer herders as part of the work collective and how they dispose over it at present. In Chapter Eight, I sketch the position of the office employees in the cooperative as granting cultural capital; In Chapter Nine, I discuss the position of the director and the manifestations of symbolic capital in the village. Applying Bourdieu's theory to analyse the local relations in a small tundra village is, at first sight, an ambitious project. I believe, however, that it still could be fruitful, because the power of the state under the Soviet regime was incontestable, and it reached even in the remotest recesses in the tundra. The case of Krasnoshchel'ye, thus, can be seen as an optimal situation, because it concentrates in a very limited space both structural and effective relations, and makes visible different forms of capital, their conversions and their dependency on the structure. This theoretical perspective is underlying the rest of the thesis, as I decided to evolve it implicitly in the empirical data and the ethnographic descriptions.
In this chapter I explore social capital by approaching the support networks in the village. The support networks work on perpetual circulation of small services, gifts and information, which confirm norms. In this chapter I approach the structural aspects of the networks and the role they play for reproducing norms. In this way I consider gender and family as the main factors for social capital.
Networks imply the idea of linked "knots" and the particular with this concept is that what happens between two "knots" affects what happens in adjacent "knots" (egos, anchor persons). The idea was first suggested by Barnes (1954) and further developed by a number of scholars as Boissevain (1974), Bott (1971), Mitchell (1974), Whitten and Wolfe (1974). Initially the idea of network came as a theoretical reaction to the structural functionalism, which turned to be inapplicable to the loose connections in large scale societies. Its application, however, is not confined to large scale.
The linkages in a network might be approached from a morphological (shape and pattern of the linkages) and an interactional point of view. The morphological approach to networks is concerned with visual representations of connectedness and density, and their structural effects expressed in clusters, span, zones and stars. Interactional aspects of the linkages are content, frequency, intensity, directedness and durability (Mitchell 1969). Boissevain concentrates mostly on the content and defines three interactional elements in the networks: information, transactions and norms (Boissevain 1974). Further he distinguishes intimate, effective and extended zones, based on interaction in the networks. In the following I will try to outline some of the basic morphological and interactional characteristics of the networks. I'll use an example as a starting point for discussing structural and normative patterns in the support networks in Krasnoshchel'ye.
Lubov Fedorova was a Saami woman, living in Krasnoshchel'ye, 46 years old, married, and with one grown daughter living in the municipality centre Lovosero. Her position in the cooperative was head (and the only employee) of the personnel department. At the same time she was also a radio operator. She led the daily radio connection with the reindeer herders and with the other divisions of the cooperative in Kanevka and Sosnovka. She was married to the director of the airport in the village. With the flights' dropping off, his tasks got reduced, and he had time on his hands for fishing red fish (salmon). Lubov used to buy meat at the cooperative whenever possible. She didn't need to pay for it; the accountants deducted from her salary the sum. They did the same whenever she bought goods available at the cooperative or commanded services held by it.
Lubov was very concerned with her daughter. She used to talk to her every day if there was a phone connection in the village. Lubov used to send her meat, fish, and potatoes whenever she could. What was in excess, the daughter could sell to acquaintances in Lovosero and Revda. Lubov used also to knit woollen socks and ask her daughter in Lovosero to sell them, if she didn't want to use them. The daughter sent back different goods from town such as champagne for the New Year celebration, biscuits and cakes. Getting meat instead of salary in this way was a good deal for Lubov - through her daughter she could realise it and indirectly get the desired goods from the market.
Once I recorded the following conversation on the phone between Lubov (in Krasnoshchel'ye) and her daughter (in Lovosero) before Christmas and New Year 2000: 'Anya, send champagne and chocolates! We shall celebrate with your uncle! ...We shall send you meat and fish! Faina will travel soon… Red fish!...Anya, there is one more thing, Can you ask Leonid if he wants some fish?... How which ?.. Volkov. He asked about red fish last time I talked to him... I cannot call from here - you know how the connection is..' At the end Anya agreed to ask him about the fish. Selling fish to Leonid Volkov was in fact not selling, but concern for a friend who might need a "luxurious" object for New Year celebration. When I later asked Lubov if they often used to sell, I understood at once that it was a wrong question. Lubov would never ask her daughter to sell on the market. It was not selling; it was just a making a favour.
Concern was also expressed in having contact regularly. I never met Leonid Volkov, but I knew who he was. His name was mentioned very often in relation to the culture house in the village. He was the founder of the Komi folklore ensemble "Afterglow" ['Vechernaia Zaria'] ("Ryt Kiia"in Komi language) but had moved to Lovosero. The members of the ensemble were women; most of them were pensioners (my landlady and her sisters were an active part of the ensemble), but there were several who were in their fifties. They used to participate in folklore events in the area, even planned to go in the future to the other side (The Komi Autonomous Republic) and many of them were producing souvenirs and traditional clothing and were selling them on the folklore festivals. Leonid Volkov was in charge of the folklore events and the cultural life in the area; that's why it was important to keep in touch with him.
Furs and crafts stand second to meat and fish in the "sent from the village" statistics. The fur products were usually given to children and sisters, and if they didn't have use for any of the given things they could sell them privately or give them to the Saami craft centre in Lovosero. When I asked the women in the village why they use the Saami crafts centre, they answered: "Saami, Komi, Nenets crafts, they used to say, they are from the same reindeer fur and are made in the same way, only the models are slightly different, but who bothers". The fur could be bought from the cooperative, but most of the women who sew, asked their friends and relatives who were reindeer herders to get some reindeer hides. Thus, to produce the fur clothing and shoes costs only time, and the products are sold at top prices to "tourists" and other aliens.
Lubov, in her capacity as radio operator in the cooperative, had a very good possibility to learn who intended to travel and where. Then she could ask if by the way the person in question could take a small package to Lovosero, to her daughter who works there, and needs food. It was difficult to repudiate such requests because anyone understood the parental concern of Lubov. As a radio operator, she also got access to the conversations between the reindeer herders and their families, and in this way she became updated with what anyone was up to. Lubov easily kept in contact with many people outside the village and with the branch offices in Kanevka and Sosnovka. She used to talk on the phone quite often and used to keep herself well informed. The only problem was that the phone connection in the village was bad. The phone cables were hanging on telegraph poles all the way from Lovosero and often were affected by any single change in the weather, and sometimes there was no connection for several weeks. It also happened that outside calls got mixed with the local radio network and private conversations could be heard on the radio. However, this was a minor problem because confidentiality in the village was of a relative degree. Information spread instantly, whether one wanted or not.
Information spreading has been the main data in the anthropological investigation of networks, especially in large-scale societies. In Krasnoshchel'ye it was just a question of time (usually hours) to get to know what happened around. This fact makes the village a very large network, but the exchange of goods and services reveal patterns I would like to outline below.
Lubov's case was representative of the village, and I'll use it to outline a model for the networks in the village. Lubov, her husband and her daughter in Lovosero help each other as much as they can. Lubov also has a large network of acquaintances in the village whom she can ask for services, and a small circle of acquaintances, (especially very important people who had resources to solve some problems outside the village to whom she shows concern). She also refers to a larger network of her daughters' acquaintances. The main pillars of her intimate network were her husband and her daughter; her effective network included many in the village and usually "resourceful" people. Her extended network was outside the village.
These three spheres are reminiscent of Sahlins' model of relation between reciprocity and kinship residential sectors. In this model of concentric circles the closest relatives are those who live nearest and among them the reciprocity tends to be generalized (Sahlins 1965). The kind of reciprocity changes according to the distance from the centre. In the outermost circles reciprocity tends to be negative. In Lubov's case, it seems to me, the endeavours were directed to the well-being of her intimate network (especially daughter) and to set preconditions for her daughter to enlarge the effective network in Lovosero and in this way probably to indirectly extend Lubov's "extended" network. In the extended network the relations tend to balance reciprocity and "the social relations hinge on the material flow"(ibid. 195).
Negative reciprocity according to Sahlins is the unsociable extreme. It is the most impersonal way of exchange. The few examples I could observe of this kind reciprocity happened on the sale stands during folklore festivals. There were many visitors from abroad and the prices could be written up. Aunt Elizaveta told me that reindeer leg-boots that usually cost 150 rubles could be sold for 280 rubles. They had to keep the level of prices high together with the other traditional craftswomen, but the economic profit was not the most important. Being there, they got recognition for their concern with traditional culture.
The optimal, but also necessary pattern of the intimate network is to have a person active in the tundra, one active in the village and one - in town. These roles were also very gender specific: men are in the tundra; the women are in the village and in town. In the following I discuss gender as the main source of division of labour in the household. I consider the spatial dimension of the networks in relation to engendered factors as "geographical mobility" and "higher education". The intimate network is usually the nuclear family, consisting of parents - children, husband-wife (conjugal) relationships and siblings (consanguine) relations. Further, I discuss these kinship relations as the most important links in the networks, and I end the chapter with several examples of relationships between distant members of the community that are not reciprocal, but are still subordinated to the values in the networks and thus invest the donors with social capital.
In the anthropological literature family and household have been discussed as problematic concepts (Yanagisako 1979). The term "household" in the village was officially bound to the idea of co-residence - people who lived in the same house were considered household ['domakinstvo']. Thus the information I got from the village administration was that there were around 225 households in the village. However there was a great variety in the structure of the households: besides the "nuclear families" there were single women living alone, a few single men living alone, mother-son families, or three generations as grandmother- mother- son; further there were houses where several single men lived together, but also there were cases of daughter-father households, and in many cases there were extended families.
There were also different solutions of the domestic activities or the "activities connected to or related to food production and consumption as well as reproductive practices of child bearing and child rearing." (ibid.). For the first, there were houses where only men lived: they drank together and went fishing together, but for food they were dependent on their mothers and/or ex-wives. In the same way their mothers and ex-wives were dependent on their sons and ex-husbands for catch and draught and hard manual labour. Mikhail, who lived on his own, used to give his catch both to his mother and his ex-wife, and he ate with both of them.
Most important is that nearly all domestic activities were gender determined in the village. Therefore, the household had a male domain and a female domain. Irrespective of the residence factor in the households, these complementary relations were always present. Traditional anthropological interpretations ascribe the label "public" to activities in the male domain, and "private" to those usually under control of women. In Krasnoshchel'ye, however, the process was the opposite - with the men in the tundra, it was the woman who became the "public face" of the household. Paradoxically, to be praised in the public domain the women in the village were up to build a "private space", that is an own house. The private space was scarce in the village and it was a life-long project to apply and get permission to build a house. Once they got permission, the women had to urge their husbands to build the house. The cooperative offered housing in sovkhoz houses, but the walls were so thin, that it was unavoidable to share intimate details with the neighbours. Some families remained living in their parents' houses, but privacy there was out of question, since in many of the houses there were no doors between the rooms, only curtains. In 1999, it was difficult to build houses, the materials had to be transported to the village, and it was too expensive. Therefore the efforts to manage the public face of the household concentrated on keeping standards of consumption. In some aspects this process reminded me of competitive consumption. In 1998 there were no electric water boilers in the village. In 1999, in every house where a woman lived (and I visited), there was one. Thus the conclusion is that male to female domains were as production to consumption in Krasnoshchel'ye.
Speaking of the relationship between male and female domains I cannot help mentioning the reversal of the famous "male : female as culture : nature" (Ortner 1974). In Krasnoshchel'ye it was male : female as nature : culture. The male domain is the tundra and men's bonds with nature were much stronger than their wives' bond with nature. Women were better in school, spent more time on reading and watching TV, and were perceived as more "cultivated".
Below I examine the two factors that reproduce these reverses: the traditional division of labour in the village and the geographical mobility of young women. The former favours the latter since the main premise for moving out is higher education and it has become a prerogative of the women. This further reinforces the traditional division of labour and creates strong clusters of male networking in the tundra, and large female networks in the village and between the village and the relatives with regular access to the market.
The division of labour in the family
No matter if the man in the household was a reindeer herder, fisherman or just going fishing and hunting, he was supposed to bring food from the tundra, and therefore was often absent from the village. The tundra was the field where men should be active, while the village and the relations with distant kin and friends were as a rule in the domain of women. This complementarity results in the following situation: most of what men eat, drink, are dressed with, and have in their houses is bought by their wives, mothers, sisters. Men almost never travel and are never at the market and therefore it very often was described as "dangerous" place - with pickpockets, swindlers and racketeers.
"Why travel? We got everything here!" - was the answer when I asked the herders if they would travel if they could. They get some work clothes from the cooperative; otherwise they get clothes from their wives who travel, or if one is single from their mothers and sisters, who also travel. Gleb had got a new set of hunting clothes from his mother who had been to Murmansk and he was quite proud of the clothes. He often laughed that he hadn't bought anything in the village store for years, an assertion that often occurred when the herders got packages in the tundra from their families and discussed the contents.
During my stay with the herders at their summer camp, they got packages from the village (from their families) twice. The cooperative occasionally sent products and materials to the herders. The families of the herders also used to send them small packages. Most of the packages contained fresh products such as milk and bread, pastries, canned home-grown products, vodka, and cigarettes. Most of these things were shared right after the arrival of the all-terrain track vehicle ['vezdekhod']. Some of these things were bought in the village store, where the herders, especially those who were married, haven't been for years. Most of them were critical towards the new products and the variety of products that they couldn't get used to: 'Before it was only one kind of butter - 'Vologodskoe krestianskoe', now there are hundreds of these, some are better, some are not so good, the butter we got last year is different from what we got this year and what we'll get next year - how can we learn which one is good, one life is not enough...' and joked:
They asked one old herder from the neighbour village if he has tried SNICKERS, he said 'Oh, yeah', then they asked him if he has tried MARS, the answer was the same 'Oh, yeah, of course', at the end they asked him if he has tried TAMPAX, the answer was again: 'Oh, yeah, of course'.
Also the supply of products for the tundra stay of the herders are not ordered by the herders themselves but by their wives, sisters, and mothers, and the needs are carefully adjusted to the needs of the household, so that it should be managed in such way that they had to buy absolute minimal quantities of food in the store. Thus a herder had asked (and in fact - got it) for 150 kg sugar for his tundra stay in the second quarter of 1998. This means more than a kilogram sugar a day, something rather unbelievable - it was evident that most of this sugar remained in the house of the herder in the village. The consumption of spirits (mainly by men) was also in the safe female hands, while the men were in the village. Some of the wives managed to keep their husbands from drinking, and some failed. Aleksander, for instance, was a straight man who didn't drink because his wife kept him sober. When he was in the tundra, she sent him vodka. Then, he was out of sight of the people in the village. On the other hand, one always should have alcoholic beverages for special occasions. Therefore, the wives were primarily concerned with keeping their men away from drinking and generally having control over the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Men could drink vodka uncontrolled, if they had the possibility. This was especially valid for the reindeer herders who were, after many "sober" days in the tundra, almost always drunk in the village. The herders, however, told me that they prefer to drink with eachother in the tundra, not in the village.
The gender differentiation in the households in Krasnoshchel'ye thus leads to strong social networks that are in two opposite ends (Bott 1971) - strong male networks in the tundra(11) and strong interdependency among the women in the village. Gender is also of primary importance for relationships with the outside world and prospects for geographical and social mobility.
Geographical and social mobility
All over the Russian North, and apparently not only Russian, the migration of women has been a long-standing phenomenon and a problem for the local communities. The reason is in the fact that the main subsistences in the North (hunting, fishing, reindeer herding) are in the male domain of activities. Boys get socialised in the tundra in such activities like hunting and fishing, and do not show any will to move to town. For the girls there are not that many activities that could tie them to the place (Hägg 1993). Moving out from Krasnoshchel'ye had two further characteristics: It was never an individual project - many family members were involved in order to help with money or connections. Secondly, moving out of the village was, as a rule, closely connected with taking a higher degree of education either professional, or pedagogical. Furthermore, the latter was the only possibility to move from the village under the strong restrictions of rights of residence during the Socialist regime. Most of the young boys and girls went to vocational school in Lovosero (PTU). There they could become reindeer herders, mechanics, or traditional craft producers, and even accountants. After finishing the vocational school, the boys were sent by the authorities to the army and lost contact with their friends and town acquaintances. The girls remained in Lovosero with friends or took higher education in the pedagogical institutes in Murmansk. During this period they often got married and therefore it was easier and more important for them to remain in town. After two years in the army the boys had only the village as an option to come back to and most of them tried to find their luck there.
The prospects for geographical mobility defined also the prospects for social mobility. In many cases people with higher education occupied higher positions and were in the stratum of nomenklatura. This turned the networks into spatial-hierarchical structures. The more to the centre in terms of geography (Lovosero, Murmansk, Moscow), the higher in the hierarchy were the "knots".
At present there was no restriction on the rights of residence. Anyone could move wherever one wanted. The towns in the area, especially Murmansk offered better paid jobs, but surprisingly for me, earning cash was not an incentive for the villagers to move to town. Their main concern was to grant the children a good education- a phenomenon also observed in other parts of Eastern Europe (Kideckel 2002: 126). In the name of education, some of the young girls and boys chose their official "nationality" in their ID cards. For instance, when Misha's daughter turned 16 and attained her majority, she applied to be written as a "Saami" in her papers, although before she was a Komi. The reason was that the Saami got a special quota in the Pedagogical institute in Murmansk and were admitted easier than Russians or Komi (nonindigenous population).
Some of the women in the village tried to break the pattern and fix higher education for their sons, but failed. One example came in the summer of 1999. Larissa, the head accountant in the cooperative and Antonina Borisovna, the head of administration in the village, had used all their connections and efforts to arrange for their sons, Artyom and Yury, to participate in an international program on reindeer herding. They were supposed to get trained in Norway and come back in a short time. The boys, who were best friends and reindeer herders, went to Lovosero, and after weeks of waiting there, they found that their places were taken by someone else. When I asked what actually happened I got different answers: That it was only for people with connections, that it was only for Saami, but the boys were a Komi and a Russian, and that the Norwegians were interested in collaboration only with people from Lovosero. Larissa, the mother of Artyom said that the boys failed because the Norwegian program wouldn't be profitable for the cooperative. Zaitsev, the director of the cooperative, representing the cooperative and the representative for MOOS (Murmansk Experimentary Reindeer Breeding Station) didn't agree to participate in it. Foreign aid programs and foreign enterprises were usually seen with distrust in Krasnoshchel'ye (see also Chapter 9). However, she hoped that her son would study one day. Artyom, on the other hand, didn't want to hear about it. He wanted to go to the tundra when he finished 9th grade at school. His mother then said that if he gets a "four"(12) in Russian, then he'd be allowed to become an apprentice in the herd. He studied hard and got a "four", but a "four" in Russian was a sign for good potentialities, and Artyom had to continue his education. After school he served at the military. In 1998 he came back in the herd. His Aunt Klavdiya, the wife of Zaitsev, the cooperative director, offered to support him if he continued with higher education in St. Petersburg, but Artyom was not interested in it. He wanted "to be in the herd" ['v stade']. When I asked him about the trip to Lovosero, he told me that because this happened in the summer, the transportation back to Krasnoshchel'ye was difficult. The boys had to walk the 150 kilometres back to the village, and as they said to me the moral of the story is, "we will never leave the village, no matter what we are promised...". For me the reason lies in the strong ties among the members of the reindeer herding brigade where he worked, as discussed in Chapter 7.
In these examples I have outlined how gender (as the conjugal roles, husband-wife) is reproduced as a determinant for the spatial aspects in the networks (tundra, village, town), and for the function (production/ consumption and exchange). In the next part I discuss family as a factor for the size, the scope, and the density of the networks.
My observations in the village started with the economic transactions around the grandmothers ['babushki'] as they used to call themselves. They needed help almost daily and got it from their closest relatives in the village. On the other hand, they were also helping their children and grandchildren as they could. This form of mutual support was completely free of interest and according to Fadeeva stands in relation to two basic values in the Russian understandings of family, which she calls paternal guardianship (roditel'skaia opeka) and filial indebtedness (synovnii dolg) (Fadeeva 1999). Cash, food, home-grown products and services, material help or labour flew between parents and children in various ways, free of expectations for return, because as Aunt Elizaveta once put it, "there will always be return, if in heaven."
Aunt Elizaveta was a typical example of this, a kind of support 'depot'; she got daily help from her five sons, and she was concerned with the ways she should help her children and grandchildren. Early in the morning she went to buy bread for herself, sometimes for her sister and sons. Afterwards came Nastya, her grandchild who brought milk from the cow and picked up bread. Afterwards Aunt Elizaveta went with the leftovers from our kitchen - to give them to the cow. Then Igor or Olesya came to see if she needed some help, to fetch water, or ask her for a small change to buy pens and pencils. Aunt Elizaveta got reindeer meat quite often. The same day when an all-terrain track vehicle came from the reindeer herders' camp in the tundra, one of the herders from Third reindeer herding brigade came with a snowmobile and brought her half a reindeer sent from her son, Artyom, and a half from her grandson, Semen, both herders in Third Reindeer Herding Brigade. Later in the evening her oldest son, Mikhail came with a half deer that he got from his son: he got it, but he preferred not to have meat at home: he didn't cook. He said he is either coming to eat with us, or eat with his ex-wife and his two sons. Aunt Elizaveta asked if they were going to send meat to his daughter who was studying in Murmansk. Mikhail said that his oldest son probably had to go there because of some affairs, and he could bring the meat along to her. Aunt Elizaveta had a large family; she had five children and the Soviet authorities had conferred on her the title of "Mother-Heroine"(13). The pragmatic aspect of having many children around was the presence of a large network and help with the daily activities. On the other hand, being a "Mother - Heroine" had made my host part of all political and cultural gatherings in the village and increased her symbolic capital.
The oldest sister of Aunt Elizaveta, Aunt Albina, did not have many close relatives around her. She was around 80 years old. Her husband died in the summer of 1999. Aunt Albina had also recently lost a daughter - who lived in Severodvinsk. Albina had only one daughter who lived in Revda. She had also several grandchildren and some great-grandchildren who occasionally came to the village. Of primary importance to her was her daughter in Revda. She was her "intimate network". From her relatives in the village she got small services, but mainly information on what and where something was sold, about how the infrastructure could be of help to her, etc. (although the village is not big, it is always possible to omit some events in the village life when they happen). Albina had to use her pension to buy goods and services in the village, in contrast to her sister Aunt Elizaveta, whose pension was given to children and grandchildren in the village and used in the market in town.
One morning Albina came and told us that she had bought reindeer meat at the sovkhoz. I was at the sovkhoz when they closed the day before. Later, when I went to the office they just hung a note that said: "Reindeer meat will be sold from 10 to 12 and from 13 to 15 at the price of 12 rubles". Obviously, Albina had bought it before it was officially announced. When I asked, she explained that she got to know before the cooperative opened. She had talked to Antonina Borisovna, the head of administration in Krasnoshchel'ye, who is her brother's daughter-in-law and found out early. Then she called Ksenia, the seller in the store, who was her sisters' (Aunt Elizaveta's) daughter-in-law to put aside the meat. Albina bought the meat and sent it to her daughter in Revda and to her sister in Lovosero, because they needed meat, and she left some for herself. Otherwise, she might have had to go to some private people for meat, and this would cost more, especially if she had to pay with vodka. Vodka was used very often to pay back for services in Russia (Hivon 1994) and Krasnoshchelie was not an exception in this regard. To ask relatives who were reindeer herders for meat was not possible, because they had big families and never had meat in excess. Those without family used to sell meat or exchange it for vodka. However that was not a good deal, although Aunt Albina used to buy great amounts of vodka and exchange it against small services such as firewood chopping, etc. In Albina 's case, the residence proximity didn't count as a factor for generalised reciprocity with her fellow villagers, but made her dependent on the existing infrastructure in the village, both as a social security system (pension) and as an economic enterprise (the cooperative). In Albina 's case, the closest network was outside the village, but in the village she had the cooperative as formal enterprise, but also had informal ties with its employees. This inverse relationship between the role of social networks and importance of the cooperative is further discussed in Chapter Eight.
Aunt Dina, to the contrary, had her sons in the village, but not children in the towns. She was most dependent on their daily help, and she spared her pension to use it in the market whenever she travelled with the folklore ensemble. The two sons were single and unemployed and lived together. Dina used to fire the ovens in their house so it shouldn't be very cold when they come back from the fishing trip, or from the hunting trip or whatever. She was all the time back and forth to the store as well, buying cookies, cans, or bread. "Of course, she could afford it", said the other aunts and explained that Dina helped her sons only with the housework, and they brought her fish and meat. "And she never gives them any money, they drink too much".
These three cases show the importance of ties between children and parents and ways of compensating for insufficiency of ties in the intimate network. Below I discuss the consanguine relations as standing next to the parental in the support networks.
There are several aspects of the consanguine relations in the networks I would like to briefly point out. Sisters usually exchanged material goods and food; between brothers it was mostly an exchange of labour (Fadeeva, 1999). Meat and fish were usually not given away to brothers, but to sisters-in-law. Brothers helped each other lending motors and boats, when building houses, ploughing the potato acre or preparing firewood for the winter. Sometimes unmarried or divorced siblings lived together. In such cases the role in the households was the same as in the ordinary family: the brother would go out in the tundra, the sister would grow potatoes and maybe tend a cow or chickens. In this way, they performed conjugal roles in the household. The importance of the siblings in the village was greatest in the age between 20 and 40 years. Later on when the children had grown up, the exchanges between siblings decreased, but the sociality remained.
Aunt Elizaveta met daily with her sisters in the village, but I never saw her asking them for anything. She told me that she asks usually her sister Marina to cut out the fur, when she sews skin shoes ['burki'], because Marina was much better at this. Whenever Aunt Albina and Aunt Elizaveta found themselves with meat, both sent a lot to their sister, Raisa, in Lovosero. She sent to them cookies and medicines from town. Although there is a hospital in the village, most of the medicines have to be bought privately in town. The hospital is supplied just with the minimum of medical supplies. Therefore, Aunt Elizaveta used to ask her sister in Lovosero to buy the needed medicines. According to her, it was more difficult to ask her children for such services. It was selfish; they needed the money for other things.
The role of the siblings who lived outside the village thus grew more important and complemented the relationship between parents and children with a more economic element. This is in conformity with Fadeeva's argument that fraternal solidarity contains much more striving for autonomy and independence (Fadeeva 1999). The relationships between siblings could also resemble the relationships between children and parents and get transformed either into paternal concern of the oldest brother or sister to care for the youngest, or in feelings of indebtedness of the youngest to help their elder siblings, as they do for their parents. Unconditional help and support was the main feature of the above discussed relationships. However, in many cases I observed unconditional support directed to people beyond one's intimate network. Below I discuss several forms of such support and the discourse around them.
Whenever I shared my interpretations with my informants, I was encountered with counter-arguments. One of the first such cases was when I asked Aunt Elizaveta to reflect on her daughters-in-law. Aunt Elizaveta had her own ranging of the daughters-in-law and her feelings towards them varied from a moderate indifference to a motherly protection. She had an explanation for it and a scale of "goodness": this daughter-in-law was lazy and impudent and coming and worrying her for small things and begging for money for the children, that one was a poor woman who needed help because her husband (although Aunt Elizaveta's own son) was drinking too much and therefore Aunt Elizaveta was trying to help if she could, the third one came from the Izhma area(14). She didn't have anyone in the village from her own family who could support her. Therefore, Aunt Elizaveta tried to help her and very often gave her small gifts such as calendars, cookies, etc. I suggested that "the best one" was the one who helped most - but Aunt Elizaveta denied it. She could not say who helped most or least of all. They all did according to their capacities. Aunt Elizaveta not only denied my suggestion, but also denied at once all calculating aspects of these relations. She explained to me that it was care, and I had to understand that they had to help each other in order to survive. The care and the small exchanges were not economically motivated. However, in Aunt Elizaveta's life to stand up for those who didn't have family reappeared in several more cases. This only confirms the importance of the family, the awareness of this importance, and the expectations of the villagers.
There was a 90-year-old lady in the village. She was the oldest one and came often to Aunt Elizaveta. It was very difficult to talk to her since she almost couldn't hear and spoke only Komi. This old woman didn't have any children. In the village she had two nieces, Irina and Ksenia who went everyday to her with bread and helped her with the oven. Aunt Elizaveta told me that the old woman fired the oven all the time and used to say that she was cold even in the summer. Aunt Elizaveta concluded that this was a kind of dementia. The old woman used quite a lot of firewood, but she was also in some kind of kin relation to the director of the sovkhoz, and he had fixed it so that she got quite a big amount of firewood from the sovkhoz. I asked Aunt Elizaveta if it was right that she got the wood just like this. My host said, "Yes, they have to care for her; she has nobody, and they should do it". She herself used to go to clean the house of the old woman and often told me that the old lady is not clean and tidy and there were ash, cinders, and leftovers all over her place. Aunt Elizaveta didn't expect any form of return; the old woman was almost unable to communicate; she heard extremely difficult and didn't hear after what was said. However, Aunt Elizaveta used to tell that she helps her and was proud of it. She also was very positive to the others' help. When I expressed suspicion to director's unselfishness when at work in the cooperative, she reminded me that he helps his old aunt, and ergo he was not selfish. During the previous regime, there was the fear that such improper use of official positions would be discovered. Therefore those who misused their positions were up to 'make a good name' towards the higher echelons as allowing for and compensating for "the sphere of blame and culpability" (Humphrey 1998:264). In the present, the endeavours directed towards making and keeping 'a good name' were about reaching the main part of the villagers. This is also an important part of the transactions in a volley of the empirical examples in the thesis.
In the above discussed examples I have sketched out the importance of the family in the every-day life. The family was the main part of the social capital of the individuals. Unconditional help was given to a larger number of the villagers, however. In the cases I describe below help was given to needy villagers with the clear consciousness that a return gesture is practically impossible. These gestures of giving affected not only the relationship between the donor and the recipient. Such gestures also gave the donor a good name in the village.
It was an evening in the spring. There was a knocking on the door, and a woman with quite dirty clothes came in and began to talk to Aunt Elizaveta in Komi - paying no attention to my presence. I'd never seen her, and I pretended to be deep in my notes. Aunt Elizaveta was talking also in Komi with a stronger voice, and I wonder if I sensed moralising notes - (I pretend that I got used to the intonation in the Komi language). At the end she opened the cellar and brought a bucket full with potatoes. She gave it to the woman, and the woman left without saying a word. When I heard the door getting closed, I asked who the woman was. Aunt Elizaveta told me that this woman was drinking too much, and she was not even able to grow potatoes. She had helped her before last year - with potatoes for sowing, and the woman had said that she is going to pay back in the autumn, but she never got paid back. Aunt Elizaveta suspected that the woman had eaten the potatoes instead of sowing them. This time it was also potatoes for sowing, but she probably didn't have anything to eat now, therefore she asked for potatoes. It was a question of survival. Aunt Elizaveta had to help her; the woman was sick and had also to be cared for. "God has said so."
A similar episode happened some time later. There was a man who came. Aunt Elizaveta also gave him a bucket full of potatoes. "How can I leave him? He is alone. He does not have a wife or children; he is completely alone!" The villagers explained such unconditional help from various points of view. In many cases it was intended to compensate for the lack of family. Traditional values in the Russian village imply also the principle of "collective guarantee" ['krugovaia poruka'], i.e. the community helps with joint efforts to needy members, but restricts individual achievement (Ledeneva: 1998: 82)
Giving away to those in need is also seen as a traditional value in the village. One of the first stories I heard in the village was about a man by the name Kukushkin who during WWII had to go to Murmansk with a small herd of cows. On his way he gave away all the cows - there were so many women with children whose men were on the front line. They needed food and therefore he gave away the cows. Afterwards he went into hiding in Krasnoshchel'ye. Then he changed his name, and his sons took the family name of their mother.
Traditional values in the village often refer to pre-Revolutionary forms and Christianity, which at present is undergoing an upswing. New evangelical churches spread the New Testament all over the tundra(15). The increased presence of religion on the TV leads to religious revival. Many of the older women in the village explained the practices of giving away and helping the old and the sick by referring to Christian values.
Under the socialist regime these values were strengthened by its rhetoric of equality, and at the same time they were transformed into a notion of "human attitude" ['chelovecheskoe otnoshenie']. Then this notion was needed to challenge the bureaucratic rules, where they were too rigid, and to fill the gaps in the system. At present one had to show a human attitude to challenge and counterwork the predatory aspects of the market economy. In fact, it was very difficult to see clearly the difference in the ideological stances and whether they belong to different ideological regimes (Pre-Revolutionary, Communist and Postcommunist), when the practices of giving away and remained the same.
Being a good villager operating with three sets of reference: traditional, Communist, and Christian, Aunt Elizaveta had become one of the central senior figures in the village. She got invited to all occasions and celebrations in the village, and somehow gained the name of a person who helps and is worth helping, both as bearer of old values (she was mother - heroine with medals from the Socialist period), but also as a good Christian as the new time enjoins and not at least as engaged in the preservation of Komi folklore.
Care, concern, and help were shown not only to human beings, but to nature and institutions as well. "To care for" appeared very often in my conversations with the old women. They had to take care for many people and things. The problems of the present time, as the old women saw them, were that young people didn't care. For the older generations "care" was a generalised state. They cared for close and distant relatives and they cared for the nature. "The herders cannot leave the herds, they have to care for the poor reindeer, that's why they are working. No, they cannot just leave them to the mercy of fate", insisted Aunt Elizaveta.
A further example was the village library. I used to go there quite often, but I didn't like to sit there because it was a quite cold place. Liudmila Aleksandrovna, the librarian, complained that the library was held by the municipality administration. In the past the library got firewood from the forestry services in the village. These services were also a part of the administration before, and the supply with firewood for the library went without any problem. Now the administrative forest services were gone, and there was no firewood for the library. The library got money to buy firewood, but it usually came with seven months delay. Not one of the private foresters would accept such delay. The librarian had to pay with her own money or bring her own firewood. She did it often. In this way, she kept the library working. The library was used mostly by the school children, and sporadically by some adults. By keeping the library open, Liudmila Aleksandrovna was helping the children to become educated and well read. The parents appreciated this. In this way Liudmila Aleksandrovna acquired a large social capital, but also the possibility for waged labour.
Until now, I have discussed gender and family as structural aspects of the support networks. I have stressed care and concern as basic values reproduced by the structural relations. In many cases people explained their acts as dictated by the moral imperative to help others solve vital problems. Any form of interest was out of question. The same logic appeared also in many of the monetary transactions I observed in the village. Below I'll discuss how disinterestedness was present also in apparently economic and monetary transactions.
In this chapter I approach the networks with a focus on the transactions and discuss how norms get confirmed and reproduced in the transactions. A special focus is on accumulation of money as opposite to care and concern, discussed in the previous chapter. I end up the discussion with some examples of social sanctioning of such practices and understandings of crime.
Money is one of the most persistent topics in the anthropological science. It has been written that money creates social distance, by depersonalising relationships, and that its introduction had a subversive effect on indigenous and traditional structures (Bohannan 1959). The disappearance of money is said, on the contrary, to shorten the distance. In Krasnoshchel'ye, money has not totally disappeared; its functions and effects, however, have become strictly regulated, and my main aim in this chapter is to show how. These "norms concerning money" I approach through describing empirically several transactions, and in this way I add transactional aspects to the structural aspects of the networks, discussed in the previous chapter.
In the previous chapter, I mentioned several uses of money: to pay services (Albina ), to shop at the local store (Albina and Dina), and to give away to the children, respectively grandchildren (Elizaveta). In the former case, money is a means of exchange; in the latter it has been a gift. Money thus operates in two transactional modes: one of short-term transactions and one that is long-term that reproduces the social order.(16)
In "Das Kapital" Marx states that one of the particular uses of money is to accumulate or "breed" more money (then it becomes capital). In Krasnoshchel'ye, money has apparently lost this function, since its slightest symptoms, as I discuss later in the chapter, are socially sanctioned. Money as means of exchange still circulates in the old infrastructure, but in the interpersonal relationships there is a tendency to give away money. Thus, instead of a depersonalising effect, money obtains a "personalising" effect.
Money also can be bartered. People "lend" and "borrow" money, without charging interest. Often the terms of these transactions change on the way, and it is not uncommon that loans are tacitly repaid in goods and services. Hence money can be seen as having a negative effect in the networks when one speculates with it); neutral (when it circulates in the existing infrastructure) and consolidating (when it is given away). Here I'm concerned with the two extremes: the negative and the positive. The multitude of possible effects of money, therefore, complicated its circulation. Moreover, everyone showed wide concern for money transactions in the village, and also in town. One had not only to sell at the right prices (not to show greed), but also to buy at right prices (not to be cheated). Moreover, the circulation of rubles during my fieldwork was further complicated by the devaluation of the ruble.
In 1998, in order to counteract inflation, there was a devaluation of the ruble. In a transitional period both the new and the old money was in circulation. One thousand old rubles were the same as one new ruble. To me it was quite difficult to make calculations in the beginning and for Aunt Elizaveta and her sister Marina - almost impossible. They had almost daily discussions about the bread. Marina lived on the other side of the village, and it was quite a long distance to the bakery. Therefore she often asked Aunt Elizaveta to buy bread for her. Then in the afternoon, she came and picked it up. I remember the first time Aunt Marina came to pick up the bread. She had to pay 15 new rubles to Aunt Elizaveta. Marina said she had a two thousand from the old rubles and 10 rubles and the rest was just kopeiki (17). She was wondering if it was too much or too little. First she gave the two thousand old ones and expected to get some change. Aunt Elizaveta didn't agree and demanded the 10 rubles plus some of the other coins. They stood and discussed it for probably ten minutes in Komi - I could recognise very often the words "ruble" and "kopeiki". It was quite amusing to see these two old women quarrel and since they didn't come to an agreement for a while, I asked if I should help. Then they laughed and said: "No, no! It doesn't matter - it was just a small change!" and switched to: "Take all the money! No, I don't need your money!" Afterwards Aunt Elizaveta had to "excuse" the quibbling and explain to me that it was probably because they were well on in years. Money actually didn't matter at all. This case not only shows the unfamiliarity with money, but also that they denied any possible concern with money.
Many writers have highlighted the parallel presence of different kinds of money: both as accounts of primitive money, special purpose money, and general purpose money and as accounts of operating with different currencies (Martinez 1990, Pine 2002). In the 1990s in Russia, the US Dollar became an alternative to the Russian ruble. Lemon writes "more U.S. currency circulates in Russia than within any other country besides the United states" (Lemon 1998:22). The dollars were more reliable than the hyperinflating ruble and in addition to that, they symbolised the new opportunities that opened with the market liberalisation. Their presence declined from the centre to the periphery (as also the rubles did). Many transactions in Murmansk were in US dollars, often abbreviated as c.u. ("conventional units") ['u.e.'] ['uslovnye edinitsi'] -. Having in mind the inflation rates during the mid 1990s I used to have the greatest part of my money in US dollars. In Revda it was difficult to exchange unless one knew someone who would like to buy US dollars; in Lovosero, it was possible at the bank office, but there they often didn't have enough rubles in order to exchange. In Krasnoshchel'ye no one even needed dollars (as they used to say) and other foreign currencies were almost never discussed. When I was there for the third time, I had somehow learned how much I needed and used to spend and took out in Murmansk approximately the right sum in Russian rubles. Another reason was also that at the same time the Russian government was just starting collaboration with IMF (the International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank, and there were official promises for diminishing the inflation. For unexpected purchases, I had some of my cash reserves in US dollars.
In the following part I describe my first and the only time I used US dollars in Krasnoshchel'ye in order to reveal some basic features of the transaction. First, the whole transaction took a week with up and downs and its trade nature became disguised. The important aspects were that I got a new acquaintance and a traditional fur overcoat ['malitsa'] from Stepan.
In November 1999, I realised the need for some warmer clothing than what I had with me. The temperatures were below minus 25 for several days, and I intended to go out in the tundra with the herders where one easily could estimate 20 degrees - lower. I said to Aunt Elizaveta that I probably needed a malitsa. She tried to find an old one, from her son Gleb, but it wasn't good enough, she told me. Afterwards, she shared my problem with her oldest son, Misha. He suggested that I could ask Fyodor, one of his friends, who could sell his mother's malitsa. Misha and Fyodor were neighbours and knew each other well. Fyodor's mother herself had sewn the malitsa, and she was the best one to sew in the village in the past, when they still used to sew clothes in the village.
I went to Fyodor together with Misha. Although I had been shown where he lived, I couldn't just go and ask him. I needed to be presented to him by someone of his friends. Therefore, I came as a friend of a friend and this was intended to encourage the transaction. Fyodor had a big wooden chest with reindeer clothing. He took out the malitsa. It was a nice one, and a very long one - it covered my ankles. The malitsa was old, but it was in a very good condition. It has been a malitsa for special occasions. It was very warm, and it was fitting me very well. I wanted to buy it and began to discuss a price; Fyodor said he didn't want to sell it - he didn't know the price. It took me several days before I got the malitsa: Fyodor didn't want to look like he was making profit from his mother's clothing; it was something special - it was memories; it was not him who had sewn it - therefore he didn't have any idea about the price. Nevertheless it was something that I also needed, he said. It was not like the fish - he could sell fish. However when I asked to buy fish, he said: "No! I do not have! I'm not a trading man! Who has told you that I sell?! Here, the people, they can just go and fish themselves -but they are too lazy to do it! I do it - and they, then, tell things..." Fyodor continued with a very long political argument about how in the present situation the weak will not survive. The re