The Eye of the Whirlwind
Russian Identity and Soviet Nation-Building. Quests for Meaning in a Soviet Metropolis
Oslo, Tromsř, Copenhagen
St. Petersburg: Aletheia (Russian edition)
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Preface to the Russian Edition - 1999
A. Post-Communist Anthropology
B. The Anthropology of East Europe
C. Theories of Socialism
D. History and Russian Identity
E. Private and Public Life in Russia
F. The New Class
G. Ordinary Life and Culture
Introduction - 1986
A. Defining the Problem
B. About the Field-Work
Chapter One: The Texture of Soviet Reality
A. Prospekt and Dvor
B. The Rules of the Game
C. Limbo
Chapter Two: Life on the Islands
A. The Weakness of General Rules
B. The Weakness of Money
C. The Importance of Place
D. Paradox and the Clear View
Chapter Three: Riding the Bus
A. Warmth - Serezha and Olya
B. Coldness - Fear and Formality
C. Peredat' and Propustit'
D. Materialism and Magic
E. The Arithmetic of the Masses
Chapter Four: The People and the Party
A. Dies Irae
B. Culture, Charisma and the Warrior State
C. Examination, Privilege and the New Class
D. Clients, Relations and Tradition
E. Mothers and Sons
Interlude: Father Peter and Tolya
Chapter Five: Freedom and Authority
A. Unifying the "Two Times"
B. Authority and Self-Defence
C. The Free Outpouring of the Soul
D. Faith and the Weakness of Authority
E. Guarding the Heart
Chapter Six: Europe and Asia
A. Western Europe
B. Central Asia
C. A Paradigm of Russian Identity
D. An Empire in Limbo
E. The Quest for a New Form of Communication
Conclusion: Visions of Evil
Epilogue - 2002
Appendix One: Fieldwork in the Soviet Union: An
anthropological research project in early 1980's Leningrad (Copenhagen-Riga
2003)
Appendix Two: Freedom Within - Authority Without: An exploration of certain Russian ideological
figures (Copenhagen-Helsinki 2003)
Appendix Three: Tables
Appendix Four: Survey Data on Informants
Bibliography
Indices: Citations index
- Thematic index
Notes
For my own part I'd just like to add that nearly every reality, though governed by its own, immutable laws, is almost always unlikely and unbelievable. Often in fact, the realer it is, the more unbelievable.
(Dostoevsky 1868-89, p.313)
The Smolenskoe Graveyard submerged in early spring
This text is the product of a long-drawn and intense process of experience and thought, and it would be quite impossible to thank everyone who has somehow contributed to it. Clearly, without my friends in Leningrad, nothing would have come of it at all. Vera, Viktor and Pavlik, Vitya, Natasha, Serezha, Tolya, Andronov and many others (all names are pseudonyms), opened their doors and their hearts to me, and gave me the opportunity to learn to know a way of life which - I'm afraid - is far richer and more interesting than the portrait I have managed to draw of it. Particular thanks are due to my now deceased academic supervisor at the Leningrad State University, Professor Rudol'f Ferdinandovich Its, without whom I would have been unable to return to Russia in 1983.
At the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, two people in particular have put their mark on this study. First, my supervisor, Professor Arne Martin Klausen, who insisted, ever since I started writing in earnest, that I should think for myself, and that whatever I wrote should be clearly and unambiguously stated. Secondly, I owe warm thanks to Hans Christian (Tian) Sørhaug, for theoretical inspiration and tactful criticism during the early phases of my work.
My friends and colleagues Arild Moe (now at The Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo), Pål Kolstø and Øivind Fuglerud (both now at the University of Oslo) have read and discussed early drafts of several chapters of the text. Their informed criticism has enriched the result significantly. Discussions with Kristin Aarnes and my brother, Christopher Sivert Nielsen, have contributed less visibly, but no less importantly. Astrid Bjønness, with her intimate knowledge of Russia and Russians, has inspired me in many ways; in fact, it was her idea that I start this work in the first place, back in 1981. My grandmother, Marabeth S. Finn, lent me the money with which to buy the word processing equipment on which the first version of this text was written.
The publication of the text in Russian in 2003 was made possible by the generous economic support of the Norwegian Research Council, the recommendations of Piers Vitebsky at the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge and Nikolai B. Vakhtin at the European University of St. Petersburg, and to the excellent and meticulous translation carried out by Alexandra N. Livanova and Ekaterina P. Prokhorova.
The present, AnthroBase, version of this text is mainly based on the Russian version, but a number of small changes have been made in the text itself and the tables in Appendix Three from the original version have been included (and to some extent updated). Most importantly, two supplementary papers have been added (Appendix One and Appendix Two). These add a substantial discussion of field methods and ethics to the text and also carry the analysis of Russian values in Chapter Five somewhat further.
During various phases of the work with this text, I have received valuable comments and criticism from a number of people, including Reidar Grønhaug (University of Bergen), Øyvind Jaer (Østlandsforskning, Lillehammer), Dmitry Pospielovsky (University of Toronto), Fredrik Barth (University of Oslo), Marvin Harris (University of Florida), Piers Vitebsky (University of Cambridge), Yulian Konstantinov (BSRCS, Sofia), Alexandra N. Livanova (University of St. Petersburg), Trond Thuen (University of Tromsø), Hülya Demirdirek (University of Lethbridge, Canada), Nora Gotaas (NIBR, Oslo), Per Liltved (Arendal, Norway), Jorunn Magerøy (Molde County Hospital, Norway), Anna Birgitte Mørck (Oslo), Kristin Rande (University of Copenhagen), Johnny Leo Ludviksen Jernsletten (University of Tromsø), Eva Klingenberg (University of Tromsø), and my wife and colleague Kari Helene Partapuoli.
Finally, I want to extent a heartfelt thanks to all my students, in Oslo, Tromsø and Copenhagen, who, since I was allowed to start teaching back in 1980, have taught me more than any book or lecture possibly could.
Oslo 1987, Tromsø 1996, Copenhagen 2002-2004
This generation
will usher in a kind of life that we know nothing of, - let us what it will
be like. People want happiness, egoistical happiness, bright colors, noise,
fireworks, passions, - and that's not all they want, I know; they want culture,
knowledge; they want life to become European at last - for Russia too; they
want to speak all the languages in the world and visit every country on earth,
hungrily, now, now! They want comfort, elegant furniture and smart clothing,
instead of old village chests and homespun coats. They want to take over everything
from abroad - dresses, theories, art, philosophical trends, hair styles, everything,
- and they relentlessly discard our own achievements, our Russian tradition.
And who can condemn all of this, when it's all so natural after so many years
of puritanism and fasting, being closed in and closed off from the rest of the
world.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva 1967, p.15)
Fifteen years have passed since I completed the fieldwork that forms the basis of this study, which is now being published for the first time
- in Russian. In those years, the world I here describe - Leningrad in the early 1980's
- has changed so fundamentally that it has, in a certain sense, ceased to exist. In this sense, what follows must be read as history. But in another sense (and as so many times before in Russian history), the old world lives on beneath the new as its precondition, without which the present must seem meaningless. For an understanding of the post-Soviet Russia of our own day, this account by a Westerner of the state of mind and means of life that characterized the late Soviet
period may thus prove of interest.
When I originally wrote this book (in 1984-861) I was, inter alia, motivated by a typically anthropological passion: to show that the Soviet Union was not a static abstraction, an artificial construct of "totalitarian" ideology, but a living social organism, a complex and subtle compound of lifeworlds, a social Texture inhabited by real people with real lives to live. While Western sovietologists and Soviet ideologues unanimously proclaimed the centralized monolitnost' of the Soviet empire, I had experienced Leningrad as particularistic and pluralistic to the point of complete disorganization. The Soviet Union simply could not be a totalitarian dictatorship, I reasoned. It was an "unplanned society", as anthropologist Janine Wedel (1992) has later said of Poland. And while the experts insisted that the unspeakable power of the "Communist" states had frozen their societies in perpetual immobility, my informants' lives were filled with violent upheavals, sudden opportunities and chance encounters, and Soviet history itself seemed - as anthropologist Bruce Grant (1995) has recently phrased it - to have been a continuous "century of perestroikas". Perhaps most striking, in view of later events, people in Leningrad in 1983 were constantly telling me that still more dramatic changes were on their way. It is true that many of them envisioned these changes as a spiritual apocalypse, while I, as an anthropologist, speculated about the collective, social forces at work. Still, it was not hard to conclude that "something" was maturing deep down in the vast, chaotic social organism that was the Soviet Union - that heavy, ponderous forces were gathering and pressing against the barriers that contained them. This imagery seemed terrifying at times, since there was so much bitterness and pain at the root of what was taking place. But there was also hope - hope that sanity might prevail, that change could take place in a more or less peaceful manner (as indeed it so far seems to have done).2
In this context, I felt the need to express my belief that life in the Soviet Union was more often individualistic and creative than deadened by totalitarian conformity, that people were motivated by "passionate realism" rather than fear of power. The real pain of 1.1 million dead in Second World War Leningrad, the passionate skepticism to any new war after this one, and the creativity and pride to survive it all "and even laugh" (as Slavenka Drakulic (1992) puts it), are graphical metaphors of the qualities I here invoke.
My work, thus, came to have an implicit focus on the possibilities for change in the Soviet system. I did not foresee the demise of the Communist Party or the break-up of the Soviet Empire. Nevertheless, my text points forward to our own age, and there is a basic compatibility between the analysis I proposed in 1986, and the changes that have later occurred (see the Epilogue of the present volume for some further thoughts on this). This is for me confirmed by the fact that many of the conclusions I draw about the Soviet Union below, have later (and independently of me) gained wide acceptance in the anthropological literature on the post-Soviet societies. (On the other hand, a number of issues that are raised by my analysis seem, in hindsight, to have been insufficiently treated in the following. I have therefore included two short papers as appendices to this volume, which update my thinking (1) on the methodology and ethics of my investigation (Appendix One and Appendix Two), and (2) on my analysis of Russian values (Appendix Two).)
Since the advent of glasnost' and perestroika and the breakdown of the Soviet empire, a whole new field of study has appeared in Western social and cultural anthropology. Students of what is commonly referred to as "post-Communist anthropology" have described many interesting aspects of life in various parts of the former Soviet empire, and stimulated a creative and thought-provoking debate on general questions of social organization and human relationships in the region. Still more importantly, anthropologists have been consistently skeptical to the policies of economic "shock therapy" favored by many influential Western actors, and to the belief that total dismantlement of existing economic and political structures followed by rapid and consistent marketization, would by itself cure all the (real and imagined) evils of the "Communist" system. Through intensive studies of the effects of reform in local contexts throughout the former Soviet empire, anthropologists have demonstrated the deeply contradictory processes at work, and shown that when abstract policies are applied to real social situations, they have unpredictable and often counterproductive consequences (for examples, see de Soto and Anderson 1993, Hann 1993, Kideckel 1995, Verdery 1991a, 1995, Creed and Wedel 1997, Burawoy and Verdery 1999).
Contributions to this literature have come both from Western anthropologists and (increasingly) from colleagues in East Europe, where, as one of the minor results of the changes taking place, socio-cultural anthropology (and, in a wider sense, qualitatively oriented social science) is now emerging as an academic discipline. We are witnessing the birth of what Richard Fardon (1990) has dubbed a "regional tradition in ethnographic writing". What Fardon means by a "regional tradition" is a complex and evolving set of assumptions of what constitutes "relevant research strategies" in a given ethnographic region. The association of African studies with classical British lineage theory (Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, Evans-Pritchard etc.) or of Melanesian studies with classical exchange theory (Malinowski, Mauss, Strathern etc.), are well-documented examples of this, as is the long-standing association of the Latin American and Mediterranean regions with studies of moral codes of honor and shame (Archetti, Blok, Bourdieu, etc.). Fardon emphasizes that regional traditions are both limiting and creative. Melanesia in fact enabled the study of exchange in anthropology, in the sense that the exchange systems of the Trobrianders, as described (most notably) by Malinowski (1922, 1935), revealed for the first time the vast complexity that even a relatively "primitive" system of moneyless exchange might have. At the same time, the researcher's insistent focus on exchange may restrain him from doing work on other problems that might be equally interesting; or else, through the power relations of the academic establishment, may prompt him to discourage his students from such work. A "regional tradition" is thus a cross between fact and fantasy, innovation and constraint, between actual field experience of a real world, and "constructions" (Berger & Luckmann 1966) of that experience to fit the researcher's notions of what he or she "should" find.
The anthropology that is being done in East Europe today is quickly acquiring the attributes of a new "regional tradition". The caveat is that we have problems delimiting the region as such. The cultural variety within the area that stretches from Eastern Germany to Mongolia, from the Caucasus to Kamchatka, is very great, and the people living in various parts of it may often seem to have more in common with their neighbors across the border than with people living at "their" region's other end.3 It is often argued that the only thing that unites this area into a region at all is the few decades it has spent under Soviet rule, and that defining a region on this basis is a political act that denies the traditional cultural plurality of the region's individual groups. One is, so to speak, reproducing the power of the Soviet state by treating its former domain as a unit of study. One should recall, however, that many other ethnographic regions are "politically" defined, although the political events in question usually lie much further back in time. The Mediterranean is perhaps the prime example, an ethnographic region that remains conterminous with the Mare Nostrum of imperial Rome, in spite of its later division into a Christian and an Islamic sphere.
Still, to my mind, the title "post-Communism" is something of a misnomer, since it defines our sphere of interest not in geographical terms, but in the terms of a (now defunct) political ideology. Like it or not, we are studying a geographical region. There exists a large "Soviet Studies" establishment in Western academia, and although this has by now mostly renamed itself "Post-Soviet", it is still applied to the same physical area, because this is where its cadres have their expertise and research experience. For anthropologists such considerations carry particular weight. Doing fieldwork anywhere in the "post-Communist" world presupposes the acquisition of a corpus of complex practical skills and cultural knowledge - that differs widely from what is needed, e.g. in Africa. Anthropologists must acquire this corpus in order to do fieldwork at all. And because we learn from colleagues with similar skills, we have founded a community of anthropologists who have done work in the "East European" region, and this community has proceeded to define the standards and interests of a "regional tradition" - which we might refer to (as does a well-known journal) as the Anthropology of East Europe.4
East Europeanist anthropology is a regional tradition in the making, and as such presents a somewhat unfinished and at times makeshift face to the world. The research community is rather small, with few older researchers with senior academic positions at prestigious universities, and a multitude of young students making interesting and unexpected contributions. The roots of this tradition go back to the work of sociologists, anthropologists and rural economists in the early years of the 20th century. These students, many of them East European (e.g. Bogoraz 1904, Chayanov 1919, Galeski 1976, Stahl 1958-65), were particularly concerned with the problems of the peasantry, and founded an influential school of rural anthropology. In many parts of East Europe, such studies continued under Communist rule after the Second World War. Most prominently, Polish sociologists developed a fieldwork-based school that is closely reminiscent of Western sociocultural anthropology (see Wedel 1992 for a cross section of the work of this school on informal organization in Communist Poland), and similar conditions prevailed for example in Yugoslavia and Hungary. In such countries, cooperation with Western colleagues was not uncommon, and a number of Western researchers who had been active before the war continued work in the area into the 50's and 60's (for examples, see Benet 1952; Halpern 1956, 1967, 1977; Sanders 1949). In the Soviet Union, in contrast, sociological and anthropological research was effectively silenced under Stalin (see Tumarkin 1999), and - in spite of the interesting empirical work that started appearing in the 70's (e.g. Arutyunyan 1970, Staroverov 1976, Boyko 1977, Pimenov 1977, Kon 1980, Shlapentokh 1989; for an early Western contribution, see Dunn 1967) - we have only recently seen a return to the social science "mainstream" (see Tishkov 1992 for a critical evaluation of the condition of contemporary Russian ethnography). Meanwhile, in the West, during the 70's and early 80's, a new generation of East Europeanist anthropologists had appeared, and a number of paradigmatic monographs, mostly on rural themes, were published (see Hann 1980 on Hungary; Humphrey 1998 [1983] on Buryatia; Kligman 1981, Sampson 1982 and Verdery 1983 on Romania; Wedel 1986 on Poland). All in all, however, we may conclude with Halpern and Kideckel (1983, p.378), in their review of the Western (particularly American) state of the art anno 1983 that Eastern European studies until the late 80's had had marginal impact on mainstream debate in Western anthropology.
Starting in the late 80's, this small, specialist field has seen unprecedented expansion, as previously inaccessible regions are explored, new questions are asked, and the number of students doing fieldwork steadily increases. Most of the leading figures of this new tradition are still the researchers that were active back in the early 80's, but today their students are also contributing to the field. Increasingly also, various traditions of anthropology - and more generally, of sociological research based on qualitative methods - are forming or reasserting themselves, often against significant opposition from traditional academia, in all the East European countries. In these circles, innovative and often interdisciplinary approaches are being pioneered, which challenge the rather airy generalizations that are often proposed by Western researchers. In St. Petersburg, for example, alongside traditional academic institutions (several of which have undergone significant internal reform), there have arisen a Faculty of Ethnology at the new European University (www.eu.spb.ru/ethno - led by Nikolay B. Vakhtin) and a Center for Independent Social Research - Centr nezavisimykh sociologicheskikh issledovanii (www.cisr.ru - led by Viktor Voronkov), specializing in applied qualitative research. As in the West, we find a young, enthusiastic, and often innovative research milieu.
One of the greatest problems of writing about Russia in the mid-80's was the almost complete lack of general sociological theory of Soviet society. Quite a number of interesting empirical studies of East European societies had appeared, but the theoretical debate, which is otherwise so lively in anthropology, was virtually absent. The study of East European societies was still heavily dominated by the paradigmatic theory of totalitarianism, which put prime emphasis on the (presumably) all-powerful state. Of course, totalitarianism theory was never completely hegemonic, and much of the empirical research that was conducted (in anthropology as elsewhere) in fact contradicted central tenets of the totalitarian model. Nevertheless, there existed no developed theoretical alternative to this model, and few efforts were made to revise existing grand theory (such as Marxism, structuralism or Weberianism) to suit the circumstances of East Europe. In writing the present volume, I was therefore explicitly attempting to build up an alternative theoretical framework, and to develop a number of analytical concepts related to empirical Soviet society. Since my work was never published, however (see Footnote 1), it has had little or no influence except on my own students.
But this of course does not mean that other anthropologists were insensitive to the need for general theoretical approaches to the East European societies (see Halpern and Kideckel 1983, p.394), and in the course of the last decade several interesting theoretical syntheses had appeared. The most prominent of these is that of Katherine Verdery, whose monograph describing life in a Transylvanian village was published in 1983. Early in the next decade, Verdery published a second monograph on urban Romanian intellectuals (1991a) and a number of theoretical studies (1991b, 1993, 1996) that detail a complex model of the inner workings of "socialist society". This model draws in part on the work of Hungarian and Romanian scholars (e.g. Konrad and Szelenyi 1979, Kornai 1980, Campeanu 1986), in part on general anthropological theory (e.g. Polanyi 1957), and in part on empirical studies by Western anthropologists (e.g. Humphrey 1991). During the 90's, both Verdery herself and a number of other prominent anthropologists of East Europe have developed her model further, and there seems at present to be something of a consensus that it represents an exceptionally fruitful avenue of inquiry.
I find it interesting and encouraging that there are many striking parallels between Verdery's account of "socialist society" and my own description of the Soviet Union below. We agree that the monolithic power of the Soviet state was a sham. In fact, the state was weak, and hampered by what Hungarian economist Janos Kornai (1980, 1992; see also Birman 1983) has called a "shortage economy". This state governed a society fragmented into Islands (enterprises, kolkhozy, bureaucratic institutions etc.) that were ruled as semi-feudal domains by rival fractions of a nomenklatura-mafia (see Verdery 1995, Humphrey 1996-97, and Wedel 1998ab for examples of how this model may be adapted to the present, post-Soviet, situation). In this scheme, the state functioned as the primary redistributor of resources and wealth within a "supply-constrained" economy of shortages, and Islands competed for access to its wealth:
"In a supply-constrained system [...] everyone scrambles for access to the pot. At all points in the system, jobs or bureaucratic positions are used as platforms for amassing resources. Personal influence, 'corruption', and reciprocal exchanges are some of the major mechanisms. This sort of behavior goes on throughout the society but is especially important for bureaucrats, whose entire reputation and prestige rest upon their capacity to amass resources. Any bureaucrat, any bureaucratic segment, tends to expand its own domain, increasing its capacity to give - whether the 'gift' be education, apartments, medical care, permission and funds for publication, social welfare, wages, building permits, or funds for investments in factory infrastructure. Throughout the bureaucracy, then, there is rampant competition to increase one's budget at the expense of those roughly equivalent to one on a horizontal scale, so as to have potentially more to disburse to claimants below. That is, what counts most in the competition among social actors within allocative bureaucracies is inputs to one's segment, rather than outputs of production." (Verdery 1991b, p.424)
Verdery emphasizes the systemic centrality of the "second economy" in Soviet-type societies, and the peculiar role played by "culture", as a battleground between state and oppositional legitimacy. The importance attached to "culture" by a regime that professed materialism as its official ideology was indeed one of the more paradoxical features of the Soviet system, and Verdery attaches great importance to it. It is linked, in her theory, to the pivotal role played by the intelligentsia in the legitimation of Soviet-type regimes, as well as to the sudden eruptions of (intelligentsia-led) nationalism that accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet world. More generally, Verdery (following Humphrey 1991) describes the growth of East European nationalism as a result of the fragmentation of socialist societies into competing "semi-feudal" domains (Islands). As will be seen below (see Chapters 2 and Chapter 4, Part D), there is close agreement in all of these respects between Verdery's reasoning and my own.
Nevertheless, there are several points on which we differ. Most importantly, I sense - in Verdery's original model, as well as in much of the later work that has been based on it - a rather incongruous distance to the subject being described. "At its best," Chris Hann remarks, "the anthropological approach can offer a fully satisfying account of 'how the system really works', the pays reel as opposed to the pays legal, including the influence of specific cultural traditions upon its operation. Perhaps even more valuably, the anthropologist should be able to convey a sense of what it feels like to live in such a system" (Hann 1993, p.9). Post-Communist anthropology has certainly contributed to this agenda, not least in the sense that it questions the meaning of many of the key terms that are taken for granted in much of the non-anthropological discourse on the "transition" - such as capitalism, democracy, privatization or civil society - and emphasizes the local complexity of the changes taking place. Nevertheless, there is surprisingly little "feeling" of everyday life in much of what is written by anthropologists about the "formerly communist" world. Verdery, for example, bases her model of "socialism" on a generalized, abstract description of the type of power wielded by the socialist state, and from this derives the parameters of daily life - rather than proceeding from daily experience to the structure of society as a whole. This approach may leave us with the impression e.g. that Russian "culture" was not primarily a lived reality, to which individuals related with emotional and esthetic passion, but (merely) an instrument of political legitimacy, over which the state and its opponents wrestled for control. Thus, the magical power and allure of "culture", to which I have devoted much attention below (see also Nielsen 1994), and which may ultimately derive from "culture's" embattled status, is lost from view in many influential texts of post-Communist anthropology.5
I believe that this distanced attitude is a legacy of the macro-political and macro-economic concerns that dominated Western pre-perestroika sociological work on the Sovietized societies, and of the strongly politicized views of many of its most prominent practitioners, notably political scientists, historians and economists (see Verdery 1996, p.7). In post-Communist anthropology, a much weakened, but rather similar bias is revealed e.g. in the fact that almost the entire literature takes for granted that its object of study is "socialism" (socialist ideology), or "socialist society", terms which are usually treated as interchangeable. Thus, the volume edited by Chris Hann that I cited above, is entitled Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice. In his introduction, Hann, who has elsewhere (1992) argued against Verdery's holistic model and her emphasis on the urban intelligentsia, emphasizes that anthropological studies reveal many "local socialisms", rather than a single, uniform, global "socialism": "[D]espite the relative uniformity of socialist institutions among Soviet allies in Eastern Europe before 1989, the actual implementation of socialist programmes varied enormously, in ways that could to some extent be explained by reference to differences in pre-socialist history and 'political culture'" (1993, p.9). Despite this clearly valid insight, however, Hann's volume as a whole is premised on the idea that there exists a global category of societies and social processes that may usefully be described as "socialist", "communist" etc. In accordance with this assumption, the contributors to his volume discuss a very wide variety of subjects, ranging from philosophical critiques of Marx's theory of "socialism" to empirical studies of "socialist" societies in Tanzania, Sri Lanka, China, and various parts of the former Soviet empire - as well as an example of "local socialism" from England. What do all of these cases have in common, except for the label "socialist"? Elsewhere, Aidan Southall remarks that "the failure of socialism [in Africa] is simply an expression of the fact that it has not been socialism at all" (1993, p.60). Could not the same be said of the majority of the cases in Hann's volume? Perhaps, indeed, it is quite as misleading to refer even to the Soviet Union as "socialist", as to speak e.g. of American society as "Christian"? As I see it, the anthropology of "post-Communism" seems to waver between extremes: Either there exists a "global socialism", an abstract concept applicable to anything that calls itself "socialist", or else there exist only (very) "local socialisms", vastly different from each other, with nothing in common at all except that on some rarified level of abstraction they are "the same thing".
The second (and related) point on which I differ from Verdery is in the surprising lack of historical depth in her discussion. Her theory is, as she puts it, an "ideal-type model [...] especially suitable for the highly centralized, 'command' form of socialism, best exemplified by [Romania and] the Soviet Union under Stalin and Brezhnev" (1991, p.420). But this equation of Stalin and Brezhnev (and the implicit contrast with the "less centralized" rule of Khrushchev) is at best naive. It fails to appreciate not only the vast difference between the Stalin era and the forty following years as a whole, not only the vast social revolutions that took place under Stalin, but also the more gradual (though no less fundamental) changes during the years of the so-called "stagnation" (zastoy) (cf. Shlapentokh 1989). So, though Verdery successfully highlights the complexity of the transition from socialism, "socialism" itself remains a discrete and self-contained system based on the implementation of a particular ideology: a static "ideal type" rather than an evolving social organism. The analytical basis of this idealization is the concept of the redistributive state, which owes much to Karl Polanyi (1944, 1957) and the substantivist school in economic anthropology. A redistributive state, according to this school, has a particular logic that under certain circumstances may aggregate into a semi-feudal order of warring factions of followers lead by patrons, each of whom controls a "feudal" resource base or domain. But this pattern has appeared in a number of forms under very different historical circumstances, and if we wish to understand its social-cultural impact on a particular empirical case (e.g. late Soviet Russia), it is essential to give an account of its historical genesis. Verdery's continuing focus on "socialism" might seem to exclude this possibility, since the continuities between pre-socialist Russia and the Soviet Union are broken by the intrusion of an alien ideology.
My own analysis is deeply committed to the idea that the socio-cultural conditions prevailing in East Europe today are the result (though not, perhaps, the necessary result) of very long-term historical processes, which may be envisioned as a complex, changing pattern of interaction between various regions, nations and sub-regions of Europe, and the various locales, classes and institutions that make up each of these. More specifically, I argue (with Gerschenkron 1970), that modernization in East Europe since the Early Middle Ages has consistently followed in the wake of Western modernization, and (with Anderson 1974ab) that is has evolved under the constant pressure of West European imperialism. The structural position of Russia as the Easternmost of the Eastern societies, as the limes separating Europe from Asia, is therefore a sociological constant of very great historical depth, and it has been demonstrated convincingly that this constant has profoundly marked the (real and symbolic) relationships between state and people in Russia. Thus, according to the Russian émigré historian Alexander Gerschenkron (1970), late modernizers go through sudden, violent "spurts" of forced, state-led modernization alternating with "stagnant" periods that are often anti-modernist. They are ruled by states that compensate for economic "backwardness" by pursuing policies of economic and political centralization; they preside over empires that are predominantly multi-ethnic, where national identities are often weakly consolidated (see also Greenfeld 1990); and they have a weakly developed sphere of what Jürgen Habermas (1962) has called Bürgerliche Öffentligkeit - which in the East Europeanist literature is often referred to with the heavily ideological terms "Civil Society" or "Third Sector" (tretii sektor). In Russia, Europe's Easternmost and most "underdeveloped" periphery, we may (as Gerschenkron emphasizes) expect each of these elements to be very powerfully expressed.
It seems to me profoundly significant that Russian "native theory" (both popular and literary) is deeply concerned with exactly these issues: Russia's relationship to the West, its borderline position between Asia and Europe, the distance between state and people. Quite often, moreover, there is fairly good concurrence between the conclusions drawn by "natives" and "social scientists" about these issues. Thus, the "victimization" of Russia, a theme of popular discourse that authors such as Ries (1997) have lately made much of, reflects Russia's historical position as a repeatedly colonized "primary periphery" (Wallerstein 1979) of West Europe. Historical analysis may thus lead us to the conclusion that cultural values and narrative tropes, which most anthropologists today tend to view as reified "discursive objects" within a semiotic-symbolic system (as "symbols that stand for themselves", see Wagner 1986), are often accurate reflections of actual sociological circumstances. Symbols (as I argue below) may thus be "true", i.e. they may communicate sociologically valid knowledge.
Such a conclusion flies in the face of much that is written in present-day "postmodernist" anthropology. Values, according to this view, are always social constructions, reifications or objectifications of semiotically arbitrary signs. While I am not insensitive to the value of this position, and though I approve of the self-critical stance that it has induced in the anthropological community, I object to its universal application, and suggest that it be applied with caution to complex empirical conditions such as those prevailing in Russia.
To exemplify what I mean by this, I shall briefly discuss some of the most intriguing recent anthropological work on Russian identity. Nancy Ries (1997) has published a fascinating ethnography of popular "talk" among Russian intellectuals in Moscow during the years of perestroika. Ries documents a phenomenon that a great many observers remark on in passing (though surprisingly few have taken the time to study it systematically): the "free outpourings of the soul" or "endless, fruitless discussions" (as my informants variously called them) that take place within the Russian (or perhaps Soviet) intimate sphere. Ries maintains that in Russian "talk" (everyday discourse) perestroika was represented as a ritual drama of transition from one stage of "the Russia story" to another: a reiteration of history rather than a transformation of it. In "talk", the inevitability of suffering and chaos are bemoaned, the heroic strategies of survivors are celebrated, and apocalyptic demands for total social transformation are given voice. As the reader will presently see, these themes (and many others mentioned by Ries) were amply represented in pre-perestroika "talk" as well. But during the hectic, unbelievable days of the "transition" itself, "talk" was vastly intensified, and "the Russia story" more frequently and passionately reiterated. But the ritual intensification of everyday narratives that claimed to challenge the status quo in fact confirmed it.
"In essence, the rituals of perestroika were a public marking and lamentation of the opposition between power and powerlessness, or, in a different valence, the battle between hierarchical and egalitarian impulses in Russian society. This opposition was hardly resolved or cancelled by perestroika. If anything, it was culturally validated and reproduced, as systematic, rational modes of social transformation were excluded from imagination and practice. By uttering their litanies and mystical poverty narratives, many people rehearsed themselves in the very stances of passivity, ironic detachment, and victimization that have helped to ensure their continuing vulnerability to power and pain." (Ries 1997, p.188)
Clearly, Ries is here making an important point. I sympathize with her belief that there was "a moment of opportunity and that a rational combination of socialist and market systems could have occurred" (1997, p.16), though I find her emphasis on missed opportunity and her trust in rationality somewhat naive. I also believe, with Ries, that Russian "talk" in many cases reproduces the perennial Russian dilemmas. However, I am not convinced that there is a simple connection between these factors. Russian talk is deeply grounded in the sociological realities of national and international politics, economy and culture, and gives voice to many profoundly valuable insights into the facts (rather than the ideals) of life in Russian society. Studies of "talk" that occurs in active situations, rather than passively over a teacup, reveal this clearly. Thus, the "talk" of Russian drinking and exchange (Hivon 1994, Pesmen 1995, Ledeneva 1996-97), of middle-aged Russians telling the stories of their lives (Pahl and Thompson 1994, Dickinson 1995), of Russian female entrepreneurs in Moscow (Bruno 1997), Russian teenagers contemplating their hopes for the future (Markowitz 1997), or Russians managing their lives in Leningrad in 1983 (see below) reveal a deeply practical attitude to life, that differs radically from the Dostoevskian dualisms of "talk" that are dwelt on by Ries.
But even these dualisms are more than naturalized but "actually arbitrary symbolic elements", as Ries claims (1997, p.25). Thus, Russians (e.g. Gerschenkron) often point out that there seems to be a "repetitious" or "circular" quality to Russian history. This fatalistic trope of "history repeating itself" is no doubt, as Ries argues, an ideological-semiotic "construction" but it is also a grimly realistic assessment of the actual prospects of life in Russia up through the centuries, given Russia's seemingly inescapable structural position as the most distant primary periphery of the rapidly (and autonomously) developing societies of the West European center. Repeated state-sponsored attempts to "overtake the West" (militarily, economically, culturally) have always, in the long term, failed, and resulted in the reproduction of similar institutional structures, similar everyday exigencies, and a similar "fatalistic", "impractical" or "passive" mindset. But fatalism is not merely a resignation and a defeat, it is also an acceptance of inevitability, and thus, as I point out in Chapter 3, a creative contemplation of the inevitable rather than a naively Promethean attempt to change what cannot be changed. Seeing Russians face real crisis, real tragedy, reveals the wisdom of this position.
Various ideologies, and various symbolic expressions of the same ideology, may thus contain variable proportions of "realism" and "construction". "It strikes me," Ries observes, "that all the references (both serious and ironic) that Russians make to their character have motivated a common journalistic and occasional scholarly reification of that concept" (1997, p.25). Certainly. But this does not mean that Russian character is only a reification. It is also a valid representation of the real.
Ries's discussion might profitably be framed by the very similar analysis made by the Russian émigré anthropologist Svetlana Boym (1994). Boym's work, which is based on the personal experience of a lifetime in Russia, as well as extensive knowledge of Soviet and Russian literature, art and film, discusses the "commonplaces" and "common places" of everyday life in the Soviet Union. In much the same way as Ries, she describes an "absolutist" streak in Russian and Soviet discourse, a "story of Russia" that switches wildly between binary extremes. This story is believed, she says, and enacted - particularly among the intelligentsia that are Ries's fieldwork subjects - and the enactors thereby perpetuate the conditions against which they rebel. Boym, however, presents this sphere of (ideal and idealizing) "teacup" discourse against the background of discourse generated by the practical exigencies of the household. "Fatalism" and "passivity", seen against the background of the coerced intimacy and latent violence of the kommunalka, may as well be Russian virtues as capitalist vices. When you have nowhere to go, remain quiet and learn to master the art of balance in "the eye of the whirlwind". Or as one Russian friend recently told me: "You must not fight against your fate (sud'ba); it is much stronger than you. You have to be considerate of your fate and take good care of it, or else it may turn against you and crush you."
As the reader will presently see, this volume is less concerned with ideological and philosophical questions (though they are also discussed), than with the sociological "facts of everyday life". Clearly Boym's distinction between everyday life itself (byt) and the ideal of everyday life (bytie) represents one such sociological fact, and it is probably possible to document that the contrast between ideology and reality, between theory and practice, is sharper and more absolute in Russian collective consciousness than in the more instrumentally oriented, compromise-prone West.6 Within byt itself, however, within the sphere of the everyday, other distinctions arise, and these come to play an important part in sociologically oriented studies such as my own.
One of the most interesting distinctions within everyday life is the breach between byt in intimate and byt in public contexts. This dichotomization of "private" and "public" life in East Europe was given an early formulation by the Polish sociologist Stefan Nowak (1981). According to Wedel (1992, p.9ff), Nowak postulated an extreme dichotomization between state and people in Poland, and therefore an extreme disjuncture between "public" and "private" spheres. What one said and did "at home" and what one said and did "at work" were entirely different matters (members of the Russian intelligentsia have referred to this as "dual consciousness"). This dualistic social structure (as opposed to the more gradualist Western ideal) has no room for a neutral, middle ground, a "polite" or "civil" society (Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit). In its place, we find a sociological vacuum, an absence of institutionalized connections between private and public worlds. Later Polish sociologists have argued, against Nowak, that the absence of "mid-range institutions" (as I call them below) is by no means total - particularly in Poland, the most consistently and successfully oppositional nation of the Soviet empire (see Buchowski 1994). Sociologists have studied the role played by such institutions as the Catholic Church and the rodowiska: the "social circle" of family, friends and acquaintances that may be mobilized for private or collective purposes (Wedel 1992, p.12). The absence of formal mid-range institutions is thus shown not to imply an empty "sociological vacuum" but a tangled breeding ground for informal mid-range institutions. Important research has been done in latter years into the subtler problems of this informal "second culture" (Wedel 1992, p.17) or "second economy" (Grossman 1977), particularly by economic anthropologists (for some examples, see Mars and Altman 1983, Sampson 1985-86, Hann 1992, Stewart 1992, de Soto and Anderson 1993, Hivon 1994, Verdery 1995, Bruno 1997, Creed and Wedel 1997, Humphrey 1998, Lemon 1998, Burawoy and Verdery 1999).
Nowak's notion of the "social vacuum" has thus been reconceptualized from a mere absence, to an absence of formally institutionalized, state-sponsored control - which necessitates the growth of informal organization. In the course of Soviet history the relationship between the state and the informal institutions has changed several times quite radically (see Grant 1995 for a description of the local effects of these transformations among an indigenous people of Sakhalin), and as a result, the configuration of "private" and "public" spheres has changed. Below, I describe or touch on several aspects of these changes: the genesis of the mafia-state under Stalin; the transition from the austere 50's to the consumer-oriented 70's; the changing governmental policies towards religion and nationality, the family and education; the switch, during the early 30's, from the esthetics of kul'tura 1, to the esthetics of kul'tura 2 (Paperny 1996). The Russian sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh has pointed out that an underlying trend of the entire period since the mid-50's has been a gradual "privatization of Soviet society", a "withdrawal of energy and emotion from the State" (1989, p.153). Shlapentokh traces this withdrawal throughout the public and private sphere: by degrees, restrictions on ownership and accumulation of private property are relaxed, private living quarters are increasingly available, the media refocuses on family life and romantic love, sexual mores are loosened, networks of friendship expanded. This is the impulse described by Svetlana Alliluyeva in the quote at the beginning of this Preface, a mood of "collective relaxation" after the extreme pressures of the preceding four decades. It corresponds to the idea of the growth of the New Class, as described by Djilas (1957; see below). Finally, Shlapentokh sees an increase in peoples' engagement in the informal, "second economy" and "second culture". I consider it necessary to qualify this last position somewhat.
As I argue in Chapter 4 (Part D), the mafia-state developed and reached its apogee during the Stalin era. Violence at that time reached a level of intensity and unpredictability that has never since been approached, and that cannot be rivaled even by the immediately preceding decades. Despite the (largely legitimate) complaints of intellectuals, however, the four decades after Stalin were largely peaceful, prosperous, and fairly optimistic. The mass hysteria of violence engendered by unchecked war between powerful rival "feudal" factions that had swept society during the Stalin years, no longer occurred. In the "social contract" engineered by Brezhnev, the leaders of the major factions of the mafia-state made themselves accountable to the central governmental bureaucracy, while the center in turn guaranteed stable deliveries of resources and wealth. The Second Economy expands in the following years - throughout the lower echelons of the system. In its higher echelons, the opposite is the case, relative stability and control reign; until they are disrupted by perestroika.
In this book, I have attempted to describe some of these long-term processes, and to situate my informants' lives anno 1978 or 1983 within them. The post-war years were the first continuous generation of peace and relative prosperity in Russia since the beginning of our century. Peace allowed the predominantly rural, unindustrialized and uneducated population, which Stalin put through such violent changes, to assimilate what had happened to them. It is essential to bear in mind that Stalin's heritage was not merely one of terror and mismanagement, but that a fundamental sociological transformation was carried out during the years of his reign. In 1914, the country's urban population was 18%, primary and secondary schools had a mere 10 million pupils, less than 15% of the population were industrial workers and less than 15% of rural women could read and write. Fifty-five years later, about 60% of the population lived in cities, 55% were workers, there were close to 50 million pupils in primary and secondary school and almost the entire population was literate. In 1900, Russia was a society split in two - a vast, uneducated, poverty-stricken majority, and a minute, "cultured" splinter group. By the time of Brezhnev's death, a substantial "middle class" of educated professionals had emerged. As Milovan Djilas pointed out in 1957, this "New Class" (see Chapter 4, Part C) was in a sense an "instrument" created by the Stalinist regime to further its own ends. But, as Djilas further argues, a class is always more than a passive instrument in the hands of a ruling clique. A class consists of people, who strive to make life tolerable for themselves and to make sense of the world around them - goals that unavoidably conflict with the purposes of the state. This conflict, and the slow "privatization" (Shlapentokh 1989) that accompanied it, was in the long run fatal to the regime itself.
As the New Class grew and the state still insisted on treating it as an "instrument", more and more of its growth slipped silently out of the state-controlled public sphere and into the burgeoning Limbo of the Second Economy and Culture. The most dynamic entrepreneurs and stirring ideas escaped from the public sphere and created the rich, but in many ways destructive "counter culture" which is the main subject of this book. Increasing numbers of Soviet citizens came to depend on the black market to sustain an acceptable standard of living, on the cultural opposition to find a meaning in life. Some of the people I knew lived their entire lives in one part or another of this dual sphere. More importantly, by the beginning of the 80's it had become impossible to survive in the Soviet Union at all without to some extent participating in this vast "society outside society", and when stagnation and later catastrophic disruption hit the national economy in the 80's, dependence on the "Second Society" increased still further. I argue below (see also Nielsen 1994) that the dominant values of the emerging New Class - which became the sociological basis for the emergence of what is today the ruling class of Russia - derived from this economic and cultural "society outside society".
But the prolonged exclusion of the New Class and its values from positions of legitimate influence had destructive consequences. On the one hand the growth of the "second economy" was accompanied by a pervasive boycott of the official economy - a major factor underlying the economic crisis that overtook the Soviet Union in the early 80's (see Chapter 2). On the other hand, the frustration of the cultural opposition led to widespread disillusionment with modernity, increasing nostalgia for traditional values, and spreading Russian and non-Russian nationalism. Economic slowdown and ethnic activism overlapped and strengthened each other. Thus, by the time of my fieldwork, the substance of society had already changed irrevocably behind the "stagnant" official facade - a conclusion that is confirmed by the general demographic and economic slump that starts to be registered at this time.
Nevertheless, the most striking feature of life in the Soviet Union in 1978 or 1983 was its ordinariness, the peaceful, leisurely flow of everyday existence. There was a certain old-world gentility to this (and a very Russian bravura), by which the nights spent over a cup of tea in a cramped kitchen were made equivalent to visits at the country estate of the Karenins. People would go to great lengths to maintain what they construed as a "normal", "gracious", "beautiful" life. There was a strong consciousness of honor and shame, proper and improper demeanor. For this reason, and in spite of the horror stories recounted by many Western authors writing about the same period, such as Hedrick Smith (1976) or Ernst Brunner (1983), the Soviet Union in 1978 or 1983 was in most respects a very pleasant place for a foreigner to visit: people were hospitable, polite and took time off to be with you. Of course, the pressure was on, even then, but there was an underlying regularity, a sense in which a brittle, but still manageable social contract was maintained and could be trusted. Within this fragile, but known framework, there was room to create a life, a culture.
The term "Soviet culture" is commonly treated with disparagement. This "culture", we are told, was a fake; it was imposed from above by the State, a superficial product of ideology rather than an authentic growth of natural selection. Nevertheless, since people had to live with these impositions, they created a "culture" around them. It is beyond doubt that a unique "Soviet culture" existed, with its ethics and esthetics, its challenges, hopes, romance, and shattered dreams. This "culture" was not external to the people who shared it; it was the medium in which their lives were lived, and against which their measures of value and meaning were established (for examples of some aspects of this, see Boym 1994, Clark 1995, Yampolsky 1995). Even those who resented the Soviet state most intensely did so as Soviet people. Their visions of an alternative world resonated with the actual world they inhabited.
"Soviet culture" may be considered from many points of view, but one of the more interesting perspectives is to think of it as an all-out attempt to establish an alternative "model of globalization" to the model we speak of as "the West", "Western Capitalism" or "Western Civilization" (see Nielsen 1994). The "Soviet" model differed from its "Western" counterpart in many fundamental ways, among which ideology was perhaps the least important. It presupposed a different economic and historical order, a different power structure, different means and standards of education; it had its own ideals of propriety, practicality, sex, and common sense; it was expressed in automobile models and hair styles, in architecture, space programs, patterns of work and leisure, crime and punishment, love and humor, conformity and protest. The punk musicians I met in Leningrad in 1984 were Soviet punks, and the content as well as the form of their self-expression would have been unintelligible to punks from Great Britain or Norway. One of these young men carried an empty slide frame wherever he went. It was the nol'-ob"ekt, he explained - holding it up to "frame" the foot of an enormous statue of Lenin - the ultimate work of art: totally portable, totally subversive, and immune from prosecution.
Today, the ubiquitous, global quality of "Soviet culture" is easily forgotten, but the fact is that it pervaded life throughout the so-called "Soviet block", and that you felt just as much at the center of the world in Moscow or Leningrad as in Paris or New York - but at the center of a different world, that modeled "globality" differently. People derived satisfaction and pride from the mere consciousness that they belonged to a vast and powerful civilization. But they also seemed to realize that part of the price they paid for empire was a certain kind of superficiality, which is precisely what many Western observers and Soviet dissidents accused them of: "Yours is not a real culture!"
The Soviet Union, like the United States, was a multinational nation, and was built up institutionally around an (often tacit) acknowledgment of this. It is true that Lenin's idea that all nations would eventually melt away into meta-national solidarity was never much of a success; still, a particular brand of inter-cultural tolerance was an important aspect of "Soviet culture". People in Leningrad lived and died, often complaining, sometimes thriving, in what I refer to below as a state of "enforced pluralism": a rapidly changing and socially diverse public sphere. Tolerance was indeed often "enforced". A scholar in the Northern Caucasus, who received a grant to study ethnic conflicts in his native city, was required to keep his findings confidential. "That was the only sensible thing to do," he assured me, and I must say that later developments seem to have proven him right. Of course, Brezhnev's social contract could not contain all conflict, but every attempt was made not to publicize or incite those incidents that occurred. One had the impression that the remembered violence of the preceding generations, the war, hunger and terror that killed maybe 100 millions, had not simply hardened people to moral insensibility, but fostered in them a respect for life and a prudent regard for otherness.
"McDonald's - Chain of free toilets
throughout Russia"
Old-style humor in a new world
www.anektodov.net
On my first trip to Russia I traveled with a friend who made a point of his intellectual image and knowledge of the country. I was young, unprejudiced and easily impressed - still I felt he was overdoing things when he told me: "You can't spend more than an hour in the same room with a Russian without getting involved in a discussion about the existence of God." Two days later I arrived and was grabbed immediately by some Russian students, who welcomed me with vodka and zakuski - salt or spicy snacks to down it with. After half an hour we were, sure enough, heatedly discussing God's existence.
Although the topic wasn't broached again in my presence for months, this experience forced me to ask many questions: What does it mean to be Russian? How do they differ from us? Do they have some secret we might learn from? I was confronted with the "Russian enigma" from my first day in the country.
Later experience only served to confirm the reality of this enigma. As a foreigner I went through the traumas of being cold-shouldered in stores, on the streets, in offices; then, suddenly, being accepted into the "family" and subjected to the full weight of its curiosity, hospitality and portveyn; later, being shrugged off as an outsider who could "never understand us", while at the same time feeling that they hadn't the slightest wish to know me except as a reserve of information or luxury items from the West; and at last, gradually learning to trust and value a few close friends, and sometimes to be able to contribute constructive insights into their difficulties and joys. I experienced the extreme standpoints of intellectuals, each cooped up in his or her tiny world, suspicious of the other little worlds around them. I was drawn into the shapeless brawls of working-class youth. I felt the barriers of lies, mistrust, ignorance, gossip and fear surrounding each tiny group of people, and the care, consideration and tact my friends showed when I ventured to defy the barriers and introduce them to each other. I came to love the easygoing attitude to time, the disorder, the generosity and intimacy; to be repelled by those attitudes when they exceeded the invisible limits of respect. Gradually I recognized the fragility of personal relations, of life itself perhaps, the peaceful sadness of the empty fields and streets I passed through, the subtleness, sensitivity and endurance needed to live among them. The hollowness of so many outer forms, the warmth of heart within, and the courage, honesty and pain of those who strove to keep a fragmented world together.
This combination of fragility and strength is perhaps the strongest impression I am left with. It is also the one that is hardest to convey, since it is so paradoxical and so consistently present on every level of existence. There is a seriousness to it that I have never experienced anywhere else. Transported to our own society, it is so easily transformed into caricature, absurdity or triviality. Strangely enough, the opposite is also true: in Russia, much Western trivia takes on an earnestness we have difficulties accepting at face value.
But at the first meeting, the core of the Russian paradox is hardly discernible. One is bombarded by conflicting impressions, strikingly European in appearance, uniquely Russian in content. This perhaps is why Westerners, since their first meetings with Russia many centuries ago, have considered the country enigmatic.
The aim of this book is dual. I seek insight into the "enigma" of Russian identity. What does it mean to be Russian, and why? In the world of "Soviet Studies", bristling with statistical surveys and ideological involvement, such questions are rare, and I believe the field may be significantly enriched by an anthropologist, for whom they are a primary concern. My second aim is theoretical. Anthropology is a powerful tool - but exploring Russia, I found it would not cover all aspects of this exceedingly complex reality. My presentation is therefore a critique of anthropology itself, and an attempt at enriching it in specific ways.
But before these discussions can commence, we need a feeling for what the "enigma" itself entails. Father Peter,7 a priest who had seen many dark sides of Soviet reality without losing his clarity of mind, volunteered this (to me disheartening) statement:7a
- "Our reality is incomprehensible to the mind and completely paradoxical. Any attempt at understanding it is doomed to failure. It therefore finds its ideal and only expression in the anecdote."
- "So we can laugh at it?" I asked.
- "Well there isn't much of anything else we can do..."
I have spoken to many Russians about what it means to be Russian, and the impression I have gathered is "enigmatic", to say the least: people often seemed to see themselves as either rotten to the core or chosen, almost holy - one or the other (or both, as in the haunting poetry of Aleksandr Blok), intermediate standpoints were rarer. The classical symbol of this clear-cut dualism is that of Russia suspended between West and East, Europe and Asia, culture (or decadence) and nature (pristine or barbarian). The problem of choosing sides in the war between these poles, attaining truth (pravda) by alliance with one, the other, or both, is endemic.
Vera, hearing I was to read a lecture in Norway on the theme: "Europe's cultural heritage - does it include Eastern Europe?", got angry: "Of course! What a stupid question."
But in a discussion with an Intourist guide, when I expressed my conviction that it's important for Westerners to understand Russia, the guide looked strangely at me and sighed: "It'll never work out. Russians are so different. We live closer together, in bigger families. We're closer to the soil, that's incredibly important. We're somewhat Asian, not only Europeans - my nemnozhko aziaty."
In part, this ambivalence reflects a real historical situation: for centuries, the cultural, political and economic influence of both "Europe" and "Asia" on Russia has been intense. Still, the "enigma" cannot be reduced to externals only. True, Zina, an émigré intellectual, was struck by "how much poorer people's lives are in Russia, how much less cultured (kul'turno)." And a working-class woman I met on the train two days later, returning home after several years in the same country as Zina, complained that the West was degenerate, people cold and inconsiderate, she was pressed upon and controlled from all sides (oni davyat), there was nowhere to run away to. So the West itself clearly gives rise to strong positive or negative feelings. But then, one of my more bitter friends used expressions nearly identical to those of the woman on the train - to describe life in Russia: "It's getting impossible to live here in a spiritual sense. They press on you (davyat) stronger and stronger." Later he continued: "There's nowhere you can forget yourself here." This makes it natural to think of "Europe" and "Asia" as symbolizing internal states within Russia and the Russians.
The impression Russia has made on Westerners is no less contradictory. Throughout the Stalin era an ideal image of the Soviet Union was projected outwards. It was a country of heroes, of millions marching in step towards Communism, led by One Party, One Ideology, One Leader. Westerners tended to accept this fiction, either embracing it as Utopian or condemning it as Dystopian - as in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) or George Orwell's 1984 (1949). The latter interpretation gained ground as rumors of the horrors of Stalinism filtered through, as Eastern Europe was subjugated by Soviet troops and the Cold War enveloped us. Western intellectuals denounced the Soviet dream, claiming that the Revolution had created a new "Asiatic Barbary" (Koestler 1954). The academic field of Soviet Studies was not uninfluenced by this trend, and it was in these years that the totalitarian model of the Soviet system was formulated:
"The totalitarian society is characterized by an official ideology, a single mass party and terroristic police control... The state has a monopoly of mass communications and means of armed combat... [and] central control of the entire economy." (Dellenbrant 1986, p.81) "The distinction between state and society ceases to exist; the state penetrates and politicizes all spheres of life." (Nørgaard 1986, p.50)
Totalitarianism was a mirror image of the Communist Party's own claims to monolithic unity. The reason for this underlying similarity may well have been that the Eastern and Western "totalitarianisms" were both based on highly inadequate knowledge of Soviet reality. Their simplistic generalizations could only survive as long as they had to account for very few facts. Indeed, until the late 50's, facts were hard to come by - in part due to the near hermetic isolationism of Stalin's reign, in part because very little relevant research was conducted in the Soviet Union.8 But since Stalin's death (1953) the availability of data has increased vastly. The first exhaustive census since 1926 was conducted in 1959, and in its wake sociological, demographic and economic research experienced a slow renaissance, and Eastern and Western "totalitarianisms" were supplanted by more nuanced views.9 In the Soviet Union, empirical sociology came into its right - e.g. in Arutyunyan's erudite and critical analysis of rural conditions during the Second World War (1970). In the West, "corporativistic" and even "pluralistic" models were proposed (Nørgaard op.cit.).10 Thus, until the 60's the Soviet Union was, sociologically, an "enigma" in the most literal sense - and later the primary need, in both East and West, has not been for general theories of wide scope, but simply for a rough idea of the lay of the land. Collecting and systematizing data has therefore been the main focus of Soviet Studies since the Cold War.11
Western Soviet Studies is a vast and heterogeneous field, encompassing political science, economy, demography, sociology, history and the humanities. It is beyond my capabilities to review this literature exhaustively here, but two common weaknesses with relevance for the present study must be noted:
First, research seems to concentrate on quantitative ("hard") data, ignoring systematic treatment of popular values and state legitimacy. Thus, in Alec Nove's classic The Soviet Economic System (1977), the all-important subject of work morale receives the following summary treatment:
"It is hard to evaluate some scattered evidence, mostly from conversations, about work morale... One hears of work-avoidance, absenteeism, drunkenness, petty and not-so-petty pilfering, bribery, and other negative phenomena. One must mention such reports..., without being able to evaluate them." (1977, p.228)
Specialized work on the "Second Economy", which has lately had increased attention, is no more informative. Gregory Grossman vaguely concludes that the Second Economy,
"...controverts such philosophical bases of Soviet society as the solidarity of the various populati