Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.
Economic sanctions against Russia form a completely new context for public and private efforts to cope with crisis trends in Russian economy. With limited access to global goods, capital, and technology markets, it can at best minimize costs of the crisis but not come back to the normal growth path. Strategies to find new trade partners and sources of capital outside the group of countries that have introduced economic sanctions against Russia are welcome, but their potential is rather limited. Under these circumstances, crisis management should be centered neither on the alleged ‘Russia’s pivot to the East’ nor on the wide-scale import substitution but on normalization of economic relations with key country partners, regaining currency stability, and structural reforms aimed at moving national economy away from commodity specialization.
This article analyses the structure of and changes to the income-earning activities of Russian urban households from 1985 to 2000. An intensive diversification of income sources is observed, which indicates an engagement with every available (and individually acceptable) opportunity for paid employment, and also an intensive engagement in different types of household work. However, the growth in real income since 1999 has induced households to abandon specific types of income-earning activities, the first casualty being subsidiary agriculture, and the second labour-intensive, time-consuming types of household work. Another important change took place in gender specialization in domestic labour: though women still worked substantially more in the household than men, at the end of the period under consideration, there are signs that this gender gap has been partially bridged.
The article contains a general comparative study of four strategies of social and economic development: "Inertia", "Renter", "Mobilization", and "Modernization". The context for comparison is explanation of correlation between adaptive features of Russia’s contemporary economic system and particularities of the mentioned strategies with corresponding ways of managing economic development problems. The comparison is based on description of strategies essence, ways and tools to achieve results. Perspectives of achieving strategic purposes as well as expected results of implementation of each strategy are shown. Special comparative study of four strategies on the base of development of competitive markets as one of strategic aims of the Russian government is presented.
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