Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia

Abstract

While much has been written on the unprecedented degeneration of the Russian economy, how people survive or do not survive remains a mystery. A close 5-year tracking of workers from a liquidated furniture enterprise in Northern Russia reveals two types of survival strategy: defensive and entrepreneurial. Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy in the face of the collapse of industry and agriculture while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamic sector of trade and service. In both cases families that manage to spread risks among multiple strategies rather than rely on singular ones do better under Russia's precipitous economic involution. By examining the deployment of inherited assets - material, social, skill and citizenship - we see how permutations of Soviet economic strategies are reenacted to survive in the post-Soviet world. Thus, as industry and agriculture have disintegrated, the fulcrum of production and redistribution has moved from factory to household, elevating women's previous role as organizer and executor of the domestic economy. At the same time that men become more marginalized in working class families they have become more dominant within the New Russian Bourgeoisie and the political descendants of the old nomenclatura. Here women are expelled from public decision-making into subordinate, often decorative positions within the household.

Uneven transformations: Space, economy and society 20 years after the collapse of state socialism

“…Much of the 1990s involved a large-scale economic collapse across the region (Dunford, 1998;Smith 1998), the immiserization of large parts of the population of the region, and the emergence of economic development models that -at least in the former Soviet Union -were characterized as 'involutionary' rather than 'evolutionary'; i.e. an economy that feeds on itself without the further development of the productive forces (Burawoy et al, 2000).…”

Surviving the Transformation: Social Quality in Central Asia and the Caucuses

“…Much of the research on the impact of the post-1991 structural transformation on the well-being of the societies and the citizens of the former USSR has focused on the Russian Federation and has demonstrated that the changes have had a dramatically negative impact on the welfare of the societies and the population (see e.g. Abbott 2007; Abbott and Sapsford 2006;Wallace 2007, 2009a; Burawoy 1997Burawoy , 2000Burawoy , 2001Burawoy et al 2000;Shevchenko 2009;Rose 2009;Wallace and Abbott 2009). However, much less is known about the impact of the transformation on the life-satisfaction of those who have survived in other CIS countries, including the Central Asian Republics and the Caucasus, although the very limited research, mostly looking at the Central Asian Republics, suggests that there has been a negative impact (Abbott 2002;Abbott and Wallace 2009a;Cockerham et al 2004;De la Sablonniere et al 2009;Galip 2009;Kanji 2007;Namazie and Sandfrey 2002;Nazpary 2002;Richardson et al 2008;Wallace and Abbott 2009).…”

Post-Soviet informality: towards theory-building

“…: 7). Round et al (2008: 172) present that, in to contrast earlier assumptions that the post-communist informality is a short-term phenomenon (Clarke, 1999, Burawoy et al, 2000, "it is now accepted that they [postcommunist informal practices] are much more than ad hoc measures." A similar assumption has been suggested by Morris and Polese (2014: 1), who argued that postsocialist informality is far from being a 'transitional' immediate post-communist phenomenon: rather it "is here to stay".…”