Post-Soviet social Collier, Stephen J
2011., 20110808, 2011, 2011-08-08
eBook
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across ...a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.
This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. ...Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world—one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doubles of one another. In this world human beings inhabit a betwixt-and-between state in which their souls are both substance and nonsubstance, both body and soul, both their own individual selves and reincarnated others. Hunters are thus both human and the animals they imitate, which forces them to steer a complicated course between the ability to transcend difference and the necessity of maintaining identity.
Russia poses a major puzzle for theorists of party development. Whereas virtually every classic work takes political parties to be inevitable and essential to democracy, Russia has been dominated by ...non-partisan politicians ever since communism collapsed. This 2006 book mobilizes fresh public opinion surveys, interviews with leading Russian politicians, careful tracking of multiple campaigns, and analysis of national and regional voting patterns to show why Russia stands out. Russia's historically influenced combination of federalism and super-presidentialism, coupled with a post-communist redistribution of resources to regional political machines and oligarchic financial-industrial groups, produced and sustained powerful party-substitutes that have largely squeezed Russia's real parties out, damaging Russia's democratic development.
Renovating Russiais a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years ...liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics.
In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering. Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization.Renovating Russiathus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.
The book establishes marriage as a pervasive idiom for the construction of collective identity in Syria, which is appropriated by individuals, sects, states and intergovernmental organizations alike. ...Its conclusions are relevant to scholars of Middle East studies, sectarianism, anthropology and politics.”
What happens when you measure an economy? How does measurement impact policy? In Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms David Darrow responds to these broad questions by looking at the application ...and profound consequences of statistical measurement to the peasant economy in Russia, from the eighteenth century to the Civil War. Nearly all studies of Russia make reference to the land allotment, or "nadel," as a measure of peasant wellbeing. This is the first work examining the origins of the nadel, how statistical measurement converted it into a modern entitlement, and how it framed the state–peasant relationship. Land, Darrow argues, was life – peasants needed it and the state, most everyone believed, had an obligation to provide it. The question, however, was how much land was enough. Statistics supplied the answer but also locked policy-makers and society into a particular way of seeing peasants and their economy. Even the empire's final attempt to reform the peasant economy after 1905 remained locked within the old regime category of the nadel. Statistical measurement strengthened, rather than weakened, the nadel as a category of peasant economic wellbeing such that it persisted beyond 1917 into the early years of Soviet power. Based on archival sources and rural councils' statistical studies, Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms shows how the state constructed both an image and a measure of peasant wellbeing from which it could not escape, and how the resultant perception that peasants were entitled to a sufficient allotment became a major obstacle to successful agrarian reform.What happens when you measure an economy? How does measurement impact policy? In Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms David Darrow responds to these broad questions by looking at the application and profound consequences of statistical measurement to the peasant economy in Russia, from the eighteenth century to the Civil War. Nearly all studies of Russia make reference to the land allotment, or "nadel," as a measure of peasant wellbeing. This is the first work examining the origins of the nadel, how statistical measurement converted it into a modern entitlement, and how it framed the state–peasant relationship. Land, Darrow argues, was life – peasants needed it and the state, most everyone believed, had an obligation to provide it. The question, however, was how much land was enough. Statistics supplied the answer but also locked policy-makers and society into a particular way of seeing peasants and their economy. Even the empire's final attempt to reform the peasant economy after 1905 remained locked within the old regime category of the nadel. Statistical measurement strengthened, rather than weakened, the nadel as a category of peasant economic wellbeing such that it persisted beyond 1917 into the early years of Soviet power. Based on archival sources and rural councils' statistical studies, Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms shows how the state constructed both an image and a measure of peasant wellbeing from which it could not escape, and how the resultant perception that peasants were entitled to a sufficient allotment became a major obstacle to successful agrarian reform.
The first English-language book to document the men who emerged from the gulags to become Russia's much-feared crime class: the vory v zakone Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in ...Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment. The vory-as the Russian mafia is also known-was born early in the twentieth century, largely in the Gulags and criminal camps, where they developed their unique culture. Identified by their signature tattoos, members abided by the thieves' code, a strict system that forbade all paid employment and cooperation with law enforcement and the state. Based on two decades of on-the-ground research, Galeotti's captivating study details the vory's journey to power from their early days to their adaptation to modern-day Russia's free-wheeling oligarchy and global opportunities beyond.
In this original, bottom-up account of the evolution of contemporary Russia, Alena Ledeneva seeks to reveal how informal power operates. Concentrating on Vladimir Putin's system of governance - ...referred to as sistema - she identifies four key types of networks: his inner circle, useful friends, core contacts and more diffuse ties and connections. These networks serve sistema but also serve themselves. Reliance on networks enables leaders to mobilise and to control, yet they also lock politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen into informal deals, mediated interests and personalised loyalty. This is the 'modernisation trap of informality': one cannot use the potential of informal networks without triggering their negative long-term consequences for institutional development. Ledeneva's perspective on informal power is based on in-depth interviews with sistema insiders and enhanced by evidence of its workings brought to light in court cases, enabling her to draw broad conclusions about the prospects for Russia's political institutions.
Tear off the masks Fitzpatrick, Sheila
2005., 20050705, 2005, c2005., 2005-07-05, 20050101
eBook
When revolutions happen, they change the rules of everyday life--both the codified rules concerning the social and legal classifications of citizens and the unwritten rules about how individuals ...present themselves to others. This occurred in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which laid the foundations of the Soviet state, and again in 1991, when that state collapsed.Tear Off the Masks!is about the remaking of identities in these times of upheaval. Sheila Fitzpatrick here brings together in a single volume years of distinguished work on how individuals literally constructed their autobiographies, defended them under challenge, attempted to edit the "file-selves" created by bureaucratic identity documentation, and denounced others for "masking" their true social identities.
Marxist class-identity labels--"worker," "peasant," "intelligentsia," "bourgeois"--were of crucial importance to the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by "de-Sovietizing" themselves.
Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources,Tear Off the Masks!offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.
