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2 Querying Democratization: Civil Society, International Aid, and the Riddle of the Third Sector Nineteen ninety-seven was a peculiar year to be in Russia. It was the height of the short-lived boom period, and the year before the bubble burst in the devastating economic crisis of August 1998 that caused foreign investors to ®ee in droves. Since the early 1990s foreign capital had ®ooded into Russia, the new frontier of capitalist expansion.Most got no further than Moscow.During 1997, many Russian acquaintances informed me that 80 percent of Russia’s wealth resided there. Some of this new wealth derived from the provinces—this was a time of expropriations and privatizations by Russia’s nascent oligarchs, and foreign investors, too (Wedel 1998). Moscow was a quite different city than the drab, gray mausoleum I had become used to and gotten fond of in the early ’90s. It was pronounced to be the world’s third most expensive city, the main streets were crammed with exclusive shops, cafes and bars, and newly constructed glitzy malls—establishments that most citizens could only look upon as museums and that I could not afford to frequent. Fast food chains such as Sbarro and Baskin-Robbins set up on street corners next to their betterpublicized competitors McDonalds and Pizza Hut. The wide streets, which used to be nearly empty except for buses, trams, and a few Zhiguli, were now jammed with expensive traf¤c, the new cars of the new elites. The expatriate community had expanded and diversi¤ed massively during this period. The new capitalist Russia offered an exciting opportunity for young Western professionals to make their careers (and sometimes a killing) as journalists, venture capitalists, consultants , and aid workers. In response to this, many people from the provinces had begun to refer to Moscow as “the West.” These changes were slower to take effect in the provinces, but by 1997 they were taking hold. In Tver’ there were new markers of what my Moscow friends called “civilization”—an Ecco shoe store, an Yves Saint Laurent cosmetics store —and the food stores were well stocked with cookies and candies from Germany , frozen seafood, lobster and shrimp, luxury teas and coffees, and chips, snacks, and candies from the United States. In fact, one had to work fairly hard at times to locate domestic food products, a fact that caused many people some consternation.1 There were bars and clubs, a casino, and a strip joint, all of which pointed to the existence of well-heeled ma¤as. The new in®ux of international capital and its uneven distribution in the city made for some strange and bemusing juxtapositions of which its citizens were only too aware. One beautiful summer day towards the end of my research, I was invited to join a friend and her cousin, who was visiting from Moscow, on a walking tour of the city. Alla, a music teacher in a local music academy, took us to some of her favorite places. We walked along the pedestrian main street, down to the Volga, and through the city park. We rode the carousel eating ice cream and took a one-hour boat trip on the Volga, rolling our eyes at the loud disco music pumping from the speakers. Then her cousin, Irina, led us to her favorite street, whose Bolshevik-era name summed up so many of the new ironies and contradictions of the city. On Ulitsa Ravenstva (Equality Street), the opulent palaces of the so-called “new Russians,” with their tall iron gates and fences, their tinted glass and huge garages, boldly towered over their crumbling wooden izbushki (peasant-style log houses) neighbors. We laughed and photographed ourselves standing, arms linked, by the street sign. My favorite icon to these Russian capitalist times, however, was located a short distance away, on the potholed road that ran from the railway station to the city center. A huge and imposing construction of steel and tinted glass, it was the abandoned shell of the Tver’ Universal Bank. It had crashed in the early ’90s, taking the savings of thousands of local people, including those of my friend Oktiabrina, down with it. In 1997, Tver’, like other provincial places, was a “city of contrasts,” as my friends ironically used to say. This was a stock phrase of Soviet textbooks, used to describe London, New York, and other imperial cities, to allude to the contradictions of capitalism. Although “privileged”by its proximity to Moscow, resources...

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