Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

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Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow Olga Shevchenko ✯ Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow shevchenko ✯ INDIANA INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796 Russia and Eastern Europe Sociology ✯ ✯ How Russians have navigated large-scale social change In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics. Olga Shevchenko is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Williams College. Cover illustration: Igor Moukhin © “Moscow 1997.” Used by permission. “A sensitive, thoughtful, and compelling portrait of life in Moscow during the final years of the last century by an observer who truly knows whereof she speaks. This is ethnography at its best.” —Kai Erickson, Yale University “Elegantly written and insightful, [this book] offers important new understandings of the struggles and strategies that Russians undertake to manage life amidst post-Soviet transition.” —Michele Rivkin-Fish, author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia ...