Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

1. Introduction: Living on a Volcano

1 Introduction: Living on a Volcano In the mornings, Lina’s bedroom serves as a playroom for her granddaughter. In the evenings, it becomes a living room. This is where she and her husband receive guests, socialize, watch TV. Sitting in this modestly furnished room with a view onto a quiet Moscow yard, its hostess, a fifty-five-year-old retired chemical engineer and the matriarch of a family of four, was treating me to homemade pumpkin jam with tea. Our conversation wandered back and forth between culinary recipes and political developments. Before long, we hit the topic of Avgustovskii krizis—the financial breakdown that had occurred four months earlier , in August 1998, and had, in a matter of days, led to a rapid escalation of prices.“The scariest part,” she remembered, was a few days after August 17, when the dollar exchange rate jumped up and immediately all the food vanished from the stores. Absolutely all of it. That is, you come into a store and you see nothing but boxes of oatmeal and of the most expensive cigarettes. Me, personally, I was just terrified. Because there’s family, kids . . . How am I going to feed them? How are we supposed to live? What if it stays this way forever? Little by little, products appeared, but at much greater prices, that was the next shock. But at least I knew: all right, there is stuff out there, even if I can only afford minuscule amounts. And after a while, we got used to the way it became. Because , what are you going to do? . . . In December, a few months after the ruble collapsed, the consequences of this event for everyday life in Moscow were still acute. For a sociologist with an interest in the experiential dimension of social change, this dramatic event presented an opportunity to explore how individuals’ methods of coping evolve under the influence of sudden political and economic disruptions. It was not long, however, before I realized that I had been interpreting the situation all too narrowly. A few days after my conversation with Lina I met with Konstantin, an engineer in his early fifties who lived on the opposite side of town with his wife and school-aged daughter in a small-sized khrushchevka apartment.1 Konstantin ’s life during the 1990s was full of twists and disappointments. After a lifetime career in an aviation research institute, he was forced by economic need to turn first to retail, then to small-scale commerce, and finally to contract construction work. At the very end of the 1990s he returned to his old post at the institute, which, in the course of the decade, managed to piece together enough commercial contracts for its staff to get by. The conversation with Lina was still fresh in my mind, and so I asked him how he and his family were affected by the recent crisis. But instead of sharing his experience of recent events, Konstantin looked at me with feigned incomprehension and said,“Which crisis do you mean? We are in crisis all the time.” 2 Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow Konstantin’s response illustrates the inadequacies of viewing crisis and everyday life as polar opposites. The notion of crisis typically evokes connotations of a sudden rupture, of a breakdown in the natural order of things, of all that everyday life is not. It is an event out of the ordinary, a powerful force that inevitably destroys the habitual patterns of existence. With its roots in the Greek krinein, “to decide,” crisis was traditionally used to indicate the decisive stage in the development of an illness, after which the patient either recovers or dies.2 Although the medical associations have given way to a far broader contemporary usage, the term retains its connotations of emergency and impermanence to this day. Such a discrete vision of crisis is blind to the possibility apparent in Konstantin ’s response: that a crisis may be perceived not as an isolated occurrence, but as a routine and unchanging condition. In such circumstances, the crisis evolves from a singular and alien happening into the very stuff of everyday life, the immediate context of decisions and actions, and, after a certain point, the only reality with which individuals have the social and cultural tools to deal. Crisis may become the default expectation that organizes people’s priorities and desires, as well as the benchmark against which they measure their successes or failures. How are...