Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia

5. Strategic Intimacy: Communities of Assistance

cha pter 5 Strategic Intimacy Communities of Assistance The well-fed person does not understand the hungry person. (Sytyi golodnogo ne razumeet.) Russian proverb told by Nina, a fifty-five-year-old CCM member Personal strategies of inclusion and exclusion are part of everyday life in the CCM soup kitchens. The protocol of friendships and familial ties dictates who is offered admission to the program, who sits with whom, and who gets extra servings behind the scenes. In chapter 3 I described the feud that erupted between Aleksandra Petrovna and Oksana over the ways in which informal networks were mobilized to distribute scarce resources . Although this disagreement originated in the soup kitchen, it acquired additional complexity, because it filtered through the CCM congregation and pitted congregants, recipients, and volunteers against one another. The divisiveness of this conflict brought to light fissures and competing interests within the seemingly united community that gathered around a set of shared religious experiences and a common commitment to providing food aid. At the heart of many disputes over religious affiliation, nationality, ethnicity, race, and age in Moscow are concerns about the connections that exist between social identities and the allocation of resources. Potential aid recipients voice their fears that outsiders are unfairly taking resources that belong to group members. In the case of the feud between Aleksandra Petrovna and Oksana, the issue of religious affiliation became especially acute. Oksana, who was officially a member of the CCM com127 128 STR ATEGIC INTIMACY munity, questioned the right of Aleksandra Petrovna, who belonged to another church but frequently attended CCM services and other events, to influence decisions about the distribution of food aid in the CCM soup kitchens. By no means are such concerns over the demarcation of insiders and outsiders unique to this congregation. Elsewhere in Moscow local churches have closed their doors to needy petitioners and demanded proof of affiliation from their own members. At the national level, popular conspiracy theories in Moscow hold Jews, refugees, and other minorities responsible for single-handedly ruining the Russian economy by channeling funds to foreign accounts and draining the state’s resources through demands for material assistance. “Blacks,” an expansive category that includes Africans, Roma, and Central Asians, are commonly represented as lazy, nonworking, irresponsible outsiders who are burdening Russia’s welfare system with demands for public assistance. A political opinion that I encountered among pensioners and other people receiving small amounts of federal assistance was that the Russian government should grant independence to Chechnya so that Russians would no longer have to support the Chechens. This chapter focuses on the problematics of ascriptive identity by investigating how Muscovites’ memberships in social groups are constituted through a complex tangle of bureaucratic taxonomies and personal relationships. I question the extent to which Muscovites feel personally invested in these identities and explore the ways in which individuals balance imagined communities that coalesce around shared sentiments and experiences against more utilitarian relationships. CCM participants play with the reductive logic of identities as strategies for associating themselves within assistance programs and for excluding the access of others to these programs, so that membership within social groups offers a valuable social currency that can be exploited for material gain. Positioning Identity Although identity politics may be about disputes over the ownership of tradition, the past, culture, or territory, they are at heart negotiations over how to create order out of perceived similarities and differences. As E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940), Fredrik Barth (1969), and Anya Royce (1982), among many others, have pointed out, the aims of identity processes are to erect and maintain stable boundaries between groups. Identities are then reified and bolstered by the allocation or appropriation of STR ATEGIC INTIMACY 129 a unique combination of cultural traits, practices, and beliefs to each social group (Bourdieu 1984; Douglas 1990; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Dumont 1970; Gellner 1983). This essentialist project of “culturalism,” what Arjun Appadurai describes as “the conscious mobilization of cultural differences” (1996:15), characterizes much of the earlier cultural studies work that has looked at Russian and Soviet identities. Paradigms of “possession” (Beissinger 2001) and “innatism” (Herzfeld 1992) have distinguished Russian and Soviet citizens along axes of high culture versus popular culture, aesthetic appreciation versus base materialism, rural versus urban, and powerful versus powerless, among others (Lotman 1994; Stites 1992). In particular, the “elites” in Russia have long been portrayed as...