Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia

Notes

209 Notes Chapter 1. Transnational Soup 1. To protect the privacy of my informants, and in keeping with standard ethnographic practice, I have given this university a pseudonym. 2. Mark Field notes that A. Zinoviev coined the term katastroika to capture this notion (Field 2000:37 fn. 2). 3. Nancy Ries talks specifically about “mystical poverty” as a key trope in Russian discourse (1997). 4. In his 1998 study of the poor and disabled in eighteenth-century Russia, Daniel Kaiser argues that the poor were invisible in the Russian historical record until the institutionalization and classification of poverty in the seventeenth century. Adele Lindenmeyr’s 1996 book about poverty and charity in Imperial Russia is probably the most comprehensive study of welfare programs in Russia. 5. See Susan Brownell’s 1995 account about the role of socialized feeding programs in China. 6. For a fascinating look at the socialist politics over kitchens in Hungary, see Fehérváry 2002. 7. For more detailed accounts of the social engineering of Soviet food practices , see Borrero 1997 and 2002, Goldstein 1996, and Rothstein and Rothstein 1997. 8. Sheila Fitzpatrick captures the intimate relations that linked Soviet citizens with the state in the 1930s with this comment: “It is one of the particularities of our subject that the state can never be kept out, try though we may. Soviet citizens attempting to live ordinary lives were continually running up against the state in one of its multifarious aspects” (1999:14). 9. For other ethnographies that focus on food aid communities, see Allahyari 2000, Glasser 1988, and Myerhoff 1978. Ethnographies that address issues of so- 210 NOTES TO PAGES 15–21 cial support and social relations, including those among recipients and volunteers , in other welfare programs include Desjarlais 1997, Dordick 1997, and Stevens 1997. 10. For a more detailed description of the social and physical landscape of today’s Moscow, see Khazanov 1998. 11. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior has a long and tormented history in Russia. Originally built during the Imperial period, it was demolished during the Soviet period, and a swimming pool was built in its place. In the 1990s, in an environment of greater religious tolerance, rebuilding of the church began. Although the renovations are not yet complete, they have been lavish, and funding for the church has come from wealthy Russians—including several with Jewish backgrounds, as a CCM recipient pointed out to me. See also Boym 2001. 12. The CCM community is a rich site for exploring a broad range of important topics in today’s Russia: the social lives of the elderly, church-state relations in postsocialist society, the experiences of black Africans, transnationalism and the experiences of expatriates, and so on. Unfortunately, an extended treatment of any one of these topics would take this book away from its primary focus on food aid and social networks. I am currently pursuing these themes in other places: Caldwell 2002, and forthcoming. 13. Although overt displays of personal religious beliefs by CCM volunteers, donors, and staff are not permitted in the soup kitchens, the motivation for the program developed from larger social justice movements that have been associated with American Protestant denominations. See Sack’s 2000 account of this connection between food and religion in U.S. society. 14. For a brief period of time in 1997–1998, the soup kitchens operated six days a week. Because of budget constraints, the program has been cut back to five days a week. 15. Despite the flux that characterizes the CCM program, the overall membership is neither contingent nor anonymous, unlike the type of aid programs that are more familiar to the North American context. In her study of a soup kitchen program in Connecticut, Irene Glasser noted that the structure of the program was necessarily loose and permeable because it was “one of the few places in modern life where questions [were] not asked, folders and charts [were] not kept, and where there [were] no eligibility requirements” (1988:34). This impersonal, private approach contrasts with the procedures followed in the CCM program, as well as with those in most aid programs in Russia. For practical considerations such as size and available resources, CCM staff serve only Muscovites who have been officially registered with the program. 16. This question about whether face-to-face interactions constitute more viable and authentic communities than do social groups based on more anonymous and intangible relations sparked a passionate and informative debate...