Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (review)

Olga Shevchenko's Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow is an innovative contribution to the sociological study of quotidian life, alas not life under ordinary circumstances. Shevchenko's book stretches beyond micro-sociological concerns towards fuller understanding of broad concepts such as social change, crisis and normality. The book is an ambitious effort to apprehend the sociological relationship between crisis and normality in the dramatic decade of change that followed communism's collapse.

Shevchenko builds on studies of the discourses and practices of everyday life laid by theorists like Sewell, Garfinkel and Berger, and Luckman. She also draws from the conceptual toolbox of Bourdieu, particularly his signature concept of habitus, and the associated notion of hysteresis of habitus, which is used to highlight the disjuncture between the dispositions and skills suitable for survival in the Soviet era and the often-murky demands of the post-socialist environment in Russia. Unlike Bourdieu, Shevchenko is less interested in using habitus to draw a link between culture and inequality than in uncovering the intricacies of a post-socialist culture built around chronic crisis, which, rather than reproducing stratification through incompatible cultures of class, underpins "shared patterns that made dialogue between differently positioned individuals possible"(7) even in an economic context characterized by rising socioeconomic stratification.

In post-socialist Moscow, the border between crisis and normality has blurred, creating what Shevchenko calls a context of "total crisis."(2) She juxtaposes the notion of total crisis to the conventional usage of the term to designate an "acute event"(3) and to the sociological study of crisis grounded in Kai Erikson's classic work. Over a decade of change that is often wildly unpredictable, the experience of crisis is normalized and, indeed, "may become the very essence of a community's identity, a mode of living and a way of self-imagining without which the community is inconceivable."(3) Crisis thus becomes a resource that enables rather than an acute event that disables individual self-understanding and community life. Indeed, the interviews she quotes at length amply illustrate the idea that crisis rhetoric permeates many Russians' articulation of micro- and macro-level experiences.

Strikingly, crisis rhetoric functions to both illuminate and obscure societal changes and the spectrum of ways they have been experienced in everyday life. The book notes that the Russian media, freed to critique a corrupt and ideologically-unmoored state, was characterized in the 1990s by "constantly catastrophic images"(48) that set a stage for the perception that positive experiences could only be extraordinary events. What this suggests is not the absence of opportunity or even a measure of prosperity for (some) ordinary Russians, but rather the hegemony of a quotidian narrative of crisis that marginalized alternative ways of understanding and communicating experiences of postsocialism. This is consistent with Shevchenko's argument that the decade of the 1990s in Russia was devoid of a legitimating ideology of transformation, something that was present in the form of "liberation rhetoric" in neighboring states. Alas, Russian "liberation" from the Soviet Bloc was not a plausible narrative.

Shevchenko's study is the product of in-depth, repeated interviews of 33 subjects from 1998 to 2000. She gathered her group through "theoretically modified snowball sampling,"(180) and the group represents a cross section of urban Russians, who share their perspectives on private life, work, leisure, society and politics in a time of intense change. One weakness of the sample is its bias towards respondents in the middle and older age groups. Just 7 of the 33 interviewees were under 35 at the time of the study, and only one was under 30 (191-94). Shevchenko (52) posits that "...even those younger Russians who had succeeded in taking advantage of newly emerging opportunities found it hard to embrace the changing and unpredictable nature of mobility and of the post-socialist job market in general." Ideally, one would want fuller evidence to support this assertion, particularly given the fact that young, educated Russians were...