Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Appendix 1. Methodology

Appendix 1. Methodology Site and Sample Selection This book is based on the fieldwork I conducted in Moscow, the city where I spent the first twenty-three years of my life and where I had professional connections with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM, now renamed Levada-Center). Obviously, the trade-off involved in selecting Moscow as a research site was that, while it minimized entry problems, it also confined the sample to a population not fully representative of the entire country. Social and economic differences, such as a wider and more complex structure of socioeconomic opportunities, better supported infrastructure, as well as a greater readiness of the population to support the economic reforms (Clem and Craumer 1995; Kolosov and Vendina 1996) made Moscow clearly distinct from other Russian regions.1 This does not mean that Muscovites’ lives were free from manifestations of social and economic instability. In fact, according to polls of the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, Muscovites reported the same problems as their compatriots from across the country throughout the 1990s. It was the severity and rank ordering of these problems that differed somewhat. While the main problems plaguing the lives of Russians in general in the mid-1990s were, first and foremost, low income (72 percent of those surveyed), poor health (30 percent), and absence of prospects for the future (24 percent), Muscovites reported being troubled mostly by the same challenges , but at lower rates: low income (64 percent), poor health (25 percent), and fear of unemployment (24 percent) (VTsIOM 1997, 6). Other differences included Muscovites’ greater vulnerability to housing shortages (20 percent vs. 10 percent), but a lesser susceptibility to the feeling of hopelessness and absence of perspectives for the future (12 percent vs. 24 percent).2 These differences make it impossible to argue that the findings of Moscowbased fieldwork fully represent the state of the Russian public opinion. But this book is far from making such claims. As with all ethnographic studies, this one does not aim to recreate a survey of how a particular set of behaviors or opinions is distributed in the Russian population. Rather, the goal is an in-depth understanding of certain discursive and practical patterns that could be traced through widely different segments of Russian society during the turbulent 1990s, with the intention of generating analytic categories that may enable one to better conceptualize the relationship between social crises and the everyday, the rupture and the routine, the shifting and the stability of social life. The unique quality of Moscow as a city of “all tongues,” in terms of the variety 180 Appendix 1 of opportunities and behavioral scenarios it contained (Kolosov and Vendina 1996; Dubin 1997), was propitious in this regard.3 A sample of Muscovites of different social backgrounds allowed me to investigate both the variability and the enduring features of the crisis framework, and to explore the extent to which its manifestations varied or cut across social and cultural boundaries.4 In addition, by ensuring the variation of my sample by gender, age, and social group, I compensated for the structural advantages that are assumed to make Moscow an outlier among Russian cities.5 In order to maintain the diversity of my sample, I relied on a theoretically modified snowball sample. In other words, I drew on personal connections and referrals (with contacts made through friends, colleagues, relatives, and neighbors ), but at the same time strove to include representatives of various social groups insofar as they had no professional knowledge of or involvement with the political and economic processes we were to discuss. Several considerations informed my choice of the snowball technique over random sampling. On the most practical level, the official phonebook listing, which is traditionally used as a database for random selection of an in-depth interview sample,6 was not available for Moscow. Without such a legitimate source, obtaining relevant information would have been extremely difficult and time-consuming.7 In addition , since many of the issues raised in the interviews could potentially be sensitive (such as instances of tax evasion or other semi- or illegal behaviors), it would be naïve to expect that they could be discussed in an interview setting without some basic degree of trust provided by a reference from an acquaintance or relative. In this respect, the sacrifices that random selection would have required in terms of rapport and openness seemed far greater than...