Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia

2. Making Do: Everyday Survival in a Shortage Society

cha pter 2 Making Do Everyday Survival in a Shortage Society What is long and green and smells like sausage? An intercity train leaving Moscow. Joke heard in Moscow Within a rich tradition of joking and storytelling, riddles such as the one shown in the epigraph poke fun at the naïveté and backwardness of rural Russians who visit the city and desperately load up with food products and other commodities.1 At a deeper level, however, the numerous quips and anecdotes that circulate in Russians’ conversations have been important forms of social and political commentary, both for the state and for its citizens. During the Soviet period, forms of satire, such as those found in the popular journal Krokodil or in circus acts, became vehicles for cultivating national values.2 At the same time, within a context where dissent was carefully managed and kept in check through tactics of surveillance and redirection, Soviet citizens became masters at creating and deciphering metaphors and subtexts as alternative means to express themselves. In this vein, humor became an especially powerful medium for articulating personal opinions that were at odds with or that commented on official rhetoric and policies. As Anna Krylova has noted, jokes are powerful because they represent the insider’s view of life as it is actually experienced (1999:247). Similarly, an acquaintance in Moscow reflected that anekdoty were powerful during Soviet days precisely because they protected the realities of everyday life from official— and often corrected—versions. 32 MAKING DO 33 Although political events and leaders offered particularly vulnerable targets for jokes and anecdotes, everyday survival provided another popular theme. Many jokes, such as the one in the epigraph, drew ironic attention to the important place that consumer goods occupied in people’s lives, the lengths to which people went to acquire them, and people’s frustrations with the state’s inability to produce and distribute goods adequately. In a conversation about shopping in Russia, a friend asked if I had heard about the “In principle” stores. In response to my negative answer, she related the following anecdote: Back in the Soviet days, a young man from the provinces prepared to travel to Moscow. He and his neighbors in the village had heard stories that the stores in Moscow were teeming with goods, unlike in the provinces, where store shelves were bare. Before the young man left on his trip, his relatives and neighbors asked him to buy certain things that were unavailable in the village. When the man arrived in the city and attempted to make his purchases, he visited the first store, only to find the shelves bare. He asked a fellow customer, “Is it possible to buy shoes?” The other person responded, “In principle, yes.” The man went to a second store and discovered that it too was bare. He asked another person, “Is it possible to buy shoes?” That person also responded, “In principle, yes.” The young man made several more attempts with the same results. Finally, in frustration, he stopped yet another customer and asked, “Where is this store, ‘In principle’?” Svetlana Boym relates a similar joke about shortages from the Brezhnev era: “A man asks the salesgirl: ‘Don’t you have meat?’ ‘You must be in the wrong store,’ she answers. ‘Here we don’t have fish. Across the street is where they don’t have meat’ ” (Boym 1994:227). As these examples illustrate, humor became an important, and collective , coping mechanism for dealing with the peculiarities of an economic system that was consistently challenged by low incomes, delayed wages, high prices, shortages, and the unequal distribution of goods (Krylova 1999; Ries 1997). In reply to my inquiry about how people have responded to shortages and other consumer inconveniences, one Muscovite told me, “We relate with humor. That’s how we survive.” Yet humor is only one strategy among many that Muscovites have devised for managing the unpredictability of Russia’s social and political economy. In this chapter, I discuss Muscovites’ survival strategies as forms of improvisation , or “making do”; and I suggest that through collective efforts to manipulate the system, Muscovites graft social relations onto economic interests. 34 MAKING DO The Tactics of Improvisation In Moscow, a common response to the ever-present changes and sense of uncertainty that colored daily life during my fieldwork was a shrug of the shoulders and the statement, “We do not...