Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia

Abstract

While much has been written on the unprecedented degeneration of the Russian economy, how people survive or do not survive remains a mystery. A close 5-year tracking of workers from a liquidated furniture enterprise in Northern Russia reveals two types of survival strategy: defensive and entrepreneurial. Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy in the face of the collapse of industry and agriculture while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamic sector of trade and service. In both cases families that manage to spread risks among multiple strategies rather than rely on singular ones do better under Russia's precipitous economic involution. By examining the deployment of inherited assets - material, social, skill and citizenship - we see how permutations of Soviet economic strategies are reenacted to survive in the post-Soviet world. Thus, as industry and agriculture have disintegrated, the fulcrum of production and redistribution has moved from factory to household, elevating women's previous role as organizer and executor of the domestic economy. At the same time that men become more marginalized in working class families they have become more dominant within the New Russian Bourgeoisie and the political descendants of the old nomenclatura. Here women are expelled from public decision-making into subordinate, often decorative positions within the household.