A City In Postsoviet Space

Abstract

The topic of the article is disputed social processes flowing in a Russian industrial city. The authors use results of field researches on Perm social problems (Perm is a big industrial city, the regional center with the population of about 1 million people. Its sociodemographic and economic parameters make it a typical example of the kind). The city witnesses the expansion of dormitory rules (adopted in private life) to public life. The analysis of managerial situations in many small and medium Perm companies reveals a flat and simplified management style. A small company becomes a closed world, the scale and behavioral norms of which remind a family (We thank O.Y. Andreeva, the associate professor of Perm State Technical University Culture Study Department, for providing us with the necessary information on the management situation in Perm small business). Contemporary city life generates “home” forms of non-traditional culture which now predominate in the economic sphere. Home rational economic culture is heterogeneous. It cradles undeveloped and rude local forms of contemporary market culture mechanisms. At the same time it originates in socialistic culture, implicitly borrowing its slighting attitude towards market forms of management: trade, personal economic interest, private enterprise. All these issues are not socially recognized, that’s why general legal regulations and moral principles cannot be applied to them. In other words, home rational economic culture is developing beyond or at least within the border zone of public morality. That’s its main difference from the former bourgeois people’s city culture. The second issue of capitalism in our country brought widespread popularity to bodily economic market practices. New businessmen relied and still rely on a ready-made tradition which had been formed in the home sphere. We are talking about the crossing of everyday, big soviet and criminal traditions. The mechanisms of behavior regulation emerged from the soviet city private sphere. Nowadays they are widely used in big public economic and political social institutions. From the sociological point of view, Perm very much reminds an agglomeration of relatively secluded social communes (local, industrial, and functional). Their peculiarities include inflexible social hierarchy, attachment of individuals to their social positions, direct control, personal contacts. The public of Perm city is enclosed in small cells. From the authors’ point of view, this “enclosure” of social life into closed local communal groups seems to be the dominating tendency which may cause various contradictory consequences. Some Perm institutions, such as representative municipal authorities (Duma and Administration) and local self-governing institutions (OTOS), aim to support the social communality of domiciliaries, but their support is limited. In comparison with western cities, a Perm activist of municipal self-government is a person of “the third age”, having the social position of a pensioner and the social past of an average skilled factory worker or a lower-rank employee (See: Sociological researches, carried out within the project “Prikamie Voter” in 1999-2001. The sample is representative of the total population. Supervisor – O. Leibovitch). On the contrary, Perm businessmen try to stay away from the communal democracy. However, political absenteeism of Perm bourgeois doesn’t prevent them from filling the leading positions in the municipal and regional representative bodies of administration. In this case democratic procedures act only as a decorative cover for some private practices of integration into power. Private forms of power redistribution are based on clan, family-relative and friendly relations and now rule the politics. The primacy of private relation, carried out by the most influential social groups, prevents the formation of a real political city community. Alienation from the new world leads to the mass spreading of certain “parallel practices” which symbolically render some characteristics of soviet life: its ceremonies and rituals, slogans and turns of speech. Local politicians skillfully exploit the sense of social nostalgia and turn each elections into the cultural staging of late socialism. They help their electorate directly (of course, temporarily), thus taking on responsibilities of a social state. In this case an imaginary political community starts to look like a soviet community. The city witnesses a paradoxical situation. Social outsiders are full and active members of the political community built in their image. On the contrary, political outsiders are independent and active, they have a relatively high level of education and at least average incomes, besides, they adopt rational market values. That’s why prescriptions of old Europe, according to which the improvement of economic welfare leads to the development of communal democracy, are not right for Perm. From the economic point of view, Perm population is split into polar social groups. Thus we face a typical social pyramid, characteristic of the early bourgeois industrial society. However, this pyramid is made up of fragile building materials and constructed on a rippled surface of the old socialist world. New social groups haven’t been formed yet, their internal social communications are not lined up, their positions are unstable, they are not generally recognized by their social neighbors and opponents. In other words, a new bourgeois city community hasn’t been instituted. This situation renders (nowadays illusory) self-determination in the gone socialist world with its old statuses, lost positions and prestige. So today Perm is a socialistic type settlement, ruled by the processes of primary bourgeois accumulation. From the social point of view, they imply the polarization of population by economic criterions. The poles are connected with the help of fatherly practices which alienate a considerable part of Perm population from achievements of the city civilization. The spreading of private practices in public life deprives social city life of openness and definiteness. It is now split into disconnected autonomous closed formations, and each of them has its own rules. So today a collection of isolated townsfolk who are trying to solve their individual problems with the help of home-made means make up Perm city community.