The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle (published by Manchester University Press in 2024) by Alexandra Vanke is an innovative and textured engagement with the world of the working class in the post-industrial cities of Russia. Combining over a decade’s worth of ethnographic research with multi-sensory data and arts-based methods, Vanke tries to capture the complexities of working-class life in the broader context of socio-economic and political transition.
Right at the outset, Vanke lays out the questions that led her to write this book- all connected to negative depictions of the working class in mainstream discourse and how they come to be dismissed or treated with contempt with regard to their role in society. While this is certainly not a novel concern, it is a timely one, especially in light of global political developments recently that have led to the working class being put under scrutiny by the elite for enabling authoritarian political shifts.
Russia as the setting for this study becomes significant on two accounts. Firstly, due to the complexity of the current regime of governmentality, described by Vanke as ‘neoliberal neo-authoritarianism,’ which has degraded the life and living conditions of the working class. Secondly, due to Russia’s aggression on Ukraine has put into question the role of ‘ordinary folk’ in enabling and resisting violence. As a result, not only are the working class subjected to narratives of blaming and shaming, but they also face real material deprivation as targets of Western sanctions.
Vanke argues that the workers ‘doubly resist’ neoliberalism and neo-authoritarianism. She turns to the framework of the ‘every day,’ recognizing it as an important site and tool to unpack the struggles, negotiations and micro-practices that allow for creative forms of resistance and pockets of possibility for counter-power. The use of the ‘everyday’ framework always carries the risk of depoliticizing everyday life and making it simply an object of cultural analysis. However, Vanke tries to tread this line carefully by emphasising how the political is inseparable from the practical, and how the agency and actions of workers are rooted in their ways of life, shaped by socio-material conditions, under systems of power.
Guided by an eclectic mix of concepts, including Raymond Williams’ structure of feeling, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, Doreen Massey’s sense of place, Edward Thompson’s class consciousness and James Scott’s everyday resistance, the author advances a theory of the every day that emphasises the interrelationship between senses, imaginaries and practical experiences within physical space, in this case within the deindustrialising city.
Situating her study between neo-Marxist and neo-Bourdieusian approaches to class and inequality, Vanke contends that for workers, the act of having to navigate everyday challenges and deprivations helps constitute a practical sort of consciousness. This consciousness and the collective action that it enables are informed by an ensemble of senses as well as socio-spatial and historical imaginaries.
She anchors her arguments in her study of two neighbourhoods, which during industrialisation served as workers’ settlements- the Yekaterinburg neighbourhood, located around a large plant, and the Moscow neighbourhood, situated between two railway lines. In both these cases, it becomes apparent that the coexistence and tensions between, residual Soviet (industrial/socialist) and emergent post-soviet (deindustrial/neoliberal) structures significantly shape both neighbourhoods. Moreover, these urban workers in imagining the future of their neighbourhoods draw on residual infrastructure and structures of feeling from the soviet era which they associate with values of community, togetherness, and a sense of being ‘ours’.
While the first part of the book fleshes out these theoretical discussions, the second looks at the ways gender, race and age as well as moral and symbolic boundaries mediate one’s sense of place and everyday experiences of inequality in working-class neighbourhoods. It examines how the changes in social stratification from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era, marked by widening inequality and precarisation, have led to the symbolic devaluation of workers. This has compelled them to reimagine class and class struggle within a neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime. The third and final part discusses the creative aspects of everyday struggle that form the workers’ disposition of resistance in the absence of union infrastructure, institutions, and possibilities for open protests. This ranges from urban gardening to the creation of alternate/informal economies, to non-payment of taxes and non-participation in military mobilisation, etc.
While the book is an impressive assemblage of textual, visual and performative elements, one concern is that the discussion at times feels constrained by the questions framing the research. This has occasionally led to repetitive and one-dimensional arguments, which stand in contrast to the study’s rich findings, leaving more to be desired.
Nevertheless, by delving into the messy linkages between imaginations of the past, present and future, the book opens up a different terrain of thinking about political action- one often overshadowed by elite politics. At its core, it underscores the idea that resistance can never be confined to those who explicitly gather and act in its name.
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Arpita Rachel Abraham is currently an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.