Abstract
Alexandrina Vanke’s multi-sited ethnographic research based on multi-sensory data is a refreshingly creative contribution to sociology’s long tradition of studies of the working class, and on its own, this makes the work a significant achievement. What is more, Vanke’s study of the everyday ways of life and struggle of urban workers in post-Soviet Russia comes at a time when Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine has much of the world wondering if ‘ordinary’ Russians will offer consequential resistance to their authoritarian state. In large part, this book is Vanke’s response to this question and to the global pressure, blame, and stigma placed on Russian workers who are stereotyped as passive by academics and non-academics alike. Instead, Vanke argues that Russian workers ‘doubly resist’, in political and especially practical, everyday ways, ‘neoliberalism worsening their living standings and neo-authoritarianism leading to increasing control over their lives’ (p. xi).
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is based on an impressive combination of qualitative research projects by Vanke spanning from 2010 to 2022. The data include 53 interviews with workers in industrial neighborhoods in Moscow and Yekaterinburg, 43 interviews of working-class men in St. Petersburg, and further ethnographic observations and participation culminating in hundreds of photos, videos, and pages of notes. The most unique data are the participants’ 41 drawings of the Moscow and Yekaterinburg neighborhoods and 35 drawings of Russian society, with accompanying explanations of their drawings. The visual data allow Vanke, and the reader, a special glance into the ‘sensual and imaginative dimensions of everyday lives and struggles of urban workers and other classed groups’ (p. 17).
The book is intentionally organized so that each chapter can be read in a standalone fashion or in sequence. Part I consists of a single chapter on the theoretical framework and is an excellent resource for academics who share similar research interests. The theoretical framework pivots around several key concepts: (1) structure of feeling, (2) senses, (3) imaginaries, (4) neoliberal neo-authoritarianism, and (5) everyday struggle. The first three concepts are central to Vanke’s novel synthesis of neo-Marxist, neo-Bourdieusian, and intersectional theories of the relationship between individual subjectivity and objective social structures. In short, Vanke pays close attention to the way that multiple and sometimes contradictory social and physical structures of the past and present are related to individual feelings and meaningful visual images people have about the world around them. The latter two concepts serve to characterize the respective modes of power struggle for those at the top and those at the bottom of Russian society. Drawing on Foucault and neo-Marxist scholars, Vanke argues that the neo-authoritarian Russian state excludes ‘ordinary’ Russians from political power while its neoliberal policies produce precarity among them. Since fear of repression tends to thwart open political protest, Russian workers often resist through more covert forms of everyday struggle instead. Everyday struggle includes neighborhood beautification efforts, informal economic activities, and other ‘practical activities of working-class and other subordinate people’ that help them build power collectively from below (p. 45). In the vein of James Scott and other neo-Marxist rethinkings of class struggle, Vanke argues that the everyday struggle of workers and others is a form of double resistance to neoliberalism and neo-authoritarianism that contributes to the formation of class consciousness in a political and practical form. Readers will be pleased to find two helpful theoretical sketches by the author that put all the conceptual pieces from this chapter together into a coherent visual representation.
Part II contains four chapters that immerse the reader in the ways of life of urban workers. Chapter 2 examines how structures of feeling in Moscow and Yekaterinburg shape how people sense and imagine their neighborhoods. Readers will surely be impressed with the multi-sensory data and Vanke’s analyses of them, such as her finding that Moscow participants portray their neighborhood as ‘more dynamic compared to the more static images of the Yekaterinburg’ neighborhood, which is interpreted as evidence of how Moscow residents feel the ‘time-space compression’ resulting from greater neoliberal development in their neighborhood (p. 73). Chapter 3 looks at how gender frames the social and spatial divisions among workers, from masculine drinking rituals in the pub (and in the workplace), to feminine domestic labor in the kitchen and in workshops, to gendered craft exhibits where working-class folks reappropriate moral worth by displaying culturally valued craft items (p. 94). In Chapter 4, Vanke explores the moral symbols and meanings attached to different class categories. She finds an interesting constellation of attitudes: workers have been devalued in the post-Soviet era; migrant workers are purportedly viewed ambivalently or pragmatically; Russian workers are less likely than their Western counterparts to distance themselves from the poor due to their Soviet heritage; workers look askance at upper classes as antisocial or criminal; and the middle classes are viewed with respect, but mostly overlooked. The final chapter of Part II investigates how participants imagine Russian society by analyzing their drawings of Russian society. Vanke argues that there are three recurring themes in how people expressed their sense of inequality and social justice within Russian society: compliance with the established order, challenging power through irony, and subverting power through class struggle (p. 135). In the main, what emerges from this part of the book is a detailed description of the manifold ways Russian workers draw moral boundaries and achieve a sense of dignity that adds in new ways to Michèle Lamont-esque studies of workers.
Part III has two chapters that take up the issue of struggle in the form of openly political protests and everyday practical activity. In Chapter 6, Vanke demonstrates how political consciousness is formed through protest activity such as an anti-migrant riot, labor protests, trade union activity, and a protest against pension reform. While Russians do participate in protests it has become riskier to do so in recent years, leading to a decline in protests and forcing workers to rely more on safer forms of everyday struggle. Chapter 7 illuminates the types of everyday struggle that are at the heart of Vanke’s argument against dominant understandings of Russia’s working class as an inactive entity. Here, the reader will learn how ‘ordinary’ Russians build power from below and improve their lives through their efforts in collective neighborhood cleanings, housing and communal art, urban gardening, and alternative economic activities such as working-class women co-running a hairdressing salon together to escape the tyranny of their former male boss. By reshaping their material environments, community ties, and individual consciousnesses through their actions, workers participate in creative forms of ‘double resistance’ against declining living standards and political disempowerment (p. 200). These findings add a new dimension to the field of research on everyday forms of resistance popularized by Scott.
On the one hand, Vanke succeeds in making the case that despite popular stereotypes, Russia’s workers are not passive or slumbering. They are actively engaged in everyday struggle. This, combined with the creative methodologies employed, is the main strength of the work. On the whole, the book provides a humanizing close-up of post-Soviet Russian workers actively shaping their lives and surroundings in their specific urban context.
On the other hand, it is because Vanke’s humanizing research is so successful that her argument falters. In arguing against the stereotype of the passive worker, the pendulum swings too far in the other direction toward the stereotype of the resistant worker. The opposite of passivity is activity, and Vanke certainly shows that workers are active, but this activity figures to be an obstacle to resisting domination and deprivation at least as often as it is a way of resisting them. While Vanke clearly and repeatedly argues that there are top-down, ‘objective barriers to workers and other subordinate groups making changes at the level of the established order of power’, the bottom-up, subjective barriers to social change such as nativist attitudes and gender divisions are not sufficiently incorporated into the overall argument or theorization about the relationship between Russia’s working class and the potential for social transformation (p. 202). This is despite the fact that these two social divisions are two of the most consistent phenomena in Vanke’s findings. Indeed, while ‘fear of repressions’ was mentioned by 5 out of 53 participants, ‘migrant workers’ were mentioned 34 times by 13 out of 25 Moscow residents and ‘less frequently’ by the Yekaterinburg residents (p. 45, 109). The bulk of the mentions of migrants are unequivocally xenophobic and are an obstacle to progressive social change, which is exemplified by an anti-migrant riot participant who ‘showing xenophobia toward migrants, criticised those protesting corruption’ (p. 196). In addition, gendered spaces are sites of everyday, working-class struggle that build power on an intra-gender basis, but they are therefore simultaneously obstacles to working-class struggle and power on the basis of unity across genders.
In the Epilogue, Vanke notes that her writing style ‘aims to engage the reader in a dialogue with the author regarding what she argues’ (p. 204). I am grateful for the opportunity to engage in that dialogue here and strongly recommend that anyone with a remote interest in the topics discussed in this review engage in their own dialogue with Vanke’s arguments.