Routinization of the New Russians?

Russian Review

Volumn 62, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 15-36

  Balzer, Harley ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247437491     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9434.00261     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. and Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York, 1990)
2. Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman, eds., The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle-class Revolution (London, 1996)
3. Chua Beng-Huat, ed., Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities (London, 2000)
4. A more extensive presentation of this material may be found in Masha Gessen, Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism (London, 1997), 101-10
5. Semen Faibisovich, Russkie novye i nenovye (esse o glavnom) (Moscow, 1999), 9-15 (the article originally appeared in 1994)
6. Yury Rytov, '"New Russians': The Origin of the Species and Its Place in the Social Pyramid. The big Russian capital is gradually becoming civilized," New Times (August 1996): 50-52. Ironically, Rytov based his coverage largely on an article in Forbes
7. This argument is developed in Harley Balzer, "Russia's Self-Denying Middle Class in the Global Age," in Explaining Post-Soviet Patchworks, vol. 1, Actors and Sectors between Accommodation and Resistance to Globalisation, ed. Klaus Segbers (Aldershot, 2001), 366-84
8. For a good early discussion of the role of technical personnel see Masha Gessen, "The New Russians," Wired (available at wired.eom/wired/ archive/3.05/russians_pr.html)
9. This material also appeared in Gessen's Dead Again, chap. 6
10. See also Hedrick Smith, The New Russians (New York, 1990), chap. 13. While many of the new entrepreneurs had worked in science and technology, they did not necessarily make their money from scientific research or engineering. The returns from other types of activity were far greater. For many, the closest they came to technology was importing and selling computers
11. See David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: 2002), which also contains perhaps the best account of the origins of Russia's new elite in the Gorbachev era
12. See also Steve Solnik, Stealing the State (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
13. Pekka Sulkunen, The European New Middle Class: Individuality and Tribalism in Mass Society (Aldershot, 1992)
14. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (Hudson, NY, 1992). Berdyaev also dismissed the idea of any significant bourgeois influence in Russia: "It is a characteristic of Russia, and one which sharply distinguishes her from the West, that there has not been, nor will there be, among us any notable and influential bourgeois ideology" (p. 41)
15. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprint ed. New York, 1953), esp. chap. 3 on "Conspicuous Leisure."
16. Becker, Accounting for Tastes
17. Gary Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment (Cambridge, MA, 2000), esp. chap. 7, "Social Markets and the Escalation of Quality: The World of Veblen Revisited."
18. Becker and Murphy, Social Economics, 91
19. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1984)
20. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 5, Pleasure Wars (New York, 1998), 26
21. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865; reprint ed. New York, 1997), 17
22. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), 3
23. The Washington Post's Robert Kaiser recently retraced his 1971 Trans-Siberian Railroad journey. In Novosibirsk he met a thirty-something banker who has successfully built a local bank to the point where he has opened a Moscow office. Not wishing to leave Akademgorodok, he had to hire Muscovites to run the operation there. He told Kaiser, "The hardest thing was having to hire someone I did not go to school with" (personal communication, October 2001)
24. Caroline Humphrey notes the phenomenon of "New Buriats" in her The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, 2002), 177. Inevitably, anecdotes have appeared about "New Chukchi."
25. Viktor Pelevin, Generation 'II' (Moscow, 2000), 31
26. Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life, 194-98
27. Evgeniia D'iachkova, "Neravenstvo v raspredelenii dokhodov i formirovanie rossiiskogo srednego klassa," Novoe pokolenie 5 (Winter 2000). A number of other studies show that education is the best predictor of protection from unemployment and likelihood of decent salary in most post-Communist countries
28. But for a different view see Theodore Gerber, "Joining the Winners: Self-Employment and Stratification in Post-Soviet Russia," in The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Thomas B. Gold (Armonk, NY, 2002), 3-38
29. "New Schools for New Russian Children," Russia Journal (24 May 1999)
30. On problems resulting from stratification in Russia's educational system see Harley Balzer, "Human Capital and Russian Security in the Twenty-First Century," in Russia after the Fall, ed. Andrew Kuchins (Washington, DC, 2002), 163-84
31. and Balzer, "Demography and Democracy in Russia: Human Capital Challenges to Democratic Consolidation," Demokratizatsiya 10 (Winter 2003)
32. Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York, 2000)
33. Matthew Brzezinski, Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier (New York, 2001)
34. Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York, 2000)
35. A less sensationalized and more useful treatment of similar material is Rose Brady, Kapitalizm: Russia's Struggle to Free Its Economy (New Haven, 1999). Brady includes a chapter specifically on the New Russians
36. Johan Bäckman, "'New Russians' and Social Change," in The Kalamari Union: Middle Class in East and West, ed. Markku Kivinen (Aldershot, 1998), 15-35. Bäckman's data come from ten interviews with New Russian businessmen in St. Petersburg
37. D. H. Holt, D. A. Ralston, and R. H. Terpetra, "Constraints on Capitalism in Russia: The Managerial Psyche, Social Infrastructure and Ideology," California Management Review 36:3 (1994): 124-41
38. For a more academic treatment of this material see Thane Gustafson, Capitalism Russian-Style (Cambridge, England, 1999). Gustafson's chap. 5 on entrepreneurship, and Brady's chap. 3 on "The Rise of the New Russians" (Kapitalizm) both offer good introductions to the entrepreneurial world extending beyond the seven or twelve top oligarchs
39. See also Victoria E. Bonnell, "Russia's New Entrepreneurs," in Russia in the New Century: Stability or Disorder? ed. Bonnell and George W. Breslauer (Boulder, 2001), 175-200
40. Bonnell, "Russia's New Entrepreneurs," 176
41. Harley Balzer, "Russia's Middle Classes," Posi-Soveit Affairs 14:2 (1998): 165-86
42. This section draws on Balzer, "Russia's Self-Denying Middle Class in the Global Age."
43. See also D'iachkova, "Neravenstvo"
44. Rossiia na rubezhe vekov (Moscow, 2000)
45. Srednii Mass v Rossii: Kolichestvennye i kachestvennye otsenki (Moscow, 2000)
46. Srednii klass v sovremennom rossiiskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1999)
47. Eduard G. Bure, ed., Bankovskaia sistema, nalogi i problemy formirovaniia srednego klassa v Rossii: Materialy nauchnoprakticheskoi konferentsii iiun, 2000 g. (St. Petersburg, 2000)
48. and Bure, M. Salazar, and B. V. Gryzlov, eds., Srednii klass v Rossii: Proshloe, nastoiashchee, budushchee (St. Petersburg, 2000)
49. Anders Aslund, "Observations on the Development of Small Private Enterprises in Russia," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 38:4:191-205
50. Nonna Barkhatova, "Russian Small Business, Authorities and State," Europe-Asia Studies 52 (June 2000): 657-76
51. Jan Winiecki, The role of the new, entrepreneurial private sector in transition and economic performance in light of the successes in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, BOFIT Discussion Papers, no. 12 (Helsinki, 2001)
52. Gerber emphasizes the role of the self-employed in the nascent middle class ("Joining the Winners")
53. These were the main complaints voiced by the individuals profiled Itogi (21 April 1998)
54. Matthew Fisher, "New czar faces a daunting job. Can Vladimir Putin stop Russia's slide into the abyss? Can anyone?" Toronto Sun (27 March 2000)
55. Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York, 2000)
56. Lawrence R. Klein and Marshall Pomer, eds., The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry (Stanford, 2001). Most of the contributions are by Russians of distinctly socialist inclinations, but there are three chapters by American Nobel Laureates
57. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, vol. 1, Education of the Senses (New York, 1984), 38
58. Jacques LeGoff argues that the changes began in the Catholic Church even earlier ("Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages," and "Labor Time in the 'Crisis' of the Fourteenth Century: From Medieval Time to Modern Time," both in his Time, Work & Culture in the Middle Ages [Chicago, 1980])
59. Arthur J. Vidich, "Inflation and Social Structure: The United States in an Epoch of Declining Abundance," Social Problems 27:5 (1980)
60. reprinted in Vidich, ed., The New Middle Classes: Life-Styles, Status Claims and Political Orientation (New York, 1995), 364-85
61. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York, 2000)
62. Compare this with David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (New York, 1997), 201
63. On the Nepmen see Alan M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: the Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley, 1987)
64. On the propaganda images see Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997)
65. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 58-62
66. Vadim Radaev, "Entrepreneurial Strategies and the Structure of Transaction Costs in Russian Business,"
67. and Vadim Volkov, "Security and Enforcement As Private Business: The Conversion of Russia's Power Ministries and Its Institutional Consequences," both in The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Thomas B. Gold (Armonk, NY, 2002), 191-212, and 83-103, respectively
68. See also Volkov, "Violent Entrepreneurship in Post-Communist Russia," Europe-Asia Studies 51 (July 1999): 741-54
69. and idem, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, 2002)
70. Helena Goscilo, "Retrieving Chic" (paper delivered at the AAASS National Convention, 1996)
71. On MMM and its advertising campaign see Eliot Borenstein, "Public Offerings: MMM and the Marketing of Melodrama," in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, ed. Adele Marie Barker (Durham, NC, 1999), 49-75. The MMM phenomenon may be instructively compared with Romania's experience
72. See Katherine Verdery, "Faith, Hope and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids, Romania, 1990-1994," in her What Was Socialism and What Comes Next (Princeton, 1996), 168-203
73. As Caroline Humphrey puts it, "the new business people first get English lessons or acquire a Mercury telephone line to the West, and only then branch into conspicuous consumption (which, I am assured, includes an obligatory mistress as well as a wife)" (The Unmaking of Soviet Life, 62)
74. Iuliia Latynina, Stal'noi korol' (Moscow, 2000)
75. idem, Sarancha (Moscow, 2000)
76. Iulii Dubov, Bol'shaia paika (Moscow, 2000). Latynina is a well-known journalist who covers economics and business, and the novels are taken as summaries of material that she could not put in the newspapers. Dubov's novel is billed by the publishers as "the first real novel about Russian business," Dubov's position as general director of Logo VAZ accords him special purchase on the activities of people like Boris Berezovsky. See the discussion by Mark Lipovetsky in this issue
77. "Klass," Ekspert (18 September 2000): 21-28
78. Michael Pinches, "The Philippines' New Rich: Capitalist Transformation Amidst Economic Gloom," in The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle-class Revolution, ed. Richard Robinson and David S. G. Goodman (London, 1996), 105-33
79. Charlotte Ikels, The Return of the God of Wealth: The Transition to a Market Economy in Urban China (Stanford, 1996)
80. Peter Krug, "Russian Public Physicians and Revolution: The Pirogov Society, 1917-1920" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1980)
81. Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson, eds., Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1990)