Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States

Societies on the Move

K. Burrell, K. Hörschelmann, K. Burrell, K. Hörschelmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137267283
• eBook ISBN: 9781137267290
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

This interdisciplinary collection explores what mobility meant, and still means, in the specific contexts of Soviet and East European socialist and post-socialist societies. Together the chapters consider diverse practices of mobility and their different contexts of power, resistance and inequality.

1

Introduction: Understanding Mobility in Soviet and East European Socialist and Post-Socialist States

Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Hörschelmann

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 it was interpreted by many as the dawn of a new era of unrestricted travel and free movement for socialist citizens who had been prevented until then from exercising those freedoms by an authoritarian political regime. Cold War understandings of socialism and capitalist market economies as two diametrically opposed systems led many to assume that mobility and freedom of travel were the preserve of citizens of western states, while socialist governments on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain lacked both the means and the political will to enable modern forms of travel, transport and communication.

This volume challenges this assumption by considering the significance of mobility for socialist interpretations of modernity, and the specific implementation and practical re-working of different mobility constellations in states that were part of the Soviet and East European socialist sphere until 1989/90. The authors of this edited collection trace a plurality of mobility practices, policies and constellations in and between socialist states and show that post-socialist mobilities likewise confound many assumptions about progress in twenty-first century post-modernity.

The volume arises from the realization that the wide ranging, interdisciplinary area of socialist and post-socialist studies and the now established mobilities ‘paradigm’ are two areas of interest which, while hitherto relatively distinct, can be brought together very fruitfully. On the one hand, to a large extent it has been their particular management and development of mobilities which have given socialist and post-socialist societies their shape. On the other, socialist and post-socialist societies – in this volume focusing on examples from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – offer rich, grounded case studies for the exploration of the peculiarities of different mobility regimes. Investigations of ‘actually existing’ socialisms and post-socialisms can lead to greater understandings of ‘actually existing’ mobilities, and vice versa.

Bringing these fields together stimulates debate and further reflection on two key questions: how do we understand mobility itself, and, as socialism saw itself as a fundamentally ‘modern’ ideology (see Pence and Betts 2008), how is it related to modernity? The first of these, mobility, is fascinating because it is all about the nuts and bolts of everyday life – how, where and why people move around – and how this mobility is both enacted in practice and represented in words, images and imaginations (Adey 2009). The so-called ‘mobilities turn’, has spawned a wave of thought-provoking research projects which have placed human mobility at the heart of geographical, social, corporeal and material experiences (Urry 2007; Hannan et al. 2006; Merriman 2004; Bissell 2010; Adey 2010; Norris 2008). What has been particularly exciting about mobilities research is the new focus it has brought on the complex entanglements of materials, objects and people, in what Cresswell (2010: 26) terms ‘constellations of mobility’, providing a prism through which the politics of managing and contesting such constellations becomes more transparent, more obviously related to specific moments and periods in time-space, with the role of embodied practice emphasized. Further, in highlighting the co-presences of human and non-human bodies and cultural imaginations in the production of mobilities, the materiality of social life has been foregrounded (Urry 2002, 2007; Adey 2006, 2010). The relevance of material-social relations for understanding particular constellations of power and politics is revealed, but so too is the recalcitrance of objects, materialities and social subjects which necessitate much of those politics, even as they are often distinctly disinterested in them (Latour 2000). As will be discussed, it is this material recalcitrance, as related to mobility, which resonates especially with the lived experiences of mobility in Soviet and Eastern European socialist societies.

Rather than movement per se, mobility is about both substance and meaning (Cresswell 2006). This is where the relevance of a focus on mobilities for socialist and post-socialist studies really stands out (cf. Lemon 2000). Mobility in socialist societies carried major ideological significance and its promotion as a marker of modernity by the state brought about particular articulations of power, politics, materiality, human agency and imagination that shaped both people’s experiences of ‘actually existing’ socialism and their understandings of the limits and possibilities for action within the regime. Thus, as several authors in this volume demonstrate, the enhancements in transport and communication systems that state socialist regimes implemented from the 1930s onwards were experienced as significant improvements and enjoyed by many, yet restrictions on travel to capitalist states, the awareness of state surveillance and frustrations with the inefficiencies of ailing transport infrastructures also moved many to question the optimistic claims of political leaders and necessitated quasi-illegal, subversive practices that were often even tolerated by the state. Just as specific constellations of power and politics shaped disparate experiences of mobility in socialist societies, however, so today mobility carries politically charged connotations and it has become an experiential domain through which people evaluate the changes that have ensued since 1989 (see below). Socialist and post-socialist studies are therefore well placed to explore the relationship between power and mobility. De Certeau’s (1984) distinctions between ‘strategy’ (emanating, for instance, from the state) and ‘tactics’ (i.e., citizen responses to this strategy), offers a useful framework for understanding constellations of power and mobility in socialist and post-socialist contexts. In the words of Cresswell (2006: 48), ‘De Certeau’s mobilization of forms of mobility as against the power which comes with fixity is symptomatic of a wider move to invest mobility with subversive meanings’. With their expansive attempts to control and ‘fix’ the various mobilities of their citizens – not unlike Foucault’s (1977) observations on panopticism – socialist states especially opened up mobility as a front in resistances which ranged from activities such as using alternative networks to acquire parts for cars, through to full-scale cross border defection. A ‘state verses citizen’ dynamic, of course, is an oversimplification of the structure of regimes which very often could not fix the mobilities of their people in the face of the stubbornness of the mobile human body or the unwieldiness of new technologies and infrastructures. Nor does it enable clarity over who was doing this fixing and who was resisting it. An analysis of mobility and power as mutually enforcing/conflicting forces, however, is an invaluable starting point for appreciating how deeply political any kind of mobility practice could be in socialist states and indeed in the post-Cold War world in general. As Dietzsch shows in Chapter 12, it also provokes a more careful examination of the power-knowledge constellations that uphold contemporary logics of mobility and of the possibilities for resisting them.

One of the prevailing preoccupations within the field of mobilities studies is social change – transport and climate change, to take one example. It is here that we see the merging of mobilities with our second point of interest – modernity. Mobility is apparently symptomatic of the ‘modern age’. Popular and scientific discourses of modernity frequently adopt a binary time-space perspective whereby (late) modernity is associated with an unsettling increase in speed, mobility, complexity and change (Berman 1983; Bauman 2000), while stasis, slowness and immobility are ascribed to social and cultural ‘others’ living ‘elsewhere’, whose conditions of life change only gradually or at the hands of intervening forces (Adey 2006). Whether these others are romanticized, treated as inferior, or both, in this time-space construction it none the less seems as though speed, movement and radical change are the preserve of advanced capitalist societies in the global North, and particularly their hyper-mobile elites, while others are stuck in a slow moving, less complex past (Kaplan 1996; Cresswell 2010; Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Chiming with feminist and post-colonial critiques of the binary frameworks and exclusions entailed in value-laden associations of modernity with speed, movement, complexity and rapid change, recent scholarship in socialist and post-socialist studies has questioned the validity of such binary chronological models for explaining the diversity of ways in which time and space were modulated, experienced and culturally framed in socialist societies. Analysts of post-socialist transformations in particular have further pointed out that the divergence in paths of ‘transition’ cannot be understood through an ordered, unidirectional chronological lens (Pickles and Smith 1998; Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008; Hörschelmann 2002).

Socialist/post-socialist scholars also need to be careful not to fetishize socialist and post-socialist societies. As Hann (2002: 9) argues, some developments within socialist/post-socialist countries have mirrored those unfolding in other places, under other regimes. The growth of new technologies, for example, and how best to both acquire and control them, could perhaps be considered a universal challenge. Writing at the time of revelations about the extent of NSA (US) and GCHQ (UK) spying, it hardly seems justified to cast Soviet style spying desires – if not techniques – as from another age. Likewise, in a world preoccupied with terrorism and increasingly concerned with austerity politics and ‘protecting’ national welfare systems, international controls of the movement of people are arguably growing rather than receding. As Cresswell (2006: 49) points out, the whole being of states – even ‘western’ ones – is tied up with the control of mobility in various guises, a point as valid for post-modernity as modernity.

Ideas generated through debates about mobility, then, can deepen analyses and understandings of socialist and post-socialist societies. The focus on mobilities, on the contingent relations between different mobilities, on different cultural frameworks for understanding mobilities, and on the power relations they entail, can produce rich insights into the politics and diverse experiences and perceptions of ‘really-existing’ socialisms and post-socialisms. Perhaps most importantly, instead of the western centric distinction between static and slow-moving socialist regimes on the one hand and rapid post-socialist transitions towards hyper-mobile, liquid modernities on the other (see Macnaghten and Urry 1998; Bauman 2000; Castells 2010), this book seeks to highlight the centrality of mobility to Soviet sphere socialist ideologies of modernity, to the material-political construction of socialist economies, geographies, social relations and life-worlds to the everyday experience of socialism, and to contestations of socialist state politics. Not only does this recognition make it easier to identify continuities between socialist and post-socialist mobilities and relations across the Iron Curtain, but it also underlines the relevance of cultural understandings of mobility and capitalist modernity for people’s assessments of the apparent successes and failures of post-socialist transformations. The diversity of experiences and the inequalities produced by post-socialist transformations along different pathways (Stark and Bruszt 2001; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Bradshaw and Stenning 2004; Hann 2004; Smith and Timár 2010) can be more fully appreciated through a focus on the differential mobilities which have been produced.

Constellations of socialist mobility: power, practice, materiality and scale

Mobility was central to socialist politics, economics, ideology and everyday life. Metaphorically, the ideological commitment to ‘progress towards a better future’ in itself implies a focus on different types of enabling mobilities. Tangibly, the energetic, and collective, road building projects of socialist Albania offer a good illustration of this (Dalakoglou 2012).The expansionist ambitions of the Soviet state, furthermore, meant that vast resources of labour, finance, technology and materials were invested in mobility projects to enable access to previously relatively inaccessible places and regions, particularly in Siberia, the Far East, and the Arctic North, for resource exploitation. Some have suggested that this Soviet expansionism was not unlike colonialism, involving comparable structures of oppression (Verdery 2004). Certainly, without the enormous carceral economy of Soviet socialism, and the forced labour of many, it is unlikely that this expansion would have been possible. While this particular ‘assemblage’ of political power, embodied labour and materiality was unique to socialism, it shows why a political understanding of mobilities is indispensable and why, perhaps, current analyses remain too tame and silent on the oppressions which are entailed in the very establishment of mobility infrastructures. Critiques have centred on differential access to, and experiences of, mobility but the exploitative relations which made (and still make) the expansion of mobility possible are too rarely addressed. Globally, today, some of the most high-profile infrastructure projects (e.g., for major sporting events) rely on the poorly paid labour of millions of workers whose labour is part of the ‘moorings’ on which mobility relies.

In Russia, these forced labourers were increasingly joined by those who settled in the ‘new’ territories as a result of a system of incentives and rewards. Their migration and resettlement led not only to new needs for travel infrastructures to complement the transportation of goods and materials, but also the extension and maintenance of new communication systems. Enabling the social relations and co-presences that Urry (2002, 2007) regards as a key component of mobility, across the vast distances of the Soviet empire, became a major challenge for the socialist regime. The complex coordination of networked socialist economies, the maintenance of spatially expansive hegemonic ideologies of socialism and the reconciliation of socialist biopolitics with the needs and desires of populations relied on the establishment and maintenance of an enabling communications infrastructure. The latter, however, also created new pressures on the system, as control was made both possible and more difficult to achieve (see Zakharova, Chapter 2).

Communications and transport infrastructures became neuralgic points which highlighted and co-produced many of the inequalities and inefficiencies of the socialist system. Rail, road and air travel thus required ‘mooring’ through maintenance and coordination, which an ailing socialist economy struggled to deliver. The extension of mobility infrastructures and communication systems that was such a crucial plank in the ideological scaffolding of socialist modernity thus became one of its major stumbling blocks. It could be argued that one of the main failures of the socialist system was its inability to sustain the investment and labour required to ‘moor’ its mobility systems over time – to maintain and not just establish its physical infrastructure, to respond to the inevitable deterioration of its recalcitrant materiality (Latour 2000), and to manage changes in technologies as well as in socio-cultural expectations that the system partly provoked through its promotion of growth-focused modernity, as new mobilities also enabled the spread of ideas and new practices beyond the complete control of state power. Contradictions inherent in the socialist political economy were thus both reflected in, and produced by its dominant mobility constellations. While the successful launches of Sputnik and Soyus into space (see Maurer et al. 2011) were staged ideologically as representations of the apparently unstoppable progress of Soviet socialism, realities closer to the ground departed significantly from this glittering image, as people often experienced time as slowing right down in activities such as queuing for even basic commodities (see Verdery 1996) or coping with unreliable trains or badly maintained roads. Zakharova (Chapter 2) explains, for instance, that in post-Stalinist Russia some communities in newly industrialized parts of the North and Far East became completely cut-off during the rainy seasons as roads became muddy and impassable. The contrast between spectacular and everyday realities of mobility, therefore, contributed to the erosion of public trust in socialist regimes and the legitimacy of their ruling elites.

Accumulating disruptions in the flows of people, information, material resources and goods created pressures on other parts of the socialist economy, politics and society that helped to ‘unmoor’ socialist relations. Increasingly, state authorities had to rely on informal social practices of ‘mooring’ that were a response to, needed by, but also undermining of socialist social and economic relations. Thus, while the voluntary labour of garage owners described by Tuvikene in this volume became the glue which held an otherwise failing automobile system together, it also provided new spaces for socializing and individual mobility. Likewise, Zakharova (Chapter 2) shows that communicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Understanding Mobility in Soviet and East European Socialist and Post-Socialist States
• 2  Communication, Mobility and Control in the Soviet Union after World War II
• 3  Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 196489
• 4  Leisure and Politics: Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain
• 5  Between Limits, Lures and Excitement: Socialist Romanian Holidays Abroad during the 1960s80s
• 6  Mooring in Socialist Automobility: Garage Areas
• 7  Women Here Are Like at the Time of Enver [Hoxha]: Socialist and Post-Socialist Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society
• 8  The View from the Back of the Warrior: Mobility, Privilege and Power during the International Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 9  Travel and the State after the Fall: Everyday Modes of Transport in Post-Socialist Serbia
• 10  Urban Public Transport and the State in Post-Soviet Central Asia
• 11  Geography of Daily Mobilities in Post-Socialist European Countries: Evidence from Slovenia
• 12  Life-Worlds of Deceleration: Reflections on the New Mobilities Paradigm through Ethnographic Research in Post-Socialist Germany
• Index