Postsocialism

Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe

Maruška Svašek, Maruška Svašek

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780857455598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In many parts of post-socialist Europe the tumultuous political and economic developments have generated strong emotions, ranging from hope and euphoria to disappointment, envy, disillusionment, sorrow, loneliness, and hatred. Yet these aspects have been largely neglected in analyses of the profound transformations that have taken place in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990. Based on a wide variety of ethnographic case studies focusing on Russian, Siberian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, and Polish communities, this volume proves the significance of emotions to post-socialist political processes as an inherent part of the transformations and sheds new light on the impact of local, national, and transnational political forces that have given rise to the resurgence of nationalist sentiments, increasing poverty and marginalization, conflicts arising from the restitution of state property, constitutional changes, and economic deprivation.

Chapter 1

Nostalgia and the Emotional
Economy: a Comparative
Look at Rural Russia

Patrick Heady and Liesl L. Gambold Miller

An emotion that emerges again and again in accounts of the postsocialist world is nostalgia. In many countries large parts of the population are prone to claim, with obvious feeling, that this or that aspect of life was better before the collapse of the communist regimes. A full understanding of the specific characteristics of postsocialist emotional life requires, therefore, a conception of the sources and functions of nostalgia. Anthropologists are well placed to investigate this question, since ethnographic techniques of in-depth interviewing and participant observation are ideally suited to gather both the content of memories and the variety of ways they are deployed in contemporary social life.

However, the exercise of collecting and interpreting these data highlights a radical difference between the ways in which nostalgic memories are understood in the local society, and the ways in which they are commonly analysed by anthropologists. For local people one of the key points about nostalgic memories is that they are true, or at least an aspect of the truth. Anthropologists, on the other hand, often consider the truth or otherwise of these memories as a secondary matter, preferring to focus on the way they are deployed in the contemporary context. In a sense anthropologists treat memories as Malinowski treated myths, as charters for contemporary claims (Malinowski 1978 [1935]: 341–51). For instance, they can be seen as a source of ‘emotional capital’, drawing on the analogy with Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984) concepts of ‘symbolic’ and ‘social’ capital, but stressing the extra impact that emotional discourse can give to such claims (Skrbiš 2002).

We do not want to dispute the validity of these analyses, but we do want to dispute their completeness. Our arguments centre round the question of the truth of nostalgic memories. An individual who is playing on nostalgic sentiments to advance a claim may not be particularly concerned with whether his nostalgic claims are true or not. Nevertheless, it is important even to him that his audience should believe in their essential truth – since the emotional effect he is trying to evoke depends on the mutual acceptance of the authenticity of shared memories. Memory can be seen as ‘individual knowledge of the past, as distinct from institutionalised memories, or history’, which gives it a living quality (Wanner 1998: 37). Shared memories represent the cognitive maps that communities have and validate those personal memories informing daily decisions.

In connection with this we want to make two points. The first of these is comparatively simple: that the relatively impersonal claims in people’s nostalgic accounts are often true, and easily shown to be so. The second is rather more complex and relates to the frequent nostalgic assertions that personal relationships were better in the past, that people were more spontaneously friendly and also more practically helpful. These claims are not only almost impossible to verify directly, they often seem inherently improbable or even contradictory. Nevertheless, we want to argue that claims about worsening personal relationships may often be true to people’s actual experience.

The factual basis of our argument will be set out below, but the underlying theoretical point can be stated here. This is that participation in economic activity requires not merely mental and physical effort and a rational expectation of gain, but also an appropriate emotional orientation towards the work and towards those with whom one is cooperating or competing. If the organisation of economic activity changes rapidly it disrupts this pattern of emotionally meaningful practical relationships, leading to a sense of violated expectations and emotional loss.

The assertion that emotions are central to the everyday functioning of economic life runs counter to the dominant academic tradition. This tradition, embodied in formal economics, has emphasised rational choice alone. Starting from the work of Adam Smith, the approach has been to assume instrumentally rational actors operating under objective constraints, and to try and deduce from this assumption both explanations of observed behaviour and recommendations as to the set of policies (on tax, tariffs, regulation, property etc.) that would maximise the welfare of particular groups or of society as a whole. This framework is common to classical economics (Ricardo, Marx), the marginalist revolution of neoclassical economics (Jevons, Marshall), the work of Keynes, and most contemporary economic theory¹. Most relevantly in the present context, it includes the deductive use of games theory to attack the idea of collective property (Hardin 1968).

However, side by side with formal economics there has been another tradition, not so dominant but refusing to disappear entirely, which encases instrumental rationality within a larger frame of less calculating motives. This tradition stretches from Hume, who derived property institutions from rational self-interest but emphasised the importance of mutual sympathy in maintaining support for them (Hume 1978 [1739–40]: 526, 575–78, 618–19), to the recent boom in experimental game theoretic studies in which hypotheses of self-centred rationality are tested (and usually rejected) rather than simply assumed (Henrich et al. 2001), to Putnam’s (1994) version of social capital theory.²

Some of the most stimulating contributions to this tradition have come from social and cultural anthropologists, or from sociologists who have drawn on and influenced anthropological work. Weber argued that any project of rationalisation must rest on irrational premises. He suggested that there were ‘elective affinities’ between specific kinds of economic activity and particular religious views, as a result of which work becomes a way of meeting emotional needs generated by a particular religious view, and vice versa (Weber 1991 [1915], especially pp. 282–84). Durkheim and Mauss were preoccupied with the ways in which individualistic motives could be reconciled with collective solidarity (both in the sense of cooperation and in the sense of emotional commitment to the group). Their related, but distinct, approaches were exemplified in Durkheim’s (1984 [1893]) study of the division of labour in society in which he posited alternative patterns of solidary relationships, and in Mauss’s studies of seasonal variations of the Eskimo (Mauss and Beuchat 1979 [1905]) and the gift (Mauss 2002 [1923]), which offered rather more subtle explorations of the interaction between individualistic, competitive and solidary motives.

Anthropology needs to develop a fuller account of the relationship between emotions, social life and economic organisation, and we believe that the outline of such an account already exists in this tradition of sociological and anthropological analysis. However, for present purposes we simply wish to draw on this tradition in a rather simple way. A key idea that we take from all these contributions is that people have to manage both their emotions and their practical lives. The way they manage the one interacts with the way they handle the other. In both cases the experience concerned (practical reality or emotion) is partly subject to, and partly outside, their conscious control. Among the emotions intrinsic to economic life are both individualistic ones of ambition and self-interest, and also the more social emotions of shared experience and fellow feeling. The particular way these motives are balanced and contrasted will differ according to the kind of economic organisation. We will argue that a key to understanding the emotional effect of the transition from a collective to a more individualistic pattern of economic organisation is the role played by emotions of mutual sympathy, and the contexts in which people feel able to act on them.

We use the expression ‘emotional economy’ to refer to these systems of economically significant emotional relationships, and will return to this topic later on in the paper. But first we will expose the reader to a blast of nostalgia, followed by an analysis of how much of it corresponds with ascertainable facts.

In this article, we will draw on the following fieldwork experience. Liesl Gambold Miller worked in Moshkino, a village in Nizhegorodskaya Oblast, to the east of Moscow, for a year in 1997–98, returning for a five-week visit in the summer of 2002. Patrick Heady has carried out four months of fieldwork in Russia. In 2002 he spent ten weeks, split between early spring and late summer, in the village of Listnoe,³ in Lipetsk Oblast, about 400 kilometres south of Moscow.

Nostalgia for the Past in a Village in North-central Russia

Sasha stands in a blue-and-white striped tank top and black sweatpants weeding and picking the ‘Colorado’ bugs from around the strawberries. He’s gained a little weight around the middle in the four years since we last met. His beard is bright red and stands out against his dark hair. He shuffles away on his bad leg, stiff and awkward, washes his hands and sits on a bench in the shade near the house. I sit with him and his elderly aunt with whom he now lives and they quickly fill me in on how life has been in the village over the past few years. Nadia describes her failing health and the exodus of young people from the village, then shrugs in exasperation, ‘Things were so much better, and stronger before. If the kolkhoz were back it would be so much better. We could even earn some money!’ When asked what she misses most about the Soviet Union, she wrings her hands and says, ‘I miss everything from before, when the USSR was together. It was all much better. We in the countryside were stronger. Now we are all weak. We went from being a strong farm to being no farm. Everything suddenly disappeared, and now we have only each other.’

Nadia’s lament was not surprising or new. Her sentiments were echoed by many of the villagers of Moshkino when Liesl Gambold Miller (LGM) lived and worked there from 1997 to 1998. At that time, however, many were still holding on to optimism about the prospects for independent farming and the potential their former collective farm had in the privatised agricultural economy. The pensioners were most critical early on, for they recognised their own limited opportunities in the free market system. But now, four years later, it seemed that the spirit in the village had not risen, but had soured. Everywhere villagers were toiling away in their gardens – not because they took great pride in their large harvests of vegetables and fruits, to be stored in the root cellar, canned or pickled – but because they were now almost entirely dependent on their gardens for subsistence.

Valya oversees the storage and distribution of grain on the Moshkinskoe farm, and monitors the petrol used by the tractor drivers. For her work she receives a small wage on top of her pension.⁴ She also sells milk regularly in Gorodets, the town fifteen kilometres away. Valya was disappointed by the way the farm was struggling. She had felt proud of the collective throughout her life and now wondered how they could continue. She said, ‘It used to be a really good kolkhoz, Maxim Gorky. We were very strong. My uncle used to be the head of the kolkhoz and he was a good, strong leader. I thought we would have such a strong farm again. As it turned out, we aren’t so great.’Valya’s concerns aren’t only with the farming operations. She, and others, feel that people in the village have become more selfish. Valya said that everything during communist times was better, ‘. . . the economy was better and people were more friendly. Now people are angry at one another. People used to help one another and now people are like beasts [kak zveri]!’ Dmitri is fifty-three years old and works in a timber factory but lives in Moshkino. He worked for the collective until 1994 when he was let go because of the restructuring process. He has no particular skills or training in agriculture and couldn’t find a position on the newly reorganised farm. He said, ‘People have changed. They think differently now. We see each other rarely so we don’t help each other as much as we used to. If I need to borrow money, like 1000 roubles, I can ask everyone and no one will give me the money. People aren’t as friendly as they used to be. They don’t feel sympathy [nye simpatichen] for one another.’

These sentiments about people being less friendly, more calculating, and less sympathetic are echoed throughout Moshkino. Villagers of all ages claim that the general feeling in the community is more isolating (chuvstvo izolyatsii) and suspicious (podozritelny) than it was before (see also Mihaylova, Chapter 2, for a case study of increasing isolation and marginalisation in Bulgaria). People reminisce about how they used to visit one another and drink together. Asked why they don’t visit one another as much any more, one thirty-four-year-old woman said, ‘Everyone is too busy trying to survive. We have to work all the time now.’

Despite this, the villagers do not assert that all personal relationships at present are unsatisfactory. All of the twenty-three households interviewed by LGM in 2002 said that their neighbours were very helpful and ‘good people’. Nor do they claim that everything in the past organisation of collective farms was wonderful. Many admit that their past was not without struggles and hardships, placed on them by the Soviet government. Dmitri talked about being a child on the collective farm. He was not full of praise for the kolkhoz but couldn’t completely disregard its allure either.

Dmitri’s mother had six children and woke at 4 a.m. each day to prepare breakfast, tend to the domestic animals and prepare for work on the kolkhoz. Dmitri said that he remembers the head of the collective coming to their house to find out why his mother was late for work. She explained that she had to finish cooking. The chairman then grabbed a pan of water and threw it onto her fire, saying ‘I guess you’re done cooking now – come to work!’ But even Dmitri says that, ‘Everything is relative. We used to have a different system and I can’t say everything was great but I can’t say that about these times either. I think something is wrong now too. Really wrong. If I need help I only have God and myself’.

The positive evaluation of collective, as opposed to individualistic, activity colours perceptions of the opportunities opened by the recent reforms, even in the case of people who were initially willing to give the reforms a chance. Sasha, whom we met at the start of this section, typifies this attitude. In 1997 he had said, ‘I’m just a horse worker. I don’t know what they are going to do in there [gesturing toward the farm offices]. But I think that now we really have a chance to do well. Maybe we can grow and be an even stronger farm. Everyone would do better. That would be ok with me!’ Five years later Sasha was not at all optimistic. ‘I’m done. I can’t work anymore, and even if I could it wouldn’t matter. The farm doesn’t work, everyone is suffering and we don’t even know what will happen. Thank God we have our garden and I have my pension and I can still walk.’ Interestingly, Sasha’s optimistic feelings about the potential for private farming in Russia were never about his own possible gains. In many conversations he referred to the farm growing, strengthening or enlarging, but never himself becoming a private farmer or becoming wealthy.

The emotional ties to collective property in Moshkino were all the stronger because collective organisation was still perceived as economically essential. In the late 1990s, the villagers were less concerned with who actually ‘owned’ the land than with how work was organised and decisions were made in the village. In fact, questions of ‘ownership’ were often viewed as inconsequential since very few villagers actually felt as though they were ‘owners’ of anything other than their house and their personal gardens (for a discussion of changing notions of ownership in Czech village contexts, see Müller, Chapter 8 and Svašek, Chapter 4). When asked about the certificates of ownership distributed during the farm restructuring, people laughed and said they had no idea where their certificate was. ‘[That certificate] doesn’t mea...