This research investigates life strategies of physical worker Russian men, belonging to the generation of people who were the most active group in the late Soviet period, went through the collapse of USSR and the transformation to capitalism. The historical biographic perspective allows reproducing common social experiences which have formed this generation. The in-depth biographical interviews were conducted with six men of age 46–63, single, with officially low income, who started their working lives in the public sector. The research shows the diversity of men’s alternative life strategies to adjust to the neoliberal economy established after the collapse of the USSR. The paper explores the biographies as representations of diverse forms of masculinities formed along gender, age, social position and marital status-based marginalization processes emerging in the transition context.
This article analyses how poor families cope with poverty in provincial Russia. It draws on both survey data and interviews. On the basis of the survey, a factor analysis was carried out. This gives evidence to four common types of reactions to poverty. The article shows that being able to use rights, resources and relations is not enough to overcome poverty. Working more, while trying to reduce expenses just to cope, means that poor families are particularly vulnerable to changes that could start a downward process. The small percentage of those who succeed highlights the need for supporting structures. The paper argues that the supporting role of public authorities is especially important when considering the possibilities for poor people themselves to take actions.
This paper re-examines poverty in a small Russian town, drawing attention to the public attitude towards the poor and the readiness of local society to be involved in the process of helping these people. The Russian official measurement and general approach to the study of poverty are not adequate to targeting the involvement of wider social groups in poverty reduction. This process needs a new approach for investigating poverty in Russia and the implementation of new social security services. A new approach could be based on interaction between people in difficult situations, local society, authorities and other stakeholders. This paper examines the opportunity to employ the idea of a participatory methodology for providing social security in the Russian Federation.
Latvia has been facing one of the deepest economic contractions in modern Economic History. Although many authors have tried to analyse its determinants and output, there is a lack of understanding of how Latvia’s internal idiosyncrasies interact with external factors in determining the crisis. This article discusses the international political economy of crisis in Latvia, analysing the interaction between external and internal factors as determinants of one of the biggest failures of Neoliberalism to promote social and economic development. To do this, the idea of duality developed by Ignácio Rangel to explain the Brazilian process of economic development is applied to the Latvian case, establishing the dynamics of Latvia’s own dualities. In this way, it is possible to discuss not only the causes of the crisis, but also its effects. On the external side, it results from the ideological imposition of Neoliberal policies; on the internal side, it results from the political and economic elite’s incapacity to adopt pragmatic economic policies to foster development. After joining the European Union, this process was aggravated, as accession favoured the establishment of speculation in real estate and consumption of durable goods as Latvia’s most significant sectors of GDP. Because of Latvia’s third duality, Neoliberalism is not only a social, economic, and political form of regulation, but also symbolises denying the country’s Soviet past. As a result, the policies chosen to deal with the crisis can be described as “more of the same.” The hope is that adopting the euro can solve problems that, in reality, are the outcome of structural underdevelopment.
This article analyses how social policies in Russia can give poor people opportunities to improve their life situations given the persisting norms of a moral and practical female responsibility for social welfare. Women working in the social sphere have created their own support networks for helping people to take part in state programmes and to become entitled to support in one way or the other. Their agenda is clearly larger than the directives they might be subject to from above. They use relations to create resources. Analysing the agency of women who are professionally working in the social sphere supports distinguishing their potential roles of empowering the poor from their controlling roles. Empirical data are based on qualitative interviews with social work experts, social workers, social pedagogues at schools, teachers, doctor’s assistants, local politicians and deputies of commissions or local village councils in two Russian regions.
This article provides empirical insights into the organizational basis of the Left in contemporary Poland and the profile of the new generation of activists. The transformation of the structure of civil society organizations towards membership-poor forms, a trend observable in the West, is replicated by the Polish Left. Their preference for discursive action and their focus on media presence can be observed. An ideological profile that rejects delegation and requires active engagement shapes decision-making on membership recruitment. The power of arguments is considered a way of gaining influence rather than through power of numbers. These organizational preferences reflect the middle class background of the founders and may influence the articulation of class interests on the Left.
This study inquires the efforts of the Ukrainian political–economic elite to improve the situation for the poor in Ukraine through legislative and private philanthropic initiatives. We compare three groups: politically active philanthropists, non-politically active philanthropists and politically active non-philanthropists. Findings show that poverty reduction efforts made by the selected elite members are rather negligible. While the wealthiest business owners focus on non-poverty reductive single-shot actions, politicians seem to emphasize non-poverty reductive long-term projects. Those with both political and economic capital tend to use either both types of capital or none of them to ease the situation for the most vulnerable groups.
This article critically analyzes Russia’s ‘aggressive’ nationalist energy transit policy in the Baltic Sea region to offer an alternative understanding of the consequences for the Baltic states. Four case studies will be used to analyze Russia’s energy transit policy in the Baltic Sea region. First, the 2003 closure of the oil pipeline in the port city Venstpils in Latvia, second, the closure of the Druzbha oil pipeline in Lithuania in 2006, third, the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline, and finally, the construction of new Russian ports in Ust-Luga and Primorsk. The case studies will be carried out using a theoretical framework based on Alexander Wendt’s constructivist works as well as David Lake’s works on hierarchy in international relations. This article concludes that Russia has accepted the fact that the Baltic states were not willing to enter into a hierarchical relationship and that Russia recognizes the Baltic states as independent neighbours. While this does not improve the energy security situation for the Baltic states, it does suggest progress in the normalization of Baltic-Russian relations which could lead to an improved security environment in the future.
"Land Ohne Eltern – Country Without Parents." Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 22(1), pp. 135–136
The trade union movement is not very active and effective in the former Yugoslav republics. There are many trade union organizations whose differences are not based on ideological attitudes but rather on personal conflicts or attitudes towards ruling political elites. Trade unions are ideologically undefined and oriented towards political passivity in order to avoid subordination to political parties. In some states, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a result of the form of government as well as domination of nationalist ideology, trade unions are divided along ethnic lines. On the other side, it is a fact that workers, whose class consciousness is at least starting to develop, need stronger and more determined trade unions. It is often the situation that workers in particular enterprises organize strike actions without the participation or support of their central leaderships. Trade unions also refuse to support wider actions of social discontent, as was the case in Bosnia-Herzegovina in February this year (2014). All these facts required from us an effort to collect in one place the opinions of trade unions activists and leaders from former Yugoslav republics. We interviewed trade unionists from big and small organizations, those who represent “official” trade unions as well as those who represent alternative ones. Our aim was to inform our readers about the attitudes of trade unionists concerning the situation in their respective states as well as about the methods and aims of their struggles. The interviews were conducted by Daniel Jakopovich, Goran Marković and Ivica Mladenović and were translated by Filip Šaćirović and Milenko Srecković.
Cross-national variations in the size of the shadow economy have been variously explained to be a result of: economic underdevelopment (modernization theory); high taxes, public sector corruption and state interference in the free market (neoliberal theory) or inadequate levels of state intervention to protect workers (political economy theory). The aim of this paper is to start to evaluate critically these competing theories by comparing cross-national variations in the size of the shadow economy with the various aspects of the broader economic and social environment denoted as determinants of the shadow economy in each of the theories. The finding is that across Central and Eastern Europe, smaller shadow economies prevail in wealthier, more modern and equal societies and countries with higher levels of social protection expenditure, greater state intervention in the labour market, more effective social transfers and lower levels of poverty. No evidence is, therefore, found to support the neoliberal suggestion that decreasing tax rates, deregulating the economy and cutting back work and welfare expenditure by the state will reduce the shadow economy. The paper concludes by discussing the theoretical and policy implications of the findings.
One of the main ideas behind this book was to trace continuities from the Soviet time to post-Soviet Russia. There are many similarities between Russia and Ukraine, indicating such a continuation. ...
The paper reviews some of the perceptions and categorizations of poverty discovered through a study of participatory approaches to poverty reduction in provincial Russia. It draws on theorizations of poverty as a subjective reality which is socially constructed and perhaps differently perceived by different subsections of the population. The paper argues that perceptions of poverty matter because they feed into both formal categorizations of need and entitlement to assistance or support. They also involve more informal, cultural understandings of impoverishment that may be morally and emotionally inflected. The authors show that perceptions of poverty are subjective, socially constructed, and vary for different categories of the population. It is important to take into account the existence of different types of poverty perception, as it is associated with both the formal definitions of "power needs", the right to receive benefits and financial support and the informal, cultural perceptions of poverty. As such, poor people's access to support, both formal and informal, the extent of their inclusion in wider social structures and environments and the capabilities these forms of inclusion or exclusion create for them are to some degree determined by perceptions of poverty, the attribution of responsibility and blame and concepts of deservingness and respectability. Perceptions of poverty and the positioning of the poor are influenced by their own explicit desire to distance themselves from the stigmatized image of the poor. This determines the interpretation of the situation and has a significant impact on the current hardships of the family and its capability to improve its situation in the future.
This article compares the regional foreign policies of the four Black Sea non-great power post-communist states. It is argued that the prominent roles played for a time by Georgia and Romania and their unprecedented influence on Black Sea political and security developments were due to foreign policy options stemming from the “new populist” character of national leaders. The latter took advantage of post-9/11 US regional involvement in order to enhance their international profile and thus increase their domestic mass support. Bulgarian and Ukrainian “new populist” leaders failed to conduct similarly visible regional policies mainly due to domestic factors.
This text reconstructs the two decade long period of the transition from nominal socialism to political – criminal and corruptive – capitalism in Serbia. The analysis covers the three most important social subsystems: political, economic and cultural. It demonstrates that the new capitalist and nationalist orthodoxy led on the one hand to the replacement of old “communist” irrationalities with new neoliberal ones and on the other hand to the destruction of healthy economic structures and civilizational accomplishments from the previous system. A special accent is placed upon the unbroken historical pattern of petrifaction of certain social structures over the long term, regardless of seemingly radical political changes. The article points out that in order to pursue its own material interests, the governing nomenklatura carried out the transition process from a one party to a multiparty system in a systematic way, from an organized and relatively stable economy based on industry to a devastated and parasitical economy, entirely dependent on foreign investment, as well as from cultural modernism to retrograde traditionalism.
This paper discusses the hopes of Ukrainians who participated in Euromaidan anti-government protests in November–December 2013, in particular resistance to police violence and demands of better living standards associated with utopian visions of "Europe" and "democracy". It also discusses some of the challenges currently faced by this movement's tolerance of rightwing radicals in its midst as the "lesser evil" in the struggle against the regime. It argues that a truly progressive movement must break with the false dichotomy of "Nazis vs. bandits" and address the pressing socio-economic problems and civil rights violations in the country.
The 2012 legislative elections in Romania have promoted a newly emerged political actor to the parliamentary arena. One year after its official creation the People’s Party Dan Diaconescu (PPDD) has mobilised a relevant amount of electoral support, ending third as the number of seats in Parliament. This article seeks to explain the political development of this populist party until its 2012 success. It uses a qualitative analysis based on primary (manifesto, organisational structure) and secondary (media reports, surveys) data. The analysis focuses on three dimensions: institutions (political competitors and party organisation), ideology, and attitudes (of the elites and voters).
The aim of this article is to examine the evolution of national communism in Ukraine in the twentieth century. In this paper, national communism in Ukraine is discussed as the only possible legal opposition to the Soviet authority that arose from the contradiction between the interests of the centralized state (in the Soviet Union as a whole) and claims for national self-determination either in cultural, economic or political dimensions (in the union republics). It is argued that national communist opposition was latently presented during all 70 years of Soviet rule; however, certain periods, when national communism succeeded in entering the political scene with clear demands against an anti-national Soviet policy, are distinguished. Each period is discussed with reference to the political situation in the USSR which enabled the activization of the national movement in Ukraine and its further penetration into the local party apparatus. Conclusions on the vitality of national communist ideas in contemporary Ukrainian society are drawn.
In post Soviet Society Europe emerged as a geographical symbol of everything positive that the end of the Soviet regime had brought to post Soviet urban Russians. At the same time the USA became the symbol of all that was negative in these changes. These attitudes had been shaped during the first years of Putin’s tenure. The views of Alexander Dugin, the seminal Russian philosopher, could here be an example.
