Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

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Indiana University Press, Dec 17, 2008 - History - 256 pages

In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

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Contents

Living on a Volcano
1
2 How the Crisis of Socialism Became a Postsocialist Crisis
15
The Lived Experience of Postsocialist Decline
35
4 The Routinization of Crisis or On the Permanence of Temporary Conditions
62
5 Permanent Crisis Durable Goods
88
6 Building Autonomy in Everyday Life
113
7 What Changes When Life Stands Still
144
8 Conclusion
172
Appendix 2 List of Respondents
191
Appendix 3 List of Interviewed Experts
195
Appendix 4 Discussion Topics
196
Notes
199
Works Cited
221
Index
235
Back cover
243
Copyright

Appendix 1 Methodology
179

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About the author (2008)

Olga Shevchenko is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Williams College.

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