A B S T R A C T
The disintegration of Soviet social contracts has
provoked, for many Russians, a continuing
deliberation over the tense interrelation between
material embodiments of value (wealth and
commodities) and moral ones (respectability,
education, and kindness). By contrast with
previous anthropological tendencies to locate
value production primarily within exchange
transactions, in this article I identify two
historically specific tropes of value (‘‘culturedness’’
and ‘‘civilization’’) and show how their
articulation illuminates positioned experiences
of large-scale change and social displacement.
From the particular vantage point of St. Petersburg
schoolteachers, I consider everyday deliberations
about value and social difference as they take
form within both local and global frames of
reference, examining how these two contexts
frequently produce divergent—but only seemingly
contradictory—visions of marketization, its
desirability, and its sociomoral significance.
[value, consumption, postsocialism, capitalism,
globalization, Russia]
L
ate one evening in December 1998, the teachers and administrators
of St. Petersburg, Russia’s English Specialization School
No. 25 were enjoying their annual New Year’s celebration ban-
quet.1
As the night drew on, some flew home to children and
dinners to prepare, and the remaining revelers piled leftover
food and alcohol onto one central table and crowded around it. Into the
stream of toasts and anecdotes, someone interjected a question for group
discussion: Was it better to be happy or to have a Mercedes?2
Several votes were offered for happiness. The head of the English
department pointedly asked me to contribute: I was the American, so what
did I think? I concurred that certainly to be happy was better. Another
teacher piped up triumphantly that it would be best to ‘‘be happy in a
Mercedes!’’ Whereupon another corrected her, saying that, no, those who
had Mercedes were not happy, because they ‘‘aspired’’—they were never
satisfied but were always aiming for more (oni ne raduiutsia potomu
chto stremliaiut).
The Mercedes question provided several minutes of distracting party
conversation. It had an assumed answer, to be sure. But in the middle of
an evening full of good wishes for 1999 and toasts praising the talents
and hard work of the teachers’ kollektiv, the debate also addressed nagging
doubts and key dissatisfactions of the moment. The ritual of playing
out possible responses allowed participants to come to an unusually
unequivocal conclusion, more reassuring than those likely to be found
in their workaday lives. Questions about who deserved what and why—
evaluations teachers made according to scales of comparison both local
and global—had a special urgency and poignancy just then, in the wake
of the August 1998 ruble crash (popularly known simply as the ‘‘kriziz’’)
that had devalued salaries radically and made getting by suddenly much
more exhausting. Around the toasting table, the revelers had found that
one could at least be glad not to have a Mercedes because having one
would mean sacrificing too much of oneself, endangering future happiness
and the sustenance of any meaningful social relationships.
JENNIFER PATICO
Haverford College
To be happy in a Mercedes:
Tropes of value and ambivalent visions of marketization
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 479–496, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic
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The debate’s outcome that night did not mean that
the question was really closed, however. Mercedes were
not entirely dismissed as not worth having; neither was
their lack—and the lack of a world of other luxuries being
consumed by a few Russians but inaccessible to most—so
easily understood or accepted. Rather, in the context of
rapid marketization and other forms of institutional and
social change, the very meanings of material prosperity
and privilege have come into question: What is their relationship
now to other familiar and trusted measures of
personal worth and moral standing? What are the correlations,
both desired and perceived, between the nature
of an individual’s productive activity (esp. gainful employment)
and his or her share of the material resources distributed
among members of a larger social body? Is one’s
level of material privilege supposed to correspond roughly
to one’s moral legitimacy and how well one is respected by
one’s peers or to some other measure? On what kinds of
resources can one rely for what kinds of sustenance? In
a situation of rapid change and social displacement, how
do people conceptualize their own value vis-a`-vis various
social others—whether according to market or other scales?
Active deliberation over such questions is not unique
to postsocialist Russia. Rather, I view it as more generally
indicative of periods of socioeconomic crisis, upheaval,
or transition (Newman 1999; Weber 1992). Indeed, many
of the narratives I describe here resonate with the descriptions
of commodification, resignification, and social
restructuring that anthropologists and historians have produced
of colonial and postcolonial contexts (e.g., Burke
1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Foster 2002). During
the past decade or so, postcolonial industrialization and the
growing dominance of transnational capitalist markets
have turned questions about commodity choice and the
cultural significance of mass-produced goods into key
themes of anthropological research around the world
(e.g., Abu-Lughod 1993a, 1993b, 1995; Appadurai 1990;
Berdahl 1999; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Davis 2000;
Gillette 2000; Howes 1996; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Miller
1994, 1997; Watson 1997).
Yet Russia—having stood for centuries as a colonial
power in its own right—constitutes a different kind of
periphery of the global economy than do the modernizing,
postcolonial societies more commonly the subjects
of ethnographic research (cf. Foster 2002; Gewertz and
Errington 1991, 1996; Howes 1996; Liechty 2003). This status
gives rise to particular brands of ambivalence on the
part of many Russians, perhaps especially those of the old
professional classes who are likely to share particular sentiments
of social entitlement as well as resentment at
having been left behind by market reforms. Furthermore,
I would argue that the rather abrupt nature of political
and economic transformation in Russia since perestroika
has provoked, for many, an especially intensive process
of interrogating the correspondences between collective
and private interests and between material and moral
indices of value. Thus, postsocialist Russia offers a fresh
opportunity to revisit and resituate relatively familiar anthropological
questions concerning how social actors conceptualize
value and social difference and how these
conceptualizations are imbricated within both global capitalist
processes and national experience.
Among the urban Russians who were part of this
study, a sense of loss and of struggle has commingled
with a particular kind of investment in what many see,
nonetheless, as processes of progress, modernization, and
positive change—with implications for how individuals
consider various ways of being and envision their own
places vis-a`-vis multiple and potentially conflicting scales
of value. In this article, I identify two key, parallel tropes
of material and moral value—‘‘culture,’’ or ‘‘culturedness,’’
and ‘‘civilization’’—that help to provide a framework
for understanding the tense deliberations over value
that, I argue, have been so central to lived experiences
of marketization and social displacement. ‘‘Culturedness’’
evokes Soviet norms of propriety and has been used to
critique post-Soviet class developments and crass nouveau
riche materialism; ‘‘civilization’’ more directly articulates
the anxieties attending globalization and the desires for
greater access to expensive consumer commodities from
the West. Thus, such everyday commentaries condense
historically specific logics of value in particular and sometimes
divergent ways, pointing up painful tensions within
teachers’ and others’ post-Soviet lives: desires for both
happiness and a Mercedes or, less metaphorically, for culturally
legitimated forms of social security as well as the
lifestyle possibilities presented by global capitalist integration.
Understanding these commentaries as situated
visions of social justice and power that people frame on
both local and international scales, however, I ask finally
whether one really needs to see the multiple desires they
express as contradictory at all.
Can a teacher be happy in a Mercedes?
And other questions of value
This article is based primarily on 12 months of ethnographic
fieldwork in St. Petersburg in 1998–99, supplemented
by follow-up work in 2003 (see Figure 1). The
research included a series of in-depth, semidirected interviews
with each of about two dozen teachers as well
as extensive participant–observation in two schools (including
participation in classes, school assemblies, and
workplace gatherings) and in less formal contexts (including
shopping trips and off-hours socializing with teachers
and their families). The overall project was planned as a
study of postsocialist consumer practice and ideology,
concentrating on the kinds of daily provisioning for which
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
480
Russian mothers and wives tend to be disproportionately
responsible. Among my reasons for focusing on teachers,
then, was the high degree of feminization of the teaching
profession. Thus, most of the perspectives reflected here
are those of women, although male teachers’ and family
members’ perspectives were taken into account whenever
possible.3
These specific views were supplemented by my
attention to local and national mass media’s treatment of
related questions of consumerism, class, and social change
and by time spent in a variety of public consumer and shopping
environments in the city.
Teachers are also one of a number of social–professional
constituencies who can provide pointed critical
perspectives on contemporary processes of cultural transformation
in Russia—by virtue of their professional roles as
providers of public services as well as the specific ways in
which they and other highly educated, still state-employed
professionals have been situated in socialist and postsocialist
economies. In the recent Soviet past, schoolteachers
(as well as, e.g., medical doctors and engineers) were
part of what Vladimir Shlapentokh (1999) has called a
‘‘mass intelligentsia,’’ in distinction to the more exclusive
intellectual elite. These strata enjoyed a certain kind of
‘‘middle-class’’ lifestyle—although they were never particularly
well paid in relation to other categories of workers
and bureaucrats (not coincidentally, both the teaching
and medical professions were highly feminized; Jones
1991; Shlapentokh 1999).4
More recently, these groups
have been among those most negatively impacted by the
disintegration of Soviet administrative and economic
structures, offering a poignant and charged perspective
from which to consider how rapid marketization provokes
crises of value and legitimacy for those caught up in it.
The world of these ‘‘old’’ professional classes, as I came to
understand it through the lens of St. Petersburg teachers’
experience, was one in which the very logics according to
which people once set goals, evaluated prestige, and received
their material rewards had been largely upended,
resulting in no small measure of disorientation and in the
need to adapt the bases of practical knowledge and frameworks
for perceiving social reality.
Although teachers had been positioned uniquely
as socializing transmitters of knowledge to the younger
Soviet generation, by the late 1990s some among them felt
Figure 1. St. Petersburg: Russia’s European capital and the ‘‘Venice of the North.’’ Photo by J. Patico.
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
481
painfully aware of an erosion of the social recognition and
respect that their work was accorded, not to mention of
the remuneration by which it was materially rewarded.
Casting themselves as relatively impoverished but at least
cultured professionals, the teachers with whom I worked
in St. Petersburg tended to be both eager consumers and
vociferous critics of the Russian market economy. They
commented on the irony that they, educated citizens of
what was so recently considered a world superpower, now
seemed to be living in just another ‘‘Third World country.’’
These judgments speak directly to the subjects’ precarious
positionings as professionals still dependent on the sinking
ship of state-sponsored institutions within a privatizing
former world power, suggesting that although teachers
are not necessarily representative of urban Russians, they
present a vantage point that is structurally revealing of certain
processes of institutional decline and marketization.
To make useful anthropological sense of the teachers’
deliberations, this article attends to some of the most concrete,
‘‘deceptively frivolous’’ (Abu-Lughod 1990) instances
of consumer judgment while also taking into account the
relatively unpredictable episodes that become occasions
for people to question and comment on the comparative
worth of different individuals and their endeavors, populations
and their development, and commodities and their
qualities. These elements of comparison are fundamental
to the way in which I mean to invoke ‘‘value’’ here: to refer
to the evaluative terms in which actors judge the significance
and worth of persons as well as things (and how
these reflect on one another). This is a mode of comparison
whereby the objects’ socially salient qualities are
framed (explicitly or implicitly) according to scales of relative
valorization. Culturedness and civilization, as discussed
here, are examples of such scales. In addition, I am
interested in how what would seem to be qualitatively
different measures of value—most notably, assessments of
people’s moral rectitude or social usefulness, on the one
hand, and their material prosperity or access to desired
commodities, on the other hand—are made to correspond
to one another, as actors articulate logics of value, that
is, visions of how various kinds of resources and rewards
are or should be distributed among members of a larger
social body. Listening closely to how these questions were
treated and noting the contexts in which they arose, as the
undercurrent of people’s discussions and decisions about
(most notably) consumption and work, brings into relief
a politics of social difference that was being negotiated in
everyday life during a period of rapid institutional change
and cultural transformation.
My framing of these questions is partly inspired by, but
also diverges from, previous anthropological approaches
to value, its representation, and its reproduction. Within
this provocative body of work (e.g., Appadurai 1986;
Graeber 2001; Munn 1986; Myers 2001), particular attention
has been devoted to the dynamics of gift versus commodity
exchange systems, building on the legacies of Karl
Marx (1990) and of Marcel Mauss (1967; see also Eiss and
Pedersen 2002; Gregory 1982; Thomas 1991; Weiner 1992).
Particularly since Arjun Appadurai’s 1986 examination of
the politics of value, a key objective has been to problematize
the relatively strict division sometimes supposed to
inhere between ‘‘gift’’ (affective, ongoing, and socially oriented)
and ‘‘commodity’’–money (impersonal, fleeting,
and individualistic) exchange (Keane 2001; Kopytoff 1986;
Miller 2001; Myers 2001; Patico 2002). This scholarship
has highlighted the fluidity and tensions at work in any
given context of exchange, emphasizing that only through
struggles over value do objects and social relations come
to be defined in one way or another. Analytical emphasis
has tended to be pitched toward economic transactions
as the primary locus at which the production of value
is examined.
A sense of struggle and doubt over legitimate meanings
and privileges is unquestionably salient in the contemporary
Russian milieu, and it is this foregrounding of
contingent and discomfiting transformation that makes
the anthropological notion of ‘‘value’’ an appropriate place
to begin an analysis of postsocialist life. Yet, rather than
fixing analytically on things in motion or moments of
transaction, my approach here is more explicitly subject
centered, asking how particular people explain to themselves,
and thereby engage in, processes of structural and
cultural change. If people, indeed, are deliberating over
how measures of material prosperity and of moral legitimacy
correspond to one another in contemporary Russia—
how they, for example, oppose, shore up, or serve as negative
or positive proof of one another—I am also proposing
that people’s shifting and strained conceptualizations of
these correspondences, as expressed here through ideals
such as ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘civilization,’’ are exactly what
anthropologists should be looking at to better understand
the ramifications of such (so-called) transitions to capitalism
as lived and jarring realities.5
Soviet culturedness, civilization,
and consumption
Although the juxtaposition of ‘‘culturedness’’ and ‘‘civilization’’
as teachers discussed these themes points to socioeconomic
tensions and deep ambivalence in contemporary
experiences of marketization, I note at the outset that they
are, in fact, closely linked, both conceptually and historically.
Hence, a brief consideration of the Soviet background
to teachers’ postsocialist conceptions is warranted.
Shifting conceptions of ‘‘culturedness’’ have been
particularly well documented by cultural historians of the
Soviet era, and their intersections with notions of ‘‘civilization’’
are significant. Although the Russian word kul’tura
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
482
can signify ‘‘an achievement of the intelligentsia in the
sense of high culture, a synthesis of ideas, knowledge, and
memories’’ (Dunham 1976:22), kul’turnost’ (culturedness)
came to refer in the early 20th century to a code of public
conduct and a template for the proper relationship of individuals
to material possessions, denoting a combination
of polite manners, hygiene, and basic knowledge of high
culture. Scholars suggest that it sanctioned a particular
kind of acquisitiveness that took root in the 1930s and remained
a central aspect of social and moral life from that
time forward (Dunham 1976; Fitzpatrick 1999). The masses
to whom the Soviet Union was to bring culture included
not only Russia’s peasants, many of whom were moving
into urban areas, but also the peoples of other republics
and regions (including Central Asians and the nomadic
groups of the Siberian north) considered backward in
their development (Fitzpatrick 1999; Slezkine 1994). ‘‘Beds,
gramophones, sewing machines, watches, and radios were
all goods that helped raise their possessors out of ‘Asiatic’
backwardness and into ‘European-style’ modernity and
culture’’ (Fitzpatrick 1999:103). A Stalin-era worker from
the Soviet republic of Tadjikistan boasted that ‘‘I don’t
live in a my old mud hut anymore—I was awarded a
European-style house. I live like a civilised person’’ (Fitzpatrick
1999:103).
Thus, culture was a matter not only of social distinction
but also of progress and civilization (cf. Elias 1978;
Frykman and Lofgren 1987), whereby European Russian
urban lifestyles were posited as the standard to which other
Soviet peoples were to aspire (even as cities like Moscow
and St. Petersburg were themselves rapidly industrializing,
urbanizing, and becoming civilized). In other words,
the project of becoming respectable and cultured (urban)
citizens through the adoption of particular material lifestyles
and modes of behavior overlapped with the ideas
of civilization that more explicitly concerned questions of
relative national and ethnic development. The tropes differ
primarily in their most immediate scales of reference,
then, as post-Soviet teachers’ commentaries still reflect.
In many ways, the roles played by commodities in this
Soviet civilizing project are strikingly similar to those that
have been observed in empire-building projects elsewhere
in the world (Burke 1996; Comaroff 1996). Specific to the
communist case was a particular kind of emphasis on collective
and individual labor as the basis for access to goods
and a special insistence that great prosperity was or would
soon be universal within the Soviet Union. Although material
prosperity was most accessible to the new administrative
elite, the ideology of kul’turnost’ stressed that the
goods people desired were available to anyone in exchange
for hard work—or that they would surely be accessible to
all citizens soon, even if reserved for some members of
the front guard now (Dunham 1976; Kelly and Volkov 1998:
295). In this sense, kul’turnost’ masked and legitimated
the entrenchment of social inequalities within Soviet society
(Boym 1994:105; Fitzpatrick 1992:218).6
Ideals and incentives notwithstanding, the 1930s and
immediate postwar period were characterized by constant
shortages and a dearth of consumer products (Buchli 1999:
93; Hessler 1996; Osokina 1998). Even after the postwar
economy had stabilized—and later stagnated, as the period
of slowed economic growth and general social malaise (the
zastoi) experienced under Leonid Brezhnev is popularly
described—hierarchically allocated access to goods and
privileges remained a lasting feature of the Soviet mode
of governance and administration, persisting for the duration
of communist rule.7
The emphasis on acquisitiveness
was amplified in the post–World War II era, when new
material comforts (‘‘crepe-de-chine dresses, old-fashioned
dinnerware’’) were cited as indicators of improving standards
of living and even an increase of good cheer in Soviet
life: just desserts for the wartime hardships survived by
‘‘the marching enthusiasts of the new Stalinist order’’
(Boym 1994:105; see also Dunham 1976).8
Although shortages
continued under Brezhnev in the 1960s, consumer
commodities and sought-after domestic conveniences
gradually became more widely available as greater priority
than ever before was given to their production.9
‘‘Their
Excellencies the Refrigerator, the Washing machine, the
Television set, the Record player, and most coveted, the
‘Volga’ [automobile] made their appearance. . . . Cookbooks
with tempting color plates, featuring jellied sturgeons
festooned in radish rosettes and live daisies, were
followed by chapters on kulturnost [sic]’’ (Dunham 1976:
244). Even in the last decades of Soviet power, official
discourses strove to frame materialist preoccupations in
terms of particular personal virtues, including simplicity,
modesty, moral purity, and mutual respect.10
Being cultured in the late 20th century, then, meant
both consuming in a tasteful manner and being a knowledgeable,
well-behaved, and ideologically correct kind of
Soviet citizen. Kul’turnost’ was a shifting but essentially
persistent coding or logic of social values, wherein the
proper use of objects indexed professional achievement as
well as moral–ideological correctness. Such ideals maintained
a more international significance, as well, as material
prosperity was held as evidence of Soviet progress and
superiority—even if such materialism was also in tension
with the explicitly antibourgeois goals of the ‘‘dictatorship
of the proletariat’’ and if enthusiasm for Soviet progress
was tempered by warnings against the kind of spiritual
degradation proclaimed to characterize the capitalist West
(e.g., Zamoshkin 1969). Mass media in the Soviet Union
and throughout the Eastern Bloc touted the material standards
of living enjoyed in their countries as among the
best in the world and as rising all the time, leading citizenries
to think of consumer goods as their right (Crowley and
Reid 2000; Humphrey 1995; Verdery 1991, 1996).
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
483
Still, this ‘‘right’’ was continually frustrated as consumer
shortages persisted, such that acquisition of desired
goods actually required continual social networking and
considerable stores of knowledge, ingenuity, and exper-
tise.11
Travel to other socialist countries in Eastern Europe
along with occasional images from Western Europe and
the United States through tourists or the Voice of America
fed a growing sense that Soviet conditions compared unfavorably
with those elsewhere and were no longer improving
(Bushnell 2003). Yet expectations of increasing
prosperity and of linear progress toward higher levels of
civilization have continued to resonate, contributing to the
way at least some citizens contemplate their shifted positions
vis-a`-vis local and global hierarchies of value and
material distribution.12
In the following two sections, I explore
teachers’ talk about questions related to culturedness
and to civilization in turn.
Contemporary struggles over culturedness
and commodification
In the late 1990s, everything one might desire had become
readily available in St. Petersburg’s shops, and money (as
opposed to social contacts) had become more primary to
the fulfillment of everyday needs. Yet people were uncertain
how much of it they would have from month to month
or how another sudden jolt of inflation might suddenly
devalue their salaries and savings.13
Although teachers and,
indeed, most families still very much depended on public
education (the former for their livelihood, the latter for
their children’s educations and professional futures in a
highly literate society), schools now received only scant
financial support from federal and local governments,
squeezing teachers between forces of structural change
and the need to provide for their households and precipitating
conflicts between teachers and their students’
families. Without a doubt, the level of their state salaries
(usually barely enough for the subsistence of one person,
let alone a family) gave them little reason to feel appreciated
or privileged—especially in the year following the
ruble’s plunge (Patico 2001a). ‘‘No one is thinking about
us,’’ one teacher summarized, asking rhetorically: ‘‘Who
lives better here (u nas)? Someone who produces or sells,
or works in a bank. We [teachers] don’t produce anything
concrete. [The attitude] works out to: go ahead and live,
however you want.’’
Although teachers’ specific roles as educators and
transmitters of culture are salient here, their more significant
commonality of experience in the late 1990s (at least
in terms of the questions considered by this study) was
based not so much in a shared professional identity or
calling but, rather, in their shared structural positions as
well-educated, relatively poor state employees.14
Meanwhile,
the professional as well as family and financial backgrounds
of the teachers and social players were various:
Some of them had been trained at pedagogical institutes
and had been teaching in public schools for as long as 20
or 30 years; others had fled professions such as engineering
and applied sciences, for which funding and demand
had dried up in 1990s St. Petersburg, choosing the field
of education because of a consistent need for teachers.
The most immediate roles played by all of these women
and men as teachers and within the schools, however,
shaped their experiences of socioeconomic upheaval in
significant ways.15
They often felt that Russia’s more respectable, knowledgeable,
useful, and hard-working subjects were not able
to consume in the cultured if modest manner that really
befit them, whereas sketchier characters were consuming
far beyond what they appeared to deserve.16
The nouveaux
riches of the 1990s, popularly known as the ‘‘New
Russians,’’ embodied the discrepancy most clearly, at
least in the common stereotypes, according to which they
had immodest and conspicuous taste in clothes; spent
money extravagantly and pointlessly; possibly engaged in
criminal activities; and showed a lack of proper respect
for others and a dearth of intelligence, education, and
culture. These stereotypes were widespread, mirrored
and coproduced by the media (e.g., in stories in the daily
Peterburg-Ekspress), and were the subject of myriad popular
anekdoty, or jokes (Krylova 1999; Patico 2000). Even
while the New Russians were roundly ridiculed, however,
the continuing need for kul’turnost’ articulated in the
anekdoty was also being eclipsed in public fora such as
the most popular glossy women’s magazines (Cosmopolitan,
Domashnii Ochag) by more explicitly consumerist
admonitions to be ‘‘super-fashionable’’ (super-modnyi)
and highly conscious of one’s ‘‘image’’ (imidzh), representing
a partial shift away from the calls for modesty and social
centeredness that had characterized an earlier era.17
Many St. Petersburg public school teachers were susceptible
to these kinds of encouragements; among my
acquaintances, this was especially true of younger, childless,
or unmarried women in their twenties and thirties
who had relatively more time and money to spend on their
individual desires for self-improvement. Yet many also
found culturedness to provide a meaningful frame for
thinking about contemporary matters of social difference
and worth. Unsurprisingly, given their own professional
commitments, teachers associated kul’turnost’ with education,
interest in high culture (museums and literature),
and being intelligentnyi (knowledgeable, part of or related
to the intelligentsia)—although such attributes could
also be, at least rhetorically, declared nonessential to
culturedness. For, beyond those qualities, the adjective
kul’turnyi referred to someone who was respectful of
others and, as one teacher put it, ‘‘[knew] how to behave
in a given situation.’’
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
484
These virtues were often taken to be lacking in contemporary
civic and social realms. In fact, dealing with
unpleasant people who had money was a recurring aspect
of life for teachers at the two schools I studied (the link
between money and unpleasantness often was seen as
causal: most likely, well-to-do people had accumulated
their money thanks to a lack of scruples). Both schools
were relatively prestigious and well-reputed public institutions,
so that entrance was difficult to gain. Here, financially
struggling teachers came into regular contact with
the parents of their students, many of whom teachers described
as quite ‘‘well-off’’ (obespechenie). Some of the
families were also members of the ‘‘intelligentsia,’’ as
teachers characterized them; and teachers sometimes
established friendships and exchanged favors with those
parents with whom they felt they could see eye to eye
(Salmi n.d.). Others did not; one woman, who enjoyed a
relatively secure financial position thanks to her husband’s
earnings from multiple jobs, said that she preferred not to
feel obligated to parents who might later demand favors
such as higher grades for their children.
On a darker note, teachers (and, notably, a school psychologist)
also correlated the wealth of children’s families
with a range of psychological, behavioral, and academic
problems: obsession at a very young age with comparing
their peers’ possessions and social status; suffering neglect
because their parents were more interested in moneymaking
than child rearing (a view I saw repeated in St.
Petersburg’s popular press and in nationally distributed
women’s magazines); difficulty with their class work and
dependence on private tutoring. ‘‘They get used to doing
nothing in school and then go for their private lessons
and everything is explained to them,’’ teacher Nadezhda
complained; ‘‘the tutor explains and their parents pay.’’
Teachers and others criticized private schools for allegedly
espousing a starker kind of grades-for-cash approach.
The teachers’ poverty in comparison with most of
their students’ economic standing was sometimes a source
of embarrassment in interactions with both pupils and
their parents. Teacher Lena described how her young
students had taken note of things she did not have, asking
questions such as, ‘‘You don’t have a watch??’’ implying
that they were shocked she could not afford one (which,
Lena explained, was not strictly true; she had already lost
or broken a few watches and could not afford to keep
buying them). A particularly insulting incident had arisen
when uniform jackets were being made for the children
in her class. A parent helping to organize the making of
uniforms had said to her, ‘‘Why don’t we have a jacket
made for you too? It will be all of 300 rubles.’’ ‘‘All of
300 rubles,’’ Lena repeated to me, indicating that the
parent’s remarks had been particularly offensive to her:
they implied that her appearance was poor as well as
called attention to the difficulty she would have affording
improvements. ‘‘When you are wearing the same outfit
all year,’’ another regretted, ‘‘you want something
new. Looking noticeably worse than the students is somehow
unpleasant.’’
A young teacher and active English tutor, Anya, explained
that she made sure to ‘‘look after herself’’ very
carefully so that she would be attractive in every detail
(hair, nails, etc.) when she went to people’s homes to give
lessons; she had noticed that people liked it. But fashionconscious
Anya had also been taken aback by a blatant
example of the evaluation of teachers according to their
attractiveness rather than their teaching. A student’s
mother (herself displeased about the incident) had told
Anya about a comment that her young daughter had
made about another teacher at their school. ‘‘Mama,’’ the
girl had said, ‘‘how can I respect my teacher if she has a
run in her stocking?’’ In another context, the run itself
might have been treated as a form of unculturedness. But
although Anya would scarcely have been caught dead with
a run in her own stocking, the tone in which she recounted
the story suggested that the girl’s judgment illustrated
the cold, precocious materialism of a new generation of
young people who might discount a well-intentioned
mentor on the basis of an impoverished wardrobe.
Beyond these image concerns, at issue in relations
between teachers and parents was a certain unease concerning
their mutual obligations and the role of money in
mediating those relationships. One group of colleagues
told of a small boy from a rich family who had seen a
workman doing repairs in a school hallway and had referred
publicly to him as ‘‘my worker.’’ Teachers inferred
that having gotten used to his family’s employment of
various individuals (such as carpenters who might come to
do fancy renovations in their apartment—a sign of privilege),
the child must have found it natural to think of
any such laborer as ‘‘my’’ worker and of any teacher, one
woman bemoaned, as ‘‘my’’ teacher. In their telling, the
personal pronoun my came across as offensive because
it was interpreted rather literally to express possession, or
perhaps simply—and no less offensively?—personal employment
of a teacher by a family rather than by the state
or by a particular educational institution.
What kinds of attitudes toward the commodification
of cultured labor and the revaluation of different subject
positions can be seen here, at this intersection of public
institutions and private capital? The women and men who
taught at these schools were not really opposed to the
idea, in itself, of working privately for other individuals.
Neither did they seem particularly resistant to the private
funds that were flowing into public schools. Rather, what
appeared really troubling to them was the thought that
a wealthy family might try to ‘‘employ’’ them; that is, that
a family would assume it could control a teacher because
it had money to pay, in effect, hiring the teacher as its
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
485
own private employee. In Soviet Russia, as one teacher put
it, ‘‘a teacher was [treated] something like a tsar or lord . . .
whereas now it is like working for a family. Even if the
parents know nothing about the educational process, they
will allow themselves to criticize it . . . at private schools
teachers work under even closer parental control, because
people who are paying money want successes, results’’
(emphasis added).
The idea that teachers were ever treated like tsars in
the Soviet Union is rather a stretch (Jones 1991). Still, the
respect and deference they had been granted as educators
and as socializers of Soviet youth contrasted starkly—at
least in the minds of some teachers themselves, and particularly
in retrospect, in the nostalgic light that has been
cast by post-Soviet processes of marketization—with the
less-attractive notion of ‘‘working for a family,’’ being retained,
as it were, as domestic labor. Liza, a young teacher in
her twenties, developed this thought, explaining (by way of
elaborating what it meant to her to be intelligentnaia) that:
I give knowledge and upbringing (vospitanie) to children.
If I work as a governess (guvernantka) and
give it to just one child—this is a different matter.
That is called a servant (prisluga)! . . . I have the need
to be useful to society (potrebnost’ byt’ nuzhnoi
obshchestvu). That’s why I didn’t become a salesperson
at a shop (lavka)—it’s not a way to realize
my possibilities.
In short, although many teachers were willing or at least
financially compelled to offer their services to individuals
for cash in certain contexts, in the classroom they were
supposed to be doing something different. Their work
there was understood to have a special kind of social justification
and legitimacy.
That legitimacy they now felt to be in question, as
circumstances mostly beyond their control were pushing
them up against divergent scales of value, scales on which
parents’ money would be weighed against the other potential
but threatened bases of cultural authority. For
teachers, it was the suggestion that wealthy parents might
be able, with their cash, to dictate coercively the terms of
the exchange—what their money would buy, where, and
when—that was most upsetting because it seemed to put
teachers in a position of greatly weakened institutional
authority, able to do little to challenge the power of other
people’s money. The immediate setting of the school
was an important stage for these dramatizations of value:
Here, the presumptuousness of the rich dealt a penetrating
blow to teachers’ sense of the worth of their hard-earned
professional knowledge and qualifications, at least as
conferred by their official positions if not also by a more
universal kind of value they believed to inhere in education
and in kul’tura.
This version of events is, of course, framed exclusively
by the perspectives of teachers; others I encountered complained
about the money that was continually demanded
by public schools for tutoring, exam preparation, additional
after-school English courses, unofficial school entrance
fees, ‘‘voluntary’’ contributions for special events and class
presents to teachers, and so on. I heard teachers acknowledge
the need for ‘‘sponsors’’ (sponsory), that is, wealthy
parents who contributed money to supply the schools with
new furniture, building renovations, or teaching materials
not covered by state funds. (Often, these were unofficial
payments that secured places for donors’ children at the
schools. Most teachers were less directly involved in the
collection of such fees by school administrators, higherups
who functioned at some remove from the rank and
file.) Meanwhile, many, especially English teachers whose
linguistic expertise was in great demand, worked as hourly
tutors in the evenings and on weekends, receiving pupils
at home or paying house calls. Although they were chronically
overworked, being able to take extra students and to
set their schedule and fees as they liked provided a welcome
opportunity and an important source of supplemental
income.18
In other words, teachers themselves were involved to
varying degrees in certain forms of private enterprise and
money transactions even within the domain of the school;
what is striking is their own accountings of their constrained
power to determine the terms on which they and
their services would be consumed. Legitimized authority
and professional integrity, on one hand, and cash resources,
on the other, could be variably understood either
as mutually exclusive and competing value forms (a
wealthy person was likely to be unpleasant) or as mutually
reinforcing ones (good pay begetting good quality of
service and vice versa). The question of how these two
forms corresponded (and in whose favor), then, was just
what teachers (and parents) were struggling to define.
The state of Russian civilization: Globalized
consumerism as a parallel scale of value
and desire
Turning to the more explicitly cross-cultural scale of
value represented by standards of civilization, I do not
mean to say that teachers represented a conservative old
guard that was resolutely, naively defending kul’tura and
the institutions of a bygone era from seemingly inevitable
forces of commoditization. To assume so would be to obscure
many of their motivations and hopes for the future,
because the teachers and their families were mostly in
favor of the most emblematic changes of the past decade.
They wanted to improve their homes, wardrobes, and
diets, and they more or less accepted the idea that building
a Western-modeled market economy was the only
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
486
conceivable path toward such progress, for themselves
and for the nation as a whole. Such attitudes must significantly
complicate an understanding of the resentfully anticommercial
sentiment teachers appeared to espouse from
their positions as neglected and cultured representatives
of public institutions.
As I have noted, not only was Russia a center of industrial
modernization within the Soviet Union but Soviet
mass media also proclaimed the Union to be a world
leader in terms of its technological and consumer sophistication
and the citizenry’s comfort and prosperity. These
claims were not entirely persuasive to the population
(Humphrey 1995; Lapidus 1983; Verdery 1991).19
Nonetheless,
the deluge of attractive and previously unfamiliar commodities
that flowed into Russia from the United States,
Europe, and throughout the world in the early 1990s
proved to be unnerving and even insulting (obidno) as
people struggled to ‘‘catch up’’ on developments they had
missed (‘‘We didn’t know there could be a bathroom like
that!’’ as one woman recalled). In all kinds of contexts,
the teachers, their families, and other acquaintances told
me—sometimes with a smile or laugh—that Russia was
‘‘behind’’ the United States and Western Europe (Figures 2
and 3).20
Often the situations that prompted these comments
were not ones I could anticipate, as these examples from
the field illustrate.
A friend asked me what I thought of Mary Kay cosmetics.
They had appeared in St. Petersburg and she
wondered whether they were popular in the United
States. I told her that I thought that they had been
more popular a decade or so ago. ‘‘Of course,’’ Olga
replied. ‘‘We are ten years behind in everything.’’
‘‘Here everything is simpler’’ [u nas vse po-proshche],
a woman told me when I likened her plant, which I did
not recognize by appearance or name, to wheat grass
I had seen in the United States. Hers, it turned out,
was oat grass; wheat grass, she explained, ‘‘is a more
expensive [plant] culture,’’ and, thus, she deemed my
familiarity with it a reflection of U.S. sophistication.
Responding to a question about ‘‘civilization breaking
out all over the world’’ (the question posed by her
Figure 2. Generic, Soviet-style storefronts (such as the one that announces this shop simply as a ‘‘Bakery’’ to passers-by) persist in the postsocialist era.
Photo by J. Patico.
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
487
teachers really referred to civilization’s ‘‘breaking up,’’
but she misunderstood the idiom), a serious and collected
high school girl taking an oral English exam
asserted that civilization comprised technology and
‘‘polite relations among people,’’ including the ability
to make contracts and to depend on others. The girl
judged that civilization was not flourishing in Russia,
in which, although it was trying to emulate the West,
such ‘‘polite relations’’ were not prevalent as yet.
On a national television talk show, a bachelor who
liked to spend all of his time traveling to exotic places
around the world discussed the difficulty of finding
a wife willing to share this unconventional lifestyle.
His next planned journey would take him to see how
a Stone Age tribe in Africa lives. Russian girls are used
to civilization and are not interested in that kind of
life, the young man regretted. In response, the host of
the show proclaimed that ‘‘if you want to see the
Stone Age, you can stay here!’’
In short, in more sober conversations as well as jokes, people
portrayed Russia as less civilized and sophisticated—in its
technology and material culture as well as in its social
relations—than Europe (esp. the western and northern
countries) and the United States. Humorous, ambiguously
disparaging evaluations of Russian development took
part in a kind of ‘‘cultural intimacy’’: ‘‘the recognition of
those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a
source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless
provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’’
(Herzfeld 1996:3). They were often tinged with notes
of irony, poking fun at ‘‘Western’’ as well as Russian life, at
times pointedly. Some evaluations acknowledged downsides
to civilization (my neighbor took my lack of ingenuity
with electrical wiring as an example: ‘‘Civilization
has spoiled you’’) and, conversely, some found worth in
the skills and hardiness that come from living under more
adverse conditions.
More importantly, these commentaries were premised
on the notion that a well-developed material culture was
integral to, and an indicator of, any normal or standard,
civilized society. Likewise, kul’turnost’ was linked with a
well-groomed, dignified, and appropriate material presentation
of self: a kind of ‘‘self-civilization’’ (Dunham 1976)
Figure 3. Soviet-style establishments coexist now with local and international franchises such as this cafe´, one of several popular chains in St. Petersburg,
2003. Photo by J. Patico.
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
488
that paralleled Russian civilization writ large, even as it
critiqued the excesses of the nouveaux riches brought into
being by the post-Soviet market economy. By these lights,
the national self-denigration and ‘‘self-peripheralization’’
(Liechty 1995:186) implied in such comments, and the
positive value attached to lifestyles perceived as Western,
should be taken seriously (if not quite at face value) as
indicators of how many people were construing differences
and inequalities on a global scale.21
As in the New Year’s Mercedes debate, these charged
comparisons were sometimes articulated with special
clarity at ritual moments of communal stocktaking. In a
birthday toast to me, one teacher, Larisa, said that perhaps
at some time in the future the situation in Russia
would be better than it was now so that I would want to
come back not to work but prosto tak, just to visit. Another
guest, a teacher’s husband and a former naval officer who
had sailed around the world, commented that conditions
were not so bad in Russia; in other places life was much
worse. ‘‘Where?’’ Larisa asked challengingly. Africa, he
argued, China. Larisa looked at him, nodded, smiled, and
said, to the amusement of the other guests: ‘‘Yes, if we
were only blacker, it would be just like Africa here!’’ The
joke presented a pointed critique of the current state of
things in Russia. No concrete parallels were drawn between
people’s lives in the two locales, but the point was
clear: Living conditions were so poor in St. Petersburg that
they could be compared to those of blacks in Africa, who
stood for the most primitive lifestyle of all. On another
day, the same naval officer compared my modest kitchen
favorably to rooms in which he had seen entire families
living in Africa; hearing this, a companion declared, ‘‘Compared
to Africa, we feel good about how we live!’’22
Thus, as they evaluated the conditions of their own
lives and events in Russia, more generally, Russians used
regional and national shorthands (‘‘Russia’’ vs. ‘‘Europe’’
or ‘‘Africa’’) to measure and compare standards of technological
advancement, economic development, and polite
relations, conceived as interrelated aspects of cultural and
civilizational advancement. (Nevertheless, that some remarks
were humorous drew attention to the distance in
culture and sophistication normally assumed to exist between
the two environments and their inhabitants—a
difference represented here through the imagery of race.)23
In a similar manner, the less-than-satisfactory material
world of St. Petersburg was vividly described through the
language of ‘‘exotica.’’24
Conversations about exotica were especially active
during the financial crisis of 1998 and its aftermath and
had somewhat subsided in 2003, during a period of relative
economic recovery. In the late nineties, in a variety of
analogous contexts, the term exotica (ekzotika) was offered
up, always with a wry smile or laugh, but also, seemingly,
as part of an actual apology to me about an environment
with which the speaker thought I—my Americanness foregrounded—would
be uncomfortable. A makeshift door
handle, crafted from a stick; a broken-down, messy house
(the hostess invited me to visit even though it was not in
very presentable shape—I could visit it as exotica); a
traditional-style oven at the family dacha—all of these
were placed in the category of ‘‘Russian exotica.’’ The first
time I met teacher Maria, she asked me why I had chosen
to come to Russia. ‘‘For something different, wild?’’
Exotica modeled a relationship of inferiority and difference
configured in time as well as space: It comprised
artifacts and lifeways understood (or hoped) to be on their
way into the past.25
Against the backdrop of Russia’s and
the Soviet Union’s historical civilizing projects, it reinforced
a familiar model of linear development that evaluated
peoples and places by relating them to one another
in a hierarchical way. (It also, tongue-in-cheek, placed
Russia somewhere much lower on the civilizational scale
than speakers would be likely to locate it in full seriousness
or than they would have been likely to locate it just a few
years ago in the last days of the Cold War.) To a certain
extent, people distanced themselves from exotica by joking
about it, effectively declaring that they were not worthy
of their degraded material position in the world or perhaps
simply pointing out that they were personally savvy
enough to have an idea about what they were missing.
The jokes both dramatized and leavened situations of financial
hardship and the humiliation they entailed.
Such ambivalence was mediated, furthermore, in
teachers’ more concrete consumer judgments. One often
heard that expensive ‘‘Western’’ goods (from the United
States, western Europe, Italy, and Scandinavia) were high
in quality (clothes and electronics were especially desirable).
A pointed example of this sensibility is people’s reference
to the ‘‘Eurostandard’’ as a way of distinguishing
among the many goods from around the world that are
readily available in shops and marketplaces. When they
cited this standard, they situated below European goods
both Russian goods (many of which were apparently held
in higher regard before the opening of the market ‘‘enlightened’’
everyone) and the products of Asia and areas
marginal to Europe: Turkey as well as Korea and China.
They also suggested that the ‘‘European’’ was not merely
a fashion, preference, or cachet but, rather, a standard of
quality, sophistication, and propriety.26
Young, fashionconscious
women tried to eschew garments from Turkey,
Korea, and China—even if an inspection at first glance
suggested to the eye that a particular item was actually
attractive and durable. Anya fretted as we walked to a shop
where she was comparing the fit of several different leather
skirts, comparable in price but some from Germany and
others from India and other points east. ‘‘If the price is
the same,’’ she reasoned, ‘‘why would I want to buy some
Indian trash (drian’)?’’ (Patico 2001b). (In the end, Anya, in
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
489
fact, purchased the Indian one as its cut and fit were the
most appropriate for her—but not without some worry
and extra consultations with salespeople.)
Yet, at the same time, a perceived risk was attached
to buying some imports—primarily imported foods—
because, as teacher Kseniia said, ‘‘Europe throws [its unwanted,
shoddy, or stale] goods out here, as to the Third
World.’’ Kseniia’s phrasing is telling because in the common
parlance of the Soviet era, it was the state that ‘‘threw
out’’ goods to the shops for people to buy. ‘‘ ‘They’ threw out
(vybrosili) or chucked out (vykydivali) goods to people in
stores. This was recognition that shops and markets
were lower-priority parts of the same system as the specially
distributed packages of luxuries to officials and
the nameless, closely curtained buildings that contained
foreign-currency stores’’ (Humphrey 1995:47). The idea that
commodities from around the world could make sense,
on some level, in terms of their allocation to the Russian
poor brings into sharper focus the particular kinds of connection
people were making between populations’ worth
and the material conditions in which they lived: For, seemingly,
a new seat of authority had assigned and released
these goods to Russians, thereby assessing their places in
a hierarchy of merit and priorities. Indeed, the analogy
suggested that capitalism had introduced new ‘‘thems’’
from the wealthy ‘‘West’’: agents vaguely imagined but
more locatable than any ‘‘invisible hand,’’ higher-ups who
‘‘allocated’’ to those down below.
Ultimately, then, the denigration of local conditions
did not translate directly into a desire for goods from civilized
places so much as it pointed to a set of more dynamic
relations of power and correspondences of value being
negotiated (cf. Berdahl 1999; Caldwell 2002).27
Accordingly,
people had developed a pragmatic sense of what the new
pitfalls to the consumer might be and of how to predict
potential problems and make meaningful links among
observed cases to avoid future missteps.28
One needed to
watch out for particular markers, such as nation and factory
of origin, unfamiliar new labels, or faked expiration
dates—on any food products, but especially imports.29
Regardless
of whether any or all of the particular suspicions
of deception and judgments of low quality were legitimate
(and at least some seem to have been), the more important
point is that such careful consumer discernments also
tended to produce knowledge about the relative positionings
of individuals, populations, and lifestyles along a
civilizational scale of value and power.30
As in the school conflicts, then, shifting measures of
value and authority were being interrogated as unsettling
questions were raised about why an ostensibly deserving
public was not receiving its legitimate rewards. Talk about
civilization and exotica reproduced a particular sense of
place and subjectivity: one that, like ideas of forsaken culturedness,
expressed the shocks of marketization but that
also was tempered by a more explicit degree of support
for the progress—however slow and uneven—such transformations
were understood to represent.
Tropes of value, visions of the good life, and
the politics of social difference
Maria, a woman who was fairly pessimistic and bitter
about the post-Soviet state of affairs in Russia, noted that
she was in favor of the market—she professed to harbor
little nostalgia for the old centralized socialist economy—
but would prefer a ‘‘civilized’’ capitalism to the ‘‘wild’’ one
Russia had now. Jumping straight ahead to the civilized
version would be nice, Maria concluded.
Her contrast of the civilized with the wild was meant,
I think, to evoke the contrasts of poverty, criminality, and
striking new wealth and the general impressions of chaos
that have so disrupted Russians’ senses of order and continuity
in the past decade. As the teachers’ bitterness
about ‘‘employment,’’ as discussed above, makes clear,
part of what makes the post-Soviet economy feel so wild
to people is the discomfiting way in which bases of authority
are unnervingly vulnerable and terms of exchange can
become startlingly fluid. This indeterminacy has to do with
contested forms of value and struggles over their interrelation
in both immediate, social and much grander,
‘‘civilizational’’ terms. At certain junctures, such as the
uncomfortable confrontation of a teacher with a demanding
and wealthy parent or the purchase of an expired
imported commodity, tangible conflicts were instantiated
between actors differently situated vis-a`-vis nation, state,
and market to define the worth of different kinds of activities
and people—to determine, indeed, on what basis
their needs and priorities were to be weighed against one
another in a postcommunist milieu. But the fluidity of
these scales of value was also the stuff of ongoing conversations
in all kinds of contexts, from skirt shopping to
classroom instruction to birthday toasts.
To return now to the story with which I opened: The
debate’s outcome that night did not mean that the question
was really closed. Rather, the teachers were engaging
in a deliberation about social difference (measured
in terms of professional activities and visibly divergent
consumer styles) and its relation to dignity and social
worth, on the one hand, and material prosperity, on the
other hand. On that evening, worthy, cultured individuals
were hoped—if not expected—to be the proper beneficiaries
of higher standards of living, such that one merry
holiday party conversation decided that Mercedes were
really undesirable, by virtue of their association with
the troubling people who currently owned them. By the
same logic, however, another conversation might well
vociferously criticize the conditions (such as a general
lack of culture in society) that keep worthy subjects from
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
490
claiming their Mercedes and other signs of value.
Doubt might also be cast on the worth of Mercedesless
subjects.
When I returned to St. Petersburg in the summer of
2003, I found more reason to wonder whether the interpretations
might, with time, be leaning ever further in the
latter direction, as teachers and other acquaintances had
diminished their suspicious critiques of New Russians—
even the category itself, people agreed, was no longer widely
used to describe the wealthy—and as some of them acknowledged
in newly accepting tones that the image of the
business person, the kommersant, could evoke positive personal
qualities such as hard work, intellect, and forwardlooking
planning. If Soviet kul’turnost’ legitimated social
inequalities in a particular way, so new idealizations of personal
success and national progress will recast the contributions
and entitlements of teachers and their similarly
positioned peers, perhaps increasingly normalizing their
relative poverty in both their own and others’ eyes. And
if teachers are gaining some conviction that the Russian
market is not necessarily at odds with useful work, professionalism,
and other measures of transcendent value
and humanity, they may also find qualities such as culturedness
to be less and less persuasive proofs of their own
entitlement—although no new language may be immediately
forthcoming, or so emotionally resonant, through
which this disenfranchised version of a middle class might
talk about forces of structural inequality. In this sense,
they may find themselves ‘‘backing in,’’ to borrow Lila
Abu-Lughod’s (1990) phrasing, to new moral contracts and
systems of power that come to seem more natural, less
shocking, and less contestable.
On that festive night, however, the colleagues were
shoring up their moral claims at a moment in which so
many material aspirations seemed firmly out of reach. Yet
to read even these earlier struggles in terms of a local
moral resistance to capitalist modernity would be deceptively
simple. For what emerges on examination of the
tropes of culture and civilization is the pressing sense that
a person must pursue both material respectability (if not
great monetary wealth) and the kind of knowledge, virtue,
and dignity money cannot buy. Neither was really satisfying
or persuasive without the other—which is exactly what
the parallel ideals of kul’turnost’ and civilization are all
about. The bitter losses of culture and the conflicted aspirations
for consumer progress that are juxtaposed in these
Russian commentaries push scholars, then, to be more attentive
to how seemingly divergent scales of value, merit,
and justice coexist—uncomfortably yet determinedly, and
often in close tension with one another—in market and
marketizing societies and to mine the kinds of value
narratives recounted here for insights into speakers’ positioned
experiences of socioeconomic transformation as
well as their ongoing engagement with those processes.
In the case at hand, although the judgments and desires
described above sometimes appear irreconcilably
ambivalent, conjoining potentially conflicting visions of
national and class pasts, presents, and futures, they also
can help make more tangible sense of just how and why
teachers and other similarly positioned citizens may be,
simultaneously, deeply resentful and utterly supportive of
global capitalist ‘‘progress.’’ For, on closer consideration,
their visions are not inherently contradictory. Rather, for
cultured public employees in contemporary St. Petersburg,
jumping ‘‘ahead’’ to a more civilized capitalism really
would mean finding a society in which some of the standards
and securities institutionalized in the Soviet past
could be more confidently reconciled with the good life
purveyed by the globalized marketplace. And is this wish
in itself unique? Although the intensity and forms of such
deliberation are specific to the historical moment under
discussion here, at a basic level, the Russian teachers’
unfulfilled desires to be both adequately civilized and
cultured, both Mercedes owners and happy, both free
and provided for, undoubtedly resonate with the aspirations
and worries of a great many subjects around the
world(s)—Third, Second, and First.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The ethnographic research on which this
article is based was supported generously by a PEO Scholar Award
and by an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities in
Eurasia Grant (1998–99), with funds provided by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State,
and the U.S. Information Agency; and subsequently by an IREX
Short-Term Research Grant (2003). I thank all of the colleagues
who read or heard one version or another of this article; you
certainly have improved it greatly with your insightful comments
and constructive criticisms. In particular, I wish to thank Jessica
Cattelino, Melissa Checker, Bruce Grant, Mark Liechty, Zolani
Ngwane, Stuart Rockefeller, Susan Rogers, two anonymous
reviewers for American Ethnologist, and especially Denis Gainty.
This work also has been enriched by discussions with members
of the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University, the
Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki, the Delaware
Valley Russian History working group, the Anthropology
Works in Progress group at Haverford College, and the Kennan
Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. I am particularly grateful
to Virginia Dominguez for her careful critiques and support
of this piece through more than one reading. And, of course, I
am most deeply indebted to the teachers and others who opened
their lives and offered their friendship to me in St. Petersburg.
1. No. 25 is not the real number of the school. All personal
names have been changed in this article.
2. That the term chosen here was not the common adjective
schastlivyi (contented, fortunate) but the verb radovat’sia (to be
glad, rejoice) is worth noting.
3. Although this study is biased toward the opinions and sentiments
of women, I did not observe clear differences in how men
and women I knew discussed the primary issues at hand. For more
direct discussion of gendered consumer practices, see Patico
2001a:ch. 4, n.d.:ch. 5.
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
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4. In the late 1990s, the very categories of class and status
according to which my informants interpreted their own social
positions were rather uncertain and contested, particularly in
the context of the kriziz that rendered making ends meet significantly
more difficult for most of them than it had been during
the preceding months. Despite the financial problems this implied,
some teachers described themselves as ‘‘middle class’’ or as
part of the ‘‘middle layer’’ of Russian society; others call themselves
‘‘poor.’’ Defining and delineating such classifications in
objective terms is extremely difficult (what should be the key
criterion: profession? salary? style of consumption? or as some
preferred, the same standard of living believed to characterize the
middle class in ‘‘the West?’’). I am sympathetic to the view that,
particularly in such a situation of flux, a more productive approach
to class may be ‘‘as a cultural project or practice—rather
than a social category or empirical condition—[through which one
may] see how the local and the global are brought together in
cultural process, not cultural outcome’’ (Liechty 2003:20–21). In
any case, assumptions about what middle-class identity might
entail in Russia varied widely at the time, even among sociologists
and journalists (Balzer 1998:167, 171; Patico 2001a; Simpura et al.
1999:56).
5. Katherine Verdery’s description of the ‘‘transition’’ as expressed
in Romania’s shifting property rights system suits here;
in this view, transition is ‘‘a process in which new constellations
of possibility and constraint work on notions of value, both
inherited and emergent, to produce [e.g.] postsocialist property
regimes only messily related to their Western blueprint’’ (1999:76;
emphasis added). As anthropologists have hastened to point
out during the last decade, the so-called transition to capitalism
is not a simple, predictable, or unilinear process of Westernization
or a derivative process whereby Russia is likely to ‘‘catch
up’’ and become ‘‘capitalist’’ in the same way as the United
States, Germany, or even the Czech Republic (Burawoy and
Verdery 1999; Humphrey 2002; Humphrey and Mandl 2002; Verdery
1996).
6. Educational opportunity policies of the 1920s created new
channels for social advancement and accrual of privileges along
with an expanded administrative hierarchy of technocrats, party
officials, state-sponsored writers, and others recruited from
worker families (Kelly and Volkov 1998). Increasingly, differential
incomes and allotments of consumer privileges provided incentives
to bureaucrats, engineers, and other professionals as well
as students. As Sheila Fitzpatrick observes, Stalin referred to the
entire elite, including communist officials, as the ‘‘intelligentsia’’;
‘‘thus, the Soviet ‘intelligentsia’ (in Stalin’s broad definition) was
privileged not because it was a ruling class or an elite status group,
but because it was [misrecognized as] the most cultured, advanced
group in a backward society’’ (1999:105). Meshchantsvo
had been a primary target of the communist revolution; the term
approximated ‘‘petite bourgeoisie’’ but also referred to a ‘‘social
type’’ that devoted excessive attention to material perks and social
climbing at the expense of intellectual interests and spiritual
qualities. Historians’ views vary somewhat as to how those negative
traits came to be reframed and rehabilitated and to what
ends (or to whose greatest benefit); as Dunham’s notable account
has it, the Stalin regime began to form a partnership with an
emergent, meshchantsvo-like middle class, ‘‘public in employment
but private and inner-directed in its strivings’’ (1976:20; cf.
Fitzpatrick 1992).
7. In a seminal discussion drawing on the work of East European
theorists of socialism, Verdery has analyzed this ‘‘allocative
authority’’ as fundamental to the logic of state power under
socialism, although
maximizing allocative power does not necessarily mean
maximizing the resources available for allocation . . .
socialism’s central imperative is to increase the bureaucracy’s
capacity to allocate, and this is not necessarily
the same as increasing the amounts to be allocated. The
capacity to allocate is buttressed by its obverse, which
is the destruction of resources outside the apparatus.
[1991:421]
In other words, the system was not oriented toward profit
generation and satisfaction of demand but, rather, toward the goal
of state monopolization of resources.
8. As a popular Stalinist phrase put it, Zhizn’ stala veselee—life
had become happier or more cheerful.
9. Under Nikita Krushchev in the 1950s and early 1960s, new
efforts to shape material culture in accordance with functionalist,
socialist ideals were made; but perceived threats to stability, including
poor availability of consumer goods and dissatisfied bureaucrats,
led the party under Brezhnev to increase material
incentives once again, to allow elites quasi-legal perks, and to
turn a blind eye to illegal or semilegal petty trade and other
informal economic activity (Buchli 1999:137–147; Millar 1990).
10. These virtues underlie, for example, the Moral Codex of
the Builder of Communism (Sharov 1965). Writings on ethics
and etiquette, although not particularly consumerist in outlook,
reconciled substantial attention to one’s own appearance with
communal interests through emphasis on the importance of good
grooming as a sign of one’s respect for others (Dubrovina 1989;
Sagatovskii 1982). Limits were set: One Soviet commentator on
ethics described ‘‘spiritual needs’’ (dukhovnoe potreblenie) in
terms of the interest in and respect for knowledge, art, nature,
one’s own and others’ labor, and other people in general; these
proper orientations were said to be absent in the superficial and
selfish ‘‘slave of things’’ (rab veshchei) who pursued material
possessions with slavish devotion and judged others on the same
basis (Sagatovskii 1982; see also Kelly 2001).
11. For the most comprehensive account of these practices, see
Ledeneva 1998; see also Grossman 1977; Millar 1981, 1990.
12. Amy Ninetto (2001) describes how similar understandings
of civilization and technological progress shaped scientists’ attitudes
toward their work and Russian national identity in late 1990s
Akademgorodok.
13. On the fetishization of U.S. currency in Russia in the earlier
1990s, see Lemon 1998.
14. See Alapuro 1998 for a related analysis of teachers’ social
networks.
15. To elaborate: Among the two dozen or so teachers I got
to know, some were married and others were not; most were
women; and most, except a few younger women in their twenties,
had either one or two children to support. Some teachers earned
extra money as private tutors, generating income that was often
significantly larger than their school salaries. Others were less
successful in attracting students or taught in fields where tutors
were less frequently sought.
16. Nancy Ries (1997) has described similar discourses common
during perestroika that indicted the wealthy and defended
the ever suffering narod (people) as constituting an everyday oral
genre of litany through which people responded critically to
(while not effectively challenging) the political chaos of the Soviet
Union’s collapse and the discomfort of economic ‘‘shock therapy.’’
Ries and others have highlighted the long-term continuity of
a Russian moral narrative about the dangers of money and
the righteousness of poverty and suffering: popular ideology
that incorporates both official Soviet platforms and pre-Soviet
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
492
(including Orthodox Christian) ideas about collectivism and social
justice (Humphrey 1995; Pesmen 2000; Ries 1997). Indeed, this
ideology is described as central to the imagination of Russianness
and the mythologized ‘‘Russian soul.’’ Echoes of such litany resonated
in the St. Petersburg teachers’ reflections about Russian
life at the end of the 1990s, although such rhetoric certainly had
become less pervasive and plaintive than that Ries recorded in
perestroika-era Moscow and was receding yet further among
teachers and others by the time I returned to visit St. Petersburg
in 2003, as I discuss here. In any case, such heroicization of poverty
configures understandings of moral and material value in a
specific and powerful way; yet its rhetorical intensity can eclipse
other configurations being hammered out simultaneously. Indeed,
less attention has been paid directly to the more ambivalent
and conflicted ways in which the material and the moral have
been entangled inextricably rather than opposed in Russian practice,
discourse, and desires—even as they may, at times, be pitted
strategically against one another as opposite or mutually exclusive
ends (a Mercedes or true happiness).
17. The stereotypical New Russian is male; despite the existence
of some wealthy businesswomen, the more frequent topics
of discussion among teachers and others were the ‘‘wives and
girlfriends’’ of New Russians who did not hold jobs and were seen
as lazy, socially isolated, and superficial (Patico n.d.:ch. 5).
18. Indeed, some were able to draw relatively large numbers
of students thanks to their good reputations or to referrals from
other students or teachers, and they could charge hourly rates as
high as $10 (as of 1999). The significance of these lessons as a
source of income is clear when one considers that teachers’ official
monthly salaries were usually in the area of 1,000 rubles,
or about $167 before the 1998 financial crisis and about $42 by
spring 1999. Successful tutors could earn much more in this
capacity than they did in their official jobs as teachers; for
example, one woman, a single mother of two, reported receiving
about 800 rubles per month from the school and 2,000 rubles in
a good month from private tutoring. Still, school positions remained
important because they provided stability and a pool of
potential private pupils.
19. Gail Lapidus (1983) observes that the 1970s saw increasing
pessimism and declining civic morale on the part of Soviet
citizens, a trend she attributes in part to consumer frustration. I
should note that although shortages of all kinds of goods were
chronic and obtaining goods from abroad was particularly challenging,
some imported commodities were available through official
Soviet channels. Many of these were from Eastern and
Central European countries, although Western European goods
were not unheard of.
The variety, quality, and sheer quantity of Western goods
seen and described [through travel, hearsay, or mass
media] established new standards for evaluating Soviet
products and services, and invited increasingly negative
evaluations of Soviet economic performance. Even
comparisons within an Eastern Europe more accessible
and less ideologically suspect to the average Soviet citizen
had subversive implications. [Lapidus 1983:237]
20. St. Petersburg holds a special position as the more ‘‘European’’
of Russia’s two biggest metropolises, both by design (as
part of the Peter the Great’s Westernizing mission) and by today’s
continuing popular opinion (Bassin 1999; Clark 1995). Of course,
as one teacher phrased the widely shared sentiment when she
considered whether her U.S. Internet suitor would enjoy a trip to
her city, St. Petersburg ‘‘may not be as European as some places’’
[mozhet byt’ eto ne takaia Evropa].
21. For a recent and extensive analysis of the attitudes of
Russian youth toward the West, see Pilkington et al. 2002.
22. This kind of reaction seems to be widespread and requires
more investigation. For example, Gerald Creed reports the words
of a Bulgarian villager who had just returned from his first trip to
Western Europe in 1995: ‘‘How can we ever be part of Europe . . .
We are so far behind. We are just aborigines here’’ (1998:275). On
related discourses of the ‘‘normal’’ and material culture in postsocialist
Hungary, see Fehervary 2002.
23. The question of how racial categories are linked with standards
of living in these Russian narratives is a fascinating one that
I have little space to discuss here. For a more extensive account
of discourses of race, ethnicity, and culture in Russia, see Alaina
Lemon’s (2000) analysis of Roma identity and performance; on
Russian representations of Africa and blackness, see Blakely 1986;
and on the use of terms of whiteness, blackness, and negry to
describe standards of living, see Patico 2001a.
24. ‘‘Exotica’’ is a sort of reverse side to the discourse of the
‘‘normal’’ as discussed in Fehervary 2002 and Rausing 2002.
25. I thank Elena Zdravomyslova (personal communication
1999) for highlighting this.
26. This is particularly clear in discussions of clothing, which
fairly unequivocally posit Western European items as high quality
and stylish, whereas Turkish, Korean, and Chinese garments—
sold mostly in rynki (outdoor markets) and iarmarki (indoor bazaars)
as opposed to the more posh shops—are assumed more
likely to be shoddily made. Although observed material virtues
or flaws in these items as well as the contexts in which they are
sold (and the people who visibly sell them: e.g., shuttle traders
from China or Central Asia in rynki vs. the young, Russian women
of fancy clothing shops) play important roles in these evaluations,
the long-standing symbolic weight of the categories ‘‘Europe’’ and
‘‘Asia’’ (Bassin 1999) also seem to inform these assessments.
27. Thus, for example, when describing a preference for Russianproduced
foods, most people did not express a sentimental or
politicized preference for the domestic but, rather, cited the
advantages of relatively local produce, milk from the nearby
Petmol plant, and chocolate from the Krupskaia factory of St.
Petersburg. Produce from nearby cooperative farms might have
more spots and bruises than the shiny, flawless fruits from
abroad, but it had more taste and was assumed to be fresher.
One did not know exactly when and how an imported, packaged
cake had been made, but local bakery stands carried breads and
sweets that one knew (or assumed) had been baked close by
within the past few days. Domestically manufactured goods,
especially cheap items specially transported to St. Petersburg
from distant cities, could fall under suspicion or derision for
similar reasons.
28. Some information was available to local consumers in the
mass media (print, television, and radio), although many buyers
depended more on hearsay. Newspapers and women’s magazines
published comparisons of commonly used products such
as mayonnaise and vegetable oil and guidelines for identifying
fresh, safe products. Domashnii Ochag, the Russian version of
Good Housekeeping, featured information about home appliances
such as washing machines (October 1998) and kitchen tools (November
1998). Both free advertisement circulars and, from time
to time, other newspapers and periodicals (such as PeterburgEkspress)
reported on comparative prices for staple items at the
city’s rynki.
29. Regarding expiration dates, one male music teacher, for
example, noted that when the imports had started pouring in to
To be happy in a Mercedes n American Ethnologist
493
Russia, ‘‘the West’’ had sent its expired goods that had not been
eaten at home. Although a shopper could, of course, examine the
expiration date to avoid problems, false expiration labels, notoriously,
were pasted over earlier, authentic ones. In my experience,
such indictments generally veered away from any discussion of
the state regulations and monitoring standards that were apparently
ineffective in ensuring reasonable food quality and safety.
Also, although people were aware that agencies that heard consumer
complaints existed in St. Petersburg, no one I asked about
them thought these agencies would be effective enough to make
the bureaucratic trouble of appealing to them worth one’s while.
For a more extended discussion of consumer practice (decisionmaking
strategies, prices, types of outlets favored, etc.) see Patico
2001a:ch. 5, n.d.:chs. 2, 4.
30. Ries (2002) provides apocryphal evidence of the actual
falsification of expiration dates in urban Russia.
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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
accepted February 14, 2005
final version submitted March 2, 2005
Jennifer Patico
Department of Anthropology
Haverford College
Haverford, PA 19041
jpatico@haveford.edu
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 3 August 2005
496