'Icebergs', Barter, and the Mafia in Provincial Russia
Author(s): Caroline Humphrey
Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 8-13
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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'Icebergs', barter, and the mafia in
provincial Russia
CAROLINE
HUMPHREY
The author is lecturer in
the department of social
anthropology,
Cambridge, andfellow
of King's College
Cambridge. Her article
'Perestroika and the
pastoralists: the example
of Mongun-Taiga in
Tuva ASSR' was
published in A.T. June
1989. She has published
widely on the USSR,
Mongolia and Nepal.
'Icebergs'
Late at night recently I was driving through the streets
of Ulan-Ude with a Buryat friend and I saw a crowd of
people huddled against the wall of a dark building, their
shoulders turned against the wind. I asked my friend
what they were doing. 'Ah, that is the queue for gold,'
he replied. 'They stand there all night, and in the morning
many more people come. Even though gold is so
expensive, for the last two years everyone has been trying
to get hold of it. They even buy and sell places in
the queue.'
A move to gold indicates a lack of trust in the value
of the rouble. In Russia today this is combined, as
everyone knows, with severe shortages of goods in the
shops, general inflation and impossibly high prices in
markets, production blockages in farms and factories, a
chaotic legal situation, and the introduction of 'rationing'.
But I believe that the social implications of the
situation are less well known and understood and it is
these which I wish to address in this article. One might
imagine a parallel with the time after the Second World
War, when many of these economic features were present.
However, for reasons which will become clear
below, the present situation should be seen as different
even from that of Russia in the 1940s. Perhaps internal
historical analogies can be drawn for some aspects of
what is happening today, but they also are to be found
further afield, and anthropology may be useful to elucidate
them.
We can begin with an very brief outline of the situation
in provincial Russia. The declaration of
'sovereignty' and other forms of autonomy vis-a-vis the
USSR, not just by the RSFSR but by regions within it,
such as the Buryat ASSR, and districts within regions,
such as the Aga Autonomous Okrug, means that there
is widespread uncertainty about government and law at
'higher' levels of the body politic. Consequently, organizations
and enterprises in the regions, run in a personal
way almost as 'suzerainties' by local bosses, have
strengthened themselves and increased their social functions
in order to protect their members. What are the
relations between these organizations? It is not possible
to rely on the law, or even know what it is these days;
and at the same time government, which used to regulate
flows of goods and allocation of labour - including
decrees by Soviets and plan-orders by Ministries - has
ceased to be universally or even generally obeyed. One
could see this situation as the beginning of the reforms,
the loosening of centralized authority and the devolution
of power. But the social structures which are now
toughening themselves are in contradiction with the
goal of a free market, even with that of a regulated but
all-USSR market. Symptoms of this are that economic
relations between local 'suzerainties' are increasingly
conducted by distinctive methods (of which people in
the west have little knowledge): by coupons and
'orders', by means of direct barter, or via what is
widely known as 'the Mafia' - a heterogeneous collection
of racketeer associations whose common feature is
that they contain their own 'protection'.
Sometimes Russians use a metaphor to describe the
local corporations which I have called suzerainties.
They are 'icebergs': of different sizes, perhaps melting
a little at top and bottom, or maybe growing imperceptibly,
floating and jostling one another in an unfriendly
sea. Such images are all very well, but the real situation
is so peculiar to the Soviet economy and so unfamiliar
to readers from the west that we need detailed examples
in order to understand what is happening.
Let us start with the case of carpets in Ulan-Ude, an
example not of production but of distribution. In September
the carpet shop on Ulitsa Pobedy was besieged,
a seething mass of people from morning to night,
though the shelves were empty. The 'queue' had
bureaucratized itself and stood at a list of eight hundred
names. The manager of the shop was in despair. He
telephoned every morning to his suppliers, and announced
the paltry results (a few hundred square metres
due from Mongolia sometime) to the customers, but
'They don't believe me! They are there all day and become
quite inhuman from the fruitless waiting. I need
to protect my assistants from their insults.' In fact, the
manager had received some other carpets, but they had
immediately been sent out 'on order' to a collective
farm. But it was not this that agitated the customers.
They assumed that the manager could get carpets on
the side, by barter. The manager said that, no, he has
nothing to give in exchange. The same was true outside,
in the town markets. A few desirable carpets were
for sale, but the sellers wanted only certain scarce
goods in exchange, and such things are, unfortunately,
hardly produced in Buryatia.
Coupons and 'orders'
Western newspapers often inform their readers that the
USSR has introduced rationing to cope with such situations.
This may give the wrong impression. There is a
distinction in principle between generalized rationing
and limited 'coupons'. What actually is being used is
the latter, a multifarious collection of food-cards (kartochka),
coupons (talon), orders (zakaz) and couponorders,
the two combined. This is an important factor
which differentiates the current situation from that at
the end of the Second World War. Then, the centralized
government was able to make an assessment of stocks
and production-flows in the country and assign goods
to cities and regions by a single system of rationing.
The system differentiated between social categories
(soldiers, mothers, pensioners, etc.) but in principle it
was universal for the whole country and population.
Today, no-one knows what goods there are, and even if
general rationing is introduced it will be impossible to
establish universal norms. Entitlements to purchase are
limited by a host of local factors. The coupons and
orders enabling people to buy things are issued not centrally
but by all sorts of regional organizations. Local
government, i.e. the Soviets at various levels, seem to
have side-stepped responsibility for the regulation of allocations
as a whole. Crucially, the talon coupons and
orders can be issued by the places where people work
(the 'suzerainties' or 'icebergs').
Long ago Mary Douglas (1967) explained the socio-
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Illus. 1. A furniture shop
in Kyzyl, Tuva ASSR,
hangs out a notice
saying that these goods
are available for
purchase only to those
with coupons issued by
the City Soviet. Such
coupons are not
allocated to people with
criminal records or
other black marks
against their names.
political consequences of the use of coupons in her
analysis of certain tribal economies in New Guinea.
She contrasted three types of primitive economy, controlled,
freely competitive, and mixed, and argued that
the currencies found in the more controlled economies
were more like coupons than money. 'I would expect
primitive coupon systems to emerge where there is
some danger that the effective demand for scarce resources
may so disturb the pattern of distribution as to
threaten a given social order'.2 Both rationing and
coupons (or licensing) are instruments of social policy,
but whereas rationing is egalitarian in intent, coupons
are not. The object of coupons or licensing is protective:
to limit access to particular goods to certain
groups of people. An important side-effect of coupons
is to create advantages, even sometimes monopolies,
for those who issue them and those who receive them.
'Both parties become bound in a patron-client relation
sustained by the strong interests of each in the continuance
of the system' (1967:131).
In Russia today it can be seen that coupons thus have
social implications both within and between 'suzerainties'.
How does this work? In large metropolitan cities
since 1 December 1990 all products are now sold up to
given 'norms' only to people with residence rermits.
On the other hand, the food-card (kartochka) is the
most prevalent form in the provinces. Such cards are
for specific products which are scarce in a given town
or region and again they are issued only to people who
have residence permits. This means that outsiders cannot
buy such products at all. If a villager goes on a visit
to Ulan-Ude for a month he or she will have a hungry
time of it without friends to provide food. As one
Soviet economist has put it, 'The kartochki only divide
the market into "apanage princedoms" and protect resources
which have been "beaten out" from "aliens"'.4
'Orders' (zakaz), which exist in several guises, are
also common. A large factory, for example, may have
its own grocery shop. In Moscow local govenmment insists
that such shops be open to the general public at
least one day a week, and perhaps to pensioners another
day a week. The other five days are reserved for the
factory. All shopping at the store is done 'by order', i.e.
purchase of a limited bundle of products (the 'order',
e.g. 300 grams of cheese, 1/2 kilo of sausages, 3 tins of
fish, etc.) which the shop changes from time to time
according to its supplies. Another prevalent fonn is for
shops selling scarce goods, such as shoes and boots, to
take a consignment directly 'by order' to an office or
factory where they are sold to employees by coupons
which have been distributed beforehand. Just as common
is a system whereby departments of an organization
such as an Institute of the Academy of Sciences
fetch in their own orders and distribute them at the
work-place. In this case, at set times the contents of the
'order' are advertised and people queue to put their
names on the list. When the set time is up the department
sends people down to the shop to collect the
goods, they are brought back to the Institute, and distributed.
These orders are more or less 'powerful' depending
on the social weight of the organization concemed
(academics, it goes without saying, rank rather
low). The shops may give better or worse quality
goods, or fulfil only 100 out of 300 orders on the list,
for example. I know one family which lives almost entirely
on the 'order' of its one privileged member, a
long-time Party member and veteran of World War
Two.
Talon coupons are similar to food-cards, but even
more limited in their use. They enable certain categories
of people (workers at a factory, members of a collective-farm,
war-veterans of a town, mothers of many
children, etc.) to buy specific products (see illus. 1).
They are extremely heterogeneous. Sometimes coupons
are limited to a specific shop, sometimes not. Sometimes
they are allocated per head in a family, sometimes
by the number of adult workers. They may be
distributed randomly (drawn out of an urn) or they may
be allocated to people who have worked especially
well. Coupons may be given out by various organizations,
from local Soviets to work-places.
The situation is clearly unfair, as it gives people unequal
access to resources. Not only are the 'norms'
different in the major cities, but in the provinces meat,
for example, may be available by two different systems
in neighbouring towns, in one by talon coupons and in
other only by orders made at the work-place. In the
deep countryside (glubinka) people often have access to
none of these systems and therefore have to provide
their own basic subsistence. A woman working as a
secretary in a state farm, for example, has an exhausting
day as she rushes to combine her job with milking
her cattle, tending her pigs, and so forth. To give an
example: in 1988 in the Kalmyk ASSR 4,214 tons of
meat were distributed through state outlets by coupons
and orders. Of this 70% was sold in the capital city of
Elista, but Elista does not contain anything like 70% of
the population. A meat coupon in the capital therefore
'weighed' considerably more than in the country towns,
and farmers were not given coupons at all.5 But despite
their unfairness these systems are widely popular as
most people think they have something to gain from
them.
Inside the organization there are many possibilities
for deploying patronage and they extend to hangers-on.
In Kalmykia orders for meat were also made by workplaces.
The construction group Kalmykstroi, for example,
sent their order to the butcher shop only for it to
be discovered more or less by chance that the director
of the group had personally added 110 names to the
list. Since many people may get left off these lists for
one reason or another (e.g. their official residence is in
another town, they do not work, or have part-time or
unofficial employment) one could interpret the director's
action as charitable, but it is also clear that the
boss (khozyain, 'owner' 'master') only stood to gain
himself by his increased patronage.
The coupon systems naturally have social effects at
the receiving end too. An example is the allocation of
vodkca coupons in regions such as Tuva which are still
subject to the 'dry law' against alcoholism. Here
coupons are allocated by committees within workplaces
and I was assured in 1989 that they take it upon
themselves to judge whether someone is 'suitable' to
receive a monthly coupon. Drunkards and 'unsuitable'
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people are refused, and must prove themselves before
their work-mates in order to get back on the list.
The coupon system itself, however, is beyond the
law. You can be prosecuted in some regions for illegal
distilling, but not for issuing coupons. In Yakutia recently
a large cartel printed thousands of counterfeit
vodka coupons. When this was discovered several
hundred people were arrested. But they were released
because no law could be found under which to prosecute
them. They had not sold the coupons and benefited
financially; all they had done was to issue their
own licence to get drunk (depriving other people of
vodka). As an observer commented, 'In the present system
the consumer is protected by precisely nothing'.
The result is that people are increasingly dependent
on the services provided by their work-places, especially
in the countryside. It is not always realized in the
west quite how all-embracing these may be. Again the
situation is utterly heterogeneous. No matter if the old
Victory Collective Farm has renamed itself the Victory
Agrarian-Industrial Firm, one must look closely at the
individual farm to see what the reality is. This September
I returned to the Karl Marx Collective Farm in Barguzin,
where I had first done fieldwork in the 1960s. I
found that it was now rather successful, having undergone
a period in the doldrums in the 1970s, but was
organizationally almost entirely unchanged. As in the
old days, what I called the 'manipulable resources' (the
surplus product over the amount supplied to the state
under the plan-order) were used to provide services for
the members as the Chairman saw fit. In this case he
had decided on cultural investment: a magnificent club
had been provided, an ethnographic museum built, an
integrated Buryat educational programme was under
way in the schools, and a sports stadium was under
construction. But Gorbachev's agricultural reforms
were here resolutely refused. Although one or two
young men had managed to winkle out low-quality
leasehold fields, the Chairman was adamant that classic
collectivised farming was the only realistic alternative.
Indeed, he, like most farm chairmen I met, saw individual
farming as a threat: it would claim his best
workers, who would put their energies into their own
profits rather than those of the collective farm.
On the other hand, in the Bodongut State Farm, also
in Buryatia, the Chairman had gone over to the leasehold
system entirely, even before it became government
policy. The farm was divided into 22 leasehold brigades.
Darmayev's brigade, for example, last year sold
produce worth 90,300 roubles to the state via the farm.
During the year the four families in the brigade lived
on an advance worth 15% of their estimated income.
Payment for any farm machinery used, for fodder, and
for amortization, housing and repairs was deducted
from the 90,300 roubles at the end of the year. The rest
of the income belonged to the families, to dispose as
they wished. For this system to be profitable to the
farm, the accounting office had laboriously to work out
two new internal sets of prices. Taking into account the
prices paid to the farm by the state for deliveries of the
plan-order, the farm had to set, for each item, its own
prices paid to the leaseholders for their products and the
set of prices at which the workers acquired machinery,
fodder, etc. from the farm. The result in this case was a
brilliant success. The farm made such a profit that it
was able to provide thousands of roubles to its workers
for loans to build houses and acquire private livestock,
to pay each year 300 roubles to mother-heroines, 200
roubles to families with many children, 130 to war invalids,
100 to veterans, to provide paid maternity leave
for three years for each child, to hire a farm postman,
club worker and kindergarten staff, to build a medical
centre, a general store, and an abattoir and meat-packing
shop.
What these two otherwise different farms have in
common is the decisive power of the Chairman. This
seems to have grown since my earlier visits, with a
corresponding weakening in the authority of the Communist
Party (not that there are any other political parties
in Buryatia as yet). Both men had translated their
economic authority sideways into politics: the Chairman
of the Karl Marx (the same man who had presided
in 1967) was also executive head of the local Soviet
and the Chairman of Bodongut was an elected deputy
to the Soviet of the Buryat ASSR. But even in lesser
and unsuccessful farms, the ordinary members are dependent
on the 'suzerain' in spheres which western
people would think of as having nothing to do with
their work. Most housing, for example, is allocated by
the work-place, and even if someone wishes to build
their own house the loan necessary to do so can be obtained
only from the employing organization directly or
via its recommendation. One's standing with the boss is
of direct consequence.
Farms and other enterprises have become economic
sub-systems with a noticeable degree of autonomy.
There are peculiar internal arrangements designed to
conserve and internally circulate their own resources.
For example, I went into one farm general store and
saw, prominently displayed against a rack of 'ordinary'
(actually fully adequate by British standards) coats, a
few glossy furs and shiny Japanese anoraks. They had
notices pinned to them: they were only for sale to
people who had sold 300 kilos of potatoes or 50 kilos
of meat to the farm. But the Bodongut state farm went
much further. It printed its own money. All internal
transactions in the farm were paid in this money, which
was converted into roubles only at the end of the year
when the farm itself was paid by the state. The initial
reason for this internal money was that no-one would
give the farm a loan to pay its first year advances to the
lessee brigades, but it continued to be used because, as
the Chairman said, it prevented people and roubles
seeping out of the farm during the working year.
A Soviet legal specialist has summed up the situation:
'Empty shop counters, as history tells us, are the
initial syndrome of social discontent. Towns, oblasts
[administrative divisions], republics are fencing themselves
off with palisades of rationing in defence against
"migratory demand", they are bringing in nothing more
or less than "buying tickets". The scale and consequences
of this mutual alienation are unpredictable. A
large number of people support such methods, and
mass consciousness brands those who penetrate into
"foreign" enclaves of the rationed market through a
prism of confrontational mythology as pokupanty [a
pun, combining the idea of those who buy up too
much, pokupat', with occupying forces, okkupanty,
C.H.] or plyushevyi desant (plush landing-forces)... In
almost every region such epithets are widespread. The
market is divided-up, and aggressive particularism is
growing.'
Turning to the relations between these defensive
'suzerainties' we should note (1) that their 'manipulable
resources' are frequently goods and labour rather than
money, (2) that the law gives little protection to informal
contracts, (3) the virtual absence of commercial
banks in the USSR, (4) the controls still exercised over
farm markets, and (5) the inequalities in access to
scarce resources between regions. It is these conditions
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1. Dialog, 1992, 2, p 58.
2. Mary Douglas (1967)
'Primitive Rationing',
in R. Firth (ed.)
Themes in Economic
Anthropology,
Tavistock: London;
p.127.
3. The reader should not
be confused by this
terrn. At present it has
the character of a local
which give rise to barter and the operations of what all
Soviet citizens call the 'Mafia'. As governmental
decrees become less effective the sheer number of informal
contracts has risen, and it is these in particular
which are neither serviced by banks nor protected by
the law.
The desperate attempts of the old system of decrees
to maintain control is illustrated in relation to this
autumn's potato harvest in Buryatia. Heavy rains
during the late summer made the fields water-logged
and delayed the harvest. As usual in such situations the
ASSR government declared a situation of emergency
and ordered all institutions such as institutes and
schools to send labour to the fields. What was unusual
this year is that the government increased the rates of
pay, lowered the work-norms, and ordered farms to pay
the helpers on time. But this was not sufficient to make
enough people come out. Meanwhile city-dwellers
needed potatoes. The result was that many people made
their own arrangements with the farms: harvesting in
return for a direct payment in potatoes. Many farms
were in such disarray that they turned a blind eye to
people simply helping themselves in the fields.
Factories and farms have always, if they are at all
successful, ended the year with some manipulable resources
in products. In the past the state plan-order was
supposed to mop up all such assets, but now that enterprises
are all officially based on self-accounting (khozraschet)
it is official policy to allow them to dispose of
their surplus as they see fit. In theory this could be
done through the medium of money. Similarly, individual
citizens with disposable assets (potatoes they
have harvested, a dacha they wish to change, etc.)
could use money. But in practice they frequently do
not, and one reason is the absence of both commercial
banks and personal bank accounts.
In the USSR today there are only a tiny number of
banks offering services to individuals or institutions,
and none in places like Buryatia, as far as I know.
Sberbank SSR, Promstroibank SSR, Agroprombank
SSR and the other state banks still play a traditional
role. This means that they do not trust customers who
might wish to bank with them, indeed they restrict
access by placing fearsome militiamen at their doors to
examine identity documents. In effect they still operate
virtually entirely on instructions from above. They are
ordered to finance X or Y project, and they do so,
without regard for its further viability (this is one reason
why so many construction projects lie unfinished in
the Soviet Union). State banks even liquidate the assets
of enterprises, or move funds between the accounts of
various customers with impunity.9 Not surprisingly
there is a widespread desire to keep out of their grasp.
Individuals can place their money in a savings bank,
but this is not a bank account as we know it. There are
no cheque-books and the idea of making loans available
to people who ask for them on their own initiative
is a novelty (see cover illustration). Rather than see
their money eaten away by inflation people are increasingly
turning to saving in commodities (for example,
gold, as we have seen).
Barter
The result is that both enterprises and individuals turn
to barter (barternaya sdelka). This is not a new phenomenon,
but it is growing. Soviet friends told me that
around 60% of the Soviet economy is now transacted
by means of barter. This must be an exaggeration, but it
shows how the phenomenon is perceived today
whatever its actual dimensions. In farms and factories
barter has always been essential to maintain production,
not just to dispose of surpluses. As mn previous work
on barter in north-east Nepal showed ?, simultaneous
barter is the kind of contract which can best dispense
with trust. It has no need for the generalized trust epitomized
by confidence in the value of a national currency.
The transactors see what is on offer, come to an
agreement, swap their products, and can then walk
away from the deal never to meet again. However, such
direct barter is extremely rare, especially in agricultural
economies. This is because the various products are
available at different times of year, and because, since
agriculture is cyclical and needs for supplies recur, it
makes sense to repeat exchanges with the same partners
rather than seek new ones each year. Unlike simultaneous
barter, delayed barter or repeated barter requires
a high degree of trust and fair-dealing. Only this
can ensure that a return is made later for an item given
today, or that both sides will wish to repeat the transaction
in the next cycle. As a result transactors tend to
establish exchange networks with 'known people'. But
these can never provide the fluid, all-pervasive links of
a monetary system, since they are limited by these very
personalized relations, by the lack of generalized trust
and information. Barter, therefore, is not only a symptom
of a disintegrated economy but also perpetuates it.
All barter, whether immediate or delayed, requires
information as to what is available where, when, and at
what rates. In the Soviet Union this is provided not by
central exchanges but by special individuals or departments
within each enterprise. These 'supply departments'
as they are known are staffed by highly-valued
people, snabzhentsy (suppliers) or tolkachi (pushers).
Their task is to travel round the country getting information
and making deals. Although the products transacted
may be valued in roubles no money changes
hands. Let us take an example. In the Aga Buryat Autonomous
Okrug the eastern region is treeless steppeland
where sheep-farms produce wool and meat, the
western part is heavily wooded. Farms of the two regions
have set up their own regular exchange relations
whereby meat and wool is exchanged for timber and
fodder.
The barter contracts are unregulated by the state and
exchange ratios vary from year to year. The effect of
this in recent years in Aga has been to advantage the
eastern farms: timber and fodder are relatively plentiful
and in any case could be acquired from places other
than western Aga. On the other hand, the relative value
of meat and wool has risen with the general disarray of
Soviet farming. As one farm director told me smugly,
his single state farm in the east was now worth more
than all of the seven farms of the western region put
together. Barter can be combined with the system of
'orders' and this may result in further trading. For example,
a farm may give a refrigerator factory spare
building materials in exchange for some refrigerators
'on order', and then trade the extra fridges for fodder
with some neighbours.
Barter thus establishes little pools of trust and mutual
help, though it does not necessarily save a transactor
from relative decline engendered by the wider external
economic situation. As in Nepal, it is clear that try as
they might to influence 'their' exchange partners, the
disadvantaged side is forced to agree, or to try elsewhere
with people who may be less well known and
less reliable in making payment. The whole system is
carried out in circumstances of utmost uncertainty
about its legality. Let us note, in brief, what the general
attitude to the law is today in the provinces, and then
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relate this to the specific circumstances of barter and
other economic exchanges.
A lawyer from Buryatia has written the following:
Why has it happened that we are building the lawgoverned
state (pravovoye gosudarstvo) with the help of...
ever spreading legal nihilism, and they even try to persuade
us that this is a natural process?
Yes, many legal statutes of the country turned out to be
imperfect in themselves and furthermore they have simply
ceased to correspond to new realities. Congresses and parliaments
have set about creating new laws on top of the
old ones. Their numbers rise with great rapidity. A large
number of corrections to the Constitution have been made.
But alas, this high tempo has not led to a correspondingly
fast growth in legal consciousness. Rather, the reverse. The
feverishness with which laws are set up and put away, and
the absence of mechanisms for enacting them, has led to a
reverse process. And should we be surprised?
In countries with a developed parliamentary tradition corrections
to the Constitution take years to work out, but we
are prepared to take them up almost by ear. The next step
is quite logical - generally to ignore the law in favour of
some 'higher goal'. Republics and regions (raiony) of the
country are establishing their own acts in contradiction to
the Constitution. And not just regions! Districts, even village
Soviets give out declarations of their sovereignty,
with the obligatory paragraph: the laws of all higher organs
of power will be effective in their territory only after
local ratification. This means chaos.
... How can the ordinary person even find out which laws
of higher organs contradict with one another? It is much
simpler to declare your sovereignty and decide which laws
you will apply and which not. ... It is not by accident that
Rolan Bykov recently said to Gorbachev that one presidential
decree is lacking, a decree which could provide the
fundament of unity for all republics - on the sovereignty
of the individual.
... But would such a decree help when our people do not
even understand that chaos does not lead to freedom but to
dictatorship, that a man cannot count himself free unless
he knows that his house is protected from a disaster, that
he cannot be driven from his work because of what he
looks like, that his right to elect and be elected is secure?
We need a state which can guarantee these elementary
human rights. A state is powerful when its subjects can not
only insult it but can also observe its laws, and, if they are
imperfect can change them only by parliamentary means,
being guided by that wise principle which preserves stability,
'The law may be bad, but it is the law'. I
What the author is complaining about is that concern
with freedom/ sovereignty at the level of the state has
resulted in a situation which effectively 'legalizes' (or
makes unprosecutable) hitherto criminal activities. Take
'speculation', for example. Speculation involves buying
something in one place, taking it to where there is
greater demand, and selling it at a higher price. It has
always been illegal (because no good productive labour
adds value in the process) and today in theory still is
so. But what about barter, which could be seen as
speculation doubled?
Most people have no objection to barter, but they do
feel very strongly about the new co-operatives (small
private firms) which are only a step away. Co-operatives,
to look at things from the outside, could be a solution
to many of the problems discussed here. But in
provincial Russia they are widely disliked, mistrusted,
and even feared. Partly this is because of their great
financial gains: a recent article estimated that whereas
the state paid 5 milliard roubles to farms for grains last
year, the co-operative sector had an income of 40 milliard.12
The author's cry, 'Yet we all eat bread!' explains
a great deal. No-one in the west expects bread producers
to be very rich, even at subsidized state prices,
yet in Russia different, age-old values prevail. The cooperatives
in fact operate in those very areas of the
economy where there is acute demand for high-value,
scarce, and novel products - not bread but exotic cuisines,
computer software, or fashions in clothing. Many
are involved simply in moving such products around
the country, in pure 'speculation' in Soviet terms, or in
the production of low-quality, yet glamorous, goods
which are then sold expensively. When this is done by
an officially-registered co-operative it is not illegal, but
legitimate business. No wonder ordinary people are dismayed.
From this it is another short step to Mafia-type
operations. These have homed-in even more specifically
to areas of extreme demand and vulnerability, but
the point is that these foci for threatening activity are
multiplying with increased scarcity. So it is not just the
expected areas of drugs and prostitution which see such
operations, but also taxi-networks (particularly in cities
where there are foreigners with dollars, or where there
is petrol scarcity), video-parlours, and home and vehicle
repairs. There is even a specialist area of 'queuemanagement',
which consists of taking money from
people who do not have time to stand for days or
weeks themselves.
In everything which has been said it is apparent that
belonging to a 'suzerainty' is almost a necessity, even
if it results in dependency, even if some people can perceive
the general social alienation involved. How else
to get 'orders' or 'coupons', let alone somewhere to
live? In effect, this means having a steady job, and
preferably an established position under a powerful and
successful boss. But many people do not have such
jobs. Pensioners, the disabled, school-leavers without
training or diplomas, demobbed soldiers and refugees
from areas of civil unrest may find themselves out in
the cold. Ex-prisoners find it almost impossible to get
good jobs. In many areas of the RSFSR this problem of
dislocation has become aligned not just with social
class but specifically with ethnic boundaries.
I would not say that this is invariably the case. Some
non-Russian cultures encourage their own forms of integration,
and this is a subject which should be further
investigated by anthropologists. For example, the Buryats
have both strong ties to the land, hence stable and
loyal populations in collective farms, and also have a
tradition of literacy and thus include a numerous administrative
/ intellectual class well integrated into regional
institutions. The Koreans, to take another example,
have maintained their tradition of intensive
vegetable cultivation and successfully engage themselves
as temporary summer brigades all over the
RSFSR, returning home during the winter to live on the
proceeds.
But we find the reverse case in Tuva. Here young
Tuvinians do not want to work on the farms and yet
many of them have not adapted to the urban work-ethic
either. Rootless gangs of young men, with no jobs or
only temporary employment, roam the towns, living
any way they can (see illustration 2). These days
people do not dare wear valuable fur-hats in Tuva for
fear they be snatched from their heads; muggings, knifings,
and attacks on buses and cars are common. It is
this anomie which lies at the base of the Tuvinian
'nationalist' riots that have caused hundreds of Russians
to flee the province. In fact, there is no real Tuvinian
nationalist party or political agenda, though one
may develop. The situation is that many young Tuvinians
simply resent the Russians: it is Russians, who
are better trained and more culturally-attuned to industrial
work who dominate in the 'suzerainties' and
who have access to better facilities, especially accommodation,
and it is mainly Tuvinians who find themselves
left outside (see illustration 3). Furthermore, Tuvinians,
amongst whom worship of sacred mountains,
rivers, trees and springs is virtually universal, hate the
Russians for their careless attitude to the environment.
coupon as described,
but the expression
kartochnaya systema is
used for the general
rationing which some
economists advocate
introducing for the
USSR as a whole in
the future.
4. Dialog 2, 1990, p 57.
5. Dialog, 2, 1990, p 58.
Residence documents
have therefore almost
become a commodity.
6. Dialog, 2, 1990, p 58.
7. Molodezh Buryatii,
1st Sept 1990, p 3.
8. A. B. Vengerov,
writing in Dialog, 2,
1990, p 58.
9. Dialog, 8, 1990, p 81.
This journal praises the
initiative of one new
commercial bank, the
Vostok, based in Ufa.
But it notes that such
independence is
anathema to the state.
Commercial banks up
to recently have been
allowed to operate
without paying taxes.
Now the Vostok has
been asked to pay a
60% tax.
10. C. Humphrey, 1985,
'Barter and Economic
Disintegration', Man,
March.
11. A. Subbotin writing
in Pravda Buryatii, 7th
October 1990, p 2.
12. Dialog, 2, 1990, p 73.
13. There is a rather
disorganized movement
called the Democratic
International
Movement of Tuva,
headed by Dr.
Kaadyr-Ool
Alekseyevich
Bicheldey, a historian,
but it is not this which
lies behind the attacks
on Russians. What he
wants is just to revive
the culture of the
Tuvinians.
14. Valery Sharov, Far
Eastern correspondent
of the Literaturnaya
Gazeta, personal
communication.
15. The population of
Tuva ASSR is 70%
Tuvinian and 30%
Russian. The
disturbances have only
affected regions where
the two groups live
side by side, not the
remote Tuvinian-only
regions, such as
Mongun-Taiga where
the documentary film
in the Disappearing
World series, Herders
of Mongun Taiga, was
made.
12 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991
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Top: illus. 2. A
Tuvinian gang, near
Kyzyl 1990.
Middle: illus. 3.
Tuvinian housing, with
Russian-occupied
apartments in the
background. Kyzyl, 1990.
Bottom: illus. 4. Factory
abandoned by the
Russians, Tuva, 1990.
The result in regions of mixed population is numberless,
sporadic, disorganized uprisings and armed attacks
on Russians and this extends to Russified Tuvinians.
For example, gangs frequently stop someone in the
street with a simple question; unless the answer is given
in fluent Tuvinian, the person will be knifed or even
shot. In provincial Russia hunting guns are to be found
everywhere, and these days they are frequently stolen
and taken to the cities. The stated reason for concerted
attacks is often economic, especially the smuggling in
of vodka, and there have been serious economic results.
As already noted, Tuva is subject to the 'dry law' while
neighbouring regions are not. Throughout Tuva construction
projects, entirely staffed by well-paid Russians,
allow the smuggling in of vodka together with
building supplies. So violent have been the attacks on
the workers and lorry-drivers by resentful Tuvinians
that many Russians have lost their lives. Factories and
mines staffed by Russians have had to close as the
workers have fled in panic (see illustration 4). In reprisal
the neighbouring, and much richer, Russian regions
have halted all capital investment in Tuva. Poor
Tuva has hardly any paved roads, few bridges, and
much of the rural population lives in yurts.14
Russians also attack native peoples for directly
economic motives. All over the forested regions of Siberia
there are logging enterprises (lespromkhoz). They
are entirely manned by Russians and have begun to be
much disliked by native peoples as the swathes of desolation
become more and more apparent. This was so in
the Karl Marx collective farm, which had objected
many times to the activities of the nearby Jubilee lespromkhoz,
though without result. I was recently told
about a more serious example: the Udegei are hunters
living in the Amur River region and for them destruction
of the forest is the destruction of their subsistence
and way of life. With the new political conditions their
protests apparently met with some positive response
from the local authorities. The reaction of the Russians
in the logging village to this threat that their enterprise
might have to close was to cut off the supply of electricity
to the Udegei village. Such disputes are everywhere
and are bound to increase, since there is as yet
no effective law in the RSFSR to establish rights to
land for any individual or group apart from 'the state'.
One result of all this 'aggressive particularism' is that
'protection' of various kinds is emerging all through
society. This is not the night-watchmen of old, but new
organizations and rackets, staffed it seems often by the
very dislocated people who have lost their footholds in
the 'suzerainties'. The old underworld is prominent, but
so are former soldiers and even ex-members of the
KGB. I have little evidence on quite how this works,
but it seems probable that it is the local bosses who are
the main employers of the more legitimate forms of
protection. I was told that the Chairman of the first
farm where I had done fieldwork in 1967 (also called
Karl Marx Collective, but in a different region from the
one mentioned above) had been shot by angry workers.
The precise reasons are not known, but it is easy to see
that the immense power of such bosses over ordinary
lives might give rise to occasional, or even not so occasional,
acts of violence, especially when there is the
hazy and exciting idea of 'democracy' around.
We are witnessing the falling apart of civil society in
Russia. The conditions I have outlined give rise to local
defensiveness in economic, social and political spheres.
In my view, many of the ethnic movements of small
minorities in Russia are primarily defensive in character.
Their aim is to preserve or resurrect different cultures,
not to impose on the Russians. But every barrier
which is raised, or to put this in the language used in
Russia itself, these 'palisades' surrounding 'icebergs' or
'apanage princedoms', this view of outsiders as locustlike
'occupying forces' buying-up everything in sight,
is also a barrier against the ultimate goal of the
economic reforms, at least as envisioned by metropolitan
liberals. It is difficult to see how a free markcet, even
a relatively free market, can be attained through the
hedges of coupons, orders, and local barter systems
which are now beginning to form a veritable maze. Let
us hope that the example of Tuva will not be reproduced
elsewhere, and that these economic barriers will
not also bring to nought the numberless generous gestures
between social groups in other areas of life which
are still prevalent in provincial Russia. []
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991 13
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