As identified by Western analysts, the key concepts marking Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet system were glasnost (usually translated as “openness” and associated with a greater willingness to allow public discussion of a broad range of issues from a variety of perspectives), democratization (the introduction of contested elections and greater voice for workers in enterprise management), and economic restructuring. The key policies during Boris Yeltsin’s rule were liberalization (of prices in particular but also of economic activity more broadly), macroeconomic stabilization (reining in inflation and avoiding excessive unemployment) and the privatization of state-owned property. Reading about these policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s had given me a sense of sharp discontinuity from the Soviet past.
As I spoke with women in Yaroslavl in the fall of 2012, however, I realized that for those who lived through these changes the boundaries between the eras and the differences among the policies were blurred. It proved difficult—sometimes impossible—to map their personal experiences onto either the historical periodization or the economic concepts.1 To take just one example, there was rationing of some food products under Brezhnev, there was rationing of some food products under Gorbachev, and it wasn’t always possible to assign a clear date to the women’s stories of shopping for food under these circumstances. Some of this was no doubt due simply to the passage of time, but it is also true that the everyday is experienced in ways that don’t fit neatly into textbook definitions; what happened at the macro level in the country certainly had a powerful impact on the lives of the women, but not always at the moment and in the ways one might have predicted.
Similarly, the terminology the women used differed considerably from that of the (Western) academic discourse.2 When the women did use the terms perestroika [restructuring] and perekhod [transition] they did so loosely and often interchangeably. This is consistent with the practice noted by Shevchenko in Moscow roughly a decade earlier: “official designations for the period—‘time of transition’ (perekhodnyi period) and ‘changes’ (peremeny)—did not take root in popular discourse” (Shevchenko 2009: 19). Instead, people used terms with much more negative connotations, terms like disintegration, collapse, crisis, or catastrophe.
There are a number of studies by economists analyzing the negative consequences of Russia’s transition policies—how price liberalization led to hyperinflation, how voucher privatization led to the concentration of wealth and the rise of the oligarchs, how stabilization led to a web of payment arrears.3 Here I look at how the policies were viewed and interpreted by a group of Russian women and how, looking back, they assess the impact these policies have had on their lives. Some changes which received a great deal of attention from Western scholars and the media—for example, voucher privatization—had barely registered with the women I spoke to, or, at least, had been largely forgotten, although the concentration of wealth resulting from that program remained a source of sharp resentment. Thus, although almost all of the women brought up the nouveaux riches “New Russians” without prompting, almost none mentioned vouchers unless I asked specifically about them, and their recollections of how the system worked were hazy and frequently incorrect. Similarly, almost none of the women who spoke with me thought of themselves as having experienced wage arrears . Since the data about the prevalence and severity of wage arrears are quite clear, the denial by the women raises a critical point. What I present here is based on the memories and interpretations of those I interviewed. Much has been forgotten, much has been transformed to fit the women’s sense of identity and the storyline of their lives, much of the technical no doubt has been only partially understood. Like all oral history, this thus offers the particular truth of this group of individuals rather than historical fact.
There are, of course, many commonalities in the demands the systemic changes placed on women in Russia no matter where they lived, and studies of the 1990s and early 2000s in Moscow and St. Petersburg (for example, Shevchenko 2009; Patico 2008 respectively) or in very small-town Russia (White 2004) offer vivid descriptions of experiences my interviewees would find familiar. On the other hand, the opportunities and challenges in provincial capitals like Yaroslavl differ in important ways from those in places either much larger or much smaller. Thus, the women living in Yaroslavl were generally more optimistic and enjoyed considerably less constrained lives than the small-town women interviewed by White, although this also reflects the later date of my interviews. At the same time, the opportunities for those in Yaroslavl to be employed at “Western” salaries—far higher than the Russian norm—are quite limited, since, unlike Moscow, Yaroslavl does not serve as the Russian base for international organizations4 nor has it attracted anywhere near as much foreign investment as the capital, which in the latter half of the 1990s received almost half of all direct foreign investment in the country. A number of the women I spoke with had studied in Moscow and some had children living and working there at the time of our conversations; many stressed the differences in the way of life in the two cities, occasionally with regret but frequently with pride. Seeing how life evolved in Yaroslavl from the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century thus adds to our understanding of this historical moment and reminds us of the importance of the lenses through which we view it.
The City
As a medium-sized provincial capital (population a bit over 600,000), Yaroslavl is the sort of place in which a significant portion of the Russian population lives. According to the 2010 census, just under three-quarters of the Russian population is defined as “urban”, but the term is used quite loosely, including as it does both Moscow, with over 10 million residents, and settlements of under 5000 (White 2004: 13). Of this “urban” population, roughly as many people live in the 23 cities which, like Yaroslavl, have populations of between half a million and a million as live in Moscow and St. Petersburg combined; slightly fewer live in the 10 cities with populations of one to one and a half million. Thus, about 38% of the “urban” population lives in cities of 500,000 or more, with another 17% living in cities between 200,000 and 500,000.5
Yaroslavl itself has a varied economy and a long history, having celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its founding. Located on the Volga River and part of the famous Golden Ring of cities to the northeast of Moscow, it is a popular tourist destination for both Russians and foreigners and serves as the site of study-abroad programs for a number of colleges and universities. Outside the lovely historic district, with its many onion-domed churches, its popular promenades along the embankment of the Volga and the adjoining Kotorosl River, and several museums and centers of education, sprawls a not especially attractive industrial city, home to several large Soviet-era factories and some newer post-Soviet enterprises. Among its major Soviet factories—not all of which have survived the end of central planning and state ownership—there have been an oil refinery and plants producing diesel engines, tires, paint for automobiles, sewing machines and dairy products. In the post-Soviet period, thanks to investment from companies in Japan and Sweden, a pharmaceutical plant and factories producing steel structures and road-building equipment have been added, along with a smattering of foreign businesses in the service sector such as McDonald’s and the German supermarket giant Globus. Thomas Remington, in his book The Politics of Inequality in Russia, classifies the Yaroslavl region (of which the city of Yaroslavl is the administrative center) as one with a “market-adaptive regime” and describes the regional government as having used political pluralism and careful coordination of the transition to “[foster] economic growth through gradual but consistent adaptation of local firms to market conditions” (Remington 2011: 97, 101–103).
In addition to the tourists and international students who pass through the city, Yaroslavl has seen a number of foreign scholars and has been the focus of several studies on the political dimensions of post-Soviet change (for example Ruble 1995; Stoner-Weiss 1997; Hahn 2001). Foreign visitors are thus not a novelty: I was one in a long line of foreigners to whom my landlady offered room and board, and several of the women I interviewed teach Russian to students from a variety of countries. On the other hand, there is not a significant expatriate community in Yaroslavl, so the city seems free of the tensions that such a community can generate. As far as I could tell, I was neither a curiosity nor an object of resentment, the latter certainly helped by the fact that my visit preceded the crisis in Ukraine and America’s response to Russian actions there.
The Women
Many of the women I spoke with had worked as teachers at some point, although several of these had either changed careers or taken additional jobs to supplement the low salaries they received in their primary employment. Most of those who were never teachers were nonetheless highly educated professionals, members of the former Soviet intelligentsia . Three women were running their own businesses, and a few others had owned small businesses in the past. Two women worked with foreign direct sales companies, two others worked in municipal offices. Roughly half of the women were receiving pensions from the government, but, like a great many Russian pensioners, they continued to work. A few had parents who were still alive; all had at least one adult child and a few had grandchil...