EDITORS NOTES
Robert Rotenberg   DePaul University

INFORMAL RELATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE:  HOW EASTERN EUROPEAN CLIQUES AND STATES MUTUALLY RESPOND
Janine R. Wedel   George Washington University

WHOSE CITY IS MOSCOW TODAY?
Anatoly M. Khazanov   University of Wisconsin/ Madison

RE-IMAGINING RUSSIAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCIENTISTS
Hugh Gusterson   Massachusetts Institute of Technology

COLONIZATION OR LIBERATION: THE PARADOX OF NGO'S IN POSTSOCIALIST STATES
Julie Hemment  Cornell University

"SWORN VIRGINS": CASES OF SOCIALLY ACCEPTED GENDER CHANGE
Antonia Young   Colgate University and Bradford University, UK

PROSPECTS FOR TRANSNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY FOLLOWING THE ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION IN A CONTESTED BORDERLAND
Robert Gary Minnich   University of Bergen

HISTORICAL MYTH AND THE INVENTION OF  POLITICAL FOLKLORE IN CONTEMPORARY SERBIA
Karl Kaser   University of Graz, Graz  Joel M. Halpern   University of Massachusetts

PRACTICE AND DISCOURSE ABOUT PRACTICE: RETURNING HOME TO THE CROATIAN DANUBE BASIN
Maja Povrzanovic   Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

THE TOPSY TURVY DAYS WERE THERE AGAIN  STUDENT AND CIVIL PROTEST IN BELGRADE AND SERBIA, 1996/1997
Mirjana Prosic-Dvornic   Midland, MI

THE YOUNG AND A SOCIETY: AN EXAMPLE FROM ZAGREB
Sanja Kalapos   Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

BOOK REVIEW: LASZLO KURTI AND JULIET  LANGMAN (EDS.): BEYOND BORDERS. REMAKING CULTURAL  IDENTITIES  IN  THE  NEW  EAST  AND  CENTRAL EUROPE
Alexandra Bitusikova   Banska Bistrica, Slovakia

Please address all requests for membership in the East European Anthropology Group ($15/yr. for full-time faculty and  professionals, $10/yr for students and part-time faculty; European subscribers should write for special rates.), institutional subscriptions to the Review ($20), or additional copies of this special Issue ($20) to the managing editor:
The Web Page for the Anthropology of East Europe Review/East European Anthropology Group contains links to most of the previously published articles.  It can be found at this URL:
condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/
Robert Rotenberg, International Studies Program, DePaul University, 2320 North Kenmore Ave, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Phone: 773/325-7460; Fax 773/325-7452;
Email: rrotenbe@wppost.depaul.edu.
Evá Huseby-Darvas (EEAG), Behavioral Science Dept., University of Michigan, Dearborn, MI  48128 evdarvas@umich.edu.
Nancy Ries (SOYUZ), Anthropology, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346; Email: nries@mail.colgate.edu
László Kürti, Film and Book Review Editor, Department of Political Science, Eotvos Lorand University, Egyetem ter. 1-3, 1056 Budapest; Email: lkurti@helka.iif.hu
© DePaul University  1998
ISSN: 1054-4720
 
 

EDITORS NOTES:
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University

 This issue is full of remarkable papers.  I am very pleased that Janine Wedel has agreed to let us publish one of her papers on East European cliques.  This papers have attracted a lot of attention the last few years, both in anthropological and policy circles.  Anatoly Khazanov brings us up to date on the atmosphere in Moscow today.  Hugh Gusterson raises some interesting issues about the way in which Russian scientists are perceived by American scientists and the press.  Julie Hemmert provides a novel view of NGO’s in East European states.  Antonia Young offers a fascinating account of Albanian women taking on life-long male roles as so-called "sworn virgins." Bob Minnich brings us up to date on the development of civil society in Slovenia.  Karl Kaiser and Joel Halpern analyze the contemporary Serbian myths surrounding Kosovo.  Maja Povrzanovic unpacks the contemporary discourse on returnees in Croatia.  Mirjana Prosic-Dvornic offers her views of the student and civil protests in Belgrade in 96-97. Sanja Kalapos gives us an account of contemporary youth issues in Zagreb.  We also have a review of Kürti and Langman’s collection of papers on remaking cultural identities, by Alexandra Bitusikova.  I think this is the first time that half of the papers were produced by authors resident in North America and half were produced by authors in Eurupe.

A Note from Bulgaria:
Our Society has been conducting anthropological research in Eastern Europe
since 1989. In this regard I would like to invite you to visit our web site http://www.cit.bg/home/bsrcs and if possible to suggest it to your readers. We also organize a field course "Mountain Pastoralism: A Field-Course With A Muslim Community In The Balkans (Bulgaria) 15 July -10 August 1998",   http://www.cit.bg/home/bsrcs/announce.htm that might be of interest for some of you and your readers.

Yours sincerely,
Petia Mankova
 
 

INFORMAL RELATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: HOW EASTERN EUROPEAN CLIQUES AND STATES MUTUALLY RESPOND
Janine R. Wedel
George Washington University

 In the 1990s, there has been widespread talk in eastern Europe of "clans," "Mafia," and other informal groups and networks.  People in the region use these terms to describe groups that wield influence and run things.  When used in the West, however, these terms often connote criminality in the form of high–profile activities such as money laundering, capital flight, and trafficking in drugs, weaponry, and prostitutes.  Western observers often fail to appreciate the relationships that underpin these activities; informal groups and networks not only enable the activities but also can shape the development of the state.  Further, most clans are not criminal, at least not to this extent, and the fact that the same terms mean quite different things fosters Western misconceptions of eastern Europe.

The assumption underlying many "transition" studies– that Western models of institutional change are directly applicable– further impairs understanding of the role of eastern European informal groups and networks.  Models employed to explain institutional change are often inadequate because they fail to appreciate the role of informal relationships, their historical foundations, and their ability to shape the nature of the state.  Conventional vocabularies from comparative politics, public administration, and sociology appear insufficient to probe changing state–private and political–administrative relations in complex administrative states.

During precarious moments of legal, administrative, political, and economic transformation, old systems of social relations, such as the informal groups and networks that functioned under communism and helped to ensure stability, can be broken up.  These informal systems also can be crucial supports for, or obstacles to, the development of new types of institutions.  Informal relationships may be as likely to shape and circumvent state and other formal institutions as the latter are likely to reorganize or overcome the former.

The impetus for this paper comes as a response to attempts by a few anthropologists and socialists of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to characterize informal groups and networks so that their roles in shaping markets and institutions might be more readily understood.  Implicit in these attempts is the recognition (1) that these informal groups and networks are critical to the shaping of markets, institutions, and society; (2) that they are complex in their social organization, and (3) that, so far, Western concepts have been inadequate to describe them.

Dirty Togetherness

The way in which these terms are used in eastern Europe, as opposed to the West, implies differences in social organization.  Ideas of bureaucratic authority and rationality incline Westerners to focus on activities and apply labels such as crime and corruption.  But the legacy of communism predisposes eastern Europeans toward interpreting these same phenomenon in terms of relationships among people, what Polish sociologist Adam Podgorecki (1987) calls "dirty togetherness."  Whereas the Western starting point is often what; the Eastern one tends to be who; who is connected to whom.  "Dirty togetherness" is about who (relationships) and what that implies about what (activities).  The local focus on relationships is worthy of our respect, not just because it is a native category, but because it tells something about how eastern European societies are organized– and how they are changing.

In the past few years, the term clan, originating in Moscow, has proliferated throughout much of the region.  The notion of clan has a long legacy in Russia.  It can be traced to the 14th century, according to Nancy Kollmann (1987), who argues that clans played a pivotal role in the making of the Muscovite political system from 1345 to 1547.¹   This usage appears to have a parallel in Russia today, where clan is widely used to describe the expansive influence of a certain political–economic elite.  Although members of this elite are not typically bound by bloodlines, they are connected by long–standing association and common experience and also have incentives for working together.

In Russia clan has a southern Soviet and negative connotation of family togetherness and operating in concert.  In Moscow in the mid–1980s, the intelligentsia elite used the word clan to disparage Uzbek political groups.

The idea of clans has been adopted from the Russian contempo-rary usage by Western scholars, journalists, and policymakers, especial-ly after Thomas Graham (1995, 1996), a senior political officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, wrote a ground–breaking article, published first in the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta and later in Harpers, suggesting that Russia is run by rival clans with largely unchecked influence.  Since Graham's article, there has been a proliferation of this usage in the Western literature.  Articles in the Washington Post and The New York Times now refer to clans in the former Soviet Union almost as readily as they might to political parties.

Mafia, like clans, also has spread throughout the region.  Eastern Europeans subsume a wide variety of groups and activities under Mafia, including:  (1) former nomenklatura (communist) managers who transferred state factories to themselves at fire sale prices; (2) officials who accept bribes; (3) ex–convicts with their own armed police or common street criminals; and (4) ethnic Mafia, in which Poles talk of a Russian Mafia, and Russians of a Chechnyan Mafia, and so on.

The legacy of communism has encouraged clans and Mafia both as suggestive idioms in eastern European life and as powerful agents reorganizing market and state institutions since the fall of communism.

Why have these idioms become so powerful and so prevalent?  What accounts for their resonance in eastern European life?  I have identified four reasons:

(1) The legacy of relative income equality.  In contrast to the relative equality that eastern Europeans came to expect under communism, a huge divide has developed between a few people with enormous wealth and the vast majority of the population with little by comparison.  Yet these societies continue to aspire, to a large degree, toward more equitable distribution of wealth.  The previous scarcity of resources, the newfound huge current disparities, and the fact that such disparities are publicly known, in contrast to the past, all contribute to the belief that people with privilege have achieved that privilege through dubious means and at the expense of those less fortunate.

(2) The legacy of little street crime.  Visible, dangerous, and sometimes organized crime, much of it in unpredictable patterns, has exploded in societies with little experience of street crime but some exposure to Western depictions of the Mafia in television and movies.  This invokes the association of Mafia, which might be expected to be behind these crimes.

(3) The legacy of suspicion.  Because state propaganda under communism was untrustworthy and contradicted by everyday life, eastern Europeans learned to "live in the lie," as Vaclav Havel (1985) described it, to doubt official explanations.  And, because so much had to be "arranged" under the table in economies of shortage, many transactions were shrouded in secrecy.  Everyday life required considerable political skill.  Who was doing and getting what and people's real motivations and loyalties were often not what they appeared.  This led to seemingly interminable speculation and suspicion at all levels of society –– from an academic's or bureaucrat's interpretation of her colleague's promotion to a citizens explanation for his neighbor's good fortune.

Suspicion was widely circulated through informal networks, which were the lifeblood of economic and political survival.  This kind of thinking has encouraged people today to interpret life's vicissitudes in terms of the influence of clans and Mafia.  Katherine Verdery (1996:220) points out that, "Talk of Mafia is like talk of witchcraft.  [It is] a way of attributing difficult social problems to malevolent and unseen forces."  With the label Mafia, one points the finger at a certain person or group such as business competitors or political opposition, and suggests they are under the spell of sinister powers.  Much like witchcraft, being labeled as Mafia is an irrefutable indictment.

(4) The legacy of informal organization under communism.  Experience with communist social organization appears to have fostered the tendency to think in terms of clans and Mafia.  Eastern Europeans have a lot of experience with networks that connected themselves and their groups to the state bureaucracy and economy.  These relation-ships were "particularistic" –– dependent on individual connections and criteria –– rather than "universalistic," in which connections and criteria are independent of a particular social relationship.²   Based on this experience, eastern Europeans tend to expect the world to work through particularistic relationships, and that makes groups that interpenetrate business and government appear clan–like.

However, although experience with communist social organization may encourage the tendency to think in terms of Mafia and clans, that experience does not necessarily lead to the social organization associated with a Sicilian–style Mafia or other informal social organization.

The State and the Power of the Communist Past

With regard to present–day social organization, the legacy of communism again is critical.  And in analyzing the organization of eastern European informal groups and networks, a critical element is the role of the state.

Under communism, the key to state power was its expansionist bureaucracy that monopolized the allocation of resources (Verdery 1991, 1996).  In a shortage economy in which demand always outpaced supply (Kornai 1980), control over resources insured state power.  Anthropologists of Central and Eastern Europe have pointed out the transformation of state distribution systems and formal bureaucratic procedures under socialism through extensive use of informal social networks (e.g., Hann 1980 and 1985, Kideckel 1982 and 1993, Sampson 1986, Wedel 1986 and 1992).  These networks connected individuals and groups to the state economy and bureaucracy and also pervaded these institutions.  Further east, patronage networks virtually ran various regions of the Soviet Union (e.g., Albini, Rogers, Shabalin, Kutushev, Moiseev, and Anderson 1995, Fainsod 1975, Hough 1969, Hough and Fainsod 1979, Orttung 1995, and Ruble 1990).  Although not explicitly institutionalized, these relationships were regularized and exhibited clear patterns.  Anthropologists attempted to map some of them.

Although communist regimes collapsed in 1989 (Central and Eastern Europe) and 1991 (Soviet Union), informal groups and networks did not.  Many groups, empowered by the erosion of the centralized state and enticed by myriad new opportunities for making money and wielding influence, rose to the occasion and seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum.  The state might have collapsed, but not "dirty togetherness."  Such informal groups could serve as crucial supports for, or obstacles to, the development of new institutions.

What do we know about the informal groups and networks that have filled the vacuum?  Groups and networks variously called clans, Mafia, unruly coalitions, restructuring networks, suzerainties,³ social circles, and other names, help shape society, politics, and business.

The term unruly coalitions was coined by Katherine Verdery (1996:193) to describe Romanian elite networks.  According to Verdery, unruly coalitions are "loose clusterings of elite [largely former Communist Party apparatus], neither institutionalized nor otherwise formally recognized, who cooperate to pursue or control resources."  Verdery (1996:194) writes that "what defines unruly coalitions in contrast to political parties is that they are less institutionalized, less visible, less legitimate."

David Stark (1996) writes of restructuring networks that shape Hungarian privatization processes.  He identifies the resulting property forms in Hungary as neither private nor collective but "recombinant" property.  He describes how Hungarian firms develop institutional cross–ownership, with managers of several firms acquiring interests in one another's companies.  This makes clear that only people with extensive inside information and hence networks have the knowledge to participate in such schemes.

With regard to Poland (1992:13–14), I have discussed the srodowisko, or social circle, as a driving force in political and economic life.  The circle is dense and multiplex; its members operate in many arenas and have multiple functions vis-a-vis one another.  In the post–communist period, members of a few elite social circles have put their fingers in a multiplicity of pies –– in politics, business, foundations.  Members are "institutional nomads," as Polish sociologists Antoni Kaminski and Joanna Kurczewska put it (1994:132–153), because circumstances demand loyalty to the circle but not necessarily to the formal positions the circle's members occupy, which typically are multiple.

The social circle served –– and, to a large degree, still serves –– to organize Polish politics and business.  For example, members of the various post–communist governments belong to previously existing and identifiable social circles.  While leaders of the first post–communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki largely hail from a Krakow Catholic intelligentsia circle, those of the government of Jan Krzysztof Bielecki come from a Gdansk circle.

Further east, I (1996, 1997a, 1997b) have written about the decade–old "St. Petersburg Clan," which has become one of Russia's most powerful clans.  The St. Petersburg Clan traces its roots to the mid–1980s, to university and club activities in what was then called Leningrad.  The chief figure in the group, Anatoly Chubais, is currently the second most powerful man in Russia after President Boris Yeltsin.  Chubais was St. Petersburg's deputy mayor before being brought to Moscow in 1991 to help execute economic policy.  Chubais recruited his group of energetic young male associates from St. Petersburg.

With the post–Soviet economy under contention, the St. Petersburg Clan competes for control and resources, operates in multiple spheres, and has a wide scope of influence.  With its source of money and power base largely the West, the Clan acquired a broad portfolio, operated largely through decree, and set up still other means of bypassing democratic processes including a network of "private" organizations funded by the West.  These organizations (ostensibly formed to conduct economic reform activities) serve as the Clan's political resource to allocate in the communist tradition, through patronage networks like those that virtually ran the Soviet Union.

All these informal groups and networks –– Romanian unruly coalitions, Hungarian restructuring networks, Polish social circles, and Russian clans –– appear to have some common features.  I have identified the following four characteristics.

First, these informal groups and networks mediate spheres.  They mediate state and private sectors, as well as bureaucracy and private enterprise, through both horizontal and vertical linkages that penetrate government and bureaucracy.  This is why the conventional vocabularies from comparative politics, public administration, and sociology are inadequate to probe changing state–private and political–administrative relations in complex administrative states.  Two conventions often distort our analysis:  The conceptualizing of institutional change in terms of sharp polar opposites (e.g., state versus private, centralized versus decentralized, bureaucratic versus market) and in terms of sharp discontinuities⁴ rather than complex and altering interactions of the new and the old.  Informal groups and networks defy accurate conceptualization in terms of polar opposites or discontinuities.

Second, informal groups and networks operate in many arenas.  Because they are active in many arenas beyond the political, it is misleading to assume they are just another form of interest group, faction, or coalition –– as these terms are understood in Western social science.  The potential influence of the social circle or clan, for example, is much more widespread and monopolistic than that of interest groups, factions, or coalitions.  Far from being confined to the political or economic realm, social circles and clans are multidimensional and multifaceted.

Because terms like interest group, faction, and coalition are inadequate to analyze these groups and networks and the social organization of which they are part, different concepts are needed.  I argue that clans are "cliques" made up of dense⁵ and multiplex⁶  networks whose members have a common identity, a la Boissevain (1974:-174).  Boissevain explains that the clique has both an objective existence, in that "it forms a cluster of persons all of whom are linked to each other," and a subjective one, "for members as well as nonmembers are conscious of its common identity."

A clique is a strategic alliance that responds to changing circumstances.  Cliques remain together not just because of long–standing collaboration.  They promote common interests (Ryan 1978:41) through strategic concentration of power and resources.  Cliques generate mutual benefits and further the interests of their members (Ryan 1978:41), and they strategically concentrate power and resources unto themselves.  (This use of clique should not be confused with the Russian klyka, which has a decidedly pejorative connotation.)

Third, informal groups and networks can wield extensive influence because of the contexts in which they are operating:  where, to varying degrees, the rule of law is weakly established, "the rules are what you make them," and interpretation and enforcement of the law is subject to much manipulation.

Fourth, it is the clique, not the individual, that typically makes the choices about how to respond to new opportunities.   Operating as part of a strategic alliance enables members of the clique to survive and thrive in an environment of uncertainty and indeterminacy.  This is a different unit of economic analysis than is usually considered –– and yet another problem with conventional models.  Westerners in particular tend to think of individuals as the primary unit to take advantage of economic opportunities.  But in eastern Europe, the unit of analysis of responses to economic incentives is not necessarily the individual –– it is often the clique.

Emerging Clique–State Relationships

What kinds of relationships are emerging between cliques and states and how are cliques shaping the nature of the region's states?  Have informal groups and networks replaced the former centralized state, or simply penetrated it to some degree?  In what ways?  To what extent are they merely using the state for their own purposes, and to what extent are they reorganizing it?  To what extent do informal groups drive formal institutions –– not the other way around?

A key difference appears to lie in (1) the nature of vertical linkages and (2) the degree of penetration of state bodies and authorities, which depends to some degree on traditions and incentives for the rule of law.  I have observed two distinct patterns of clique–state relationships.

One form of clique–state relations is the "partially appropriated state" in which Polish social circles (and, I believe, also Hungarian restructuring networks and Romanian unruly coalitions) take over from the state, or privatize, certain functions or spheres.  In Poland, for example, legislative initiatives since 1989 have, as Antoni Kaminski (1996:4) writes:
led to the creation of formally non–governmental bodies engaged in profit-making activities which involve the resources of the state, and which rely on the coercive powers of the state administration.  They allow for the establishment, between public and private domains, of corporate bodies with undefined functions and responsibility which create legal opportunities:

– for the appropriation of public resources by private groups and institutions, through the spread of political corruption;

– for an indirect enlargement of the dominion of the "state" through founding of institutions that in appearance are private, but in fact are part of the ("appropriated" by the ruling parties) public domain.

The result is that, while the state is incapacitated because it has delegated decision–making to organizations under the guise of "self–government," parts of the state have simply been appropriated by private groups.  Under the "partially appropriated state," informal groups and networks clearly deal with relevant state authorities, or what is left of them, but the group as such is not synonymous with the authorities.

By contrast, the "clan–state" assumes the communist state's former monopoly on power and control over resources.  While occupying multiple institutions, members of the clan maintain dense and multiplex ties.  Members of the clan are dispersed, but, as Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya (1997:2) put it, "[they] have their men everywhere."

The notion of a "clan–state" builds on the observation a la Graham that Russia is run by rival clans with largely unchecked influence.  Certain clans are so closely identified with particular ministries or institutional segments of government, such as privatization, that their agendas sometimes seem identical.  Meanwhile competing clans have equal ties with other segments of government such as the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance.  With rivalry between clans within the executive branch, the Russian government is not a level playing field that can ensure impartiality under the rule of law.

Under the clan–state, the clan uses state resources and authorities (to the extent they can be separately defined in a given instance) but also keeps state authorities far enough away so that they cannot interfere with the clan's acquiring and allocating of resources, but close enough to insure that no rivals can draw on the resources.  This enables the clan to bypass sources of authority and influence that might otherwise apply, and thereby enhance its own.  The strength of the clan lies in its ability to circumvent, connect, override, and otherwise reorganize political and economic institutions and authorities.

The clan–state model appears to recreate the "dual system" of communism in which state organizations had counterpart Communist Party organizations that wielded the real influence, albeit de facto.  The St.Petersburg Clan, for example, set up a series of Western–funded "private" organizations run by the Clan whose actions in lieu of the Russian government include negotiating  loans from the International Monetary Fund.  By providing a model for shadow government that persisted beyond its own supposed collapse, the communist dual system appears to have smoothed the way for the clan–state.

Clan–State or Partially Appropriated State?

Several key characteristics distinguish the "clan–state" from the "partially appropriated state."

The first question concerns the degree to which independently sustainable institutions can be built.  Do state authorities have the capacity to remain separate from the institutions and agendas of cliques?  Does the agenda of the clan differ from that of state authorities?  (In some instances the two may appear to be indistinguishable because they are so strongly identified with each other.  The ability of "state" bodies to influence and execute policies depends more on particularistic ties than on formal authority.)  Do clan members empower state institutions, or can state authority empower the clan?  The real source of influence is the clan:  Thus, when the clan departs, the institutions it empowered lose their influence or disappear altogether.

The clan–state model allows for maximum deniability.  If the state is criticized, activities can be attributed to the clan.  If the clan is criticized, activities can be attributed to the state.  This setup not only facilitates deniability, it institutionalizes it and, indeed, may be the closest thing to institutionalization that exists under the clan–state model.

Under the partially appropriated state model, informal groups and cliques use state actors, who are passive, corruptible, and "bought."  For example, cliques in Poland may use or help to place non–clique members in Parliament.  However, under the clan–state model, state actors associated with clans are actually doing the "buying."  In Russia, clan members occupy positions in the executive branch as a clan and are clearly buying.

The partially appropriated state model exists in the context of a weak state. Verdery describes a state in which "the center has lost control over political and economic processes, and the structures of domination are segmented."  In the clan–state model, on the other hand, ministries– indeed, entire segments of government– are ruled by certain powerful clans.  This can hardly be called a "weak" state.

The second question concerns the shape of the rule of law and how is can be used and manipulated.  The clan–state operates in a context where the rule of law and democracy are not possible because there is little separation of the clan from the state.  The same people with the same agenda comprise the clan and the relevant state authorities.  The clan is at once the judge, jury, and legislature.  The system is weak in constitutional terms and lacks outside accountability, visibility, and means of representation for those under its control.

The third question pertains to horizontal ties.  What is the legacy of and potential for the development of counteracting horizontal ties?  In addition to differences in the nature of vertical linkages, there are critical differences in the nature of horizontal ties.

Here Poland and Russia represent diverse social organizational and cultural conditions that influence the existence and capacity of horizontal linkages.  While Poland has traditions of collective action and horizontal ties (e.g., Wedel 1986, 1992), Russia largely lacks such recent traditions.  While the Polish church has served as a major catalyst for organizing horizontally, the Orthodox church in Russia, under communism, did not play such a role.  Poles are noted for their flouting of the law in the face of attempted vertical control, but Soviet rule was credited with effective vertical control.

Indeed, the existence and capacity of horizontal ties that can counteract attempted vertical control appear to differ fundamentally in the appropriated state model, as compared with the clan–state model.  For example, in Moscow businesses are known to pay some 30 percent of their turnover to "Mafia" groups that control and have divided up the city through force, collusion, and/or monopoly power.  In stark contrast to what may be possible in Moscow, in July 1994, I observed business people in Warsaw's Old Town who, in response to "Mafia" attempts to collect protection money and to lax responses on the part of local police, actually shut down their shops for several days at the height of the tourist season, in protest.⁷

What is the potential in these two contexts for an "anti–mafia movement" as Schneider and Schneider (1994) have described for Sicily?  The history and recent experience of horizontal organization suggests that, unlike in Poland, in Russia, there appears to be little potential for an "anti–clan movement."  I would speculate that, in Poland, such a movement would pattern itself after the informal social circles that began to speak out around issues in the latter half of the 1980s.  Experience suggests that these circles can be quite effective in counteracting attempted vertical organization.

The nature of vertical linkages and the existence of potentially counteracting horizontal ties clearly affects the shape of the rule of law and the mutual responses of eastern European cliques and states.  And the relationships that are emerging between eastern European cliques and states have enormous implications for the future shape of eastern European states, societies, politics, and economics.

Textnotes

1. According to Kollman, the Muscovite political system was grounded in affinitive relations, kinship ties, marriage alliances, and clans, notably the "Boyar clan".

2. An example of a particularistic relationship is one in which a job applicant is known to be married to a powerful person. A universalistic relationship is one in which, using the job applicant example, the applicant may not be asked if he or she is married, let alone the identity of the spouse.

3. Caroline Humphrey (1991:8) writes of "organizations and enterprises in the [former Soviet] regions, run in a personal way almost as 'suzerainties' by local bosses."

4. These tendencies derive from the classical social theories of the 19th century and from the structural-functionalist "integration" models of sociological theory employed by many fields. These models reinforce this tradition of dichotomous thought through their assumption that effective institutionalization of a new system requires a tight and standardized mode of integration.

5. The networks that comprise the clique are "dense" in that members of a person's network are in touch with one another independently of that person.

6. Members are connected to each other for multiple purposes. Thus the networks that comprise the clique are "multiplex" (rather than "single-stranded"), in that members relate to each other in multiple capacities - political, economic, and social.

7. Accounts of this episode were reported in local newspapers and in the New York Times ("Warsaw Tourist Shops Close to Protect Against Crime," Aug. 7, 1994, A-11).

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Stark, David
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              and Societies 4 (Fall), Pp. 351-92.
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              vol. 101, Pp. 993-1027.

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              Europeennes de Sociologie, Vol. 35, no.2., Pp. 224-258.

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    Comments Appreciated!
Respond to:
Janine R. Wedel, Associate Research Professor,
Department of Anthropology; and Research Fellow, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
Address:  Department of Anthropology, 2110 G Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20052.
Phone: 202-994-6346  Fax: 202-994-6097
E-mail:  jwedel@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
 
 

WHOSE CITY IS MOSCOW TODAY?
Anatoly M. Khazanov
University of Wisconsin/Madison

 In many respects, Moscow is becoming a normal city.  It is being filled with different forms of life and social activity that were previously invisible or forbidden.  The market economy has brought the city new types of buildings, such as commercial banks and offices, luxury hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, vending stalls, boutiques, casinos, private clubs, etc.  Street artists, just like those in Paris and London, have appeared throughout the city, each one eager to paint the portraits of all those who wish.  Thanks to the importation of consumer goods, durables, and foodstuffs, Muscovites have gained access to commodities which over the years have been in short supply.  Vendors in private shops and stores are urgently trying to learn proper retail etiquette, and sometimes even crack a smile when helping customers.  Hotel personnel are gradually getting used to the idea that their business is to cater to their patrons, rather than keeping vigil over their guests' Moral behavior or political sympathies.

Eating at cafes and restaurants is no longer a problem.  While in the 1980's there were only 300 restaurants in the city, by 1997 their number had increased to 1200 (Itogi, November 4, 1997: 36), and by the beginning of 1998 to more than 1500 (Den’gi, N 2, January 28, 1998-.38). Although the mayor of Moscow has complained that this was still ten times less than in major European megalopolises, a remarkable progress is quite evident.  Moreover, waiters have begun to rejoice each time that customers sit at their table.

Not so long ago it was practically impossible to find a place where one could quickly get an inexpensive snack.  To satisfy this demand, the idea of fast food was imported from the West. McDonald's came first, and created quite a stir as a symbol of the Western standards of service and of the Western way of life.  Pizza Hut, Steak House, Baskin Robbins, and others followed suit.  In addition, vendors selling hot food and beverages also appeared on Moscow's streets.  Signboards advertising hot dogs - often accompanied by the Russian goriachie sosiski (hot sausages) for explanation - became quite common.

This rapid Western expansion into services that had previously not existed in Moscow provoked a desire to promote against it something decidedly Russian.  Thus, another fast food chain appeared called Ruvskoe Bistro (Russian Bistro), aimed at competing with McDonald's and similar cheap restaurants by offering fast food Russian cuisine.  This was considered so important that the first outlet of the new chain was solemnly opened by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and President Yeltsin was one of the first patrons.  Ironically, the word bistro is of French origin, but this was disputed on curious legendary grounds.  Allegedly, the Russian Cossacks who came to Paris after their victorious campaign against Napoleon were always in a hurry when they demanded food service, often saying hyviro, hyviro (quickly, quickly)- thus giving a name to the idea of the small snack bar, or bistro.

Most potholes on Moscow's streets have disappeared, while traffic jams have become as commonplace as in New York or Paris.  Every year the number of cars in Moscow is increasing by about 300 thousand (Nezavisimaia gazeta, October 31, 1997).  The total has already reached 2 million; in addition about 200 thousand more belonging to visitors are pre in the city every day (Simptom, N 8 (44), 1996: 15).¹  However, pedestrians and drivers have yet to learn to respect one another, and pedestrians do not have the right of way.

Moscow after dark has become a city full of bright streetlights, marquees, and a bustling nightlife; especially in comparison with the Soviet era.  Russian language editions of Playboy, Penthouse,and Vogue fill newspaper kiosks.  Even more serious publications, such as the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Le Monde have become readily accessible in Moscow.

In the last few years the level of inflation in Russia has considerably lowered.  Nevertheless, Muscovites still trust the dollar considerably more than the ruble.  Among the most frequent of signs seen on the streets of Moscow today is Obmen valiuty, often accompanied by the English equivalent, "Currency exchange."  Advertisements for consumer goods have partly taken the place of advertisements for ideas and, as in the West, present the world as one large shop window packed with consumer items.  Moreover, ads for cigarettes, hard liquor, and Coca Cola are encountered on Moscow's streets more often than on the streets of any Western city.  A neon billboard, measuring about 200 square meters, advertises Coca-Cola on Novyi Arbat Avenue.  It is even larger than similar billboards in New York's Times Square and London's Piccadilly Circus (Nezavisimaia gazeta, November 21, 1997).  These achievements of modem Western civilization have preceded other Western traditions, such as respect for the law and the timely payment of wages, in coming to the
Russian capital.

The craving of Muscovites for Western styles of life is reflected in the writing of advertisements.  Strictly speaking, advertisements - as Westerners understand them - have been found in Moscow for only about the past ten years.  Only after the August 1991 putsch did the ever-present masterpieces of Soviet agit-prop (agitation and propaganda), such as "The Party is our Helmsman The People and the Party are One," or the especially absurd "Lenin is More Alive Than Any Living Person," began to disappear from the streets and buildings of Moscow.  But Soviet advertisements were pure agitation and propaganda, even when they advertised goods and services.  These types of Soviet advertisements, such as "Fly Aeroflot," in essence substantiated the lack of choice, because in the USSR Aeroflot was a monopoly, and it was impossible for ordinary Soviet citizens to fly on Western airlines.

Western advertisements, apart from their direct goals, acquired some other functions in Moscow.  They demonstrate the possibility of choice in goods and services, and at the same time tempt Muscovites to embrace the consumer society.  It has become fashionable for advertisements to use English words.  The writing varies: sometimes in Latin characters, others in Cyrillic (often accompanied by an incorrect transliteration)- sometimes with two variations at once.  This occasionally has a humorous result.  A few years ago, along the respectable Kutuzovsky Prospect (Avenue), where I had once lived, I noticed a new, modest cafe under a strange name: Drim - a word written Cyrillic, but which does not exist in the Russian language.  No one in the cafe, even among the wait staff, knew what this word meant; and it took some time for me to realize that Drim was in fact a Russian transliteration of the English word, "Dream."

Purists and many in the power elite of Moscow have long been protesting the preponderance of foreign words in advertising, but still without real success, because the appearance of these words was far from accidental.  On the one hand, this is connected with the necessity to define new Western realities; on the other, to the desire to display in advertisements an aura of the Western way of life.  Thus, on the streets of Moscow appeared English words such as "SHOP" often written in Cyrillic, as an analog for the Russian magazin.  In the naming of stores, which in the eyes of their owners (though often not in practice) correspond to Western standards, the English words "supermarket" and "minimarket" are seen more and more often- as well as new, compound hybrid words; in which one part is Russian and the other the English "super" or "market." The French boutique has also come into fashion and represents a salon, in which expensive clothes, shoes, et cetera are sold.  The reaction to "Western dominance" in advertising is noticeable in the attempted return to pre-Revolutionary names, almost forgotten during Soviet times: lavka (a small shop), traktir (in the past, a cheap restaurant, a snack bar where hard liquor was sold, but today often a respectable restaurant serving Russian cuisine), trapeznaia (cafe), and others.

Russia is still in transition, and nowhere is this more evident than it its capital, despite the fact that in a way Moscow is even less Russia than New York is the United States, or Paris is France.  Even the Moscow authorities admit that "Russia is not Moscow yet."

The job market situation in Moscow is much better than in the rest of Russia and in many of the countries of the CIS.  By April, 1997, only 48,387 city-dwellers were registered as unemployed.  One should take into account, however, that official Russian statistics tend to I if significantly understate these figures.  According to some estimates, the true number of the unemployed in Moscow is close to seven percent of all able-bodied people (Simptom, N 11 (59), 1997: 8-9).  Also, every fifth employee in Moscow lives in the suburbs or in towns of the Moscow oblast’ (administrative region) (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996: 12).  Every day about 500 thousand of these people commute to the capital (Simptom, N 1(49), 1997-. 67).  But, if and when they lose their jobs, they are registered as unemployed not in Moscow, but in their place of residency (L'vov, 1997- 144).  Still, Moscow has avoided the perils of high permanent unemployment; and many workers from Ukraine, Moldova, and even from some regions of Russia come to Moscow eager to take, sometimes illegally, the available jobs - especially in construction - that are not appealing to Muscovites.

Moscow is much wealthier than the rest of Russia.  Contrary to what occurs in many other  regions of the country, pensions and wages to budget-dependent groups are usually paid without delay in Moscow.  The provision of budgetary resources per Muscovite is three times higher than for any Russian citizen living outside the capital (Bernstein, 1997:2).

Large state investments in Moscow's financial and credit institutions contributed to the rapid formation of this new sector in the city's economy- In the early period of market reforms, the State Central Bank provided low interest loans to Moscow banks, giving them access to cheap credit. High inflation rates in the initial years of reform were propitious to their activities.  Capital was accumulated easily and quickly.

It is no wonder that Moscow's tax base constitutes about 20-25 percent of the states' total revenue, even thought the capital accounts for only 6 percent of the country's population.²  Although Moscow's GNP represents 13.1 percent of the country's total (Nezavisimaia gazeta-Regiony, No. 1, October 1997:2), about 80 percent of Russia's financial capital and the lior’s share of foreign investments are concentrated in Moscow (Moskovskie novosti, December 14-2 1, 1997-. 18).  Thus, of the 6.7 billion dollars in foreign investments in Russia during the first half of 1997, 5.5 billion dollars (83 percent) was invested in Moscow.  In addition, most of the Russian monopolies and corporations have their headquarters in the capital, and are paying municipal and other
taxes there.

However, while Moscow is the most affluent city in Russia, it is also the most expensive.  It has actually become one of the most expensive cities in the world.  While in New York City the price of office space is about 60 dollars per square meter, in Moscow the cost is around 100 dollars or more.  In this respect, Moscow is second in all the world only to London.  A modest dinner for two at an inexpensive restaurant costs at least 60 to 70 dollars, or even more.  No wonder that less than one percent of Muscovites eat at restaurants more or less regularly (Itogi, November 4, 1997- 8).  A taxi ride from Shermet'evo airport to downtown, a distance of about 17 miles, costs 70 dollars.  Although the official average monthly income per person in Moscow (250 dollars)³ is more than twice the average of the rest of the country, the subsistence minimum in the capital is also more than twice as high (Simptom, N 5 (41) 1996: 48; Pul's, N 36 (120) 1996:25; Trud, September 5-11, 1997- Moskovskii komsomolets, September 18,1997; Nezavisimaia gazeta, October 22 1997).

Income differentiation in contemporary Moscow, just as social variety, is much greater than in the Soviet period and continues to &,-row.  In 1992, the incomes of people in the top ten percent of earnings were 7.3 times higher than those in the lowest ten percent, in 1993 the difference was 13.3 times; in 1994 it was 28.3 times; in 1995, 31.6 times, and in 1996, 45 times.  In the rest of Russia, the average difference was 10. 5 times in 1995, and 13 times in 1996 (Pul’s,  N 36 (120),1996: 5-1 Simptom, N 5 (41), 1996:49; L'vov, 1997: 1 1 1).  Official publications of the Moscow authorities estimate that 2 to 3 percent of Muscovites are characterized as very wealthy, while an additional 10 to l2 percent are considered highly paid.  Fifteen to eighteen percent of Muscovites are considered middle class in terms of income; while 55 to 60 percent are poor, with the remaining population (I 8 to 20 percent) living below the poverty line (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996 - 6-7 Simptom, N II (59), 1997: 42).

The so-called New Russians consist of the emerging class of businessmen, bankers, and executives, the corrupt officials whose lifestyles do not correspond to their reported incomes, and the Mafiosi.  They keep their money in Swiss and British bank accounts, and are acquiring villas on the Cote d'Azur and in Switzerland, or in Londor’s Belgravia district.  In addition, scores, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who found employment in banking, financial institutions and other private companies, or who managed to open small businesses, have begunto enjoy high living standards, although only in comparison with the average Muscovite.⁴  Nevertheless, they open bank accounts, buy cars, and spend their vacations in Turkey and Cyprus.

Still, all of these people constitute but a minority of Moscow's nine million plus inhabitants.  They live side-by-side with about 2,200,000 elderly pensioners (Simptom, N 9 (57), 1997:18), who spend their declining years in financially trying circumstances.  In 1995, the average pension of a retired person amounted to a mere 45 percent of the subsistence minimum (L'vov, 1997: 102).  In addition, there are many hundreds of thousands of disabled persons in Moscow; about 200 thousand of whom are still able to work, but only 40 thousand of whom managed to find jobs (Moskovskie novosti, February 1-8, 1998: 21).  The lifestyle of well-to-do Muscovites contrasts with that of the millions of employees in those sectors of the economy which were adversely affected by reforms-, namely, in the military-industrial complex (about 25 percent of Moscow's industries consist of plants that produce military equipment - L'vov, 1997-.118), in machine building, metal working, and the automotive industry- as well as in public health, education, and the sciences.  Industrial enterprises in the city are now producing less than half the production of their heydays.  Still, in 1997, the recession continued (Trud, September 51 1, 1997).  Moscow is over-saturated with colleges, universities, and research institutions.  Eighty-four universities and other institutions of higher education (I 5 percent of Russia's total), with about 477 thousand students and about 80 thousand faculty are located in the capital.  In addition, by 1996, about 240 thousand people were employed in various research institutions.  Although in the period from 1991 to 1995, the number of scholars, scientists, researchers, and their staffs decreased by 53 percent, they still constitute more than 13 percent of Moscow’s labor force; while in Russia this sector makes up, on the whole, three percent (L'vov, 1997-. 118-119).  Almost all of Moscow's universities and research institutions are now facing formidable financial difficulties, and many of them are barely getting by.  Their personnel were accustomed to what in Soviet times amounted to middle and upper class incomes, while in 1996, their average wages amounted to only 63 percent of the city's average (L'vov, 1997-. 119).  Nowadays they constitute a part of the millions of people who live slightly above or near the poverty line and are characterized as the "new poor" (Simptom, N 5 (41), 1996: 52; Varoli, 1996: 8).⁵

Moscow's nouveaux riches have to share the city with the new and numerous underclass-. the beggars, the homeless, tramps, and more than 20 thousand prostitutes (several thousand of whom are aged 11 to 14 years, or even younger), who charge anything between 100 dollars to several thousand dollars for their services - rates higher than anywhere else in post-communist Europe (Komsomol'skaia pravda, March 26, 1997).  They also have to share it with refugees and involuntary migrants, mainly from Azerbaidjan, Georgia, Tadjlkistan, Moldova, and Chechnia.  According to official statistics, these people number only 15 thousand, but more reliable sources place their number at more than 100 thousand (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996: 9; Simptom, N 1 (49), 1997: 67).  These people are persecuted by the Moscow authorities, who want them to leave the city, and are harassed by the Moscow police as easy prey for extortion.  Ordinary Muscovites also do not harbor kind feelings for the refugees, migrants, and visitors from the southern republics.  More than 57 percent of Muscovites are of the opinion that the migrants are negatively affecting the labor market, and more than 70 percent claim that the migrants are to a large extent responsible for the shortage of affordable apartments.  More than 77 percent are sure that most of the migrants are involved in criminal activities (L'vov, 1997: 155).  None of these groups - new rich, new poor, the underclass, and the migrants - associate or intermingle with each other- each lives their own lives and spatially become more segregated than in The Soviet period.

Moscow also boasts the highest degree of political activity in Russia.  Democrats, liberals and Westernizers, populists, Slavophiles and monarchists, communists, and neo-fascists - all of them have their own vision of Russia's past, present, and future; and each is trying to implant their vision on
Moscow's landscape.

National iconography and symbolism (flags, emblems, anthems), ceremonies and festivals, public squares and representative buildings, shrines, monuments, sculptures (along with their design and location), state patronized and supported arts as an aesthetic force for binding the nation together, even postage stamps represent a political lexicon that may reflect a continuity with the past and serve as a bridge between a past and a future.  They may also accentuate a break with a past.  However, there is not one past, but many, and the same symbols may have quite a different meaning to different social and ethnic groupings.  There are no "natural" symbols at all.  The symbols of state and nation are just as arbitrary and arguable as any other symbols.  Which past and whose symbols are selected, and how they are selected and interpreted, may be a matter of consent or contestation.  At present, Russia's self-identification is ambiguous and uncertain.  It is still a matter of the ongoing political and ideological debate that involves cultural presentation as well.

In Russia, the future always begins with rewriting and restructuring the past.  Thus, Moscow has become the battlefield on which the different political forces and social groups are producing, modifying, and appropriating competing national representations.  In this contest, historical facts, myths, and symbols are invented or reinterpreted, and monuments and public spaces are destroyed, erected, and reconstructed in an attempt to shape the country's collective memory and to demarcate new sites of power.  So far, post communist Moscow has failed to come to any symbolic, cultural, or stylistic unity, and, to a large extent, has ignored the social aspects of urban development.

Nowadays, Moscow is a city of imitation, fakes, and bad-taste eclecticism which often borders on sheer kitsch.  At the street level, this is apparent in the numerous two-sided posters which show a picture of an Orthodox church accompanied by the words "the heart of Russia" on one side, and an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes or imported hard liquor on the other.  At a higher level, this is evident in the old-new state symbol, the double-headed imperial eagle, which, after more than sixty years, is once again brazenly displayed on the roof of the State Historical Museum - located at the entrance to Red Square - while Lenin's mummy still rests in his mausoleum and the red stars still crown the steeples of the Kremlin towers.  The double-headed eagle was borrowed from Byzantium in the 15th century and symbolically implied the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome.⁶  Nevertheless, it is actively exploited today by Yeltsin's leadership and, ironically, is bitterly opposed by the same communists who are longing for the restoration of the Russian Empire.  The imitative character of post-communist Moscow is also evident the fervor to rebuild churches destroyed in the Soviet period, which is sometimes accompanied by the destroying of existing historical and cultural monuments.  However, the hastily rebuilt churches are inserted into the semiotic context of the urban landscape that had been developed during the Soviet era.  Thus, their semantics are quite different from the original.

The political opposition is fairing no better.  The ideological collapse of communism in Russia simultaneously resulted in the end of totalitarian symbolism.  In fact, the latter did not disappear completely, but became discrete.  The secret places and memorials of the Bolshevik Revolution and the monuments to the communist rulers and heroes have lost a significant part of their charisma.  In the Soviet period, they served as shrines of compulsory national adulation; nowadays they retain a positive symbolic meaning only to the communists and their supporters.  To satisfy the need for additional symbols, the opposition, instead of attempting to create new ones, is trying to appropriate the symbols that it totally negated in the recent past.  This is most apparent in their meetings and demonstrations, during which portraits of Stalin, who almost destroyed the Orthodox Church, peacefully coexist with icons.  Likewise, protesters carry red banners of the Soviet Union alongside the yellow-black-white tricolors of the Romanov dynasty, without showing any hint of the paradox that surrounds this contradictory and oxymoronic display.

No wonder contemporary Moscow has several different faces.  One of them is best expressed in the slogan: enrichessez-vous.  This is the motley Moscow of conspicuous consumption and fancy shops.  The number of such shops far exceeds the real demand, because they often duplicate each other, and no more than 5 or 6 percent of Muscovites can afford purchases there in any case (Lokotova, 1998: 58).  This is the Moscow of prestigious foreign cars, with chauffeurs and bodyguards.  The number of such expensive automobiles in Moscow exceeds the total in many Western capitals.  This is the Moscow of renovated and newly constructed office buildings and expensive condos.  Numerous new magazines (Profil', Den’gi, Domovoi, Mir i Dom, and others) are filled with advertisements for apartments in the so-called "elite houses" where one square meter of dwelling space costs more than two thousand dollars.  They also advertise the services of designing and remodeling firms that promise to remodel and furnish apartments in any style: from German to Japanese.  Since anti-Americanism has again become fashionable in Russia, these firms are especially recommending the "evroremont" (remodeling in the European style), which together with furnishings may cost up to 120 thousand dollars for even a one room apartment (70 square meters) in an elite house (Roshek, 1998-.55). This is also the Moscow of nascent suburbanization, a completely new phenomenon for the city.  In the Soviet period, mainly the working class and the underprivileged lived permanently in the suburbs.  Those who could do so preferred to settle in the city.  Middle and upper class Muscovites, especially those with young children, liked to move to the suburbs, where they owned or rented dachi (wooden summer houses), only for the summer months.  Now, one is witnessing the birth of another suburban Moscow, where single family brick and stone houses and mansions cost from several hundred thousand to several million dollars.  Twenty to thirty thousand such houses have already been built in the most scenic locations (Moskovskie novosti, December 14-21, 1997 -. 8).  Not infrequently, their construction is in blatant violation of Russian legislation which forbids construction of villas in the vicinity of reservoirs that supply the capital with drinking water (Moskovskie novosti, October 26-November 2, 1997- 12).

Another face of Moscow is shaded in gray hues.  It represents the grim communist past and the hardships of the transition period.  This is the Moscow of wholesale markets where the numerous poor, who cannot afford to shop at retail stores, find the majority of their foodstuffs and consumer goods.  This is the Moscow of elderly women trying desperately to supplement their meager income by petty trade on the streets, all the while intimidated by police who extort bribes from them, at the same time closing their eyes to the activities of real criminals.  This is the Moscow of crowded communal flats occupied by several individual families; the Moscow of four- to ten- or more story apartment buildings built from prefabricated cement slabs, depressing in their monotony.  One fifth of Moscow's apartment houses still consist of khruvhcheby, five story houses of very low quality construction, whose building was initiated under Khrushchev  (they are ironically called khrushchehy by Muscovites because this word sounds similar to the Russian word truvhcheby, or slums).

In principle, families with modest means are entitled to rent-free dwellings provided either by the state or the city-, "modest" meaning those who currently occupy tiny flats or rooms with no more than 5 square meters of floor space per family member.  Still, by 1996, 346.6 thousand families in Moscow were waiting for rent-free apartments; 14 percent of them bad been waiting for ten years or more (L'vov, 1997-.96- Nezavisimaia gazeta - Politekonomiia, N 2, January 1998 -2).  However, the construction of living quarters for the poor strata of the population has all but come to a stop.  In the past, up to 67 percent of the city's budget was allocated for this purpose, while today this is only 3 percent (L'vov, 1997:99-100).  Only state and city officials and bureaucrats are provided with rent-free apartments - and those are of the highest quality.  For the rest of the population, the municipal government has built too many apartment buildings in the outlying districts of the capital, where Muscovites were supposed to be able to purchase apartments at favorable rates.  Upon closer investigation, however, the advantages of these apartment buildings are revealed to be fictitious.  The supposedly low cost of municipal lodgings was fixed at 630 dollars per square meter, but similar apartments on the open market were fetching 500 to 550 dollars for the same space.  As a consequence of this situation, there are now 40 thousand unsold and empty apartments; only one tenth of those built have been purchased (Kamensky, 1997: 48-49).  To solve the problem, the Moscow government now wants to provide subsidies and develop a system of mortgages, ideas which in their Western understandings are virtually nonexistent in Russia (banks are providing only short term mortgages, at very high interest).  However, some experts doubt that many Muscovites would be capable of purchasing apartments with even these favorable conditions (L'vov, 1997: 1 00).

One more face of contemporary Moscow is determined by the interests and the tastes of the political class, which, in its attempt to create and promote a new national identity, tends to propagate a mighty statehood and Russian nationalism with Orthodox accretion.  Remarkably, the boundaries between the public and private realms have not yet changed significantly in post-communist Moscow.

Having embraced a market economy, Moscow has collided with the problems that follow the absence of commercial and office space.  Construction and real estate have appeared to be an extremely lucrative business.  However, if the construction boom had been precipitated by market demands, it is the municipal authorities that are profiting more from it than anyone else.  The Moscow municipal government remains the principal owner of city land, as well as the main customer and primary builder in the city.  Likewise, every step in construction, beginning with architectural projects, is under its tight control.  In fact, monopolism, clannishness, and dependence on bureaucracy are very strong in Moscow's architectural establishment.  In order to receive a project from the city, one should be sufficiently servile, obedient, and on good terms with its authorities.  In these respects, capitalism liri Moscow, at least in most cases, has turned out to be bureaucratic capitalism.

This state of affairs, together with an enormous concentration of capital in the city, has allowed Yuri Luzhkov, the authoritarian mayor of Moscow and one of the most influential politicians in Russia, to play the populist-nationalist card and use the construction boom to carry out, in short order, the large-scale reconstruction of the city, especially its historical center.  A priority has been given to highly publicized grand projects, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars, which have irreversibly changed the face of downtown Moscow.  The political aspects of this Luzhkov-style reconstruction, which is being carried out with the full consent of Yeltsin's leadership, is entirely obvious.

On the one hand, every Muscovite must know and feel that construction is being carried out by those in political power, and that only those in power can make the city comfortable for each person.  This is why the reconstruction of the city and the erection of new buildings is so provocatively noticeable and, in its very essence, antidemocratic.  It seems that the municipal and state authorities are simply screaming for everyone to hear: "we are the power." The Moscow mayor and his cronies peremptorily decide which architectural style befits the capital and which does not.  It is well known that Luzhkov dislikes architecture of glass, concrete, and metal.  Thus, to please him the architectural establishment have already come out against the "mechanistic implementation of Western architectural style (Segodnia, March 2, 1996: 8)," and now demands an adherence to the so-called "traditional Moscow style," even though no one has ever defined this style in any convincing or professional way.  Moscow is not a very layered city.  Its characteristic feature is not the perpetuation of tradition, but rather its frequent interruptions.  Nevertheless, it is the adherence to Moscow traditions that above all other characteristics is taken into account by the city bureaucrats when they decide, often arbitrarily, whether to approve or reject architectural projects (Rezin, 1997- 52).

In practice, the contemporary "Moscow style" Is an eclectic mix of post-modernist vernacular with elements of the neo-Russian architecture of the second half of the 19th century, which aspires to the alleged Russian symbolism (gables decorated with arches, tent-like and helmet-like exterior ornamental features set over roofs, merlons and pointed towers on roofs, kokoshniki: a series of corbelled-out, round, or pointed arches arranged in receding tiers as a purely decorative feature, et cetera).  This is hardly accidental.  The neo-Russian style (incidentally, in the past it was usually called the pseudo-Russian style), which found its inspiration in the Russian architecture of the 17 century (Barton, 1990: 175 ff), was not noted for its artistic merits.  No wonder that contemporaries ironically labeled as "chests with kokoshniki" such specimens of this style as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Imperial Historical Museum.  However, in the neo-Russian style the ideological side always prevailed over the artistic one, and this is just what makes it so attractive to the Moscow authorities preaching the ideas of traditionalism and derzhavnost' (mighty statehood).

Any traditionalism, even the most imitative and tasteless, works much better for an assertion of the ideology of derzhavnost' than avant-garde.  Members of the Russian avant-garde in the early post-revolutionary period, even those who had been devoted to the communist cause, earned the hard way that it was impossible in the Soviet Union to be avant-garde while simultaneously reflecting in their art the official ideology.  I am afraid that this is also impossible in post-totalitarian Russia.  In fact, the official concern with forms of local cultural identity is not new in Moscow.  It was quite conspicuous during the reign of Czar Alexander 111, and even more so in the Stalin era (Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, 1992; Papernyl, 1996: 51 ff.).  Still, contemporary Moscow architecture contains some new and almost beguiling characteristics, which prove that Russia is still in transition, and that nothing there is certain as of yet.  In addition to the "local tradition," contemporary Moscow architecture attempts to adopt post-modernism to support traditionalist, nationalist, and statist ideologies.  Post-modernism is, however, ill suited for any official rhetoric.  The two different aesthetic principles are combined without comprehension of the fact that they are opposites.  Thus, a contradiction has emerged- the image of the mighty state is asserted by means of its deconstruction.

In the early years of perestroika, exhibitions were mounted at the Moscow Manezh Gallery of major city projects.  Muscovites used to record their opinions in ledgers placed at the gallery.  The authorities would peruse these ledgers, but then go ahead with their own projects, studiously ignoring everything they had read.  But at least a modicum of democratic decorum was maintained, and the projects were open to public scrutiny.  Nowadays, the city government is not permitting even that.  Authoritarian decisions have replaced independent experts, public opinion, and open bidding competition.

Russia is a more verbal country than a visual one.  From the 19th century Russian culture has acquired a clearly literature-centered character.  Now they are trying to change this in Moscow.  All principles of the current Moscow style are mendacious.  Instead of history, one gets its negation.  Incorrect replicas of destroyed monuments are rebuilt from the bottom up, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and a growing number of other buildings, next to which even original monuments lose their authenticity.  A replica may appropriate the style of a lost original, but its message is different.  In a way, the replica becomes more real than the original, because it is contemporary.  Instead of declared respect for the city's architectural ban-nony and landscape, one witnesses their disruption (e.g., the Trade Center at Manezh Square).  The disfigurement of Moscow's historical face, which began under Lenin, reached its climax under Stalin, and continued under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, has been resumed in the post-communist period-, this time by the authorities who claim to be democratic.  Instead of contemporary architecture, Moscow gets its imitation.

It is well known that monuments say more about the agenda and artistic preferences of those who ordered their construction than about the persons or events they are intended to commemorate (Wohl, 1996- 1).  While the characteristic feature of the contemporary Western cultural tradition connected with society's democratic and egalitarian principles Is the decline of public monuments and statues, they are mushrooming in Moscow and have become a vehicle for statist and nationalist visual propaganda.  Another contemporary tendency, that of miniaturization of sculptural monuments to make their scale more humane, is also alien to post-communist Moscow.  Its iconography is certainly acquiring illiberal and authoritarian traits, and tends to celebrate things that are removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary people- imperial rule, military victories, the pomp and circumstance of the Church, the omnipotence of the state, et cetera.  Perhaps nothing symbolizes this better than the Victory in World War II Monument on Poklonnaia Hill, a pompous and ugly reserve of the Soviet spirit, or the nearly 90 meter high monster monument to Peter the Great on Krymskaia Embankment, which Muscovites have nicknamed "the Terminator." The latter was built despite vehement public protests, and is widely perceived not only as characteristic of dubious, but officially cherished artistic values, but also as a symbol of Russia's new statehood.

Thus, culture again becomes ideology, and ideology becomes politics.  The old imperial double-headed eagle and Saint George defeating the dragon (the pre-Revolutionary emblem of Moscow) have functionally replaced the hammer and sickle and red stars of the Soviet era; but in some places they even share the same reverence and respect.

Statism was always an important ideological factor in Russia.  Its current merger with nationalism seems almost natural.  While a declared goal of the Russian leadership is to build a multiethnic civic nation in the country, its actual policy suggests something quite different (Khazanov, 1997- 138-139).  The triumph of the new power and its search for self-expression through the control of public space, monumental propaganda, and pageants reached its apogee in September 1997 during the festivities for the artificial 850-year Jubilee of Moscow.  This event, with its pompousness, ostentation, and inevitable haste, was a repetition of the Soviet-era syndrome for mass celebrations (Grueva, 1997: 56-59).  In the best tradition of Potemkin villages, building facades were quickly repaired and beautified anew, but only in downtown and only of the edifices that faced the street.  In addition, this repair and beautification was done in such a way that the paint will certainly chip and peel by the end of the first winter.

In aesthetic terms, the jubilee, with its large pageants, mass processions with thousand of participants, choreographed rites, military symbols, and abundant fireworks, was an attempt to resurrect the Soviet-era "Grand Style." However, only the political and financial elite and their families were invited to and attended the most prestigious events.  The ordinary taxpayers were entertained with cheap performances.  All of this also recalls the Soviet era.  The tribute to capitalism consisted of a new style in advertising.  Slogans like "Moscow is Russia's true value" -were placed on advertisements for Italian plumbing equipment and Belgian toilets.  Likewise, at the close of the festivities, church bells began ringing all over the city at the same time that billboards for Menatep Bank and Sainsung Electronics lit up the night sky.

More interesting were the ideological aspects of the festival.  I very much doubt that its organizers knew Ernest Renan’s celebrated saying that to be a nation its members have to forget many things, but they followed his dictum in practice.  In the performances organized on the occasion of Moscow's pseudo-jubilee, Russian history unexpectedly appeared as an endless, unbroken sequence of golden centuries.  It turned out that all was well and good during the reign of the grand princes, the czars, the emperors, the communists, and the post-communist leadership.  The message was clear- the murky waters of the past should be apotheosized, not enlightened and debated anymore, in order to assert historical continuity and to fabricate a new political reality.  It was as if the long-buried concept of the Third Rome had never been forgotten.  In a song specifically commissioned for the 850-year jubilee, Moscow was called the "prophet" and "messiah." The official narrative was a clear démarche against national retrospection and the still numerous liberal-minded people in Moscow who adhere to Western values.  In an interview given in regards to the jubilee, Luzhkov exalted Moscow as having preserved the "spiritual conservatism," In Luzhkov's view, Moscow in this sense was advantageously distinct from Russia's seaside cities (obviously, St. Petersburg is the first that springs to mind), in which a constant foreign influence has resulted in an intensive erosion of the national mentality and common statist values. (Trud, September 5-11, 1997).

But that is not all.  Once again, we are witnessing the widespread use of Russian mythopoeia: pre-Revolutionary Russian symbols and reinvented episodes from Russian history are used and manipulated to provide the authorities with an aura of legitimacy.  The festivities and television, which broadcast the Jubilee ceremonies to all of Russia, must have shown to all who watched that a consumer society has already arrived in Russia, and will soon make its appearance throughout the rest of the country, if only other regions follow Moscow's example.  But this "new" society should be a specifically Russian, great power, nationalist and Orthodox consumer society.

Construction of the memorial at Poklonnaia Hill came to no less than 200 million dollars.  The cost of the monument to Peter the Great is, at minimum, 15 to 20 million dollars.  The reconstruction costs for Manezh Square and its commercial center are kept from public scrutiny, as if they were a state secret, but are estimated by experts to be 350 million dollars minimum. The renovation of the capital, in anticipation of the jubilee, cost about 60 million dollars, with a further 50 million dollars spent on organization (Izvestiia, September 9, 1997).  In market economies, expenditures usually correspond to income.  In post-communist Moscow, however, things are done a bit differently.  The construction of churches and monuments, reconstruction of downtown, and the celebration of the artificial jubilee were carried out with a sweep that goes beyond all reasonable limits.  In Moscow today political populism is accompanied by aesthetic populism.  Moscow's mayor, with a clear conscience, ravages the municipal coffers for the glorification of his own political ambitions, and for the satisfaction of his own extremely low cultural standards.

Only one face is conspicuously absent in present day Moscow -- that of the middle class liberals. These people played an active role in the defeat of communism in Russia and the downfall of the August 1991 putsch, a role which at that time led a well-known publicist to name Moscow "the city of decent people." Today, their impact on Moscow's landscape is minimal.  Under these circumstances, city authorities, without hindrance, accomplished the reconstruction of the Manezh Square, the very square which in the era of perestroika became the gathering place for democratic rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people who had just awakened to political activism.  This "closing down" of the public space for democratically minded Russian citizens is taking on an almost symbolic meaning.  Marked by impeccably bad taste, the new constructions are becoming a memorial to their time.
 

Textnotes

1. Russian statistics are still not very reliable, and those on Moscow are no exception.  Whenever possible I prefer to use data published by the Department of Press and Information of the Moscow Municipal Government in such editions as Pul's and Simptom.  These publications, although not classified, are published only in 680 copies each to provide information for the deputies of the City and State Dumas, as well as for the Russian government, for Moscow's high officials, and for the editors of some newspapers.  I am most grateful to the people in Moscow who assisted me in obtaining these editions.

2. Moscow mayor Luzbkov boasts that Moscow contributes an even 43 percent to the state budget (Obshchaia gazeta, October 16-22, 1997), but this is apparently an exaggeration.

3. Actually this figure should be somewhat higher because of the widespread practice of tax evasion and employment in the "shadow economy."

4. The number of those employed in small businesses (no more than 7 or 8 employees) in Moscow has reached 1.3 million people.  In addition, a significant number of people are employed in these businesses without registration, in order to avoid paying taxes (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996:24-1 Simptom, N 11 (59), 1997- 12).

5. In 1996, Professor Alexel Komech, Director of the Institute of Arts Studies and one of the most respected art historians and critics, told me that his salary was 1200 rubles ($200) a month; while his daughter, a minor clerk in one of Moscow's hotels, earned 1300 rubles a month.

6. Actually, this may be another myth.  Some scholars are of the opinion that this emblem was borrowed by the Moscow Great Prince Ivan III from the Habsburgs.
 

References

Bernstein, Erlen
    1997  "The Moscow Miracle." New Times, July- 27-29.

Berton, Kathleen
    1990  Moscow: An Architectural History.  New York: St. Martin's Press.

Grueva, Elena
    1997  "Prazdnik Zemll." Itogi, September 16-.56-59.

Kamensky, Alexel
    1997  "Vozdushnye zamki dlia tekh, komy tesno." Itogi, April 1: 48-49.

Khazanov, Anatoly
    1997  "Ethnic Nationalism in the Russian Federation." Daedalus, 126, (3)- 121-142.

Lokotova, Zhana
    1998  "Tseny podzemel’ia." Itogi, February 24: 56-58.

L'vov, G. N. (ed.).
    1997  Moskva 1996: Obshchesvennoe mnenie.  Moscow: Meriia.

Papemyl, Vladimir
    1996  Kul'tura Dva.  Moscow- Novoe literatumoe obozrenie.

Revzln, Grigory
    1997  "Stil'." Itogi, September 2: 48-53.

Roshek, luila
    1998  "Dizainervkie uvlugi." Profil', No.3: 49-54.

Tarkhanov, Alexel and Kavtaradze, Sergel.
    1992  Architecture of the Stalin Era.  New York: Rizzoll
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Varoli, John D.
    1966  "There are More 'New Poor' and 'New Russians'." Transaction, N 4, October-. 6-11.

Wohl, Helmut
    1996  "Monuments, Real and Imagined." In: Claudio Véliz (ed.). Monuments in an Age Without Heroes.
              Boston- Boston University Press: I- 1 5.
 
 

RE-IMAGINING RUSSIAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCIENTISTS
Hugh Gusterson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 Three factors shaped global society in the period after 1945 -- capitalism, colonialism, and cold war.  Of these three, anthropologists have almost entirely ignored the cold war in the recent wave of theorizing about global processes.  And now we are in the process of ignoring the reformulation of the international security order in the decade after the end of the cold war. If I can be permitted to play with Arjun Appadurai's language about global flows and structures, I would like to suggest that, in addition to "ethnoscapes," "mediascapes," and "financescapes," global society is patterned by "securityscapes." Far from producing deterritorialization in the new global order, these "securityscapes" regulate the flow of people and resources between countries, distribute nation-states into hierarchies and alliances, and produce complex discourses of identity and enmity.  Especially for those working in the security apparatuses of the superpowers, the cold war provided lived realities, structures of feeling, and cultural imaginaries articulating the innermost recesses of the self to the nation-state.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cold war "securityscape" has buckled and twisted into a strange new shape.  In the new world order that is now congealing, Russia is no longer an enemy but is not quite a friend, is no longer communist hut not exactly capitalist, and is no longer a superpower but, with its 12,000 nuclear weapons ready to destroy us (Norris and Arkin 1997), is hardly a country like any other.  It is the rapid dislocation and ambiguity of Russia's position in this "securityscape", and the ambivalence Russian and American security personnel feel towards one another as new discourses are superimposed across old ones, that I want to explore in this paper.  The paper is based on fieldwork conducted at both of America's nuclear weapons laboratories -- Los Alamos and Livermore -- and among Russian nuclear weapons scientists at a variety of sites.

Let's begin with a little Orientalist sensationalism.  In their best-selling book, One-Point Safe, the journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn describe the New Russia thus:

The country was bleeding to death stripped and robbed of its assets by their former guardians, like the Gypsy children roaming the streets... The vast arsenal once built up regardless of cost... was waiting to be hauled away and sold in lots to black market customers ... Russia ... was about to turn into the greatest thieves' kitchen in history.  The high command of the Russian military, custodian for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, was in the front rank of the looters.(Cockburn & Cockburn 1997:34).

This is the emergent image of "the Russian threat", recently popularized in the Hollywood film Peacemaker, featuring a corrupt and drunken Russian military officer who steals an ICBM warhead and sells it to Yugoslav terrorists who want to destroy New York.

Western and Soviet discourses on security in the 1980s had represented Russia quite differently.  Those discourses divided the world into two tiers: the first tier was occupied by the superpowers and their European allies.  In this tier the superpowers, despite their enmity, were represented as sharing a common heritage of technical rationality that made them mature enough to discipline their rivalry into nuclear deterrence.  In the second tier were so-called "developing" nations who, in the Orientalist imaginary of a national security elite, were seen as too irrational and too internally chaotic to be entrusted with nuclear weapons.  In the 1990s the Russians, while retaining their nuclear arsenal, have slipped from the first to the second tier in Western security discourse.  The Russian threat is no longer seen to be a well disciplined "evil empire" but a poverty stricken, chaotic state that cannot defend its old sphere of influence and which threatens to spew nuclear materials among the second tier nations, and to sub-national terrorists, as it struggles to reorient itself.

In this new securityscape egalitarian rivalry has given way to hierarchical cohabitation.  The U.S., as the sole superpower, is expanding NATO into the old Soviet sphere of influence, has forced Yeltsin to accede to a START II Treaty the terms of which are skewed against the Russians, is unilaterally reinterpreting the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in America's favor, and sending its oil companies to secure the reserves of the Caspian.  Meanwhile the U.S. has spent $265 million buying Russian weapons so that they can be studied (Rothstein 1995), and has started to sub-contract scientific research to former Russian nuclear weapons scientists, who now constitute a high-tech version of the reserve labor armies throughout the third world whose existence enables American employers to function more efficiently.  For example, shortly after cutting the Los Alamos Laboratory's budget for magnetic fusion research by two thirds, the U.S. government gave $90,000 to Russian scientists to do the same research (Hickox 1992).  They also gave $3 million to former Russian weapons scientists to work on new technologies for nuclear waste disposal (Easthouse 1994).  Russian science is becoming a yard sale in which the American state can rummage for bargains.  Describing this new situation, one manager at the Livermore Laboratory told me, "the Russians worked on everything ... You gotta sift through all of that ... so we start out at the Russian Academy of Sciences and work our way through the system, see who's good, who isn't good... and then we target those people ... and see if there's something there this country's interested in."

Most of the American money has been spent, however, on securing Russian nuclear warheads and fissile material from theft or purchase.  The U.S. government has spent several billions of dollars buying Russian uranium to keep it off the market (Bukharin 1993; Cockburn and Cockburn 1997), providing equipment to help dismantle Russian nuclear weapons, making sensors and video technology to protect Russian nuclear material in storage, and developing special containers and railcars for transporting the material (Associate Press 1995; Lockwood 1993, 1994, 1995).  Many hundreds of millions of dollars have also been spent on the new science center at Dubna, where former weapons scientists are subsidized by Western governments hoping to keep them out of trouble.

These assistance programs, often called the "lab-to-lab programs," have generated increasingly frequent and extensive contacts, and even joint experiments, between the Russian and American nuclear weapons scientists who were, throughout the cold war, only able to communicate by seismographic semaphore, as each side listened for the muffled sounds of the other's underground explosions far across the world.  As Russian and American weapons scientists struggle to make sense of each other and of their own histories in the light of a new geopolitical order, there are four themes I want to pick out in their discourse.  They are Russian backwardness, Russian pride, doubleness, and what I want to call militarist utopianism.

First, Russian backwardness.  The encounters between Russian and American scientists have been structured and enabled by the fact that Russia lost the cold war and its economy and society are in disarray.  On the Russian side these encounters have also been inflected by a national discourse about Russian backwardness reaching back at least to Peter the Great.  American scientists told me, with some amusement, that the Russian technology they saw reminded them of American technology a quarter century earlier.  Russian weapons scientists, at one point three months behind on their salaries and growing their own vegetables to get by, told me of the disappointment they felt at having their life's work frozen by a state that had simply run out of resources, complaining, for example, that the Livermore Laboratory is building a $1.2 billion laser to simulate thermonuclear explosions, while Minatom cannot afford such a facility.  One Russian scientist visiting the Livermore Laboratory said, "In Moscow, most of us live in small flats.  I marvel at how spacious and modern your houses are ... And the vast size of your lab, the sophistication of your equipment ... is simply wonderful" (Independent 1989).

Akhil Gupta argues that discourses of underdevelopment constructed in the West are internalized in other countries, where identity incorporates what he calls a "pervasive sense of being underdeveloped" (Gupta 1998:x).  As Russia slides down the ladder of nations, its scientists are developing just such a sense.  But Gupta remarks that national identities are structured by "contradictory logics and incommensurable discourses" (p.6), and that this sense of underdevelopment may coexist in dialectical tension with a sense of nationalist pride.  We find the coexistence of these contradictory logics not only in Russian scientists' own discourse, but mirrored as well, interestingly enough, in the discourse of American scientists who believe, in an almost mystical way, in the theoretical acuity of the Russian physicist's mind.  One American weapons scientist, focusing on the Russians' intellectual ability rather than their technological prowess, said, "we're good at the theoretical stuff too, but they're really good at it. maybe it's because they don't have the machines we do ... but they really know how to write elegant equations" (Easthouse 1991).  Another American, saying that the first Soviet H-bomb design was better than the first American design, told the story of John Wheeler, an American physicist, finally meeting Zel'dovich, one of the designers of the Soviet H-bomb, and presenting him with a male-shaped salt-shaker and a female-shaped pepper shaker.  Alluding to the superiority of the Soviet H-bomb, he said that the "male" was Zel'dovitch and the "female" was Teller, the inventor of the American hydrogen bomb.  In a context where Russian scientists lack the resources to do cutting edge physics today, nationalist nostalgia for such glorious achievements in the past is increasingly important.  Thus Yuli Khariton himself, the Russian Oppenheimer, now in his 90s, has taken it upon himself to write his own account of the Soviet A and H bomb programs, emphasizing that the Soviets had no assistance from spies at Los Alamos in their hydrogen bomb program.  Insisting on Soviet priority, he concludes, "American colleagues have clearly underestimated the significance of the Soviet test in August 1953, which must be considered the first test in the world of a hydrogen bomb" (Khariton and Smirnov 1993:30).  Thus has the arms race which has been stifled in the present been projected back into the past.

The third theme I want to foreground is "doubleness" -- the awareness on the part of both Russian and American weapons scientists that they have formerly secret doubles in another country -- "the guys on the other team" as one Livermore scientist called them (Cockburn and Cockburn 1997:27).  One Los Alamos scientist, when I asked what it was like to meet his counterparts for the first time, banged the table and exclaimed, "they're just like us!" He added, "even their directors are like ours.  The director of Chelyabinsk is shy and retiring, like John Nuckolls [of Livermore], and the director of Arzamas is amiable and easygoing like Sig [Hecker of Los Alamos]." One Livermore scientist, who I will call Henry Mullins, said, "I went over there and met the Henry Mullins counterpart, who had worked nuclear bombs, reactor lasers, electron lasers, gas lasers, solid state lasers ... It's a tremendous camaraderie.  I found it to be like working with my brother ... Similar excitement about working together.  Similar excitement about the science.  Similar work ethic ... You get into equations right away.  You know it was like a door opened to these people."

This experience of doubleness has recently moved Los Alamos and Arzamas-16 to become sister cities, in a move eerily recapitulating, yet displacing, anti-nuclear strategies of the 1980s, which tried to use U.S.-Soviet exchange programs to undermine the arms race.  The two cities have exchanged delegations and gifts, developed a pen-pal program for their children, and Los Alamos has raised $10,000 in medical aid for Arzamas-16.  Arzamas-16 presented the Los Alamos City Council with a ceremonial brass bell.  When a delegation from Arzamas-16 visited in 1995, a Los Alamos councilor read this proclamation: our "two communities ... share unique histories [sic], similar national security missions, similar educational, family and patriotic values, and similar beliefs in the benefit of science to all mankind" (Schaller 1995).  It is this sense that the American and Russian weapons scientists together constitute a single transnational community applying science to the betterment of humankind that I call militarist utopianism.  I heard it in the words of the Livermore scientist who said, "you have the people who do things for the love of science and your country... Our bond first was science and then we're trying to bond the two countries ... We feel that what we were doing in retrospect was the right thing.  Building nuclear weapons for deterrence stopped World War III." And I heard a similar utopian vision in the words of a senior scientist from Arzamas-16.  He was describing a joint experiment between Los Alamos and Arzamas-16.  "After the experiment the scientists were unscrewing the shields that protected the diagnostic equipment.  You couldn't tell who was Russian and who was American.  They were all just scientists working together on a task.  At first it looked as if the data were lost.  But then the data appeared on the screen, and a collective cheer went up."

To conclude: during the cold war, when the United States and the Soviet Union were equals, American and Russian weapons scientists shared a discourse of mutual antipathy, grounded in the rivalry of the arms race, which obscured the ironic commonality of their projects.  As we move beyond the cold war world and Russia is partially absorbed into a clientilistic relationship with the U.S., Russian and American weapons scientists are at last allowed, albeit in carefully restricted and monitored situations, to meet and even to collaborate on occasion.  As old discourses morph into new shapes, the rivalries of the cold war melt and reappear in the register of nostalgia.  Meanwhile an old, submerged sense that Russian and American scientists, despite the antipathy of their governments, were engaged in a single project has now burst forth in a startling discourse of commonality and cooperation.  In this context, paradoxically, a utopian image of a divided international community restored to wholeness works to further the projects of the national security state in the world after the cold war -- a world in which Russian and American weapons scientists re-imagine their cold war rivalries as a collaborative project and cautiously join together to ensure the endurance of their dark art.
 

REFERENCES CITED

Associated Press
    1995  "Los Alamos Helps Russia Track Plutonium." Los Alamos Monitor, September 22.

Bukharin, Oleg
    1993  "Soft Landing for Bomb Uranium" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists September, pp.44-49.

Cockburn, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn
    1997  One-Point Safe.  NY: Doubleday.

Easthouse, Keith
    1991  "LANL, Soviet Scientist May Share Data." New Mexican November 18.
    1994  "Lab Scientists to Help Russians with Project. New Mexican July 26.

Gupta, Akhil
    1998  Postcolonial Developments. Duke University Press.

Hickox, Katie
    1992  "DOE Ripped for Hiring Russian Scientists." New Mexican, March 10.

Independent
    1989  "Lab Scientist Hosts Russian Visitors." Independent, December 27.

Khariton, Yuli and Yuri Smirnov
    1993  "The Khariton Version." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May pp.20-31.

Lockwood,  Dunbar
    1993  "Dribbling Aid to Russia." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August, pp.39-42.
    1994  "Purchasing Power." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April, pp.9-12.
    1995  "Getting Down to Business." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  January/February, pp.12-13.

Norr
    1997  "Estimated Russian Stockpile, End of 1996." Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 53(3):
              May-June pp.62-4.

Rothstein, Linda
    1995  "Secrets" off the Rack." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March/April, pp.6-7.

Schaller, Charmian
    1995  "Los Alamos Welcomes Russians." Los Alamos Monitor October 17, p.l.
 
 

COLONIZATION OR LIBERATION: THE PARADOX OF NGOS IN POSTSOCIALIST STATES
Julie Hemment
Cornell University

 The stimulation of civil society has been central to the efforts to democratize post-socialist states and has been regarded as a crucial dimension of transition.  However, recently criticisms have been made from both East and West.  Some of those who were once most in favor of the notion of civil society and its promotion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have become disaffected with the emergent structures, while others question why concepts and terms are exported with such enthusiasm at a time when their salience is challenged in Western countries (Carothers 1996). Even George Soros, the high priest of the "open society" has distanced himself from some of the processes that are underway in Eastern Europe today (Soros 1997).

In order to ground this discussion I shall consider a central plank of the democratization process, the non-governmental sphere.  Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)¹  are a striking feature of the post-Communist landscape.  Their role in transition is crucial as they serve as conduits for the distribution of material, technical and intellectual resources  - international agencies such as the World Bank and donor governments frequently send funds directly to internationally recognized NGOs rather than to governments.  Equally important is their symbolic function. Perceived by their advocates to be a vital component of civil society, the existence of NGOs has been encouraged and stimulated by international agencies and western governments accordingly.

Discourse about NGOs is strikingly polarized.  I have been struck by an apparent paradox, that while they are seen to be tied to democratic and emancipatory movements and concerns, NGOs are also perceived as part of the attempt by Western states, external to these societies, to control, civilize and discipline post-socialist states.   In this paper I will present both positive and negative evaluations of NGOs and explore some of the contention about this new sphere.  I shall then provide an historical analysis of the concept of civil society as it has been used in the context of Eastern Europe and the USSR, from the late 80’s and early 90s when it was much in vogue,²  to the more recent backlash against it. I shall then consider how the contemporary non-governmental sphere has apparently failed to meet these expectations and reconsider the binary colonization/emancipation. Why does civil society continue to be viewed in such polarized terms and what does this tell us about the processes of transition?

NGOs as Salvation

Some positive views of NGOs are as follows:  First, let’s take the self representation of an international NGO, taken from an announcement of an internship position advertised on the internet:

ISAR is a non-profit organization that supports the growth of the non-governmental sector in the countries of the former Soviet Union….our mission is to empower grassroots activists to address local social, political, and environmental challenges by providing them with grants, training and other forms of technical assistance.

This rhetoric suggests a progressive form of democracy-building at its most grass-roots and people friendly.

A second, similar type of language is found among scholars who celebrate NGOs as progressive forces in the context of transnationalism and see them as key players in an emergent "global civil society".  In a recent article, anthropologist Terry Turner (n.d.) provides a positive reading of the new networks of NGOs, environmental and rights activists and sectors of the media and public opinion,  "An emergent transnational community of movements and groups has begun to coalesce as a new, global extension of civil society, in complementary opposition to the longer-established sector of global civil society comprised of private transnational corporations." This type of rhetoric is also pronounced among feminist activists and scholars, particularly in the aftermath of the Fourth World Conference on Women.³

Finally, a third constituency that celebrates the emancipatory potential of NGOs is found at what is traditionally considered to be the opposite end of the political spectrum, among pro-market liberal democrats.  Until his recent turn around, George Soros, international financier-turned-philanthropist and promoter of civil society in the former Communist states has epitomized this trend.  With western governments, Soros’ Open Society foundation has promoted NGO development as part of the agenda to stimulate the development of an independent pluralistic "civil society" in post-Communist states and has set up independent media organs, think tanks and academic institutions accordingly.

In these positive evaluations, NGOs are progressive bandits that work to protect people against the incursions of evil states and/or international forces.  The symbolic order around NGOs is predicated on a series of binary oppositions, most fundamentally between state/society.  In all cases, the "non-governmental" sphere is seen to lie outside the state/society dichotomy, and NGOs are seen to represent a third realm that is apparently free from particularistic interests.  They transcend politics, particularly the politics of the Cold War, they are non-aligned and stand for universal values, mere facilitators of local empowerment.  In the first example, the ISAR announcement is inflected with Christian notions of voluntarism and charity and contains a set of oppositions based on the pair sacred/profane (not-for-profit/for profit, charity/business) at the same time as it draws on an international development discourse of entitlements and rights. In the second case, the "global civil society" discourses replicate the same binaries - state/society (or "community"), profit/not-for-profit - at a global level.  In the third example, the Soros-type discourses rest on the same binary state/society, but are expressed slightly differently, as "open society"  vs. the totalitarian state, or "dictatorship."  It is important to note, however, that this is a (good)state/(bad)state binary, as the designation "open society" is modeled on the liberal democratic state.  Far from transcending politics, this last position smacks of liberal triumphalism at the "victory" of liberal democracy over Communism.  In this discourse, "NGO" becomes a metaphor for "civility," "freedom," a concrete referent for "civil society" which is the desired end of "transition."

The Denouncers

As I have noted, there is a new trend toward critiquing the non-governmental sphere and its role in the "democratization" process.  Here NGOs are perceived to be an arm of a