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The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle

Online ISBN:
9781526185105
Print ISBN:
9781526167637
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle

Alexandrina Vanke
Alexandrina Vanke
Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
9 January 2024
Online ISBN:
9781526185105
Print ISBN:
9781526167637
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

Building on a more than ten years of research into the everyday world of workers, the book suggests a novel account of urban life in post-industrial cities with a particular focus on inequalities and responses of ordinary people to them. It argues that workers residing in Russia’s deindustrialising urban areas are actively engaged in a wide range of practical activities that the author terms as everyday struggle aimed at grassroots improvement of living conditions and creative resistance to both worsening of socio-economic standing and increasing state control over their everyday life under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in two major Russian cities, the author develops a network of concepts, including structure of feeling by Raymond Williams, habitus by Pierre Bourdieu, class consciousness by Edward P. Thompson and everyday resistance by James Scott. The book provides empirical evidence that class consciousness of urban workers is being formed within socio-material infrastructures of post-industrial cities, combining in their landscapes socialist industrial and neoliberal post-industrial structures. This class consciousness of Russia’s workers has clear affective, environmental and peaceful dimensions, manifesting in their attachment to place and nature, as well as in their engagement in anti-war resistance. Looking at the interrelation between senses, imaginaries and practical activities of deindustrialising communities, the book vividly tells the stories of urban workers and other city dwellers by taking their perspective. At the same time, the book provides a complex explanation of the processes in the greater Russian society.

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