‘They Called Us Spekulyanty’: Shame and Pride in the Biographies of Female Shuttle Traders in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

This article explores the emotional dimensions of post-1991 socioeconomic transformation in Russia. Biographical narratives of cross-border traders (chelnoki) offer insight into continuities and ruptures of social structures in Russia in the early 1990s and bring to the fore the salience of shame (styd) and pride (gordost’) in understanding social change. The negotiation of these emotions is influenced by the traders’ pre-1991 social status and affected their post-1991 pathways. Embedding the notions of styd and gordost’ in the context of changing moral, class and gender regimes illustrates that these emotions played a key role in the socioeconomic transformation of post-Soviet Russia.

Some years ago, during my work stay in a provincial Russian town, I had a conversation with a market woman at the local bazaar. When I told her about my work as a German teacher at a local language centre, she replied that in Soviet times she had been a lecturer of French and English literature. However, months of unpaid salary in the early 1990s impelled her to follow a friend’s invitation to travel to Poland and join the blossoming business of buying (cheaply abroad) and selling (more expensive locally), or in Russian, kupi-prodai (shuttle trading). Initially, she told me, she felt ashamed of working ‘in the streets’ (na ulitse). However, as more and more people tried to make ends meet in open-air markets, public attitude towards traders changed. My interlocutor told me that people slowly understood that traders did not engage in shuttle trading out of greed, but because they had no other choice. And, she added, trading was profitable. In the mid-1990s, her large profit margins increased her self-esteem; as the family’s main breadwinner, she was able to pay for her children’s education. I later learned that her story was not singular but representative of a mass phenomenon in the 1990s in many postsocialist countries.

In this article, I explore how the fracture of socioeconomic and professional stability in the lives of those who began trading in the early 1990s reflects larger processes of social change. The timeframe of this article covers the period 1991–1998 when the first generation of shuttle traders engaged in what some call ‘trading by necessity’ in Russia (Bruns & Miggelbrink 2011, p. 234).¹ I chose this timeframe because the early years of socioeconomic transformation in Russia best capture the ruptures and continuities, as well as the meaning of trade in the lives of those who took up trading activities as a necessary means (vynuzhdennaya mera). Based on biographical narrative interviews with former traders,² I argue that the emotions associated with small-scale, cross-border trade provide a lens to understand transforming structural conditions. The two primary emotions that emerged in my research were styd (shame) and gordost’ (pride). Discursively embedding them in the context of changing moral, class and gender regimes, I aim to show that emotions were not only a result but also a driving force of socioeconomic continuity and rupture in post-Soviet Russia. In so doing, I contribute to the rich literature on emotions in postsocialism and to the equally rich scholarship on shuttle trade. This article uniquely combines these threads with an empirically grounded analysis of how the emotions related to shuttle trade correspond to the emotional dimension of post-1991 socioeconomic transformation in Russia.

Markets and small-scale cross-border trading in the 1990s

During state socialism, individual trade of foreign goods was strictly forbidden and socially proscribed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, distortions and inefficiencies in the supply system generated myriad entrepreneurial endeavours; mushrooming open-air markets satisfied growing consumer appetites in postsocialist societies. While it would be wrong to indicate the end of the Soviet Union as the birth of shuttle trade—after all, various forms of cross-border trade existed in Soviet times (Mukhina 2014, ch. 1)—as a mass movement it gained momentum because of post-Soviet deregulation. Largely unregulated import taxes spurred the cross-border mobility of goods and people. In the face of raging unemployment and unpaid salaries in the early 1990s, many people, especially women, resorted to small-scale, cross-border trade (so-called ‘shuttle traders’ or chelnoki) as the last available means of subsistence. The lifting of travel restrictions and simplification of visa procedures further facilitated the traffic of goods, predominantly from China, Turkey and Poland, to the post-Soviet countries (Mandel & Humphrey 2002; Billé et al. 2012; Morris 2013; Mukhina 2014). The chelnochnyi biznes (shuttle trading) basic rationality was simple: chelnoki regularly travelled abroad to purchase consumer goods cheaply and in portable quantities, and sold them more expensively at street markets back home (Yükseker 2004).

Irina Mukhina highlights the enormous impact of female shuttle trade on the ‘social space of the post-Soviet existence’ (Mukhina 2014, p. 8). Even if the number of people involved in shuttle trading is hard to determine, they are estimated to have increased ten times in the 1990s (Mukhina 2009, p. 341). In Russia, figures range from ten million in 1994 (Yakovlev et al. 2003, p. 4) to 30 million at its peak in 1996 (Mukhina 2014, p. 50) with numbers significantly declining after the financial crisis in 1998. Thus, throughout the 1990s in Russia, shuttle trading became a mass practice and a major means of individual and societal supply of goods and hard currency with an estimated volume of US$20 billion in 1998 (Yakovlev et al. 2003, p. 4).

Not only did market spaces offer a livelihood to those who had lost their salaried jobs, they also served as places from where criminality, corruption and market competition became part of everyday life in postsocialist cities. Retail hubs in Warsaw, Moscow, Ekaterinburg and Kazan (to name just a few) became notorious for the fantastic fortunes generated there by the ruthless. The criminals’ interference in politics and bloody gang wars shaped public image of the market. Stories of spectacular profits and middle-of-the-day shootings contributed to the mystification of bazaar businesses and the negative image of those who earned their living in market-based commercial activities (Volkov 2002; Zabyelina 2012; Mukhina 2014).

Rapidly changing postsocialist realities brought on by the accelerated flow of capital, labour and commodities have created a complex network of trajectories and ruptures. These tensions produced a particular set of emotions and values. In pre-1991 Russia, smaller village markets existed across the country and throughout all professional spheres (sometimes referred to as a ‘second economy’). Here, homegrown fruit and vegetables were sold primarily by women, while smuggled products and stolen state property were also sold semi-secretly across all the socialist economies. Post-Soviet small-scale, cross-border business differed from earlier commercial practices in terms of product acquisition and the range of people involved, with accompanying multi-ethnic and diverse social backgrounds. In post-1991 Russia, many traders (including all my interlocutors) travelled great distances, as also indicated in research on small-scale cross-border trade between Russia and Turkey (Hann & Hann 1992; Yakovlev et al. 2003; Bloch 2017), between Russia and China (Mandel & Humphrey 2002; Billé et al. 2012), and in studies that examine open-air markets in Russia as drivers of globalisation (Mukhina 2009, 2014, p. 16; Bloch 2011). Until 1994 the absence of a legal framework regulating the small-scale import and retail sale of goods, yielded significant profits for shuttle traders. Later, however, the value of duty-free goods was limited to US$1,000 and 50 kg (Wielecki 2015, p.74), a regulation that, according to my informants, fostered corruption, as it facilitated the bribing of border officials. Abroad, traders established international trading networks from scratch while their Soviet-era social and professional position—accountant, employee at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, teacher—often helped them sell merchandise locally on a retail basis.³

In recent years, many scholars have objected to a postsocialism framing that ‘emphasises rupture over continuity’ (Müller 2019, p. 534).⁴ Voices from within the so-called postsocialist space have criticised the concept for reproducing ‘dichotomies and homologies’ rather than taking seriously the necessity to explore the ‘nitty-gritty of policy change and fiscal reform which affected the lives and livelihoods of their subjects’ (Makovicky 2016, p. 3). I acknowledge the long-term trajectories of post-Soviet structural transformation, and my findings from the Russian context show that shuttle trading ought not to be reduced to a mere continuation of previous black market activities. Continuities and ruptures in the retail of goods after the collapse of the Soviet Union are complex and extend beyond the topic of informality. I argue that the mass mobilisation of those engaged in the retail business in the early 1990s requires a broader set of analytical approaches than simply looking at concepts of informality and social embeddedness. If we want to better understand emerging capitalism against the history of post-Soviet Russia, the inclusion of emotions broadens the scope of analytical approaches.

More generally, studies on small-scale, cross-border trading in the postsocialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia have focused on a variety of social and economic phenomena. These include the economic dimensions of trade between Russia and Turkey (Yakovlev et al. 2003; Yükseker 2004; Yadova 2009), traders as a particular ‘social group’ (Yadova 2009) and markets as conspicuous places of post-Soviet stratification (Dyatlov 2017) with multi-ethnic socialities (Nikolotov 2019). The complex entanglement of formal and informal dimensions of market trade has also received extended scholarly attention. Zabyelina (2012) scrutinises the destructive and productive forces of the informal economy and the conspicuous criminality at the Cherkizovskii (Cherkizon Market), one of Moscow’s largest markets, which was shut down in 2009. Challenging the stigmatisation of bazaar trade as an informal practice, as opposed to advanced formalised economies, scholars questioned the multiple meanings of informal transactions, and explored small-scale trading as a subversive practice blurring the lines between formality and informality (Bruns & Miggelbrink 2012; Polese & Prigarin 2013; Holzlehner 2014; Morris & Polese 2015; Polese 2016).

Most scholarship on postsocialist petty trading in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia acknowledges that active engagement in the market business was ‘not a moral-free activity’ (Kaneff 2002, p. 34). Associations of styd and gordost’ were pervasive in the biographical interviews with my interlocutors. References to shame also appear throughout the literature on postsocialist shuttle traders in and beyond Russia. Irina Mukhina (2014), who studied the gendered features of market trading in Russia establishing that approximately 80% of the practitioners were women, claims that the negative branding of retail activities was an aftereffect of state socialism, when personal enrichment ran counter to the official ideology of collective work for the common good. The work of Alexia Bloch (2011) also engages with the female predominance of post-Soviet traders and links the emotional challenges of trading to changing gender and labour regimes in a rapidly globalising world. Yet, the emotional dimension of styd and its close twin gordost’ has never been systematically embedded in the social context in which it was grounded. In this article, I take seriously the emotions and values attributed to trade by analysing styd and gordost’ in the biographical accounts of my informants.

In coupling styd and gordost’, I do not suggest the emotions are binary oppositions or have directionality from one to the other. On the contrary, this study is motivated by the need to create a wider understanding of the ambivalent dynamics of and between these two self-referential emotions. On the individual level, they are negotiated and transformed in multiple and sometimes ambiguous ways, often within one single narrative. In studying the multifaceted and changing meanings of styd and gordost’ and their relevance to the shuttle trading experience, I will follow the appeal of Thomas Scheff to more closely and systematically scrutinise the origin of the ‘master emotions of everyday life’ (Scheff 2003, p. 244) and their impact on social structures.

I collected the interviews that empirically ground this study within a broader research agenda wherein I tried to understand the predominance of women in post-Soviet shuttle trading. I decided to work with biographical narrative interviews because this method best captures individual trajectories and lived experiences in the face of changing structural conditions (Rosenthal 2004). Biographical narrative interviews do pose the challenge of working with different and overlapping temporal layers. Taavetti (2018) differentiates between ‘Time Remembered, Time of Remembering and Time of Researching’ in her work on the history of queer sexualities and the cultural politics of memory. These layers are deeply intertwined and integrate collective and individual memory, experience and discourse. My interlocutors’ recollections of shuttle trading in early 1990s Russia are open to multiple interpretations, for example, if recorded by a different researcher or told in a different context. Hence, the interpretation of emotions attributed to the experience of shuttle trading in the accounts of former female practitioners are subject to the overlapping layers of meaning attributed over time by my informants and myself. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that the focus of this study—the emotional dimension of trading in the 1990s—builds on my informants’ recollection of a period in their lives that had long passed and been influenced by their post-shuttle trading experiences.

I used grounded theory methodology (GTM) to structure the responses and coded the aspects of the biographical accounts that appeared most relevant. The application of GTM was motivated by my attempt to comprehend ‘the complex world of lived experience from the point of view of those who lived in it’ (Schwandt 2006, p. 40). However, I explicitly enhance the passive notion of ‘experiencing’ with a more active mode of shaping. The biographical narratives of traders convey information about a larger societal configuration and each individual’s position. All my interlocutors viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a turning point in their lives. At the beginning of the 1990s, unexpected challenges confronted their predicted life paths, requiring adaptive skills far beyond those they might have wished for in a reform of the Soviet system. The emotions my interlocutors attributed to the shuttle trading experience illustrate the connection between individual emotions and social change. Based on available discourses and interpretative resources in the interview material, I contextualise these emotions in three different, interrelated categories: moral economies; class and social status; and (domestic) gender roles and their transformation over time.

Emotions as an analytical lens

Emotions, as Sara Ahmed (2014, p. 9) reminds us, should not be reduced to ‘psychological states’ or something that emerges from the ‘inside’. Instead, we must critically examine the relation between the body and the social and power structures that determine the politics of its experiences (Ahmed 2014). The ‘emotional turn’ in the humanities and social sciences stimulated a productive debate in which scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet studies examined these relationships from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives (Suny 2004, 2011; Steinberg 2008; Plamper 2009; Reddy 2009; Steinberg & Sobol 2011). Rich ethnographies demonstrate how the ‘political is emotional and that emotions have politics’ (Lemon 2008, p. 214). These areas of study encompass property redistribution and privatisation (Svasek 2008; Zerilli 2008); war, ethnic conflicts and the upsurge of nationalist and traditionalist sentiments (Leutloff-Grandits 2008; Skrbiš 2008; Shahnazarian & Ziemer 2014); and the de-evaluation and revaluation of labour (Humphrey 2002; Mandel & Humphrey 2002; Morris 2016; Bloch 2017). Despite diverse geographical and topical foci, most scholars understand emotions as a sociopolitical phenomenon because of the multiple ways in which they make, shape and relate to power. Power relations influence an individual’s position in the social fabric. Emotions are key to understanding the lived experience of post-Soviet transformation because they ‘do’ things (Spackman 2002; Steinberg & Sobol 2011). What emotions do is shaped by individual dispositions and sociocultural, political and economic conventions. In honing the salience of power in the study of emotions, Lutz and Abu-Lughod suggest engaging methodologically with emotions by asking how ‘discourse becomes emotional and emotion becomes discourse’ (Lutz & Abu-Lughod 1990, p. vii). The meaning of discourse here draws from Foucault’s analytical apparatus as ‘a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance’ (Diamond & Quinby 1988, p. 185). I frame my empirical research on female shuttle traders within these theoretical debates by looking at the ways the emotions of shame and pride reproduce and rearrange social divisions in post-Soviet Russia.

Alena Minchenia’s discourse analysis of shame in the context of suppressed protests in 2010 in Belarus argues that shame reinforces ‘divisions along the lines of class, civic engagement and political views’ (Minchenia 2017, p. 21). Her emphasis on shame and pride as powerful emotional forces in the production of social inequality aligns with my thesis. To understand the prevalence of styd (shame) and, to a lesser degree, gordost’ (pride) in the biographical accounts of female shuttle traders, I ask how these emotions first came to structure the particular social location and historical moment in post-Soviet Russia. I then embed my empirical findings in a grounded analysis of shame and pride in three specific yet interrelated discourses about moral economies, social stratification and gender regimes. My analysis engages with the following set of questions. First, how did shame and, to a lesser extent, pride come to be associated with shuttle trading? Second, what layers of social differentiation does the reiteration of shame produce? Third, how do these emotions change in the biographical accounts?

Changing economic moralities

Profit-making and self-enrichment were socially proscribed by the ideology of state socialism; the Soviet criminal code equated speculation (spekulyatsiya)⁵ with corruption and theft (Leese & Pawlik 2019, p. 144). Spekulyatsiya evoked more of a moral than legal understanding in the public attitude towards moneymaking, a perspective also prevalent in post-Soviet times. Business practices aimed at personal enrichment, such as trading, were perceived to be immoral because ‘profits had to be earned, not just turned’ (Baysha 2014, p. 94). Indeed, with the right connections, highly competitive trading strategies or simply good luck, some self-made traders could become staggeringly rich, virtually overnight, such as Anna, one of my informants, who recounted that ‘at the age of 24 I could afford a brand new Mercedes’.⁶

Markets were considered unruly, chaotic and dangerous places, where mafia-like structures prevailed and racketeering clans ruthlessly exercised a sort of martial law (Zabyelina 2012). These associations are vividly illustrated in the accounts of my informants who personally experienced corruption, incidents of armed robbery and violent assault at the markets, on the way to retail hubs abroad and at international borders. To stay safe at the local markets, they had to pay constantly changing stall fees and protection racket levies. Those of my informants with strong networks kept a codeword (parol) from influential patrons (kryscha), which spared them local protection rackets. Informants from Kazan told me proudly that ‘their bandits’ (nashi bandity) were respected even at the stadium market in Warsaw and whenever they were asked who they are, they would simply answer, ‘We are from Kazan’, and they were left in peace (My govorili my iz Kazana! V Varshave togda kto podoshol tipo ‘A Vy chto?’ my skazali otkuda my priekhali i on—’ponyal’).⁷

The challenging and lawless environment at the market exacerbated the everyday struggles of my informants and added to the negative emotions associated with trading in the 1990s. However, the negative reputation of shuttle trading ought not to be reduced to the concentration of criminal and corrupt activities at marketplaces. The attitude of the broader public towards private businesses and itinerant sales in particular was that they were ‘akin to cheating or stealing or an act of extreme desperation similar to begging’ (Mukhina 2014, p. 46). The sentiment was exaggerated due to the high value attributed to intellectual occupations (Mandel & Humphrey 2002). In the interviews, it was striking how the stigmatisation of open-air market trade mirrored the self-perception of my informants. Sveta, a former seamstress from a small industrial town in Chelyabinsk Oblast’, explained:

You know, in the 1990s, before the shuttle trading, I was working in an atelier. I worked with women, and I knew a lot of people so when we started trading, it was very embarrassing [stydno]. We were hiding under the counter when people we knew passed by and I knew a lot of people. We were just hiding. Yes, in the early 1990s the attitude towards us was that we were speculators. And this is also how we thought about ourselves [i my sami sebya tak schitali]. Generally speaking, this is what we were, speculators.⁸

The reference to hiding requires elaboration, as it also appeared in other narratives. Shame etymologically derives from the Indo-European skam or skem, which is close to ‘to hide/cover’.⁹ The Russian word styd is derived from stuzha, meaning ‘cold’ or ‘chilly’¹⁰ and the relation to ‘freezing’ and ‘covering’ hints at the affective dimension of shame. Psychoanalysts argue that the bodily reactions to shame are an attempt to avoid self-exposure, such as lowering the head and eyes or hiding (Sedgwick et al. 1995; Garfinkel 2012). Social scientists accuse psychology of ‘ignoring the social component in shame’ (Scheff 2003, p. 250). According to Scheff (2003, 2013), shame in its function of a ‘master emotion’ is key to understanding social ideals and interactions. More recently, anthropologists emphasise the need to engage with the complex ways in which shame relates all those dimensions combined: body, biography and culture (Probyn 2004; Ahmed 2014). Against the background of this discussion, Sveta’s reference to hiding is revealing. She was one of the few traders who openly admitted that ‘I loved my profession but, when the 1990s came, I said: Well, this is my time [vot moe vremya]!’¹¹ The majority of the other interview partners insisted that ‘No one was keen about engaging in shuttle trading or similar commercial activities. It was nothing, but an existentially necessary measure [isklyuchitel’no vynuzhdennaya mera]!’¹² Sveta does not explain her engagement in shuttle trading exclusively on the basis of economic hardship but rather relates it to her genuine interest in improving her financial and professional situation and, eventually, in travelling abroad. Despite her self-determined involvement in the retail business, she still classified her economic activities as spekulyatsiya. The negative view of spekulyatsiya at that time in Russia affected her self-perception to the extent that she hid under the counter, whenever someone she knew passed by. Her affective reaction gives a sense of the power of social norms irrespective of an individual’s attitude or personal preference.

Especially in the early 1990s, the marketplace did not provide any shelter from the predatory forces of criminal gangs, nor from embarrassing encounters with old colleagues and acquaintances. The latter was more difficult for those who began trading as a survival strategy because they had no alternative. Nadezhda, an informant from Ekaterinburg, aptly summarised the resulting emotional struggles evidenced in one form or another in all my interviews:

Well, when I started with the business, they pointed a finger at me [na menya pokazyvali pal’tsem]. Torgashka [pejorative term for market trader] they called me when they saw me at the market here  …  they all pointed with their fingers at me. … At first, at first, I was offended [snachala, mne bylo obidno]. Wasn’t it obvious that I wasn’t stealing, but earning the money for my family?¹³

Her account captures the dilemma experienced by many other traders, women in particular, caught between morality expectations and the reality of post-Soviet economic transformation. Nadezhda was a former teacher and her colleagues and her husband disapproved of her new source of income. Over the years, she became very successful in the trading business and, from the early 2000s onwards, she took over the position of the deputy director of one of the largest Russian markets. Yet listening to her biographical narrative, I had the feeling she continued to struggle even today with the shame she experienced:

In the school, for example, they [the teachers] would say to my children, ‘Your mother is a speculator’ and their father also behaved like this. Why did so many of my acquaintances turn away from me and call me speculator and torgashka? They did not recognise how hard I was working, that it [trading] was constant, relentless work. You need to sell, then you need to invest this money somewhere else to buy something new. It’s not just a matter of spending R10,000 and getting R20,000 profit, that’s not how it happens.¹⁴

Like many other traders, Nadezhda stressed that her work allowed her to provide for her children, which should have been appreciated, not condemned:

When my daughter graduated from the university, we went for holidays in Spain. I also paid the trip for my youngest daughter and all her friends when they went to Greece. You see, their father could not offer this to them.¹⁵

Another informant revealed the hypocrisy in public and private attitudes towards traders:

Yes, yes, yes, of course, we were all scared of the speculators (laugh). Well, I don’t know about you, but my mother bought my jeans only from speculators.  …  Yes, well, maybe we were speculators. My husband still believes that we did something wrong.  …   Well, how to say … I earn more than he does (laugh), so he can say, whatever he wants, right?¹⁶

The harsh economic situation in Russia in the 1990s and the success of early traders attracted more and more people to small-scale entrepreneurial activities. By 1996, an estimated 41% of the working population was directly or indirectly involved in market trading (Mukhina 2009, p. 343). Sveta, the only woman I met who continued to work in trading, explained:

With time, peoples’ attitudes towards us have changed. It became obvious, maybe because they realised that they have nowhere else where to buy their clothes, except from us. People suddenly approached us with respect. We still try very hard not to give people a reason to talk badly of us. You know, we are not doing bad things, we try to be decent people. I want to think that I’m doing the right thing, that I don’t have to feel ashamed [chtob ne stydno bylo]. Nowadays, [trading] has become a serious occupation. … People pass by and ask: ‘How, have you been keeping the business going for so many years? You are doing so well.’ And it seems to me that this [appreciation] is the most important thing. Indeed, before, we were ashamed of this kind of work [stesnyalis’ takoi raboty]. But now we are proud of it [Teper’ my stali ei gordit’sya]!¹⁷

Emotions attributed to trade became more diversified in the biographical narratives and a sense of pride shimmered through when women spoke of their achievements. Olga Sasunkevich (2010) pointed out that female traders in a post-Soviet context may also apply what she calls a ‘pride identity’ as a rhetorical strategy to attain a higher social status in discussing their livelihoods with others, such as interviewers. I can relate to Sasunkevich’s observation as the women with whom I talked emphasised how shuttle trading allowed them to feed their family, provide education for their children and afford luxurious items or fancy holidays. In addition to pride in rising consumption capacities, Sveta’s example most explicitly reveals that a growing acceptance of trading activities amongst the broader public also mattered a great deal to the traders.

The broader public’s perception of small-scale entrepreneurial practices has shifted over time. The dire economic situation in Russia throughout the 1990s gradually normalised market retailing, and my interlocutors told me that those who at first were critical of traders, later asked them for advice about how to start a retail business. Yet, the shadow of shame remains and, as in Sveta’s case, produced what Charles Cooley (1922) calls the ‘looking-glass self’, the theoretical precursor to what later became known as ‘social interactionism’. This assumes that our actions and reactions are determined by the ways in which we think we are perceived by others. To date, Sveta had been ‘trying hard’ to make a ‘decent’ impression (staraemsya byt’ poryadochnymi lyud’mi), demonstrating the importance of maintaining a sense of pride or ‘self respect’ (Sayer 2005, p. 954). However, as Sayer (2011) reminds us, while wider social values and moralities mediate our own experiences to a certain extent, they do not fully condition our reflexivity. In this sense, it is important to keep in mind that the transformation of economic moralities in post-Soviet Russia has been an ongoing process shaped by multiple dynamics on the individual and social levels. Cross-border traders were amongst the first to reflect critically on the economic and social changes, and they were well aware of the active role that they had taken up within this transformation.

The economic stabilisation and stricter regulation of trade in the early 2000s reduced market trading as a mass phenomenon as wealth began to concentrate in a smaller number of hands. The majority of my informants had opted out of market trade by then due to more attractive job opportunities, declining profits after the financial crisis of 1998, stricter import and tax regulations, and age. Many were proud of these achievements; nonetheless, they often mentioned that their economic success had come at a high cost. Although all my informants referred to the shamefulness of trading, their individual responses to this emotion differed widely: Sveta’s acceptance, Tanya’s irony, Nadezhda’s anger and other reactions such as social distancing. I will explore social distancing in the following section, attending to how class and status shape the multi-layered experiences of shame and pride.

Class consciousness and social status

Styd and gordost’ are culturally loaded terms with complex meanings. Thomas Scheff illustrates that ‘pride’ in Western societies tends to imply the negative connotations of ‘arrogance and selfishness’ (Scheff 2003, p. 243). Discourses around shame and pride differ depending on specific sociohistorical contexts, and in the narratives of traders in post-Soviet Russia, I found pride to be a positive emotion. While changing economic moralities are a crucial factor in the analysis of styd and gordost’ in traders’ accounts, they do not exhaust the pool of reasons for these emotions. Frequent allusions to the low social recognition of market trading indicate that the loss of social status also spurred feelings related to styd. The biographical interviews that form the basis of this analysis provide samples of people with different social backgrounds. To understand the meaning of emotions in the traders’ accounts, I examine how the discourses around styd and gordost’ are applied differently within a similar context and how this relates to an individual’s position in the social fabric.

Shuttle trading in post-1991 Russia has undergone continuous changes in social composition and practical hierarchies. Whilst in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a majority of petty traders sold their products in the streets, at emergent markets or around ‘newly-fixed and newly-permeable borders’ (Alexander 2015, p. 317), with time, these minor sites of economic exchange became so profitable that, as the Russian historian Viktor Dyatlov (2017) noted, it was at the markets where post-Soviet stratification took place. It is important to keep in mind that modes of retail practices varied across different postsocialist countries in the 1990s and continue to undergo transformation and diversification today. Still, it is possible to roughly determine three types of traders. First, there are those who take advantage of relative proximity to a border that allows them to travel back and forth on a regular basis, sometimes several times a week (Bruns & Miggelbrink 2012; Sasunkevich 2015; Humphrey 2018). Second, there are those who travel from provincial towns to retail nodes but do not cross national borders for their purchases. The final type of traders includes those who travel significant distances and purchase large quantities of goods for wholesale retailing at home. All my informants were part of the latter group, which was common for the first generation of traders who did not need to comply with rigorous import regulations established later. The main purchase destinations for my interlocutors ranged from Italy, Poland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to Syria, Greece, China and Indonesia.

My interlocutors had different trading strategies. For instance, Anna avoided the market and sold her merchandise in consignment stores [komissionnyi magazine]. Lyubov had a similar strategy and emphasised that she sold luxurious products from Milan at TsUM (Tsentral’nyi Universal’nyi Magazin) in Moscow. The rest of my informants can be designated chelnoki, as they sold at open-air markets, some from tables in the street (Zlatoust), others out of shipping containers (Kazan) or, later, in newly built retail halls (Ekaterinburg). However, by the beginning of the 2000s all but one had given up trading, which is why I focus on stratification dynamics in the early and mid-1990s.

Amongst my interviewees, the interpenetration of status/class consciousness with feelings of styd pertaining to trade can be understood in two groups: those who identified with the term chelnoki and used first-person pronouns (‘us’, ‘we’) when talking about their trading experiences, and those who differentiated between their business practices and those of shuttle traders, from whom they verbally distanced themselves by speaking of ‘they’ or ‘them’. The most conspicuous representative of the second group was Anna, a successful businesswoman from Ekaterinburg, who identified as a member of the intelligentsia and told me that her ancestors were wealthy merchants in pre-Soviet times. She took early advantage of modest buying and selling opportunities during her medical studies and began trading professionally in 1991 after she completed her degree. However, she clearly rejected the term chelnoki as applied to her business and emphasised the professionality of her activity; she described herself as a manager, selling luxurious fabrics from the United Arab Emirates through commission shops, and employing (kormila) a group of academics who could no longer feed themselves because their salaries were so devalued:

Well, how to say this, these shuttle traders—I have never been a shuttle trader—it’s just that somehow, amongst people with higher education it was considered embarrassing [eto schitalos’ stydno]. It is shameful to stand in the market to sell something. It was just the ultimate disgrace [poslednii pozor]. People simply did not do this!¹⁸

Her conviction that people with higher education would not engage in trading is not only inaccurate,¹⁹ but also indicates the strong interdependency of economic moralities and social status. The evaluation of shuttle trade as ‘the ultimate disgrace’ (poslednii pozor) stigmatises those who engaged in this commercial activity. Stigmatisation, according to Erving Goffman (1963), is a means of communication with a strong performative capacity. It can serve to enhance self-esteem through ‘downward comparison [which] means to compare oneself to less fortunate others’ (Heatherton et al. 2003, p. 7). In this sense, Anna’s shaming of or distancing from ordinary traders can be interpreted as an attempt to maintain her upper-class role in a rapidly changing social order. Analysing stratification processes in Bourdiesian terms, Iván Szelényi (Eyal et al. 1998, p. 18) points out that the increasing relevance of economic capital in Central and Eastern European postsocialisms has led to an intra- rather than an inter-class conflict. A quote from Anna illustrates one of the facets of intra-class struggles:

It was like the first time in our lives that we had money. You see, until the 1990s, people did not have this money. They could not buy these expensive things. People from the 1990s, you could say that I am one of them [vot ya chek iz devyanostykh tak skazhem]. …  Well, my father also asked me, ‘Why do you need a Mercedes?’ But I just love Mercedes.²⁰

Her father belonged to the older generation of Soviet intelligentsia. He lost his academic position in the early 1990s and eventually joined his daughter’s business. However, he considered his daughter’s consumption patterns pretentious and a display of bad manners (neprilichno) due to their social background. He did not want her to be associated with the so-called New Russians (Novye Russkie), but for Anna the Mercedes was the right accessory to show off her status in times of rapid stratification. Thus, while the medium changed (for example, from academic degree to expensive cars), her Soviet social status remains a pivotal argument for making sense of her post-Soviet position, especially in the face of massive social change.

Despite officially proclaimed classlessness, social stratification in the Soviet Union was rapidly deepening even in the Brezhnev years (Matthews 2011). In the early years of post-Soviet transformation, class consciousness such as notions of pride amongst factory workers or strong identification with the intelligentsia environment loomed large in the life stories of my informants. Their class backgrounds fan out different perceptions of change brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how different groups experience and make sense of post-Soviet social stratification. However, my interviews also shed light on existing differences in lifestyle in Soviet times, illustrated for instance by strongly diverging housing conditions, holiday allowances, and other material or symbolic benefits related to one’s profession and social position. Nadezhda, who held a degree in education, explained: ‘There was nothing to buy and for us, it was very difficult! Well, and the apartment, well … we lived in an obshchezhitii [housing facility provided by her husband’s factory]. This means that the four of us lived in one room’.²¹

Another informant, 62-year-old Lyubov, described her life as a chief accountant in Soviet times: ‘I had my own driver, I lived in the centre of Moscow. My company rented an apartment for me that had about 160m²’.²² Of all my interlocutors, Lyubov, now a businesswoman living in Moscow, underwent the most profound decline in social status in the early 1990s. She contrasted her privileged position in the Soviet period when she was ‘a highly respected person’ (ya byla uvazhaemym chelovekom) with the time when ‘perestroika came, and it happened that I was a nobody’ (potom eto perestroika vse tak sdelala chto ya bylo nikem). She first lost her job and then fell victim to a scam, which left her with nothing. For Lyubov, like Anna, it was important to emphasise a social distance from ‘ordinary shuttle traders’ by insisting on the ‘different level’ (drugoy uroven’) that she had achieved with her entrepreneurial activities:

It was another level; I mean, not the market level . … That means, we were going to Venice, and San Marino, and Milan. …  I mean, the market was still considered a place for pensioners and the less affluent strata of society. But I was already above that. That is, I was not just someone who sold there. I was already at the management level. In shuttle trading, you lose your respect and recognition and other things [ty teryaesh’ vot v etikh chelnochnykh otnoshenyakh uvazhenie, priznanie, i eshche chto-to] … somehow gradually my education, my experience, and my intellect have brought me forward.²³

In these reflections, Lyubov relates her personal success to qualities that she had already developed in Soviet times.²⁴ The breakdown of the Soviet order deprived many people of their previously inhabited social status because economic capital prevailed over cultural (educational credentials) and social capital (networks and powerful social connections), but social background still determined one’s position in the stratification of the 1990s.

The group of economically successful traders eventually became part of a new middle and upper class (White 2000, p. 148), undergoing as a consequence a double transformation in terms of social mobility. However, this status was rarely maintained in the long-term. In this sense, my research findings mirror other studies on the role of shuttle trade in postsocialist economic transformation in that it illustrates how the sudden rise of affluence did not last or grow into small or medium-sized enterprises (Mukhina 2014, p. 141).²⁵

The initial downgrading of a trader’s social position was often accompanied by a clash of class-induced habitus. Ways of behaving, beliefs and other dispositions, such as one’s habitual attitude towards others, do not change as rapidly as socioeconomic conditions. It is in this clash that I locate the emergent emotional dimension of styd and gordost’ in relation to the experience of trade as a shameful activity.

Acknowledging a difference between those who felt styd and those who determined what stydno (shameful) is allows us to view the unfolding of tacit hierarchy and the practical power of emotional discourses. For instance, it was not considered shameful to avoid taxes or customs duties, but women who worked as shuttle traders and retailed at the market experienced a feeling of styd stemming from the exposure of their economic activity to the public, negative attitudes from family and friends, and inner conflicts caused by a personal commitment to socialist ideology. Some traders distanced themselves from shuttle traders, exercising agency over the emotional power of styd and gordost’, and in doing so reproduced social hierarchies that had long-term effects on post-Soviet stratification.

Gender-specific dimensions of shuttle trading

The tools of gender discourse are key to understanding the emotional experiences of female traders in post-Soviet Russia, namely the often highlighted gender dimensions of shame (Lutz & Abu-Lughod 1990; Elias 1997; Ahmed 2014) and recurring references to topics of gender differentiation in my interviews. Despite the continuities of Soviet and post-Soviet social order, the rise of market capitalism in Russia significantly changed the social position of all my informants, in the public and private spheres. Here, I illustrate the ‘emotional work’ (Bloch 2011) my informants had taken up to navigate gender-specific contingencies that emerged in the context of family economies and their roles within them. The most contentious issue was not the fact that women were working, but the kind of work they were doing. Similar to the degradation of shuttle trading from the perspective of economic moralities and social status, many struggled with allegations that cross-border trade was not a proper occupation for women. It is worth analysing this classification of gender-appropriate work, especially considering the strong predominance of women in the business.

At the beginning of the 1980s in Soviet Russia, female participation in the labour force and study programmes reached 85% amongst women aged 16–48 (Lapidus 1989, p. 41). The Soviet version of female labour participation, however, was a simplified and pragmatic version of emancipation, ‘positing that women’s freedom was something that could be granted to them without changing men’s social roles and duties’ (Ghodsee 2006, p. 35). This attitude led to what has often been called the double or even triple burden of work, chores and active community participation that fell almost exclusively on the shoulders of women (Temkina & Zdravomyslova 2003; Ghodsee 2006). Olga Sasunkevich (2015) argues that the predominance of women in trade goes back to the gender segregation of reproductive work in Soviet times, when household provisions and caring for family remained a female responsibility. Male ignorance of domestic tasks and childcare was a common complaint mentioned by the majority of my informants:

It was very hard to knock out of him what he had been used to for years. He thought, kind of, washing dishes or floors was not a man’s business. Also, there were all these scenes of jealousy, that is, he had these … [unfinished sentence] now he perfectly understands that this is nonsense, of course, well, over the years … I never gave up. It was all for the family.²⁶

The fact that women were travelling as part of their trading work in some cases led to a range of responses, from jealousy to insult. The condemnation of trade as a dishonourable occupation by husbands or family members and the resulting emotional struggles were a regular topic in interview responses. Interestingly, Lyubov’s comment evidences a nuanced redefinition of domestic gender roles. Identifying with the traditional ideal of female self-sacrifice by claiming that she was trading for the good of her family, she insisted that her husband took on a more equal share of household tasks and a more rational attitude towards her occupation. In this way, she reconciled established models with new social and economic realities. Her case adds an important level of complexity to the discussion of public discourse in the early 1990s in Russia, which was dominated by the discrediting of the communist system and the reallocation of gender roles according to the binary model of a housewife and a male breadwinner (Ashwin 2000; Gal & Kligman 2000; Temkina & Zdravomyslova 2003; Bloch 2011).

The mobile trading practices of my interlocutors challenged both the communist ideal of working for the common good and traditional family values. In Nadezhda’s account, this led to conflict with her husband because of his refusal to acknowledge the post-Soviet economic condition:

Interviewer:

You said that your husband called you a speculator. What exactly does that mean?

Nadezhda:

He believed that  …  he had a negative attitude. Therefore, probably this was why our relationship dissolved. I knew that I needed to make money. I needed to provide my children with clothes and shoes so that they were all fed, so that they always went to school in good clothes … 

I:

And did he not understand the changes that were going on in the country?

Nadezhda:

Exactly, he didn’t! He opened the fridge, and in the fridge there was sausage, and the freezer was full of meat. … My husband did not understand this [that the money for this food was earned by her business], he believed that happiness was not in money [on schital chto ne v den’gakh schast’e]. Of course, but you have to live on something, don’t you? If we did not depend on money, it would be quite different.

I:

What did he do while you were working? Did he help you somehow?

Nadezhda:

Nothing, he didn’t look after anything, there was nothing he cared about. … If I hadn’t started working at the market, I don’t know how we would have survived.²⁷

This discussion between spouses illustrates the impact of post-Soviet transformation processes on family dynamics and between partners. The emotional register that Nadezhda invokes here requires some further reflection. The indignation and scorn in her words reveal an ongoing process of emotional engagement in the contradictory values and realities of Soviet times and rapid market transformation in the 1990s. Throughout the interview, as well as in all the other conversations I had while researching this article, I encountered a range of discursive registers regarding the moral ambiguity of trade. What is particularly interesting about this complex ethical reasoning for the analysis of emotions are the ways in which necessity overcomes feelings of shame and allows certain practices to be revaluated and reclaimed.

Sveta and Elena, whom I met together, had very different ways of dealing with the experience of styd and gordost’. They were the first traders I had spoken to who had gone into business with their husbands. While they mentioned the initial embarrassment of engaging in open-air market selling (kogda my nachali torgovat’, eto bylo tak stydno), both accounts were charged with modest pride, triggered by economic success, the ability to provide for their families and the fact that they, rather than their husbands, were in charge of the business.

Yes, he joined the business. My husband and I worked together, but after all, I was the boss. I took care of the documents; everything was on me. My words were decisive and when it came to selecting [the goods] … . It was also on me to choose the goods; for sure it was.²⁸

My husband has always submitted to my intuition 100%. If I said, we’re not buying this [product] anymore, we’ll get something else now, he agreed because I always had a feeling for what would sell.²⁹

This cooperation with their husbands allowed Sveta and Elena to reconcile the private and the public realm, which in turn made them less vulnerable to the negative attitude of others and increased their self-esteem.

Through trading, many women were able to sustain their close family circle, as well as relationships with relatives and friends. As in the example of Anna, whose successful business allowed her to employ her father and his doctoral students, Tanya was also able to provide for her parents, which transformed their initial resentment of their daughter’s engagement in market trade into gratitude:

In the beginning, it was terrible! How does our princess—meaning our daughter, our wonderful girl—suddenly go somewhere to trade in a booth? Well, then when I began to bring back money that provided them with their former living standard, they changed their attitude. It was the money that altered their opinion.³⁰

Tanya pointed out, with some sarcasm, the double standard of post-Soviet morality and did not spare her parents in illustrating the powerful impact of capitalist realities on Soviet ideology.

Irrespective of social background, willingness to engage in the rising market economy or their circumstances, all my informants stressed that trading was a necessary means (isklyuchitel’no vynuzhdennaya mera) that they undertook because of a lack of alternatives. However, they did not consider themselves victims of larger external forces. When asked about the reasons for female predominance in the shuttle trade, no one seemed to consider the deteriorating situation in the labour market in the 1990s a particularly gendered phenomenon. They viewed women more fit for the job due to specifically female qualifications, including a better sense of fashion (predraspolozhenye k mode), sales skills (ritoricheskie sposobnosti), a gender bonus in negotiating with policemen and customs officers, as well as their genuine interest in travelling, which apparently was not shared to the same extent by men.

Those who remained trading were required to manoeuvre between various and prevailing ideological systems, adapt strategically to changing market conditions and overcome various challenges when purchasing the goods. In this way, they acquired access to various assets, such as profits from financial incentives, first-hand knowledge of other places, networks and entrepreneurial skills. These assets often came at a high price since the traders were exposed to arbitrary taxation, corrupt border controls, sexual harassment (at markets abroad) and bitter allegations from jealous husbands back home.

Conclusion

Post-Soviet shuttle traders are often depicted as a resilient group, empowered by the experience of successful survival strategies and equipped with the skills to adapt to all kind of challenges. In my research, I wanted to shed light on the salience of emotions to the lived experience of post-Soviet economic transformation. In my biographical narrative interviews with female cross-border traders who were active in the early 1990s, feelings of styd and gordost’ were a common thread in individual accounts of post-Soviet professional ruptures. Their personal life stories revealed how those who engaged in trading activities tried to maintain their Soviet social status at the same time as they broke with taboos of Soviet economic morality. Thus, their experiences were emblematic of the ruptures and continuities of this time. Rather than a linear transformation from styd to gordost’, however, my analysis illustrates the broad range of discursive registers women traders applied to navigate, negotiate and reconcile the tensions inherent in transforming moral, class and gender regimes. The value of this study is that it shows how emotions relate to the inertia of power structures and the roles traders played in the negotiation, transformation and reproduction of moral, class and gender regimes in post-Soviet Russia.

The emotional dimension of trade was tightly interwoven with the moralising public gaze, social status and domestic appreciation. Analysing life histories revealed that the mode of influence and the subsequent ways of acting were closely linked to the sets of capital and social status acquired in socialist times. The difference between those who belonged to the established intelligentsia and those who experienced upward social mobility in Soviet times revealed an interesting distinction; one group of traders who identified with shuttle trading and the styd it provoked, and another group who distanced themselves from the specific type of commercial activity and the places they were located (open-air markets). Those without the self-assurance of the intelligentsia habitus or a supportive family environment were more sensitive to the condescending public gaze. Traders with an intelligentsia background looked down on market traders, considering marketplaces inappropriate for people like themselves, although they engaged in similar trading activities. This research points to the power of social status in shaping the emotions associated with trade and the emotional labour performed by women to make sense of the changing environment in the first decades of post-Soviet economic transformation.

Disclosure statement:

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was conducted for the author’s thesis (2019) at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University, Berlin. The author received no specific funding for this work.

Notes on contributors

Claudia Eggart

Claudia Eggart, Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), Mohrenstr. 60, Berlin 10117, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Stammler-Gossmann contrasted cross-border trade by ‘necessity’ and by ‘advantage’ (2012, p. 234). The former referred to those who engaged in trading practices directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union; the latter to those trading practices that had continued into the third postsocialist decade.

2 Originally, I collected the interviews for my Master’s in East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. For this research, I conducted 12 biographical narrative interviews with traders (ten women and two men). With the exception of one woman, they had all begun trading in the early 1990s and left the business between 1998 and 2006. I found the participants through an online call in an open Facebook forum, through personal contacts, and by introducing my study in a language school in Ekaterinburg. I conducted the interviews in Russian in 2018 in Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Zlatoust and Kazan. At the time of the interviews, my interlocutors were aged between 48 and 86 and were from varied social backgrounds.

3 Anthropologists who follow trading trajectories in different post-Soviet countries highlight that many traders made profitable use of their borderland position (Billé et al. 2012; Bruns & Miggelbrink 2012; Fedorova 2012; Sasunkevich 2015; Alff 2018). Unlike the former shuttle traders I interviewed, borderland traders did not necessarily travel great distances. In her study of traders commuting between the borderlands of Belarus, Lithuania and Poland, Olga Sasunkevich (2015) emphasises that cross-border trade was not only a result of living conditions in the turmoil of the 1990s but bore palpable traces of informal economic activity as a habitual practice in the Soviet Union (see also Mandel & Humphrey 2002; Morris & Polese 2015).

4 See also Chari and Verdery (2009), Donahoe and Habeck (2011), Thelen (2012).

5 The term spekulyatsiya is a debated concept from Soviet times, when it referred to the buying and selling of goods for individual profit-making (Zemtsov 2017). This practice was criminalised and morally condemned under state socialism.

6 Interview, Anna, 49, Ekaterinburg, 5 May 2018.

7 Interview, Tanya, 49, Kazan, 3 June 2018.

8 Interview, Sveta, 57, Zlatoust, 29 May 2018.

9 See ‘shame’ in the online Etymology Dictionary, available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/shame, accessed 11 February 2023.

10 See ‘shame’ in the online Etymology Dictionary of Russian language, available at: https://lexicography.online/etymology/%D1%81/%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B4, accessed 11 February 2023.

11 Interview, Sveta, 57, Zlatoust, 29 May 2018.

12 Interview, Tanya, 49, Kazan, 3 June 2018.

13 Interview, Nadezhda, 61, Ekaterinburg, 25 May 2018.

14 Interview, Nadezhda, 61, Ekaterinburg, 25 May 2018.

15 Interview, Nadezhda, 61, Ekaterinburg, 25 May 2018.

16 Interview, Tanya, 49, Kazan, 3 June 2018.

17 Interview, Sveta, 57, Zlatoust, 29 May 2018.

18 Interview, Anna, 49, Ekaterinburg, 5 May 2018.

19 Various studies show that up to two-thirds of traders had university degrees. See, for example, Bedzir et al. (1997), Il’ina and Il’in (1998), Yakovlev et al. (2003), Egbert (2006), Eggart (2019). The main reason was outstanding salaries at educational and academic institutions and high unemployment rate.

20 Interview, Anna, 49, Ekaterinburg, 5 May 2018.

21 Interview, Nadezhda, 61, Ekaterinburg, 25 May 2018.

22 Interview, Lyubov, 62, Moscow, 2 June 2018.

23 Interview, Lyubov, 62, Moscow, 2 June 2018.

24 Elizabeth Schimpfössl (2018) examines how the wealthiest stratum in Russia legitimise their fortunes. Similarly, I encountered two seemingly contradictory narratives: a highly neoliberal claim that ‘anyone can make it’ and, on the other hand, the claim that inherited qualities allowed them to be more successful than other people.

25 This does not mean that my informants did not gain professional skills as entrepreneurs, but rather refers to the unfavourable business environment and the high barriers for small-scale businesses to grow and stabilise. The reasons I found in the accounts of my informants were the lack of predictability, changing tariff and border regulations, and high rents. Another blow came from the ruble crisis in 1998 and subsequent attempts to formalise the trading sector (Mukhina 2014), when about 40% of traders opted out of the business (Stammler-Gossmann 2012, p. 234). In other cases, my informants stopped working in the business simply because they retired. For more research on the gradually increasing regulation of cross-border trade and markets in Central and Eastern Europe, see Sik and Wallace (1999), Bedzir et al. (1997).

26 Interview, Lyubov, 62, Moscow, 2 June 2018.

27 Interview, Nadezhda, 61, Ekaterinburg, 25 May 2018.

28 Interview, Sveta, 57, Zlatoust, 29 May 2018.

29 Interview, Elena, 64, Zlatoust, 29 May 2018.

30 Interview, Tanya, 49, Kazan, 3 June 2018.