Other Transitions: Multiple Economies of Moscow Households in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines survival strategies of urban households in post-socialist cities during the transition from the Soviet system to a market economy. The article links the outcomes of systemic transformation to the daily lives of households and connects urban change induced by mass privatization to class and gender processes inside the households. These “other transitions” in everyday class and gender processes are consistently overlooked by macroeconomic approaches that dominate among transition theorists and policy consultants. The focus is on households in a Moscow neighborhood who attempt to meet the competing demands of earning income, fulfilling domestic responsibilities, and securing child care in a rapidly changing urban context. The diverse formal and informal economic practices of households are analyzed using the model of “multiple economies” that include paid work, informal work for cash, unpaid domestic labor, and help in kind, labor, and cash from networks of extended family, friends, and neighbors. Mapping the typically invisible transformations of multiple economies of households contributes to creating alternative geographies of transition that are rooted in daily household experiences, acknowledges the existence of multiple economies practices, and emphasizes their importance for household social reproduction.

The research combined qualitative interviewing with GIS (geographic information systems) in order to develop the model of multiple economies, elicit household perspectives on urban change, and provide the information for mapping of the landscape of multiple economies. GIS was also used to understand the dynamics of local urban change resulting from privatization.

Key Words:

• Moscow
• transition
• multiple economies
• households
• everyday life

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to all participants of this study for sharing their life circumstances with me. Aerogeodetic Enterprise of Moscow and the phone book publisher “Evroadres” donated digital data on the study area I used to create maps. Kevin St. Martin and Susan Hanson gave me very insightful comments on working drafts of this article. Their continuous support of my work is invaluable. I also received the highest quality feedback from the three anonymous reviewers. Part of the fieldwork was funded by a PSC-CUNY Research Award.

Notes

Source: Interview data.

Source: Interview data.

*Some households indicated several sources as equally important first source. These are included in all corresponding categories.

**Additional income includes informal jobs, alimony, and renting out extra living space.

Source: Interview data.

*Multiple economies include economic practices of 71 adults in 30 interviewed households. Adult household members include ex-husbands who live in the same apartment and still share income and boyfriends who share income on a regular basis but do not live permanently in the household.

1. See Tashakkori and Teddlie (1997) and Winchester (1999) on mixed research methods.

2. NAICS is a classification system based on SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) that was in use until 1997. To accommodate Moscow's specifics, I created a certain number of categories (see Pavlovskaya 2002 for detail). Russia is changing its statistical and classification methods in order to make its data comparable internationally, and while no single system is in use now, the new classifications of economic establishments are similar to NAICS. Using these codes will also allow for analysis of the data collected in the future.

3. The interviews provided the information concerning a total of 71 current household members and 64 family members who no longer lived in the interviewed households but often played a crucial role in their daily lives (e.g., grandparents, [ex]parents-in-law, ex-husbands, and other relatives).

4. In the remainder of the article, I will refer to Alexandra's mother as “grandmother” to indicate the importance of this subject position in many Moscow households. In addition to providing unconditional care to their grandchildren, grandmothers typically perform a large amount of work in domestic economies on a daily basis, which is referred to simply as “help.”

5. Soviet communal apartments are a result of urban housing shortages. In these apartments, each of several families has one or two private rooms, and all share the kitchen and the bathroom.

6. Housing shortages were a major problem in large Soviet cities. In Moscow, mass housing construction did not begin until the 1960s. Many regulations ensured that only those in the greatest need for a larger living space were included on any waiting list. According to Alexandra, city bureaucrats said that her sons did not need privacy until the age of nine (at which point they would be considered to be of a different sex than herself), and, therefore, she was not entitled to a larger apartment when they were born.

7. In addition to city housing, many state agencies built free housing for their employees, which was an important job benefit in the context of prevailing housing shortages.

8. In 2000, Alexandra still received 86 rubles (just over $3) per month for each son.

9. Laundry services are drop-off places, with clean clothes available for pick-up in three to five days. While convenient, their quality was so low that many families preferred to do their laundry by hand.

10. This consists of buying cheap consumer goods abroad and reselling them in Russia in various ways (see Humphrey 1999 for the analysis of the post-Soviet trade, including the informal trade by the individuals).

11. Soviet divorced women or single parents were often stigmatized. Single parents, however, received significantly more benefits than divorced mothers because the latter were expected to receive child support from ex-husbands. In reality, however, child support payments were either insignificant or absent. Many interviewed women refused to collect formal alimony payments in order to have full control over their children.

12. For example, in their study of Soviet society, Zaslavskaya and Ryvkina 1991 defined as many as 78 different social groups using statistical data (quoted in Zaslavsky 1995), while traditional Marxism divided people into only two or three major classes based on their position relative to the means of production (see Gibson-Graham 1996b).

13. They include various types of noncapitalist exploitation such as community- or family-based. In addition to capitalist class processes, this school of thought identifies feudal, communal, ancient class processes, and self-exploitation as fundamental types of class relations present in modern societies (Gibson-Graham 1996b).

14. Such a graphic representation of a theoretical argument was inspired by Mingione (1987), who effectively utilized a diagram to show a “household reproductive mix.”

15. The term “household resources” as used here includes not only material or financial resources but a whole range of practices and strategies that support the everyday lives of households across multiple economies.

16. During the Soviet times, such research was not encouraged, and now it is limited by the difficulty of obtaining data and the lack of interest in studying such phenomena.

17. According to one of the main post-Soviet economic reformers, Stanislav Shatalin, up to 90 percent of the second economy was expected to be absorbed by the emerging free market (Shatalin et al. 1990; quoted in Treml and Alexeev 1994,; 226)

18. Examples of paid work performed in private household spaces include domestic workers (Mattingly 1999), middle class women with young children in technical, clerical, and professional occupations (Christensen 1993), or people who run businesses out of and work for pay in their homes (Ahrentzen 1997).