An interview with sociologist Alexandrina Vanke by Mitja Stefancic
Mitja Stefancic interviews Dr. Alexandrina Vanke, author of The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia, about the motivation behind writing this book, why the concept of ‘class’ is understood differently in Russia, and various forms of everyday resistance to neoliberal neo-authoritarianism.
Dr. Alexandrina Vanke’s latest book, The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia (2024), is the result of a decade of research on the world of working-class people in post-industrial Russia. It is based on empirical materials collected by Dr. Vanke, who is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The volume draws on a comprehensive sociological investigation of working-class life and struggles. By showing how working-class people engage in everyday struggle, the analysis helps us achieve a better understanding of Russian society. Indeed, her representation of Russian workers as active citizens who care about the environment and human relations, challenges discourses and narratives which tend to represent them as being ‘passive’ and ‘backward’. The author kindly agreed to the following interview.
When did you start writing your book, “The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia”? What prompted you to focus on this research topic and when did you decide to embark on it?
I started writing the first chapters of the book in the summer of 2021 in Manchester after the year of lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But I signed the book contract with Manchester University Press while I was in Moscow one month before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. This dramatic event interrupted my writing. Apart from coping with strong emotions it evoked, I needed to understand how I could reframe the initial idea of workers’ life and struggle in the new context created by the war. I tried to analyse the ethnographic data collected between 2010 and spring 2022 from a retrospective perspective, i.e., in the here and now and looking to the future at the same time.
I have a very longstanding interest in the affective dimensions of social class. Between 2010 and 2013, I was exploring how blue-collar and white-collar workers talked about their bodies and sexualities. That is how I approached the topic for the first time. Then I worked in a series of research projects which looked at workers from different angles. In those projects I studied representations of the working class in Russian mass media, workers’ engagement in upward social mobility and their everyday life in post-industrial neighbourhoods.
In academic circles, is it currently more difficult to publish a book on Russia, or easier than it was, say, some years ago; or nothings has changed for researchers who investigate Russia?
Since 2022, scholarly interest in Russia has increased in academia globally. Hundreds of books on this topic are published each year. The problem is that most of them align with the Western hegemonic media agenda without drawing on reliable empirical data collected in the country. At the same time, some social science scholars still doing ethnography and qualitative research in wartime Russia face problems with signing book contracts with Western academic publishers.
For example, this happened to the book ‘Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance’ (forthcoming 2025) by Jeremy Morris, which builds on rich ethnography and offers alternative explanations of Russian society. Despite this, as Morris writes in his research blog, he approached more than 10 academic publishers before the book found its home.
In your book, you aim to provide practical and informative knowledge of how ordinary working-class people in Russia become engaged in everyday struggles. Could you briefly summarize your arguments?
In the book, I argue that Russia’s workers and a wider group of ordinary people are actively engaged in everyday struggle under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism suppressing open protests. By everyday struggle, I mean a complex set of practical actions emerging within the horizontal networks of cooperation, and aimed at meeting numerous life problems generated by the Russian political regime. This argument offers an opportunity to extend class struggle from its classical meaning referring to labour conflicts towards practical actions aimed at improving life together from the bottom up in worker’s places of residence and neighbourhoods.
I argue that everyday struggle is practical and driven by both class-based imaginary and a sense of inequality, which Russia’s ordinary people form today. Everyday struggle manifests in such practical activities as grassroots maintenance and cleaning of local infrastructure, decorating courtyards and cultivating mini-gardens near social housing blocks, as well as engaging in alternative economic activities, including running cooperatives and refusing to pay taxes. In contemporary Russia, everyday struggle exemplifies the creative forms of double resistance to neoliberalism and neo-authoritarianism.
However, to what extent everyday struggle is effective in terms of macro-change is an open question.
Does the trade union movement play any role in workers’ lives in contemporary Russia? What avenues exist for workers for negotiations and bargaining with the state and the corporate sector for their livelihood, safety and general advancement?
Since March 2022, all open political activities, including street rallies, were suppressed by the state in Russia. Nevertheless, trade unions and labour organisations have continued organising strikes despite the repressive context. The leaders of labour protests who spoke publicly for workers have been imprisoned. This happened, for instance, to Kirill Urkaintsev, the leader of the trade union of courier workers, who was sentenced to prison in February 2023. But this does not mean that workers do not express their disagreement or do not claim better conditions during the war. According to the independent project ‘Monitoring of Labour Protests’, the number of labour protests in Russia has been steadily increasing, but they took less radical forms, which include employee demands, complaints and appeals to the state organisations, as well as strikes, factory shutdowns, roadblocks and pickets. Workers tend to engage in their horizontal networks of cooperation and express solidarity in everyday life. That is what I call workers’ engagement in everyday struggle.
Why is the concept of “class” in Russia understood differently when compared to its use in Western Europe and elsewhere? Are there any practical consequences resulting from this difference?
Compared to Western European societies with stable social hierarchies, in Russia, like in other post-socialist societies, ‘class’ is an element of the changing social structure that is now in the process of formation. Soviet society nominally consisted of the working class, intelligentsia and the nomenclature, i.e. bureaucracy. There is a debate on what type of social structure Russia has today. I view contemporary Russian society as consisting of a variety of class groups, including a large number of working and ordinary people, the middle class with cultural, economic and ‘security’ factions, and the elites subdivided into top-ranking political bureaucrats and oligarchs. As I write in the book, the working class constitutes one-third of the Russian working population. It is the largest single group in society, according to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey.
Apart from this, class in Russia is a very affective subject. My research participants may have not self-identified with any class but expressed a variety of social emotions from jealousy to indignation regarding inequalities and social injustice they experienced in at places of residence, at work and in society. In Russia, affective class is rooted in constellations of senses of place, inequality and social justice.
Sociologically, it is interesting how the war in Ukraine has changed the social structure and influenced workers’ and ordinary people’s sensation of their class positions. But social science scholars will be able to understand the consequences of the war on the class re-formation only later.
How should we extrapolate President Vladimir Putin’s political power in Russia? Does he really have unopposed support from the vast majority of Russians, or are there members of the Russian society who are critical towards him?
According to the October 2024 mass survey by Levada Centre, 62% of total respondents would support Vladimir Putin in the presidential elections if they had happened in the survey week. This is a hot debate among social scholars whether we can trust surveys in a wartime country with a neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime, as far as the survey questions may pre-construct respondents’ answers and thus, reproduce the hegemonic discourses by the national media. In such a way mass surveys make political leaders powerful in the mirror of public opinion.
As a qualitative sociologist, I do not have reliable quantitative data allowing me to address the question about Putin’s support by Russians correctly. Drawing on my ethnography, I can say that older interlocutors tend to support Putin more often because of the pension benefits they receive which enable them to live a modest yet stable life. At the same time, younger and middle-aged research participants were rather critical about his political leadership because they sensed an increase in polarisation and diminished chances of leading a good life compared to their parents.
This demonstrates a generational split in Russian society and partly explains why older people tend to support the war in Ukraine more often compared to the younger generations. However, this does not mean that all older people support Putin, and vice versa – this does not mean that all young people do not support him. It tells us that increasing social fragmentation, atomisation and repressions generated by neoliberal neo-authoritarianism makes the Russian regime resilient despite economic sanctions in the context of war. But how this will influence the future of Russian society is a subject for further reflection and exploration.
Mitja Stefancic is co-editor of the “World Economics Association- Commentaries”. He works in the fields of political and social economy with expertise and a deep interest in the cooperative movement.
Alexandrina Vanke is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.