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Overview
In the 1990s, the former states of the Soviet Union underwent dramatic and revolutionary changes. As a result of enforced, neoliberal reforms the fledgling republics were exposed to the familiar effects of globalised capital. Focusing on Kazakhstan, where violence and corruption are now facts of everyday life, Joma Nazpary examines the impact of the new capitalism on the people of Central Asia.
Nazpary explores the responses of the dispossessed to their dispossession. He uncovers the construction of 'imagined communities', grounded in Soviet nostalgia, which serve to resist the economic order, as well as the more practical survival strategies, especially of women, often forced into prostitution where they are subject to violence and stigma. By revealing the extent to which Kazakh society has disintegrated and the cultural responses to it, Nazpary argues that dispossession has been a stronger unifying force than even ethnicity or religion.
Comparing the effects of neoliberal reforms in Kazakhstan with those in other regions, he concludes that causes, forms and consequences of dispossession in Kazakhstan are particular instances of a much wider global trend.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745315973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2002 |
| Series: | Anthropology, Culture and Society Series |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
THE AIMS
Most people I met in Kazakhstan described the post-Soviet change as chaos (bardak) and described themselves as dispossessed by this change.
Two young Kazakhs describe below aspects of what people called chaos. A young Kazakh man:
The life stinks here. Everybody has become a Raskolnikov without his conscience. He killed an old woman but went mad for that. In Kazakhstan today you can kill a person for $100 in the morning and in the evening drink the money with a prostitute in a restaurant without having any regret. You will sleep without nightmares. The next day you are prepared to kill anybody again for $100. This is our life. It is not only what our elite and mafia do but everybody has the same mentality. Our people (nash narod) are starving but they are building their villas in Medeo, buying their Mercedes and spending money on prostitutes in restaurants.
A young Kazakh woman:
Before, in the Soviet time, there were moral limits and the authorities looked after them. There were high moral standards and the party took care of them. ... But today people have become like savage animals. They behave according to the law of the jungle. Everybody who is strong hits, rapes, murders and robs everybody else who is weak.
A Russian worker gave an illustration of chaos and dispossession by commenting on the following event. On 9 October 1996, Aleksaner Petreovich Terletskii, a 56-year-old Russian worker, poured a bottle of petrol over himself, and set light to himself and burned to death in front of the office of the Belgian multi-national company Traktebel. The event received high coverage in the Russian-speaking media and great attention in my neighbourhood. The man was working as a driver in one of the Almaty energy stations which were bought by the Belgian multi-national. Somebody had stolen his wallet, which contained his driving licence and his salary. He said to a colleague that he would go to the police station to make a report. After making the report he went to work, but was told by the manager of the station that he was sacked for leaving work without permission. He resorted to the other authorities without any result. Finally, he became so desperate that he burned himself in protest. As result of this event Traktebel, already feared and hated in my neighbourhood, was discredited further. People were particularly furious because the man had been working for the station for a long time and had only two years to go to his pension. A Russian unemployed electrician, who gave me the news first, was of the opinion that directors in the privatised companies treated workers as slaves. Then he added: this is chaos (Eto bardak).
Bardak, which literally means brothel, was used as a metaphor for complete chaos. It was used to describe different elements of the current situation such as corruption, cynicism, violence, the mafia, lawlessness and arbitrariness of state officials, the dissolution of the welfare state, the dispossession of a wide range of people from economic and social rights, alcoholism, prostitution, ethnic conflicts, despair, suicide and fear of the future. Another key word which was interchangeably used with chaos was wild capitalism (dikii kapitalism). Bardak is a metaphor with multiple interrelated meanings. It generally connotes the extreme legal and moral disorder in the social life. When it is used to describe a field of social relations it means that the interaction between people is based on illegal and immoral ways such as chicanery, corruption and use of force. The very arbitrariness inherent in the current situation is described as an absolute disorder (chaos). It is used to describe disorder and lack of control in a person's mind or life as well.
But the chaos is seen by the dispossessed to affect different people in different ways. Those who are already powerful use these arbitrary methods to subjugate those who are weaker. The dispossessed used the words poor (bednye (plural), bednaia (feminine), bednyi (masculine)) and poverty (bednost) to depict their own dispossession and lack of power in general as a results of the chaos. What the dispossessed describe as 'chaos' are the circumstances of their plunder: a situation which they think has been deliberately created by members of the former Soviet elite and a variety of Westerners.
The aims of this book are to describe and analyse the main elements of the post-Soviet 'chaos' in Almaty, Kazakhstan, from the point of view of the dispossessed and their responses to it. All names in this book, except those publicly known, are pseudonyms.
My focus is the way in which dispossessed people understand and react to what they term 'chaos' and their own dispossession and the variety of coping strategies they use. In the following two sections I discuss chaos and dispossession.
CHAOS
In the Russian language, in addition to bardak, there is another word for chaos, khaos, with its root in the Greek word xaos. However, people used rarely khaos. Bardak differs from khaos in two senses: it has stronger implications, meaning total disorder; and it has direct immoral connotations. In a sense bardak was described as a Sodom created by the devil himself. The local notions of chaos are different from the notion of the 'new barbarism' proposed by Kaplan (1996). Kaplan, focusing on Sierra Leone, Nigeria and other crisis-ridden countries, argues, from a Malthusian position, that the world has reached an irreversible ecological crisis because of the explosive growth of the population. The resultant scarcity of resources has triggered fierce competition for survival. In this struggle those people who have strong cultures, such as Turks, manage well, but those who have weak cultures, such as Nigerians and the other Africans, are doomed to descend into a new barbarism governed by primordial forces. So the current turbulent situation in parts of Africa and the Balkans is described as a new barbarism caused by the resurgence of irrational primordial forces. Richards (1996) and Richards and Peters (1998), looking at the civil war in Sierra Leone, show that the war and the child-participation in it is far from irrational. The war, Richards says, is a result of the crisis of the patrimonial regime, and children take part in it because the partisan army provides them with self-esteem and a kind of education. Kaplan's voice is that of an imperialist: if irrational people, say in the Balkans or Africa, are doomed to chaos and disorder because of their cultural deficiencies, then order can only be restored and preserved by the intervention of the rational and benevolent West (NATO – headed by the US?). Moreover, the West should keep at bay the irrational civilisations which are a threat to its own rational civilisation (Huntington, 1997). The popular notions of chaos in Kazakhstan situate its origins in the post-Soviet change. The new rich and the world capitalism headed by the US, are blamed for creating the chaos through a joint conspiracy. This kind of conspiracy theory, although not sophisticated, has a core of truth. Moreover, it has important political and ideological implications. It opposes diametrically the idea that Western military and economic intervention will provide a solution to the chaos. By contrast, the very intervention of the West, epitomised by American imperialism, is depicted as the main reason behind the chaos (see chapters 3 and 6). In terms of local conceptions, the chaos is not an expression of the surge of primordial instincts, but a result of the speculative capitalist rationality (the profit-making logic).
Another issue, worth mentioning, is the subjective aspect of the notions of chaos. From the point of view of an observer, the levels of social disintegration, growth of violence, ethnic tensions and other indicators of chaos, in its local descriptions, are, judging from the reports in the media, lower than in many other trouble-ridden countries around the world such as Nigeria, Zaire, Somalia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Peru, etc. However, in spite of this, most people have an acute and exaggerated sense of chaos, talk about it often and express enormous feelings of fear and insecurity. The feelings of a total void which permeates all aspects of life are commonplace. Not only is the present disconnected from the past, but the progression of time has been cancelled altogether. There is no future. Such a description of chaos, although corresponding to a real 'chaos', reflects the particularity of the post-Soviet change. That is, the sudden and brutal emergence of market forces in a non-market society. The breakdown of social trust and the sudden emergence of the random and invisible logic of the market forces accompanied by the alienated and alienating greed for accumulation of capital, bolstered by enormous use of force, create the experience of a very radical ontological disruption (see the conclusions in chapter 3). Thus life and events have become extremely contingent and unpredictable, reducing the people's sense of agency. Chaos to a great extent is the lack of ability among the dispossessed to navigate these newly emerged stormy conditions of a predatory capitalism. However, not everybody experiences the introduction of the market as chaos. Those few groups who can ride on the waves and get rich, experience the post-Soviet change as a pleasurable spectacle of wealth, power and consumption (see chapter 6). For the newly dispossessed groups this spectacle is the Sodom, mentioned above.
Moreover, chaos should not be understood as the diametrical opposite of order. Chaos is rather a chaotic order, an arbitrariness resulting from the random tensions between and chaotic articulation of myriads of smaller pockets of order. For example, the people's reciprocal exchange within networks have some order (see chapter 4). Racketeers who extract protections fees from traders in a particular market create a kind of order there (see chapter 3). Or a bully who aims to control a particular neighbourhood may claim to be the guardian of social morality (see chapter 7). So chaos is far from being a meaningless anarchy caused by blind primordial forces. It is rather a chaotic mode of domination in the service of the speculative logic of accumulation of capital in the post-Soviet historical conjuncture. Below I discuss this form of domination at some length.
CHAOTIC MODE OF DOMINATION
The political dimension of this chaos is a chaotic mode of domination, a situation which is created by the ruling elite in response to the current 'crisis of hegemony' (Gramsci, 1971). According to Gramsci such a crisis happens in a situation where the whole of the old system is socially, economically and ideologically in crisis, while the revolutionary forces are absent or not strong enough to transform the system into a new one. This crisis is expressed primarily on the level of political and ideological representations. The traditional political parties lose their support and legitimacy, the old common sense is broken and the ruling classes lose their moral and cultural influence over the population. In such a situation the old ruling groups, who have better cadres and much more experience, reorganise their forces in new guises. Fascism, Gramsci says, was such a device, through which landlords and large industrialists rearranged their forces by manipulating middle class prejudices.
Poulantzas (1983), discussing Gramsci's concept of the crisis of hegemony, argues that fascism is only one form of the exceptional states which may emerge as a response to the crisis of hegemony. While arguing that such forms are contingent upon particular historical conjunctures, Poulantzas distinguished empirically three forms of such states: fascism, Bonapartism and dictatorship. I would like to add to his list the chaotic mode of domination which has emerged as a response to the crisis of hegemony in the post-Soviet republics and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc. From this point of view the chaotic mode of domination is the way the former communist elites rearranged their forces not only to keep but to extend their power and privileges. The domination in this context is in contrast to the hegemony which is achieved through ideological and moral influence and leadership.
The foremost cause of the crisis of hegemony was the economic stagnation since the late 1960s. The crisis of the system began in the 1970s with economic stagnation. According to Aganbegyan (1988), one of the main proponents of perestroika and an economic advisor to Gorbachev, the Soviet economy since 1967 had been in a continuous decline. This was accompanied by the growth of the black market, corruption, mafia-like networks and the general decline of morale. To my knowledge, there is no adequate theory of the crisis of the system. This is because we still lack, to a great extent, an adequate theory on the nature of the Soviet economic system. However, some theorists have pinpointed some of the elementary causes of the stagnation. For example, Ticktin (1992), a main theoretical authority in the field, argues that the Soviet type of the growth was dependent on the extensive use of labour and raw materials. The abundance of labour and raw materials up to the late 1960s guaranteed rapid economic growth. But when these reserves of labour and raw materials were exhausted, sustaining the economic growth required the replacement of the extensive use of production factors with an intensive one. This required the modernisation of machines and the deployment of new technological innovations. The regime's failure to fulfil this task resulted in the stagnation. Castells (1998), on the other hand, argues that the crisis of the Soviet society from the mid-1970s onwards was a result of the inability of the system to transform its industrial economy to one based on information technology. Military competition with the West, resulting in the enormous growth of the defence budget which diverted investment from non-military sectors of the economy, played its part in the stagnation of the system as well.
Besides the economic stagnation, the country experienced a general moral crisis expressed by the workers' indifference to their work, the loosening of professional discipline, the growth of alcoholism, widespread corruption, the prevalence of cynicism, the expansion of the second economy, the loss of the ideological authority of the communist party, the high rate of divorce, the decline of birth rate and the rebellion of youth against the Soviet life-style. All these were symptoms of the breakdown of the social contract between the elite and the people. In order to renew their hegemony the most sensitive part of the elite launched perestroika under Gorbachev's leadership. As Kagarlitsky (1988) observed, there were two generally opposed expectations of perestroika and glasnost. Workers and radical groups expected that these should result in socialist democracy, while the elite wanted a transformation to capitalism. The workers and radical groups failed to become a political force capable of significantly influencing events. On the other hand the elite failed to unite around a common platform. It was fractured along two general lines: conservative/reformists on the one hand and centre/periphery on the other. While both conservative and reformist agreed on the transition to a market economy, they differed with regard to the pace deemed appropriate for such a transition. The conflict between centre and periphery acquired primarily an ethnic character. While two Caucasian republics (Georgia and Armenia) and the three Baltic republics plus Moldova wanted to secede, the rest demanded greater political and economic autonomy from the centre. Indeed, these two conflicts were locked into each other, as a consequence of the fact that the conservatives resisted the demands of the periphery for more autonomy and reformists, while opposing secessionist tendencies, agreed to concede a higher degree of autonomy to the periphery. The intensification of these two conflicts led to the failed coup in August 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR in December of the same year by Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belorussia.
The chaotic mode of domination which emerged as a result of the processes of the disintegration of the USSR had two main phases: 1987–92, and 1992 onwards.
The first was characterised by the disintegration of Soviet society as a moral community into networks of influence on the one hand and networks of survival on the other (1987–92). During this phase the central planning and central distribution of goods and credits had collapsed. The communist party, Komsomol, KGB, MVD, the army and the cultural/ideological apparatus were disorganised. The centre did not exert any authority over the periphery. The local and regional elites reorganised themselves into multiple networks of influence which acted independently of the centre (Humphrey, 1991). Humphrey, who reported on such a situation in provincial Russia described these decentralised power networks as 'suzerainties'. As Humphrey illustrates, a main feature of chaos was the enormous illegal and quasi-criminal power that the collapse of the centre bestowed upon these regional and local networks, whose spheres of influence often overlapped. Acting arbitrarily, they negotiated their relationship through the use of violence, exchange of bribes, tributes and favours. In doing so they spread violence, cynicism and corruption in all spheres of social life. Those who created these networks were the political and managerial elite, the black marketeers and the newlyemerged mafia. An important element of this process was the disintegration of the welfare state. Those lower down the social scale built their survival networks, creating new forms of moral communities (see chapter 4).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. People And Places 3. Bardak: Elements Of Chaos 4. Networking As A Response To The Chaos 5. Women And Sexualised Strategies: Violence And Stigma 6. Construction Of The Alien: Imagining A Soviet Community 7. Ethnic Tensions 8. Conclusions: Whose Transition? References Index