One reason Russia’s figure was not higher was because miserably low unemployment benefits put many people off registering (especially since they were often not paid out anyway). But more importantly, many state enterprises responded to the recession not by shedding workers but by reducing their hours or wages; in some cases they kept people on the books without paying them at all. Under- or pseudo-employment was a crucial lifeline for millions of Russians, supplying them with at least some income and continued access to the services and welfare that large-scale enterprises still provided. This also meant, though, that millions were obliged to make up the shortfall in income by taking up a whole range of other activities: factory workers moonlighted as cab drivers, engineers sold encyclopaedias, librarians cleaned apartments.
At the same time, the collective identity of the working class was being undone. The USSR had defined itself as a ‘workers’ state’, claiming – however rhetorically – a vanguard role in the global labour movement. The transition to capitalism, among many other things, meant a fundamental rejection of this received idea. Thanks to its association with the Communist regime, the very category ‘worker’ had been delegitimized at a stroke. Interviewing workers from a dozen factories over the course of the 1990s, French sociologist Karine Clément pointed to a process of what she called desubjectivation, as workers lost their sense of themselves and their place in the world. Many now refused any identification with the working class – and, often, with any social group at all; interviewees spoke again and again of their isolation, their lack of a future, their uselessness to society. ‘I am unsure of everything,’ said one; ‘I am a useless screw in a badly built car,’ said another, while others still observed that ‘I am not a man’ or that ‘I am a person on whom nothing depends.’{26}
Even as the identity of the working class was being undermined, the foundations of the economy were shifting beneath it. The labour that had defined the Russian working class was disappearing. An exodus into the service sector had already begun, bringing with it a marked decline in the skills of the labour force: the share of skilled and highly skilled workers fell from a third to a quarter of all workers between 1994 and 2002.{27} The industrial workforce remained sizable for much of the 1990s, but the value it produced was concentrated in a handful of sectors staffed by relatively few employees: extraction of oil, gas, metals, coal.
Russian women, meanwhile, felt the full impact of that decade’s ‘restructuring’ along several dimensions. Their historically high labour-force participation had cut both ways during the Soviet era: in many cases it brought greater emancipation, but at the same time meant an expansion of the ‘double burden’. Yet a notional commitment to the idea of women as wage-earners remained in place until perestroika, when ideas about women returning to ‘the work of motherhood’, their ‘purely womanly mission’, began to circulate – in part as a solution to the mass unemployment that would evidently come with large-scale economic reform.{28}
Presented as a choice in the 1980s, women’s ejection from the workforce became an inescapable fate only a few years later. Women accounted for a disproportionate share of the newly unemployed after 1991, as well as being over-represented among the working poor: in 1993, 70 per cent of those who had jobs and yet were classed as ‘extremely poor’ were women.{29} In part this was because of shrinking (and often unpaid) wages in the ‘feminized’ sectors of the economy. There also were many more women pensioners than men – a consequence of women’s longer life expectancy and the higher toll taken among men by the Second World War – which again left women disproportionately vulnerable.
The erosion of women’s role as workers coincided with their removal from politics. After the abolition of a Soviet 30 per cent quota, the number of women in key governmental and administrative roles declined rapidly. It seems almost too fitting that Women of Russia, a political party that won twenty-three seats in the 1993 parliamentary elections, disappeared in 1999, merging with a party named ‘Fatherland’. This process went hand in hand with the resurgence of essentialized views of sexual difference. As Labour Minister Gennady Melikian put it in 1993: ‘Why should we employ women when men are unemployed? It is better that men work and women take care of the children and do the housework.’{30} Such attitudes were nothing new, of course, either in Russia or anywhere else. But though the changes under way in Russia echoed the backlash against second-wave feminism taking place in the West, they were striking in their speed and intensity. Reversing whatever gains women had made under Communism was presented as a return to the ‘natural’ state of affairs.
On top of all this, Russian women were experiencing increasing levels of violence and abuse in the home. The available statistics understate the reality by some distance, but they are appalling enough: in one survey, 40 per cent of wives reported being beaten by their husbands at least once, and 27 per cent said they had been beaten repeatedly; in 1994, female homicide rates peaked at levels twenty times higher than the European average.{31} In this respect as in others, the first post-Soviet decade pushed existing trends to horrific new levels.
The intelligentsia, for its part, underwent a twofold unmaking in the 1990s. The state institutions and structures that had materially sustained it were dissolving, and the sense of collective social identity that marked it out as a specific group was dwindling. Downgrading and déclassement were the fate of many, especially of those from the ‘mass intelligentsia’ – engineers, technicians, ‘specialists’ – created by Soviet industrialization.
The transition to capitalism had an especially dramatic effect on the vast scientific and technical apparatus. Basic funding for research in all fields dried up, and in many cases disappeared altogether. Spending on science accounted for only 2 per cent of the government budget in 2000, and the total amount was around one-thirtieth of what it had been in 1990. Thousands of academics and technical personnel were thrown into unemployment, or continued their work on minimal or non-existent resources. Many others emigrated: according to one rough estimate, some 8,000 top-level mathematicians and physicists left the country between 1990 and 1999.{32} The experience of that decade showed that scientific and technical foundations built over generations can be eroded with dramatic speed. Having helped to turn an agrarian empire into a global superpower – complete with nuclear arsenal, space programme, advances in astrophysics and cybernetics – Russia’s scientists found themselves marking time amid its ruins.
The cultural sphere is often better able to function on meagre means, and to spring back from crisis quickly. Even here, though, the impact of ‘transition’ was far-reaching: the withdrawal of state funding did away with thousands of jobs and an entire ecosystem of publishing. Some of the old journals and magazines staggered on, and a motley array of new ones emerged. But the advent of the market meant the disappearance of many of the networks and channels through which cultural products had been diffused.
Institutional atrophy and slumping economic fortunes helped bring on a splintering of the intelligentsia’s collective sense of self. In 1993, the sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin argued that the very idea of ‘a shared intelligentsia sentiment, lending rhythm to the existence of the whole social layer’, had already vanished.{33} What was taking place now was a ‘powerful process of professional differentiation’, as the former intelligentsia was separated out into various roles thrown up by the new market order. The 1990s boom in petty trade generated a host of low-skilled, badly paid, loosely ‘cultural’ jobs in advertising and sales. ‘Professionalization’ was also in large measure a process of deskilling and proletarianization, only partially masked by the glossy patina of the new consumerism.