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'Icebergs', Barter, and the Mafia in Provincial Russia

1991; Wiley; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3033166

1467-8322

Caroline Humphrey,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

The author is lecturer in the department of social anthropology, Cambridge, andfellow of King's College Cambridge. Her article 'Perestroika and the pastoralists: the example of Mongun-Taiga in Tuva ASSR' was published in A.T. June 1989. She has published widely on the USSR, Mongolia and Nepal. 'Icebergs' Late at night recently I was driving through the streets of Ulan-Ude with a Buryat friend and I saw a crowd of people huddled against the wall of a dark building, their shoulders turned against the wind. I asked my friend what they were doing. 'Ah, that is the queue for gold,' he replied. 'They stand there all night, and in the morning many more people come. Even though gold is so expensive, for the last two years everyone has been trying to get hold of it. They even buy and sell places in the queue.' A move to gold indicates a lack of trust in the value of the rouble. In Russia today this is combined, as everyone knows, with severe shortages of goods in the shops, general inflation and impossibly high prices in markets, production blockages in farms and factories, a chaotic legal situation, and the introduction of 'rationing'. But I believe that the social implications of the situation are less well known and understood and it is these which I wish to address in this article. One might imagine a parallel with the time after the Second World War, when many of these economic features were present. However, for reasons which will become clear below, the present situation should be seen as different even from that of Russia in the 1940s. Perhaps internal historical analogies can be drawn for some aspects of what is happening today, but they also are to be found further afield, and anthropology may be useful to elucidate them. We can begin with an very brief outline of the situation in provincial Russia. The declaration of 'sovereignty' and other forms of autonomy vis-a-vis the USSR, not just by the RSFSR but by regions within it, such as the Buryat ASSR, and districts within regions, such as the Aga Autonomous Okrug, means that there is widespread uncertainty about government and law at 'higher' levels of the body politic. Consequently, organizations and enterprises in the regions, run in a personal way almost as 'suzerainties' by local bosses, have strengthened themselves and increased their social functions in order to protect their members. What are the relations between these organizations? It is not possible to rely on the law, or even know what it is these days; and at the same time government, which used to regulate flows of goods and allocation of labour including decrees by Soviets and plan-orders by Ministries has ceased to be universally or even generally obeyed. One could see this situation as the beginning of the reforms, the loosening of centralized authority and the devolution of power. But the social structures which are now toughening themselves are in contradiction with the goal of a free market, even with that of a regulated but all-USSR market. Symptoms of this are that economic relations between local 'suzerainties' are increasingly conducted by distinctive methods (of which people in the west have little knowledge): by coupons and 'orders', by means of direct barter, or via what is widely known as 'the Mafia' a heterogeneous collection of racketeer associations whose common feature is that they contain their own 'protection'. Sometimes Russians use a metaphor to describe the local corporations which I have called suzerainties. They are 'icebergs': of different sizes, perhaps melting a little at top and bottom, or maybe growing imperceptibly, floating and jostling one another in an unfriendly sea. Such images are all very well, but the real situation is so peculiar to the Soviet economy and so unfamiliar to readers from the west that we need detailed examples in order to understand what is happening. Let us start with the case of carpets in Ulan-Ude, an example not of production but of distribution. In September the carpet shop on Ulitsa Pobedy was besieged, a seething mass of people from morning to night, though the shelves were empty. The 'queue' had bureaucratized itself and stood at a list of eight hundred names. The manager of the shop was in despair. He telephoned every morning to his suppliers, and announced the paltry results (a few hundred square metres due from Mongolia sometime) to the customers, but 'They don't believe me! They are there all day and become quite inhuman from the fruitless waiting. I need to protect my assistants from their insults.' In fact, the manager had received some other carpets, but they had immediately been sent out 'on order' to a collective farm. But it was not this that agitated the customers. They assumed that the manager could get carpets on the side, by barter. The manager said that, no, he has nothing to give in exchange. The same was true outside, in the town markets. A few desirable carpets were for sale, but the sellers wanted only certain scarce goods in exchange, and such things are, unfortunately, hardly produced in Buryatia.