Small-Town Russia: Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities: A Portrait of the Intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999-2000 [Hardcover]

This book examines a number of key questions about social change in contemporary Russia - issues such as how people survive when they are not paid for months on end, 'the New Poor', the falling birth rate, why so many Russian men die in middle age, whether regional identities are becoming stronger, and how people's sense of 'Russianness' has developed since the creation of the Russian Federation in 1992. It examines these issues by looking at actual experiences in three small Russian towns. It includes a great deal of original ethnographic research, and, by looking at real places overall, provides a good sense of how different aspects of social change are interlinked, and how they actually affect real people's lives.

Examining key questions about social change in contemporary Russia, this book explores issues such as how people survive when they are not paid for months on end, 'the New Poor', the falling birth rate, why so many Russian men die in middle age, whether regional identities are becoming stronger, and how people's sense of 'Russianness' has developed since the creation of the Russian Federation in 1992.

Anne White is Senior Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, University of Bath. She is the author of De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: declining state control over leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953-89 (Routledge, 1990) and Democratization in Russia under Gorbachev, 1985-1991: the birth of a voluntary sector (Macmillan, 1999).Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Socio-Economic and Demographic Trends in Russia and its Regions 2. Characteristics of Small Towns across Russia: Sub-Regional Variation in Living Standards and Population Trends 3. The Fieldwork Towns and their Regions 4. State Sector Employees: the New Poor 5. Livelihood Strategies 6. The Intelligentsia, the 'Middle Class' and Social Stratification 7. Civil Society and Politics 8lƒ(