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The Social History of Post-Communist Russia . Ed. Piotr Dutkiewicz , Richard Sakwa , and Vladimir Kulikov . Abingdon, UK : Routledge , 2016. xvi, 313 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Maps. $160.00, hard bound.
Book Reviews
In the twenty-five years since Soviet collapse, countless books have been published that try to make sense of the political and social changes taking place in Russia and the CIS. Two factors make this book stand out: first, the authors are exclusively Russian (bar a short epilogue by Richard Sakwa), and have lived through the changes they analyze; second, the book focusses on the opinions and material conditions of everyday Russians, rather than elite politics or institutional change that are so often the focus of studies of Russia's post-communist transformation. The picture of Russia that emerges is a contradictory one, on the one hand relishing the stability brought by the Putin era, but riven by new and multiple inequalities on the other. The Social History of Post-Communist Russia thus makes for a sobering and, at times, emotional read.
In Chapter 1, Piotr Dutkiewicz introduces the main themes of the book, making the important observation that the western focus on the development of civil society has hindered an exploration of Russian society as a whole (2). Chapter 2, by Boris Kapustin, seeks to re-embed discussions of "the people" into discourses of postcommunist transition and argues that instead of...