Marketisation and democratisation in the Russian Federation: the case of Novosibirsk

Abstract

The concurrent passage of the processes of democratisation and marketisation in the former communist world have attracted considerable attention throughout the social sciences. Less attention has been paid, however, to the local dimensions of change. Much of the literature lacks an understanding of the role of people and institutions at the local level in dismantling communism and building new structures and practices. This paper explicitly focuses on the local experiences of wider processes of transformation by exploring participation in and exclusion from debates over future strategies for local economic development in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Drawing on literatures on markets and democracy, this paper argues that the expected democratisation of post-Soviet politics and the pluralisation of political representation are limited, at least at the local scale, by the playing out of the processes of marketisation and democratisation in grounded contexts, both local and global, by the passage of those transformations at a particular moment in history, and by their concurrence.