REVIEWS 393 feeds off and into a similar sentiment in Western Europe (Brexit, Lega Nord in Italy, Alternative for Germany, etc.). This, however, is less a minor quibble and more an anticipatory look to future work from Dzenovska. In the meanwhile, her masterful book belongs on the shelves of academics from many disciplines. University of Washington Aldis Purs Morris, Jeremy. Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016. xxvii + 261 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. References. Index. £66.99. Political scientists and sociologists have created significant knowledge about policy and its effects in contemporary Russia. But theoretically-robust and engagingly-descriptive ethnography is a different and arguably more difficult category of scholarship. Jeremy Morris triumphantly pulls off the achievement in his excellent book, Everyday Post-Socialism. He focuses on a small industrial town in Kaluga Region. This is a former ‘monotown’. In the Soviet period, it grew up around quarries. It was a small centre for the manufacturing of cement and products associated with road construction. Now it contains various ‘inheritor’ industries, including foreign car manufacture and plastics, as well as numerous independent firms and a thriving informal sector. Morris’s book takes us inside this community. It analyses provincial working-class identity in terms of employment, the informal economy, gender and generation. Morris has already written widely about post-Soviet ‘informality’, the ways in which personal ties, as well as flexible relations to administration, regulation and the law structure much of working-class identity and economic survival strategies. This is one of several theoretical frameworks that support the empirical material. Another is the concept of habitability, or how people have organized their lives in ways that make existence bearable and sufficient. Pursuing this organizing principle allows Morris to throw light on the everyday practices of people’s lives. But it also implies a population living independently from neoliberal discourses of deracinated personal ambition. Instead, a web of personal connections and practices allow people to survive, modestly to get on — and act too as the sources of a partly class-based identity that provides consolations that go beyond the immediately material. The Soviet Union was the workers’ state and some categories of manual labour were especially privileged in terms of wages and public celebration. For some, it was possible to be a manual worker and consider oneself a significant person in a way that is impossible in a capitalist economy. Even thirty years later, manual work SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 394 continues to shape not just the economies of some post-Soviet towns but also the inner lives of many post-socialist Russians. In facing this reality, Morris takes his subjects seriously, not simply as anonymous case studies or statistical data, but as persons with as much richness and dignity as members of higher social groups. Morris’s ethnographic approach is an immersive one. It rests on many visits to the township both in the 1990s and more recently, during which he lived, socialized and worked alongside selected members of this working-class community. Inevitably, there is a self-selecting quality to some of the empirical base that results. The conclusions rest on lengthy and repeated encounters with relatively small numbers of informants, rather than more superficial interviews with a larger and more representative field. But Morris lives in the homes of some of these people, becomes part of their social circles, visits them at work, drinks with others, and spends long hours helping them with sophisticated DIY, modestly describing his sometimes hapless contributions. What this amounts to is a detailed, compelling and convincing description of a crucial layer of contemporary Russian civilization. The book transcends its field. Anyone who is interested in Russia can find it enjoyable and useful, as can scholars with a cognate theoretical focus or an interest in the wider post-socialist region. Historians, of whom I am one, will learn from its approach to historical time in the present and immediate past. Unlike many works of social science, it does not simply offer a snapshot of an abstracted present, or make a nod to chronological context, but creates a more careful sense of how people and place relate to...
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Aug 13, 2019
Marilyn L Flynn 
Open Access