The Janitor Generation: The Ethics of Disengagement in the Late-Soviet Period

Abstract

The preceding chapter has demonstrated that the key feature of the postcommunist period in Russia is the concomitant process of the exodus of the society from the sphere of politics and the evasion of any transformative action by an increasingly depoliticized and technocratic state. It is therefore obvious that we cannot find the paradigm of postcommunist social praxis in the ever-narrowing political sphere. Instead, we should focus on this very exodus or disengagement as an ethos or a form of life in its own right, rather than as an indicator of underdevelopment, or some chimerical feature of the Russian ‘tradition’. Nonetheless, this disengagement is not an entirely unprecedented move that followed the brief surge of political mobilization of the Soviet society during Perestroika, but should rather be understood as a recommencement of the process that was characteristic of the late-Soviet period. To understand postcommunist social practices it is thus necessary to undertake a genealogy of this ethics of disengagement, paying particular attention to the way it has succeeded in enabling autonomous forms of life at a distance from the ritualized Soviet public sphere.