Culture and Post-Socialism: The Moral Economy of Market Building

Abstract

Russia’s transformation from Soviet to post Soviet–a process neither integrated nor complete was a project of remaking meanings and norms, relations and foundations of authority, and identities (Kennedy 2002; Weiner 2007). The importance of culture and power was clear empirically in such issues as contested and confused identities (rossiianin or ethnic identities), political legitimacy (power sharing between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet or Duma), and Russia’s “appropriate” political system and position in the global polity. Yet meaning, authority, and the like have been rare theoretically in discourse on Russia’s post-Soviet economy. Or maybe this is not surprising, as this topic was the turf of economists and political scientists. Yet social issues are not the property of one discipline alone: as economic sociology reveals, economies are more than costs, money supply, property, profit—concepts far less objective and clear cut than economists and political scientists admit.