[lbo-talk] "Life and death under Russian capitalism"

[B.]

[Saw this floating on the web. A $121 book? Yow...
-B.]

Life and death under Russian capitalism

Barry Healy
5 May 2007

Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of
Post-Soviet Change?

by Rebecca Kay
Ashgate, 2006
236 pages, $121.50

Life in the Stalinist Soviet Union was never pleasant
but is there any evidence that capitalism is better?
Rebecca Kay’s careful sociological survey of men in
post-Soviet Russia shows that seen both objectively
and subjectively capitalism has brought an assault on
civilisation there.

In the mid-1980s male life expectancy in the USSR was
63.8 years. By 2000 it was down to 59. Research shows
that the increased mortality rates are due primarily
to deaths in the young to middle-aged population.
Female life expectancy is also shorter by two years.

Cardiovascular diseases are the biggest killers,
especially of middle-aged men, and are associated with
over-working. Accidents and poisoning claim up to
400,000 men per year, and 100,000 commit suicide or
are murdered.

Of the men who die in the 20-55 age group, two-thirds
are drunk at the time of death.

Drunkenness also contributes to the fact that 30-40%
of all serious violent crime now takes place within
the family. Each year around 14,000 Russian women die
at the hands of their partners (compared to total
Soviet fatalities of 17,000 in the 10 years of the
Afghan war).

Kay traces the origins of Russian male/female
relations back to the Domostroi, a handbook on family
life that the Orthodox Church endorsed in the
sixteenth century. “The husband should punish his
wife”, says the Domostroi. “Beat her when you are
alone together; then forgive her and remonstrate with
her.”

The Bolsheviks famously set out to eradicate such
attitudes, though Stalin deliberately tried to turn
back the clock. Despite this, gender relations in the
Soviet Union achieved great advances.

Kay records that beginning in the 1960s, the
bureaucracy used educational theorists at the USSR
Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Pedagogical Sciences
to propagate a very conservative line on the “natural”
roles of men and women. “We have an obligation to
bring up our sons to be real men and our daughters to
be real women”, one of them declared.

Soviet media of the period discussed such problems of
social life as the unseemly behaviour of women in
wearing trousers, smoking and drinking. “What was
important was that restating the existence of such
problems frequently enough allowed the Soviet
government to make what was effectively a complete
U-turn in its policy on gender, whilst still
continuing to pay lip service to notions of equality”,
Kay states.

Little wonder that, when capitalism was reintroduced
in 1991, reactionary ideas flourished. Both men and
women have lost out in the process.

Women have been pushed out of many jobs and have less
access to setting up their own businesses. But men are
forced into gruelling overwork that shortens their
lives.

Many men work two or more jobs, frantically trying to
support their family. “You just have to work”, one of
Kay’s interviewees said. “I work as hard as I can and
I try to find more.” The violent illegality of Russian
capitalism tends to exclude women and build a male
mystique around it.

Young Russian men have to navigate their way through
the danger of two years’ compulsory military service.
Soviet pride in the army still remains, but
conscription-aged youth have to calculate that, given
men’s shorter life spans, surrendering two years is a
big sacrifice.

Worse than that, the internal life of the Russian army
is dominated by psychopaths who inflict dedovshchina
(bullying) on recruits. Too often the dedy is fatal.

Based as it is on extensive interviews, Kay’s book
brings many of these contradictory pressures to life.
The strength of this work is the candour of the men
who spoke so freely to her.

Reflected through the book is the fact that it is
capitalism that is inflicting dedy in Russia, whipping
men beyond human endurance at work and encouraging
vodka-soaked escapism. These working-class men,
suffering horribly as they try to maintain their
dignity in the middle of their harsh reality, are
truly heroes of post-Soviet Russia.