From Free Life, Issue 28, September 1998
ISSN: 0260 5112

This is the most substantial publication of Ms Walton's to date (unless she has produced anything since) and, without commenting on any 'political' content of her earlier work (I have tended to be encounter her in the anarchist milieu), only serves to enhance her reputation as an excellent writer.

In the book she describes her experiences living in a kommunalnaya (communal flat) in the formerly 'closed' southern Russian city of Samara during 1993. The book serves two purposes. First, simply as a description, often in the words of local residents, of what life has been and is like in Samara (and implicitly in most of the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia). On the assumption that it presents an accurate picture of life in the late post-Stalin and early post-Soviet era (and other sources suggest that is does), it also serves as a marker to gauge future improvement (hopefully).

Second, as it has been an area of recent theoretical academic study of mine, Little Tenement on the Volga stands as an first-rate example of one particular type of qualitative research: overt participant observation.

There is perhaps little in the book to excite libertarians qua ideologues, except as a grim reminder of what happens when the voluntary, organically evolving social structures that a capitalist society is based upon are stifled.

Several features dominate this book, all of which are obviously interlinked. First, alcohol. Now, I like a drink or five, but Ms Walton describes a society where much of the populous, particularly, but not exclusively, men, are almost permanently under the influence of drink: "Drinking is the main recreational activity ..." (p45). Of course, people who are drunk, and this includes here everyone from tramps to doctors, are of little good for much else.

Then there is the all-pervasive corruption. Ms Walton describes perestroika as merely the legalisation of what had become endemic: the nomenklatura stealing from state enterprises and then selling the goods on the black market. By the time of the 1991 coup, half of all state property had been handed over to companies set up by the nomenklatura. She records the testimony of one young entrepreneur and that how having to resort to bribery, protection deals with local gangsters and outright theft (such as buying medicines from corrupt, drunken doctors at the local TB clinic to sell on to the Vietnamese) is simply the normal way of doing 'business'.

A more routinely irksome (for the average citizen) manifestation of this is the day-to-day corruption of the petty bureaucracy: "The art of survival lies in learning to circumvent the rules. When every transaction is controlled by a venal bureaucracy blat [influence] and bribery have more concrete meaning than the illusions of democracy and civil rights" (p116). One respondent comments "Bureaucrats increase the number of rules and regulations in order to get paid for them. Our only recourse is bribery" (p8). Ms Walton describes an "Asiatic mode of personal relations" (p23), not based upon objective, truthful relations but on bribery, boasting etc. In Russia, it seems, it has always been about favours granted and favours received.

General person-on-person crime is also rampant. A neighbour of hers was robbed by other neighbours just to steal his watch to pay for vodka. The police found them collapsed, dead drunk, in their own flat.

Ms Walton extensively surveys the lot of women and finds it an unhappy one. The idea that the Soviet era at least afforded some relative improvement to the lives of women was a myth: women were still confined to 'traditional' roles and a life-time of back-breaking toil. Ms Walton also notes the way that women seem endlessly prepared to put up with almost routine and 'natural' male drunkenness and domestic violence and suggests that this is to perpetuate male 'infantilism', thus giving themselves some role and purpose in life. More generally, Ms Walton describes Russia today as still a 'babushka economy' where, by hard physical labour, older women maintain much of the infrastructure (such as exists).

Not surprisingly, the general standard of living is appalling. Ms Walton's kommunalnaya consisted of flats sub-divided into ten to twelve rooms, each containing one family. Each flat contained one kitchen and washroom. There was no hot water and the water and electricity supplies were frequently cut off without warning. The shops often contain noting worthwhile buying and even when they do their opening times are erratic. When people have discovered a shop which contains goods and which is open, people (i.e. women) will often literally fight each other for very poor fare indeed.

If there is any consolation for these city-dwellers it is that life in the countryside is even worse. At the time of her visit, the sovkhoz (collective farms) still existed, often with an essentially nineteenth-century infrastructure, and Ms Walton describes how they reminded her of nothing less than 'Indian reservations' (p83).

Ms Walton is not overly optimistic about the future. There is a return to, or reliance upon, more primitive and barbarous ways of thinking. Three forms of this that she particularly notes are an upsurge in the belief in 'wise women', fortune-telling, astrology etc. Ms Walton considers this to be at least partly a continuation of the old Soviet-era ways where people had their decisions made for them. Another is the growth in racism: Jews, Tartars, Uzbeks etc. are being blamed for all of society's ills. The other manifestation is an increasing nostalgia for authoritarian measures to combat the various social problems. "The more scared people become the louder the clamour for state control. When they can no longer find refuge in the bottle or the stars, they will seek it under the centuries-old heel of despotism" (p118).

However, perhaps the most revealing phenomenon that Ms Walton unearthed is a terrible naiveté about the nature of capitalism. One elderly women who had lived through the Stalin era perceptively noted that, although Gorbachev and Yeltsin had got rid of communism, that had not 'got capitalism' in exchange. Instead, all they had was speculation and the mafia. This woman was something of a rarity: most Russians seemed to think that capitalism was just about 'buying and selling' and not about an intricate, voluntary and stable social system. Sadly, one suspects that the Russians are not alone in this!

Since her time in Samara things may have got better. One hopeful indication, at least for the future, is that some two years after Ms Walton's visit, inflation in Russia was about 140 per cent; recently it has been brought down to 'only' 12 per cent. One can only wish Ms Walton's respondents well.

Nigel Meek