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Your reading is only partly right. We might think of this as stage four of the transition. The first stage was the shock therapy we all know about, accompanied by privatization of state enterprises, massive capital flight and criminalization/corruption of political administration and economic life. The second stage, which for some reason is much less studied in the west, is the privatization of housing stock, which began almost at the same time as shock therapy. Russians were allowed to privatize their apartments and rooms in communal flats basically for a song and a prayer. Along with the totally hokey "voucherization" program, this was designed to show Russians the benefits of the capitalist economy and to create a "new middle class" of small property owners. To a large extent, this program was a success. Especially in the big cities, people with the means became wrapped up in renovating their flats or selling them and buying new flats. A "legal" real estate market was thus created. In reality, this unsurprisingly opened up yet another huge field for the criminally talented, the well-connected (local bureaucrats), and those looking to legalize gains ill gotten through other forms of privatization and the criminal economy. In any case, even after the "new middle class" privatized its flats, "the state" remained the largest property owner by far. And this ownership extended to residential stock: everything that didn't or couldn't belong to the newly endowed flat owners -- basements, roofs and attics, infrastructure, courtyards, flats or room for janitors, etc. -- still was in the custody of the state, as well as the responsibility for upkeep, cleaning, and maintenance. This is not mention other "commercial" properties: worker and student dorms, shops and shopping centers, palaces of culture, schools, museums, government establishment buildings, parks, etc. State control of these spaces collapsed, and state subsidies disappeared, so the de facto "owners" of these spaces (local bureaucrats and directors) began renting them out to any and all takers (businesses and offices). This was anything but a bloodless process, of course. Symbolic in this regard was the assassination in the mid-nineties of Mikhail Manevich, head of the Petersburg State Property Committee. Manevich was a friend of arch-privatizer Anatoly Chubais, and a colleague of Vladimir Putin, who was then a fellow deputy mayor of the city (in this case, in charge of foreign investment relations). But Manevich's murder and similar assasinations of government officials or "businessmen" are what got talked about then as now. The effect on the society at large was much less publicized. During that heady period I worked as a volunteer for the Nochlezhka (Night Shelter) Foundation, which advocated the rights of the homeless, ran a shelter and soup kitchen, and published the street newspaper Na Dne (The Depths). The mass of anecdotal evidence we gathered then suggested that well over half of our "clients" had become homeless as the result of illegal evictions and other criminal manipulations of the new property and residence laws. In many cases, defenseless people were effectively kidnapped by "realtors" (criminal gangs), plied with vodka and other forms of coercion, and made to sign away their flats or rooms for free or for nominal sums. The second stage of the transition also involved privatization of dachas and plots in gardening co-ops, which came later and continues today under the so-called dacha amnesty. This is partly the relevant stage in the Rechnik affair because (theoretically at least) the members of this co-op could have been allowed to privatize their plots and thus legalize the houses they had built there, as has been the case with tens of thousands of such co-ops all across Russia. Why, instead, the current conflict has erupted has everything to do with stages three and four of the transition. The third stage was dominated by the "oligarch wars" that began in the nineties and continue today, albeit in milder form, and the subsequent Putin "stabilization." For our purposes here it matters that under Putin the "law enforcement" agencies (militia, OMON, FSB, prosecutors) and the courts were reconsolidated as the "toughest mafia in town," enforcing the business plans of the "new" oligarchy (really the same old oligarchy minus "capitalism with a human face" poster boy Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky, and Berezovsky), which were totally fused with the imperatives of the "resurgent" Russian state (the siloviki). In terms of the real estate market, everything might have remained at the level of the petty turf wars of the nineties (when the security forces first began branching out into protection rackets and as hired muscle for corporate raiders). But the oil- and gas-fueled boom economy suddenly put a lot of cash into the hands of the Putin oligarchs and their government allies. Since the industrial base had been mostly destroyed, it was no surprise that the oligarchs, the state bureaucrats, and the banks began investing heavily in new building and housing construction, property development, and more substantial real estate speculation. In terms of urban transformation, this business had previously been limited mostly to Moscow, which is how the city's perpetual mayor, Luzhkov, and his wife, Elena Baturina, have made their fortunes. But now the other big cities, especially Petersburg (the hometown of many of the prominent siloviki -- Putin at al. -- and many of most powerful "liberals" -- Kudrin, Chubais, Medvedev, etc) have in the past seven or eight years been subjected to similar building booms. The problem is that this boom hasn't focused only on underdeveloped suburban areas, but also on the city centers, which are more attractive in terms of sales and potential rents to the speculators and developers. And this has meant that the local governments -- now more or less purged of internal opposition -- have turned their control of nominally publicly-owned real estate and land to their own advantage. They grant permits for infill construction in parks, squares, and courtyards. State architectural, historical preservation and land use committees sign off (for a price) on demolitions of historic buildings and evictions of current residents. These same committees also sell attic spaces in residential buildings to developers, who suddenly begin erecting two- or three-storey mansards over the heads and objections of the residents, who may have privatized their own flats, but (except in a few cases) have either failed or been unable to form their own co-ops and gain legal title over their building's communal spaces (sidewalks, courtyards, attics, basements, stairwells). When these conflicts turn "hot" (as thousands of such conflicts have done over the past several years), the police are more than willing to conduct "anti-terrorist" operations like what we're seeing in Rechnik now. In Petersburg, for example, one of the hottest current conflicts involves a residential building a couple blocks away from the Winter Palace. A development company has mysteriously acquired the rights to the attic there and begun constructing a two-storey mansard over head and the vigorous objections of residents. On several occasions, the company's "security guards" have simply beaten up protesting residents, and the local police have either been happy to ignore their distress calls or even back the "guards" up when the residents have attempted mass obstructions. A couple months ago, someone from the company called the police and told them that one of the leaders of the residents' protests was involved in "terrorist" activity. Police arrived in the middle of the day (when this woman was at work) to carry out a search of her flat, scaring the living daylights out of her aging mother, who was home alone at the time. So this is the fourth stage of the transition -- the "new enclosures." It has led to a new phase of "mixed" class warfare. I call it mixed because the forces fighting the developers and the bureaucrats are politically, culturally and socially mixed -- lower or upper middle-class small property owners opposing infill construction in their courtyards or the squares next to their houses alongside much less well-off residents of the same building who live in non-privatized communal flats. Liberal preservationists (like Petersburg's Living City movement) battling historic building demolitions and skyscraper construction along with communists (for example, from Petersburg's Civic Initiatives Movement). Or National Bolsheviks and anarchists (who otherwise hate each other's guts) uniting to help residents defend the so-called Submariners Garden, a lush courtyard grove in the northeast part of Petersburg, an area that was built up after the war. Despite their vigorous defense, the grove (which they had themselves planted and cultivated over several decades) was razed to make way for a new housing development whose major investor is the FSB. I wrote about this conflict and the bigger picture it represented on our group's blog. The entry also includes testimony from the residents that I filmed on the day the grove was razed: http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/submariners/ You'll notice that the residents had no problem identifying what happened to them as class warfare. On the other hand, when the final push came to shove (early in the morning, to catch residents unawares), the "inter-faith" coalition defending the Submariners failed to mobilize again. I have also written a more general article for the London magazine Mute about these conflicts in Petersburg with a local sociologist and activist : http://www.metamute.org/en/Anti-Viruses-And-Underground-Monuments I apologize both for the looseness of my argumentation there and here, and the fact that I think I might have forwarded these same links to the list on some other occasion. Getting back to Rechnik, I think we find here the same mixed class warfare. Luzhkov and Co. are pushing the line that the conflict is all about "legality" -- no one ever had any business building anything there. They claim that the area should be turned "back" into a park. Given his track record, it isn't hard to believe Luzhkov isn't just shilling for more profitable uses of the land. On the other hand, Rechnik isn't just home to "war veterans," but to better-off folks who took advantage of the legal vacuum to build McMansions there. And so the public defense of the Rechniki has brought together the Left Front and the liberal Yabloko Party, as well as usually more regime-loyal elements from the government-appointed Public Chamber. Anecdotally, the folks on the main Petersburg mailing list for housing and preservationist activists are divided over Rechnik. Some applaud the fact that "the state" has finally put its foot down on the "illegal" seizure and development of "environmentally protected" public lands. Others see this as yet another, more violent instance of what I've described above. There's more detail about the conflict in the following article: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/a-rechnik-war-veteran-fights-a-new-battle/398766.html Interestingly, while the Rechnik conflict is under way, a similar conflict over a national preserve near Sochi has also sparked a nationwide protest movement. Here it is quite clear how the high Russian authorities-cum-real estate barons view the use of public lands and "environmental protection": http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/kremlins-hand-seen-in-plans-for-disputed-black-sea-resort/398484.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,675569,00.html I would appreciate any suggestions, off list or on, about how to analyze these conflicts from a Marxist perspective. Finally, I would just like to add that Russians, who have supposedly been "stabilized" (pacified) by Putin and his gang, sometimes seem to show a lot more moxie and courage in defending communal and public good than their counterparts elsewhere. I suppose this is one way of saying that "the transition to capitalism" hasn't been completed. But we could take these stories as something that (however feebly) illuminates the ways forward for folks elsewhere. Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 10:09:20 -0800 (PST) From: New Tet <[email protected]> Subject: [Marxism] [microsound] Russians Rally Around a Falling Enclave It seems the transition from the Soviet economy to capitalism is still happening, or am I reading this wrong? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/europe/02moscow.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
