Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Drawing on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites, this study recounts how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life. It describes the identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges in various domains, from consumption and daily rhetoric to urban geography and health care. In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.