RUSSIA AND ITS NEIGHBORS
13. BOOK REVIEW. Joma Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (Pluto Press, 2002)
Joma Nazpary, a Jordanian researcher at the University of London, lived in Almaty -- Kazakhstan's largest city and former capital -- from July 1995 until October 1996, teaching at a local university. His anthropological study of Kazakhstan society is based mainly on his direct observations and on the detailed information he collected about the daily lives of the numerous people he got to know at work and in his neighborhood. The result is an illuminating and often entertaining account of how ordinary people manage to survive in the post-Soviet "bardak" (chaos), of their attitudes and beliefs, and of the social, ethnic, gender, and inter-generational tensions that divide them. Much of the discussion is relevant not only to Kazakhstan but to most or all of the post-Soviet countries.
The author achieves a remarkable fusion of the abstract and the concrete. Thus the political economy of commercialized sex comes to life through the mixed feelings of young women who resort to prostitution and the predicament of young men who can no longer afford to have girlfriends. The dynamic of Russian-Kazakh relations emerges from a minute analysis of an incident in a bar where a Russian gets beaten up by Kazakhs after laughing at a rural Kazakh migrant (the type of Kazakh most resentful of Russians) who falls off his chair.
Joma Nazpary argues that "bardak" is not just the inevitable confusion of transition, but "the chaotic mode of domination" -- a deliberate violent strategy on the part of the corrupt elite designed to dispossess, disorient, and intimidate the mass of the population. Ordinary people react by forming tight networks for mutual aid, and console themselves by imagining an idealized semi-mythical lost Soviet community which embodies threatened traditional values.
But whatever one may think of the author's theories, the book should be valued by anyone seeking a detailed picture of social and economic conditions on the decaying periphery of the former USSR.
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