“You Owe Me a Drink for That”: The Soviet Rituals of Commodity Redistribution

НАСТОЯЩИЙ МАТЕРИАЛ (ИНФОРМАЦИЯ) ПРОИЗВЕДЕН,РАСПРОСТРАНЕН И (ИЛИ) НАПРАВЛЕН ИНОСТРАННЫМ АГЕНТОМ АРХИПОВОЙ АЛЕКСАНДРОЙ СЕРГЕЕВНОЙ ЛИБО КАСАЕТСЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ИНОСТРАННОГО АГЕНТА АРХИПОВОЙ АЛЕКСАНДРЫ СЕРГЕЕВНЫ

Abstract

The paper researches the Soviet ritual of treating a group on the occasion of getting material or symbolic benefit from an individual (in spoken Russian, they are called by the words obmyt’ and prostavit’sya). In the paper, these rituals are considered as a kind of symbolic benefit sharing: buying drinks and food on the occasion of getting a good, the individual gives back their part to the group. In conditions of “limited good” (G. Foster), such rituals are especially relevant because they allow the beneficiary to protect himself from possible envy of others. The Soviet economic system preserved the image of “limited good” in the cognitive orientations of people, and at the same time, it developed the skill of maintaining personal relationships through acts of non-monetary exchange. Therefore, participation in such rituals was not entirely voluntary: many Soviet people had ideas about moral and supernatural sanctions for refusing to treat the group, and they often faced the pressure of the group, requiring them to share excessive benefits. After the collapse of the Soviet system, these rituals did not entirely disappear, but they became less common and lost their binding nature.

Acknowledgements. The study was supported by the grant of the Russian Scientific Society No. 20-18-00342 “Institutional and non-institutional rituals in the structure of Late Soviet society (1956-1985)”.

We thank historian Alexander Fokin, associate professor of Tyumen State University, for his help in conducting the study, who asked the students of the elective course “Anthropology of the Soviet” to record interviews with their relatives. We are also grateful to our colleague Elena Yugai, who kindly shared with us the materials of her interviews, and to the students of the Russian School of Economics, Tyumen State University and the A. P. Chekhov Taganrog Institute, who conducted interviews with relatives for us, answered the questionnaire and wrote ethnographic essays.