Discourse on Precarity: A Russian Perspective
Olga Tarakanova
Four precarious theatre workers appear on stage in Caries of Capitalism and present their ideas on how to promote or fight for security in the theatre industry. A quarter of ticketing revenues goes to a winner, who is chosen by the spectators’ direct vote. The winner invests the money in their project, and reports on the work done after the show at the beginning of the next one. At the end of every show, a new winner is chosen.
Caries of Capitalism is a piece of theatre aimed at directly transforming the local reality. Choreographer and dancer Asya Belaya suggests an app similar to LinkedIn for theatre freelancers and institutions. Producer Xenia Anikeeva stands for the unionization of freelance producers and proposes an audit of salaries in the industry. Director and writer Natalia Zaitseva advocates the urgency of basic income, but first wants to make the local version of the Google Spreadsheet on salaries that has shaken the art world recently. Performer and actress Nyu Simakina has a rehab idea for tired precarious workers with leisure activities, a daily allowance and no production outcomes.
Precarious performers of ‘Caries of Capitalism’: Nyu Simakina, Natalia Zaitseva, Asya Belaya, Xenia Anikeeva (left to right). In their first episode, they proudly tell the audience of their precariousness: low-paid nightshifts as a sound engineer, unpaid rents, having a very low childcare allowance because of no full-time job, having no propiska (residence registration, which is compulsory in Russia).
As a team of co-creators and a self-declared service bureau for precarious workers, we have constructed the infrastructure in which to nurture these ideas and translate them into reality. Besides, on stage, we provide the audience with the context in which to situate the projects. In fact, the mapping of context is where we started at the very beginning of the project. What do we know about the precarious condition here in Russia, in Moscow?
Following Judith Butler’s distinction[1] between precariousness as one’s dependence on others’ actions and therefore a general human feature, and precarity as the distribution of precariousness between various social groups, I want to point out that the feeling of insecurity has been very familiar to Russian theatre workers lately. To start with, Kirill Serebrennikov, an iconic director openly critical of the state politics, and his colleagues were accused of embezzling state funds. Then, Pavel Ustinov, an actor, and hundreds of other people were accused of injuring police officers during the street protests against the ban on opposition candidates’ participation in city council elections. The motto for the public demands to release them and other political prisoners states: ‘I am/We are’ — plus the name of an accused person.
‘I am/We are precarious,’ I would say, even though the concept of precarity is yet to become widely popular in the local discourse. In 2014, the ground-breaking study ‘The Precariat’ by Guy Standing was translated into Russian. A number of reviews and interviews with Standing followed. The common goal of those texts was to establish whether one could speak about a new class theory in a post-soviet context. The answer was yes. After the disintegration of the USSR (though not in the 1980s), the neoliberal economic system was established in Russia. Deregulation gradually led to 70 percent of the country’s wealth currently being owned by 3 percent of its citizens. At the same time, many people are working on temporary contracts or in part-time positions (30-40%), or with no contracts in the informal sector (around 6% of workers are employed only informally, while many more work across the informal and formal sectors, making this amount to 20% of total employment). According to surveys, even people with a full-time job fear losing employment and do not feel secure because of the inadequately small amount of money they get. This data comes from sociologist Zhan Toshchenko’s 2018 monograph on the local precariat[2].
Both in Toshchenko’s and Standing’s works, the revolutionary potential of the precariat is mostly located in one sector of the (proto)-class, namely: well-educated youth with no job avenues (or ‘progressives’, as Standing calls them). A large number of these people are arts workers. In fact, Russian arts workers have been thinking about precarity over a period of time. I would like to highlight two texts by art critic and curator Maria Chekhonadskikh[3]. Chekhonadskikh emphasizes the impact of ‘tusovka’ relations, first outlined by curator Viktor Miziano, in the local art infrastructure[4]. She describes two similar types of relations between of an employer to an artist employee: ‘a father’ and ‘a friend’.
Even though a comprehensive arts infrastructure was in place by the early 2010s, these close relationships are spaces of manipulation, claims Chekhonadskikh. She provides a strong critique of communal and horizontal politics, often romanticised in Russian art circles as a synonym for political art. Instead, she claims that artists need to create a public sphere and find a basis for solidarity with other groups.
In fact, that is what is most important for me in our performance. I have come to call Caries of Capitalism not just a performance, but a ‘miting’. It’s a borrowed Russian word, from ‘meeting’, that stands for street gathering, mostly protest. Theatre is also a gathering. But it is distinguished from street politics by two features. Firstly, there is time for meditating on things, for collective exercises in critical imagination. Secondly, there is the possibility of a feedback loop. I can not only proclaim slogans from stage; I can ask questions and listen to answers. It’s not a lecture or a tribunal, it’s a space for dialogue. Now, on the day before our first performance, I don’t even even know if our audience is mostly precarious, or if they are full-time workers. I don’t know how many freelance artists or repertory theatre workers I can expect to see in the audience. But I would like to know that and see them with my own eyes. This is not possible in a journalistic piece on precarity or in a real ‘miting’. Hence, my most important question to them and to myself would be: does it feel like we have a basis for solidarity, and if so, how do we articulate it with clarity?
[1] Butler, Judith. 2010. Frames of war: when is life grievable? London: Verso.
[2] Toshchenko, Zhan. 2018. Prekariat: ot protoklassa k novomu klassu. Moscow: Nauka.
[3] http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/17/article/239, https://www.colta.ru/articles/raznoglasiya/10206-my-segodnya-vse-stali-rabotnikami.
[4] ‘Tusovka is a form of the artistic milieu's self-organization, in a situation where other institutions and state protectionism are altogether lacking’, writes Miziano in: http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/41/article/794.
Olga Tarakanova is a freelance theatre and dance critic and dramaturge from Moscow, where she writes for The Village and Knife Magazine. She is a dramaturg and media artist of Locker Room Talk and co-creator of Caries of Capitalism at the Meyerhold theatre centre (2019).