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This
phenomenon is difficult to pinpoint as it has been studied very
little. But among some of its more basic characteristics are the
following: the people’s chief preoccupation is survival, not capital
accumulation; they are prepared to take any employment, use
different methods of earning money, and have several jobs at a time;
wage labor is replaced by family labor and by mutual support
networks based on close neighborly, kinship, and ethnic ties; and
money lending is based on kinship and trust rather than formal
contractual relations.
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These features
of the informal “survival” economy did not conform to market
principles, which the Russian government sought to enforce. On the
contrary, they were designed to keep both the state and big business
at a safe distance from society to minimize the ruinous effects of
their decisions and activities on the mass of Russian families.
Here is an
example of a typical self-sufficient family system sustaining three
generations of family members. The grandfather and grandmother live
in a village. Their children and grandchildren are city dwellers. In
summer the grandchildren stay with their grandparents in the
village. Their mother and father come down from the city to help
their elderly parents during the sowing season, and in the autumn
they collect their children along with sacks of potatoes and
vegetables to help the family survive over the winter. In return,
they supply the elderly couple with goods that are hard to get in
the village, such as medicine.
As this
example demonstrates, the economy of survival is not based on purely
economic relations, but is conditioned by noneconomic – personal,
family, and social – factors.
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