XV April International Academic Conference
On Economic and Social Development
Higher School of Economics, Moscow, April 1-3 2014
Ronan HERVOUET, Assistant Professor in Sociology (Université Bordeaux Segalen / France)
and Research Fellow (Centre Emile Durkheim / France).
The (post)Soviet type paternalism: an ethnography of the kolkhoz condition in Belarus
The Belarusian society is often studied through a top-down perspective. The authoritarian
Lukashenka’s regime is described through its apparatus, its control organs and its media
propaganda. The society is often considered as divided into three groups: the activists, who
support the regime; the dissidents, who resist the regime; and the others, a passive and atomized
society, governed and alienated by the political regime. But very few researchers have done
fieldwork in this closed country and explored the effective ways through which the “nonactivist” and “non-dissident” people – the “ordinary” people – express their agency, adopt tactics
(de Certeau) and secondary adaptations (Goffman) to build their everyday life and to define life
projects inside this authoritarian context. I have been adopting an ethnographic approach for
more than ten years – in particular I worked and lived five years in Belarus. Referring in my
different works to anthropologists (Yurchak, Ries, Caldwell, Shevchenko, Scott…), to historians
(Lüdke and the Alltagsgeschichte…) and to sociologists (Goffman, de Certeau, Bourdieu,
Burawoy…), I analyze the variety of attitudes adopted by ordinary people within this
authoritarian regime (distance, negotiation, retreat…) and I try to conceptualize an ethnographic
sociology of authoritarianism from below. In this perspective, my last research deals with the
kolkhoz condition.
The Soviet collective system has been traditionally analyzed from the top. This system is
characterized at the same time by the protections it offers, and the control it exercises. The
current Belarusian system, which is inherited from the Soviet times, has the same characteristics.
As a matter of fact, many scholars described the Soviet system of social security as being a paternalistic
one. Both universal and complete, this system aimed at protecting the person ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the
work-place, by providing insurance not only for common social risks, but also for habitats and even
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organized collective entertainment. After 1991, this model was abandoned in most of the ex-URSS
countries. Only Lukashenko - elected in 1994 president of Belarus - has maintained the Soviet heritage,
being against the liberal transition towards market economy. Twenty years after his election, he pretends
being a model in the region, insisting that in Belarus the chief of the state (or batka, i.e. father in
Belarusian), as the state itself, never abandons its citizens. More broadly, this economic system is also a
political system, aiming at controlling the rural population and producing docility. The workers have to
obey to the hierarchy, otherwise they could not using some kolkhoz’ resources, which are important for
their personal activities on their own plots. Gaps between official social protection regime and the
realities of social and economic problems existing in rural Belarus can be observed, like short workingcontracts, strong disciplinary laws forbidding the change of the work-place, low social security payments
or dissembling unemployment.
The aim of my research is to complete this top down perspective by an ethnographic one. The long-term
ethnography started in 2005 will facilitate the exploration of the collective farm workers’ point of view, in
order to understand an apparent paradox: their attachment to this subjugating system. At first I will try to
describe the different strategies adopted in order to live better in the kolkhoz: as the wages are low, the
workers and the administration use different resources to improve the everyday. These practices imply
strong interdependence within the kolkhoz and sometimes it produces a feeling of solidarity. Then I will
precisely analyze these moralities and these moral feelings: the kolkhoz system produces at the same time
forms of subjugation and forms of dignity. I argue that the kolkhoz workers express their attachment to
this constraining paternalist system because simultaneously they can express their distance with this
system by adopting forms of ‘clandestine lives’ (Goffman) and ‘arts of resistance’ (Scott). They thus can
appropriate small parts of their lives, even being strongly dominated by an authoritarian hierarchy.
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