Introduction -- A complaint to the authorities : what it is, and what it can tell us -- Development of the Soviet mechanism of complaints : a request for justice in the context of the socialist project -- Request for justice through the late Soviet mechanism of complaints : how and to whom? -- Post-Soviet transformations of the mechanism of complaints -- New mechanism of complaints in action : what's changed?
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"This book considers the process of legal modernization in Russia from the perspective of the development of the mechanism of complaints addressed to the authorities from the pre-revolutionary period to today. It analyses wide-ranging data and sources, collected over 17 years, such as legislation, in-depth interviews, archival materials, original texts, and examples of different methods of complaints in the Soviet and contemporary Russia. Being marginal to the legal system and almost invisible for researchers of legal development, the complaint mechanism has functioned as an extremely important way of restoring justice, available to the majority of people in Russia through centuries. It has survived several historical gaps and, in a sense, acts as a thread that stitches different eras, coexisting with the establishment and modernization of legal institutions, compensating, accompanying, and sometimes substituting for them. The research covers a period of over 100 years, and shows, how and why at major historical crossroads, Russia chooses between full-fledged legal modernization and saving of the authoritarian social contract between the state and society"--
This article examines the options for redressing abuse of office available to citizens in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. I consider the courts, the procuracy, and the complaint mechanism as sites for citizens to lodge claims against abuse of office in late-Soviet and post-Soviet times. After the collapse of the Soviet system there was an attempt to overcome the Soviet legacy, to strengthen legal institutions and establish administrative justice. Analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet normative documents and statistical data allows us to argue that opportunities for Russian citizens to combat service crimes in the courts have improved substantially. However, the system for coping with abuse of office remains imperfect, and retains features of the Soviet legacy despite vague legislation about administrative justice and dual ways of coping with abuse through legal and quasi-legal mechanisms. The re-establishment of the complaint mechanism in the conditions of contemporary Russia exacerbates this imperfection. Overall, the complaint mechanism occupies a significant place in people's options for making claims against officials, especially claims against high-ranking officials.
Elena Bogdanova – PhD (Kandidat Nauk) in Sociology, Research Fellow, Centre for Independent Social Research; Visiting Lecturer, University of Eastern Finland, European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. Email: bogdanova.nova@gmail.com
This article examines how Russian SOS Villages are undergoing foster reform, which prescribes a transition from institutional care for children deprived of parental care to family care model. The article analyses the problems and transformations experienced by SOS Villages, outlining the aims, instruments, and priorities of the reform. Empirically, the article is based on qualitative investigation of two Russian SOS Villages. Officially, SOS villages have the status of non-state children's homes. However, they were originally conceptualised as a means to implement family care by specially arranged SOS families (headed by SOS mothers). Comparing the activities of SOS Villages with the theoretical concepts of development, resilience, and attachment shows that children raised in SOS Villages avoid the typical problems associated with institutional care. SOS families provide favourable conditions for socialisation, protection, overcoming of social isolation, while maintaining sustainable contact with a significant adult. The normative context created by Decree 481, which changed the status of children's homes, alongside innovations in family policy and the general upsurge of traditionalist discourse, has made SOS Villages vulnerable. As a result, they are forced to protect both forms of their existence: institutional and family. Despite their conceptual adherence to the goals of the reform, in the eyes of the state the SOS Villages remain institutional entities targeted for closure or transformation into temporary residences for children. My research shows that under these new conditions SOS Villages have developed various strategies of involuntary mimicry. The most significant is the re-registration of SOS families as foster families. This helps keep children with their SOS families but significantly increases the level of responsibility and risks for SOS mothers. SOS Villages have also developed new activities, which may be useful in these new conditions. The establishment of consulting service platforms is one of these. The transformations taking place with the SOS Villages show that the reform is directed mainly, or solely, towards correcting the institutional level of the system. Due to multiple formal conflicts with newly emerging conditions, one of the most successful and experienced providers of family care for children without parental care has been left in a vulnerable position.
This article analyzes religious justifications used by contemporary Russian citizens in filing complaints addressed to the president of the Russian Federation. The concept of critical capacity postulated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot is applied as a frame of analysis. This research permits identification of a connection between the transformation of political (presidential) discourse, which took place in 2000s, and attempts of citizens to justify their claims for justice based on Orthodox foundations. Developing a complaint mechanism promotes the reproduction of a particular way of coping with injustice and also special grammar of argumentation based on practices of appeal of the "weaker citizen" to the "stronger state," rather than on a dispute between equal actors. In such an approach, all regulatory normative systems involved in aligning justifications are reduced to rhetorical devices, the legitimacy of which is determined by situational political discourse. At the same time, religious rhetoric in complaints contributes to the reproduction of the absolutist model of presidential power and the merging of religiosity with political legitimacy and civic loyalty.
Consumption in Russia and the former USSR has been lately studied as regards the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet period. The history of Soviet consumption and the Soviet variety of consumerism in the 1950s-1990s has hardly been studied at all. This book concentrates on the late Soviet period but it also considers pre-WWII and even pre-revolutionary times.The book consists of articles, which survey the longue durée of Russian and Soviet consumer attitudes, Soviet ideology of consumption as indicated in texts concerning fashion, the world of Soviet fashion planning and the survival strategies of the Soviet consumer complaining against sub-standard goods and services in a command economy. There's also a case study concerning the uses of concepts with anti-consumerist content. Contributors include: Lena Bogdanova, Olga Gurova, Timo Vihavainen and Larissa Zakharova.
Purpose This paper aims to consider how the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic questions the neoliberal project of ageing, based on a notion of a healthy, active, working older person. A long-term struggle to include older people has been (temporarily) replaced with a struggle to exclude them. This seems to be one of the most sensitive sore spots of the coronavirus crisis and one of the most serious challenges to social policy and welfare systems the world over. The purpose of this paper is to consider where the concepts of ageing and the action on ageing were at right before the crisis and what their further development may look like.
Design/methodology/approach This paper provides a critical overview of main conceptions based on the neoliberal project of ageing.
Findings The main principle of the neoliberal project of ageing, which had been formed on the crossroad of social theory and policy through decades, became vulnerable in the face of COVID-19 pandemic. The new forced ageing reveals its repressive nature through ensuring seniors' safety from exposure, their removal from work and isolation. The theory now faces new challenges of meshing a neoliberal actor – active, independent and productive – with an older person in isolation, who needs safeguarding, of re-conceptualizing social exclusion of seniors in a situation where exclusion is equated with safety, of resolving a dilemma between isolation and respect of human rights and of keeping progress in anti-ageism.
Research limitations/implications This paper presents an overview of the main conceptions, underlying the neoliberal project of ageing. It aims to designate the vulnerabilities of the project, which were revealed under the situation of pandemic. Further development of the discussion needs detailed analysis of theoretical conceptions of ageing.
Practical implications Theoretical debate reflects policy of ageing. Discussion of theoretical problems of ageism, social exclusion, safeguarding of the elderly and compulsion are necessary for improvement of social policy of ageing.
Social implications When the neoliberal project of ageing comes into collision with the reality with the reality, the authors recognize it as a crisis. It moves the society, and especially the elderly, to the situation of uncertainty. This paper calls for discussion and search for a new balance among the generations in a society.
Originality/value This paper relies upon the current debate on neoliberal project of ageing and responds immediately to the situation of pandemic. Now conceptual problems in theories of ageing and policy projects became visible, and the authors suppose it is time to initiate this discussion.
