Only in postsocialist Russia could a soup kitchen serve as a stage for the unfolding of culture's current dramas and metaphors. As Muscovites from all walks of life enter the soup kitchen and interact with others in need, with the volunteers, and with the anthropologist, the story unfolds, spreads, and flourishes eventually causing the reader to forget that the setting is the Christian Church of Moscow, which has run a soup kitchen for over ten years. Melissa L. Caldwell's account of "social support in the new Russia" takes us into a soup kitchen but leads us further afield throughout a familiar terrain. Caldwell describes and carefully analyzes the continued patchwork involved in making ends meet in Moscow. The book, suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, is a tremendous addition to the growing library of post-socialist ethnographies. It certainly challenges Western ideas of welfare and assistance while also offering another critical analysis of the role of Western reform and aid agencies in the transformations in Russia. It questions the value of using welfare as a band-aid for social ills, and highlights the very reasons why such an approach is especially problematic in Russian culture.
Ironically recent news in North America has highlighted the stunning reality that there are more billionaires in Moscow than in any other city in the world. This is surprising because Moscow, and the former Soviet Union, is still seen as a place of want, a place mostly of have nots rather than haves. Caldwell's ethnography richly describes how in the presence of a handful of billionaires clustered in the city, the free market has brought most people a new taste of poverty rather than new found riches. Survival for most, like the success of the wealthy, is still closely linked to personal ties and ones ability to cobble together the necessary goods and services required to make it. During Caldwell's primary research from 1997-1998 and nearly every summer thereafter, she has witnessed the paradoxical blossoming of the consumer market and the persistence of an economy of uncertainty and shortage. Networks of kin, friends, and acquaintances remain the most dependable way to secure everything from food, durable household goods, clothing and automobiles, to even apartments. While Caldwell introduces these informal networks through interviews with her acquaintances at the soup kitchen, she moves on to astutely describe the way the soup kitchen is really a microcosm for Russian life in general. While soup kitchen regulars may be more at risk for social and financial destitution, they are not unlike many people walking the streets of Moscow.
In her analysis of the social poverty of Moscow residents, Caldwell moves the research of poverty and social welfare into new and critical territory. Anyone who has done research in the former Soviet Union in the past decade knows that this point cannot be over emphasized. So while people are still scrounging for and hoarding products, the Muscovites Caldwell worked with view these insufficiencies as a reflection of the more serious social problems in the city and "identify social isolation, not financial limitations, as the primary cause of scarcity in Russia today" (p.6). The idea that scarcity, as traditionally measured by the availability of consumer goods, can (and should?) be interpreted through a social lens is a perspective that warrants further development, and Caldwell does a commendable job in shedding light on the inter-relatedness between economic and social practices. By closely examining the Post-Soviet welfare state, Caldwell gives us much needed insight on the history and cultural position of aid and the "culture of giving" during Soviet and Post-Soviet times. Food and the soup kitchen become lively metaphors for living and assistance. While food is given and received at the kitchen, the reader comes to recognize through Caldwell's intimate conversation details that there is much more changing hands than simply food. Through a telling linguistic analysis we see that aid among Muscovites is closely tied to vzaimovyruchat' (mutual rescue or mutual assistance) reflecting the importance of the "interdependence of social relations and responsibilities" (p. 85). The aid, therefore, is about the social responsibility that Russians see as more salient than the passing of consumer goods.
One of the supporting critical ideas that Caldwell argues is that soup kitchen community members are not using nostalgic notions of the past and social networks as a form of resistance, but instead use them to make sense of the changes that have happened in their country and to try to modify capitalism, consumerism, and democracy so that it is decidedly more Russian in nature. For the majority of Muscovites, and Russians in general, western-implemented transformations after the collapse of the Berlin Wall seemed scarcely liberating or natural. Caldwell deftly shows how the soup kitchen has been forced to stand in for the retracted and crumbled state that still leaves many wondering "What went wrong?" As Caldwell discovered, even if they have yet to find answers to this question, through enduring systems and networks of social support, they are still finding ways to "make do" po-russki, or Russian-style, as only the Russians can do.