Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States

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Mobilities in Socialist and
Post-Socialist States
Societies on the Move

Edited by

Kathy Burrell
University of Liverpool, UK

and

Kathrin Hörschelmann
University of Durham, UK and Leibniz Institut for
Regional Geography Leipzig, Germany
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Kathy Burrell and
Kathrin Hörschelmann 2014
Remaining chapters © Respective authors 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-26728-3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mobilities in socialist and post-socialist states : societies on the move /
edited by Kathy Burrell, University of Liverpool, UK, Kathrin Hörschelmann,
University of Durham, UK.
pages cm
1. Migration, Internal – Europe, Eastern. 2. Migration, Internal – Europe,
Central. 3. Tourism – Europe, Eastern. 4. Tourism – Europe, Central.
5. Transportation – Europe, Eastern. 6. Transportation – Europe, Central.
I. Burrell, Kathy, editor. II. Hörschelmann, Kathrin, 1971– editor.
HB2042.7.A3M63 2014
304.80947—dc23 2014022071
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements ix

Notes on Contributors x

1 Introduction: Understanding Mobility in Soviet and

East European Socialist and Post-Socialist States 1
Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Hörschelmann

2 Communication, Mobility and Control in the Soviet Union

after World War II 23
Larissa Zakharova

3 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 45

Ciprian Cirniala

4 Leisure and Politics: Soviet Central Asian Tourists across

the Iron Curtain 62
Botakoz Kassymbekova

5 Between Limits, Lures and Excitement: Socialist

Romanian Holidays Abroad during the 1960s–80s 87
Adelina Oana Stefan

6 Mooring in Socialist Automobility: Garage Areas 105

Tauri Tuvikene

7 ‘Women Here Are Like at the Time of Enver [Hoxha]…’:

Socialist and Post-Socialist Gendered Mobilities in
Albanian Society 122
Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

8 The View from the Back of the Warrior: Mobility,

Privilege and Power during the International
Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina 148
Catherine Baker

9 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’: Everyday Modes of

Transport in Post-Socialist Serbia 173
Marina Simić

v
vi Contents

10 Urban Public Transport and the State in Post-Soviet

Central Asia 194
Wladimir Sgibnev

11 Geography of Daily Mobilities in Post-Socialist European

Countries: Evidence from Slovenia 217
David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

12 Life-Worlds of Deceleration: Reflections on the

‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ through Ethnographic
Research in Post-Socialist Germany 240
Ina Dietzsch

Index 261
List of Illustrations

Figures

4.1 In front of a store with clothes, Cairo, 1978 78

4.2 With pineapples and bananas, Havanna, 1976 79
6.1 A garage area in Tartu, Estonia 111
7.1 Communist era bunkers, Devoll, 2005 128
7.2 Chinese truck transporting people, Sarandë, 1989 133
7.3 Queuing for bread in Tirana, 1992 135
7.4 Land of the Mercedes, Korçë, 2012 141
10.1 Marshrutka in Khujand 201
10.2 Switching lines 203
10.3 Postcard featuring modern public transport in a
modern city – trolleybuses on the Lenin Avenue
in Dushanbe 205
10.4 ‘Diverse forms of ownership are the foundations of
the economy’ 209
10.5 ‘Independence is a holy duty of the citizen’ 209
10.6 ‘We raise our dear city to the level of the historic
capitals of the nation’ 210
10.7 ‘Dushanbe is the homestead of love and the house of
hope for the Tajiks of the world’ 211
10.8 ‘We transform our city into a sea of flowers’ 211
10.9 ‘A cultivated capital is a cultivation of our home’ 212
10.10 Modern Belkommunmash trolleybus in Bishkek 212
11.1 Modal split of Slovene workers from 1981 to 2002 223
11.2 Investments in various transportation sector
modes in Slovenia 225
11.3 Example of a spontaneous and unkempt carpooling
parking lot next to the freeway access point south of
the capital city of Ljubljana 227

Maps

6.1 The map of Tartu with garage areas 113

10.1 Fixed-track system in Central Asia 199

vii
viii List of Illustrations

Tables

4.1 Soviet Central Asian tourists travelling abroad 75

4.2 Soviet citizens travelling abroad in 1956 and 1961
by origin regions and republics 76
11.1 Daily commuters to work according to mode of travel
and education (structural percentages), Census 2002 233
Acknowledgements

This volume arises from three Royal Geographical Society-Institute of

British Geographers annual conference sessions on ‘Socialist and Post-
Socialist Mobilities’, held in London in September 2010. We would like
to thank everybody who contributed to and attended these sessions.
Secondly, we are extremely grateful to Duncan Light and Craig Young
for their invaluable roles as reviewers for, and supporters of, the volume,
and Duncan especially for also reviewing the introduction. Finally, we
would like to thank our families, Matt, Anya, Marian and Lewis, and
James, Karl and Lea, for their support throughout the project.

ix
Notes on Contributors

Catherine Baker is Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University

of Hull. She has parallel research interests in international intervention
and in nationalism, culture and media. She is the author of Sounds of
the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991
(2010) and, with Michael Kelly, Interpreting the Peace: Peace Operations,
Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina (2013). Her articles have
appeared in History Workshop Journal, Slavic Review, War and Society and
elsewhere.

David Bole is a research fellow at the Anton Melik Geographical Institute,

Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and
Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His particular interests include spatial devel-
opment, urban, economic geography and daily mobility. He is currently
leading a transnational cooperation project SY_CULTour and a post-doc-
toral project dealing with the interaction of daily mobility and transport
land use in post-socialist cities.

Kathy Burrell is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the

University of Liverpool. Her research interests lie in the intersections
between mobility, migration and material culture. She has published
widely on different aspects of Polish wartime, socialist and post-socialist
migration to the UK and is now working on a new project investi-
gating the material remittance and gift circuits Polish and Zimbabwean
migrants maintain after migration. She is also interested in issues
surrounding ‘superdiversity’ and population turnover and ‘churn’ in
ethnically diverse areas.

Ciprian Cirniala is PhD student at the University of Potsdam in contem-

porary history. His thesis is titled ‘Silence, Order, Safety. Representations
of Public Police and the Legitimization of Power in the Socialist Republic
of Romania 1960–1989’. His research interests are in the history of
communism, police history, philosophy/theory of history, history of
historiography, the history of Argentinian tango and mobilities in the
twentieth century, history of photography, film and arts. He has written
several papers on policing in socialist Romania.

Ina Dietzsch holds a deputy professorship at the Institute of Cultural

Anthropology and European Ethnology, and is working on the research

x
 Notes on Contributors xi

project ‘Media Worlds and Everyday Urbanism’ funded by the Swiss

National Research Council. She is also involved in a collaborative
teaching project with the School of Art and Design about spatial prac-
tices in the tri-national agglomeration Basel. Her areas of expertise lie in
the cultural dimension of post-socialist transition in Germany, anthro-
pology of knowledge, the collaborative research of artists, academic
researchers and publics. Her further research interests are in urban devel-
opment in contexts of superdiversity, media anthopology, processes of
energy transition and the re-writing of notions of nature in general and
in Bulgaria in particular.

Matej Gabrovec is Senior Research Fellow at the Anton Melik

Geographical Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research inter-
ests include transport geography with special regard to public passenger
transportation and land use and land cover changes studies. He is an
author and co-author of various transport and mobility studies articles
and monographs.

Kathrin Hörschelmann is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University

of Durham (UK), and currently seconded for a Research Fellowship at
the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig (Germany).
Her work focuses on the social, cultural and political geographies of
post-socialist transformations as well as on youth culture, citizenship
and international politics. In addition to these topics, she has engaged
critically with questions of gender and youth inequality and with the
politics of producing academic knowledge about post-socialism. She is
co-editor of Public Spheres after Socialism.

Botakoz Kassymbekova is a post-doctoral fellow at the Technical

University Berlin. She received her PhD from Humboldt University in
Berlin and is currently revising her dissertation on early Soviet rule in
Tajikistan for publication. In her current project she is studying the
history of Grand Hotels in Imperial and early Soviet Moscow and St.
Petersburg. She was inspired to look into Soviet tourism practices by her
father for whom travelling was a life passion and a way of life.

Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex and

Willy Brandt Guest Professor in Migration Studies at Malmö University.
At Sussex he was the founding director of the Sussex Centre of Migration
Research and a former Dean of the School of European Studies. From
2000 to 2013 he was the editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies. His research has been mainly on different aspects of migration
xii Notes on Contributors

and mobility, including labour migration, return migration, student

migration and retirement migration, all these with a focus on Europe.

Adelina Oana Stefan is a PhD candidate in History at the University

of Pittsburgh, working on a dissertation titled ‘Vacationing in the Cold
War: Foreign Tourists to Socialist Romania and Francoist Spain, 1960s–
1970s’. She holds an MA in History from Central European University
(Budapest, Hungary). Her most recent publication is ‘Passengers’ Railway
Identity in Socialist Romania during the 1950s and 1960s’ in Ralf Roth
and Henry Jacolin (eds), Eastern European Railways in Transition, 19th to
21th centuries.

Wladimir Sgibnev is a post-doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute

for Regional Geography in Leipzig. His research focus lies in the trans-
formations of post-socialist urban landscapes. He holds a PhD in Central
Asian Studies from the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he was
working on urban space production processes in northern Tajikistan
from a Lefebvrian perspective; and a MA degree from Sciences Po Paris
in Political science and East European studies.

Marina Simić obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University

of Manchester. She is currently a lecturer at University of Belgrade,
Faculty of Political Sciences. Her research interests include post-socialist
transformation in Europe, anthropology of the state, cosmopolitanism
and problems of location and belonging.

Tauri Tuvikene is a geographer teacher at the Centre for Landscape

and Culture (Tallinn University) and is at present finishing his doctoral
dissertation at University College London. His dissertation project enti-
tled ‘The Freedom to Park: Post-Socialist Automobility in Tallinn, Estonia’
explores through regulations of car parking the politics of mobility, state
and citizenship under the post-socialist condition. His main research
interests include mobility, urban planning and studies of post-socialist
cities from a theoretical perspective.

Julie Vullnetari is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of

Global Studies of the University of Sussex. Her research interests focus
around migration and development; the interaction between migra-
tion, gender and age; and migration of Romani communities. More
recently she has been researching everyday life during communism in
Albania and border communities. Her publications include articles in
journals such as Global Networks, International Migration and Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies. Her latest book Albania on the Move: Links
 Notes on Contributors xiii

between Internal and International Migration was published by Amsterdam

University Press (2012).

Larissa Zakharova is Associate Professor and maître de conférences

at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the
author of S’habiller à la soviétique. La mode et le Dégel en URSS (2011),
co-editor of a special issue of Cahiers du monde russe (n°47, 2006) and
of Cacophonie d’empire. Le gouvernement des langues dans l’empire russe,
en URSS et dans les États post-soviétiques (2010), and editor of a special
issue of Les Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (n°2, 2013) on daily life
under Communism. She is currently working on tools of communica-
tion and their role in modes of governing and social relations in the
Soviet Union.
1
Introduction: Understanding
Mobility in Soviet and East
European Socialist and
Post-Socialist States
Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Hörschelmann

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 it was interpreted by many as the
dawn of a new era of unrestricted travel and free movement for socialist
citizens who had been prevented until then from exercising those
freedoms by an authoritarian political regime. Cold War understand-
ings of socialism and capitalist market economies as two diametrically
opposed systems led many to assume that mobility and freedom of travel
were the preserve of citizens of western states, while socialist govern-
ments on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain lacked both the means
and the political will to enable modern forms of travel, transport and
communication.
This volume challenges this assumption by considering the signifi-
cance of mobility for socialist interpretations of modernity, and the
specific implementation and practical re-working of different mobility
constellations in states that were part of the Soviet and East European
socialist sphere until 1989/90. The authors of this edited collection
trace a plurality of mobility practices, policies and constellations in and
between socialist states and show that post-socialist mobilities likewise
confound many assumptions about progress in twenty-first century
post-modernity.
The volume arises from the realization that the wide ranging, inter-
disciplinary area of socialist and post-socialist studies and the now
established mobilities ‘paradigm’ are two areas of interest which, while
hitherto relatively distinct, can be brought together very fruitfully. On the
one hand, to a large extent it has been their particular management and

1
2 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

development of mobilities which have given socialist and post-socialist

societies their shape. On the other, socialist and post-socialist societies –
in this volume focusing on examples from the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe – offer rich, grounded case studies for the exploration of
the peculiarities of different mobility regimes. Investigations of ‘actually
existing’ socialisms and post-socialisms can lead to greater understand-
ings of ‘actually existing’ mobilities, and vice versa.
Bringing these fields together stimulates debate and further reflec-
tion on two key questions: how do we understand mobility itself, and,
as socialism saw itself as a fundamentally ‘modern’ ideology (see Pence
and Betts 2008), how is it related to modernity? The first of these,
mobility, is fascinating because it is all about the nuts and bolts of
everyday life – how, where and why people move around – and how
this mobility is both enacted in practice and represented in words,
images and imaginations (Adey 2009). The so-called ‘mobilities turn’,
has spawned a wave of thought-provoking research projects which have
placed human mobility at the heart of geographical, social, corporeal
and material experiences (Urry 2007; Hannan et al. 2006; Merriman
2004; Bissell 2010; Adey 2010; Norris 2008). What has been particularly
exciting about mobilities research is the new focus it has brought on
the complex entanglements of materials, objects and people, in what
Cresswell (2010: 26) terms ‘constellations of mobility’, providing a prism
through which the politics of managing and contesting such constel-
lations becomes more transparent, more obviously related to specific
moments and periods in time-space, with the role of embodied prac-
tice emphasized. Further, in highlighting the co-presences of human
and non-human bodies and cultural imaginations in the production
of mobilities, the materiality of social life has been foregrounded (Urry
2002, 2007; Adey 2006, 2010). The relevance of material-social rela-
tions for understanding particular constellations of power and poli-
tics is revealed, but so too is the recalcitrance of objects, materialities
and social subjects which necessitate much of those politics, even as
they are often distinctly disinterested in them (Latour 2000). As will be
discussed, it is this material recalcitrance, as related to mobility, which
resonates especially with the lived experiences of mobility in Soviet and
Eastern European socialist societies.
Rather than movement per se, mobility is about both substance and
meaning (Cresswell 2006). This is where the relevance of a focus on
mobilities for socialist and post-socialist studies really stands out (cf.
Lemon 2000). Mobility in socialist societies carried major ideological
significance and its promotion as a marker of modernity by the state
 Introduction 3

brought about particular articulations of power, politics, materiality,

human agency and imagination that shaped both people’s experi-
ences of ‘actually existing’ socialism and their understandings of the
limits and possibilities for action within the regime. Thus, as several
authors in this volume demonstrate, the enhancements in transport
and communication systems that state socialist regimes implemented
from the 1930s onwards were experienced as significant improve-
ments and enjoyed by many, yet restrictions on travel to capitalist
states, the awareness of state surveillance and frustrations with the
inefficiencies of ailing transport infrastructures also moved many to
question the optimistic claims of political leaders and necessitated
quasi-illegal, subversive practices that were often even tolerated by
the state. Just as specific constellations of power and politics shaped
disparate experiences of mobility in socialist societies, however, so
today mobility carries politically charged connotations and it has
become an experiential domain through which people evaluate the
changes that have ensued since 1989 (see below). Socialist and post-
socialist studies are therefore well placed to explore the relationship
between power and mobility. De Certeau’s (1984) distinctions between
‘strategy’ (emanating, for instance, from the state) and ‘tactics’ (i.e.,
citizen responses to this strategy), offers a useful framework for under-
standing constellations of power and mobility in socialist and post-
socialist contexts. In the words of Cresswell (2006: 48), ‘De Certeau’s
mobilization of forms of mobility as against the power which comes
with fixity is symptomatic of a wider move to invest mobility with
subversive meanings’. With their expansive attempts to control and
‘fix’ the various mobilities of their citizens – not unlike Foucault’s
(1977) observations on panopticism – socialist states especially opened
up mobility as a front in resistances which ranged from activities such
as using alternative networks to acquire parts for cars, through to
full-scale cross border defection. A ‘state verses citizen’ dynamic, of
course, is an oversimplification of the structure of regimes which very
often could not fix the mobilities of their people in the face of the
stubbornness of the mobile human body or the unwieldiness of new
technologies and infrastructures. Nor does it enable clarity over who
was doing this fixing and who was resisting it. An analysis of mobility
and power as mutually enforcing/conflicting forces, however, is an
invaluable starting point for appreciating how deeply political any
kind of mobility practice could be in socialist states and indeed in the
post-Cold War world in general. As Dietzsch shows in Chapter 12, it
also provokes a more careful examination of the power-knowledge
4 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

constellations that uphold contemporary logics of mobility and of the

possibilities for resisting them.
One of the prevailing preoccupations within the field of mobilities
studies is social change – transport and climate change, to take one
example. It is here that we see the merging of mobilities with our second
point of interest – modernity. Mobility is apparently symptomatic of the
‘modern age’. Popular and scientific discourses of modernity frequently
adopt a binary time-space perspective whereby (late) modernity is asso-
ciated with an unsettling increase in speed, mobility, complexity and
change (Berman 1983; Bauman 2000), while stasis, slowness and immo-
bility are ascribed to social and cultural ‘others’ living ‘elsewhere’, whose
conditions of life change only gradually or at the hands of intervening
forces (Adey 2006). Whether these others are romanticized, treated
as inferior, or both, in this time-space construction it none the less
seems as though speed, movement and radical change are the preserve
of advanced capitalist societies in the global North, and particularly
their hyper-mobile elites, while others are stuck in a slow moving, less
complex past (Kaplan 1996; Cresswell 2010; Macnaghten and Urry 1998).
Chiming with feminist and post-colonial critiques of the binary frame-
works and exclusions entailed in value-laden associations of modernity
with speed, movement, complexity and rapid change, recent scholar-
ship in socialist and post-socialist studies has questioned the validity of
such binary chronological models for explaining the diversity of ways
in which time and space were modulated, experienced and culturally
framed in socialist societies. Analysts of post-socialist transformations
in particular have further pointed out that the divergence in paths of
‘transition’ cannot be understood through an ordered, unidirectional
chronological lens (Pickles and Smith 1998; Stenning and Hörschelmann
2008; Hörschelmann 2002).
Socialist/post-socialist scholars also need to be careful not to fetishize
socialist and post-socialist societies. As Hann (2002: 9) argues, some
developments within socialist/post-socialist countries have mirrored
those unfolding in other places, under other regimes. The growth of new
technologies, for example, and how best to both acquire and control
them, could perhaps be considered a universal challenge. Writing at
the time of revelations about the extent of NSA (US) and GCHQ (UK)
spying, it hardly seems justified to cast Soviet style spying desires – if
not techniques – as from another age. Likewise, in a world preoccupied
with terrorism and increasingly concerned with austerity politics and
‘protecting’ national welfare systems, international controls of the move-
ment of people are arguably growing rather than receding. As Cresswell
 Introduction 5

(2006: 49) points out, the whole being of states – even ‘western’ ones – is
tied up with the control of mobility in various guises, a point as valid for
post-modernity as modernity.
Ideas generated through debates about mobility, then, can deepen
analyses and understandings of socialist and post-socialist societies. The
focus on mobilities, on the contingent relations between different mobil-
ities, on different cultural frameworks for understanding mobilities,
and on the power relations they entail, can produce rich insights into
the politics and diverse experiences and perceptions of ‘really-existing’
socialisms and post-socialisms. Perhaps most importantly, instead of the
western centric distinction between static and slow-moving socialist
regimes on the one hand and rapid post-socialist transitions towards
hyper-mobile, liquid modernities on the other (see Macnaghten and
Urry 1998; Bauman 2000; Castells 2010), this book seeks to highlight
the centrality of mobility to Soviet sphere socialist ideologies of moder-
nity, to the material-political construction of socialist economies, geog-
raphies, social relations and life-worlds to the everyday experience of
socialism, and to contestations of socialist state politics. Not only does
this recognition make it easier to identify continuities between socialist
and post-socialist mobilities and relations across the Iron Curtain, but it
also underlines the relevance of cultural understandings of mobility and
capitalist modernity for people’s assessments of the apparent successes
and failures of post-socialist transformations. The diversity of experi-
ences and the inequalities produced by post-socialist transformations
along different pathways (Stark and Bruszt 2001; Burawoy and Verdery
1999; Bradshaw and Stenning 2004; Hann 2004; Smith and Timár
2010) can be more fully appreciated through a focus on the differential
mobilities which have been produced.

Constellations of socialist mobility: power, practice,

materiality and scale

Mobility was central to socialist politics, economics, ideology and

everyday life. Metaphorically, the ideological commitment to ‘progress
towards a better future’ in itself implies a focus on different types of
enabling mobilities. Tangibly, the energetic, and collective, road building
projects of socialist Albania offer a good illustration of this (Dalakoglou
2012).The expansionist ambitions of the Soviet state, furthermore, meant
that vast resources of labour, finance, technology and materials were
invested in mobility projects to enable access to previously relatively
inaccessible places and regions, particularly in Siberia, the Far East, and
6 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

the Arctic North, for resource exploitation. Some have suggested that
this Soviet expansionism was not unlike colonialism, involving compa-
rable structures of oppression (Verdery 2004). Certainly, without the
enormous carceral economy of Soviet socialism, and the forced labour
of many, it is unlikely that this expansion would have been possible.
While this particular ‘assemblage’ of political power, embodied labour
and materiality was unique to socialism, it shows why a political under-
standing of mobilities is indispensable and why, perhaps, current anal-
yses remain too tame and silent on the oppressions which are entailed
in the very establishment of mobility infrastructures. Critiques have
centred on differential access to, and experiences of, mobility but the
exploitative relations which made (and still make) the expansion of
mobility possible are too rarely addressed. Globally, today, some of the
most high-profile infrastructure projects (e.g., for major sporting events)
rely on the poorly paid labour of millions of workers whose labour is
part of the ‘moorings’ on which mobility relies.
In Russia, these forced labourers were increasingly joined by those
who settled in the ‘new’ territories as a result of a system of incentives
and rewards. Their migration and resettlement led not only to new
needs for travel infrastructures to complement the transportation of
goods and materials, but also the extension and maintenance of new
communication systems. Enabling the social relations and co-presences
that Urry (2002, 2007) regards as a key component of mobility, across
the vast distances of the Soviet empire, became a major challenge for the
socialist regime. The complex coordination of networked socialist econ-
omies, the maintenance of spatially expansive hegemonic ideologies of
socialism and the reconciliation of socialist biopolitics with the needs
and desires of populations relied on the establishment and maintenance
of an enabling communications infrastructure. The latter, however, also
created new pressures on the system, as control was made both possible
and more difficult to achieve (see Zakharova, Chapter 2).
Communications and transport infrastructures became neuralgic
points which highlighted and co-produced many of the inequalities
and inefficiencies of the socialist system. Rail, road and air travel thus
required ‘mooring’ through maintenance and coordination, which an
ailing socialist economy struggled to deliver. The extension of mobility
infrastructures and communication systems that was such a crucial plank
in the ideological scaffolding of socialist modernity thus became one of
its major stumbling blocks. It could be argued that one of the main
failures of the socialist system was its inability to sustain the invest-
ment and labour required to ‘moor’ its mobility systems over time – to
 Introduction 7

maintain and not just establish its physical infrastructure, to respond to

the inevitable deterioration of its recalcitrant materiality (Latour 2000),
and to manage changes in technologies as well as in socio-cultural
expectations that the system partly provoked through its promotion of
growth-focused modernity, as new mobilities also enabled the spread
of ideas and new practices beyond the complete control of state power.
Contradictions inherent in the socialist political economy were thus
both reflected in, and produced by its dominant mobility constella-
tions. While the successful launches of Sputnik and Soyus into space
(see Maurer et al. 2011) were staged ideologically as representations of
the apparently unstoppable progress of Soviet socialism, realities closer
to the ground departed significantly from this glittering image, as
people often experienced time as slowing right down in activities such
as queuing for even basic commodities (see Verdery 1996) or coping
with unreliable trains or badly maintained roads. Zakharova (Chapter 2)
explains, for instance, that in post-Stalinist Russia some communities in
newly industrialized parts of the North and Far East became completely
cut-off during the rainy seasons as roads became muddy and impassable.
The contrast between spectacular and everyday realities of mobility,
therefore, contributed to the erosion of public trust in socialist regimes
and the legitimacy of their ruling elites.
Accumulating disruptions in the flows of people, information, mate-
rial resources and goods created pressures on other parts of the socialist
economy, politics and society that helped to ‘unmoor’ socialist relations.
Increasingly, state authorities had to rely on informal social practices of
‘mooring’ that were a response to, needed by, but also undermining of
socialist social and economic relations. Thus, while the voluntary labour
of garage owners described by Tuvikene in this volume became the glue
which held an otherwise failing automobile system together, it also
provided new spaces for socializing and individual mobility. Likewise,
Zakharova (Chapter 2) shows that communication systems evolved in
the Soviet Union as a complex tangle of controlling mechanisms and
sometimes more, oftentimes less politically subversive communication
practices. In this volume too, Cirniala (Chapter 3) proposes that these
apparent contradictions between state controlled and managed mobili-
ties on the one hand, and ‘recalcitrant’ plural practices of living with,
within, and between the formal spaces of socialism can be conceptual-
ized well, as already discussed, through de Certeau’s framework of strate-
gies and tactics.
Both the ideological claims and material realities of socialism were
significantly measured against its ability to provide smooth, fast and
8 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

equal conditions for the transport of people, goods and information. As

contradictions and tensions accumulated that socialist systems of power
and control could no longer contain, the ‘egalitarian’ pretences of these
systems were also put under pressure and differential access to travel and
transported goods became a cornerstone for critique, fuelling much oppo-
sition. In socialist societies, as elsewhere, the question was thus not one
of mobility or immobility, but whose mobility was enabled or restricted,
and how specific relations of power and mobility were managed. The
‘politics of mobility’ was central to both the cementing and justification
of socialist state power, and to its subversion and contestation.
Different socialist states also found different answers to the manage-
ment of the flows of people, goods, materials and information that
they had promoted but struggled to contain. These different answers
provoked several military interventions and assertions of supremacy by
the Soviet state, as well as a nuanced system of socialist networking and
collaboration that conceded, and sometimes had to concede, certain
departures from Soviet socialist norms. In part, these concessions were
occasioned by intersections between socialist and Western states that
generally happened below the radar of official socialist propaganda,
but were obvious to those who were permitted to travel west, and to
the many workers in socialist factories who were told to prioritize the
production of goods for western clients. The reliance of socialist states
on western finance to fill the holes produced by its own inefficiencies,
and the converse flows of goods as payment for those loans, clearly did
not fit with the self-reliance and growth rhetoric of socialist ‘alterna-
tive modernity’. The mobility of people, goods, ideas and finance across
the Cold War divide became a further key contradiction that socialist
regimes had to manage, struggle with, and find different answers for.
With the dawn of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union under
Gorbachev, those differences became pronounced, highly visible, and
eventually irreconcilable. The collapse of state-socialism was in crucial
ways occasioned by the political will of Hungarian and Czechoslovak
authorities, which permitted refugees from the GDR to flee across its
borders to the West, and by the decision of Soviet leaders not to inter-
vene. Having become a major cause of protest against socialist regimes
over decades of Cold War division, freedom of travel, and of the travel
of ideas, became a key motivation for, and symbol of, the revolutionary
changes that ensued from perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As the above shows, socialist and post-socialist mobilities make visible,
and need to be understood as produced through, specific articulations of
scale. The geo-political here is intimately tied to the regional, national
 Introduction 9

and local, and these scales are in many ways transformed and brought
into new constellations through mobility. If we focus on the spheres of
everyday life and social practices, this becomes equally clear. The different
socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had a funda-
mental impact on the mobilities of ordinary people. On the one hand,
socialist ruling elites worked hard to control the international mobility
of people, attempting to censor images and communications from non-
aligned countries and making it almost impossible to emigrate or travel
abroad, while at the same time keeping much freer lines of mobility and
communication open within the socialist bloc. These different regimes
also shaped, purposefully or inadvertently, people’s more ‘mundane
mobilities and banal travels’, thus not only choreographing mobility
but also reconstituting daily place-making activities in the process (see
Binnie et al. 2007). Running a household in a shortage economy, for
example, both positioned people in slow moving queues for hours on
end (Merkel 1998; Veenis 1999), effectively rendering them immobile
at certain times of the day, and necessitated a certain relationship with
the immediate neighbourhood – specific routes to and from work to
take in certain shops. State sponsored holiday policies ensured that
many families travelled extensively within their countries, but the pres-
ence of troops, militias and the secret police also had negative impacts
upon people’s ability to move freely around their neighbourhoods. For
some people the state of the public transport systems dominated their
daily routines. In addition to all these physical mobilities, imaginative
mobilities were very important to daily life in the socialist bloc, not least
the presence of the ‘Imagined West’ (Yurchak 2006), brought to people
through western goods (Burrell 2011a) and popular culture. Mobilities
theories clearly offer a distinctly geographical prism through which to
reassess these spatialities of everyday life in the socialist bloc.
They also remind us to consider how mobility is produced and experi-
enced through difference and the power relations it entails. With regards
to socialist societies, it is important to note that experiences of mobility
differed markedly depending on people’s standing in political and social
hierarchies, privileges endowed to different sections of the workforce,
to economic, cultural and political elites, and the corresponding restric-
tions on mobility that affected anyone suspected of ‘subversive’, oppo-
sitional activities. Gender also remained a differentiating factor in a
system that pursued equality through work and universal social welfare.
The particular restrictions suffered by women as a result of subordinating
reproductive labour to the productivist logic, while maintaining patriar-
chal gender relations in politics and economic management, thus also
10 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

affected their everyday mobilities. They continued to have most of the

responsibility for care work and the management of households in the
shortage economy, while few enjoyed the travelling privileges that came
with power and authority. In retrospect, however, many women today
credit the socialist system with providing the necessary material condi-
tions for gender equality, and find these sorely missing in really-existing
post-socialism (Einhorn 1993; Gal and Kligman 2000; van Hoven 2002;
Hörschelmann and van Hoven 2003). Mobility was further experienced,
imagined and contested differently depending on age. On the one hand,
the inefficiencies of the socialist system and its increasing inability to
deliver its welfare promises placed older people in positions of greater
vulnerability and dependency, while on the other, young people found
their life chances increasingly limited by socialist restrictions on the
travel of people, goods, ideas and cultural commodities. Changing
cultural expectations here met with different generational demands for
mobility, and many young people’s imaginations of desirable, modern
lives departed significantly from what the system allowed or enabled.
Access to mobility infrastructures and experiences of socialist time-
spaces further differed between urban and rural, central and periph-
eral places. Although state investments in mobility infrastructures and
in the social, cultural and economic facilities of far-flung places were
centrally concerned with eradicating such differences, they persisted
in a variety of forms. Highlighting these relationships between social,
cultural and spatial differences and the politics, experience and represen-
tation of mobility helps us to develop a more nuanced understanding of
socialist everyday lives as well as of the struggles that led to gradual and
radical transformations of the regimes. It also helps us to gain a better
understanding of the complexities and perplexities of post-socialist
transformations.

Reconfiguring mobilities: change and continuity in post-

socialist constellations of mobility

Mobility has become a heavily charged term in recent discourses and

reflections on post-socialist developments. The successes and failures of
post-socialist governments and economies are largely measured against
how they support or restrict mobilities and the social differences and
inequalities that emerge around it, or that entrench those that existed
before (Lemon 2000; Stenning 2005). While recognizing again that there
are limitations with the category ‘post-socialist’ for analysing fully the
changes which have taken place in former Soviet sphere countries – not
 Introduction 11

least the difficulty in deciding what is ‘post-socialist’ about develop-

ments which may be happening elsewhere too – a focus on mobility
does help to illuminate the specific multi-scalar changes which have
been taking place under the umbrella of post-socialist transformation. It
is useful to consider international and domestic experiences of mobility
in turn, as they highlight different, although inevitably overlapping,
facets of post-socialist change.
The collapse of socialism brought new international mobilities – new
advertising and international business ventures, an increasing globaliza-
tion of popular culture (see Pilkington et al. 2002) and new neo-liberal
ideologies in place of ‘old’ socialist ones. It also brought an upsurge in
international migration. The years 1989, 2004 and 2007 appear impor-
tant markers for changes in international migration regimes in the post-
socialist world, physically and symbolically reinforced by the growth
of transport infrastructures – such as budget airlines (Burrell 2011b) –
linking eastern and western Europe. International mobilities have loos-
ened and transformed, evidenced in large-scale westward migrations, but
it is also clear that the post-socialist experience of moving across borders
has been deeply asymmetrical. There was, perhaps, a sort of uniformity
in the immobility regimes of the countries within the socialist bloc.
Even though the opportunity for international migration, and indeed
international travel, inevitably varied from country to country and
person to person (as illustrated in Stefan and Kassymbekova’s chapters
in this volume), the ability of bodies to cross borders was similarly, and
certainly ideologically, framed and controlled throughout the region.
High levels of migration were in evidence in the 1980s – from Poland
for example – but this could only be achieved by adhering to certain
rules and rehearsing blueprinted state-citizen mobility power games,
such as the process of requesting and then waiting anxiously for pass-
ports. From this angle, the mobility cornerstones of socialism appear to
have given way to new structures of international movement which are
(even) more embedded with inequalities, and far more volatile. As Baker,
Chapter 8, demonstrates, war in the former Yugoslavia fundamentally
changed mobility patterns there, not only displacing and ‘reordering’
existing populations, but bringing in high numbers of western forces
and workers, visibly alerting people to the new mobility inequalities
manifesting around them.
Post-socialist changes in international mobility are significant,
then, on many levels. It is undeniable that for many citizens of former
socialist states enhanced freedom of movement has been a genuinely
positive development. The volume of migration in the 1990s, again out
12 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

of Poland but perhaps even more notably from Romania and Albania,
certainly suggests an embracement of new opportunities, if also under-
lining the extent of social hardship experienced in ‘transitioning’ post-
socialist states. But international migration within Europe at the close of
the twentieth century was still inscribed with the geo-political inequali-
ties of Cold War continental structuring. Romanians in Spain, Poles in
Germany, Albanians in Greece, even East Germans in West Germany –
these populations were not automatically welcomed, and sometimes
even barely perceived, as fellow Europeans. And while their experiences
as immigrants have been no more difficult than those of Turkish guest
workers or former colonial migrants, there is a particular framing of
Eastern Europe in the Western European imaginary which allows for a
deeply rooted othering process to take place. As Kuus (2004: 473) argued
on the eve of EU expansion, this framing, immediately recognizable
from post-colonial theory, places much of Eastern Europe as ‘not-yet-
fully European’. Ten years on from these observations this framing
persists. Given the almost pan-western European alarmist, and in many
cases racist, media responses to the 2014 relaxation of labour market
restrictions for Romanians and Bulgarians within the EU, it is barely a
stretch to find a commonality between the position of the post-colonial
and the post-socialist migrant in the maturing post-Cold War world.
As this example suggests, post-socialist migration has had to route
many of its paths within or around the expanding mobility structures of
the EU. Notwithstanding the various problems and limitations actually
experienced by EU migrants, the ‘free movers’ observed by Favell (2008)
are of course those which find themselves within the EU as it enlarges
and liberalizes, not outside of it, like much of post-socialist Europe and
certainly Eurasia, positioned against Fortress, or more appropriately
‘gated community’ (van Houtum and Pijpers 2007) Europe. Post-colonial
perspectives again bring clarity to the position of the EU vis-à-vis the
rest of the world. According to van Houtum and Pijpers ‘the European
Union is increasingly following a modernist logic of (b)ordering, much
resembling the colonial mind-set, that involves the making of a divisive
order between the self-claimed illuminated, enlightened beacon and an
external world of chaos and darkness’ (2007: 296). Colonial mindsets,
furthermore, are not in short supply. Just as the power of the EU has
reconfigured European, and to a certain extent global, mobilities, so has
the changing position of Russia as it draws in migrant workers from
neighbouring states especially, arguably reconfiguring new neo-colonial
powers in the process. A recent issue of the The Economist (7/9/13), for
example, noted that Tajikistan is the country most reliant on remittances
 Introduction 13

from overseas workers in the world, such is the disproportionate scale

of the Tajik migrant population working in Russia in particular. This
has not only had clear implications for the politicization of mobility
regimes around Russia – the politics of visas for example – but also illus-
trates the barely reconstructed post-colonial balance of power in the
region, reinforced by the all too familiar second class status endured by
migrants from the former Soviet republics living and working in Russia.
Post-socialist mobility regimes are a mesh of old and new tensions and
suspicions.
As Verdery (2002) pointed out over a decade ago, post-socialist restruc-
turing has always been part of something much larger, embedded in
much more fundamentally global shifts in international power. And
in this post-Cold War world, technological advances have been used
to (bio-)securitize borders and movement in increasingly sophisticated
and ideological ways; as with spying, Soviet desires to control mobility
were perhaps more prophetic than they were accomplished. It is the
example of spying, however, which may reinforce the significance of
the post-socialist legacy within this new global structure. While many
countries in Western Europe exhibited fairly muted responses to the
revelations of the full extent of US National Security Agency spying,
Angela Merkel, of East German background, reacted much more angrily.
Divergent histories and experiences among the population of Europe
still have sway over present reactions and future decisions. More gener-
ally, the links between past and present in mobility, power and control
suggest that the ethical and political questions raised by socialist/post-
socialist mobilities can be important for critiquing new developments
and inequalities.
While these important geo-political restructurings, tested by the
movement of people, are key to understanding the wider changes of the
post-Cold War world, the focus on domestic mobilities arguably reveals
even more fundamentally the everyday legacies of socialism and post-
socialist transformation. New experiences of poverty and unemploy-
ment in many cases shrunk everyday working class spatial routines
(see Stenning 2005), with the loss of subsidized travel and holiday trips
impacting heavily on the ability of ordinary people to move around
locally, let alone nationally. Some of the old socialist immobilities, of
course, also outlasted the formal end of socialism. Queuing for goods
intensified in many places in the early 1990s, and the slowness enforced
though dealings with governmental bureaucracy has proved resilient
across the region generally (on Albania see Vullnetari and King, this
volume). On the other hand, the pace of new urban development and
14 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

investment during the 1990s changed people’s relationships with their

home towns and cities, forcing them to learn new ways of moving
around, sometimes enticing them but at other times alienating them
(Burrell 20011c; Hörschelmann 2009). At the same time, the rise in
social inequalities at a time of severe economic decline and of major
reductions in public spending has led to new experiences of immobility
in everyday life. Those on low incomes frequently describe a sense of
isolation and being ‘stuck’ in place (Stenning 2005; Hörschelmann and
Stenning 2003; Hörschelmann 2005), both because of the decline in
public transport and their inability to connect with, and participate
in, new consumer cultures that characterize redeveloped metropolitan
centres and shopping areas (cf. Hirt 2012; Stanilov 2007). Changes
in identity, and especially the sense of lost moorings experienced by
many of those who lost their previous work-related status, have also
contributed to such senses of isolation and immobility. It is important
to point out here again that such experiences are not unique to post-
socialist societies. Pearce (2013), in a recent commentary on the effects
of austerity on health in the United Kingdom, for instance, explains
that stigmatizations of place affect strongly how often people leave
their houses and how they travel through the city (also see Warr 2006;
Wacquant 2007). What is different, in comparison, for post-socialist
societies is thus perhaps less the experience, extent and severity of
inequality, but the stark contrast with an (imagined) socialist past of
(relative) equality, esteem for workers, and greater security of liveli-
hoods. In retrospect, significant sections of the population there-
fore experience their current life-worlds as more restrictive and less
mobile than those of the past, even as the world around them appears
to have gathered tremendous speed and seems to almost move ‘past’
them (e.g., on high-speed trains, low-budget flights that cater for tour-
ists, students and migrant workers, private cars, unequally accessible
internet connections, etc.).
A focus on pace and change offers complex insights into post-
socialist mobilities. The tendency to concentrate on depopulation and
the persistence and even growth of immobility regimes risks rehearsing
those modernism debates which posit some post-socialist changes as
going ever further backwards. While such a discourse of ‘going back’
is sometimes used as an explicit critique of present realities (Petz 2000;
Hörschelmann 2002; Stenning 2005), there is also another possible
interpretation which can inspire an important change in perspective.
As Dietzsch’s chapter in this volume illustrates, for those who do experi-
ence a clash between the immobilities and apparent slowness imposed
 Introduction 15

on them by state policies, economic decline and mobility restructuring,

deceleration can become a positively charged, critical response to the
worst excesses of ‘modern’ life and the harm it causes to human lives
and the environment.
Some of the most interesting observations on everyday post-socialist
mobilities have come through the study of transport systems directly.
As Bole and Gabrovec show (Chapter 11), a new diversity of mobility
experience has evolved, swapping the commonality of queuing and
bartering for car parts for variably increased levels of motorization,
while the public transport systems established to support the socialist
workforce have become more stratified by class, reflecting wider social
and economic changes. What Simić and Sgibnev both show (again this
volume), however, is how important transport has become in shaping
post-socialist citizen-state relationships. While Sgibnev demonstrates
the visual politicization of trolleybuses in Central Asia, Simić reflects
on how public transport has become an important metaphor for the
absent or underperforming state in Serbian everyday life. We are back
where we started. Mobilities, socialist and post-socialist, tell us about the
intrinsic balance between state and citizen, about inequalities between
these citizens and about where the power lies in different societies.
What the chapters in this volume are able to do is tease out where these
im/balances and relationships carry overtly socialist or post-socialist
markers – the continuation of commuting subsidies in Slovenia, the
lack of trust in the state in Serbia, and the ideological insecurity of the
government in Tajikistan.

Chapter summaries

The chapters in this book – written from a wide range of discipli-

nary perspectives – are part of a wider effort to bring specificity to the
mobilities literature and to push understandings of socialism and post-
socialism further. They tell us about the impact of politics and power on
the everyday mobilities of ordinary people, explore what mobility meant
and means in the specific contexts of socialist and post-socialist regimes
and societies, and how it is practiced in the social and political contexts
which oscillate around them. The geographic range of the chapters is
unavoidably limited – not all countries which could be represented are
covered in the volume – but we hope that the richness of the empirical
data gathered and analysed through these contributions provide an
exciting starting point for further investigations into the myriad inter-
sections between mobility, socialism and post-socialism.
16 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

The opening chapter, by Zakharova, introduces us to the scale of

the project of instigating and controlling communicative mobilities in
post-war USSR. Through careful, exhaustive archive work Zakharova
reveals the often ad hoc nature of Soviet communications policy and
the ongoing problems presented to the regime by population move-
ment and advances in technology. Her work underlines how a focus
on communicative mobilities can illuminate the limits of the state, the
pressures it faced in ‘keeping up’ with capitalism and its own citizens,
the responses these citizens created to circumnavigate controls and the
inevitable social inequalities generated by uneven technological devel-
opment across the Soviet empire. Similar problems in policing and
controlling mobilities in Romania are uncovered in the next chapter by
Cirniala. Here, for all the draconian attempts by the Ceauṣescu regime
to control mobility, it is the subversive de Certeau-esque tactics by
Romanians which stand out – the appropriation of state ideology for
furthering personal mobility goals, the defections of policemen charged
with monitoring the border, and the transformations of serious state
ordered trips into lighthearted outings. Neither of these chapters under-
emphasize the might of the state, nor its controlling intentions, rather
they both demonstrate that mobility provided the times and spaces to
defy these intentions.
Attitudes to international mobility are considered in the following
two chapters by Kassymbekova and Stefan. Concentrating on Soviet
Central Asian tourists in ‘the West’, Kassymbekova shows us how the
potentially threatening desire to travel westwards was closely moni-
tored by the Soviet regime, with would be-tourists carefully selected for
their suitability to travel – sufficiently reliable and loyal to the state that
their presence abroad could be important soft power components in
the ongoing Cold War propaganda skirmishes. Certain Soviet citizens
were able to travel, and were exposed to the western world, but they
could not leave behind the controlling structures and devices of the
Soviet state completely as they did so. In Romania, as Stefan shows,
similar mechanisms were used to select and monitor travel abroad, but
in her chapter she also highlights the value placed on being a tourist by
ordinary Romanians, and the powerful lure that western experiences
held, especially juxtaposed to shortages at home. International mobili-
ties were highly stratified and required intricate negotiation, but they
nevertheless provided exceptional time-spaces where highly cherished
freedoms could be enjoyed.
Leaving behind the romance of international tourism, Tuvikene’s
chapter takes us into the banality of everyday mobilities in Tallin,
 Introduction 17

reminding us of the different material restrictions shaping mobile

lives and of the theoretical importance of noting the ‘moorings’ which
underpin these mobilities. Here the mobilities are cars, and the moor-
ings are the garages and the associated social industry of maintenance
which supported them. In a shortage economy car maintenance required
subversive and resourceful behaviours, an irony in that while the mate-
rial deficiencies of the Soviet union challenged the realization of actual
physical automobilities these moorings created new spaces of social
bonding. The message from these five chapters together is clear; socialist
regimes may have wanted total control over some of the most politi-
cally sensitive mobilities of their populations, but the reality played out
differently on the ground. Material shortages and lack of technological
prowess often opened up new opportunities for more autonomous forms
of mobility.
The midway point of the book sees Vullnetari and King provide a
thoughtful appraisal of gendered mobility in socialist and post-socialist
Albania. Their overview reinforces many of these previous observations
about socialist mobility, not least the multiple immobilities endured by
Albanians at the behest of the state, while at the same time showing
what changed (increased internal and international migration) and
what did not (queuing, in different forms) after socialism collapsed.
As already noted, the focus on gender is an important reminder that
women and men’s lives moved in different ways under socialism and
in the transformations which have come since. Vullnetari and Kings’
observations about the changing nature of the security of mobility are
particularly important. Rising crime rates have impacted on women’s
mobilities especially, underlining the unpredictable and diverse impacts
of post-socialist change on human mobility.
This recognition of crime and danger as a significant dimension
of lived mobilities leads very well into the next chapter by Baker on
Bosnia-Herzegovina. A state ravaged by war and remodelled by popula-
tion displacement through conflict, Baker shows the further disorien-
tating impact of the influx of mobile westerners through peace keeping
missions. The internationalization of post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina
created new inequalities around mobility, generating freedoms for
some, such as opportunities to travel for translators, while restricting the
movements of others as the material process of securitizing the country
through activities such as mine laying and road blocks unfolded.
If the state in Bosnia-Herzegovina was itself almost displaced by the
force of this international presence, mobility can be seen as central to
citizen-state relationships in post-socialist Serbia, as shown in the next
18 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

chapter by Simić. Taking a similar time period to Baker, Simić shows

different mobility fallouts, this time the difficult negotiation of what
role the state should have after socialism and how interventionist it
should be. Serbia in the 1990s, as represented by encounters with its
public transport system, is presented as an economic and political
‘in-between and both’ time-space – neither socialist nor ‘post-socialist’.
It is the in-depth focus on everyday mobilities here especially which
crystallizes this lived experience uncertainty. Moving away from former
Yugoslavia geographically, but staying with discussions about the state
and the political contexts of public transport, Sgibnev offers insights into
the different mobility developments of the Central Asian republics. Here
the politicization of public transport is not just implied but is actively
displayed, exhibited through the use of Soviet era trolleybuses as mobile
billboards carrying political messages designed to bolster fledgling inde-
pendence. The position of the state is much clearer here – not an issue
of not enough state, as suggested in Serbia, but rather the state feeling its
way through change by relying on old certainties – transport provision
for workers, and heavy politicization of public space.
Our final two chapters move away from such overt debates about
the limits and practices of post-socialist states, and focus instead on
the spatial realities of shifting mobilities in post-socialist lives. In their
analysis of automobility in Slovenia, Bole and Gabrovec outline the
extent of change in daily travel patterns there, a country which has
embraced car usage more enthusiastically than anywhere else in the
former Soviet sphere. Automobility has shaped the post-socialist social
and geographical landscape of Slovenia in so many ways, from the class
stratification now imbued in public transport systems to infrastructure
planning designed to facilitate car mobilities. Through this concentra-
tion on car usage, Bole and Gabrovec show the multi-scalar implica-
tions of post-socialist transformation. Alongside revelations about the
changing day to day spatial mobilities of ordinary Slovenians sit the
big questions of post-socialist transformation, modernity and ‘catching
up’. Has Slovenia ‘caught up’ with the West, or has it simply carved
out its own automobile path? Fittingly, in the final chapter Dietzsch
addresses these bigger issues and questions. Using a former industrial
town in what was East Germany as a case study, she turns all those
assumptions about speed, modernity and catching up on their head.
Why should speed be construed as progress? Why should a depopu-
lating, ‘slowing down’ town be considered to be slipping behind? In
a world of growing environmental concerns especially, she calls for a
new understanding of post-socialist mobility to be formed, one that
 Introduction 19

recognizes different pathways and different priorities, and one that

resists the hegemonic tendency to still posit post-Soviet socialist sphere
countries as backwards. One of the many fallouts of post-socialism,
perhaps, is that it offers opportunities to pioneer alternative responses
to the speed of the postmodern world and the prevailing neo-liberal
order.
Collectively, then, the authors here demonstrate the novel under-
standings that can result from an engagement with the modalities,
politics, materialities, conceptualizations and experiences of mobili-
ties in, and also stretching beyond, socialist and post-socialist societies.
They show that experiences of socialism and post-socialism are diver-
gent, often unexpected and cannot easily be generalized, but they also
illustrate more widely the importance of grounding mobilities in time
and space. It is hoped that together they provide a nuanced response
to Cresswell’s (2006: 7) observation that ‘writing on mobility remains
either very specific ... or maddeningly abstract’. In their different ways,
the chapters all point to the fundamental interweaving of politics and
materiality in mobility, simultaneously underlining the usefulness of
mobilities for understanding the big questions about how different soci-
eties and regimes work in practice, and reinforcing the value of using
tangible case studies to investigate both the universalities and peculiari-
ties of actually existing mobilities.

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22 Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Höschelmann

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2
Communication, Mobility and
Control in the Soviet Union
after World War II
Larissa Zakharova

Introduction

Letters, postcards or telegrams are expressions of people’s mobility,

marking the roads of travelling and migration. They are ‘meta-migratory
or para-migratory materials communicated between individuals finding
themselves in remote places’ (Hasan-Rokem 2009: 510–11). Mobility
intensifies communications at-a-distance, as moving material artefacts
or ‘de-materializing’ connections via telephone assure ‘imagined pres-
ence’ and reorganize social relationships. As Urry (2007: 157) argues:
‘mobility systems are not to be viewed as bounded and autonomous but
in part depend upon how forms of travel presuppose and, on occasions,
bring into being modes of communication and new forms of organiza-
tion at-a-distance’ (Urry 2007: 157). The physical mobility of individuals
is accompanied by the movement of a letter or a card in the opposite
direction, symbolizing the social or family attachment of individuals to
the place they left. Thus, due to physical mobility and modes of commu-
nication, social relations are not located in place but constituted through
circulating entities (Urry 2007: 46). But what happens when political
control intervenes with mobility and the means of communication?
According to Castells (2010: 36): ‘Diffusion of information technology,
both of machines and of the know-how, could hardly take place in a
society where the control of information was critical to the legitimacy
of the state, and to the control of the population.’ Does this mean that
in socialist societies, the physical mobility of individuals interrupted
social ties because of the lack of information and communication tech-
nologies and due to political control? By analysing the politicization of

23
24 Larissa Zakharova

communicative mobilities in the post-war Soviet Union, this chapter

seeks to offer more nuanced answers to this question, showing how on
the one hand political interventions in the organization of mobilities
and communication did indeed influence social relationships, while on
the other hand a sense of community emerged that was independent
from the authorities’ intentions.
The chapter is part of a larger research project that examines the medi-
atory role of mail, telephone, and telegraph in governing the Soviet state
at-a-distance from 1917 to 1991, and the social interactions that resulted
from this new system of ‘communication mobility’. Studying material
forms associated with practices of power helps to deepen our under-
standing of the nature of the Soviet political regime. Means of commu-
nication – ways of transmitting orders and directives – played a crucial
role in the practices of the Soviet government. Their constant improve-
ment was intended for a better management of a vast territory spanning
two continents and inherited from the Tsarist Empire. Improvements in
the means of communication had an important role to play in tightly
controlling a heterogeneous population. They also modified the nature
of social relations and how people perceived time and speed.
By looking at channels of communication in the USSR, this project
aims to answer a number of questions that are fundamental for the polit-
ical regimes of the twentieth century: what forms of control were made
possible by the emergence and spread of the new tools of governing?
How did individuals make use of these new communication tools in a
manner that was not desired by the political regime? To answer these
question, I examine three aspects: (1) tangible means of communication
within the Soviet territory, (2) the nature of the Soviet political system
and (3) social and political dimensions of interpersonal communications
in the USSR. The purpose of my project is, firstly, to shed light on trans-
formations in the modes of governing that were enabled and induced
by changes in the materiality of practices of power, and secondly, to
understand the influence of the political system on social cohesion by
analysing individual exchanges in the USSR from 1917 to 1991.
This research draws on archival sources, particularly the archives of
the Ministry of Communications of the RSFSR and of the USSR. The
documents examined include plans, projects, statistical data, reports
and inter-ministerial correspondences on the development of networks
and services and on the allocation of telephone lines to private users.
Important documents regarding the question of control and surveil-
lance of communications can be found in the Communist Party
archives that have been opened up since the beginning of the 1990s.
 Communication, Mobility and Control 25

The KGB and regional Party committees regularly sent reports on indi-
vidual exchanges (letters and telephone conversations) to the Central
Committee of the Communist Party. These materials provide informa-
tion about public attitudes and about the regime’s concerns to find out
what those attitudes were. These surveillance techniques were tools of
governing because their ‘purpose was to act on people, to change them’
(Holquist 1997: 417).

Enabling communication for a mobile society

After World War II, Soviet society was on the move: soldiers and evacuees
returned home or were displaced from one region to another (Manley
2009).1 The building of hydroelectric dams (on the river Kuma in Karelia;
in Stalingrad; in Tsimliansk, 280 km to the east of Rostov-on-the-Don; in
Kakhovka and in Melitopol in Ukraine) and the construction of canals
linking the Volga and the Don, and others in Turkmenistan, was followed
by the arrival of settlers in these regions during the early 1950s.2 From
1954 to 1960, several million people settled in the so-called Virgin Lands
(Kazakhstan, the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East) (Pohl
2004, 2007). Further, after the XXth Party Congress in 1956, some of
the ethnic groups deported under Stalin were allowed to return home
(Campana et al. 2009). During the 1950s, rural exodus led to an increase
in the number of people living in cities and the proportion of urban and
rural populations became equal. After 1970, it became easier for people
to leave rural areas and move to the cities because kolkhoz workers could
now obtain the necessary internal passport without having to seek the
permission of the head of their collective farm. Social and geographic
mobility was followed by the development of communication networks.
The Soviet Union’s rulers had decided to concentrate on making tech-
nological progress and multiplied projects to improve communication
channels within the USSR. At the same time, however, they also tried to
hamper social dynamics founded on free communication by seeking to
control society through the censorship and surveillance of all forms of
interpersonal communication.
The Soviet Union’s leaders were eager to create the illusion of a
communicating, modern society – even if too much freedom to commu-
nicate represented a threat to the political order inasmuch as it could
contribute to the diffusion of oppositional and contrary ideas (Griesse
2011). Their plans were related to different aims. First of all, there was the
need to have a governable society by creating an imagined community
(Anderson 1983). Different tools of communication were interrelated
26 Larissa Zakharova

and developed in symbiosis: radio waves served to spread propaganda

and to assure the functioning of wireless telegraph for political and
economic management. The postal network was to connect individuals,
but was also the main tool for the country-wide diffusion of printed
media. Printed media as well as the wireless were key vectors for the
creation of an imagined community.
The authorities’ first priority was to provide state-sponsored means of
communication (a postal service at the very least) to as many people as
possible. As post offices and telephone exchanges were established in
new settlements all over the country, the authorities prevented the devel-
opment of informal means of communication that would escape their
control. Yet individuals found ways to circumvent the control of their
private communications – for example by taking the convenient route of
transmitting a letter to acquaintances by proxy ( poslat’ s okaziey).
The networks which were set up on the eve of World War II enabled
better communication between the western and eastern halves of
the country thanks, for instance, to the longest telephone line which
stretched over 8,000 kilometres between Moscow and Khabarovsk.
Connected in 1939, this telephone line was later also connected to
Vladivostok. If before the war network density was greater in the western
half of the Soviet Union, the evacuation of factories and qualified staff
to the eastern half during the war repaired this imbalance. By 1950, 171
cities were connected to Moscow by telephone, but some towns in the
eastern Soviet Union had only very weak links with the centre. Post was
only delivered to the coasts of Kamchatka and of the Sea of Okhotsk
two or three times a year because of a lack of ships and the Ministry of
Communication’s complete reliance on the transport capacities of other
administrations. To resolve this problem, the government decided in
1955 to offer 13 fishing boats to the Khabarovsk region for the transport
of post bags.3
Means of transportation were particularly important to maintain
connections with remote parts of the country. In 1955, the number of
cars used for transporting post was still below the pre-war level (3,686
in 1940 and only 3,000 in 1955). A shortage of tyres stopped the distri-
bution of post in the entire Magadan region in September 1956. With
the onset of winter and the impossibility of travel by sea, the Ministry
of Communication asked an agency of the Ministry of Chemical
Industry to provide Magadan with tyres.4 The same year, the Ministry of
Communication also asked for seven additional cars for the Chelyabinsk
region because postal distribution was delayed in Magnitogorsk,
Kopeysk, Korkino and other towns of the region.5
 Communication, Mobility and Control 27

Trains were the main means by which post was transported across the
country, but the speed of postal distribution depended on the trains’
timetables. Aeroplanes had been used to transport post in the USSR
since the 1920s. The number of their destinations grew radically over
several decades.6 In 1948, post flew from Moscow to both new desti-
nations (Vladivostok, Chita, Kemerovo, Molotov, Fergana, Makhach-
Kala and Voroshilovgrad) and old (Kaliningrad, Nizhniy Novgorod,
Kazan, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Alma-Ata, Frunze, Stalinabad, Ashkhabad
and Saratov).7 The generalization of the use of aeroplanes changed the
notion of speed in postal communication through the country. But due
to the lack of solid landing strips during the autumn and spring rains,
which also turned the roads to mud, their use became impracticable and
the distribution of post by aeroplanes was even stopped completely in
certain regions.8 Thus, despite the major ‘technological revolution’ in
transport and communication, social relations in the USSR were none
the less strongly influenced by the country’s climate conditions. To
resolve this problem, in 1956 the Soviet government proposed to use
helicopters to transport post in certain regions.9
The authorities also undertook various projects for regional economic
and cultural development – including the construction of new auto-
mated telephone and telegraph exchanges and post offices that were
to replace the existing old, ramshackle buildings which were no longer
capable of meeting the growing demand for personal communica-
tion.10 By the end of the 1950s the reconstruction and repair of the
damage caused during the war was completed (Psurtsev 1967: 387).
The growth of communication networks was not, however, equal from
region to region. For the whole Soviet Union, the number of communi-
cation offices grew eight-fold between 1913 and 1960, but this growth
was even more pronounced in Central Asia (Uzbekistan = 26-fold,
Kyrgyzstan = 30-fold, Tajikistan = 22-fold), and Belarus (24-fold).
The main task of this effort was to improve the accessibility of means
of communication in rural areas. In 1956, many post offices were
accommodated in relatively inconvenient premises, such as private flats
belonging to collective farm workers, or were quite simply absent: 171
settlements in 44 districts of the Kirov, Arzamas and Krasnodar regions
and of the Tatar autonomous republic had no post office, and corre-
spondence was entrusted to occasional travellers.11 In 1959, 80 per cent
of the Soviet Union’s post offices were situated in villages and the country
did not compare well with the United States: a single post office in the
USSR was responsible for a geographical area three times larger than its
American counterpart (Vishnevskiy 1960: 17–20, 28). The situation had
28 Larissa Zakharova

hardly improved by 1962: over 1,200 rural settlements, 1,800 collective

farms and 100 state-owned farms were situated more than five kilome-
tres from the nearest post office. In the Tyumen region, 318 settlements
were situated more than five kilometres from the nearest post office, 134
in the Tomsk region and 61 in the Lipetsk region. No post was received
at all in 23 of 136 settlements in the Sorokin district of the Altai region.12
In these settlements the sense of community was primarily based on
geographical proximity and co-presence. Given the mass rural exodus
of the time, this meant that people who moved to the cities were cut off
from the friends and family they left behind in the countryside. Thus,
because of insufficient communication infrastructures the physical
mobility of individuals was not always accompanied by the necessary
means to communicate at-a-distance, and social relationships depended
on the possibility of getting access to those means.
The risk of creating closed, isolated communities due to insufficient
communication infrastructures was strong, which is why over time a
post office was opened in every new settlement. For instance, when the
construction of a new power plant began near the city of Belovo in the
Kemerovo region in 1956, the nearest post office was at first situated
ten kilometres away and the team of 1,500 builders found it difficult
to communicate with the outside world. Following a request from the
Ministry of Power Plant Construction, the Ministry of Communication
ordered the local authority to build a new post office for the building
site.13 The government thus contributed to preserving existing social
links and the agencies which had mobilized individuals to the construc-
tion sites lobbied the Ministry of Communication on their behalf. In
1956, the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Soviet Union’s offi-
cial Communist youth organization) presented a letter to the Party and
government in which it deplored the lack of access to postal and wire-
less services of young people in the town of Norilsk. As a result of this
letter, the Ministry of Communication ordered the opening of a new
post office.14
Access to postal services was also of vital importance for ‘virgin
landers’ as it enabled the new settlers to be sent vital goods like sewing
machines. Parcels represented the bulk of the post that residents in the
new settlements received, while they mostly sent letters and postcards
to their relatives.15 Sending food parcels was also a common practice.
Until 1961, 60 per cent of the parcels sent from Moscow and other post
offices in the Moscow region contained food, as people adopted their
own measures to compensate for the deficiencies of the state’s distribu-
tion system for consumer goods (which was essentially concentrated in
 Communication, Mobility and Control 29

the capital). In November 1960, as part of an attempt to eliminate the

cost of reimbursing people whose food had gone off due to long delays
in postal delivery, the authorities forbade post offices from accepting
parcels containing food.16

Complementary mobilities

Increasingly, mobile individuals tried to preserve their social links not

only by developing mutual aid practices but also by exchanging news.
The measures the authorities took to increase the volume of written
correspondence and telegrams during holidays (New Year, October
Revolution Day on the 7th of November, May Day, and so on) reveal
the way in which the Soviet authorities thought about the itineraries
of people’s mobility and the necessary relations that this mobility
implied. From their point of view, communications had to be organ-
ized in a radial manner, that is between Moscow and provincial towns
and villages. Besides laying new telegraph lines and increasing the
number of places from which telegrams could be sent (in Moscow, for
example, one could even send a telegram from any metro station), the
authorities also extended the working hours of telegraph lines between
Moscow and Voronezh, Rostov, Krasnodar, Sochi and Leningrad the eve
of holidays.17
In the Khrushchev era, there were also moves to intertwine the tele-
phone, in its functional dimension, more closely with mobility in order
to showcase the advanced technological stage of communication services
in the Soviet Union. In 1955, inhabitants of Moscow were thus given the
opportunity to buy train tickets over the telephone. However, take-up
was so enthusiastic that telephone lines were overloaded in the morning
and even the lines of several ministries were put out of order. Those in
charge of Moscow’s telephone network suggested the service only be
made available in the evenings when most state employees would have
gone home for the day, but the Ministry of Transport disagreed.18 Thus
the idea of the Ministry of Transport making a commercial profit based
upon the social demands of people’s mobility conflicted with the imper-
ative of the rational functioning of government communications.
Telecommunications became an intricate part of, and changed the
modalities of travel, as it became possible to communicate independent
of fixed locations. Thus, in the mid-1950s, a new project was imple-
mented to try and conjugate two forms of mobility: telegraph services
were offered to passengers in railway stations. Mobile cashiers tended to
the needs of customers in the waiting rooms of railway stations, on the
30 Larissa Zakharova

platforms and even on board the trains themselves.19 Physical mobility

could therefore be followed by communicative mobility, creating ‘in-be-
tween spaces’: telegrams were a quick and concise means of commu-
nication which enabled people to improve the organization of their
appointments. Communication thus had the effect of complementarity
in relation to physical travel.
The Soviet authorities made a series of attempts to provide means
of communication to mobile individuals. Even if they could not offer
sufficient services to people living in the countryside and in outlying
regions, they took into account different forms of mobility such as the
movement of workers, the return of evacuees and tourism (Gorsuch and
Koenker 2006). To meet the demands of the Soviet Union’s many tour-
ists, the authorities ordered the construction of new automated tele-
phone exchanges (ATEs) in several cities along the Black Sea coast for
the beginning of the holiday season. In 1956, for instance, an ATE which
had been presented at an industrial exhibition in Moscow was disman-
tled and transported to Sochi.20 Communication was thus regarded as
central to constructing and representing Soviet modernity. We will now
see to what degree individuals could benefit from these politics.

Access to means of communication: territorial and

social inequalities

Social and territorial inequalities in access to communication services

were pronounced, especially regarding telephones. An explicative note
appended to the 1966 plan for the development of means of commu-
nication gives one an idea of the rarity of telephone lines. It had been
planned that on the first of January 1967 there would be 1,900,000
telephone numbers in all of Russia’s urban centres (1,540,300 of them
concentrated in ATEs), yet the total increase for 1966 was a mere 38,500
numbers.21 Taking into account the fact that by 1970 around half of
the RSFSR’s estimated 130,079,000 inhabitants lived in cities,22 one can
estimate that there was only one telephone number for every 34 people
in each city.
In 1969, only 6 per cent of the USSR’s inhabitants had access to a
telephone (compared with 2 per cent in 1940 and 4 per cent in 1965).
Variations in these figures reveal territorial inequalities: Latvia had the
highest number of telephones (12 per cent), followed by Estonia (10
per cent) and Armenia (9 per cent). The Baltic Republics fared better
thanks to their pre-Soviet telephone networks, whereas the Central
Asian republics had the lowest number of telephones (a mere 4 per cent
 Communication, Mobility and Control 31

in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) due to their low level of

urbanization. Further, only 37 per cent of all urban telephone lines in
the USSR were for private use – the remaining 63 per cent were used by
the state.23 Telephone networks were therefore above all an administra-
tive tool for running the country.
The distribution of telephone lines thus underlined spatial and social
inequalities. Comparing telephone access between cities and villages
reveals major inequalities which rural exodus further aggravated (the
fewer the inhabitants, the less likely it was for those who stayed to be
given access to modern means of communication). In 1969, only 1 per
cent of all rural inhabitants in the entire USSR had access to a telephone,
and the national figures once again reveal the same level of inequality:
Estonia, 5 per cent; Latvia, 4 per cent; Armenia and Lithuania, 2 per cent;
Uzbekistan, 0.53 per cent; Turkmenistan, 0.48 per cent; Tadzhikistan,
0.42 per cent.24
An analysis of the situation in the RSFSR’s Tatar autonomous republic
can help one understand how rural exodus influenced communication.
In 1973, the urban population of the republic grew by 3 per cent, while
the rural population declined by 2 per cent.25 The following year, around
4 per cent of the republic’s inhabitants had access to a telephone, but in
rural areas, this figure was only 2 per cent.26 With the increase in urban
populations, the number of inter-city telephone calls27 and telegrams
also grew: by 8 per cent each in 1973. Letters remained the major means
of personal communication, however, and the postal network was used
even more intensively for the distribution of printed media, which were
increasingly printed locally. The Tatars sent, on average, 28 letters a year
and received 130 journals and newspapers.28 The rhythm of exchange of
private news essentially depended upon the speed of postal distribution:
on average, individuals received or sent a letter twice a month. While
the limited access to telephones generally prevented a more intense
rhythm of communication, social ties between urban inhabitants were
strengthened by the better availability of telephone services, while rela-
tions between rural residents and between those who had moved to the
cities and those who had stayed behind in the villages were much harder
to maintain.
Across the country, inter-city communication was conducted from
public call offices but these were not available everywhere, not even in
some urban areas. In 1956, for instance, some towns near Moscow (such
as Balashikha, Reutovo, Lyublino and Kransnogorsk) had no public
telephone offices capable of making city-to-city calls at all.29 Those
cities that did have inter-city telephone lines were mostly connected to
32 Larissa Zakharova

Moscow. Such a radial scheme was closely related to the political goals of
governing the country as it limited the possibility of maintaining social
links between people living in provincial cities.
With the growth of mobility, the demand for inter-city telephone
communications grew from year to year. Thus in 1955, 2.5 per cent of
inter-city telephone communications took over an hour to be connected
as the overloaded telephone network was incapable of meeting the real
demand for communication.30 People tried to use rapid tools of commu-
nication to shorten distance, but the technology they had access to
did not always permit it. Unpublished statistical data enables one to
compare the unequal use of different means of communication. In 1955,
the inhabitants of the RSFSR sent 1,584,872,400 letters and postcards
and 111,150,900 telegrams. In 1954, 995,300 telegrams were sent every
day, a number which grew to 1,013,000 daily in 1955. This compares to
191,300 telephone calls a day in 1954.31
How could people acquire a telephone for private use? Communications
equipment issued to civil servants for strategic reasons was sometimes
appropriated by people for private use and thus became a symbol of
social inequality. In 1947, an ATE with a 3,000-number capacity which
had been requisitioned in Germany after World War II was installed in
the city of Voroshilov (112 km north of Vladivostok in the Primorskiy
region). One thousand numbers were allocated to the local military head-
quarters free of charge, but when the Primorskiy military command was
abolished these numbers were distributed among the families of soldiers
and officers (who did not pay for the telephone service). It took until
1956 for the head of the local agency of the Ministry of Communications
to find this out, and from then on everybody had to pay.32
As telephones were a scarce commodity even in the 1950s and 1960s,
there was a long bureaucratic procedure to obtain one. Local authorities
often wrote to the Ministry of Communications to ask for the installa-
tion of a telephone line in the flat of a member of the local elite. These
local authorities sometimes underlined the social importance of access
to a telephone for the candidate, saying that he or she needed to be able
to use the telephone outside his or her working hours.33
In 1954, Ms Almazova – an employee of the All-Soviet Ministry of
Fisheries – applied for the installation of a telephone in her flat in
Moscow but was told that her local telephone exchange did not have
the necessary technical infrastructure to accommodate her request. Two
years later, however, after the telephone exchange was modernized, a
telephone was installed in the communal flat of Almazova’s neighbours.
An angry and no doubt jealous Almazova complained bitterly to her
 Communication, Mobility and Control 33

superiors – particularly about one female neighbour with whom she

had complicated relations. She thought it unfair and improper that this
woman (of all people) had been given a telephone whereas she – an
important employee of the All-Soviet Ministry of Fisheries – had not.
So her superiors at the All-Soviet Ministry of Fisheries sent a letter of
complaint to the All-Soviet Ministry of Communications in which they
defended the interests of their employee, and in response the Ministry
of Communications asked the head office responsible for Moscow’s tele-
phone system to investigate the case. This investigation later discovered
that when Almazova had applied for a telephone in 1954, 147 other
people living in her building had already seen their application turned
down. When the local telephone exchange was rebuilt in 1956, newly
available lines were used to satisfy some of these requests, but priority
was given to older applications made before 1947. The investigation
concluded that Almazova’s neighbour had originally applied for a tele-
phone in 1943, 11 years before Almazova, and that she had therefore
quite rightly been given priority.34 The principle of social justice there-
fore played against the mechanism of privileges. The employee of the
Ministry had hoped to obtain the rare tool of communication because
of her professional status, but as her request had not been supported by
a letter from her Ministry, the head office responsible for such matters
treated her request for a telephone as an ordinary application and added
it to the waiting list. Even the later intervention of the Ministry did not
change this because all telephone lines had already been allocated.
This comical situation shows the technological limitations the central
authorities faced. While their interventions resulted in a certain degree
of asymmetry and social inequality between people, in certain cases
those responsible for the telephone network were not able to serve
the authorities’ interests – particularly when faced with a shortage of
equipment.
The concentration of elites in the same neighbourhood was one
technique used, however, for granting privileges and exercising surveil-
lance. In 1955, an apartment block situated at 98/11 Meshchanskaya
Street in Moscow was allocated to the branch of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs responsible for the accommodation of foreign diplomats and
their families. Some flats in this building, however, had no telephone,
so the branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs asked the Ministry of
Communications to install telephones in the foreign diplomats’ flats.
A shortage of telephone wire meant that it took over a year to install
telephones in all the flats,35 and even in the early 2000s the tenants
now living in these flats complained about the fact that their telephones
34 Larissa Zakharova

generally worked for only half an hour at a time. The reason for this
was that diplomats’ conversations were secretly recorded and the audio
tapes used had to be replaced after half an hour. When the tape ran
out the line was automatically cut until a new tape had been spooled
into the recorder.36 Thus, the state’s surveillance system also interfered
with the smooth flow of communication. The next section focuses on
this issue in more depth.

The extent of state control over communications

The question of evading the state’s surveillance of interpersonal commu-

nication is linked to that of resistance to the regime and to dissidence.
One should not, however, overestimate the importance of resistance
against the Soviet state during the 1950s and 1960s (Krylova 2000:
119–46). After World War II, the inspection of private correspondence
or wiretapping was not overwhelming and omnipresent and the vast
majority of Soviet citizens would not have worried about needing to
hide anything from the State, as they had integrated Soviet norms and
ways of thinking and thought of themselves as worthy Soviet citizens
(Kotkin 1997; Hellbeck 2006). The situation was different, of course,
for those whom the state regarded as potential enemies or ‘suspects’,
such as former members of aristocratic families or Gulag prisoners, who
developed specific coded language in their communications with rela-
tives in order to hide their political opinions from the censors (Jobert
2005; Jobert 2009; Figes 2012). However, even those who should have
feared the prying eyes of the state reading through their personal corre-
spondence did not always use caution. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for
instance, was arrested February 1945 as a result of his correspondence
being opened and read. Solzhenitsyn was finally ‘released’ in 1953, but
all his post was inspected for a further 17 years.37
The practice and the effects of inspecting private communications
revealed a degree of tension between political aspirations and pragma-
tism: an analysis of the use of wiretapping and of the inspection of private
correspondence can help one understand the extent to which the state
was able to control individuals by these means. ‘Black chambers’ run by
the political police (OGPU-NKVD-KGB) for the interception and inspec-
tion of written correspondence were attached to post offices. In 1923
and 1924, it has been estimated that the OGPU opened and read around
5,000,000 letters and more than 8,000,000 telegrams per year across the
country (Rosenfeldt 2009: 91–95). As around 130,000,000 telegrams
were sent in total that year (ibid.), this means that an astounding 6 per
 Communication, Mobility and Control 35

cent or more were intercepted. In the years immediately after the revolu-
tion, this was only possible because the Soviet political police used some
of the staff and infrastructures of the tsarist censorship regimes that had
been developed largely during World War I (Holquist 1997; Holquist
2002).
The categories by which letters were defined as requiring inspection
varied from period to period. During the drive towards the collectiviza-
tion of agriculture, all letters from rural areas to soldiers were opened:
the aim was to prevent an uprising in the army. From the 1930s onwards,
political control focused on all correspondence with people living abroad
as well as all letters sent by foreigners living in the Soviet Union. After
World War II, private correspondence was intercepted according to two
principles. The first one – named ‘alphabet’ – consisted of the system-
atic opening of letters from or to persons identified as ‘suspicious’. The
second one relied upon various factors which were considered suspi-
cious such as letters sent to an anonymous address (e.g., a numbered
post office box); voluminous letters or letters sent in high numbers by
the same person, as they could include tracts. Letters sent abroad were
also opened (Rosenfeldt 2009: 98–99). After 1956, dissidents became the
prime target of the postal inspectors. In Moscow, during the 1970s, 30
KGB employees tapped around 50 phones. This low number is explained
by the low quantity and quality of available technology: tape reels were
a rare commodity, bought in Eastern Europe and of poor quality. They
often tore during transcription. These technological problems were a
key reason why surveillance was carried out primarily by other, more
archaic means of control, such as using informants (KGB employers and
simple Soviet citizens) who filed reports on ‘suspicious’ individuals.
Wiretapping was mostly used to control representatives of the Soviet
elite. In 1942 and 1943, equipment for tapping telephones was installed
in the flats of Marshals Budennyy, Zhukov and Timoshenko during
‘planned maintenance’ of their home’s heating system (the marshals all
lived in the same building, at 3 Granovskogo Street). A special room was
used to house the equipment. Following the arrest of the head of the
Ministry of Interior, Beria, in 1953, this same Ministry ordered that the
wiretaps be cut. The equipment was dismantled and taken away, and the
room was allocated to the superintendent in charge of the building.38 To
a certain extent, reshuffles at the top of the leadership sphere were thus
accompanied by changes in perspective on the elites whose telephones
should be tapped.
Towards the end of the 1940s, the KGB began to tap the telephone
conversations of Lev Landau, a physicist. Landau’s importance was
36 Larissa Zakharova

related to his participation in the atomic bomb project, but this was not
the only reason why his conversations were tapped. Reports transmitted
by the KGB to the Central Committee reveal that Landau feared neither
surveillance nor repression: his awareness of his strategic importance
as a researcher and his realization that the Soviet authorities depended
on him enabled him to openly express his ‘anti-Soviet’ views. It was
his trump card in his games with the authorities. According to Landau
himself, he was involved in the atomic bomb project because he was
Jewish. In fact, Landau dreamed to emigrate from the USSR, and during
an international conference held in Moscow in May 1957 Landau gave
an American physicist called Weiskopf a list of Soviet scientists who
should be invited to the United States. He included himself in the list
and explained who had taken part in the A-bomb project. The Party
subsequently prohibited him from travelling abroad, fearing that he
would not return.39 Controlling communication therefore sometimes
served to limit the international mobility of certain individuals.
This was also the case with another famous physicist, Andrey Sakharov.
His dissident activities were the reason for which his mobility was limited
in every possible way, and in 1980 he was arrested and exiled to Gorki for
almost six years. All his post was inspected and most of his letters were
never delivered. His telephone conversations were also monitored, and
microphones installed in his flat in Gorki enabled the KGB to monitor
his conversations with guests. Sakharov’s post was, however, inspected
even before he was exiled: in 1968, a letter addressed to Sakharov from
the editor-in-chief of an American journal, War and Peace Report, was
confiscated by the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets,
and Sakharov did not know that the editor had suggested they create an
International Political Party together. In 1969, after the publication in
the West of Sakharov’s thoughts on progress, peaceful coexistence and
intellectual freedom, many Western authors decided to send Sakharov
copies of their books on similar topics, but all of them were confiscated
and never delivered.40
The partial opening up of Soviet society following Stalin’s death
was expressed through increasing levels of mobility outside the
USSR (Gorsuch 2011), but this mobility was socially speaking highly
unequal as only representatives of the elite were granted the right to
travel abroad. Communication with foreign countries grew as mobility
increased. When in 1963 Vladimir Ashkenazi – a Soviet pianist from the
Moscow State Philharmonic Society – went on tour in London, all his
telephone conversations with his father living in Moscow were tapped.
He had been under KGB surveillance since his tour of the United States
 Communication, Mobility and Control 37

and Canada in 1958. The KGB reported to the Central Committee that
Ashkenazi had shown himself to be politically immature: he praised the
Western way of life and complained of his small fees in the USSR. In
1961, Ashkenazi married a girl from Iceland who had come to Moscow
in 1960 to study at the state conservatoire. Based on ‘serious compro-
mising materials’, the KGB repeatedly (in 1959, 1961 and 1962) warned
the Central Committee’s ‘Commission for Travel Abroad’ of the undesir-
ability of allowing Ashkenazi to travel abroad.41
Wiretapping was not, however, always exclusively employed for the
surveillance of persons under such strict overall control. The writer
Arkadii Perventsev’s telephone was tapped in 1972 in order to identify
the anonymous persons who were calling and threatening him following
the publication of his novel The Honour from the Youngest Years (which was
awarded the Stalin prize for literature and accused the Crimean Tatars
of being traitors).42 This surveillance was carried out to protect him and
to identify the authors of the threatening calls, but at the same time the
installation of wiretapping equipment obviously forced Perventsev to
reinforce his self-control and self-censorship.
Those who migrated abroad were not prevented from corresponding
with friends and family in the USSR as the state considered some of their
communication convenient for reinforcing Soviet official discourse.
In March 1960, the Party Committee of the Krasnoyarsk region sent
a report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party based
upon an inspection of personal correspondence between people in the
Krasnoyarsk region and any relatives they had living abroad. Every time
someone living abroad expressed even the slightest disappointment with
their lives outside the Soviet Union, the Party Committee presented it as
proof of the hard life people led in ‘bourgeois’ countries. The report was
exclusively made up of extracts of letters that agreed with the tenets of
Soviet propaganda – as if the Party Committee of the Krasnoyarsk region
was trying to reassure the Kremlin.43
Thus, a certain Dmitrii Borisenko, who was born in 1934, had married
a German woman and had emigrated to Western Germany in 1958,
wrote to his brother that his worker’s salary was not enough to feed his
family (and go drinking every Saturday) and that his wife would also
have to look for work. Maria Gedrat, a German national born 1935 and
emigrated to Western Germany in 1959, wrote to her mother and sister
that life was harder in Germany, that it was difficult to find a job, and
that the people were ‘worse than in Siberia’. She wrote that she had
no intention whatsoever of encouraging them to join her in Germany
and told them she was thinking about returning to the USSR. A certain
38 Larissa Zakharova

Aleksey Piterskii, who had emigrated from Harbin to the United States,
also wrote to an acquaintance of the difficulties he faced in trying to
find work in America. Many complained in their letters of the difficulty
of finding a job and of the high cost of living abroad. Prokhor Leoniuk,
who had been living in the United States since the 1920s, wrote about
his impressions of the Soviet exhibition in New York. His praise of the
Soviet Union’s industrial achievements corresponded to socialist ideolo-
gies during the Cold War: the future belonged to the USSR, whereas
American children were doomed. The interception of these kinds of
letters enabled the authorities to evaluate the efficiency of their propa-
ganda on the other side of the Iron Curtain.44 The auto-censorship of
the letters’ authors meant that KGB officers could behave more like
regulators or moderators of these relationships-at-a-distance than as
‘gardeners’, to use Bauman’s terminology (1991: 70–82): they did not
try to ‘clean’ the society from ‘undesirable elements’, but kept an eye on
exchanges between ‘suspicious’ individuals, removing only those letters
that could have had a ‘pernicious’ influence on Soviet subjects. The KGB
thus tolerated the existence of transnational communities of ‘affect’
with rather weak ties so long as their expressions of ‘communion’ were
commensurate with official discourse.
The report prepared by the Party Committee did not analyse the
reasons why those who had emigrated were disappointed. There is no
reference to the likely contradictions between the mythologizing of
western lifestyles and reality. Nostalgia, homesickness, missing one’s
family and relatives, feelings of isolation in a foreign country with a
different language and all the attendant challenges and difficulties are
never mentioned by the Party workers. Simply expressing disappoint-
ment was enough to reassure the Soviet Union’s leaders that their propa-
ganda and social engineering efforts were successful. The censors never
mentioned the fact that the authors could have sent their relatives a
letter critical of life in capitalist countries simply in order to confirm
their arrival and to protect their relatives from persecution.
Compared to letters and untapped telephone conversations, postcards
and telegrams were a less ‘secure’ means of communication because
they were semi-public: they were explicitly personal (addressed to only
one person) but implicitly public (since their text, picture and stamp
were readily visible). The risk of control and repression if ‘anti-Soviet’
ideas were expressed was greater with postcards and telegrams than
with closed letters, as not only state employees but also zealous citi-
zens desiring to ‘preserve’ the social order might discover them. Since
the sender of a postcard or telegram could not be sure who would read
 Communication, Mobility and Control 39

them, he or she would typically adapt his or her wording accordingly

(Östman 2004: 423).
The shifts in the organization and channelling of surveillance that I
have described here show that Soviet authorities were confronted with
a major contradiction: the significant increase in the speed and volume
of transport and communication that was enabled by modernization,
also threatened to politicize society in ways that the state struggled to
contain. This problem explains why modernization was accompanied
by surveillance in the first place. Soviet Research and Development
had for several decades served first and foremost the military-indus-
trial complex, whereas civilian technologies were neglected and mostly
inferior quality imitations and adaptations of Western inventions. The
lack of research and innovation in civilian technologies made them
inefficient and provoked their permanent obsolescence. This in turn
became an obstacle to further modernization and limited the state’s
ability to control society. One of the inherent contradictions of the
Soviet system was that the state apparatus failed to grasp and keep
up with the new realities brought about by the system’s embrace and
specific implementation of ‘the technological revolution’ (Castells
2010: 28–31).

Conclusion

Inspired by Mary Douglas’ ‘grid and group’ cultural theory, Catriona

Kelly notes that Soviet leaders aspired to put in place a ‘strong grid’
and a ‘weak groups’ ideal. This in turn was meant to allow the ideology
to penetrate all spheres of Soviet life and to enable tight ideological
control over tolerated informal groups and organizations (Kelly 2009:
52). This explanatory framework is particularly useful for understanding
communicative mobilities in post-war Soviet Union. Soviet leaders tried
their best to avoid ‘propinquitous, co-present communities’ that could
create strong groups, and wished instead to stimulate communities of
‘affect’ based on shared communist ideals. For this, they attempted to
provide state-supported means of communication to people on the
move in order to associate mobility with communication that could
be controlled. Yet, their efforts did not necessarily lead to the desired
results. First, the grid turned out to be weaker than expected, especially
in the late Soviet period, when the ideology became frozen and formal-
ized. Second, strong groups did emerge in the Soviet Union and contrary
to the regime’s expectations, they grew out of communities of ‘affect’
(Yurchak 2005).
40 Larissa Zakharova

Following World War II, Soviet authorities found themselves conf-

ronted with unexpected consequences of their politics. They encouraged
the physical mobility of their citizens for political or economic reasons
and thus stretched out social ties. The ensuing increase in geograph-
ical distance between people and their relatives and friends provoked
a growing demand for communication, but despite efforts to develop
public means of communication, the means available could not match
real social demand. The Soviet authorities therefore had to invest in the
communication sector in order to avoid an outbreak of social discon-
tent, but they also feared the possible consequences of too much free
communication. They therefore tried to retain control over the flow of
communication. In a context of chronic shortages this turned out to be
difficult because it implied additional expenditure (to pay the censors
and purchase or design surveillance equipment). These contradictions
between support and fear of communications confirm the difficulties
of Soviet statism ‘to manage the transition to the Information Age’
(Castells 2010: 2).
To what extent did mobility influence communication? Rural exodus
tested the abilities of the regime to reach the population: it almost cut
off some regions from the rest of the country as the regions’ post offices
were closed due to being unprofitable. Such economizing provoked
contradictions with the state’s ideological preoccupations: these
regions became spaces of co-present communities that the state strug-
gled to control. The main efforts to provide means of communication
and control were focused on urban spaces, where ex-rural inhabitants
moved to. New post offices were also opened, however, mainly to serve
large construction sites. The displacement of people that rural-urban
migration and the construction of new settlements entailed changed the
geography of communication: some strong ties in co-present communi-
ties became weaker because of distance, while new strong ties appeared
in the cities thanks to advanced communication technology, especially
the telephone. Internal migrations changed traditional social patterns.
But this geography also depended upon the way in which Soviet leaders
planned the country’s communications network. This scheme was radial
in form as such a network was ideal for the purposes of centralized polit-
ical governance and economic management. It led to social links being
easier to maintain between the capital and provincial cities than between
provincial cities. Thus, even if the post-war Soviet Union followed the
general twentieth-century pattern of intertwined transport and commu-
nication development, one of its specificities resided in the fact that the
networks were spatially organized in accordance with the administrative
 Communication, Mobility and Control 41

division of the country. Flows of people, goods and communication were

therefore channelled and organized along the tracks that had evolved to
coincide with this administrative structure.
The spread of communication infrastructures in cities was also
made necessary by the weakening of social ties that characterized rural
communities with their more enclosed social structures and direct
modes of interaction. Modern communications equipment such as
telephones, available to the city-dwelling elite, contributed to shape a
specific, urban culture of communication with exchanges of news on a
daily basis. Access to means of communication with foreign countries
was also regulated by a strict social hierarchy: ordinary Soviet citizens
exchanged letters with their relatives living abroad, whereas the elite
could communicate by telephone.
These differentiated levels and speeds of communication providing
different types of links (of varying strengths) led to the state introducing
various forms of surveillance. Wiretapping first of all served the aims
of police surveillance as it enabled the state to uncover and monitor
the political opinions of the elite. The inspection of postal services, on
the other hand, was more directed at governing the country, a tech-
nique of power exercised through general surveillance of the population
(Holquist 2002: 236–39). The mere organization of control – its focus on
specific target groups (such as dissidents or persons who had relatives
abroad) – left a wide range of social categories out of reach of the regime.
The state tried to control mobility and communication, but it could not
keep all mobile individuals under observation. For instance, those who
felt they had been treated unfairly in the process of allocating telephone
lines could complain about these injustices in letters to their relatives
that were probably not opened by the KGB. The physical mobility of
individuals and the major increase in postal and telephone communica-
tions created spaces of some autonomy from the official ‘grid’.
Another specificity of communicative mobilities in post-war Soviet
Union was their politicization: each decision on mobility and each act
of communication had a political significance in the degree to which
they corresponded to the aims of the regime. To communicate by post
card or telegram on the eve of official holidays symbolized political
loyalty and belonging to the Soviet imagined community. The provi-
sion of opportunities for sending telegrams from a railway station or
using the telephone in a vacation resort were supposed to demon-
strate technological progress and its positive impact on the quality of
life in the USSR. The state encouraged such conjunctions of transport
and communication mobilities, whereas in other cases it tried to cut
42 Larissa Zakharova

social ties and forms of imagined presence at-a-distance, especially

when communication served to transmit politically undesired ideas
and opinions. Thus, communicative mobilities in the post-war Soviet
Union triggered new modes of governing populations, moving from
the severe repressions of Stalinism to an increased reliance on selective
surveillance and citizen’s self-control as the state was unable to extend
full control over ever increasing flows of goods, people, communica-
tions and ideas.

Notes
1. According to the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR of 4
June 1949, which followed the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the
USSR of 18 May 1949, it was necessary ‘to voluntarily displace 2,200 fami-
lies of kolkhoz members and other inhabitants of rural and urban areas to
Karelia in 1949 in order to employ them in the enterprises of the Ministry
of forestry and paper industry of the USSR and in the Karelian collective
farms, including 500 families from the Voronezh region, 200 families from
the Vladimir region, 300 families from Gorki, 300 from the Moscow region
and 150 from the Autonomous Bashkir Republic. Later, according to the reso-
lution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of 11 February 1949, a further
300 families from the Kursk region, 150 from the Riazan region and 300
families from the Autonomous Chuvash Republic in order to complete this
population displacement’: State Archives of Russian Federation (GARF), f. A
259, op. 6, d. 5681, l. 70.
2. These construction sites used volunteer and Gulag labour forces. GARF, f. A
389, op. 1, d. 118, l. 227; d. 457, ll. 63–65; Russian State Economic Archives
(RGAE), f. 3527, op. 4, d. 2050, ll. 1–3, 6, 10, 24, 33–34, 143–46, 148–49,
196–97.
3. GARF, f. A 389, op. 1, d. 126, l. 22.
4. Ibid., d. 125, l. 129.
5. Ibid., d. 127, l. 196.
6. Ibid., d. 457, l. 2.
7. RGAE, f. 3527, op. 7, d. 849, l. 9.
8. GARF, f. A 389, op. 1, d. 118, l. 158.
9. Ibid., l. 163.
10. Ibid., d. 54, l. 145 ; d. 118, ll. 31, 46.
11. GARF, f. A 389, op. 1, d. 118, ll. 150, 157.
12. GARF, F. A 389, op. 1, d. 529, l. 41.
13. Ibid., d. 125, ll. 118–19.
14. Ibid., d. 118, l. 236.
15. Ibid., l. 65, 135 ; d. 122, l. 57.
16. Ibid., d. 461, l. 69.
17. Ibid., d. 126, l. 167.
18. Ibid., d. 54, ll. 26, 28, 29, 36.
19. Ibid., d. 123, l. 66.
20. GARF, f. A 389, op. 1, d. 123, l. 72; d. 127, l. 245.
 Communication, Mobility and Control 43

21. Ibid., d. 457, ll. 40–41.

22. Narodnoe khozaistvo SSSR za 1990 god, Moscow, Goskomstat, 1991.
23. RGAE, f. 3527, op. 4, d. 4399, l. 9.
24. Ibid., l. 11.
25. National Archives of Tatarstan Republic (NART), f. R 5666, op. 2, d. 1071, l.
131.
26. Ibid., l. 160.
27. Ibid., l. 132.
28. GARF, f. A 389, op. 1, d. 457, l. 63.
29. GARF, f. A 389, op. 1, d. 457, l. 63.
30. Ibid., d. 126, l. 89.
31. Ibid, ll. 92, 99, 100
32. Ibid., d. 125, l. 126.
33. Ibid., d. 54, ll. 71–73 ; d. 266, ll. 26, 67.
34. Ibid., d. 125, l. 121.
35. Ibid., ll. 88–90.
36. Interview with a former tenant of a flat at 98/11 Meshchanskaya Street in
Moscow, on 24 December 2009.
37. Russian State Archives for Modern History (RGANI), f. 89, per. 37, d. 23, l.
1–2.
38. RGANI, f. 89, per. 18, d. 27, l. 1.
39. Ibid., d. 42, ll. 1–17.
40. Ibid., d. 114, ll. 1–13 ; per. 37, d. 44, ll. 1–3 ; d. 42, ll. 1–5.
41. RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, ll. 18–21.
42. Ibid., f. 89, per. 18, d. 49, l. 1.
43. Ibid., d. 319, ll. 41–44 (o. i.).
44. Ibid., ll. 41–44 (o. i.).

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at war, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Östman, J O (2004) ‘The postcard as media’, Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the
Study of Discourse 24 (3): 423–42.
Pohl, M (2004) ‘Women and girls in the virgin lands’, in M Iliç, S E Reid and L
Attwood (eds) Women in the Khrushchev era, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 52–74.
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tity in the virgin lands’, in N Breyfogle, A Schrader and W Sunderland (eds)
Peopling the Russian periphery: borderland colonization in Eurasian history, London
and New York: Routledge.
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Rosenfeldt, N E (2009) The ‘special’ world. Stalin’s power apparatus and the Soviet
system’s secret structures of communication, Vol. 2, Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen.
Urry, J (2007) Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Vishnevskiy, A A (1960) Razvitie sviazi v SSSR, Moscow: Vysshaia partiinaia shkola.
Yurchak, A (2005) Everything was forever until it was no more. The last Soviet genera-
tion, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
3
Power and Mobilities in Socialist
Romania 1964–89
Ciprian Cirniala

Introduction

In 1979, the Romanian progressive rock band ‘Sfinx’ coined two phrases
which described fittingly how mobilities were experienced by many
Romanians after the post-war period of industrialization: ‘life is running
faster’ and ‘time is in trouble’ (Aldea 1979). Only two years later, the
band’s lead singer Dan Andrei Aldea emigrated to western Germany,
thus further symbolizing the contradictions that the Romanian state
could no longer resolve by simultaneously promoting and restricting
mobility. I will look in the following chapter at how these song lyrics
related to Romanian political reality. In order to do so, I will examine
how the state police dealt with the issue of geographical mobility in the
period 1964 to 1989. I show that, while the police were authorized to
encourage and administer desired mobilities, they also occupied a crucial
position in restricting and eliminating alternative forms of mobility that
were considered a threat to the government. Mobility itself became a
focus of state planning and political leaders grasped its importance to
the process of legitimization. But they also suspected mobility’s poten-
tial of undermining it and thus challenging the state security system as
a whole. Because of this, they charged the police with administering and
regulating the spatial movement of the population. This in turn enabled
the police to extend its spatial reach and ubiquitous control of society,
which it attempted to legitimize as necessary for public safety. In this
chapter, I will examine the relationship between representations of the
police and the realities of mobility in Romanian society, illuminating
both the restrictions on mobility that were implemented by the police
as an arm of the state, and the plurality of mobility practices that none-
theless resulted from social uses of mobility infrastructures.

45
46 Ciprian Cirniala

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an insight into these relations

in Romania between 1964 and 1989. I am interested mainly in the ways
the police as law enforcer attempted to contain horizontal mobility
(Bejenaru 2010: 214). Below, I discuss the latter concept under two over-
arching thematic categories: emigration or travelling practices across
the border, and migration or travelling practices across the country.
Since moving from one point to another was at times a question of state
security, it is important to ask how and by which means that move-
ment took place. Moving from point a to point b became a thoroughly
administered act, the object of the daily routine of many policemen’s
work. At the same time, following a mathematical definition of a line
between a and b as an infinite sum of points, one could assume at least
some points where mobility practices jarred with authoritarian regu-
lations of mobility. The analysis of this game of coercion and elusion
revolves around two fundamental questions, which will be addressed at
the end of this chapter: Keeping the above definition of line in mind,
by which practices could police vigilance be eluded in spite of severely
narrowed possibilities of travelling? Who prevailed in the competition
over mobilities and what images of the police and of its power of seduc-
tion emerged from it in the public eye? In other words, what got lost
when legitimization was gained?
My analysis of mobilities is part of wider research on police represen-
tations in socialist Romania from 1964 onwards. I am particularly inter-
ested in the relationship between institutional constructions and popular
images of the police, and in the role of these discursive constructions in
legitimizing power in mid- and late socialism. Connecting this histo-
riographical analysis of police representations and socialist dictatorship
with current theorizations of mobility, the following chapter contrib-
utes not only to scholarship on power and practices of subversion in
state socialism, but also produces more generally relevant insights into
the relationship between technologies of power and mobility practices.
I thus aim to produce a ‘sensitive mobile ethnography’ that de-centres
the current western-centric focus of much mobilities scholarship (Jensen
2009: xv–xix) by considering how mobilities became central to state
ideology and the maintenance of state power under the specific condi-
tions of Romanian dictatorship. The chapter draws on a heterogeneous
range of historical documents that nonetheless all demonstrate different
facets of the interplay between coercion and mobilities from the perspec-
tive of representations of the police. They include numerous files kept
by the former Romanian Intelligence Agency Securitate on emigration
and internal tourism; selected summer camp diaries of schoolchildren;
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 47

smuggled letters to Radio Free Europe between 1979 and 1985 as exam-
ples of parallel storytelling on forbidden emigration; private motoriza-
tion accounts; and finally, selected literary and film fiction to illustrate
practices of alternative mobilities that are rarely the focus of research.
Following a review of current theories on mobilities, these documents
are analysed for what they reveal about the police’s insidious practices
of containing mobilities, especially the staging of mobility as a means
of control, and how police control was sought to be subverted in private
practices of mobility.

The value of de Certeau for understanding

socialist mobilities

There is little theoretical work that comes out of, and provides a specifi-
cally focused framework for understanding socialist mobilities. It is
useful, therefore, to consider theoretical approaches developed in other
contexts that can be meaningfully adapted and applied to Romania
(1964–89), and to which my research may contribute new insights. In
particular, I will analyse my empirical data through the lenses of de
Certeau (1988) and Gardiner’s (2000) critical reading of his concept
of ‘spatial practices’ (de Certeau 1988: 91–130). I am interested in de
Certeau’s conceptualization of poaching as a means of gaining discrete
power over the spatial order of the city, and subsequently in the defi-
nition of tactics as spaceless, dependent on time and manipulating
events into ‘opportunities’ (de Certeau 1988: xix). Offering a critical
reading of de Certeau, Gardiner (2000) points at his ‘powerful correc-
tive to Foucault’s highly pessimistic and one-dimensional analysis of our
present-day “disciplinary society”’ (Gardiner 2000: 179), being aware at
the same time of de Certeau’s idealism (Gardiner 2000: 179). Gardiner
helps us in critically nuancing the idea of ‘everyday life’ and in grasping
the possibilities opened by its delinquent dimension, or ‘anti-discipline’
(de Certeau 1988: xiv–xv), as subtle urban warfare (Gardiner 2000: 171).
This is also picked by James C. Scott in his use of the terms ‘hidden
transcripts’ (cf. de Certeau 1988: 172), and ‘backstage transcripts’ (Scott
1990: 202), which are helpful for understanding relations of power
between ‘the dominant and the weak’ (Scott 1990: 202).
Leaning on de Certeau’s conceptualization of the everyday and
applying it to mobilities, Urry further argues that the realm of the
everyday is constitutive of a place of departure that defines practices
of tourism (Urry 1996: 2). If we relate this idea to Romanian mobili-
ties prior to 1989, however, then it would be more accurate to speak
48 Ciprian Cirniala

of practices of tourism without departures, where flights of the imagina-

tion, for instance, had to make up for the frustrating lack of opportu-
nities to travel in actual fact. Both forms of ‘tourism’ can be defined
with Vannini as a form of work (Vannini 2009: 26) and as a fragile
result of ‘negotiated, and heterogeneous spatiotemporal orders’.1 On
a metaphorical level, this brings us back to poaching, clandestine
subversions or anti-discipline. Cresswell’s identification of ‘desire lines’
as a way of interrupting the ‘pattern of clear boundaries’ invoked by
political power (Cresswell 2012: 7), and the contrast between Bauman’s
concept of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000: 9) and the space-bound
inertia of socialist political contexts before 1989, are also useful for
reflecting on Romanian socialist mobilities. Thus, Bauman argues that
the socialist state sought to retain legitimacy by promising safety as
a means of protection against the senses of lost moorings produced
by ‘liquidity’ (Bauman 2005). Finally, Siegelbaum’s observation of a
‘dynamic tension’ between the car and socialism (Siegelbaum 2011:
2) and Gătăjel’s insight into the ‘bliss and suffering’ that resulted from
the extension of private motorization in the last decades of socialism
(Gătăjel 2011: 145, 153) offer an empirical ground for testing many of
the ideas presented above. These authors show in their work how the
‘tools’ of mobility themselves enabled certain practices And made them
necessary, including those that potentially undermined governmental
control and relations of power, although the ‘tools’ themselves were
‘unconditional’ (Fischer et al. 2009).
This chapter considers mobility practices as representations at both
state and individual levels. The analysis that I present shows that it is
not only consumer societies which open up countless ways of poaching
on the ‘properties of others’ (de Certeau 1988: xi–xii). So too did the soci-
eties of people’s democracies before 1989, where the Other was mainly
perceived as the State and ‘poaching’ was primarily a response to the limi-
tations imposed by the panoptic power of the police, which sought to
minimize free mobility space. Everyday spaces, on the other hand, also
opened up niches for alternative practices that resembled much of the
spirit of de Certeau’s examples of ‘walking in the city’ (de Certeau 1988:
91–110). Inspired by this, I have therefore been searching for potential
‘clandestine forms’ of eluding the ‘violence of order’ (de Certeau 1988:
xiv–xv), often hidden and as such ‘unreadable’ (de Certeau 1988: xvii) if
we only think of reading them in a conventional way.
Let us consider the assumption that the ‘user of a city’ (de Certeau
1988: 98) has time to exercise discrete power over an urban landscape
permeated with governmental control and authority through selection,
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 49

the same way Cresswell’s ‘desire lines’ (2012: 7) denote. Following this
perspective, I will search for those ‘modalities of pedestrian enunciation’
(de Certeau 1988: 99) Romanians chose before 1989, and more specifi-
cally, for moments of ‘synecdoche’ or ‘asyndeton’ (de Certeau 1988:
101–02). The former, as de Certeau reads Augoyard, is manipulating the
space by expanding it while the latter is doing the same by selecting or
fragmenting the space. Nevertheless, a fundamental criterion of a dicta-
torship is the intended control over private time, too. Consequently,
attention also needs to be directed towards the creativity of shifting time
into manipulative moments, manifest in the hidden backstages of daily
lives, as we shall see in this chapter.
However, the ‘relations between spatial and signifying practices’
(de Certeau 1988: 105) seemed, in communist Romania, rather frac-
tured by the police’s insidious traffic control and administrative meas-
ures such as renaming streets, cities, let alone Ceauṣescu’s craving for
urban systematization. And yet, both the continuing migration from
the provinces to Bucharest and the persistent emigration which took
place prove that urban desire and the lure of the western world could
overcome the powers of the new bucolic life in the villages and of the
Romanian motherland. Thus the ‘sensuousness’ (Gardiner 2000: 16) of
the human body, the individual desires, are central in triggering that
spatial ‘delinquency [that] begins with the inscription of the body in
the order’s text’ (de Certeau 1988: 130). Taking this selection of de
Certeau’s fundamental ideas as a point of departure, the next section
will balance his ‘idealism’ (Gardiner 2000: 179) with the realities found
in the empirical data.

Police strategies: containing mobilities

In the Socialist Republic of Romania, mobilities were ‘culturally

significant practices’ (Jensen 2009: xviii), and by the 1960s they had
been strongly politicized by the Romanian Communist Party (PCR).
Geographical mobilities acquired political meaning. This explains the
PCR’s intensive controls through practices that ranged from deporta-
tions to labour camps and political arrests, especially in the aftermath
of World War II, to exiling, house detentions and limiting everyday
mobility, tourism or emigration from the 1960s onwards, although
arrests as a consequence of breaking the new restrictive legislation
continued through the decades after. Even travelling to a fellow socialist
state was difficult, especially Yugoslavia. Internal mobilities were tightly
regulated, too, with contradictory results. On the one hand, national
50 Ciprian Cirniala

tourism, migration towards urban areas, investment in roads and other

travelling infrastructures and even private motorization were embraced
under the banner of modernization. Together with the expansion of
cinema, radio, television and postal services, they were intended to
legitimize the regime by creating outward displays of modernity.
On the other hand, these elements became a manifestation of control
and of the incongruities of Romanian socialism, which included controls
of those driving in and from Bucharest, the prevention of migration to
Bucharest or of travelling towards borders. Queuing practices, electricity
shortages, expulsions from cities and semi-agrarian urban life further
built a picture of the experiential design of socialist life which had at its
heart the policing of life and all its associated mobilities. The relation-
ship between power and mobility practices thus proved intricate and
revolved frequently around the need and desire to seal people off from
the West. Moreover, this relationship was double-edged since mobility,
depending on how it was shaped by the regulations, could generate
political capital and lead to the creation of subversive tactics facilitating
movement. Modernization both increased the interconnectedness of
the criminal world and enhanced the pervasiveness of police control.
These ambiguous mobilities became the object of competing hegemonic
and very alternative usages.
A key position in managing these contradictory outcomes of socialist
mobility was held by the police, which was set up as a new socialist
institution and renamed ‘people’s police’ (miliṭia) in 1948. Fragile itself,
the miliṭia was charged with defending the revolution, a task which
developed particularly through the careful administration of mobility,
since mobility was imagined to be linked to espionage and counter-rev-
olution. New identity cards, strict surveillance of the population, espe-
cially at the Yugoslav border, deportations of ‘people’s enemies’ and of
those social categories deemed undesirable (Lăcătuṣu 2008: 206) were
all measures adopted to control the population spatially. From the wide
range of means employed by the police in its strategy to contain mobili-
ties, in this section I focus on visa restrictions and their consequences
for the behaviour of both police and the civilian population.
The Governmental Commission for Passports and Visas aimed to
obtain exact figures on the numbers of people crossing the country’s
western border with Yugoslavia. It recorded 16,093 Yugoslavs entering
Romania in 1966 and 258,503 in 1968, while Romanians travelling to
Yugoslavia numbered much less: 8,131 in 1966 and 44,329 in 1968
(Acnsas 1969a: 19–21). No information is available on the reasons
for this increase in numbers, which occurred in just two years, but
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 51

the slight opening up of the regime in 1968 is likely to have encour-

aged tourism between the two countries. Nevertheless, the Romanian
authorities intended to limit both entries into, and departures from,
the country. They agreed to honour agreements with Yugoslavia over
small border traffic, but limited the total number of possible entries
without visas to 150,000 per year. This bilateral agreement on border
traffic meant that the police’s reach was restricted, raising fears over a
‘titoist danger’ (Lăcătuṣu 2008: 206) and of ‘contamination’, as will be
shown below.
In 1970, 387,000 applications for passports and visas were recorded
(Acnsas 1971: 134). Of these, 250,000 were of a private nature, and
62,400 of them were rejected. In addition, 52,000 applications for
‘moving abroad’ were recorded. Applications to leave Romania perma-
nently appear to have constituted a major problem for the state. Thus,
in 1977 the Commission for Passports and Visas of the Ministers’
Council noted that during 1976 ‘the County Party Commissions organ-
ized discussions with over 30,000 people applying to permanently leave
the country’, but, that ‘the number of those who gave up their travel or
marriage [with a foreign citizen] is only 955 people’ (Anic 1977: 19).2
During the same year ‘the County Party Commissions approved 12.249
people to permanently leave the country and refused other 17.660 files’
often without direct arguments explaining that rejection. A conclusion
of the meeting was that ‘the emigration propaganda was not fought
efficiently enough’ (Anic 1977: 20). Furthermore, in 1976 the following
applications were recorded: ‘583,094 applications for temporary travels
abroad, of which 138,108 were for business trips and 444,986 for private
interest’. This constituted an increase of 10 per cent in the number of the
business trips and a ‘decrease of 57,484 in the number of private travel
applications, determined by the reduction of the currency basis [allowed
for such travels] [ ... ]’ (Anic 1977: 21).3 Still, in 1978, 1,100 individuals
were recorded as having left on a business trip and not returned to the
country (Acnsas 1978: 7). Consequently, in the same year business trips
of individuals discovered to have the intention of not returning were
cancelled.
The Ministry of Interior explained this spike in emigration figures
as the result of contamination with other ideas, with foreign ideology.
The purpose of the Commission for Passports and Visas was therefore
redefined as protecting the people from that imminent danger, and the
fight against ideological contamination became its official mantra. This
additional agenda stretched the police’s ability to fulfil its wider range
of tasks significantly and created gaps in its efficiency. While on the one
52 Ciprian Cirniala

hand control was tightened, on the other hand this opened opportuni-
ties that both the police and civilians seized in a variety of ways.
Although not systematically, the figures show for instance that police
personnel were themselves starting to flee across the border, using oppor-
tunities such as accompanying officials on state visits abroad. Their status
meant that they did not need to camouflage their departure, since they
were believed to be intending to come back from their journey. There
was a drop in numbers from 3,000 in 1969 to 490 policemen who fled in
1970, but this was mainly due to a reduction in the numbers of minis-
terial business trips (Acnsas 1970: 134), not to a change in policemen’s
attitudes. This phenomenon of fleeing policemen is highly revealing. It
shows that in the appropriation of ‘law and order’ private lives enjoyed
primacy, regardless of professional status or identity. Since the fugitives
embodied the ‘law and order’ at the same time as they subverted it, the
ironic consequences of their actions were far reaching. Beyond the irony
of language (a fugitive ‘law and order’), police emigration was simul-
taneously an official and a hidden act, which is in fact a more subtle
camouflage itself.
There were also reports of corruption cases related to visa permits: ‘So,
colonel Jitaru Costache from the Passport Bureau of Bacău police [ ... ], in
order to have sexual intercourse with a citizen who applied for tempo-
rary travel abroad, procured her data from her visa application file’
(Acnsas 1970: 138). Cases of misconduct by personnel were not recorded
systematically by topic in the files of the former police, but other reports
on sexual intercourse with detainees (Acnsas 1973: 102) allow us to
conclude that corruption related to visa permits occurred with some
frequency. Thus, as controls over mobility increased, so did abuses of
power and counter-strategies of police legitimization. In other words,
mobilities became a terrain for the simultaneous exercise of coercion
and appropriation through corruption.
The opportunistic behaviour of middle and low ranking personnel
was enhanced by material and strategic feebleness, both in the adminis-
tration of the Yugoslav border area and in the administration of internal
mobility generally. Renewing or acquiring new technology for tracking
the movement of people and vehicles was a problem for the Ministry of
Interior Affairs (Acnsas 1968: 104). This, combined with the new division
of the country into 23 administrative units, reduced the police’s ability
to monitor and control car traffic (Acnsas 1968: 107). Besides, Ceauṣescu
believed that the police were not working well enough and had failed
to enforce the law on entries into big urban centres sufficiently, thus
allowing criminality to increase in cities, including in Bucharest (Acnsas
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 53

1977: 3). This assumption probably reflected reality, but it ignored the
wider factors contributing to the perceived failings of the police, espe-
cially the pressure placed on police action by the extent of a diverse
population’s mobility practices. People adapted to the political context
but did not give up their dreams, finding ingenious ways of subverting
state policies.
These tactics used to subvert control resembled disguises rather than
‘positionings in space’, from ‘hiding behind’ official rhetoric, to faking
passports or disguising one’s body in order to facilitate border trans-
gression. One tactic adopted by numerous individuals or groups was
to appropriate official state logic and vocabularies. The Council of the
Workers of German Nationality from the Socialist Republic of Romania
illustrates this, arguing in a petition that:

Releasing passports should be easier for certain righteous and reliable

individuals wishing to visit their relatives abroad, thus having the
opportunity to understand the reality of life in capitalist countries,
because the majority, after coming back, are very critical towards
the propaganda of some of the tourists from the Federal Republic of
Germany. (Acnsas 1969b: 6)

The appropriation of socialist ideology reflects both the high, yet not
completely prohibitive, price a departure could have cost and the
willingness to comply with the rules in order to enjoy a journey. The
example quoted draws our attention to the politicization of mobility
and its random use of criteria beyond official argument and beyond
the rational. The implication for civilians was that they had to change
tactics and as such, employ time in the absence of space, to wait for
opportunities of escape, for moments of ‘synecdoche’ and ‘asyndeton’
(de Certeau 1988: 101–02). Shortly, since the tactic of appropriating
ideology did not always prove sufficient, civilians developed many
other ways of escape.
These practices of escape were practices of mobility, as becomes clear
when consulting the Securitate’s ‘Public Attitude Reports’, which were
compiled in a meticulous attempt to understand, track and contain
them. The reports frequently focused on topics related to movement:
‘border’, ‘foreigners’, ‘attempts to flee across the border’, ‘people
stopped at the border’, ‘travels abroad’. Towards 1989, escape attempts
appear to have occurred with some frequency, as new headings appeared
in the records: ‘the border in the last 24 hours’ (Acnsas 23a) or ‘foot
prints’ (Acnsas 23b, 1988). Civilians appear to have compensated for
54 Ciprian Cirniala

this exaggerated situation of control by employing numerous practices

to elude the prohibition of travelling: buying passports from Yugoslav
citizens (Acnsas 1986: 99), hidings in trucks, in trains or in transported
furniture, business trips from which they never came back, crossing the
Danube by swimming at night, marrying a foreign citizen, disguising as,
and most probably bribing, border police. Even individuals belonging to
the nomenclature were using opportunities to travel abroad for official
visits, but never returned (Acnsas 1987). The absurdity of the situation
became particularly clear in November 1989, when the famous Nadia
Comăneci fled across the border using a fake passport, which provoked
Ceauṣescu’s nervous collapse (Gal 2001: 232).
What all of these examples demonstrate is the fact that mobility prac-
tices were practices of camouflage rather than positioning in space. They
were practices of disguise rather than guise, as the definition ‘removing
one’s cape, in order to run as fast as possible’ (Treccani 2014) of the Latin
term excappare (‘to escape’) implies. The strategy of coercion in rela-
tion to mobility thus simultaneously evoked creative tactics of eluding
surveillance. In sum, the practices outlined above point to socialist
mobility as a world of meaning inhabited by ordinary citizens through
their sensuous bodies (Gardiner 2000: 16). The Romanian Communist
Party’s effort to re-occupy this space of clandestine meaning through
representation is discussed in the following section.

Mobility stagings and representations

The Party strategy of containing emigration did not only change the way
people practiced travelling abroad; it also led to new forms of governing
time and space in order to exercise control at the same time as giving
people the feeling of mobility. This was accomplished, I would argue,
by replacing free mobilities with ritualized, staged uses of time and
space that disciplined people’s movements. This ‘mobility on demand’
included: (a) political marches, gatherings for welcoming the Leader,
patriotic work and marches of The Youth for Home Defense; (b) system-
atically detaching students and other social groups, for instance through
the so-called process of repartitioning, which meant that after graduating
they were allocated jobs in remote areas away from their home towns;
(c) promoting an ideology of modern tourism that stressed motorized
travel while downplaying en masse aspects, and compulsory elements
of trips to museums, construction sites, natural reservations and histor-
ical commemorative sites; (d) the occupation of childrens’ free time
with activities at the ‘Pioneers’ Clubs’, the collection of recyclables; or
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 55

secondary school students participating in ‘agricultural practice’, where

they served as an unpaid labour force for fulfilling the agricultural five-
year-plans.
This mobilization of various types (a–d) came to represent Ceauṣescu’s
notion of the rotation of cadres in ways that were often farcical, childish
and ineffective. To illustrate this, let me describe the example of ‘agri-
cultural practice’ (d) in greater depth. On such occasions, as part of the
‘patriotic work’ that citizens were expected to do, factory employees,
students and 13- to 14-year-old children were driven on buses to the
fields in order to help with the harvest, be it for corn, grapes, potatoes or
anything else that needed to be picked up for free (Velican 2010: 131).
The abuse of their unpaid labour culminated in checks at the end of
the day to ensure no-one was taking home produce that was classified
as a ‘state good’. Nevertheless, children and students often found ways
of transforming the meaning of such activities, for instance by turning
them into days of adventure: games were played, songs recited, jokes
told, teachers mocked and cheated upon, grapes eaten while hidden in
the vineyard, and potatoes thrown at each other (Cirniala 2009). This
was far from being subversive and threatening to the government. Not
even the responsible teachers and brigadiers of that time would call
this ‘antirevolutionary’, ‘boycott’, or ‘hostile activities’, as happened
in more serious cases involving adults working in production during
earlier decades. But everyday history teaches us that even such small
niches of indifference, such daily ways of responding to authority, helps
to build a culture of subversiveness, which changes our understanding of
dictatorships. Thus, ‘agricultural practice’ was not only about one-way
authoritarian rituals, but very much intertwined with private attitudes
and influenced by an increasingly persistent inertia of subjects and
processes.
Another type of spare-time, mobile activity, but with a strong degree
of discipline, was the ‘expedition’. Often conducted as part of a summer
camp, it consisted of nature tours taken by groups of children and a
teacher with the purpose of having closer contact with nature and of
bonding with schoolmates. As the name suggests, children conducted
a whole series of activities during the ‘expedition’, such as measuring,
photographing, reporting and analysing the places they encountered,
all in a strongly pedagogical, didactic manner. Usually a person from
the group with beautiful handwriting was responsible for keeping the
expedition diary. One such diary I found in the archives bears the title
‘Expedition Diary of the Crew “The Steppe’s Camomile”, General School
Jugureanu, Brăila County’ (Diary 1972). It describes the trip of a group
56 Ciprian Cirniala

of ten girls led by teacher Paraschiva Lupaṣcu in the Retezat Mountain,

Romania. The fragment reflects a narrative style related to the icono-
graphic cult texts dedicated to Ceauṣescu:

20 June 1972. A day marked with golden letters in the calender of

our lives, the day when we step to unknown horizons, the day of big
challenges, the day when we start the fight with difficulties ( ... ). The
distances are swallowed by the locomotive of a long and very hurried
train. ( ... ) or the first time we pass through so many tunnels and
admire the wonderful Jiu Valley. It is amusing that our train drives
with such a speed through villages, over streets, stabbing the heart of
forests. (Diary 1972)

Obviously these school children experienced a journey that otherwise

would not necessarily have taken place. The reason was that the mobility
of families was still restricted from many points of view. Thanks to the
summer camps and trips planned by schools, a wider number of children
could be ‘mobile’ and see the country. Nevertheless, the ‘golden letters’
of the diary hint at ideological tourism and witness indirectly that the
practice of expedition diaries was at least animated by teachers if not even
inspired and edited. Some of the diary entries were published in the local
newspapers, pointing at the pedagogical aspect of the respective trip.
Inside the diary I found such a newspaper excerpt (Diary 1972) about the
same expedition. The article announces other expeditions and their envis-
aged places to visit: The Golden Mines of Băiṭa, The Golden Museum of
Brad, The Memorial House and The Grave of Avram Iancu, The Mountain
Oak of Horia and the Scăriṣoara Cave. These sites of national pride and
communist legitimization point to a clear ‘patriotic education’ curriculum
that aimed less to promote the well-being of children than their develop-
ment as righteous citizens. This purpose was cannibalized later by the cult
of the ‘Great Leader’. The extent and the political colour, the homogeni-
zation and control would mark the difference between Romania and any
country from the western world of that time. Nevertheless, as I mentioned
when describing the ‘agricultural practice’, children found opportunities
for ignoring the rules and created in this manner ways of mobility that
ran parallel to the rules. Staging time and space implies, therefore, the
simultaneous occurence of ‘backstage’ behaviour.
In addition to the reworking of mobility ideologies in practice, the
state’s control of mobility was also reinterpreted, albeit subtly, in cultural
representations. I illustrate this with a focus on three films as exam-
ples of ‘poaching’ (de Certeau 1988: xi–xii) through representational
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 57

means. Their production complemented ‘the big interplanetary cruise’

(Scînteia Almanach 1975: 232) that the country would embark upon by
completing the Scientific-Technical Revolution (Scînteia Almanach 1975:
75–76) with a rather modest dimension of mobility. The films are based
on or inspired by real stories and illustrate the second part of my argu-
ment in this section – that the meanings of mobilities were reinterpreted
in representations shared by numerous people. Film fiction as medium
and representation links the Party’s vision of mobility with individual
desires and further with reality. But these three levels in the representa-
tional process, as levels of domination, were never rigidly overlapping.
Growing societal ruptures reveal resistances – perceivable in the films
presented below. These bring us back to the issue of the police. The first
two of them, ‘Buletin de Bucureṣti’ (‘Bucharest Identity Card’, 1982) and
‘Căsătorie cu repetiṭie’ (‘Marriage Rehearsal’, 1985) were directed by
Virgil Calotescu and reflect the difficult situation of free movement and
settlement from the province to/in Bucharest.
In ‘Bucharest Identity Card’ (1982), Boulevard Ion C. Brătianu is
shown with the big Intercontinental Hotel in the background. Especially
its intersection with the Boulevards Queen Elizabeth and Carol 1st are
intensively trafficked by cars and passengers. It is the story of Silvia
Popescu who is completing her studies in agronomy and intends to stay
in the capital city, possible only with a Bucharest ID. As the film goes
on, Silvia finds out from friends that the help of ‘connections’, be it
from among the police or elsewhere, would be required to enable her
to stay in Bucharest. After a complicated search she finds Radu, who is
ready to marry her in exchange for 10,000 lei.4 The marriage fails, but
the two are both assigned a job in the same village. Upon the impending
visit of her mother, who does not know anything about the divorce and
has a weak heart, they decide to marry again in the sequel ‘Marriage
Rehearsal’ (1985). This time everything has a happy ending and they
embark on family life together.
There is no room here to follow the couple in the sequel ‘Marriage
Rehearsal’ (1985), settled as a family in the orderly space of a village.
Let’s focus instead on ‘Bucharest Identity Card’ (1982). At one point
Silvia’s roommate suggests: ‘Just call mummy, she finds some relative at
the police, and that’s it!’ (Buletin de Bucureṣti 1982). Beyond the candid
lightness and fastness we get acquainted with the eventual corruptibility
among police, complemented by the creativity of the characters: The
pretend marriage Silvia undertakes and the fabrication of juridical argu-
ments for the later divorce are illegal ways to obtain a Bucharest identity
card. This discrete allusion to interactions between police and civilians
58 Ciprian Cirniala

is countered by a representation of the righteous policeman: he politely

offers Silvia a piece of information, he controls their identity cards at
night in a park and leaves soon after with a certain tolerance towards
the young couple and finally, he is asks them to pay a fine for walking
on a public lawn. From the point of view of the ‘public eye’, this is what
mattered, whereas for the individual what happened behind this ‘stage’
mattered the most. The two realms were definitely intertwined, but the
power, independently from its shifting legitimacy, continued to separate
efficient public representations and efficient private practices.
The third film that catches both representations of mobility and of
the police is the petty criminal comedy, Brigada Diverse în alertă (‘Brigade
Miscellaneous on Alert’, 1971). The three humorous figures, Gogu,
Trandafir and Patraulea, are very mobile across the country when it comes
to their business improvisations, but they are most interested in travel-
ling abroad. The West is their professional glimmer of hope and soon the
three show vivid creativity when it comes to reaching this destination.
One of them would work as a tourist guide, the second as a showbiz
manager and the last as a cabaret singer. These professions are fictitious,
they are projections of a would-be American dream and their common
denominator is the idea of a tour or concert abroad. In their imagina-
tion, played with humour and self-irony, they see themselves crossing
the ocean, leading a show on the big stages of Tokyo, Melbourne and
New York or leading tourists across Romania, eventually fleeing across
the border. The ‘getting-along’ with the police that is hinted at in Buletin
de Bucureṣti becomes a fully lived culture in Brigade Miscellaneous on Alert
(1971). The film parodies the duplicity of a police that, on the one hand,
embodies law and order, and on the other hand is fully involved in
the delinquent culture as a self-ironical and humorous interlocutor of
three petty criminals. The latter also frequently shift roles, from right-
eous civilians to perpetrators of illegality, so that it becomes unclear who
represents which side of the legal/illegal binary, leading to moral confu-
sions which metaphorically open spaces for imaginary ‘departures’ that
would have otherwise been impossible.

Conclusions

Instead of the ubiquitous description of modern mobilities as ‘fluid’,

in the case of socialist Romania, it might be more appropriate to adopt
the metaphor of a labyrinth that foreclosed many mobility options as a
result of state and police control, but which nonetheless was pierced by
 Power and Mobilities in Socialist Romania 1964–89 59

inefficiencies, corruption and subversion tactics, which resemble some

of the urban flexibility of the new millennium.
While mobility was intended by the Romanian state authorities to
enhance their dynastic, perennial power, it also led to an increase in
suspicion about the opacity of the masses, whose temporal and spatial
practices the authorities in fact struggled to police. The ‘masses’ were
numerous individuals who overcame the panoptic eye of the police and
of the Securitate by finding the technology of secret passages through
time. I am talking about the backstage of lives, of re-invented privacy
that helped people to be mobile in socialism. As a consequence, in an
almost simultaneous response to reduced mobility and an expanding
police, there emerged a secret world of increasingly plural mobilities
that limited the reach and effectiveness of the strategy of public safety
and in some cases turned it on its head completely.
The police’s paradoxical role of enabling fluid traffic while congesting
mobilities rendered it a consistent medium for the representation of
power. Here resided the source of power consolidation, but also the edge
of de-legitimization. This outcome is illustrated perfectly by practices
of civilians, ranging from the appropriation of law and order to fleeing
over the border, from childish games during agricultural campaigns to
adults applying various ‘ruses’ (de Certeau 1988: 39) for procuring an
identity card. The representations that accompanied these practices and,
more directly, the representations in the films discussed here, point to
a disquieting contradiction with the official glare of marches and of the
Scientific-Technical Revolution. But this contradiction was reassured by
the public resilience of loyalty.
I have provided so far examples of ‘poaching’ practices that in time
could increase and reach an unimagined diversity. Over time this
changed the reality behind the apparent stage of autarchic continuity of
Ceauṣescu. It also changes our understanding of dictatorships, rendering
them fragile and permeable. The answer to ‘what was lost when legiti-
mization was gained’ is apparently paradoxical, but can be understood
together with the complexity of mobilities suggested in the chapter and
with the parallel of open loyalty and hidden ignorance: When legit-
imization was produced, mobility was lost. Far from pretending that
the examples I have given represent the key through which ‘a secret
layer of meaning [can] be deciphered’ (Johnson 2011), I think of them
as overlooked possibilities. In the short term, geographical limitations
served the police’s purposes and filled the gaps of its technological back-
wardness. Yet, in the long term, spatial restrictions nurtured powerful
60 Ciprian Cirniala

dreams of moving and myriad attempts to realize them through tactics

of ‘poaching’ and navigating the labyrinth.

Notes
1. Vannini is paraphrasing from Peters (2006: 69).
2. Author’s own translation.
3. As an additional measure to discourage travel abroad and in order to prevent
valuable losses across the border, each person was allowed to take only a
limited sum for their travel, usually not enough for their stay abroad.
4. The amount corresponds to four average (net) salaries in 1982 Romania. See
http://www.insse.ro/cms/rw/pages/castiguri1938.ro.do.

References
‘Brigada Diverse intră în alertă’ (1971), Engl.: Brigade Miscellaneous on Alert (film),
directed by M. Drăgan, my translation.
‘Buletin de Bucureṣti’ (1982), Engl.: Bucharest Identity Card (film), directed by V.
Calotescu, my translation.
‘Căsătorie cu repetiṭie’ (1985) Engl.: Marriage Rehearsal (film), directed by V.
Calotescu, my translation.
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4
Leisure and Politics:
Soviet Central Asian Tourists
across the Iron Curtain
Botakoz Kassymbekova

Introduction: mobility as politics

Mobility was a key political resource for Soviet leaders. It was treated as
a tool, symbol and goal of the Communist state. The ability to be physi-
cally mobile was understood as essential for defending the Soviet regime
within its borders but also for the spread of its influence outside. Soviet
leaders spent an enormous amount of energy, capital and resources on
the construction of roads, railways, aeroplanes and the telegraph. Speed
and mobility were key to the success of the revolution and a reason for
the Bolshevik’s triumph.1 However, while everything was done to enable
physical mobility across the Soviet empire, at the same time fixity and
immobility constituted an integral part of the Soviet regime’s means of
governance and control. For Stalin especially, uncoordinated movement
of people posed political and economic risks. His passport and registra-
tion policies, forced resettlement and labour camps aimed to fix people’s
locations and control their movements tightly (Shearer 2009; Martin
1998). Unregulated and unregistered movement was harshly observed
and punished. Free contact with the outside world was deemed suspect
and could lead to various penalties.
Major changes took place, however, in the Soviet state’s relationship
with its citizens after Stalin’s death that led to a significant transforma-
tion in the way travelling was organized, controlled and experienced.
In this chapter, I trace some of these changes as they affected tourists to
and from Soviet Central Asia. I argue that although foreign tourism was
used by the Soviet state in the post-Stalin era as a means to affect social,
economic and cultural changes, its liberalization led to de-politiciza-
tion of its experience by Soviet tourists, and thus their understanding

62
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 63

of ‘abroad’ as peaceful and desirable prestige object. Although Soviet

tourists had to negotiate different interests and identities, between
demonstrating loyalty to the state and circumventing controls in order
to follow some of their own interests, they perceived their travels as
leisurely activity, rather than ideological work on behalf of the Soviet
state. Socio-economic, ethnic and gender inequalities persisted in access
to travel, especially to capitalist countries, and state policies partly
sought to tackle such inequalities but also partly reinforced them as
tourist opportunities continued to fall severely short of demand and
were thus used as a means of distinction, privilege and reward.
The chapter is based on oral history interviews and archival material
of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Oral history inter-
views were conducted primarily during 2009 and 2010 in Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with seven women and two men who travelled
to countries outside of the Socialist Bloc such as Italy, France, Greece,
Cuba, Egypt and India. The respondents were mostly members of ‘influ-
ential’ and privileged families in Central Asia and occupied white-collar
professions in the fields of medicine, engineering, arts, sciences and poli-
tics. Significantly, the interviewees were all representatives of the ‘titular
nations’, in Soviet categories. This sampling was not intentional, but
rather historical. Representatives of previously privileged groups among
the non-titular nationalities were most likely to leave Central Asia after
the establishment of independent republics and experiences with civil
war, as was the case in Tajikistan. Further research needs to be conducted
to compare experiences among various ethnic groups. However, it needs
to be mentioned that between the mid-1960s and the 1980s, Central
Asian educated elites were for the most part ‘russified’ members of the
Soviet Central Asian societies. The GARF material consists of records
from the Central Council for Tourism and Excursions of the All-Union
Central Council of Labour Unions (fond number 9520). These records
contain rich material about Soviet internal and foreign tourism. Of
special interest for this chapter were reports about Soviet Central Asian
tours ‘abroad’, that is countries outside of the Soviet Union and the
Socialist Bloc.

Soviet mobility from Stalin to Khrushchev

Tourism during the 1920s and early 1930s reflected the ambivalence
towards human mobility of the early Soviet state. Soviet leaders wanted
to demonstrate their achievements to the world and thus invited famous
foreigners to visit the Soviet Union to witness the country’s achievements
64 Botakoz Kassymbekova

and future projects (Salmon 2008). Internal tourism by Soviet citizens –

usually available for urbanites from the Central regions – was promoted
as part of the larger ‘cultural revolution’. According to Soviet leaders,
tourism in the Soviet Union differed radically from Western tourism,
since in the Soviet Union it was treated as a cultural and political task
that provided an opportunity to work on oneself and for the benefit
of one’s country (Noack 2012; Orlov and Iurchikova 2010). Without a
cultural and political task, tourism was considered a bourgeois waste of
time. Soviet tourism was promoted as work on one’s body and on one’s
country by exploring nature and bringing culture to less developed
regions (Noack 2012: 238–39). It was also used as an instrument, albeit a
limited one, to enable the distant ‘peoples’ of the Soviet Union to learn
about each other and to experience the vast Soviet ‘homeland’ (Koenker
2003). While tourism was never officially forbidden under Stalin, only
a very small number of Soviet citizens could undertake touristic travels.
Nature resorts and sanatoriums were available for a limited number
of Party functionaries and did not constitute a regular activity for the
Soviet citizen. A significant proportion of Soviet citizens, especially in
Central Asia (both local and external), were forcefully removed from
their homes and settled within the new regions without an opportunity
for free movement.
Stalin’s death radically changed the nature of Soviet politics. It allowed
hundreds of thousands of purged ethnic groups and labour camp pris-
oners to leave their exile and return home. In addition to them, thou-
sands across the Union were now allowed, and could afford, to see the
world within and outside of the Soviet Union without being accused of
illegal movement and treachery. If during Stalinism people were force-
fully displaced and penalized for unsanctioned foreign or domestic
travel, they were now encouraged to travel in order to discover and enjoy
their homeland and countries abroad. The rise of Soviet tourism, that is
tourism by Soviet citizens across the Soviet Union, in the post-Stalinist
period represents a radical break from the Stalinist practice of rule and
the role of human mobility. Soviet politics underwent a dramatic change
from negative control of population mobility to positive governance.
Anna Gorsuch correctly concludes that in the Khrushchev era ‘Soviet
citizens were newly treated, if unevenly and within definite limits, as
responsible and reliable, as individuals confident in their Soviet identity
and trustworthy to send abroad’ (2011: 4).
But human mobility, and Soviet tourism particularly, neverthe-
less remained an important tool of the state and an object of politics
(Gorsuch 2011; Noack 2012). Where, when and how a Soviet citizen
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 65

enjoyed a vacation was carefully planned, organized and observed. Mass

media, especially through films, guided a Soviet citizen on their jour-
neys: ‘correct’ positive behavior was staged in film and in literature.
Routes, tastes and objects of the ‘tourist gaze’ were controlled for ideo-
logical correctness. Tourists in the Soviet Union, although allowed to
leave the Soviet Union, never really departed the realm of the political.
And this is not surprising. Modelling and regulating human mobility
is not an entirely exceptional story for modern states. Designing,
directing, controlling and prohibiting certain kinds of movement is an
essential part of a state building project (Torpey 1998: 240; Hannam
and Knox 2010). It is through producing authorized movement that
states signify and produce experiences of citizenship and territory. It
is through organized mobility that states institute social, political and
physical boundaries that categorize subjects and their agency as well
as mark the relationship and bond between the state and its subjects
(Shearer 2009; Alatout 2006).
Soviet leaders consciously treated tourism as a political activity.
Significantly, they proclaimed ‘free time’ to be a ‘social category’
(Dolmatov 1988: 17; see also Noack 2012: 233). While promises of
healthy recreation were part of Soviet politics since the founding of the
Soviet state, it was Khrushchev who brought the Soviet welfare regime
on its way. Welfare of citizens, rather than control by physical force,
became the aim of his political agenda. As a result, quality of life under
Khrushchev rapidly increased. Light industry and consumer goods
replaced military orientated heavy industry; housing and living stand-
ards became the objectives of competition with the West. An ideal Soviet
citizen in Khrushchev’s epoch (and later) was not so much a soldier,
worker or hero, but rather a happy peaceful human being who could
afford comfortable housing, food, clothing and spare time. However,
while the post-Stalinist leadership increasingly safeguarded and promoted
‘free time’ to Soviet citizens, it also increasingly attempted to direct it.
It proclaimed, for example, that ‘rational and useful utilization of free
time was a subject of special and everyday task of the Communist Party
and the Soviet state’ (Dolmatov 1988: 17). As late as 1985, the Soviet
leadership still argued that the aim of tourism was to ‘raise Communist
consciousness and active life position, Soviet and socialist patriotism,
loyalty to the revolution, military and work traditions and growth of
cultural level of the population’ (Dolmatov 1988: 15).
Tourism into and out of the Soviet Union was also liberalized after
Stalin’s death because the regime searched desperately for new sources
of revenue. Inviting wealthy foreigners who could spend their cash
66 Botakoz Kassymbekova

in the Soviet Union became one of the industries in the post-Stalinist

period that grew firmly until the Union’s demise. If 528,371 foreign
tourists visited the Soviet Union in 1958, by 1964 this figure had nearly
doubled to 1,033,441, while as many as 4,399,799 foreigners visited the
Soviet Union in 1977 (Siverson et al. 1980: 365). Soviet tourists, on the
other hand, visited countries outside of the Soviet Union on a much
smaller scale: from 40,099 in 1958 to 373,070 in 1964 and 2,465,029 in
1977 (ibid.). This is because the Soviet Union’s opening to the outside
world was aimed at accumulating hard currency and showcasing Soviet
achievements. Foreign tourists could be easily controlled: their routes,
food and experiences could be staged and manipulated.2 Sending Soviet
tourists abroad, however, entailed more organizational and financial
investment: tourists had to be carefully chosen and trained, routes and
trips planned and organized. Most importantly, the exchange of rubles
into foreign cash meant spending hard currency that the Soviet lead-
ership tried to avoid. Although the Soviet state attempted to organize
cashless tourist exchange,3 this proved difficult to realize. As a result,
the number of those travelling to ‘capitalist’ countries beyond the Iron
Curtain constituted a minority, on average 12–15 per cent of all trips
outside of the Soviet Union for the case of Central Asia. Soviet foreign
tourism never became mass tourism, while internal Soviet tourism did.
Thus, in 1975, 11,546 Kazakh citizens visited other socialist countries
and only 1,670 travelled to ‘capitalist’ states.4 Soviet tourists to foreign
countries were officially treated not simply as leisure-consumers, but
as active developers who were supposed to carry positive experiences
back home – tourists were usually organized into groups by their
profession, for example as engineers, doctors, agriculturalists, and so
on – or as cultural leaders who constituted exchanges between devel-
oped foreign and developed Soviet cultures. Nevertheless, as archival
reports on tourist experiences and eye witness oral accounts suggest,
Soviet tourists understood themselves as consumers and leisure trav-
ellers and used opportunities to transform their trips into holidays,
rather than work.

Mobility as a reward for loyalty?

The gap between private consumer interests and the state’s demands
for loyalty and allegiance to the Soviet system that characterized the
travel experiences of many Soviet tourists in the post-Stalin year is well
depicted in the late perestroika film Shapka [Hat], based on Vladimir
Voinovich and Grigorii Gorin’s play ‘Home cat of average fuzziness’.
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 67

The film tells the story of Fima Rakhlin, an author who works at the
Union of Soviet writers and who chooses to write neutral stories about
‘good people’ instead of ideologically inspiring novels. Rakhlin is not
being harassed by the police, neither by his colleagues or the director
of the writers’ union for his ‘neutrality’. All are in fact on very friendly
terms with him. Yet, while others receive ‘presents’ for their ideolog-
ical literary work in form of hats made of expensive fur and travels to
the West, Rakhlin receives the cheapest and least prestigious hat from
a ‘cat of average fuzziness’. The film tells the story about how Rakhlin
attempts to receive a prestigious fur hat from the Union. The culmi-
nating moment of the story is an explanation from the Union’s director,
who is Rakhlin’s occasional drinking partner and a friend, that it was
impossible in the Soviet Union to stay ideologically neutral and at the
same time receive extra benefits from the state. The director, who had
just returned from another foreign trip to his luxuriously furnished
apartment served by a maid, explains to Rakhlin that in order to receive
the extraordinary one had to ‘sell the soul’. The director is not portrayed
as an evil or broken Soviet collaborator, but rather an unhappy person
who accepted the rules of late Soviet politics. At the end of the story,
Rakhlin does obtain the hat through his wife’s lover, a military general,
who was able to force the issuing of the hat. The military connection
proved to come too late, as Rakhlin died before receiving it.
The film shows that physical and political mobility were closely
connected in the late Soviet Union. The closer and more loyal one was
to the government, the further one could physically leave the country.
Another important revelation of the film is that it was not the loyalty per
se that mattered, but rather the agreement to perform loyalty in public,
not necessarily in private. When the director in his apartment complains
to Rakhlin how he hates Soviet rule, which made him a writer-hero even
though by his own estimation he was a bad writer, and when Rakhlin
points to surveillance microphones, the director responds: ‘they do not
care about what I say here, they know that I drink and that I hate them,
it is important for them what I say outside, in public ... They ask from
me loyalty, not principles’. Rakhlin did not have to become ideological,
but rather act as if he were ideological in order to receive rewards. The
director tells him: ‘visit Party conferences, read Soviet speeches and
then return to ask for better hats ... I also hate doing it, but I do it’. The
director tells Rakhlin about a tourist trip to Paris organized by the Union
where he was asked about Soviet politics and Afghanistan. The director
explains to Rakhlin that he would have wanted Westerners to like him
and would have liked to answer their questions accordingly, but he could
68 Botakoz Kassymbekova

not afford to, as that would have meant giving up his privileges in the
Soviet Union. He therefore repeated the answers that the state provided
about the non-existence of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and
the killing of enemies in Afghanistan. Since Rakhlin, by contrast, stayed
away from politics because he had no interest in it, he was not able to
receive the same rewards.
Reports on Soviet tourists demonstrate that one’s professional standing
was important in being granted the opportunity to travel abroad. Urban
Party officials and technical white-collar workers were deemed the most
loyal, reliable and suitable to represent the Soviet Union abroad. This
is ironic. Although the Soviet state claimed to represent workers’ and
peasants’ interests and ideals and claimed to be a peasant-worker state
(by eliminating Tsarist officials and bourgeoisie), it was state administra-
tors who had better chances to go on tours outside of the Soviet Union.
Thus, in 1967, out of 3,128 people who travelled abroad (to socialist and
non-socialist countries) from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan,
63 per cent were state officials and only 22.7 per cent were workers.
The group included only 32 peasants, which equates to 1 per cent. The
majority were engineers (878), teachers (414), and doctors (322).5 That
same year, the Uzbek Socialist republic sent 2,601 tourists abroad, 50
per cent of whom were Party officials, 24 per cent workers and peasants,
and 29 per cent technical white-collar workers.6 From the Tajik Soviet
Socialist Republic, 257 state officials and 91 workers were able to see the
‘world’.7
But professional background in itself did not suffice to receive permis-
sion to go abroad. The closer one was to the Communist Party, the
greater the chances were to leave the Soviet Union. In order to leave the
Soviet Union one had to have an exemplary personal profile supported
by recommendations from colleagues, the Party, militia, neighbours
and doctors (Gorsuch 2010: 365; Shevyrin 2009: 117). The Tajik Labour
Union reported in 1967:

The leaders of the groups were chosen from the Party and Labour
Union active members, the engineering-technical personnel, and
university teachers. They were confirmed by the Presidium of the
Labour Union Council ... Special attention was paid to selecting
quality tourists [for travel] to capitalist countries.8

A female engineer whom I interviewed in 2009 confirms this selective-

ness by party allegiance in her memories of travelling from Kazakhstan
to ‘capitalist’ countries:
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 69

[t]he Labour Union allocated the trips to organizations; organizations

gave them to good workers. Colleagues voted for who should go on
the trips. The best workers received trips free of charge ... . I know
they [secret police] called my colleagues and asked what kind of a
person I was, what my political views were, whether I was loyal and
all this ... They [my colleagues], of course, told them I was a good
person and that I behaved well. This is the only way I could travel.
They [friends] had to support me.9

Soviet tourists had to represent the Soviet Union in the best light possible.
Mandatory lectures about Soviet achievements were organized for future
travellers at the local Labour Union. One participant remembered: ‘We
listened to the latest the Party decisions, etc ... During the lectures we
were observed and it was important to show that we were loyal and to
ask “correct” questions. It was not difficult; we just had to spend some
time, everyone knew what and how to say’.10
In 1970 the Tajik Republic Soviet of the Labor Union reported that:

[In the] selection of tourists, especially to capitalist countries, business-

like [!], political and moral qualities, participation in public life, ability
to keep state secrets, were taken into account. Recommendations were
discussed and confirmed with regional and town Party Committees.
Groups to capitalist countries first of all consisted of members of the
Communist Party, Soviet and Union workers, top-performers of the
communist labour force. The political and economic meanings of
tourist trips were explained to the future tourists, they were introduced
to the political and economic situation of the countries visited, talks
[were held] about consciousness and protection of state secrets, about
sabotage [podryvnoi deiatel’nosti] of the imperialist secret service.11

Five years later the Tajik Labour Union reported similarly that:

travelling groups were supported with informational material that

reflected the republic’s achievements. Lectures were read based on
the 24th Party Congress; tourists were informed about the work of
the 9th Five Year Party Plan [ ... ] Tourists were taught to perform,
it was ensured that tourists took national costumes with them, that
they learned Tajik songs and the Tajik hymn.12

The immediate concern of Soviet officials was to develop a strategy

to force Soviet citizens to return home. Thus, while for many today
70 Botakoz Kassymbekova

tourist practice is naturally associated with family and friends, in the

Soviet Union, more often than not, husbands and wives, children and
parents travelled separately, especially when going abroad. The family
was separated as a safety mechanism to force the tourist to return home
‘to the family’. A tourist was more likely to travel with a colleague
from another town or republic than with family members or friends.
Correspondingly, from a total of 6,762 people who visited foreign coun-
tries from the Uzbek SSR in 1974, only 2,015 were registered to visit
foreign countries for the exclusive purposes of vacation and recreation.
This is not surprising as these 6,762 travellers comprised of 132 special-
ized groups: 36 agricultural groups, 21 teacher groups, 9 constructor
groups, 7 railway workers groups and 6 medical workers groups.13 It
is important to note that all these specialists were technically called
‘tourists’ and their trips were organized through the Inturist [Foreign
Tourist]. As one of the agricultural engineers recounted when remem-
bering his visit to Cuba:

We visited Cuba through our kolkhoz organization, so we had to visit

sugar plantations, factories. This was part of the program. We had to
talk to workers. It was an exchange ... But we were tourists. We did not
care. The main thing was that we went to see other countries.14

Individual family holidays abroad, let alone individual tours, were

almost non-existent. As Anne Gorsuch (2011) explains, while abroad
Soviet tourists were considered to play important roles as representa-
tives of the Soviet Union on an ‘international stage’. Officially, tourists
were not allowed to leave their groups during the entire duration of the
trip. Talking to foreigners was strictly forbidden unless it was part of an
arranged ‘cultural’ programme. Hence, although mobility was allowed,
it was highly restricted. One could leave the Soviet Union physically, but
one did not leave the Soviet system. A female engineer from Kazakhstan
remembered: ‘Everyone could see that we were Soviet tourists, we were
always in a group, like clouds.’15
Despite having been carefully selected for their loyalty to the state,
Soviet tourists were carefully observed during their trips. An official
from the Party or the Communist Youth Organization (Komsomol)
usually led the group, managing their tour as well as their behaviour.
In addition, there were usually two undercover secret police officers or
collaborators among the ‘tourists’, whose duty it was to monitor the
behaviour of group members, especially if they travelled outside of the
socialist bloc. People rarely knew who the collaborators or the policemen
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 71

were, not even the ‘collaborators’ themselves. This system of ‘divide and
rule’ insured that no informal/illicit arrangements were made by the
group and that they were safe. Although the anonymous surveillance
system was effective in many ways, still, as noted by Gorsuch, very often
powerful ‘normal’ tourists were socially and politically stronger than
group leaders or agents. Thus, collaborators and leaders would have been
reluctant to report on important officials in order to avoid potential
negative repercussions (Gorsuch 2011: 23). A renowned scientist from
the Academy of Sciences in Kazan, who at the time of the travel was a
promising young academic, thus remembered:

One could figure out who the collaborator was. Once, during a trip to
France, a school teacher let the rest of the group know that he could
write about this and that, but that he would not, he did not want to
be busy with those kinds of things. He worded it so that it could be
understood variously, not very clearly, but we all understood what
he meant.16

Movement away from home symbolically represented new freedoms but

this new mobility also brought perceived dangers, such as the possibility
of ‘immoral’ behaviour. A central theme of Soviet films about tourism,
for instance, was adultery. In order to prevent these perceived risks to
the morality and thus model status of Soviet tourists abroad, they were
structurally coerced into demonstrating and practicing ‘good Soviet
citizenship’ during the tours. Strict programmes and prescribed behav-
ioural norms were implemented to minimize the perceived dangers of
foreign trips. Thus, not for a minute were Soviet tourists allowed to ‘do
nothing’ or ‘wander around’ and careful attention was paid to appro-
priate clothing. As a female artist from Tashkent remembered: ‘We had
to look good. We had to be clean, formal, civilized. We could wear
national clothes, but we were supposed to be, and actually wanted to
be, modern’.17
Men were expected to wear ties and to dress and behave formally. A
group leader from Kazakhstan, for example, complained in 1964 that
a certain Simakin drank alcohol and appeared at an organized public
event in an untucked shirt.18 Simakin’s behaviour was discussed at a
closed Party meeting back in Kazakhstan where it was decided that
he would not be recommended for any further foreign trips.19 As the
daughter of a high ranking Soviet official in Dushanbe remembered: ‘We
were acquainted with the programme of the trip. We were told, as Soviet
people, not to drink, not to smoke, to behave ourselves, and to listen to
72 Botakoz Kassymbekova

the group leader ... Everywhere we [went, we] looked official’.20 Soviet
tourists also had to represent the achievements of the socialist state by
appearing healthy and well, as the complaint of a Kazakh group leader
to the Moscow Central Labour Union shows. In his official report on a
tour he led in 1964, he argued that ‘unhealthy people should not travel
abroad, since a certain Itsenko-Kushinga attracted attention with her
[unhealthy] appearance and was a burden for the group’.21
Those with medical conditions had few opportunities for travelling
abroad. This is evident, for instance, from the recollections of a factory
manager whose wife had to undertake medical tests due to health prob-
lems prior to undertaking a trip to Italy in the late 1970s:

My wife had a cardiac defect. The doctor told me that my wife could
not travel abroad. She could travel anywhere in the Soviet Union,
you know, but they did not allow her to travel to the West. I told
them they should cure her and then we would go. Doctors told me
that they could not cure her, they did not know how to. I told them,
either cure her or let us go ... We got a medical certification then
through friends.22

Another, perhaps more important, reason why the Soviet state did not
allow Soviet tourists with medical conditions to leave the Soviet Union
was because it was expensive to provide medical care in the West. At a
time when the Soviet Union looked for ways to earn, not spend, foreign
currency, medical costs had to be avoided.
Tourists’ financial resources were also restricted. While the Soviet
Union used foreigners’ visits into the country as a way to raise hard
currency, Soviet tourists abroad were only allowed to take a very small
amount of money out of the country in order to ‘minimize currency
losses’, from 30 to 100 rubles (Lebina 2005). Any surplus money that
the tourists took was confiscated with the violations reported to local
Party Committees.23 As a former tourist from Tashkent remembered:
‘We were given 50 rubles for the trip: it was enough only for ice-cream
and souvenirs. We could not buy anything with the money.’24 These
financial restrictions had the associated effect of making sure that tour-
ists could not engage in undesired ‘unnecessary’ activities. In 1979, the
Soviet leadership issued ‘Official Rules of Conduct of Soviet Citizens in
Foreign Trips’, according to which Soviet citizens had to be ‘modest and
courteous’ when coming to shops or markets, and were prohibited to
save money for shopping by economizing on food and living conditions
(Golubev 2011).25
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 73

Other measures to ensure that Soviet tourists behaved appropri-

ately included the confiscation of passports and an elaborate system
of reporting. Travellers knew that their behaviour was reported to their
workplace or regional Party Committee and that failure to publicly
demonstrate loyalty would result in an admonishment or a ban on
further travels abroad. This is why many behaved ‘according to instruc-
tions’, or at least publicly presented appropriate behaviour. Travellers
also knew that, after returning home, they would need to write a report
about their experiences for the organization that had sent him or her
on the tour. Usually, tourists were further obliged to deliver a public
lecture to a local or regional Party Committee, to the Komsomol, to the
Labour Union or to their collective at work (Chistikov 2011: 168), and
some published pamphlets about their exemplary travel experiences
(Ishanturaeva 1953; Ernazarov 1979).
Despite this elaborate system for moulding and monitoring behaviour,
post-Stalinist Soviet society understood and valued creative collaboration
within the Soviet system. It was acceptable to present one’s loyalty in
public, but still not be regarded as a ‘collaborator’. It was also expected,
however, that one could use the Soviet system for private purposes that
diverged from the official party line. It was expected that every Soviet
tourist, for instance, would bring a Western product back home, even
if officially no sums were available for shopping. Societal expectations
drew borders within the official sphere and allowed for private interests
to co-exist alongside official policy lines.

The persistence of inequalities

While officially, the main criteria for assessing tourists’ suitability for
foreign travel was their loyalty and allegiance to the state, in practice,
inequalities persisted that were related to economic standing, ethnicity
and gender. Thus officials and professionals travelled more often than
workers and peasants because, as one Soviet tourist from Kazakhstan
remembered, ‘it was very expensive’: ‘[M]ostly heads of organizations
travelled to the West, it was very difficult for a “normal” worker to visit
Europe, for example. Not because they were worse, they simply did not
have the money.’26
Kazakhstan’s Labour Union reported in 1964 that representatives of
the local nationality, Kazakhs, constituted only 9.4 per cent and ‘workers’
only 8.2 per cent of the tourist body due to the expensive nature of the
trips, usually costing around 400–450 rubles.27 Factory workers could
not afford such trips, especially those who lived in faraway regions,
74 Botakoz Kassymbekova

as the flight to Moscow itself posed a financial challenge, the Kazakh

Labour Union reported. Moreover, prices rose each year and the Kazakh
Labour Union complained that the price for a tour to Egypt increased
from 270 in 1973 to 380 rubles in 1975, which was more than people
could afford.28
In order to partially compensate for such price rises, however, Labour
Unions increased their subsidies. In 1974, for example, the Uzbek SSR
reported that out of 6,762 people who travelled outside the Soviet Union,
2,200 ‘best workers’ (peredoviki) were funded by the Organizations’
Funds and Social Security Funds. In 1976, it reported that out of 7,597
travellers, 3,000 workers had been granted subsidized trips for over-ful-
filling work plans or performing especially difficult tasks.29 Travelling
was thus also used as a system of reward and access to subsidized tours
was a matter of competition between workers, whose achievements
were popularized for propaganda purposes and interpreted as a sign of
loyalty to the Soviet regime. One of the key contradictions of the state
socialist regime can be clearly observed here: while officially, the regime
propagated equality, in actual fact it required differentiation through
a system of rewards in order to motivate the work force. The gaps that
emerged as a result of this contradiction were sought to be filled ideo-
logically, but people frequently saw through this and simply learnt to
play the game.
Members of the ‘titular’ nationalities were also initially strongly under-
represented amongst the tourist groups. In the 1960s and early 1970s,
the vast majority of travellers from Central Asian Republics to foreign
locations were Russian. In 1967, they constituted the largest group
amongst tourists from the Kazakh Republic (1,766), followed by only
258 Ukrainians, 228 Kazakhs, 125 Jews, 111 Germans, 65 Tartars and
19 Uzbeks (see Table 4.1).30 Although it is not clear exactly when and
how it started, from about the mid-1970s, Labour Unions in the Central
Asian Republics were pressured, however, to provide more opportuni-
ties for local titular nationalities to travel abroad. In Central Asia this
‘affirmative action’ was accomplished most successfully in Uzbekistan
and Tajikistan. Indeed, Uzbekistan was the only Central Asian Republic
where titular nationals dominated tourist groups in 1975. In Tajikistan,
although only one-third of the tourists were Tajik, they still comprised
a larger group than Russians. In Turkmenistan, Turkmens and Russians
made up equal numbers of tourists. Kazakhstan was the only country
where representatives of the titular nationality were almost three times
less likely to travel abroad. It is possible that this was due to the fact
that, until the 1980s, Russians constituted the largest ethnic group in
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 75

Table 4.1 Soviet Central Asian tourists travelling abroad (compiled by the
author)

1961 1967 1975

Russians Titular Russians Titular Russians Titular

Kazakhstan 68% 10% 56% 7% 55% 20%

Uzbekistan – – 50% 50% 26% 55%
Tajikistan – – 45% 24% 23% 33%
Turkmenistan 81% 13% 53% 24% 42% 38%
Kyrgyzstan 65% 17% 67% 16% 40% 30%

Source: State Archive of the Russian Federation, Fond 920 (Other nationalities included
Germans, Ukrainians, etc.).

Kazakhstan. However, although Kazakhs constituted the second largest

ethnic group, proportionally they also had fewer opportunities to travel
abroad than representatives of some other ethnicities. Perhaps this was
related to the fact that Kazakhstan was considered less of a ‘borderland’
republic than other Central Asian republics. In comparison, Uzbekistan
was treated as the centre of Soviet Central Asia and it is possible that
this was the reason why it received the largest number of foreign tour-
ists and why ethnic Uzbeks participated most in tourist trips. This would
have been to showcase the Soviet Union as an inclusive society to the
Muslim world (Kemper et al. 2009), as Moscow presented Uzbekistan
as a Soviet version of modern Muslim society. Sending Soviet Muslims
abroad served the purpose of demonstrating to the rest of the world the
determination of the Soviet regime to achieve the liberation, develop-
ment and modernization of the ‘East’. Tourism was thus part of Soviet
international anti-colonial politics.31 In the context of anti-colonial and
anti-imperial movements throughout the world, Soviet Muslim tour-
ists were to promote the image of a non-colonialist and anti-imperialist
Soviet state abroad. Hence, tourism by Central Asians from the Soviet
Union should be understood not only as a reward for loyalty by Central
Asians, but also as a mechanism to forge allegiances between Soviet and
foreign ‘Easterners’. It is thus also not surprising that Uzbeks and other
‘Muslim’ tourists from Central Asia received more tourists from, and
went on more tours to India, Pakistan, Africa and Cuba, which were of
strategic relevance for the Soviet regime.32
Nevertheless, it is important to note that Central Asians as a whole
received far fewer opportunities to travel than residents of Russia’s central
Moscow and Leningrad regions (see Table 4.2). Although the data for
1970s is not easily available, the data for 1956 and 1961 shows that the
76 Botakoz Kassymbekova

Table 4.2 Soviet citizens travelling abroad in 1956 and 1961 by origin regions
and republics33

1956 1961

Moscow 6,734 10,007

Leningrad 966 5,205
Kazakh SSR 193 753
Uzbek SSR 206 852
Saratov region 284 888
Odessa region 182 632

Source: GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 316 (1956) and d. 395/397 (1961).

great majority of tourists came from Moscow and Leningrad. The data
also suggests that the number of tourists from non-Russian republics
was growing, just as the state simultaneously promoted increased tourist
participation by workers and women.
As with nationality, increasing gender equality was also a key goal of
the socialist state with regard to foreign tourism. Female quotas were
occasionally tracked, recorded and discussed. If in 1963 the Tajik Labour
Union reported that it sent 62 women and 156 men abroad;34 in 1970,
257 women and 303 men from Tajikistan were able to travel, narrowing
the gender gap in international mobility. 35 This gap varied consider-
ably across the nationalities, however. For example, while in 1974 the
Uzbek Labour Union reported that it sent 4,447 men and 2,315 women
abroad, in the same year 4,679 men and 6,342 women travelled abroad
from Kazakhstan.36 Although more research needs to be conducted to
scrutinize gender dimensions of Soviet foreign tourism, it seems that
although tourist groups from Central Asia were generally dominated by
men, occasional campaigns ensured greater participation by women.

The limits of control

The Soviet state politicized the experience of tourism not only because
of economic considerations, but also because consumption-oriented
tourism to capitalist countries could have led to uncomfortable questions
about supply and demand in the Soviet Union and to questions about
the quality of life in socialist states. At the same time, Soviet tourists
clearly were very interested in leisure pursuits and the consumption of
foreign products, as is evident from their contemporary recollections as
well as from the archived reports of group leaders. This led to a complex
situation: while Soviet tourists had to represent the ‘most humane and
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 77

civilized’ system in the world, their experience abroad suggested other-

wise, as the following excerpt from an interview with a former leader
of a Komsomol organization from Kazakhstan shows. Recounting her
most memorable and surprising experiences of material culture in Italy,
she noted her surprise at the standard of sanitary facilities: ‘Their toilets
were better than our restaurants, we were afraid to do our business there.
It smelled so good. Towels were so white, we were afraid to use them. We
were told to use it, not to be shy, but we were afraid’.37
Paradoxically, the freedom and ability to experience the West (which
was almost universally perceived as superior to the socialist system by
Soviet citizens) neutralized these feelings, often ending in laughter.
Photographs taken by Kazakh tourists thus frequently showed foreign
‘luxuries’ (by Soviet standards) and stores full of clothes or exotic fruits
as evidence of the ‘good life’ abroad (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Enjoying
and admiring such luxuries became a luxury in itself and was perceived
as a positive Soviet experience. The aim of the tourist became, it seems,
not the revolution and resistance that would somehow lead to the
break-up of the Soviet Union, as some have suggested, but rather a desire
to travel more often and to thus become more ‘modern’ oneself. As early
as 1964, the Turkmen Labour Union complained to Moscow that some
people were getting ‘addicted’ to tours and that they ‘wanted more and
more’ of them.38
The practice of controlling group travel was not as necessary as state
leaders might have thought. For the most part, Soviet tourists such as
those whose recollections I have presented here did not aim to escape
and stay abroad. While tourism beyond the Iron Curtain did intro-
duce Soviet citizens to non-Soviet standards, these experiences abroad
did not automatically spoil or corrupt the tourists in the way officials
feared. Despite the fact that the tourists were positively impressed by, for
example, Western cities, this did not necessarily fuel a desire to emigrate.
A former tourist from Kazakhstan provided this classical response, given
by other former Soviet Central Asian tourists too: ‘We did not think
about whether the West was good or bad. We were curious. We wanted
to know how it was there. We could not talk to locals. We would have
always needed a translator.’39
The former tourists I interviewed primarily belonged to the upper
echelons of Soviet society, as did most travellers abroad. Their life in
the Soviet Union was comfortable (by Soviet standards) and many had
access to goods that ‘normal’ Soviet citizens did not have. It is only
natural that as ‘loyal’ members of the ruling classes (or as those who
displayed such loyalty to the outside), these tourists did not feel the
78 Botakoz Kassymbekova

Figure 4.1 In front of a store with clothes, Cairo, 1978

Source: Private Collections (Anonymous).

need to work against their own government, one that not only prom-
ised a better life, but also delivered on its promises, that is by offering
tours to another ‘world’.
Few tourists also felt sufficiently equipped to emigrate. Their knowledge
of foreign languages was limited and they could not imagine working
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 79

Figure 4.2 With Pineapples and Bananas, Havana, 1976

Source: Private Collections (Anonymous).

somewhere else. Moreover, many had families back in the Soviet Union
which they did not want to leave behind. The policy of not allowing
families to travel together, it seems, was effective: ‘Did we want to stay
there? No, we wanted to go home. There is nothing better than home.’40
80 Botakoz Kassymbekova

Most were afraid to stay in a place they did not know. They also under-
stood that life abroad was not that simple: ‘We saw beggars, we felt bad
for them. We thought, “they are poor, they demean themselves”.’41
More importantly, although Soviet tourist experiences were carefully
choreographed and monitored by tour leaders and agents, people found
ways of moderating and departing from official itineraries and permitted
norms, which made their experiences more personalized and rewarding.
Such unauthorized behaviour included ‘illegal commercial activities’
that stayed largely unreported. Although group leaders frequently
complained about ‘contraband’ Soviet money and illegal trade in their
official reports, a vast amount of ‘successful’ trade was never registered.
This is how a daughter of a high official from Tajikistan remembered her
trip to India:

Everyone brought something to trade. This is how we made money.

Those who returned from trips told us what people wanted to buy
from us abroad and so we [took it with us to] exchange ... When I
went to India I took an iron with me. Those who had returned from
India had told me we should take irons. I took it. I got some money
for it from the hotel workers and I could buy some clothes ... No,
nobody caught me, everyone did it.42

A tourist from the Kazakh Republic similarly remembered that ‘Vodka

was the best thing to take with us. In Italy we sold 1 [bottle of] vodka
and could buy 2 jeans. This was a great deal. Everyone dreamed about
jeans, we had enough vodka.’43 Sometimes the exchange did not work,
however. As a female engineer from Chimkent recalled:

We heard that in Egypt they wanted pens because of the lead. So,
we thought, ‘hey, this is easy’, and we took 100 pieces with us. Once
we were in Egypt, we tried to sell them. We were very excited, but
nobody wanted our pens. They looked at us as if we were crazy. They
said, no, no, give us dollars. So, we just gave the pens to children in
the street ... My husband wanted to take a photo with a belly dancer,
but we had no money. He offered pens, but the belly dancer would
not agree to get paid with pens. This was very disappointing for my
husband.44

Other rumours led tourists to undertake unauthorized activities such as

individual tours. A former Party official from Almaty thus remembered
going out in Rome on New Year’s Eve because,
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 81

[W]e had heard that Italians throw away their old clothes from the
windows. We did not have enough money to buy clothes, so we
went outside on the streets on New Year’s Eve and waited for the
‘clothes rain.’ Nothing happened. It was cold, we waited and waited,
but nothing came. We were disappointed not to get some Italian
clothes.45

Even if ‘inappropriate’ behaviour was reported back home, ‘sentences’

were not harsh. In 1972 tourists from the Kazakh Soviet Republic were
reported to have communicated with buyers and traded vodka, cigarettes
and currency.46 A secret agent from the Tajik SSR complained that tour-
ists smuggled in large amounts of fabrics from Egypt and that the tour
guide had gone to night bars with the tourists without permission.47 An
agent who travelled with the Kyrgyz group in 1974 reported that tourists
sold watches, electric razors and other personal things.48 The agent also
pointed to the fact that the Inturist organization earned 325,640 rubles
from the trips conducted by the Kyrgyz SSR that year.49 In 1975, Uzbek
tourism brought in 1,457,142 rubles in revenue. Of the 8,045 registered
tourists, only 26 were reported for violating norms of behaviour: that is
smuggling money in national caps – tubeteika – (the caps were also sold),
in toothpaste tubes and in music play stations.50
Usually, these misdeeds resulted in verbal reprimands from the head
of the organization or the local Party section. This was followed neither
by militia persecution, nor by Inturist injunctions. No jailing or other
serious implications ensued. This is why many tourists used opportuni-
ties to make money unofficially and to use the freedoms offered by the
structure of Soviet foreign tourism. The most serious penalty was barring
the person from future foreign travel. This happened rarely, however,
and only in the most extreme cases. One such case occurred in 1974,
when a tourist – a manager of a drug store in Dushanbe – from Tajik
SSR left the group to visit a Mosque in Cairo. This would not have been
reported by the tour leader if the tourists’ audio copy of the Koran had
not been found at the airport in Moscow.51 However, when a school
teacher bought a Muslim prayer, Masbekh, from Afghanistan he ‘received’
only a verbal reprimand. Such reprimands did not seriously hurt Soviet
tourists and they continued to use all possible methods to enjoy their
tours as much as they could and to bring things back from abroad to
show at home. Despite the highly politicized structure of Soviet foreign
tourism, one should not overlook the gaps and possibilities within this
structure which offered the chance to escape official politics. It is these
possibilities themselves which made the post-Stalinist Soviet structure
82 Botakoz Kassymbekova

tolerable. Indeed, it is the porous nature of this structure which ensured

that Western experiences did not result in large-scale anti-Soviet senti-
ments in Central Asia.

Conclusion

It is fascinating to investigate post-Stalinist tourism as a symbol, tool and

aim of the Soviet state to forge societal, economic and political change.
Although most authors on Soviet tourism acknowledge the political
work behind the Soviet leisure industry (Gorsuch 2011; Noack 2012;
Golubev 2011; Chistikov 2011; Shevyrin 2009), I have suggested in this
chapter that the study of tourism can provide intriguing insights into the
possibilities, gaps and limits of state protected spaces and territories. As I
have sought to demonstrate, despite its extreme politicization, the actual
practice of Soviet tourism led to a de-politicization of the public sphere
and a non-political understanding of the Soviet ‘homeland’ and of loca-
tions ‘abroad’. Although the political aim of creating ‘a Soviet citizen as
a consumer’ was politicized, it nevertheless should be treated as a politics
of de-militarization and an official de-politicization of society. Of course,
readiness to treat citizens as consumers and human beings, rather than
workforce and military units, does not mean that the politics disappeared
per se, but rather that it was transformed. Nevertheless, the difference in
the treatment of citizens in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist period was
enormous. I would argue that tourist experiences after Stalin should be
analysed as a politics of de-politicization and an expression of growing
trust by the state and by Soviet tourists in the state. In the case of Central
Asia, the Soviet tourist experience did not result in the delegitimization
of the Soviet system as some have suggested (Golubev 2011). On the
contrary, it shows that more and more Soviet citizens were ready to ‘play,
trick, subvert’ state structures and relied increasingly on their safe status
as Soviet citizens. This is because they knew that the era of terror and
harsh punishment had gone, while the post-Stalinist Soviet state offered
new spaces, gaps and possibilities for exploration and enjoyment.
Opportunities to travel abroad in the post-Stalin era were mainly
reserved for white-collar professionals and members of the Communist
Party or the Komsomol. However, from the mid-1970s onwards, more
and more non-Party members, titular nationalities and women also
began to visit the world on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This was
partly due to the transition that the Soviet Union underwent after the
death of Stalin. After the early decades of isolation, it began to open
itself to the world and promoted a politics of ‘peaceful co-existence’,
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 83

started by Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet Union increasingly measured

itself against Europe and was keen to enable its citizens to learn about
life in Europe and the rest of the world. It seems that the Soviet leader-
ship also paid more attention to delivering on its claims toward equality
by offering greater opportunities to those who otherwise would not
have been able to travel abroad: members of the working class and peas-
ants. Although these less privileged sections of the population stayed a
minority within tourist groups, there was a positive increase in travellers
from these backgrounds, enjoying benefits that during Stalinism would
have been unthinkable.
An important reason for the increase of Soviet tourism across the
Iron Curtain is that Soviet leaders acknowledged that tourism was an
economic activity that brought in revenue. Nonetheless, the Soviet prac-
tice of tourism remained a political endeavour: tourists were observed
and reported, routes were carefully programmed and independent
travel was impossible. Nevertheless, the punishments for ‘deviant
tourist behaviour’ were not harsh: usually they amounted to little more
than verbal reprimands. As a system of ‘tricking’ the state authorities
was well under way in all spheres of Soviet society, deviant tourists were
also sometimes rather admired by fellow citizens. This is significant for
understanding the context of post-Stalinist society. While the state
could be, and was, subverted, ironically this paved the way for Soviet
citizens to feel some trust towards the government. Unprecedented
improvements in living conditions and previously unthinkable liber-
ties, such as freedom of movement within the Soviet Union and some
opportunities to travel abroad, signified new relations between the
Soviet state and its citizens.
One could argue that no formal ‘de-politicization’ occurred in the
Soviet Union and that the new ‘social contract’ between Soviet citizens
and the state continued to be deeply political. This is true. However, the
concept of the political – just as any other concept – is highly contextual
and historical. On the one hand, the Soviet citizens who were allowed
to travel abroad did not enjoy the same freedoms as those practiced
and imagined in other parts of the world or today. Many felt that they
needed to represent the Soviet Union in a good light and that they were
constrained by long bureaucratic procedures, financial restraints and
surveillance. On the other hand, however, the experiences of travel were –
first of all – connected to joy, curiosity and excitement about encoun-
tering the world without being personally endangered. For Central Asian
tourists, travelling was not so much about ideological competition, mili-
tary danger or political work but rather about opportunities to compare,
84 Botakoz Kassymbekova

to consume and to discover – experiences associated with freedom and

personal development. It is in this context that we need to understand
the relationship between mobility, politics and the non-political experi-
ences of Soviet tourists abroad.

Notes
1. Although transportation was one of the most acute problems during Stalin’s
reign and the total share of investment into transport fell, between 1913 and
1956 the railway freight increased 16 times. (Westwood 1959: 26).
2. Foreign tourists and Soviet citizens still found ways to exchange in activities
considered illegal by the Soviet state. See (Popov 2004).
3. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 659. Protocols, stenographs and decrees of the sessions
of the Tatar, Udmurt, Uzbek, Cheliabinsk Tourism Councils.
4. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 2146, l. 118. Protocols of the Republican Labour
Union Councils about the organization of the Soviet tourism abroad.
5. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1096, l. 141–50. Reports of the Republican, Regional
and District Labour Union Councils about the organization of Soviet tourism
abroad.
6. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1100, l. 1. Reports of the Republican, Regional and District
Labour Union Councils about the organization of Soviet tourism abroad.
7. GARF, f. 9520, d. 1099, l. 130.
8. GARF, f. 9520, d. 1099, l. 130. Reports of the Republican, Regional and District
Labour Union Councils about the organization of Soviet tourism abroad.
9. Personal interview, Chimkent, Kazakhstan, March 2009.
10. Personal interview, Chimkent, Kazakhstan, March 2009.
11. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1423, l. 1. Reports of Republican and Regional Labour
Union Councils about organization of Soviet tourism abroad.
12. Ibid, l. 106.
13. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1980, l. 212
14. Personal Interview, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, April 2010.
15. Personal Interview, Chimkent, Kazakhstan, March 2009.
16. Personal Interview with a participant of a Soviet touristic group from
Tatarstan, Berlin, Germany, July 2012.
17. Personal interview, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, March 2009.
18. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 691, l. 55. Reports about work of tourist group leaders,
who spent vacation in countries of people’s democracy (these countries
included those of the Socialist Bloc, Vietnam, China, Yugoslavia).
19. Ibid., l. 57–58.
20. Personal interview, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, April 2010.
21. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 690, ll. 29–32. Report of the Labour Union Council
about work on Soviet foreign tourism.
22. Personal interview, Chimkent, Kazakhstan, March 2009.
23. GARF, f. 9520, d. 1099, l. 130.
24. Personal interview, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, March 2009.
25. Osnovnyie pravila povedeniia sovetskikh grazhdan, vyezzhaiushchikh v kapitalis-
ticheskiie i razvivaiushchiiesia strany, approved by the Central Committee of
the Communist Party on 17 July 1979.
 Soviet Central Asian Tourists across the Iron Curtain 85

26. Personal Interview, Almaty, Kazakhstan, March 2009.

27. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 687, l. 79. Reports about Labour Unions’ work on
Soviet foreign tourism.
28. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 2146, l. 118. Reports about Republican Labour Unions’
work on Soviet foreign tourism.
29. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 2314, l. 1. Reports about Labour Unions’ work on
Soviet foreign tourism.
30. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1096, l. 141–50.
31. At the same time, International Congresses of Muslims and Colonial ‘peoples’
were organized in Tashkent in the 1970s.
32. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1100, l. 1.
33. Although these numbers include travels to the Socialist Bloc, they give a
sense of a scale between various regions and republics.
34. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 588, l. 59–61. Reports and notes about Regional and
District Labour Union Councils’ work on organization of Soviet foreign
tourism for the year 1963.
35. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1423, l. 1
36. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1980, l. 212. Reports of District and Regional Councils
in RSFSR about the work of the organization of Soviet tourism abroad.
37. Personal interview, Almaty, Kazakhstan, April 2010.
38. GARF, f. 9520, d. 1423, l. 18.
39. Personal Interview, Almaty, Kazakhstan, March 2010. Similar responses in
Personal Interview, Dushanbe, April 2010, Personal Interview, Chimkent,
Kazakhstan, March 2009, Personal interview, Tashkent, 2009.
40. Personal Interview, Chimkent, March 2009.
41. Ibid.
42. Personal interview, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, May 2010.
43. Personal Interview, Chimkent, Kazakhstan, March 2009.
44. Personal Interview, Chimkent, Kazakhstan, March 2009.
45. Personal Interview, Almaty, Kazakhstan, April 2010.
46. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1663, l. 87.
47. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1664, l. 229, 242.
48. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 2147, l. 81.
49. Ibid.
50. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 2146, l. 114.
51. GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1980, l. 223

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5
Between Limits, Lures and
Excitement: Socialist Romanian
Holidays Abroad during the
1960s–80s
Adelina Oana Stefan

Introduction

‘I was off to Sofia to spend the New Years Eve of 1953’ wrote Romanian
poet A E Baconsky in his travel memoirs published in 1968 (Baconsky
1968: 9). While this may seem like banal information given the vicinity
of Bulgaria and Romania and their shared belonging to socialist space, it
was in fact quite an event. Travelling abroad was a troublesome under-
taking for Romanian citizens during the early communist period and only
certain categories of people such as those belonging to the nomenklatura,
sportsmen, prominent writers or members of folkloric ensembles were
able to take short trips, mostly to neighbouring socialist countries. This
situation was to change in the late 1950s–early 1960s with the consolida-
tion of power of the Romanian socialist regime. As the regime aimed at
legitimizing itself not only through force, as had happened in the early
1950s, but also through a program of social welfare, ordinary women
and men received better access to consumer goods, housing, and last but
not least vacations, including those abroad (Murgescu 2010: 132). From
the first law to regulate foreign travel, issued in 1957,1 a gradual libera-
tion ensued. The law of 1957 only set up general principles about how a
Romanian citizen could temporarily leave the country.2 As a response to
Romanians’ increased interest in taking vacations abroad, the Council of
Ministers issued further, more thorough regulations in 1967.3
Nevertheless, the simplification of procedures for foreign travel was
one of the first steps to socialist Romania’s entrance into the intricate

87
88 Adelina Oana Stefan

world of global mobility. Like other socialist states in Eastern Europe,

in the 1950s–60s, Romania also initiated an intensive modernization
process, which meant an increase in the mobility of people and goods.
This mobility was mainly internal and stemmed from the rapid pace of
industrialization. For example, at a discursive level socialist newspapers
frequently reported about commuters (mainly from rural to urban areas),
or working class tourists as products of this new society. On the other
hand, in the late 1950s to early 1960s more Western tourists started to
come to Romania, further complicating the issues surrounding mobility
in socialist Romania (Turnock 1991: 210).4 Despite looking like empty
propaganda, mobility became a fact of life in socialist Romania of the
1950s and 1960s and it acquired internal and external dimensions.
Although foreign tourism was not the most important type of mobility
in socialist Romania of the 1960s to 1980s, it was definitely one of the
most exhilarating ones.
This article examines both the official policies of the Romanian
socialist state during the 1960s–80s regarding holidays spent abroad, and
the everyday life experiences of ordinary tourists who took such vaca-
tions. I argue that although these vacations offered access to a private
space they remained under the gaze of the state. Each trip abroad had
to be pre-approved by the militia and the Securitate (communist secret
police).5 However, once the Romanian travellers were off to their desti-
nations they did not embody the propagandistic ideas of their state, but
followed their own leisure programmes. Thus, socialist tourists craved
the same enjoyment and recreation as their capitalist counterparts. In
observing this, this study positions itself against the ‘victim-oppressor’
paradigm that is still present in Romanian historiography when it comes
to the study of the communist period, which views the communist
regime in Romania as dominated by sheer force.6 I argue that such an
approach overlooks the modernization process that took place during
this time. A reassessment of this period is needed, and everyday life,
especially tourism, is one of the lenses that can shed light on actual
practices during the age of socialism in Romania.
My research asks several questions in order to illuminate the signifi-
cance of travelling abroad for Romanian socialist society from the 1960s
onwards. For example, what was the meaning of foreign travel in the
context of a socialist regime and what were the official regulations
concerning leaving the country? Were there any social or professional
groups that might have had privileged access to such holidays? Which
were the available countries or routes? Did the regime favour organized
trips over individual travelling? What types of activities did Romanian
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 89

tourists perform when travelling abroad on vacation? What sort of social

interactions, if any, did Romanian tourists have during these travels and
how did they engage as consumers with the places they visited?
I rely on a variety of primary sources for this article. First of all, I use
records of the discussions held within the Central Committee of the
Romanian Communist Party, which was the key decision-maker during
communist time. Secondly, I rely on the archives of the former Securitate,
which offer details about the regulations concerning foreign travel, and
even tell the stories of people who went on such vacations, albeit from
the official point of view. I have also conducted oral history interviews
with three people who took vacations abroad during the communist
period, which I collected during 2010 and 2011. These participants have
diverse educational backgrounds: one was a graduate from college, the
second one holds a PhD, while my third interviewee graduated only
from high school. In terms of the time frame they cover, the first two
interviewees talked about the 1960s and 1970s while the third inter-
viewee spoke about the 1980s, when travelling abroad started to be
more severely controlled again.
When analysing oral history interviews, I apply Alessandro Portelli’s
conceptualization of an interview as ‘dialogic discourse’, namely a narra-
tive that emerges in the realm of the dialogue between the interviewee
and the interviewer, and is shaped by the particular circumstances of
this dialogue (Portelli 1997: 3). Portelli also addresses the question of
oral history’s reliability as a source. He argues that ‘oral sources are cred-
ible, but with a different credibility. The importance of oral testimony
may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it,
as image-nation, symbolism, and desire emerge. Therefore there are no
“false” oral sources’ (ibid.: 3). What is important in oral history and what
I follow in my oral history interviews is the ways my three interviewees
build discourses about the past, how they express certain details, and
also what they forget. Indeed, I am more interested in this than in how
accurately they reproduce the chronology of events, or certain historical
details.

Tourism in Romanian historiography

Tourism has received little attention in Romanian historiography. In

general, scholars have focused on issues like political repression, the role
of elites or international relations, silencing social and cultural develop-
ments at the level of everyday life. The small number of studies which have
tackled ordinary people’s practices and their ways of life have focused on
90 Adelina Oana Stefan

queuing, economic shortages and housing, ignoring the importance of

holidaymaking and tourism for the socialist regime (Campeanu 1994).
This is also true for more general tourism historiography.
Until recently, historians regarded tourism as an ‘unserious’ business,
one which should be the object of study for anthropologists or sociolo-
gists. Scholars from these latter disciplines were in fact the first to pay
attention to tourism in the late 1970s. For Dean MacCannell, a sociolo-
gist considered to be the founder of tourism studies, tourism is both a
product of modern consumerism and an attempt to reduce everything
to a commodity (1999: 3). However, he fails to recognize the authen-
ticity of the tourist experience when he says that for tourists it is not
the act of sightseeing that is important but ‘the image or the idea of
society that the collective act generates’ (ibid: 3). For the British sociolo-
gist John Urry, tourism is also more about democratization and novelty
rather than a quest for authenticity (2002: 12). For Urry, what defines
the tourist experience is the gazing at places and objects that are out of
ordinary: ‘What makes a particular tourist gaze depends upon what it
is contrasted with; what the forms of non-tourist experience happen to
be (workplace, home)’ (ibid.: 1). However, more recent approaches to
tourism reject the idea of tourism as an exceptional event, and empha-
size that, by contrast, tourism is ‘infused into the everyday’ (Franklin
2003: 2). Ellen Furlough and Shelley Baranowski thus argued that histo-
rians should pay more attention to tourism as it ‘is not only a formidable
economic force but has also been operated by various types of govern-
ments as an instrument at the juncture between ideology, consumption,
social harmony, and national coherence’ (Furlough and Baranowski
2001: 16).
This is particularly true for socialist societies where tourism repre-
sented modernity ideologically as well as in social practice: ‘[S]ocialism
too was part of the modern world, and socialist tourism also reflects
the ineffable tension generated by travelling in groups, or according to
officially arranged itineraries, in order to produce individual meaning’
(Gorsuch and Konker 2006: 2). Gorsuch and Koenker identify a shift
which occurred in the politics of tourism and in tourists’ mentality
during the 1960s, transforming it from a purposeful journey for work
reasons for the enhancement of one’s intellectual and physical capital
to a leisure activity followed by anyone interested in ‘visual, cultural and
material consumption’ (ibid.: 3).
However, many of these studies refer to domestic tourism, with
international travelling receiving scant attention. Thus, most relevant
studies portray foreign travel in the Eastern bloc as primarily a means of
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 91

overcoming economic shortages (Luthar 2005: 229–59, Chelcea 2002:

16–43). Brenda Luthar’s article on ‘desire, consumption and surveil-
lance’ thus presents Yugoslavs’ shopping trips to the Italian border
town of Trieste during the 1950s–1960s as cultural and social practices
employed in order to deal with shortages (Luthar 2006: 230). Similarly,
Liviu Chelcea’s study focuses on the role of border trade and transcul-
tural networks for acquiring goods in a Romanian village situated close
to the Yugoslav and Hungarian borders (Chelcea 2002: 16–43). On the
other hand, Anne Gorsush’s recent book on Soviet tourism abroad brings
a slightly different perspective to travelling during socialism. She mean-
ingfully shows how although foreign travel was officially supposed to
enforce Soviet identity, in reality it was a multifaceted experience that
involved gazing at places, shopping and identity building (Gorsuch
2011). My research on international tourism in socialist Romania
complements Gorsush’s findings on tourism in the Soviet Union, and
asserts that travelling abroad involved a complex negotiation of the
tourist with the socialist state, as well as searching for pleasure and
amusement. Here, then, I define international tourism from socialist
Romania as an experience constructed through difference, but also as
a particular private space which the socialist state conceded to some of
its citizens.

Organizing tourism: from trade unions to the national

office for tourism-Carpati (ONT-Carpati)

The development of tourism in socialist Romania was a complex, multi-

faceted phenomenon. Undoubtedly, following the Sovietization process
of the early 1950s, the Soviet model of the 1930s–50s was the most influ-
ential in crafting tourism policies and practices. This model focused on
collective trips, which were supposed to strengthen workers’ socialist
identity. However, tourist policies were also shaped by the specific
background of Romanian society and by the people in charge of imple-
menting those policies. Most of these people were former employees of
lower rank within the agencies which had dealt with tourism in previous
political regimes, in particular during the interwar reign of King Carol
II, who had implemented tourism policies inspired by the German Kraft
Durch Freude initiative or the Italian Dopolavoro programme. Thus, most
of the socialist tourists in 1950s Romania belonged to the bourgeoisie
and white-collar working class. These are categories of people who were
used to going on vacations before the war. Hence, in a meeting held
in 1955, the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party
92 Adelina Oana Stefan

complained that only 30 per cent of those taking the subsidized collec-
tive tours were workers.7
Starting with the 1960s, the socialist regime in Romania developed a
more elaborate tourist policy that emphasized individual travelling and
the consumerist dimensions of tourism. As Sheilla Fitzpatrick explains,
the paradox of Stalinism is that although the official discourse stressed
the importance of production, classes in themselves were not defined
by this concept; rather consumption and the ability to acquire goods
were the criteria for status in socialist society (Fitzpatrick 2000: 12–13).8
Socialist Romania followed the same model, and the goods consumed,
or the travels taken, became important criteria in establishing social
distinctions within ‘equalitarian’ socialist society. The 1960s brought a
reconfiguration of socialist society which was no longer divided between
people with ‘unhealthy’ social origins (bourgeoisie and kulaks) and those
with healthy origins (blue-collar working class). Thus, although healthy
origins remained an important criterion in determining one’s place in
society, profession, education and political affiliation to the Communist
Party became the decisive factors. This phenomenon triggered more
social and economic expectations which the socialist state tried to meet
by, among others, offering individual vacations, a form of consumption
which cost little but preserved the social equilibrium.
The shift from collective to individual vacations is meaningfully
reflected by the institutional organization of tourism. During the 1950s
the trade unions were primarily responsible for the organization of vaca-
tions for workers. The National Office for Tourism, an agency that was
private during the interwar period and nationalized after World War II,
became part of the General Working Confederation, an organization of
the communist trade unions in 1948, thus stressing the highly signifi-
cant social role of tourism. A separate National Office of Tourism was
however re-established in 1955, and charged with the organization and
overseeing of international tourism.9 It was run in a more commer-
cial manner than in the years before. In 1959, the National Office for
Tourism’s role became more important as it started to function as an
independent agency within the Union for Sport and Physical Education,
and after 1967 as an independent institution that had a role similar to
that of a ministry. The Ministry of Tourism itself was created in 1971,
a sign of the increased importance of tourism in Romanian socialist
economy and society.
From 1959, the ONT-Carpati (National Office for Tourism – Carpati)
became responsible for both internal tourism and for the populariza-
tion of Romanian tourism to foreign destinations. In 1962, further
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 93

restructuring took place and the responsibility for organizing Romanian

tourists’ vacations abroad was added to ONT-Carpati’s responsibilities.10
The ONT-Carpati’s reshuffle of 1967 reconfirms this responsibility,
citing the organization of foreign excursions as one of the main tasks
of ONT-Carpati.11 The institutional framework reflects the party’s inten-
tion to increase the role of tourism within the national economy, but
also mirrors certain managerial shortcomings within the ONT-Carpati,
as corruption and mismanagement were rife and party leaders struggled
to find solutions other than changing the institution’s leadership and
its affiliation.12
As the party’s interest in tourism grew, a considerable number of adver-
tisements began to be published in local and national newspapers about
the possibility of spending vacations abroad through the ONT-Carpati
during the 1960s. Before going any further, it is necessary to clarify what
abroad meant for socialist Romania of the 1960s and how this concept
altered throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The 1960s’ advertisements
referred merely to neighbouring socialist countries, especially the USSR,
always mentioned first, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and
the GDR. Only in the late 1960s–early 1970s did tourist destinations
become more diverse as they included countries such as Austria, France
and even Japan.13 At the level of high politics this situation reflected the
diversification of available tourist destinations, a change in the political
orientation of Romania from the Soviet Union to Western countries,
and the intention of acting in a more entrepreneurial way. For ordinary
Romanians this opening translated into greater freedom of movement,
although the barriers were never completely lifted as an exit visa was
still required for Romanians citizens to leave the country.14
This change in tourism policy can be seen in official statistics. According
to Scînteia, the Communist Party official newspaper, and to a report
by Radio Free Europe, in 1962 25,000 tourists went on foreign vaca-
tions, compared to 13,000 in 1959 and 21,000 in 1961.15 As Romania’s
population comprised 18,500,000 inhabitants in the early 1960s, less
than 1 per cent of the Romanian population travelled abroad (The
Statistical Yearbook 1990: 50). However, the number of Romanian tour-
ists travelling abroad increased in the following years reaching 482,179
in 1976. From these tourists, 416,520 travelled to socialist countries
while 65,534 visited non-socialist countries.16 Most of the tourists who
travelled to socialist countries went by car while tourists who visited
non-socialist countries took the plane.17 In the 1980s, the socialist state
started to discourage tourists from using personal cars when travelling
abroad by imposing additional restrictions on gasoline consumption.
94 Adelina Oana Stefan

The intention might have been to curb individual trips as well. While
individuals travelling by personal cars through the National Office for
Tourism – Carpati were permitted to keep gasoline within the limits of
their car tanks, those travelling on an individual basis were allowed to
leave the country with only ten litres of automobile fuel.18
In a nutshell, the number of Romanian tourists going abroad
increased suddenly and rapidly at the end of the 1960s as a conse-
quence of the change in policy regarding foreign vacations. Alongside
its ambition of playing a more important role within international poli-
tics, the Romanian socialist state became more confident as it stopped
political persecutions (political prisoners were collectively amnestied in
1964) and a new social structure emerged at the beginning of the 1960s.
This triggered a larger degree of permissiveness and more focus on issues
like consumption and tourism.

Travelling abroad ... but how?

The procedure for applying to take part in an excursion organized by the

National Office for Tourism – Carpati was easier for vacations in coun-
tries of the Eastern bloc or in an organized excursion. First of all, poten-
tial tourists had to fill in a form provided by the ONT-Carpati. During
the 1960s the form asked for the person’s name, date of birth, profes-
sion, current and former work place, personal identification number,
school history, name of parents, their personal data, convictions (if
any), data about relatives abroad, political membership both before and
after 23 August 1944 (the official date of the communist party’s coming
to power).19 Basically, the form asked if the applicant was a member of
the Communist Party.20 The next step was sending these forms to both
the local militia and the Securitate offices (the Romanian communist
secret police), which had to approve the application. For travel to the
countries of the communist bloc the restrictions were not so severe. For
example, of 33 people applying for a permit to travel to the Soviet Union
in April 1966, all were allowed to go, even though one was a former
political prisoner.21
In contrast, travelling to Western countries was much more difficult.
There was a constant fear among the Romanian communist authorities
that some of the tourists would not return and would ask for political
asylum in Western countries. A report from 1968 of the Commission
for Visas and Passports – a central institution affiliated to the Council
of Ministers in charge of approving passports requests – complained
that out of 54,080 travellers 644 had remained abroad.22 As a result, the
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 95

Commission asked for more thorough verifications from militia and

Securitate.23 In addition, the tourist was supposed to ask for approval
from her/his employer, approval which the Commission regarded as a
moral warranty.24 Moreover, the report of the Commission for Visas and
Passports recommended to the ONT-Carpati to group together people
working within the same institution so they would keep an eye on each
other.25 Tourists going abroad on vacations through ONT-Carpati had
to submit their application to one of their offices and then await a
response. The approval was supposed to come no later than 30 days
after submission.26 The procedure was more complicated when tour-
ists travelled on their own to visit relatives or friends. In this case, the
tourist sent the application directly to their nearest branch of the Office
for Passports, Foreigners Monitoring and Border Control.27 This office
was part of the militia and dealing with this institution was always
troublesome and bureaucratically complicated in Socialist Romania.
Bureaucracy played a role in discouraging many Romanian citizens to
fill in such requests.
Another problem was the availability of foreign currency, which was
needed for foreign travel. Foreign money (valuta) was not provided by
the Romanian state but by the person whom the Romanian citizen was
visiting, because Romanians were forbidden to possess such currency
unless they had been working abroad or had been receiving remit-
tances.28 If a person did fulfil all the criteria (possession of foreign
currency, employment in the socialist sector and political reliability)
there was a high chance of getting permission to travel abroad on
an individual basis. For example, of the 13 requests made in January
1969 all were approved.29 However, the system was unpredictable
as a couple of months later, in April, only half of the requests were
granted.30
Legislation on travelling mirrored the embryonic political opening
up of the late 1960s. There was an inner conflict between restrictive
policies towards travelling and the state’s ambition of getting inter-
national acceptance, which the legislation reflected closely. Thus, the
decision of the Council of Ministers no. 2414 from 1968 simplified
the procedure for obtaining a travel visa and for issuing a passport for
collective tours. When travelling in groups organized by the National
Office for Tourism or by the Communist Youth Organization to
socialist countries, tourists did not need an individual passport as they
were travelling with a collective passport issued by the ONT-Carpati.
This limited tourists’ personal choices as they could not take indi-
vidual trips without first also individually applying for a passport. The
96 Adelina Oana Stefan

law no. 43 from 1968 regulated the issuing of a passport and catego-
rized it according to its purpose and the solicitant’s professional status
(civil, diplomatic, personal and work passport). According to this law,
an ordinary citizen received a passport for four years.31 However, the
passport was kept in custody at the local militia bureau and handed to
the owner only when he or she was travelling. Although this stipula-
tion clearly restricted traveller’s movements this was not specific to
communist Romania; all communist countries with the exception of
Yugoslavia applied the same rule.

Who were the travellers?

Despite the process of liberalization described above, a vast number

of citizens did not enjoy the privileges of foreign travel before 1989.
For instance, travelling abroad was prohibited for all those whom the
communist regime regarded as ‘unreliable’ (e.g., because they had been
convicted and never rehabilitated for crimes like murder, pandering,
smuggling, gunrunning, mulling and begging).32 Other restrictions,
characteristic of dictatorial regimes, included people convicted for
membership of the legionary movement, those who were suspected of
wishing to emigrate or individuals who held foreign currency in bank
accounts abroad – who if allowed to travel could withdraw the money.33
In addition to these political restrictions, there were individuals who
could not travel as they simply lacked the material means for it (The
Statistical Yearbook 1990). Despite the socialist state’s promise of social
equality and prosperity, economic conditions did not improve for every-
body. In the 1960s the housing crisis was at its peak as more people
migrated from rural to urban areas, and for many individuals, especially
young people, foreign travel was not affordable even if they had met the
regime’s political criteria (Murgescu 2010: 234).
This observation is confirmed by the particular case of a group of
people who travelled to the Soviet Union in April 1966, whose compo-
sition barely complies with the official discourse. The information
provided on the visa paperwork issued for the 33 tourists who were part
of the group suggests a much greater variety of professions and ages than
the ones publicized in Scînteia, the official newspaper of the Communist
Party. Thus, among the tourists there were ten blue-collar workers, five
white-collar workers, two intellectuals/professionals, thirteen house-
wives and three retired people. In terms of age, only 13 tourists were
under 40 years old, and regarding the gender distribution, women
outnumbered men, 18 to 15.34 It is striking that there were so many
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 97

housewives in this group because it is well known that socialist official

ideology discouraged women’s unemployment. Likewise, the number
of blue-collar workers and youth is lower than expected, undermining
the claim that workers and young people were championed in a socialist
society. The only finding that matches with socialist ideology in this
story is the high number of women, as socialism emphasized equality
between women and men. Nevertheless, the presence of housekeepers
and of people older than 40 in such large numbers suggests that on a day
to day basis socialist ideology could be abandoned in favour of a rather
more entrepreneurial way of thinking.
Leaving aside the issue of who could travel, the document discussed
here also provides a window into the tourists’ motivations to travel
abroad and the social dynamics of travelling. First of all it can be inferred
that blue-collar workers became more interested in going on vacations
abroad, which reflects a change in the cultural pattern of travelling in
Romanian society. If in the 1950s party documents complained about the
lack of blue-collar workers’ interest in taking vacations, in the mid-1960s
this problem looked like it was being partially resolved.35 However, as we
have seen, blue-collar workers were far from being the dominant group
of tourists. Moreover, looking at this particular trip to the USSR, one
notices that 21 tourists from this group were born between the wars
in the Cernowitz area at a time when this region was part of the larger
Romania (Hitchins 1994). This suggests that for them the purpose of
the trip was to visit their relatives, now within the borders of the Soviet
Union. Under these circumstances, only the remaining 12 tourists who
had no previous connection with the area might have been driven solely
by tourist pursuits.
The social profile of those taking individual excursions either to
socialist or Western countries was also quite different to that of tour-
ists going on organized tours. For example, from 13 tourists who got
approval for foreign travel in January 1969 only one was a blue-collar
worker (electrician), with the remaining 12 earning their living as
doctors, architects or actors. This shows that individual travelling was
confined to elites who had both the material and political connections
for such an undertaking. This was rather a cosmopolitan group of people
who spoke foreign languages and had friends or relatives abroad, a privi-
lege which not many Romanian citizens enjoyed. Thus, the communist
state tolerated the tension between the practice of individual travelling
and its official ideology – which emphasized collectivism – as this type of
tourism brought certain benefits to the state, including a better external
image and a sense of normalization for certain internal elites.
98 Adelina Oana Stefan

Time consumed, time controlled

In Katherine Verdery’s seminal essay on the ‘etatization’ of time in

socialist Romania, time is mostly associated with state control imposed
in the form of queuing (Verdery 1996). While it is true that queuing
for food was a hallmark of Romanians’ lives in the 1980s, the notion
of time under socialism has many facets, vacations being one of them.
When I interviewed people about their pre-1989 vacations, they rarely
mentioned any restrictions that were imposed on their schedules.
Moreover, they indicated the banality of the activities they performed
while on vacation. Undoubtedly, organized excursions are characterized
by a higher degree of coercion, and those planned by the ONT-Carpati –
a structure of the dictatorial state – were no exception. So, what was
the relationship between pre-arranged and free activities? What sort of
consumers were Romanian socialist tourists: were they focusing only on
cultural objectives – as hailed by the regime – or were they also looking
for the fulfilment of material desires?
According to my interviewees, mandatory activities dominated the
schedules, but the guides also allowed tourists some free time. Anca, a
researcher at the University of Bucharest, says that ‘we had a guide, a very
good one who led the whole tour and after that he left us some time at
our disposal to visit something on our own. It wasn’t quite all the time
taken’.36 In her account, she focuses on the activities that were freely
chosen such as going to concerts, visiting certain museums – which were
not included in the official tour – and churches or simply shopping.
‘Yes, we visited the Impressionist collection at the Puskin museum, we
attended live concerts at the Moscow Conservatory. It was quite some-
thing to listen to the Oistrakh brothers.’37 Unlike Anca, Elena, another
interviewee – who had worked as an engineer at the Galati Siderurgical
Plant – attended only the mandatory activities of the tour as she thought
she might be under surveillance because of her father, a former political
prisoner.38
Fearful of such opportunities for freedom that travelling even on
organized tours allowed, state authorities continuously complained
about the schedule of the tours – not strict enough in their opinion.
A report by the Committee for Visas and Passports from 1968 recom-
mended that travel guides should be better trained politically and that
foreign travel tours should include only communal cultural activities so
that tourists could keep an eye on each other.39 This request was unreal-
istic and Anca’s recollection proves that: excursions abroad were a blend
of officially approved activities with tourists’ personal agendas. Thus,
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 99

Anca remembers that in Moscow she visited modern art museums, the
Kremlin and the Ostankino Tower as part of the official tour, which
enriched her from a cultural point of view, but she also went to several
shops where she bought things she could not find in Bucharest such as
the records of some Western musicians.40 Interestingly, in her account
she played down the commercial elements of her trip. In her words, ‘first
of all, the commercial objectives were not of great interest at that time.
The notion of “shopping” didn’t exist, but of course I bought certain
goods there, for example, in Prague I purchased a camera, it was a Laika,
I remember.’41
Foreign travel was a complex experience for Romanian tourists before
1989. It involved both gazing at places and things that were new to
them and coping with economic shortages by partaking in smuggling
activities. Anca confirms this observation when she mentions a further
commercial episode in Prague where she sold a bottle of Romanian
cognac – famous at that time in socialist countries – to a young couple
in order to obtain some extra foreign money.

We had all the normal aspects, like any other tourist. We had with us,
for example, cognac which was very appreciated and we had the right
to take, I don’t remember exactly two-three bottles of cognac. And
I tell you, I will never forget this gesture. I approached two young
people who were coming from the opera and I asked them in English
if they want some Romanian cognac. The man said yes and he gave
me the money I asked for ... This is how we managed to get some extra
money in order to buy something there.42

Although Anca did get involved in smuggling she did not appear to
consider it illegal. In her account she underlined that she only took
out of the country the quantity of goods that she was allowed to take –
once again distancing herself from the commercial nature of her travel.
Moreover, she unconsciously labelled this type of behaviour as normal,
which suggests an informal contract between tourists and the socialist
state: as the official system was not able to provide certain goods, the
state or various agents of the state (custom officers, for example) allowed
tourists to act on the edge of legality when travelling abroad.
This ambiguity between legality and illegality is reflected by the
memories of my other interviewees. Constanta, a factory technician
from a small town in the Apuseni Mountains, recalls an episode from
her trip to Bulgaria taken in the early 1980s when she agreed to carry
two sets of Bulgarian cigarette packs across the border on the way back
100 Adelina Oana Stefan

for another tourist.43 It was a two-day excursion organized by the Youth

Tourism Bureau (BTTs – Biroul de Turism pentru Tineret) and her first
trip out of the country. Constanta stated that she only took the excur-
sion to see a new place but a colleague from the group who bought
merchandise from Bulgaria to sell it in Romania asked her to take some
of the goods he purchased in order to get them through border control.
Constanta accepted, and everything went well. The event of going
abroad was clearly very important for her and her identity as a tourist.
Constanta saw this trip as an opportunity for cultural enrichment and
she underlined many times during the interview her lack of interest in
commercial activities. Constanta’s narrative of taking cigarettes over the
border thus does not make her a smuggler and does not threaten her
tourist identity.

Conclusions

The Romanian system of managing ordinary people’s foreign vaca-

tions during the 1960s–80s functioned within the boundary between
official policies and negotiated practices. The right of ordinary people
to travel abroad became a part of the modernization paradigm of
the 1960s onwards. However, the Romanian communist regime was
not eager to grant full access to this new right. Thus, collective trips
were favoured over individual ones to make coercion and surveil-
lance easier and the amount of exchanged foreign currency that could
be exchanged was more strictly regulated. This is why most of the
archived information available about foreign travel refers to this type
of trip.
The difficulty of getting access to foreign currency discouraged a large
number of Romanians from enlisting for trips abroad. Nevertheless, this
obstacle was not insurmountable, and those tourists who embarked on
a foreign journey nonetheless attempted to supplement their lack of
foreign money by getting involved in smuggling activities. Although
smuggling was officially illegal, its frequent occurrence transformed it
into a normal practice, equally accepted by both tourists and Romanian
authorities, especially during the 1980s when economic shortages
became worse.
The socialist state aimed to carefully screen and survey those who
took vacations abroad but the state lacked both the resources and the
means to do so thoroughly. Although the state could control the desti-
nation of organized tours, it could not fully monitor the activities tour-
ists performed while on vacation, or the meanings tourists attached to
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 101

those activities. Moreover, the composition of tourist groups did not

closely follow official ideology; the number of blue-collar workers trav-
elling, which was the main group the regime championed, was usually
lower than that of white-collar workers or pensioners.
There was great variation in the types of tourist groups and forms
of travel to destinations abroad. Foreign travel was not simply a trans-
parent reward for those who stayed faithful to the communist regime,
but was made available to people without a political commitment too.
Political affiliation alone, therefore, was not enough to make one a
tourist, as going abroad required certain economic and cultural capital.
Individuals had to be curious enough to wish to discover new places in
order to become tourists. With regards to the related commercial prac-
tices of ‘low level’ smuggling, tourists had to possess financial resources
to be able to buy the goods they sold abroad, or have certain connec-
tions in order to acquire these goods through informal means when not
available on the official market. Tourists also had to master a foreign
language to communicate with locals and sell their merchandise. More
generally, the experience of going abroad put tourists in contact with
other cultures, foods and customs that undoubtedly affected their
identities. Thus, the opportunity for foreign travel transformed these
socialist citizens into complex individuals integrated into the world of
global mobilities.
Finally, it seems clear that the system of enabling ordinary people’s
vacations abroad was intended to offer a controlled freedom within
the confines of the specific circumstances set up by the regime. This
research has demonstrated that Romanian tourists also had their own
agendas when travelling abroad, however, grasping the opportunity to
meet hitherto frustrated cultural and consumerist desires. They found
ingenious ways to carve out niches for activities below the radar of the
controlling state.

Notes
1. Decree no. 548 from 14 of November 1957 in the Archives of the Council for
the Study of the Securitate’s Archives (ACNSAS), Documentary Collection, file
no. 11750, Vol. 32, f. 190.
2. Ibid., f. 191.
3. Ibid., f. 192.
4. In 1972, 2.9 million foreign tourists visited Romania out of which 2.3 million
came from socialist countries and 600,000 from capitalist countries. (Turnock
1991: 210).
5. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 11750, Vol. 32, f. 5.
102 Adelina Oana Stefan

6. The three main research institutes that deal with the communist period
in Romania include in their titles words such as totalitarian, communist
crimes and resistance. For a general work about the historiography of the
post communist period in Romania see Bogdan Murgescu, ‘The Romanian
Historiography in the 1990s’ in Romanian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 3,
no. 1, 2003. However, there is a tendency in Romanian historiography to
work against the resistance paradigm and in this respect I mention the very
recent work of Adrian Mihalache and Adrian Cioflanca, Istoria Recenta Altfel,
(A Different Recent History) published in the spring of 2013.
7. National Archive of Romania, CC of PCR, Political-Administrative Collection,
24/1955, f. 3.
8. Status is understood here in terms of Pierre Bourdieu as a quantifiable quality
determined by one’s social, economic and cultural capital within a society
(Bourdieu 1984).
9. HCM no. 1781/ 5 September 1955 in Colecţie de legi, decrete, hotărâri,
(Collection of Laws, Decrees, and Decisions), Vol. 3, (Bucuresti: Editura
Ştiinţifică): 40. (HCM- Hotararea Consiliului de Ministri translated into the
English as Decision of Council of Ministers). Council of Ministers was part of
the executive power in socialist Romania.
10. HCM nr. 162/ 1962 cu privire la unele măsuri pentru îmbunătăţirea şi
dezvoltarea activităţii turistice (Decision no 162 about the development of
tourist activity) în op. cit.: 53.
11. Decretul nr. 32 din 1967 privind înfiinţarea, organizarea şi funcţionarea
Oficiului Naţional de Turism al Republicii Socialiste România (Decree
no. 32/1967 about the establishment of the National Office for Tourism of
Socialist Republic of Romania) in op. cit.: 33.
12. National Archives of Romania, CC of PCR, Economic Collection, 45/1967.
13. Informatia Bucurestiului,(Bucharest’s News), 19 November 1968.
14. The data about the rejection rate for travels abroad in Socialist Romania is
quite limited. However, in 1974 there were 528,617 people who travelled
abroad out of which 276,581 travelled for tourist purposes while the number
of rejected requests was of 41,612 – overall, less than 10 per cent. See National
Archives, CC of PCR, Chancellery Collection, 46/ 1974.
15. Scînteia, 2 November 1962 in OSA, Romanian Unit, 300–60–1, box 371.
16. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 13165, Vol. 5, f. 345.
17. Ibid., f. 345.
18. ‘The Decree no. 277 from 25 July 1979 regarding certain measures for the
rationalization of fuel consumption and the economical distribution of auto-
mobiles’ in Official Bulletin of RSR: 89.
19. There is a very complex discussion about the precise moment when the
communist parties seized power in Eastern Europe after World War II. Most
specialists see this as a process that took place between 1944 and 1949
(Naimark and Gibianskii 1997).
20. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 14351, f. 11.
21. Ibid., f. 12.
22. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 11750, Vol. 32, f. 15.
23. Ibid., f. 15.
24. Ibid., f. 40.
25. Ibid., f. 45.
 Romanian Tourists Abroad 103

26. Ibid., f. 241

27. Ibid., f. 242.
28. Starting with the end of the 1960s the Romanian state sent workers abroad to
countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
29. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 11751, Vol. 1, f. 231.
30. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 11751, col. 2, f. 174–79.
31. The law no. 43 from 13 November 1968 in Collections of Laws, Decrees,
Decisions, and other Normative Acts (Bucuresti: Editura Ştiinţifică).
32. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 11750, Vol. 32, f. 93.
33. Ibid., f. 94.
34. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 14351, f. 11.
35. National Archive of Romania, CC of PCR, Political-Administrative Collection,
24/ 1955, f. 4.
36. Personal interview, Bucharest, April 2010.
37. Russian violinists.
38. Personal interview, Bucharest, February 2010.
39. ACNSAS, Documentary Collection, file no. 11750, Vol. 32, f. 240.
40. Personal interview, Bucharest, February 2010.
41. Personal interview, Bucharest, April 2010.
42. Ibid.
43. Personal interview, Bucharest, March 2010.

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University of California Press.
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2010, Iasi: Polirom.
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6
Mooring in Socialist Automobility:
Garage Areas
Tauri Tuvikene

Introduction

While automobility has been given much attention in the mobili-

ties literature (Beckmann 2001; Böhm et al. 2006; Featherstone 2004;
Merriman 2009; Urry 2004), most work has focused on objects on the
move. There has been little attention to not-moving, immobile, and
fixed worlds, conceptualized by the more encompassing term ‘mooring’
(significant exceptions include Adey 2006; Hannam et al. 2006; Urry
2003; see also work on ‘stillness’ by, for example, Bissell and Fuller 2009).
In terms of automobility, this is all the more surprising considering that
individual vehicles are mobile only in relation to their immobility; they
are parked for more than 90 per cent of their use time which also trans-
lates into vast amounts of needed space. Immobility is an integral part
of mobility, as it is related to it dialectically (Urry 2003) and symbioti-
cally (Adey 2006). In terms of automobility, this means a need for places
like parking lots, parking garages, petrol stations, but also motorways
and streetscapes without which automobility would not exist or would
be very different.
In his analysis of Soviet car culture, historian Lewis H. Siegelbaum
(2008, 2009) explains how Soviet automobility was shaped by the
shortage of necessary parts and fuel, describing it as a ‘torture’. The
torture, however, was made less bitter by garage boxes. The mobility
of automobiles was made possible by a complex mix of immobilities
and mobilities happening around a garage box: the relative fixity of it
and the immobility of hoarded materials were concomitant with the
flow of necessary spare parts and fuel, itself heavily relying on existing
social relations. In the Eastern Bloc, garage boxes were mainly arranged
in constellations of a number of boxes defined here as – for the lack

105
106 Tauri Tuvikene

of a more suitable term – garage areas. Garage boxes in these areas

were not just necessities but also provided space for social activities,
creating places for masculine rendezvous as well as sites for conver-
sations. Siegelbaum (2009) talks about ‘male-bonding’ and commu-
nity building in such areas (see also Tuvikene 2010). Therefore, while
spaces of automobility are seen as non-places by Augé (1995), it would
be more truthful to follow Merriman (2007) who sees motorscapes as
socially and culturally meaningful. However, garage areas were not just
about consumption. Instead, even though they provided pleasure and
community, they were sites of ‘production’, sites for keeping socialist
automobility in movement. This paper introduces these spaces in rela-
tion to the mobility literature and discusses what their presence tells
us about the particularities of the Soviet system, including relations
between wider social processes and everyday life. The chapter, there-
fore, develops two arguments. First, following literature on mobility
I will argue that mobility comes with mooring, and is made possible
by it. My aim here is to clarify the concept of ‘mooring’ because it is
sometimes used interchangeably with immobility, stasis or fixity. I seek
instead to demonstrate that mooring itself is not the same as those
terms but is an activity and space that enables and produces mobilities.
Fixity and immobility are part of it, but they are not exclusively what
mooring is about. Therefore, it is not the immobilities that one should
focus on in the dialectics of mobility and mooring, but how these and
concomitant fixities ‘enable, give licence, encourage and facilitate’
different mobilities (including limiting some) (Cresswell 2006: 735).
In other words, it should be about how such immobilities and fixi-
ties produce mobilities. Second – and building on the first theoretical
argument – the paper stresses the importance of mooring spaces in the
construction of socialist automobility. By linking mobility, immobility
and fixity, garage areas became important in producing mobilities in a
shortage economy.
The empirical material for the case study on garage areas was gath-
ered over a five-year period from 2005 to 2009, including fieldwork in
Estonia’s two largest cities – Tartu and Tallinn. As there were no recent
studies focussed on garage areas, the fieldwork involved mapping and
photographing areas in Tartu with on-the-spot conversations with garage
box users, and similar activities in several garage areas in Tallinn. Using
this material as a base, I conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with
garage box users and analysed 26 correspondents’ replies to the Estonian
National Museum’s survey ‘Bike. Car. Radio. Television’ (ERM 1997) –
regarding car usage in the Soviet era. The interviews with respondents
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 107

aged 38 to 75 were structured around issues of garage construction and

its utilization during Soviet times, as well as how changes in society
have affected their use in the post-1991 era (see Tuvikene 2010).
Correspondents’ responses added more comprehensive reflections on
the uses of garage boxes by individuals and their families, the latter being
particularly the case for female respondents. Due to the lack of material
about Soviet era car culture in Estonia, the ERM (1997) responses are one
of the most comprehensive sources for understanding the everyday side
of car use, including practices structured around the garage box.

The mobility/mooring discourse

Even though the mobility literature has argued that ‘mobilities cannot
be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastruc-
tural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities’
(Hannam et al. 2006: 3), the focus has primarily been on ‘mobility’.
This could be partly due to the fact that the ‘mobility turn’ (Sheller
and Urry 2006), was initially a critical response to the dominance of
‘a-mobile’ and ‘sedentarist’ perceptions of space, place and society in
the Social Sciences (Cresswell 2011). The starting point for mobilities
research is therefore a mobile system, whether it is aeromobility, auto-
mobility or migration. However, these systems are composed of not
only mobilities but also moorings which, then, suggests a dialectic of
mobility and mooring (Urry 2003). As Urry (2003: 125) has argued,
‘fluidities of liquid modernity’ are enabled by moorings, meaning that
all mobile machines presume time-space immobilities. Furthermore,
an increase in mobility often requires increased immobility, as, for
instance, the scale of immobile structures in aircraft-airport systems
highlights (Urry 2003). Similar observation is relevant in relation to
the mobility of airport passengers, workers and immigrants (Adey 2006;
Cresswell 2001), where ‘[t]he mobility of some can immobilise others’
(Cresswell 2001: 21). Increasing movement in some places can also
decrease movement in another, at least relatively, as would be the case
in an urbanism that is ‘splintered’ into networks of different qualities
and speeds (Graham and Marvin 2001). Moreover, by acknowledging
the dialectic relationship of mobility and mooring, we should also
acknowledge the significance of multiple mobilities for mooring. As
Adey (2010: 24) notes, ‘mobilities may create structures and fixities
which may influence further movement.’
However, there has been a tendency to use the term mooring in the
same way as immobility, stability, fixity or similar terms that imply stasis.
108 Tauri Tuvikene

The conceptual confusion is well illustrated by the following passage

from a key text on mobility and mooring:

[The complex character of interlinked mobile/immobile systems

stems from] the multiple fixities or moorings often on a substantial
physical scale that enable the fluidities of liquid modernity, and
especially of capital. Thus ‘mobile machines’, mobile phones, cars,
aircraft, trains and computer connections, all presume overlap-
ping and varied time-space immobilities (Hannam et al. 2006: 3, my
italics).

I argue, however, that instead of using the terms immobility, fixity and
mooring interchangeably, the connections and differences between
those terms should be explored. In its everyday usage, mooring refers
to either a structure (like piers and wharfs) to which vessels are fixed
or to the activity of fixing a vessel. The mobility literature, of course,
extends its meaning further, although it often reproduces the duality of
activity and space. Hill (2012: 116), in his paper on gated communities,
thus sees moorings as ‘the periods of immobility’ and ‘the sites where
routine socialites are grounded’. Other authors stress that material enti-
ties like ‘platforms, transmitters, roads, garages, stations, aerials, airports,
docks, factories’ (Hannam et al. 2006: 3), while not mobile themselves,
harness the mobility of particles attached to them (like a vessel to a
pier) and produce flows and movement (unloading and uploading the
vessel with goods, fresh water and rested personnel). As it appears from
such discussions, the production of mobility is what mooring is about
(as Adey 2010; Hannam et al. 2006; Urry 2003 point out) but it is not
usually stressed or explored in much depth in the mobility literature.
Instead, as with immobility or fixity, mooring tends to appear as simply
a ‘speed = 0’ type of movement. However, as I argue here, mooring
should be seen as something that acts as an ‘enabler’ that will ‘permit,
provoke or enable’ other entities to be mobile (Adey 2010: 21). Instead
of being equal to immobility and fixity, it is a type of immobility or
fixity (separately or together) that produces mobility. Immobility and
fixity relate in specific ways to mooring, as I will explain next.
Immobility means pause in movement. Its duration may extend from
a few moments to possibly months, if not years. The immobility could
be ‘temporary moments of rest’ (for example, a bus stop or passport
control), ‘short periods of storage’ (for example, an overnight stay of a
car in a garage) or ‘long-term infrastructural immobility’ (for example,
airports and railway lines) (Urry 2003: 125). The immobility could aid
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 109

the recovery of resources (as a stop for a moment of rest while running)
or keep further consumption of resources in mobility limited (as a stored
car does not consume petrol). Using the example of an airport, Adey
(2006: 89) notes the ‘dialectical’ and ‘symbiotic’ relation of mobility and
immobility in overnight stays and the checking of aircraft so that ‘[m]
ovement is possible only through particular periods of rest.’ However, not
every immobility is necessarily an ‘enabler’ of mobility. One might think
here about cars in traffic jam (or cars that have broken down), where
not moving could be seen as a desperate wait for mobility rather than a
moment of rest. As I stress here, the immobility of mooring is only such
stasis that is productive. This productiveness, though it could happen on
its own, often results from the links to fixity which I will explore next.
While fixity is often also used synonymously with immobility or
mooring (see, for instance, Adey 2010; Hannam et al. 2006), this
paper argues that a clear distinction between those terms is necessary.
Fixity, therefore, should be seen rather as a special immobility. ‘Fixity’,
as discussed here, does not mean a temporary immobility – whatever
its duration – but refers to the most common being of an entity for
which mobility would denote an unnatural if not a problematic state
(as in the mobility of a house during a flood). Yet, fixity is also not seen
here as an ‘eternal immobility’ but rather as ‘durability’, meaning that
fixity gives the entity other potentials. For instance, a garage box as a
not-easily-movable entity allows cars to be stored behind locked doors,
highlighting that it is not just the immobility of the structure that is
important but the fact that it protects the car. Fixity could be described
by notions like site and place which, even though they are often under-
stood in sedentary terms, would become part of mobility when related to
mooring. That is because fixity could provide a stable point to construct
capabilities for movement – which might be with concomitant immo-
bilities (like in a garage) or without them (as transmitters) – while also
being a place to assemble the various other mobilities that are necessary
for producing mobility. Cars, for instance, need the mobility of oil and
spare parts, which would be (temporarily) immobilized in fixed places
like petrol stations and garages. Often, also, the fixity requires mobili-
ties of labour, materials and capital for it to come about. Being itself
produced, fixity, then, provides potentials for immobilities to take place,
which, later on, translate into mobilities.
To conclude, the production of mobility rests on mooring as a
space and activity for producing mobilities. The productive character
of mooring results from particular kinds of immobility and fixity
(happening either together or separately). Mooring occurs in various
110 Tauri Tuvikene

spaces like gated communities, airports, platforms and garage areas from
which the latter will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter.

Setting the scene: garage areas in the socialist system

Interest in driving cultures and automobile spaces has increased in the

last decades, resulting in a considerable body of literature (see for review
Merriman 2009), some of which considers Soviet automobility specifi-
cally (Gronow and Zhuravlev 2010; Hamilton 2002; Siegelbaum 2009;
Siegelbaum 2011b). The upsurge of interest has resulted from thinking
about cars in relation to a system – ‘automobility’ (Beckmann 2001) –
where cars are a constitutive element. In this research, however, there
has been minor interest in car immobility, though it is beginning to
be acknowledged (see, for example, Hagman 2006; Henderson 2009;
Marusek 2012). The majority of car use, however, happens when cars
are not moving. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of their use time is spent
standing still. This simple fact should increase the interest in car immo-
bility, even more so as the time spent without being ‘in motion’ is also
the time for repairing and maintenance (which all cars need, ranging
from cleaning and refuelling to more extensive work on the body and
engine). When cars are stopped they are also accessible for criminals to
steal and vandalize, which is a constant concern for car owners and leads
to a set of possible solutions to counter that threat. Car immobility does
not come in one form; it has variations depending on the temporality
of immobility which could also translate into the character of mobility
production. The mooring spaces for immobility range from a simple
place for parking – which might not even be especially designated, as
is the case in some curb parking – to ‘cocoons’ covering the whole car
(garage boxes). Garage boxes allow the immobility of a car in a similar
manner to parking lots, but due to their spatial form they become the
site of multiple activities related to vehicles ‘not in motion’.
Those additional features, however, are important for drawing out
some distinctive aspects of ‘Soviet automobility’ compared with other
automobilities in the world. Siegelbaum (2011a: 13) in his attempt to
conceptualize Soviet automobility – or what he calls the ‘Socialist Car’ –
arrives at the conclusion that even though ‘the Eastern Bloc’s version of
automobility both replicated and departed from Western standards’, the
‘Socialist Car’ could be placed ‘conceptually somewhere between the First
and Third Worlds, which is why the term “Second” seems appropriate’.
Socialist planned economies ‘could not cope with all the details of such
a highly sophisticated system’ as automobility (Siegelbaum 2011a: 13).
It seems that the effects of automobiles were not anticipated: the state
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 111

produced cars, the state also largely distributed them, but the question
of accommodating cars in the city was not entirely thought through. An
influential architect in Estonia commented on this issue, characterizing
architects as reactive rather than proactive (Port 1973):1 ‘more cars are
produced every year and they are bought eagerly. And the city planners
need to take it into account, plan ahead’.
Space, therefore, was amended reactively in order to deal with cars,
reflecting the characteristics of the socialist economic and planning
model. In socialist cities where most citizens lived in high density resi-
dential quarters, garage areas (see an example on Figure 6.1) became
‘spaces of socialism’ (Stenning 2000: 102). The aim here is not to stress
their ‘socialist’ character but to understand their position in those socie-
ties which influenced their use, meaning and spatial form. With land
lacking economic value, garage areas were often low-rise with some of
them also located in relatively central areas of the city. Parking garages
were mostly not included in residential construction. Even though the
inefficiency of this kind of land-use was noted by official documents (for
example, in Eesti NSV Riiklik Ehituskomitee 1985), this resulted in little

Figure 6.1 A garage area in Tartu, Estonia (see also Map 6.1). Two-storey garage
buildings on the left hand side and one-storey ones on the right
Source: Tauri Tuvikene (photo taken in 2006).
112 Tauri Tuvikene

change to the development of garage areas. In addition to the low-rise

building form, some of the garage areas consisted of single, mostly metal
garage boxes which were meant to be ‘temporary’ but often stayed for
decades. Those temporary areas were largely the result of the socialist
priority system (Gentile and Sjöberg 2010) where service functions were
secondary to housing and were therefore often not completed. Garage
boxes became rare but much needed and desired commodities, even if
one could not acquire or construct a proper building. The importance of
garage areas in socialist culture is also illustrated by the existence of the
popular comedy ‘Garage’ (Garazh in Russian) that was made in 1979 and
directed by the admired Eldar Ryazanov. The movie is set in one room
of a Moscow museum where during the official gathering of employees
they have to decide who among them gets a garage box and who does
not. The situation leads to multiple comical episodes highlighting the
desire to have a garage box in a Soviet society.
Before proceeding to a discussion of how socialist automobility was
produced through the use of garage areas, it is necessary to understand
their spatial location in terms of living places which gave the produc-
tive potential of garage areas a particular character. Even though garage
areas were mainly meant for the residents of apartment buildings and a
close proximity to housing areas was ideal, they were often constructed
hundreds of metres away. This was reflected in the planning principle
that a distance of 400–600 metres between housing and ‘other service
functions’ like garage areas, shops, cafes and restaurants, or post offices
was deemed reasonable (Port 1983: 9). Garage areas, therefore, were not
even planned to be in very close proximity to accommodation. Also,
although they might have been sometimes located close to apartment
buildings, many owners were from residential districts further away.
Garage cooperatives aimed to be constituted by local residents but in
practice could have members from any part of the city, so long as they
owned a car. It was not uncommon for people to cover a distance of a
couple of kilometres to get to their garage box. In Tallinn, the capital
city of Estonia, the average distance of garage boxes from homes was
measured to be 1.6 km (Metsvahi 1979), meaning that public transport
also had to be accessible. In some cases the box used was not, strictly
speaking, one’s own garage box but was located closer to another apart-
ment building and was ‘owned’, for instance, by a relative. Still, as the
car owner was servicing his or her car there, had a key and constant
access, it functioned as his or her ‘own’. A regular phenomenon in a
socialist city was a garage area with hundreds of boxes on the outskirts
of a housing estate. In these cases, even though the closest boxes to
apartment buildings might have been less than a hundred metres away
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 113

from home, the others could be up to a kilometre away. The largest

garage area in Tartu had around 1,450 boxes stretching over 600 metres
in one direction and about 200 metres in another, to which should be
added the distance individual boxes had from homes inside the nearby
housing estates, Jaamamõisa and Annelinn (see Map 6.1, garage area A).
This particular garage area was located between a military airbase and
a residential district used mainly by military personnel. Although this
could be argued to make it a special case, considering also its large scale,2
Tartu, as a relatively small city with 113,400 inhabitants in the late
Soviet period, also had three other areas with around 500 garage boxes
each: one consisting of only metal boxes, and the other two built from
stone (see these garage areas indicated with letters A to D in Map 6.1). As
this discussion suggests, the distance between garage boxes and homes
made the cycle of ‘daily use and night storage’ for car-based commuting

Legend

City centre
Vahi
Garage area
Fr.R

Major road
va
.Kr

Nar
eut

Housing estate
zwa

Pu A Railway
ldi

ies
i tee
La Jaamamõisa B Water
Jaama
City border
C

0 0.5 1
Annelinn km
Kald
a te N
e
Ringtee

ia
Võru

Ri

Aardla
Ringtee

Map 6.1 The map of Tartu with garage areas. Letters A to D refer to the four
largest garage areas in Tartu. The road names can be used for finding garage areas
via Google Maps or other online mapping systems
Source: Tauri Tuvikene.
114 Tauri Tuvikene

to work complicated and translated to a mooring that meant longer

periods of immobility for the mobility-device. The ‘mooring’ that garage
areas provided, then, was not merely the regular immobility for cars but
the more extensive ‘not in motion’ kind of automobility in the form of
storage, repair and social activities.

Garage areas in the mooring/mobility of

Soviet automobility

The assumptions of capitalism as ‘liquid’ or in ‘flux’ and the Soviet

system as antagonistic to capitalist economic organization would suggest
that socialist cities were relatively immobile. Although there are grounds
for this assumption, it would be a narrow perspective as increased
mobilities did exist alongside restricted ones. At the same time as there
was limited mobility of consumer goods there was an increased flow
of public transport. Increased flows of public transport, furthermore,
existed alongside the restricted daily mobility of individual cars. The
cities of the Soviet Union, of course, could hardly be described as being
car-based urban constellations, as the number of cars was low with the
cities mainly relying on public transport and there being no supermar-
kets with extensive parking lots or drive-in restaurants. Still, space was
amended in order to accommodate the mobility and also immobility of
cars. Garage areas are an explicit manifestation of this spatial amend-
ment. They appeared in this mixture of increased and limited mobility
in the ways they were constructed and in the ways they supported the
use of individual vehicles.
It is possible to argue that the construction of garage boxes itself was
related to the inventive handling of mobilities, both of one’s own and
of others’. Garage areas were mostly built by people themselves without
direct state support; a governmental ordinance stated in 1960 that ‘the
construction of garages in the residential districts of the cities and in the
villages of the Soviet Union / ... / should normally take place with car
owners’ own resources and capabilities’ (Eesti NSV Ministrite Nõukogu
1960). Although the state functioned as the coordinator, assigning land
plots for garage buildings and keeping a list of those who requested a
garage box, some of the organizing was done through personal networks
by forming garage cooperatives. Whatever the institutional form of a
garage building, however, the actual construction of boxes was mainly
done through the use of one’s time outside of official working hours, that
is evenings, sometimes nights, and weekends: ‘[a]s father was working
during the daytime we were constructing at nights when I had to show
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 115

him the light’ (Šmutov 2004). Garage buildings, even though consisting
of tens of boxes, were in general simple one-storey, sometimes two-storey
buildings that could be constructed by laypeople. Sometimes the work
was conducted collectively with each future garage box owner contrib-
uting a certain amount of time or paying someone else to contribute
instead. In some cases, the official flows of equipment were altered in
order to bring various materials to the garage box construction site or
to help with work. Often, use was made of discarded materials from
factories (ERM 1997, KV 843: 152–56). The ‘dialectics of mobility and
mooring’, although commonly analysed through the way mooring
enables mobilities (to which the paper turns next), suggests also that
mobilities enable mooring. Before garage areas started to take part in
the moorings of Soviet automobility, they needed to be produced. The
‘fixity’ that garage areas came to exhibit had to be produced through
manifold mobilities.
The mooring of automobility grows mainly from the fact that not
only is a car a source of freedom, but it is also a problem (Hagman
2006; Verrips and Meyer 2001). Although Soviet society was not the
only context where cars have caused problems for users, there were
particular circumstances which gave car troubles their distinctive char-
acter. As was already pointed out above, Soviet automobility could
be characterized by the importance of ‘not in motion’ car use. Citing
Siegelbaum (2009: 3), ‘[i]f the irrepressible desire to own a car animated
Soviet car culture, shortage shaped it’. A car itself was ‘one of the most
deficit commodities’ in Soviet society (Siegelbaum 2008) with a price
reaching the amount paid for an apartment in a cooperative building
(Gronow and Zhuravlev 2010: 137). A mid-range new car (Zhiguli) cost
about 3.5 times the average annual salary of a Soviet worker with also
a number of years waiting time added (Siegelbaum 2008: 239). Even
though private cars were produced in increasing numbers in the Soviet
Union, especially with a rapid increase in the early 1970s when a Zhiguli
factory was opened in Togliatti, individuals still had to follow uncon-
ventional or complex practices in order to overcome ‘the minefield of
obstacles’ (Siegelbaum 2009: 6) that followed even getting permission to
buy a car in the first place. Nevertheless, in addition to the deficit of cars
there were other shortages that played a part in forming socialist auto-
mobility. These shortages could be conceptualized as a lack of mobili-
ties necessitating the fixity of a garage box to immobilize them for an
extended period as a ‘standing reserve’ (Adey 2006). The immobility that
garage boxes allowed was important, then, for both cars and various car
components.
116 Tauri Tuvikene

Throughout the year, private cars were stored in a garage box to

protect them from the weather and from thieves who could steal not
only the car but also its parts (like wheels, side-view mirrors, windshield
wipers) (French 1995: 169; Siegelbaum 2009). The sufficient mobility
provided by public transport and the problems that roads caused for
the ongoing mobility of individual vehicles made many car owners
store their cars permanently over the winter period. In Estonia (and in
many other regions of the former Soviet Union) temperatures fall below
0°C from November/December until April, reaching as low as –20°C or
even –30°C on some days, accompanied by a layer of snow and ice.
The mobility of a car also increases its potential of immobility due to
wear and tear that, as respondents in interviews noted, were worsened
by conditions in winter, such as corrosion caused by the salt added
to streets to melt snow and ice. Furthermore, and not just in winter,
mobility consumes oil as well as lubricants and tyres which, if not in
deficit, deplete finances. Storage during winter and other times of the
year, therefore, sustains mobility by simply keeping the mobility-device
immobile, echoing what Adey (2006) notes about aircrafts in airports:
rather than being an inactive motionless immobility, it is a necessary
part of the mobility of the device. The immobility of cars in garage boxes
helps to produce mobility in the longer term.
In addition to the storage of vehicles, garage boxes provided space to
store spare parts and petrol. And, importantly, not only store but hoard.
As Kornai (1992: 244) points out about the ‘deficit economy’ of the
socialist system, ‘[t]he less certain the prospect of obtaining goods, the
more intensively buyers have to hoard’, which in Soviet society applied
to firms, non-firm institutions, as well as to households. It was, there-
fore, necessary to harness the mobility of goods whenever they emerged
on the market and to store them in one’s garage box to make them avail-
able whenever necessary for the car owner. Spare parts stored in garage
boxes were like a ‘standing reserve’, to use Heidegger’s notion cited in
Adey (2006: 88), meaning ‘an ordering strategy enacted by humans to
place technology and objects close to hand so that they may be of use
and ordered further’. Often, the spare parts moved through alterna-
tive markets exhibiting, then, mobilities separated from official flows
(Siegelbaum 2009).
The immobility of spare parts was accompanied by the skill of car
owners who harnessed garage boxes as individual service stations. This
was even recommended in magazine articles which suggested that
garage boxes should have a trench for car repairs and a work-desk with
a bench clamp for do-it-yourself activities (Nelling 1971). A wide variety
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 117

of other tools and materials were in ‘standing reserve’ for mobility

production in a garage box: ‘There were a lot of tools, like bench claws,
chisels-drills-saws-drove chisels, hammers, nippers, all sorts of key tools,
a heater for vulcanizing, all sorts of lubricating oils, anti-corrosion oils,
wires, battery recharger, paints and solvents, wax for covering paint,
petrol, thick and liquid lubricating materials, painting oils, various spare
parts’ (ERM 1997, KV 838: 239). Coming back to the ‘deficit economy’
mentioned above, DIY was not just the result of habit or even of finan-
cial difficulties but of a lack of official services: ‘[t]he [official] service
stations for individual cars are still incapable for dealing with car owners
needs’ (Nelling 1971: 146), with an article a year later noting that the
official facilities are providing ‘far from excellent service’ (Raudik 1972).
Looking back at the Soviet era, Gronow and Zhuravlev (2010: 136) note
that ‘[t]he resources invested by the state in maintaining private cars on
the road were totally inadequate.’ Kurt Möser (2011: 158) likewise, in
a paper about the importance of ‘tinkering, repairing, and modifying’
highlights that in socialist societies the average consumer of automobile
was also a producer – with even a political value as the activity reduced
the burden on socialist industries – starting right after purchasing a
car: for example, by applying anti-corrosion fluids to the inner body of
the car. Möser (2011: 162) further notes that cars had a ‘built-in repair
friendliness’ making the maintenance and repair easier. Ladas/Zhigulis
were made to be repaired by their owners, something which was unfa-
miliar for British Lada owners who were in trouble after the guarantee
of their car ended (Hamilton 2002). Ladas sold in the Soviet Union even
included tools as standard equipment to which some additional tools
and spare parts were added by the owner (Aleksius and Palu 1972).
Furthermore, the useful life of a car in socialist countries was (made)
longer than in the West (French 1995: 164; Gatejel 2011; Möser 2011).
In my own research, the links between driving and repairing were signif-
icant. Not only were some models of cars particularly preferred for their
more robust and easier to comprehend build (for example, Moskvich),
but being able to repair a car appeared as a factor in whether a person
even wanted to own a car. A female respondent, for instance, explains
that she gave up the car after her husband died: ‘Even though I was able
to drive, I was not a “repairman”’ (ERM 1997, KV 840: 164). Indeed,
Siegelbaum (2008) mentions that in the Soviet Union, about one third
of all car owners did the maintenance of their car by themselves and on
average owners spent 162 hours a year on the maintenance of their cars:
equivalent to a month of full-time work. Obviously, not every car owner
possessed the same skills for dealing with cars. However, as garage areas
118 Tauri Tuvikene

were constellations of single boxes, garage boxes were equipped with

various technical complexities and drivers with different repair skills
were located in close proximity. This allowed those with fewer skills to
learn and receive help from more experienced ones. Siegelbaum (2009)
illustrates this with stories from the Russian weekly journal Literaturnaia
gazeta about a man from a garage area nicknamed ‘Uncle Vasia’, who
with little equipment but substantial skill and ingenuity restored cars
in little time. The ‘community building’, as referred to by Siegelbaum
(2009), however facilitated not only car repairs but also the acquisition
of spare parts on the grey market. To a certain extent, then, it was not
just individual garage boxes that produced mobility but whole garage
areas.
Finally, the role of physical space in enabling practices, including
mobility, should be discussed. While it would be difficult to claim a
direct link between the ‘space of mooring’ and the mobility activity
carried out through it (so that activity would not occur without this
space), different types of space enable different forms or experiences of
mobility, such as the ‘smoother ride’ enabled by well-built highways.
The same applies to a garage box which significantly limited the burden
of car ownership and improved the mobility of one’s personal vehicle.
Not every car owner had a garage box, but in 1982 the rate of garages
per cars in bigger cities of the Baltic States reached around 55 per cent
(Sheshtokas et al. 1984: 26). Those without their own garage box were
making use of boxes owned by other people, or the maintenance and
repair was done by a friend or acquaintance, and some activities could
be carried out in a parking lot without a surrounding ‘cocoon’. But to
deal with the ‘deficit economy’ effectively, the storage of cars and spare
parts, harnessing one’s skills and the ‘built-in repair friendliness’ of cars,
a garage box was an essential space. Without garage boxes, state serv-
ices would probably have been even more overwhelmed. It is therefore
reasonable to argue that garage boxes and their most common exist-
ence in socialist cities in the form of ‘garage areas’ provided mooring
for socialist automobility. They produced mobility through providing
a place – a ‘fixity’ – to the immobilities of cars and their accompanying
elements like fuel and spare parts, while also providing a ‘fixed’ point
to let car owners do repairs and maintenance. Also, a set of social activi-
ties – from conversations to barbecue and sauna evenings – were enabled
by the scale and (relatively) desolate location of garage areas. Thus, while
enabling automobility to take place, they were also spaces away from
home for (mostly) men and a space busy with social activities, which,
 Mooring in Socialist Automobility 119

as noted before, were not just about socializing (consumption) but also
facilitated the production of mobilities.

Conclusion: garage areas and the ‘dialectics of

mobility/mooring’

This paper has shown how the ‘dialectics of mobility/mooring’ – a

significant theme for mobility research – plays out in socialist automo-
bility. I defined mooring as the ‘production of mobility’ through fixity
and immobility (either together or separately). Thus, although the term
‘immobility’ is often used synonymously with mooring, the question
is how immobility or fixity translates into mooring so that it produces
mobility. It was then shown through the example of garage areas how
immobility recovers resources or reduces the further consumption of
resources, and hence ‘enables’ a device to be mobile for a longer term.
The other key character of mooring – fixity – should also not be seen
as being the same as mooring or immobility. Fixity denotes a stable
ground – a durable place – to assemble various other mobilities that are
necessary for producing mobility. The fixity itself, however, does not
appear from nowhere but is produced through the various mobilities of
people, finances and materials.
In a Soviet society characterized by limited liquidity with the lack of
spare parts for individual vehicles but also the scarcity of official serv-
ices, ‘not in motion’ car use denoted an important part of automobility.
As a second argument, then, the paper pointed out that garage areas
formed particular mooring spaces for socialist automobility. The fixity
of a garage box which itself had to be brought about through the inven-
tive handling of one’s own and other’s mobilities allowed immobilities
for cars and spare parts in the form of a long-term storage facility and
let them be accompanied by service activities – all of which enabled
individual vehicles to be in movement. Garage areas as constellations of
garage boxes added the possibility of being helped by skilful individuals
from neighbouring boxes. Garage areas, therefore, were sites of mooring
that produced mobility.

Notes
1. Author’s translation here and elsewhere of Estonian sources.
2. When all the garage areas larger than 10 boxes are counted in Tartu, this one
area would constitute around 23 per cent of all the garage boxes in those
areas.
120 Tauri Tuvikene

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7
‘Women Here Are Like at the Time
of Enver [Hoxha] ... ’: Socialist and
Post-Socialist Gendered Mobilities
in Albanian Society
Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

Introduction

Mobility – or the lack thereof – has been one of the defining features
of the socialist period in Albania and of the social transforma-
tions following the regime’s collapse in the early 1990s.1 The ban
on foreign emigration during the communist era created a sense of
deep isolation amongst the population, who literally stormed the
country’s borders once the fall of the ‘system’ was considered inevi-
table. By 2010, around 1.4 million Albanians – equivalent to half
the resident population – were estimated to be living abroad, prima-
rily in Greece and Italy (World Bank 2011: 54). Within communist
Albania internal movements were strictly controlled through a set of
laws and regulations. The post-communist response was large-scale
internal migration, especially from rural areas towards the capital
Tirana and the port city of Durrës. This impressive spatial mobility,
both international and internal, has brought about social mobility
for some, immobility for others. Meanwhile, everyday mobility has
also changed, reflected essentially in the rise of private car owner-
ship from zero during the communist years. At the same time, being
stuck immobile in queues for food and consumer goods – typical of
shortage economies – has not been eradicated but transformed, for
during the post-communist era long queues have been about getting
visas at foreign embassies, or waiting to be checked by immigra-
tion police at border-crossing points. Both ‘then’ and ‘now’, issues

122
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 123

of security – of borders, states and individuals – loom large. These

various forms of mobility and immobility are deeply gendered, while
at the same time gender relations themselves are being constantly
transformed and negotiated.
Against this background and framed within the mobilities paradigm,
this chapter seeks to investigate some of the complex ways in which
the socialist regime in Albania and its collapse have shaped experi-
ences of mobility for ordinary Albanians. The chapter is structured
along a combination of thematic and temporal lines. A discussion of
key theoretical concepts on gendered mobility is followed by a descrip-
tion of research methods and sites. The empirical part starts with an
analysis of spatial movements followed by everyday mobilities during
Albania’s socialist era. Next the transformation of both of these mobil-
ities in the post-socialist years is examined. The concluding discussion
highlights the fact that mobility reflects power relations and inequali-
ties, since such movements are socially, economically and politically
produced.

Gendered mobility: theoretical perspectives

The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by large-scale East-West

movements, some more permanent than others. Around the same time
an increase in emigrant and refugee flows from the Global South towards
Western and Northern Europe was recorded, while governments in the
receiving countries devised all possible ways to curb them (Castles 2003).
An important conceptual development was the analytical framework of
‘globalization’, which highlighted the rapid and intense technological
developments that brought about ‘time-space compression’ and the
popularity of the virtual world (Harvey 1990). Meanwhile, the interdis-
ciplinary field of migration studies was experiencing the ‘transnational
turn’, a perspective which also emphasized these intense and sustained
interconnections across the world. Arguing for a departure from ‘meth-
odological nationalism’, the proponents of transnationalism empha-
sized the need to study migrants on the move as they maintained links
and travelled frequently between their origin and destination countries
(Basch et al. 1994; Vertovec 1999). While ‘mobility’ had not become a
buzzword yet, it had been part of the discourse in human geography
even before the so-called decade of mobility studies (Cresswell 2006;
Cresswell and Merriman 2011). For example, Zelinsky’s (1971) ‘mobility
transition’ was a framework that held people’s spatial movement very
much centre-stage.
124 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

The transition to the ‘mobility turn’ was a logical next step aiming to
put movement – of people, things, information and ideas – at the heart
of this globalized world. Its key tenets, according to Urry (2007), are as
follows. First, social relations should be considered as involving some
form of distance which necessitates movement to ‘connect’. Second, a
set of five interdependent ‘mobilities’ produce and structure social life.
These are: (a) corporeal travel of people for work, leisure, migration and
so on, (b) physical movement of objects, for instance from producers to
consumers or in the shape of souvenirs, (c) imaginative travel taking place
as images of peoples and places are transported through visual media,
(d) virtual travel often involving the use of Internet applications, and
(e) communicative travel through person-to-person messages via mobile
phones, text, letters, emails and so on. The third tenet is that physical
movement performed through the human body incorporates racial,
gender, class and other features, (moving) through institutional and
material infrastructures that channel and shape these flows. Fourth, the
face-to-face has not disappeared but is from time to time made possible
through movement. And finally, distance and mobility raise problems
for modern states that want to control and govern these mobilities and
the bodies (populations) that enact them.
This post-disciplinary framework is very useful in structuring our
analysis. First, the study of other types of movement beyond migra-
tion, such as everyday mobility, car usage or imaginative travel, helps
us paint a more rounded picture of socialist and post-socialist Albanian
society. Second, by investigating access to mobility and the potential
to be mobile – what Kaufmann et al. (2004) refer to as motility – we can
unravel the layers of inequality both within Albania, and also in relation
to Albania’s geopolitical position in the region and the world. Third, the
framework enables us to examine how power is (re)produced through
the process of controlling population mobility. Fourth, the framework
emphasizes the importance of socio-spatial moorings or spaces of rest
that configure and enable or disable mobilities, as a prerequisite for
understanding the various inequalities and power negotiations that
take place in society (Cresswell 2010). This role can be exemplified,
for instance, in the way infrastructures such as migration policy and
patriarchy shape social relations and women’s and men’s experiences of
mobilities (Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006).
Understanding mobility thus means considering its different types
and aspects. Beyond the physical movement that is observable, mobility
involves meaning, ‘the narratives and discourses that make these move-
ments make sense culturally’ (Cresswell and Uteng 2008: 6). Each of
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 125

these dimensions is shaped by gender roles and in turn contributes to

how gender is (re)produced or contested (Cresswell and Uteng 2008).
We understand gender to be a relational concept, in that the behaviour
of women functions very much in relation to that of men. In addi-
tion, gender is situated in a specific historical, political, geographical
and cultural context. We aim to understand how the socialist and post-
socialist frameworks shape various types of (im)mobility in Albania,
the ways these movements and their associated personal experiences
have been affected by gender, and the meanings given to them as part
of everyday life. Gender is a key analytical dimension colouring the
mobility lens through which we view Albanian society.

Sites and methods

The chapter draws on two research projects. The first aims to docu-
ment and analyse everyday life in Albania during the communist
era. The themes of work, leisure, family and gender are investigated
through oral-history interviews with middle-aged and older people. The
stratified sample of 120 participants was selected on the basis of their
geographical location and personal profile. Reflecting the political and
economic geography of communism, we selected sites representative of
Albania’s three macro-regional configurations (North, South and Tirana)
and of the diversity of living/working environments during the commu-
nist era (capital city, new industrial town, state farm, rural cooperative,
border area). Given the passage of 20 years since communism’s demise
in Albania, age was an important selection criterion for individuals. We
interviewed people aged 40 years and older, including many in their 70s
and 80s whose memories spanned the entire communist period. Within
this wide age range we sought to balance gender ratios and solicit inter-
views with individuals from all walks of life: from teachers and nurses
to shepherds, cooperative and factory workers, from former members
of the communist party to those who had spent years in prison, labour
camps and internal exile.
This diversity in profiles was prevalent also in the second project,
where the focus was migration. The study aimed to understand tran-
snational flows and relations in the Albania-Greece ‘migration and
remittance corridor’, with fieldwork in a group of villages in southern
Albania and in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. A village-based household
survey to remittance receivers (N = 350) was followed up with in-depth
interviews in both countries (N = 45). Our approach was based on the
concept of transnational households, which offer themselves as ideal
126 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

sites in which to examine the interplay of gender, migration and remit-

tances – the goal of the research (see Vullnetari and King 2011).
For both projects interviews were recorded, transcribed and selectively
translated. They were then analysed following a thematic approach,
whereby themes were identified after a detailed process of coding, and
then related back to the research questions framing each study. Software
packages were used to aid the analysis (NVivo9 for the interviews and
SPSS for the household survey).
Although the two projects differ, they are united by three key
features. First, the data collection methods are informant-centred,
allowing the voices of ‘ordinary’ people to emerge (Thompson 2000).
Second, the gender dimension of social relations in Albanian society
stands central. And third, although mobility and migration were not
explicit themes of the first project – as they were for the second – their
salience in the everyday life of the time, as in the post-socialist years,
is undisputed.

Albania 1945–90: an era of immobility?

Albania’s communist past has received little academic attention so far,

both in absolute terms and relative to other former socialist countries.2
As a result, references to mobility have often focused on the ban on
migration and controls on internal movements (Hall 2004). Given the
various types of mobility analysed in this chapter, a more nuanced picture
emerges, one where blocked mobility existed alongside movement or
potential movement, and voluntary immobility alongside involuntary
mobility. Following Büscher and Urry (2009: 100), we consider these
types of movement very much as constitutive of economic, social and
political relations of the time and analyse them as such, mindful of their
historical embeddedness.

Spatial mobility
Policing external mobility: the defence of the nation
At the end of World War II Albania joined the socialist camp led by
the Soviet Union. The victorious communists headed by Enver Hoxha
swiftly consolidated power through various tools, including controls
over mobility and information. Relations with foreign allies went
through phases of friendship and diplomatic collapse linked not only
to the government’s policy of ‘self-reliance’ and ethno-nationalism,
but also to internal struggles amongst Politbureau members (Mëhilli
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 127

2011). Albania became increasingly isolated after breaking with neigh-

bouring Yugoslavia in 1948, with the Soviet Union in 1961 and finally
with China in 1978. The break-up with Yugoslavia, the spill-over of
civil war (1946–49) from neighbouring Greece and the various anti-
communist missions trained abroad and parachuted into Albania by
the British and American intelligence services (Dravis 1992) convinced
the Albanian authorities that the country, its people and, more impor-
tantly, its leadership, were under constant threat of attack. National
borders thus took on unprecedented importance and their defence was
to be a ‘duty above duty’ for every Albanian, as a key slogan of the time
emphasized.
The border was defended not only against the enemies from without
but also those within. According to the Penal Code of the time, anyone
trying to escape the Albanian gulag had committed high treason against
the fatherland, a crime punished by a minimum ten years in jail – if the
defector was not shot at the border. As the defector was subsequently
considered an enemy of the people (armik i popullit), his close family
would suffer years of exile to Albania’s remote hinterland. This involun-
tary mobility was combined with involuntary immobility, since once in
their exile site, the family was hardly allowed to move elsewhere (see the
memoires of Lubonja 2007; Bekteshi 2009).
Mobility to ‘abroad’ was controlled in a number of brutal as well as
more subtle ways. First, ordinary Albanians did not have a passport for
international travel. This privilege was allowed only for carefully selected
and screened individuals or groups of people such as diplomats, members
of the Politburo, drivers of import-export trucks, some students and
specialists who went to study or train abroad, sportsmen and women,
and a handful of folk and cultural groups. Their common denominator
was their ‘good biography’, in other words they or their families were
avowed communists. Thus, access to such external mobility reflected,
and at the same time reinforced, marked inequalities internally.
The second means of control was the defence of the border. Physically,
this meant sealing the border by means of electric signal fences, sentry
posts and concrete bunkers (Figure 7.1).
Border guards were selected from the best communist families and
were deployed in areas far from their village of origin, so that they were
not ‘compromised’ (or asked for favours) by the local population. In the
following extract 61-year-old Gjon, interviewed in the northern district
of Kelmend along the border with Montenegro, recalls his time as a
border guard in the southern district of Devoll.3
128 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

Figure 7.1 Communist era bunkers, Devoll, 2005

Source: Julie Vullnetari.

Gjon: Soldiers [border guards] were always on duty to observe who is

moving around the border. So if someone tried to go [escape] they
[border guards] lay in waiting, or if you tried to escape you were
shot at.
JV: Where were they from, the army people stationed here in
Kelmend?
Gjon: From Korçë, Sarandë, Vlorë [southern Albania] ... As a form of
exchange. We were sent there [to the south] and they were brought
here. Soldiers at the border shouldn’t serve in their own home
territory.
JV: Why?
Gjon: They might be friendly or related [with the locals] ... Perhaps it
was imagined that we would not be holding people accountable, in
other words we would be making compromises easier.

The third way to control people’s physical mobility was through the
careful control of information and imaginative travel. Throughout
most of the communist years, listening to foreign radio stations or
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 129

watching foreign television channels could land someone a hefty

prison sentence. Some complied while others listened to the radio
in secret or covered their windows with blankets when watching TV.
Especially in the 1980s, imaginative travel ran wild, particularly in the
coastal areas which could receive Italian TV signals. The TV screens
transported Albanians into a hedonistic world of material abundance,
pleasures and desires denied in their Albanian reality (Mai 2001a).
Vetting and blocking the capitalist ‘propaganda’ was just as impor-
tant as the bombardment of the population with socialist propaganda,
which tried to brainwash recipients into believing they were the
happiest people on the planet, living in a socialist paradise. Emigration
was portrayed as a wound of capitalism stemming from the unemploy-
ment, inequality and poverty capitalism creates, hence not compatible
with the socialist system where these social ills have been eradicated
and where love for the socialist fatherland reigns. The emigration
history of pre-communist Albania was invoked as a concrete example,
by emphasising the suffering of people’s separation and the exploi-
tation of immigrant workers by ruthless capitalists. As Albania was
now a progressive socialist society, emigration was regarded as point-
less, unless associated with a desire to overthrow the regime. Policing
mobility became part of the defence of the nation with involuntary
external immobility its most prominent feature.

Planning internal mobility: building socialism

While external migration was banned, internal mobility was planned.
Regulated within tight parameters of management of the economy, this
internal mobility can be used as a mirror to understand deeper socio-
economic and political transformations during various phases of the
‘building of socialism’. Thus, the first post-war years were characterized
by a relatively free and large-scale rural to urban migration as the recon-
struction of the country set in motion the building of various indus-
trial and transport infrastructures. Recruitment drives were carried out
around the country whereby young people were brought to the towns,
given shelter, food, clothing, as well as training and work. Intentionally
or not, such labour mobilizations had the effect of giving a strong ‘revo-
lutionary’ blow to structures that were increasingly being regarded as
archaic, such as patriarchy. Examples abound from our fieldwork data of
young women being recruited from remote highlands to work in indus-
trial sites such as at the ‘Stalin’ textile plant, constructed with Soviet
help in the outskirts of Tirana in the 1950s. Now in her mid-70s, Lena
was only a teenager when she came to Tirana from a highland village
130 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

in 1952. As she narrates details of how she experienced rural-urban

mobility it becomes apparent what a life-changing event this was:

I was one of ten girls who left our village and came to work here. It
was very difficult at the time ... We left without telling anyone [ikëm
tinëz]. My parents didn’t speak to me for a couple of years but then
they came around to it ... When I came here I was wearing a pair
of çitjane [oriental trousers] with some 12 metres of cloth wrapped
around me. They [the women recruiters at the factory] asked me to
take them off and gave me a dress to wear. I was shy and was like
this [she puts her hands over the front of her body as if to protect it,
legs held together tight]. We got used to it afterwards, but the begin-
ning was difficult. But no one touched you [s’të prekte kush as flokun,
meaning personal safety was guaranteed]. I worked in this place for
40 years until I retired in 1992.

These schemes resulted in boosting the urban population as most of the

new arrivals settled in these towns for good.
Later, after the early 1960s, a policy of ‘rural retention’ and minimal
urbanization was pursued, forming what Sjöberg (1994) calls an ‘anti-
migratory system’. Administrative restrictions involved ‘legal prohibi-
tion on migration’ and dwelling permissions or pasaportizim (an internal
passport system). Similar to the hukou registration system in China (see
Davin 1999), these restrictions were aimed primarily at rural-urban
migrants, and were especially prohibitive of settlements in the capital
Tirana. Nevertheless, some migration outside the prescribed parameters
did take place. For example, some people moved to adjoining rural areas
of the ‘forbidden’ cities, while marriage with urban dwellers was used in
other cases to circumvent the rules (Sjöberg 1992).
The combination of keeping rural populations in situ and protecting
the frontier created a high-density population, as buffers, in rural areas
along the entire land border of the country. People living in villages in
what was called the ‘border zone’ (zonë kufitare) had their internal pass-
port stamped to that effect. Life in these villages involved other layers
of mobility control. A dusk-to-dawn curfew operated and local vigilante
patrols questioned anyone who dared transgress. Visiting relatives in
these villages from outside was only possible with special permission
from the local office of the ministry of interior. Places of involuntary
immobility, these rural areas were also sites of struggles for freedom as
many individuals – usually men – attempted escape, at times with tragic
consequences.
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 131

Perhaps the most mobile populations in these areas were the border
guards and the officers manning the border posts. The latter were part
of the cadres who were circulated at intervals around the country,
always following job appointments from central government directo-
rates. Teachers and medical doctors were also moved around in this way,
especially immediately after graduation when they were required to do
several years of ‘duty’ in remote villages. Initially envisaged as temporary
moves, these often ended up as permanent, either following a marriage
with a local person or due to difficulties of being re-appointed in a job
closer to home.
Other labour mobilization was more temporary. Young people were
recruited to do unpaid volunteer work building railways and bridges
and digging drainage systems around the country. Besides providing
free labour, these campaigns (known in Albanian as aksione) played a
key role in the indoctrination of youth with communist ideals. They
were a feature of building socialism and ‘the new socialist man’ prev-
alent throughout Eastern Europe during these years (on Bulgaria see
Brunnbauer 2005). Women’s emancipation had an important place
in such initiatives, and much work was carried out to change patriar-
chal attitudes. The following conversation comes from an interview
with Mira, 49, who lives in a village in south-east Albania. Her account
emphasizes how women’s mobility – in contrast to that of men – had
been traditionally regarded as suspect by the patriarchal structures of
society. Controlling women’s mobility was one way to control their
sexuality and preserve the female body for reproduction within marriage
only – an interesting prelude to post-socialist anti-trafficking campaigns
we come to later. Although the communist party’s ‘emissaries’ like Mira
were out in force to change the ‘old’ mentalities, the fundamentals of
patriarchy remained strong. This interview excerpt thus demonstrates
that beyond the observable practice of mobility lies an equally, if not
more, important aspect – its meaning as a key element in understanding
a particular society.

Mira: The desire of young people to go to these aksione was very great.
But many obstacles were put in their way by parents ... Parents did
not allow young women more specifically, as it wasn’t a problem
for men. There was this mentality that nothing happens to guys ... I
had no obstacles from my family. And so I was an organizer and
a guarantor. I went to every house to persuade parents to let their
daughters go to aksione.
JV: What was the concern that parents had for their daughters?
132 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

Mira: ... at that time a young woman had to marry the man her
parents gave her. They were concerned that if their daughter left
the village, if she left her house and went away with men, she
would fall in love and if the guy she fell in love with did not marry
her, she would be stuck at home [unable to get married as her
honour had been ‘spoiled’] ... So this was the mentality and we had
to work a lot to change it ... There were plenty of guys, that wasn’t
a problem. But women were also needed [to go to aksione] along-
side men. Men were always ready to go ... You took a small suitcase
with some clothes with you, food and drink were taken care of,
there were [leisure] activities every night ... But it was pointless to
have only guys there, women were needed as well. But for the
women to come was very difficult [her emphasis].
JV: You said you became guarantor. What do you mean by this?
Mira: In the sense that here, look at us, we go to aksione and nothing
has happened to us. So in other words we would take ourselves as
examples and say [to the parents] that their daughter would be with
us. ‘Nothing will happen, look for example so and so went and came
back and nothing happened to her’ ... So then they would say: ‘Ok, if
so and so went, my daughter can go too’.

During these aksione people lived in barracks and temporary shacks

where living conditions were spartan but the enthusiasm of youth over-
came material shortages. This leads us to examine the shortage economy
in more detail.

Everyday mobility
The same complex combination of mobility and stasis was prevalent
in everyday life in other ways too. Private car ownership was forbidden
and the typical private travel means was a bicycle. As public transport
was extremely limited, large distances were covered by bike or on foot –
people simply walked to places: from one village to another or from the
village to the city. At times they would get a ride in open (Chinese) trucks,
often sitting on top of logs, chromite ore or other cargo (Figure 7.2).
In the most remote highland areas children had to walk for
hours to get to school, including in rain and snow (many still do).
Consequently, geographical distances were stretched in time, the
opposite of the time-space compression noted by Harvey (1990) for
post-industrial high-tech societies. But time, as Verdery (1996: 46–47)
notes, does not have the same significance in a socialist system as
it does under capitalism. The rudimentary infrastructure of public
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 133

Figure 7.2 Chinese truck transporting people, Sarandë, 1989

Source: Erik Stewart, Norway.

and private transport left people stranded for hours and even days
on key transport nodes, where they were faced with primitive over-
night accommodation as the few hotels were either full or unafford-
able. Kol, now in his mid-50s, lives in his remote home village in
northern Albania and as a teenager attended a boarding school far
away, visiting home three or four times a year. Recalling ‘those days
of hardship’ brings feelings of sadness but also of nostalgia, which he
tries to confront by putting a humourous spin to his otherwise sad
narrative of one of these journeys.

Kol: I was 16 years old and I remember those days of hardship. The
train [home] would go as far as Laç. It didn’t come all the way to
Shkodër at the time. Many times I jumped from the window of the
train so that I could secure a place in the queue for buying tickets
for the Shkodër buses that would take us from Laç to Shkodër. It
happened many times that I had to sleep in Laç. But Laç, especially
in winter, was a horrible place, partly because it smelled due to
the [petro-chemical] factory ... I was the only boy from this area in
that school ... And there were some girls who were from Dukagjin,
from Shkodër, from this area, doing their nurse training in Korçë
134 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

[south-east]. Often we travelled together ... I will remember this

one difficult occasion for as long as I live. The train left us at 11
o’clock at night in Elbasan [town in central Albania]. Where to go
now? I was all by myself, surrounded by nine girls, I swear to God
[he implies a kind of responsibility to sort out things for everyone
as the only male in the group]. What could we do? There was
nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep. And there I was with nine beau-
tiful girls, so I was a little bit overwhelmed ... I went to the local
branch of the ministry of interior [dega e brendshme] and asked for
help.4 I swear I’m not lying
Dila (his wife): I want to know how this ends [joking]
Kol: I’m telling the truth. I did really go there ... They sent
someone ... one of their policemen ... to accompany us. He took us
to a dormitory of one of the schools in Elbasan.
Dila: So you ended up in the dormitory with nine beautiful girls
[laughing]
Kol: They took us to a room, which was bare, no beds, no blankets ...
everything was so bare and it was so cold ... But we had lots of donuts
[petulla] with us and that’s how we spent the night.

As this excerpt demonstrates, everyday life was characterized by scarcity

for many products and services. Like in many other centrally planned
economies, priority was given to armament and industrial production
at the expense of consumer goods. The ‘shortage economy’ affected
women’s daily life in particular, as they were often the ones standing in
long queues for hours in order to secure basics such as bread and milk
for their families. Verdery (1996: 46) considers this ‘immobilization of
bodies’ in queues as the effect of the state’s seizure of citizens’ time,
which instead of producing goods, produced incapacity and lack of initi-
ative, thereby enhancing power for the state. In Albania one queued to
purchase just about anything – bus tickets, foodstuffs, consumer goods
and so on (Figure 7.3).
Almost everyone we interviewed for our study had their own story
of getting up in the small hours to queue for bread, milk or some other
scarce item. People working in top government institutions were not
spared either, as Liria, 61, who used to work as a secretary for the Central
Committee in Tirana, recalls:

We would get up early in the morning and stay in the queue ...
Sometimes my husband, some days my mother-in-law and some-
times myself ... We would get up early for milk as this was the most
problematic item in the morning. [My husband] would stay in the
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 135

Figure 7.3 Queuing for bread in Tirana, 1992

Source: Rose Peacock, UK.

queue whereas I would prepare the breakfast and get the children
ready for school ... We would get up at five-thirty or so because by
seven we had to be at work.

In contrast to this overall sense of immobility and of ‘being stuck’,

interviewees often emphasized one aspect of mobility which they felt
was lost by the transformations that had taken place since the 1990s.
This was the security of mobility, in other words personal safety. Lena
evoked this when she said in her earlier quote that ‘no one touched
you’, a phrase repeated by many informants especially when referring
to women’s personal safety. Often we heard that women could travel
the length of Albania on their own without fear of harm. This is usually
attributed to a combination of an idealized view of people’s humanity,
and to the fear of punishment – laws were harsh and stringently
executed. Talking with an Albanian immigrant couple in the Greek city
of Thessaloniki about their experiences as migrants there, it was striking
to hear how they positively compared women’s freedom of movement
within the city with that during the socialist period in Albania. They
said that ‘women here are like at the time of Enver [Hoxha]’. Rather than
a glorification of the past, this expression reveals the failures of Albania’s
136 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

post-communist governments and society more generally to deal with

some fundamental issues of human existence in the present.

Albania on the move: a post-wall era?

The communist regime in Albania was the last domino of Eastern Europe
to fall in the early 1990s. The post-communist transformations that
followed were radical and rapid, including those related to mobility.

Spatial mobility
Policing external mobility: the defence of the EU
While Eastern Europe was swept by the wind of democratic change, pres-
sure in Albania was building more slowly (Tarifa 1995). Undoubtedly
Ceausescu’s end in Romania pushed Hoxha’s successor Ramiz Alia to
speed up reforms in order to quell the popular unrest that was brewing.
One important concession was related to travel abroad. A decree passed
in June 1990 made it easier to obtain a passport. Two weeks later around
5,000 Albanian men, women and children climbed the walls of western
embassies in Tirana, asking for political asylum. Most of them – 3,200 –
entered the West German embassy, arguably influenced by TV images of
East German refugees storming the West German embassy in Prague. It
was time for imaginative travel to transform to real movement.
In the past a few individuals and small groups had managed to escape
through remote mountainous paths, bypassing electric wires, local vigi-
lantes and border guards with their shoot-to-kill policy. This time the
drama was being played right in the heart of the capital, entering at
the same time every Albanian household through images streamed by
national and foreign TV stations. This first symbolic act of collective
escape from the Albanian ‘gulag’ not only put the Albanian authori-
ties in the public limelight, but required a public response from western
diplomats too. A new era of intensive and large-scale mobility had just
dawned.
Albanians eagerly embraced their new-found freedom of movement
but their excitement was short-lived. Western governments which had
welcomed communist-time defectors with open arms were quick to
install a web of laws and regulations aimed at preventing arrivals once
the communist system fell. Even as the Berlin Wall was being pulled
down amid the euphoria of a new era of freedom and democracy, a
new kind of wall was being put up amid fears of an immigrant ‘inva-
sion’ from the East (Manfrass 1992; Okólski 2000). Freedom of move-
ment now took on a new meaning and symbolism, replacing the threat
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 137

to socialist ideology with the threat to the capitalist world’s security

and prosperity. Almost overnight open arms turned into ‘borders of
papers and visas’ (Kapllani 2009). The European Union as the dominant
political project in Europe was used by West European governments to
‘tame’ their ‘uncouth’ Eastern brethren, lifting them out their commu-
nist backwardness into the capitalist modernity. In what can be seen as
a neo-colonial eastward expansion of the EU there is an all-too-obvious
hierarchy of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, shifting further east with each
round of accession (see Chari and Verdery 2009). The Western Balkans,
geographically surrounded by old and new EU members, yet isolated by
this very geography in a sort of a backyard ‘Balkan ghetto’, found itself
so near Europe yet so far. The International Crisis Group (2005), which
has lobbied for more access to visa-free travel for these countries, labels
the insurmountable obstacles their citizens faced when applying for EU
visas as ‘consular sadism’. Often only the political elite and their fami-
lies could obtain a visa, leaving the ordinary population no option but
to try ‘alternative’ routes: packed on rubber dinghies across the sea to
southern Italy, hidden inside long-haul freight trucks from continental
Europe to the UK, and walking in droves for days and nights over the
mountains to Greece. The similarity with the communist years was just
too obvious to miss.
As Albanian freedom of movement became an issue of concern for
neighbouring EU countries, several measures were put in place to bring
‘order’ to it, or ‘manage’ it in official-speak. The Greek army was deployed
along the land border between Greece and Albania and the short stretch
of sea opposite Corfu, while Italian Navy ships and aircraft patrolled the
Adriatic waters to intercept incoming clandestine boats. Many migrants
lost their lives along the way, or were beaten and even deliberately shot
at by these ‘border defenders’, yet the flows continued (Papailias 2003).
The EU immigration and neighbourhood policy was deployed to aid
with its directives on combating irregular migration, human smuggling
and trafficking (Dedja 2012; Geiger 2007). Albanian authorities had
surely done a sterling job curbing their citizens’ mobility in the past, so
it was only logical to call upon their services again now. Under the guise
of combatting ‘illegal’ migration, Albania’s authorities were requested
to strengthen border controls, thus once again policing international
migration out of their country. In contrast to the defence of the nation,
external mobility was now controlled for the benefit of the EU.
Several interviewees described how they and their friends or family
had been apprehended by Albanian border police while still on Albania’s
territory, before crossing the ‘green line’. The ‘blue border’ is just as
138 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

faithfully protected. Many remember the burning of rubber dinghies

(used to transport migrants clandestinely to Italy) by Albanian authori-
ties off the coast of Vlorë in 2002 in a show of power against human
smugglers. Even more radical action followed in 2006 when a ban was
imposed on ownership by Albanian citizens of all boats. Reminiscent of
the ban on road vehicles during the communist years, disabling mobility
in this sense reproduces and reinforces power hierarchies privileging
those at the top, for it is the mobility of the poor that is controlled and
disciplined.

Mobilizing gender
Understanding mobility requires a careful examination of ‘moorings’
as well as movement (Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006). Two
such moorings, patriarchy and migration policy, intertwine in inter-
esting ways in the Albanian context. We single out two. First, there is
the way that gender, and by extension patriarchy, shapes who can leave
and how this migration is perceived. Especially in the 1990s, Albanian
migration was male-led. Most women travelled later, primarily to join
their husbands or other male relatives. Male migration for work was
perceived by patriarchal origin communities as normal, while women’s
movement abroad (when not joining their families) was veiled with
nuances of lost honour and sexual impropriety (King and Vullnetari
2009). Such attitudes were compounded by the trafficking discourse,
much of which was imported into Albania by western agencies and
adjusted for domestic use by local NGOs who spotted a valuable source
of donor money in anti-trafficking campaigns.
In the post-communist years women’s security, and by extension
their mobility, had indeed been seriously affected, as various local
forces of power emerged to fill the vacuum created by the withdrawal
of the omnipresent communist state (Mai 2001b). As a result, girls were
taken off school by worried parents and kept close to home, for fear
of being kidnapped and forced into prostitution. While such cases did
occur, many other women took to emigration and even working in the
sex industry as a way of bringing some form of control over their own
bodies and mobilities (Davies 2009). Ironically, international actors
advocating an anti-prostitution and anti-migration agenda promoted
precisely the opposite outcome as awareness-raising campaigns run
by their proxies such as the International Organization for Migration
advised women to stay at home if they wanted to be safe (Andrijasevic
2007; Geiger 2007). In fact, some women were leaving precisely because
their safety and security had been compromised by their male relatives
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 139

and co-residents in origin communities. For any challenge to patriar-

chal authority brought shame on the family and even justified violence
(Nixon 2009).
A second way in which moorings and mobilities are intertwined is
in how they structure the physical movement of objects. In our migra-
tion project we traced in detail the movement of remittances – money
and goods – amongst transnational households, seeking to understand
who sends them, who receives them, how they are used, as well as the
meaning given to their movement at the micro (family) level and at the
macro (country) level. Our findings clearly reveal the interplay between
mobility and socio-cultural context as a mooring. For example, according
to Albanian custom a woman ‘belongs’ to the household of her husband
once she gets married, transferring thus her duties and obligations to
his family members. This conditions the sending of remittances. In
migrant couples it is generally the husband who pools the joint earn-
ings in one sum and sends them to his father in the village, creating
what we call ‘male remittance corridors’. In contrast, married women
send more in-kind remittances such as clothes, furniture and medicine,
to their own relatives – usually another female, forming ‘female remit-
tance corridors’. When women send cash these are smaller amounts,
labelled as ‘for a coffee’: a subtle way of negotiating behind the scenes,
rather than confronting upfront existing patriarchal structures (King
et al. 2011; Vullnetari and King 2011).

Planning is communist: ‘free for all’ internal migration

Parallel to mass emigration since 1990, internal movements too have
been large-scale, estimated by the World Bank (2007) as at least 20 per
cent of the population between 1990 and 2005. There has been a major
population shift from the mountain regions to the western lowlands,
focused especially around Tirana and Durrës. More than 90 per cent of
internal migrants moved in this direction during the intercensal period
1989–2001 (INSTAT 2004:12). The outflow was particularly intense
from the impoverished north-east, and especially from the border zones
whose populations had been artificially increased under communism.
Somewhat different was the story for their fellow-citizens from the
south and south-east. These people were amongst the first to walk over
the border to Greece. Many who moved internally to Albania’s coastal
areas did so after having accumulated financial capital from work in
Greece. This gave them a head-start in the city for they were able to
quickly build houses or flats, unlike the migrants from the rural north
who started off their town life in wood and plastic shacks.
140 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

Functionally consequent to the mobility policies of the commu-

nist era were the post-1990 migrations from smaller towns founded
to exploit mineral and energy sources, such as Bulqizë and Laç. They
were mixed towns of sorts as people had settled there from various parts
of the country, recruited through the labour drives mentioned earlier.
When the industries closed down in the early 1990s, they became pools
of unemployment and lost hope.
From these places too, the vast majority of internal migrants relo-
cated to Tirana, which together with Durrës have experienced explosive
population growth. Estimates of those living in the Tirana-Durrës metro-
politan area vary between 850,000 and 1 million, three quarters of the
country’s urban population (World Bank 2007: 5). While some migrants
could afford to settle inside the Tirana city boundary, the vast majority
went for undeveloped peripheral areas which were formerly state-owned
enterprises or agricultural cooperatives. There they built without permis-
sion creating sprawling informal peri-urban settlements. Since urban
planning was associated with (rejected) communism, a free-for-all land
grab took place, the ‘private’ unleashing its revenge on the ‘public’.
As a result, social services and public infrastructure have been put
under severe strain, making residents’ life an everyday struggle. Examples
abound of overpopulation of schools, lack of public health centres, inad-
equate water and sewage systems, poor public transport services, neglect
of solid waste management and of public green spaces, and very high air
and noise pollution (Pojani 2011). Still today, most streets in peri-urban
areas are mud roads. Meantime traffic congestion has become a feature
of downtown Tirana, which is often grid-locked throughout the day,
with ‘Mercs’ of course.

Everyday mobility
‘Land of the Mercedes’
No sooner did the communist regime fall than the first private cars – the
symbolic Mercedes – appeared on the roads (Figure 7.4).5 Car ownership
has skyrocketed (Pojani 2011). Its rapid rise was due to the very poor
state of public transport and infrastructure. Nowadays the skeletal and
dilapidated rail network hardly carries any passengers. Car ownership
was also considered a symbol of freedom and luxury, both denied during
the communist years. The rapid increase of income inequality in the
post-communist years affected also the meaning given to certain forms
of mobility. Thus, newly class-conscious Albanians perceive car owner-
ship as a status symbol while associating bicycles, mopeds or buses with
the poor strata of society (Pojani 2011).
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 141

Figure 7.4 Land of the Mercedes, Korçë, 2012

Source: Julie Vullnetari.

Another layer of inequality is related not to class but to gender: men

are often the owners, sole drivers, and most frequent users of private
vehicles. Throughout the rural areas in the north and south where we
carried out fieldwork we hardly came across female drivers. True, in
Tirana, women drivers have become part of the traffic flow, although
still in the minority. In turn, drivers of public and private passenger and
goods transport vehicles such as buses, taxis, coaches, trucks, minivans
and so on are – with very few exceptions – men. Such male facilitators of
human mobility within Albania and across the Greek-Albanian border,
also facilitate other counter-flows of goods and money – since sending
remittances (money or goods) through a paid courier such as a bus or
taxi driver is very common (Vullnetari and King 2011).
In Greece too where migrant families have been able to acquire a car,
this is often driven by men. The car thus facilitates a higher degree of
freedom and mobility for men, enabling them to seek better-paid jobs
across greater geographical distance. Women have lower job mobility
and have to decline better-paid jobs if these are far from their place
of residence. Thus, as Cresswell and Uteng (2008) argue, how people
move is a gendered process and in turn reproduces gendered power
hierarchies.

At the back of the queue

Searching for food and queuing during the communist years had
equipped people with special skills and many derived satisfaction from
their inventiveness in order to feed their families, as Burrell’s (2003)
examples from Poland show. The end of the shortage economy brought
an end to the queues for food and consumer goods, but some skills were
142 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

successfully re-applied to new types of queues that continued to ‘immo-

bilize bodies’ in the post-communist era, ironically especially those who
moved.
The introduction of strong immigration rules by western countries
for Albanians ensured long and arduous queues at western embassies
throughout the last two decades.6 An entire informal industry sprung
up around these queues, hawking snacks and bottled water as people
waited under the scorching sun, to selling out-of-the-queue visas for
those who had a ‘contact’ or, alternatively, serious money to pay. In
the following excerpt from an interview with a migrant couple living in
Thessaloniki, the queue at the embassy – which may not have produced
a visa anyway – was bypassed in this way:

Anita: When I came to Greece a year ago I entered through the pass-
port control as if I had already been in Greece, but was just getting
the entrance stamp on my documents ... We paid €3,000 [to
smugglers].7
Luli: Cash-in-hand.
Anita: Why? Because we couldn’t get a visa – they [embassy staff]
either want money [a backhander], or they make it impossible.

Elsewhere in their interview the couple described the queues at the

Greek border-crossing points which have to be endured every year. The
queues can stretch several kilometres during peak times of migrants’
arrival and departure such as at Easter and in the summer. Migrants
have had to wait in their cars or coaches for days on end, often with
small children and elderly parents. Ironically, increased mobility due to
globalization and technological advances has not succeeded in elimi-
nating stoppages as bodies are immobilized by states obsessed with the
security of mobility. Thus, the ‘etatization of time’, as Verdery (1996)
labels the tendency of socialist states to seize their citizens’ time from
them, has some application to capitalist states too.
Although Albania is becoming more capitalistic, it has not yet thrown
off its socialist mantle reflected in other types of queues. Queuing has
been part of everyday life for anyone who attempts to access a state-run
service such as paying their electricity bill, obtaining a birth certificate,
property title deed or other document from a municipality or a central
government office, or receiving their monthly pension at the post-office
before the money runs out. One does not necessarily have to physically
wait in line at the office. Nowadays the quest – whether for a tax code,
telephone connection, national insurance form, medical document or
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 143

school certificate – can only be completed after several trips to this same
office or to another in which the citizen is subjected to an exasperating
ping-pong game. Like in communist times a ‘mik’ (contact) would help,
but even that is being replaced by the ‘coffee’, a euphemism for any type
or amount of bribe.
These are just some of the things that are keeping Albania at the very
back of the ‘virtual queue’ of former socialist countries waiting to join
the EU. Albanians know too well that being at the back of the queue is
not promising: the goods may sell out before your turn comes and you
return home empty-handed. Some time ago the joke did the rounds
that, when Albania would be ready to join the EU there would be no
EU any more. In the current climate of drawn-out crisis throughout the
European area, when key things such as the Schengen project of free
movement and the viability of the euro are called to question, the joke
does not look quite so far-fetched.

Conclusion

The last 20 years have witnessed tremendous social and economic

transformations in post-socialist Albania. Post-socialism promised a
new era of freedom, democracy and prosperity, all lacking during the
communist years. Hope for change was in the air even as malnourished
Albanians chanted ‘Liri-demokraci’ (Freedom-Democracy) while making
the symbolic V-sign. Very soon, internal and international migrations
reached epic proportions. The remittances migrants sent back were the
lifeline for their families and the country as a whole, while later also
responding to the rapidly increasing consumerism. The spectacular rise
in the number of cars in private ownership – from a zero base – and their
strong association with masculinity and success, were strong indicators
that Albania’s new-found mobility was a male-led one, as had been the
parallel processes of migration, entrepreneurship and so on. Mindful
of the challenges of economic and political chaos, and in the vacuum
created by the collapse of paternalistic state structures that provided from
cradle to grave, Albanian society withdrew into the safety of patriarchy,
causing a retreat of women into the domestic sphere. Ironically, the
West’s ‘progressive’ anti-trafficking agenda colluded in this resurgence
of patriarchy by asking women to stay at home (Andrijasevic 2007).
To be sure, Albanians have been quite inventive and practical in their
responses to the emerging geography of opportunities. Migrant commu-
nities are spread around Europe and North America, while internally
migration has redistributed demographic, economic and social resources
144 Julie Vullnetari and Russell King

in a counter-process to the centrally planned economy of the communist

years. Yet, although Albania seems like a country on the move, zooming
in closer with the critical mobilities lens reveals that, as in commu-
nist times, not everyone is positioned and able to be mobile. Unequal
access to mobility reflects and reinforces the positions and interactions
of power between people. This ‘power-geometry’, to put it in Massey’s
terms (1993), is shaped by an individual’s class, gender, ethnicity and
educational background, as well as by geography and Albania’s place
in the regional and global hierarchy. While visiting London or Paris for
shopping or a family weekend is only three hours away for jet-setter
professional men and women who are doing well in Tirana, a day is
hardly enough to reach the remote north or south of the country where
tilling the land for subsistence farming is done by donkey-pulled ploughs
and where young women are deprived of elementary education.
Thus, considering post-socialist transformations through the mobili-
ties optic offers us insights not only into the act of moving and being
(or not) mobile, but also the degree to which those who move (or not)
are truly in control of their own mobility (or involuntary immobility),
and thus free to perform it as they wish. For as Bauman (1998: 9) argues,
‘mobility has become the most powerful and most coveted stratifying
factor’ in the globalized world.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the Leverhulme Trust and to UN-INSTRAW and UNDP for

funding the research on which this chapter is based. We are grateful to
our research participants for their hospitality and sharing their life story
with us.

Notes
1. The terms ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ are used interchangeably in this chapter
without indicating any ideological stand.
2. Although this is changing. See for instance, Mëhilli (2011, 2012), and Sjöberg
(1991) for an important earlier study.
3. We use pseudonyms instead of interviewees’ real names in order to protect
their identity.
4. The dega was probably the most feared local institution at the time as it was
here that the interrogation of suspects took place during pre-trial detention,
often under severe torture and abuse. Hence, the simple act of going there to
ask for help is considered by Kol as daring.
5. Albania has often been called the ‘land of the Mercedes’ due to the dominance
of this make in the country. In the 1990s it was the absolute market leader as
 Gendered Mobilities in Albanian Society 145

the only car perceived to be robust enough to cope with the awful roads. As
other brands have slowly made their way into the country, its importance
has dwindled somewhat, although according to a 2009 survey nearly half of
cars owned in Albania were Mercedes (http://www.idra-al.com/en/read_more.
php?newsid=29, date accessed June 2012).
6. Only in December 2010 were Albanians in possession of a biometric passport
allowed to travel visa-free in the Schengen area.
7. A sum equivalent to the annual wage of a teacher in Albania, or a third of a
migrant’s average annual earnings in Greece.

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8
The View from the Back of the
Warrior: Mobility, Privilege and
Power during the International
Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Catherine Baker

This chapter shows how spatial practices of security and intervention,

as well as the spatial implications of post-socialism discussed elsewhere
in this book, have produced novel mobilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina
since the outbreak of war in 1992 and the beginning of international
intervention in the same year. Within and around a site of international
intervention such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, movement across space is
deeply structured by power and privilege. Their structuring effects are all
the more visible because of the restrictions placed on movement by the
military geographies that emerge from conflict and the political geogra-
phies that may develop in response to it: the blocking of transit routes
by checkpoints, the laying of mines to deny movement to an enemy,
the fortification of elements of the built environment, such as schools
or factories, that had previously served public purposes, the political
division of territory, exacerbated by forced migration, the visa restric-
tions imposed by powerful states on the country’s nationals who may
previously not have been subject to them. While some of these factors
are also manifested in spaces that are not sites of intervention, it is in
post-conflict spaces where they are most visible.
The political and social relations that structure movement may be
discussed within what John Urry (2007: 44) refers to as a ‘mobilities
paradigm’. This calls attention to the interdependent movement of
bodies, objects, images, messages and interpersonal virtual communica-
tions (Urry 2007: 47). Every mobility has been produced by ‘political
decision making and ideological meanings’ which facilitate or limit the

148
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 149

ways in which all these subjects of mobility can move (Adey 2010: 131).
As a result, ‘[w]ho is mobile, and who is not, and how mobility and
immobility are managed, ordered and experienced are becoming ever
more significant questions’ (Burrell 2008: 354). Within the general poli-
tics of mobilities, military movement should not be neglected (Kaplan
2006; Gregory 2010; Williams 2011). Humanitarian intervention then
produces specific mobilities that warrant closer investigation (Smirl
2008).
The security practices of those who take part in peace operations
have a profound effect on constituting and reconstituting space within
the area of intervention (Higate and Henry 2009). Whether as delib-
erate policy or whether as the result of actions consciously taken for
other purposes, foreign forces bring certain spaces into being, sustain
other kinds of spaces and destroy yet more. The troops and contingents
thus ‘actively and necessarily create and maintain spaces of security
and insecurity’, meaning that ‘peacekeepers’ impact on space is consti-
tutive rather than benign’ (Higate and Henry 2009: 17). Higate and
Henry’s perspective combines this attention to space with an attention
to ‘the mundane, the routine and the obscure social aspects of security’
(2009: 18) that mean security must be viewed as an ‘embodied perform-
ance’ (2009: 17), taking place in space. This position, illustrating the
‘embodied’ geopolitics demanded by Lorraine Dowler and Joanne
Sharp (2001: 167), helps to understand the mobilities of international
intervention as they were constituted in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The
chapter explores these by analysing the mobility narratives of people
who travelled within Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of the intervention,
and particularly the mobility narratives of locally recruited interpreters.
After a consideration of the linguistic–material spaces created by mili-
tary intervention, the chapter goes on to discuss the spatial practices in
which interpreters were able to engage as a result of their employment
by foreign military forces.
The data used in this chapter consist of semi-structured interviews with
foreign soldiers and locally recruited interpreters collected by the author
in 2009–10 as part of a research project on languages in peace operations;
some published memoirs of peacekeeping are also drawn on to support
the interview data.1 The 51 interviewees, recruited through snowball
sampling initiated through a number of channels (magazine advertise-
ment, online peacekeeping reunion groups, discussion lists), included
29 locally recruited interpreters who worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 13
British soldiers, 2 British civilian linguists, 2 Danish soldiers, 1 Danish
civilian linguist and 4 other civilians with relevant experiences for the
150 Catherine Baker

project. My positionality as a female civilian British national and native

English speaker with fluency in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian should be
acknowledged and will have affected the co-construction of narrative
in every interview. However, an interview-based methodology is appro-
priate for research of this type because it permits the study of mobilities
through ‘close readings of specific groups from particular historicised
places’ (Hyndman 2012: 253).
Bosnia-Herzegovina was not only a site of international interven-
tion, but also a space that continued to be affected by the transnational
collapse of Communism in 1989–91.2 The visa restrictions and refugee
management policies imposed by Western governments on citizens of
Bosnia-Herzegovina who attempted to travel abroad during and after the
war were experienced as so humiliating precisely because of the contrast
with what had gone before, when Yugoslavia had been a diplomati-
cally significant state in the Non-Aligned Movement and when many
Yugoslavs had been not just legally but also financially able to travel
to most countries with little hindrance. Violence intended to create
monoethnic territories forced more than a million Bosnians to move
and institutionalized new demarcations based on ethnopolitical separa-
tions; however, the geography of where one could find work and where
work did not exist had also been determined by the fates of socialist
enterprises during the collapse. Indeed, where the war is interpreted
as a contest to take over control of and privatize the formerly state-
owned enterprises that no longer had formal owners after the collapse of
socialism, conflict and post-socialism become utterly intertwined. The
intersection of both phenomena – post-socialism and the aftermath of
conflict – therefore produced the politics of mobility that this chapter
will discuss.

Peace operations and space in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The United Nations peacekeeping force (UNPROFOR) that served in

Bosnia-Herzegovina between August 1992 and December 1995 consisted
at its height of some 23,000 troops (Durch 1996: 239) and was devel-
oped on the basis of a smaller force sent to Croatia earlier in 1992. The
conversion of the intervention to a peace enforcement mission led
by NATO rather than the UN resulted in what would now be referred
to as a ‘surge’ of more than 24,000 further troops to form the new
Implementation Force (IFOR) in December 1995–January 1996, most
notably 20,000 troops from the US military (Phillips 2005: 16). When
IFOR became the Stabilization Force (SFOR) a year later, the mission was
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 151

gradually reduced to 7,000 troops. The expansion of the force’s mandate

to oversee the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, and the
exercise of its power in doing so, had visible effects on space within
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Foreign forces had already set up bases in a number
of Bosnian towns, particularly in central Bosnia, and had liaison offices
and military observer missions in others; a military cartography of
supply routes, extending over the Bosnian border into Croatia, had
already been established. The NATO force divided Bosnia-Herzegovina
into three sectors or Multi-National Divisions (MNDs), each garrisoned
by a different subset of the IFOR coalition, and established bases in a
greater range of towns. Large, heavy and powerful military equipment
was brought into the country, including artillery – which had not been
available for use under UNPROFOR’s mandate – and construction equip-
ment that would be used by military engineers in repairing damaged
infrastructure such as roads and bridges. The force’s material presence in
space had therefore grown and spread.
Simultaneously, however, its presence in space had a political dimen-
sion. The Dayton Agreement obliged all the local armed forces that had
taken part in the conflict to remove the checkpoints that had severely
impeded civilian movement around Bosnia-Herzegovina and that were
now defined as ‘illegal roadblocks’; if this was not done on schedule,
IFOR would and did close them down by force. IFOR thus contested, and
largely won, the practical power to regulate movement within Bosnia-
Herzegovina. The right to do so had been granted to the force under the
military annex of the Dayton Agreement, which provided that ‘IFOR
shall have complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground,
air and water throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina’, with the right to
‘utilize any areas or facilities to carry out its responsibilities as required
for its support, training, and operations, with such advance notice as
may be practicable’ (OHR 1995). On a wider scale, the political settle-
ment that IFOR was mandated to implement also represented a political
reordering of space, based on the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into
entities conceived as Serb and non-Serb, and the subdivision of that non-
Serb entity into cantons based on Bosniak majorities, Croat majorities
or an official consociational mixture. This settlement has been criticized
by scholars including Gearóid Ó Tuathail (2006: 145) as an instrument
that ‘rewarded ethnic cleansing by dividing Bosnia into ethnoterritorial
entities which were given state-like administrative powers’.
IFOR thus had the somewhat contradictory task of securing new
borders while simultaneously upholding the goal of ‘freedom of move-
ment’. ‘Freedom of movement’, understood as the ability for civilians
152 Catherine Baker

to move around Bosnia-Herzegovina without being prevented from

entering certain territories on the basis of ascribed ethnicity, was a
significant objective of IFOR and other agencies including the UN High
Commission for Refugees and the High Representative.3 The interven-
tion organized a number of initiatives to promote this, including the
physical repair of roads and bridges, the introduction of new car regis-
trations that would not associate a vehicle with any particular territory
within the country (Hadžić 2007: 142), and the organization of UNHCR
convoys with an IFOR escort to deter local residents and police from
turning back or even stoning the buses. Facilitating freedom of move-
ment was a prerequisite for achieving the longer-term goal of refugee
return (see Ó Tuathail and Dahlman 2006; Jansen 2011). It also ran
in parallel with the objective of restructuring Bosnia-Herzegovina’s
economic life around principles of free trade (Richmond 2008), the same
principles that were used to reorder post-socialist European space in
general. Spatial practices surrounding this economic policy included the
start-up funding of a multi-ethnic trading area off the highway known
as ‘Route Arizona’ where small-scale producers could sell their goods,
and which also became a centre for black-market trade and sex work,
catering for – and with some participation from – SFOR members and
foreign contractors (Haynes 2010).
The example of the site off ‘Route Arizona’, domesticated as ‘Arizona
Market’, demonstrates that the intervention’s impact on space was more
than material, but rather involved new assemblages of language, materi-
ality and practice. Whenever foreign troops deploy into a space, they are
likely to rename elements of it formally and informally, replacing local
understandings of the space with their own naming conventions and
historical and symbolic references rather than fully incorporating local
names into their own spatial practices: ‘Formal and informal military
practices of renaming space are ubiquitous, and they exert “the power
of naming” perceived by Mary Louise Pratt in colonizers’ navigational
mapping’ (Footitt and Baker 2012: 145; see Pratt 1992: 33). Foreign
troops commonly abbreviated or corrupted long Bosnian toponyms with
unfamiliar phonetics, but what most permeated into Bosnian geography
was the force’s practice of naming roads, initiated by UNPROFOR and
carried over into the NATO period (IFOR and its successor force, SFOR).
UNPROFOR had labelled inter-city roads in English using themes such
as geometric shapes, gemstones, birds, snakes and fish. ‘Route Arizona’,
similarly, belonged to a set of highways renamed by IFOR after US states.
The anthropologist Kimberly Coles, who observed her fellow election
monitors making sense of Bosnia-Herzegovina through these maps,
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 153

remarks that they exemplified foreign interveners living in ‘a parallel

world of statelike practices and institutions laid out on top of Bosnia
proper’ because they were insulated from, and often not linguistically or
culturally aware of, the country’s social complexities (Coles 2007: 64).
These territorial decisions become acts of placemaking, creating new
opportunities and constraints in the everyday lives of local people
who happen to live within, or choose to move to, these new military
spaces (Higate and Henry 2009: 55). Although the presence of militaries
at any site creates specific economic, social and cultural geographies
(Woodward 2005), the placemaking of deployment represents an accel-
erated, and often temporary and precarious, version of these processes.
The military bases of peacekeeping forces are sources of direct local
employment for catering assistants, cleaners, drivers and interpreters
(these last are generally highest on the pay scale for local employees).
Some contingents, including British forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina from
1998 onwards, may also hire a wider range of skilled local workers to
replace some combat services support roles such as mechanics, carpen-
ters and financial administrators. The forces pay hard currency, at salary
rates higher than those available for comparable or even professional
work in the wartime/post-war economy, and unlike a number of local
employers in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina can be reliably expected to
pay their employees every month.
The impact of this military–economic placemaking on towns such as
Šipovo and Mrkonjić Grad, two small towns in Republika Srpska that
became the sites of multiple British bases after 1995, was significant.
The major pre-war employers, the factories – formerly constituted as
complex ‘self-managing enterprises’ under the distinctive arrangements
of late Yugoslav socialism – had closed, and indeed British forces were
renting their premises as bases. The foreignness of the military employer
also offered the prospect of employment without the need for ‘connec-
tions’ (veze) that local power-holders in the area might seek to monopo-
lize.4 What had been marginal towns in north-west Bosnia thus became
temporary economic honeypots when British forces arrived in the
region. The same went for Banja Luka, already the largest town in the
area but with a parallel significance in the new military geography as the
headquarters location of an MND. Banja Luka thus became a key loca-
tion in the collection of interviews on which this chapter draws.
Among the interpreters I interviewed in and around Banja Luka in
2010 was Dejan, who had been working for successive foreign units
in the Banja Luka area since 2001. Dejan had been born in Croatia,
a different Yugoslav republic, and his family had moved away from
154 Catherine Baker

former Yugoslavia in 1993. He narrated his decision to move from the

third country in 2000 to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Banja Luka specifi-
cally, as economic:

I had a friend here in Banja Luka, and she told me that, well, I knew
that the militaries were in, and all sorts of international organizations
were here, and I thought that with my English I could come over here
and find a job, because I had also heard that the salaries were really
good, and I didn’t have any job in [the third country] at that time, so
I decided to come here to look for a job.5

Mobility as the exercise of power

The performance of security and power through using militarized

mobility and denying control over mobility to other forces is evident in
many accounts by personnel who participated in the intervention. The
memoir of Bob Stewart, the first commander of a British battalion in
UNPROFOR, makes clear that military vehicles were employed with the
intention to have this performative effect from the start, in this recol-
lection of a conversation with a Canadian battalion commander, Michel
Jones:

We talked about how to get the right mix of armoured vehicles. Here
Michel was adamant. He advised, ‘Noise impresses, size impresses, and
numbers impress. I want more of everything. The French armoured
personnel carriers are better than mine but they are not as noisy or
impressive.’ ... Everything Michel said made great sense to me – partic-
ularly about the use of armoured vehicles. (Stewart 1993: 37)

Later commanders continued to recognize this effect. Bob Barry, who

commanded another British battalion in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the
handover from UNPROFOR to IFOR, wrote of an incident where IFOR
had to enforce a troop withdrawal in accordance with the demilitariza-
tion provisions of the Dayton Agreement:

I visit A Company the next day at Kupres. Arriving by helicopter at the

British logistic base I can clearly see the Warriors [armoured vehicles]
parked up alongside the squadron of tank transporters that will lift
them, together with the additional ammunition mounted on DROPS
lorries. The company is a formidable sight and is in high spirits.
In Sarajevo Richard Smith confirms that there are indeed several
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 155

thousand Muslim troops refusing to leave Tito Barracks. The French

HQ appears friendly, capable, well organized and deadly serious about
evicting the ABiH. They are reinforced by a company of US armoured
infantry equipped with Bradley, their equivalent of Warrior, and a
company of Apache helicopter gunships. (Barry 2008: 242)

These impressive, noisy and to certain audiences threatening vehicles did

not solely convey soldiers, but often also the interpreters whom soldiers
would rely on for language support. Though some local interpreters had
desk-based roles, many more spent most of their working hours outside
the base travelling to liaison visits or accompanying patrols. Militarized
mobility thus became part of their everyday lives, though interpreters’
different positionality in terms of localness, civilian status and (often)
gender meant that military vehicles figured in their accounts in different
ways. One account by Bojan, who worked for British forces in various
parts of the MND between 1996 and 2000, conveyed the use of these
powerful vehicles to perform security and set it in the context of his
wider beliefs about the British impact on Banja Luka politics:

[T]he presence of that camp in Ramići [near Banja Luka] meant a lot
for the state-making process that happened in Sarajevo. When the
British left Banja Luka, that’s when these separatist tensions in Banja
Luka began to occur. The sheer threat of those armoured vehicles, and
some very determined British officers who were there at that time,
were the reason that this did not happen earlier, this separatism that is
now taking place here, in this town where the two of us have met.6

His remark supports Higate and Henry’s observation that ‘spaces of secu-
rity can be produced and maintained [in different ways] as a consequence
of contrasting security performance noted to flow from a mix of “essen-
tialized” national identity, character and observable practice’ (Higate and
Henry 2009: 129). Bojan illustrated his perception of the British presence
by narrating an incident where a British officer had used a Challenger,
the Army’s main battle tank, to confront ammunition thieves at a check-
point near Koprivna on the Inter-Entity Boundary Line:

Some of the local people were stealing ammunition from a Challenger

tank that was parked in front of the checkpoint. And of course it was
maybe due to the fact that the officer in command was letting some
local people collect some diesel that was dripping from a tank during
the summer ... of course the officer just let them do that, because the
156 Catherine Baker

diesel was dripping anyway, it would have been lost. Somebody was,
picked up some ammunition. Oh, you should have seen what they did!
When this tank, this ninety-ton vehicle, chased the car to Koprivna,
turned on the pavement in Koprivna, and ripped it. And pointed the
barrel in a café, where this person was hiding. It was (laughs), this
was some kind of shock therapy for the ammunition thieves, that
never wanted to get near the checkpoint again. ... But, after that, they
had to fix the asphalt of the pavement. It cost something like ten
thousand marks for them to get the machines for asphalting. But
it was a demonstration of power which was necessary back then.
Because if they hadn’t done that they would just come again and try
to steal the ammunition of the tank. ... So that was one interesting
occasion, when I looked at how quickly the Army is ready to just turn
into combat machinery in a second (snaps fingers). When they were
completely relaxed, there were just local people who collected diesel,
they’d even hired a local man to bake bread and doughnuts and bring
them every day. Ah, it was totally relaxed, and suddenly it was just
like, woah, on a tank, and chased them. So, it’s this shock therapy
that I think was very useful back then.7

This was a security performance with a flair for the dramatic. The shift
from benign paternalism to this almost cartoon-like over-display of
power, backed up by what must have appeared like almost unlimited
financial resources to make good the damage, made a profound contri-
bution to this narrator’s impression of British forces and their differences
from other forces that contributed to IFOR/SFOR. The incident could
equally have been retold by a different narrator with a more critical
voice to portray a foreign force protected by legal and financial privilege
as well as the physical power of an Army main battle tank. Bojan’s use
of the term ‘shock therapy’ to describe the officer’s performance invites
one to reflect on the post-socialist economic reforms across post-socialist
Europe, described with the same language, that immediately introduced
free trade and privatization after the collapse of Communism, at the cost
of increased inflation, unemployment and corruption in public institu-
tions (see Pusca 2007), though to suggest a direct comparison in this
speaker’s thinking risks academic overstretch.
Departing from the view of mobility and power in the above narrative,
however, the most common view of military vehicles in interpreters’
narratives was to regard them as a source of danger to oneself. During
the conflict, the greatest dangers to interpreters had been from snipers
and from local armed forces who might seek to detain and interrogate
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 157

them at checkpoints or to coerce them into collaborating with them

in their home towns. These dangers subsided after the Dayton Peace
Agreements, though some violent confrontations or threats were still
reported by interpreters working after 1995. What most worried inter-
preters – in a context where pre-war healthcare expectations had been
badly damaged by war and the conversion to a fragmented health insur-
ance system – was the risk of being injured in a military vehicle accident.
This could be the result of a mine strike but could also be the result
of poor driving by soldiers.8 The drivers most likely to be complained
about and to cause danger were young male soldiers in combat regi-
ments who experienced the speed and power of their vehicles as a source
of fun and adventure. Interpreters who did not share their excitement
but who were in the back of the vehicle without control found it diffi-
cult to speak up and protect themselves. In the extract below, Jovana,
who worked for British forces between 1998 and 2001, recalls a fright-
ening experience when she could not prevent militarized mobility being
enacted on her:

Once I had a situation that I think I’m going to remember till the
rest of my life. It was a big mi[nefield], like sign, ‘Minefield,’ and I
was in the Land Rover, in front of us, so with my team I was in the
Land Rover, in front of us was actually a young second lieutenant or
whatever, 18–19 years old, just straight from the school. He was a
Warrior patrol leader, so he was leading the whole thing. And in the
back of that Warrior, apart [from] his team [of] soldiers, was one of
my colleagues. And there was a big sign, ‘Do not cross,’ or, ‘Stop, it’s
a minefield.’ But no, he [the lieutenant] decided that the way that he
wanted to show his bravery or whatever, and I’m – at that moment
I’m just thinking, if they’re going to go on, if he stops on a mine – I
don’t care about him, I just – I do care about my colleague, because
he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, because he’s in the back of the
Warrior. And I remember starting screaming to my patrol commander,
‘Get Slobodan out of it. I just want him out of it.’ Because I don’t care
about your boss, he’s obviously lunatic, you know, he’s crazy. But I do
care about my colleague, and I was thinking, ‘OK, we are behind that
Warrior, so if they get stuck on a mine, they’re going to go into the
air, and we know that we are supposed to come back.’9

This was one of several such experiences narrated in Jovana’s inter-

view. The story, and many others like it, clearly illustrate the signifi-
cance of embodied performances in constituting security and insecurity.
158 Catherine Baker

On these drives, mobility and security were understood by the travel-

lers in different, incompatible ways. For soldiers deployed to Bosnia-
Herzegovina, especially by the late 1990s when threat levels to them
were low and patrolling had become routine, the deployment had a
touristic quality fuelled, off-duty, by cheap food, alcohol, goods and serv-
ices (Baker 2011a). The subjectivity of these young soldiers (though not
necessarily of their commanding officers) included not only the accept-
ance of thrill and risk but also the perception that, as military travellers
who had entered a conflict zone, they ought to be exposed to such.
Interpreters were at the mercy of soldiers’ handling of the vehicle, and
their powerlessness in transit crystallized broader feelings about certain
troops’ disrespect for them as human beings and as people from Bosnia-
Herzegovina or former Yugoslavia. Another extract from Jovana’s inter-
view, when she had been involuntarily caught up in a Land Rover race,
showed that this mobility was also gendered. It is presented at length in
order to illustrate the emotional work of recollection in this instance:

We were deployed in Kozara, which is a mountain next to Banja Luka,

kind of quite steep. And [the] soldier was driving around the Land
Rover, I was in the back of the Land Rover, two of them. There were
like two Land Rovers, they were chasing. And I’m sitting in back of
the Land Rover, no seats, because it’s old Land Rover, so I’m sitting on
the floor, holding myself, because they are chasing, in the mountains,
like off-road, they love that, off-road ... like driving like crazy, because
it’s like a boy thing, it’s an army thing, it’s like a video game. Wow!
You know. And ... so they have seatbelts, handbrake is not working,
and you have uphill things, so, you know.
And I’m in the back, no seatbelt, no seat at all, and the satellite
phone box is loose as well in the back. And at some point, because they
stopped uphill, and without handbrake, he had to kind of speed up
like, you know, within seconds. And they’re laughing, they’re having
fun, and that satellite phone box, orange box, it looks like a suitcase,
like plastic, hard plastic, hit me in the back, and I, seriously at that
moment I thought I’m going to be, you know, that I broke my spine
and I’m not going to be able to walk. And at that moment I was like, ‘If
it was in UK, guys, you would be in jail. First of all this kind of vehicle
wouldn’t be on the road, not to mention me sitting on the floor not
having a seat, not having a seatbelt. Not mentioning the box being
loose and flying around.’ ... At that point I said, ‘This is not the way how
you,’ you know. But they had fun. They didn’t mean anything wrong,
just they did ... they had fun, they didn’t care. ‘Are you complaining,
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 159

or are you having fun? Ah ha ha ha ha. Are you OK there? Yee hah,
yippee, you are, such fun. Are you OK there? Are you still alive?’ And
you’re like in tears, you don’t know what to do, because you cannot
stop them, and you cannot go out, because you’re going to be, you
don’t know. Maybe they’re going to leave, and leave you in the middle
of the mountains, and, you know, it’s Bosnia, you don’t want to stay
there. And then you come back, ‘OK, all my joints, all my bones, are in
place. OK, another day.’ ...
And then ... I felt it’s even worse for the reason that obviously they
wouldn’t be allowed to do that back home, like in UK, so, OK, let’s
do whatever we want. Let’s play games, just because it’s Bosnia. Just
because it’s like, you know, third world country, so we can do what-
ever we like, nobody’s going to catch us. So we’re allowed, it’s just a
boys’ game.10

In ethical terms, the interpreter might well be said to have been driven
in such a way without her consent: ‘Agents have a duty, before crossing
the boundaries of others, not only to determine whether the other
person is consenting, but also to be accountable for having an awareness
of the sorts of circumstances and actions that might prevent that other
person from voluntarily consenting’ (McGregor 1996: 207). The dangers
of being left alone in remote territory with no means of getting home,
and of confronting soldiers who could influence superiors to terminate
a contract, are clearly just such circumstances. They were exacerbated by
the tendency, described by interpreters from various bases and phases,
for those soldiers who did not appreciate interpreters as professionals to
treat them instead as logistical items (elsewhere in her interview, Jovana
had retold a briefing reminding soldiers not to forget their helmets,
body armour, satellite phone boxes and interpreters). Disregard for
interpreters’ humanity in this sense was compounded by the disregard
Jovana, and others, perceived some soldiers to have towards Bosnians
as a group: in her reconstruction of their sense of privilege, ‘it’s a third
world country, so we can do whatever we like’. A growing critical litera-
ture on how the agents of international intervention view the sites to
which they are deployed (Duffey 2000; Razack 2004; Whitworth 2005;
Pouligny 2006; Rubinstein 2008; Sion 2008; Higate and Henry 2009;
Fluri 2011; O’Reilly 2012) suggests, regrettably, that this reconstruction
would be accurate for a number of troops. Such thinking may lead not
just to accidental violence but also to deliberate violence inflicted by
troops who come to consider it legitimate (Razack 2004), and thus needs
to be challenged when it appears.
160 Catherine Baker

The personal mobility of interpreters

Beyond participating in and being affected by the spatial practices

of foreign soldiers, interpreters also found that their own personal
mobility was altered in relation to other Bosnians who were not
employed in what Kathleen Jennings (2010: 231) has called the ‘peace-
keeping economy’. The ‘peacekeeping economy’ comprises the many
direct and indirect resource flows that enter local, national, regional
and micro-local economic spaces as a result of the activities of foreign
military forces and civilian agencies, and one of these effects is the
recruitment of local employees including the group discussed in this
chapter, interpreters. The economic benefits of such work – high sala-
ries, hard currency, reliable payment – have already been discussed,
but traded against this temporary financial gain was the structural
precarity of working on a short-term contract for a unit that might
relocate within Bosnia-Herzegovina or even withdraw altogether at any
time. Interpreters who had completed all or most of their education
before 1992 when the war began had formed expectations about their
future careers and the ways in which they would use their skills that,
in many cases, would not be fulfilled in the trajectories they turned out
to have. In becoming and working as interpreters, they experienced
not only post-conflict but also post-socialist dislocations. On one hand,
they were coming to terms with a type of flexible working that had not
existed in pre-war Yugoslavia, and with the dramatic reduction or even
absence of entitlements such as sickness and maternity leave. On the
other hand, they were coming to terms with a new working identity
that they had not expected to take on, to the extent that the very fact
that it existed to be taken on was evidence of what had happened to the
society they had lived in.11
Working or having worked as an interpreter led both directly and
indirectly to privileges in personal mobility. This was most visible
and direct during the war, when civilian mobility was restricted not
only by shortages of fuel, food and water but also by the many check-
points that all local armed forces involved in the conflict placed across
roads in order to hold territory and deny entry to enemies. While
the existence of organized criminal networks across the ethnicized
boundaries shows that these checkpoints were more porous than
might normatively be imagined (Andreas 2007), the level of danger
involved in presenting oneself at a checkpoint in times where ‘enemy’
civilians were at risk of detention, imprisonment and torture made
them effectively impassable for most. Mobility out of surrounded
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 161

cities, including the UN Safe Areas (see Hyndman 2003), was thus
extremely restricted unless one had the capital to negotiate safe
passage. Interpreters working for UNPROFOR, however, were offi-
cially able to pass through checkpoints in the course of their duties
when they accompanied convoys along routes that UNPROFOR had
negotiated in advance with the liaison officers of the relevant local
armed forces. This safe conduct did not always materialize: check-
point guards often attempted to turn back UNPROFOR convoys and
sometimes succeeded, making the checkpoint a major site of confron-
tation between peacekeepers and local militaries. Even when a convoy
was allowed through, guards might attempt to reject or even detain
the interpreter, whose safety would then depend on an UNPROFOR
officer’s ability to negotiate and willingness to use force. Lejla, who
had worked for UNPROFOR in Sarajevo during this period, recalled
two checkpoint confrontations with dramatically different results. In
one incident, an UNPROFOR officer who was present when a convoy
was stopped at a checkpoint had allowed a different interpreter to be
detained; she had been released after two weeks, quit her job and left
the country. In another:

I had a similar situation at the checkpoint, but the liaison officer

for whom I was working, he said ... ‘She works as an interpreter for
UNPROFOR, she has a UN ID card, you can allow us safe passage
or not. You cannot take people off our vehicles and cars.’ Then we
had to stay at this checkpoint for about forty minutes, until all the
phone calls were made, and we were ordered to go back. We were not
allowed to pass through, and then we had to file a request for a clear-
ance for me to go back to Sarajevo with a strong recommendation
that in the future we always announce our movements.12

Passage through a checkpoint was a high-risk situation for interpreters,

but it could bring privileges in the shape of being able to buy food outside
siege lines at cheaper prices and then take it home for family, friends
and neighbours. An extended network of people could thus benefit from
one of their number being an interpreter. With the lifting of sieges at
the end of the war, the worst price discrepancies were alleviated, but
interpreters still experienced privileged mobility compared to most
other civilians when it came to crossing former front lines. In one case
where two nearby towns had become monoethnic as a result of ethnic
cleansing, an interpreter from the now-Bosniak town of Maglaj working
at an IFOR base in the now-Serb town of Doboj became a go-between for
162 Catherine Baker

Bosniaks displaced from Doboj, who asked him to recover hidden valu-
ables or photograph the remains of their homes. In the longer-term, he
felt that ‘we interpreters were the first ones to break the ice’ in terms of
routine social travel between the towns, and that through taking their
friends to socialize there they had influenced the mobility of others in
ways that went well beyond their work.13
In the course of work, interpreters might travel not only in militarized
ground transport but also by helicopter, the aircraft that has become
emblematic of late twentieth century military mobilities (see Blackmore
2003; Lisle and Pepper 2005). Helicopters enabled UNPROFOR/NATO
forces to bypass the uncertainties of ground transport (mountain roads,
floods, snow, potential mines or roadblocks) altogether and were a mode
of transport that NATO had aimed to control since the introduction
of a no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1993. The military
annex of the Dayton Agreement stated that ‘[a]ny flight activities by
military fixed-wing or helicopter aircraft within Bosnia and Herzegovina
without the express permission of the IFOR Commander are subject
to military action by the IFOR, including the use of necessary force to
ensure compliance’ (OHR 1995). Local militaries had to apply to IFOR
for permission for helicopter flights, and on several occasions a force
would have all its helicopter flights banned for several days as punish-
ment for making an unauthorized flight or obstructing a cargo inspec-
tion (Rayner 1996). A senior British officer recalled that helicopter travel
had facilitated an emotional visit for an interpreter that he could not
have made as a private individual, during a journey in 1998 when a
British general offered to fly him back to the village and house in eastern
Bosnia that he had been forced to leave:

A: So we landed in the garden and we went and spoke to the man in

the grey shirt, who was the Serb who had taken over the house and
was living in it. But it was a very strange, sort of rather emotional
moment for this chap to drop in, you know, almost from heaven,
as it were, to see where his house was, and the Serb assured him
that his mother’s grave was being properly looked after and things
like that. ...
Q: And if somebody had been a private individual, would they not
have been able to get back there?
A: They probably wouldn’t have risked getting back there at that
stage, it would still have been too hostile for a Muslim to turn up
that deep into Republika Srpska. So it was an odd moment to drop
in out of the sky.14
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 163

This was another remarkable performance of security and mobility,

using resources so far outside the reach of a Bosnian civilian as to seem
an exercise of power ‘almost from heaven’. Even the power to arbitrarily
deviate en route was reserved, under NATO’s control of Bosnian airspace,
to the aircraft of the intervention, and would have been cause for the
suspension of helicopter privileges if exercised by the aircraft of the local
militaries.
Yet working as an interpreter could also mean being expected to be
more mobile than one’s circumstances permitted. The work pattern
of many bases until the early 2000s was for interpreters to complete
alternating 12-hour shifts within a duty week or fortnight and then to
spend the next week or fortnight off work. During their duty weeks they
were accommodated on the base. The shift patterns caused difficulty for
women who already had caring responsibilities, and one woman who
had worked as an interpreter on these kind of shifts reported driving
home at night between shifts in order not to be separated from her baby.
When military bases closed down because a unit was being posted else-
where in Bosnia-Herzegovina, interpreters would need to move with the
unit in order to keep the job. This was sometimes possible for people
without family responsibilities, but it would mean redundancy if an
interpreter was unable to move. In one case, the commanding officer of
a British UNPROFOR battalion had attempted to find new employment
for two experienced interpreters who had been made redundant after
British forces later left the area. He had used personal connections to
recommend one interpreter for a secretarial job in Croatia but regretted
that he could do nothing for the other interpreter, whose status as a
carer required her to remain in her home town.15 To hold on to an inter-
preting post as long as possible required workers to be a maximally flex-
ible subject. Interpreters’ social embeddedness often prevented them
from fully exercising such flexibility.

Interpreters and international mobility

Relatively greater opportunities for international mobility, both tempo-

rary and permanent, were another significant privilege of having worked
as an interpreter. Bosnians had been severely affected after the outbreak
of war by Western states’ imposition of visa regimes: in contrast to the
largely visa-free travel that Yugoslav citizens had used to enjoy, citizens
of Bosnia-Herzegovina required visas to travel to the EU’s Schengen
Area until 2010 and still require them to visit the UK. This was a stark,
humiliating contrast to the famous ‘red passport’ of socialist Yugoslavia,
164 Catherine Baker

which in Bosnians’ narratives of mobility had come to signify not only

easier travel but also everything else that had been lost with the destruc-
tion of the former country (Jansen 2009). Collectivized as a group that
was considered to be at risk of overstaying legal visit lengths and, in so
doing, of becoming a security threat to the host state (see Huysmans and
Squire 2009), Bosnians were caught up in the geopolitics of mobility,
which in contexts of conflict and disaster appears to accommodate the
flow of capital and aid more comfortably than the flow of displaced
humans (Hyndman 1997: 149). The flow of aid and intervention itself,
however, involves a privileged mobility for interveners. Foreign military
and civilian workers travelling to Bosnia-Herzegovina on behalf of the
intervention did not need visas, whereas their countries demanded them
from visiting Bosnians. They spent varying amounts of time in secured
spaces (see Duffield 2010), and they generally left when their missions
were over. Interpreting jobs enabled Bosnians to improve their positions
somewhat in this geopolitics of mobility, but not to acquire the same
amount of mobility privilege that foreign visitors took for granted.
A common experience for many interpreters who worked for British
forces in the IFOR/SFOR period was to visit the UK and/or Germany for
two to three weeks in order to participate in Bosnia-specific field exer-
cises for units undergoing pre-deployment training. In these Operational
Training Group (OPTAG) exercises, soldiers would visit mock villages on
Army training ranges and role-play scenarios that the trainers expected
them to encounter at their destination.16 Characters from the imaginary
local population, as well as the troops’ interpreters, were role-played
by native speakers of the local language(s), including some interpreters
flown in from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Interpreters’ narratives of OPTAG
‘ran on parallel tracks to the official and British understanding’ (Baker
2012b: 144), emphasizing linguistic games with their colleagues during
the scenarios and also the touristic and consumer practices they engaged
in on the margins of OPTAG. One interpreter, Gordana, reported that a
colleague had been disciplined after staying on in Germany to buy a car
and drive it back to Bosnia. She herself had encountered more serious
consequences after extending a visit to the UK for a week and being listed
as missing when she did not return to the base in Bosnia-Herzegovina
with her group. She implied that her supervisors had suspected her of
entering the UK with the intention of staying on without documents:

Meanwhile, the supervisor called me. I called her from England and
I said ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a few days,’ which I did, but when
I came back I was sacked because I shouldn’t have done it. ... I didn’t
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 165

mind, because, when I was sacked I was a bit disappointed, as I said,

I was a bit angry with myself, as well. I was – I thought I shouldn’t
have done it. But in the end of the day when I thought about it later I
was told by a few people, quite a few people, ‘Oh yes, if you stay there
shouldn’t be any problems,’ and – I should have talked with somebody
else, probably, but I thought, ‘If they know, they’ve been working now
for almost ten years, so they should know.’ So I stayed, and it raised a
big problem. So I guess it’s their fault and my fault as well.17

Either a lack of policy or a lack of information at the level of Gordana’s

supervisor had led to this unfortunate result, where her personal circum-
stances had intersected with British official anxiety about foreigners
on tourist visas becoming undocumented immigrants through
‘overstaying’.18
Gordana’s account also hints at one of the several routes for interna-
tional mobility that became open to interpreters. This group of young
skilled workers, a profile that foreign agencies considered essential for
the reconstruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina, ‘buil[t] up language profi-
ciency, social networks and finances’ in the course of their work and in
fact ended up among the people most able to settle permanently outside
the country (Jansen 2006: 193–94). This could be achieved by studying
in higher education abroad and taking advantage of post-study work visa
schemes where they existed, or by obtaining funds and contacts to enter
as a foreign worker. Another route, which to the best of the author’s
knowledge was taken up only by female interpreters, was marriage to a
foreign citizen whom they had met in the course of their work. Although
interpreters’ work trajectories had granted them advantages for all these
routes, it was not the case that every former interpreter who wanted to
travel could do so. One interpreter, in conversation, expressed disap-
pointment that UK public spending cuts and tuition fee increases were
making it ever harder for former interpreters to study in a country with
which they had already established connections. Another, discussing the
problems of raising a family in a country where politicians spoke only
of politics, used restricted international mobility as a symbol of socio-
economic problems that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s leaders were yet to solve:

But you just have to move on and say, ‘OK, that’s past, let’s move
on, let’s talk money (laughs). Let’s talk development, let’s talk a good
life, here.’ We still – you know, we don’t have a chance to take our
children for a holiday to Paris, to Disneyland, whatever, because it’s
too expensive, it takes visas, it takes many many things to do so. And
166 Catherine Baker

having all those problems on one side, how could we think about
nationalism and stuff like that?19

In the contemporary globalized economy of security, the countries of

interpreters’ former employers were not the only destinations for migra-
tion. Private military contractors in charge of logistics in Afghanistan
and Iraq recruited workers in catering, construction, firefighting, secu-
rity and administration to work on multi-national bases in these new
conflict zones, requiring ‘fluent English’ of all applicants.20 Former
interpreters were at an advantage in this recruitment since they already
had proven expertise in military English and satisfactory track records of
working in military environments. Though salaries were yet higher, the
risks to workers were greater than interpreters in Bosnia-Herzegovina – at
least in peacetime – had faced. More than 900 foreign civilian contrac-
tors were reported to have been killed in the first four years of the war
in Iraq, including one Bosnian carpenter (Brown 2010: 829–30). The
dangers were well known to former interpreters who were considering
what to do next. Bojan, for instance, described the death of a man from
his home town who had been killed when his convoy struck a landmine
in Afghanistan:

[I]t took them 14 days to get that man back ... . Because of the lack
of coordination between the embassies. First of all, embassies don’t
know that those people are there, because they go through private
companies, and they don’t go through embassies. You don’t need a
visa to get there, you just need a passport and a company contract.
But when you die and they have to bring you back, it’s a compli-
cation with embassies, because the embassies don’t know who you
were. And why did you go there?21

Although working as a locally recruited interpreter in Bosnia-Herzegovina

gave Bosnians access to resources that could facilitate mobility, the fact
that they had been employed by the militaries of foreign countries did
not automatically lead to their mobility as an occupational group. No
new visa class in SFOR-contributing states, for instance, was created for
former local employees of SFOR. Indeed, an automatic right to reset-
tlement for interpreters did not come up for discussion in the West
until the late 2000s, when it became evident that interpreters in Iraq
and Afghanistan had been targeted as a class for persecution and initia-
tives such as the US-based ‘List Project’ were created to lobby coalition
governments for interpreter resettlement (see Fitchett 2012). Interpreters
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 167

from Bosnia-Herzegovina who could satisfy the authorities of a poten-

tial host country that they had a well-founded fear of persecution were
able to claim asylum on an individual basis. It is clear that some former
interpreters took this route as a result of their individual experiences,
although, over the duration of the foreign intervention in Bosnia-
Herzegovina as a whole, interpreters were not continually exposed to
the same level of danger as their more recent counterparts in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Conclusions

Making sense of mobility, power and privilege in Bosnia-Herzegovina is

complicated by the country’s simultaneous experience of conflict, recon-
struction and intervention on the one hand and post-socialist disloca-
tion on the other. Certain phenomena, notably the ontological crisis
in expectations about work and about personal relationships with the
state, are common to all post-socialist societies (see Haney 2000; Dunn
2004; Ghodsee 2005; Kideckel 2008). Citizens of many east European
countries have experienced the constraints of visa regimes, though some
have seen their mobility transform again as their own countries have
joined the Schengen Area. Other phenomena are more representative of
conflict-affected and post-conflict societies, such as the impact of ethnic
cleansing and urban siege warfare, or the territorialization of Bosnian
space by a military intervention consisting of more than 20,000 troops.
On the face of things, Bosnia-Herzegovina may appear strikingly
different from much of post-socialist Europe (Bunce 1999: 770). However,
it is possible to argue also that the ‘double lens’ of analysing post-so-
cialism at the same time as analysing security and conflict is produc-
tive for understanding even post-socialist societies that have not been
through disruptive war. There, too, security and intervention practices
may be observed, and the ways in which they manifest are structured
by the circumstances of post-socialism. From Bulgaria, a study of the US
military’s refurbishment of a hospital near the Serbian border before the
Kosovo War confirms, on a small-scale, the distancing effect caused by
US force protection policies that prevented troops from visiting towns
and markets in their leisure time (Valtchinova 2004: 147–49). The
disputes around the siting of a US missile base in Rędzikowo, Poland,
originate in an attempt on the part of residents and businesses to open
this former militarized space (part of a Soviet military training ground in
northern Poland) up to agriculture and eco-tourism, only to see its airport
reconfigured as a new strategic geopolitical node (Materka 2012). The
168 Catherine Baker

Schengen enterprise is both post-socialist (the incorporation of former

Communist space into one liberal European trading area) and security-
driven (with unverified migrants from outside its borders perceived as
so threatening that high-tech fortified border fences and all-surveying
visa screening practices are necessary to keep them excluded) (Walters
2002). The mobilities of security and the military can therefore not be
detached from the mobilities of post-socialism, whether within the
embodied geopolitics of intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina or further
afield. Linking together these military and security geographies within
a post-socialist context helps to demonstrate also that the politics of
post-socialist mobility are central to understanding the reconfiguration
of European political space.

Notes
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the EastBordNet conference in
Catania in 2011 and as a poster at the RGS–IBG conference in 2010. I am grateful
for comments made by the attendees in Catania, the Languages at War research
team, and the editors and reviewers of this paper.
1. The Bosnia-Herzegovina case study formed part of the Arts and Humanities
Research Council-funded project Languages at War: Policies and Practices of
Language Contacts in Conflict, which involved the University of Reading,
the University of Southampton and the Imperial War Museum.
2. See also Simić, this volume, on post-socialist mobilities in Serbia.
3. In EU law, the free movement of people, goods, capital and services also
constitute the ‘four freedoms’ that underpin the concept of the Common
Market (Barnard 2010).
4. It is possible to conceive of cases where hiring of local employees might not
be done with all the transparency there normatively should have been, but
at least there would have been the prospect of employment through different
‘veze’.
5. Interview, May 2010.
6. Interview, May 2010.
7. Interview, May 2010.
8. Similar complaints have been recorded in multiple intervention sites from
local residents interviewed by Béatrice Pouligny (2006: 167–68), ‘problems
of driving on the roads and accidents caused by international staff generally
came at the top of the list. People were shocked by some accidents, and still
more so by the scant lack of attention paid to them and the lack of respect
too often displayed by international staff.’
9. Interview, November 2009.
10. Interview, November 2009.
11. The economic aspects of working as an interpreter are discussed in more
detail by Baker (2012a) and the ruptures in interpreters’ educational trajecto-
ries are discussed by Baker (2011b).
12. Interview, October 2009.
 Mobility, Privilege and Power 169

13. Interview, May 2010.

14. Interview, May 2009.
15. Interview, May 2009.
16. The villages had been built to simulate German villages in 1942 (Ware 2012:
117) and had been adapted for ‘Balkans’ training by, for instance, putting up
signs in Cyrillic script (to accustom soldiers to the otherness of not being able
to read letters off a road sign).
17. Interview, May 2010.
18. See Fekete 2009: 19–42 for a critical description of the hardening UK migra-
tion policy in the early 2000s, the time when this visit took place. British
soldiers who were not UK citizens often experienced similar obstacles to their
international mobility during the 2000s (Ware 2012).
19. Interview, May 2010.
20. Advertisement by DynCorp on a Bosnian recruitment website, http://www.
posao.ba/job.php?jobID=54919 (accessed 9 May 2011).
21. Interview, May 2010.

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9
Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’:
Everyday Modes of Transport in
Post-Socialist Serbia
Marina Simić

Introduction

The collapse of the Yugoslav socialist state changed the lives of its
citizens radically.1 The state’s disintegration was accompanied by
wars in Croatia (1991–95), Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–95) and Kosovo
(1998–99), conflicts in Slovenia (1991) and the NATO bombing of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (what is now Serbia and Montenegro)
in 1999. Serbia was faced with international isolation and a radical
impoverishment of the population that brought with it many turbu-
lent changes in people’s everyday lives. The period from 2000 onwards
is usually understood as a ‘period of recovery’ (e.g., Greenberg 2011).
However, although the crisis after the turn of the millennium was
a far cry from the severity of the 1990s, most people still felt that
the situation was more of a ‘road to normality’ than of stability.
Thus, most people I worked with in Serbia in 2005–06 the mid 2000s
perceived the situation in the country as still politically and econom-
ically unstable, as some kind of prolonged transition whose end was
yet unseen.
From 2005 to 2006 I conducted ethnographic research on state
transformation and everyday life in the northern Serbian province of
Vojvodina, locating myself mainly in the capital of the province (Novi
Sad), but also following my informants in their frequent trips to the
state capital Belgrade and other towns, mainly within Vojvodina. In this
chapter I will focus on the disorder that the so-called ‘fall’ (from grace)
brought to my informants’ everyday lives, primarily through their
inability to travel – something which is seen as one the of the worst
consequences of the ‘fall’, and one which my informants felt created
a major gap between their experiences before and after the collapse

173
174 Marina Simić

of Yugoslavia.2 I will analyse the connections between two aspects of

mobility: (1) the idea of progress and change (from socialism to capi-
talism), and (2) everyday modes of movement through the use of public
transport. These two aspects are closely interwoven – not only did the
latter become a metaphor for the former, but both relate to changing
ideas about the state and the market.
I focus on a group of people I worked with while in Novi Sad, who
were mostly in their late 20s and 30s. They came from different back-
grounds; some of them were students, whilst others were unemployed
or employed professionals. During my yearlong visit to Novi Sad I
came to know the families of some of them and befriended some older
people who I also met there. However, I primarily spent my time with
highly educated urban people who considered themselves Novi Sad
‘born and bred’, although some of them had come there as students
and then stayed after they had finished their studies.3 These people do
not form a ‘community’ or a coherent group. My interest rather lies
in their discursive practises of positioning through which they under-
stood the society in which they lived and made sense of their current
situation. I focus on various everyday practices, such as the use of public
transport, in order to understand the different ways in which people
conceptualize recent changes and their own social position through
reflection on such practices. Thus, my analytical object was neither a
‘community’, or the town of Novi Sad, nor Serbian culture, or Serbian
society, but rather modes of narrating and conceptualizing experiences of
social and economic change. I adopt Fernandez’ concept of ‘revelatory
incidents’, which he defines as ‘especially charged moments in human
relationships which are pregnant with meaning’ (Fernandez 1986: xi).
My long-term participant observation allowed me to witness many of
these incidents and I tried to place them ‘in their multiple contexts, to
tease out their multiple meanings’ (ibid.). In the following sections, I
trace people’s practices through the analysis of their narratives; what
certain people said about certain things. This is not conversation anal-
ysis or some linguistic exercise. Instead, I seek to place practices in
multiple contexts and capture the meaning my informants generated
through them. In other words, I am interested in what these concep-
tualizations do for the people I worked with, how the narratives and
practices allow them to position themselves in a series of social fields
and in relation to a series of divisions, processes and contexts. In this
chapter, I will focus on the use of everyday modes of public transport
between Novi Sad and other places, and argue that public discourses
about transportation in Serbia served as the principal metaphor for
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 175

expressing ideas about political order, disorder and the role of the
state.
Through an ethnographic analysis of changes in modes of local
transport I will further explain why, for many of my informants, the
period from 1999 onwards resembled less a ‘transition’, as some scholars
working on the end of socialism in other parts of Europe have called
it,4 than a ‘situation’ (situacija) – a state of affairs applied not only to
the circumstances of the Serbian state (understood as corrupt and/or
inefficient), but also denoting a certain ‘state of mind’ and ‘moral and
cultural degradation’, as my informants called it, that happened during
the 1990s. Thus, situacija is a generic term that implies more the feeling
of being trapped in a corrupted ‘situation’ than of moving (cf. Jansen
2005).
Situacija was never a timeless characteristic of Serbian society. It was
rather the consequence of the great ‘fall [from grace]’ that happened in
Serbia during the 1990s. In the period when I completed my fieldwork,
ten years later, situacija was still a dominant trope used by my inform-
ants to describe the Serbian state and society (although what situacija
referred to, and what had caused it, varied greatly among my inform-
ants). It was not only a descriptive device, but an explanatory trope that
encompassed the essence of ‘the fall’.

Travel and state: between the state and the market

Important changes in the availability and reliability of public transport,

and in the general ability of people to travel, have been noted by many
researchers of post-socialist ‘transition’ as one of the most frequent
complaints about things that were ‘lost in transition’ (Nazpary 2002;
Stenning 2005). In Serbia, the instability of the 1990s is often described
in terms of immobility of all kinds; public transport was chaotic,
coaches and trains were severely restricted, whilst a UN embargo and
the introduction of a restrictive visa regime made travelling out of the
country extremely difficult. The inability to travel abroad, but also the
simple inability to move around town via public transport or in some-
one’s car, or to travel between places by coaches and trains, changed
people’s understandings of the places they inhabited and which they
transformed through their everyday activities. The travel regimes of the
1990s were still remembered and frequently referred to by my inform-
ants, as well as connected with today’s ‘situation’.
This (in)ability to move established a hierarchy of places, making my
informants feel as if they were ‘trapped in the situation’. As Bauman
176 Marina Simić

(1998: 88) observes regarding the hyper-mobility of the present, the

ability to move freely, ‘to be global’, is the main signifier of modernity. It
inserts a division between the ‘first’ and the ‘second world’ as a distinc-
tion between those who are mobile and those who are ‘locally tied’.
Furthermore, for the first world ‘space has lost its constraining quality’,
while those from the second world are ‘thus bound to bear passively
whatever change may be visited upon the locality they are tied to, the
real space is fast closing up’ (ibid.: 88). Similarly, in contrast to what
some imagine as the ‘speeding up’ of the contemporary world, many
scholars studying post-socialist Eastern Europe have noticed that the
‘chaos’ produced during the period of transition’ actually slowed things
down enormously for the people they studied. This altered people’s
understandings of time, as they began contrasting it with the time of
socialist modernity, (Verdery 1996; Lemon 1998; 2003; Nazpary 2002;
Platz 2003) with many people claiming that history was moving back-
wards instead of forward (cf. also Verdery 1996: 35 who claims that in
late socialism time was ‘rendered non-linear’). In Serbia, rather than
going backwards, people saw themselves as living in limbo, a chaotic
state of affairs that was between socialism and the expected new order
of capitalism, or whatever would come next. Metaphors of travel, or
more precisely of ‘immobility’, became prominent in everyday conver-
sations and served as a backdrop for talking about the state and ‘the
system’, bringing to light different ideas people had about the state and
its apparent ‘Balkan’ character.
In contrast to the situation in the 1990s, when many people in Serbia
experienced the state as very present, when I conducted fieldwork many
people felt that there was not enough of the state, and where its pres-
ence was felt, it was not working properly. As Lemon (2003: 25) observed
concerning the Moscow metro, ‘while public transit can stand in for the
good old – or bad old – order, it can also be a backdrop to social chaos’.
Similarly, I would argue that people’s understandings of public transport
in Serbia closely relate to the idea of the ‘fall’ and changes to the state
and its ‘character’ which enable us to recognize how people understand
the changes in their everyday lives brought about by the end of socialism
and the emergence of a new (state) system. I will focus on train and
coach transport, positing a link between time-space and the state. Making
a link between space and the state and following de Certeau’s (1988) idea
of ‘space as practiced place’, I argue that public transport served as an
important backdrop for political talk about ‘order’ and ‘disorder’. I argue
that people’s understanding of transport is closely related to changing
ideas of the state and market, which may help us to recognize how people
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 177

understand the changes in their everyday lives brought about by the

end of socialism and the emergence of a new system.

Taking the train ...

According to Lefebvre, spatial practices encompass both production

and reproduction. They involve the ‘physical and material flows, trans-
fers, and interactions that occur in and across space in such a way as
to assure production and social reproduction’ (Lefebvre 2007: 33). It
could thus be argued that the inability to move around in ways that
were previously possible prevented commonly found forms of social
reproduction and created new ones. Most of my informants were in
high school or were students during the 1990s and their concerns were
mainly getting to school or university on time, or travelling ‘home’ for
the weekend, a regular activity for many of them. This, however, was
not easy and I collected many stories of walking long distances between
Novi Sad and the neighbouring villages and towns where my inform-
ants lived. Most of my informants were initially from Novi Sad and
they used to travel to the neighbouring town – Sremski Karlovci – to
attend what is one of the best-known grammar schools in the country.
When walking or hitchhiking was not an option, they needed to find
ways of getting onto overcrowded trains and even if they made it onto
the train, journey times were very unpredictable, as there were cancel-
lations and frequent schedule changes.
My informants remembered these problems as an interruption of
‘normality’, which they remembered vividly and compared with the
current situation. Conversations with others during my frequent
travels, mostly between Belgrade, Novi Sad and the far northern town of
Subotica where some of my informants’ parents lived, taught me about
the moral stories that lie behind these explanations and helped me to
place discourses of travel in the social world of my informants. Thus,
my interest here lies more with what Lefebvre calls ‘representations of
space’, which is a ‘space as directly lived through its associated images
and symbols’ (Lefebvre 2007: 39). According to Harvey this allows ‘such
material practices to be talked about and understood’ and enables ‘mental
inventions that imagine new meanings or possibilities for spatial prac-
tices’ (Harvey 1997: 219). Some ethnographic illustrations may clarify
what I have in mind.
One day in April 2006, I was travelling from Novi Sad to Belgrade with
Svetlana, her sister Branka and Ana, Svetlana’s colleague from the town
museum. Ana and Svetlana were visiting their colleagues at the Belgrade
178 Marina Simić

Ethnographic Museum and I was going with them. Branka was going to
see her boyfriend and spend a couple of days with him in Belgrade.
It was a weekday morning and the train was not full. Ana, in her mid-30s,
was the oldest among us and she remembered the trains of the 1990s well.
She used to study in Belgrade, and travel between Novi Sad and Belgrade
almost every weekend. At the time coach travel was generally restricted
as fuel was scarce and coach tickets far too expensive.5 During the course
of the trip that lasted around one hour and forty-five minutes to cover
the 80 kilometres between Novi Sad and Belgrade, we talked about the
transport chaos of that time. Ana mentioned that some higher standard
train carriages were brought into service at the beginning of the 1990s.
The trouble was that there was often only one good carriage per train and
it was usually placed at the front of the train. She continued:

you could not always get into it, but if you did get in, it was great.
Once, I was sitting in a train carriage with a guy who was an ex-drug
user. You could see that, he was a rock’n’roll type and knew a lot
about cultural things, books and films. At that time intelligent people
used to get trains, not cars, as mafia people are doing today, and we
were talking for the whole trip. From above our seats there was hot
air coming down [this type of heating was unknown to me] and that
made the windows misty, as it was very cold outside.

This story was beautiful and fairy-tale like, and I could easily imagine the
snowy December night and the train moving slowly across Vojvodina’s
plain.

At one point during the trip Svetlana got off and went to the toilet,
coming back delighted with the train’s toilet facilities. We were all
surprised. Ana said that it must have been because they wanted to sell
the railway to some private entrepreneurs, so they tidied it up. Svetlana
added that trains are much cleaner in the West, but not because they
are more cultured, but because the law forces them to be cultured.
There, if you don’t do everything correctly, don’t flush the toilet [for
example] the doors automatically lock and you cannot get out.

This remark describes ‘the West’ and ‘Western states’ as totalitarian

states that have total control and surveillance over everything. If people
do not obey the law, they will be caught and punished. This may look
like a very strange way to represent ‘the West’ – which is supposed to
be capitalist and individualistic, but the point my informants wanted to
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 179

make was not about control, but about the efficiency of a ‘state’ (regard-
less of the state ‘system’ – capitalist, or socialist) that my informants
felt they had lost during the 1990s. Thus, this does not mean that my
informants evoked ideas about ‘national character’, but rather that they
were aware of external circumstances that brought changes to the state
system, that seemed to be mostly visible in changes to the efficiency of
a public transport system that was for a long time understood to be the
epitome of modernity and progress brought by socialism. It seemed that
the trains’ chaotic behaviour resembled Serbia’s struggling modernity. I
will explain more.
It has been widely argued that the building of railways was closely
connected to the nineteenth-century idea of modernity and progress
more broadly (Schivelbusch 1986; Bear 2007). The idea of progress was
also firmly embedded in the socialist modernist project (see for example
Kandiyoti 2000; Todorova 2005) and the building of railways was an
important part of that process both in Serbia in the nineteenth century
(Stojanović 2005) and in socialist Yugoslavia after World War II when
the new government made building the state rail system a top priority.
However, during the 1990s, the ‘rational utopia’ of modernity, order and
progress embodied in the ‘pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated grid
of the railway car’ (de Certeau 1988: 111) seemed to be failing. National
fuel shortages made train transport the primary means of inter-city
transport which quickly resulted in overcrowded, unreliable trains with
frequent cancellations and schedule changes. Trains would normally
run late and sometimes people would wait for considerable amounts of
time at some random place (popularly called an ‘intersection’ or ‘junc-
tion’) for another train to pass.
Trains used to be divided into three classes: local – stopping services
(‘travellers’ trains’ in literal translation), express (‘fast trains’ in literal
translation) and inter-city trains (‘business trains’ in literal translation).
The latter two were merged into one a few years ago. ‘Business’ trains
were the most expensive, but that did not guarantee that they would
come on time. However, when they came to a junction, people told
me that ‘business’ trains would have priority, resulting in local trains
having to stop for the business train to pass (even if the local train was
more punctual than the business train), which created further delays.
Although this practice was much more typical in the 1990s, it was still
common in 2005 and 2006 when I completed my fieldwork. Thus,
every time I was on a train and we stopped without an obvious reason,
people would start to grumble and someone would affirm that ‘we are
waiting at [or more accurately for] a junction’. However, the more or less
180 Marina Simić

chaotic behaviour of Serbian Railways which, according to many of my

informants, seemed to have an agency and will of its own was somewhat
compensated for by very low ticket prices, especially during the 1990s,6
when most people did not buy tickets in the first place, but instead
bribed conductors with small amounts of money.
Trains used to have no lighting or heating, which meant that they
would stop in summer and allow people to get water as temperatures
in the overcrowded trains became intolerable. The almost unbearable
conditions of railway travel have changed somewhat in recent years,
as a friend of mine once pointed out to me when we were taking the
train together from Novi Sad to Belgrade. We boarded the train through
the door and she told me that this was an improvement, since she had
been forced to enter an overcrowded train through the windows before.
Ticket prices had also risen, though they remained cheap and it was still
possible to bribe conductors, especially for short journeys. There were
also many concessionary cards for trains, but their application often
depended on the knowledge and good will of the ticket issuer who some-
times gave a 30 per cent discount, sometimes 50 per cent and sometimes
no discount at all. Thus, a friend told me while I was complaining about
different discounts I was getting (or not) for my train ticket with the
same pass, ‘see, that is because the state does not exist, when we were
the state [that is exactly the phrase he used – kada smo bili država], you
knew exactly how much the ticket cost’.7 Opinions of this kind were
widespread and virtually all of the people I met felt that they were still
living in a rupture created by the fall of the socialist state saying that the
state collapsed, even that it does not exist, that ‘we don’t have a state’,
or that ‘this is not a state’.
Many academic texts about the break-up of the former Yugoslavia
similarly reify the idea of a tabula rasa, a radical break between before
and after ‘the fall’, treating the state as if it were a tangible reality that
collapsed (among numerous texts, see, for example Bolčić 1995). This
view is in accordance with more traditional definitions of the state,
viewed as a political system, although not one necessarily imbued
with agency in a Durkheimian way (cf. critique by Taussig 1992; 1997).
Others argue that the state is not a thing, that it does not exist as such
(Miliband 1969: 49), while Abrahams (1988) writes about the state as a
mask and an ‘illusion’.8
However, this is not to say that the state does not constitute a ‘reality’.
What these authors disagree about is whether that reality is simply a
self-evident fact, or whether instead, it is a reality generated by concepts
of the state, a reality that comes into being because everyone assumes
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 181

it exists, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, I do not

want to deny the reality of the effects of the state (Mitchell 1991; Trouillot
2001; Bourdieu 1994). Together with Žižek (1997), Taussig (1992;
1997) and Navaro-Yashin (2002), I wish to question instead what it is
that generates those effects. Taussig and Navaro-Yashin argue that the
idea of the state is actually the imagination of the people who produce it
by living as if it really existed without the consciousness of the falsity of
their fantasies (albeit with real effects), and as such it should be decon-
structed. Navaro-Yashin (2002), following to some extent Anderson and
Taussig, argues that people ‘reify and reinstate’ the state through their
everyday practices (cf. Anderson’s 1991 idea of imagined communities).
But, following Žižek and Sloterdijk, Navarno-Yahsin (2002) argues that
people in contemporary societies are aware of the falsity of the ideology
that reifies the state as if it were ‘a thing’.
Navaro-Yashin’s ethnographic account shows that people in Turkey
are not just aware of the ideology of state power: they are also aware
of their own cynicism towards the state which becomes their ordinary
habitus. However, Navaro-Yashin is careful not to make the people
with whom she worked look as though they do not believe in the very
existence of the state. Rather it seems that they do not believe in the
‘modern’ ideology of the state encompassing the equality of all of its
citizens, which, as Harvey (1996) argues, is one of the basic ideological
principles of the modern state as opposed to pre-modern hierarchical
structures based on inequality. It could be said that a fantasy of the
state is, as Green puts it with reference to the Balkans, ‘a fantasy with
teeth’ – ‘an ideologically mediated invention that affects how things
are, whether or not people believe in the invention’ and furthermore,
it cannot be simply deconstructed and abandoned (Green 2005: 158).
Thus, it is important here to try to disentangle a complex set of ideas
people in Serbia employ when they say that there is no state anymore.
I do not think that they are claiming that there is no government, but
they are making a claim about the loss of a socialist state that used to
provide extensive welfare and other ‘services’. They were also presenting
the idea that capitalist modernity in its ideal version is not what has
been introduced in Serbia. These are two different issues, but they were
commonly put together.
In Serbia, the visible dissolution of the state made people want
to believe in the state and the idea of progress connected to it, as
if somehow the state’s dissolution created the belief itself. It seemed
that people suddenly realized that what they knew to be a fantasy
(although they behaved as if it were not) proved to be a fantasy
182 Marina Simić

and they wanted their fantasy back (cf. Žižek 1997). As Žižek (1999)
observes, socialist bureaucrats who talked about corruption and other
malaises of the state, actually wanted to believe in socialism (also
see Žižek et al. 2005: 179f.). I do not want to say that people were
nostalgic for socialism, in most cases they were not, but they wanted
the ‘system’ to work (whatever the system is). Thus, contrary to the
situation in the 1990s when many people experienced the state as very
present, in 2005–06 when I undertook my fieldwork, many people felt
as if they now lived in a vacuum between two state formations; one
that has passed and one that is coming, whose contours are still to be
revealed. In other words, many people felt that there was not enough
of the state actually in existence, or if it was, then it was not working
properly. The idea of an incomplete, or failing, inadequate state is at
the heart of much state formation theory both Marxist and Weberian
(cf. for example Barrow 1993) – it has been severely criticized as taking
the ‘western’ model of the state as the norm and comparing all other
examples with it, while for my informants’ ‘orderly state’ and ‘orderly
society’ went hand in hand (cf. critique of the concepts state and civil
society by Hann 1996). The ethnographic point I am making here is
still different, however: my informants were actually claiming that
they felt they were living somewhere between an older state regime
and a newer one, which meant that at that moment there was either
chaos or not enough of the state, and sometimes both. My inform-
ants claimed that if ‘there was (a properly working) state’, the railway
would be working properly. Of course they could have said that if
there was a proper market, the railway would be working properly, but
the railway was a state-owned company and my informants expected
that the regulations should come from the state. My informants’
visions of a well-functioning society were focused on state regulation
and better organization rather than the necessary adoption of Western
capitalism as an ideal model of state and society.
In the next section I will touch upon the changing roles of the state
and the market and show how the dissolution of the state led informants
to draw on images of a ‘Balkan character’ opposed to Western moder-
nity in order to show how the ideas of movement and mobility became
closely connected with ideas of the state and the changing system.

Taking the bus ...

Serbian Railways is a publicly owned company. Bus transport in Novi

Sad is also publicly owned. Inter-city coach transport, however, is now
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 183

run by numerous private companies (some of which were previously

state-owned, whilst some are new). Despite these ownership differences,
people seldom make any distinction between types of public transport
and who owns them. What is interesting here is that the change of owner-
ship from supposedly socialist to supposedly capitalist did not change
people’s perceptions of it very much. In this section I will explore some
of the reasons for this unusual shift, which will also illuminate further
some of the ideas presented above.
During the 1990s’ crisis, coach transport was usually restricted due to
the lack of fuel under the UN embargo, but despite this, coaches were
usually considered more reliable than trains (although it was not neces-
sarily the case). Unlike the shortcomings of trains, which were seen as a
consequence of the failure of the whole railway system, my informants
blamed problems with buses on the caprice of the driver. There were
many practices that made my informants think so, from driver music
choice imposed on passengers (drivers regularly played music loudly for
all the passengers to hear) to changing a bus route in order to accom-
modate a friend or finish some personal business. According to most
people, Serbian coaches were notorious for ‘stopping at every white [or
sometimes yellow] house’ in every village if that was convenient for
the passengers, but for most of my friends that was of no use at all.
It favoured ‘peasants’ and their needs, while city dwellers commuting
between urban places were forced to travel much further and in a much
more crowded coach than was necessary, if the bus driver stuck to the
regular route.9 Let me illustrate what I have in mind with an ethno-
graphic example.
I used to travel frequently between Novi Sad and Belgrade with many
of my informants. On one of those occasions, Voja and I took a bus from
Belgrade to Novi Sad on an early evening in June. Voja was a member
of a large NGO organization which had its main branch in Belgrade and
so we used to travel together a lot. We usually went by bus, as they were
more reliable than trains and Voja needed to be in Belgrade on time,
although sometimes we also managed to find someone to give us a lift by
car. It was a pleasant summer evening, the town was cooling down from
the daily heat and the bus was air-conditioned and uncrowded, prom-
ising a smooth journey. We were sitting near the front of the bus and at
one point, when we were already approaching Belgrade, we overheard a
conversation between the bus driver, whose accent indicated that he was
from Serbia, and a man from Bosnia.10 The bus driver’s friend was talking
about the dženaza (a local term for a Muslim funeral distinguishing it
from a Christian one) of a man from Bosnia and added, ‘There is no such
184 Marina Simić

place as Bosnia, whatever people say’. That was more or less the end of
the conversation, because the man got off in Batajnica, on the outskirts
of Belgrade, which was not a place where the coach regularly stopped.
The men were colleagues, and one was doing a favour for the other. Voja
was astonished by this fact, telling me ‘it could only happen in Serbia’.
He was not really angry, but rather amazed by this example of ‘brother-
hood and unity’ (a popular socialist slogan) brought to life by people
from different parts of the former Yugoslavia whose loyalty to comrades
at their place of work allowed them to do little illegal favours for one
another, like stopping where the coach is not supposed to stop, or even
driving off-route if needed. Voja concluded, even with some sympathy,
that Balkan people are all similar in their defiance of rules.11
Similar arguments about ‘disorderliness’ were also applied to other
parts of the world – in fact to almost every place that ‘deviates’ from
the idealized image of Euro-American societies as places where people
follow the rules and where everything is, or should be, ‘orderly’. In much
literature on post-socialist transformation similar ‘disorderly’ behaviour,
including an economy of favours that breaks the established discipline
of work, has been ascribed to practices of socialist economies rather than
to their transformations (see for example Dunn 2004). I encountered
similar explanations at times, but more often participants’ dissatisfac-
tion with different kinds of public services was framed in the language
of ‘the fallen’ state and its ‘Balkan character’.
There were several economic crises in the former Yugoslavia (Comisso
1980) and during the 1980s the Yugoslav economy deteriorated (for the
claim the decline was not radical, if it was a decline at all, see Naumović
2006), the largest fall of production after 1945 happened in 1991 (Lazić
and Sekelj 1997), after the constitutional reforms that were followed by
the break-up of the country. Thus, for most of my informants, socialism
still provided some kind of security with stable wages and housing
provided by the state, while insecurity actually came with the collapse
of the socialist state. This makes socialism remembered in rather ideal-
ized terms and the driver’s power over the bus and his (never her in
my experience) passengers brought a similar message to my informants,
signalling the changing position of the state and the market. Thus, a
friend of mine told me that he was especially outraged by the typical
practice of drivers switching off passengers’ seat lights, which prevented
them from reading. He could think of no other rational explanation for
this practice, so he concluded that it must simply be due to caprice on
behalf of Serbian drivers who did just as they pleased. For my inform-
ants it was a sign of disrespect which they believed they did not deserve
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 185

as they had bought a ticket and paid for a service that should be deliv-
ered. This was the main problem for my informants: for them, bus
drivers behaved as if they were ‘masters’ of the bus and as if they should
be addressed as ‘guvs’ (‘governors’, srb. ‘majistor’), while according to
my friends, those ‘masters’ should be civil servants, and thus ‘servants’,
not ‘masters’. This dubious claim had a double meaning, as passen-
gers wanted on the one hand to be treated as citizens for whom the
state had responsibility, while on the other hand wishing to be treated
as customers who had paid for the trip and thus ought to receive the
service according to market logic. These two contradictory expectations
were connected by the demand for a more effective state regulation of
the market. My informants’ evocations of the law mostly referred to the
regulation of everyday acts and attempts to ensure a standardization of
behaviour and experience in public and other services. For my inform-
ants, this ‘cultural intimacy,12 arose from participating on the one hand
in widely shared, and enjoyed, practices of rule-bending, while on the
other hand desiring what they imagined to be positive effects of obeying
the rules: ‘an orderly state, orderly public transport and a system that
works’. Still, a low level of trust in the state made people think that even
if the rules were followed, there was no guarantee that people would
be treated fairly or justly. For my informants, this state of affairs was a
consequence of ‘the fall’ during the 1990s that was conceptualized as a
fall from modernity to some kind of ‘Balkan’ ‘pre-modernity’.
Rather than being an expression of an essential Balkan character,
images of Balkan pre-modernity need to be seen as the product of
Occidentalist and Orientalist discourses that construct identities of self
and other in pernicious and hierarchical ways. The term Occidentalism
has been used in various ways in social sciences following Said’s intro-
duction of the term ‘Orientalism’ in the late 1970s. Here I will follow
Coronil (1997: 14) who defines Occidentalism as ‘the expression of a
constitutive relationship between Western representations of cultural
difference and worldwide Western dominance’. The idea of the ‘Balkans’
has become reified alongside ideas of the state. Here I follow Carrier
(1995a: 8) who writes that ‘the issue is not (or should not be) whether
people reduce things to essence, whether an essence of being (“chair”)
or an essence of a relationship (“the gift of my wife’s mother”)’, but that
we should try to understand when and why these reductions become
entrenched for those people who produce them, and for whom they
become the ultimate explanatory tool (in academic literature, as well as
in everyday life). Furthermore, these ideas became used in subtle ironies
of positioning which becomes part of cultural intimacy.
186 Marina Simić

The idea of the ‘Oriental’ character of Serbian culture or the Serbian

state (an interesting slippage in itself) is a staple component of some
academic literatures that claim that the proper ‘working ethics’ of capi-
talism cannot be established in Serbia because of its ‘Oriental’ char-
acter which stems from various sources (‘eastern’ religion, ‘Oriental’
history, eastern socialism, etc., e.g., Meštrović et al. 1993; Szerbhorvàth
2002). Critiques of this approach frequently refer to Said’s (1978)
work on ‘Orientalism’ (e.g., Gallagher 2001). However, Fleming (1999;
2000) argues for a more historically grounded implementation of Said’s
(1978) model, questioning the very possibility of applying ‘any model
of orientalism’ to the Balkans. Similarly, in her influential study of
Western imaginations of ‘the Balkans’, Todorova (1997) gives a histori-
cally grounded critique of Said’s version of Orientalism, arguing that it
is necessary to examine the specific genealogy of Western stereotypes of
the Balkans from the early Renaissance to the present age. Bakić–Hayden
(1995) and Bakić–Hayden and Hayden (1992) similarly show that East
and West do not form simple binary oppositions, but must be placed in
the cultural and historical settings in which their meanings are gener-
ated. Here I will follow Herzfeld (1997: 26) who suggests that we should
take ‘the useful concept of “orientalism” beyond its hitherto much too
narrowly textual sense’ and speak ‘of practical Orientalism, practical
Occidentalism, and practical essentialism in general.’ In that sense I want
to go beyond the binarism of the oppositions implied in Orientalism and
try to see how ideas that stem from that logic are employed in everyday
social interactions – who can use them and under which circumstances
to explain different aspects of the ‘situation’. What is important for my
analysis is to see how people in Serbia see themselves as positioned in
relation to the imagined ‘West’ and more importantly how some of the
ideas that may be labelled ‘Occidentalist’ relate to the Serbian state (cf.
Carrier 1995b).
To be sure, as Paticio recently observed, in socialism certain modernist
values ‘of work and professionalism were linked consistently with the
privilege of consumer access’ (Paticio 2009: 211), but I believe that in
my ethnographic context the ideas of professionalism and the properly
working state were combined with the (imagined) relationship between
socialism and post-socialism and the ‘character of the state’. In many
post-socialist countries the time after the fall of socialism was seen as
a return to pre-modernity (Platz 2003; Pine 2006), while in the ethno-
graphic context I describe here the ‘chaos’ after the fall of socialism was
not only labelled pre-modern, but specifically ‘Balkan’, which is to say
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 187

that for my informants when ‘modernization’ failed, what was seen to

be left was the ‘truly Balkan character’ of the country.
However, as I have noted above, evocations of the ‘Balkan character’
were not simple essentializations on the part of my informants, but
rather part of a specific cultural intimacy that was not used without
irony. Both Oriental and Occidental ideas about Serbia/the Balkans and
the West were tools for criticizing my informants’ own positions as well
as the imagined ideals of the West. Let me illustrate this with a final
ethnographic example.
I was travelling to Belgrade with Vesna, her husband and two of her
friends whom we met on the bus. Vesna and her husband Petar were
coming to stay overnight at my place in Belgrade, as they had to be at
the American embassy early the next morning to apply for visas. We
learnt that Vesna’s friends had recently returned from a visit to see rela-
tives in Vienna. They were very excited about their visit and told us
many stories about Vienna’s beauty and the general advantages of living
in Austria, ranging from clean streets to higher salaries. When we were
not far from Novi Sad, the coach broke down. Nobody informed us what
was happening. The bus driver had gone, supposedly to ask for help. We
waited for an hour until a decrepit bus, instead of a coach, came to pick
us up. Vesna commented that this could happen only in Serbia, because
Serbia is ‘Balkan’. The following conversation ensued:

Petar: Well, at least we are not going backwards.

Vesna’s friend, joking: And the driver was not blind-folded.
Petar: You can’t be sure, we actually didn’t see [the driver, for we were
sitting at the back].

They referred to the scene from Who’s Singing Over There, a movie by
Slobodan Šijan which is an important part in people’s everyday under-
standing of themselves and frequently used to explain different things.
In the film, the driver praises his son for his ability to drive blind-folded
and backwards.13 This evocation of the ‘wisdom’ of Who’s Singing Over
There was clearly an example of ‘cultural intimacy’, as outlined above. It
included the tension between the ‘stream-lined progress’ of modernity
embodied in buses that should go forward according to the company
schedule and their sudden and unpredictable stops, meaning either no
movement at all, or transport that was non-linear and unpredictable.
Many scholars of post-socialism in Europe have noticed that irony
and cynicism played a great role in people’s positioning relative to the
regime and their understandings of themselves in that interaction (e.g.,
188 Marina Simić

Yurchak 1997; 2006; Gilbert 2008). It was usually understood not only as
a mode of speech, but as a particular way of engaging in public activity
in the sense described by Kierkegaard’s ‘ironic person’ (Cross 1998).
However, in Kierkegaard’s understanding the ironic subject does not
speak in respect of some really existing ‘reality’ that the irony actually
refers to, but is ‘continually pointing to something impeding, but what
it is he does not know’ (quoted in Cross 1998: 138). However, in post-so-
cialist Serbia, as was also the case in socialist Yugoslavia (see Žižek 1999;
Jansen 2000), there were some ‘ideals’ – imagined points of comparison
that produced the ironical gap. Thus, this is not to say that my inform-
ants naively believed in the promises of ‘the West’ (whatever it may
contain – a high living standard for some, trains and buses running on
time), but that they wanted the Serbian state ‘to work’ and provide them
with the ‘right’ to travel, which would leave no ironical gap.
This brings me back to the beginning of this section. The post-socialist
shift from state to private ownership did not change my informants’
perception of the situation, as the central problem of the state remained
unchanged. Ideas of progress and of a ‘stream lined modernity’ of
socialism (Bauman 1994) embodied in public transport evoked the main
problem of Serbian ‘transition’ – a feeling of being trapped in a motion-
less ‘situation’.

Conclusion

One of the most frequently stressed attributes of contemporary times

is ‘what Marx once called the annihilation of space by time’ (Massey
1994: 146). Marx was actually talking about new ways of transport that
emerged in nineteenth century Europe. Massey argues that this process
appears to ‘have gained a new momentum, to have reached a new stage.
It is a phenomenon which has been called “time-space compression”’
(Massey 1994: ibid.; see also Harvey 1997). However, in contrast to this
‘speeding up’ of the contemporary world, many scholars working on
post-socialist Eastern Europe have noticed that the ‘chaos’ produced in
‘transition’ has slowed things down enormously for the people they have
studied, altering people’s understandings of time, contrasting it with the
time of socialist modernity (Verdery 1996; Lemon 1998; 2003; Nazpary
2002; Platz 2003; Humphrey 2002) and producing a sense of history
as going backwards instead of forwards, thus reversing the modernist
narrative of progress.
During the 1990s in Serbia things were also speeding up, but the
motion was turbulent, without a modernist linear direction. In Serbia,
 Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’ 189

rather than going backwards, people saw themselves as living in limbo, a

chaotic state of affairs that was between socialism and the expected new
order of capitalism, or whatever would come next. This liminal phase
was more a non-time, or a rupture that seriously confounded ideas of
time and progress in Serbia during the 1990s, as the ability to travel
decreased on every level, making people feel trapped in ‘the situation’.
Metaphors of travel, or more precisely of ‘immobility’, became promi-
nent in everyday conversations and served as a backdrop for talking
about the state and ‘the system’, bringing to light different ideas people
had about the state and its ‘Balkan’ character that, it seems, came into
being during the 1990s. Following Lefebvre’s idea (2007: 39) that repre-
sentations of space imply ‘space as directly lived through its associated
images and symbols’ allowing material practices to be talked about and
understood, it could be said that in Serbia previously common spatial
practices were altered after the fall of socialism, requiring the creation
of new ones. In the ethnographic context I described, people concep-
tualized those relations through ideas of the state and its changing
‘character’. People’s understanding of public transport in Serbia meto-
nymically embody the idea of the ‘Serbian fall in 1990s’ and changing
conceptions of the state.

Notes
1. This chapter is based on research conducted for the project ‘Cultural Heritage
and Identity’ (no. 177026), funded by the Serbian Ministry of Education and
Science.
2. However, although many people might have represented their lives in the
language of ‘radical rupture’ (Jansen 2005) it was not necessarily the best way
to analyse the situation and I tried to capture the complexity of the current
conditions and different ways people conceptualized and experienced those
changes. This should be clear in the rest of the chapter.
3. I have concealed the identities of the people I have worked with and all names
in this chapter are pseudonyms, apart from a few public figures when that was
not possible or necessary. I will explain more about my informants in the next
section.
4. The term transition was usually used by economists who were looking towards
the transition from socialism to capitalism (although there were many excep-
tions among them too, e.g., Nelson et al. 1998), but the term is very much
abandoned in anthropological studies (if it was ever used) (Burawoy and
Verdery 1999a; 1999b; Humphrey, 1999), although Gellner (1993) uses it in
his Foreword to one of the first anthropological volumes on post-socialism.
5. In some parts of Serbia, trains remain the preferred mode of travel, as coach
services are limited, or even nonexistent and expensive. In Vojvodina, on the
other hand, some places have a coach, but no train station. The biggest towns
like Subotica and Novi Sad have both train and coach services.
190 Marina Simić

6. This also applied to public transport within cities, which was virtually free.
7. Similarly, many older people with whom I spoke had a hard time under-
standing that in Britain the price of train or bus tickets can fluctuate, as they
expect a fixed price for the same journey. This is related to changing ideas of
the role of the state and the market that I will discuss later.
8. Literature on the problems of the reification of the state is very wide ranging.
There is not enough space to engage in the debate surrounding this literature
here.
9. This was usually legal, as most of the newly privatized bus companies
decided that it was more profitable to extend their routes in order to attract
more customers. Most of the inter-city buses from Novi Sad were thus turned
into local ones forcing my informants, who were all urban dwellers, to learn
much more about Serbian villages than they would have liked.
10. We assumed that the driver was from Serbia and the guest driver from Bosnia
by their accents, although we could not, of course, know how they identified
themselves.
11. Even if both drivers were of the same ethnicities (e.g., Serbs from Bosnia,
who speak the same dialect/language as Croats and Bosniaks from Bosnia),
my point here is that this example shows that there is a specific recognition
of similarity between ‘Balkan people’ that transverses ethnic differences.
12. Michael Herzfeld defines cultural intimacy as ‘shared social knowledge’ that
brings instant recognition of insiderhood that is ‘also felt to be disapproved
by powerful outsiders’ (1997: 94).
13. The film is usually classified as a black comedy. It follows a group of people
travelling through rural Serbia to Belgrade the day before the Nazi air
attacks of 1941. They travel in an awful bus led by a drunken conductor
and his dumb son. Many hilarious episodes punctuate the journey with the
conductor and the owner of the bus interrupting the journey as they wish
(for example, the conductor stops the coach for a barbeque, selling food to
the coach customers). The journey ends after several days of travel, arriving
in Belgrade only to be hit by a bomb on the first day of World War II in
Yugoslavia.

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10
Urban Public Transport and the
State in Post-Soviet Central Asia
Wladimir Sgibnev

Introduction

After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, tramway and trolleybus

systems were reduced substantially in the Central Asian republics of
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Despite being very costly for
passengers, however, these transport systems have continued to run in
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In this chapter I will argue that in Kyrgyzstan
and Tajikistan the significance of trolleybuses goes beyond their
capacity to transport people. Functioning trolleybuses are conceived
and perceived as running examples of the authorities’ ability to address
vital issues such as electricity and welfare provision, and thus maintain
the illusion of a functioning Soviet-style welfare system. The exalted
symbolic value of trolleybuses is underlined by the Tajik authorities’
decision to make use of them as nation-building billboards.
The role of mobility for space and identity production has been widely
recognized and researched. Looking at research on corporeal mobili-
ties, there is, however, some bias towards mobilities with a seeming
kinship with modern societies, conceived as multifaceted networks of
individuals – that is towards cars and planes, and the respective systems,
spaces and non-places they produce at the interplay of global flows and
individuality. Here, we can distinguish two major research foci: Research
on aeromobilities that mirror global flows of knowledge and capital is
appealing for the insight it offers into nodes and armatures of globali-
zation. As to research on automobility, it promises a critical analysis of
Western modernization and urbanization. Both Peter Merriman (2004)
and Tim Edensor (2004) have looked at the pivotal role of the automo-
bile in national identity formation. John Urry has also argued against
Putnam that the automobile did not isolate people from each other

194
 Urban Public Transport and the State 195

in American suburbia, but was, on the contrary, the ‘central element

of social citizenship’ (Urry 2002: 265). Moreover, walking and hiking
as modes of corporeal mobility have received attention with regard to
tourism and public health (Brown and Bell 2007). With Rebecca Solnit’s
‘Wanderlust’, too, we have an insightful cultural history of walking and
walkscapes (Solnit 2001). In contemporary urban contexts, anthropologi-
cally founded studies of walking are increasing, many of them as studies
of resistance to the automobile city – thanks to de Certeau’s famous
quote of walking being a subversion of dominant modes of mobility (de
Certeau 1984: 93).
Public transport, though, is somewhat neglected by mobility scholars.
The problem stems not only from the fact that public transport does not
lend itself to producing such eloquent terms as automobility, aeromobility
or walkscapes. It seems as if public transport lacks the potential to explain
issues of globalization, modernity and power, all in spite of its modal
split and cultural significance. This perception needs to be revised, as I
will demonstrate in the following sections using the continued symbolic
significance of public transport in Central Asia as a case-study.
While there has been a neglect of public transport in current liter-
atures on mobilities, there are valuable studies of railways, such as
Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s seminal cultural history of railways (1977) that
gives insights into the intertwining of mobility and mentality. Railways
furthermore intrigue researchers interested in the role of transport infra-
structures for empire building. Yet this work remains centred on historical
rather than contemporary mobility – for instance, Musekamp’s analysis
of the Prussian Eastern Railways (2013) or Urbansky’s research in the
role of the railway in Russo-Japanese colonial ambitions in northern
China (2008). Concerning the interrelation between railways and the
city, a lot of attention is being paid to the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, that is the iconic periods of modernization and urbani-
zation. Noteworthy are Bendikat’s comparative study of Berlin and Paris
(1999), or De Block and Polasky’s analysis of early light rail systems as
elements of space production and domination in Belgium (2011). This
includes an insight into a cultural history of urban railway systems with
an emphasis on representative urbanity and suburbanization. The latter
is also a keyword for prominent scholarly work focused on the United
States, namely the emergence of streetcar suburbs, the jitney phenom-
enon, the demise of the streetcar systems after World War II, their
replacement with trolley- and autobuses and the spreading motoriza-
tion of the population, as, for instance, described by Schwantes (1985)
and Schrag (2000).
196 Wladimir Sgibnev

Contemporary urban public transport – especially outside Western

contexts – has however received rather meagre scholarly attention,
with the notable exception of Müller-Schwarze’s (2009) anthropologi-
cally grounded research on Diablos Rojos – the painted buses in Panama
and their significance for urban and national identity. As far as post-
socialist cities are concerned, the transformation of public transport
systems is still in need of detailed research. Several studies have been
undertaken looking at major cities of EU accession countries such as
Poland (Pucher 1995), the Czech Republic (Pucher 1999) and Hungary
(Hook 1999). For the former Soviet Union, studies exist, among others,
on Uzbekistan (Akimov and Banister 2010; Gwilliam et al. 2000),
Kazakhstan (Finn 2008; Gwilliam 2000; Gwilliam 2001) and Tbilissi
(Finn 2008; Grdzelishvili and Sathre 2008). Still, the papers deal above
all with institutional change and privatization management and not
with the social and cultural aspects of public transport in a transition
period. The effects of public transport on space production also remain
unscrutinized. The same goes for anthropologically grounded research
of the role of public transport in identity formation and power relations.
In order to fill this research gap, I seek to shed light in my work on the
representative dimension of public transport in Central Asia.
My research is inspired by current discussions on mobility and power
and strives to contribute to the development of a ‘movement-driven
social science’, as proposed by Büscher and Urry (2009: 100). Power is
a key issue in mobility studies, which aim to transcend the sedentary
image of the exercise of power. Much to the contrary, current theo-
ries of mobility conceptualize it as ‘intertwined with space and power’
(Jensen 2011) and therefore inherently politicized. Looking at mobility
as a politicized issue does furthermore prevent a romanticized view ‘of
mobility, flux and destabilisation as ipso facto liberatory’ (Jensen 2009:
147; cites Morley 2000: 47). Politicizing mobility therefore means to
engage in a critical approach to mobility studies themselves.
In line with Jensen, I would conceive of public transport as a ‘politi-
cised armature’ (Jensen 2009: 150), and thus as a ‘potential venue for
new articulations of politics’ (Jensen 2009: 155). The findings are based
on a series of interviews and observations conducted in post-Soviet
Central Asia during the course of 2009 and 2010. The bulk of evidence
comes from the Tajik capital Dushanbe, but I will also draw on addi-
tional evidence from other settings, most of them in Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan. Public transport users and non-users were interviewed along-
side transport employees and officials responsible for transport plan-
ning. Additional evidence was drawn from local newspapers. Altogether,
some 20 formal interviews were collected, alongside a large number of
 Urban Public Transport and the State 197

short encounters en route, since ‘mobile’ methods, ‘tuned into the social
organisation of “moves”’ as proposed by Büscher and Urry (2009: 103),
played an important part in the analysis. I strived to collect interviews
and impressions on the move – in the vehicles themselves, and inside
the public transport system – waiting for the trolleybus and inside
the garages, and thus to get a grasp of ‘“indigenous” mobile methods’
(Büscher and Urry 2009: 111). Issues of social relations, though, seemed
more important to me than an analysis of ‘indigenous’ mobility – much
in tune with D’Andrea, Ciolfi and Gray who argued that a methodology
‘which includes but transcends a narrow focus on data collection on the
move, needs to address structure, power and meaning at multiple levels’
(2011: 158).
I will therefore attempt to sketch the interrelation between power,
mobility and everyday life on three different levels. Taking up Philippe
Braud’s work on emotions and politics (Braud 1996), the chapter
focuses on (1) materials, (2) language and (3) rites and ceremonies of
the mobility-power nexus in Central Asia. Firstly, the material that
will be focused on in this chapter is the running stock of the region’s
public transit systems. After an overview of the decline of electric urban
transit in the 1990s, I will look at the massive investments in trol-
leybus systems in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and will, finally, discuss
the unsustainable and largely symbolic character of these investments.
Secondly, ‘language’ is considered in terms of the significance of public
transport for the population and the authorities – what they think and
say about transit in Central Asia, thus constructing its symbolic value.
This part will deal with three aspects of the conflict between marshrutka
minibuses and trolleybuses: the welfare aspect, the state agency aspect
and finally the issue of representative urban landscapes. The difference
between privately run marshrutkas and publicly funded trolley buses is
not just one of ownership, but also of signification, in particular when
it comes to reconfigured social stratifications after the demise of the
Soviet Union. In the final part, detailed insights are given into how trol-
leybuses in Dushanbe are used for state representation purposes through
slogans on transit vehicles – a ritualized invocation of the state’s basic
principles aiming at regime legitimation.

Materiality: changes in fixed-track overground transit

systems in central Asia

When thinking of Soviet public transport, the sumptuous Moscow and

Saint Petersburg underground systems perhaps first come to mind. Ten
other cities of the former Soviet Union had their metro systems built in
198 Wladimir Sgibnev

Soviet times – among them Tashkent, the Soviet capital of Uzbekistan,

which received a metro system in 1977, and which is still well kept and
preserved in luxury. Tashkent was the only city in Central Asia to have a
metro system until 2012 when a line opened in Kazakhstan’s largest city
of Almaty. While metros were and are promoted as symbols of technical
achievement and modernity, they are not the central concern of this
paper. Overground fixed-track1 public transport such as trams and trol-
leybuses in fact carry the majority of the overall passenger load and thus
require greater attention.
Despite the general reduction in publically funded transport, strong
differences are apparent between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on the one
side, and the other Central Asian republics on the other. Of the roughly
30 fixed-track public transport systems that were built in Central Asia
in Soviet times, half were closed down after the demise of the Soviet
Union. Almost all fixed-track systems in Uzbekistan were closed down,
with the notable exception of Tashkent’s tram network and the inter-
urban trolleybus line between Khiva and Urganch. Half of the systems in
Kazakhstan are not running any longer, and the remaining systems have
experienced severe cutbacks. Turkmenistan’s only trolleybus network in
Ashgabat was cut down to one line out of eight in the early 2000s and
closed entirely in January 2012 – with the vague promise of a metro line
to be built in some distant future.
In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, however, the picture looks different:
although these two countries were hit worst by the dissolution of the
USSR, the local trolleybus systems are all in place and have received
substantial public funding over the last few years. The fleets in both
capitals – Bishkek and Dushanbe – are being renewed and have almost
regained pre-independence scope, not to mention the small system in
Naryn in the Tien-Shan highlands that opened in 1994 in the midst of
economic turmoil after independence. A second line is being built for
the trolleybus system in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh. Even though
its construction was halted during the bloodshed in June 2010, the trol-
leybuses are reportedly running again. Finally, in Khujand in northern
Tajikistan the system is on the brink of closure, yet delivers a constant,
if very low, level of service.
The present paper argues that trolleybuses are more than simply a
means to move around town – that the symbolic value of preserving
these costly systems has played a role in the political decision to keep
them running. This marks the difference between support for fixed-track
transit in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan compared with its decline in neigh-
bouring post-Soviet Central Asian countries.
 Urban Public Transport and the State 199

Kazakhstan

Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan

Turkmenistan
Tajikistan Trolleybus systems
functioning
nominally functioning
closed down since 1991
Afghanistan large investments
Tram systems
N functioning
closed down since 1991
0 250 500 1.000 km

Map 10.1 Fixed-track systems in Central Asia

Source: C. Bittner, W. Sgibnev (2010/2012).

In the Soviet Union, urban transport systems were the responsibility

of different ministries of the member republics – buses mostly under the
jurisdiction of the Ministry of Automotive Transport and electric urban
transport systems under the Ministry of Communal Services. Their high
hierarchical position indicates the importance of public transport for
Soviet urban administration. A system of cross-subsidies and annual
debt write-offs enabled the financial survival of these systems (Akimov
and Banister 2010).
Economic decline and the political turmoil of the 1990s, however, led
to a substantial abatement of publicly run transport. Responsibility for
running urban transport systems was transferred from central minis-
tries to the municipalities, without any appropriate transfer of funding
(Gwilliam 2001). The ageing rolling stock was decaying and no funding
was available for the purchase of new vehicles or even spare parts or the
maintenance of overhead lines or the trolleybuses. Running vehicles
were taken out of service to cannibalize the spare parts. Municipalities
throughout Central Asia attempted to privatize bus fleets and created
legislative frameworks for line tendering in the course of the 1990s –
with various degrees of success (Akimov and Banister 2010; Finn 2007;
Gwilliam 2001). In contrast to the bus systems, tram and trolleybus
systems did not lend themselves to privatization due to high initial
200 Wladimir Sgibnev

investment costs and they continued to place a severe financial burden

on urban budgets (Muktarbek uulu 2008). Therefore, the municipali-
ties either had to keep up high levels of subsidies (up to 70 per cent of
the running costs according to Akimov and Banister (2010); or up to
98 per cent according to Gwilliam (2000)), or decide to close down the
systems. In the case of Uzbekistan, apart from failing public budgets,
market protection interests played an important role in closing down
trolleybus systems, as this provided a large market for the locally
produced GM Uzbekistan minibuses – ‘Damas’ – and Isuzu Uzbekistan
midi-buses.
After independence, public transport enterprises were unable to meet
the basic mobility needs of the population. The gap was filled by an
ever-growing fleet of minibuses – so-called marshrutkas. Marshrutkas first
appeared in Soviet cities in the 1930s. At the beginning, they played a
minor role, yet an ever-growing one, in particular since the first domesti-
cally built minibus – RAF-10 of Latvian origin – appeared on the market.
Unlike standard taxis, they were assigned to fixed marching routes, hence
their name. They provided a comfortable, albeit rather expensive express
service on major urban thoroughfares. They institutionally reported to
taxi companies and not to the bus or tram companies which were meant
to carry the majority of the passenger load according to Soviet urban
planning principles.
During the course of the 1990s, Latvian RAF-minibuses were mostly
replaced either by second-hand Western products (domestically refur-
bished Mercedes-Benz Sprinter and Ford Transit vehicles) or, since the
mid-1990s, by Russian Gazel’ (GAZ 3221x) minibuses. The taxi compa-
nies of the Soviet era were able to survive as large marshrutka providers,
as they were independent from the ailing bus and tram companies. In
Khujand, for instance, Sorvon, the privatized former taxi company,
boasts a market share of around 90 per cent, employing salaried drivers
as well as free-lancers with their own or leased minibuses, operating in
a virtually unregulated and untaxed ‘shadow market’. When industrial
plants closed down and released thousands of people into unemploy-
ment, the marshrutka sector was able to absorb a large proportion of
the work force, as the market entrance barriers and necessary initial
investments were very low. Every sixth vehicle in Tashkent’s urban
traffic is a marshrutka, and this proportion is comparable to other large
cities in Central Asia. Additionally, a considerable number of people
work on popular marshrutka routes in private cars, most of them on
a part-time basis. Transportation is therefore a vital branch of Central
Asian economy: Akimov and Banister estimate for Uzbekistan that
 Urban Public Transport and the State 201

Figure 10.1 Marshrutka in Khujand

Source: S. Behrendt (2010).

one family in ten is supported by a member driving a taxi or minibus

(2010).
In spite of this hostile environment in terms of the preservation of
trolleybus systems, large-scale investments were injected into them
in Dushanbe and Bishkek. In Tajikistan the investments were terrific
indeed, considering the country’s otherwise dire budget: roughly US$
15 million were spent on trolleybuses from 2005 to 2010. State money
202 Wladimir Sgibnev

was directly allocated to the town of Dushanbe for trolleybus purchases,

reflecting in no way the financial capacities of the city-owned transit
company Dushanbepassgortrans. As Akimov and Banister have noted for
Tashkent (2010), in Tajikistan investment into transit still largely resem-
bles that of the Soviet period.
In Dushanbe, 45 ZIU-682V trolleybuses built in the 1970s–80s had
survived the 1990s, which was enough to provide a basic service on a
rudimentary network. In 2001, four Trolza 5264.01 were purchased from
the Russian trolleybus builder – the first investment in the electric transit
system since independence. After major negotiations, a large delivery
contract was signed between the Mayor of Dushanbe M. Ubaydulloev
and Trolza Director P. Berlin in September 2004. During the next two
years, 100 units of ZIU 682g-012 were delivered to Dushanbe. A follow-up
contract in December 2008 ensured another delivery of 60 ZIU 682-GOM
in February 2009. In Bishkek, the administration proved its commit-
ment to the trolleybus system as well, even if on a smaller scale: 35 ZIU
682G-018 joined the rolling stock from 2001 onwards, and 21 units BKM
321 / BKM 32102 from the Misk-based Belkommunmash plant in 2009.
The older ZIU-628V engines were immediately scrapped after the 2005
delivery, although they were in running order. Even the four vehicles
delivered in 2001 were put out of service. The Dushanbe rolling stock
is today the youngest in the whole ex-USSR, yet this large investment
has proved to be excessive and unsustainable. Out of 160 engines avail-
able, barely 90 are in daily service, according to employees’ statements.
This means that 70 machines stand still, which is considerably more
than is necessary for an emergency reserve. One reason for this is the
lack of staff: the drivers have good employment opportunities in Russia’s
trolleybus systems and are thus prone to work migration. Furthermore,
the large funding aimed at renewing the capital’s trolleybus fleet had
no financial follow-up at all to provide for maintenance of the new
vehicles. As no financing for spare parts exists, drivers either have to
shoulder these costs themselves, or brand-new trolleybuses are canni-
balized for spare parts to keep the rest of the fleet running. At least 20
machines from the newest deliveries have already been scrapped for lack
of maintenance and spare parts.
Neither were funds allocated for the maintenance of the overhead
lines, which, in contrast to the brand-new rolling stock, are completely
run down. Very few switches do actually work, which increases incidents
and breakdowns and forces the drivers to perform breathtaking manoeu-
vres on crossroads. The decision to renew the vehicle fleet seems there-
fore to be excessive and unsustainable, driven to a large extent by the
 Urban Public Transport and the State 203

Figure 10.2 Switching lines: As the switches do not work properly, the young
fare collectors on trolleybuses double as living switches: they get off the buses
and climb the small ladder at the rear of the vehicle. Prior to the switch in ques-
tion, they tear down the contact poles. The trolleybus keeps rolling slowly, the
boys run and place the poles back again on the overhead lines
Source: W. Sgibnev (2010).

desire for symbolic activity: the case of the Dushanbe trolleybus system
seems to go in line with Stalinist mega-projects. They too provided for a
sacralized dramaturgy of the regime and apart from the (often doubtful)
benefit of the construction itself, they were called to strengthen soci-
etal bonds and safeguard a particular interpretation of the past (Gestwa
2004). At the same time, their sheer size and all-encompassing ambi-
tions made them very difficult to control and to sustain.
State authorities employ, it seems, a ‘concerted space ordering policy’
(‘Raumordnungspolitik’) as a key to domination and re-creation of the
social body (Gestwa 2004: 43). This rightly resounds with Jensen’s state-
ment that ‘planning ideas or imaginaries of mobility co-produce urban
subjects as well as legitimize costly transport infrastructure’ (Jensen 2011:
260). Dushanbe’s trolleybuses appear in a way as the low-key counter-
part to pompous Soviet metro stations. On the local level, they appear
as symbols of technological achievement and of the state’s care for the
population. Public transport promotes these images on a large-scale – as
we will see in the following.
204 Wladimir Sgibnev

Language: the image of electric transportation

Trolleybus systems were, at the time of construction in the Soviet period,

promoted as spearheads of modernity. Postcards and guidebooks feature
high-rise buildings along wide boulevards, with trolleybuses running
on the lanes.2 Popular support for trams and trolleybuses is thus often
coupled with Soviet nostalgia. Publicly owned enterprises which guar-
antee low prices and even offer free transport or reduced fares for partic-
ular categories of the population function as reminders of a romanticized
Soviet era. The state is regarded here as the ultimate provider of potential
movement, offering mobility capital, to employ Jensen’s terminology
(2011: 256). This offer of mobility capital must be seen here as a strategic
tool of the state, as the ‘moulding [of] late-modern subjects takes place
also through her or his mobile practice’ (Jensen 2011: 259). In contempo-
rary Central Asia, the moulding of subjects through mobile practice takes
place by means of a Soviet-style public service provision – understood
as a ‘moral economy of gift’ (Gestwa 2004: 54). As in Soviet times, the
provision of public services, Gestwa argues, pushes the citizens into non-
repayable moral debts, with political subordination as consequence.
Today, public transport is predominantly used by lower income classes
(Grdzelishvili 2008), mainly because of low cost fares. Even slightly lower
than bus fares, they often amount to half the price for transportation
by a marshrutka (e.g., in Bishkek 4 Som versus 8 Som on a marshrutka;
in Dushanbe 0,50 Somoni versus 1,00 Somoni; on the interurban line
in Khujand even 0,50 Somoni using the trolleybus versus 1,70 Somoni
for a marshrutka ride, as of 2010). Furthermore, publicly run transport
offers fare concessions for veterans, pensioners and schoolchildren, and
in some towns monthly passes for students and schoolchildren, which
do not exist on marshrutka routes.
Due to their relatively lower income, public transport users in a post-
Soviet environment are very sensitive to the price of transport fares
(Grdzelishvili 2008). Fare increases give cause to publicly voiced protests,
as for instance in Khujand, where a fare increase had to be taken back due
to citizens’ pressure. By keeping up trolleybus systems, authorities pretend
to continue running a Soviet-style public service and welfare system and
present themselves as ‘caring for the population’. They provide the sovi-
et-style zabota – ‘care’ – in an environment otherwise characterized by
economic competition and the state’s retreat from public service provi-
sion: even if the state is unable to provide appropriate pensions, at least
it strives to provide for public transport opportunities.
As trolleybuses are mainly used by people on low incomes, their social
status is low. In contrast, marshrutkas, valued for their speed and relative
 Urban Public Transport and the State 205

Figure 10.3 Postcard featuring modern public transport in a modern city –

trolleybuses on the Lenin Avenue in Dushanbe
Source: Author’s private collection, photographer unknown.

comfort, are used by people with higher incomes. Combined with the
substantial growth of private car ownership and usage among the wealthier
strata (Akimov and Banister 2010), middle- and upper-class citizens openly
express their disdain for trolleybuses. In post-Soviet slang, public transport
in general and trolleybuses in particular are called lokhovoz, which roughly
means bumpkin-mobile. My interview partners in Dushanbe and Khujand
moreover explicitly described trolleybuses as kambaghal-arba – pauper
carriages. This does not only work in contrast to private cars, but also in
contrast to minibuses, which are regarded as a more prestigious means to
move around town. Upper-class citizens mark their status by inscribing
social difference onto the sensory landscapes of movement (Jensen 2011:
265), clearly linking mobility to power. Sliwa and Riach (2012: 32–34)
have observed an olfactory stratification of society which is, among others,
linked to public transport: to put it simply, ‘on a bus, it stinks’. They have
termed it a ‘ghettoisation of bodily smell in public transport’ while the
‘private car acts as [a] barrier of being exposed to other people’s personal
smells’ (ibid.). This is true for the Central Asian case as well, confirming
once again the role of public transport as a means of everyday space
production and sense-making – and therefore its social significance.
206 Wladimir Sgibnev

Despite upper-class prejudices, a large part of the population in Central

Asia relies on public transport for its daily mobility, that is for its subsist-
ence, and the use of public transport has risen since the severe economic
downturn in the 1990s (United Nations 2007). Transit enjoys ‘high social
importance’, and ‘serious disruption to public transport ... might under-
mine the political stability of the city and even the country’ (Akimov
and Banister 2010). Beyond being a means of mobility, public trans-
port is conceived and perceived as a sign of a functioning state, in spite
of general economic decline and political instability which have led to
curtailed funding and electricity shortages. The problem of electricity
shortages is particularly pronounced in Tajikistan. In Dushanbe, the huge
return of the trolleybuses was only possible after the electricity supply
to the general public had been ensured in the late 2010s. The problem is
even more salient in Khujand where trolleybuses run very infrequently
due to failing energy provision. In interviews, citizens expressed their
hopes that the situation would improve over time, presenting the trol-
leybus service as a barometer of electricity provision for the town.
Beyond the electricity issue, regulation of the marshrutka sector is
rhetorically used by the authorities to demonstrate a regained state
agency in public service matters. There are several observable shortcom-
ings with regard to the marshrutkas, such as safety issues, low comfort
when cramped, transport chaos around main stops, no reduced fares
for pensioners or students and so forth. Yet the major issue are finan-
cial flows in the marshrutka sector which are difficult to trace and to
tax. Drivers usually pay a flat licence fee – which evidently does not
apply to thousands of unlicensed freelance drivers – and keep the
surplus. Structurally, therefore, the marshrutka sector operates as in the
early 1990s. Moreover, marshrutkas are associated with the negatively
connoted ‘wild 1990s’, with chaos, danger and struggle for survival.
And still – marshrutkas are one of the few functioning sectors of the
economy, apart from bazaars and, to a minor degree, the mobile phone
system and resource extraction. Getting a hold on the previously
unregulated marshrutka sector and embedding it into a corresponding
legal framework would show that the state has overcome the crisis of
the 1990s, and has regained stability and regulative powers. Similarly,
any regulation and consolidation of this highly atomized sector would
probably be attractive for those working in the state bureaucracy as it
additionally opens up illicit income opportunities through tendering,
licensing and taxation procedures. Since 2010, marshrutkas and taxis in
Tajikistan have been required to be officially registered, to pay licence
fees and bear special licence-plates. The ongoing regulation of the
marshrutka sector, such as a legislative foundation for line tendering
 Urban Public Transport and the State 207

(Finn 2007; Gwilliam 2000), providing safety and quality criteria, has
to be seen in this light.
Even prior to regulation, the driver’s profit margins were low, as most
of them had to carry the costs of fuel, maintenance, repair and even-
tually instalments for leased cars, themselves. Resistance patterns have
therefore developed in order to circumvent registration. In Dushanbe,
unregistered vehicles play hide-and-seek on the streets, putting their
destination plates down when a police patrol comes in sight. They
pretend to be private people on a private trip, and put the plates back
on again afterwards. In a political environment which is very strictly
controlled by state authorities, the mobilities sector is in this regard an
exceptional venue for survival strategies based on small-scale grassroots
resistance, reflecting Jensen’s idea of the mobilities as a ‘potential venue
for new articulation of politics’ (Jensen 2009: 155).
Legal regulation of the marshrutka sector goes further, with strict spatial
regulation aimed at providing representative town centres. Akimov and
Banister state for the case of Tashkent that the ‘leadership cares about
the image of the city ... . Private providers’ use of older buses from less
reputable firms would negatively impact the city’s image’ (2010). This
becomes even more severe when dealing with the already negatively
connoted marshrutkas. In Dushanbe, they have been completely banned
from the main representative street – the Rudaki Avenue – since the end of
the 1990s. Surprisingly, smaller private cars providing marshrutka services
are tolerated as, in the eyes of the administration, they do not disturb the
solemnity of the avenue. Agile six-seater Tangem minibuses were entirely
banned from the city centre for the same reason and replaced by Russian
PAZ midi-buses. In Bishkek, the situation is similar, as marshrutkas are not
allowed to enter the central Ala-Too square during daytime. Furthermore,
in city centres – this is true for Dushanbe, Bishkek, Khujand and Osh
altogether – marshrutkas are obliged to stop at regular bus stops and not
at any requested spot as elsewhere. In contrast to the marshrutkas, trol-
leybuses enjoy preferential treatment on main thoroughfares. In the eyes
of the urban administration, brand-new trolleybuses go very well with
representative avenues – obviously, the state’s care for the population
here meets the state’s preference for grand, tree-lined street designs.

Transport vehicles as billboards for state propaganda

It is not suspiring that a state authority which conceives the urban

environment as a tool to create legitimacy also sees the provision of
mobility as a means to achieving this goal. Since public transport has
high social significance, the vehicles lend themselves as billboards for
208 Wladimir Sgibnev

state propaganda in the eyes of the authorities, and are largely used for
nation-building, educational purposes. The slogans promoting moder-
nity, morale and national pride combine with monuments in the capital
city and parades to ‘cultivate patriotism, explain and justify policies,
and secure the acquiescence and cooperation of the people in times of
crises’, as Nourzhanov (2001) puts it. He further claims that ‘symbolic
encapsulation of the themes of regime legitimacy, common identity,
and cultural revival through historical references is particularly crucial
for emerging nations’ (Nourzhanov 2001) – an observation which the
use of trolleybus vehicles by Tajik state authorities does confirm. With
Jensen I would argue that this logic of urban space production uses
‘causal qualities of the urban space to achieve social ends, such as social
coherence, order and hierarchy’. Its aim is to create ‘truths’, which ‘serve
to underpin, enable and sometimes make desirable particular kinds of
urban existence, including what it means and how to be, say, a modern
urban cosmopolitan’ (Jensen 2011: 261). Dushanbe’s trolleybus slogans
deal with precisely these issues.
The green-white bus and trolleybus livery is similar to the one in
use in Moscow: when the delivery of Trolza vehicles was signed in
2005, the Tajik side opted for a cheaper livery already being mass-pro-
duced for the Moscow market. Simultaneously, this created a visual
link to the Russian capital, thus providing Dushanbe with an air of a
‘metropolis’, as a trolleybus driver put it. While almost all other public
transport providers decided to rent out bus sides for advertisement,
Dushanbepassgortrans opted against it. Nowadays, Dushanbe is one of
the very few towns in the ex-USSR where all public urban transport has
the same-coloured livery, creating a strong common visual identity of
the transport fleet.
Another particularity distinguishes Dushanbe’s rolling stock: all
trolleybuses and large buses bear a slogan on the side. Several dozen
different slogans exist, to the extent that seemingly every trolleybus
bears an individual slogan in Dushanbe’s road traffic. Repetitions of
slogans occur but are quite rare. They are made up by the Dushanbe
town administration – often reflecting on speeches of President Emomali
Rakhmon – and transferred to the town’s transportation department for
implementation. The slogans are then inscribed on vehicle sides in the
Russian Trolza trolleybus plant before delivery. They sum up the princi-
ples on which Tajikistan is based – or should be based in the eyes of the
authorities – and provide guidelines for appropriate life in the capital.
The first major group of slogans fosters regime legitimacy by refer-
ring to the foundations of the State. Independence is declared as holy.
Figure 10.4 ‘Diverse forms of ownership are the foundations of the economy’
Source: Wladimir Sgibnev (2010).

Figure 10.5 ‘Independence is a holy duty of the citizen’

Source: Wladimir Sgibnev (2010).
210 Wladimir Sgibnev

Further slogans belonging to this group focus on the rule of law or to the
country’s basic economic principles.
Another group of slogans calls upon Tajik history and conveys – in
Nourzhanov’s terms – the hope for a ‘revival through historical refer-
ences’ (2001). They allude to Samarkand and Bukhara, both presented
as historical cultural centres of the Tajik nation, which were wrongfully
devolved to Uzbekistan in Soviet times. Hence, these slogans urge the
huge Tajik-speaking community in these towns to be loyal to the inde-
pendent Tajik state.
In order to visualize its outstanding and historical role in an inde-
pendent Tajikistan, Dushanbe has to be a well presented and flourishing
town. This message is conveyed in a third group of slogans – common
identity based on beauty and morale – which ascribes to town embel-
lishment the capacity to have a positive influence on social relation-
ships and morale. Beauty becomes a political instrument for fostering
civic spirit, common identity and state stability. The causal chain
between urban space embellishment and embellishment of the society

Figure 10.6 ‘We raise our dear city to the level of the historic capitals of the
nation’
Source: Wladimir Sgibnev (2010).
Figure 10.7 ‘Dushanbe is the homestead of love and the house of hope for the
Tajiks of the world’
Source: Wladimir Sgibnev (2010).

Figure 10.8 ‘We transform our city into a sea of flowers’

Source: Wladimir Sgibnev (2010).
Figure 10.9 ‘A cultivated capital is a cultivation of our home’
Source: Wladimir Sgibnev (2010).

Figure 10.10 Modern Belkommunmash trolleybus in Bishkek

 Urban Public Transport and the State 213

as a whole stems from Soviet planning principles (Gestwa 2004) and is

being upheld in an independent Tajikistan.
It is difficult to assess whether slogans placed on trolleybuses attract
attention or are more effective compared to the ones written on walls
and printed on banners – which also abound on Dushanbe’s major thor-
oughfares. Yet the decision of the authorities to use public transport
vehicles as propaganda media, renouncing advertising revenues, shows
once again the importance of public transport for political representa-
tion in the country.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have attempted to transcend the mobilities research

focus on auto- and aeromobilities to show the significance of public trans-
port for widening the scope of mobilities research. I would argue that a
greater focus on public transport is particularly valuable for analysing
the role of power in mobilities, by looking at the space-ordering role
of mobilities, their influence on identity formation and the modes of
exercise of power which go along with them.
As we have seen, cities in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan boast trolleybus
systems which public budgets can barely afford. Yet in Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan, similarly unprofitable systems were closed down: the polit-
ical will to support local bus producing monopolists is undoubtedly one
important reason leading to this decision. In Kazakhstan, an early imple-
mentation of tendering legislation has helped to establish a regulated
bus transit market in the country, supplanting closed trolleybus and tram
systems. Furthermore, a higher proportion of private vehicle use as well
as higher average incomes have attenuated the effects of public transit
system closures. As shown in the first part, trolleybus systems in Tajikistan
and Kyrgyzstan reflect the Soviet legacy of exercising state authority via
unsustainable ‘great projects’: although the political systems have nomi-
nally changed since independence, the means to exercise power have
not. Out of these motivations, the authorities in Dushanbe or Bishkek are
willing to shoulder unreasonable investments in trolleybus systems – yet
without proper rolling stock maintenance and upkeep of overhead lines,
these investments remain ‘white elephants’.
Although state authorities have cut back almost all welfare benefits and
public services, they are being upheld in the mobilities sector by means
of subsidized trolleybus systems. With regard to the limited role of trol-
leybuses in fulfilling mobility needs, they are all the more important for
the representative dimension of politics: in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,
214 Wladimir Sgibnev

trolleybuses convey more than their capacity to transport people. Of

course, one could perhaps say the same about the recently introduced
tramway systems in France or Spain, which were inspired by the wish
to re-invigorate some mythical ‘urbanity’ and boost attractiveness in a
supposed global competition for the creative class. Yet there is more to
this statement when looking at the Central Asian case. In these coun-
tries, with their rampant power shortages, functioning trolleybuses are
running examples that the authorities are able to address this vital issue
on a large-scale. And where social benefits are cut back to a minimum,
for a pensioner a free ride in a trolleybus maintains the illusion of a
functioning welfare system. The regulation of marshrutkas as remnants
of the ‘wild 1990s’ and their ban from city centres is a regular feature
of post-Soviet capital cities: Finn (2008) observed a similar ban in the
Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Finally, in countries with limited resources,
trolleybuses allow futuristic vehicles to run on streets, promising moder-
nity for a relatively low price, whereas Almaty, Astana and Tashkent are
able to invest in metro systems for the same reason.
The trolleybuses’ representative dimension is brought to extremes in
the Tajik capital Dushanbe, as witnessed in the discussion on edifying
and educating slogans on the sides of trolleybuses there. The decision to
make use of trolleybuses as running nation-building machines evidences
the authorities’ conviction that mobility matters.

Notes
1. Tramways and trolleybuses are both counted as fixed-track transit systems.
In contrast to buses they require particular infrastructure, this means higher
initial investments and relatively high follow-up costs. Trolleybuses will feature
more prominently in the paper, as they represent the fixed-track system found
in Bishkek and Dushanbe, where the bulk of fieldwork was carried out. Yet the
conclusions drawn in this chapter are relevant for both tramways and trol-
leybus systems in Central Asia in general.
2. The Soviet Union even spread the equation of trolleybuses with modern
urbanism to Afghanistan. A trolleybus system for Kabul was planned in the
mid-1970s as part of the urban development plan proposed by Leningrad
specialists in the framework of Soviet development aid to the country. The
trolleybus system eventually opened with great pomp in February 1979, only
some months after the Daur revolution which brought the People’s Democratic
Party to power.

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11
Geography of Daily Mobilities in
Post-Socialist European Countries:
Evidence from Slovenia
David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

Introduction

The recent shift towards recognizing the significance of mobility for

society has seen various authors report on both the quantitative increase
in people’s mobility within space, and on the new mobility patterns
which have emerged over the last few decades (Sheller and Urry 2006;
Latham et al. 2009). As cars came into general use in North America and
western Europe, for example, largely due to technological development
(e.g., the steel and petroleum industries) and governmental measures
that promoted the growth of automobile infrastructure (Urry 2007),
public (or collective) transport has experienced a significant downturn
and now accounts for an average of no more than 20 per cent of all
passenger travel in Europe, and even less in North America (Eurostat
2010). Correspondingly, researchers have become increasingly inter-
ested in the rise of ‘automobility’ in western society, and its cause and
effect.
To date, however, this interest in automobility has included very
few discussions on commuting in post-socialist countries. This chapter
discusses the extent of change in commuting patterns in post-socialist
countries. Studies on this topic are quite rare (e.g., Bole 2004; Stenning
2005; Lukić and Tošić 2011; Burgmanis 2012). This is why the main
objective of this chapter is to shed some light on the specific dynamics of
post-socialist commuting, using Slovenia as a case-study. As this chapter
will demonstrate, the commuting of Slovenians has been marked by
excitement over their cars, not only as a means of transportation but also
as a ‘source of freedom and the connection with the wider community’

217
218 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

(Uršič 2010: 295). The chapter, then, focuses on the case of Slovenia
and attempts to define all the reasons for (and some consequences of)
this shift in mobility. We focus on the three basic characteristics which
have had the most significant affects on this distinctive daily mobility
shift: changes in the economy, lifestyle and work process changes, and
policy changes. Our aim is to explore these characteristics that influence
the experience of daily mobility in Slovenia, especially the ‘automobi-
lization’ of society, based on the interpretations of available empirical
data. We argue that the experience of daily mobility in Slovenia is influ-
enced partly by a general post-socialist transformation and partly by
local, place-specific individualities. By doing this, we wish to present an
approach which will be relevant for researching the causes of the daily
mobility changes in other post-socialist countries as well.
Findings in this chapter are based on the quantitative research of avail-
able official statistical data. Discussions on everyday mobility changes in
post-socialist countries are based on findings from the Eurostat database
(Eurostat 2010; 2011; 2012), while various national statistics are used to
analyse mobility changes in Slovenia (Statistical Office of the Republic
of Slovenia 1990; 2003; 2012). Some findings are also based on the ques-
tionnaire analysis (European Commission 2006) and the authors’ own
findings regarding public transport development and case studies of
daily mobility in Slovenia (Bole 2004; 2011; Gabrovec and Bole 2009;
Bole and Gabrovec 2012; Gabrovec 2012).

Basic features of commuting in European post-socialist

countries

History: the era of public transport

Post-socialist countries have emerged from a specific socio-political
system that lasted for more than half a century and, within it, created
some characteristic patterns of commuting. Planned, centralized and
collectivized development was also reflected in mobility patterns which
were based on collective and organized transport, paid by working
organizations. In more urban environments and in the industrialized
countryside there were large state-owned public transport companies,
the remnants of which can still be found today.
Public transport was a widely used means of daily travel and was signif-
icantly more prevalent than private transport. Still, one should note that
car use did not entirely pass socialist countries by, even though they were
affected by it to a much lesser degree than their western neighbours. In
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 219

most socialist countries it was the poorer supply of cars as consuma-

bles in particular which contributed to low car use. Regulated produc-
tion and consumption basically made cars simply too expensive, often
technologically inadequate, and, due to poorer productivity, there were
usually long waiting periods to purchase one (see the case of Poland
in Jastrzab 2011: 35). The car was thus unable to become the ultimate
consumer good and as such could not cause the rapid growth in car use
and ‘automobilization’ of society as was the case in the western world
after World War II (cf. Urry 2007). Nevertheless, some authors find that
it was in the car industry that the more liberal and free-market forms
of the socialist economy first appeared. In the 1970s many auto plants
in socialist countries were among the first to form ties with western
companies due to technological requirements, and this was the first
evidence of the gradual abandonment of the utopian socialist economy
(Hamilton et al. 2005). In Czechoslovakia, the majority of cars produced
(especially Škoda cars) were intended for export to western countries. As
Fava (2011: 26) wrote: ‘a paradoxical situation emerged, one that was
full of contradictions: the Socialist car, produced in a system based on
supply – the political economy of communism – had to be sold in capi-
talist markets, where it was demand that counted most.’
Collective commuting and the proportionately high usage of public
transport were also affected by indirect factors that were not present
in western countries. The first factor was the industrially and collec-
tively designed nature of the economy. This economy played a signifi-
cant role in the development of socialist countries because it was the
foundation of social, economic and consequently also spatial devel-
opment. It was organized on completely different foundations to
capitalist countries and its role was emphasized due to political and
ideological reasons, mainly to industrialize the countryside and as a
means of transforming an essentially peasant society (Musil 2005: 29).
In Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland and East Germany
especially, there were attempts to reduce regional disparities by placing
industry in previously under-industrialized or unindustrialized areas.
In the vicinity of these factories, large residential neighbourhoods with
high-rise apartments were constructed that were supposed to be the
source of the labour force. In general, this meant that the daily flows
of workers were quite concentrated and large in number because the
factories were designed in a typical Fordist manner, with a large number
of workers that mostly began and ended work at the same time and
came from one source (nearby newly constructed neighbourhoods with
high-rise apartments). This collective economic arrangement was thus
220 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

also easily served by public transport, which was, in the context of

this collectivization of work, often the only option for arriving at and
departing from work.
Socialist social structure, which stressed egalitarianism and the exist-
ence of only one ‘equal’ class, also enabled and enhanced the role of
public transport. Urry claims that individualism, flexibility and the
possibility of free choice of movement in space are closely connected
with the emergence of car use (2007: 119). On the other hand, one might
say that in a society in which social stratification is not tolerated and in
which the importance of society as a whole is stressed above individual
wishes and rights, public transportation also obtains a symbolic value:
it becomes the symbol of egalitarianism, classlessness, or a symbol of a
single strong working class. ‘In the post-socialist era, cars are promoted
as “engines of liberty,” representative of an automobility equated with
autonomy’ (Hanasz 1999). However, cases have been described of how
communist social elites secretly privatized ‘social property’, especially
cars (Péteri 2011), which indicated that these groups also craved the
personal freedom and flexibility enabled by cars, just like the desires of
social groups in the western world.

Everyday mobility changes in post-socialist countries:

the decrease in public transport, the increase in
private transport
It is difficult to say when exactly this turn in commuting occurred, but
it certainly began even before the fall of the socialist system. There are
no reliable sets of data for the socialist period, other than rare excep-
tions. According to Eurostat data (2011), in the 1990s collective forms
of transportation were roughly at an equal level with private transpor-
tation in practically all post-socialist countries. Due to methodological
problems in data capturing, it is more difficult to show the situation in
all countries, but we can focus on individual cases. The most commonly
used public transport in the early 1990s was the bus, which reached
a share of approximately 30 per cent of passenger kilometres travelled
in the majority of European post-socialist countries, whereas the train
reached an approximate share of 15 per cent. A very quick increase in
the share of car use is evident; in the early 1990s, this share accounted
for more than half of the entire modal split in the majority of countries.
The origins of this mobility change thus began even before the fall of
socialism, so even the countries within the socialist system were not
immune to the introduction of cars in society and the individualization
of travel habits.
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 221

More reliable data has become available for the second half of the
1990s; however, this is only available for certain countries. Some coun-
tries became exclusively car-oriented in only 20 years, even more than
their western neighbours (e.g., Lithuania, Slovenia and Poland). In terms
of daily car use, these post-socialist countries are catching up with the
western European countries and even overtaking them. According to all
statistics,1 public transport in all European post-socialist countries has
experienced a downturn – mostly due to this increase in private trans-
port. In some cases where the socioeconomic condition of the popula-
tion did not allow for any mass purchasing of cars, there has even been
a taxi boom – for example, in the Polish city of Krakow (Urząd Miasta
Krakowa 2002).
Of course, alongside this growth in private transport, more appropriate
road infrastructure began to spread as well; this infrastructure was based
on enabling as much accessibility, or ‘freedom’, as possible for car drivers.
In this regard, post-socialist countries were significantly lagging behind
their western neighbours. After 2004, EU membership did contribute
extensively to the construction of road infrastructure, co-financing parts
of freeways and thus enabling the rapid growth of the freeway network
(Eurostat 2011). Data from the freeway construction index show that
post-socialist countries have been building freeways at an accelerated
pace.2 Traditional transportation geography usually attributes increase
in private transport and the corresponding decrease in public transport
to economic growth and the rise in the purchasing power of the popu-
lation. In the case of post-socialist countries, this explanation may be
correct but it only explains the process and not the causes behind it.
The connection between the increase in purchasing power and the
motorization of the population can also be shown in a different light. A
significant correlation between the decrease in public transport and the
increase in private transport can also be explained by the basic socio-
economic orientation of countries, which is defined based on the rela-
tionship between the agricultural, industrial and service sectors of the
economy. A brief analysis of both phenomena indicates that there are
also significant connections between employment in the service sector
and the percentage of cars used in passenger travel. The reason for this
connection could be simple or slightly more complex: the simple expla-
nation is that services create a higher added value and thus a higher
income and better purchasing power of the population, which is then
spent on cars. The more complex explanation, however, is also based
on the characteristics of Fordist industry, which, due to its specific
organization (uniform working hours and mass daily commutes to the
222 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

workplace), also enables collective passenger transportation. In short,

the flexible organization of work typical for work in the service industry
is more suitable for the use of the flexible car, and the less flexible organ-
ization of work (factories) is more suitable for public transport.
All of the above reasons probably play a role in the daily mobility
changes in post-socialist countries and are ‘place-specific’ or dependent
on where the development in individual countries is headed. These coun-
tries certainly have some common historical and current forces which
have contributed to changes in commuting habits (and continue to do
so). The result of these factors is clear and is reflected in this decrease in
public transport and increase in private transport, evident in nearly all
the post-socialist European countries. It is less clear which of these forces
is most responsible for these changes.

The case of Slovenia

The transformation of commuting may be characterized as a revolu-

tion with spatial and social implications. These implications have been
researched far more rigorously than their causes, and they are evident
mainly through the process of dispersed suburbanization of the popu-
lation and the economic activities enabled by the diffused transport
system (for more, see Uršič 2010). Today, Slovenia is the sixth-most
motorized EU country3 (521 cars per 1,000 inhabitants) with the third
lowest percentage of the population using public transport (which at 13
per cent is higher only than post-socialist Lithuania and Poland).
This high degree of motorization is undoubtedly partly a result of the
low urban percentage of the country’s population. According to Eurostat
data (2012), in 2005 only a fifth of all Slovene households lived in
densely populated areas. This percentage is the lowest among all coun-
tries of the European Union, where the average percentage is 50 per
cent. An analysis of motorization in selected regions of the EU (Nared
and Razpotnik Visković 2012) has shown that the degree of motoriza-
tion in bigger cities is substantially lower than in the surrounding rural
areas. In bigger cities the number of vehicles per 1000 inhabitants lies
between 300 and 400, whereas in rural areas this number surpasses 500
vehicles per 1000 inhabitants. Regarding car ownership and transport
habits, the Slovenian rural population does not deviate much from
the European average pertaining to rural areas. The biggest difference
is seen with the urban population, which has to do with the small-
ness of Slovene cities (the capital Ljubljana has a population of merely
272,000). Slovenians are traditionally strongly connected to rural areas,
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 223

90
80
70
60
1981
50
1991
40
2002
30
20
10
0
Car Bus Train Walking or
cycling

Figure 11.1 Modal split of Slovene workers from 1981 to 2002

Note: Included are only those who work outside the place of their permanent residence.
Source: Pelc 1988; Bole 2004.

even though they might now be living in cities (Uršič and Hočevar
2007: 120).
Looking at the history of commuting, truly radical changes occurred
within two decades, especially in the mode of workers’ commuting. As
Figure 11.1 demonstrates, workers, as the most frequent public trans-
port users, completely changed their travel habits over a 20 year period.
Furthermore, not only did they switch to cars but they also began travel-
ling longer distances (Bole 2011). Train tickets are cheaper than bus ones
in Slovenia, so some bus users switched to train. On the other hand,
on some routes trains are faster than cars due to road traffic jams. In
these cases the number of train passengers has increased. Also the public
perception of the train is much higher than of the bus. Because of these
factors, train travel has remained stable or even has slightly increased,
but bus travel has decreased significantly.
According to the population census of 2002, 68 per cent of employed
people were driving themselves to work, while the number of commuters
(people who do not drive to work themselves, but are fellow car passen-
gers) is 10 times lower (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2003).
The vast majority drive to work alone and some of them take their chil-
dren to school on their way to work. Unfortunately, the last population
census in 2011 does not include any data about the mode of transport
people were taking to work, but the decrease in the number of passen-
gers using public transport clearly shows that the number of drivers who
224 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

drive themselves to work has increased. With daily commuters there is

also a clear difference in the modal split between genders. Of the drivers
who drive themselves to work each day 60 per cent are men, while 40
per cent are women.4 The bus became outdated and is now mainly used
by those who cannot drive (minors) or cannot afford a car (the elderly
and the poor). Even symbolically, the bus was branded as an inferior and
outdated means of transportation, representative of the socialist era, and
today is used most extensively by more marginalized groups of society.5
Gender is also a significant variable among daily commuters who take
the bus to work; the ratio is 3:2 in favour of women. The level of employ-
ment of women and men in Slovenia is almost equal, but statistical data
shows the underprivileged position of women regarding the usage of
the family car. With the increase of the number of cars per household,
however, the differences between both genders have decreased.
Regional comparisons of public transport use among daily commuters
are also interesting because they help explain the causes behind these
everyday mobility changes (Gabrovec and Bole 2009; Bole and Gabrovec
2012). Above-average usage of public transport in Slovenia can only still
be found in the following areas:

● Areas with larger and more significant factories, usually still from the
socialist era;
● Centres of major towns (the capital);
● The least developed rural settlements;
● Atypical areas on the outskirts of towns with competitive train and
poorer road connections.

In all other areas, which represent the majority of the territory of

Slovenia, public transport has been preserved only in its most necessary
form, which provides transport for schoolchildren and a few occasional
passengers. Below, we shed some light on some of the most important
reasons for this revolution in the private mobility of the Slovenian
population – these experiences are very specific to Slovenia; however,
they can indicate the direction that daily mobility research could take
in other post-socialist countries as well.

Policy

The construction of ‘car’ infrastructure and spatial development

At the start of this chapter we mentioned political decisions that also
contribute to changes in commuting habits. This includes not only the
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 225

obvious political changes which have taken place in Slovenia as a post-

socialist country, but a whole range of decisions, from spatial govern-
mental policies to international politics, and especially the accession
process and entry into the European Union. Slovenia’s spatial develop-
ment after 1991 was largely marked by roads – the construction of the
freeway network was a priority and, according to Kos (1994: 223), the
construction of freeways had ‘a legitimizing role in the conditions of
populist (car) orientation of modernism.’ In the development of post-
socialist identity, the construction of the freeway network was shown
as a key ideological generator of development and ‘produced tangible
economic results’ in comparison with the slower and less tangible devel-
opment of public transport, which was also much less popular among
the population (Uršič 2010: 482).
The construction of a fast freeway network had more than just a
symbolic and ideological role however; politicians saw it as a welcome
foundation for showcasing Slovenia’s economic growth. Until 2008,
freeway construction represented the vast majority of all infrastruc-
ture- and construction-related investments (see Figure 11.2), and
the contribution of the construction industry to economic growth
reached 17.5 per cent annually (Usenik and Lipnik 2008). The greatest

100,0

80,0

60,0

40,0

20,0

0,0
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008

Motorways % Other roads % Railways %

Airports % Sea ports %

Figure 11.2 Investments in various transportation sector modes in Slovenia

Source: Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2012.
226 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

investments in the construction of the freeway infrastructure were

made after 2004, when Slovenia entered the European Union and was
thus given the opportunity to obtain funds for these large construc-
tion projects.
Of course, the construction of freeways also affected commuting
patterns. One study (Bole 2011) has shown that the commuting of
workers between places that were connected by the freeway increased
significantly. The freeway network thus has an effect on spatial devel-
opment because it enables increasingly long daily commutes for work,
education, leisure activities and other necessary travel; of course, the
car is completely adjusted to this system and it enables greater flex-
ibility with regard to the selection of the place of work. Due to its
small size, Slovenia became a very monocentric region where people
can commute to work or drive to places of consumption in the capital
on a daily basis, while living even an hour or more away. However,
public transport has not been modernized nor has it become competi-
tive: for the most part, bus lines have not adjusted to the new road
network and buses still take the slower parallel local road network,
even when driving long distances. The railway infrastructure has also
not changed.
Car transportation has also benefitted from the specific settlement
structure of Slovenia, which is typically dispersed in the form of small-
scale suburbanization (Ravbar 1997). Settlement has begun to adjust to
the freeway system as the dominant means of transportation, especially
in the form of dispersed construction with a low population density
surrounding freeway access points (Uršič 2010: 484), and this addition-
ally stimulates car transportation and hinders public transport, which
has more difficulty performing its role in areas with low population
density. In Slovenia, spontaneous carpooling began to develop along
freeway access points where daily commuters in particular negotiate
on commuting to the city together and thus lowering their commuting
costs (Gabrovec and Bole 2009: 91).
In Slovenia, the construction of freeway infrastructure was a high-
priority political decision. The neglect of public transport was also a
political decision. These political decisions affected the future changes
in the mobility of the population and thus the more ramified, expensive
and wasteful infrastructural network.

Reimbursement of commuting costs

An important financial mechanism that indirectly encourages
people’s investment in their means of transportation is the manner of
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 227

Figure 11.3 Example of a spontaneous and unkempt carpooling parking lot next
to the freeway access point south of the capital city of Ljubljana
Source: Janez Nared.

reimbursing commuting costs. In accordance with Slovenian legislation

(Zakon o delovnih razmerjih 2002), employers must ensure the reimburse-
ment of costs for travelling to and from work. This employer obligation
was already in force in socialist Yugoslavia, and after Slovenia became
independent the labour unions also managed to include this obligation
in Slovenian legislation. Details concerning the manner of making this
payment are regulated by collective agreements within particular indus-
tries. As a rule, employees receive their commuting costs reimbursed
in cash, usually as the amount of the price of public transport between
their place of residence and their workplace, and this income is not
taxed. This legal arrangement has numerous positive effects because it
facilitates travel to a wider selection of workplaces for inhabitants in
more remote places, while at the same time it represents a considerable
additional financial source for the socially disadvantaged. On the other
hand, it stimulates suburbanization and dispersed settlement because
moving from the city into the outskirts dozens of kilometres away saves
a significant amount of money when purchasing an apartment, and
228 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

the increased commuting costs must be paid by the employer. Most

employees do not spend their reimbursed commuting costs on public
transport tickets but use them to cover their private transport costs.
Because the price of a bus or train ticket is usually higher than the fuel
used for travelling the same distance, after the employees pay for the
fuel they still have some money left for buying or maintaining their
cars. They save that much more if they carpool to work. An analysis has
shown that the government spends more on reimbursing commuting
costs to employees in public administration and public institutions
than the total income from the sale of tickets of all public transporta-
tion providers in the country (Gabrovec 2012). In this way, with the
help of this legislation, car transportation to work is subsidized by the
employers and represents the institutionalization of automobile culture
in Slovenia.

The chaotic organization of public passenger transport

Uncoordinated and insufficient organization of public transport is char-
acteristic of Slovenia, and this is partly a result of historical development
and partly due to the inefficiency of responsible government bodies.
In the period prior to 1991, bus transportation providers carried the
majority of passengers, and trains carried only about one-tenth of all
public transport passengers (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia
1990). This was partly a result of the politics of the time, which mainly
encouraged road transportation and neglected railways and left them
to stagnate or deteriorate. Bus transportation was provided by ten state-
owned bus companies which held a monopoly in individual regions and
also competed against one another in overlapping areas and on inter-
regional lines. With the exception of a few individual cases, bus compa-
nies did not work together with railway companies, and so there were
no lines serving train stations and bus companies carried their passen-
gers directly to their end destination. After 1991, almost all state-owned
public transport companies were privatized. However, this privatization
did not introduce any changes in the company’s operations. Company
managements did not have any desire to adjust the lines to the changed
working hours of the employees in the service industry, nor to introduce
new lines in the growing suburban settlements. They were satisfied with
mainly transporting secondary school students and other passengers
that did not have access to cars.
Due to the ongoing decline in the number of passengers, bus lines were
cancelled at times when the number of passengers reached a level below
the breakeven point, and the services offered significantly deteriorated,
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 229

especially outside of peak hours, during school holidays and on week-

ends. In the first decade after independence, the government paid practi-
cally no attention to public transport. Because the number of passengers
was declining to the extent that transportation was no longer profitable,
public transport companies were instead simply granted subsidies by
the government. In 2004, the bus companies obtained concessions for
transportation in accordance with European regulations; however, this
was not based on an open competition, but all existing bus companies
were granted concessions for lines that had already been in operation.
As a result of this kind of development, transportation scheduling has
remained practically unchanged in the past couple of decades, there are
significantly fewer rides in the same public transport network, and bus
companies did not even re-route their lines onto the newly constructed
freeways, so they became increasingly less competitive compared with
private transportation with regard to travel time. There is no tariff
integration, neither at the state nor regional levels, and there is also
no uniform information portal for public passenger travel. Schedules
are only posted on the websites of individual transportation compa-
nies (some smaller transportation companies do not even post their
schedules), and some transportation companies do not even post their
schedules at stops despite the legal requirement to do so, making public
transport almost useless for occasional passengers. Not surprisingly, the
consequence of this development is a significant decline in the number
of passengers, especially in bus transportation. Only in recent years have
certain improvements been seen in the public transport services offered,
resulting from the initiatives of individual local communities (Gabrovec
and Bole 2009).
A further consequence of this lack of competition and poor quality of
public transport, is that in recent years carpooling has grown consider-
ably in popularity, especially among young people. One student initia-
tive resulted in the creation of the website Prevoz.org (Prevoz 2012),
which was initially meant to help coordinate car transport for univer-
sity students within Slovenia and was created by a group of students
majoring in information technology and social science. Soon the use of
the web portal expanded beyond the ranks of students. As part of the
project ‘Slovenia Is Reducing CO2: Best Practices’, the portal was often
presented as a best-practice example of achieving sustainable mobility
because it increased car occupancy (Mladenovič 2012). However, one
negative aspect was overlooked: due to the lower transport price and
especially the greater speed, carpooling took a share of passengers away
from public transport, and so its effect on reducing CO2 emissions is
230 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

questionable. Instead of being a ‘good practice’ that could complement

available public transport, carpooling has instead become a competitor
for poorly available public transport.

The economy: purchasing power and motorization

Compared to other European countries, the development of motori-

zation in Slovenia stands out. Compared to other former socialist
countries, only the Czech Republic has had a similar development to
Slovenia. At the time of Slovenia’s independence in 1991, there were
approximately 300 cars per 1,000 inhabitants (Statistical Office of the
Republic of Slovenia 2012). In the Czech Republic at the time, there
were 248 cars per 1,000 inhabitants and in all other socialist countries
at the time there were fewer than 200. In western European countries,
the number was around 400, and in certain countries, such as Ireland or
Portugal, the level of motorization at the time was even lower than in
Slovenia (Eurostat 2012). The level of motorization thus corresponded
with the purchasing power of the population; however, it was signifi-
cantly lower in other European socialist countries at the time due to
various red-tape obstacles and long waiting periods for purchasing cars.
Nonetheless, purchasing a car in Slovenia was also to a large extent tied
to domestic (Yugoslav) producers. Similarly to other socialist countries,
the purchase of a car was connected with a waiting period of several
months due to an insufficient supply, the import of foreign cars was
expensive due to high customs duties, and the purchase itself was not
possible in domestic currency and was thus more difficult to carry out.
Due to a limited supply of new cars, the price of used cars was relatively
high. Slovenia has thus seen an uninterrupted and quite steady motor-
ization growth since the 1960s until today, when it exceeds 500 cars
per 1,000 inhabitants, making it comparable to, or even higher than,
economically more developed European countries (Statistical Office of
the Republic of Slovenia 2012; Eurostat 2012). The process is thus very
similar to the one in western European countries, only with a time
lag. Whereas Germany reached a level of motorization of 300 cars per
1,000 inhabitants in the mid-1970s (Kuhnimhof et al. 2012), Slovenia
only reached this level in the early 1990s because a large portion of the
rural population was unable to afford a car in the 1970s. For example,
in 1977 Rus (1977) claimed that in many villages in Suha krajina (a
karst region approximately 50 km east of Ljubljana) no inhabitant
owned a car. Because some of these villages did not even have any
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 231

public transport connections with the employment centres, its people

started migrating away during this period. Now, however, the degree of
the motorization of this area has reached the Slovenian national level
(Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2012). Significantly it was
the ownership of cars and the subsequent connection with workplaces
that halted the depopulation of the area and enabled the preservation
of the cultural landscape.
Today, Slovenia has reached and even exceeds the level of motoriza-
tion of the most economically developed countries in Europe, even
though its income and purchasing power are significantly lower. This
means that the Slovenian population has to either use a large part
of its income to purchase cars, or purchase cheaper cars. The data
concerning the consumption patterns by household for 2005 (Eurostat
2012) show that the average Slovenian household uses 7.1 per cent
of its income to purchase personal cars. In the European Union, this
percentage is higher only in Luxembourg and Malta. Even when it
comes to total transportation costs, Slovenian households surpass the
majority of European countries at 15.6 per cent in 2005. With regard
to transportation costs, Slovenians spend very little on transportation
services or public passenger transport; that is, they spend less than
half of 1 per cent of their household expenditures on this. However,
in contrast to expenditures for private transport, these expenditures
have been decreasing in both relative and absolute terms in the past
decade (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2012). It is there-
fore evident that Slovenians are more willing to give up other goods in
order to be able to purchase a car. This is also shown by the results of
studies conducted by the Statistical Office of Slovenia (2012). In only
65 per cent of Slovenian households can all of the household members
afford to take a week-long vacation. On the other hand, 80 per cent
of households own a car and, of the remaining 20 per cent, only one-
quarter cannot afford one while three-quarters do not need one. On
the basis of the indicators above, two questions may be asked. First,
is the willingness of Slovenians to spend an above-average portion of
their income for their means of transportation a result of necessity
because they could not otherwise fulfil their basic mobility needs, or
is it the result of a specific lifestyle and the fact that a car still repre-
sents an important status symbol? This raises another question: will
motorization continue to increase in Slovenia or will it, similar to what
studies in Germany show (Kuhnimhof et al. 2012), begin to stagnate
and gradually decline?
232 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

Changes in lifestyle and work habits

Travel chains and life values

Lifestyle can be defined according to different levels of mobility. For
example, Drozg (2012: 166) defined four types of lifestyles according to
mobility: ‘from very mobile with a wide home-range to less mobile with
a small home-range’. This analysis of mobility, according to the type of
place of residence, showed that there is a larger portion of inhabitants
with a more mobile lifestyle in the suburbs and in the urbanized coun-
tryside than in cities and the less urbanized countryside. The percentage
of inhabitants living in the urbanized countryside has been increasing
consistently in the past few decades, and this area also has an above-
average percentage of households with dependent children. It is these
households that are the most dependent on private transport due to the
transportation of children to school and various after-school activities.
This is also clearly evident from the statistical data concerning assets
(Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2012). Ninety-eight per
cent of households with two or more adults and at least one dependent
child own a car. The inhabitants of this type of household, with the
typical travel chain of home-school-work-store-home or similar, most
certainly depend on private transport for covering their daily routes,
living as they do outside of major cities. Public transport providers
did not adjust their services for this group of urbanized countryside
residents, neither with their schedules nor with their pricing policies.
Interestingly, fewer single-parent families with at least one dependent
child own a car: in this group, only 79 per cent of households (in
contrast to 98 per cent in the previous group) own a car. In these house-
holds, it is evident that purchasing power is lower because 13 per cent
stated that they cannot afford a car. It is true, however, that adults with
children have not been convinced even by the better public transport
services in more economically developed countries. In Germany, for
example, an increased use of multi-modal transport among younger
men was documented; however this finding does not apply to young
couples with children (Kuhnimhof et al. 2012). The process of young
families moving to the countryside with a poor public passenger trans-
port system is undoubtedly one of the main factors affecting above-
average motorization in Slovenia.
The practice of using public transport also has negative connota-
tions; for the majority of Slovenians, this is a service that is intended
only for underage students and poor people who cannot afford a car.
This attitude is also confirmed by a Eurobarometer study (European
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 233

Commission 2006), in which European Union citizens were asked

whether they would use private transport less frequently if fuel prices
doubled. Twenty-two per cent answered that they would drive much
less frequently, 31 per cent answered that they would drive somewhat
less frequently, and 26 per cent would drive as often as usual. According
to this survey, Slovenians are the least willing among all Europeans to
change their habits; 9 per cent answered that they would drive much
less, and a staggering 47 per cent answered that they would drive as
often as usual. As an alternative to private transport, Slovenians are less
willing to use public transport – that is, merely 26 per cent of respond-
ents (37 per cent in Europe); on the other hand, they would be more
willing to carpool with relatives, acquaintances or neighbours (23 per
cent of respondents, Europe 10 per cent). This greater willingness to use
public transport in Europe was reported by the residents of large cities
and those with higher levels of education. On the one hand, this shows a
greater environmental awareness among the educated, and on the other
hand it also shows a better reputation commanded by public travel. This
relationship between travel habits and education is worth noting. What
is also interesting is the educational structure of commuters according
to their selection of mode of transport for travelling to work, shown in
Table 11.1.

Table 11.1 Daily commuters to work according to mode of travel and education
(structural percentages), Census 2002

Foot Car,
or as Car, as
Education Total bike Motorcycle driver passenger Bus Train Other

Total 100.0 14.9 0.3 67.7 6.3 8.9 1.3 0.6

No 100.0 27.6 1.2 35.3 11.1 21.5 1.7 1.7
education
Did not 100.0 23.3 1.8 41.7 10.1 19.6 2.2 1.2
finish
elementary
school
Elementary 100.0 20.3 0.8 50.0 9.9 16.6 1.4 0.9
school
Secondary 100.0 13.6 0.3 70.5 5.8 7.9 1.3 0.6
school
Junior 100.0 14.6 0.1 73.1 5.3 5.6 1.1 0.2
college
College 100.0 13.9 0.1 74.5 4.3 5.8 1.3 0.2

Source: Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2003.

234 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

It is clear that the higher the education the smaller the percentage of
daily commuters travelling to work using public passenger transport or as
passengers. The percentage of daily commuters that travelled to work in
2002 as car drivers is twice as high among the highly educated compared
with drivers with incomplete elementary education. In Slovenia, higher
education is in no way connected with better environmental awareness,
which would arguably result in selecting a more sustainable form of
mobility. On the contrary, higher education is connected with higher
income and more cars per household (Gabrovec 2009).

The flexible organization of the work process

Undoubtedly the radical change which marked Slovenia’s develop-
ment into a post-socialist society was the change in the economy. The
Slovenian economy had been designed in a typical Fordist manner,
based on large factories with a strictly organized work process (Bole
2008). The crisis in the Fordist organization of the economy began a few
years before the fall of socialism, and it was most evident after 1990 with
accelerated deindustrialization and tertiarization, particularly in larger
towns (Lorber 2006). The spatial structure of the country also adjusted
to the production system analogically, a phenomenon best described by
Soja (2000) in his description of the postmodern or post-industrial city.
Especially in the suburbanized environment, where mainly smaller and
medium-sized companies are located, new commercial, business and
shopping zones are appearing, while the old socialist industrial zones
are also obtaining an increasingly more consumer and commercial func-
tion (Bole 2008). Traffic connections and the accessibility of these new
economic locations became even more important from the point of view
of the users (employees and consumers) because this new post-industrial
spatial structure requires a highly flexible mobility of inhabitants, infor-
mation and capital. As the distances between the locations of economic
activities and the residences of people, who are slowly ‘fleeing’ to the
suburbs, increased in Slovenia after 1991, accessibility also became more
car-dependent (Uršič 2010: 478). However, there is a mutual connection
between cause and effect here; the use of cars is not only strengthened
because of the separation of production, consumption and residence
space, but also because multifunctional areas (such as the typical old
city centre) are slowly disappearing due to the spread of monofunctional
areas, which results in an increasing need for travel (ibid.).
Due to the flexible nature of work in the post-Fordist economy, these
newer business areas are much more oriented towards car transport,
which, at least as understood by many, enables greater flexibility and
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 235

mobility among workers and consumers. The flexible organization of

work is based on workers’ individual abilities, diverse job tasks, flexible
and irregular working hours, individual work contracts, ‘just-in-time’
production, and so on (Bole 2008: 36). Urry (2007: 120) describes a
similar process: ‘technological and organizational changes, which break
down distinctions of night and day, working week and weekend, home
and work, leisure and work.’ Public passenger transport in Slovenia has
not been good at keeping up with this kind of restructuring and the
demands of the flexible (post-industrial) organization of the economy.
Any adjustments to the new system of work and living have taken place
slowly and are still not finished. In many places in Slovenia, bus and
train schedules are still adjusted to ‘factory’ work, for which there is
simply no real need anymore because traditional industry disappeared
or was significantly reduced in size. For example, the last buses from
Idrija, where half of all workers still work in industry, depart for the
surrounding villages at 2:20 p.m. (Ministry of Infrastructure and Spatial
Planning 2012), timetabled for the end of work in the local factories.
Workers with a different work schedule thus do not have the possibility
of commuting to work by means of public transport. The current service-
oriented economy requires flexibility with regard to mobility; however,
public passenger transport finds this difficult to fulfil. For example, other
studies have shown that in the areas of Slovenia where the service sector
of the economy dominates, cars have an above-average significance in
commuting (Gabrovec and Bole 2009: 62).
Public transport has gradually adjusted to the needs of some social
groups who depend on it – especially schoolchildren and factory
workers, for whom a neo-Fordist manner of work with its less flexible
organization of working hours is still typical. However, these two groups
represent a relatively small share of the Slovenian population – the
remaining population, representing the majority, depends on transpor-
tation by car.

Conclusion

It is clear that there have been fundamental changes in commuting

in post-socialist countries; this is shown by both official data and
by different case studies from individual cities. What unites all post-
socialist countries is a certain heritage, especially the collectivization
of society and economy, which shaped the population’s commuting
patterns. Entry into a new social order was supposed to put all of these
countries ‘back on track’ in order for them to become more like their
236 David Bole and Matej Gabrovec

western neighbours. However, here caution is necessary; it is true that

the differences in commuting between countries have reduced, as far
as general car use by the population is concerned. On the other hand,
however, while many post-socialist countries have become more subor-
dinate to car culture, others (e.g., Hungary) have preserved a consider-
able collective basis for commuting in comparison with neighbouring
countries. We therefore believe that the excessive simplification found
in the notion of ‘catching up’ with countries with a capitalist tradition is
somewhat out of place. We propose a more considered thesis: that post-
socialist countries have developed their own type of commuting, which
today retains remnants of their collectivist past alongside their capitalist
present. Post-socialist mobility has not, therefore, been a leap into capi-
talist mobility, but a special mix of processes which are both ongoing and
place-specific. Greater car use more or less follows Western trends, but
in some post-socialist countries public transport is undergoing a more
rapid decline and breakdown than has happened in the West. Is this the
result of a negative relationship with collective transport, a consequence
of rejecting the earlier collective principles of communism?
The goal of this chapter has been to present, explain and interpret
commuting habits in Slovenia. Based on this case, it has been shown
how the remnants of the socialist past, post-socialist forces and the
geographical characteristics of space are creating today’s commuting
patterns. The remnants of the communist past include various factors;
for example, the obligatory reimbursement of employees’ cost of travel-
ling to work. Other factors depend on the current state of the capitalist
order (e.g., consumerism, the rising standard of living and passengers’
travel habits) and are characteristic not only of Slovenia, but are global.
For other factors, history and social trajectories are less relevant than the
geographical specifics of Slovenia itself (e.g., a specific spatial develop-
ment, policies and political decisions). Together these factors have been
shaping commuting patterns in Slovenia which in many respects are
worrisome and unsustainable. We believe that to fully understand the
implications of post-socialist everyday mobility, more critical qualita-
tive investigations of daily commuting practices and experiences, from
different territories and from different perspectives, are necessary.

Notes
1. Eurostat 2010; Eurostat 2011 and Eurostat 2012.
2. Data on motorway length by country and by year is available on Eurostat
database portal (see Eurostat 2012).
 Daily Mobility in Slovenia 237

3. All data refers to 2010 and is taken from Eurostat (2011); they include 27 EU
countries, three EEC countries, and Turkey, Croatia and Macedonia.
4. Special analysis of 2002 population census data was made. Data on modal
split and gender were coupled.
5. Improving the public perception of buses and trains has become an important
goal of national authorities, demonstrated by financing marketing campaigns
such as www.prednostzavse.si, which aim to popularize public transport in
Slovenia.

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12
Life-Worlds of Deceleration:
Reflections on the ‘New Mobilities
Paradigm’ through Ethnographic
Research in Post-Socialist Germany
Ina Dietzsch

Introduction

This paper is about mobility and its pace. There is a basic assumption
that modern societies are societies of increased mobility and accelera-
tion (Rosa 2010; Sheller and Urry 2006; Bauman 2000). This assump-
tion is embedded in the cardinal modern paradigm of eternal growth
which apparently unabashedly determines economic processes, polit-
ical action, cultural values and moral geographies. However, within the
European framework of many unclear, contradictory and continuously
changing regulations and processes and within ‘fragmented law zones’
(such as EU, the Eurozone or Schengen area) without one single centre
of political decision making (Faludi 2008) we have to ask how people
generate their own, more complex European geographies (Hess 2006:
115), mobilities and time regimes. Referring to Anna Loewenhaupt
Tsing, the argument I will make in this chapter is led by the basic
assumption that mobilities come to life in ‘frictions’ (Tsing 2004). Tsing
argues that,

[s]peaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction

in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. ... Roads are a good
image for conceptualizing how friction works: Roads create pathways
that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they
limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a struc-
ture of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling,
excluding, and particularizing. (ibid.: 6)

240
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 241

Such friction, for instance, comes to the fore if one considers that EU
citizens, imagined as ‘mobile dromocratic travellers’, generate them-
selves in transnationalism as a mode of social reproduction and create
populations with members balancing two (or more) local existences
(Karakayah and Tsianos 2007: 9).
For my argument I will draw on the results of an interdisciplinary
research partnership that consisted of five sociological and anthropo-
logical projects, carried out between 2007 and 2010 in Wittenberge,
a shrinking town in the northeast of the German federal state of
Brandenburg. The main method of the research partnership was ethno-
graphic fieldwork and we endeavoured to work in a collective, collabora-
tive and publically engaged way. Several PhD students lived in the town
for about a year, conducted participant observation and interviews with
residents, entrepreneurs and politicians. They collaborated with artists to
contact people, build trust and analyse research materials. Furthermore,
they tried to make their research as transparent as possible by organizing
events and cultural highlights in town and maintaining an office visible
to everyone, prominently placed on the main street.
Wittenberge is a former industrial town, located in the former GDR. It
had grown rapidly from the beginning of the twentieth century to the
1980s as part of wider processes of industrialization. During this period, it
was able to benefit from its favourable geographic position between Berlin
and Hamburg. Since the 1980s however, it has lost almost all its industry
and a third of its population. The formerly advantageous geographical
situation has changed as it has become disconnected from the new corri-
dors of speed: since 2013, most high speed trains have passed through
without stopping at Wittenberge’s large railway station. The large station
building now appears even more over-dimensional than it already did,
since the town has lost its status as one of the GDR’s main railway hubs.
The town is shrinking. Populated increasingly by elderly people and
decreasing in the number of its inhabitants, the town has to fight for its
infrastructure and physical connectedness to transregional or even global
space day by day. Because of the massive, irreversible out-migration of
young people this previous middle-sized town has been forced to trans-
form itself into a small town, and so has its urbanity.1 Public discourses of
‘shrinking’ regions and cities started to take hold in Germany at the turn
of the century, in the context of a governmental programme trying to
respond to the vacancy of at least one million homes in the eastern part of
the country. The programme aimed to ‘take apartments off the market’, to
cite the official term, meaning in reality the demolition of buildings.2 At
that time, ‘shrinking’ named the unthinkable – something diametrically
242 Ina Dietzsch

opposed to what had, up to that point, been the unchallenged assump-

tion that German post-war modernity was characterized by continuous
growth and acceleration. I remember finding it very disturbing myself to
hear for the first time the suggestion that entire cities could be ‘given up’
and human settlements allowed to be reclaimed by nature.3
Beside its use in the context of urban planning and urban policy, the
term shrinking also has to be seen as a cultural category describing everyday
life experiences and activities of a ‘residual’ population. Whereas many
urban planners and policy-makers understand shrinkage simply as nega-
tive growth or the reversal of growth I argue that it is much more than
that. In terms of social relationships for instance, it means far more than
simply the decrease of networks. Through the out-migration of mostly
younger people, in a cycle of decline, families, social networks and rela-
tionships are perforated quite randomly. Moreover, the everyday life of
people who stay is full of incidents indicating that the remaining physical
fabric of the town is too large for its purpose. The range of such experi-
ences reaches from observations of very small concerns to those of a wider
extent. Smaller examples include the wholesale packages that are too big
for a newly set up small shop, or the over-sized grill at the weekly market
serving only a few customers with bratwurst (Dietzsch and Scholl 2011).
However, in some respects the entire public infrastructure of the town is
affected. It becomes too large and unaffordable. Schools and hospitals are
closed, and often somewhere in the middle of the town a gaping wound
of demolished apartment buildings reminds one of what has happened.
The growing age of the population, the high unemployment rate
(about 22 per cent in the region) and the withdrawal of the global
economy, furthermore, lead to the collective experience of having too
much time. Time gained by global processes of technical acceleration
(e.g., the development of means of transportation, services supported
by digital means of communication doing logistic work) can no longer
be filled in an economic sense by useful activities. This has changed
everyday life patterns of interrelating time and space. In the following,
I will expand upon three points: the reduction of spatial horizons and
the speed of everyday activities while maintaining the positive value
of speed and growth (lubricants); the co-existence of acceleration and
deceleration (synchronization work), and a re-writing of space-time
structures (stones on the road).

European mobilities4

The dissolution of the Eastern bloc has removed many barriers for
the accelerated circulation of capital, goods, ideas, human beings and
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 243

diseases (Kodalle and Rosa 2008: ix). Commentators have highlighted

the increase, since the 1980s, of suitcase trade and border-crossing
petty trades, as well as registered and unregistered seasonal workers, as
a result of disparate living conditions in Europe. They have pointed to
the facilitation of trans-border traffic after 1989 (Wallace 2002; Iglicka
1999; Wallace et al. 1997; Konstantinov 1996), and after 2004 (Eade and
Valkanova 2009; Burell 2009; Cyrus 2006; Egbert 2006), and the increase
in mobility as a result of the gradual equalization of working permis-
sions for citizens from states of EU-accession after 2004, as well as the
growth of low budget airlines (Färber 2011; Burrell 2009).
This new freedom of movement and the high levels of inner European
mobility, however, tend to make us forget that some have to stay ‘in
place’ in order to enable others to be mobile (Sassen 2002; Bauman
2000). And indeed, by no means are all European citizens free movers.
In 2004 the Swedish geographer Richard Ek criticized EU policy for privi-
leging projects that promote dromocracy (the power of speed) through
new infrastructures, and imaginations of EU citizens as highly mobile
dromocratic travellers (Ek 2004: 18). His critique is only one of the
voices reminding us of the problematic assumptions entailed in omni-
present discourses that privileges frictionless mobility and confirm the
hegemony of the positive value of eternal growth. The ambitious political
goal of leaving no individual at a disadvantage because of where he or
she lives is being realized in the EU by infrastructural measures – such as
mega-corridors between large cities – that go along neatly with the idea
of ‘catch-up’ modernization. Although the new European Commission
White Paper of 2011, ‘Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area –
Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system’, is more
moderate in its goals and more responsible in terms of energy use, it is
still oriented towards steady economic growth and the conviction that
there is no alternative to increasing mobility:

Mobility is vital for the internal market and for the quality of life
of citizens as they enjoy their freedom to travel. Transport enables
economic growth and job creation: it must be sustainable in the light
of the new challenges we face ... The future prosperity of our conti-
nent will depend on the ability of all of its regions to remain fully and
competitively integrated in the world economy. Efficient transport is
vital in making this happen. (European Commission 2011: 3)

However, a perspective that understands mobility as coming into being

in frictions (Tsing 2004) reveals that the maverick logic of migration has
also enforced new dynamics alongside the external borders of the EU. In
244 Ina Dietzsch

the publication of the project ‘transit migration’ carried out in 2003–06

by German researchers and artists (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe
2007), the authors argue that the increasing facilitation of mobility has
been accompanied by a new ‘political style’ to govern and regulate migra-
tion (Karakayah and Tsianos 2007: 7). This new style made border spaces
in the Southeast of Europe a laboratory of migration policy and places
of deceleration (ibid.: 8). Combining ideas from the work of Agamben,
Foucault and Virilio, the detention camps for migrants in particular are
described as ‘speed boxes’ (Virilio 1986), places where the suspension of
order is transformed from a holding operation into a permanent tech-
nique of government (Panagiotidis and Tsianos 2007: 78). The border
space produced there ‘represents a multifaceted constitutive plane of
struggle, where the regime of mobility control is itself challenged by
the fluid, clandestine, multidirectional, and context-dependent forms
of mobility’ (Tsianos et al. 2009: 2–3). The camps hence create their own
mobility composed of waiting, hiding, uncalculated detours, intersta-
tions, places of settlement, of being rejected and coming back. These
camps are not places of avoiding in-migration. Like waiting queues, they
are places of deceleration, temporarily slowing down the speed of arrival
(Panagiotidis and Tsianos 2007: 82).

They bring illegal and clandestine migration back into society by

rendering it visible and compatible with a broad regime of temporal
control. Decelerated circulation means that migration is not regu-
lated through space, but through time. (Tsianos et al. 2009: 8)

Mimi Sheller and John Urry both assert and call for a ‘new mobilities
paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) in the social sciences and anthro-
pology. They highlight increasing mobility and emancipation from
geographical place as the dominant contemporary development (see also
Bauman 2000). This corresponds to a perception of accelerated lives to
which many recent technological changes have contributed. However,
the example of transit migration above gives an indication that in the
context of increasing mobility, slowness and deceleration also occur and
require attention in research.
Looking towards physics for a definition, the sociologist Hartmut
Rosa understands acceleration as an increase in speed followed by an
increase of quantity moved within a particular temporal unit. Quantity
can be related to all kind of things: events, experiences, communicated
words, produced or consumed goods, life partners, jobs, educational
training and so on. As a result of the progress in media technology and
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 245

technologies of transport the quantity of all these things appear to grow.

Rosa argues that this is because of a taken for granted link between tech-
nological and social acceleration (the acceleration of lives, the thickness
of situations of change of partners, apartments etc.) that is actually in
need of explanation. Rosa suggests that media technology and technolo-
gies of transport or logistics do not necessarily correspond to the pace
of social life, and that the relationship between them requires careful
examination. The time saved by technological progress does not neces-
sarily have to result in new and more activities. It does not have to lead
to an increase in the quantity of things transported and dealt with. It
could instead contribute to more free space, idleness and autonomy over
one’s time in the lives of individuals. However, this is apparently not
the case.
In order to better understand the forces that link technological and
social acceleration, Rosa demands a more exact, categorical definition
of the process of acceleration, one that does justice to several distinct
aspects of acceleration and to the relationship between deceleration
and acceleration. He outlines five categories in particular: natural speed
limits, ‘deceleration islands’, retardation as a dysfunctional side-effect,
and intentional deceleration as structural or cultural inertia (Rosa
2008).
With a view to contemporary Europe, I would add to this the fact
that regular transmigration between eastern and western parts of Europe
(Eade and Valkanova 2009; Burrell 2009; Smith and Eade 2008) intro-
duces new landscapes of inequality, inserting divisions between the
places people migrate from and those they move to. Increasing inner
European migration creates residual sedentary populations (see Williams
2009; Miegel 2002) in peripheral regions that are becoming increasingly
‘empty’. Each of these populations has their own logic of practicing and
interpreting mobility. Mobility in such places is often understood as the
out-migration of others, the loss of friends and of close relationships with
adult children or grandchildren. In 2004, the German anthropologist
Franziska Becker, at that time working on mobility in Görlitz (another
shrinking city in the very east of Germany), stated that mobility and
immobility were associated with very different characteristics: ‘Spatial
mobility is put on a level with individuality and flexibility and is highly
valued. In opposition to that sedentarism is associated with stagnation
and immobility ... Sedentary people simultaneously appear as left behind
and backward’ (Becker 2004: 257, my translation). Drawing on the
results of our research in Wittenberge, I will argue that Becker’s conclu-
sion still applies to many regions in former East Germany. However, it
246 Ina Dietzsch

has to be broadened in light of newer developments. In the discursive

framework of energy scarcity, climate change and aging populations,
sedentarism and self-chosen immobility (even parting from the idea of
eternal economic growth), are gaining new (everyday) political signifi-
cance. This discourse considers voluntary and enforced sedentarism and
deceleration in new ways, including ‘lubrication’, ‘synchronization’ and
the ‘intentional slowing down’ of movement – three dimensions that
I offer up here to elaborate further here on the concept of ‘frictions’,
proposed by Tsing (2004).

Slowing down while maintaining the value of mobility

and speed: lubricants

In one of the publications arising from our research collaborations

in Wittenberge, anthropologist Anna Eckert and sociologist Andreas
Willisch state:

The town presents itself towards strangers as a town of traffic. There

is the river Elbe and its port, the railroad with the yard office and the
national highway with its bridge across the river. The inhabitants pin
their hopes for economic connections on the expansion of the port
which is funded by the government. Since the transition, the railway
repair company has been the largest employer on site. (Eckert and
Willisch 2012: 183, my translation)

In informal conversations, inhabitants couch their increasing discon-

nectedness in ironic terms and metaphors. As one interviewee said:
‘Imagine the following: the earth moves and rotates. Where does the
earth stand still? There are two places where the earth does not rotate:
the poles. I think the poles are in Wittenberge.’5
One of the frictions which make mobility emerge is produced by
the fact that Wittenberge’s people are coerced into being immobile
or slowing down. Anna Eckert examined the everyday mobility of
long-term unemployed people (Eckert 2011). Her results suggest that
unemployed people are disciplined by the job centre in ways that tie
them disproportionately to the town, in multiple ways: they have
to be permanently available; need permission for absence on week-
days, are obliged to attend courses proposed by the job centre which
thus also determines the place of those courses and so on. Supported
by job centre measures, however, they also keep themselves fit for
future employment opportunities within the logic of mobility and
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 247

acceleration – some by staying physically active, others at least in their

minds. Instead of practicing mobility over longer distances they talk
about others who are travelling, for holidays and jobs – mostly associ-
ating mobility with creativity and freedom. Accounts of the mobility
of others are consolidated by those who portray immobility as a sign
of passivity, stagnancy, isolation and even stupidity. However, Eckert’s
research participants are not only trapped within this framework of
positive mobility accounts. Their situation also affords an astonishing
amount of effort to stay actively in motion and connected to the world
around them.
One of the participants thus described how he regularly visits the large
supermarket ‘Kaufland’. He even calls these visits ‘Kaufland journeys’.
Sometimes he leaves in the morning before breakfast for a planned
journey by car to the out-of-town location of the supermarket. He does
not intend to buy anything there but strolls through the mostly still
empty aisles between the shelves. He enjoys being addressed as someone,
as a consumer and potential participant in the market. Eckert describes
the scene vividly: ‘One can imagine: soft music, the giant range of
commodities. Everything has been newly ordered, still untouched by
other costumers, the floor shines, a kind of private viewing of goods’
(ibid.: 138).
The second set of practices Eckert has observed is the intentional
stretching of time for daily activities. The most common method for
this is to swap faster means of transportations for slower ones, that is
selling the car and going by bicycle, or walking instead of cycling. This
also alters residents’ sense of distance and entails new experiences and
encounters. As one woman explained, when asked about the destina-
tion of her one week holiday: ‘I went by bicycle to my friend in the next
street.’ Referring to other examples, she also showed how people tried
to fill their time with worthwhile activities such as going on planned
daily laps through the town in connection with invented useful tasks.
Walking the dog, regularly visiting friends or relatives, window shop-
ping and sports like Nordic walking or jogging all legitimize the outdoor
presence of the residents and create opportunities to experience being
seen in town, strengthening the feeling of being part of society.
Individual practices like this are accompanied by a slowness that can
be sensed by everyone on their tours through the town. Modern devel-
opment seems to be upside-down: instead of the usual acceleration of
urban places, the formerly busy town that was once determined by the
time regimes of industrial work, has slowed down. With one exception,
everything shrunk instead of growing: in contrast to what the German
248 Ina Dietzsch

philosopher Hermann Lübbe calls the ‘shrinkage of the present’,

resulting from acceleration (Lübbe 1998: 272) the present appears to be
expanded. For those who still believe in the arrival of a ‘big investor’,
one day in the future, this slowness is a kind of ‘standby modus’. The
town seems to be only temporarily asleep, waiting until a major invest-
ment of one type or another revives it. And until this happens, like in a
moratorium, people try to keep themselves mobile and flexible, main-
taining the capacity to participate in potential future accelerations. By
doing so, they contribute to the lubrication of a global mobile system
that draws on resources as and when needed, even while they are seem-
ingly ‘standing still’ or ‘slowing down’.

The co-existence of acceleration and deceleration:

synchronization work

Another kind of friction is caused by the necessity of coordinating

different time regimes. As Rosa argues, ‘Wherever processes need to be
synchronized acceleration leads to problems of friction. They can be
sensed in everyday life in those places where high speed processes meet
backward-systems. Everything that is able to go faster is retarded by
what goes slower.’ And this increasingly creates social impatience (Rosa
2008: 17).
For example, a third of the population of Wittenberge have jobs
which put them above the basic subsistence level, and half of them
commute. They participate in, and co-produce, a highly mobile environ-
ment, crowding the train station in the early mornings and evenings,
or commuting by car and often only returning on the weekends.
Greenfield shopping centres around the town or in the suburbs of Berlin
and Hamburg are also visited by car. Within this environment of acceler-
ated mobility, poorer inhabitants are forced to move at a much slower
pace, often without a car because they cannot afford it. Their strength
and time resources are drained enormously by this lack of access to a car
and the need to rely on other modes of transport (Eckert and Willisch
2012: 183, my translation).
Hence, experiences of de- and acceleration have to be balanced. This
can be observed most clearly in the newsroom of the local newspaper
by looking at the work of local journalists. Journalistic work, even that
of a local newspaper, is connoted strongly in terms of mobility: infor-
mation runs, texts are running out, something runs through the news
wires.6 Local journalists cannot survive without a car. Usually they are
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 249

sent by their editors-in-chief to spread out into the region in order to

collect regional news and keep networks going. They have to make
sure that they are first on the scene – sometimes they are even asked
to be in different places simultaneously. Journalism in general is very
much a business of space-compressing transport and short-lived infor-
mation. Moreover, its infrastructure is characterized by transnationally
operating publishers. And finally, recent technological developments
and increasing problems attracting junior staff to live in the town, have
contributed to a situation where ever more information needs to be
processed by ever fewer people.
In a place like Wittenberge, the time pressure and the accelerated
conditions under which journalists have to work collide with the
increased time of their readers. Whereas the local journalists find it diffi-
cult to catch-up with the increasing speed of their work process, causing
more mistakes with the accuracy of information or spelling and typing
errors, their readers have more and more time at their disposal. They are
often unemployed or retired, trying to kill time through useful activi-
ties. That is why they read more slowly and more carefully. By doing so,
they notice more mistakes and complain about the declining quality of
their paper. Different time regimes have to be negotiated by both sides
in everyday practice and this indeed causes impatience, as argued by
Rosa.
The situation in the local newsroom is paralleled by many other occa-
sions when fast and slow life-worlds clash: the everyday experience of
high speed trains passing through, set against the many local people
who are dependent on the slower and not always reliable regional
trains, or people who meet in shops and on the street, some being in
a hurry and others trying to expand their activities to take up even
more time. The collision of different patterns of time and space was also
clearly demonstrated by conflicting interests when plans for the pedes-
trianization of the main high street were proposed. Whereas people in
gainful employment and shop owners wanted to make sure that valu-
able customers were able to reach shops as easily as possible by car,
others asked for benches to rest on and for easy access for bicycles and
Zimmer frames.
I would like to make one last point in connection with the co-exist-
ence of acceleration and deceleration. It is not just the case that some
have to stay in order to allow others to be mobile as argued above: the
opposite is also true. Some need to be mobile to sustain those who
are less mobile, for instance by taking children to school or providing
250 Ina Dietzsch

mobile health care. The consumer gap created by a lack of shops and
the poor selection of clothes and other goods is filled by highly mobile
people from Vietnam, India or Pakistan providing an odd assortment of
goods from world-wide Chinese distributors. These are people who settle
just for a short time in order to earn money in the interstices between
accelerating and decelerating life-worlds.
Following Hartmut Rosa and Klaus Kodalle’s arguments, all these
incidents can be understood as aspects of a ‘desynchronization’ of time
regimes within a community which requires new synchronization work
by individuals and institutions (2008: ix). What is to be synchronized is
not only the simultaneous existence of different speeds. With accelera-
tion and deceleration we also find a contemporality of time regimes that
evolve in opposite directions.

Turning away from the paradigm of growth: stones on

the road

A third kind of friction appears as a result of attempts to regain autonomy

in a world that is increasingly perceived as hopelessly beyond one’s
grasp. As described above, some long-term unemployed people adopt
strategies that cohere with the logics of growth and acceleration. Each
of them tries out an individualized pragmatic solution to deal with the
surfeit of time and geographical disconnectedness. One could also say
that social inequality here is translated into time-inequality (Nowotny
1989). This inequality also affects the resources that people have avail-
able to develop alternative practices and ideas for living that subvert
the hegemony of dromocracy. As speed and hypermobility also carry
negative connotations such as being addictive and leading to a loss of
freedom, self-control and efficiency through the retarding side-effects
that they produce (Klein 2012: 31), some of our research participants
partly sought to regain a sense of productivity and self-control by
making decisions over how far they moved and how they spent time
that were based on their own needs. Examining what we have else-
where termed ‘slow living à la Wittenberge’ (cf. Dietzsch and Scholl
2011; Dietzsch 2012) reveals an interesting parallel to the adoption of
growth-sceptical cultural models which have been developed in situ-
ations of wealth. After conducting research on slow living as a social
movement in Europe, Wendy Parking and Goeffrey Craig (2006), two
cultural studies’ scholars from New Zealand, for instance emphasize that
slow living is not an anti-modern movement that calls for a return to
pre-modern agrarian society. It is about a re-territorialization, about the
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 251

adjustment of individuals’ inner time as well as social time and about

self-determined immobility:

If we see slow living, then as a response to globalization, this is not

to define it as merely a defensive retreat to the local but as part of a
reconfiguring of local social relations and identities in new reflexive
ways which ‘utilize, criticize and even contribute to globalization,
while developing new senses of locality and community’. (Parking
and Craig 2006: 11, quoting Purdue et al. 1997: 645)7

In Wittenberge, we found that some people also appreciated this slower

life and developed conscious interests in spending time more carefully.
Amongst them were people who had founded their own micro-busi-
nesses in the fields of organic nutrition or house building, alternative
health and well-being. Second-hand shop owners, the keeper of an
organic shop, a woman who runs an Ayurveda centre – they all try to
turn the tables by using the advantages of immobility and slowness for
their own benefit and for the well-being of a small community within
an alternative milieu. There were only a few of them but this alterna-
tive milieu connected with the wider town, for instance when in critical
times of serious illnesses or poverty, people outside of their immediate
community consulted them about ways of changing their lives.
This small but significant community is ready to take into considera-
tion the social rather than financial benefits of living a slower and ‘freer’
life. By doing so, people within this community try to escape the control
of the state, which is perceived more and more as a punishing state first
and foremost, for example through the tough disciplining measures of
job centres. A woman who grows organic herbs, for instance, said the
kind of disconnectedness she now lives feels like freedom and is recuper-
ative. Being part of a globally connected life-style and having to subject
herself to the discipline of the job centre, in contrast, had made her
ill and fearful. She lives off 200 EUR per month and a job centre grant
which she receives temporarily for starting a micro-business. The money
from the grant is needed to pay for the certification of her products as
organic. By embracing financial modesty she has freed herself from the
time pressure caused by an economic logic of growth and acceleration.
She now determines for herself the speed and time of her work.
Another example is a family of five who took over the organic food
shop in town to escape the stigma of receiving social benefits. During this
process they gained knowledge and enjoyment of healthy eating. They
also created a situation where they could make responsible decisions
252 Ina Dietzsch

about the products in their shop and, at least for a short time, experi-
enced the feeling of self-determined living. Sadly, they had to abandon
their business to look after their disabled child.
These strategies are Janus-faced, however, as in exchange for a sense
of freedom and self-control, those who adopt them frequently accept
very low income levels. The strategies are also ambivalent as, on the one
hand, there is great generosity and readiness to help others financially,
while on the other hand this applies only to selected individuals of a
very small circle. There is also a strong desire to retain individual control
even as one connects with others, which can lead to self-exclusion. The
reasons behind this desire to retreat are cited as exhaustion, a lack of
willingness to expose oneself to something one does not like and the
wish to get a rest from other people. The contradictory mixture we can
find here is a combination of the socially oriented economic action of
the slow living movement and the use of micro-businesses as a means of
relief from too much negative external interference.
Under conditions of severe labour market pressure, enforced slowness
and limited resources for mobility, people who make the decision to
stay in Wittenberge despite the fact that they have few realistic chances
of finding a job there gain a flexibility, through hard work and much
day-to-day effort, that is apparently at odds with their lack of spatial
mobility. They liberate themselves partly from the pressures of a labour
market that increasingly requires long-distance travel, and in its place
they have adopted a slower, less mobile life that enables them to survive
socially, psychologically and materially.
It is useful here to draw again on the work of Virilio (1999) and
Kodalle and Rosa (2008), who have characterized contexts of accelera-
tion as raging stagnation: although nothing remains as it was, there are
no major changes either. This principle is reversed here into its opposite.
Within seemingly immobile slowness and steadiness something impor-
tant changes: people are parting, incrementally, from the paradigm of
growth.

Post-socialist mobilities? Some prospects

To what extent can we speak of post-socialist mobilities in these cases?

Of course, the situation in this region of eastern Germany is also a result
of its socialist and post-socialist history. However, it is too simple to
conclude therefore that post-socialist contexts in general are places of
deceleration. What my account demonstrates first and foremost is that
de-industrialization has required a re-writing of time regimes on the
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 253

scale of entire former industrial towns.8 Although differing in intensity,

scope and speed, this also applies to regions in western parts of Europe
that have gone, or are currently going through, de-industrialization or
where rural settlements are becoming depopulated.
There might be a lot of similarities with other places in the former
socialist bloc, such as the diversity of economic practises undertaken
to maintain social reproduction at a minimum level, as described by
Stenning and Smith for Krakow and Bratislava in Stenning at al. (2010).
There are crucial differences too, though. Whereas Stenning and Smith
state for their particular urban districts in Poland and Slovakia a ‘consid-
erable evidence of other-than-neo-liberal subjectivities’ which ‘only
rarely reflected attempts to explicitly and intentionally contest neo-lib-
eralization’, our research participants significantly exceeded this. Two
examples shall suffice to demonstrate how their critique of neo-liber-
alism took shape in our conversations. Speaking about a close friend, the
owner of the organic shop said:

Ever since I have known him he has wanted to have no water or elec-
tricity metre. He earns his money by not being dependent on anyone.
Let it be any department or, as I said, water and electricity. ... Because
according to his conviction this is something that everyone is enti-
tled to and nobody has the right to monopolize it. ... And me, my
opinion is that I do not need to work 12 hours every day, or even as I
had to once, you know, 16 hours a day for a pittance because I had to
give a lot of money to the state. ... I still don’t know why I had to do
this, because the state did nothing for me in return.9

In 2008 another participant imagined a future life beyond capitalism

when he noted: ‘We are going to get really severe post-war conditions.
Politicians are already starting to talk about it as if it’s already begun
and I don’t think it’s exaggerated. I think that the Euro will be worthless
around this time next year. I’m not sad about it.’10
In addition, our observation that people sell their cars not necessarily
because they need the money but because a slower means of transport
allows them to fill time and to expand their daily activities does not
apply to other post-socialist areas (see Tuvikene on Estonia and Bole
and Gabrovic on Slovenia, this volume). Furthermore, in Wittenberge,
people are less likely to compensate for the withdrawal of public trans-
port by informal means of transportation than is the case in rural
Romania for instance. There, giving strangers a lift (paid or unpaid)
is the most usual way of tackling the deterioration of public transport
254 Ina Dietzsch

systems.11 In Wittenberge, several factors prevent this practice from

becoming equally commonplace. The first is the high degree of indi-
vidualization that developed in the growing industrial town during the
time of the GDR. The second is the particular kind of urbanity which
results from processes of shrinkage, with all their facets and ambiguities,
falling somewhere between the highly controlled sociality of a small
town and the anonymity of strangers in big cities. The third is a high
degree of formality in German society, accompanied by a general stig-
matization (even criminalization) of informal practices. The final aspect
relates to the perception of criminality in the context of the town’s
decline. Although criminality is not actually very high, one outcome of
the aging of Wittenberge’s population is that the presence of youth in
urban public space is regarded with suspicion and makes older people
feel vulnerable to all manner of perceived threats. As we can see here
again, there are some similarities with developments in other post-so-
cialist contexts.
The revival of bicycles as a major means of transport, however, has
to be understood in the context of the physical characteristics of the
Wittenberge’s particular landscape. Beside the effect of keeping the body
(for potential work) going, the flat landscape allows for long bicycle rides
with relatively little physical effort.
What the cases discussed in this chapter primarily suggest is that
just as post-socialist research has had to part from the idea of catch-up
modernity, it also has to part from the idea of catch-up mobility.
Mobilities, as well as processes of modernization and globalization, are
situated. They emerge in particular, localized contexts and in frictions.
New disparities, created by new mobilities, merge with older factors
(such as whether a post-socialist context exists or with the consequences
of the North-South divide in Western Europe during the Cold War).
Furthermore, the fact that in everyday contexts of poverty a morality of
sustainability evolves, in my opinion opens up new avenues for post-
socialist research to make connections with emerging work on ‘energy
transition’ (Krauss 2006) and post-carbon societies (Urry 2011). Due to
aging populations, poverty and the effects of climate change in several
places, European citizens have already accommodated themselves with
a new moral order in which mobility and acceleration are no longer
the ultimate symbols of ‘success’. However, very little research has been
done to date that aims to understand the particularities of this change.
On the scale of ordinary people’s everyday practices these insights can
be made productive by turning the focus to new relations between
immobility, survival strategies, poverty, sustainability and control over
 Life-Worlds of Deceleration 255

natural resources. Such analysis would have to direct the focus away
from questions about how actors tackle problems of de-industrialization
towards the future prospect of post-carbon societies. My hope here is
that post-socialist research might expand the examination of inclusion
and exclusion within new relations of centre and periphery in Europe
by provoking a shift in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ from a concen-
tration on mobility and acceleration towards more attention to decel-
eration and sedentarism. This would include research on local efforts
to adopt the ‘Cittàslow’ model in Poland, a new moral attachment to
local products and green movements in Romania and Bulgaria,12 all
of them emerging in assemblages in which global connections inter-
mingle with socialist and post-socialist histories and local particulari-
ties. Such a focus would also make visible the micro-policies of all those
who, although living in modesty or even poverty, feel responsible for
the fate of future generations.

Notes
1. The population declined between 1980 and 2005 from 32,287 to 19,767.
Source: Land Office for Data Processing and Statistics of Brandenburg. See
http://www.wittenberge.de, accessed 22 August 2007.
2. The trigger was the joint federal and state-level programme entitled
Stadtumbau Ost (urban development under changing demographic and
economic conditions in the East). This was introduced in reaction to the
massive loss of population in the five new federal states (the former GDR),
which was then perceived as a challenging and ‘totally new’ situation. Prior
to this, a report had been published by the governmental commission on
Wohnungswirtschaftlicher Strukturwandel in den neuen Bundesländern (structural
change of the housing economy in the five new federal states; cf. Pfeiffer,
Simons and Porsch 2000) in which for the first time monstrous and unimagi-
nable figures were released. It noted that one million homes lay empty and
the prognosis suggested a further million facing a similar fate. This report
challenged the self-evidential idea of eternal growth and therefore one of the
basic certainties of modern societies. The signal effect of this report helped
to establish a vocabulary of shrinking, Rückbau (unbuilding) and demolition,
so far avoided (cf. Kil 2002). The authors identified ‘new, difficult tasks’ in a
situation lacking ‘known effects’ and ‘known tools’ – a situation in which ‘one
almost would be able only to speculate’ (Pfeiffer et al. 2000: 52). Subsequently,
federal and state governments launched their programmes for urban devel-
opment under changing demographic and economic conditions in the East.
According to two experts in urban and regional planning this was the first
time in Europe that a federal government had responded to shrinking proc-
esses (Welch Guerra and Schauber 2004: 26).
3. For a summary of the development of shrinking as a term and concept see
Dietzsch 2009.
256 Ina Dietzsch

4. Purposely I speak here of European mobilities. Current developments in

Europe can be affected by socialist history but not necessarily. Furthermore,
in the cases in which they do, they do not in the totality that would have
been suggested by the term post-socialist.
5. Interview Harry Semmler (pseudonym, all names of research participants are
changed), 11 June 2008.
6. In the context of another research project I conducted fieldwork in the news-
room of the local newspaper as well as in other newsrooms in Berlin and
Frankfurt. The German word journalists used to talk about these things is
‘laufen’. Its literal translation is ‘run’.
7. About place-making within the Slow Living Movement see also Pink (2007;
2008).
8. For similar developments in Poland see Stenning 2005.
9. Interview Jan Streich 16 May 2008, my translation.
10. Interview Reiner Lahr, 27 November 2008, my translation.
11. I owe this information to my colleague Judit Miklos (project ‘Charisma and
Miseria’) who conducted fieldwork in Romania.
12. See for example (1) a Slow-Food Earth Market in Romania: Targul Taranului,
http://www.fooddevco.com/html/earth_market.html (access: 17 May
2012) (2) Citta Slows in Poland: Polska Krajowa Sieć Miast Cittaslow (access:
18 January 2013); (3) http://www.goodfoodgoodfarming.eu/ (accessed 18
January 2013) – scroll down the website and find the photo campain with
opinions also from people from Romania and Bulgaria; (4) see also Sofia
News, for example 13 February 2012: ‘Environmentalists Launch Campaign
to Certify 1st Bulgarian Bio-Village’ or from 16 June 2012: ‘“Occupy Eagles
Bridge” Movement Emerges in Bulgaria’; (5) Shale gas as conflictual political
issue: a neat summary of the debate see in New York Times Online, Special
Report 22 April 2012: ‘Shale Gas Search Divides Romania’ by Palko Karasz.

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Index
aeromobility, 107, 194, 195
aeroplanes, 11, 27, 62, 93, 194
Albania, 6, 12, 17, 122–47
Armenia, 30, 31
Ashkenazi, Vladimir, 36
Austria, 93, 187
automobility, 18, 105–21, 140–1,
157–8, 217–39
see also cars
Bauman, Zygmunt, 38, 48, 144,
175–6
bicycles, 132, 140, 247, 249, 254
border guards, 127–8, 131,
136, 137
borders, 11, 13, 16, 46, 50–4,
59, 91, 100, 122–3, 127–8,
130–1, 139, 141, 142, 151,
168, 243–4
Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17, 148–172
Brigada Diverse în Alertă (Brigade
Miscellaneous on Alert, 1971), 58
Bucharest, 49, 50, 52, 57, 99
Bulgaria, 12, 87, 93, 99, 100, 131,
167, 255
Buletin de Bucureşti (Bucharest Identity
Card, 1982), 57–8
buses, 55, 133, 140, 141, 182–8,
199, 208, 220, 223, 224, 226,
228–9, 235
see also marshrutka minibuses,
trolleybuses
car pooling, 226–8, 229–30
cars, 17, 18, 26, 57, 94–5, 105–21,
140–1, 143, 200, 205, 207,
217–39, 248
see also automobility
Căsătorie cu Repetiţie (Marriage
Rehearsal, 1985), 57
Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 16, 49, 52, 54,
55, 59, 136
checkpoints, 148, 151, 157, 160–1
261
class, 15, 18, 63, 68, 82–3, 88,
91–2, 96–7, 101, 140, 204–5, 220,
224, 232
coaches, 141, 175, 178, 182–4
colonialism, 6, 12
Comăneci, Nadia, 54
commuting, 88, 217–39, 248
Cresswell, Tim, 2, 3, 4, 5, 19, 48,
106, 107
Croatia, 150, 151, 153, 163
Czech Republic, 196, 230
Czechoslovakia, 8, 93, 219
Dayton Peace Agreement, 151
De Certeau, Michel, 3, 7, 16, 47–9,
176, 195
depopulation, 14, 231, 241–2, 253
emigration, 9
from Albania, 12, 122, 129, 137,
138, 142
from Romania, 12, 45, 46–7,
49–54, 96
from Poland, 11, 12
from the Soviet Union, 36, 37–8,
40, 78–80
see also migration – international
Estonia (socialist era), 30, 31, 103–21
European Union, 12, 136–7, 143,
221, 225, 226, 231, 233, 236,
240, 243
garages, 7, 17, 105–21
Garazh (Garage), 112
gender, 9–10, 17, 63, 73, 76, 96–7,
122–47, 158, 224
Germany, 12, 164, 230, 232
FRG, 37, 45, 53
GDR, 8, 93, 219, 241, 254
post-socialist, 240–59
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 8
Greece, 12, 63, 122, 125, 127, 137,
139, 141–2
262 Index
helicopters, 162
Hungary, 93, 196, 219, 236
Italy, 63, 72, 77, 80, 91, 122, 129,
137, 138
Kazakhstan, 25, 62–86, 194, 196,
198, 213
KGB, 25, 35–8, 41
Kyrgyzstan, 27, 31, 75, 194–216
Landau, Lev, 35–6
Latvia, 30, 31, 200
Lithuania, 31, 221, 222
‘liquid modernity’, 5, 48, 107, 108
see also modernity
Lefebvre, Henri, 177, 189
letters, 23, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34, 35,
38, 41
materiality, 2, 24, 108, 152, 197
marshrutka (minibuses), 197, 200,
204, 206–7
migration – forced, 148
migration – internal
in Albania, 122, 129–30, 139–40
in Germany, 241, 242
in Romania 49, 50
in the Soviet Union, 6, 25
migration – international, 11, 12, 49,
51, 122, 137, 138, 142, 165, 166,
202, 244, 245
military mobilities, 148–172
mobilities ‘turn’/’paradigm’, 2, 107,
123, 124, 148, 244, 255
modernity, 1–2, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 18, 30,
50, 90, 137, 176, 179, 181, 182,
185–8, 195, 198, 204, 208, 214,
242, 254
‘moorings’, 6, 7, 17, 48, 105–21
Moscow, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32,
22, 35, 36, 37, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81,
98, 99, 112, 176, 197, 208
national identities, 56, 63, 69,71, 73,
74–5, 126–7, 166, 203–13
occidentalism, 185–6, 187
orientalism, 185–6, 187
passports, 11,
Albania, 127, 130, 136
Romania, 50–1, 53, 54, 95–6
Soviet Union, 25, 62, 73,
94–6, 108
Yugoslavia, 163
Perventsev, Arkadii, 37
Poland, 11, 12, 93, 141, 167, 196,
219, 221, 222, 253, 255
post-colonial theory, 4, 12
post-socialist ‘transition’, 4, 11, 173,
175, 176, 188
post-socialist state mobilities, 10–15,
136–8, 148–72, 173–93, 194–216,
217–39, 240–59
propaganda, 8, 16, 26, 37, 38, 51, 53,
74, 88, 129, 207–13
public transport, 194–216, 218–39
see also buses, trains
queues, 7, 9, 13, 15, 50, 90, 98, 122,
133, 134–5, 141–2, 244
Radio Free Europe, 47, 93
remittances, 12, 95, 125, 139,
141, 143
roads, 5, 6, 7, 27, 50, 62, 108, 116,
117, 140, 151, 152, 160, 162,
208, 221, 224, 225–6, 228
Romania, 12, 16, 45–61, 87–104, 136,
253, 255
police, 45–61
summer camps, 55–6
telecommunications, 50
travel controls, 50
see also emigration and
migration – internal
Russia, 6, 12–13, 30, 202
Sakharov, Andrey, 36
Schengen Zone, 143, 163, 167, 168,
240
secret police, 11
in Romania, 88, 94
in the Soviet Union, 67, 70
(see also KGB, Romania, police)
Serbia, 15, 17, 18, 167, 173–93
Sfinx, 24
Shapka (Hat, 1990), 66–8

shortages, 9, 10, 16, 17, 26, 33,
40, 90, 91, 99, 100, 105, 106,
115, 117, 122, 132, 134, 141,
160, 179
of electricity, 50, 206, 214
Siegelbaum, Lewis, 48, 105, 106, 110,
115, 117, 118
Slovenia, 15, 18, 173, 217–39
smuggling, 81, 96, 99–100
socialist state mobilities, 5–10, 24–44,
45–61, 62–86, 87–104, 105–21,
126–36
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 34
Soviet Union, 16, 17, 23–42, 62–86,
105–21, 194–216
automobility, 105–21
expansionism, 5–6
postal system, 24–9
telecommunications, 29–34
see also emigration,
migration – internal, KGB,
secret police, tourism
space exploration, 7
Stalin, Joseph, 24, 36, 37, 62, 64
Stalinism, 42, 64, 82, 83, 92, 203
surveillance, 3, 4, 7, 13, 24–5, 33–9,
41–2, 50, 54, 67, 70–1, 83, 98,
100, 178
Index 263
Tajikistan (also as Tadzhikistan), 12,
15, 31, 62–86, 194–216
tourism, 16
Romania, 46, 47–8, 49–50, 51, 54,
87–104
Soviet Union, 30, 62–86
trains, 7, 14, 27, 30, 54, 56, 133,
134, 175, 177–82, 183, 188,
195, 220, 223, 228, 233, 235,
241, 248, 249
trolleybuses, 15, 17, 194–216
Urry, John, 6, 23, 47, 90, 107, 124,
148, 194, 220, 235, 244
Uzbekistan, 27, 31, 62–86, 194, 196,
198, 200, 210, 213
Verdery, Katherine, 13, 98, 132, 134,
142, 176
visas, 13, 50–1, 52, 93, 95, 96, 122,
137, 142, 148, 150, 163–5, 167,
168, 175, 187
walking, 132, 137, 177, 195,
223, 247
the ‘west’, 8, 9, 16, 38, 49, 50, 58, 65,
67, 72, 73, 77, 99, 117, 137, 178,
182, 185, 186–8, 219