Precarity and Social Imaginaries of Working Lower Classes in Russian Single-Industry City: The Case Study of a Large Car Factory

The research focuses on the everyday lives of the working classes in a large Russian single-industry city. Single-industry cities are home to 40% of Russia’s population and produce 25% of the country’s GDP (Crowley 2021). The Russian authorities often present the working people living in single-industry cities as their social base and portray them as ‘true people’ with genuine values. At the same time, the problems of Russian single-industry cities represent one of the most difficult challenges for the Russian authorities in the country (Ledyaev et al. 2023). The working people in single-industry cities are experiencing increasing social material and economic precarisation (Bolotova 2022, Morris 2016, Zubarevich 2011). Although this group is crucial for understanding political, economic and social processes in contemporary Russia, it has not received sufficient attention from researchers. This research uses an ethnographic case study of recent social, labour and economic precarisation and the destabilisation in working people’s everyday lives in a large Russian single-industry city. Applying the concept of social imaginary, the research examines how working people make sense of and respond to the deconstruction of work and social disintegration, and how they reflect on the past, present and future of both the car factory and the city in the context of the internationalisation and subsequent nationalisation of the former. The research covers a long period from 2008 to the present, encompassing the internationalisation of the city-forming enterprise in the mid-2000s and its renationalisation in 2022. The empirical research is based on in-depth interviews (N=30) and participant observation.