Introduction: Local Capitalisms in Siberia

Abstract

There is almost no doubt that it was capitalism – and not ideology or any specific country – that ‘won the Cold War’ (Hann 2017), and hence the collapse of the Soviet bloc opened up new spaces for the expansion of capital. It was proposed that capitalism in the post-Soviet context should work along western lines: Russian economists, experts and politicians in an alliance with the IMF chose the neo-liberal American type of capitalism as the primary model for Russia’s transition to the market (Lane 2007). However, since the 1990s, the transition model has undergone significant changes, and there is ample evidence that post-Soviet capitalism is very different from the original ideas and from the state of affairs in other capitalist countries (Hall & Soskice 2001; Hann 2002, to cite but a few). In fact, a single model is not capable of either producing or explaining the variety of forms that capitalism takes in the real world. There is evidence that even in the centre of the capitalist world – in the USA – there are very different, local forms of economic assemblage which have nothing to do with the simplifying logic of the totalising market (Tsing 2015). The articles in this special section aim to demonstrate the diversity of capitalist logics found in cases we have examined in Russian Inner Asia. The forms of capitalism we discuss are diverse, and there are many reasons why this is the case. Perhaps the most important is that capital comes to the Eastern peripheries from diverse sources: Russian agro-holdings, the Russian state and international mining companies. Sometimes capitalist relations also ‘grow on their own’, emerging from the practices of hunters and fishermen or travellers and tourists in the Siberian taiga. Furthermore, each of our stories reveals that some of the capital on Russia’s eastern fringes is of Chinese origin. We posit that, whatever the origin of the capital, the emergent economic organisms do not turn out to be pure ‘Chinese’ (as one might imagine reading Zhou 2016) or plainly ‘Russian’ economic structures. On the contrary, the nascent organisms growing in the Siberian cultural landscape, remaking it and mixing with it, intertwining with other capitals, objects, practices, present ‘impure’