Depths of Russia

Douglas Rogers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals, also from Cornell.

• Introduction: Oil, States and Corporations, and the Politics of CulturePart 1. From Socialist to Postsocialist Oil1. The Socialist Oil Complex: Scarcity and Hierarchies of Prestige in the Second Baku2. Circulation before Privatization: Petrobarter and New Corporate Forms3. The Lukoilization of Production: Space, Capital, and Surrogate CurrenciesPart 2. The Book Years4. State/Corporation: The Social and Cultural Project Movement5. Corporation/State: Lukoil as General Partner of the Perm RegionPart 3. The Cultural Front6. Oil and Culture: The Depths of Postsocialism7. Alternative Energies: Lukoil-Perm in Corporate and Cultural Fields8. "Bilbao on the Kama"?: The Perm Cultural Project and Its CriticsAppendix: Governors of the Perm Region in the Post-Soviet PeriodGlossaryReferencesIndex

Rogers focuses on how things work within oil corporations: how the new oil giants evolved out of Soviet carcasses; how they operate in symbiosis with the state; and, in particular, how they directly shape social and cultural institutions. The intersection of oil, money, and power might be a sexier topic. But the ways in which politicians and corporate bosses redefine and blend roles on the ground—indeed, to the point that Lukoil-Perm assumed the lead in a grand campaign to make the city of Perm a capital of culture, competing with St. Petersburg—provide more insight into the real texture of everyday.(Foreign Affairs) In general, many of the books trying to explain contemporary Russia are awkwardly similar in their approaches.... Douglas Rogers' book on the role of oil as a source for both state-building and a re-invention of culture in the Perm region is an innovative and enriching... exception to this trend.(Transitions Online) [The Depths of Russia]... shows how a detailed anthropological study of a region far from Moscow and St. Petersburg can reveal new and unexpected information about developments in Russia. These results make this a book well worth reading and pondering over. It is an important contribution to anthropology/ethnography, business studies, and the understanding of postsocialist Russia.(Slavic Review)