While much has been written on the unprecedented degeneration of the Russian economy, how people survive or do not survive remains a mystery. A close 5-year tracking of workers from a liquidated furniture enterprise in Northern Russia reveals two types of survival strategy: defensive and entrepreneurial. Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy in the face of the collapse of industry and agriculture while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamic sector of trade and service. In both cases families that manage to spread risks among multiple strategies rather than rely on singular ones do better under Russia's precipitous economic involution. By examining the deployment of inherited assets - material, social, skill and citizenship - we see how permutations of Soviet economic strategies are reenacted to survive in the post-Soviet world. Thus, as industry and agriculture have disintegrated, the fulcrum of production and redistribution has moved from factory to household, elevating women's previous role as organizer and executor of the domestic economy. At the same time that men become more marginalized in working class families they have become more dominant within the New Russian Bourgeoisie and the political descendants of the old nomenclatura. Here women are expelled from public decision-making into subordinate, often decorative positions within the household.

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S This paper follows the struggles of Russian coal miners who first challenged the Soviet regime in 1989 and helped precipitate its downfall in 1991. In the Arctic city of Vorkuta, the movement's most militant and radical center, the dreams of workers have again, as in 1917, become bonds of their affliction. In response to invading market forces, the city strike committee has turned from support of the new regime to renewed opposition, the independent trade union movement increasingly throws its weight behind the once reviled mine management, and the mines themselves have rallied around the conglomerate, long a symbol of arbitrary power.

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Analyses of the transition from state socialism to capitalism typically focus on political impediments and underestimate the economic obstacles to economic transformation. Based on a case study of the Soviel wood industry, we argue that there will be no economic transition so long as enterprises retain two historic features, namely anarchy in production and bargainig in external relations. Far from constituting a revolution, the withering away of the party state has exeggerated the pathologies of the old economic order. Barter has become more important, conglomerates have strengthened their monopoly and workers have greater controll of the shop floor. If there is a movement toward a market economy at all, it is toward a form of merchant capitalism that deepens economic underdevelopment and thwarts the rise of modern bourgeois capitalism.