Redefining Need, Reconfiguring Expectations: The Rise of State-Run Youth Voluntarism Programs in Russia

This article investigates the restructuring of the Russian social welfare system by interrogating Putin-era state-run projects to promote youth voluntarism. Set up in the aftermath of liberalizing social welfare reform, these organizations are interesting hybrids: at the same time as they honor the Soviet past and afford symbolic prominence to Soviet era values, they simultaneously advance distinctively neoliberal technologies of self-help and self-reliance. In dialogue with recent studies in the anthropology of neoliberalism and the anthropology of postsocialism, I consider the implications of these intertwined logics. Focusing on the interpretive work undertaken by one provincial voluntary organization, I argue that it offers a symbolic salve and a measure of recompense to those most disaffected by neoliberal reform, while at the same time inculcating new models of subjectivity and citizenship. In so doing, it encodes a new vision of the common good that has interesting hybrid features and draws on the models that the Putin administration ostensibly disparages.