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Redefining Need, Reconfiguring Expectations: The Rise Of State-Run Youth Voluntarism Programs In Russia, Julie D. Hemment

Julie D Hemment

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 …