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THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE CEMENTING MODERNISATION: TRANSNATIONAL MARKETS, LANGUAGE AND LABOUR TENSION IN A POST-SOVIET FACTORY IN MOLDOVA A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor in Philosophy Rebecca A. Chamberlain-Creangă Michaelmas Term 2011 DECLARATION I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. ii ABSTRACT The aim of my thesis is to investigate workers’ reactions to transnational market reform in a Soviet-era factory in the Republic of Moldova. The thesis finds that there are varying, blurred responses of contestation and consent to market modernisation in the context of one factory, the Rezina Cement Plant of Egrafal Group Ltd., one of Moldova’s first major European transnational-corporate (TNC) private enterprises. Language plays a critical role in workers’ responses, since language is important to Egrafal Ltd.’s goal of market integration and capitalist labour reform. However, corporate language expectations frequently clash with the language that was previously embedded in Moldova’s industrial workscape. As a result, the thesis argues that workers adopt, resist or modify factory reforms through what I call linguistic styles or situational performative modes linked with ideas of modernity, markets and mutuality. The thesis goes on to argue that employees’ spatial status location in the plant, irrespective of job skill and income, corresponds to employees’ differing linguistic modalities and differing tendencies towards protest and accommodation in response to factory restructuring. Workers in the top strata of the factory’s Administration Building speak multiple languages, long for cosmopolitan lifestyles and benefit from high integration into corporate-market structures. Many achieved job mobility in the plant since socialism and now accommodate to capitalism and corporate styles through linguistic code- switching. The middle strata of ethno-linguistic minorities in Administration’s laboratory and the lower strata on the shop floor lack corporate-backed linguistic capital and are on the fringe of modernisation; both are highly job insecure and protest capitalist change by way of what appears to be traditional language usage, but is in fact a contemporary response to liberal-economic change. This finding leads the study to conclude that workers’ fragmented linguistic-based reactions to market reform do not entail real protectionist collectivism, as Polanyi would have envisioned (Polanyi 1944, 150), nor enduring moral-economic protest along the lines of E.P. Thompson (1971). This is for the very reason of workers’ competing modernist longings and job insecurity – alienating workers from each other whilst drawing them back to local ties – which effectively keeps workers in perpetual oscillation between markets and mutuality. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Professor Jonathan Parry has supervised the development of this thesis with patience and dedication. I am thankful for his inquisitive questions, insightful comments and heartfelt encouragement during the writing stage. Without these, this would have been a different thesis. Dr. Frances Pine and, more recently, Dr. Mathijs Pelkmans, have also generously shared in the task of supervision. I am grateful for Mathijs’ attentive, tireless reading of drafts. His skilful feedback has helped me become a better writer and thinker. I want to thank the LSE Department of Anthropology and its faculty who have carefully nurtured my academic interests over the years. I thank all for ad hoc discussions on my research and for opportunities to present my work in seminars, providing valuable feedback. The Department is a creative and operational space not least because of its administration, so I thank Yanina Hinrichsen and Camilla Griffiths, and more recently Joanna Stone, for all of their practical support. I am truly grateful for the financial assistance received from the British Government in the form of a British Marshall Scholarship in the first year of my PhD. I am equally indebted to an anonymous donor who left me a cheque on the eve of embarking on fieldwork, believing in my project before many others. Later during fieldwork, I was generously supported by three American Title VIII (US Department of State sponsored) grants: an ACTR-ACCELS American Councils Advanced Research Fellowship – Combined Research and Russian Language Training Program (March- December 2005), an IREX EPS Fellowship (July-September 2007), and an ACTR- ACCELS American Councils Advanced Research Fellowship (March-June 2009). I also appreciate a travel grant from the University of London’s Central Research Fund in 2004. Post-fieldwork write-up was made possible owing to an invaluable fellowship from the American Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Eurasia Program Dissertation Write-up scheme (2007-08), as well as to important funding from an LSE Alfred Gell Memorial Studentship (2006-07) and an LSE Metcalfe Studentship for Women (2004-06). Small travel grants from the LSE and the Rațiu Family Foundation have allowed me to attend various conferences in the USA and UK, helping to improve this project, for which I am thankful. Many colleagues from LSE Anthropology provided companionship and support along the way. I particularly thank Marina Sapritsky. Beyond the LSE, I thank Lyndon Allin, Elizabeth Anderson, Michael Bobick, Jennifer Cash, Răzvan Dumitru, Monica Heintz, Ambassador William Hill, Charles King, Ambassador Răduța Matache and Constantin Matache, Beth Mitchneck, Kalman Mizsei, Kimitaka Matsuzato, Vladimir Solonari and Dmitry Tartakovsky for reading previous versions of my work and providing endless discussion on Moldova. I especially thank my informants in Moldova and Transnistria for their help. For now I leave them unnamed for reasons of confidentiality, even as I recognise my fieldwork would not have been possible without them and their openness towards me. Last but not least, I thank my husband Ovidiu for his incredible assistance prior to, during and after fieldwork. His unfading interest in my research has been a constant source of encouragement for me. My parents, Connie and Sherman, and extended family have provided longsuffering material and social backing. I am indebted to them all. iv A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION I have used the Library of Congress system in the transliteration of Russian from the Cyrillic. Romanian remains in its original Latin-alphabet form. Where there are Romanian and Russian names used inter-changeably for towns, I have used the version most commonly utilised among inhabitants of that town (like Rybnitsa from Russian instead of Rȋbniţa/Rȃbniţa from Romanian in this predominantly Russian-speaking city.) The only major exception is the secessionist region of Transnistria, called Pridnestrov’e by residents and Transnistria by Romanian-speakers. I use the Romanian- language variant in the thesis for its ease of read, and not for any political reason. All translations are my own, except where noted. I thank Ovidiu Creangă for his help in reviewing my Romanian-language translations. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration……………………………………………………………...………………..ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….…iii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………...……iv A Note on Transliteration and Translation…………………………………………...….v Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………..…vi List of Figures and Tables………………………………………………..……………viii Part One. Introduction…………………………………………………………...…….1 Chapter 1. Introduction: Modernisation and Language in Moldova…….........................2 1.1. Research Topic and Questions 1.2. Modernisation, Language and Social-spatial Location in Moldova’s History 1.3. Social-linguistic and Economic Dynamics in Contemporary Moldova 1.4. Research Themes in Social Theory and Anthropological Literature 1.5. Fieldwork Site and Factory 1.6. Methodological and Ethical Considerations 1.7. Overview of Chapters Chapter 2. The Construction and Conflict of Factories, Languages and Modernities along Rezina’s Boundary-zone........................................................................................54 2.1. Introduction 2.2. A Tale of Two Cities: Soviet Industrialisation in Rezina and Rybnitsa 2.3. Factory Construction, Language and Demographic Change in Soviet-era Rezina and Rybnitsa 2.4. Linguistic Nationalism and Armed Conflict on the Rezina and Rybnitsa Borderland 2.5. Rybnitsa Heavy Industry as Socialist Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Transnistria 2.6. Conclusion Part Two. Egrafal Ciment S.A. Rezina........................................................................97 Chapter 3. The Administration Building: Control Room...............................................112 3.1. Introduction 3.2. The Case of Russophone Moldovans in the Control Room and Society 3.3. Formal Work Mode in the Control Room 3.4. Informal Work Mode: Being