Post-Soviet Deindustrialization and Problems of Communal Infrastructure (A Case Study of the South of Sakhalin Island)
The paper examines the general problem - degradation of communal infrastructure (reservoirs, pumping stations, networks) in the periphery as a result of post-Soviet deindustrialization basing on the example of the village of Shakhtyorsk (until 1947 - Toro, Jap. 塔路) in the Uglegorsk district of the Sakhalin Region. The field study was started during a trip to South Sakhalin in 2013 and expanded by analyzing the historical background and monitoring the development of the situation in subsequent years. The study of the “Japanese trace” in the collapse of utility networks provides an opportunity to examine the problem from the original perspective without reducing to technical (critical deterioration of networks), financial (lack of budgetary funds), purely managerial (inefficient local bureaucracy) and transformational (transition from Soviet to market conditions of economy) aspects. The author concludes that the reasons why the growth of income from the resource base of the region ceased to directly affect the maintenance of the life support system of the population (municipal and social infrastructure) lie in the institutional level and are explained in the theory of extractive institutions and the concept of “slow” violence. Political and social extractive institutions ensure the redistribution of public goods from one social group to another, deepening inequalities in access to basic life support resources between the center and the periphery, between the privileged and the disadvantaged.Extractive institutions in the “real sector” are inextricably linked with discursive practices that seek to rationalize such attitude towards disadvantaged groups in the form of economic expediency (optimization, palliative urban planning), belittling the social role of certain groups (“pensioners”, “private owners”). According to the results, the post-Soviet stage of communal infrastructure in the south of Sakhalin turns out to be inferior not only to the Soviet (non-market) but also to the Japanese one (market but colonial).