{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028794880910060435, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0135087095627444, 'mean_word_length': 5.10412147505423, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Social Change in Provincial Russia: The Intelligentsia in a Raion Centre

THE 1990S HAVE SEEN THE DEVOLUTION of considerable powers to the oblast' (regional) level. The oblast' capitals and their political leadership are the object of increasing scholarly interest. While the oblast' is undoubtedly of key importance in understanding Russian politics and economic developments, it should not be assumed that one can extrapolate from the experience of oblast' capitals to generalise about provincial society as a whole. Social change in the oblast' capital in some respects mirrors that in Moscow. The vast majority of towns, without the powers and opportunities of the regional capitals, may be very different. To date, little attention has been paid to developments at the sub-oblast' level: that of the raion (county) and raion centre (county town).' This article represents the first findings of a study which sheds light on social change in smaller Russian towns and attempts to discover how trends in such towns mirror or differ from those in the big city. It is based largely on 41 interviews conducted in spring 1999 in Zubtsov, a small raion centre in Tver' oblast'.2 With a population of 8100,3 Zubtsov is near the smaller end of the 'small town-big city' spectrum; trends here diverge most clearly from those in the oblast' capitals.4 Just under a quarter of Russian towns have populations of between 5000 and 10 000. Hence, in size at least, Zubtsov is typical of many other places.5 The research explores the changing identities6 of professional people: people who, in the Soviet period, were considered to belong to the 'intelligentsia'. It particularly investigates the 'core' intelligentsia of teachers, journalists, doctors and librarians.7 These people have a powerful sense of having been marooned as links with the world outside the raion have weakened in the 1990s.8 It is claimed that 'the Russian intellectual class is rapidly losing its intelligentsia identity'9 and the intelligentsia is often asserted to be 'dying' or 'dead'.?1 This metaphor may be understood to imply a number of areas of decline. With reference to large cities, 'shrinking' and 'weakening' may be more appropriate descriptions of these tendencies. The number of people working in traditional intelligentsia occupations has shrunk as a result of redundancies and resignations; there has also been a 'brain drain' abroad, especially from Moscow and Petersburg." State institutions such as schools are threatened by staff shortages as graduates prefer to enter the private sector.12 Professionals who retain their state employment often take on secondary employment, which may result in a weakening of their intelligentsia identity. They develop business skills and-in the context of a multitude of 'Westerising' cultural