Pension Time, Pension Space: Escaping from Work to Labor at the Siberian Huts

Abstract

The article examines how - due to certain infrastructural, bureaucratic, legislative, regional conditions, and contexts - territories, communities, biographical trajectories, and temporalities that do not obey rural social logic emerged in the Middle Ob region in the 2010s-2020s. The focus is on a layer of little-studied spaces - huts, fishing bases, farmsteads outside settlements. The temporal logic within which these spaces develop is the logic of expectation, preparation for life in retirement. The originality of the situation under study is determined by the gap that manifests itself in various forms of social tension. In the same year, both 40- and 65-year-old men can retire, each of whom spend time in huts, but differently estimate the remaining time of active life in the space between the village and the hut. The frustration of the older generation, often not hidden in conversation, and the young generation’s questions about their plans for retirement make one wonder what is “wrong” with this situation - apart from the inequality of opportunities. A place in the structural hierarchy, a place that pays for a living, is not the ultimate goal of my interlocutors; such unfreedom turns out to be an instrument for liberation in retirement. In order to describe how, thanks to different types of decelerations and accelerations, a special retirement time emerges, created by the expectations of the owners of the huts, I consider what the work that men do in the huts consists of. These questions are in counterpoint to what men’s work looks like in rural institutions: the perception of work in a position as “delirious” confirms the specificity of the two-part strategy of young pensioners. They seek work “dependence” in order to gain “independence” and freedom, which they invest in life and work in the huts.