ABSTRACT
Domestic involution can take place either through diversification or through concentration of economic activity, and economic products can be shared or accumulated. If economic involution spells the demise of an institutional order in which strategies are narrowly confined, domestic involution opens up strategies by relaxing rules and liberating assets. There are a few families whose response to involution is more proactive than reactive, more entrepreneurial than defensive. The process of economic involution has destroyed the grounds of collective solidarity without creating new ones; the workplace has dissolved and been replaced by the household. Russian society is increasingly polarized between a class of marginal households retreating to subsistence and self-provisioning, largely headed by women, and a male class of merchants and regulators. A new type of society is appearing in Russia that statistical data cannot disclose. It is a network society that is both resilient and quiescent, that adapts without mobilization.
