The issue of whether a sense of ‘privacy’ exists in Russia (and if so, from what date) has been extensively debated. This article looks at the problem from a new angle, taking issue with the rigid division into public and private ‘spheres’ propounded in post-Habermasian social theory. Using material from interviews and participant observation, it argues that the creation of private/ intimate situations and relationships takes place in a performative way. Thus, a shop-keeper (someone inhabiting what would usually be understood as ‘public space’) may ‘privatise’ relationships with some customers, e.g. by supplying from his or her own household stocks goods that are not for sale. Privacy (or conversely, publicness)2 becomes a matter of social practices, rather than of social institutions or ingrained social structures. The fieldwork site to which my discussion relates, the village of Stepnoe in

Krasnodar region, southern Russia, was selected as a case-study for the Fernab der Städte [Far from Any Cities] project, and members of the Krasnodar Centre for Anthropological Research worked there over the whole course of the project. Before this research began, I had already had quite intensive contacts with many residents of the village over many years, and had conducted folkloric and ethnographic research there in 1995, accompanied by archive work on the history of the village’s formation. My contacts there knew I was an academic, and we had quite often discussed various topics of scholarly and political interest. It could be said that I was already partly incorporated into the everyday life of some residents of the village. This point was decisive in my choice of Stepnoe as an object of study. Before beginning my field work, I told the people I knew in the village

about it, and received their permission to ‘study them’. But it was quite difficult to persuade local residents to make contact with other members of the research group. This ‘closed’ character is typical of villages and stanitsas3 in both the steppe and the mountain districts of the territory. Only on the Black Sea coast, where village residents are actively engaged in receiving tourists over the summer, and have become accustomed to the presence of outsiders both in their homes and in the streets of their villages, are things a little different.