ABSTRACT
Globalization theories are often criticized for their overly abstract nature. Hay and Marsh (2000: 6) call globalization “a process without a subject.” How is globalization experienced by Russian people? To set the stage for a discussion of the lived experience of globalization and postsocialism in today’s Russia, there is no better starting place than the imagery of the iron curtain. The finite and irreversible air that surrounded this metaphor was, and is, something of an exaggeration, since the curtain was in fact porous, allowing for a modest amount of exchange and interpenetration which, in the atmosphere of information deficit, could yield surprisingly potent results. 1 Yet the scope of transnational exchange remained limited, the numbers of Soviet citizens allowed to travel abroad (mostly to Eastern Europe) was no more than a few thousand a year, and the global-internationalist thinking was largely confined to a narrow section of policy-academic elite (English 2000). In the minds of millions of Soviet citizens, the iron curtain had the immediacy of actual reality, delimiting their sources of information about the world, their sense of opportunities and the economic reality of their everyday lives.
