Selling, yet still social: Consociational personhood among the self-employed in eastern germany

The temporal and spatial proximity of the ‘failed model’ of a socialist state has played a considerable part in generating the evidence for trust in its political opponent, the liberal state. Studies on neoliberalism suggest that the politico-economic reality structuring people’s lives has profoundly changed, redeploying or re-engineering the state. The elite touting Estonia as a glowing example of fiscal balance and budget cuts to their Baltic neighbours, to other East and West Europeans, and even to the world, has only recently started to lose credit. People’s memories of Soviet Estonian agriculture presented it as the one helping disastrous Soviet agriculture to survive. Stephen Collier’s recent book Post-Soviet Social on Russia is one of the latest ethnographies providing minute details of the profound changes after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The neoliberal reforms of the 1990s transformed the state farms, and the villages that had been built around these in 1950-1980 to accommodate the agricultural work-force needed.