Vasilina Orlova

Preliminary abstract: The rapid processes of urbanization and industrialization changed the face of the planet, and Siberia had its share in these transformations. Dispersed throughout the Russian Federation are thousands of small ‘city-type settlements’ constructed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The remarkable period of industrial upheaval resulted in mass internal migrations and relocations in response to a centrally planned economy. Camps, town, and cities sprang up almost overnight, creating a remarkable industrial geography of socialist reorganization. Following the end of the Soviet Union, many of these towns on the industrial margins suffered from a drastic reduction in government support and a collapse of manufactures. These processes resulted in a process that might be described as the evacuation of population. This work investigates mobility and moving that people conduct in failing and malfunctioning infrastructures in rural Siberia as well as affects that the precarious conditions generate (Allison, 2003, Tsing, 2015). How people make decisions regarding their mobility and what conditions these decisions? Infrastructures become agential and affective: in the material settings spring such modes of attachment as nostalgia, melancholy, and anticipation. Affects function as the form of rationality overwhelming the calculations to leave. The malfunctioning infrastructures and ruins produce affects that paradoxically make people disregard economic hardships and the rhetoric of better opportunities elsewhere. This work on affective infrastructures connect the theories of affect (Deleuze, 1977, Stewart, 2007) and infrastructures (Larkin 2008, 2013, Simone, 2004) offering to consider beliefs, inertia, denial, and sense of belonging as infrastructurally embedded.