Transition

But before any of that could happen, there was a prior problem that took longer to recognise and longer still to resolve: the gap in mutual understanding between counterparts. Western development practitioners and their post-Soviet interlocutors were not, in most cases, starting from shared assumptions about what words meant, what problems looked like, or what counted as a realistic starting point for change. Until that gap was acknowledged and addressed, dialogue was blocked — not by bad faith, but by the invisibility of the gap itself.

This became concrete in the development of a social impact action plan for a nuclear facility community. The initial dialogue process stalled for several months. It was unblocked only after a working paper was prepared specifically for the technical counterparts — not a policy document, but an attempt to make legible what the Soviet model actually entailed for the people who had lived inside it.

The working paper did not solve the problem. It created the conditions in which the problem could be honestly named. That is, in itself, a form of empowerment: the capacity to describe one’s own situation accurately, in terms that others can understand and respond to, is a precondition for any meaningful participation in the decisions that shape it.

Field notes — nuclear facility community, post-Soviet transition

The mono-town model, in which entire communities were built around a single enterprise — typically a military, industrial, or nuclear facility — created a social architecture that had no real equivalent in Western experience. Employment in such facilities was not simply a job. It was the organising principle of an entire life. The concept of unemployment, in the Western sense of a labour market condition with associated welfare mechanisms, was largely meaningless in this context. In the Soviet model, there was no unemployment — not because jobs were plentiful in any market sense, but because the enterprise was the community, and leaving it was not a realistic option. The word itself carried no usable meaning for people whose entire adult experience had been structured around the assumption of permanent attachment to a single employer and a single place.

What that employer provided was equally important to understand. Nuclear facilities in the Soviet system were not simply workplaces. They were, in many cases, self-contained social worlds: housing, healthcare, education, and cultural facilities of a standard that was dramatically higher than the surrounding region. Olympic-level sports facilities were not uncommon. The workers in these communities had not merely lost jobs when the transition came. They had lost an entire way of life — one that, for all its constraints, had provided a level of security, amenity, and social belonging that no transition programme was in a position to replace.

Once the technical counterparts understood that this was the starting point — that the people in these communities were not simply unemployed workers in need of retraining, but people navigating the collapse of a total social system — the dialogue became possible.

The nuclear facility communities were not alone in facing this kind of total structural collapse. Military conversion — the process of repurposing facilities, workforces, and communities built entirely around defence production and garrison life — presented the same fundamental challenge in a different register, and in some respects a more complex one.

The Soviet military-industrial complex was, like the nuclear sector, a world unto itself. Closed cities — known as ZATO, or closed administrative-territorial formations — were not on official maps. They did not appear in telephone directories. The people who lived in them moved through a parallel social universe: better supplied, better serviced, and more tightly controlled than the surrounding civilian population. Security clearances governed not only professional life but social relationships, travel, and access to information. The identity of the worker and the identity of the facility were, over generations, effectively fused.

When conversion came — and it came rapidly, chaotically, and without adequate preparation in most cases — what collapsed was not simply an industrial base. It was a social identity, a security system, a set of assumptions about the future that had been so thoroughly internalised that most people had never had occasion to question them. Workers who had spent careers producing weapons systems for which there was suddenly no budget, no political mandate, and no market found themselves not only without employment but without a vocabulary for their situation. The concept of entrepreneurship, of market-oriented production, of competition for customers — these were not merely unfamiliar. They were in many cases actively alien to the values and the self-understanding of people who had been trained to see their work as service to the state rather than exchange in a market.

Here again, the prerequisite for any useful dialogue was mutual comprehension. Western advisers and programme designers who arrived with toolkits developed for market economies and assuming a baseline of market literacy were, in many cases, solving the wrong problem. The right problem was harder and more human: how do you help people whose entire frame of reference has been dismantled to construct a new one — not by replacing their experience with someone else’s model, but by starting from what they actually knew, what they had actually built, and what they were actually capable of?

The answer, developed through practice rather than theory, was consistently the same as in other contexts: begin with what exists. The engineering capability in a converted defence facility was real and often formidable. The organisational discipline of a workforce trained to demanding specifications was real. The social cohesion of a community that had lived, worked, and raised children together for decades was real. None of these were transferable wholesale into a market economy — but none of them were worthless either. The task was translation, not replacement: finding the pathways through which existing capability could be redirected toward new purposes, and ensuring that the people doing the redirecting were the community members themselves rather than external consultants with fixed timelines and predetermined outputs.

The Chernobyl experience added another dimension. A disaster of that scale produces not only material devastation but a profound assault on the sense of agency — the conviction, essential to empowerment in Diener and Biswas-Diener’s framework, that one has the competence and energy to pursue important goals. Working with communities living with the consequences of Chernobyl meant working first with that assault: rebuilding, slowly and carefully, the psychological conditions without which external support produces dependency rather than capability.

This principle — that the community’s own resources are the starting point, and that the practitioner’s role is to help make those resources visible and usable rather than to substitute for them — connects the military conversion experience directly to the South Africa work, to the nuclear facility communities, and to the grassroots programmes operating in Italy today. The geography changes. The political and economic context changes. The human dynamic does not.

The most durable transitions were not those managed most efficiently from above. They were those in which communities found, or were helped to find, the agency to author their own recovery.

Field observation — post-Soviet transition programme