A man who still does a lot (interview with Zh. T. Toshchenko)

This interview with prof. Zh. T. Toshchenko is a continuation of our series of conversations, conducted over the course of almost two decades and covering his entire life. The focus of the first part of the conversation is on discussing the topics and results of his research over the past five years, but then we touched on a more distant past. Toshchenko presented the conclusions of his large-scale theoretical and empirical study of the precariat. It was based on his concept of the “sociology of life”, which made it possible to approach the explanation of the lifeworld of the precarious people. The next step was an analysis of contemporary Russian labor policy, in particular such a trend as the precarization of labor. The dominant role of labor in the life of Soviet society is reflected not only in the social sciences, but is also vividly presented in Soviet literature of that era. Hence, the question of reflecting the precarization of labor and other aspects of life of the population of Russia in contemporary art was natural. According to Toshchenko, criticism of everything that was called “industrial prose” in the 90s has resulted in almost complete disregard for this issue by today’s writers. In the coming years, the hero of the day is focused on generalizing what has been done in the process of developing the problematic of the social contract. That it is necessary to identify and comprehensively analyze the dynamics of interests of the institutions of power and the people. Here the mechanisms for building a modern democratic society can be found. The results of the second part of the interview allow us to assert that Zh. T. Toshchenko is the only Russian sociologist whose works provide a half-century-long dynamic of labor relations in the USSR/Russia, from the movement for communist labor to the precariat.