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Stephenson, Svetlana and Safin, Rustem (2024) The end of the “time of the streets”: temporality in the life course of a Russian ex-gangster. International Sociology. ISSN 0268-5809 (In Press)
We present the analysis of two biographical narratives by Tzigan, an ex-gangster from the Russian city of Kazan. Using the methodological approaches developed in qualitative longitudinal research, we explore his journey in and out of the gang as a part of the collective biography of a generation that came of age at a time of catastrophic collapse of the Soviet social order and a difficult transition to market economy, and who elected to join the alternative social order of street gangs. His decision to leave the gang was also conditioned by the macro-changes in the post-Soviet society, which reverberated through the world of the streets. We address the different times in Tsigan’s life – his childhood, youth and adulthood, his time on the streets, his decision to leave the gang and his reflexions and memories of his past as reconstructed through the narratives presented at two different points of his biography. We show how his memory of the time in the gang has dramatically changed between the first and the second interviews, as he looked retrospectively on his former self from the vantage point of his current law-abiding life. In our analysis, we use the theoretical and conceptual framework of sociology of time and processual sociology and Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope.
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