151 © e Author(s) 2016 J. Morris, Everyday Post-Socialism, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95089-8_5 5 Unhomely Presents: Trauma and Values of Endurance Among Older People We are a rubbish dump for Moscow now, in a literal as well as ﬁgurative sense, I mean. On the site of the clay mining pit they’ve started trucking in all kinds of muck [ drian’]. We’re worried about how it will aﬀect the water supply. In Soviet times under Rodomirov there was one authority [ vlast’] for everything—the housing, the plant, the roads, and this couldn’t have happened. At the same time half the town works in Moscow on the construction sites. It’s such a shame. Who wants to live in a railway carriage behind barbed wire for six months at a time and never see your family? No, I will stay at the metal fabricating workshop for my measly 16,000 a month. 1 is is my town, my home is here. What can you do? We have enough [ nam khvataet]. Everything is orientated to protect the big city people, but it wasn’t always like that. 1 16,000 roubles was equivalent to around 500USD in late 2009 when this interview took place. At the time this sum was close to the mean wage for industrial blue-collar work, but low considering Lyova’s age and skills. Previously he had been paid around 14,000 roubles by the local authority as a housing maintenance welder. A few of the ethnographic materials for this chapter appear in Morris (2014).