Car Accidents and Post-Soviet Road Ethics on Kolyma Roads

Abstract

This article debates with the literature on modern accidents, with a specific focus on car accidents. Modern accidents are typically analysed as technology-generated events outside the moral economies of modern societies. By analysing the differences in how residents of settlements along the Kolyma roads of the Magadan region of Russia recount and remember the so-called “summer” and “winter” accidents on the road, the author highlights the special symbolic status of accidents that occur in freezing weather and explains it in terms of “moral breakdown” (a term by J. Zigon). In this situation, habitual moral actions become risky or impossible, forcing the actor to make an ethical choice. “Moral breakdown,” in turn, is considered to be an effect of post-Soviet changes in the infrastructure of roadside assistance, which are driven by the scaling of the settlement system and the intensification and autonomisation of intra-regional mobility, interpreted by the Kolyma inhabitants in terms of moral decline. Thus, the article offers a historically contextualised interpretation of modern accidents, considering the moral and infrastructural changes in the life of Kolyma settlements during the post-Soviet period.