In the early 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ‘shock therapy’ imposed from above created a condition in which the collapse of the centrally organized economy and the inability of the state to pay wages, forced newly unemployed professionals to seek alternative livelihoods. Among the most visible responses to the faltering state economy was the proliferation of ‘shuttle trading’: small-scale cross-border commerce in which individuals – predominantly women – transported goods, often in bulk and manually, between sites of purchase and resale. Despite the small-scale, manual character, shuttle traders supplied an estimated 75 percent of consumer goods to post-Soviet countries by 1996 (Mukhina, 2014).

Traders transported these goods across international borders in large cubic polypropylene bags called kletchatkaja sumka, or simply kletka. In my interviews with women who worked as shuttle traders in the 1990s, these bags figured prominently, together with the notion of krutit’sya, a polyvalent term that captures the necessity of keeping things in motion to make ends meet (lit. to spin). As an object, the bag is unremarkable: cubic, cheap, and easily replaceable. Yet in the context of shuttle trading, it becomes a dense node of relations. Its size determines how much can be transported; its appearance signals a particular form of commerce; its weight imposes limits on mobility. Carried over long distances, it leaves marks on the body such as cuts, calluses, fatigue. It also attracts attention, marking its bearer as a certain kind of traveler, subject to scrutiny and regulation.

The bag, one could say, operates as a cross-scalar interface that links global supply chains to individual bodies, translating shifts in price, policy, or demand into tangible burdens. But even the body itself can become such an interface as the following example shows: for many years, traders could carry 50kg of goods customs free. To avoid import tariffs when exceeding the limit shuttle traders walked through the customs corridor as if their bags ‘were filled with feathers,’ as one of my interlocutors put it, while the bags’ actual weight cut deep into the skin. No less striking is the strategy of wearing multiple fur coats on top of each other, while performing as if dressed in a light summer attire. For those who never carried such bags: textiles are heavy and fur even more so. One woman told me they even wore high-heels to support the image of lightness and avoid inspection. The physical detail of this border snapshot raises a broader question: how do large-scale political and economic transformations come to be felt, anticipated, and negotiated at the level of the body?

This essay takes that question as its point of departure. Based on interviews with shuttle trading women and years of fieldwork at two transnational markets that materialized during the 90s and persisted till today, the 7^th Km Market in Odesa and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, I argue that the geopolitical and the realm of the intimate, local, and everyday are closely intertwined, rather than two distinct fields neither of experience, nor of study. What appears as statecraft becomes, at closer range, forces encountered as weight, heat, knowledge, fatigue, and timing. The body, for instance, materializes geopolitics as physical strain, the bag as a material symbol of transformation. These experiences inform future decisions, thus re-making the geopolitical conditions that first made the bag necessary. In my work, I am interest in how geopolitical forces and relations co-produce the spaces, scales, and practices of everyday lives that, in turn, shape how people not only make sense of their relational position in the world, but also shape this world as a result. I propose the notion of lived geopolitics to reframe the geopolitical as an effect that is produced at multiple scales concomitantly. Such an approach does more than simply ‘bringing in’ the everyday; it rethinks the scales at which the geopolitical itself comes into being.

To develop this argument, I focus on the vernacular term krutit’sya. In Russian, which still functions as lingua franca at both markets in Odesa and Bishkek, krutit’sya, literally means ‘to spin’ or ‘to turn.’ In the context of enduring economic struggle, krutit’sya, has come to denote the improvisational labor required to secure a livelihood under conditions of instability. The term captures a mode of action both practical and conceptual: sourcing goods, negotiating prices, organizing transport, managing risk, and responding to regulatory change. It also increasingly includes digital practices such as monitoring exchange rates and coordinating shipments. To say that one must krutit’sya is to acknowledge that stability must be actively produced through adjustment to shifting constraints. As one interlocutor from the 7^th Km Market in Odesa put it: Krutit’sya is like a ballerina’s spin. Like a dancer spinning on one foot alone, she suggested, market entrepreneurs must maintain balance through motion. The metaphor is instructive. The dancer’s rotation produces an axis, allowing her to hold a position that would otherwise be unsustainable. Motion, in this sense, is a technique for generating stability.

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