Who Owns the Soviet Past?

For the other former Soviet republics, particularly Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and, to some extent, Ukraine, the end of the Soviet Union could be framed as a restoration of lost sovereignty and the remedy for decades of subjugation.  But for the newly-christened Russian Federation, despite momentary bursts of enthusiasm over a vaguely-defined future in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991, the end of the USSR was a moment of profound loss.  The slippage between Russia and the Soviet Union was always problematic; when outsiders called the entire Soviet Union "Russia," they were, perhaps out of ignorance, engaging in a colonialist attitude towards the other fourteen republics that went far beyond anything Russians in power were willing to say.  Or perhaps they were inadvertently doubling down on a repressed truth: the multinational Soviet Union was always dominated by Moscow.

When Yeltsin decoupled the institutions of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic (RFSSR) from their Soviet counterparts and, more important, stopped all flows of RFSSR funds into USSSR structures, this could have been a moment not just to rebuke the Soviet legacy, but to deny any identification between the newly emergent Russian Federation and the Soviet Union that once contained it.  But this was not to be, nor could it reasonably have been expected.  In declaring itself the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, in addition to assuming the Soviet debt, also got the USSR's seat on the UN Security Council, most of the Soviet Union's foreign diplomatic property, and control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.   It could have been possible for Russia also to assume moral responsibility for the Soviet Union's crimes as part of a process of national and international reconciliation, but a brief period of reckoning with the Soviet past in the 1990s gave way to glorification and rehabilitation. The Soviet Union was not Russia, but the Soviet past now belonged to the Russian Federation.

Even though the RFSSR broke with the USSR more quickly and decisively than most of the other republics, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Russia became the country the others broke away from, while all the Soviet glories and achievements that were threatened with irrelevance were now the heritage of Russia specifically.  It is Russia's status as heir to the USSR that explains moments that are otherwise absurd.  In the wake of Russia's 2014 and especially 2022 invasions of its neighbor, Ukraine's derussification process included taking down the remaining monuments to Lenin; many in the Russian media expressed their outrage. But at what? Russia is no longer a communist country, and Lenin is no longer the object of required public adoration.  In this particular monumental skirmish, both sides are tacitly agreeing to Russia's status as heir to the Soviet imperial/ colonial legacy.

Partying like it’s 1989

Assuming the weight of the Soviet past has a paradoxical effect, taking away precisely as much as it adds.  Russia did not so much inherit the Soviet Union as inherit the Soviet Union's loss.  The compensatory rhetoric of Russian greatness already began to grow in the 1990s before being adopted wholeheartedly by Putin the twenty-first century, but it was a greatness seen in the rearview mirror. The combination of territorial diminishment, economic freefall, and dwindling international prestige meant that all rhetoric of Russia's greatness referred to a vanished past. This combination of greatness and loss is why nostalgia alone is insufficient as a model for Russia's discursive transformations over three post-Soviet decades. 

Not long after the Soviet collapse, Gregory Freiden wrote an article speculating about the possibility of a national Russian transformation "from Romans into Italians." The idea behind this metaphor is that contemporary Italians may be cognizant of the heritage of the Roman Empire, and possibly even proud of it, but their identity is not "post-Roman," and the fall of the Roman Empire is not a particularly painful wound for residents of the city of Rome more than a millennium and a half later. Russia has not become Italy to the Soviet Rome, with the most obvious explanation involving how little time has actually passed since 1991. 

More to the point: to the extent that we can ascribe a desire to a country, Russia does not want to become a postimperial nation-state like Italy. 

This could be partly explained by the incompatibility between the very idea of the nation-state and the multi-ethnic federation that is Russia, but Russia is not the only country in the world that includes multiple ethnicities (or "nationalities"), with multiple language and religions.  Even Italy didn't look like a strong candidacy for nationhood before it achieved unitary statehood. But Russia's postimperial problem is not that the country is excessively heterogeneous; on the contrary, it is not heterogeneous enough.  It is not the Soviet Union.  And, at a future temporal remove, it is not the Russian Empire.  Despite any of Putin's protests to the contrary, Russia remains post-Soviet because it is haunted by the fact that it is not Soviet.  The discourse of the national body, of the proprioceptive state, continues to frame Russia in relation to the lost territories of the Soviet Union.  This is the discourse of melancholy: Russia is a state the cannot let go.

This melancholy expresses itself through Soviet nostalgia, of course, but also through the repeated revisiting of the moment when the Soviet Union was lost.   For the melancholic, the loss of the loved one has always just happened, no matter how much time has passed. For melancholic Russia, the end of the USSR is still taking place.  It is still the foundational wound out of which the Russian Federation emerged; it colors Russia's relations with its neighbors, its rhetoric about the post-Soviet space, and the increasing imperialistic rhetoric about Russia's destiny.  The collapse is also revisited through revisionism:  years of conspiracy-mongering have made it a truism that the USSR was brought down through a Western plot in which Gorbachev features prominently.  The greatest melancholic expression of the preoccupation with the Soviet downfall is temporal: not only is the collapse still being felt, but it is projected onto the future.  The same conspiratorial logic that explains the end of the USSR as the triumph of Western manipulation also assumes that the West has only just begun.  Now the West is trying to dismantle the Russian Federation, in order to be free of Russia's obstinacy and to exploit the country's natural resources.  Russia is not just mourning its past, Soviet incarnation, but engaged in the anticipatory mourning of a Russian collapse that may never happen.  The soul-crushing timelessness of melancholia, where grief never seems to end, has reached its apotheosis, stretching out into the future as well as the past.

Thus Russia is always under the threat of dismemberment. The threat comes in a variety of flavors:  the West's desire to take possession of Siberia (a "fact" gleaned from Madeleine Albright's mind by a long-distance psychic); the West's fomenting of "color revolutions"; Ukraine's "Russophobic" "Nazi" government; Western plots against Russia's children, by subverting their traditional values and adopting them as orphans who will grow up to fight against their motherland; spies and foreign agents working to tear the country apart; the Internet itself, viewed as a CIA product; information warfare of all stripes; "gay propaganda," which will exacerbate Russia's demographic problem and weaken its patriarchal foundations; foreign religions and "cults," which undermine the country's unity; and attacks on the Russian gene pool (including alleged Ukrainian bioweapons targeting Russians).

In 1992, Stanislav Govorukhin directed a documentary film called The Russia We Have Lost (Россия, которую мы потеряли), an idealized portrait of tsarist Russia and an uncompromising attack on Bolshevism and the Soviet Union's early leadership.  Govorukhin's title was targeted and specific, but the timing of his film's release, and the extent to which this phrase entered Russians' vocabulary, points elsewhere.  Or rather, everywhere.  For over three decades, Russia has been defined as an entity that is always lost or on the verge of being lost. Emerging from two previous collapsed empires, the Russian Federation has loss built into its very foundation. 

Next: What Comes Next

Black Bile

Ascribing melancholia to a country or people could be as dicey a proposition as talking about a sovereign state's proprioception: just how much metaphorical slippage is a reader supposed to bear?  The beauty of melancholia is that, historically, it is also based on what we might now think of as a confusion between the physical and the abstract. Melancholia was originally one of the four humors that the Greeks believed governed human behavior, before it became the term for a mood disorder and eventually losing out to "depression" as diagnostic category. Literally meaning "black bile," melancholia can also be rendered in English as "melancholy."  Scholars writing about melancholia as a psychological condition or medical diagnosis usually prefer the Greek word to the more prosaic "melancholy." I chose "melancholy" for this book's title as a matter of legibility, but I use the terms interchangeably; my justification is that the post-Soviet phenomenon I am describing is neither medical nor strictly psychological.

Though modern psychology prefers "depression" to "melancholia," it was one of the fathers of modern psychology who led the way for its survival as something other than a strict diagnostic category.  Sigmund Freud's 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia" isolated the phenomenon as something more narrow than general depression, but with ramifications that depression itself does not have.  For Freud, melancholia is a disordered reaction to loss.  When a loved one dies, we mourn (a typical and healthy process of grieving), but mourning that becomes obsessive and debilitating is properly classified as melancholia. The two phenomena appear to have a common cause; as Freud writes, the "exciting causes due to environmental influences are...the same for both conditions:" 

Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition. It is also well worth notice that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful (243-244). 

Welcome back, Freud

In a sense, Freud's definition of mourning is exactly what the average mourner is most afraid of:  for him, the "work of mourning" is only complete when the mourner has managed to emotionally disengage from the departed. In other words, to feel less attached.  Because loss is a part of reality, and

“respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit [...] and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. [...]t is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (244-245). 

Through this work, mourners are therefore obliged to accomplish what they are the least inclined to do: to work through the grief and move on. To aid this difficult process, cultures and religions the world over have proscribed rituals whose purpose is to shape the process of mourning and bring it to its conclusion.  Melancholics, however, are unable to complete the mourning process, because their relationship with the lost object is conflicted.  

While both mourning and melancholia are characterized by “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, [and] inhibition of all activity,” according to Freud, only melancholia features "a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (244). 

Melancholia for Freud is a variety of narcissism, a conclusion that Priscilla Roth extends further.  In "Melancholia, Mourning and the Countertransference," Roth argues that losing the loved object itself is not what causes harm:  "the danger is to the person's sense of himself, which depends on his sense of an ongoing internal attachment to his loved object” (38).  Following Melanie Klein, Roth concludes that the melancholic maintains attachment to the "internal object" (the version of the loved one that one incorporates into one's self) while projecting the positive feelings onto a new external object at the expense of the one that is lost: “This is the double identification of melancholia—on the one hand taking over the qualities of the object of desire and, on the other, projecting the unwanted feelings of worthlessness into the object who is identified with the unloved self" (44).

My intent here is not to diagnose some mythical or essential "Russian mentality" (or worse, "Russian soul"), nor do I wish to describe a condition that somehow applies to all individual Russian citizens by default.  There is no attempt to peek inside the heads of Russia's leader; the sheer volume of speculation about the inner workings of Vladimir Putin's mind shows how depressing and self-defeating an activity that would be.  All riddles of Russianness will remain comfortably wrapped in mystery, safe within their enigma. Rather than plumb the dubious depths of a national psyche,  I want to continue the practice that I have developed in my previous work:  to focus on the artistic, political, ideological, and media discourses that define Russia for itself.  It is these discourses that are profoundly melancholic.

As a concept, discursive melancholia need neither claim access to the inaccessible (that is, the conscious minds of individuals or groups, or, even worse, their unconscious) nor pathologize an entire people through the appropriation of a term that, historically, has had the force of psychiatric diagnosis.   Many critics after Freud have brought the study of melancholia beyond the level of individual psychology, most notably Julia Kristeva.  Elaine Miller describes Kristeva's elaboration of melancholia as "a kind of world-forming activity" that "transcends the individual and must be understood as a relation between self and world that cannot be 'cured’” (11). 

Even more productive are the innovations made recently by scholars of disability studies whose work on neurodiversity provides a useful model. Melani Yergau's Authoring Autism and Julie Miele Rodas's Autistic Disturbances borrow from queer theory's investigations of the queerness of artistic texts rather than queer characters to make a similar advancement in the literary scholarship on autism, shifting their attention from characters who may or may not display autistic traits to the narratives in which these same characters are presented. Both Yergau and Rodas discover autistic rhetorical strategies and uses of language whose importance does not depend on the presence of an actually autistic character.  Russia need not be a land of melancholics for the prevailing discourse to be melancholic through and through.  [1]

 Note

[1] I make a similar argument about the television series that is the subject of my book, HBO's The Leftovers:  Mourning and Melancholy on Premium Cable(2023).

 Next: Who Owns the Soviet Past?

Phantom Limbs

Russia's imaginary collective body is haunted by memories and fear of dismemberment, as well as by a kind of national/imperial dysphoria. For those who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is essentially the wrong collective body.  The Soviet Union covered approximately 8.65 million square miles, consisted of fifteen republics, and had borders that extended for six thousand miles in the West and three thousand in the East. The largest country in the world, it occupied one-sixth of the surface of the Earth.  The Russian Federation is about three-quarters that size:  6.6 square million miles, with borders roughly proportional in length to those of the USSR. Still the largest country in the world, it has a complicated relationship with the other independent states that once made up the Soviet Union. The conventional Russian term for the former republics, the "near abroad," reflects a sense that these countries are not quite foreign, and were once part of a sovereign entity dominated by Russia. They are Russia's phantom limbs.

Really, I’m fine with just a fist bump

That body-based understanding of the relationship between Russia and its neighbors goes only one way; residents of the other former Soviet republics would be understandably outraged to hear their countries dismissed as amputated parts of a larger body.  Particularly in Ukraine, however, these radically different understandings of nationhood frame the conflict with Russia.  As I have argued repeatedly, Ukraine sees Russia as "other," while Russia sees Ukraine as an extension of itself. There is something not just offensive, but patently absurd about insisting that a group of people who see themselves as distinct are merely a minor variation on your own identity ("You say you're not us, but you're really us"), as indistinguishable to outsiders as Podujevo and Popolac. Soviet irredentists long for a lost whole, unable to accept that everyone else has moved on.

The most common affective framework used to describe post-Soviet Russia, particularly under Putin, involves nostalgia. Nostalgia has its place, and a great deal of excellent work has been done on its role in Russia. Nostalgia colors Russian mass entertainment and political rhetoric; it moves people, and it also moves goods and money. But nostalgia is not a strong enough description of the current state of affairs, or of the path that led to it. We come closer when we combine nostalgia with the other mood that comes up so frequently in analysis of contemporary Russian life and politics: resentment/ressentiment. That burden of betrayal and outrage often points back to a particular point of origin that cannot quite be left behind.  Nostalgia, loss, despair, paralysis, and resentment all work together as the constituents and products of a particular type of melancholia.

Next: Black Bile

Balancing the Body Politic

As a young gay man in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, Barker took the then-radical step of centering “In The Hills, the Cities” around two gay men without making their homosexuality the source or object of the horror. Nonetheless, it was a choice with thematic resonance. As cisgender men, Mick and Judd share the isomorphic symmetry of Popolac and Podujevo; there is no way the story can be read in terms of the tired metaphor of the "battle of the sexes."  But they are also almost mirror opposites of each other: Mick is a journalist who "was obliged to have an opinion on everything under the sun. Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in."  The dance instructor Judd, to Mick's horror, is somehow both "to the Right of Attila the Hun" and infuriatingly uninterested in politics--all he wants to do is see the endless procession of holy virgins who decorate the infinite supply of churches in the Yugoslav countryside.   Yet the incompatibility of their world views only inflames their passion, leading them to have intensely satisfying sex in that very same countryside. Their relationship is an obvious parallel to the intimate, fundamentally physical antagonism of Popolac and Podujevo, who are obliged to let off steam every decade.

Barker's story rests on a familiar, almost Freudian connection between eros and thanatos, or, more specifically, sex and violence. Two sets of male bodies are in conflict: Mick and Judd, and Podujevo and Popolac, and each chooses between the two options most conventionally available for male bodies: fighting and fucking.  We know far more about what divides Mick and Judd than we do about the longstanding grievances of Podujevo and Popolac, and, tellingly, they are both personal (their general disposition) and political.  Mick gravitates more towards the fascist side of the spectrum, but (if you should excuse the expression in this context) passively.  Judd is a leftist who needs to engage. With Mick dead, Judd makes the odd, but consistent choice, to join Popolac. Mick needs to be part of a larger (political body), while Judd's body is left by the wayside, wrecked and ready for decay.  [1]

As a work of fiction, "In the Hills, the Cities" reminds us of what should be obvious, but is easily forgotten:  the fundamentally imaginary nature of the nation, the country, the state, and the people.  We treat them as both bodies that move and subjects that have agency.  What does Russia "want"? Where is it (or, worse, "she") going?  Consider the only recently abandoned British habit of referring to entire peoples as if they were a single person:  in two world wars they were fighting "the Hun." Both Barker's and Mayakovsky's extended metaphors place these imaginary constructs in a simulation of space, to fascinating results.  They  involve a metaphor whose slipperiness I wish to acknowledge upfront:  proprioception.  Proprioception generally refers to an individual's sense of how their body both takes up space and moves within it. 

Good proprioception is what allows us to move about in the world without constantly looking at everything around us, and allows us to dodge obstacles because we know (or think we know) precisely how much space our bodies occupy.  Proprioception's relationship to our actual physical bodies is not as straightforward as one might think, because it is a sense that can extend beyond the corporeal.  Anyone who (successfully, comfortably) drives a car knows that we relax behind the wheel when we know just how big our vehicle is, allowing us to turn it and park it.  When a car runs into ours, we might say "That car hit me," because the car has become a proprioceptive extension of our self.  All it takes to become acutely aware of proprioception's role is to start driving a moving truck after years of owning a subcompact: initially, it feels as though our body (our vehicle) has become a stranger.

To speak of a country's proprioception is, on the face of it, absurd: countries are not bodies, and they do not pick up and move about.  But we personalize geopolitical entities all the time, especially when they are an object of strong emotional attachment.   When we imagine Russia as a bear, when we talk about a country  "faltering," or "overreaching," in its military adventures, when Russia "grabs" land from a neighbor, tries to gain a "foothold," or "tramples" borders, we are not actually that far off from Mayakovsky's depiction of Russia as a kind of folksy, peasant version of the monsters from Attack on Titan. If Russia (or any country) "strides confidently" across the world stage or if it "stumbles," we are attributing a metaphorical proprioception to an imaginary body.  And an imaginary body can be immobilized.

Sorry, wrong movie

Note

[1] Four decades later, Barker's choice of setting looks inspired, if not prophetic: there is no such town as Popolac, but Podujevo is a real city located in Kosovo, the Albanian-majority region Serbs consider central to their national identity. Now known by its Albanian name of Besianë, the town, according to a  recent report on the Serbian television program "Pravo na sutra," is entirely Serb-free.  On the subject of Popolac, "Pravo na sutra" is predictably silent.  The Serbian/Albanian framework is both anachronistic and overdetermined. On the one hand, even though the Wars of Yugoslav Succession started several years after the story saw print, the Serb/Albanian conflict was not exactly new. On the other, Barker makes no explicit reference to it, nor is there any reason to expect he knew anything about it.  The animosity between Serbs and Albanians to disinterested Westerners is just as obscure as the battle between Popolac and Podujevo is to Mick and Judd. It is conflict distilled down to essence, shorn of historical conscious while gesturing to a historical stereotype (the intramural feuds that plague the Balkans).

Next: Phantom Limbs

The Geography of the Body

As far-fetched as the comparison may seem, "Fixation" does help us come up with an answer, precisely because the question is embodied in an area so far from the brain.  By this I don't mean that the reasoning that led Russia down such a terrible path was faulty (though it certainly was that); rather,  the very idea of "reasoning" sends us down the wrong path entirely.  While many of the decisions made by those in power in and around the Kremlin reflect an understandable form of self-interest (particular decisions leading to personal enrichment), the discourse surrounding Russia's place in the world, as well as the politics both generated by and sold to the broader public, is primarily about affect.  How does it feel to be a Russian citizen in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse? 

The Russian Federation is not unique in the primacy of affective politics, or in the elites' manipulations of popular sentiment.  Playing on the public's fear, resentment, and anger is a tried and true method for the authoritarian accumulation of power. But while there are certainly many points of commonality among authoritarian governments and movements in the 21st century (anti-globalization, fear-mongering about migrants, the exploitation of economic insecurity, and the stigmatization of minority or foreign groups), the local context is always just that: local.   Or, in Russia's case, post-imperial.

I am far from the first person to suggest that one of the root causes of contemporary Russia's woes is the country's complicated relationship with its Soviet past.  In fact, this isn't even the first book I've written that takes the post-Soviet condition as its premise.  Unidentified Russian Objects is, at least in my own head, the final volume of an unofficial trilogy about Russia's inability to address its post-Soviet hangover.  Soviet Self Hatred dealt with the stigmatized identities that have played a prominent role in the Russian imaginary since well before the Soviet collapse, while Unstuck in Time explored the fantastic and science fictional preoccupation with Russian and Soviet history, be it through time travel, the creation of alternate Soviet futures and presents, or the willful denial that the USSR even ended. Under the umbrella title Russia's Alien Nations (a title that exists primarily in my own imagination, but also on my blog), these books were intended to be my final statement on the matter.  I sometimes think of them as a twist on the classical Aristotelian unities of action, time, and place,  although that would suggest that the world I am describing is the well-wrought result of a guiding artistic sensibility. The first book dealt with identity (substituting for "action"), the second with time, and the third (that is, this one) with space.

By "space" I mean actual, physical geography (and the imaginary constructs that accrue to it), as well as the metaphors that such geography generates.  In order to render the scale of nation, empire, and international conflict legible, these metaphors recast geopolitics in terms of the body.

As an illustration of this process, I'd like to introduce two fictional texts, only one of which is actually about Russia. The other story is  "In the Hills, the Cities," which concludes the first book in Clive Barker's ground-breaking, six-volume horror collection, Books of Blood.  A bestselling author whose early work was closely identified with the rise of "splatterpunk" (intensely graphic, transgressive, and often literary horror fiction), Barker is probably better known as the creator of the Hellraiser series and its iconic monster, Pinhead.   "In the Hills, the Cities" is about Mick and Judd, two British gay men unhappily vacationing together in rural Yugoslavia, where they stumble upon a bizarre ritual. Every ten years, the cities of Popolac and Podujevo each band their entire population together into a collective giant. Each city becomes a grotesque Balkan kaiju composed entirely of the bodies of its residents:

It was a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made entirely of men. Or rather, a sexless giant, made of men and women and children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and strained in the body of this flesh-knitted giant, their muscles stretched to breaking point, their bones close to snapping.

When Podujevo collapses (resulting in a horrifying death toll), Popolac goes insane, marching through the countryside and accidentally killing Judd.  Mick catches onto Popolac's foot and joins the giant collective body on its trek through the hills.

Yeah, this’ll end well

Barker was not the first to exploit the metaphor of the body politic in order to create a collective national body; my second text is a bit closer to home. In 1921, Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky composed an epic poem about the standoff between Soviet Russia and the capitalist West, 150,000,000, with the entire population of Russia (along with its flora and fauna) combined into the form of a giant named "Ivan," so that Ivan could enter into hand-to-hand combat with the West in the figure of a giant Woodrow Wilson. A century later, imagining international conflict as a struggle between enormous national Megazords looks rather dubious, but Mayakovsky was merely doing what Mayakovsky usually did:  deliberately exaggerating a familiar notion or extending a metaphor further than usually thought advisable (in this case, the body politic).

But "In the Hills, the Cities" takes things into territories that, under Mayakovsky's pen, never made it further than subtext.  The story is unforgettably evocative, and remains a minor touchstone of geek culture.  [1] But it is also a triumph of the extension of a dead metaphor:  just what, exactly, is the body politic?

Note

[1] As Ruthanna Emrys notes in her insightful commentary on the story, Popolac has gone on to inspire a heavy metal song by Halo of the Void, a custom Magic: The Gathering card, and countless illustrations on Tumblr. Not to mention an outstanding issue of Alan Moore's classic run on the Swamp Thing comic just three years after the story was published. 

Next: The Proprioceptive Body Politic

Introduction: Self/Inflicted

On November 10, 2013, a 29-year-old performance artist named Petr Pavlensky took off his clothes, sat down in the middle of Red Square, and nailed his scrotum to a cobblestone. Pavlensky had already gained a good deal of notoriety for his previous concatenations of political artistic spectacle and self-harm:  the year before, he sewed his mouth shut for an action he called "Seam" in protest of the state's persecution of the feminist anarchist Pussy Riot collective. Just four months before "Fixation" (his Red Square scrotal extravaganza), he lay naked in front of the St. Petersburg legislature, wrapped in barbed wire as a statement about the increasingly repressive laws adopted by the Russian government (this action was called "Carcass").  Eventually, he would go on to cut off an earlobe while sitting on the roof of the country's most notorious psychiatric facility and set fire to the doors of the FSB headquarters, before leaving the country to continue his political art activities in Europe. 

All of Pavlensky's actions were designed as political commentary, but, with the passage of time, it is "Fixation" that has proved to be the most cogent and enduring, if perhaps not entirely in keeping with the author's intent.  Deliberately coinciding with a national holiday in honor of law enforcement ("Police Day"), "Fixation" was, in Pavlensky's words, "a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society. As the government turns the country into one big prison, stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures, society is allowing this, and forgetting its numerical advantage, is bringing the triumph of the police state closer by its inaction.”.

Well, perhaps, but the uninitiated observer could be forgiven for having difficulties connecting the action's form to its content. The objects of Pavlensky's ire were certainly well-known social and political ills (at least in Russia's liberal, progressive, or opposition circles). The form of his critique might not be immediately obvious or legible (what, exactly, does the rise of a police state have to do with testicular piercing?), but there is a historical precedent.  As Anastasia Kayiatos points out in her essay "Penile Servitude and the Police State," prisoners in the Soviet Gulag sometimes resorted to self-mutilation in response to the excesses of camp life, including nailing their scrotum to benches or planks. Self-harm becomes a violent precursor to passive resistance. In Pavlensky's case, the police confronting him were stumped. They wanted to arrest him, but they couldn't move him without either causing serious damage or having a much more intimate encounter with a noncompliant body than they ever signed on for.

My point is not that "Fixation" missed its target. Quite to the contrary, the performance of violence on the artist's own body a powerful if not uncontroversial means of highlighting the violence inherent in Russian political and governmental life.  Younger Russian artists and scholars have since argued that the use of violence as a critique of violence is a dead end, and that political artistic production must escape the cycle of reinforcing discursive violence by instrumentalizing it even for the purpose of satire or protest. Their conclusion that such violence ends up implicating all involved is part of an internal debate, but it, like Pavlensky's protest, ends up turning back once again to the State and its official discourse.

This critique has only been reinforced by highly troubling accusations made against Pavlensky. In 2017,  a member of the Russian Teatr.doc political art group accused Pavlensky and his partner, Oksana Shalygina,  of sexual assault.  They denied the charges, declared the accuser an informer, and fled to France with their children.  Just three years later, Shalygina published a book called He Never Hit Me in the Face (По лицу он меня не бил), detailing years of physical and emotional abuse at Pavlensky's hand (Pavlensky denies the charges).  Now Pavlensky's violent art begins to look even more self-referential than the self-harm initially suggests;  Pavlensky's artistic blurring of the boundaries between the subject of violence and its object takes an an air of (unconscious) self-accusation.

Three years into Russia's brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pavlensky's art in general, and "Fixation" in particular, start to look less like a criticism and more like a diagnosis.  Outraged Ukrainians and guilt-ridden Russian liberals have been reexamining the Russian cultural legacy, including calls for the "cancellation" of Russian culture entirely. [1]  Highlighting Russian artistic achievements on stage, screen, or even in print does not feel right, but nor does an outright ban, particularly of work produced by opponents to Putin's war.  Within the Russian Federation, the room for dissenting political and artistic expression has dwindled to virtual nonexistence.  Russian culture is stuck, fixed in place in a state of abjection.

But it is not just the opposition that has lost its room to maneuver.  The expectations for a quick victory in Ukraine, fed by woefully inadequate intelligence, unrealistic assumption, and a system that does not encourage the bearing of bad news to the country's leaders, were rapidly dashed. Rather than immediately taking Kyiv and removing Zelensky, the Russian military has (at least so far) been unable to sustain a serious advance while unwilling to undertake a serious retreat, relying on a population of prisoner "volunteers" and ethnic minorities from the provinces as cannon fodder.  Russia is stuck in Ukraine, and, as in the case of Pavlensky, the wound is self-inflicted.

"Fixation" was also prophetic in the choice of male genitalia as the site of pain and paralysis.  Putin's presidency has been notoriously masculinist, even phallic, from the ubiquitous picture of a bare-chested Putin on horseback to his appropriation of the rhetoric of sexual violence.  The opposition has turned this trait against him, with the slogan "Putin Is a Dickhead"  ("Путин—хийло”) making its way from Ukrainian street protests to the Russian Internet to an episode of The Simpsons over the course of a decade.  Pavlensky, however, chose to put a nail through his scrotum rather than his penis; one imagines that even he was willing to suffer only so much for his art.  The scrotum and testicles are also often used as signs of masculine toughness ("Putin's got balls"), and yet they are the site of maximum masculine vulnerability ("Ukraine's got Putin by the balls").

Though it might be too great a weight to rest on Pavlensky's tortured scrotum,  "Fixation" ends up standing for Putin's folly in Ukraine, a Russia trapped in a war that it can neither win nor lose, a culture with no place to go, and, for that matter, a population of men who face the prospect of mobilization and death in a senseless war by virtue of nothing but their biological, assigned sex.  And whether we think of the subject as Putin himself, the Russian elites, or the broader population that has assented to Putinism through apathy and cynicism, the victim is primarily to blame.

This is not Mother Russia, calling her sons to action, but Father Russia,  trapped in a humiliating, compromising position.  One imagines him, exposed, suffering, and unable to move, asking himself:  how did I ever get to the point where this seemed like a good idea?

Note

[1] I use the term "cancellation" reluctantly, because of the instrumentalization of "cancel culture" discourse by the right wing.  Nonetheless, this term has been ubiquitous in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine.

Next: Balancing the Body Politic