"Little Russians:" Ukrainian "Orphans" and Their Russian Guardians

The explosive mixture of post-Soviet melancholy, imperial revanchism, and the rhetoric of child protection found its ideal expression in the Russian policy of transporting children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation.  Widely considered a war crime, the placement of Ukrainian minors in foster care, children's homes and reeducation camps, along with a law passed to facilitate their adoption by Russian citizens, is not only an act of cultural genocide (as if that were not bad enough), but it is also the logical conclusion of a decade of repressive policies carried out in the name of children as a step on the road to further repression.  To add to the irony, it is a glaringly obvious example of the Russian state's knee-jerk habit of projection:  accusations of crime on the part of the "enemy" often reflect the actions or the intent of the state itself.

The campaign against foreign adoption that led to the passage of the Dima Yakovlev law was accompanied by a broader campaign against what in Russian is called "iuvenal'naia iustitsiia." The term's literal translation as "juvenile justice" is misleading, since the legal punishment of minors for crimes and misdemeanors is only a small part of the debate.  What is really at stake is what Americans would call the child welfare system: the set of laws, institutions, and officials who have the capacity to intervene when a child may be in danger. 

I wrote about the child welfare controversy at some length in Plots against Russia, so I will confine myself to the highlights here. In response to discussions and proposals in the early years of the twenty-first century about establishing new Russian legal child welfare structures, hard-liners resorted to the sort of fear-mongering that presaged the turn towards "traditional values" after 2012.  According to traditionalists, the entire project is designed to weaken or even destroy the Russian family by undermining parental authority and allowing the state to seize children from their homes. This rhetoric was a fascinating synthesis of retrograde patriarchy, the liberal critique of totalitarianism, and an inversion of the early Bolshevik hostility to the family. For Cold War liberals and Soviet dissidents, the hallmark of an overreaching state disdainful of personal freedom is interference with the family.  For the early Bolsheviks, the traditional family was an antiquated ideological obstacle to the better education of the next generation of Soviet citizens. For the defenders of patriarchy (particularly Russian Orthodox activists), the traditional family is a natural and even holy social unit that should be immune to the vicissitudes of politics and social change.

The fight against "juvenile justice" was, like the struggle against "gay propaganda," one of many conservative social movements that started in local, church, and non-governmental circles in the Oughts before becoming coopted as part of the state's nascent official ideology in the Teens. In particular, it was a useful instrument in the propaganda campaign to show that Europe and the United States had become dystopian, politically correct hell scapes, populated by queers, migrants, rapists, feminists, and, eventually, Satanists. Many of these are the same groups that Russian propaganda claim dominate in Zelensky's Ukraine.

Relocating Ukrainian orphans to Russia is logically consistent with Russia's presentation of its conflict with Ukraine, but at the same time, if taken to its logical extreme, it undermines the very notion of ethnos that has come to dominate Putin-era Russian discourse. The official media had long found it difficult to take most of the newly independent states all that seriously,  particularly when either the borders of a given state were considered "artificial" or "cobbled together" (as with Moldova) or the country in question shared a great deal of linguistic and cultural commonality with Russian (as with Belarus).  Ukraine, whose population for years included Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers, not to mention speakers of a Russian/Ukrainian creole, and whose legally-recognized territory reflects the outcomes of the last two World Wars, falls into both categories. What began as condescension about the very notion of Ukrainian statehood turned into the demonization of Ukrainian "nationalists," before taking on its most extreme form in the wake of the 2014 invasion:  denying that Ukraine and Ukrainians as such even exist.  Ukrainians, in this model, are simply Russians who refuse to admit that they are Russian, and who speak a language whose resemblance to Russian renders it slightly hilarious.  If they actually believe in their own existence, it is because they have been brainwashed by bad actors.

Yup, this is what stock photos gives me for “child welfare system”

Russian propaganda on the "Ukrainian Question" is, of course, consistently inconsistent. If Ukrainians and Russians really are the same, then how are we to take seriously the allegation of Ukrainian bioweapons labs developing virus to target specifically Russians?  And if they are not all the same, what, exactly, is Russia doing with these Ukrainian children?  We should not expect consistency, of course. The messages about Ukrainian genetic warfare and Russian/Ukrainian ethnic solidarity are not being issued by the same people at the same time, or included in the same document or broadcast.   But the lack of recognition of their incompatibility is not just about disorganization, or about the (reasonable) assumption that audiences are not following the messaging that carefully.  It is about the fundamental incoherence underlying the current Russian discourse of nationhood, ethnicity, and identity.  Are people born Russian, or are they made Russian, either by social forces or personal choice?

Throughout the entire Soviet period, Russian social sciences have taken a path diametrically opposed to mainstream Western scholarship.   Where the overwhelming majority of European and North American scholarly works on nationhood and identity operate under the assumption that ethnicity, race, and identity are social constructs, Russian scholarship has leaned heavily towards primordialism.  Much of this has to do with the canonization of the aforementioned theories of Lev Gumilev.

Next: Naming Names

Moscow Does Not Believe in Yaoi

The Dima Yakovlev law made its way through the parliament at roughly the same time as the gay propaganda law (with only six months separating Putin's signature on each). In both cases, the alleged concern over the fate of Russia's children could involve both fear for their development into adulthood and anxieties over Russian demographics.  The demographic concern is a fascinating case of displacement: whatever population problems Russia might face, it is patently absurd to blame them on either foreign adoption or Russians who identify as queer. Straight Russian couples are choosing to have fewer children for all the reasons birth rates have dropped throughout Europe, exacerbated by an unpredictable economy and shortage of affordable housing. Linking demography to queerness and foreign adoption makes it look as though the state has found a way to fight an intractable problem, while also taking advantage of popular prejudice for political gain. To paraphrase the common disclaimer, no actual children have been helped during the development of this propaganda campaign.

Russia's rhetoric of child protection may look as though it is focused on the future, but, as is so often the case with knee-jerk social conservatism, it is more about an unwillingness to part with a particular view of the past. It is a pathologization of an otherwise predictable generation gap:  the children raised in post-Soviet Russia have different experiences, pastimes desires, and values from those of their parent's and grandparents' generation.  But in the years leading up to and following the passage of these laws, deviation from the norms of the past is explained as the result of the malign influence of the West, which is deliberately trying to undermine Russia's traditional values.

The gay propaganda law initially targeted cultural productions whose audience was presumed to be children, but slightly less than a decade after its passage, the law was amended to remove the distinction between children and adults.  This fact might support the "slippery slope" argument, that any censorship to protect children will inevitably spread to adults. But it also suggests a state-inspired infantilization of the entire population: no one is mature enough to be exposed to this dangerous content.  This infantilization, in turn, proves to be another manifestation of Soviet melancholy, as the inciting incident was perceived as an assault on Russia's (Soviet) past, while also echoing the Western conservative fanboy's complaint about updating their favorite IP (An all-female remake of Ghostbusters means "They're raping my childhood").  Adults had to be protected because now even their childhoods were no longer immune the lavender menace.

The melancholic nature of the fight against gay propaganda became particularly clear at precisely the moment the law expanded its scope to include adults. In December 2022, after nearly a year of bombings that killed scores of Ukrainian children and battles that turned teenage Russian recruits into cannon fodder, official Russian public opinion confronted an outrage against the very idea of prelapsarian (i.e., Soviet) childhood innocence:  a gay romance novel entitled Pioneer Summer ("Лето в пионерском галстуке").

Pioneer Summer is the work of Katerina Sil'vanova and Elena Malisova (pseudonyms for Ekaterina Dudko and Elena Prokasheva), and is now available in an excellent English translation by Anne O. Fisher .  The co-authors began releasing their novel in installments on ficbook.net in 2016; the book is often referred to as "fan fiction," although this term can be misleading to outsiders.  Summerappeared in the "Originals" section, which hosts amateur writing that does not use a preexisting fandom. [1] In 2021, it was published by Popcorn Books, a Russian publisher that, in its three years of operations, had begun to make a name for itself in the world of YA literature, as well as for featuring books on queer themes.  Summer was a surprise hit; by October 2022, it had sold 250,000 paper copies along with thousands of ebooks. A sequel, What the Martin Does Not Say ("О чем молчит ласточка") had already been published in August of that year.  These books are the prose equivalent of the popular Japanese manga genre called yaoi: romantic stories about boys in love, usually written and read by women.

Think of the children! But not like that!

The book had all the ingredients of a Russian moral panic:  gay romance, a less than reverent attitude towards the Soviet past, teenagers, concerned "experts" and pundits, and, of course, the Internet.  Young readers made countless teary TikToks about how the book made them feel, leaving their elders perplexed by the phenomenon. Even worse from the point of view of Soviet traditionalists, the book appeared on the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Young Pioneers.  It is unlikely that this was planned; if it were, the book would have come out in 2022, not 2021, and, in any case, it was written and posted on ficbook.net years earlier. But the conspiratorial mindset leaves little room for chance:  Popcorn Books was trying to undermine respect for a beloved Soviet institution.

The fallout for those involved with the novel's publication was predictable: the authors have been declared "foreign agents" and were obliged to flee the country, while Popcorn Books, after being charged with violating the gay propaganda laws, was purchased by a new owner, who has declared his hostility to all things LGBT, and is trying to sell off the business. But the furor around the book itself was somewhat surprising.  No one could have expected Russian cultural conservatives to welcome a gay romance novel, even one bearing the "18+" warning that was supposed to protect it from the original version of the gay propaganda law.  The condemnations of the book often included casual assertions that the minimum age warning label did nothing to stop children determined to get their hands on such material

The vitriolic attacks on Summer are, of course, homophobic; at this point, that is a given. But they also engage in a strange kind of temporal collapse, reducing both Russian history and the human lifespan to a timeless singularity. In a Telegram post on May 25, 2022, Zakhar Prilepin, a writer famous for his xenophobic and neofascist views who would go on to be severely injured in a 2023 assassination attempt, raged against Popcorn Books (a name he compared to "Porno Books"), declared that he would like to burn down their offices (at night, when no one was there).  And added:

As they say, what are the guys [at war] fighting for?

We must pass a law to protect our national Soviet symbols: the red banner, the red tie, the paintings and sculptures of real and cult heroes of that period. Otherwise, the number of people ready to use them for mockery grows greater and greater. (https://t.me/zakharprilepin/10747)

Somehow, a revisionist take on Soviet childhood could undermine the war effort by Russian young adults, while the Soviet past itself is now thoroughly assimilated to both Russian history and the Russian present.   The conspiratorially-minded film director, blogger, and honey-voiced crank Nikita Mikhalkov also sees a story about a gay romance forty years ago as an attack on Russia today:

You have to be blind or an enemy not to see. How can we at the same time wage a serious, bloody battle against Nazism, against the rebirth of fascism in the center of Europe and at the same time the values of this same Europe that we're trying to battle with our own hands right here foster. And all during the hundredth anniversary of the Pioneers.

These screeds wrap homophobia, "Nazism," and the militarization of Russia into one ideologically clear package, all pointing to a lost paradise of Soviet childhood innocence and clarity of purpose. It was bad enough that "gay propaganda" could undermine the morals of today's youth, but absolutely unacceptable to project it onto a bygone age whose centrality to Russian political and cultural discourse has become all too clear since Putin's return to office.

Note

[1] This makes Summer different from the most famous example of fan fiction becoming commercial success, E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey.  Fifty Shades started out as Twilight fan fiction, but the author removed all references to Stephanie Meyer's world to make it stand on its own. The authors of Summer did not have to take this extra step. 

Next: "Little Russians:" Ukrainian "Orphans" and Their Russian Guardians

Stranger Danger

Very little of what I have described in previous posts could have been characterized as “news,” since it was all fairly well-known years before the passage of the “Dima Yakovlev” adoption ban. Moreover, the few bits of information that are genuinely new only reached public consciousness in the year after the ban took effect. So it is difficult to see the timing of this particular law as anything other than opportunistic at best, cynical at worst.  Along with the trial of Pussy Riot, the imprisonment of “Bolotny” protesters,  the charges against Alexei Navalny,  the laws reclassifying any NGO that receives money from abroad as a “foreign agent,” and, of course, the “gay propaganda” law,  the ban on adoption by Americans looks like simply one of many examples of Russia’s central government crackdown on dissent.  But the very fact that this list is so extensive only begs the question: why bring orphans into all this?  

The bill was rushed through as a punitive response to the US Congress’s “Magnitsky List,” a law banning entry to the US for people implicated in the death of a lawyer imprisoned on what are widely regarded as trumped-up charges.  Opponents of the adoption ban refused to call it the “Dima Yakovlev” Law, preferring instead the “Anti-Magnitsky Law,” the “Anti-Orphan Law,” or, more generally, “that cannibalistic (liudoedskii) law.” But the Magnitsky scandal confuses more than it explains: after all, what does transnational adoption have to do with forbidding Russian legislators entry into the US?  

Viewed in the most cynical light, the adoption ban seems to be a recognition that the complications in recent Russian-American relations can be boiled down to biopolitics: which Russian bodies can leave the Russian Federation and cross American borders?  American critics of the Magnitsky Act point out that it replicates a Cold War paradigm, always translating our bilateral disputes into matters of emigration and immigration.  

But the problem is more than one of biopolitics: the choice of orphans as the bodies in question immediately demands a politics of sentimentality and humanism, even if the principles of humanism are arguably being violated.  In Tourists of History, Marita Sturken argues that America’s response to any large-scale calamity (the Oklahoma bombing, 9/11) is to invoke the rhetoric of a nation’s lost innocence.  In my own work on catastrophe, I assert that such a rhetoric is rarely claimed in similar circumstances by and for Russia: that is, discursively, Russia does not insist on its innocence; unlike America, it does not have the luxury of pretending that previous tragedies are irrelevant, since, on the contrary, their relevance is stressed and reinforced on an almost daily basis.   

The orphan, however, is bound up in a network of innocence.  While any baby or small child works as a symbol of innocence, the orphan is particularly powerful because he or she is not just innocent, but is always already an innocent victim.  Victimhood is a powerful discursive strategy in postsocialist Russia: the people are the victims of the politicians and the rich, while the country itself is often represented as the object of exploitation and disdain on the part of Europe and (especially) the United States.

 The innocent child is also a figure that demands protection, and in whose name a great many otherwise questionable policies can be justified.  Russia is hardly alone in using the rhetoric of child protection as a fig leaf for encroaching on individual liberties; what is noteworthy is how recent this tactic is in the Russian Federation, as well as how widespread it has become.  Since 2012, the Russian legislature has passed a string of laws whose ostensible purpose is to protect children, but whose effects appear to critics to be much less, well, innocent:  smoking bans in public places and cartoons, bans on violence in cartoons,  bans on a whole range of subject matter on television before 10:00, restrictions on Internet content (the final frontier of free speech), and, most notably, the “gay propaganda” law, which, while framed as protecting minors, effectively makes it illegal to say anything positive about gays and lesbians in public. 

I’ll take a demon child instead, if that’s ok

Thus the Dima Yakovlev law is not just the culmination of years of nationalist rhetoric about the country’s resources and pride, but part of an extremely clever reappropriation of the liberal/sentimental tropes that have long served to critique Russian government policy. Institutionalized children are often seen as victims of an uncaring state, but now they are being doubly victimized: the suffering Russian orphan has become a powerful weapon of state.  Children are not being protected, but the rhetoric of child protection allows the government to inflate its own reputation while clamping down on dissent.  The actual children are still “raised” by the same state that deploys them as a tool to ensure that concerted opposition will be either stillborn or aborted. 

Next: Think of the Children!

Adopting a Law

Here we finally turn to the aspect of this debate that I assume is best known by people in this room:  the controversy over the abuse of Russian adopted children at the hands of their new parents, leading (indirectly) to the adoption of the Dima Yakovlev law (irony of ironies, Dima Yakovlev couldn't get adopted in Russia, but his law could). And here all the aforementioned discourses of Russian orphans are marshaled, pell-mell, in defense of an adoption ban, along with one of the main arguments normally used against it:  the suffering of individual children. In the years leading up to the ban on adoption of Russian children by American citizens, the Russian media had provided extensive coverage of cases involving dead adopted Russian children, often under circumstances that could, at least at first, reasonably be called suspicious.  As early as 1996 (in the run-up to the first legislative proposals for an adoption ban), 2 1/2-year-old David Polreis (born Konstantin Shelpin) was found dead, with bruises and other signs of physical abuse all over his body.  

The parents claimed that the child suffered from “Reactive Attachment Disorder,” a controversial diagnosis that has become quite common among formerly institutionalized children.   The parents, with the support of therapists practicing the Evergreen treatment protocols  (themselves a controversial repurposing of the discredited “holding therapy” once practiced unsuccessfully on autistic children), claimed that the child had beaten himself to death.  The sentencing of the mother to eighteen years in prison did little to calm passions in the Russian media.  The case brought Reactive Attachment Disorder into the Russian anti-adoption lexicon, providing an easy (and I would argue, legitimate) target for critique.  Moreover, the Evangelical parents, thanks to their own words, come off as religious fanatics (or, in Russian terms, sectarians):  before the adoption, Rene Polreis was deeply concerned about ending up with a “child conceived by atheists.”  

The 2008 death of adoptee Chase Harrison, whom his new father forgot and left in a hot car for hours, was, if anything, even more scandalous.  Here we have the perfect storm of Americanism:  car culture, parking lots, workaholic, unfeeling parents, and, worst of all, a judicial system that refused to imprison the culprit.  Immediately the media and blogsphere were filed with claims that little Chase was the victim of anti-Russian bias and concerted neglect on the part of the American government.  It’s worth noting how infrequently Russian press reports mentioned the  Commonwealth of Virginia, the state in which the Harrisons lived, which only exacerbated an understandable lack of popular comprehension about the difference between federal and state jurisdictions (and, perhaps, also reflected common assumptions that the judiciary is at the beck and call of the executive).  

In talking about Chase Harrison, I have omitted one salient detail: in Russia, his birth name was Dima Yakovlev.   Withholding his name was appropriate, if only to attempt to replicate the strange temporal gap between the boy’s terrible death and the drafting of the law that now bears his name.  Dima died on July 8, 2008; his adopted father was found not guilty on December 17th of that same year.  The adoption ban bearing Dima Yakovlev’s name was signed into law on December 28, 2012.  By this point, transnational adoption as a political issue seems to have drifted away completely from the fate of actual or potential adoptees.

“Adoption” stock photo also looks like ad for doomsday cult

There are enough facts and factoids on each side of the issue to make a convincing case.  On the pro-adoption side, we have the deplorable conditions of most Russian orphanages, the paucity of Russian citizens willing to adopt, the near-impossibility of finding Russian parents to take in children with special needs, and the statistical comparison between the number of Russian adoptees who have died suspiciously in the United States and the number of unwanted children who die in Russian orphanages. On the anti-adoption side, the cases of abuse and neglect would speak for themselves, and recent exposes in the American press have suggested that the American adoption and child-protection system is far too porous a safety net. If the lack of understanding of the relationship between the American federal and state authorities leads many in Russia to erroneous conclusions about plots and conspiracies, this same complex interplay between the federal government and the states also facilitates a horrific network of informal “rehoming,” in which difficult adopted children (from a variety of countries, including both the US and the Russian Federation) are passed from one set of adoptive parents to another, without the knowledge, let alone the approval, of child welfare authorities.  In addition, increasing scrutiny of the evangelical “Quiverfull" movement towards maximal adoption (sometimes leading to families in the double digits) casts doubts on the preparation and fitness of these parents to cope with the problems they will inevitably encounter. (Here I recommend Kathryn Joyce's The Child Catchers).

There’s just one more question, though: why was this happening now?

Next: Stranger Danger

Children for Export

In 2013, Arkady Mamontov used his Special Correspondent broadcast to screen a brief documentary called "Mama-America." For those not familiar with him, Mamontov is one of the most virulent propagandists on Russian state television;  watching his appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars in 2022 was like seeing two kindred spirits find themselves at last. "Mama-America," which aired less than a month after the Dima Yakovlev law took effect, begins with a recitation of statistics about Russia's natural resource exports: wood, oil, and over 5000 children.  Images of innocent toddlers repeatedly alternate with video footage of a a tree trunk being sliced by a tables saw.

There’s a point being made by this juxtaposition—what could it possibly be?

The first phase of mass-mediated opposition (or, at least, strong concern) about transnational adoption in the 1990s focused primarily on the networks of trade, influence, and bribery that complicated presentations of foreign adoption in Russia as a humanitarian and altruistic endeavor.  As Lilia Khabibullina noted, the newspaper headlines on the subject were dramatic and predictable:  "Deti na eksport” “Children for Export", "Prodazha detei,” [Children for sale”] "Rynok rossiksikh detei,” [The market in Russian children].  These stories of corruption easily resonated with the Russian public, given that they invoked the aforementioned anxieties over export while plugging in to the the all-too-familiar lived experience of networks of corruption in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.  Here I wish to draw attention not to the veracity of these reports (and a number of them are substantiated in multiple media outlets), but their essential plausibility: true or not, these acts of child-selling and bribe-taking were immediately legible. Far more legible, in fact, than narratives of selfless Westerners rescuing children for no personal gain (and acting, ironically, like the exact opposite of the rapacious denizens of capitalist countries in Soviet propaganda). 

 The first significant confluence of media attention and legislative action took place in 1997, when the Duma threatened to ban foreign adoption altogether. The result (over many years), was not a ban, but ongoing negotiations between Russia and adopting countries (particularly the US) aimed at regulating the adoption industry.  This early wave of concern pre-dates the rise of anti-American sentiment in Russia (the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1998 were a significant turning point), and there was little political enthusiasm for an international confrontation. Moreover, the concern in Russia was not about the fate of the adopted children qua children; there was little argument that Russia's adopted orphans were not in some way individually better off being raised by families (and by families with significant means).  In other words, this was not yet an argument about mistreatment and abuse, and there were few "victims" with names and faces.

But even this early round of anti-adoption sentiment contains a number of the features that would become so prominent in the years to follow. First is the aforementioned notion of children as a national resource or national treasure, often closely tied with patriotic historiography and military rhetoric.  In the 1990s, "Krasnaia zvezda” [Red Star, the military newspaper] ran a series of features about modern-day orphans adopted as mascots by army regiments, thereby recapitulating the famous figure of the World War II era "syn polka.” [son of the regiment]  The positive invocation of the "syn polka" suggests a native Russian/Soviet way of offering abandoned children (or at least boys) a better life, here by replacing absent parents with the discipline and comradeship of the army.  Similar attempts to look to the Soviet past for positive solutions can be found throughout the media--the Mamontov documentary referenced above included a reporter standing in front of the statue of KGB-founder Felix Dzherzhinsky,  proclaiming that this man who has recently been declared a criminal did one thing right: he took care of the problem of bezprizorniki without exporting Russian children abroad (as if that had even been an option on the table back then). 

But the military aspect here is crucial.  First, because it makes more immediate sense in the Russian context than it might elsewhere.  Boys who "graduate" from the detdom lack any of the cultural capital that allows so many young men to avoid the draft, and therefore follow a well-worn path into military service.  While both orphanhood and the military provide ample negative material for muckraking journalism of the chernukha variety (hazing being a life-long constant), in popular narrative, each is transformed into a model of patriotic heroism.  The protagonist of Viktor Dotsenko's now all-but-forgotten "Beshennyi” [Mad Dog]series  (a 1990s bestseller that I already milked for every last drop of significance in Overkill)  is a military hero precisely because he is an orphan:  the fictional Savely Govorkov makes the symbolic substitution of nation for family that proves far more difficult in real life.   And in the furor over the so-called "Dima Yakovlev" law, proponents repeatedly return to the threat that "exported" Russian children might one day serve in foreign armies (presumably in an eventual war between the US and Russia).  Such a military context is completely absent from Western discourses of transnational adoption, and this absence shows just how wide the discursive gap can be.

The other striking aspect of the debate, particularly before Dima Yakovlev, is the transformation of individual children into pure biological potential.  The Soviet slogan "Beregite detstvo!” [Protect childhood!]   already brought the question of child welfare to an alarming level of abstraction (as much of the work of Andrei Platonov shows, childhood can survive perfectly well without children). But the post-Soviet anxieties about children lost to the motherland take this abstraction from the macro level to the micro, indeed to the microscopic:  "exported" children represent a serious blow to the vitality of the gene pool (genofond). The deployment of the notion of genofond is a fascinating and complex topic in its own right, resonating both with the still-popular ideas of Lev Gumilev and his "ethnogenesis"  (which posits ethnos as a real, non-constructed entity that Gumilev treats as the true subject of history).  But here ethnogenesis merges with poorly assimilated understandings of genetics: it is the Russian genome itself that becomes the most valuable and the most endangered of all the motherland's natural resources. Never mind that the children most likely to be adopted are the very children whose heredity ("nasledstvennost'") is so routinely maligned.  The very fact that foreigners want these "defective" children shows their value: once again, Russia is being tricked into making a bad deal.

The discourse of genofondmay well be the most dehumanizing of all the rationales for banning transnational adoption, in that it reduces the children in question to mere phenotypical expressions of their genetic potential.  Ironically, this is the reasoning that progressives in the West are usually so ready to condemn as a neoliberal recapitulation of capitalism as natural:  Richard Dawkins' famous reformulation of evolution not in terms of species or individuals,  but the genes who use their hosts as vehicles for survival and reproduction.  But in the hands of Russian nationalists, genetic Darwinism becomes a tool for collectivist thinking: not the selfish gene, but the selfish gene pool.

Next: Adopting a Law

American Dad (and Mom)

For Western adoptive parents, adoptable children are embodied entirely in terms of suffering and need.  The vast literature on transnational adoption in general (as opposed to research focusing on Russia) speaks of the construction of the "waiting" child, who languishes in sub-Dicknesian orphanages in the vain hopes of being given a loving home.  These children are, indeed, waiting, but, technically, many of them are waiting for their mothers who have not relinquished parental rights to come back to them. But even setting aside this hugely important point, the construction of the "waiting" child depends on a discourse of mutual presence and mutual lack.  Lack, in that the children desperately need basic care and warmth, but also in that many of the adoptive parents themselves suffer from the unfulfilled need for a child to take care of.  Presence, in that the child him or herself embodies the thing so wanted by the would-be mother or father. Orphans and infertility make a perfect closed loop of pathos.

More puzzling to the Russian media are the parents motivated not by childlessness but by sheer altruism, often (but by no means exclusively) in the form of an evangelical Christian calling. Altruism and childlessness part ways when it comes to motivation, but share a common sense of the "waiting" child.  The marketing aspects of both the industry of international adoption and the smaller industry of the adoption memoir trade on the orphan as poster child: while would-be adoptees may be shown in the most flattering and attractive light to would-be parents, the deployment of images of such children as part of a political or cultural campaign is rather different.  In such cases, the child simply can never be abject enough.  Witness the cover of Russia's Abandoned Children:  the dirtiness of this child seems awfully mannered, the dirt here equivalent to make-up applied before a photo shoot. 

Please, sir, could I have some more…subtle book covers?

Simultaneously the objects of pity and the subjects of suffering, these children are both intensely national (Russian orphans are not Chinese orphans--their living conditions and bureaucratic fates are the products of their local circumstances) and essentially fungible (Russian orphans are not Chinese orphans--most of them can be read as white and seamlessly incorporated into mainstream white America). American attitudes towards transnational adoptees have evolved significantly since the 1950s:   adoptive parents of Asian babies are now more likely to try to connect the children to their natal cultures, and part of the motivation has to be a recognition that the children will always be visibly distinct from their (usually white) adoptive parents.  But even here, the assumption is that an adoptive child's needs are primarily emotional, material, pedagogical, and medical.  Regardless of national origin, a child is a child is a child, to be assessed and evaluated as an individual subject that must be saved and provided a better life, rather than part of a national body whose integrity must be preserved at all cost. 

 It is easy to look at the relationship between Russian orphans and Western (particularly American) would-be parents as one of supply and demand; indeed, the very appropriateness of this formulation highlights one of the primary sources of unease about such adoptions in Russia: that children are being moved across borders as part of market transactions.  This concern is by no means unique to Russia, nor can it be dismissed: the highly publicized cases of child theft and sale in numerous countries, most notably Guatemala, confirm that this is an enterprise that almost effortlessly lends itself to corruption and exploitation (E.J. Graff has an especially damning expose called "The Lie We Love" in Foreign Policy) . But the timing of transnational adoption from Russia and the former Soviet republics had to heighten such concerns.  As the countries' borders were opened and trade restrictions virtually abolished, Russia was awash in cheap imports, both physical (Snickers) and cultural (Santa Barbara); in return, Russia exported precious, non-renewable natural resources (minerals and oil). As I have argued elsewhere (and repeatedly), anxieties about rapacious capitalism and a country for sale took on symbolic form in the media and culture industries through the focus on Russian women (as mail-order brides and prostitutes) and urban legends about kidnapping, trafficking, and murder for the sake of organ harvesting. These symbols combine a dehumanizing commodification with a sense of national dismemberment, and they were quickly joined by the figure of the Russian child adopted by foreign parents.

Next: Children for Export

Children of the Counter-Revolution

The Russian drama of transnational adoption is a puzzling one to American-born observers.  The long tradition of adopting children in the United States is anomalous, and neatly jibes with national myths about immigration, adaptation, and reinvention.  Indeed, in the hands of a Horatio Alger, orphanhood is tantamount to opportunity:  like the country itself, the American orphan is rootless and ingenious.  Little Orphan Annie  survives numerous trials and tribulations, only to be adopted by a capitalist sugar daddy who admires her pluck.  She doesn't mind that he's old and bald, and Daddy Warbucks doesn't mind that she travels with an obnoxious mutt and lacks any visible pupils in her apparently empty eye sockets. 

The hills have eyes. Orphans, apparently, do not.

As one of the key nodes in the network of transnational adoption, the United States has produced a great deal of scholarship on the subject in recent years.  These studies span a variety of disciplines, from sociology to anthropology, from history to literature.  Many of the authors are themselves either transnational adoptees or parents of children adopted from other countries. Add in the ever-growing genre of transnational adoption memoirs (again, by both parents and adult children), and it is safe to say that the last few decades have seen something of a baby boom in adoption studies.  Many of these works focus on questions of race, which is both a real issue in the lived experience of adoptees and the “go-to” category of alterity in contemporary America.  Adoptions from Russia and the former Soviet Union, while providing material for numerous memoirs, have not received as much attention as adoptions from China and Latin America, in part due to relatively smaller numbers, and in part due to the fact that many of the babies adopted from the Russian Federation can safely be assimilated to the American category of  “whiteness.”

Transnational adoption is also a complicated subject for American Slavists, and not only because it implicates many of us personally.[1]   Regardless of our individual political views, we are transnational by profession.  Studying another culture does not only mean trying to adopt it--at times, it means begging to be adopted by it.  We study abroad and stay in host families, accumulating local mamas and papas with an alarming filial promiscuity.  Both our country and our profession encourage an individualist (some might say neoliberal) approach to family ties and national identity. This is why, for all our expertise, we're never really trusted by the American State Department, whose foreign service arm is so afraid that their officers might "go native" that they have devised a system of rotation guaranteed to prevent the accumulation of real local knowledge, let alone linguistic proficiency. 

There is no neutral position to be occupied here; if anything, the local knowledge as Russianists may well be an obstacle. No one engaged in the debate over Russian transnational adoption occupies a privileged position; even those with direct experience of Russian orphanages and Russian adoption are often trapped in a particular perspective, that of humanitarian sympathy and desperation.  We have all heard the horror stories about Russian orphanages, and those who've paid closer attention know about the stalled attempts in the past twenty years to establish alternatives. 

But if the Russian Federation's efforts to provide a physical habitat for its abandoned children cannot be considered a success, the Russian orphan's place in the national consciousness is equally vexed.  The recurring debates about transnational adoption in the Russian Federation unintentionally highlight the ambiguous status of orphaned children:  they are, by definition, "unwanted," but when foreign couples express an interest in adopting them, the Russian media and government succumb to a moralistic fit of mimetic desire, and will not let them go.  Wanted and unwanted at the same time, these children are Schrodinger's orphans, trapped in a perverse superposition that is no place like home. The dilemma appears irreconcilable by definition: what do we do with such a child?  Solomon advises us to take disputed babies and chop them in half, gambling that maternal love will trump maternal desire.  But affect does not provide a way out of this particular dispute, since both sides use sentiment as their main weapon,

The plight of orphaned and institutionalized children in Russia is a serious, painful subject. The lives of real children are at stake. But their role as putative real children in the discourse in itself obscures the actual lived experience of the children and their caretakers: they are described in such a way as to score rhetorical points.  So I will start with what might seem to be the most inappropriate way to talk about orphans: a joke.

—Кто твой отец? спрашивает учительница Вовочку.

—Товарищ Сталин! 

—А кто твоя мать?

—Советская родина!

—А кем ты хочешь стать?

—Сиротой!

“Who is your father,” the teacher asks Vovochka.

“Comrade Stalin!”

“And who is your mother?”

“The Soviet Motherland!”

“And who do you want to be when you grow up?”

“An orphan!"

There are multiple versions of this joke, of course--I first heard it as an army joke about Russia’s all-purpose anecdotal Jew, Rabinovich, wishing to be rid of the “beloved communist part of the USSR” (the mother) and Leonid Ilich Brezhnev (the father).  The military variation will have some resonance below, but Vovochka is really the ideal subject:  the never-aging scamp of Soviet jokelore is impervious to all attempts at education and refinement. His reflexive disregard for everything his parents and teachers tell him suggests a picaresque hero who effectively orphans himself in each telling of the tale. 

This particular Vovochka joke, with its revolving cast of characters and infinite adaptability to the changing times, indirectly reminds us that the history of Russia in the twentieth century is also the history of wave after wave of orphans, the sadly predictable result of war and displacement.  Easily the most studied orphan population (or at least orphan phenomenon) was the bezprizorniki  (street children)  who were repeatedly invoked as a social ill in the wake of the October Revolution and ensuing Civil War.  Alan Ball’s And Now My Soul Is Hardened  provides a scholarly, but heartrending account of the lives of these children, and of the government’s attempts either to help them or to solve them as a problem.  By the 1930s, bezprizorniki had been replaced by the orphans and wayward youth as raw material for reforging, as seen in the book and ever-popular film The Republic of SHKID,  and formalized into a pedagogy of moral education through labor by Makarenko in his book,The Pedagogical Poem (itself turned into that Soviet classic film, The Road to Life).   In a series of detailed and insightful articles, Laurie Bernstein shows the complicated legal entanglements involved in sorting out the status of children orphaned in the Great Patriotic War, as well as examining the functioning of the post-Stalin child welfare system. But for most of the twentieth century, the Soviet orphan was, as one might expect, an internal problem.  

But the Vovochka joke also connects the loss of parents with the loss of nation, a motif that resurfaces at short, regular intervals throughout the two-decade-long adoption debate.  And by using the word "orphan" as the metaphorical answer to a metaphorical question, it even encodes the problem of definition that complicates both the liberal/humanitarian construction of transnational adoption (domestically and in the West) and the nationalist/anti-commodity-capitalist response:  what, exactly, constitutes an orphan?  As in many countries that supply children to the transnational adoption network, Russia has long supported a network of orphanages whose inhabitants occupy any one of a surprisingly wide range of familial statuses.  Indeed, the English term "orphanage" is deceptive; the Russian "detskii dom" or "detdom”  or “dom rebenka” says nothing about orphans per se.  These "children's homes" (or, as some of the American adoption memoirs put it, "baby houses")  contain not only children of unknown parentage and children whose birth mothers have waved their parental rights, but a large number of “social orphans,” children whose parents are alive and, if not well, at least possible to locate.  Like American children in foster care, these children live in the limbo of a temporary status that all too often becomes a permanent ontological state.  I use the term "orphan" for the sake of convenience, while nevertheless recognizing the inadequacy of the term. 

Next: American Dad (and Mom)

Note

[1]  I don't have the stats, but I would guess that the number of Russian children adopted by American-born Russianists is exceeded only by the number of Russian spouses married (and possibly divorced) by American-born Russianists.

"I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"

Chapter One:

Unfit Motherlands

"I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"

When Sting released his song “Russians” in 1985, the chorus contained some of the most asinine lyrics to make the radio Top Forty :  “I hope the Russians love their children, too.” [1] It was, of course, a rhetorical gesture to remind listeners of what was at stake in the event of a global nuclear war, but really: did anyone think the Russians hated their children?  Or that in a millennium of existence as a culture, they still hadn’t made up their minds?   

In the nearly four decades since the song's initial release, the question it poses has taken numerous ironic twists and turns, most of which involve the question of adoption.  The 2012 "Dima Yakovlev" law banning the adoption of Russian children by U.S. nationals was allegedly meant to protect the country's young, but instead called attention to the dismal conditions of Russian orphanages and the fate of those children who would now be denied a home.  Ten years later, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials initiated a process widely recognized as a war crime:  the transportation of Ukrainian children into the Russian Federation for subsequent fostering and adoption.  Just a week after the invasion began (and before this latest adoption program was initiated), Sting released a video in which he performed "Russians" on Instagram, and re-recorded the song the following month to raise money for humanitarian and medical aide to Ukraine.   Taken together, these two historical moments remind us of two crucial problems with Sting's question (besides the obvious one already raised): who, exactly, are the "Russians," and whose children qualify as "theirs"?

Stick to tantra, Sting

Obviously, Sting was engaging in the common Western habit of referring to the Soviet Union as "Russia"--the crucial distinction between the two was invisible to most non-specialists outside the Eastern Bloc.  But this is an error that inadvertently demonstrates the imperial/colonial structure on which the USSR was founded: as a group, the decision-makers were, in fact, the "Russians" (even if key individuals in the leadership had different ethnic backgrounds). In the years since the first invasion of Ukraine, Russian talking heads have increasingly denied any distinction between Russians and Ukrainians, going as far as to deny the very existence of Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a people.  Moving Ukrainian children to Russia is the biopolitical equivalent of the Russian Federations incursions across Ukraine's borders:  a declaration that Ukrainian children are Russian children, too.

Whoever these children are--Russian orphans adopted by Westerners, Ukrainian children transported across the border without their parents' or guardians' consent, or simply the notional child in whose "defense" a flurry of restrictive laws have been adopted by the Russian legislature over the course of more than a decade--the policies and debates framing their welfare remind us how difficult it is to disentangle sincere concern for the most vulnerable members of a society from broader ideological questions and conflicts. Children, it seems, are never simply children.

Anxieties over the fate of children might seem like the opposite of melancholy, or even its remedy: the existence of the next generation can be a great consolation for the death of someone older.  At the turn of the twentieth century, the comfort provided by children in the face of loss was actually condemned by an influential, but profoundly idiosyncratic Russian philosopher whose ideas influence generations of Russian and Soviet thinkers: Nikolai Fyodorov. Fyodorov believed that  the acceptance of loss was a serious mistake.  Instead, all of humankind's efforts should be directed towards the physical resurrection of the dead. To that end, people should reject all the things that distract them from what he called the "Common Task": sex, reproduction, and child-rearing.  Though Soviet policy would almost always be pro-natalist, the romantic appeal of scientific resurrection was a significant component of early Soviet ideology, even if, at the time of this writing,  every early Soviet citizen who was taken with this idea is, to quote The Wizard of Oz, quite sincerely dead. Fyodorov's philosophy does not justify questioning whether or not the Russians actually love their children, but did contain the implicit sentiment that Russians might be better off loving their children a little less.

Fyodorov's philosophy is melancholic through and through: accepting loss is inherently unacceptable, so the dead must not be allowed to remain dead.  The only future that matters to him is one that brings back the past. Since the last Perestroika years, Fyodorov, like so many pre-Soviet artists, thinkers and writers,  has undergone something of a renaissance.  His body has not been resuscitated, but his ideas have cropped up in the strangest of places, as Anya Bernstein's work on Russian transhumanism demonstrates.  If Fyodorov has exerted any influence on Russian policy makers and pundits, it is only indirectly.  Indeed, official Russian rhetoric since the first invasion of Ukraine has been distinctly pro-death:  men are exhorted to be willing to lay down their lives for Russia, and even if it comes to nuclear war, as Putin himself said in October 2018, "An aggressor should know that vengeance is inevitable, that he will be annihilated, and we would be the victims of the aggression. We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will just drop dead. They will not even have time to repent for this."  Two months after the full-scale invasion, top propagandist Margarita Simonyan predicted that the fighting would escalate into World War III: 'This is to my horror on one hand, but on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak... We're all going to die someday." As slogans go, "We're all going to die someday" could use some workshopping, but it makes its point:  no lives matter.

On February 19, 2023,  few days before the first anniversary of the invasion, a video by an apparently drunk "patriotic Russian mother" made the rounds of Russian and Ukrainian social media. Addressing an imaginary Ukrainian audience, she declares, "I'm the mom of four sons...I'll give all four of them to you.  Like fuck you'll  break Russia. I'll just have more." In another video just a few months earlier, an older "patriotic" mother argues with a young woman about the war. The young one asks, "Do you have a son?" She does. "And you'll send him off to die?" "Sure, if I have to."   "Aren't you sorry for him?" "Sure, but  what else can I do? " In another video, posted just a day before the anniversary,  a different mother made the case of sacrificing her children. This one has already buried one son, and is ready to offer up her two younger ones: "There's a profession:  defending the motherland"  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5uaprygzPk_ ).   Some of the commenters voice suspicions that this video is a "fake;" they claim an actress is reading a script for propaganda purposes. That may be the case, but the veracity of the video is not the point.  With frequent appeals to the Soviet Union's sacrifices in World War II, such videos complicate Sting's decades old sentiment.  In this framework, yes, Russian love their children, too, but they are supposed to love the Motherland more, as evidenced by Russian mothers who are ready for their sons to die.

In times of war, mothers have always sent their sons to their possible deaths; this is a basic condition of war. The willingness to make this sacrifice (and to sacrifice one's self) is predicated either on the conviction that there is something greater or more important than one's individual life, or on the understanding that there is no choice (situations in which not fighting is tantamount to death).  In the case of Russia's war in Ukraine, the reality on the ground starkly diverges from the rhetoric used both in these video and on state television:  the exodus of thousands of draft-age men, often with the assistance of their moths and wives, demonstrates the limits of the "Z" narrative of resurgent Nazism.  In World War II, Soviet men did, indeed, sign up in droves to protect their country from the Nazi invasion, just as Ukrainian men and women are doing in order to fight off the invaders from Russia. But today's Russian men are treating this war not as an existential threat to Russia, but as an existential threat to themselves.

These videos, along with the constant haranguing by Kremlin propagandas, implicitly accept that "the Russians" love their children, but are asking them to love their country more. Or rather, not their country (in which case, there would be less draft-dodging), but the narrative about their country and its place in the world.  It is a narrative in which the hero of history, and the protagonist of story, is Russia itself, that is, Russia's collective body (and not the individuals who make up the country's population).  The regime needs Russia to be Mayakovsky's giant Ivan, ready to engage in single combat with a multi-headed hydra of Biden, Soros, and Zelensky.

By this point, it should be clear that the word "children" is doing a lot of work here.  In Sting's song, and in the various adoption controversies, "children" are assumed to be young and helpless.  In the context of the war, the "children" (or, more often, "sons") have reached (young) adulthood thanks to the love and care of the parents who are willing to let them go.  But in both cases, children and sons are placed within a framework that, while acknowledging the value of their personal pain and suffering, considers them in terms of the national collective body.  And not just any body, but a militarized, potentially mobilized body;  within the sentimental discourse of the plight of the orphan is the fear that the internationally adopted child will become a soldier in a war against his own motherland.

Orphans, adoption, and the rhetoric of child protection since 1991 situate the national collective body in a strange web of overlapping temporalities.  Orphanhood involves loss by definition (although the question is complicated by the phenomenon of "social orphans," discussed below) and therefore points to the past; adoption should function as a compensatory measure, a remedy in the present for a wound of the past, but international adoption involves past, present, and future at once, replicating orphanhood as not just the loss of a parent or parents, but the removal of a child from the motherland, thereby depriving the child of a Russian future (in the case of the Dima Yakovlev controversy) or supplying a Russian future to a child who never wanted one (the seizure of Ukrainian children).  Moreover, these questions must be understood against the backdrop of demographic anxieties (the Russian Federation's shrinking population and the falling ratio of ethnic Russians to non-Russians in the RF), concerns about the Russian-speaking populations in other former Soviet states, and the overall sense that Russia, as the latest iteration of forms of statehood that included the USSR, is, quite simply, much smaller than it used to be.

All of which brings us back to melancholy.  The adoption question is rooted in the ongoing sense of Soviet loss--of territory, of prestige, of population, and the fears that Russia  is selling off its natural resources as a prelude to the total dismantlement of the state. Internationally adopted children are both fear and loss, a variation on the endless melancholy of the post-Soviet Russian condition.  And as a vehicle for anxieties about the future (state collapse, adopted orphans joining foreign armies), it is an expression of melancholy projected onto the future, a proleptic melancholy:  loss will continue, and it can be mourned in advance.

Next: Children of the Counter-Revolution

Notes

[1] And keep in mind that this was during the reign of Duran Duran, so there was stiff competition.

Instead of a Conclusion

If there's one thing I hate in Russian scholarly writing, it's the coy avoidance of a conclusion with the phrase "Instead of a Conclusion."  Today's entry warrants it, because I'm not being coy.  This is a chapter that has run away from me several times, and needs some rethinking before I can being to wrap it up.  I realize this is unsatisfying, but that's what happens when you're writing in real time, without a net.  If I force things, the conclusion can't help but be unsatisfying.

Instead, let's move on to the next chapter. Please join me next week for Chapter 3: "Unfit Motherlands: Adoption and the Rhetoric of National Integrity." Yes, we're skipping 2, but it's also quite possible Chapter 3 will become Chapter 2.  Again, no net.

Next: "I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"

What We Talk About When We Talk About Russia

Naming and claiming a territory is no doubt a political act; indeed, in the history of international relations, what could be more of a signature move than that? But it is also a philosophical question. When we apply a name to something, what, exactly, are we doing? And what is the nature of the name and its relationship to the named?

In semiotics, this question has an easy answer: Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of the discipline, declared that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. This is what distinguishes the sign from the symbol, for which this relationship usually has a logical or metonymic basis.  A nation or idea is slippery and vague enough to constitute what is often called a "floating signifier;" following Claude Levi-Strauss, post-structuralist theorists have connected this term with the varieties of ideology.  Certain, the "Soviet" was and is a floating signifier, as is "Russia," but the same could hold true for any nation, state, or empire.

Look, honey! It’s a floating signifier!

But for every assertion made by a critical theorist, there is an equal and often opposite assertion on the part of an analytic philosopher. Perhaps analytic philosophy might lead us in a different direction? In 1970, the philosopher Saul Kripke delivered a series of public lectures that, in 1980, were collected and published as Naming and Necessity, which, among other things, argued against what was then the reigning paradigm among philosophers of language when discussing names and naming: the descriptivist theory of proper names. Associated primarily with Bertrand Russell, Gottlieb Frege, Lutwig Wittengenstein, and John Searle, this model (also sometimes referred to as the "Frege-Russell view" or "mediated reference theory"), posits that names effectively function as containers of descriptions of the given person. "Lev Tolstoy," for example, would be a phrase that collects such well-know facts as "Russian author," "philosopher of nonviolence," "died at a train station," and "had a long beard," among many, many others. This explanation does not do descriptivism justice, nor does it account for the differences in the approaches taken by Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Searle. 

It is enough to know that Kripke was arguing against what he saw as fundamental flaws in descriptivism, proposing (though never quite endorsing) what would come to be known as the "causal theory of reference." Kripke argued that names initially gain their referent through the inaugural act of "dubbing" (or "initial baptism"); a for instance, a parent names a newborn girl Svetlana, causing others to use the name in reference to her from then on. The name accrues new significance over time, based on Svetlana's own qualities and actions; if Svetlana gets glasses at  age 7 and subsequently wear them all the time, she will not always have been the girl with glasses,  but those who meet her later in life will inevitably see this as one of her distinguishing features.  Svetlana will continue to be Svetlana if she loses a leg, and also if she starts using a prosthetic.  For Kripke, most proper names function as "rigid designators:" they always refer to the same thing.  This is usually discussed in terms of "possible worlds" (is water always water in every possible world), but a more relevant way of looking at it for our purposes might go back to its constituent parts: like the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, is it always the same thing when its components are swapped out?

"Russia" is a proper name. Does that mean it also qualifies as a rigid designator?  Yes, to the extent that there is some commonly-understood "Russia" at which people point when they say the word. It would take a great deal of geographical ignorance to place "Russia" in South America, or to call the Russian Federation "Brazil." But countries can be poor examples of object permanence: there is no longer a country called "Yugoslavia" or the "Soviet Union," though they still function as rigid designators because we know what they were in the past.  After the repeated partitions of Poland in the 19th century, Alfred Jarry's Father Ubu announced his intention to invade Poland because "there is no Poland." It is unsurprising that sovereign states want very much to insist on their own persistence, or even on their eternal essence: they want their countries to be rigid designators. Or, more to the point when it comes to Russia, there are political forces that very much want the population to believe "Russia" is a rigid designation: Russia is whatever was at one point Russia, or what the leadership declares to be (and always have been) Russia. Hence the repeated declarations that "there is no such sovereign country as Ukraine" (shades of Ubu!), in part because Ukraine as a recognized state is a relatively recent historical phenomenon.  The claim is totalizing, and much order than Ukrainian statehood:  Kyiv, after all, has long been claimed as the "cradle of Russian civilization," even as, geographically, it might be more proper to declare it the "cradle of Ukrainian civilization." To the ears of a Russian nationalist, this sounds like a punchline.

Next: Instead of a Conclusion

What's In a Name?

This crisis of naming involves multiple, apparently contradictory, understandings of its subject (usually "Russia") as well as divergent philosophies of naming. "Global Russian" downplays the "Russian" part of the designation, allowing it to mean whatever the speaker wants "Russian" to signify. "Global Russian" delights in linguistic slippage (to the point of slipping between languages): "Russian" is whatever the "Global Russian" speaker points to when they say "Russian." Crucially, it is a self-designation:  though there is plenty of room to criticize the Global Russian project for unacknowledged imperialist holdovers, "Russian" in this case is not imposed on subjects who reject the name.

The statist iterations of the "Russian World" project signal  what might be called "incantatory" naming, or "magical thinking":  here, the most important thing is the very fact of the assertion of the name.  There is nothing new about this; the path from the straightforward nationalist slogan during the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, "Ovo je Srbija" ("The is Serbia") that was slapped on a whole range of disputed territories to the much-derided Russian billboards in occupied Ukraine ("Russia Is Here Forever," which looked ironic once Russian forces left).  This is the linguistic logic of manifesto, which, regardless of any substantive content, rests on reasserting the existence of the document's subject ("We are Futurists," for instance).

It is a logic that is simultaneously aggressive and melancholic, a deliberately unequivocal assertion that responds to the unresolved loss of what had been thought to be a fixed referent.  At the heart of this crisis of naming is an inability or refusal to define what, exactly is being named, and what constitutes is semantic, geographical, and juridical borders.  Thus all the current names are inherently unsatisfying:  The Russian Federation (itself a truncated iteration of the "Russian ("Rossiiskaia") Soviet Federative Socialist Republic),  Russia (which describes what, exactly?), Rus' (which makes nostalgic and imperialist claims on Kyiv), the Commonwealth of Independent States (the umbrella association that replaced the USSR, and which barely registers now as an afterthought), the USSR itself (defunct, and built around the initially empty signifier of "Soviet"), the Russian Empire (which always seems on the verge of some sort of comeback). Nor should we forget the "Near Abroad" (the former Soviet states minus the Russian Federation) and  "Novorossiia" (a forgotten name revived for the purposes of post-2014 expansionism). The impoverished language for describing not just Russian statehood, but the imaginary community of Russianness, is combatted with utterances that appear to be merely constative ("This is Russia") but are politically performative ("We declare this to be Russia"), based on whatever evidence is convenient or can be manufactured (the bones of Russian heroes, allegations of Russophobic atrocities).

Just add water, and you get Russia

This crisis in naming has long held an obvious political dimension, in that Russia's leadership and media apparatus have abrogated for themselves the power (or at least, the veto power) over naming conventions throughout the former Soviet space. As early as 1995, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's government reversed the trend of calling the newly independent states by their preferred names. According to a list prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Belarus was once again to be called "Byelorussia" and Kyrgyzstan "Kirighizia," although Moldova was formally designated the "Republic of Moldova" with the shortened form "Moldavia." Such inconsistencies are interesting, but not crucial. The policy, which matched a general hostility to the idea of changing linguistic norms out of consideration for minority and ethnic populations as "political correctness," reinforces the authority of the Russian state as naming power. The most significant faultline continue to involve Ukraine. Just as, in English, the use of the definite article ("the Ukraine") has been rejected as a diminution of Ukrainian statehood, so, too, do Ukraine's supporters ask that the Russian preposition used with the country's name be "v" (in) rather than the traditional "na" (on), which connotes a territory rather than a sovereign entity.

Next: What We Talk About When We Talk About Russia

The Diaspora Begins at Home

The term "global Russian" is contused and problematic, both within the snobshchestvo and without. From a political or sociological point of view, the idea of the global Russian is marginal at best.  At issue is a very small group of people who consider themselves an elite, representing an idea far more than an actual empirical trend. The idea itself has a great deal of value for understanding not just contemporary Russia, but also the vexed relationship between diaspora and transnationalism.  On the face of it, the global Russians are transnational through and through.  If they emigrate, they may just as easily come back.  If they leave the country, they might simply be following jobs and opportunities, and returning to Russia could very well be their next step.  More important, one does not have to leave Russia in order to be a global Russian.  

Yet the global Russians make a valuable contribution to our understanding of post-Soviet diaspora, thanks in part to the issues of loss discussed above.  Traditionally, diaspora is about leaving the homeland for another country, and succeeding, failing, or not even trying to assimilate. What country are the global Russians leaving behind?  The Soviet Union was a multi-national empire that technically lacked a titular nationality: "Soviet" was not an option for Line Five of the internal identity documents. But whatever one's attitude towards Soviet ideology and aspirations, despite the self-hatred encoded in the stereotype of the sovok, the identity that did, in fact, cover everyone, regardless of "nationality" (ethnicity), the identity that, for good or ill, posited a common culture, a common background, and even a common lingua franca (Russian) was Soviet. Everyone in Russia (and the other republics) has been exiled from that homeland.  The elitism and cosmopolitanism of the global Russian is antithetical to the now defunct Soviet ideology, but this is a difference of content rather than form.  In their aspirations toward internationalism and their focus on Russian culture as a default common ground, the global Russians are recapitulating some of the most appealing aspects of Soviet structures and Soviet discourse.  This is a profoundly compensatory gesture, an attempt to define a community in the absence of a vanished home. That home is no address or street--that home is the Soviet Union.  

Thus the transnational character of the  Global Russians is, like their name, deceptive, since the global Russians are a Soviet diaspora in a world that has rendered a return to the Soviet home impossible.  The global Russians allow for a redefinition of the Russian community itself: trans-ethnic (like Soviet identity) and deterritorialized (exiled from its form Soviet home).  The global Russians posit a "Russian" diaspora that is capacious enough to include the Russian Federation itself.  Just as millions of Soviet citizens "left" their native country in 1991 without taking a step, now Russians can belong to a diaspora while living comfortably in the suburbs of Moscow.

The "Global Russian" was not the only framework available for rethinking Russian identity beyond the country's borders; it wasn't even the newest.  With origins dating back to the 1980s, an idea called "the Russian World" was quickly being coopted from its originally liberal roots for the purposes of a nationalist/imperial agenda under Putin.  Since Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the phrase has become irredeemably expansionist, yet in the beginning, it was in many ways the prototype of the short-lived "Global Russian" movement.

During the perestroika years, a group of forward-looking Soviet intellectuals centered around the philosopher Mikhail Gefter was already anticipating the need for a new, unifying identity that could function in a world where the "Soviet" was no longer viable.

Gefter's group effected a partial deterritorialization of group identity, positing that people might feel a sense of belonging to various "worlds" that could not be defined solely by geography, even if such a world originated in a specific, identifiable country or state. Since these worlds could overlap and coexist without sparking territorial disputes, their close cooperation could serve as a model for avoiding military conflict (Nemtzev).  Unsurprisingly, there was one such world to which Gefter's circle paid especially close attention: the Russian World.

What looked initially like an abstract, philosophical exercise gained a sense of urgency after the Soviet collapse. As I have already discussed in Plots against Russia, a broad range of elites and cranks spent the 1990s obsessed with the development of a new "Russian Idea" that could united a fractured and fractious nation.

Initially, the framework of the Russian World was not all that different from the Global Russians that eventually followed. Each would offer a vision of Russianness that tried to move beyond nationalism and imperialism whose aspirations towards inclusiveness were complicated by a questionable terminology. Each used the word for "Russian" (russkii)  in a manner divorced from the word's ethnic definition.  "Russian" was instead a matter of language and culture, not ancestry.  For Gefter's circle, speakers of Russian had a world view that was structured by the Russian language, steering them towards common ways of thinking that were not necessarily shared by non-Russian speakers.  There are, of course, numerous flaws with this notion, from its resemblance to the discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to an unrecognized cultural imperialism that makes no allowances for the intersecting cultural identities of non-Russian Russian speakers in the former Soviet Union.

This, however, was in the 1990s, and this relatively benign formulation of the Russian World would not survive the Putin Era.  Putin brought up the concept early in his presidency, in a 2001 speech, but, as with most questions of politics and ideology, it would take years for the Russian World to take on a more oppressive overtone.  In this speech, Putin defined the Russian World as an extraterritorial phenomenon, less about borders than about all the people “who speak, think and – what is perhaps most important – feel in Russian," whether they lived within the boarders of the Russian Federation or beyond (Suslov 2020). Over time, the Russian World proved to be a useful vehicle for the state's soft power initiatives, resulting in a transformation of the imaginary geography that formed the idea.  The early version of the Russian World looked a bit more like a distributed network, but now it was rested on the relationship between the center of power (the Russian Federation, and less, generally, Moscow) and the various Russian-speaking  communities around the world.

It’s the Russians’ world, we’re just living in it

Nor did the foreign policy implications of the "Russian World" go unnoticed, as Russia's relations with some of its fellow former Soviet nations soured after the color revolutions in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine 2004-2005 (Budraitskis). In 2007, Putin issued a decree establishing the "Russkiy Mir Foundation" (Russian World Foundation), which would work with the Russian Orthodox Church to promote traditional "Russian values" beyond the country's borders (more on this in the next chapter).  Now the Russian World would be thoroughly instrumentalized for Russian foreign and cultural policy, not to mention national security.

There has been a great deal of valuable scholarship on the Russian World concept as soft power and as the ideological buttress for renewed imperialism.  For our purposes, though, what is particularly remarkable is the stark stylistic and institutional contrast between the "Russian World" and its younger, now almost-forgotten sibling, the "Global Russians."  One was born in the realm of pixels and memes in the blogosphere, while the other was adopted as a state-sponsored initiative and literally turned into a foundation.  One emphasized cosmopolitanism by sidestepping the Russian language itself in its naming convention, while the other would insist on an awkward transcription of its Russian name in Latin script ("Russkiy mir").  When combined with the question of "russkii" and "Rossianin," as well as the gone-but-never-forgotten "Soviet," the range of designations and circumlocutions suggests less an identity crisis than a crisis of naming.  These are the unidentified, and possibly Russian, objects.

Becoming Russian outside of Russia

The early proponents of the global Russian idea are clearly putting their emphasis on the global, but the term that proves far more vexed, and also more potentially productive, is "Russian." The English word "Russian" has shown itself to be far more elastic and capacious than the Russian word "русский." The Russian adjective (also substantivized as a noun) is an exact match to the English term primarily when referring to the Russian language ("русский язык"); otherwise, the adjective used to refer to things or people connected with Russia as a country ("Россия") is "российский."  As mentioned earlier, the corresponding noun for citizens of the Russian Federation is likewise derived from the country's name: россианин.  One of the great ironies of the Soviet Jewish emigration is that Jews left the Soviet Union ostensibly because of discrimination facilitated by the country's rigid classification system; Jews were considered a "nationality," and therefore the infamous Line Five of their internal identification documents declared them Jews.  In Russia, Jews, Tatars, Germans and any other people who were born and raised in Russia but not of specifically Russian (Orthodox/Slavic) descent are, by definition, not Russian. But Soviet Jews (and, indeed, virtually any white man or woman born in the USSR) immediately become "Russian" in their host countries. 

This was always great fodder for jokes, and in 2011 rendered a failed American reality show almost nonsensical to observers back in the Russian Federation.  "Russian Dolls" has the distinction of being canceled almost as soon as it was aired, but for Russian speakers outside of America, its attempt to trade in "Russian" stereotypes was a bizarre misfire:  virtually ever single "Russian Doll" was a Russian or Ukrainian Jew. In turn, these women, when speaking in English, always referred to themselves and their families as "Russian" (even to the point of musing aloud as to the likelihood of their parents accepting their marriages to men who weren't "Russian.") [1]

However bad you think this show might have been, it was actually much, much worse

In nearly every possible respect, the "Russian Dolls" are the antithesis of the global Russian ideal: narrow, provincial, and crass, they correspond much more closely to the archetype of the sovok (or even worse, to decades of Russian ethnic humor). But their utterly deracinated, deterritorialized deployment of the term "Russian" is instructive.  In the New York context, if fits in perfectly with a tendency to use language as a shorthand for ethnicity (the “doll” who breaks off her relationship with a 'Spanish" man was almost certainly not dating someone who spoke Castilian and hailed from the Iberian peninsula).

In turn, the snobshchestvo's adoption of an English term to describe their identity is a rejection of everything narrow and exclusionary within Russian-language ethnonyms.  In choosing English, Global Russians cast off the baggage with which the term "русский" simply cannot part.  A Snob contributor named Aleksandr Goldfarb can comfortably muse about whether or not he is a global Russian in a way that he cannot consider his status as any sort of "русский." In Russian, the phrase "Aleksandr Goldfarb is Russian" ("Александр Гольдфарб--русский") inevitably sounds like an ethnic joke in search of a punchline. 

The appeal of a more capacious word is quite clear. The official term "Россианин" ("Rossianin") is stilted and formal, and as one commentator on Snob puts it, the word sounds as alien as "Марсианин" ("Martian").  The same commentator points out that in English (and in many other European languages) one can quite comfortably refer to a "Russian of Polish descent," but the same locution sounds ridiculous in Russian.  This commentator's name?  Iraklii Buziashvili.[2] This is a point any Russian speaker could make, but if the speaker's name is Ivan Petrov or Mikhail Ivanov, it is a safe bet that he would be less likely to bother.  

As a self-selecting group, the members of the snobshchestvo are much more likely to see these issues as relevant.  The last thing I wish to do is comb through the names of contributors and commenters in search of Jewish, Georgian and other non-"Russian" names, which would be problematic and offensive for so many reasons. But even the most cursory glance at the site suggests that ethnicity is at least as strong a motivator for entertaining the notion of "global Russianness" as is mobility or social class. 

Next: The Diaspora Beings at Home

Notes

[1] For an excellent analysis of Russian Dolls, see Chapter One of Claudia Sadowski-Smith's The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2018

[2] Russian speakers would immediately recognize this as a Georgian name.

The Russia That We Invent

In 2008 the Russian tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov teamed up with Vladimir Yakovlev, founder of the Kommersant newspaper, to create a new magazine called "Сноб" (Snob). The magazine was designed to both entertain and form a particular contingent of people, a task facilitated by its lively Internet site, snob.ru, whose users make up a community they like to call the "snobshchestvo".  The magazine and site consist of well-written, but unspectacular essays, blog posts, and interviews, covering a wide range of subject matter of interest to its presumably well-travelled, not impoverished readers; in a different context, the October 2011 article, "Как попасть в элитную американскую школу-пансион" ("How to get into an elite American boarding school") would be almost offensively irrelevant. Far more noteworthy than the magazine's content is its definition of the community it serves.  Yakovlev was no stranger to creating powerful catch phrases; many credit him with coining the term "новые русские" (New Russians), though Hedrick Smith might disagree.  In announcing his new project, Yakovlev created a term for his readers that, while analogous to "новые русские," evokes an entirely different set of values "глобальные русские" (global Russians).

"Global Russians" was a concerted attempt to define an identity for the globe-trotting, border-crossing Russian that was based on positive, cosmopolitan traits, rather than on nostalgia, loss, and displaced ethnicity. As Yakovlev puts it in 2009:

Over the course of many years, successful Russian intellectual professionals could make the choice between being a "sovok" or being a foreigner.  Those who left the country most often did so in order never to come back and to stop being "sovoks"; to become American/French/British, that is, to take root in the culture of the countries to which they moved.  Over the last 5-10 years, a different model of behavior has been taking shape.  This is the model of behavior of a person who can live easily at the same time in Russia and in other countries, and is not trying to stop being a sovok or to become a foreigner. 

The opposition between "sovok" and "foreigner" is key.  "Sovok," slang that could signify either the entire Soviet Union or a single resident of the USSR, was a particularly powerful term in the 1980s.  The  sovok was the Soviet citizen (or émigré) as crass, tacky, acquisitive, and thoroughly uncivilized.  An archetype of self-loathing, the sovok is a projection of anxieties about Soviet backwardness, rendering him the exact opposite of the cosmopolitan:  local to the core of his being, the Sovok is the yokel of the USSR.[1] The sovok abroad was the equivalent of the Ugly American, but he represented a far greater threat to the identity of the nationals with whom he was associated.  Arguably, there is nothing more characteristic of a sovok abroad than the frantic, self-conscious, and usually unsuccessful attempt to mimic the foreigner.  

The global Russian, by contrast, is quite literally at home in the world: "Global Russians суть русскоязычные, свободно адаптирующиеся в любой стране мира люди, которые могут жить и работать где угодно." ["Global Russians are essentially Russian speakers who adapt freely to any country of the world, who can live and work anywhere."] One phrase that comes up again and again is: "жить, где вздумается" (to live wherever I feel like). Yakovlev himself admitted that global Russians were “a group that has not yet completely identified itself and is also in the process of development…and of the creation of a new system of values." But while the name quickly became fighting words (the object of ridicule by many in the blogosphere), Snob quickly developed an audience of people for whom the term made sense on a personal level.  The Russian photographer Artyom Zhitnev writes, 

That's us.  Let's say we live in Berlin, Moscow, and Paris. But we're still Russian.  Like it's not important where we live.  We have in common our books, art performances, and iPod playlists.  A common dislike of consommé and a love of pelmeny.  We're the ones who confidently yell at the sales clerk in a store on Monte-Napoleone Street in Milan.  We come up with Google.  We enjoy "Lafitte" in Paris.  We win podiums.  We buy palaces and publishing hoses.  We make Europe eat bliny with caviar."

Zhitnev's statement, while asserting cosmopolitanism, contains a definite element of national pride ("We invented Google") that borders on hubris (Google may preach the open-source gospel, but it seems unlikely that Sergey Brin would share credit with the entire snobshchestvo). It also, quite tellingly, associates the "global Russian" with a particular set of habits of consumption.  This is important, but dangerous territory:  the primary qualities that insulate the global Russian from the twin threats of the sovok (who loves his pelmeny and brags about his country's contribution to World culture) and the "new Russian" (who buys palaces the way the sovok buys pelmeny) are taste and cultural accomplishment ("we win podiums"). 

The cosmopolitanism of the global Russians is encoded into their very name: though one can certainly find the phrase "глобальные русские" in both Snob and the sites that write about it, the global Russian community makes no secret about that fact that their name is English.  An argument can be made that, in a bilingual community, "global Russian" simply sounds better.  Each of the two words has two syllables with a stress on the first, while the Russian term has total of seven syllables, varying stress between the two words, and a near homophony with Russian obscenity. But "global Russian" is also a clear ideological choice, one that is in apparent conflict with one of the common definitions of the group: "люди, живущие в разных странах, говорящие на разных языках, но думающие по-русски" (people who live in various countries, speak various languages, but think in Russian). It should be no surprise that the English term itself proves a useful weapon in the arsenal of Snob's critics.  Yet the site itself displays a linguistic equanimity reminiscent of Zhitnev's globe-trotting ease.  The writers do not engage in a self-conscious game of dropping English words when there are perfectly good Russian equivalents, but they also don't avoid foreign words that are found to be useful.  Arguably, the global Russian is not showing off their English, but is, instead, comfortable enough to use English words without worrying about showing off.  

Next: Becoming Russian outside of Russia

Note

[1] I discuss the sovok at some length in Soviet Self-Hatred.

The Russia We Take with Us

A far less Gothic fate awaits the border-crossing Russian national who is posited not merely as a body, but as a self. Emigrés, migrants, contract workers, and students enrolled in foreign educational institutions are not exterior to biopolitics (arguably, no one is), but they do fit in ontological categories that allow for at least the possibility of subjectivity, agency, and interiority. Indeed, the very notion of "brain drain" (an international phenomenon that became a relevant threat to Russia once borders were opened) is based on a bodily metaphor that nonetheless stresses interior, intangible properties such as education and intellect. Moreover, numerous Soviet and pre-Soviet waves of emigration have established models for the lives and social organizations of Russian speakers abroad. But even the periodization of emigration from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union betrays particularly limited assumptions of the nature of "Russianness":  the massive outpouring of Ashkenazi Jews in the last decades before World War I doesn't even count.[1]These emigrants were Jews who were presumed to have a weak affiliation with Russian culture (and, in many cases, a limited command of the Russian language); their departure was just another phase in the nearly 2000 years of Jewish diaspora.  By contrast, the largely Jewish third wave of emigration under Brezhnev does "count," because the people leaving were, despite their minority status, perceived as thoroughly acculturated within the country at large. 

Soviet-era emigrations constituted diasporas, but, for the most part, they were short-lived, yielding to the powerful pressures of assimilation by the various host countries.  This is because the movements across the border were unidirectional and unrepeatable; with notable exceptions, those who left Russia or the Soviet Union were never coming back: what could be a clearer sign of removal from the state body than being stripped of citizenship? Biopolitically, the populations of these diasporas constituted a nearly non-renewable resource:  Russian-speakers abroad could not be expected to "breed true," nor could they count on reinforcements from the mother country. These waves of emigration were not what is today considered transnational: for the home country, they were a loss of human capital, while for the emigrants themselves, these emigrations represented near-complete isolation from their former national homes.

Soviet and pre-Soviet emigration was never about simply moving from one place to another.  As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, we find Dostoevsky continually configuring emigration to American as a trip to the underworld (for Svidrigailov, the choice between moving to America and suicide is almost a toss-up). The Soviet years made the connection between emigration and death much more explicit, through continual reinforcement of the is trope: the White émigrés in Bulgakov's play Flight ("Бег")  are dead in all but name, while the heroine of Olesha's A List of Benefits ("Список благодеяний") can only redeem the crime of merely considering emigration by dying in a communist demonstration on the streets of Paris.  Even in the first years of perestroika, emigration was presented as a kind of civil death.  In 1983, the American documentary series Frontline aired an episode about the lives of émigrés called "The Russians Are Here;" when it was aired on Soviet state television in 1986, it was simply called "Бывшие" ('Former").  Nor should one forget the paradigmatic film drama of the Gorbachev era, "Интердевочка" (Intergirl), which manages to make the post-emigration death toll a transnational phenomenon:  when Tanya, a former hard-currency hooker has moved to Sweden with a client-turned-husband, her mother discovers Tanya's former profession and kills herself, and a distraught Tanya dies while driving her fancy foreign car. 

There’s no place like home

The dismantling of the Soviet Union introduced multiple complications to the idea of diaspora for this part of the world, complications that resonate with broader trends in diaspora studies.  The Soviet Union itself intersected with two prominent diasporic communities: the aforementioned Jews, for whom the Soviet Union was a prominent, but not exclusive, diasporic site, and the Armenians, whose homeland was part of the USSR (and whose nationals were not considered members of a diaspora when they lived in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, but were arguably diasporic in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region in the Republic of Azerbaijan). Ethnic Russians living in the other fourteen constituent republics were technically outside of Russia, but did not typically consider themselves as being part of a Russian diaspora; their language was the Soviet lingua franca, and Soviet culture was their native culture virtually by default. After 1991, such Russians found themselves ethnic, and in many cases, linguistic minorities in foreign countries without ever crossing a single border.  The Russian term for these countries, "ближнее зарубежие" (the "near abroad") is wistfully proprietary, acknowledging (just barely) the existence of new foreign vistas.  Suddenly, the Russian diaspora had multiple, heterogeneous sites, which in turn contained multiple, heterogenous "Russian" diasporas. A culturally Russian Jew living in Tashkent had visible pathways for emigrating to Israel or the United States, but not to Russia, whereas an ethnic Russian (i.e., of Orthodox descent) might have a mechanism for getting to the Russian Federation, but a harder time ending up in the U.S. or Israel (unless, as is often case, by accompanying a Jewish spouse). At the same time, the disappearance of Soviet-era travel restrictions and the rise of Internet technologies resulted in a complete renegotiation of the terms of diasporic life.  Return trips were possible and relatively common, while real-time communication has become reliable, widespread, and cheap. 

Just as the Russian diasporas were taking on forms that were unprecedented in previous waves of emigration, the scholarly interest in globalization and contextually renegotiated national identities was prompting a reexamination of the diasporic idea.  In his seminal 1990 article "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Arjun Appadurai proposed a new framework for cross-cultural interactions in a postmodern world, isolating "five dimensions of global cultural flow…: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes, c) technoscapes (d) financescapes; and (e) ideoscapes." These "perspectival landscapes…are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part by their own sense of what these landscapes offer." Global cultural negotiations and renegotiations are never simple a straightforward case of influence, assimilation, or rejection; nor can any one of Appadurai's five dimensions be used as the key for explaining the other four.  Diaspora as such was not Appadurai's primary concern here, but his work (along with that of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall,  Steven Vertovec, just to name a few) has led to what Thomas Faist identifies as the "awkward dance partners" of diaspora and transnationalism. [2]

Russian diasporas after 1991 seem tailor-made for a more nuanced, polyvalent approach to transcultural processes.  The two post-Soviet decades that have come and gone provide a wonderfully messy and productive clash between postmodernism's flexibility regarding identity, ideology, and culture on the one hand, and the new circulations of Russian and former Russian citizens who are the product of a rigid, quasi-modernist, quasi-medieval classificatory system of ethnicity that is entirely opaque to the rest of the world. While nationalists within the Russian Federation are doubling down on blood-and-soil definitions of Russianness, Russian-identified diasporic subjects are confronted by essentialism in their new host countries, while taking the opportunity to attempt a redefinition of Russian identity that puts the diaspora at the center rather than the periphery.

Next: The Russia That We Invent

Notes

[1] [Insert footnote on emigration scholarship]

[2] [Insert footnote on the huge body of work regarding diaspora and transnationalism.]

The Russia We Have Lost (Again)

Despite occupying a large and relatively stable portion of the intersection of Europe and Asia, Russia has a surprising tendency to get lost.   Stanislav Govorukhin's famous 1992 documentary, Россия, которую мы потеряли ("The Russia We Have Lost") set the tone for a reflexive definition of a country that has always already disappeared.  Here symbolic geography bids its final farewell to actual geography, as the overwhelming majority of the film’s viewers watched it from within the borders of the Russian Federation. [1]  Yet the discourse of loss retains its power, attributing a sense of existential homelessness to the very people who would be expected to see Russia as their home. This, too, is not new; as my first epigraph reminds us, it was Pyotr Chaadaev who, in his first "Philosophical Letter" of 1829,  famously described his compatriots as "resembling travelers," who never manage to seem at home in any home they make. With the benefit of hindsight, however, Chaadaev's situation looks almost cozy in comparison to that of his post-Soviet descendants.  Govorkuhin's vanished Russia, after all, is the country in which Chaadaev was domiciled. If it also happened to be the country that put him under house arrest and declared him insane (rendering him the first, but not the last, free-thinker punished through psychiatry), this is only one of the many historical omissions that allows Govorukhin to view tsarist Russia in such rosy hues. 

 This rhetoric of loss is all the more powerful when we take into account the obvious fact of the disappearance of empire and great power status: juridically and (for the population) phenomenologically, the homeland had shrunk drastically in 1991.  As former Soviet citizens were confronted by the transformation of the largely notional internal borders of the USSR into the bureaucratic obstacles to mobility that true borders constitute, the Nineties saw a proliferation of alternative imaginary geographies to compensate for the grievous loss of great superpower status:  the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the ruble zone, the near abroad, the common cultural space, the Russian abroad, not to mention the revival of words that had previously been the near-exclusive domain of specialists (россиянин and русскоязычный).

To define a new Russian cultural space, then, is to combine lexicography (the meaning of the word)  with cartography (the location on the map). Words and borders each require their own particular mode of definition.  If geographic Russia constitutes a "center" of Russianness (in a political culture that has long placed high value on centrality), the loss of territory (satellite republics), influence (satellite states), and population (through the redrawing of maps and the vast movements of peoples) presents centrifugal pressures on a culture and, with the rise of Putin, a regime, that turns sovereignty into a cardinal virtue.  Indeed, one can look at the intense rhetoric of gosudarstvennost' ("statehood")  in Putin's Russia as an anti-entropic move, not just in the obvious sense that Putin and his apologists make clear ("we're stopping the country from falling apart"), but in terms of the very definition of Russian nationhood and identity.[2] Gosudarstvennost' is the antithesis of a postmodern, post-territorial mode of identity formation that can be, with at least limited comfort, assimilated to the ancient category of diaspora. 

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, intellectuals and state functionaries have intermittently lamented the lack of a "national idea," to fill in the gap left by communist messianism, and, more generally, the sense of historic mission that Berdyaev argued was central to the "Russian idea."[3] It would be far more productive, however, to posit that what is contested is not the "Russian idea," but the "idea of Russia." The current discourse in and on Russia can be roughly (indeed, crudely) divided into two broad camps:  the "state reconstructionist" and the "centrifugal/diasporic." In the first category are the modes of thought that fight desperately against the forces of entropy, and that align themselves most closely with both the idea and the apparatus of state.  The aforementioned gosudarstvennost' casts itself as the heir to the Great Power, as well as the modern recapitulation of the medieval central power engaged in the "gathering of the lands." The Putinist stress on sovereignty is a celebration of structures and borders, as well as a compromise between blood-and-soil nationalism and the affirmation of a multiethnic state.[4] Closely aligned is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as client and ally, celebrating it's own "state-building" role in a faith-based collectivism or "neo-sobornost'."[5] The ROC's extraterritorial ties also connect it to the discursive strands that celebrate Russian unity by minimizing, rather than maximizing, the significance of borders and (current) territory: Russia as a hegemonic state, whose power and scope are defined by its influence on its once and future "brother nations." Even more expansive is the ideology of Eurasianism, particularly as revived and espoused by Alexander Dugin: here, the nation's destiny is cross-continental and trans-civilizational.[6] But even Eurasianism, though entropic in form, is a retrenchment in content.  Russia is merely redefined on a broader scale. 

Oh, God, not the Russian Idea again…

By contrast, most of the centrifugal/diasporic rhetoric is anything but reassuring.  Indeed, much of this rhetoric actually serves to support the state reconstructionist stance, as evidence of the need for centralization.  Elsewhere I have written of the discursive power concentrated in the term "bespredel," gangland slang for utter lawlessness whose very morphology encodes the dangers posed by a lack of boundaries and borders.[7] Here I am focusing on the much more explicitly biopolitical framework that structures the patently negative centrifugal phenomena (negative in the sense that few champion them, and that they reinforce state reconstructionism), before moving on to recent attempts to recast a decentered "Russianness" in terms of a deliberately positive, transnational diasporic framework (the "global Russians"). 

Indeed, so many of the woes repeatedly recited about Russia in the 1990s can be assimilated to a biopolitical understanding of threats to Russian statehood.  First and foremost we have the various manifestations of depopulation: plummeting life expectancies, the spread of infectious disease, and declining birth rates (Murray Feshbach's notorious "ecocide").[8] These phenomena stand out from the rest in that they have little to do with travel and border-crossing (AIDS was an exception, initially framed as a threat from foreign bodies before becoming sadly domesticated as a now familiar Russian problem), and are framed in terms of internal weakness.  The other threats, however, are understood as manifestly centrifugal problems.  The real-life crimes of human trafficking take on nationalist significance in the 1990s, when the export of Russian women (either as willing brides or enslaved sex workers) is framed in popular novels and films not in terms of the individual women's suffering, but of the fatherland's humiliation at the hands of a rapacious West.  The "export" of women is cast as a loss by Russian men (who can't have "their" women), and as a human expression of the generalized crisis constituted by the dismantling of national wealth for sale abroad.  Here, women are the equivalent of the precious ores, metals, and hydrocarbons with which Russia parts at far too low a price, and which are in such demand because of their high quality ("Our women are the most beautiful in the world"). [9]

The losses from trafficking easily dovetail with a powerful set of urban legends that crystallize the anxiety over commodified bodies crossing borders:  rumors abound that women are being lured not just for sex, but for the sake of their internal organs, to be sold to the highest bidders.[6]  Unsubstantiated stories of forced organ sales are hardly unique to Russia, but in the Russian context they function perfectly as metaphors for the damage to national integrity (wholeness) that bodily border crossings pose. They also function synecdochically as yet another representation of a collective body that is being sold against the population's will, retail and piecemeal rather than wholesale. Here we should recall the traditional ultranationalist rhetoric that frames treason as sale:  Russia is being bought and sold, Russia's blood is being consumed by parasites.  [10]  In turn, the organ rumors crop up in the final component of the most crudely biopolitical centrifugal imaginings: the anxieties over transnational adoption.  Stories of children sold abroad for spare parts have been a recurring feature in the Russian media since the last major public debates on adoption (in 1997, when a ban on foreign adoption was discussed but not instituted).   The adoption debate, then and now, pits multiple conceptions of the country's orphans against each other: as victims of misery and deprivation (when discussed by proponents of transnational adoption) and as valuable human resources (when discussed by detractors).  As with human trafficking, the characterization of international adoption as a centrifugal threat necessitates that the children in question be viewed as objects rather than subjects. 

Transnational adoption is the topic of another chapter of this book project, so I won't deal with it in detail here.  Suffice to say that adoption, trafficking, and organlegging are overlapping discourses of national commodification and loss, functioning as metaphors for the dismantling of the nation rather than its reconstruction.  Each of them construes the various populations involved in a fashion that deprives them of agency; victims at best, these soon-to-be-foreign bodies do not spread Russia and Russianness abroad, but rather represent a subtraction or amputation from the body of the nation.  By extension, the bodies of Russian nationals are a resource to be husbanded; what looks like a romantic, anti-globalist, anti-capitalist nationalism can just as easily be interpreted as an older economic formation.  The centrifugal threats are part and parcel of capitalism, but their rhetorical opposition resembles a nearly-forgotten mercantilism.  The Russian population itself is a national treasure, to be guarded like a medieval dragon's hoard rather than to circulate in a global capitalist fantasy of frictionless trade and wealth creation.

Next: The Russia We Take With Us

Notes

[1] I previously touched on this idea in Plots against Russia.

[2] "Gosudarstvennost'" is a difficult term to render in English; "statehood" is too neutral, while "sovereignty," though congruent with contemporary scholarship on biopolitics and human rights, tends to posit the state as it faces outward toward the rest of the world.  Gosudarstvennost' is a variation on sovereignty that emphasizes the coherence of the state as seen and experienced by its citizens.  See John Squier, "Civil Society and the Challenge of Russian Gosudastvennost," Demokratizatsiya  10.2 (2002): 166-182.

[3] [Insert note on Yeltsin's commission, the 1990s, debates, Berdyaev, etc.]

[4] The concept of "blood and soil" nationalism is usually associated with Alfred Rosenberg and  the Nazi regime, but, as Giorgio Agamben points out, the Rosenberg's phrase has a long history, going as far back as Roman law. Agamben uses this connection as part of his larger argument regarding the biopolitical nature of citizenship (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

[5] [Insert footnote on sobornost.']

[6] For an excellent overview of Dugin's ideas, see Chapter Two of Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity. *Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

[7] Eliot Borenstein.  Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. 195-224.

[8] Murray Feshbach. Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

[9] Borenstein, 77-97.

[10] [Insert footnote on urban legends about organ harvesting.]

Where the Bodies Are Buried

Everything Everywhere All at Once;

or, Geography, Blood, Culture

We all resemble travelers.... In our own houses we seem to be guests, in our families we look like strangers, in our cities we look like nomads..

Pyotr Chaadaev, '

First Philosophical Letter" (1829)

"My address

Is not a house or a street.

My address is

The Soviet Union."

 Vladimir Kharitonov

"Our Home is Russia"

--Political Party in the 1990s

"He probably figured Sasha was just one of those Black Russians, the way Marina's neighbors from the Palisades assumed Ukraine was  full of Mexicans, asking Marina what language Mexicans spoke in Donetsk"

--Anya Ulinich, Petropolis (2007).

Where the Bodies Are Buried

In October 2022, as Russian occupying forces began to face the reality of their imminent loss of Kherson, a Ukrainian city they had controlled since March, they did what most retreating armies do: gathered up whatever valuable or strategic items they did not wish to surrender.  Among them was a collection of human bones.

These bones belonged to Prince Grigory Potemkin, an 18th-century statesman, military leader, and lover of Catherine the Great.  The mastermind behind the Russian Empire's (first) annexation of Crimea and the architect of the expansion of the region then known as "Novorossiya" ("New Russia"), Potemkin had been buried in the city whose incorporation into the Empire was one of his greatest accomplishments. This was not the first time his remains had been disturbed, and, given the history of both the region and the Prince himself, it may not be the last.  

Don't look at me without my skin—I’m hideous!

Catherine the Great had decreed that Potemkin be buried in Kherson, one of the (Ukrainian) cities he founded; her son wanted Potemkin's bones crushed and scattered. Over the next two hundred years, the bones were tested and re-tested (to prove their identity), put on display, photographed, and interred again; local legend has it that his skull disappeared at some point in the twentieth century after some children used it as a soccer ball.

The decision to "rescue" Potemkin's remains from the Ukrainians who had held the city as part of their sovereign territory for over thirty years is indicative not just of the nature of Russia's war in Ukraine, but of the continued attempts to use symbolism as a proxy for identity.  In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery analyzes the long history of meaningful corpses deployed in the service of competing national myths:

By repositioning them, restoring them to honor, expelling them, or simply drawing attention to them, their exit from one grave and descent into another mark a change in social visibilities and values, part of the larger process of postsocialist transformation.

Potemkin's clearly fits the bill, although there is a strong argument to made that, in 2022, the issue are less "postsocialist" than they are "imperial-revanchinst." Potemkin's legacy in Ukraine is complicated, in that he is both the founder of two of its important cities and the political figure who ensured that what is now Ukrainian territory would be a constituent part of the Russian Empire.  

Bringing Potemkin's bones back to the Russian Federation was, to put it mildly, an interesting choice.  After all, Potemkin is best known (perhaps erroneously) for the villages that bear his name. The popular version of the story is that, four years after Crimea's 1783 annexation, Catherine the Great, accompanied by several foreign ambassadors, took a trip to Novorossiya, with an eye towards impressing Russia's allies with its accomplishments in this recently acquired territory. Since said accomplishments were few and far between, Potemkin arranged to have facades of villages set up along Catherine's route, in order to create the false impression of thriving settlements. Since then, "Potemkin villages" have become a metaphor for any attempt to create the semblance of something real in the absence of anything tangible. By this logic, would it not have been easier for Russian troops simply to pretend that they had moved the bones without actually doing anything at all?

But Verdery points out that dead bodies function precisely because they are symbolic and material at the same time: " Most of the time, they are indisputably there, as our senses of sight, touch, and smell can confirm. As such, a body's materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy" (27). It is as material objects that they reinforce the symbolic value of their geographic location: "their corporeality makes them important means of localizing a claim" (27-28).  

If anything, the hasty transfer of Potemkin's bones to Russian territory reminds us of the true Potemkin Village in this particular story:  Russian-occupied Kherson itself.  As soon as the city was brought under RF control,, the local citizenry were subjected to a PR blitz that amounted to changing the city's window dressing.  The streets were decorated with billboards proclaiming, "We''ll stay here forever!" as well as images of Russian national heroes, from Pushkin to General Suvorov. "Forever" didn't last out the year.

Potemkin's bones were not the only national treasures looted by Russian forces on their way out, but their seizure sends a mixed message. On the one hand, it is consistent with the Putinist regime's assertion that Ukraine is part of Russia (and therefore all its cultural heritage is also Russian).  But on the other hand, the remains of Russian heroes can mark the territory of their internment as essentially Russian. Bringing Potemkin back to Russia proper is an admission of territorial diminishment.

It is also an inherently melancholy act, although the object of melancholy is not what it might immediately seem to be. Two centuries on, it would be difficult to argue that Russia is somehow unable to complete the process of mourning Grigory Potemkin,  Potemkin's bones are a symbolic substitution, indeed, a displacement for the true melancholia involved: the unresolved mourning for the loss of a larger, greater Russia.

Readers who might not be looking forward to an entire chapter on famous corpses can rest assured that I am using Potemkin as the beginning of an argument that will generally steer clear of cemeteries.  This particular act of wartime grave-robbing makes sense not just as part of an ongoing war between two sovereign, post-Soviet nations, but as an example of the multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting attempts to situate Russia in the aftermath of two empires, the Tsarist and the Soviet.  Though the Russian Federation that emerged out of the ruins of the USSR is still an enormous and powerful country, the borders of this new nation have proven inadequate to define what "Russia" is and how it should be understood.

Does Russia consist of any place that enough people consider to be "Russian soil"? And does having a Russian national hero such as Potemkin interred at a particular site further the claim of its Russianness? (Never mind that Ukrainians might also claim Potemkin as their own). Is Russia where Russians live now, or where Russians once lived and died (and are now buried)? Is Russia a primarily geographic entity (borders, land, soil), or does Russia consist of the community of people who define themselves as Russian?  Is the common denominator of Russianness blood, language, culture, or history? If the Russian Federation is the successor state to both the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, what does that say about the Russians outside of the RF who live on former Soviet or Imperial territory?

Next: The Russia We Have Lost

What Comes Next

The picture I am painting of Russia is not a pretty one, and, on the surface, it is out of synch with the aggressive, patriotic bombast of the 2020s.  But the bombast is compensatory, a cover for the malaise I have been describing throughout the introduction.  We have a Russia lurching between paralysis and overextension, a country that, deep down, is still preoccupied with the loss of territories posited to be intrinsic to Russia's sense of its place in the world. This is the essence of post-Soviet melancholia: the inability to move on from the partial loss of organs and limbs that make up the notional body politic. As for the supposedly lost parts, they deny that they ever truly belonged in the first place.  The objects of post-Soviet melancholia refuse to identify as Russian, while Russian imperial discourse refuses to identify them as anything else. Nor is there room in this reified Russian identity to acknowledge internal dissent as still identifiably Russian:  all opposition is posited to be masterminded from the outside.  And where is the room for the internal opposition to make any claim to Russianness? As so-called "national traitors" or "foreign agents," they become un-identified as truly Russian. 

Currently, this book is projected to have five chapters, though I reserve the right to change their titles, contents, and number at any time. I also might skip a chapter here and there and come back to it.  So I am asking for patience from the handful of people who might continue to read this blog/book in progress.

Don’t ask me what’s going to happen. I can’t even predict the future of my own MS in progress

Chapter One is called "Everything Everywhere All at Once: Geography, Blood, Culture." An examination of post-Soviet Russian symbolic geography, this chapter considers the role of emigration and diaspora in the conception of contemporary Russia.  In particular, I will examine the structurally homologous but ideologically contradictory notions of the "Global Russian" (a cosmopolitan subject whose hybrid, but postmodern Russianness is independent of geographical location) and the "Russian World" (an idea that eventually became a proxy for a Putinist imperial worldview). 

The second chapter, "Culture as Cudgel," looks at the deployment of Russian culture as an ideological tool.  It may very well disappear from this book, folded into the other chapters. In any case, it is very likely the last one to be written.

Chapter Three, "Unfit Motherlands:  Adoption and the Rhetoric of National Integrity" traces the debates and anxieties about transnational adoption from its heyday in the 1990s through the 2012 Dima Yakovlev law banning most such adoptions.  The rhetoric surrounding the most scandalous adoption stories were not just about abuse and child protection, but about the fate of the national, collective body and the dilution of the gene pool.  The chapter ends with a look at the Russian criminal practice of moving Ukrainian orphans (or, in may cases, "orphans") across the border in order to Russify them. After the full-scale invasion, this policy was Russia's own enactment of the national erasure that was alleged to be behind the adoption of Russians by Americans before 2012.

The fourth chapter will either be called "Russia's Alien Nations: Agents, Spies, and Extraterrestrials" or "Infections in the Body Politic (Aliens, Plagues, Spies and Foreign Agents)."  It will be about fears of Russia's dismantling by foreign powers, often expressed in narratives of infiltration, spying, infection, and alien invasion.

The final chapter is "The Necropolitics of Putinism," and will treat the regime's response to disaster and mass death.

After that, there will probably be some sort of conclusion.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Next week: Chapter One Begins

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?