Invasion of the Capitalist Marketing Machine

Foreignness, hybridity, and the threat to an essential Russian purity are all up for grabs in one of the strangest Russian films of the twenty-first century.  Branded, the 2012 film written and directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerain, was a joint Russian-American film productions that appeared at the very end of Medvedev’s presidency.  A last gasp of cross-cultural cooperation, Bradshaw and Dulerian’s film proved that when the former adversaries join hands and work together, they can produce truly spectacular crap.  If we were to make a word cloud out of the limited number of reviews of this spectacular flop, “worst” would be one of the largest of the bunch.  [1]

Released in Russia as Moskva-2017, but renamed in English presumably so the half-dozen people who've read Olga Slavnikova's novel 2017 in translation won't get confused, Branded is a film that defies all attempts as summary.  So let me try:  Misha Galkin (Ed Stoppard) nearly dies as a boy when a constellation shaped like the head of Elsie the Contented Cow zaps him with lightning.  Naturally, when he grows up, he works in marketing, helping Russia learn to love fast food. His boss is a part-time American spy played by Jeffrey Tambor, whose niece Andy (Leelle Sobieski) is in town to produce a reality show about extreme cosmetics and weight-loss surgery.  They fall in love, which means they have sex in his car during a traffic jam. 

Meanwhile, a cabal of evil white men on a far-off island are plotting to make the world's population want to be fat.  They sabotage the reality show, throwing its contestant into a coma.  Misha runs away to the countryside, where he spends years herding cattle.  Andy comes for him eventually, but he stays with the cattle.  One night, he has a vision that one of the cows has turned red, so he builds a special wooden hut/altar, slaughters the cow, burns cow and altar, and pours the resulting ashes all over his naked body. 

When Andy brings him back to Moscow, Misha discovers they have a fat, spoiled son, and that Misha now sees the CGI-generated brand creatures that attach themselves to people, growing fatter as their hosts fatten themselves.  Strangely, no one believes Misha when he says he sees these things, and Andy and son leave him.  Misha throws himself into his new work: conning a Chinese company that wants to bring a chain of vegetarian fast-food outlets to Russia (easily the most improbable part of this whole story).  He uses them to finance a media campaign about the dangers of beef, all of which allows the giant CGI monster egg on top of the Chinese company's building to grow and grow, until out hatches…a carnivorous, brand-eating dragon that starts eating the other brand creatures. Misha's efforts lead to a global ban on advertising, and to the return of his estranged wife and son.  Even reality show coma girl wakes up, thin and wobbly, but with great hair.  In the end, the cow-head constellation looks down from on high, and sees that it is good. 

Branded has all the hallmarks of hilariously terrible B-movies, starting with a voice-over narrator providing backstory at every turn.  Tambor and Sobieski fulfill the typical role of actors who are too good for this material, while Ed Stoppard is…perfectly at home.  Finally, Russia has its very own equivalent to Plan 9 from Outer Space. 

This really needs to become a midnight cult movie

Branded is not exactly an alien invasion movie, but it is not exactly not an alien invasion movie, either.  It’s possible that the cow-shaped constellation guiding Misha on his spiritual journey is an alien entity (she is, after all, literally floating in outer space).  She might be a primal bovine god; certainly, Misha’s ritual evokes caricatured representations of “primitive” worship, while the red cow could be a reference to the red heifer that some premillenialist Christians believe to be a prerequisite to Christ’s return. None of this adds up to anything coherent, of course, but by this point that should hardly be a surprise. 

The message of the movie (that branding and advertising are bad) is not a new one, and it has been delivered much better many times before, including in Russia (both Pelevin's novel Homo Zapiens and its cinematic adaptation).  It checks all the boxes for Russian postcommunist anxiety about a degraded, market-based culture in a disordered, agglutinative mess that may as well be a snapshot of a segment of the collective unconscious.  It is also a paradox from start to finish. Audre Lord famously proclaimed that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," but the makers of Branded appear to have raided the entire toolshed in the hopes that she was wrong.  How do they develop a polemic about the evils of capitalist marketing and brands? By working as a Russian-American writing and directing team and somehow convincing well-known and respectable Western actors to star in it. They have produced a film that tries very hard to look like an American movie of its time, completely with huge swaths of CGI. Perhaps the greatest irony is that, as Charlie Jane Anders writes, they are guilty of false advertising," with trailers that promise a "weird, surrealistic version of They Live " luring moviegoers to dismal and unoriginal treatise about the evils of late capitalism.  Branded argues for purity from a place of hybridity.  As we shall see, hybridity can be both a boon and a danger in Russian cinema about alien influence, but here it is simply a dead end.

Note

[1] "Branded is a Terrible, Terrible Movie" (reelchanger.net) "Make no mistake about it, this is a horrible movie" (Moviemoses.blog). Jim Batts calls it a "cinematic endurance test."

Next: Sputnik: Beware of Hitchhikers

UFOs after the USSR

With the abolition of literary censorship and the rise of market-oriented publishing, fantasy and science fiction in Russia greatly expanded their foothold in the bookstores after 1991, and not only thanks to the influx of translated material.  Yet contemporary Russia never became a popular tourist destination among the interplanetary set.  Aliens did come to Post-Soviet Russia, but only occasionally.  Dmirty Bykov’s 2005 novel The Evacuator focuses on a man and a woman who seem to be engaging in a linguistic erotic fantasy, where the man claims to be an alien and teaches the woman how to speak his language (much of which sounds like baby-talk versions of actual Russian words).  When Moscow is threatened by a series of terrorist attacks, he reveals that this role-playing game is actually real, and volunteers to evacuate his beloved (along with a few other random people they meet along the way) to his more advanced homeworld.  When they arrive, the homeworld turns out to be just as chaotic and dangerous as Earth, so they turn around and go back to where they started. 

Readers of Bykov’s Living Souls (ЖД) will not be surprised to find that the author’s attitude towards group identity is playful and skeptical; even in the beginning of the novel, the “alien” is so much like a human Muscovite that the differences are hardly worth nothing, while the ending suggests that it is easier to find the true Other back at home.  Completely uninterested in the conventions of science fiction, Bykov produces a fantasy about alien visitation whose contrivances are only barely plausible. For him, science fiction serves the same purpose as biblical myth in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe: it provides a set of familiar yet resonant tropes that help us think about catastrophe. 

Post-Soviet cinema has been similarly reluctant to have its earthbound heroes share screen time with aliens from outer space.  As Irina Souch reminds us in her recently-published monograph Popular Tropes and Identity in Contemporary Russian Television and Film, just one week after the failed August coup attempt against Gorbachev set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the official dismantling of the USSR, Eldar Riaznov released a film that, on the cusp of the Soviet and post-Soviet era, serves as an elegy for a vanishing world: The Promised Heavens (Небеса обетованные). In this bittersweet and charming movie, a collection of elderly homeless men and women, many of whom had been brought low by the destruction of the Soviet system, have been living on a landfill, only to find out that their new "home" is about to be demolished to make room for a condom factory.  But the self-proclaimed "president" of the landfill has an answer: he has been contacted by aliens who are ready to take them all away to a better world.  By the end of the film, the aliens have not appeared, and our homeless heroes are surrounded by the police. But when the President and his comrades climb aboard an old steam train that was abandoned years before they were, the train ascends into the clouds, presumably taking the President's group off to the alien promised land in the sky. 

Of course, we never see the aliens.  indeed, that's the point, as the film is about faith at a time when faith seems ludicrous.  If we take the plot literally, then, yes, The Promised Heavens is a film involving aliens.  But, to quote from a pivotal scene in Parker & Stone's The Book of Mormon: it's a metaphor.  Everything about this film is, to the point of resembling pure allegory.  Russia has abandoned its elderly? They live in a dump.  Russia can't conceive of a future? The dump is being replaced by a condom factory. For the plot to work, the aliens could just as easily have been fairies, or simply angels. Yet "aliens" are undoubtedly a better choice.  We would already have some idea about what fairies are and what they could want (answer: nothing good), while angels would take the already literalized metaphors and crush them flat.  Aliens, on the other hand, are pure alterity: they could be anything, which is why they are such an appropriate screen onto which the heroes can project their hopes. 

Tecent films about alien invasions are much more at home within their generic confines.  The Darkest Hour (2011), was essentially an American film, with Russian investment and the involvement of Timur Bekmambetov as co-producer. Bekmambetov’s role would not necessarily require any Russian content, as he is one of the few contemporary Russian directors to have found commercial success as a filmmaker in Hollywood (anyone buying tickets to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter in expectation of Russian themes would be sadly disappointed, not to mention strangely underinformed). The Darkest Hour puts Moscow at the center of the invasion from outer space, but most of the viewpoint characters are Western (from Sweden, the U.S., and Australia). Part of the plot even involves their attempt to get to the American Embassy for safety—it’s already been gutted, but the roof does provide a nice aerial view of Moscow under siege.   The Darkest Hour is less about Russia encountering the alien than about the conflict between two different species of aliens (Westerners and extraterrestrials) using Moscow as an exotic backdrop. 

No, I’m not from Chertanovo. Why do you ask?

Six years later, the hit movie Attraction (2017) is a purely Russian production, directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, transferring familiar blockbuster tropes to a Russian setting.  An early scene of an alien craft crashing into the Chertanovo district of Moscow provides that particular thrill of urban architectural destruction familiar from such films as Independence Day. Aside from the visuals, one of the attractions of Attraction is that, like the best first contact movies, it seems to be about more than simply what we are seeing.  The alien is benign, but the Muscovites who survived the consequences of his catastrophic landing are in no mood to greet him with the traditional bread and salt. Bondarchuk himself said the story was allegorical, with the extraterrestrial filling the general role of “Other,” while the screenwriters even went as far as saying they were inspired by the 2013 anti-migrant riots in the Moscow neighborhood  of Biryulyovo. The political parallels are not exactly delivered with the lightest of touches (“You're from another galaxy? Well, we’re from Chertanovo!” shouts the mob as they go off in search of alien scum to pummel).  It also doesn’t hurt that the alien visitor happens to look like he would be equally at home in either his spaceship or as the lead singer in a boy band. The main characters immediately find themselves in a love triangle that plays out like Romeo and Juliet, if Shakespeare had only though to include exoskeletons and death rays.[1]

The film's sequel, Attraction 2: Invasion (2020), ups the ante, as sequels usually do: now, for a variety of uninteresting reasons, the civilization that sent the alien heartthrob is now hellbent on destroying the planet.  So far, so predictable:  countless American movies have used the same scenario, with the United States as the default representative of the entire planet's interests and defense.  Invasion simply Russia for America, with the occasional nod to contemporary geopolitics.  The opening credits include news video clips from around the world, summarizing both the events of the first film and their consequences over the two years since, with a Russian reporter noting that, since Russia has refused to share the examples of alien technology salvaged in 2017, the West has instituted another round of economic sanctions.  Meanwhile, Russia's newly-formed "Extraterrestrial Threat Prevention Unit" is doing its best to head off a repeat of the previous incursion, an endeavor that the film's very title shows is futile.  Again, this is completely standard fare for the genre, but it can also be read as the SF extrapolation of the Putinist posture vis-a-vis an outside world that is considered hostile by default.

This is not to say that there is no threat; indeed, this being a sequel, the threat has doubled.  Not only is  Ra, the AI controlling the alien's spaceship,  prepared to destroy the planet if it does not hear back from its master, but now Russia itself have been subverted by the aliens.  Ra has taken over Russian media, broadcasting fake news about Yuliya, the heroine and love interest from the first film.  She has been branded a terrorist who must be stopped at all cost.  This is patently false, but what is true (and potentially disturbing to the status quo) is that, in the figure of Yuliya, alien influence has utterly transformed one of Russia's citizens. Thanks to the miracles of extraterrestrial technology, Yuliya has started to develop some of the same abilities as her alien heartthrob, Hekon (whom she calls Khariton). This, too, is an unsurprising plot point for an SF sequel/franchise:  uplifting ordinary characters to superhumanity can function as anything from wish fulfillment to franchise building.  Her status is complicated, because she is the main point of audience identification.  But she is also an object lesson in the dangers of miscegenation and hybridization:  when you sleep with the enemy, you become the enemy.  At the same time, the speed with which the population believes the false information about Yuliya is bracing; still, by 2020, should the Russian audience truly be shocked by how easy it is to be declared an enemy of the people?  In its own, small way, this film is playing with fire, as it implicitly encourages viewers to root for a "foreign agent."

Next: Invasion of the Capitalist Marketing Machine

A Hothouse Flower in a Communal Apartment

The plots of Soviet science fiction looked outward rather than inward; Soviet cosmonauts brought enlightenment with them to other stars.  Soviet science fiction was both expansive and protectionist: it went out to meet the alien, but did not bring the alien home.  When the Strugatsky brothers played with the alien invasion theme, they did so in their typically abstracted manner:  the humans in  The Second Invasion from Mars (1968) are decidedly lacking in curiosity about their new alien overlords, and the book provides only a few details (such as their peculiar fondness for gastric juices).  The focus, rather, is on the ease with which the the inhabitants of Earth adapt to their new situation.  Roadside Picnic (1972) is less about an alien invasion than it is about the aftermath of Earth's encounter with utterly unknowable aliens who seem to have no interest in the planet whatsoever. Instead, the human characters spend their time scrounging for the artifacts the aliens casually left behind, in the hopes that they can figure out their function and use them to their advantage.  Moreover, each book takes place in a generic setting, featuring characters whose names are not even remotely Russian. The Strugatskys were intermittently fascinated by the fallout of human encounters with alterity, but took pains to keep these scenarios far from the Soviet present (or from an imagined Soviet future).

Only three significant Soviet-era works that I know of break with this paradigm: Alexander Merer’s 1976 Home of the Wanderers and Georgy Martynov’s Callisto, , and Abram Terz’s 1957 short story “Pkhentz.”  Well-translated into English by Clarence Brown, “Pkhentz” is the most prominent Soviet-era story to exploit the metaphor of the alien as a way to defamiliarize the Soviet present.  The metaphor is further literalized by the circumstances of the story’s (non-)publication: straying so far from the strictures of Socialist Realism, “Pkhentz,” along with the rest of the texts eventually collected in Fantastic Tales, could only be published abroad.  Its author disguised his identity through another act of displacement and alienation, adopting the Jewish and folkloric name “Abram Tertz” as a pseudonym to replace his (non-Jewish) Russian legal name, Andrei Sinyavsky. Foreign publication was the “crime” that resulted in Sinyavsky’s trial, imprisonment, and eventual exile. The stranded alien protagonist of “Pkhentz” never managed to leave the USSR; Sinyavsky wasn’t allowed to stay. 

“Pkhentz” is narrated in the first person by Andrei Kazimirovich Sushinksy, a reclusive hunchback trying to stay alive and sane in a Moscow communal apartment.  If we accept the narrator as reliable, he is actually an alien who crash-landed in Yakutia and feigns his disability in order to help him pass as human.  But human he is not: he is a cactus-like creature with multiple limbs ending in hands that contain eyes (his “hump” is actually one of his arms protruding from his back). Andrei Kazimirovich despairs of ever being able to communicate precisely how alien he is.  He imagines himself explaining to the Soviet authorities: 

You can see for yourselves-I'm a creature from another world. Not from Africa or India, not even from Mars or one of your Venuses, but from somewhere still more remote and inaccessible. You don't even have names for such places, and if you spread out all the star maps and charts in existence before me, I honestly couldn't show you where that splendid point of light, my birthplace, has got to. (497) 

A plant-based organism, Andrei Kazimirovich has no need of human food, but is completely dependent on water.  This brings him into conflict with his fellow communal apartment dwellers, who resent the “excessive” time he spends in the shower.  As a result of his constant dehydration and the obligation to contort his body into a humanoid form, he is slowly crippling himself (an eye on one of his “feet” has already gone blind from constantly being stepped on). Satirizing the miseries of an atypical individual under the intrusive conditions of Soviet collective life, Sinyavsky exploits the alien metaphor to the fullest by making his narrator an exotic plant that can barely survive in the harsh Moscow winter and the harsher Soviet communal apartment. 

Is your washroom preventing alien plant people from dehydrating?

It is easy to see Andrei Kazimirovich’s plight as that of the Soviet intellectual, but, as Anasstasia Kayiatos argues, the story begs for a queer reading.  The disguised/closeted Andrei Kazimirovich is obsessed with Leopold, a fellow hunchback he meets at the laundry, going as far as making vague hints about his own true nature to see if this other hunchback is “like him.” When confronted by the naked body of the woman who has been desperately trying to seduce him, he gets his first glimpse of female genitalia: 

I caught a glimpse of something resembling human features. Only it didn't look female to me, but more like an old man's face, unshaven and baring its teeth. 

A hungry, angry man dwelt there between her legs. He probably snored at night, and relieved his boredom with foul language. (490) 

Tertz’s is a Freudian kind of queer; after all, Andrei Kazimirovich's most horrible neighbor is a shrewish women named “Kostritskaya”—with the “o” in her named pronounced, according to the rules of a Russian, as an “a”, her name all but screams “castration.” 

The queer reading does not negate the “intellectual” interpretation, nor does it even require that we not believe that Andrei Kazimirovich is an alien.  The power of the alien as metaphor lies in its polyvalence; just as Marvel Comics’ mutant X-Men can stand in for any oppressed group one has in mind (Jews in the 1960s, gays in the 1980s), so too does the alien from outer space accrue multiple meanings through multiple readings. 

Ultimately, “Pkhentz” is about the narrator’s double-bind.  Unable to survive in this unforgiving habitat, he also finds himself assimilating against his will.  Toward the end of the story, he laments the limitations of human language to describe the situation in which he finds himself: 

How could they understand me, when I myself am quite unable to express my inhuman nature in their language. I beat about the bush and try to make some headway with metaphors, but when it comes to the point I can find nothing to say. I can only see a short, solid GOGRY, hear a rapid VZGLYAGU, and an indescribably beautiful PKHENTZ beams down upon my trunk. Fewer and fewer such words remain in my memory. I can convey their structure only approximately in human speech. If I were surrounded by linguists asking "what do you call this" I could only shrug my shoulders and say: GOGRY TUZHEROSKIP. (499-500) 

By the end, dying of dehydration and ill-treatment, Andrei Kazimirovich once again abandons Russian, but with mixed results: 

 Oh native land! PKHENTZ! GOGRY TUZHEROSKIP! I am coming back to you. GOGRY! GOGRY! GOGRY! TUZHEROSKIP! TUZHEROSKIP! BONJOUR! GUTENABEND! TUZHEROSKIP! BU-BU-BU! MIAOW, MIAOW! PKHENTS! (506)  

Now his “alien” language is interspersed with French, German, baby-talk, and cat sounds.  In “Pkhentz” (a story whose alien title is never given an exact meaning in Russian), an alien perspective is both revelatory and self-destructive, in that it is unable to either maintain itself when immersed in the new (Soviet) environment or go fully native.  The end of the story is either the narrator’s complete descent into madness (if we believe his talk of being from outer space to have been a delusion from the start) or a depressing commentary on the impossibility of adaptation without self-annihilation. 

“Pkhentz” is a brilliant story for its earthbound readers, but it would serve as a terrible advertising brochure for drumming up Soviet tourism among interplanetary visitors.  Counterfactually, one can imagine “Pkhentz” as the cautionary tale that kept aliens away from earth for the rest of the Soviet period. 

Next: UFOs after the USSR

Russia as Flyover Country

[Note: earlier versions of the next few blog entries were originally serialized on my Soviet Self-Hatred blog, but I subsequently decided they did not fit into the resulting book. Five years later, they are being repurposed for Unidentified Russian Objects.. ]

When an alien space ship comes aground in the 2009 animated feature Monsters vs. Aliens, a reporter who sounds remarkably like Tom Brokaw announces, “Once again, a UFO has landed in America, the only country UFOs ever seem to land in.” This is one of those cartoon moments of self-aware humor clearly directed at the parents in the audience, but, as the saying goes, it’s funny because it’s true. 

In modern science fiction, the United States is a prime target for alien visitation. Witness the classic 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, where a humanoid extraterrestrial named Klaatu lands in Washington DC and nearly dies after being shot due to a misunderstanding. The world ends up on the brink of annihilation at the hands of Klaatu’s robot, only to be averted at the last minute through the repetition of Klaatu’s mysterious command “Klaatu barada nikto".  By sheer coincidence, that last word is the Russian for “nobody,” a noun that would be appropriate for a depiction of Russia’s role in such tales of first contact: nobody from outer space bothers to go there.[1] 

Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still, but he told us where we stand

Whether or not aliens intend to colonize the earth, when it comes to first contact with aliens, America has colonized the international imagination.  In 2000, the Russian dramatist Evgeny Grishkovets published a novella in monologue form about his relationship with the United States, a country he had never visited.  Entitled “A…..a”, as if the country’s name were a taboo, the novella frames the question in decidedly science fictional terms:  

Isn’t it strange that in all, or rather, in most fantastic films and novels, if aliens come to Earth, they always arrive in the United States. And it’s not only because most of the films and books are made in America.  It’s just hard to imagine that aliens would land anywhere else. 

Grishkovets rejects a range of possible alternative landing sites: China, Hungary, Belgium.  Why bother?  In any case, the Americans will be right there to figure things out, so the aliens shouldn’t waste their time. And as for Russia: "Coming to us is either too early, or too late.  It could make too unpredictable and incorrect an impression, and the consequences are best left unimagined.” The United States simply makes sense. Grishkovets concludes: “If I were an alien, I would land only there.” 

For the most part, the history of Russian science fiction supports Grishkovets’s premise. That this was the case during Soviet times should come as no surprise: why would a country whose government is so cautious (and intermittently paranoid) about its citizens’ contact with real, existing foreigners from the dystopian hellscape of late capitalism be comfortable with stories about space aliens’ adventures in the USSR?  Such an alien viewpoint could be didactic (as it was in Alexander Bogdanov’s 1912 Engineer Menni, about a socialist Martian from his previous novel Red Star (1908) visiting our world). But the danger of satire was also quite clear. 

Thus Russian-language stories and films about alien visitors to the USSR were few and far between. The most famous tales of alien visitation and its aftermath (such as the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s adaptation, Stalker) set the action in other countries.  Aliens do occasionally come to Russia in Kir Bulychev’s series The Adventures of Alisa (including his most famous scoundrels, Krys and Vesel’chak U), but only once do they make it to the twentieth century; the rest of the adventures take place at the end of the 21st (Per Asper ad Astra, the 1981 film written by Bulychev, takes place one century after that).  In their novella “The Visitors,” the Strugatsky brothers set their story of mysterious aliens in the context of an archaeological expedition in  Tajikistan.  Whether remote in time or in space, the safest place for the story of alien visitors to the Soviet Union was somewhere that minimized the social and political context (as in the 1978 short psychedelic cartoon Contact (Vladimir Tarasov), which depicts the encounter between a Bohemian painter and a shape-shifting alien in a vague, bucolic setting). 

Of course, not everyone chose the safe route. 

Next: A Hothouse Flower in a Communal Apartment

Undocumented Aliens

[Note: earlier versions of the next few blog entries were originally serialized on my Soviet Self-Hatred blog, but I subsequently decided they did not fit into the resulting book. Five years later, they are being repurposed for Unidentified Russian Objects.. ]

Sleepers demonstrates one of the potential pitfalls of the spy thriller: deadly literalism.  The characters have significance beyond their individual fates and personalities, but they are more allegory than symbol:  this particular televised melodrama leaves no room for ambiguity.  The sleepers are American spies, and they represent the evils of the West, full stop.  It is in the more fantastic varieties of storytelling that alterity can be set free from the literal, taking advantage of the polyvalent interpretations made possible by the manifest unreality of the world in which the story takes place.

As in my previous books, I want to make the claim for fantasy and science fiction (F&SF) as crucial genres for negotiating the questions that haunt a particular culture, as well as for the value of looking through an F&SF lens at cultural productions more commonly assigned to the category of realism.  In particular, science fiction has inestimable value for considerations of alterity.  One of the obvious benefits of the countless stories of encounters with aliens is that they provide a space for imagining an Other that is, at least on the surface, separate from or surplus to the standard “Others” that populate our world (based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, political affiliation, and religious belief).  Conversely, the gaze of the purely imaginary Other highlights certain aspects of our own identities, as mediated through the conscious and unconscious concerns of the writer and the writer’s milieu.  Just as utopias reflect the priorities of the times in which they were first imagined, so, too, is the external perspective of the alien visitor shaped by preoccupations about the world that is under the alien’s gaze.

The alien is always not just imaginary, but doubly so:  first, in that the F&SF context requires the suspension of disbelief in order to confront us with the viewpoints of characters who are unreal by definition, and second, because that alien (whether from another place or another time) is almost always the creation of someone from the default or unmarked category that the alien encounters.  Imagining the perspective of an alien nation requires the writer’s self-alienation, as well as invoking a pun at least as old as the Alien Nation media franchise. 

Proof that anything can be a buddy cop show

  Begun in 1988, the Alien Nation story is an allegory of immigration and discrimination about the tensions between humans and the 300,000 former slaves whose spaceship crashed in the Mojave Desert, after which they move to Los Angeles (apparently, even alien former slaves all think they have a screenplay or two in them).  Ostensibly, this is a story about the relations between the alien “Newcomers” and humans, but in fact, “humans” in this case means “Americans.”  When District 9 develop a similar premise in 2009, its South African setting gives it particular, local ramifications.

What, then, does the alien mean to Russia?  What stories can be told by imagining an extraterrestrial guest taking up housekeeping in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation?

Next: Russia as Flyover Country

Sleeping Dogs Lying

By the time Sleepers first aired, Russian audiences were no longer surprised by propaganda-heavy news and talk shows that demonized nearly all oppositional thought. But in the world of entertainment, there could still be a reasonable expectation of at least minimal nuance.  In terms of ideological content, scripted television in 2017 was not so dramatically different from from scripted television of 2007: much of it avoided politics entirely, with the "patriotic" quotient slowly increasing in proportion to the topicality of the story.  The state-controlled media apparatus was still hesitant to switch from cultivating the population's apolitical cynicism to sustained attempts at widespread political mobilization.  This is one of the reasons that Sleepers stood out: viewers would be hard-pressed to avoid a political agenda that is hitting them on the head multiple times each episode.

The other reason is that this propaganda exercise was performed so professionally:  well-known actors and directors had signed on to it, a guarantor of quality that seemed at odds with the show's purpose.  The show was aimed at a mass audience, but the reviews and the criticism would inevitably come from Russia's intellectuals, who, by and large, saw Sleepers as a betrayal.  Sleepers distilled official Kremlin paranoid geopolitics into a brew that liberals found unpalatable.

The hero of Sleepers is FSB Colonel Andrei Rodionov, who, thanks to a spending a decade and a half on assignment in the Middle East, finds the Moscow he returns to in 2013 nearly unrecognizable. Given that the series aired in 2017, the choice of time period is significant, allowing the show's creators to establish its Manichaen worldview without the burden of addressing Russia's (first) invasion of Ukraine.  Though the plot's threads lead back to Iraq and Libya, the conflict is between great powers, without proxies to muddle the playing field.  As for Rodionov, his absence from Russia between 1998 and 2013 means that he has missed out on Putin-era prosperity and Moscow's transformation into a playground for the wealthy.  Rodionov is a sleeper of a different kind. Without every setting foot in a time machine or falling into an explicable coma, Rodionov is a twenty-first century Rip Van Winkle, bemused and appalled by a brave new world.

Unlike his complacent compatriots, however, Rodionov is politically very much awake. Two days before his arrival in Moscow, he survived an assault on the Russian Embassy in Libya, provoked and coordinated by the CIA.  In case we might not have noticed just how evil this action was, the camera lingers on an innocent little blonde Russian girl, her brief life snuffed thanks to American perfidy.  The attack is a result of the Americans' discovery that Russian and China are about to sign an energy deal that will guarantee Russia a radiant economic future. The Tripoli attack is only the beginning, of course; the CIA has activated its long-dormant "Sleepers" program, calling on a network of stealth agents throughout the Russian Federation to initiate a campaign of propaganda and terror. 

Given that Sleepers was intended as a Russian version of The Americans (as confirmed by Michael Idov, who worked for the production company that made the show but refused to be involved in it), the premise itself is not particular surprising.  The real bone of contention is the identity of the sleeper agents themselves.

Had they been interested in a more subtle story of spycraft, Bykov and Minaev could have revealed that the sleepers had disguised themselves as loyal true believers in the Putinist order, so that they looked more like Rodionov than like his ideological opponents.  Instead, the sleepers are hiding in plane sight: consistent with the media's constant denigration of opposition figures as traitorous hacks bought and paid for by the CIA and George Soros.  They all live in luxury and drive fancy cars, gorge themselves on sinister American hamburgers, and ooze disdain for ordinary Russians. There are stand-ins for specific opposition figures (Navalny, murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya) and representative of generic types (cynical hipsters), and they are all equally odious. 

Sleepers is a manifestation of the Putinist imaginary.  On the most obvious, superficial level, it is a secondary world of the kind found in so many works of fantasy. But instead of taking place in a realm in which vampires and witches are real, Sleepers takes place in a land in which in all the tropes of Putinist propaganda are true: the U.S. really is behind all manifestations of opposition, the West really is hell-bent on Russia's destruction, and the opponents of the Putin really are self-interested traitors who are only to happy to sell whatever passes for their souls to the highest bidder. 

“Time to wake up!”

Or maybe hit the snooze button

But on the other hand, Sleepers is also a case study in the mimetic desire that still animates the post-Soviet entertainment industry.  Idov explains this in no uncertain terms, confirming that Sleepers was modeled after The Americans, noting that

such mimicry is common in Russian entertainment. He attributes this to lingering effects of the Soviet period, when Russians had only sporadic exposure to outside pop culture. “Almost no Russian TV series comes into being without a clear American or British inspiration,” he said. Russians are “so insecure about their pop culture that basically they don’t trust their instincts. They were always so proud of their space program and ballet—two things Russia can be rightfully proud of—but they only remembered that they could do space movies after Gravity, and ballet movies after Black Swan.

Sleepers shows exactly how the Russifying of Western examples can go so terribly wrong.  It is an uneasy mix of uninspired imitation of American espionage tales and The Americans in particular along with the tropes and cliches of Soviet popular entertainment.  The hero is patriotic and upstanding to a fault; patriotism is reinforced by decorating the positive characters' offices with portraits of the country's leader; the hero's failed marriage reinforces the themes of cynicism and betrayal, and every romantic scene is accompanied by the kind of drippy, melodramatic music that was popular in the USSR forty years ago.

Finally, Sleepers is a sign of Russian propaganda's increasingly impoverished imagination when it comes to alterity.  A good-faith representation of difference allows for the possibility that those with whom one disagrees might also have a sense of themselves as heroic, correct, or even somewhat justifiable in their otherwise dubious actions.  But shows like Sleepers are what we get after years of unrelenting demonization of all opposition: in a world where anyone supporting Ukrainian sovereignty is a Nazi, anyone interested in alternative forms of political-artistic expression are mentally ill, blasphemers, or servants of Satan (Pussy Riot), queer people are victims of the importation of Western immorality, and protesters agitating for freedom of expression or fair elections is a paid agent of the CIA, State Department, or George Soros, the primitive geopolitics of Sleepers makes a sad kind of sense.

Next: Undocumented Aliens

When the Sleeper Wakes

If lighthearted shows such as Adaptation were an odd fit for increasingly bellicose times, the 2017-2018 series Sleepers was ahead of the curve.  Its paranoid, antiliberal, jingoistic tone now looks like a preview of the rhetoric that would define Russia during its "Special Military Operation" in Ukraine.  If ever there were a scripted television show made to convince its audience that Russia was under siege from enemies foreign and domestic, it would be Sleepers.

Yet Sleepers the show did exactly what sleeper agents are supposed to do: it took its viewers by surprise.  The show had a complicated pedigree. It was created by the author, TV host and Internet personality Sergei Minaev, whose work had long combined a glossy, contemporary feel with an unwavering support of Putin and his policies (culminating in his approval of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine). That Minaev would write Putinist pabulum is not particularly surprising, but Yuri Bykov's decision to direct the first season took the liberal intelligentsia by surprise.

Before Sleepers, Bykov had directed several acclaimed films, including The Fool (2014), To Live (2010), and The Major (2015). This last film, about a police officer who tries to cover up his accidentally killing of a boy in a hit-and-run, was a hit and Cannes, and was eventually adapted as the series Seven Seconds on Netflix (2018). He was an avowed socialist who participated in the 2017 Bolotnaya Square protest that was a turning point in the regime's handling of opposition rallies. Bykov directing Sleepers was only slight less thinkable than Michael Moore directing 24.

Initially, Bykov pushed back against allegations that he had sold out:  “The U.S. is our geopolitical rival and acts brazenly, like imperialists" (Yegorov). But just a month later, he repented his involvement and even announced that he was leaving the film industry:

I can't say that I didn't understand where I was going, but, clearly, I didn't completely realize how unforgivable it was to be insufficiently accurate, honest, and clear about teh themes of Sleepers... People must always protest and demand justice, otherwise there will be no changes, while I betrayed the entire progressive generation that wants to change something in this country.

Emotions were running much higher than one might reasonably expect from yet another eight-episode serial, especially one with such low ratings.  At times it seemed more people were writing and arguing about Sleepers than actually watching it.  Nonetheless, a truncated second season was rushed into production, aired before the 2018 elections, and viewed by an even smaller audience than that of the first season.  The mismatch of low ratings and aggressive release schedule on Channel One (a channel whose importance is indicated in its very name) would seem to confirm what critics had suspected:  Sleepers was a state-ordered propaganda confection intended to reinforce the already familiar narrative of Russia under siege.

Definitely a bad dream

Sleepers was widely viewed as a response to the hit FX series The Americans, which had just finished its fifth (and penultimate season) four months before the Channel One drama premiered. The creators of The Americans took their premise from the 2010 arrest of ten "illegal" Russian spies living in the United States under false identities, something that could have resulted in a a paranoid thriller about dangerous post-Soviet agents undercutting American freedoms. Instead, they took the more daring move of making the Soviet spies not just the show's protagonists, but their heroes.  What might have looked almost treasonous during the Cold War became inevitable with the casting of Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as the main characters:  American viewers found themselves sympathizing with Soviet agents whose mission was to undermine the American way of life. Adaptation accomplished something similar, but in a lower-stakes semi-comedy.

But Sleepers was an entirely different short of show, set in the present day and operating with the unshakable belief that American and NATO were Russia's implacable and current enemies.   There was no room for confusion about the heroes and villains, or for any of The Americans' moral gray areas.  

Next: Sleeping Dogs Lying

Twenty-First Century Espionage Man

Putin's ascendency started a process whose side effect would be the revival of the classic espionage pattern. This is not simply because Putin was the product of the KGB, or because he remains a Sword and Shield fanboy well into his Botoxed golden years, nor is it the likely result of a well-formulated plan that began with his installation as president. We should recall that in the early years of the new century, Putin made significant overtures to Western countries (the United States included) with an eye towards international economic cooperation.  Rather, it stems from the Putinist determination to centralize power and establish the principle of gosudarstevennost' (statehood/sovereignty) as foundational not only to the Russian Federation, but to all of Russian history. Putinism is the political reincarnation of Soviet gigantomania; where the Soviet aesthetic foregrounded immensity of size as a guiding principle (the biggest statues, the biggest buildings), Putinist geopolitics demonstrates a strong preference for size, scale, and longevity. From its early days, Putinism insist on seeing and thinking like a state; with Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, it broadened to a quasi-Huntingtonian, civilizational discourse.  For Putinism, it is the Russian state that is the hero of history.  Its only logical interlocutors are other states. 

Given the increasing belligerence of Putin's third and subsequent terms, it is somewhat surprising how small a role American and European spies have played in popular entertainment, and how late they have been to make themselves known. Even as real-life American citizens were arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage (Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich), they had few fictional counterparts to pave the way.   Nor was Russian counter-intelligence a frequent source of twenty-first century heroes.  Until recently, both American and Russian spies were easier to find on television in more lighthearted fare rather than outright thrillers.  A series called Agent of National Security ran on the TNT network from 1998 through 2004, with a 2019 sequel film, featuring a hero who used his skills as a college theater major to help in the fight against organized crime and separatist elements.  Agent did not skimp on the action:  evil-doers were defeated, people were threatened and killed, but, like Cops: Broken Street Lights (Menty: ulitsy razbity fonarei), the show on which it was modeled, Agent tried to charm its viewers with its quirky characters and absurd situations in which the hero found himself. 

Would you trust your national security to these men>

in 2017, TNT took another stab at the spy genre, this time with an even more pronounced comedic slant: Adaptation,which ran for two seasons and 37 episodes ending two years after its premier.  This time the protagonist is Ashton Ivy, an American spy who happens to speak perfect Russian;  under the name Oleg Menshov, Ashton has been dispatched to the frigid climes of Noyabrsk, a grim, Siberian oil-producing city. The series is an extended cat-and-mouse game, and much of the humor comes from the multiple ways in which Ashton fails to understand everyday Russian reality while still not actually getting caught.  Curiously, Ashton is a sympathetic figure, despite being a foreign agent; indeed, when the show premiered, residents of the town in which it was filmed lodged their objections to being portrayed as drunken, uncouth yokels.  It helps that the stakes in this particular infiltration are not quite existential: Ashton is not trying to destroy Russia or weaken its military.  Rather, he is sent to Siberia because the U.S. has learned of a new Russian method for obtaining cheap gas.  Ashton's mission is in the economic interests of his homeland and against those of his target, but the series manages to keep Ashton's exploits at a distance from the American Russophobic forces that the news media were already warning their viewers about.  The poster for the first season shows the Statue of Liberty holding a torch that looks like a cigarette lighter in the shape of a hammer and sickle, with the telling slogan, "An American Spy in Gazprom."  It would be naive to pretend that Gazprom is an entity somehow separate from the Russian state, but highlighting Ashton's mission in a company rather than, say, the Kremlin or a military research facility, means refraining from pushing more obvious patriotic buttons.

Help! Is there a semiotician in the house?

In Adaptation, Ashton is always on the back foot because he has been sent on assignment to a strange and distant land. His viewers undergo a similar displacement, but in time rather than space: the light comedy and low stakes of Adaptation are curiously out of step three years after the seizure of Crimea, when the news media are devoting more and more time to uncovering the sinister machinations of Russia's enemies (with the United States as enemy number one).  Adaptation's geopolitics were so anodyne that liberals didn't even bother to criticize it.  And, in any case, the show would be eclipsed by a much more tendentious rival spy drama that appeared at roughly the same time:  Sleepers(Spiashchie). With an eight-episode first season that began in October 2017 and a truncated, concluding second season in early 2018, Sleepers was the show that everyone was talking about.

Next: When the Sleeper Wakes

17,000 Moments of Spring

The greatest success story in the world of Soviet espionage entertainment was Yulian Semyonov, whose two novels about KGB Colonel Vitaly Slavin were runaway hits. The first, Tass Is Authorized to Declare was turned into a popular film and translated into multiple languages, including English.  Yet the success of the Slavin books was dwarfed by Semyonov's thrillers set decades before the Cold War.  His stories about Colonel Maxim Maximovich  Isayev, better known by his German alias Max Otto von Stierlitz, remain a fixture of Russian mass culture, in particular thanks to the miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring.  Stirlits, who worked to undermine the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War rather than the West Germans or Americans once the war was over. has remained a hero of Soviet jokelore to this day.  At the height of Stielritz' fame,  decades had passed since the Soviet victory,  but Soviet action heroes were still fighting Nazis on the Eastern Front or behind enemy lines. World War II is a perennial setting for British and American dramas as well, but as only one small part of a larger landscape of espionage and battle as mass entertainment.

No, this is not Gorbachev checking out a Grindr profile

This (understandable) fixation on World War II held back the development of Cold War spy narratives.  Besides Seventeen Moments of Spring, the other signature spy stories of the Brezhnev era focused on the fight against Nazis: Vasily Ardamatsky's Saturn Is Almost Invisible (1963) and the blockbuster novel and film The Sword and the Shield (1965/1968) both take place during the Second World War.  Vladimir Putin's decision to join the KGB is widely attributed to his fandom for this particular movie.

By now, no one should be surprised to hear that World War II has continued to play an outsize role in Russian culture. This is not only a matter of the War's function as a moral touchstone for every generation, but also of seven decades of WWI-related cultural production. As I argued in Overkill, the Great Patriotic War was one of the few acceptable settings for the (sometimes graphic) depiction of violence before perestroika.  Crime was officially all but non-existent in the USSR, and in any case not a suitable subject for mass entertainment; the television police dramas of the 1970s had such a broad appeal not just because they were well-made, but because they had so little domestic competition. World War II was a cultural safety valve for violent entertainment.  As in the West, it usually served as the site of a stark Manichaean conflict between good and evil, while (after 1945) also having the advantage of an eventual foregone conclusion (the Nazi defeat) that could justify the savage fighting and tragic human losses depicted along the way. As a recent historical setting World War II stories could be simultaneously inspiring, horrifying, and exciting in a way that plots centered in the Soviet present could not.  The Soviet present was simply not accessible as the grounds for the military or criminal plots that could so easily serve as the grounds for ideological contestation.  Spy dramas, along with most opportunities for adventure, were consigned to the safely cordoned off cultural space of the Great Patriotic War.

The end of Soviet censorship (followed shortly thereafter by the end of the Soviet Union) could, at least in theory, have led to an espionage drama renaissance.  After all, the pent-up demand for crime fiction was sated by a seemingly endless supply of tales of gangland shootings and mafia wars, not to mention the decade's signal (fictional) professional, the hitman.  Science fiction enjoyed a similar, if smaller boom, accompanied by the birth of "Slavic fantasy" (sword-and-sorcery and subpar Tolkien imitations with Russian window dressing).  But the 1990s turned out to be a less suitable climate for spy stories.  Classic espionage requires actors sneaking around in the interests of a foreign, hostile state.  With the Cold War over, what state was that going to be?  But it wasn't just about the lack of an obvious foreign enemy; the hostile state is in a symmetrical, almost co-dependent relationship with the "good" state that the heroes call home.  When James Bond fights agents of the Soviet Union, he is not a rogue or independent actor (no matter how charming and individualistic he might be); he is operating on behalf of Her Majesty's Secret Service. Obviously, the Russian Federation existed as a state, but it was much less centralized than the regimes that preceded and followed Yeltsin.  For the nine years of Yeltsin's presidency, the state did not occupy as large a discursive or cultural role.  In its weakened form, Russia in 1990s storytelling was often the hapless victim of malign powers conspiring against it, but these enemies were usually not part of state structures. On the contrary, they were the supranational, conspiratorial forces that manipulated states themselves: Jews, Masons, international capital, and secret societies.

In other words, the enemy in the 1990s was usually some manifestation of globalism, facing a Russian Federation that lacked the will and the resources to effectively fight back. Here the Russian situation made sense within the larger context of ascendant neoliberalism, a free-trade global agenda that downplayed sovereignty, and whatever the chattering classes across the world chose to believe the "end of history" actually was. Just as the West was confronting the increasing threat of international terrorism performed by non-state networks, the Russian Federation faced the threat of separatism (the first Chechen War) and the vague specter of state collapse.  Rather than the familiar "spy vs, spy" narrative, Russian entertainment offered variations on a complex, asymmetrical struggle between the patriotic remnants of the Soviet security apparatus (often functioning either as lone wolves or autonomous units), organized crime, corrupt politicians, separatist terrorists or agents of international cabals.  The aggressive, anti-Western turn in response to the 1999 NATO bombings of Yugoslavia began the process of restoring a framework in which states were opposing states:  the United States and the European Union were, if not enemies, than at the very least rivals, and the Russian Federation would have to retrench and act accordingly. 

Next: Twenty-First Century Espionage Man

Spies Like U.S.

Despite the paranoia about saboteurs  and agents of foreign power under Stalin and the frequent charges of "Anti-Soviet activity" leveled against dissidents even decades later, the spy drama occupied a surprisingly limited corner of the Soviet cultural space.  As any American instructor who has taught (or tried to teach) a comparative course on Cold War culture knows, English-language films and novels about Soviet and NATO spycraft dwarf their Soviet counterparts in number and significance.  Not that the USSR was a passive participant in the Cold War; rhe tensions between the USSR and the NATO bloc featured prominently in propaganda posters and in the news. In the Brezhnev years, Westerners, particularly reporters in the USSR could occasionally find themselves charged with espionage and booted out of the country.  But Cold War tradecraft yielded little in the way of Soviet mass entertainment. When James Bond fought Soviet agents in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a one-sided struggle: he had no contemporary counterpart on the Soviet silver screen.

Spymania and paranoia were central to an American Cold War culture that feared the triple threat of ideological subversion ("Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?"), geopolitical hegemony (the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence through diplomacy, international aid, ideological appeal, and possible conquest), and nuclear weapons.  The danger to the American psyche played itself out in dramas of communist brainwashing (The Manchurian Candidate) and the flexible metaphors of science fiction (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Soviet agents abounded in dramas and comedies, becoming so familiar that they could be abstracted into the cartoon  Pottsylvanian spies Boris and Natasha in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.

Only in my Omegaverse fan fiction, TBH

By contrast, the Soviets, as we have already seen, were fighting the influence of Western popular culture rather than inventing a plethora of  imaginary Western spies to match wits with chekist heroes.  The aforementioned propaganda posters featured Western atrocities in Vietnam and portrayed NATO as an existential threat to the peace-loving USSR.   The United States needed to continually remind its population of the "communist threat" to rally political support for military spending and foreign wars; arguably, Hollywood helped this effort by turning the Cold War into entertainment.  The Cold War played out in the news, in Soviet policy, and in outright propaganda.  There was little need to make the Cold War "fun."

The Soviet Union was never in a position to be able to ignore public opinion or the public mood entirely, but it was not subject to the same sort of electoral pressures that obtained in the West. Moreover, the near absence of market pressures meant that the production of popular entertainment was not necessarily commensurate with popular demand.  Filip Kovacevic's 2023 "A List of Soviet Films about Counterintelligence, 1923-1991" tallies 40 movies on this theme in the 1970s alone. But, while many of the Cold War spy stories that did make it to the bookstore, television, or movie theaters are still fondly remembered by readers and viewers who came of age during the late Soviet period, East/West espionage never approached the outsized role of James Bond films or John LeCarre novels from the same period.  Venyamin Dorman directed a series of four films about a West German spy who eventually changes sides, beginning with the 1968 The Secret Agent's Blunder and concluding 18 years later with The End of Operation Resident spanned the period from Brezhnev's retrenchment through the beginning of Gorbachev's perestroika.  The series,  based on a set of popular novellas by two veterans of Soviet state security, was a particularly interesting phenomenon, in that it invited the audience to develop a guarded sympathy with its Western spy protagonist while following him, step by step, as he embraces the Soviet cause. 

Fortunately, The Resident’s Mistake is not a hospital drama

There were individual spy novelists who wrote popular novels, but not enough for an identifiable genre to appear or sustain itself. Former counterintelligence officer Roman Kim (1899-1967) was one of the few exceptions, writing a number of well-received spy novels. The early part of Kim's fictional output was set in Asia, and almost all of it took place during World War II. Each of these factors (along with the lack of translations of all but one of his novels into any non-Warsaw Pact language) contributed to limiting Kim's role as a creator of Soviet Cold War espionage culture. As Filip Kovacevic argues, Kim himself was vexed by his country's failure to engage with Western spy fiction on its own term. In his 1964 novella "Who Kidnaped Punnakan," an authorial stand-in describes the power of British and American spy thrillers: 

Their descriptions of the evil deeds of the Red spies are pushed into the book markets of Europe, Latin America, Asia, Near and Middle East, [and] Africa in an organized manner. And millions of readers of all ages are swallowing them up. [...] They gradually form the images of the intelligence officers from the countries behind the “Iron Curtain” in the readers’ consciousness, convincing them that all that is written in those entertaining books is true and that the countries of the Communist bloc indeed send killers to all corners of the globe, such as Dr. No, Grant, Colonel Vasiliev (as quoted in Kovacevic). [1]

These comments are in service of Kim's larger argument about the value of spy stories,  one that is familiar both from internal Soviet debates about mass culture and from the the more general problem of postwar mass consumption:  the persistence of the defitsit (shortage).  Kim would have preferred to see Soviet writers mobilize as producers of patriotic espionage drama, fighting James Bond on the only front in which he exerted any real power: the imagination.  The Soviet culture industry would never quite meet that challenge, generally avoiding the Cold War context in favor of heroes who would fight on the never-ending (fictional) battlegrounds of World War II.

Note

[1] When this post was being drafted, Kovacevic's KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union, was still in press.  This chapter will subsequently be revised to reflect the new monograph's contributions.

Next: 17000 Moments of Spring

The Enemy Within

Plenty of nations recognize (and even enforce) the status of the "foreign agent." Indeed, the Russian legislation bears a strong resemblance to the Foreign Agent Registration Act  (FARA) adopted by the United States in 1938. Amended five times since then,  FARA has been criticized as a tool for the suppression of dissent, whose application is sporadic and selective. Yet whatever its faults may be, FARA's rare invocation means that it has not been used broadly as an instrument of political intimidation in the U.S.; most Americans can comfortably spend their entire lives without even knowing of the Act's existence. Moreover, the government labors under a heavy burden of proof thanks to FARA's 1966 revision.

In the Russian Federation, "foreign agency" is the contentless culmination of two decades of increasing demonization of alterity, the foreign, and the outside world. After years of reflexively dismissing every manifestation of dissent as the result of foreign money rather than personal principle, the pretense of a logical chain of evidence has been abandoned.  Being a foreign agent has nothing to do with actually being bought and paid for by a foreign power; it is the recognition of dissenting thought as foreign by definition.   Therefore the words that describe the foreign agent status are devoid of content, serving instead as a signal:  the voice behind whatever you are about to read or hear is alien.

It does not take a deep knowledge of Soviet history to find disturbing twentieth-century precedents to the foreign agent phenomenon.  We need only recall the "wreckers" of the Stalinist 1930s brought up in this chapter's first paragraphs. LIke "foreign agent," the  term "wrecker" applied to a wide range of people the state found inconvenient, who were thus the targets of unsubstantiated charges of espionage and sabotage. . While the contemporary Foreign Agent law has not yet led to widespread show trials and imprisonments, such a development is not out of the question. Since 2022, the prosecution of dissidents as foreign agents has been supplanted by even broader-ranging criminal statues that have been used to charge a wider range of Russian citizens with "discrediting the Russian armed forces" or "spreading false information" about the Special Military Operation.

The foreign agents of late Putinism are the essence of alterity itself,  freed from the particular ethnic, sexual, gendered, or religious trappings that surround other folk devils.  They need not actually be queer,  sectarian, or  Ukrainian; rather, they embody the threat posed by all of these categories as a free-floating ethos or ideology that renders them equivalent to the pariahs du jour. In the absence of even the pretense of evidence or due process,  they are alterity's monsters, players in a fictional narrative that its authors need develop only in the broadest strokes. They are the alien nations of the Russian state.

As such, they are the culmination of decades of storytelling that, in every sense of the word, entertained the thrill and threat of the alien. Some of these narratives, such as the tales of spies and sleeper agents, would look to Westerners like contemporary updates on familiar Cold War themes, while others (from zombies to extraterrestrials to apocalyptic contagions) had been relatively underdeveloped in Soviet times. All of these more fantastic figures are even more prominent in the West than they are in Russia, but their relative novelty and postsocialist context make them play out differently in a country that, increasing, is depicted in its own media and by its own leaders as under constant siege from the West.

Next: Spies Like U.S.

Agents of a Foreign Power

On August 2, 2021, journalists Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova launched a clever and informative new podcast called "Привет, ты иногент!" ("Hi, You're a Foreign Agent!").  Groysman and Churakova were political journalists whose resumes were a collection of the greatest hits of Russian independent media: Novaia gazeta, Kommersant, TV-Rain, and the investigative journalism outlet known as "Proekt" ("Project.").  Less than three weeks earlier, Proekt had been banned from operating in the Russian Federation as an "undesirable organization;" not long after that, both Churakova and Groysman found themselves on the most recent update to the country's registry of "foreign agents." 

Technically, this designation was to indicate that the writers or media outlets received funding from abroad, but no evidence of such funding was required in order to justify the status. In reality, journalists and public figures  who in any way questioned  state policy were being slapped with the "foreign agent" label at an increasingly rapid rate.  By the time Churakov and Groysman were added to the roster, they thought they knew what the status entailed; after all, so many of their colleagues had become "foreign agents" in the previous few months.  But the actual experience was another matter:  they were entirely unprepared for the bureaucratic hellscape that stretched out before them.

Foreign agents must submit quarterly, forty-page reports on their income and expenditures, listing every purchase they have made in the past three months. While foreign agent status does not technically prevent them from working as journalists, few employers are willing to take a chance on hiring them.   Their status also appears permanent; there is no procedure established for getting oneself removed from the list.

But perhaps the most obvious, and odious, requirement is that foreign agents must engage in the social media equivalent of wearing a cowbell around their necks or the scarlet letter on their blouses.  Everything they post on the Internet must feature following disclaimer: 

ДАННОЕ СООБЩЕНИЕ (МАТЕРИАЛ) СОЗДАНО И (ИЛИ) РАСПРОСТРАНЕНО ИНОСТРАННЫМ СРЕДСТВОМ МАССОВОЙ ИНФОРМАЦИИ, ВЫПОЛНЯЮЩИМ ФУНКЦИИ ИНОСТРАННОГО АГЕНТА, И (ИЛИ) РОССИЙСКИМ ЮРИДИЧЕСКИМ ЛИЦОМ, ВЫПОЛНЯЮЩИМ ФУНКЦИИ ИНОСТРАННОГО АГЕНТА.

This communication/material was created and/or disseminated by a foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent, and/or a Russian legal entity performing the functions of a foreign agent.

This disclaimer quickly became something between a magic spell, a bureaucratic mantra, and a Putinist prayer.  Russian readers of this book will have seen these words  far too many times, and, like late Soviet subjects faced with a poster reminding its viewers that "we will fulfill the decisions of the 25th, 26th, or 27th congress of the communist party," will skip over them rather than read them.   In the early days of their podcast, they playfully wondered aloud about just how strictly they would have to follow the rule (would they need to include it on Tinder)?  Now that, in the wake of the February 2022 invasion, they have found at least temporary shelter in Europe (Churakova) and the United States (Groysman), they have retained the disclaimer in the newer, diaspora phrase of the podcast, inviting special guests to read it at the beginning of each episode.  While their foreign agent status is now irrelevant, they nonetheless continue to embrace it, at least for the purposes of their podcast (which, they say, is meant for "anyone who might feel a little bit like a foreign agent").

If feeling. "a little bit like a foreign agent" sounds facetious, it is deliberately so.  Groysman and Churakova are engaging in the decades-long opposition practice of answering self-righteous cant with absurdity, rejecting the logic of the state by refusing to take it seriously.  However effective this may have been before February 2022, since the invasion, it has proven powerless against the draconian methods the regime now freely employs:  not just fines, but arrests and convictions to serious jail time. But even if their humor now looks like a holdover from a less horrible era,  it nonetheless highlights the substance, or rather, lack of substance, behind the "foreign agent" designation.  Wielded without even the fig leaf of due process, it is a punishment that uses words to enact something rather than to meansomething.

Next: The Enemy Within

The Language Police

A frequent flashpoint for anxieties over status and contamination is the Russian language itself. Or rather, the Russian language and its perceived competitors.  Language can easily become a proxy for both internal and external politics, as was certainly the case in the Soviet Union.  The USSR was a multinational and multilingual state, home to native speakers of more than a hundred different languages spanning multiple language families.  Though technically not the "official" language, Russian was the lingua franca for all federal and inter-republic communication, and more often than not, Russian was essential for career advancement.  Each of the fifteen constituent republics had their own primary national language, while also recognizing numerous minority tongues.  Russian was also taught widely throughout the Eastern bloc as part of the mandatory school curriculum; the extent to which students in, say, Poland or Czechosklovakia valued their Russian skills certainly varied, but there was the presumption of Russian as the most likely common tongue among the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies.

By the 1980s, English was in increasingly high demand in the big cities of the Soviet Union, though lack of travel opportunities and limited contact with foreigners made the development of proficiency difficult.  Like almost everything else, this situation changed with the end of Soviet Power.  Suddenly, it seemed, English was everywhere. English was essential not just for working with the Americans and the British, but because of its rise as a global language throughout the twentieth century.  The writing was on the wall, and it wasn't in Cyrillic.

In the newly-created Russian Federation, English seemed to be everywhere.  Would-be English instructors hawked language lessons  in an astonishing range of advertisements, from handwritten flyers taped to walls to relatively sophisticated television commercials. The high-speed adoption of capitalism was accompanied by numerous, ugly-sounding English terms "fyuchersy" (futures), "vaucher," popular books were "best-sellery," and soon young Russians were exclaiming "vau!" (wow). English and English-sounding names attached themselves to new consumer products and stores (Moscow briefly had a truly terrible fast-food joint called "Burger Kvin"), and English proficiency offered a gateway to better careers.  This is not to say that everyone learned English, or learned it well, but that, in the big cities at least, the chances that a foreigner could get assistance in English vastly improved over the next two decades.  When Russian producers (sorry, "prodyusery" adapted the British time-travel police procedural Life on Mars in 2012, its policeman protagonist wakes up after an accident to find his is a Soviet militiaman in  1979.  At one point, he is part of a team confronting a potential American spy, so he casually switches to English to ask the man questions. His colleagues are stunned:  in what world does a Soviet cop know English?  By 2012, an English-speaking policeman might not be common, but it would be unsurprising.

The backlash against English and Anglicisms was virtually instantaneous, and also understandable.  The proliferation of English and English-derived words, as well as the increased use of Latin letters, far outpaced the general population's familiarity with the language.  What could be a clearer sign of loss of status and cultural colonization than the rise of foreign language use, accompanied by the transformation of one's own language into something increasingly less comprehensible? English was becoming insufferable at the same time it was becoming essential. Meanwhile, the other former Soviet republics were adopting laws enshrining their national languages (which usually did not include Russian).  The narrative about the threat against the Russian language practically wrote itself.

“Менеджер” (menedzher) is an old Slavic word first attested in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign

Russian had been declared the Soviet Union's "official" language only a year before the country ceased to exist.   The Russian Federation's leadership began to address the language issue almost immediately after the Soviet collapse, with Yeltsin establishing a Federal Council on the Russian Language in 1991. Two years later, the new Russian constitution affirmed that Russian was, indeed the national language. but this did little to allay concerns about the language's status and future. The Federal Council was reconstituted by Putin in 2000, making it the second time that a new president made the Russian language a priority from the beginning. The result was two successive bills entitled "On the National Language of the Russian Federation," which would eventually be signed into law by Putin in 2005.  Initially, the bill banned both obscene language and excessive foreign borrowings,  but the final version left out the obscenity clause and contained a watered-down statement about unnecessary foreign words.

The foul language restriction became law in 2014, banning swear words in the media, public performances, while requiring books containing "non-normative language" to put warnings on their covers.  This was part of an important shift in public policy, at a time when a wide range of restrictions were implemented in the name of "protecting the children" (prohibitions on discussions of suicide, the law against "gay propaganda," increased censorship of the Internet), and less about protecting the country's purity from pernicious foreign influence.  Still, as is the case with many post-Soviet cases of conservative social engineering through legislation, activism and government initiative on the local level would pave the way for eventual national laws.  As early as 1997, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov ordered all public signs that contain English to have the Russian words printed twice as large as their foreign equivalents. This was after a previous law from 1993 failed to make much of a difference. English was not the only target:   In 2021, activists and politicians were denouncing the use of Tajik and Uzbek on Moscow metro signs.

In 2019, Putin addressed the Presidential Council on the Russian Language, informing them that "war" had been declared on the Russian language by "inveterate Russophobes" and "aggressive nationalists." The Council Chairman, who happens to be named Vladimir Tolstoy, went further:

The war waged against the Russian word and the Russian language in the so-called civilized world makes it possible to consider it a powerful and formidable weapon, which means that this weapon must be in full combat readiness. Russia has achieved truly breakthrough successes in the military sphere and in ensuring its defense capability in recent years, but much remains to be done in the cultural sphere, most importantly, in fine-tuning the control of these processes.

Unsurprisingly,  it is the war in Ukraine that seems to have motivated new rounds of concern and prohibition.  Just one month after the 2022 full-scale invasion, the leader of Russian-occupied Crimea declared that it was time to "cleanse" the Russian language of Anglicism now that the West is indulging in an orgy of Russophobic hostility against Russia's language, spirituality, and culture. That this call was coming from Crimea was particularly symbolic: annexed by Russian in 2014, Crimea was a symbol of an awakened Russia's resolve to redress historical "wrongs," reassert its regional and global authority, and affirm the strength and value of Russia's culture.

In this regard, as in virtually all other matters of public expression, the rhetoric and policy on language after February 2022 has built on the already increasing suspicion of foreign (particularly Western) connections, in the name of security,  patriotism.  and the fight against Russophobia.  In 2023, the classroom time devoted to English in grades five through seven was reduced. The agenda behind this move could not have been more clear: the hours freed up from studying a foreign tongue now devoted to "The Spiritual and Moral Culture of Russia." The initiative met with mixed reactions, as many parents still saw English proficiency as an important skill for their children's future.

Also in 2023, the Duma began consideration of a bill that would prohibit the use of English words in some signs and advertisements, and require that any words in Latin letters be accompanied by their Russian equivalent, but in a larger font. The bill was debated and revised for two years before finally passing in June 2025, in a somewhat watered-down form. The provisions themselves are less important than the rhetoric surrounding them. According to the executive order Putin signed in conjunction with the law,

Russia successfully counters efforts to limit the use of the Russian language, to ‘cancel’ Russian culture, ‘including Russian literature,’ to discriminate against Russian media outlets, and to impose ideological frameworks that contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values 

At a June 5, 2025 meeting of the Council for State Policy on Promoting the Russian Language and Languages of the Russian Federation, Putin announced the creation of a national "Day of the Russian Language." Council Chair Yelena Yampolskaia welcomed both the new holiday and the new law, even as she regretted that the law was not as strong as she would have liked, calling the Russian language "a sacred matter for every citizen of Russia." The ideological framework of the project was undeniable: "The approach of my colleague and me can be called patriotic."  Yampolskaia even asked the president to "address [his] message to every first-grader on the first page" of the forthcoming unified national reading and writing textbook:

On September 1, most of them will hear your words read aloud by their teachers, parents, or grandparents. But a little later, children will read your words themselves. I am certain that pride – the feeling that the President of their country has addressed them personally – will undoubtedly remain, making the start of their school life even more momentous.

It is certainly a sign of the times that a debate that began with genuine disorientation in the wake of the USSR now ends not only with a relatively draconian law and a state holiday, but with a display of fealty that identifies the power and beauty of the Russian language with the words of Vladimir Putin himself.  More important that the growing cult of personality, though, is the new clarity with which the state is approaching the language question.  The war in Ukraine has been continually framed as a battle for Russia's identity: first, by denying the identity of Ukraine as anything other than a regional variation of Russia and Russianness; second, by insisting that any display of Ukrainian nationalism or anti-Russian sentiment is the result of insidious Western manipulation; and third, by reinforcing the already powerful notion that Russia is a fortress under siege hostile, foreign forces.  The seizure of Ukrainian territory is expansionist at the same time that it is a retrenchment, through insisting that this foreign adventure is not "foreign" at all.  Everything foreign has become suspicious, language included.  Russification begins at home.

Next: Agents of a Foreign Power

What Color is Your Revolution?

One of the reasons that paranoia about the Yugoslav example was so powerful was that it contained an element of truth: the United States had been quite open about supporting pro-democracy movements in the post-Soviet space; this was a significant part of their activity in Russia after 1991 (when Yelstin's government welcomed the assistance). As long as democracy was considered to be an ongoing national project, it was possible for foreign aid in democratization to look beneficial rather than sinister (even if the heavy hand of American assistance in propping up Yeltsin for his 1996 reelection was not a ringing endorsement of the democratic process). 

But in the aftermath of the NATO bombing, Otpor, and Milosevic's ouster, such activity looked suspicious. In the early twenty-first century, Putin and his advisors looked on as neighboring countries went through what came to be called "color revolutions": the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine the following year, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan the year after that.  Though "color revolution" has become a term of art in Russia, the names of these three uprisings were as fortuitous as they were programmatic: protesters stormed the Georgian parliament with roses in their hands; orange was the color adopted by the Ukrainian opposition candidate, and the tulip is the national flower of Kyrgyzstan. Nevertheless, these names highlight an important commonality that Putin's regime has not ceased to harp on: the influence of American political scientist Gene Sharp (1928-2018).

“Color revolutions will not succeed: Moscow and Belgrade stand firm!”

Founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, an NGO devoted to the study of nonviolent resistance, Sharp is perhaps best known for his 1994 book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation.  In all his works, starting with this first book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), Sharp developed Gandhi's ideas about the efficacy of nonviolence within a particular theory of government:  it is the subjects of the state that grant power.  Should the subjects (that is, the citizens) withhold their consent to be governed, the state can respond with violence, but that is usually playing into the hands of the resistance.

Sharp insisted that he was a scholar rather than an activist, but From Dictatorship to Democracy, which was has been translated into dozens of languages, easily serves as a handbook for would-be revolutionaries. Given that he frames the question of revolution as a struggle against dictatorship, Sharp has been widely acclaimed throughout the Western world.  His ideas, and the support of the Albert Einstein Institution, played a role in the 1980s Baltic separatist movement, Otpor in Serbia, and the Arab Spring, among other uprisings.  

There is nothing neutral about a revolution or supporting a revolution, and so Sharp remains the subject of heated polemics, not only in the countries where resistance movements have followed his playbook, but also on the Western Left.  Sharp had strong ties to the foreign policy establishment of the 70s and 80s; could his writings just be Cold War ideology repackaged as popular liberation? In 2019, Marcie Smith published an essay calling Sharp “one of the most important Cold War defense intellectuals that the U.S. has produced," whose critique of the centralized state is another form of neoliberalism. Despite the popularity of his writings among American Leftist protesters, Smith sees Sharp as a fellow traveler for neoliberal and corporate interests. Sharp has a point, but she also displays a common fallacy among the American Left in her interview with Jacobin's Branko Marcetic:

And it seems Sharp was right. The USSR is dead, vestiges of socialism in Eastern Europe have largely been eliminated through the Color Revolutions, Yugoslavia was destroyed, and so on, all nonviolently.

Blaming the Color Revolutions for destroying the "vestiges of socialism in Eastern Europe" is a misunderstanding of the both these revolutions' goals and the character of the regimes they attempted to overthrow.  They were aimed at the government, not at the welfare state.  Equating Eastern European regimes (dictatorial or otherwise) with the "vestiges of socialism" is a matter of sentimentality more than anything else, a desire to see the postsocialist regimes so often denounced by Western leaders in terms of their countries' previous commitment to a socialist project.   Yet so many of these regimes, Russia's included, are following a neoliberal path of their own.  In Russia, it was the Putinist neoliberal attacks on the social safety net that caused significant unrest back in the days when street protest was not an automatic ticket to prison.  A 2005 law replacing a set of benefits for retirees, veterans and the disabled with meager cash payments brought otherwise apathetic Russian citizens out into the public square, picket signs in hand. As  late as 2018, a law raising the retirement age sparked rallies and demonstrations throughout the Russia's major cities.  

Whatever some Western Leftists might think about Sharp, he, like Soros, became a useful folk devil for Putinist propaganda, featured in news reports about the West's plans to dismantle the Russian Federation (as they supposedly, and successfully, plotted to destroy the USSR). . The "Color Revolutions" his work helped inspire ultimately became a set of buzzwords used to scare and intimidate: whatever "color revolutions" actually were, they would not be tolerated in the Russian Federation.  Protesters against Putinist policies were, by definition, either hired hands or dupes of Western security forces scheming to destroy the RF.  By the time of Russia's second invasion of Ukraine, opposition was tantamount to treason.

 Next: The Language Police

Yugoslavia as Dress Rehearsal

Suspicions were not confined to foreign intervention within Russia's borders.  Many in Russia looked to developments in other parts of the former socialist world as indicators of what awaited Russia.  In the 1990s, that meant primarily the fate of the former Yugoslavia.  Though not part of the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia could be imagined as a kind of Soviet Union (or even Russia) in miniature.  Formed from seven constituent republics to the USSR's fifteen, Yugoslavia was a collection of interrelated ethnicities and linguistic communities that, despite attempts at delicate power-sharing in the wake of postwar Yugoslavia's founder's demise,  always had to deal with the problem of unequal numbers: of all the nationalities in Yugoslavia, the Serbs were the plurality.   The match between the USSR and Yugoslavia is imperfect: Serbian numerical and linguistic dominance was complicated by the understanding that they shared a common language with many of their non-Serb compatriots. The dominant language of Yugoslavia reflected the numerical superiority of its largest republics:  what was then called "Serbo-Croatian" designated the dialects spoken by Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Montenegrins, but was not native to all Yugoslavs. Some of the other languages in Yugoslavia had a fairly high level of mutual intelligibility; though Slovenian and Macedonian are very different from Serbo-Croatian, their common origins made learning or deciphering them relatively easy.  Smaller populations of Albanian and Hungarian speakers learned Serbo-Croatian as an entirely foreign tongue.

This is not the place to relitigate the Yugoslav collapse, about which there is still little consensus among its former citizens. What is important is the immediate sympathy that the Russian state media expressed for the Serbs in this conflict.  While many stressed the historical ties between two Orthodox nations, it is a safe bet that most Russian audiences had to be reminded that these ties "always" existed in order to feel this particular form of international solidarity. This is ironically consistent with the run-up to the Yugoslav Wars themselves, which were made possible by "reminding" people who had comfortably lived side-by-side for decades that they were actually ancient enemies. What Russian politicians and pundits saw in the Yugoslav breakup was both a replay of the end of the USSR and a cautionary tale about Russia's future. The Serbs' benevolent intentions were being misunderstood by hateful nationalist separatists abetted by Western powers, while the push for Croatian independence was actually the resurrection of Nazi-era collaborationist Croatian fascism. This narrative was particularly prophetic, not because it was accurate (it was not, though some Croatian nationalist elements made it easy for the Serbs to make this argument),  but because it now looks like a dry run for Russia's own propaganda campaign about Ukraine after Maidan.

The Russian reflexive identification with the nationality that was trying to preserve the Yugoslav union by force would be intensified by the Western European and American support of the republics that declared their independence.  Western narratives were far from immune to oversimplification and the power of historical parallels, not to mention a total demonization of the Serbs, but they were nonetheless based on factual reporting about the perpetration of genocide by Bosnian Serbs and the credible prospect of a similar outcome in Kosovo, the Albanian-majority autonomous province located within Serbia.  As NATO intervened (first in a 1995 bombing campaign In Bosnia), Russian claims that Yugoslavia was a dress rehearsal for similar intervention in the Russian Federation became easier to make.  The NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 not only solidified Russian support for Milosevic's regime in Serbia, but it also was the turning point in popular attitudes towards the West: America and NATO could not be trusted to respect the sovereignty of a nation whose actions they deemed crimes against humanity.

Serbian building bombed by NATO in 1999

This was not the end of Yugoslavia's role as an object lesson for Russia.  Internal opposition to Milosevic had been growing steadily, and in 1998 (a year before the bombings),  the Otpor ("reistance") movement formed on the basis of pre-existing student protest activity, growing from street demonstrations and graffiti to a powerful anti-government force in the 2000 elections.  Their slogan "Gotov je" ("He's finished") turned out to be accurate: Milosevic was voted out of office and,  just a year later, sent to the Hague to stand trial.  Otpor was a grass-roots democratic movement, but the timing of its activities made it easy for conspiracy mongers to assimilate Otpor to the NATO's attacks on Serbia.  Here we have the beginning of the narrative that would come to dominate Putin-era coverage of democratic opposition movements in the postsocialist world:  they are Western dupes and CIA fronts advancing European and American interests under the guise of popular revolt.

“Resistance”

Next: What Color is Your Revolution?

Hooked on Grants

A Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who earned billions on currency speculation and the stock market, Soros could not have been more perfectly cast as either a crusader against illiberalism or as conspiratorial mastermind hell-bent on undermining a country's sovereignty and traditional values. As of 2017, he had spent twelve billion dollars of his own money on poverty reduction, government transparency, and higher education, and yet by that point, he had been thoroughly demonized in many of the countries that benefited from his largesse.  In 1993, Soros founded the Open Society Institute (later rebranded as the Open Society Foundations, or OSF). That year, Soros-sponsored programs gave one time grants of $500 to 25,000 Russian scientists to support to support them when funding had all but disappeared, as part of a plan to fight Russian brain drain. Soros and OSF bought equipment for research laboratories and financed purchases for over 100 research  libraries throughout the Russian Federation. For more than a decade, the OSF administered a grant program that funded faculty, students, and schoolteachers at a cost of more than 100 million dollars. The OSF provided Internet access to 33 Russian universities for five years.

George Soros, apparently unaware that he is imitating Mr. Burns from The Simpsons

With a foundation named for Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Soros's agenda was clear, and also consistent with the overall ethos of the 1990s: Russia (and the rest of the Eastern bloc) had to break with its past and embrace the institutions and approaches characteristic of liberal democracy.  The OSF funded Russian human rights organizations such as the Team against Torture, Agora, and Memorial. In addition to their Soros funding and the character of their activism, these organizations all have one other important feature in common:  since the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, all of them have been declared foreign agents by the Russian Federation (and only the Team against Torture is still operating).   Effectively, the change in the official stance on Soros, NGOs, and liberal democracy has retroactively criminalized activity that in the 1990s was welcomed and acclaimed. Soros-sponsored books started to be removed from libraries in 2015,  with Soros himself now persona non grata. That same year, Putin railed against "so-called foreign foundations... that hook high school graduates on grants and take them away.”

The crusade against Soros is not unique to Russia; indeed, it is even more prominent in the philanthropist's birth country, Hungary, which, under Viktor Orban (himself a former recipient of Soros funding), has always been ahead of Russia on the path to illiberalism.  It also represents a new trend in the circulation of ideas and talking points among the anti-globalist global far right: if, in the 1990s, Russia's right wing forces gained financial and intellectual support from anti-abortion evangelical Christians and conspiratorial nutcases like Lyndon LaRouche, now the postsocialist world was rehearsing scripts that would make their way to Fox News, where Soros is a popular folk-devil.  [1]. Like most of the ideas that have made their way into mainstream Putinism, the demonization of Soros had begun on the fringes of Russian political culture before being embraced by the country's leadership and media. 

In Russia after 1991, distrusting the motivation of foreigners--particularly foreigners from the alliance of countries long thought of the enemy--is understandable.  Even humanitarian aid was, in addition to testifying to Russia's humiliation, inscrutable and strange.  Why is the United States flooding our shelves with free chicken legs, or providing spicy, leftover Gulf War MRE's for Russian grandmothers who grew up on much more bland fare ?  Why are the same countries flooding the country's streets with evangelists and prostelytizers for new religious movements?  Are these would-be businessmen who have come to Russia here to aid our development, or simply rob us of our natural resources and spirit away "our" women?

Note

[1] Another example is the "anti-gender" movement, which, though begun in the Catholic countries of Western Europe,  gained serious momentum in Russia and other postsocialist countries, before becoming a MAGA talking point in the U.S..

Next: Yugoslavia as Dress Rehearsal

There Goes the Neighborhood

Chapter 4

Russia's Alien Nations:
Agents, Spies, and Extraterrestrials

There Goes the Neighborhood

Losing borders is like losing skin.  It's not just that the body (politic) is obliged to change its shape, but that a reliable surface layer of protection has vanished.  Open, porous, thin-skinned, the nation's collective body is subject to penetration, infiltration, and contamination. 

The last years of the Soviet Union and the early years of the Russian Federation launched a period of refreshing, even shocking cosmopolitanism.  Borders opened (or fell), international travel became, if not commonplace, then eminently thinkable, and foreign investment was officially encouraged (although the legal and regulatory environment turned such encouragement into a mixed message).  The iron curtain, already a hackneyed metaphor, describing the entire Soviet bloc, gave way to the transparent screen: there was no longer any need to peak behind it.

The obligatory Iron Curtain. You’re welcome.

This is not to say that the Soviet Union was an autarky, or that, to the extent that it was sealed off from potential foreign subversion  the USSR's relative isolation was effortless.  In Stalin's time, the emphasis on vigilance was code for paranoia, as the NKVD and informers ferreted out "spies" and "wreckers" (saboteurs) on the flimsiest of evidence. World War II not only wrecked whatever sense of national security the Soviets may have had, it also brought the country close to total ruination.  During the Cold War, vigilance was less a matter of hunting for spies than it was of countering seductive foreign influences: jazz, rock, the counterculture, and commercialism, not to mention the more straightforward ideological threat posed by democratic and capitalist models.  Vigilance was supposed to be a kind of self-discipline, but in the Brezhnev Era, it expressed itself more in terms of surveillance (Komsomol organizers, teachers, bosses) and a growing gap between the generations.  Policing foreign input could not curtail citizens' desire for it, in any of its myriad forms; to the contrary, efforts at control only made the desire stronger.[1]

The removal of restrictions on travel and the abolition of censorship on the cusp of the Soviet collapse inevitably brought on a flood of Western imports, both physical and cultural. Was this a long-awaited opening to the outer world, leading to the moment when Russia will be invited to join the global community with open arms? Or was it all a pretext for the cultural, political, and economic colonization of the former Soviet Union by the aggressive forces of a capitalism that, in the absence of a communist alternative, could assume eternal hegemony? This chapter looks at narratives and tropes of a vulnerable Russia suffering from invasions and infiltrations of all kinds, from foreign institutions masking their malign intentions in the guise of humanitarian and developmental assistance to unscrupulous foreign businesspeople, from foreign spies to domestic forces that have compromised themselves as foreign agents, and even the occasional extraterrestrial invader.

We start with the influx of foreigners from the West, seeking investment opportunities, chances to engage in the construction of civil society, evangelize the locals, and cultural and education exchange.  In English, these visitors are generally called "expats;" the people who fled to Russia due to post-Soviet civil conflict and economic depredation were, at best, called refugees or migrants.  It is the latter category that more often (but not exclusively) sparked a common colloquial lament: "Понаехали!" The word means "arriving in large numbers," or "overrunning," but the context is closer to the English phrase "There goes the neighborhood." Particularly in the big cities, the appearance of newcomers, often with a limited command of the Russian language and an appearance that is euphemistically referred to as "non-European" or "non-Slavic," made some inhabitants long for a time when immigrating or even simply changing domicile was a matter of strict regulation.

The Westerners who arrived were generally more welcome, but still subject to suspicion.  What possible reason could they have to come all this way?  Greed, exploitation, and indoctrination were all distinct possibilities.  Philanthropy and charity work each sparked skepticism.  But what is particularly telling is how certain famous Westerners and foreign entities whose activities were, on the whole, greeted warmly in the 1990s have been reinterpreted as part of a plot to destroy Russian culture, undermine Russian values, and render the country forever dependent on Western Europe and the United States.  To understand, we need to look no further than one of the most famous investors and philanthropists in the post-Cold War world: George Soros.

Note

[1] In Flowers through Concrete, Juliane Furst demonstrates that the 1970s Soviet publications devoted to condemning hippies actually served as something of an instruction manual for Soviet would-be members of the counterculture.

Next: Hooked on Grants

What Child Is This?

The previous decade's panic over the fate of Russian children in American hands yielded to the cynical population transfer of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation, all ostensibly in the name of children's welfare. It requires little effort to see that the individual children themselves are the pretext for concerns far removed from orphanages and classrooms.  The children are rhetorical weapons in Russia's geopolitical battles with its chosen enemies.  The question is not, "What is best for these children?" but "Who shapes the Russia of the future?"

If the children themselves are merely symbolic pawns in an ideological battle, their biological parents are close to irrelevant to the struggle into which their offspring have been dragooned. However disputed their virtues or vices as parents may be, this, too, is a proxy for the fitness of the countries themselves.  In the Introduction, we looked at notions of Russia as a collective body, wrestling with its enemies on the world stage. In a military or diplomatic context, that body is almost always male, but in the discourse of international adoption and the appropriation of children, the symbolic body is maternal.

Dima Yakovlev's birth mother may well have been an alcoholic, and Miles Harrison, his adoptive father was unforgivably negligent in leaving him in a parked car for nine hours, but the conclusions drawn about international adoption are huge leaps from the specific to the general.  The story is evidence for what each side already knows:  to would-be American adoptive parents, Russia is a land of drunks practically designed to produce fetal alcohol syndrome; to Russian opponents, the Americans are either religious fanatics or selfish individualists who cannot be trusted with Russian babies.  The Fairfax County Circuit Court acquitted Harrison of involuntary manslaughter; in passing the Dima Yakovlev law, the Russian State Duma implicitly found him guilty.  The father or mother may be found wanting, but the verdict's object is the fatherland or motherland.

The crux of the ideological debates over the fate of children is the question of synecdoche: the relationship between the part and the whole.  Sting's hope that "the Russians love their children, too" is cast in the plural, but the whole point is that "the Russians" here are less an undifferentiated mass than a collection of parents who love their own children. In other words, a Soviet general might hesitate to launch the nuclear weapons leading to global annihilation out of concern for his specific children or grandchildren.  But the connection of (possibly endangered) children to the future of the country treats parents and children as demographic categories.  Perhaps coincidentally, Russian exhortations to protect children as well as maternal and paternal health are usually phrased in terms that point towards institutions or phenomena rather than people :  "Beregite detsvo" (Protect childhood) or "Beregite materinstvo" (Protect motherhood). 

Someone missed the memo: aren’t (gay) rainbows one of the things we’re supposed to be “protecting childhood” from?

The Motherland and Fatherland are not loving mothers and fathers, invested in the personal prosperity of their individual children. On that level of abstraction, children are, indeed, the "future":  future soldiers, future workers, and future producers of more children. 

Next: Chapter Four: Russia’s Alien Nations: Agents, Spies, and Extraterrestrials

Kinder, Gentler Kidnapping

According to Ukrainian sources, nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly removed from Ukraine to Russia since the 2022 invasion, a practice that turns out to have begun with the first invasion in 2014. This early wave of children never turned up in the Russian federal database; as part of a much smaller-scale operation, they were immediately matched with adoptive families and foster parents upon arrival. As one staffer at the International Criminal Court told the banned Russian news outlet iStories, “They’ve abducted more children than their system of guardianship, created back in 2014, could take in. The couples who used to adopt new children without any problems already had their hands full, and newcomers have nowhere to go" ("An Arctic Welcome"). A number of Ukrainian mothers have traveled to Russia to reclaim their children, some of whom have special needs, but most of the kidnapped minors remain in the Russian Federation .

In contrast to the furor sparked by the underage population transfer that has been taking place since the 2022 invasion, the transportation of Ukrainian children between 2014 and 2022 drew little attention in the international media.  One likely reason may have been geographical:  all the children taken to Russia during this first wave were from Donbas, which was under separatist control. There were no pro-Kyiv local authorities to protest, and a larger portion of the civilization population with emotional and political ties to Russia.  This, in turn, facilitated the Russian media's portrayal of the children's removal as part of a humanitarian mission. According to a study by the European Resilience Initiative Center, the process began in December 2014 under the aegis of a Russian humanitarian celebrity, Elizaveta Glinka, better known to the Russian-speaking population as "Doctor Liza."

Doctor Liza

At least officially, the children transported by Doctor Liza were part of a much narrower category than those in the post-2022 wave: the ones who were the object of extensive Russian media coverage were patients in Donbas hospitals evacuated to Russia for treatment, a move made possible by Putin's favorable response to her request to amend Russia's laws to allow medically-justified transfers of Ukrainian children.  Doctor Liza's motivations may well have been humanitarian, but they both facilitated and were facilitated by a discourse that denied any serious distinction between Ukrainians and Russians (not to mention the border between their two countries). Publicly, Doctor Liza also denied that the Russian military was involved in a conflict she described as a "civil war." Doctor Liza's death in a 2016 plane clash effectively foreclosed any public debate about her actions, cementing the reputation she had already gained as a "Russian Mother Theresa."

The Russian authorities continue to frame their actions as a humanitarian relief effort, but the irony is difficult to ignore.  The RF's previous children's rights' ombudman, Pavel Astakhov, was responsible for fomenting propaganda about the mistreatment of Russian children at the hands of liberal Europeans, and was a key figure in the implementation of the Dima Yakovlev law banning foreign adoption of Russian children. His replacement, Maria Lvova-Belova, is now internationally notorious for facilitating the illegal adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian nationals.

No one who had ever known Maria Lvova-Belova early in her career would have supposed her destined to be the target of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant.  Like Doctor Liza, she exemplifies the curious slippage between Russian disability and child welfare activism on the one hand and aggressive Russian imperialism on the other.  The biological mother to five children and adopted mother of eighteen more, in 2008 she co-founded Blagovest, an NGO dedicated to the social adaptation of orphans. Six years later, she started the Louis Quarter, for disabled orphans who had aged out of institutional care but needed assistance to learn how to live independently.  Both organizations were meant to fill a desperate need in Russian society, and they also have the advantage of being part of some of the few non-governmental sectors that the Putinist state continues to support:  those related to disability and adoption. Lvova-Belova was an adoption advocate in both her public and private life before the Dima Yakovlev law was passed, and the activities she and her allies engaged in would prove useful in its aftermath, when the government wanted to show that domestic efforts made foreign adoption unnecessary.

But the nationalist and conservative character of her charity work was clear enough:  Lvova-Belova is also part of social activism rooted in Russian Orthodoxy.  "Blagovest" takes its name from the Orthodox bell wringing peal called the Annunciation of the Good News.   Her work with orphans and the disabled is accompanied by strong opposition to abortion (a practice that was not particularly controversial in the Soviet Union or Russia until Western right-wing groups began working with Russian counterparts to push for a ban).  Adopting eighteen children is certainly unusual, but, perhaps ironically, it echoes the very phenomenon that was demonized during the Dima Yakovlev years: religious, altruistic parents "called" to expand their families through adoption.  In the United States, the "Quiverfull" movement that encourages multiple adoptions helps promote a Christian Nationalist agenda: bringing more babies to Christ not only saves souls, it can eventually shift the balance at the polls as well. Activists like Belova may consider their choices apolitical, but any such pretense disappears in the context of Russia's invasions of Ukraine.  Lvova-Belova herself has adopted a fifteen-year old from Mariupol, the eastern Ukrainian city that was all but razed to the ground during a Russian siege in 2022.

Whatever the ethnic and linguistic background of this particular teenager, Lvova-Belova is effectively russifying them by placing them in a domestic and educational context that denies Ukrainian sovereignty and casts doubt on the very existence of Ukraine as a people and culture. Reports from the "summer camps," schools, and institutions in which many of the displaced Ukrainian find themselves suggest that they are kinder, gentler reeducation camps.  Like all children in the Russian Federation, they are obliged to attend the new classes called "Conversations about What's Important," which are canned lessons in Russian patriotism whose name resembles a popular 1990s series of nostalgic Soviet-style musical specials ("Songs about What's Important"). These classes peddle the Putinist narrative of Russian greatness, as well as the state's interpretation of Russia's war in Ukraine. Belova-Lvova herself attests to the efficacy of Russian patriotic education:

[Belova-Lvova] acknowledged that at first, a group of 30 children brought to Russia from the basements of Mariupol defiantly sang the Ukrainian national anthem and shouted, “Glory to Ukraine!” But now, she said, their criticism has been “transformed into a love for Russia,” and she herself has taken one in, a teenager. 

“Today he received a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation and does not let go of it!” she posted on Telegram on Sept. 21, along with a photo. “(He) was waiting for this day in our family more than anyone else.”

Thanks to Belova-Lvova's influence with Putin, all the children brought from Ukraine are immediately eligible for Russian citizenship, a fact that reinforces just how instrumental these forced adoptions are to the new Putinist conception of Russianness as something simultaneously primordial (associated with nature, with the soil), voluntary (as a matter of allegiance) and actuarial/biopolitical (a function of one's passport). As Russia expands beyond its post-Soviet borders, so too does its definition of the Russian stretch to accommodate the new reality that the leadership hopes to create on the ground. 

Sting's hope was not in vain.  The Russians do love their children, and their (expansionist, aggressive) love is a force that makes "their" children Russian. 

Next: What Child Is This?

Naming Names

While there is no need to go into detail about Gumilev's ideas, a few key points stand out: first, that he treats the ethnic group like an organism, with a lifecycle from birth to death; second, that the rise of an ethnic group is predicated on the activities of expansionist "passionaries," expansionist leaders who unknowingly harness the energy of the sun; and, third, ethnic groups can be talked about as real, non-contingent entities that bear an intrinsic meaning.   Gumilev's theories benefited from the epistemological chaos of the last Soviet years, when intellectuals and ordinary Soviet citizens were particularly receptive to new paradigms to explain the world around them. But they were also conveniently fit with Soviet taxonomies of ethnic identity, or "nationality:" every citizen was born into an ethnic identity, which in turn was a valuable piece of information to be included on identity documents. Ethnic identity was a matter of inheritance: a child could claim the identity of either their father or their mother, but not both.

This Soviet classification system, in turn, reinforced prerevolutionary notions of Russianness.  Where before "Russian" had to mean "Russian Orthodox, now it mean, de facto, descendants of people who had once beenRussian Orthodox without belonging to another recognized nationality. Russian Jews, for example, could never be ethnically Russian, because they were ethnically Jewish, even if their entire world and upbringing was rooted in the Russian language and culture. In Soviet times, the potential mismatch between ethnic classification and linguistic and cultural background was mitigated by the fact that all Soviet citizens had a primary identity: whatever else they were, they were Soviet.

The Russian Federation after 1991 was confronted with a gaping semiotic hole left by the disappearance of the Soviet:  how would citizens of the Russian Federation who were not ethnic Russians be described?  For most of the first thirty years of the post-Soviet period, the old-fashioned adjective "rossiiskii" and noun "rossianin" (from the Russian word for "Russia") were used to distinguish from the "russkii" (ethnic Russian). To non-Russian speakers, this might sound like terminological hair-splitting, but at issue is the very notion of the collective self. Theoretically, if this terminology were applied to the Ukrainian children kidnapped by the Russian state, then we could say that their possible permanent residence in the Russian Federation would render them "rossiane" (Russian citizens), but not "russkie" (ethnic Russians). Indeed, if the internal passport still displayed "nationality," as it did in Soviet times, these children could still be ethnically Ukrainian while no longer holding Ukrainian citizenship.

But one of the things the war has made clear is that the discourse of identity in Russia has now changed drastically.  On the one hand, everything Ukrainian is now subject to negation:  Ukraine was never a real country, Ukrainian identity is an illusion, and the very "Ukrainian project" is an anti-Russian plot at its core. And 'anti-Russian" here means "russkii," not "rossiiskii." Russophobia, a concept that has become a lynchpin in Russian propaganda, is etymologically related to "russkii." More to the point, the term "russkii" has expanded, and, like an aggressive regime not recognizing the sovereignty of its neighbor, has seriously encroached on "rossiiskii."   Russian wartime propaganda overwhelmingly prefers "russkii;" for one thing, it is an everyday term laden with emotion, while "rossiiskii" sounds bureaucratic. For another, the choice of this word also represents an imperial drive whose target is internal: "russikii" can now be capacious enough to encompass ethnic non-Russians who are citizens of the Russian Federation. As Andrei Pertsev (?) persuasively explains , "russkii" is now an identity that can be claimed much more broadly, as well as a declaration of affinity to a particular set of political and nationalist views.

What it means to be "russkii" is a key question now that Russia is bombing its neighbor.  On June 22, 2022, a minor rock star perfoming under the name "Shaman" released a clip on YouTube called ""Ia--russkii" (I'm Russian). Standing in a Russian field of wheat like something out of Woody Allen's 1975 Russian-themed comedy Love and Death, Shaman, clad in a stylized version of Russian peasant garb, looks to the skies and sings about his Russianness in vague, nature-inflected quasi poetic terms:

I'm Russian

I inhale this air

The sun looks down on me

The free wind blows above me

It's just like me

For most of the song, being "Russian" is all about romantic tropes sung in his autotuned voice, backed up by soaring instrumentals.  The chorus is almost equally vague with one possible exception:

I'm Russia, I go to the end

I'm Russian, my blood is from my father

I'm Russian, and I'm lucky

I'm Russian, despite the whole world

I'm Russian

Somehow not a parody

Being Russian is mostly a set of positive tropes that any number of ethnicities could lay claim to, except for the part about the "blood from his father." When asked about this line, Shaman explained that he was not talking about actual biological inheritance, or even actual biological fathers: he was referring to his "heavenly Father." He also deflected criticism that he was defining Russianness in terms of resistance and hostility; the world "despite" here is supposed to mean "no matter what the rest of the world thinks," as opposed to the Russian word's more obvious meaning (out of spite against something). 

The vagueness of this patriotism is in perfect sync with wartime Putinism, and, if Shaman is to be believed also helps redefine Russianness as something independent from one's ancestry.  People who live on Russian soil and live by Russian value (whatever those are) can be "russkie." [1]

This is the promise implicit in bringing Ukrainian children to Russia.  Under the right conditions, they, too, can become Russians, just as the non-ethnic Russian citizens of the RF are now free to identify with a term formerly restricted to a particular ethnic group.  Russia is russifying Ukrainian children as part of an effort to Russify itself.

 Note

[1} Less than two months later, the humorist Alexander Gudkov released a parody that replaced the word "russkii" with "uzkii" (narrow).  The new version is about someone so thin you can use him instead of dental floss, but also has a strong political undercurrent:  Gudkov sings that his views are also "narrow."

Next: Kinder, Gentler Kidnapping