The Russia That We Invent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Becoming Russian outside of Russia

Note

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

The Russia We Take with Us

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

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

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

There’s no place like home

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

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

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

Next: The Russia That We Invent

Notes

[1] [Insert footnote on emigration scholarship]

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

The Russia We Have Lost (Again)

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

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

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

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

Oh, God, not the Russian Idea again…

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

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

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

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

Next: The Russia We Take With Us

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] [Insert footnote on sobornost.']

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

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

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

[9] Borenstein, 77-97.

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

Where the Bodies Are Buried

Everything Everywhere All at Once;

or, Geography, Blood, Culture

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

Pyotr Chaadaev, '

First Philosophical Letter" (1829)

"My address

Is not a house or a street.

My address is

The Soviet Union."

 Vladimir Kharitonov

"Our Home is Russia"

--Political Party in the 1990s

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

--Anya Ulinich, Petropolis (2007).

Where the Bodies Are Buried

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: The Russia We Have Lost

What Comes Next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next week: Chapter One Begins

Who Owns the Soviet Past?

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

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

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

Partying like it’s 1989

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: What Comes Next

Black Bile

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

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

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

Welcome back, Freud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Note

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

 Next: Who Owns the Soviet Past?

Phantom Limbs

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

Really, I’m fine with just a fist bump

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

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

Next: Black Bile

Balancing the Body Politic

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, wrong movie

Note

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

Next: Phantom Limbs

The Geography of the Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, this’ll end well

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

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

Note

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

Next: The Proprioceptive Body Politic

Introduction: Self/Inflicted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Next: Balancing the Body Politic