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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Naming Names

Moscow Does Not Believe in Yaoi

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

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

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

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

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

Think of the children! But not like that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

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

Stranger Danger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Think of the Children!

Adopting a Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Stranger Danger

Children for Export

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Adopting a Law

American Dad (and Mom)

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Children for Export

Children of the Counter-Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Кто твой отец? спрашивает учительница Вовочку.

—Товарищ Сталин! 

—А кто твоя мать?

—Советская родина!

—А кем ты хочешь стать?

—Сиротой!

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

“Comrade Stalin!”

“And who is your mother?”

“The Soviet Motherland!”

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

“An orphan!"

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

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

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

Next: American Dad (and Mom)

Note

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

"I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"

Chapter One:

Unfit Motherlands

"I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"

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

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

Stick to tantra, Sting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Children of the Counter-Revolution

Notes

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

Instead of a Conclusion

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

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

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

What We Talk About When We Talk About Russia

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

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

Look, honey! It’s a floating signifier!

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

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

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

Next: Instead of a Conclusion

What's In a Name?

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

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

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

Just add water, and you get Russia

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

Next: What We Talk About When We Talk About Russia