Phantom Limbs

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

Really, I’m fine with just a fist bump

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

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

Next: Black Bile