The Russia That We Invent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Becoming Russian outside of Russia

Note

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