The Russia We Have Lost (Again)
Despite occupying a large and relatively stable portion of the intersection of Europe and Asia, Russia has a surprising tendency to get lost. Stanislav Govorukhin's famous 1992 documentary, Россия, которую мы потеряли ("The Russia We Have Lost") set the tone for a reflexive definition of a country that has always already disappeared. Here symbolic geography bids its final farewell to actual geography, as the overwhelming majority of the film’s viewers watched it from within the borders of the Russian Federation. [1] Yet the discourse of loss retains its power, attributing a sense of existential homelessness to the very people who would be expected to see Russia as their home. This, too, is not new; as my first epigraph reminds us, it was Pyotr Chaadaev who, in his first "Philosophical Letter" of 1829, famously described his compatriots as "resembling travelers," who never manage to seem at home in any home they make. With the benefit of hindsight, however, Chaadaev's situation looks almost cozy in comparison to that of his post-Soviet descendants. Govorkuhin's vanished Russia, after all, is the country in which Chaadaev was domiciled. If it also happened to be the country that put him under house arrest and declared him insane (rendering him the first, but not the last, free-thinker punished through psychiatry), this is only one of the many historical omissions that allows Govorukhin to view tsarist Russia in such rosy hues.
This rhetoric of loss is all the more powerful when we take into account the obvious fact of the disappearance of empire and great power status: juridically and (for the population) phenomenologically, the homeland had shrunk drastically in 1991. As former Soviet citizens were confronted by the transformation of the largely notional internal borders of the USSR into the bureaucratic obstacles to mobility that true borders constitute, the Nineties saw a proliferation of alternative imaginary geographies to compensate for the grievous loss of great superpower status: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the ruble zone, the near abroad, the common cultural space, the Russian abroad, not to mention the revival of words that had previously been the near-exclusive domain of specialists (россиянин and русскоязычный).
To define a new Russian cultural space, then, is to combine lexicography (the meaning of the word) with cartography (the location on the map). Words and borders each require their own particular mode of definition. If geographic Russia constitutes a "center" of Russianness (in a political culture that has long placed high value on centrality), the loss of territory (satellite republics), influence (satellite states), and population (through the redrawing of maps and the vast movements of peoples) presents centrifugal pressures on a culture and, with the rise of Putin, a regime, that turns sovereignty into a cardinal virtue. Indeed, one can look at the intense rhetoric of gosudarstvennost' ("statehood") in Putin's Russia as an anti-entropic move, not just in the obvious sense that Putin and his apologists make clear ("we're stopping the country from falling apart"), but in terms of the very definition of Russian nationhood and identity.[2] Gosudarstvennost' is the antithesis of a postmodern, post-territorial mode of identity formation that can be, with at least limited comfort, assimilated to the ancient category of diaspora.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, intellectuals and state functionaries have intermittently lamented the lack of a "national idea," to fill in the gap left by communist messianism, and, more generally, the sense of historic mission that Berdyaev argued was central to the "Russian idea."[3] It would be far more productive, however, to posit that what is contested is not the "Russian idea," but the "idea of Russia." The current discourse in and on Russia can be roughly (indeed, crudely) divided into two broad camps: the "state reconstructionist" and the "centrifugal/diasporic." In the first category are the modes of thought that fight desperately against the forces of entropy, and that align themselves most closely with both the idea and the apparatus of state. The aforementioned gosudarstvennost' casts itself as the heir to the Great Power, as well as the modern recapitulation of the medieval central power engaged in the "gathering of the lands." The Putinist stress on sovereignty is a celebration of structures and borders, as well as a compromise between blood-and-soil nationalism and the affirmation of a multiethnic state.[4] Closely aligned is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as client and ally, celebrating it's own "state-building" role in a faith-based collectivism or "neo-sobornost'."[5] The ROC's extraterritorial ties also connect it to the discursive strands that celebrate Russian unity by minimizing, rather than maximizing, the significance of borders and (current) territory: Russia as a hegemonic state, whose power and scope are defined by its influence on its once and future "brother nations." Even more expansive is the ideology of Eurasianism, particularly as revived and espoused by Alexander Dugin: here, the nation's destiny is cross-continental and trans-civilizational.[6] But even Eurasianism, though entropic in form, is a retrenchment in content. Russia is merely redefined on a broader scale.
Oh, God, not the Russian Idea again…
By contrast, most of the centrifugal/diasporic rhetoric is anything but reassuring. Indeed, much of this rhetoric actually serves to support the state reconstructionist stance, as evidence of the need for centralization. Elsewhere I have written of the discursive power concentrated in the term "bespredel," gangland slang for utter lawlessness whose very morphology encodes the dangers posed by a lack of boundaries and borders.[7] Here I am focusing on the much more explicitly biopolitical framework that structures the patently negative centrifugal phenomena (negative in the sense that few champion them, and that they reinforce state reconstructionism), before moving on to recent attempts to recast a decentered "Russianness" in terms of a deliberately positive, transnational diasporic framework (the "global Russians").
Indeed, so many of the woes repeatedly recited about Russia in the 1990s can be assimilated to a biopolitical understanding of threats to Russian statehood. First and foremost we have the various manifestations of depopulation: plummeting life expectancies, the spread of infectious disease, and declining birth rates (Murray Feshbach's notorious "ecocide").[8] These phenomena stand out from the rest in that they have little to do with travel and border-crossing (AIDS was an exception, initially framed as a threat from foreign bodies before becoming sadly domesticated as a now familiar Russian problem), and are framed in terms of internal weakness. The other threats, however, are understood as manifestly centrifugal problems. The real-life crimes of human trafficking take on nationalist significance in the 1990s, when the export of Russian women (either as willing brides or enslaved sex workers) is framed in popular novels and films not in terms of the individual women's suffering, but of the fatherland's humiliation at the hands of a rapacious West. The "export" of women is cast as a loss by Russian men (who can't have "their" women), and as a human expression of the generalized crisis constituted by the dismantling of national wealth for sale abroad. Here, women are the equivalent of the precious ores, metals, and hydrocarbons with which Russia parts at far too low a price, and which are in such demand because of their high quality ("Our women are the most beautiful in the world"). [9]
The losses from trafficking easily dovetail with a powerful set of urban legends that crystallize the anxiety over commodified bodies crossing borders: rumors abound that women are being lured not just for sex, but for the sake of their internal organs, to be sold to the highest bidders.[6] Unsubstantiated stories of forced organ sales are hardly unique to Russia, but in the Russian context they function perfectly as metaphors for the damage to national integrity (wholeness) that bodily border crossings pose. They also function synecdochically as yet another representation of a collective body that is being sold against the population's will, retail and piecemeal rather than wholesale. Here we should recall the traditional ultranationalist rhetoric that frames treason as sale: Russia is being bought and sold, Russia's blood is being consumed by parasites. [10] In turn, the organ rumors crop up in the final component of the most crudely biopolitical centrifugal imaginings: the anxieties over transnational adoption. Stories of children sold abroad for spare parts have been a recurring feature in the Russian media since the last major public debates on adoption (in 1997, when a ban on foreign adoption was discussed but not instituted). The adoption debate, then and now, pits multiple conceptions of the country's orphans against each other: as victims of misery and deprivation (when discussed by proponents of transnational adoption) and as valuable human resources (when discussed by detractors). As with human trafficking, the characterization of international adoption as a centrifugal threat necessitates that the children in question be viewed as objects rather than subjects.
Transnational adoption is the topic of another chapter of this book project, so I won't deal with it in detail here. Suffice to say that adoption, trafficking, and organlegging are overlapping discourses of national commodification and loss, functioning as metaphors for the dismantling of the nation rather than its reconstruction. Each of them construes the various populations involved in a fashion that deprives them of agency; victims at best, these soon-to-be-foreign bodies do not spread Russia and Russianness abroad, but rather represent a subtraction or amputation from the body of the nation. By extension, the bodies of Russian nationals are a resource to be husbanded; what looks like a romantic, anti-globalist, anti-capitalist nationalism can just as easily be interpreted as an older economic formation. The centrifugal threats are part and parcel of capitalism, but their rhetorical opposition resembles a nearly-forgotten mercantilism. The Russian population itself is a national treasure, to be guarded like a medieval dragon's hoard rather than to circulate in a global capitalist fantasy of frictionless trade and wealth creation.
Next: The Russia We Take With Us
Notes
[1] I previously touched on this idea in Plots against Russia.
[2] "Gosudarstvennost'" is a difficult term to render in English; "statehood" is too neutral, while "sovereignty," though congruent with contemporary scholarship on biopolitics and human rights, tends to posit the state as it faces outward toward the rest of the world. Gosudarstvennost' is a variation on sovereignty that emphasizes the coherence of the state as seen and experienced by its citizens. See John Squier, "Civil Society and the Challenge of Russian Gosudastvennost," Demokratizatsiya 10.2 (2002): 166-182.
[3] [Insert note on Yeltsin's commission, the 1990s, debates, Berdyaev, etc.]
[4] The concept of "blood and soil" nationalism is usually associated with Alfred Rosenberg and the Nazi regime, but, as Giorgio Agamben points out, the Rosenberg's phrase has a long history, going as far back as Roman law. Agamben uses this connection as part of his larger argument regarding the biopolitical nature of citizenship (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[5] [Insert footnote on sobornost.']
[6] For an excellent overview of Dugin's ideas, see Chapter Two of Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity. *Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
[7] Eliot Borenstein. Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. 195-224.
[8] Murray Feshbach. Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege. New York: Basic Books, 1993.
[9] Borenstein, 77-97.
[10] [Insert footnote on urban legends about organ harvesting.]