What Comes Next
The picture I am painting of Russia is not a pretty one, and, on the surface, it is out of synch with the aggressive, patriotic bombast of the 2020s. But the bombast is compensatory, a cover for the malaise I have been describing throughout the introduction. We have a Russia lurching between paralysis and overextension, a country that, deep down, is still preoccupied with the loss of territories posited to be intrinsic to Russia's sense of its place in the world. This is the essence of post-Soviet melancholia: the inability to move on from the partial loss of organs and limbs that make up the notional body politic. As for the supposedly lost parts, they deny that they ever truly belonged in the first place. The objects of post-Soviet melancholia refuse to identify as Russian, while Russian imperial discourse refuses to identify them as anything else. Nor is there room in this reified Russian identity to acknowledge internal dissent as still identifiably Russian: all opposition is posited to be masterminded from the outside. And where is the room for the internal opposition to make any claim to Russianness? As so-called "national traitors" or "foreign agents," they become un-identified as truly Russian.
Currently, this book is projected to have five chapters, though I reserve the right to change their titles, contents, and number at any time. I also might skip a chapter here and there and come back to it. So I am asking for patience from the handful of people who might continue to read this blog/book in progress.
Don’t ask me what’s going to happen. I can’t even predict the future of my own MS in progress
Chapter One is called "Everything Everywhere All at Once: Geography, Blood, Culture." An examination of post-Soviet Russian symbolic geography, this chapter considers the role of emigration and diaspora in the conception of contemporary Russia. In particular, I will examine the structurally homologous but ideologically contradictory notions of the "Global Russian" (a cosmopolitan subject whose hybrid, but postmodern Russianness is independent of geographical location) and the "Russian World" (an idea that eventually became a proxy for a Putinist imperial worldview).
The second chapter, "Culture as Cudgel," looks at the deployment of Russian culture as an ideological tool. It may very well disappear from this book, folded into the other chapters. In any case, it is very likely the last one to be written.
Chapter Three, "Unfit Motherlands: Adoption and the Rhetoric of National Integrity" traces the debates and anxieties about transnational adoption from its heyday in the 1990s through the 2012 Dima Yakovlev law banning most such adoptions. The rhetoric surrounding the most scandalous adoption stories were not just about abuse and child protection, but about the fate of the national, collective body and the dilution of the gene pool. The chapter ends with a look at the Russian criminal practice of moving Ukrainian orphans (or, in may cases, "orphans") across the border in order to Russify them. After the full-scale invasion, this policy was Russia's own enactment of the national erasure that was alleged to be behind the adoption of Russians by Americans before 2012.
The fourth chapter will either be called "Russia's Alien Nations: Agents, Spies, and Extraterrestrials" or "Infections in the Body Politic (Aliens, Plagues, Spies and Foreign Agents)." It will be about fears of Russia's dismantling by foreign powers, often expressed in narratives of infiltration, spying, infection, and alien invasion.
The final chapter is "The Necropolitics of Putinism," and will treat the regime's response to disaster and mass death.
After that, there will probably be some sort of conclusion. Your guess is as good as mine.
Next week: Chapter One Begins