The Post-Soviet Imaginary: Constructing New Russian Fantasies

"The Post-Soviet Imaginary: Constructing New Russian Fantasies" examines interviews and essays of one hundred seventy eight students (age 15-22), whom I met in April 1996 and April 1997 in Barnaul, Siberia (Russia). Using the texts of the students’ descriptions of such basic notions as “gender,” “nationality,” “man,” “woman,” and “Motherland” as my main source, I tried to understand how the young people in a post-Soviet Siberian city located themselves within the available symbolic representations of gender and national identity. The interpretation of the students’ texts was rooted in two major theoretical frames: structuralist and post-structuralist analysis on one hand and the psychoanalytic theory on the other. The former illuminated the main narrative mechanisms through which the students expressed their experience. As the first chapter argues, it was the logic of oppositions and binaries, the logic of cognitive inconsistency and supplementary negation that framed the students’ verbal constructions. In turn, the psychoanalytic approach (mostly in the forms of Melanie Klein’s and Julia Kristeva’s versions) was instrumental for grasping one of the key oppositions indicated by the students - the opposition between the new Russian woman and the new Russian man. These two figures were called upon to express the students’ anxiety caused by the loss of the symbolic sign-posts of the Soviet epoch. By using object relations theory, I detected a paranoid structure in the students’ fantasies about the new Russian man and the new Russian woman, which manifested itself first of all in such rhetorical phenomena as splitting, consolidation, and symbolic inhibition. My further analysis of the metaphors and associations used by the students led me to identifying these two models of national and gender identification as the object of abjection (the new Russian woman) and the object of narcissistic identification (the new Russian man)

"Не взлетевшие самолеты мечты": о поколении формального метода

Статья является введением к трехтомной антологии русского модернизма

Second-Hand Nostalgia: Composing a New Reality out of Old Things

In the last few years, the Moscow photographer Danila Tkachenko has produced several highly successful photo-series that creatively reworked and reframed important material objects of the socialist period. Using some of his projects as a case study, this article offers a methodological shift by approaching a second wave of nostalgia for communist past without relying on socialist experience as a key interpretative  and explanatory frame. As the essay shows, the decreasing prominence of the firsthand knowledge of socialist lifestyle is compensated by the increasing visibility and importance of (old) socialist things. The essay introduces the term ‘second-hand nostalgia’ to refer to this type of interaction with the material culture of the socialist period. Retaining the melancholic longing for the times past (typical for any nostalgia), the term points, simultaneously, to a condition of historical disconnect from originary contexts, which made possible the objects of current nostalgic fascination in the first place. Keywords: nostalgia, material culture, Russia, postcommunism, photograph

Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space between Stalin and Hitler.

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience was reflected in various gestures of withdrawal and distancing. I suggest that these discursive and mnemonic moves—from commemorating victims to memorializing victimhood—could be seen as signs of the emergence and development of postcolonial reasoning in post- Soviet Belarus. The postcolonial estrangement that these historicist projects have produced is a consequence of a utopian search for sources of authenticity outside the power structures imposed by “occupation regimes.” So far, this retrospective quest for a safe place “in- between” has resulted in a series of dead ends. Instead of bringing the nation together, it has polarized the society. Instead of providing an attractive alternative to the moral duplicity of state socialism, it has offered a historical justification for ethical relativism. These deadlocks and false turns of postcolonial studies of socialism can be seen as reflecting the early stage of this intellectual movement. Alternatively, they may signify the emergence of a different—conservative and nostalgic—form of postcoloniality. In either case, these debates helpfully outline the uneasy process of the retroactive creation of colonial subjectivity, demonstrating how the act of reclaiming an important historical place can become indistinguishable from being beholden to this place

On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine\u27s Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine’s Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated and mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve’s implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non-liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics

Russia’s Social Upper Class: From Ostentation to Culturedness

This article discusses examples of strategies employed by representatives of Russia’s new social upper class to acquire social distinction. By the late 2000s many of the upper-class Russians included in this study distanced themselves from the conspicuous ostentation ascribed to the brutish 1990s. Instead, they strove to gain legitimacy for their social position by no longer aggressively displaying their wealth, but instead elaborating more refined and individualized tastes and manners and reviving a more cultured image and self-image. These changes found their expression in various modes of social distinction ranging from external signs, such as fashion and cars, to ostentation vicariously exercised through the people these upper-class Russians surrounded themselves with

At the intersection of globalization and "civilizational originality' : cultural production in Putin's Russia

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet Russian cultural studies', the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin's Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.Peer reviewe

Outer space technopolitics and postcolonial modernity in Kazakhstan

This is the final version. Available on open access from Routledge via the DOI in this recordThis article examines the role of outer space technopolitics in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It explores how outer space, the technological artefact of global relevance, works as a postcolonial fetish of modernity that is called upon to produce what it represents, i.e. the reality of a technologically advanced Kazakh nation. The article shows that in its project of becoming a spacefaring nation the country reiterates major incentives that have motivated nuclear and space programme development in the postcolonial context of the Global South. The article explores how collaboration with Russia allows Kazakhstan to claim its share in the Soviet space legacy rather than to distance itself from it. It then traces the rise of a new internationalism in the Kazakhstani space programme outside the post-Soviet context. The article contributes to the debate on postcolonial techonopolitics and shows how outer space has been used to enhance the conventional domain of postcolonial national ideologies – nativism and tradition – with technology and science. Finally, the article depicts how the growing resistance to the space programme among Kazakh civil society groups reveals a close association of the environmental agenda with an “eco-nationalism” permeated by a profoundly anti-imperial and, ultimately, antiauthoritarian political discourse

The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking

How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country’s international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics which allows to productively conceptualize the connection between a state’s transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and non-compliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth and justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia’s limited politics of accountability towards the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics