Ксения Черкаева - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Academic papers by Ксения Черкаева

Социология власти, 2019

Учетная карточка щенка немецкой овчарки, родившегося в блокадном Ленинграде, была случайно найден... more Учетная карточка щенка немецкой овчарки, родившегося в блокадном Ленинграде, была случайно найдена в пакете с канцелярским мусором и теперь хранится в государственном архиве. История этого документа открыла наше исследование межвидовых отношений людей и служебных собак в экстремальных условиях войны и блокады. Факт содержания нескольких сотен крупных служебных собак в осажденном городе долго не оглашался: их спасение считалось неэтичными по отношению к памяти ленинградцев, погибших от голода. Тем не менее породистые собаки, собранные у гражданского населения осенью 1941 года, пережили самое страшное «смертное время» первой и второй блокадной зимы в инженерной воинской части, где они и их вожатые обучались новаторскому методу поиска мин. Саперы с собаками быстро прославились на Ленинградском фронте: они обнаруживали не только мины, но любую взрывчатку, в том числе потайную диверсионную. Наша статья открывает новый ракурс этой истории. Советская теория дрессировки базировалась на «научно-объективном учении о рефлексах». Мы же показываем практическую сторону этой методики: использование служебных собак в военных целях опиралось в первую очередь на личную эмоциональную взаимную приязнь каждого вожатого и его собаки. Формально оставаясь инженерным имуществом, минорозыскные собаки выступали в роли самостоятельных исторических акторов, доверительных партнеров человека. Наше исследование посвящено тому, как сталинская система, не вторгаясь в интимную область личных отношений людей и служебных животных, тем не менее планировала и поощряла такую межвидовую приязнь в военизированных государственных учреждениях, где все было подчинено идеологическому влиянию. Все, кроме врожденного видового поведения самих военных собак.

Новое Литературное Обозрение, 2018

Статья рассматривает историю российских законов, защищающих достоинство и честь. Дореволюционные ... more Статья рассматривает историю российских законов, защищающих достоинство и честь. Дореволюционные правоведы полагали, что юридическая защита нравственного достоинства личности невозможна, ибо не общество, а лишь сам человек может уронить его. Но когда Моральный кодекс строителя коммунизма прописал основы нравственности, закон взял моральный облик и достоинство граждан под защиту в числе прочих нематериальных личных благ. С распадом СССР Моральный кодекс исчез, а защита «чести и достоинства» осталась: сегодня закон определяет достоинство как «морально-правовую категорию», соответствующую общепринятым социальным стандартам.

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"Personal Dignity as Personal Property: Metamorphosis of Russian Laws Concerning Defamation."
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This article examines the history of Russian laws protecting citizens’ dignity and honor. Pre-revolutionary Russian legal scholars assumed that ethical dignity could not be legally protected because it was not contingent on social esteem: it could be tarnished only by the bearer himself. But when the Moral Codex of the Builder of Communism outlined the norms of morality, the law extended its protection to citizens’ ethical dignity, among their other immaterial personal values. The Moral Codex disappeared after the Soviet collapse, but the legal protection of “honor and dignity” remained: today, the law defines dignity as a “moral-legal category,” determined by commonly accepted social standards.

Ab Imperio, 2014

This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land... more This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, for analyzing consequences of repressed histories while itself neglecting important historical facts: like the fact of Stalin's post-1956 omission from public discourse. I show that Etkind's texts rely on such factual omissions to denounce the “criminal state” from a position of non-complicity, perpetuating a popular perestroika-era historiographic narrative that today is countered by “patriotic” historiography, which unproblematically unites the Russian people and nation against foreign aggression. The two positions are counterparts, this essay argues, united by a morally unambiguous relationship to the past, and by the omission of factual details that could complicate such an unproblematic identification.
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Статья критикует работы Александра Эткинда о “искривлении горя,” анализирующие последствия политических репрессий в общественной памяти. Однако, в этих работах Эткинд игнорирует исторические факты важные для подобного анализа: например, факт умолчания имени Сталина в официальных обсуждениях после ХХ Съезда. Тем самым автор продолжает популярную историографию перестройки, давшую возможность публично осуждать советский режим не обдумывая личную сопричастность к его злодеяниям. Данная публикация указывает на недопустимость избирательного подхода к истории, так как именно на исторических пробелах строится новое заблуждение: продолжению перестроечной историографии, содержащей пробелы и неувязки, сегодня и противопоставляется новая патриотическая идеология, объединяющая нацию против “внешнего врага,” как в настоящем времени, так и в оценках прошлого.

Cahiers du monde russe, 2018

This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their ow... more This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their own outdoor-tourist gear out of illicitly obtained industrial materials. Reading these stories not as evidence of illicit circulation, but as expressions of ethical claims, I show that they are united by common assumptions of goodness, and argue that these assumptions cannot be understood through analytic frameworks concerned with private, acquisitive interest. Instead, I argue that they must be understood in terms of the “personal:” an idiosyncratic Soviet property regime that was not opposed to, but co-constitutive of, socialist property. Analyzing 1960s political statements, juridical arguments and media texts, I show that the 1961 Third Party Program reforms extended the juridical logic of personal property to personal ethical realms. Specifically, the Program demanded that people place their ethical obligations – to strive for the overall greater good – above their formal obligations to follow letter of the law. By framing necessary but unplanned transactions in the a-legal terms of “mutual aid,” this ethical stance helped the economy appear functional despite its endemic circulation problems.

Environmental Humanities, 2018

The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free m... more The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects' lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure the lives of those actors whose biosocial demands can be neither stamped out nor befuddled by propaganda. In this article we examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that could have created the totalitarian service dog: institutions that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. Our narrative begins with a recently discovered genealogical document, issued to a German Shepherd bred by plan and born during the World War II Leningrad Blockade. Reading this document together with service-dog manuals, Soviet physiological studies, archival military documents, and autobiographical narratives, we unravel the history of Leningrad's early Soviet military-service dog husbandry program. This program, we argue, relied on a particular distinction of public and private: at once stimulating affectionate interspecies bonds between dogs and their handlers and sequestering those relationships from the image of rational, scientifically objective interspecies communication. This reduction of human-dog relations to those criteria that could be scientifically studied and centrally planned yielded tangible results: it allowed the State's dog husbandry program to create apparently unified groups of dogs and dog handlers and to successfully mobilize these groups for new military tasks, like mine detection, during World War II.

Essays by Ксения Черкаева

The American Historical Review, 2020

This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a ne... more This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a new hagiography, a story of a woman who gave away everything—her house, her money, her possessions, and even her name—who wandered homeless, and who has helped people resolve desperate situations ever since. Retelling the fragmented stories of how people asked for her intervention, and of how, through their actions, new mycelia of power grew on the ruins of the Soviet socialist state, I hope that this essay helps opens a loophole: a space between naïve faith and sociological faithlessness in which we might understand today’s miracles without crushing them by the secular objectivist gaze. Looking through this loophole, this essay retells some of stories I heard about the Soviet collapse and about how people survived it: about gleaning the planned economy’s rubble, chance connections, personal ties, Divine Providence, fast fortunes, and the enclosure of fields.

Anthropology and Humanism, 2017

This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exc... more This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exchange in 1980s Leningrad and St. Petersburg 30 years later, and about things' incommensurability spurring stories. It is, specifically , about one dead penguin: a bird that was killed, found, bought, gifted , found, stolen, and gifted again.

Society for Cultural Anthropology, Fieldsights – https://culanth.org/fieldsights/they-sow-the-wind-and-reap-the-whirlwind-covid-doubt-in-st-petersburg , 2020

Lacking state-imposed quarantines, we’ve been abandoned to personal choices. Advising us to save ... more Lacking state-imposed quarantines, we’ve been abandoned to personal choices. Advising us to save ourselves and our neighbors by staying home, our governments struggle to keep the wrong doubts from going viral. But accusations of falsity are as bottomless as the hoaxes they try to contain. States accuse each other of spreading disinformation, and scholars show that these accusations are themselves often false, that “an EU-funded body set up to fight disinformation ends up producing it.” The falsity of such accusations of falsity gives fodder for new accusations. And thus the battle against an infectious pandemic becomes overshadowed by the battle for faith, against doubt. In this “infodemic,” America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) urges citizens to do these “three easy things: Don’t believe the rumors; Don’t pass them along; Go to trusted sources of information to get the facts about the federal (COVID-19) response.”

Can a state agency order citizens (not) to believe?