Petra Rethmann. Russia: Anthropological Insights. North York, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2018 (original) (raw)
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My main thesis can be formulated as follows: accounts of the traumatic presence of the Soviet past in present-day Russia — descriptions that rely on analytical frameworks based in claims concerning the masses’ post-Soviet nostalgia and the restoration efforts of the political powers-that-be, which supports and guides this nostalgia — are becoming less and less adequate to grasp the current situation. We are no longer dealing with nostalgia and the desire for a return of the lost object, but with a politics whose objective is the positive recoding of nostalgia for the Soviet past into a new form of Russian patriotism for which ‘the Soviet’ lacks any historical specificity, but is rather seen as part of a broadly conceived and comically heterogeneous cultural legacy. The consideration of this inner and intense connection between the Soviet past, nostalgia and the project of modernization of Russia includes revealing of main cultural tendencies (in reinterpretation and restoration of historical past) as well as discourse analysis of president Medvedev’s speeches dedicated to the modernization project.
Oushakine begins his analysis of trauma and national reconstruction in Russia by describing how the uneven pace of post-Soviet development has threatened even the possibilities of movement through the cityscape of Barnaul, the provincial capital of the Altai region and the main field site for Oushakine's research between 2001 and 2003. The commercialization of once-private apartments, with the concomitant demand that these new enterprises maintain the sidewalks outside their entrances, has resulted in what Oushakine calls the "semi-privatization" of public space: sidewalks composed of a hazardous patchwork of brick, asphalt, and cinder blocks that literalizes the fragmentation of Russia's cultural landscape after the end of state socialism. 1 Such vivid images of the fracturing of a once-coherent social space are familiar tropes in studies of postsocialism, as is Oushakine's concern for how postsocialist subjects have responded to such physical and symbolic disruption: the collapse of established narratives, social organization, regimes of value, and indeed the entire symbolic edifice that structured not only the official culture of state socialism but also the everyday life of its citizens. What 1 Serguei Alex.
Review essay on Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); and Lukas Mücke, Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956-1972 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013). In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: History, we are often told, is the study of continuity and change. This truism, it seems to me, is an underestimation of the discipline, but one might argue that the specific questions that are asked of continuity and change do much to define the dynamism of a particular historical subfield. As Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd write in the introduction to their edited volume, The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, study of the early post-Stalin era has long been “rooted in … the paradigm of ‘continuity and change’ between the Stalin years and their aftermath” (25). Questions in this paradigm began to be asked immediately after Stalin died in 1953 and would continue to be posed in the following decades. Indeed, as Kozlov and Gilburd note, “writing about [what came to be known as] the Thaw has a rich history” (24). Early analyses of the Thaw—which tended to focus on high politics and reforms, socioeconomic trends, and literature and the arts—did not reach a consensus on the extent to which the period marked a break in the history of the Soviet Union. Study of the Thaw has grown even richer over the last 15 years, as some scholars have explored earlier objects of analysis on the basis of new sources and approaches, while others have taken the cultural and subsidiary turns. Questions of continuity and change continue to be posed, only now they often concentrate on mentalities, identities, subjectivities, emotions, and various other cultural topics. The subfield of early post-Stalin studies has become increasingly dynamic, to be sure. Focusing on the social as well as the cultural and making important contributions to the subfield, each of the three books under review poses productive questions about the extent to which the death of Stalin marked a break in the history of the Soviet Union. In the ambitious introduction to The Thaw, Kozlov and Gilburd present a case for change. So, too, does Lukas Mücke in his Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956–1972. In contrast, Brian LaPierre, in Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, emphasizes continuity. In this review, I examine these three books’ engagement with the question of continuity and change in part by presenting them as exercises, if implicit, in the history of emotions. Indeed, affect is central to interpretations of the metaphor of a thaw; if some scholars present the metaphor to mean anticipation or optimism, others emphasize uncertainty or anxiety. Kozlov and Gilburd write of post-Stalin optimism, LaPierre of anxiety, and Mücke of feelings of gratitude and entitlement. The themes of emotions and continuity versus change overlap to an extent. For example, post-Stalin optimism suggests rupture in terms of affect, whereas anxiety implies continuity in that Soviet citizens continued to feel materially and physically insecure. The different arguments are in part a function of different objects of analysis. Like other scholars who write of optimism and change, Kozlov and Gilburd center their attention on intellectuals; like those who emphasize anxiety and continuity, LaPierre concentrates on the lower classes. Mücke, interested in pensioners of various social backgrounds, is more difficult to classify in this regard. A question that emerges is what might unite the different affective experiences of these as well as the various other social types discussed in the contributions to Kozlov and Gilburd’s volume and the growing literature on the 1950s and 1960s. In this connection, scholars of the post-Stalin era would be well served by directing attention to 1990s and early 2000s literature on the early Soviet period. Indeed, we would benefit in particular from turning to the work of the “modernity school,” one of the most innovative literatures in the Soviet field in the last two decades. Many of the insights of the modernity scholars suggest that what places intellectuals, hooligans, pensioners, and others in a single history is their interaction with an expansive state, whose ambition in the early post-Stalin years remained the molding and integration of its population. However, this review emphasizes not the modern state’s activities but citizens’ affective responses to its objectives. In so doing, the review foregrounds the notion that individuals, caught...
Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2001
eliminate the not infrequent mistakes and typos. The illustrations should be more closely integrated with the argumentation and analysis.. This is an interesting and substantial collection of articles. What it is not, however, is a post-Soviet primer on post-modernism. While the oppositions evident in the topics discussed above fit the current popular framework of conflicting "constructed identities," for the most part this interpretive matrix can either be replaced by older interpretive frameworks with no less, and probably more, explanatory power or is not actually practiced in the articles. The arguments about "constructed identity" by Schleifman and Holquist could just as easily be recast as pursuit of economic selfinterest by locality, center, and Cossackry respectively in an explanatory matrix that predates Marx. Engel presents a case for inclusion of women, using post-modernist terminology-"problematize the narrative"-but otherwise not distinguished from longstanding arguments of feminists. The articles on the Orthodox Church and multiparty politics are straightforward historical narratives with barely a nod to postmodernism. Kosach's article most comfortably assumes the contours of postmodernist argumentation. This is not accidental. T'he post-modernist approach works best when its subject is un-self-conscious. In both Mozhaisk and with the Cossackry folk are pursuing the time-honored practice of naked self-interest, so pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is not particularly revelatory. That does not mean that post-modernism is inapplicable to either Mozhaisk or Cossackry, but it does mean that the sources utilized should come from ordinary people who are un-self-conscious representatives of the Mozhaisk sacredotal vision or the Cossack claim for ethnicity. This collection is valuable because of the content of the articles, and it would have been better had it not been stretched to fit a post-modernist mold..
This special issue emerged from the eponymous interdisciplinary conference we co-organized at the University of Sheffield in October 2010. The conference aimed to address the relationship between contemporary Russian culture and Russia's Soviet past, a relationship characterized by profound ambiguity. We approached this topic with the assumption that, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society and culture are still dependent on their Soviet heritage, which is upheld and rejected, often simultaneously, in practically all fields of symbolic production, from state ideology to architecture, from elite literature to mass culture. Russian culture remains suspended between the historical narratives of the emergence of the new nation from the ruins of the USSR and the Soviet cultural legacy, whose models are no longer functional; the result is the instability of its ideological symbolic order and a palpable traumatic void, which its subjects fill with their incoherent, emotional, and ideologically charged interventions.