Friendship and Politics in Russia (original) (raw)

Russia, it seems to many, has an overabundance of friendship. Some link this phenomenon to the underdevelopment of formal institutions, which forces people to rely on informal relationships to achieve their goals. Others link it to the Stalinist past, which made friendship a dearly earned achievement, rather than an innocuous ascription: in a society where relatives informed on each other, an ultimate and real friend was a person who withstood the threat of terror and did not betray. No matter what the reason, the ubiquity of profound friendships is acutely believed in by many Russians, who frequently contrast their society with those of the United States and Western Europe by asserting that Russia's is based on friendship. It is surprising, then, that there was no serious study of friendship undertaken in Russia from the 1980s, when Vladimir Shlapentokh's book Love, Marriage, and Friendship in the Soviet Union appeared, 1 until 2009, when a group of researchers, including myself, at the European University at St. Petersburg published a volume titled Druzhba (Friendship). 2 The book was intended, obviously,