Kazan’s Day of Slavic Writing celebration on the steps of the Kamal Tatar State Academic Theater, which puts on performances in Tatar and other languages. (May 24, 2014)
In Varieties of Russian Activism, my chapter starts off the section on “The Building Blocks of Everyday Activism: Identity, Networks, and Social Trust.” Cultural spaces and events like national theaters and concerts, can serve as ideal spaces for fostering these building blocks. As the Russian political space for electoral politics and protesting closes, the cultural sphere remains a viable space for activism, especially concerning politics related to language and identity. Although government engagement with and management of cultural activity has been increasing, such as through the 2022 executive order on the “preservation and strengthening of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” and the ensuing creation of Cultural Front of Russia divisions in Russia’s regions, it is not possible to entirely shut down the use of culture for alternative identity and political community building. Doing so would delegitimize the use of these venues and cultural forms for pro-regime activity.
In the chapter, I examine how regime supporters and anti-regime activists both utilize these cultural spaces in the capital cities of three of Russia’s ethnic republics, Karelia, Tatarstan, and Buryatia. Like that of many other authors in this book, this work contributes to the decentering of Moscow and the Kremlin in our approach to understanding Russian politics. People experience politics, and especially policies and activities aimed at nation-building, close to home. My comparative regional approach examines variation and similarities in how people engage with national theaters, concert halls, and other venues using observations from fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015-2016.
Some of the venues and activities I examine are connected to Soviet-era legacies. For example, the regional capitals, Petrozavodsk, Kazan, and Ulan-Ude, each have national theaters that were utilized in the early 20th century to promote regional language and culture as a means for bringing people across the USSR into the socialist project. Today, these theaters still receive government funding and support to put on plays and other activities in minority languages. When people come together to watch a play in the Karelian, Tatar, or Buryat language, they are supporting those languages at a time when their promotion is challenged through restrictive educational policies and clamp downs on language activist protest (see Guzel Yusupova’s contribution to this volume). While this activity does fall within the boundaries of permissible engagement with minority languages set by the government, it can still provide opportunities for those “building blocks of everyday activism” to form.
Cultural activities can serve multiple purposes that are both activism in their own right and can provide the foundation for future activism in other forms. First, they can promote and construct an identity linked to the particular language, dance form, composer, etc. featured at the event. Minority language learners can use a play for practice, or non-ethnic Russian cultural figures can gain a larger following, for example. Second, they are an opportunity for bonding over a shared experience of that identity, potentially strengthening community ties and revealing preferences. Audience members see others attending, cheering, and showing interest in the same language or topic that may be counter to the pro-regime line. Third, they are sites for Scott’s (1990) infrapolitics, or hidden politics that don’t appear political or threatening to government censors and officials, but that can convey messages intelligible to the opposition, pushing back against centralizing nation-building policies.
As the government tightens controls on language, culture, and values, it differentiates treatment of cultural activities. Promotion of Karelian language is okay within the bounds of the National Theater of the Republic of Karelia, but its promotion is not permitted through granting it official language status or through Nuori Karjala’s UN funding and engagement with Finnish groups, which resulted in a “foreign agent” label in 2015. Still, even the government funded cultural spaces can be sites for contestation over national identity and language politics. In the chapter, I demonstrate how the degree of this contestation varies across the capital cities and is shaped by regional contexts related to history, international ties, and intergroup relations..
Alexei Titkov posted this on his Facebook feed and, with his kind permission, I translated into English and edited it a bit. I repost it because it reminded me of some of the conversations I had in Russia last autumn when mobilization was at its height:
An almost invisible hero of last week:
head of the city of Nevinnomyssk (Stavropol Region) Mikhail Minenkov
Minenkov is a Lieutenant colonel (in the reserve), former paratrooper, sambist, chairman of the regional rugby federation. He went out to the square in front of the city administration – handing out stickers “SvoikhNeBrosaem Z” [We don’t leave a man Behind Z] and St. George ribbons.
Here we have direct quotes from Minenkov’s Telegram channel:
“Good evening! Good weather. People are already walking around without jackets.
So I brought stickers with me – a whole pack of St. George ribbons. I ask why there are so few St. George ribbons on cars – among friends, comrades, acquaintances. And everyone is afraid.
This is really embarrassing guys. The boys need to be supported. May 9 is coming soon, symbols must be supported. I urge everyone, printers, to print these stickers and hang them up without fear that they will scratch your car. To wear this St. George ribbon, to support our boys, to remember our grandfathers, this is very important.
And hello to all the chickenshits who are afraid of a scratch on their car.”
***
Alexei: Our editors are already being asked: what does this say about the mood in Russian society, its trends.
Answer: practically nothing. Only what we observe.
Wearing Z-symbols to ordinary people in everyday situations is most often inconvenient, or something. Even if ideologically “for” – they do not express it by external signs. And the matter is, most likely, not only of cars, which they don’t want touched.
For comparison here’s a story that I myself observed in recent months. Nearest Moscow region. On the way to the bus stop, every time I noticed the same balcony of the same five-story building. Balcony like any other: glazed. Last spring it began to look ceremonial: behind the glass is the Russian tricolor, on the glass is the letter “Z” glued together from stripes.
Nothing bad happened to the balcony: no cracks from thrown stones, no lumps of dirt. But in the summer, for some reason, the letter “Z” was gone, only the flag remained. By autumn, the flag was also removed, now it’s just a balcony like a balcony. Like all neighbors.
I do not think that the inhabitants of that apartment have changed dramatically or, as they say, “seen the light.” At least, we don’t hear “Chervona Kalina” being sung. But something made them remove it. Quietly, imperceptibly.
It would be good if someone studied such cases. The smallest of small.
Everything is made up of them.
***
Alexei ends his post there. But if you go to the Telegram channel, which, it turns out is a super patriotic channel, you find an equally telling comment under his video.
Natalya: “Excoose me [sic] maybe it’s off-topic, but maybe not. Who has heard that the Governor has decreed that blocks of flats must have toilets installed in their basements? In connection with the situation?”
The most liked comment under the feed is an anonymous attack on the mayor’s use of WWII symbols.
Maybe the point of my repost is that there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing social media research. The right way being not to hurry to draw conclusions and not to see online speech as ‘reality’, but to merely triangulate that speech online with what can be observed offline. And even then, be careful about biases. Given the amount of patriotic Z channels with lots of “likes” one could conclude the war is popular. Given the amount of downvotes and poo-emojis in response to such patriotic posting, one might conclude the opposite.
*Warning: this post contains both irony and seriousness. If you would prefer a milder academic, please ask for one.*
PostRussia meets today in Washington, Philly, and New York.
They agreed on the territorial dismantling of Russia, but they are less certain on their own name, styling themselves variously ‘Northern Eurasia’, ‘PostRussia’, ‘FreeNationsRf’.
As a self-avowed decolonization movement of the Russian Federation, which you would assume meant a degree of indigeneity in its make-up, it’s ironic that it is funded by US military-industrial money, peopled by mainly Ukrainian public figures, a Lithuanian, a Tatar (the only member with decolonial credentials), and one Russian political consultant in employment with a Ukrainian political party.
A recent interview with their most media savvy rep was entitled:
‘Russian mentality comes from Great Horde’.
Personally, I’m not happy as a Kalugan resident to be assigned to the “Republic of Chernozemye-Yugorussiya”. For one thing the flag is really shit and the capital is Voronezh.
Regarding the conference in the US, there are some respected names*, which I guess leads me to reflect on my own public engagement in the last 12-or-more months which could be summarized as ‘speak less and with more discernment about one’s interlocutors as well as one’s knowledge claims’.
Looking at the programme with 60-or-so named speakers at the event there are many speakers claiming representative credentials for ethnic and geographic communities within the Russian Federation. However, among the many political scientists, journalists and activists there is not a single sociologist. Not a single researcher – as far as I can tell – who is qualified to speak about the potential or otherwise of Russian people themselves to engage with a process of post-colonial transition, let alone decolonization. Not a single person curious as to how to build civic capacity to assist in the ”peaceful and non-violent decolonization… [and] control the collapse” [sic].
In the words of Ilya B writing for Doxa a while ago: ‘Real change is possible only if “decolonization” becomes a process by which Russians rework their own self-consciousness, their past and present, whose imperial and chauvinistic foundations have largely led to today’s war’.
It would be useful for people who want to constructively engage in this debate to revisit the work of one of its leading scholars: Madina Tlostanova. (I will write about others another time)
Memorably she employed three phrases: Russia, the ‘second-class Empire’, engaged in ‘secondary orientalism’ as a result of its ‘secondary Eurocentrism’. The old propaganda myth of the Russian Empire (Russia as liberator) has been reworked – Russian elites today appropriate the decolonial agenda as a tool for criticizing the West. For Tlostanova, Russian Imperialism lives on and was always a European colonial project; communism is a distraction. Decolonization needs transverse, coalitional forms of governance, not a recreation of ethno-states. Tlostanova seems suspicious of the ‘internal colonization’ perspective and the idea that ethnic Russians comprise a subaltern subject.
Whether you agree with Tlostanova or not, it is hard to see how the Forum in Washington advances the decolonial agenda in Russia. Some of her writings from more than 10 years ago have a certain resonance:
Russia’s complexity is a timebomb. The empire did not entirely disintegrate even today, continuing to impose its imperialist ideology onto the remaining colonies at the same time proclaiming a new nation-state image in its most reactionary, ethnic-nationalist form, multiplying internal racialized others with Russian citizenship yet no rights. Hyphenated identities are not really possible in Russia, as it does not even accept the western idea of the civil (not ethnic) nation, sliding more and more in the direction of biological racism and bubbled-up xenophobic constructs. The rotting ex-empire will finally disintegrate into smaller parts. Yet this will not help much, because the imperial difference does not generate anything promising, particularly given the specificity of Russian religious, political and cultural traditions. The looming completion of its disintegration as an empire would lead to even more chaos, bloodshed, and poverty for the population which simply had the misfortune of being born in this space, which still speaks a common language, but is no longer united spiritually or ideologically. [edited for length – original here]
This type of writing has a strong rhetorical effect today though there are numerous points Tlostanova makes that I and other scholars disagree on. Do you agree with her?
*It may well be that some representatives of indigenous peoples within Russia believe this is a worthwhile forum to advance their interests.
Regina Smyth*, Andrei Semenov and I have just published an edited book on activism. The book has nine chapters and 18 contributors. In the introduction the editors discuss the framing of the volume – broadly relying on three approaches to the study of activism: social identities and connections, frames, and local political opportunity structures.
Activism is any type of grassroots collective action aimed at redressing failures of governance, protecting rights, or demanding changes in policies enacted or imposed by elites. These actions emerge from and redefine participants’ relationships to their local communities and their perceptions of the meaning of citizenship (Fröhlich 2020). Activism varies widely across groups, issues, and regions. It also varies across individuals as they decide to participate or not participate, dip in and out of activism, engage in actions across issues, or move from local activism to national protest, as observed in the Navalny rallies that burst out in Russia in winter 2021. And since the war on Ukraine began and the scope of activism seemed to narrow.
In the Russian context, most local activists regard their actions as nonpolitical. As in other authoritarian states, the futile and aggressive nature of power politics leads citizens to distance themselves from institutionalized political arenas. For many local activists, politics is a dirty business. In contrast, actions that address local concerns are acceptable. After 2005, many local movements limited alliances with political parties or political opposition groups to attract social support (Clément, Miryasova, and Demidov 2010). Over time, depoliticization defines a significant schism between political and civic activists (Semenov 2021).
For social scientists, any action, even localized events, taken to alter power relations, redistribute funds, or demand policy change goes to the heart of politics. Yet Nina Eliasoph (1997) argues that there is no dissonance in nonpolitical activism in a culture of political avoidance. The nonpolitical construct emerges as residents experience shared feelings and understandings based on the disruption of their everyday lives that are distinct from high politics (Clément 2008). In Russian society, the distinction remains crucial to the dynamics of societal participation and individuals’ movement from nonpolitical to political engagement, a pattern examined in the volume.
Despite many examples of successful activism in the 2000 which we review in the introduction, it remains widely believed that Russian society is largely passive. This impression stems from a dominant paradigm in Russian sociology in which the traumatic Soviet and post-Soviet experience engendered distrust and atomization, rendering “new social forms of interaction impossible” (Gudkov 2011, as quoted in Sharafutdinova 2019, 189). Even in critical approaches observers remain trapped by the idea that sustained expression of or demand for civil liberties is all but impossible. It is a measure of the stubborn persistence of this perspective that the growth in local activism remains understudied.
As Gulnaz Sharafutdinova notes, “At a minimum, intellectuals owe the public a degree of self-reflection to avoid turning their disappointment with the absence of democratic change in Russia into a suggestion that change is not possible” because of societal passivity (2019, 195). Our studies take up this point, acknowledging that Russian society has changed enormously even over the second, more repressive decade of Putin’s leadership. And even since the invasion of Ukraine, new activism has emerged with new actors and methods, such as the feminist antiwar resistance, direct action, and passive resistance to the draft and mobilization.
The Societal Building Blocks of Activism: Identities, Communities, and Social Capital
Clément’s pathbreaking work (2008) underscores the first set of factors that our authors bring to the book: shared understandings, identities, networks, and experiences that influence worldviews and shared grievances. This focus on the interactions or relations among actors has much in common with the concept of social capital and the emergence of prosocial norms that enable collective action. While Russian civil society remains underdeveloped, existing social ties and identities are the building blocks of joint action and organization. Our authors suggest that they are at the root of activism and are strengthened and extended through activism, creating a new type of activist identity that can transcend the boundaries of local issues. They also emerge via social entrepreneurs, who shape the frames and narratives we discuss in the next section of the introduction.
Generating Grievances and Forging Solutions: Information and Framing Processes
In political contexts where few independent social organizations or movement structures exist, social activism is coordinated through communication that emphasizes shared identities and grievance or framing. Social entrepreneurs can provoke participation by providing three types of information: a diagnosis of the shared problem, a prognosis of how taking a specific action will solve that problem, and a call to arms that brings people together. Our chapters illustrate this dynamic: how individuals come to see action as a meaningful path to achieve common goals.
Grassroots activists rely on new media and alternative tools to generate collective action frames despite these controls. These frames emerge from the daily interactions noted by Clément and articulated by activist leaders, civic organizations, and independent media. The information that facilitates frame resonance comes from daily activities such as grocery shopping, or coping with medical problems. These personal experiences shared by family, neighbors, and colleagues counter the regime’s depiction of social reality and are reinforced by personal networks, independent media, and online discussions.
Opportunity Structures, Arenas, and Incentives for Action: State in Society
The concept of opportunity structure focuses on factors that shape the probability of collective action: the ability to engage formal state institutions, state repression, available partners within government, partners outside of government, and potential financial supporters. This list includes media allies, business support, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social organizations, and other existing civic associates. It also includes local planning officials and priests.
In nondemocratic regimes, the opportunity structure defined by the multiparty system, formal institutions, and frequent elections appears to be open. Yet the policy process—a hegemonic party, mechanisms of legislative co-optation, and bureaucratic coercion—renders the system closed. For almost two decades, the regime has increased harassment of social organizations that support local actions (Semenov and Bederson 2020) when actions previously aimed at overtly political actions have been directed at nonpolitical initiatives.
Despite increased direct state action, the chapters in this volume show that these factors vary across local contexts. Many of our chapters focus on urban action spaces, where mobilization is more likely to emerge. The Russian state is not a unitary actor but a “melange of social organizations” (Migdal 2001, 49). Even in the state’s seemingly least responsive periods, activism has the potential to manipulate a calculus of pressures rooted in broader state aims. For example, bureaucrats can find it useful to align themselves with, or make implicit concessions to, activists to meet these aims, especially in the arenas of social provision, education, and cultural production. This more nuanced view of state-society relations recognizes the state as both a source of grievances and a potential partner in solving the problems in everyday life.
From this perspective, we need to look beyond national state actions to understand the compromises inherent in authoritarian governance (Fröhlich 2012). Echoing Clément’s body of work, these approaches call for a focus on how state authority operates in people’s daily lives and how people come to imagine, encounter, and reimagine the state. Activism often exists in a bureaucratic ecosystem comprising what Russians call formal volokita—or red tape and informal fixes and workarounds (Morris 2019).
The Repertoire of Contention
At its core, social activism is about communication among social actors and between society and elites, expressing preferences, interests, grievances, and demands. The range of available forms of protest actions, or repertoire, has evolved through history with changes in opportunity structures, resources, and technology (Tilly 2008). Contemporary repertoire varies in size from a protest involving tens of thousands to the action of a single citizen who engages in a picket or wears a symbolic color or piece of clothing.
Influenced by Deleuze’s (1987) concept of the rhizome, Kapferer and Taylor (2012) highlight the contestation of hegemonic state processes via overlooked or less visible processes. They identify societal practices counteracting the state that are open-ended, relational, and structured by “processes that spread out laterally in all directions” (5). Clément (2015) notes that the informal mechanisms that Russians relied on to solve problems for decades can be read as infrapolitics—including the reliance on blat, or personal relationships, that Ledeneva (2013) notes as marking Soviet-era social relations. This rhizomatic logic is relevant to some of the more successful examples of activism in our volume and may yet prove decisive tools in opposing mobilization, even electronic mobilization of soldiers.
The theme of infrapolitics reemerges throughout our book, underscoring how everyday hidden actions shape political behavior and provide a platform for the organization. Through this lens, the universal experiences of powerlessness and marginalization do not necessarily lead to anomie and atomization. Rather, hidden transcripts, which prefigure organized activism, are plentiful, from the online sharing of creative memes ridiculing the government to sophisticated forms of microresistance, such as cheat sheets on how to avoid traffic fines. These actions foreshadow our discussion of how activism shapes state-society relations, allowing for change, in fits and starts, in both social and state structures. Creativity and learning are implicit in these actions.
In the next post I will summarise the separate sections and chapters of the book.
*While our names appear in alphabetical order on the book’s cover, no one should be in any doubt that Regina Smyth is the intellectual motor driving this volume. Her resourcefulness, care, tact and organizational skills made it possible.
[Drunk Wisconsin wrote this after I asked why people were unwilling to challenge some of Snyder’s more outlandish claims – like the one about eugenics. There will be a follow-up on child abductions from Ukraine when Sasha Talaver publishes about it soon]
I first became suspicious of Tim Snyder when I saw his Twitter thread about how Russia’s soldiers “sent to die were largely Asians” and that “[i]n the mobilisation the people forced to serve will also be largely Asians.”
Criticizing the Russian Federation, especially since the start of its war with Ukraine, is easy. The Russian government makes it easy with every single utterance from an official figure, with every single action is takes on the battlefield, with every hypocritical whataboutism it engages in online. There is no need to make up nonsense, no need to skew statistics, no need to lie. The truth speaks for itself.
As I wrote in response, he is wrong and he has nothing to back up his claim. A randomly selected video of a dead or captured Russian soldier will immediately show that the soldiers Russia uses are not “largely Asians” by any reasonable definition.
I believe that Mr. Snyder’s incorrect beliefs are driven by reporting that has been severely misunderstood by the general public and by important personalities active in the public discourse. People who don’t know any better look at the statistics reported by outlets like Mediazona and incorrectly assume that soldiers from places like Bashkortostan or Dagestan or Buryatia are of non-Russian ethnicities.
Tim Snyder is not someone like that, he should know better. He should be honest with the facts and he should apply basic logic to the data we have available. The data speaks for itself: the majority of Russia’s population is ethnically Russian. Ethnic Russians (in the American understanding – white people, not Asians) make up about 70-80% of the population. They are found all over the country and make up a majority of the population in almost every region in Russia, including many “ethnic republics” like Buryatia, which is intended to be a republic within the Russian Federation that serves as a home to the native Buryat population.
As a matter of fact, only a handful of subjects within the Russian Federation are overwhelmingly majority non-Russian, and they’re located in the North Caucuses (Dagestan, Chechnya, etc.) and in Tuva. The rest either have ethnically Russian majorities or are a strong mix of Russians and non-Russians, like Tatarstan or Chuvashia.
When looking at the places within Russia where soldiers are are coming from, regardless of if they’re serving by contract or if they are mobilized, the common trend is not that those places are non-Russian, but that they are poor. Poverty is the link between Russian Chelyabinsk and non-Russian Dagestan. You cannot explain the disproportionate numbers from both Bashkortostan (~30% Russian and ~30% Bashkir) and nearby Sverdlovsk Oblast (~90% Russian) by ethnicity. If Buryatia provides a disproportionate number of soldiers relative to its overall population, you cannot assume that all those soldiers are non-Russian. After all, ~60% of Buryatia’s population is ethnically Russian, and no one has so far been able to provide any evidence that the selection mechanisms the government employs to obtain men to throw at the front are explicitly selecting for non-Russian ethnicities.
Moreover, the extremely strong claim that the majority of the soldiers sent to fight are “Asian” can’t possibly be true when you think about the numbers. If ~20% of Russia’s population is non-Russian, that takes the pool of potential soldiers down to ~14 million men, only a portion of which are of fighting age (20% of 140 million citizens is 28 million, only half of which are men). Do you really think that Russia has managed to get hundreds of thousands of people from a limited pool of 14 million to the fight? Why would they limit themselves in the number of soldiers they can muster in what they claim is an existential battle? It doesn’t pass the smell test in any way. Again, look at a randomly selected video of Russian soldiers, dead or alive, and see how many look “Asian.”
I bring up that single Twitter thread because it demonstrates Snyder’s thinking on one of the major points he makes in his piece titled Russia’s Eugenic War. It’s one of many flawed arguments he makes in the article, one of many logical leaps that have no grounding, and it’s the reason why we cannot take him seriously as a commentator on the war – he is not interested in trying to objectively understand the situation, he is actively taking a side in the conflict and choosing to go out of his way to make Putin and the Russian Federation look as evil as possible, even at the expense of factual accuracy and reasonable assumption. Again, there is no need to do that, they make themselves out to be evil all by themselves.
Snyder’s article doesn’t start off too bad. While I disagree with the “genocide” label he gives to the situation in Ukraine, it’s undeniable that the Ukrainian identity is showing its full potential as Ukrainians defend their homeland against a war of aggression. He’s on to something very profound, something many Russian intellectuals have been commenting on for years at this point, when he states “[i]ndeed, the war raises the question: what is Russia? Putin has failed to answer this question in any positive sense.” It’s true, Putin has failed in that goal entirely. It’s one of his regime’s biggest and most important failures, and has very serious ramifications for Russia. It seems, though, that Snyder and I disagree on why he failed and what it means.
“Judging from Russian mass media, including the all-important talk shows, the dominant Russian self-understanding at the moment is that of an “anti-Ukraine.”“
Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin Russian commentator, has coined the term “anti-Russia” to label Ukraine and its government, which he believes is a puppet state of the boarder West (led by the United States). Markov is an insane clown of a man, he’s wrong on almost every point, but the fact that Snyder uses the exact same terminology is telling because neither Markov nor Snyder are actually digging in to the complexities that make up either Ukraine or Russia.
Just as it would be wrong to define Ukraine’s entire existence as “anti-Russia,” it is wrong to do so in the other direction. Despite the fact that Ukraine is engaged in a war for its sovereignty, it still has broader ambitions that have nothing to do with Russia directly. Ukraine wants to join the EU, for example. Ukrainians want a government free from corruption, a government that answers to the people and performs the basic functions one would expect from a government, like building roads and funding high-quality public education. Snyder himself, at the very end of the piece, says “Ukrainians persist in defining their highest goal as “freedom,” in the sense of an open future, full of possibilities.”
If we were to actually judge Russia’s self-image by Russian mass media, including “the all-important talk shows,” we would come away with only one reasonable narrative; that Russia is the last bulwark against an aggressive and expansive West that seeks to dominate the entire world and impose its corrupt ideology on everyone. This can be seen in the way the talking heads on TV excuse Russia’s military failures by saying that Russia isn’t fighting Ukraine (which should be an easy enemy, in their eyes), but fighting literally all of NATO. This can be seen in Putin’s own speeches and addresses about the war, the majority of which are spent talking around Ukraine, not about Ukraine, and focusing on the evils and wrongdoings of the US and its allies.
What can’t be gathered from consuming that propaganda is that Russia is an “anti-Ukraine,” at least in part because Ukraine as a independent agent comes up less often than does “the collective West” or NATO. Russia may be portrayed as an “anti-West” or as an anti-Nazi force, considering that the propaganda claims Russia’s soldiers are fighting literal Nazis serving a literal Nazi regime in Ukraine. It would be easier to make the argument that Russia’s true aims in this war is to stop the spread of “gayness” to Russia (see Putin’s multiple references to gender-related Western culture war topics) than it would be to back up Snyder’s claim.
He then goes on to make an argument surrounding this claim: “There is no explicit image of Russia to be found among Russian elites; there is, however, an implicit racial notion to be found in policy.” It’s tough to know where to start on this topic because Snyder is wrong on every count.
He mixes the “self-cleansing” of Russia from internal threats like anti-war Russians who have either fled the country or who have been prosecuted by the authorities with the flawed claim that ethnic minorities are being sent to die in the war with the fact that Russian prisoners are being used as recruitment centers for the Wagner Group. First, the majority of anti-war Russians are ethnically Russian (because the country is majority ethnically Russian), so the “self-cleansing” can only be an ideological cleansing, not a eugenics-style purification of the race, as Snyder implies. Second, as I have already covered above, ethnic minorities are not being intentionally selected to fight and die in the war. The majority of Russia’s soldiers are ethnically Russian and the majority of casualties are subsequently ethnically Russian. Again, the country is majority Russian. Third, the prisoners that are being recruited (and it is recruitment, we haven’t seen forced expulsion of prisoners reported by anyone) by the mercenary Wagner Group are not being recruited out of a desire for “purification” as Snyder argues, but out of a desperate need to find warm bodies to fill the front line and rush the enemy’s positions. Russians are not eager to volunteer to fight in this war, so the government has to use other means, any means, to find more men. Snyder never provides any source that this prisoner use is “explicitly presented as a purification of the Russian population.”
While I can’t prove what is in Putin’s head, I can pretty confidently say what is not. Specifically, I can say that while Putin may be a bigot of the homophobic or transphobic variety, he is highly unlikely to be a racist bigot. Russia’s government is an autocratic pyramid with Putin at the top, so the alleged “implicit racial notion to be found in policy” necessarily has to emanate from Putin himself.
Let’s take Putin at his word. In order to avoid potential bias in my own translation, I have entered Putin’s address to the country that started the war into Google Translate. Here are some parts of the speech that I think are directly relevant to the topic I am covering here. The bolded emphasis is my own.
“In this regard, I appeal to the citizens of Ukraine. In 2014, Russia was obliged to protect the inhabitants of Crimea and Sevastopol from those whom you yourself call “Nazis”.”
“Today’s events are not connected with the desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. They are connected with the protection of Russia itself from those who took Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and its people.”
“I should also appeal to the military personnel of the armed forces of Ukraine.
Dear comrades! Your fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazis, defending our common Motherland, so that today’s neo-Nazis seized power in Ukraine. You took an oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people, and not to the anti-people junta that plunders Ukraine and mocks these same people.”
“..the fate of Russia is in the reliable hands of our multinational people.”
Here is another one from his speech on February 21st, 2022, three days before the invasion.
“Let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space. These are our comrades, relatives, among whom are not only colleagues, friends, former colleagues, but also relatives, people connected with us by blood, family ties.”
Here are excerpts from his address announcing the “partial” mobilization in Russia.
“Today I appeal to you, to all citizens of our country, to people of different generations, ages and nationalities, to the people of our great Motherland…”
And another very interesting quote from a speech to the Security Council in a meeting on March 3rd, 2022 in which he praised the heroism of an ethnically Lak Russian soldier, one of the first reported causalities that was publicly confirmed.
“I am a Russian person. As they say, I have Ivans and Marias in my family. But when I see examples of such heroism as the feat of a young guy Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov, a native of Degestan, a Lak by nationality, I want to say: “I am Lak, I am Dag, I am Chechen, Ingush, Russian, Tatar, Jew, Mordvin, Ossetian.” It is impossible to list all.”
To be clear, I despise Putin, I despise the war, and I do not accept any of the nonsense he spouts about NATO’s expansion or the “Nazi regime” in Ukraine. But as I said at the beginning, there is no need to create falsehoods to explain why Russia is in the wrong. Putin states it clearly himself, regardless of his clumsy attempts to coat the invasion as a measure of self-defense, that he intends to invade Ukraine and overthrow its government to establish a puppet regime. We take him at his word that he wants to invade Ukraine and overthrow the government, so why wouldn’t we take him at his word that he has no ill will towards Ukrainians as a people or the various ethnic minorities in Russia?
“Our multinational people” is a phrase that Putin has consistently used in all of his speeches for year. It’s an official part of the metodichka directives to state propaganda when it comes to TV and online media within Russia. The government always treads carefully around the issues of ethnicity and religion in Russia, always careful not to stir up any discontent. This is a major point of criticism of the Putin regime from Russia’s right wing. Yegor Prosvirnin and his wildly successful Sputnik & Pogrom project was a massive driver of critique that called out Putin for failing to use “русский/russki” and instead choosing to use the non-ethnically-specific “российский/rossiyski” when referring to the people of Russia. “Multinational” is an intentional choice by Putin’s regime because it avoids the difficult subject of Russia’s failed federalism and the internal contradictions of multiple nationalities/ethnicities existing alongside the Russian majority. In English, both of those variations are translated simply as “Russian” with no regard for which option is being used. Tim Snyder doesn’t have an out here; he should catch the difference and draw the appropriate conclusion that Putin and his government act in a politically correct manner when it comes to Russia’s internal politics.
Looking at the problems raised by the non-government-aligned Russian right wing is extremely useful. They point to the unregulated flow of migrants from Central Asia and the South Caucuses to Russia as a massive problem. How does that square with the alleged “eugenics” that Putin is supposedly engaging in? Importing Muslim non-Russians in massive numbers does not help build the “pure” society Snyder is claiming Putin wants to build.
Right wing bigots show their antisemitism and xenophobia by looking at the elite of the Russian Federation. “Look at who the oligarchs are!” they say.
Roman Abramovich – Jewish
Oleg Deripaska – Jewish
Alisher Usmanov – Uzbek
Petr Aven – Half Latvian, half Jewish
Vagit Alekperov – Azeri
The Rotenberg brothers (close friends of Putin from back when they were in the same sambo class when they were teenagers!) – Jewish
“Look at who is in major government positions!” they say.
Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnillin – Tatar
Head of the Russian Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina – Tatar
First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential AdministrationSergey Kirienko – Jewish, but adopted his mother’s Ukrainian last name
Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu– Tuvan
It must have taken Snyder a long time to put on all those blinders that allowed him to claim that the Russian Federation is intentionally sending ethnic minorities like Tuvans to die in the war when the Minister of Defense, the guy who is in charge of the war effort, is ethnically Tuvan himself.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the mini-dictator of Chechnya, is a huge public figure who allows himself a lot of freedom to make statements that are not at all in alignment with the eugenics theory. Would a dictator intent on building a purely Russian society allow the Islamist rhetoric that Kadyrov engages in? How does the “Akhmat is power” slogan cried out by Kadyrov’s personal forces work to attain this goal? What about “Allahu Akbar?” If Putin wants to purify Russia of anything non-Russian, why not start within Russia itself by going after a pseudo-Islamist semi-theocracy?
Listen to the leaked phone conversation between prominent Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin and businessman (and former Russian senator) Farkhad Akhmedov. The first is Jewish and the second is Azeri. At no point in their private conversation are they lamenting the top-down discrimination they face. At no point are they afraid for their lives or their livelihoods because of the alleged “implicit racial notion to be found in policy.” As a matter of fact, they use both “русский/russki” and “российский/rossiyski” without a second thought when referring the their people and their country.
Where are the purges? Why hasn’t Putin been using his incredible autocratic power to remove the “undesirables?” Why can we find non-Russians in Putin’s inner circle stretching back decades into his early life? My answer is clear – Putin is not a bigot of that kind. He has a perception of ethnicity and nationality that was formed by his life in the Soviet Union, which, despite many flaws and contradictions, was not the type of racist society that Snyder needs for his narrative.
It is undeniable that he does not believe Ukraine should be fully independent from Russia. It is undeniable that Putin believes Ukrainians and Russians to be almost the same thing, certainly close enough that they should exist under one big umbrella. Putin’s thoughts on this topic and many others are illogical, based on skewed readings of history, clearly suffering from delusions of grandeur, self-contradictory to the fullest extent, but they are not at all leading him to conduct “wartime eugenics.”
Snyder references Ivan Ilyin twice in his piece. He could have referenced Alexander Dugin or any other right wing Russian thinker and have been as equally wrong. I recommend this video on the ideology of Putin’s Russia to show why it is a mistake to refer to any philosopher when it comes to trying to understand Putin’s Russia. The bottom line is that Putin’s Russia has no ideology.
This brings me to the last point that Snyder makes in his post, a point that is periodically echoed by others online, that Russia is abducting Ukrainian children and forcing Ukrainian female refugees to flee to Russia as a part of an effort to help shore up the declining fertility rates and to raise them as Russians instead of Ukrainians.
I am not a demographer by training, so I cannot speak from a position of expertise here, but I highly doubt that even a couple hundred thousand Ukrainian refugees successfully integrated into Russian society are going to make any difference in Russia’s demographic troubles. The Russian Federation has somewhere around 140 million people. Even though every single dead Russian solider takes Russia further away from demographic stability, it is still a drop in the bucket, and I’d wager that the Ukrainians who end up assimilated into Russia will similarly not make or break any demographic trends.
What I believe is happening to Snyder is that he has taken a position in the Russo-Ukrainian war, he has chosen the side of Ukraine. It’s understandable. As a matter of fact, I think it’s the only reasonable position for non-Russians and non-Ukrainians to take when looking at who is in the wrong (Russia) and who is in the right (Ukraine, as it seeks to defend itself from a senseless war of aggression). But while normal people who casually observe current events can be excused for not going out of their way to research the details of the situation, public personas like Timothy Snyder have to be held to a higher standard.
It makes it very difficult to pick up any of Snyder’s books or read any of Snyder’s articles on Substack or elsewhere without having a massive asterisk by everything he says. At the bottom of the page, the asterisk is explained: “Take with a grain of salt, this person is highly biased.” He is considered a leading expert on the region, he is invited to high-profile podcasts like Sam Harris’ and he gets articles published in prominent media institutions.
Snyder’s commentary drives the thoughts of many others downstream, and the inaccuracies and bad assumptions he makes find their way into creating narratives in the public conversation that make it harder to stop this war, help Ukraine, and end Putin’s regime. We have a responsibility to try our best to understand the reality in which this war exists. We have to accurately gauge Putin himself and his government so that we don’t fail to anticipate an invasion like this one or, god forbid, a nuclear strike. We cannot expect to successfully end this war with fair conditions for Ukraine and create a stable relationship with (a hopefully revived and revitalized) Russia in the future without avoiding the unnecessary errors Snyder makes.
This is the first of a series of short posts about a new book (Varieties of Russian Activism) I have had the honour to co-edit with Andrei Semenov and Regina Smyth. Details at the end of the post.
Western media regularly report on Patriarch Kirill’s support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the media misjudge Kirill’s authority. They treat him as though he were a pope, whose word is law for the entire Russian Orthodox Church. To be sure, Kirill often seems to have this opinion of himself, and he has taken measures to centralize church power in his office. Nevertheless, these efforts have faced resistance. Bishops of dioceses and prominent priests in Moscow and elsewhere have learned how to carve out and protect a free space for themselves. None will speak out directly against Kirill or the war, but not all simply parrot his line. The range of opinion within the Church is even greater at the grassroots among ordinary priests and believers.
We might think of three categories: dissidents, true believers, and those who check the box, “difficulty in answering,” on public opinion surveys. The number of open dissidents is very small in a society in which public opposition to the war is strongly repressed. Soon after the invasion, about two hundred (out of 15,000) Russian Orthodox clergy signed an open letter calling on the government to cease hostilities. One signatory, Fr. Ioann Burdin, was arrested after a parishioner complained to the civil authorities about a sermon that Fr. Burden had preached against the war. A local court fined Burdin, and his bishop removed him from his post and instructed him to find another diocese in which to serve. Several other signatories have also been fined, and at least two have gone to the West, although others have faced no punitive measures, so long as they have refrained from further dissent in sermons or on social media.
At the other pole are those priests who gladly advertise themselves as true believers. They have actively supported the war effort, arguing, like the Patriarch, that the very existence of the nation is at stake. Some are prominent internet and media presences, such as Fr. Andrei Tkachev. They call on believers to donate money for projects in the Russian-occupied territories, to encourage enlistment in the armed forces, and to support new initiatives for patriotic education in schools, universities, and parishes.
Many ordinary priests and believers (the majority?), however, fall into a hard to define category. They privately express ambivalence about the war but refrain from public criticism. Their dominant reaction to the conflict is more like resignation than enthusiasm. Typical are comments such as, “the confrontation was probably inevitable,” or “the situation in the Donbass perhaps made a military intervention necessary,” allusions to the growing tensions between the two countries, especially since the Maidan Revolution of 2014. These church people want to be proud and supportive of their nation (and of the men going into war), but they are anxious that things may not turn out well, that Russia may again be humiliated, as it was when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Others, not knowing quite what to think or say—perhaps out of fear of repercussions, perhaps out of genuine confusion—nod their heads to the “special military operation” but refrain from taking an active pro-war position. Instead, they recommit themselves to doing what good they can in their small corners of the world: social ministries to recovering drug addicts, religious educational programs for children and adults, or restoration of church buildings that fell into disrepair in the communist days. These priests and believers will often say something like, “The Church should be above politics.”
Still others are too pressed by local concerns to worry much about church or state politics. The average priest in a rural village barely makes ends meet financially, and he serves people whose daily lives are often grindingly hard. Many lack access to good medical care (the average life expectancy of a Russian male is barely 65 years), are used to economic deprivation and personal setbacks, and fear that the world is passing them by, as young people move away and adopt new social values.
Jeremy Morris’ term “defensive consolidation” captures something of this mood. I call it “the politics of ambivalence.” Let me describe how it plays itself out in one diocese. The bishop still has warm memories of the hospitality that he received on a visit to the United States twenty years ago. He has many professional and personal connections to Ukraine and in recent years has expressed dismay at the growing political tensions. He once said, “What has happened is like a bad divorce. I think that Russians and Ukrainians will find a way to live together again, but it will take several generations.”
While faithfully posting Patriarch Kirill’s pro-war pronouncements, the diocesan website emphasizes local church events, not the war. The bishop’s own statements, reported by local media but not posted on the site, have been circumspect. He has noted that Russian attacks on Ukraine have come back to “hit us here at home,” referring to Ukrainian missile and drone strikes within Russia, sometimes damaging churches in border areas. He emphasizes the diocese’s humanitarian work, especially in providing food and medicine to refugees (primarily women and children) from eastern Ukraine and helping them relocate. He recently reported that dozens of Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) priests have fled to Russia from areas that the Ukrainian army has reoccupied. They were afraid that they would be accused of collaboration, because they had helped Russian military authorities distribute food and clothing to the local populace.
What emerges from this particular diocese is a picture of the many different sides of the war as the bishop’s flock experiences it. The bishop would not think of challenging the Patriarch or the President, but neither does he talk like a “true believer.” Indeed, it is hard to know exactly where he stands. Even if he were opposed to the war (and I do not know that he is), he would regard public protest as counterproductive. What he does emphasize is his pastoral concern for the little people affected by the conflict. He wants his priests and parishes to continue their constructive, everyday work of worship and service.
Western critics of Russia and its church would like to see more dissidents—and perhaps Russia cannot change until there are. But it seems to me that many Russians, even those born after 1991, have learned the Soviet art of going with the flow publicly, while personally remaining ambivalent about the official state or church line. In the worst case, this ambivalence results in paralysis. People hunker down and quit thinking about others and their needs. I am convinced, however, that in some cases ambivalence impels creativity: the creation of spaces in which people commit themselves to acting humanely and therefore in quiet contrast to the hatred that rages around them.
The politics of ambivalence does not change the course of the war, but to many Russians it seems the only viable alternative to active, public support.
An example of the academic transitional justice literature
Seems like it’s easy to get sidetracked by the goings on of the ‘good Russians’ in exile, and I promise to move on to more worthwhile causes soon, but because the discussion in Riga this week touched on lustration* I think it is interesting. Why? Because real ‘lustration’ is happening now in liberated territories of Ukraine (jail sentence in Lyman for v. low level bureaucrat). The questions of decommunization, collective guilt, and EU-accession (for Ukraine) and so on, are all connected to this topic.
It’s quite scathing in its own right. Here are some snippets that relate to what I have to say. (I edited them down a little, but they are in the order of the original article)
One of the panelists, culturologist Andrey Arkhangelsky, argues that “Putin’s man is a Soviet man without ideological superstructures.” He undertakes to characterize the “ideomania” of contemporary Russia. “Communal hatred for a neighbor. Piss in her soup, relatively speaking, ”says Arkhangelsky.
His thought is picked up by Yan Levchenko (also a culturologist). Waving his hand he proclaims: “War is the realized simplicity of a man who wants to pee in his neighbor’s soup.”
Moderator Morozov admits that he has about the same vision of the problem, and adds: “It is largely an understanding that this Z-ideology is not produced, but it really is in some sense of the word … is “folk””.
If a mosquito bites us, it does not mean that it has an ideology. In the first case, this is the instinct of self-preservation, in the other case, the mosquito just wants to eat,” sociologist Igor Yakovenko addresses other participants from the stage.
This is another form of processing the masses, the population. <…> But, as Yan [Levchenko] rightly said, it merges with the layers of the communal kitchen, the layers of hatred for the neighbor, irrational hatred,” sums up the sociologist. In his opinion, people who should appear before the tribunal after the end of the war are divided into two categories: “werewolves” and “zombies”.
The question that started the discussion – what can be done right now to stop the war – is left unanswered by almost all experts.
“I personally support lustration as wide, fast and harsh as possible,” says former political prisoner Daniil Konstantinov . He admits that he is “close to the style” of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. The activist believes that a revolution may take place in Russia in the future, after which the country is unlikely to have courts capable of punishing the current accomplices of the war, and suggests creating “special bodies” just in case.
— Daniel, learn the theory of human rights! – Elena Lukyanova, a lawyer and teacher at the Free University , reacts emotionally to this . When emotions subside, Konstantinov recounts his meeting with Vano Merabishvili, the former head of the Georgian Interior Ministry: He says that when we fired a huge number of police officers, we faced claims from our Western partners, who, like Elena, say: “How is it? There are human rights, labor legislation, social obligations. How can you hire and fire people like that?” And then Vano leans over to me and says: “How can they not understand? Well, what kind of people are these? These are the cops!”
It is no less necessary, Gudkov believes, to create a “big media”: “To reach the deep people, otherwise we are working for each other. We convince each other of the need for beauty, democracy and freedom. And the deep people don’t know about it!”
“Maybe we should really create some kind of coordination meeting to develop a plan for taking power in the most reasonable and safe way? Gennady Gudkov finally offers. And he repeats: “We must give the plan to the people.”
Ilya Azar, who missed this speech, remarks dryly: “This is not a plan.”
My initial harsh response is that this talk reveals people who not only know nothing of their own country (beyond their info-bubbles and massively simplistic models of human behaviour), but even worse, do not wish to know anything. The topic of lustration comes up with the ominous option: ‘special authorities’ «специальные органы». instead of courts.
Only Lukyanova and a v. few others come out of this with, not only any dignity, but with even faint stirrings of empathy, interest in understanding processes, or critical thinking. And these, recall, are the great and good liberal minds of the whole post-Soviet generation(s).
Gudkov snr. is at least more or less honest – he repeats what I said *a year ago*: media in exile needs to work out how to speak to actual Russians, and not to itself. But again, this idea is a unidirectional fantasy: Russians for him are a receptacle, not capably of becoming political subjects.
And as for the others, characterizing their countrymen and women as zombies, werewolves and ‘Soviet’ people who like to piss in the soup of their neighbours is really going to win them supporters at home. Arkhangelskii should be ashamed of himself.
Fundamentally, these people are just as bad as Putin [ok, maybe not as bad, lol] because they don’t recognize that essentially their own mindset hardly differs: change only from above, imposed by coercion, viewing people as incapable of political subjectivity, extreme generalization and sweeping measures, the people are mere clay at best…
Of course, my own (I’ll admit, intentionally provocative) response on Twitter provoked pushback from people thinking that I believed existing Russian courts were capable of dispensing justice post-bellum.
The foundation of democratic justice is to be judged by one’s peers. I’m merely pointing out that the main ideas of the ‘opposition’ amount to pretending that transitional justice can be achieved without courts in a make-believe space where they, the good Russians, have complete dictatorial power. This is symptomatic of their fundamental unseriousness and a trap for oppositionists because the implication is they support a Japan 1945 scenario. And this cuts to to the heart of competing ideas about lustration, which are always part and parcel of realistic and achievable ‘transitional justice’ (a big academic and practitioner topic of research). Ekaterina Schulmann is absolutely correct on this: lustration involves compromises. That’s right folks, a first for this blog: me and Schulmann agree on something.
And this is all the more ironic because of the liberal credentials of these ‘good Russians’…. who are nonetheless the first to jettison their principles, including a commitment to ‘due process’. As I also pointed out recently, even the Venice Commission in Ukraine continues to struggle to ensure due process and equality before the law in the decommunization and post-conflict lustration laws going through parliament there. (And part of the conditionalities of EU-accession).
One could do a network sociology of the people in that benighted room in Riga and you would get numerous people who earned good money FOR YEARS from the Presidential Administration and V. Surkov via PR man Gleb Pavlovsky or elsewhere. And they get to decide that *now* they’re the ‘good Russians’? Because the system at whose table they ate well at for years, eventually ate them?
*I’m using the term lustration in this post very loosely and I’m aware I am conflating it with decommunization laws, and prosecution of war-time collaborators. The Russian ‘liustratsiia’ is used by Russian observers generally as a process of identifying, punishing, and barring from public life in the future those guilty of particular crimes during the current period.
Can you spot the barriers to decolonising in the picture at my workplace?
In the previous post I responded to an article that accused ‘Russian cultural studies’ in the West of inculcating ‘imperial’ values in students. As a follow up, the Moscow Times asked me to comment for a piece. They asked: are you in favour of an art for art’s sake approach to studying Russian culture? Should Russian culture be ‘decolonised’ and have any efforts to do this backfired? In your opinion, what is in the immediate future for Russia studies? And how should Russia experts respond to criticism from scholars of Ukraine? Here’s my detailed response. You can read the interview here (when it appears).
Art for Art’s Sake
As discussed in my previous post, these questions largely show widespread misunderstanding of what humanities and social science education in universities is for. While students who enter universities might conceivably choose a subject like Russian Studies because of their romantic ideas about its exoticism, they are quickly disabused of this motivation in pretty much any state university programme on either side of the Atlantic. And actually, I think the idea that students nowadays choose subjects based on such notions as ‘art for art’s sake’ is rather condescending. Most students on my courses acknowledge that Russia is an important part of the world, and a constituent of Europe, or European culture, and think that they should know more about it, quite often because of the inadequate caricature of ‘The East’ they perceive in journalistic and public culture in general. To come back to the first question: 99% of university courses abandoned the naïve idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ long ago. The purpose of Area Studies, of which Russian Studies is an small component, is to inculcate (or rather promote and encourage) two things: expert and usable knowledge, wielded by critical thinkers.
It is true that the study of Russian literature was once (long before my time) similar to the study of other literatures: taught from the perspective of a ‘canon’ of universally great writers studied for their intrinsic insights into Western-centric concepts of moral complexity (the F R Leavis tradition), or, in the already anachronistic contrarianism of Harold Bloom, writing in the 90s, for “aesthetic pleasure and self-insight”. It is ironic that these kind of charges should be put to a curriculum of Russian literature in 2023. It says far, far more about those imagining this non-existent Bloomian classroom, than those who teach and study. Bloom was reacting in the early 1990s to the dominant approach, ‘social reading’, that had been operative since the early 1970s and before: that a value of studying literature was to better understand history, society, and the big structures shaping change. If Bloom fought a rear-guard action for essentialism and elitism, the vast majority of literature students had, for generations already, been made painfully aware that the ‘canon’ was itself an artificial construction after the fact. When I studied literature at university from 1992, my teachers were already ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, by reading and analysing ‘neglected’ works alongside, or more often, in favour of, ‘the classics’. I spent more time reading Mary Wollstonecraft than Byron or Shelley, Fanon than Conrad, and South Asian writers than Kipling. Indeed, it was already indispensable to do such parallel reading. When I started teaching Russian literature in 2000 I continued the work of my teachers, selecting works for study which told us something important about Soviet and Russian history, politics and society. And that included works written in the twentieth century which revealed the horrors of the Civil War, Stalinism, collectivisation (and Holodomor), WWII and the Holocaust, and the collapse of the USSR. In educational contexts where it was possible, students read these works in the original Russian language.
Should Russian culture be ‘decolonised’?
Decolonising, along with post-coloniality, and anti-imperialism are all tricky concepts that are quite difficult to use without further definitions. In particular the first term has been strongly associated with recognising the deep structures and currents of racism and their roots in Euro-American culture and society. I work in a global studies department and our courses on Eastern Europe are merely a part of many programmes. Some of our more advanced programmes ‘provincialise’ Europe by studying it and the ideas associated with it alongside, and from the perspective of, scholars from South Asia, East Asia, and South America. Russia is a ‘special’ case because it is a Eurasian country and can be viewed as a ‘subaltern’ empire – as Viatcheslav Morozov has memorably written. What he means by this is that historically Russians strove to be treated ‘equally’ with other Europeans, but were invariably relegated in a process of ‘orientalisation’ – seen as exotic, backward, and a threat to the more advanced and enlightened Western civilization. Ukraine sat both within this paradigm – orientalized as part of East Slavic ‘non-really European Europe’, and within the Russian imperial hierarchy. A curriculum proposing deep knowledge about the USSR period and after would have to address both Russian and Ukrainian (and others’) postcolonial identities. Specifically the process of ‘decolonising’ would recognize that the Russian and Soviet empires generated of cultural knowledge about Ukraine privileging the ideas and narratives of the centre (Russian-centric, or perhaps in the USSR more complicatedly, Moscow-centric) over those of Ukrainians themselves. Decolonial study of Ukraine would also show how that Russo-centric cultural knowledge was applied to subjugate, mute, and disempower Ukrainian aims to attain statehood and develop a national identity. However, this would be need to be done in parallel with recognizing those same decolonising processed as applied to ‘Russia’ (which has never been a ‘nation state’ and is a product of complex processes of internal colonization and imperial expansion), and ‘Russians’, whose own search for a national identity has been stymied by the imperial overlay for centuries.
However, we should not be coy: what most people mean when they say we must ‘decolonise’ Russian Studies is that a hygiene test should be carried out on all writers and thinkers and that those failing this test, from Dostoevsky to Brodsky, should be inscribed in a black book, accessibly only with a key from the head librarian. A keynote to a recent academic conference I attended in 2022 was by a Ukrainian sociologist. His proposal was clear: all study of Russian culture should be stopped immediately. Russian authors and books (all of them) should be removed from European seats of learning until the war ends, reparations are paid, and Ukrainian studies given an equal ‘footing’ with the study (whatever that looks like) of Russia. The academic audience was very receptive to this proposal.
The immediate future for Russia studies? And how should Russia experts respond to criticism from scholars of Ukraine?
Hopefully it is clear from what I’ve already written that literary, culture, and indeed Russian studies also, has been ‘critical’ (of colonialism, imperialism, racism, dictatorship, and totalitarianism) for generations, and in some ways at the forefront of decolonizing and anti-imperial thinking – particularly where is it part of a curriculum (as in my institution) aimed at provincializing Europe. But let me be more specific, the best response to criticism from scholars of Ukraine is to take action. I take decisions I make about course curriculum very seriously: in my previous position (2005-2016) we collectively taught a course on the ‘cultural politics’ of the former Soviet space. The course was initially conceived by scholars of Georgian, Armenian, and Polish-Ukrainian heritage. In its many iterations, ‘Russia’ as an object and subject of study in the course was positioned appropriately: as merely one perspective. A whole semester was given over to non-Russian and non-Ukrainian topics and another semester saw Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet experience share roughly equal billings. No one would say there was ever an ‘ideal’ balance, nor that such a balance was possible or even desirable (because in some years we were fortunate to have more ‘indigenous’ scholars contribute). Today I teach a descendent of this course and because I know little about the Caucasus and I have much fewer contact hours, I have adapted this course and now it has roughly equal coverage of Russia and Ukraine since the perestroika period of the USSR. In my view the ‘global’ study of Russia, and any other state, is the way to go forward – contextualising it at every turn. The vast majority of sources on Ukraine in my course are from contemporary Ukrainian scholars. In conclusion, as long as ‘area studies’ exist (they tend to be reinvented every thirty years) there is unlikely to be any other sustainable model (outside tiny ivy-league colleges) for teaching Russia and Russian, and that is true also of Ukraine and Ukrainian.
Seems like you can write any old crap even for EU-funded media now and make defamatory accusations without any repercussions: This latest of many such articles contains baseless and frankly ridiculous statements about ‘Western’ scholars who work on Russian culture. We are all ‘useful idiots’ now.
“Western universities and research centres focusing on Russian cultural studies often end up in a way glorifying the Russian empire both in its Czarist, Bolshevik, and current forms instead of uncovering and condemning the track record of dictatorship, mass repressions, mass murders, deportations, and genocide.”
No evidence is presented to support this statement.
Secondly, in a section attacking Jan Rachinsky of Memorial, the authors write:
“Thus, a weaponised Russian/Soviet culture is being promoted in the West with the help of gullible education and research centres, eulogising Russian culture and raising whole new generations of scholars with an imperial paradigm and mindset.”
The only evidence offered to support this second statement is a link to a Swedish university film club (in Uppsala). This statement neglects to mention that the club makes clear it seeks to contextualize Soviet film in terms of the ‘tragedy’ and ‘pain’ of the Stalinist and post-Stalin epochs. https://ires.uu.se/…/master-programme…/ires-film-club-/…
The two opinion writers have no claim to expertise on the topic of Russian Studies. One has a Law degree from Cambridge and works for USAID, the other is also a lawyer working for a think tank that has no expertise in this area.
I wouldn’t usually pay much attention to this, but the article is published by a relatively ‘mainstream’ EU-affiliated outfit. Many people will see this article. Yes, I know it is an Op-Ed, but even the shonkiest outlet would exercise more editorial control than is in evidence here.
Of course, the chief irony is that Dostoevsky is increasingly taught as a quintessentially European (showing the influence of French and English literature), as much as a ‘Russian’ writer. In the neoliberal university you are MORE likely to encounter him in an English literature department, where he would be presented as a globally-significant author who anticipated some twentieth-century developments in literature. Much, if not most of the Russian context, along with the politics, would be absent completely. The course you study him on might use – *horror-of-horrors* – the politically-incorrect term “The Great European Novel”. (Long ago, I once taught Dostoevsky and Tolstoy along with Stendhal and Flaubert in a course bearing this name).
By contrast it is precisely in a Russian culture or lit course that his views would come in for dissection, contextualization, and implicit or explicit condemnation (as a thinker who became arch-conservative, betraying the progressive ideals of his youth). Should his political views of Pan-Slavism be highlighted? Yes they should. Any Russian Studies course that is not a pure ‘lit-crit’ one, would probably spend some time talking about his political views and how he, as a public figure, represents more than one current in 19-century Russian thought. And how influenced that thought is by European traditions, while not losing sight of its indigenous development.
In a lit-crit course ‘Dosti’, as he’s known by teachers (or it just me?), might be read alongside Tolstoy, who also comes in for a bashing now, despite writing from a (albeit limited) perspective of the colonized well ahead of his time. The New Yorker published a piece with a spectacularly bad-faith interpretation of Tolstoy’s anti-oppression, Christian pacifist and anarchist philosophy. If we transplanted what the New Yorker author wrote to English lit, it would come out equally anachronistically and bizarrely wrong as something like: ‘Shakespeare in Othello ignores the resonance of #MeToo in his depiction of Desdemona’s murder. Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the vegetable metaphors in Othello does disservice to the idea of guerilla gardening for progressive causes.’
I don’t bother keeping track of these ridiculous self-promoting pieces attacking authors dead for a hundred and fifty years or more, but sure as eggs is eggs there will be more of them.
On the one hand Cosmism is a welcome change from the usual, and very lazy analysis that sees Russia as some kind of Thanatos culture (obsessed with death). However, Zizek seems to confuse Cosmism with celebration of death and Thanatos. He completely misses the point. Cosmism is so indelibly linked to the Soviet project of overcoming death for all humankind. I mean, even Star Trek is a warmed over version of ‘dialectical monism’ (things become ‘one’ via change). Keti Chukhrov did a good write up of this in her book. She has a lovely passage on Ilyenkov’s Soviet ‘eternal return’:
if mind is ever the attribute of matter, and matter cannot do without thinking, any form of matter will develop into mind, and since the mind is only the human mind, humankind will always be able to be reborn in other galaxies.
Transhumanism and all those related esoteric Russian avenues of thought are about as far as one could get from relevance to the war. Which is presumably why Zizek the jackdaw thinker pounced on them like shiny baubles. Truly beyond parody.
Thing is, Zizek is just a lazy f*cker. He did a slightly more serviceable job in Meduza just a few days ago. In that piece he makes a good point that directly challenges my thesis about ‘defensive consolidation’ that is hard to counter: “Don’t be fooled by pragmatic arguments about the lack of power of ideology. Most people are cynics who don’t take it seriously. But it still works.” In one line we perhaps have Zizek’s main lasting contribution to marxian psychoanalysis. When we say we’re not ideological, we prove the point that there is ideology. When we say ‘There’s No Alternative’ to the cartel politics we have in the US or UK: that’s ideology. When Russians say ‘My country right or wrong. I’m not for war’, that’s an insidious reconstituted form of regime ideology.
The problem with this? There is no ideology behind Putinism, neither Cosmological, nor Thanatos. We’ll come back to this in a moment.
Zizek wouldn’t be Zizek without a defence of the ‘what if’ federal USSR survived. Ok, this is a short piece, but it still comes out like a very childlike crayon version of some actually quite reasonable alternative history. I guess here I am also disturbed by his typical lack of knowledge about the Bloc he grew up in. In garbled fashion he says that the Soviet multicultural federative union was salvageable/a template for a peaceful post-USSR. One *might* agree with ginormous caveats, but here Zizek has to couch it in terms of ‘pluralism’, precisely the opposite of any conceivable Soviet ontology. This is a red rag to me: read just any discussion of monism and communism in anthropology, I beg you! Dumont, Lambek, Descola, Graeber – all authors I read thanks to my colleague A. K. Clearly Zizek is not a wide reader, I mean, we even have evidence he never really read Ranciere (see the Counterpunch take-down).
Something you always suspected: your favourite lefty uncle is really just the worst liberal simp: “The ideal Russia in my view is the eastern version of the European Union. I think the EU is a pretty efficient system of institutions.” Wow! Screw that sidewise with a big Frontex boat. Phillip Cunliffe and Christopher Bickerton have just written two useful articles in the NLR on the EU as a dysfunctional set of institutions which block real politics: The EU’s power strengthens in proportion to the decay of democracy within member countries, and political legitimacy within it comes from elite supranationalism, rather than democratic representation. The EU is neither ‘federal’, nor ‘democratic’ in any meaningful way, its institutions serve a minority of the Bloc and have been unable to deal with expansion, neighbour-relations, internal imbalances, democratization and any of the challenges of C21 you might mention. And the barriers to changing this are formidable. The irony is that one could envisage a post-USSR democratic socialist federation as a better model than the EU. Bickerton in particular highlights how EU decision-making is usurped by national interests (European Council) in a way that makes the USSR look like a paragon of post-national governance. Zizek provides just one more example of Westerncentric (EU bloc as the only imaginable sovereignty pool).
Okay, on Lenin Zizek is ‘not even wrong’ – Lenin the thinker is of course anti-imperialist, but you can’t defend Lenin just by blaming Stalin as the original Leninist. Once more, this is sub-undergraduate Russian history. Next up, a good bit: who doesn’t like someone taking Chomsky’s bullshit down a peg or too, or ridiculing the disgustingly hypocritical reaction of parts of the German left? I mean, we all do that for breakfast every day.
The useful part of the article is on the coalesce of authoritarian countries and post-fascism. However, of course this ain’t original. Is an anti-liberal alliance possible between Taliban, China and Russia? What about global capitalism? Seems a bit… lacking in materialist analysis. Has he read Klein and Pettis on China? Why would China align with anyone when they can’t even raise internal consumption enough to dream of non-dependence on US demand. The hackneyed ‘BRICS’ is another giveaway. I’m sorry, you what? BRICS is so 2008, you know.
As someone who owns many Zizek books and who paid for hardback copies, I just can’t stand it when he memoryholes his own work: now he calls for war communism without communism – just cowardly! In ‘In Defence of Lost Causes‘ Zizek wrote: ‘between the Stalinist gulag and the Nazi annihilation camp was also, at that historical moment, the difference between civilization and barbarism’. Zizek literally wrote perhaps one of the best non-academic defences of Stalinism as a way of rehabilitating communism. He seems to have forgotten this.
Then there’s some very obvious if simplistic stuff about identity politics in the US being a distraction from the politics of solidarity and opposing fascism. Finally we get one decent point: “Russia is now a very traumatized, divided country. The official discourse is becoming more radical…most people are just scared. Russia cannot be rejected as a country. The Putin-supporting crowd is not even applauding itself.”
Basically Zizek presents a set of arguments indistinguishable from any of my blogs from the last year. He adds: “fascism is a way of avoiding internal contradictions by proclaiming a false sense of solidarity.” “Russia is the most divided society, and if you play the card of national unity correctly, this can be partially disguised. So the term can be applied to Russia, but it is very limited in time.” Like me, Zizek would disagree with the ‘harder’ Russian fascism diagnosers like Greg Yudin.
“The tragedy of Russia is that in the 1990s the West tried to forcefully impose a neoliberal model on it. The direct result is Putin and the war.” writes Zizek at the end. Once again, a bit of a caricature. I wouldn’t be annoyed, but it does disservice to the ‘trauma’ argument with which I agree and which is at the heart of most of what I’m writing at the moment. Again, Zizek clearly didn’t read ANY scholarship on domesticating neoliberalism, or even any serious work on neoliberalism published after 2000. There are reams on this that avoid this ‘victim’ narrative Zizek repeats. Neoliberalism was as much a Russian elite project as anything and even emerges earlier indigenously within Soviet planning.
Surely it’s possible to write a ‘Zizekian’ materialist analysis of the war, and one which takes account of psychoanalysis (ressentiment) and actual history (geopolitical tragedy, actually-existing socialism) without Zizek. It must be tried. And preferably without hiding behind the opaque shadow of a Lacan or Badiou.
Nikolai Fyodorovich rolling his eyes at Zizek’s latest. Borovsk, Kaluga Region.
Postsocialism 