Tag Archives: book review

‘Russia’s Spiral into Madness’ reviewed: The Times’ man in Russia writes his acid take on 25 years in Russia

Leave a reply

Marc Bennetts’ new book pretty much hits the spot for anyone who wants a comprehensive and accessible journalistic treatment of ‘how we lost Russia’. Now, to those who know my extreme prejudice against journalists, this might sound like a backhanded compliment but it’s not. Having met Marc after he returned to the UK after more than half a lifetime of living in Russia, I knew how angry he was at the country he’d devoted so much to. I was frankly a bit scared that his book would join a long shit list I’ve made of ranty, self-indulgent and poorly researched takes puking on their own moral clarity.

Thank God I was wrong. What Bennetts has produced is a product of anger and disappointment, but it’s all the better for that. Many of my well-informed readers will not need to read this book. But then it was not written for them. It does exactly what it needs to do to inform the educated Western reader and actually give them a real taste of the foreign journalist’s life in Russia and, as the title says, a ‘spiral’ into madness.

I may quibble at the psychological metaphors at the best of time, but Bennetts is very careful to document things he’s experienced – like the utter cynicism and mendaciousness of other – particularly Russian – journalists and broadcasters like Kiselyov and Popov. These are the scenes that stand out – as one would expect from probably one of the best embedded and connected foreign journalists in Russia. Standout moment in this genre for me was when Bennetts phones up an ailing Gleb Pavlovsky after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to ask him about D. Medvedev’s transformation. He’s told curtly: Medvedev ‘is not a popular person’.

Now, the insider journo view, while welcome and interesting, is not even the main thing though. Thank goodness. We’ve got chapters on Galina Starovoitova (assassinated 1990s politician who represents the ‘road not travelled’ and where Bennetts examines the question of lustration). We have zoom-ins on Nemtsov, Navalnyi, Zhirinovsky, the Orthodox Church, the occult, and plenty of Bennett’s exceptionally good Ukraine journalism post-2022. And a lot on Putin. But in a good way, trust me.

I particularly liked the way that the book moves back and forth from Russia to Ukraine – this is surely something that will give it lasting power given the allergy journalists have towards such an approach. The book actually opens with the liberation of Kherson – which is both extremely smart and also serves to illustrate one of the main conundrums: the production of pathological indifference (in this case Bennetts; supposition about the motives of Russian soldiers).

Off the bat, Bennetts doesn’t shy away from strong metaphors (like the title and subtitle of the book) and for a little while I wondered whether he’d also go off the deep end. However, even in the preface he says that he’s given the material enough space to ‘control my hatred’. He wonders for moment whether his relationship to Russia is like the conflicted emotions of the relatives of brutal criminals. It could have all unravelled after this. So too could have a thematic commitment to the topic of ‘collective delusion’. It’s there, but only to the extent it should be – the first-hand accounts of people denying the reality beyond their bubbles and contorting themselves to protect their received views. The depiction of how people avoid cognitive dissonance is almost identical to that I describe in my own book. Overall then, two shit-list bullets dodged.

The opening chapter ends then with a question that really sums up the problem with journalistic accounts: why has Russia ‘allowed itself’ to be ruled by the same ‘unremarkable’ man for a quarter of a century and so quickly slide into ‘violent nationalism’. This is again, shit-list territory for me. Thankfully, Bennetts doesn’t give in too much to amateur political science and the book quickly settles down after this to the much more revealing, rewarding, and informative work of explaining why the British gen-Xers are so Russia pilled. Much of what Bennetts writes applies to so many of us. For shame! When he returns to the ‘why’ questions, it’s generally along the lines of what one would expect: Putin bought people off. Which is not exactly wrong.

Early in the book, Bennetts is effective in portraying the ‘revenge’, ‘humiliation’ motivations among interlocutors as they sometimes gleefully indulge their geopolitical id and cathetically (not cathartically) allocate their darkest mental energy to the dreadful objects of Ukraine and West. This somewhat undercuts the earlier ‘apathy’ musings. But that’s ok, I think. Some of the time one gets the impression that already long ago Bennetts had become more than a little jaded – as one might expect – and that he enjoyed baiting and provoking ‘believers’. I’ve done the same, I have to admit. He doesn’t seem to reflect on how this approach might affect the kind of defensively consolidating reaction he often describes

I’ve also experienced the same ‘demonic’ reactions when cognitive dissonance threatens to come undone (when he tells someone Ukraine is not being ‘liberated’). I too could have used the term ‘poisoned’ to talk about the effect of continuous exposure to Russian TV. Nonetheless, for a fourth time, Bennetts avoids the easy moral pandering of 95% of his colleagues when he quickly follows all this up by reminding us that none of his Russian acquaintances supported the war or Putin and later discusses the thousands of anti-war arrests. I’m genuinely surprised when a journalist resists the temptation to do this nowadays. Even after meticulous descriptions of wartime Mariupol, Kharhiv and Kherson, Bennetts returns immediately to undercut the implication of collective guilt by focussing on the organized and principled opposition within Russia to the invasion.

As I mentioned – the sections about Putin are surprisingly nuanced: especially where Bennetts does the job so many émigré Russian experts (and scholars!) are unable to do and expertly dismantles the myth that Putin is popular or represents some secret connection between state and people. We also have multiple excellent takedowns of the fellow-travellers and state propagandists – acid depictions of their intellectual and moral corrosion.

Bennetts’ book has something of the John Reed about it. Sincere, insider, adventurer and shrewd observer. That’s probably less of a compliment than it sounds, because despite its skill and immediacy it has some of the same blinkers, as one would expect. But overall, it is excellently done. I cannot say I agree with all of it, especially when it gets psychological or sociological, but I’m glad I read it.

Five landmark sociology and anthropology books to help understand Russia

4 Replies

A comment to a previous post asked the question: “Could you please indicate 10 or so best anthropological and/or sociological books which explain the current state of affairs in Russia?”

The question implies a need for books with political insight, which is a matter of debate. In this post I’ll stick to books in English since 2005, and which had a considerable amount of fieldwork behind them (broadly understood). In my view there many other deserving recent books that could make this list. There are also many which are not in English and not characterized by significant fieldwork but which are equally important; they might appear in a further post. The aim here is just a quick and dirty list for readers unfamiliar with this terrain. All these books are, in my view, interesting and accessible to educated general readers and give a diverse flavour of engaged and embedded research carried out in (and sometimes before) the ‘Putin era’.

Georgi M. Derluguian. 2005. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography. Chicago University Press.

Derluguian, by force of intellectual personality, manages to combine micro-level insights with ambitious theorizing and historicizing. Today, his book seems prophetic because it warned of the effects of a dangerous vacuum after the curtain fell on the ‘most successful example of a state-directed effort to industrialize in order to catch up with the West’. After 1991, two reactive strategies were unleashed – corrupt patronage that defeated and demoralized groups who sought to develop civil society and democracy, and secondly, the mobilization of ethnic and religious solidarities as forms of ‘resistance’ from below.

The blurb for this book is unusual for an academic tract in that its promise of a ‘gripping account of the developmental dynamics of Soviet collapse’ is no exaggeration. While ostensibly telling the story of a prominent leader in the Chechen revolution, its portrait of the overlooked underclass of the Soviet project is memorable. Correctly emphasizing the role of employment-related benefits as socially-cohesive in Soviet times, Derluguian details the subproletarians ‘exit’ from society. Rather than take ethnic strife at face value, the author sees this third class as opportunistically mobilized to fight in the many conflicts of the post-Soviet space. At the end of the book he writes:

“How does one operationalize in research the residual category of “no-longer-peasants” that variously goes by the names of “Street,” “marginals,” “subaltern peoples,” “crowds,” “underclass,” “adolescent gangs,” “lumpens,” or, very broadly and negatively, “de-ruralized populations”? Bourdieu’s discussion of the Algerian sub-proletariat demonstrated ways of meaningfully incorporating in our analyses this most awkward of all classes – a class that is increasingly important, both numerically and politically, in the contemporary world.”

For Derluguian, the theory of so-called “ethnic conflicts” formulated in the book centres on class, state, and social networks rather than nationalism or identity: ‘the revived evocation of traditional moral communities tends to scapegoat competing ethnic groups, weak and corrupt local governments, and, increasingly, the common enemy that is American “global plutocracy.”’

Olga Shevchenko. 2009. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

This is a book my students read, and I would recommend to anyone who really wants to get a feel for the sense of insecurity experienced in the 1990s and how it was formative of so many currents in today’s society. Shevchenko’s work is universally praised for capturing a genuine ‘zeitgeist’ of insecurity and uncertainty. ‘Crisis’ is a governing and everyday feeling about life in late 1990s Moscow. Like in Walter Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History, the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. One of the first metaphors used by residents is that of ‘living on a volcano’. Shevchenko focusses on continual efforts of people to cultivate practical autonomy and independence (from each other and from the state). Crisis becomes a symbolic resource for people who default to cynicism.

“one’s capacity to disengage oneself from all things public became a value in itself, a value manifested not only in practical actions of economic self-provisioning, but also in the position postsocialist subjects took on a variety of issues, from media to voting to history. It was through stating this detachment that one could provide evidence of one’s personal evolution by juxtaposing it to one’s substantially more engaged and idealistic reactions a few years earlier”

It’s easy to see how the ‘deterioration’ discourse had long-term effects that are still operative – inhibition towards forms of civic involvement and ‘defensive’ institutions anathema to the ideal of the public sphere; the strength of the message from the centre that only a ‘power vertical’ can ensure a hard won ‘stability’. The book should really be read alongside Shevchenko’s penetrating shorter pieces on post-Soviet subjecthood: “Resisting Resistance” (on internalized neoliberal ideology), and “The politics of nostalgia” (with M. Nadkarni) both from 2015.

Douglas Rogers. 2015. The depths of Russia: oil, power, and culture after socialism. Cornell University Press.

Rogers is something of an undersung hero in Russian Studies because his work is so broad-ranging and interdisciplinary, while retaining an uncompromising anthropological sensibility. In his book on Ural oil companies and the local and regional state, Rogers admits that his story of the success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as part of neoliberal governance will ‘horrify many proponents of civil society building’ because it will be read as ‘co-optation’ and ‘hijacking’ of NGOs into the service of the Putin-era centralization of state building (grant-giving as ‘infrastructure’, the state as a ‘social customer’). Far from accepting this normative framework and interpretation, Rogers provokes the reader to think anthropologically about social organization beyond ‘civil society’ as a loaded and sometimes meaningless symbol. Corporations and state are interpenetrated nowhere more effectively as in social responsibility work by big oil. CSR serves in Russia as a powerful multidimensional metacoordination of society and state, while retaining the informal elements of network clientelism that typify political relationships.

Rogers’ book is also of interest to those interested in the history of Sergey Kiriyenko’s emerging reputation as a so-called political technologist. His success in ‘remaking the policies and procedures of Russian governance for a new, more centralized time’ were laid down during his time as plenipotentiary of the Volga Federal District (which includes Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, and Perm Krai) and are now on display in occupied Ukraine.

Julie Hemment. 2015. Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

How does the state co-opt and incorporate youth in Russia? It must involve more than deception or simply better social advantage for youth participating gin state youth projects. The value of Hemment’s ethnographic engagement with students, educators and project leaders lies in the challenge it presents to binary oppositions like ‘oppression/resistance’, ‘truth/lies’, ‘authentic/inauthentic’ as it pertains to the social and political life of young people.

Projects mobilizing young people and sponsored by the state link to a genuine appeal around reviving the Soviet past, democratic initiatives in the 1990s, and global forms of youth projects today. The book is also a model of the collaborative method between western researchers and Russian colleagues, something that regrettably remains overshadowed by a publishing model that hides, as much as reveals, the dependence by Western-based researchers on Russian academic partners.

“Rather than docile subjects that follow the state line, young people emerge as active agents that adapt participation in these projects to their own ends, showing a range of various motivations to participate and engage with them.” – one review wrote.

Rustamjon Urinboyev 2021. Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia. University of California Press. [open access]

Urinboyev, in this short book covering the period 2014-2018, achieves many things much longer and laborious works do not: he creates an enticingly vivid ethnographic portrait of Central Asian workers’ lives in Moscow in their interactions with each other and Russians; he undertakes an all-too-rare ‘translocal’ and transnational research project by following money remittances back to Uzbekistan and showing the social, as well as economic consequences of them there, as well as a boomerang effect back to Moscow.

Moreover, the book is also about the gradations of migrant legalization and ‘adaptation’ in Russia, with lively portraits of the difference between ‘fake’, ‘clean fake’, and ‘almost clean’ residence registrations and work permits, as well as the trade in passports. Migrants are co-producers of new forms of legal order and informal governance in Russia – they are not passive. Weak rule of law and corrupt police provide opportunities as much as obstacles. Urinboyev gets up-close and personal to his research subjects and his book is full of humour and humanity.