Tag Archives: eurasian knot

“a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something” Eurasian Knot interview, Part II

Leave a reply

The second part of the interview. First part is blogged here. Transcript lightly edited for readability. Once again, a huge thanks to Sean and Rusana for the chance to talk about the book this is based on.

 Sean: Yeah. So let’s talk about these characters, other than Navalny and Putin, the protagonist and the antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors. You treat your interlocutors as co-creators. You even revise the manuscript based on their comments. So can you tell us a bit more about them and their place in your book?

Jeremy: This book is full of very, very different people from different walks of life, and I, I hope that’s a strength of it. So I have people that I knew before I started doing ethnographic work who live in Kaluga region, people who work in factories, people who work just in the local authority, pensioners, students. And they gradually became part of my work. obviously the whole point of doing anthropology/ethnography is that you don’t hide the fact that you’re a researcher, although of course now I have to obscure things. You know, I can’t officially be doing research there. I would get into trouble for that, but there’s nothing to stop me talking to people, chatting to people and remembering what they’ve said to me. So there’s this kind of very difficult methodological dilemma going on, an ethical one as well. But largely, you know, I’m talking to people, some of whom I’ve known for 25 years.

They know that I’m gonna write something and that they may feature in that. And then there’s people in Moscow that are also part of this book in contrast to the previous book. and that was also important to kind of gauge the whether or not people in Moscow generally had different attitudes towards the war or not. And actually what I guess is surprising is that you find the same people in equal measures everywhere. You know, there isn’t this strong pro-war, bias in small, disadvantaged places where people think they’re gonna do well. There’s just as many “loyal xenophobes” in the upper middle class in Moscow, that are like, yeah, we like this war. We, you know, we’re gonna make Russia great again. You know, it’s a lot of stereotypes that we have to get over, get away from.

But when it comes to your question about including people In the research, this is what anthropologists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to have some kind of, reflexivity and feedback from the people that they are extracting resources from. I’m gaining things and I can never give back what I have got from these people. When it came to my previous book, I went around and gave people copies of this book and people translated it. and now with the internet and with AI, when I write something very often I say to people, look, you know, you told me about this ,Andrei ,working in a turbine factory making; you told me this right? I’ve written about it. I send them a link and I say, you tell me where, whether I was right or wrong. And sometimes they’ll say, “yeah, this is fine. sometimes they’ll say, that’s not what I meant. You got it completely wrong. You’re an idiot.” But that’s part and parcel.

And again, in this book, I have people that I wrote about before in depth, and I can almost do a kind of oral history of their life with them, because I’ve known them for 25 years or 15 years. And I could see how they’ve completely changed. And I document that in the book. People, especially people who have working biographies that I’m really familiar with. I talk a lot about their job prospects and how they feel about changing jobs and retraining and the opportunities. But also the risks that the war brings, particularly for blue collar workers, in these de-industrializing and now re-industrializing places. And I’m in a constant dialogue with many people about this. Now, of course, the war complicates that because some people are scared, rightly and wrongly about talking to me, whether it’s over Messenger apps or in social media, or even in person sometimes. So that complicates it. But still I’m trying my best to involve people in a dialogue. and that’s the best you can really hope for. And I would say that I’m probably the only person doing social research on Russia that is trying to do that.

Sean: since the war has come up repeatedly, let’s talk about that. ’cause that is one of the big questions that people who even pay attention to Russia are interested in. And you say that in response to the outbreak of the war, which you say was shocking to many people, and you have this concept of defensive consolidation. What does that mean?

Jeremy: It’s not a perfect formulation. I started with this very early in the war and I’ve adapted it and kind of tinkered with this term, but really it’s a response to what is very a Anglocentric imposition of the term “rally around the flag”.

So there’s all this work done on rally around the flag and how after 9/11 Americans rally around the flag and they strongly supported military intervention in Afghanistan. Iraq’s a little bit different as we know, but there’s this idea that there was a strong consensus, a rallying around the leader, massive increase in the popularity of Bush. And so, partly, rightly, partly wrongly, anglophone political scientists kind of impose this model on Russia because they see that Putin is super popular.

They also see that the annexation of Crimea led to a spike in his popularity and that his popularity supposedly is now also higher, as high as it’s ever been. Now, I think that’s misleading. I think that’s problematic on multiple levels, but defensive consolidation is my way of saying “Yeah, sure. When a country goes to war and it’s big war with a lot at stake, regardless of how people feel about the justifications and aims and the decision that the leader made, they fundamentally come to have to deal with that in their daily lives. But also they have to deal with that and thinking about the future of their society.”

And so defensive consolidation for me is a way that the war actually kind of makes people much more reflective on what they would like their society to look like in the long term, and indeed what is lacking and what potentialities are missing. and so here then defensive consolidation links back to history and all the lost opportunities of the last 37 years, back to the break up of the Soviet Union. And so it’s this longue durée: So it’s defensive because it prompts people to look to what they think the government could be doing and isn’t doing. And it’s consolidating also because they look to each other and they look to local sources of authority and leadership in this time of crisis as well. So it’s not rally around the flag. Because a positive sense of patriotism in the service of war is missing. That isn’t to say that people don’t become more patriotic, but as I’ve said, there’s a difference between nationalism and patriotism which goes back to George Orwell. There’s an essay by George Orwell on English patriotism where he, he tries to kind of, recover, recuperate patriotism in a non-aggressive way. I’m not saying that he’s totally successful, and I’m not saying that my concept is perfect, but it’s just this alternative to rally around the flag because fundamentally, I don’t believe, and the more I talk to people, the more I become, firmly convinced of this. I don’t believe that a majority support anything to do with the war. That is to say they don’t want to see more Russian people die. And they don’t want to see more Ukrainians die, actually.

I mean, I think we’re at the point now where most Russians would accept peace on terms short of the, the indictment of the leadership, the loss of territorial integrity of Russia as it was [after 2014], the loss of Crimea. They wouldn’t want that, but most Russians would accept a ceasefire. and that’s something, I mean, again, it, it’s a million miles away from I think what is still the dominant kind of paradigm, which is that Russians are enthusiastic for the war.

Sean: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, they, they change all the time as we, as we know here too, Ana.

Rusana: I tell you this, I’m gonna borrow your term defensive consolidation for my work too, because I was doing field work during the war. So part of it was before the war, and then part of it was after the war started. And I also had a very acute sense of like, you know, I was trying to find like kind of a spectrum of opinion, even though like my work is not about the war at all.

But among the people I worked with, my interlocutors, I was looking for some sort of spectrum. And then I felt like after the war there was some sort of consolidation. You had to be, at least in the group of people I work with, you had to be pro-war, but not necessarily like you were saying because people felt like it was a good cause.

But more so in the face of this enemy, you kinda had to unite despite your sort of smaller differences in opinion, you had to unite because there is this kind of external threat.

Jeremy: And it could be both. It’s flexible. It’s what Sara Ahmed calls a sweaty concept. It’s emotional and it’s flexible, right? It’s, it, you could be pro-war and defensively consolidate. And I also document that in the book. You know, I know plenty of people that, again, they, they don’t like the war. They don’t want, they didn’t want the war, but it’s happened. And, you know, we’ve gotta do something to support Russian soldiers because actually they’re also the victims in the eyes of some of my interlocutors, they’re not seen as aggressors. They’re seen that way often especially if they’re mobilized and not volunteers. There’s very little sympathy and empathy for volunteers who are seen as kind of making a mercantile decision.

But there also is defensive consolidation around people adamantly opposed to Putinism and who who’ve been reinvigorated in a defensively consolidating way. They’re like, okay, this actually makes it even more important to think about making the future better for our country when peace comes and when there is a transition. And then there’s people in the middle,who again, it’s kind of trying to get away from this idea that they’re apolitical. So again, people much more willing to volunteer to get involved with things like ecoactivism. That’s also an example of defensive consolidation. Like we have to do something to make things better for our country because our country is in crisis and a disaster, a geopolitical disaster has unfolded. We didn’t get a say in it, but we have to do something.

“What is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?” The Eurasian Knot podcast. Part I.

1 Reply

Listen to the whole one-hour conversation here: https://www.euraknot.org/everyday-politics-in-russia/

But for those who would prefer to read or skim, here’s a lightly edited version of the first half of the conversation with the two hosts.

If you can, please support the podcast in a time when humanities and social sciences are being defunded in the US. https://www.patreon.com/euraknot

And of course, the first question I have is, what is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?

Well, I originally wanted to use the term “micropolitics” but the publisher didn’t like that. So I compromised, but I figure it’s a good compromise. Everyday politics is a way of drawing attention to the way that it’s not just electoral politics, it’s not just NGOs that do politics, it’s not just politicians that do politics. It’s a way of really grounding the term and trying to give voice to people who may themselves say that they’re not interested in politics, that they’re alienated from politics, but by interacting with them, listening to them, talking to them, you kind of tease out what the content of their everyday life is, that is still political. What they’re unhappy with, what they’re satisfied with, their attitude towards what’s going on in the life of their country, even if they don’t recognize that as political.

I have asked, given that you brought up a challenge, maybe this is because I’ve been reading your blog for a long time, your social media interactions, but reading this book, I feel it comes from a sense of frustration on your part, in the way that politics, however we frame it, or the Russian people are understood. And it sounds like you’re trying to push back against a lot of our assumptions and tropes that we use, like around, you know, atomization and the apolitical and these types of things. Am I right with that sense?

We need to remember that most of what we read about most places in the world that are not the US, you know, they’re filtered through multiple layers. They’re filtered through the way the media decides to cover things, but even when it comes to scholarly research, there’s also a filter, you know, there’s kinds of truths, you said tropes, but we could also call them paradigms or truths that are widely accepted, particularly in political science, which is the big daddy of ways of looking at Russia. Although, you know, my book also responds, and tries to engage in dialogue with the dominant paradigms as they have been promulgated in anglophone political science. But absolutely, I’m also frustrated because, as I said, the whole reason for choosing the term everyday politics is that most of what gets heard and what gets visibility is this very top level of politics.

“Let’s try and work out what Putin is thinking, who has his ear, who he talks to in his bunker during COVID, was that why he started the war”;  it can get to a point where it’s as if he’s the only political actor in the country, and obviously that’s not true, that’s kind of almost a caricature, but, you know, if you want to get a book published, you’ve got to have Putin in the title, and obviously I didn’t want to do that. On the other hand, obviously, there’s maybe an unhealthy obsession with the most visible liberal political opposition actors, including the late Alexei Navalny, who I have a lot of respect for, what he did, and I write about this in the book, but again, it is a bit unhealthy because it tends to crowd out other grassroots activities.

These things may not appear overtly political, but of course are. If I am sitting in my little town, deindustrializing town, my Rust Belt town, thousands of kilometers from Moscow, and some oligarchic forces in Moscow want to make money from dumping trash in my neighborhood illegally, and I approach my elected representatives, and I get pushed back, you know, the grassroots organization of opposition to that, which is also part of what I write about in the book, is political, and is generally neglected in the way that journalists and researchers write about the political in Russia, which is all the more surprising because, very often, these kind of local actions are successful because the whole political atmosphere in Russia is very brittle and febrile, and actually quite often elected politicians, if there is pushback, there is some kind of compromise or backing down for various reasons, which maybe we won’t get into now,

But there’s all kinds of political stuff going on in Russia, and then we can actually find out something that is surprising perhaps to some people, which is that even as the Russia state becomes more and more repressive, and tries to control all kinds of different things going on, you know, from what messaging app you use in your phone, to what kind of on-demand video you access, despite all of these things, people are not passive, and that’s a problem, again, if we talk about the word “trope”, there is an unhelpful, and I would say unhealthy trope even in scholarship, that is, Russians are depoliticised, atomised, and passive. Of course, there is something about that that’s true: people are quite scared often to get toe-to-toe with the powers that be because they have a huge coercive apparatus. But at the same time, that leads us down some dangerous pathways in assuming that Russians are not just coerced, but conformist, and coopted into supporting the war on Ukraine.

 So let’s dispel some of those myths, and go down to the local level. You already mentioned the successful story, but at Archangelsk and the trash scandal, and people’s pushback against it, there was of course kind of couched in this, like, as an environmental issue, but we could say that it’s also a political, deeply political issue. Could you tell us some more of these successful stories? I just want to feel better about today.

This is really frustrating because I was pitching an article, to an American journal, of political science, and they were like, well, there isn’t really anything going on, you know, no protest is possible. And then I just opened a social media feed, and I see that in the Far East, there’s street protests by local residents in a small city against the local authorities because the local authorities are allegedly poisoning stray dogs. So again, is that political? Well, yes, it is because although it’s a little bit like your example of environmentalism in Arkhangelsk protecting the local environment there; maybe it’s a moral objection to what’s going on, but it is also inherently political because it’s showing that people are not only unhappy with what their local authority is doing, they are willing to publicly show up and express their political subjectivity. We might believe that we have very little say when it comes to elections and the cross that we put on our ballot paper may or may not make any difference. We’re not necessarily interested in a wholesale change of elected officials at national level, you know, you very rarely get people say, oh, well, you know, I want the whole system to collapse, right? Because the system, the system has offered relative economic and social stability.

If I then link it to my own work, so I mainly focus on two small towns in the Kaluga region and I pseudonymise them, I obscure exactly where they are, but it’s a little bit like the our Arkhangelsk case, but on a smaller scale, a trash disposal site was located in a very small village in a protected environmental area, close to a national park, and that was successfully fought against by local people. And that was relatively recent. That was less than 6 years ago, but that really culminated in them being able to use legal, protest, organisational, social media, social network, ways and means to push back And the private company and the Moscow government

that was backing the private company, they backed off. Not before trying to use the security services and the police to intimidate these local people. We’re not saying it’s all, you know, ideal and wonderful; it just shows that political power, sometimes we call it associative and structural political power, is there, even if it’s not visible, even if many Russians themselves don’t believe that they can do this. But once it starts, once they get involved, they often feel empowered by this and then go on to become much more politically radicalised. And that, again, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re massively anti-regime, but they become politically aware and politically empowered in ways that they weren’t before.

So, do you think that the invisibility of everyday politics in Russia is a result of certain, say, expectations coming from political science or Western observers more generally that say, politics or political action comes in this form, say, like a street protest or showing up at elections. So, I guess what I’m trying to ask is that, do you think that scholars and wider audiences sort of try to cast political action and the forms that are expected or are usual to them onto a different space and that’s where the invisibility is coming from? Or is it just a result of stereotypes about Russians as passive, more general?

I think that’s part of it. I mean, it’s multi-layered and that’s the problem with it because you start talking about this and people are like, well, you know, Russians don’t do this or Russians don’t do that. So, it’s multi-faceted, unfortunately, cultural stereotypes, pernicious cultural stereotypes of which I’ve mentioned, you know, passivity and atomization. And again, we should say that the protests in 2022 against the invasion of Ukraine were unprecedented. This is extremely repressive authoritarian regime and yet people still risked a lot to come out. And a lot of people were arrested and their lives were ruined as a result. And that then leads into these impossible expectations that we in the West often impose on Russians, taking a cue rightly from the extremely courageous and successful protests in Ukraine in 2004 and then 2013, 2014.

It’s almost like, you know, Russian society is almost the victim of Ukraine’s success in that, you know, the Ukrainians were able to do it. Why can’t the Russians do it? Well, you know, the Russians did what they could. And they live in a much more [repressive environment] even in 2022, even in 2014, even in 2004. They lived in a state which had a much higher coercive capacity. And yet, there are still protests going on. We won’t call them protests. They’re actions. They’re anti-war actions going on. They have to be clandestine. And that’s the next point, the third point, if you like.

The problem is with political science and just the media in general’s coverage of all processes. It needs something really visible and sound-biteable and newsworthy. So somebody risking it all to go out, night after night and graffiti, “I love Ukraine”, in their local environment. Okay, that might not mean very much to Ukrainians and I totally accept that. And they might say that’s totally inadequate. And I understand that. But it’s still political and it’s still something that is really important to maintaining a sense of purpose and solidarity among the many, many, many millions of people in Russia that do not support the war and feel a strong sense of shame and emotional hurt for what is being done in their names to Ukraine.

So there’s all kinds of stuff going on. Also, like I said, it’s not avertly about the war, but for example, these protests against dogs being euthanized. A lot of that just gets completely ignored. And I was saying just the other day when I was in Russia to an activist and I just was like, yeah, is anybody in Russia doing this collating and collecting this data and they’re like, “no, it’s up to you”. And I’m like, well, are we doing it? And no, we’re not. There’s not really as far as I’m aware, a good protest database.

And this then leads into the next point, which is researchers are really lazy. And I mean, I know journalists are lazy because they tell me that as well. And maybe researchers are almost as lazy as journalists in that they want a quick win. They want an off-the-shelf database or they want a pre-existing survey. Maybe if they get grant money, they’ll pay for a survey. But again, it’s also like, we’ve got these things set up to quickly gather data. So we can quickly gather data about this favourite subject of political scientists, “do Russians support the war?”

Something that I’ve kind of hooked on several years ago. And that is our as outsiders, and maybe even within Russia itself, but as outsiders, a lot of us, particularly those who have problems or against the Putin system, Putin regime, we’re looking for a revolutionary subject. We’re searching for that individual or social group that’s going to tip the scales against this system. And I remember just in my years of observing Russian politics, it was the middle class, and then it was the youth, and then it was…, it’s this constant, searching and searching and searching. And I think that’s another reason why we missed the trees for the forest, maybe, or however to put it.

 I agree. And again, we can’t help here, but like call back to the life and death of Navalny, and how, as I said, I’ve got respect for what he did, especially the building of capacity and the training of activists. But his personality, again, was an example of that, you know, people pinned their hopes on him, as this revolutionary subject. And then that bias and that unhelpful kind of blinkeredness in coverage extends to these other figures.

Yeah, so let’s talk about these characters other than Navalny and Putin, other than the protagonist and then antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors

[tbc…]