Tag Archives: Shulman

Russia’s ban of “LGBT movement” helps us understand the advantages and disadvantages of a cultural and social values analysis

9 Replies
Credit: Coming Out, source: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/blog/2019/3/25/russias-push-for-traditional-values-urges-us-to-think-about-visibility-and-invisibility-in-more-complex-ways

Catching up on the impossible-to-keep-up-with output of Russian journalism and punditry in emigration, I was reminded by Ekaterina Shul’man [Schulmann], speaking in her inimitable soundbite machine-gun style that Putin’s elite does not have an ideology but merely a collection of memes. Shul’man made this comment as a kind of rebuke to the idea that the conservative ‘trad’ politics of the elite are more than skin-deep sentiments. This was on the eve of the events of this last week where Russia’s top court effectively banned any visible LGBT identity expression from public and discursive space. Since then, police have raided the numerous gay-friendly clubs in Moscow. The real and lasting damage to the lives of LGBT people should never be downplayed, but I found myself agreeing with Shul’man that the apparent obsession with deviant sexuality on the part of the Russian elite is more a reflection of their own homosocial and homoerotic projections and denialism, than a broad social conservative consensus or homophobic collective consciousness.

The idea that elites may think they are ‘leading’ when in fact they are quite distant from the (low) salience, or indeed relative unremarkableness [read: ‘social liberalism’] of the majorities’ sexual and gender politics, is at the heart of a number of research writings I’ve published in the last few years – see the end of this post for details.

It is nice to see a mainstream liberal commentator like Shul’man agree with what actual sociological research and opinion polls taken together indicate: that if it were not for the endless homophobic, anti-trans, and gender-conservative messaging from the centre, Russians would barely give a thought to these issues and would likely score lower on scales of traditionalism/social conservativism than the US, Poland and even Ukraine. It is also good for such a visible commentator as Shul’man to imagine a near future when both elites and ordinary people might quickly ‘forget’ the recent past of active homophobic state policy. After all, as I have argued, that is precisely what Western societies have been good at doing since the 1990s. In fact, despite ‘forgetting’, real episodes of hate-crimes against visible others continue to blight ‘liberal’ countries.

However, when it comes to parsing ‘values’-orientations for a general audience, Shul’man is less confident, and her own biases become visible. She can almost never complete an interview without revealing her stark disdain for Soviet culture and society which goes beyond any reasonable sociological critique. She correctly diagnoses homophobia as a symptom of the authoritarian repressed personalities of the elite (clearly some little Soviet boys growing up in the 50s never got past their anal-fixation stage). But she herself exhibits an unhealthy disgust with all things ‘Sovok’. We won’t go into the ‘why’ of this now – but I’ve written plenty about this as projection of status anxiety and overcompensation (guilty conscience) among the liberal intelligentsia.

Shul’man quickly gets on to her hobby-horse about the emptiness and down-right harmfulness of Soviet culture/society because she subscribes to the idea that Soviet and Post-Soviet people were damaged goods thanks to the values they internalized in the USSR. These usually include low social trust, an orientation towards survival over self-expression, a lack of a firm sense of the self in society, ingroup conformity, etc. And, as usual, the evidence for this is pretty unconvincing to anyone who wants to look at a range of indicators beyond the ubiquitous Inglehart–Welzel cultural map which divides every nation into a plot on an pair of axes measuring ‘survival-self-expression values’, and ‘traditional versus secular values’.

We are also on familiar ground when Shul’man bemoans the lack of genuinely cohesive or ‘healthy’ national identity values beyond the Russian language (a rather weak post-colonial glue), the myth of WWII (we saved the world), the anchor of the president as national authority (we know his name and face and he exists). This follows in the footsteps of authors like Vera Tolz who really brought this argument to prominence in the English-speaking academic world 25 years ago, with her question of whether these national characteristics were enough to sustain a civic sense of Russian identity (reader: the jury is still out). However, in Shul’man’s case I would argue we have projection once again: if only Russia could become a normal post-imperial country like the UK or France!  I would really like to know how she thinks those those civic ideals are doing in France – famous for its nonracist policing, or the UK, famous for its healthy relationship to its myths of WWII and Empire (irony off).  

The other problem with an obsession about Russians lacking so-called liberal or democratic civic values is that we get lost in the weeds of a normative ranking of populations (Russians are supposedly still beholden to authoritarian or populist demagoguery, but Americans are not!) instead of at least tempering a discussion of values with material interests and, frankly, experience of, and reflection on the real world. Now, to be fair to Shul’man, she again makes a positive contribution, saying that any maladaptive Soviet personality is on the wane – Russians are no different really from any other Europeans in their values because of the 30 year-experience of the market economy (and ‘neoliberalism’ – a word she would never willingly utter). She even says later in the interview that she really disagrees with Levada’s framing and agenda (that Russians are dysfunctional maladaptive post-Soviets).

From here we get some better analysis, albeit cloaked in Shul’man’s continued bias towards a narrow understanding of ‘value’ categories over material interests and experiences. Before the war, Shul’man was good on reminding people that even official polling shows that Russians were most concerned with social inequality. In the context of nearly two years of war she again insists that ‘national-patriotism’ is not really a strong, or motivating value, rather that (social-ist) ‘justice’, order, human rights, and peace, are most important. Here she even pauses on the word ‘socialist’ values for emphasis, knowing how discomforting/surprising this notion is to her audience. The interviewer here cannot contain himself, implying that ‘freedom’ must therefore be somewhere lower down in the order of preferences. To give her credit, Shul’man again shows the perspicacity to remind him that freedom is an element of human and particularly social rights. For example the right to be free of fear of poverty in a socially democratic state.

Overall then, we can see the uses, but also limitations of applying a ‘values’ prism to examining Russian society. I recommend the full interview to Russian speakers, whether they like Shul’man’s output or not (she can be a bit Marmite). For me, it’s useful to see how when intelligent observers really drill down they can’t help starting to examine material interests which in turn reveal the real woes of Russian society – not gays, but GINIs.

My only major objection is this continuing reluctance to take the socialization of the Soviet period seriously as productive of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ instincts and feelings (can we stop saying ‘values’ now?). One could therefore say that the liberal discourse Shul’man so expertly deploys ignores the insistent legacy of ‘popular socialism’ produced by the USSR experience (whatever we think of the Soviet reality itself), as well as its grave contribution to today’s Russian-imperial chauvinist complexes. In some respects you cannot have one without the other. Nor is it necessarily the case that social change (read: people becoming more socially liberal) will shift people to make them more economically liberal or geopolitically post-imperial.

Some self-promotion (readers can always email me if they want pdfs):

Morris, J. (2023). How homophobic propaganda produces vernacular prejudice in authoritarian states. Sexualities, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607221144624

ABSTRACT: An understanding of gendered homophobia in authoritarian states like Russia provides insights into intolerance as a function of propaganda. What is the effect on ordinary attitudes of “political homophobia” (Boellstorf, 2009) disseminated at fever pitch by state-controlled media intent on dividing the world geopolitically into debauched gay-friendly states, and those willing to defend “traditional Christian” values? Despite authoritarian societies appearing very different from pluralist ones, attitudes are plastic, diverse views possible, and survey polling unreliable. The ethnographic materials presented here show the need to meaningfully engage with vernacular prejudice and differentiate it from regime and media messaging. Everyday forms of homophobia and heterosexism have their origins in complex social phenomena and historical legacies beyond geopolitically-motivated hatred.

Morris, J. B. (2022). »Har vi nogensinde været europæiske?« Hverdagsrefleksioner fra Rusland om køns- og seksualitetskulturkrigen. [‘Have we ever been European?’ Everyday reflections from Russia on gender- and sexuality culture wars] Nordisk Østforum, 36, 103–120. https://doi.org/10.23865/noros.v36.3384

ABSTRACT: Whereas the influence of Russia’s state-led policy of conservatism is reflected in everyday talk – especially in relation to the idea that Euro-American values of permissiveness and ‘tolerance’ are misplaced – the findings reveal more nuanced ideas ‘from below’ about cultural differences between Russia and the putatively ‘other’ Europe. The article further notes the volatility and variance in survey methods that seek to measure ‘intolerance’ and cultural difference. They can exacerbate what, as Katherina Wiedlack and others have pointed out, is a colonial and orientalizing discourse that features an ‘enlightened’ West and a ‘passive, backward’ East. This article shows how ‘intolerance’ and acceptance of non-normative sexuality in Russia do not differ greatly from the situation in comparable societies of the global North.

Jeremy Morris & Masha Garibyan (2021) Russian Cultural Conservatism Critiqued: Translating the Tropes of ‘Gayropa’ and ‘Juvenile Justice’ in Everyday Life, Europe-Asia Studies, 73:8, 1487-1507, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1887088

Paywall free Author link

ABSTRACT: the essay argues that vernacular social conservatism re-appropriates official discourses to express Russians’ feelings towards their own state. Intolerance is less fuelled by elite cues but rather reflects domestic resentment towards, and fear of, the punitive power of the state, along with nostalgia for an idealised version of moral socialisation under socialism.

Challenging the view that Russians are ‘passive’.

1 Reply

uncollected rubbish

uncollected rubbish from a designated municipal site.

 

In a previous post I talked about the phrase: ‘people are Russia’s replacement oil’ as representing a new extractive shift to harvesting economic rents in more intensively from ordinary people. In this post I want to talk about liberal pundits’ interpretation of this turn of events. A much truncated version of what I wrote below was part of a short piece for Ridl.io

But before that just a quick recap on the reality of ‘making ends meet’ for many Russians that I talked about previously. Ordinary people are suffering from a decade-long decline in their living standards putting them in a position of extreme want. Published average incomes may look survivable, but the reality is that, like in other unequal countries, such statistics are misleading not least because of the distorting effect of a small number of very high incomes. In 2018 average gross wages were 40000 rubles a month or $560. Whether this figure is fiddled or not, in any case it ignores the large effect of lower informal (undeclared) incomes, and the imbalance between big city state company employment and the rest.  Independent polling indicates that the ‘real’ average pay was less than 20000 rubles ($305). $300 is not even a subsistence wage. Even adding to it a lower secondary wage, a family is left virtually nothing for clothing, medicines, travel or spending on children. When trying to measure relative poverty a robust measure is how much a family spends on food and other essentials. The open acknowledgement of the extreme poverty in which many Russians life can be seen in political events like the strange passing of a law allowing Russians to collect fallen trees, ‘for their own needs’.

Influential independent political observers like Valerii Solovei and Vladislav Inozemtsev draw pessimistic conclusions about the ‘extractive turn’. Mostly they view their fellow citizens as passive and lacking any agency, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary – the massive informal economy that sustains livelihoods and habitability above the bare subsistence level and is seriously disruptive to the state. Solovei paints a vivid picture of Russians as passive sponges to be wrung dry in any way possible by an emboldened state – where can people hide from taxes on fuel and cigarettes? (I guess you can anticipate my answer to him – in both cases it’s in the interstices of the informal economy). To be fair to him, he at least strikes a warning note: history shows that eventually people get fed up and social strife is the result. However, his remedy is predictably unimaginative, a bourgeois democratic revolution (without any messy involvement of ordinary people) such as what ‘could have been’ in 2011-12. But how realistic is political change without the engagement of people beyond metropolises? And how would a bourgeois democracy he envisage address the enormous structural inequalities and imbalances Russia faces? Doesn’t this approach just reproduce a ‘two Russias’ perspective so criticized by other observers such as Ilya Matveev? We can see traces of this stigmatizing perspective everywhere: the assumption that a ‘lack of culture’ or an ‘authoritarian personality’ prevents the ‘other’ Russians from seeing the light. On the latter, Carine Clement has recently taken this idea to task. In particular, she rejects the ‘mythical apoliticism of Russians’ and asks the question – if Russians’ ‘authoritarian’ thinking includes a strong element of critique of the existing social order, then to what degree is it really authoritarian?

Inozemstev’s approach is more interesting. He starts with the notion of popular disenchantment and elite indifference, but then links this to a more general pessimism.  Noting that the ‘new oil’ trope indicates people have awareness of how costly the elites are to them he despairs that ‘the authorities realise quite how broken the Russian population’s willingness to resist really is, from mass protests to even small-scale acts of dissent.’ Does this view make the mistake that only ‘open’ protest is a mark of resistance? Elsewhere Inozemstev actually hints at what is in plain sight: the informal economy as a bulwark against complete penury for many. He notes that even the Russian government openly acknowledges that 38 million people’s work and income is opaque at best to the state. I agree with him that most Russians want to hold down a legitimate employment in the formal economy. However, given such pessimism, even this is increasingly questioned by some of the already most vulnerable. The qualifying period for an old age pension will soon increase from 6 to 15 years, the social rights that accrue to a formally employed person are losing their value due to the erosion of the health system in general.  All in all Inozemstev proposes some incremental reforms that can be characterised as too little too late (tax free allowances on low incomes, assistance schemes like food stamps), which are regressive (increasing VAT) or even defeatist (corruption should be limited to the resource sector). Overall it looks like a kind a pale Fabianism with little scope for taking root.

In his latest piece Inozemstev is closer to some of the points I make in my previous post – detailing what the increasing in indirect taxation will mean to ordinary people – a real rise of around 10% in petrol costs and the real fall in incomes since 2008. Interestingly, given the ongoing ‘rubbish disposal’ protests, he points to the very large increase in household bills for waste disposal. This increase – a doubling has not gone unnoticed by ordinary people and they are up in arms about it – especially in places like the town I study which has been repeatedly the victim of fly-tipping of Moscow rubbish and which recently saw its head of the council’s environmental services jailed for taking bribes to allow such tipping.

Ekaterina Shulman uses the questionable assumptions and methodology of the World Values Survey data to address the topic of ‘turning the screws’ on ordinary people. She first argues that a shift in Russian values from ‘superatomisation’ characteristic of the 1990s to ‘conservative’ is somewhat positive as it facilitates collective action and sociality. A notable effect is the strengthening of weak ties and broadening of the scale of interpersonal trust especially among the young and dynamic. On the other hand, she sees in Russia the continuing legacy of totalitarianism: ‘secular, atomised society’ that produces the lonely distrustful individual with atrophied social skills.  Homo soveticus is very much still with us in her view. Consequently, she greets the shift in public opinion from ‘political security’ to ‘social security’ with some surprise (in reality this aspect of public opinion has always been there).

The beef I have with approaches like these is that the ordinary Russians who daily make decisions about how to live are presented as an undifferentiated mass – suffering from ‘learned helplessness’ (a phrase used by Ekaterina Shulman but also by Carine Clement) or as an unruly source of social unrest – the word ‘revolt’ (bunt) is reserved for them. At worst this ‘by-the-numbers’ approach gives the impression that ‘we’, the addressed middle-class audience of these pundits, should fear the ‘other’ Russia.  Solutions presented ring hollow – they are either a form of gradualism or legalism (vote, even if the field is rigged; use your right to agitate against a bad candidate; if only we just adhered to the Constitution; wait for those nostalgic old people to die). In my final post on this topic, I’ll make use of James Scott’s ideas of infrapolitics to talk more about everyday forms of resistance to the extractive turn.