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The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia
The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia. In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair. The Patriotism of Despair examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the "neocoms": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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April 17, 2013Book Review:
The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia by Serguei Alex. Oushakine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. pp. xi + 299
Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University in the United States of America. He possesses a profound interest in excavating the Russian culture that surfaced after the legal, economic, political liquidation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and its ultimate socio-political collapse in December, 1999. Unlike many other contemporary conventional academic scholars, Oushakine stands out from the rest of them for his ability to apply and integrate modern and post-modern social theories in his illustration and explanation of the bleak, grim, and traumatised post-Soviet Russian society and its culture. Culture matters in post-Soviet present Russia.
The Patriotism of Despair is an innovative detailed presentation of the post-communist society in the modern state of Russian Federation. The revolutionary element of this scholarly work is the author’s approach to the post-socialist Russian society; instead of the conventional way of analysing a society from the larger marcro-level of perspective on the state level, Oushakine focuses on impacts of transition on the the narrower micro-level of society, where real social individuals are experiencing the consequences of the societal changes that have been set in motion from the top central power-yielding elite of the new Russian state.
Through the author’s lens of analysis, The Patriotism of Despair reveals the other side of interpretation of the Soviet identity crisis in Russian Federation: the socio-psychological disintegration of the Sovieticised socially constructed system of codes and meanings and the absence of new positive and optimistic perspective of an individuals self-perceived future. The author attempts to provide for the Western audience an explanation to why do many post-Soviet peoples consider the liquidation and collapse of the Soviet Union a total traumatic disastrous tragedy, rather than a monumental historical event of liberalisation of the ex-Soviet Russian society from the cultural and political hegemony of the Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology formerly proscribed and violently reinforced by the now de funct Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Secondly, he attempts to explain and depict a new system of meanings and codes that post-Soviet Russian people reconstituted after the demise of the former superpower. Finally, he provides an alternative explanation to the stagnant process of democratisation of state and society, if such socio-political phenomenon even exists.
The first two chapters focus on the inter-dependent relationship between the introduction of capitalism into the Russian society and the perceptions of human [in-]security of the Russian ethnic population in the post-Soviet federative diverse nascent republic. The author explains in his first chapter that the introduction of capitalism, as an alien economic concept, resembled more of “a physical rupture in the established social fabric” (p.77). Following this logic, the author claims that the capitalist economic system in the early post-Soviet years fragmented and ruptured the former Soviet Russian society as they were slowly readapting to the new socio-economic configurations. However, the alien notion of that particular novel economic concept positioned many post-Soviet Russian people (i.e. the Russian ethnic majority) in disadvantageous conditions of society, where the driving economic force of a capitalist system is the competitive market. Simultaneously, the people were searching for a new Russian semiotic system to replace to vanished and obsolete Soviet one. The violent nature of socio-economic transformation in Russia filled in the void, where the Soviet semiotic system occupied in the socio-psychological space of the Russian etnos.
This aspect of the Russian transition period rendered few positive values, which led to the people’s alienation from values of Western origin. Consequently, the Russian post-Soviet ethno-national reconfiguration began to shift towards alternative social constructions of their perceived historical collective existence that would self-explain their recent traumatic memories of the Soviet past in the post-socialist Russia. Chapter 2 presents an array of perspectives and formulations of the Russian etnos. With the total destruction of the Soviet system of meanings and values appropriated by the former Soviet people the adverse consequences of market liberalisation in Russia, along with the Soviet theoretical approach to etnos as being separated from the state “prefigured the current ideas of ethnicity and solidarity rooted in a particular terrain and helped to frame post-cold war relations as a geopolitics of etnoses” (p.129). Although, the recent traumatic memories, constructed out of the ruins of the Soviet Union, are experienced individually in the society of the absence of the familiar Soviet social order and its institutions to accommodate the traumatised, the perceived shared experience of the unique kind of suffering bound the post-Soviet people together into a “community of loss”. However, as the people appropriated new identities as victims there was a natural need for “other-ing” the social criminals that put the traumatised through such horrendous experiences. These “other-ed” groups were identified through the logic of violence (i.e. anti-Semitism, racism, cultural and political hegemony, imperialism). Nonetheless, the self-victimisation of the Russian etnos through “other-ing” the aggressive foreign enemy also contributes to the notion of patriotism in a form of individual isolationism.
In the last two chapters, Oushakine presents the story of the returning Russian veterans from the Chechen War. As the Russian soldiers were heading back to their respective homes after having lost their fellow combatants in expeditions, they began to reposition themselves as the self-identified valorised social group in relation to the state and the society. These military people claim to have had same experiences of loss and acquired a traumatic memory from the state-commissioned war by the federal centre. Their return symbolised the continuity of the military strength of the recently polemicised former Soviet Russian army and “the post-Soviet uncertainty where the exchange of sacrifices emerged as an effective mediating tool between the veterans’ experiences and their claims for recognition from the increasingly disengaged state” (p.200). Subsequently, the notion of the Russian etnos began to appropriate a highly militarised identity, as the concept of patriotism was strongly associated with the constantly reproduced and reconstructed image of the militarised identity/entity.
Meanwhile, the author explains that the mothers of the dead soldiers strongly contribute to the reinforcement of the above-mentioned qualities of the Russian etnos. As the victims of child-loss due to the state’s unpopular military policies, these women represented a mosaic of “a psychological tableau of coping”. However, as they tried to find a “wider social importance in the deaths of their sons”, it became “fundamentally entangled with the rationalisation of the state’s military politics” (p. 258). However, the post-Soviet human [in-]security and uncertainty and the lack of cohesive social mechanism that would produced a vital civic discourse and shared standards created a socio-psychological void in their social minds that needed to be occupied by a new unifying socially constructed identity, that would have circumscribed these victims into one imagined community with common and/or shared devastating experiences. On the contrary, these women appropriated a new social identity of a maternal victim of loss and traumatic emotional experiences, instead of individual recovering from the emotional pains and becoming politically responsible female citizens. Subsequently, these groups of mothers with deceased children have subjected themselves into the self-victimised, militarised, mystified, supernatural, cult-like Russian national identity and etnos. Thus, “the public space and the nation’s history eventually became the source of an emotional striving for revenge and retribution rather than accountability and justice” (p.258).
The author’s methodology is one of the spectacular aspects of his anthropological research of the Russian culture. Oushakine’s qualitative methodology of ethnography, participant observation, and personal interactions with the subjects profoundly contributes to the scope of the analysis of a segment of the post-Soviet Russian society. The key factor of this study, however, was not the application of the research methods, but the author/researcher himself. His previous familiarity with the geographic space enabled him to navigate through the cultural geography of Barnaul easier, than if it were to be studied by an outsider. The significance of the familiarity is the continuity of the city’s historiography from the Soviet to the post-Soviet eras. Such continuity through the lens of the author permits the researcher to utilise appropriate periodisation formulas to distinguish the past from the present time frames (i.e. Soviet and post-Soviet), because he has both historical ties to the cultural space through the means of origin.
Secondly, the study undergoes successful triangulation of not only the methods of qualitative research, but also the application of multidisciplinary set of theories. Chapter 1 was heavily influenced by social psychology of capitalist societies subject, which required a person to be cross-disciplined in economics, sociology, and psychology. Meanwhile, Chapter 2 was heavily influenced by cultural anthropology and socio-political philosophy regarding the status and the nature of the Russian etnos. Certainly, an educated person may have the conventional definition of any of the mentioned terminology; however, in the last two chapters the author unifies his presentations and theoretical explanations from previous chapters into one seemingly coherent case study of victims of war, loss, and death in a city of Branaul.
Unfortunately, there is a substantially significant flaw in his research project that is more related to the design of the case study, which fails to completely answer the main posed questions. In his introduction, he states that he chose Barnaul as the cultural social space he will study. The reasons for his choice were primarily identified as its slower transformation (and to an extent Westernisation) compared to other larger and more populous cities. He claims that the [side-]effects of the post-Soviet Russian societal transformation are still evident in the city’s cultural landscape. His place of origin and affinity towards the city provide reasonable legitimacy and credibility for the researcher’s role and position in relation to the average Western reader as the genuine authority to produce and reproduce the knowledge he gathered for his anthropological presentation of the members of this particular traumatised “community of loss” in this small town in Russian Siberia. The central problem with his presentation is the ambiguity of the concept of trauma, which is crucial for the structural foundation of his exposition on the post-Soviet Russian culture, nation, and etnos.
It is important to emphasise that the qualitative understanding of a trauma is culture bound. People in the United States may perceive a particular event A to be a traumatic event, while the people in an another foreign country may perceive that same event A as a socially inconvenient event. There is no concrete relationship between trauma and the events that occurred during the early years of the post-Soviet transition in Russia, except the author’s segmented texts from the field site. Although many of the responses that were published in this text were depicting a grim, dark, and bleak Russian society, they do not indicate that there has been a recent trauma all over Russia, because of the collapse of the semiotic system. According to the 2009 poll, a sample population of 10,000 people across Russia stated that they missed the old Soviet system of order in society and some have indicated that they preferred to go back in time. (Denisova, Eller, Zhuravskaya, 2010). However, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, an economist, compared the economic data-sets of 1990 and 2009 and concluded that were generally joyous and content with the independent Russia, because the overall quality of living had improved, mortality decreased, life expectancy increased, income per capita tripled, and the Soviet system had become obsolete by 1991 (ibid.). Thus, even with the collapse of the Soviet semiotic system associated with the Soviet state there must be a parallel system of signs and meanings that functioned during the Soviet era (especially during the repressions) and continued to this day. Hence, the quality of trauma may always be perceived to outsiders as a significant factor, while not necessarily the same to the Russian people.
Thus, recent collective memory of the disastrous trauma and catastrophe may not be the drive for the etnos formation. Interestingly, the author did not emphasise enough that the city was located on the periphery of the Russian Federation, being close to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. The spatial context of the city is highly relevant to the identity formation of the post-socialist Russians particular only to Barnaul, as the location of the studied space pre-determined its historical instrumental role in the whole functioning of Russia. Historically, the city was one of the oldest cities built in that region during the Imperial era. In addition, during the World War II (or as regionally rendered as the Great Patriotic War) the city was a temporary location of Soviet authorities and throughout the Soviet era it was one of the important strategic industrial cities of military ammunition. Although the author correlates the collective traumatic memory of the post-Soviet transition period as a result of capitalism in Russia in conjunction to the subsequent Chechen War, the city’s economic status played greater importance during the militarised periods of higher level of productivity rather than in times of peace. The time of transition also signified the retraction of the Soviet/Russian military from the satellite states in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. The retraction indicated the reduction in state spending on military and military industry, which was the main component of Branaul’s economic component. Thus, it is not entirely validated that the trauma of the post-Soviet feeling of uncertainty, while the Russian etnos has been searching for a new identity after being stripped of the Russified Soviet internationalist socialist identity, caused the people of Barnaul to become militarised, isolated, or patriotic, because the effects of the post-Soviet transition period in Russia could be purely economical, such as the loss of appropriate jobs and the narrowing of career opportunities for the city’s population as Russia was moving away from a military-industrial planned economy to a pseudo-capitalist state-supervised market economy (Hill and Gaddy, 2003). These socio-economic reconfigurations may have summoned negative reactions from the population economic class differences within a formerly Soviet cohesive group due to capitalist nature of competitive economy, yet often rendered as a scapegoat to incite racism or internal xenophobia.
In addition, the author fails to define what is deemed to be, through his lens, the Russian culture, nation, and/or etnos. Although he is writing as an anthropologist, where the discipline generally lacks major positivist theories, he has not established a pan-Russian pattern and instead he described a marginalised and underprivileged social group within Russian Federation - the conscripts and their mothers. By the late 1980, the Soviet Army was been socially and physically deteriorating due to unhealthy lifestyles of the soldiers, increasingly severe hazing rituals, sub-human living conditions, and the evident first steps of the liberalisation of the Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachov. Meanwhile, there were many legal methods of avoiding the mandatory military service in the Soviet Union (and later in Russia): continuing higher education, recently born children of the potential conscripts, or by the early 1990’s a not-yet criminalised simple monetary transaction between the candidate and the official at the military administrative district office. Thus, the alternative explanation to the dissatisfaction of the mothers and sons with the Moscow-sponsored campaign for territorial re-integration of Chechnya would be the young male citizens’ lack of diverse set of marketable skills to gain an income due to their previous belief that they would be going to work at the city’s military industrial sector as it has been historically done. However, as the position of the Russian Federation has changed on the international geopolitical arena after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. the role and position of the former important producer of military ammunition has also changed to its disadvantage. Ultimately, the question of the Russian etnos was raised and revitalised among the so-called victims of the “community of loss” in order to create a social and cultural distinctiveness from the tainted and poisoned post-Soviet capitalists and foreign entities to legitimise their existence (raison d’être) on par as the economically stronger Russian social sub-groups particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were the main beneficiaries of the reforms, compared to the isolated and disconnected city of Branaul, a former VPK city. The author failed to acknowledge that the social mobilisation of the Russian ‘etnos’ in-group members was tied to the economic disadvantages only in that particular city researched, while making the a priori assumption that such pattern was country-wide.
Works Cited
Denisova, I. et al. (2010) ‘What Do Russians Think About Transition?’, Economics of Transition 18 (2): 249-280.
Hill, F. and C. Gaddy (2003) The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold. 1st. edition. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Oushakine, S.A. (2009) The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Originally submitted as a class assignment for CERES colloquium in Jan 2011
The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia by Serguei Alex. Oushakine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. pp. xi + 299
Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University in the United States of America. He possesses a profound interest in excavating the Russian culture that surfaced after the legal, economic, political liquidation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and its ultimate socio-political collapse in December, 1999. Unlike many other contemporary conventional academic scholars, Oushakine stands out from the rest of them for his ability to apply and integrate modern and post-modern social theories in his illustration and explanation of the bleak, grim, and traumatised post-Soviet Russian society and its culture. Culture matters in post-Soviet present Russia.
The Patriotism of Despair is an innovative detailed presentation of the post-communist society in the modern state of Russian Federation. The revolutionary element of this scholarly work is the author’s approach to the post-socialist Russian society; instead of the conventional way of analysing a society from the larger marcro-level of perspective on the state level, Oushakine focuses on impacts of transition on the the narrower micro-level of society, where real social individuals are experiencing the consequences of the societal changes that have been set in motion from the top central power-yielding elite of the new Russian state.
Through the author’s lens of analysis, The Patriotism of Despair reveals the other side of interpretation of the Soviet identity crisis in Russian Federation: the socio-psychological disintegration of the Sovieticised socially constructed system of codes and meanings and the absence of new positive and optimistic perspective of an individuals self-perceived future. The author attempts to provide for the Western audience an explanation to why do many post-Soviet peoples consider the liquidation and collapse of the Soviet Union a total traumatic disastrous tragedy, rather than a monumental historical event of liberalisation of the ex-Soviet Russian society from the cultural and political hegemony of the Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology formerly proscribed and violently reinforced by the now de funct Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Secondly, he attempts to explain and depict a new system of meanings and codes that post-Soviet Russian people reconstituted after the demise of the former superpower. Finally, he provides an alternative explanation to the stagnant process of democratisation of state and society, if such socio-political phenomenon even exists.
The first two chapters focus on the inter-dependent relationship between the introduction of capitalism into the Russian society and the perceptions of human [in-]security of the Russian ethnic population in the post-Soviet federative diverse nascent republic. The author explains in his first chapter that the introduction of capitalism, as an alien economic concept, resembled more of “a physical rupture in the established social fabric” (p.77). Following this logic, the author claims that the capitalist economic system in the early post-Soviet years fragmented and ruptured the former Soviet Russian society as they were slowly readapting to the new socio-economic configurations. However, the alien notion of that particular novel economic concept positioned many post-Soviet Russian people (i.e. the Russian ethnic majority) in disadvantageous conditions of society, where the driving economic force of a capitalist system is the competitive market. Simultaneously, the people were searching for a new Russian semiotic system to replace to vanished and obsolete Soviet one. The violent nature of socio-economic transformation in Russia filled in the void, where the Soviet semiotic system occupied in the socio-psychological space of the Russian etnos.
This aspect of the Russian transition period rendered few positive values, which led to the people’s alienation from values of Western origin. Consequently, the Russian post-Soviet ethno-national reconfiguration began to shift towards alternative social constructions of their perceived historical collective existence that would self-explain their recent traumatic memories of the Soviet past in the post-socialist Russia. Chapter 2 presents an array of perspectives and formulations of the Russian etnos. With the total destruction of the Soviet system of meanings and values appropriated by the former Soviet people the adverse consequences of market liberalisation in Russia, along with the Soviet theoretical approach to etnos as being separated from the state “prefigured the current ideas of ethnicity and solidarity rooted in a particular terrain and helped to frame post-cold war relations as a geopolitics of etnoses” (p.129). Although, the recent traumatic memories, constructed out of the ruins of the Soviet Union, are experienced individually in the society of the absence of the familiar Soviet social order and its institutions to accommodate the traumatised, the perceived shared experience of the unique kind of suffering bound the post-Soviet people together into a “community of loss”. However, as the people appropriated new identities as victims there was a natural need for “other-ing” the social criminals that put the traumatised through such horrendous experiences. These “other-ed” groups were identified through the logic of violence (i.e. anti-Semitism, racism, cultural and political hegemony, imperialism). Nonetheless, the self-victimisation of the Russian etnos through “other-ing” the aggressive foreign enemy also contributes to the notion of patriotism in a form of individual isolationism.
In the last two chapters, Oushakine presents the story of the returning Russian veterans from the Chechen War. As the Russian soldiers were heading back to their respective homes after having lost their fellow combatants in expeditions, they began to reposition themselves as the self-identified valorised social group in relation to the state and the society. These military people claim to have had same experiences of loss and acquired a traumatic memory from the state-commissioned war by the federal centre. Their return symbolised the continuity of the military strength of the recently polemicised former Soviet Russian army and “the post-Soviet uncertainty where the exchange of sacrifices emerged as an effective mediating tool between the veterans’ experiences and their claims for recognition from the increasingly disengaged state” (p.200). Subsequently, the notion of the Russian etnos began to appropriate a highly militarised identity, as the concept of patriotism was strongly associated with the constantly reproduced and reconstructed image of the militarised identity/entity.
Meanwhile, the author explains that the mothers of the dead soldiers strongly contribute to the reinforcement of the above-mentioned qualities of the Russian etnos. As the victims of child-loss due to the state’s unpopular military policies, these women represented a mosaic of “a psychological tableau of coping”. However, as they tried to find a “wider social importance in the deaths of their sons”, it became “fundamentally entangled with the rationalisation of the state’s military politics” (p. 258). However, the post-Soviet human [in-]security and uncertainty and the lack of cohesive social mechanism that would produced a vital civic discourse and shared standards created a socio-psychological void in their social minds that needed to be occupied by a new unifying socially constructed identity, that would have circumscribed these victims into one imagined community with common and/or shared devastating experiences. On the contrary, these women appropriated a new social identity of a maternal victim of loss and traumatic emotional experiences, instead of individual recovering from the emotional pains and becoming politically responsible female citizens. Subsequently, these groups of mothers with deceased children have subjected themselves into the self-victimised, militarised, mystified, supernatural, cult-like Russian national identity and etnos. Thus, “the public space and the nation’s history eventually became the source of an emotional striving for revenge and retribution rather than accountability and justice” (p.258).
The author’s methodology is one of the spectacular aspects of his anthropological research of the Russian culture. Oushakine’s qualitative methodology of ethnography, participant observation, and personal interactions with the subjects profoundly contributes to the scope of the analysis of a segment of the post-Soviet Russian society. The key factor of this study, however, was not the application of the research methods, but the author/researcher himself. His previous familiarity with the geographic space enabled him to navigate through the cultural geography of Barnaul easier, than if it were to be studied by an outsider. The significance of the familiarity is the continuity of the city’s historiography from the Soviet to the post-Soviet eras. Such continuity through the lens of the author permits the researcher to utilise appropriate periodisation formulas to distinguish the past from the present time frames (i.e. Soviet and post-Soviet), because he has both historical ties to the cultural space through the means of origin.
Secondly, the study undergoes successful triangulation of not only the methods of qualitative research, but also the application of multidisciplinary set of theories. Chapter 1 was heavily influenced by social psychology of capitalist societies subject, which required a person to be cross-disciplined in economics, sociology, and psychology. Meanwhile, Chapter 2 was heavily influenced by cultural anthropology and socio-political philosophy regarding the status and the nature of the Russian etnos. Certainly, an educated person may have the conventional definition of any of the mentioned terminology; however, in the last two chapters the author unifies his presentations and theoretical explanations from previous chapters into one seemingly coherent case study of victims of war, loss, and death in a city of Branaul.
Unfortunately, there is a substantially significant flaw in his research project that is more related to the design of the case study, which fails to completely answer the main posed questions. In his introduction, he states that he chose Barnaul as the cultural social space he will study. The reasons for his choice were primarily identified as its slower transformation (and to an extent Westernisation) compared to other larger and more populous cities. He claims that the [side-]effects of the post-Soviet Russian societal transformation are still evident in the city’s cultural landscape. His place of origin and affinity towards the city provide reasonable legitimacy and credibility for the researcher’s role and position in relation to the average Western reader as the genuine authority to produce and reproduce the knowledge he gathered for his anthropological presentation of the members of this particular traumatised “community of loss” in this small town in Russian Siberia. The central problem with his presentation is the ambiguity of the concept of trauma, which is crucial for the structural foundation of his exposition on the post-Soviet Russian culture, nation, and etnos.
It is important to emphasise that the qualitative understanding of a trauma is culture bound. People in the United States may perceive a particular event A to be a traumatic event, while the people in an another foreign country may perceive that same event A as a socially inconvenient event. There is no concrete relationship between trauma and the events that occurred during the early years of the post-Soviet transition in Russia, except the author’s segmented texts from the field site. Although many of the responses that were published in this text were depicting a grim, dark, and bleak Russian society, they do not indicate that there has been a recent trauma all over Russia, because of the collapse of the semiotic system. According to the 2009 poll, a sample population of 10,000 people across Russia stated that they missed the old Soviet system of order in society and some have indicated that they preferred to go back in time. (Denisova, Eller, Zhuravskaya, 2010). However, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, an economist, compared the economic data-sets of 1990 and 2009 and concluded that were generally joyous and content with the independent Russia, because the overall quality of living had improved, mortality decreased, life expectancy increased, income per capita tripled, and the Soviet system had become obsolete by 1991 (ibid.). Thus, even with the collapse of the Soviet semiotic system associated with the Soviet state there must be a parallel system of signs and meanings that functioned during the Soviet era (especially during the repressions) and continued to this day. Hence, the quality of trauma may always be perceived to outsiders as a significant factor, while not necessarily the same to the Russian people.
Thus, recent collective memory of the disastrous trauma and catastrophe may not be the drive for the etnos formation. Interestingly, the author did not emphasise enough that the city was located on the periphery of the Russian Federation, being close to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. The spatial context of the city is highly relevant to the identity formation of the post-socialist Russians particular only to Barnaul, as the location of the studied space pre-determined its historical instrumental role in the whole functioning of Russia. Historically, the city was one of the oldest cities built in that region during the Imperial era. In addition, during the World War II (or as regionally rendered as the Great Patriotic War) the city was a temporary location of Soviet authorities and throughout the Soviet era it was one of the important strategic industrial cities of military ammunition. Although the author correlates the collective traumatic memory of the post-Soviet transition period as a result of capitalism in Russia in conjunction to the subsequent Chechen War, the city’s economic status played greater importance during the militarised periods of higher level of productivity rather than in times of peace. The time of transition also signified the retraction of the Soviet/Russian military from the satellite states in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. The retraction indicated the reduction in state spending on military and military industry, which was the main component of Branaul’s economic component. Thus, it is not entirely validated that the trauma of the post-Soviet feeling of uncertainty, while the Russian etnos has been searching for a new identity after being stripped of the Russified Soviet internationalist socialist identity, caused the people of Barnaul to become militarised, isolated, or patriotic, because the effects of the post-Soviet transition period in Russia could be purely economical, such as the loss of appropriate jobs and the narrowing of career opportunities for the city’s population as Russia was moving away from a military-industrial planned economy to a pseudo-capitalist state-supervised market economy (Hill and Gaddy, 2003). These socio-economic reconfigurations may have summoned negative reactions from the population economic class differences within a formerly Soviet cohesive group due to capitalist nature of competitive economy, yet often rendered as a scapegoat to incite racism or internal xenophobia.
In addition, the author fails to define what is deemed to be, through his lens, the Russian culture, nation, and/or etnos. Although he is writing as an anthropologist, where the discipline generally lacks major positivist theories, he has not established a pan-Russian pattern and instead he described a marginalised and underprivileged social group within Russian Federation - the conscripts and their mothers. By the late 1980, the Soviet Army was been socially and physically deteriorating due to unhealthy lifestyles of the soldiers, increasingly severe hazing rituals, sub-human living conditions, and the evident first steps of the liberalisation of the Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachov. Meanwhile, there were many legal methods of avoiding the mandatory military service in the Soviet Union (and later in Russia): continuing higher education, recently born children of the potential conscripts, or by the early 1990’s a not-yet criminalised simple monetary transaction between the candidate and the official at the military administrative district office. Thus, the alternative explanation to the dissatisfaction of the mothers and sons with the Moscow-sponsored campaign for territorial re-integration of Chechnya would be the young male citizens’ lack of diverse set of marketable skills to gain an income due to their previous belief that they would be going to work at the city’s military industrial sector as it has been historically done. However, as the position of the Russian Federation has changed on the international geopolitical arena after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. the role and position of the former important producer of military ammunition has also changed to its disadvantage. Ultimately, the question of the Russian etnos was raised and revitalised among the so-called victims of the “community of loss” in order to create a social and cultural distinctiveness from the tainted and poisoned post-Soviet capitalists and foreign entities to legitimise their existence (raison d’être) on par as the economically stronger Russian social sub-groups particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were the main beneficiaries of the reforms, compared to the isolated and disconnected city of Branaul, a former VPK city. The author failed to acknowledge that the social mobilisation of the Russian ‘etnos’ in-group members was tied to the economic disadvantages only in that particular city researched, while making the a priori assumption that such pattern was country-wide.
Works Cited
Denisova, I. et al. (2010) ‘What Do Russians Think About Transition?’, Economics of Transition 18 (2): 249-280.
Hill, F. and C. Gaddy (2003) The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold. 1st. edition. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Oushakine, S.A. (2009) The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Originally submitted as a class assignment for CERES colloquium in Jan 2011
December 2, 2012
Read for an Anthropology of Post-Soviet Russia course in grad school, well-written with some great insights into the creation of a "national idea" in post-Soviet Russian society (like the connections between neo-fascist and homosexual movements, led by guys like Limonov)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews