Bums, Shamans, and Holy Fools: Dmitrii Bykov’s Living Souls

In 2006, the Russian writer Dmitrii Bykov published a novel that offered a perverse revisionist reading of Russia’s past, present, and future. Entitled ZhD in Russian, the initials lend themselves to numerous interpretations, from “railroad” to “live souls.” A version of the latter phrase, suggesting a counterpoint to Gogol’s Dead Souls, became the somewhat less evocative title of the English translation, Living Souls.⁶

In Living Souls, we learn that Russia has long been the battleground between the Varangians (the modern Russian population) and the Khazars (the Jews).⁷ Caught in the middle is the “native” population, who either live in isolated villages or, ignorant of their own roots, become assimilated in the big cities. Occasionally, some of these urban-based natives undergo a kind of midlife crisis, drop out of society, and join the growing ranks of the homeless. In the English translation, the women among them are called Mashkas and the men, Joes. In the Russian, however, the men are Vas’kas (I will omit the apostrophe in the name from here on out).⁸ Vaska is a variation on Vasya, with an ending that implies either the speaker’s condescension toward an inferior or warm feeling toward a friend who is something of a scamp.

Most of the action takes place in a time that appears to be an alternative version of the very near future, but with repeated references to the early post-Soviet years. The book presents two, seemingly contradictory, views of the Vaskas. When they are referred to as the natives, then they are simply the latest iteration of a peaceful, nonconforming group of bystanders who prefer to stay out of the way of history. Most of the time, however, they are a more of a social problem, a reinterpretation of the crisis of homelessness that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vaskas are repeatedly rounded up and moved into shelters, but now there is hope for a limited reintegration into society: the new “Salvation Plan” allows families to adopt Vaskas and bring them into their homes, like pets. When one of the characters expresses his dissatisfaction with the program, another remonstrates with him: “ ‘You’re saying it was better when they cluttered up the streets and subways?’ Shura said lazily. ‘It was you who kept writing “Something must be done!” And now something’s been done and still you aren’t happy!’ ” He adds: “What’s the alternative, Slava? Remember what it was like when Luzhkov was Mayor? What do you suggest, turn them into sausage meat?” (203).

We learn about the Vaskas because of one particular case of adoption: “Since she was eleven, Anka had dreamt of having a Vaska” (201).⁹ She knows she wants a full-grown adult rather than a child. The entire episode is disturbingly like a story about a child adopting a dog (indeed, it even resembles the beginning of the Disney film Lilo and Stitch):

One tried to juggle with two balls, another struggled to do a handstand, putting his legs against the wall and tumbling down again and again. Two more Mashkas of about sixty clapped hands and sang a Russian folk song with a sad rakish tune, although she couldn’t make out the words. She noticed a couple of young ones sitting thoughtfully over a game of chess, moving the pieces at random: the Syndrome clearly made it impossible for them to learn the rules.

She had discounted the idea of a child Vaska from the start. She liked one of about thirty-five, with a long face and big teeth and glasses, but at that moment he did a somersault and gazed up at her with such doglike devotion that she wanted nothing more to do with him. Her eye fell at last on an elderly Joe with thin straw-colored hair, who had been sitting quietly in the corner gluing a little box and not trying to impress anyone. (209)

Anka chooses the old man and is sent home with instructions about his care and feeding: “No tobacco or vodka of course, and feed him strictly as prescribed … . Plenty of black bread and iron and outdoor exercise and daily walks” (210). This particular Vaska is a bundle of contradictions. On one hand, we find out that he is one of the “natives,” and a highly respected one, at that. Indeed, his people esteem him as a kind of sage. On the other hand, his midlife breakdown and transformation into a Vaska is both socioeconomic (like the dislocation that struck so many middle-aged people after the fall of communism) and overtly medicalized. He and all his fellow Vaskas suffer from something called “Vasilenko Syndrome,” a condition whose name is meant to be the source of the group’s nickname (“Vaska” for “Vasilenko”).

Bykov is, in fact, playing multiple games with the variations on “Vaska.” The man adopted by Anka is named Vasily Ivanovich, which means that Vaska is a version of his real name. More important, his name, while ordinary, is also immediately recognizable. The most noteworthy Vasily Ivanovich in Russian culture is Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, the Red Army commander who became famous during the Russian Civil War. The writer Dmitry Furmanov, who served as commissar under Chapaev, published one of the most popular novels of the early Soviet period based on his experience. Titled Chapaev, it came out in 1923 and served as the inspiration for an even more popular film in 1934 (by the Vasiliev brothers—more Vaskas!).

In the novel, Furmanov is simultaneously impressed and frustrated by Chapaev, who demonstrates a tactical genius but an otherwise simplistic worldview. In the movie, he is prone to portentous aphorisms. But he found his greatest success in Soviet jokelore, with endless anecdotes about Chapaev and fellow protagonists Anka and Petka; in most of them, he appears to be a dolt.¹⁰ All of this became grist for the mill of the premier post-Soviet satirist Victor Pelevin, whose 1996 novel Chapaev and the Void (published in the United States as Buddha’s Little Finger) splits the difference by portraying the commander as an inscrutable Zen sage.

It would be difficult for a Russian reader not to think of Chapaev when encountering Bykov’s Vasily Ivanovich, if for no other reason that the fact that the jokes never use his last name; though they are referred to as “jokes about Chapaev,” they are always about Vasily Ivanovich, Petka, and Anka. And of course, the girl who “adopts” Vasily Ivanovich in Living Souls is named Anka.¹¹

On one hand, Vasily Ivanovich is so helpless that Anka has to take him for walks every morning. Anka’s family friend, Gurov, thanks her for taking care of Vasily Ivanovich (“He’s completely useless when it comes to practical matters, as you know”), prompting Anka to ask, “Is it a bad case of the Syndrome?” Gurov’s answer, like everything related to Vasily Ivanovich, is frustratingly vague: “Yes, or rather the highest form of it, I’d say. But forget the Syndrome, what he has isn’t an illness, it’s part of his nature, and I’m happy you’re friends with him. Now listen carefully. This man could be the salvation of you and your family” (224). He adds: “my job’s simply to make sure we lose as few of ours as possible, and Vasily Ivanovich is one of our best. Don’t be surprised, Vaskas are never what they seem” (224).

On the other hand, when Anka eventually travels with Vasily Ivanovich, she sees that he is received by his fellows as a kind of shaman savant, a more docile variation on the holy fool. Yet he is also clearly a bomzh (Russian slang for the homeless), as Bykov spells out earlier in the text. What exactly is Bykov doing?

In a much more complicated fashion, Bykov is playing the same game as Bravo and Kasta: indulging the audience’s familiarity with a negative stereotype while also (at least in Bravo’s case) revealing the yokel’s hidden gifts. In much of his work, Bykov delights in frustrating moral and aesthetic expectations. (His novel Justification, for example, reveals the Gulag to be a testing ground for finding the country’s best people.) Living Souls is an odd variation on the alternate history genre, in that it is really an alternate near-future based on two important deviations from our historical reality: first, the discovery of a new fuel source that renders hydrocarbons irrelevant; and second, the transformation of conspiratorial or secret histories from speculation to fact (the Khazars and the Varangians).¹²

The Vaskas are a key feature in what turns out to be a phantasmagorical exploration of both Russian chauvinism and Russophobia. When removed from the philosemitic fantasies of Arthur Koestler and his acolytes, the very idea of the Jews as the Khazars fits a familiar paranoid paradigm of a sinister nation within a nation. But conservative Russian nationalists are simultaneously undermined by the identification of Russian state power (the government, the military) as Varangian rather than native to Russia. If the natives are the “real Russians,” then their depiction is simultaneously Russophilic and Russophobic. Consistent with the snobbishness and classism behind phrases like “some sort of Vasya,” at best they live a step removed from utter squalor. As the homeless, they are a blight on the post-Soviet urban landscape; as genetic defectives reduced to incompetence in midlife, they are the phenotypic expression of Russian backwardness. But as fonts of wisdom, however Zen or absurd that wisdom might be, they are truly in touch with the land, and they preserve gentle moral values forgotten by both Varangians and Khazars. In this sense, they are a twisted version of a Slavophile fantasy.

The Vasyas of popular song and the Vaskas of Bykov’s novel remind us how easily these stigmatized identities switch valences and become glorified, and how easily they move from one category to the other.

Cattle Call

There are, however, a few terms that resist reclamation, in particular the epithet that has the broadest, least specific scope in the Russian arsenal of projected stigmatization: bydlo. Bydlo is a Polish and Ukrainian collective noun that originally referred to cattle, but in Russian denotes the brainless, unwashed masses who follow the crowd, believe what they are told, and, of course, have terrible taste. Compared to bydlo, the concept of sovok is practically optimistic: Soviet holdovers will inevitably pass, but stupidity is forever.¹³

As an insult, bydlo functions multidirectionally: one might hear a (possibly liberal) snob dismiss, say, Putin’s supporters as bydlo, but one might just as easily hear someone who claims to represent the common people attacking the elites, saying, “They think we’re all bydlo.” Indeed, even though the word sovok has its roots in words related to politics, it is bydlo that has the stronger political component (along with its obvious concerns for social class). Sovok, we recall, implicated everyone who came of age in the USSR, to one degree or another. As an attempt at alienating the negative from one’s concept of the collective self, sovok could never be an unqualified success. Bydlo, in contrast, is an ideal tool for alienation. Moreover, it is universal: every culture can have bydlo, but only some can have sovki.

As the scholar and journalist Sergei Medvedev put it in a 2012 article, “Fenomenologiia bydla”: “In the 1990s, we disdainfully tried to distance ourselves from the sovok, while in the 2000s, instead of the sovok we began to speak of bydlo.”¹⁴ The decline of sovok and the persistence of bydlo puts sovok in context. Like many countries, Russia has a long history of alienation between the elites and the masses (terms that should really be put in scare quotes, since their definition is both provisional and malleable), traceable in no small part to the long serfdom of the majority of the ethnic Russian population before 1861. In Pushkin’s time, this was expressed in disdain for the unwashed chern’ (from the word black, it connoted an intellectual rather than physical darkness). In the last six decades of the nineteenth century, the common people (narod) were fetishized across the Russian political spectrum, from the Slavophiles (who saw the peasants as the bearers of true Russian values) to the Populists (whose movement to “go to the people” was a dismal failure) to the varieties of Marxists (who saw the future in the proletariat).

In 1908, the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok wrote his famous essay, “The People and the Intelligentsia,” lamenting the naive one-sidedness of the intelligentsia’s infatuation with the common folk:

But from the other side—ever the same faintly ironical smile, the knowing silence, the gratitude for “instruction” and apologies for “ignorance,” with an undertone of “for the present, till our time comes.” A dreadful laziness and dreadful torpor, it always seemed to us; or else the slow awakening of a giant, as it seems to us more and more. A giant waking with a singular smile on his lips. No intelligent smiles like that; one would think we knew all the ways of laughing there are, but in face of the muzhik’s smile—which has nothing in common with the irony that Heine and the Jews have taught us, or with Gogol’s laughter through tears, or with [Vladimir] Solov’ev’s loud laughter—all our laughing instantly dies; we are troubled and afraid. (359)

For Blok, the people and intelligentsia might as well be warring nations: “Between the two camps—the people and the intelligentsia—there is a line at which they can meet and agree. No such uniting line existed between the Russians and the Tatars in their frankly hostile camps” (360). Blok sees in this conflict an oncoming disaster, borrowing from the metaphor of Gogol’s troika at the end of Dead Souls, and suggesting that the Russian troika might be on the verge of trampling the intelligentsia beneath its hooves. A hostile interpretation of the Russian Revolution would hold that Blok was prophetic.

But Blok’s giant muzhik or runaway troika are (like the sovok) the historically contingent and ultimately short-term metaphorical manifestation of a centuries-old problem that is not going away. In Blok’s time, this split between the elites and the common folk is appropriately framed in terms of impending catastrophe, while the late- and post-Soviet sovok is an image of inexorable decline. When each moment passes, we are left with something that is, at least structurally, the same gap as before (if we do not include the intelligentsia in the sovok category, as do Pelevin and Bykov). It is an algebraic formula, with one variable representing some notion of the elite, and the other standing in for some notion of the common.

As the post-Soviet period wears on, we start to see a possible deideologization of this gap, starting in the late 1990s, when the bydlo can be merely crass, and coming to an abrupt halt in Putin’s third term. The contempt for bydlo (or, to borrow a Soviet-style formulation, “Bydlo and the Struggle against It”) goes farther than the disdain for the sovok. Sovok-hatred is preoccupied primarily with taste, while bydlo-bashing rests at the dangerous intersection of taste, intelligence, and, eventually, politics.

When it comes to culture, the sovok’s lament was that culture wasn’t being produced with him in mind anymore. His alienation from post-Soviet trends in art, entertainment, and literature was a constituent element of his personal story. As Western and Westernized mass culture come to dominate the post-Soviet media ecosystem, the anxieties center around (1) the incredibly poor quality, lack of sophistication, and sheer stupidity now on offer; and (2) the audience that is presumed to enjoy this stuff and even want more of it.

Bydlo functions simultaneously as national and global; global, in that the contempt for bydlo easily inscribes itself within a worldwide tradition of elite disdain for the unwashed masses; and national, in that the critique of bydlo so often plays out in terms of shame for a specifically Russian “backwardness.” Even this, however, could be framed as a kind of progress: self-hatred does not have to rely on the Soviet experience anymore.

Watching the Defectives

Unlike its Internet successors, bydlo is a creature of television. That is, bydlo is posited as the ideal audience for the stupefying messages conveyed by state television. Even worse, the bydlo threatened to become not just the audience but the subject matter of mass entertainment. This would certainly be the case in Russia, as in the rest of the world, when Internet streaming technology made video blogging accessible to the masses (YouTube’s motto was, famously, “Broadcast yourself”). But before YouTube and its imitators, in the age of the dial-up modem and the 2400-baud connection, national television was already moving in the direction of turning its least sophisticated viewers into entertainment in their own right. The most notable example was the TV6 program called Znak kachestva (Seal of Quality).

Initially a ten-minute series of clips aired twice a day on TV6, after three years on the air Znak kachestva changed to an hour-long format in June 1999, only to be cancelled in 2001 due to low ratings. In its classic, pre-1999 format, Znak kachestva was a step toward the democratization of television, even if some of the audience probably watched it in horror. The show had an uncomplicated premise, giving virtually anyone the chance to express themselves before the entire country at no cost, whether that expression took the form of (frequently terrible) singing and dancing or the recitation of poems that were unlikely to grace the pages of selective literary journals. Paid announcements and advertisements were also included, but in a manner consistent with the rest of the show (commercials were not prerecorded).

Because most episodes had no grand design beyond the program’s basic conception, virtually any random episode can be taken as representative of Znak kachestva’s typical content. The only differentiating factor was that the daytime broadcast tended to favor children and teenagers a bit more than the evening version, which relied heavily on amateur exotic dancers trying to win a never-ending “erotic show” contest promising work in Russia and abroad. An episode that aired on May 26, 1999, presents two different colorfully garbed women reading tarot cards, lighting candles, staring at icons, and gazing into crystal balls. Madame Sofia offers her help removing curses and finding success in love and business, in a deadly earnest tone that her central-casting witch’s outfit renders all the more comical. She is followed by a young man playing the guitar and singing off-key, then by a set of erotic dancers. Immediately after the erotic dancers we see a group of five teenage (and preteen) girls, performing basic aerobics moves while lip-synching to the song “Ia uchus’ tantsevat’ ” (“I’m Learning to Dance”). Znak kachestva was a late-twentieth-century twist on the nineteenth-century physiological sketch, offering up peculiar character types for the viewer’s entertainment, if not edification.

Indeed, the elements that compose Znak kachestva’s minimalist frame reinforce this sense of a parade of character types. At least twice during every sequence, the performances are interrupted by an animated clip of a spaceship with the Znak kachestva logo as it lands in front of Red Square. When the door opens, out come a violinist in a tuxedo; a big-haired, big-breasted woman in the skimpiest of bikinis; and a young man listening to his boom box: Znak kachestva is a freak show from outer space. Yet immediately after the last cartoon character leaves the ship, telephone numbers flash across the screen, reminding the viewers that they, too, can be transported through the ether and end up on the nation’s television screens. Thanks to Znak kachestva, the idiot box is no longer a one-way means of communication: anyone in the audience can become part of the show.

But who, exactly, is the audience, and why are they watching the show, let alone performing on it? The amateurs who dance, sing, and declaim are, more often than not, painfully sincere: the would-be exotic dancers hope to land paying gigs, while the singers’ and poets’ dreams of stardom are almost palpable. From its very beginning, Znak kachestva held out the promise of fame and fortune as a distinct possibility. Znak kachestva created its very own girl band through an amateur competition: the bland but relatively successful Strelki. But the innovation of Znak kachestva is not so much that it takes no-talents seriously as that it has it both ways: the amateurs perform their hearts out, smiling or looking soulfully at the cameras, but the producers add their own editorial comments in the form of quips and chastushki printed at the bottom of the screen. The commentary, while sarcastic, does not break with the show’s overall level of sophistication and taste: these ready-made aphorisms may make it all the more difficult to take the performers seriously, but they show no more evidence of talent than do the singers and dancers themselves. The aforementioned guitarist probably doesn’t realize that his picture is accompanied by the phrase “Radost’ derzhi v karmane, a gore na ekrane” (Keep your joy in your pocket, and your misery on the screen), nor do the aerobics girls know that while they are jumping and waving, the audience is reading the words “My uchilis’ tantsevat’, chtoby doma ne skuchat’ ” (We learned to dance, so as not to stay at home bored).

Znak kachestva may well be the first Russian example of self-conscious popular entertainment with such polyvalent irony. It appeals to both the earnest amateurs and the skeptical hecklers, living up to its self-proclaimed status as a narodnaia peredacha: it has something for everyone. The show exploits the irony inherent in the very name, Znak kachestva: initially referring to Brezhnev-era attempts to improve consumer goods by affixing a “seal of quality” to various products, the znak kachestva quickly became the stuff of Soviet anecdotes, implying the exact opposite of the intended meaning. It is an official emblem of high quality that the savvy consumer immediately realizes is a sign of no quality. This symbol was supposed to alert the consumer to the arrival of an extraordinary product but actually meant more of the same shoddy merchandise. The irony of the Brezhnev-era znak kachestva is affixed to the post-Soviet amateur performers, who themselves play the role of the defective goods elevated to high-quality status.

Playing a complicated game with its audience, Znak kachestva invited them both to identify with and mock the people on screen, who were essentially audience members who might have been better-off never leaving their couches. Critics hated it, of course, because the “people’s show” showed the people to be hopeless fools. Nearly twenty years after the show went off the air, however, what is striking is how harmless and good-natured it actually was. A product of the free-wheeling 1990s, Znak kachestva did not invite its viewers to draw political conclusions; culture and politics were still largely separate spheres.

It can only be a coincidence that the show changed to a moderated, MC-facilitated format just a few weeks before Putin first became prime minster, but the fact that the show went from giddy chaos to controlled tedium on the eve of the next great political transformation of the post-Soviet era is certainly evocative. The show’s 2001 cancellation, no doubt attributable to both the failure of the new format and the limited shelf life of novelty programming, was also well-timed. When next we see the bydlo take to the airwaves, the stakes will be much higher.

A Coat of Not Many Colors: Vatnik

In 2011, the cartoonist Anton Chadsky invented a meme that would, a few short years later, become a mainstay of political discourse and satire: Vatnik.

The Russian word vatnik originally and primarily refers to a cotton-padded jacket that was part of the Soviet army’s winter uniform from the 1940s through the 1960s, also serving as standard-issue winter clothing for prisoners in the Gulag. In a 2014 interview with Snob, Chadsky explains how he turned the vatnik into an Internet meme: “It was in 2011, a couple of months before the mass protests against the falsified Duma elections. I decided to draw a character who would embody all the negative qualities of the typical Russian citizen (rossiianin). By analogy to SpongeBob Square Pants, Rashka Square Vatnik (Rashka-Kvadratnyi Vatnik) was born.” Chadsky also cited American satirical cartoons as an influence, claiming that they can help people “set their brains right”: American Dad and Family Guy “are cartoons that poke fun at the flaws of American society. I want my readers to look at themselves from the outside, get more rational, and not fall for propaganda.” For better or worse, Vatnik takes visual inspiration from SpongeBob (he is roughly the same shape) and satirical inspiration from the work of Seth McFarlane.

Where SpongeBob is a bright and healthy yellow (well, healthy for a sponge), Vatnik is gray. Where SpongeBob smiles vacantly, Vatnik looks like a mean drunk. One of his eyes is always blackened, the other purple and closed shut. His teeth are few and far between, and his face is usually covered with a five-o-clock shadow.

As a mouthpiece for the kind of reflexive chauvinism known in Russian as urapatriotizm (hurrah patriotism), the Vatnik meme quickly spread throughout the Internet. Obviously, this is fundamentally different from the way in which the idea of the sovok spread in the 1980s and 1990s, before the Internet was a mass phenomenon. The sovok’s origins were verbal, as part of oral folklore; subsequently, artists could create caricatures of the sovok, but they were always multiple and secondary: there is no single representation of the sovok.

The sovok started as, and remained, a character type; Vatnik was a character intended to suggest a type. When aggressive patriotic sentiment came to the forefront during the war in Ukraine, Vatnik was ready. And this is where Vatnik’s trajectory differs from that of the sovok. Where the sovok was a concept known primarily by people who could, at least theoretically, fall within its target group, Vatnik took a different path.

Vatnik was now both a specific character (as seen in the Internet meme) and a general category, a distinction I am trying to highlight here by capitalizing the word as a proper name for the character and using the definite article (with no capitalization) when referring to the type. Within Russia and the Russian-speaking community, vatnik was less an ethnic slur than a political label. Putin’s critics reserved the label vatnik (and its more generalized corollary, vata [cotton]) for a part of their own society that they found loathsome. Internally, vatniki were essentially politicized, pro-Putin bydlo.

In Ukraine, vatnik as a designation for the Russian enemy inevitably became an ethnonym. Slurs are casually tossed about on all sides of the conflict: Russians refer to Ukrainians as ukropy (dills), while Ukrainians, who have long complained of moskali, now also call Russians kolorady. With the possible exception of kolorady (based on the apparent resemblance of the St. George’s ribbon, a Russian military symbol that has recently been adopted for patriotic purposes, to the Colorado beetle), these terms have no independent negative meanings. Ukrainians are called “dills” because the Russian word ukrop shares its first three letters with Ukraine, and moskali simply comes from Moskva (Moscow). They are offensive only because they are meant to be offensive.

As a Ukrainian ethnopolitical slur, vatnik has little to recommend itself; it is just one item in a sadly growing vocabulary for denigrating a nation’s external enemy. Within Russia, the vatnik follows the path of the sovok and the bydlo toward alienating a subsection of one’s own, larger group. No doubt the vatnik is a compendium of national and ethnic stereotypical traits easily identifiable with Russians: the rowdy, aggressively patriotic vodka-swilling drunk is not exactly an original idea. The critique, however, is less ethnic or national than it is ideological: the vatnik is an object of scorn not because of his ancestry but because of his behavior and his worldview. Or rather, the only ancestry that is important for understanding the vatnik is figurative: he is a descendant of sovok.

Vatnik’s own creator, Anton Chadsky, makes the link clear: “Vatnik’s success comes from the fact that it has filled an available niche, just as the term sovok did in its time. Some people made fun of Russian nationalists, others of communists, still others of pagans, but there was no single, collective image. Vatnik combined all of that into himself, becoming a universal symbol” (“Sozdatel’ ‘Vatnika’ ”). In another interview, he extends the comparison:

In my opinion, Vatnik is the anthropological continuation of the activity and way of thinking of the sovok. There’s no Soviet Union, so there are no sovki. The people who are nostalgic for the USSR today I would also call vatniki. Vatnik is the grandson and son of the sovok, he thinks in the same categories, but under contemporary Russian conditions and realities. But again, that’s if you think of the word sovok negatively. But Genis himself doesn’t put negative connotations into the word; his definition has nostalgic notes to it. I would consider the image of the sovok as a more parodic and more caricatured negative, just as I see in the image of the vatnik a person living according to the stereotypes delivered to him by the state on television screens. (“Vnuk ‘sovka’ ”)

It makes sense that Chadsky sees the sovok in such a strongly negative light, since it is negativity that both characterizes and drives his idea of the vatnik. Under Chadsky’s pen, Vatnik is difficult to love: ugly, bruised, and aggressive, his features are usually contorted to express the feeling that his creator identifies as central to the vatnik’s existence—hatred.

Compared to the vatnik, the sovok looks positively gentle. The sovok, after all, is the quintessence of Late Socialism, preoccupied with consumption, culture, and work avoidance. But the vatnik, even if he is the “grandson” of the sovok, has a more troubling and more complicated historical context. Chadsky designed him to represent his own era, an era that he understands in terms of a more distant Soviet past: the Stalin years. Though the coat that gave Vatnik his name was a mainstay of military life during World War II, Chadsky specifically connects it to the Gulag. The vatnik lives in two times at once, as Chadsky himself told an interviewer: “The vatnik is the Russian citizen [rossiianin] who, to this day, still mentally lives in Stalin’s camps and is fine with that” (Zhogov). Thus, according to Chadsky, the key to the vatnik is hatred, whose targets include but are not limited to: America, the West, sexual minorities, liberalism, and Ukraine (2015).

The sovok oscillated between representing a maligned segment of the post-Soviet population (people who clung to their old Soviet ways and worldview) and encompassing virtually everyone who was raised in the Soviet system, ruefully acknowledging kinship with a character type that, while not flattering, may have had its charms. The vatnik’s role in the Russian imaginary is much more clear-cut. Chadsky acknowledges that some people might try to appropriate Vatnik as a positive representation of their own self-image but is convinced that this would be a misunderstanding of what Vatnik is all about. The sovok was abject, but the vatnik is the politicized abject. The vatnik is the (presumably liberal) Russian’s ideological opponent in political debates and processes that are real, relevant, and current. To put it simply: an American vatnik would be a cartoon character made out of a MAGA hat.

Chadsky may be right when he identifies the vatnik with hatred. For that matter, if we believe in the importance of authorial intent, he has to be right, at least in the initial stages, before the Vatnik Internet meme spreads both with and without him. But even if we accept that the hatred is initially the product of Vatnik and the people he parodies, hatred inevitably becomes a two-way street. Loving Vatnik-as-parody is difficult to disentangle from hating the vatnik as an object of parody. Which raises the question: is Vatnik an instrument of Russophobia? The image of Vatnik is so hostile (however hilarious) that accusations of Russophobia begin to look rather credible.

Vatnik is not just a condensation of Putin-era patriotism and aggressive chauvinism; he is a symbol, or perhaps symptom, of contemporary Russia’s political polarization (again, see MAGA hat). Appreciating Vatnik places the viewer in a very particular subject position, that of someone who is fed up with everything Vatnik represents. Chadsky rejects the possibility of a positive reappropriation of Vatnik and does not offer as a possible alternative the overidentification with Vatnik—Vatnik as styob. Styob is a particular form of humor pioneered (or at least initially identified) in the late Soviet era, in which the straight-faced adoption of Soviet cant or ritual serves to undermine the very thing adopted. In the United States, the most obvious example would be the right-wing person Stephen Colbert created for The Daily Show.

But it is precisely the question of the vatnik’s reappropriation that shows the limits of Chadsky’s vision. Fair enough: the visual image of Vatnik is so repellent that it would appear to defy positive self-identification. In her 2016 article on “conspicuous patriotic consumption,” Vera Skvirskaja traces the path of the vatnik from liberal satire to nationalist point of pride, with particular emphasis on the resurgence of the original vatnik (the coat) in contemporary Russian fashion. Many of her examples are about people either wearing the vatnik or proudly claiming to be vatniki. But once we move to appropriation, Vatnik, the image from the Internet meme, starts to fade from view.

A quick search of the Internet reveals multiple instances of Russian speakers proudly claiming their vatnik identity, even if they are dwarfed by content targeting the vatnik for ridicule. In 2015, Andrei Iurevich Lukin, a self-published poet and science fiction writer, composed a poem called “I Am a Vatnik,” subsequently set to music by Vasily Rodin and a YouTube slide show by the Tula Creative Association of Orthodox Writers. Its greatest success online (with 13,930 views as of March 19, 2020, though the account has since been deactivated) is a video of the poem as read by the actor Yuri Nazarov, a mainstay of Soviet and Russian film and cinema, best known in the West as the heroine’s father in Little Vera. Nazarov, a signatory to a 2014 open letter by cultural figures in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, brings both theatrical talent and nationalist street cred.

The poem assembles the characteristics usually associated with the vatnik, but combines them with the tropes of Soviet patriotism, in precisely the same manner used by defenders of sovok. In fact, the poem invokes sovok in its very first line (as always, the unrhymed, inelegant translation is my own):

I’m a vatnik, a hereditary sovok,

Born in the USSR in the days of yore.

I’m black bread. I’m a pleather boot.

I’m the military oath’s sonorous word

And the triumphant red banners.

It turns out that the defenders of the vatnik are obliged to follow the same strategy as those who ridicule him: assembling a list of stereotypes and touchstones to define him through metonymy. When the vatnik is the object of satire, those touchstones are thoroughly negative: drunkenness, blind devotion, nostalgia, poor hygiene. In Lukin’s poem, some of those traits are present, but they are outweighed by the familiar tropes of Soviet patriotism:

I’m the son of a different time and age.

Within me burns How the Steel Was Tempered,

And the soldier’s medal in May …

Lukin moves swiftly from the revered Soviet heritage to the ideological battles of the present, implying a connection between past glories and the conflict in Ukraine:

I’m guilty before Europe

Because I’m happy beyond measure at Crimea’s return.

I remember the Crimean Spring,

And am not ashamed of my country.

Defending the vatnik inevitably relies on one of his most unappealing characteristics: his anger. Lukin turns that anger into proud defiance:

I’m a vatnik. So those who destroy our monuments

Don’t recognize me!

I’m a holiday!

I’m a solemn fireworks display!

I’m the laurels given to the fallen.

I’m the wind blowing through the St. George’s ribbon.

I’m not ashamed to cry on Victory Day.

I have not forgotten!

I remember!

I’m proud!

Svirskaja’s thesis about the reappropriation of the vatnik is convincing in the abstract, especially when shifting the focus from the meme to the actual item of clothing that inspired it. If, however, we stick with the meme (and the hostile caricature behind calling someone a vatnik), then the patriotic reading is on shakier ground. This may be because, online, Vatnik-the-meme is in his natural habitat; patriotic and Putinist vatnik revisionists are fighting a rear-guard battle. Compare Lukin’s roughly fourteen thousand views on YouTube to the popularity of a satirical song with the same title, this time by a YouTube performer and chan denizen posting under the name bitard671. His song, which spares no venom in its portrayal of the vatnik, had 93,927 views as of March 19, 2020.

Styob may surround the vatnik as an item of clothing, but the path for converting the vatnik stereotype into something positive relies on turning vices into virtues, on turning a portrait of regressive nostalgia into a point of pride. If anything, Anton Chadsky himself, along with his various antics in the past several years, resembles an exercise in a styob of a different kind: at times, Chadsky appears to be engaging in styob whose object is not the Russian chauvinist but the “Russophobic” Russian liberal.

This begins with Chadsky’s name, which is both a pseudonym and a portmanteau. “Chadsky” combines “Chaadaev” (the nineteenth-century intellectual whose critique of the barrenness of then-contemporary Russia led the authorities to declare him insane) and “Chatsky” (a name whose orthographic difference from “Chadsky” yields to homophony when either one is spoken aloud). Chatsky is the protagonist of Alexander Griboyedov’s 1831 play, Woe from Wit, about a man who, on his return home from abroad, is appalled by Russian reality. (Tradition has it that Chatsky himself was based on Chaadaev.)

Styob may well be the best framework for Chadsky’s most scandalous public art action on a visit to Ukraine that turned into extended exile. On January 12, 2015, a video posted online caused a minor stir on Russian social media: filmed at an event in Kyiv titled “Junta und vata” (a multilingual reference to the Russian media’s characterization of the post-Maidan government as a “bloody junta” and the Vatnik-inspired term vata (cotton) to characterize Russian nationalist sentiment), it was called “Poedanie russkoiazychnogo mal’chika” (Eating the Russian-Speaking Baby, or Eating the Russophone Baby) (“V Kieve razrezali”). Most likely this video was inspired by an earlier scandalous political art action in 1998, when the artist Yuri Shabelnikov baked a life-sized (or perhaps, death-sized) cake baked in the shape of Lenin’s corpse, to be consumed by those in attendance at the performance (Rivituso). Chadsky’s event was even more macabre. In this case, the base of the cake is decorated in the colors of the Russian flag, on top of which lies the shape of an infant, complete with diaper and pacifier (also, naturally, made of cake rather than human flesh). As the theme to the 1980s evening soap opera Dallas inexplicably blares in the background, the revelers laugh and ask to eat various baby parts (“I want the belly!”) and shout about the “bloody Kyiv junta.”

Events like these are easy to dismiss as bad taste (though in his interview with Dmitrii Zhogov, Chadsky noted that “the baby was excellent. Very tasty”). But to take them at face value is both to misunderstand the styob and succumb to elementary trolling (which, come to think of it, is often tantamount to a weaponized form of styob). In this case, the choice of a baby was a pointed reference to an infamous case of propaganda in the summer of 2014, when Russian state television aired a false report about a Russian boy publicly crucified by Ukrainian fighters in the city of Slovyansk.

The baby also subverts the very premise of this sort of propaganda. What, after all, is a “Russophone” baby? At the surface level, we know exactly what this means: the child of Russian-speaking parents. But on reflection, we realize the absurdity of the term. A baby cannot be Russophone because a baby cannot speak. This renders the banana cake baby the perfect simulacrum of an ideological concept that has no counterpart in real life: the banana cake construct is just as much a fake baby as a biological baby is a fake Russophone. As an idea, eating a Russophone baby is an atrocity, but as a reality, it cannot be a crime, because there is no Russophone baby to eat.

In the hands of a different artist, then, the Russophone Baby action could serve as a critique of language-based nationalism throughout the entire Eastern Slavic region, or even reinforce a common Russian dismissal of the existence of Ukraine itself (on the basis that Ukraine and the Ukrainian language are simply variations on Russia and Russianness). Yet this is manifestly not Chadsky’s intent, as seen in his response to his critics, whom he called in his interview with Zhogov, “fainting, drooling maniacs and rapists, hysterical maidens, sighing over the banana cake baby while gladly swelling the real corpses Russia makes with your approval in Eastern Ukraines.”

Unless Chadsky is engaging in some sort of next-level styob that even my cynical eyes can’t recognize, it is hard to miss just how saturated his condemnation of the “hate-filled” Putinists is with unadulterated hate. To be clear: this is neither a “plague on both your houses” nor a “good people on both sides” argument; it is quite possible to sympathize with Chadsky’s politics while being put off by his rhetoric. Which brings me back to the main feature distinguishing the vatnik phenomenon from the sovok: where the sovok is engaged in a subtle back-and-forth game between identification and alienation, the vatnik (like the MAGA hat) leaves no room for even rueful, ironic identification. The sovok is a symbol of backwardness and poor taste, but also of nostalgia for a time when the cash nexus was relatively powerless. Vatnik is an icon of ideological civil war.

If we look back at the four axes around which these stigmatized identities revolve (culture, wealth, effectiveness, and criminality), Vatnik, the Vaskas, and the bydlo all cluster around the same section of our imaginary map: all of them prove deficient in culture and wealth. All of them serve as a proxy for socioeconomic class, a category that, even three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is still murky. None of these identities are in any way aspirational; there is little about being dismissed as bydlo that could serve as a cause for envy. But before bydlo and their brethren came to the fore, and after sovok had already begun to recede, another group became the target of mockery: the semicriminal businessmen known as the New Russians. In a time when millions of Russians saw their savings dwindle into nothing, the New Russians managed to make wealth unappealing. This, in fact, is the lesson of Kasta’s appropriation of Bravo’s song from the beginning of the chapter: a Vasya with piles of money is ultimately still a Vasya.