Notes
Introduction
1.On nationalism, imperialism, and Eurasianism, see chapter 8 of Bassin, Gumilev Mystique; Bassin and Pozo, eds., Politics of Eurasianism; Bodin, “Russian Geopolitical Discourse”; Clover, Black Wind, White Snow; and three works by Marlene Laruelle—In the Name of the Nation; “Larger, Higher, Farther North”; and Russian Eurasianism. On Russian Orthodoxy and the state, see Engstrom, “Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy”; and Sidorov, “Post-Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor.” Mikhail Suslov has published a fascinating monograph on these topics, Geopolitical Imagination.
2.On shame in the first post-Soviet decade, see Sharafutdinova, Red Mirror, 88–96.
3.On aphasia and despair, see Oushakine, “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”; and Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair. On trauma, see Noordenbos, Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for Russian Identity; and Wakamiya, “Post-Soviet Context and Trauma Studies.” On nostalgia, see Boym, Future of Nostalgia; and Kalinin, “Nostalgic Modernization.” See also Lipovetsky, “Post-Sots.”
4.Eng and Hann’s subsequent book on the subject, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, came out in 2019.
5.In Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, Anya von Bremzen devotes an entire chapter to the centrality of the Olivier salad: “Piling potato, carrot, and pickle fragments into a bowl, I think that Olivier could be a metaphor for a Soviet émigré’s memory: urban legends and totalitarian myths, collective narratives and biographical facts, journeys home both real and imaginary—all loosely cemented with mayo” (177).
6.Martin Muller makes this point in “Goodbye, Postsocialism!”
7.In Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism, Nicolette Makovicky contends that “postsocialism continues to be bandied about for lack of a better alternative,” which Muller in “Goodbye, Postsocialism!” sees as an imperative if we are to develop alternatives. Muller’s argument makes sense, but we are all still waiting.
8.See my Plots against Russia (53–98) and Yablokov, Fortress Russia (50–78).
9.Putin, “Postsovetskii period,” as quoted in TASS, April 11, 2012.
10.Kirill Kobrin also proclaimed the death of the post-Soviet in 2016, in both Russian and English: “What has changed? The public agenda. The hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not for Russian society. What is appropriate and desirable. And, most importantly, the project of the present and the past. The old post-Soviet project, once relevant back in 1991, is over. It has achieved its aims. It’s just that nobody’s rushing to pronounce what has happened as the ‘natural, logical results’ of this process” (“Death of the Post-Soviet Project in Russia”).
11.As detailed in Gordon, “Post-Communist Russia Plumbs Its Soul.”
12.For an early post-Soviet analysis of this terminological shift, see Freidin (“Romans into Italians”). Irina Souch and Mark Steinberg have separately noted Putin’s shift from rossiiskii back to russkii in the aftermath of the seizure of Crimea.
13.Souch writes, “I consistently refer to the ‘post-Soviet’ era and do not divide the period after 1991 into separate decades. The term ‘post-Soviet’ is treated here not as indicative of a static situation but as a dynamic category” (Popular Tropes of Identity, 9).
14.The choice of the male pronoun here is deliberate. And the etymological and historical connections between “fan” and “fanatic” are long established.
15.It was issue 171, and I’m ashamed to say that I did not have to look this up.
16.For a thorough overview of nationalist and imperialist science fiction and its influence, see chapter 4 of Suslov, Geopolitical Imagination.
1. Zombie Sovieticus
1.By the time the sequel (sorry, “subsequent moviefilm”) came out in 2020, the Kazakhstan government had given up its outrage in favor of cashing in, advertising Kazakhstan tourism with Borat’s catchphrase, “Very Nice!”
2.See Isenberg, White Trash; Newitz and Wray, eds., White Trash; and Wray, Not Quite White.
3.As Jill Lepore writes in “A New Americanism” (2019):
The United States is different from other nations—every nation is different from every other—and its nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state. But in the American case, the origins of the nation can be found in those seams. When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation?”
4.See the introduction to my Men without Women.
5.Maja Soboleva, looking at the material from a different angle, proposes a periodization that basically agrees with Krylova’s: theoretical (1900s–1930s), the development of norms of Soviet morality (1930s–1950s), and moral theory and Marxist ethics (starting in the 1960s).
6.A fuller version of this argument can be found in my “Defying Interpretation.”
7.The gendered implications of Babichev’s role are discussed in Men without Women.
2. The Rise and Fall of Sovok
1.The most comprehensive compilation of sovok origin stories can be found in a footnote to Konstantin Bogdanov’s Vox populi.
2.“Aleksandr Gradskii” (2009).
3.For more on the anekdot, see Graham, Resonant Dissonance; Draitser, Taking Penguins to the Movies; and Draitser, Making War, Not Love.
4.For more on meshchanstvo, see Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 19–23, 87–109.
5.For more on MMM, see my “Public Offerings: MMM and the Marketing of Melodrama.”
6.On the importance of Paris in Russian culture, see Gilburd, To See Paris and Die.
7.Mamin himself wrestled with this conundrum, ultimately emigrating to the United States in 2019 (Ponomareva, “ ‘Zdes’ stalo nechem dyshat’ ”).
3. Just a Guy Named Vasya
1.In addition, the phrase “Vasya was here” is the generic stand-in for graffiti, like “Kilroy was here.”
2.Sometimes Vasya gets a last name: for years, Russians have used the name “Vasya Pupkin” as shorthand for the virtually nameless average person, the equivalent of “John Doe” or “Joe Blow.”
3.I am tempted to say “genes,” but the legacy of Lysenkoism makes the term problematic here.
4.In Plots against Russia, I examined the way in which charges of Russophobia enable a conspiratorial and defensive stance on behalf of the Russian state. For approaches that take Russophobia more seriously as a real phenomenon, see Basulto, Russophobia; Mettan, Creating Russophobia; Robin, Making of the Cold War Enemy; Shafarevich, Rusofobiia; and Tsygankov, Russophobia.
5.Yes, I’m aware that the same could be said of the United States, but the contours of the debate in a country whose national myth rests on the cult of opportunity, success, and self-reinvention are different.
6.The title ZhD is also a pun on the novel’s ethnic and religious themes; it sounds suspiciously similar to the plural form of the most common Russian antisemitic slur (zhidy).
7.Here Bykov is playing with the fringe theory that Ashkenazi Jews are actually descendants of the vanished Khazars, popularized first by Arthur Koestler.
8.I am adapting the English translation, replacing “Joe” with “Vaska” in all the quotes from the text.
9.“Anka still didn’t understand. Sometimes at the dacha she would look through old magazines—children’s ones no longer interested her—and would come across the mysterious word ‘bomzh,’ the old name for them, meaning ‘of no fixed abode.’ Bomzh! Like the strike of a deep bass gong, ending in a long buzzing echo. It was only under the new humane programme for them that they were called Vaskas and were sent treated and sterilized from the shelters to stay in people’s homes. There weren’t only Vaskas in the shelters, of course. Sometimes an old granny with nothing to eat would apply to live there, or a runaway with nowhere to live. They would have to pay for a doctor’s certificate saying they were Vaskas (the proper medical term was ‘Vasilenko Syndrome’), and without one they wouldn’t get in. Several illegal deals had been exposed, and the scandal was discussed at length on television; her father said it was only the tip of the iceberg” (204–5).
10.Seth Graham provides a thorough analysis of the Chapaev joke cycle in Resonant Dissonance (105–13).
11.At one point, one of the characters even jokes that Vasily Ivanovich’s last name is Chapaev.
12.Yuliya Minkova, in “The Squid and the Whale a la Russe,” contrasts Living Souls with the “wearying struggles between interchangeable political factions in fantastic or futuristic settings.” Instead, she sees the novel’s inventive approach to history and nationality as evidence of a desire to show “why the Russian nation still has not been formed” (286).
13.For more on bydlo, see Anne Marie Devlin’s excellent “Lard-Eaters, Gay-ropeans, Sheeple, and Prepositions.”
14.In the same year, S. G. Bochkarev called bydlo the “key word” on the Russian Internet, citing a sharp rise in its use in the years prior to the publication of his article, “ ‘Bydlo’ kak kliuchevoe slovo runeta.”
4. Whatever Happened to the New Russians?
1.Williams need not have worried; it turns out that the wealthy elites are the forgiving types, at least when their business interests are not threatened.
2.Those trendy shoes were also featured in that year’s hit song “Exhibit” by Leningrad, which Williams may not have known.
3.The burgeoning field of Russian romance fiction has been the subject of several fascinating articles by Julie Cassiday and Emily D. Johnson, who also coedited a special issue on international romance fiction in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (2020). In her contribution to the issue, “Exploring His/Her Library,” Johnson argues that the booming market for Russian-language romance novels has not been accompanied by the kinds of professional networks and readers’ communities that characterize the Anglo-American romance world.
4.The same holds true for science fiction. The simple fact that H. G. Wells called his novel The Time Machine tells the uninformed reader that it comes at the beginning of the SF time travel subgenre.
5.My only memory of it from everyday Soviet life was as the name of one of the three kinds of cheese I could count on finding in the store.
6.Galina Lindqist, for example, argues in her “Spirits and Souls of Business” that “New Russians are in many ways a ‘phantasm’ (Agamben, 1993), an imagined cultural entity, known to most culture bearers, as well as to observers, by representations alone.” Mark Lipovetsky writes in his “New Russians as a Cultural Myth”: “Whether New Russians are real is an open question. For a literary critic, they are real insofar as they are reflected in literary and cultural texts.”
7.Nor would a New Russian be likely to call himself a “New Russian,” as Iuliia Idlis notes in a roundtable about the New Russian phenomenon recorded by Radio Svoboda on November 14, 2010: “I never met a single person who would say with complete sincerity, absolutely honestly while looking you in the eye: ‘I’m a New Russian.’ … The closest he might come would be ‘I probably was one of those New Russians.’ … That is, no one is ready to take on the full burden of the cultural symbols the term carries” (https://www.svoboda.org/a/2218403.html).
8.As Seth Graham notes, there were numerous famous, wealthy Russian citizens who could have provided fodder for the jokes about New Russians, but they are rarely mentioned (2009, 135).
9.As Graham puts it, “The anekdot-al New Russian is a type defined by a cluster of behaviors and accessories associated with a single demographic category: the rich. Other standard attributes of the type—stupidity, violence, drunkenness, amorality—are important (but secondary, even optional), but material wealth is de rigueur” (2009, 132).
5. Rich Man’s Burden
1.Unless otherwise indicated, all the New Russian jokes come from https://anekdoty.ru/pro-novyh-russkih/ and were translated by me.
2.As Seth Graham puts it in Resonant Dissonance: “The Chukchi are unlike most other ethnicities conscripted into joke-lore in that their history, ethnography, and especially their relations with the Russians are largely irrelevant to the functions and content of the jokes” (115).
3.Justin Cronin toys with a similar trick at the end of his Passage trilogy, only to reveal that the story is not entirely over.
4.This naming convention is maintained in the seven volumes of fan fiction that have been released online since the project began, with the exception of an anthology called Bitva rasskazov (Battle of the Short Stories).
5.The Ethnogenesis series is as much an e-book phenomenon as a print one, if not more so. I have been unable to get copies of the print editions; as a result, the quotations here are from the unpaginated e-book editions of the Billionaire novels. The translations are mine.
6.In real life, Lev Gumilev had no children.
7.In Russian, referring to Russia as “this country” (eta strana) rather than the “motherland” or “fatherland” has come to be construed as dismissive and unpatriotic.
8.Later in the first book, Gumilev says to another character, “Why are you looking at me like I’m Roman Abramovich?”
9.The first novel begins at the same time as Russia’s armed conflict with Georgia in 2008. Gumilev’s wife, Eva, begs him to find a way to help the poor people suffering at Georgian (not Russian) hands. He arranges to invest in the rebuilding of the town of Tsinkhval when the fighting is over, telling Eva, “I think that’s enough for now… . You know I’ve always held the principle that if you want to feed a hungry man, don’t give him a fish, but teach him how to fish.”
10.“Self-made man” is in English in the original Russian text.
11.The very process of moving from superrich amorality to respectable, responsible citizenship is enacted over the three seasons of the hit television series Mazhor (Silver spoon, 2014–). The main character is a spoiled young rich man named Igor, whose father, desperate to find a means to force his son to mend his ways, forces him to join the police force. He surprises everyone, himself included, by rising to the challenge.
6. Russian Orc
1.The first letter of the word “Orc” is capitalized by some writers and left lower-case by others. Tolkien himself was inconsistent, although in his private correspondence he argued for capitalization. (See the discussion about this on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange, “Tolkien’s Capitalisation of Races, i.e, Elf, Dwarf, Orc,” https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/176914/tolkiens-capitalisation-of-races-i-e-elf-dwarf-orc.) I have chosen to capitalize the noun in English throughout the book, except when the original writers do not.
2.In his discussion of the paradoxes of Russian paleoconservatism in Russia’s Postcolonial Identity, Viacheslav Morozov notes the double bind enforced by the movement’s binary framework: “By grounding its every move in the Eurocentric normative order, Russian paleoconservatism abuses and inverts the hegemonic vocabulary but makes no attempt at transcending or abandoning it” (122).
3.Miéville is notorious in fantasy circles for calling Tolkien “the wen on the arse of fantasy literature.” For a slightly more polite elaboration of his views, see her “Tolkien—Middle Earth.” Scholarly opinions on the alleged racism of Tolkien’s depiction of the Orcs varies, though even his defenders register some level of discomfort. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs,” Robert T. Tally Jr. argues against the common assumption that Tolkien’s Orcs are inherently evil; while Orcs “are presented with surprising uniformity as loathsome, ugly, cruel, feared, and especially terminable … Tolkien could not resist the urge to flesh out and ‘humanize’ these inhuman creatures from time to time” (17). Richard Angelo Bergen concludes that “one gets the sense from his essays and letters that Tolkien is uncomfortable with stating that orcs are altogether irredeemable, and this is probably because of his commitment to an Augustinian understanding of evil, and orcs’ close association with corrupted humanity. However, orcs in The Lord of the Rings certainly do appear unredeemable” (116). In a blogpost, James Mendez Hodes asserts, “Tolkien explicitly and purposefully crafted orcs as a detrimental depiction of Asian people specifically.” See also Robin Anne Reid’s comprehensive bibliographic essay on the topic, as well as chapter 4 of Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness.
4.See Paul B. Sturtevant’s blog post on The Public Medievalist (2017), as well as his Middle Ages in Popular Imagination.
5.Brin’s call for a more sympathetic treatment of Orcs was primarily political, but it has implicitly been answered by many within the F&SF community. Or rather, it was answered before Brin even raised the issue. In 1999, the British writer Stan Nicholls began a series of novels where the protagonists are Orcs. Here the Orcs are not exactly paragons of virtue, but their plight is compelling. Humans, in bringing agriculture and industry to the Orcs’ enchanted world, have caused environmental devastation and an ever-worsening shortage of magic. The series, which consists of two trilogies to date, is unsurprisingly called Orcs.
6.Most of my information about Tolkien’s translation and circulation in the Soviet Union comes from Mark T. Hooker’s exhaustive Tolkien through Russian Eyes.
7.Hooker also shows how fraught certain English terms have been when rendered into Russian, and not just by Kamenkovich and Karrik. Depending on the translation, the term “Chief” in Return of the King ends up as “Generalissimo,” “Boss” (Nachal’nik), “Predvoditel’ ” and “Pravitel’.” Vladimir Murav’ev made the obvious but daring choice rejected by all the other translators: Vozhd’, a word that cannot be dissociated from Stalin.
8.For more on Yeskov in English, see Miller.
9.Orc revisionism is not exclusively a post-Soviet phenomenon. In 2017, Netflix released Bright, a Will Smith vehicle that takes place in a world just like our own, except that Orcs and Elves share our world after a Last Battle with the Dark Lord a couple of thousand years ago. The idea had potential, but all of it was squandered. The world building makes absolutely no sense—somehow, everything else about twenty-first-century Los Angeles is more or less the same, despite the long-term presence of magical creatures. There is an earnest but poorly developed attempt to use Orcs and humans as a metaphor for race relations, but the result never rises above painfully recognizable racial stereotypes (Orcs in street gangs sound like Hollywood Latinos in street gangs). The filmmakers use what could have been an intriguing premise as the setup for one of the most overplayed genres: the buddy-cop tale (Will Smith is partnered with an Orc, played by Joel Edgerton). Netflix claims the film was popular, but given its notorious reticence to share actual data, we are asked to accept it at its word, admittedly reinforced by its otherwise inexplicable decision to go forward with a sequel (Spangler). Critics have been almost uniformly unkind to Bright, trashing it as one of the worst movies of the century. As an example David Ehrlich titled his review on Indiewire “ ‘Bright’ Review: Netflix’s First Blockbuster is the Worst Movie of 2017.”
10.See, it sounds like “offshore,” and it’s literally floating above ground! Who comes up with this stuff?
11.Never mind the fact that this term does not exist in English and therefore is used a slur against Russia only by speakers of Russian.
12.The longtime dissident, Valeriia Novodvorskaia, in a statement on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made not long before her death, addresses the Donbas separatists: “Do you know who Putin is? He is a beast, he is a Stalinist, he was spawned from gloom, he is from Mordor, he is the real Sauron!” (quoted in Davidzon).
13.Other online examples include a 2016 LiveJournal post titled “Va vsem vinovatye russkie orki, i lichno VV, razbor golubogo breda (Russian Orcs are to blame for everything [deceptors]), referring to “Orcs from the neofascist Putin’s reich”; a 2106 LiveJournal post called “Russkie orki unichtozhili pamiatnyi znak nevinnym zhertvam NKVD” (Russian Orcs have destroyed a memorial display to the innocent victims of the NKVD” [Leusenko]); and a pro-Putinist open letter to an ethnic Georgian Russian media figure accusing her of Russophobia: “Putin = Voldemort, Sauron, and Darth Vader in one convenient package?? (I’m copyrighting that)” (sensei-yoda), as well as “Ukraina Tolkina protiv Ukrainy Martina” (Tolkien’s Ukraine vs. Martin’s Ukraine [Kazarin]). The references to Orcs and Mordor continued after the 2022 invasion. After the execution-style killings of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, the Russian liberal journalist Andrei Loshak wrote on Facebook: “These really are Orcs. Under their president’s leadership, they have declared war on civilization and are marching their way to a new barbarism.”
Conclusion
1.Stephen Norris (chap. 2) notes that “Mikhalkov’s decision to play Alexander III, tsar of Russia, led many observers to conclude that the director was making a play at becoming the leader of Russia.”
2.Susan Larsen sums up the film’s affirmative messages best: “Mikhalkov is summoning his viewers to return to the three codes embodied in his hero’s life: the Russian officer’s code of honor, the Mozart lover’s allegiance to high culture, and the patriot’s loyalty to the traditional ‘folk’ (narodnyi) way of life that Andrei adopts in his Siberian exile as a village barber living humbly with his wife—and his family’s former maid—the loyal Dunia (Anna Mikhalkova) in a wooden cottage filled with apples (emblems of paradise regained, perhaps) and small children” (501). Kirill Razlogov notes that, despite the film’s attempt to dramatize a “clash of civilizations,” the ideological messages are a mismatch with the film’s emotional drama: “The contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the West and Russia explains almost all of the plot’s twists and turns,” but does not reflect the individual scenes, nor one’s conclusive feelings about the film as a whole. It appears that the rational and emotional principles … exist and develop independently of each other” (24).
3.Chapter 2 of Stephen Norris’s Blockbuster History in the New Russia includes a short but thorough discussion of Mikhalkov’s role in the revitalization of the Russian film industry.