The Roots of Self-Hatred

My search for a framework to understand these phenomena led me to studies on minority identities, this despite the fact that, whatever the iteration of Russian statehood, “Russians” are clearly a majority. But, as is the case with Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, numerical majority (or, failing that, plurality) is not a guarantor of the comforts usually associated with majority identity—that is, the ability to think of one’s own identity as unmarked or neutral, as white people tend to do in the United States (Jovic). As explanations for why confidence in the Soviet Union eroded in the 1980s, replaced by despair in the 1990s, two ethnic studies models suggest themselves: self-hatred and melancholia.

As a concept, self-hatred has been most clearly elaborated as a phenomenon within the Jewish community. Sander Gilman’s landmark 1990 study, Jewish Self-Hatred, argues that the phenomenon is the result of “outsiders’ acceptance of the mirage of themselves generated by their reference group—that group in society which they see as defining them—as a reality” (2).

Gilman identifies a key mechanism in self-hatred in the isolation of a particular subgroup within the community of outsiders that can bear the entire burden of “otherness,” allowing, in this case, the “good” Jews to feel unsullied by ethnic slander: “the quality ascribed to them as the Other is then transferred to the new Other found within the group that those in power have designated as Other” (4).

Jewish self-hatred is a controversial notion, most notably because of its use by some in the Jewish community against fellow Jews who criticize Israel. Paul Reitter, in On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, notes the “sense that today the phrase ‘Jewish self-hatred’ can serve only as a smear” (121). But even beyond the phrase’s political afterlife, Reitter, in his critical genealogy of the phenomenon, shows both its productivity and its limits. Polemicizing with Shulamit Volkov, he finds both her and Gilman to be too restrictive in their understanding of the term: “Why shouldn’t the ‘hatred’ in ‘Jewish self-hatred’ refer also to an animus that played itself out more fruitfully and incisively?” (123). And why must Volkov insist on the purity of this singular emotion: “The ‘more typical’ mix of ‘shame,’ ‘disgust,’ and ‘despair’ shouldn’t count, according to Volkov” (124). Though Reitter does not approach the question from this vantage point, his book is a reminder that discussions of Jewish self-hatred usually treat emotions in general, and hatred in particular, as settled questions. What happens when we bring affect theory into the mix?

In her 2004 book, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed investigates the “sociality of emotions,” the way in which emotions constitute and are constituted by collective bodies such as the nation (8). Among the many affective states she discusses are two that are particularly important for reconsidering the concept of self-hatred, as well as its potential relevance to the post-Soviet context: hatred and shame.

According to Ahmed, conventional understandings of hatred are inadequate when it comes to understanding the relationship between self and other: “Rather than assuming that hate involves pushing what is undesirable within the self onto others, we could ask: Why is it that hate feels like it comes from inside and is directed towards others who have an independent existence?” (50). Hatred, she writes, is both ambivalent and a “form of intimacy,” an “investment in an object [that] becomes part of the life of the subject even though (or perhaps because) its threat is perceived as coming from outside” (50). In effect, the connection between the subject (that does the hating) and the object (that is hated) becomes symbiotic: “hate sustains the object through its mode of attachment, in a way that has a similar dynamic to love, but with a different orientation” (51).

Ahmed recasts hate as a form of intimacy that necessarily complicates the relationship between self and other, implicitly revealing that hatred is, by nature, perverse. It is perverse in the etymological sense of “turning away or turning back,” but also in terms of Freudian desire: hatred is a libidinal attachment. Strangely (or, perhaps, perversely), this understanding of hatred has the potential to free self-hatred from its familiar taint of the perverse. By projecting negative characteristics onto a particular subset of one’s own stigmatized group, those who experience self-hatred are taking the libidinal logical of love and hatred to its logical conclusion. The feelings for the other are always about the self.

Like hatred, shame also involves a complicated dynamic between self and other, even if it is more apparent. Shame is different from guilt. Where guilt is simply culpability for a bad action, shame is attached to the very selfhood of the transgressor. It is not just a matter of doing something bad, Ahmed argues, but of being bad for having done the bad act: “the badness of my action is transferred to me, such that I feel myself to be bad and to have been ‘found’ or ‘found out’ as bad by others” (105). In its framework, shame, like hatred, is intersubjective, requiring at least the possibility of an other in order to function. The classic sense of shame involves the culprit’s public exposure to the community’s disdain, as exemplified by one of the Russian words for shame: pozor, whose morphology contains a root for “seeing” or “vision.” This, however, is the deep structure of shame; shame can be felt even when there is no one else to see it: “Shame as an emotion requires a witness: even if a subject feels shame when she or he is alone, it is the imagined view of the other that is taken on by a subject in relation to herself or himself” (105).

In keeping with the overall themes of her book, Ahmed is particularly interested in the way in which emotions can be both individual and collective; when they are collective, they help constitute the notion of a particular body politic of community (for better or for worse). So Ahmed’s greatest concern in discussing shame involves the individual and collective sense of having committed injustice against others (as in, for example, the case of slavery in the United States): “What is striking is how shame becomes not only a mode of recognition of injustices committed against others, but also a form of nation building. It is shame that allows us ‘to assert our identity as a nation’ ” (102).

Applying Ahmed’s insights to self-hatred yields multiple benefits. First, her treatment of hatred and shame help depathologize self-hatred. This is important, because, as Reitter’s critique of the term’s use in political debate shows, there is nothing more hateful to a given group than signs of self-hatred. In the Jewish context, “self-hatred” turns traits that could be either neutral or positive into symptoms of degeneration: self-deprecating irony is therefore displayed by people who wish desperately to be different, and individual rejection of a mainstream Jewish practice or political point of view can only be rooted in an unhealthy rejection of one’s identity (rather than, say, a genuine disagreement or desire to do something in one’s own way). And if an element of self-hatred is actually present, is it entirely destructive?

Second, Ahmed’s complication of the relationship between self and other pushes Gilman’s work further away from the empirical and into the symbolic. Her model of intersubjectivity does not require self and other to be entirely distinct (or even entirely real) entities. In itself, this insight is not new; it is a truism of psychotherapy that the patient’s conflicts with a parent are ultimately as much about the internalized version of the parent as the actual mother or father, who need be neither present nor even alive for the therapy to have value. This, in turn, calls into question the relationship between “real life” and the frameworks used to understand it. If the subject is a particular collectivity (group, country, nation) and the stories it tells itself about both itself and a given object of comparison, we can see that the relationship between empirical data selected as evidence and the narrative framework the evidence justifies is just as multidirectional as Ahmed’s approach to hatred: the narrative, once it exists, supports itself through examples that legitimize it.

In the post-Soviet context, this dynamic plays itself out in the sociologist Lev Gudkov’s brilliant and confounding 2004 book, Negativnaia identichnost’ (Negative identity). Gudkov argues that Russians after the Soviet collapse construct a “negative identity” based on hostility toward a Western (often American) other. Their envy of their more successful international rivals inculcates what Gudkov calls a “social asthenic syndrome,” a passive, apathetic outlook on the world. Social asthenia appears to be a kind of lazy person’s ressentiment, the hostility toward a perceived superior enemy that somehow doesn’t quite coalesce into a program of action. As Vladislav Zubok argues, “Gudkov sets the bar very high for Russia and Russians. He makes no effort to hide that his ideal prototype of the society that Russians failed to emulate is the United States, with its long tradition of voluntary associations and local initiative” (192). How much of Gudkov’s approach is informed by his own disappointment in his country’s perceived failure to meet this standard?

In the American context, recent scholars of (non-Jewish) ethnic identity have more and more turned to a new framework: racial melancholia. Eventually taken up as a heuristic for African Americans in Joseph R. Winters’ Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, the concept was initially elaborated in an article by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han as a “depathologized structure of everyday group experience for Asian Americans” (667).⁴ Asian Americans, they write, find themselves mourning an original, preimmigration “home” while experiencing melancholy over the endless deferral of eventual acceptance within the American “melting pot”:

Mourning describes a finite process that might be reasonably aligned with the popular American myth of immigration, assimilation, and the melting pot for dominant white ethnic groups. In contrast, melancholia describes an unresolved process that might usefully describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. This suspended assimilation—this inability to blend into the “melting pot” of America—suggests that, for Asian Americans, ideals of whiteness are continually estranged. They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal. (671)

Obviously, the Russian context is different. Assimilation is not the issue for Russians; what is “suspended, conflicted, and unresolved” is the relationship with the lost USSR. In our case, racial melancholia suggests a structure of feeling rather than a model to follow or impose. Both self-hatred and (racial) melancholia offer productive ways to address post-Soviet Russia. As categories, they overlap in time and space, but each focuses on a specific aspect of contemporary Russian identity. Self-hatred most clearly operates when intellectuals and media figures adapt stereotypes about Russian backwardness in order to project them onto an at times imaginary Russian subgroup, shifting the burden of stigma from “good” Russians to “bad” Russians. Melancholy, a category examined in the conclusion of Alexander Etkind’s Warped Mourning, underlies a more complex reaction formation, an obsession with lost great-power status that exceeds the bounds of mere nostalgia (Eng and Han’s “compelling fantasy and lost ideal”). Rather than mourn a past greatness and move on, post-Soviet melancholia will not let go of the USSR’s imperial grandeur; this does not have to translate directly into a desire to rebuild the Soviet Union itself (a motivation often attributed to Vladimir Putin) but lends an appeal to an imagined recreated great-power structure that can finally compensate for the loss.

That appeal is part of the focus of Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s magisterial study, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (2020), which, as the subtitle suggests, is devoted to the post-Soviet identity crisis I have begun to describe. While Sharafutdinova is careful not to paint a picture of Russia as a country where everything is masterminded by a Svengali in the Kremlin, her primary focus is on the ways in which Russia’s leadership exploits the ambient anxieties about the country’s identity and destiny in order to create a narrative that legitimizes the Putinist system. She writes:

Vladimir Putin’s politics of collective identity reclamation has rested on the following important objectives and mechanisms: (1) making sense of the experience that Russian society went through in the 1990s in a way that resonated with ordinary Russians; (2) reconstructing the Russian national identity by emphasizing the positive aspects of the Soviet and pre-Soviet experience and by playing into the core cognitive structures that made up the Soviet collective identity; and (3) working to instill a sense of pride and positive distinction associated with belonging to the Russian nation. (19)

Her analysis is spot-on, as are her objections to some of the reigning sociological paradigms in post-Soviet Russia, which I discuss later. Like Sharafutdinova, I am concerned with the idea of collective identities in Russia, but where Soviet Self-Hatred differs is in focusing on the manifestations of the problem rather than the Putinist solutions. The identity formations discussed in the following chapters are not part of a state-sponsored response but rather the result of popular desires to reconceive group identities on the fly. Soviet Self-Hatred is about identity as a mask, an image, or a performance. It is about shame, but also about the defiant pride that uses shame as a point of departure.

But what is (or was) postsocialism? For that matter, what does it mean to be “post-Soviet”? And how do Soviet self-hatred and post-Soviet shame haunt the scholarly and political debates about the boundaries of postsocialism?

Tethered to the Post

On December 27, 2019, the radical Russian poet Roman Osminkin made a humorous early New Year’s pronouncement on Facebook: “The proverbial ‘post-Soviet’ will be over when the last viewer of Irony of Fate chokes on the last spoonful of Olivier salad.” His friends and followers immediately understood, but explaining the references to the broader, non-post-Soviet world highlights the post’s recursive nature. The post-Soviet exists as a community of people who share a set of Soviet references; getting the joke requires at least a tenuous membership in the club. Ergo, the post-Soviet will be over when there is no one left to find Osminkin’s words immediately funny.

There is no shame in not getting the joke; to the contrary, the joke works by exploiting a shared feeling of light, amused shame. For decades, (post-)Soviet families have rung in the new year by watching Eldar Ryazanov’s 1976 film, an accidental love story and farce premised on the unrelenting sameness of Soviet domestic structures. After a drunken celebration, Zhenya, the male lead, is mistakenly put on a plane from Moscow to Leningrad after passing out. When he wakes up, he gives the taxi driver his address (3 Builders’ Street), where there turns out to be a building exactly like Zhenya’s on the Builders’ Street in Moscow. Somehow, his key opens the door, and he collapses on what he thinks is his bed. The apartment’s actual tenant, a young woman named Nadya, is shocked by this turn of the events, but by the time the movie finishes up its third hour, the two of them have, of course, fallen in love. The film remains a beloved classic, simultaneously encouraging nostalgia for a simpler time while highlighting the sheer visual monotony of the Soviet built environment. Learning that your apartment key opens any number of identical doors is a meta-utopian discovery. In the nostalgic/utopian reading, everyone belongs to the almost fractally homologous socialist construction, thereby living in a world that encourages random but heartfelt horizontal ties between strangers (who are never really strangers but friends or comrades you have yet to meet). The dystopian reading, in which the interchangeable residents of interchangeable buildings represent humanity at its most faceless and fungible, practically writes itself, even if it is never the focus of the film proper. In any case, the post-Soviet afterlife of Irony of Fate is an annually recurring celebration of alienation’s opposite: wherever you go, you are already at home. Now that so many Russian speakers live in the diaspora, such a message has a visceral appeal.

As for the Olivier salad, this is a holiday staple whose visual aesthetic (a pile of gray mush interspersed with flecks of orange and green) is not for the faint of heart. It is, of course, a Russian dish traditionally served on New Year’s Eve. Made of potatoes, pickles, peas, carrots, and meat smothered in mayonnaise, the salad seems to spark both nostalgia and revulsion at the same time.⁵ This is the perfect recipe for the post-Soviet condition.

Of necessity, this book uses the terms “post-Soviet” and “postsocialist” as liberally as a post-Soviet cook scoops the mayo into the Oliver salad. They are not quite interchangeable, nor are they uncontroversial. Throughout most of its three-decade lifespan, “postsocialism” has been a theoretical framework and term of convenience whose premises are frequently called into question by the very scholars who work in the postsocialist field. “Post-Soviet” has clearer geographic boundaries but raises the same concerns about temporality posed by postsocialism: when will it ever end?

The terms “postsocialist” and “post-Soviet” have a built-in limitation, in that the “post” suggests an expiration date that comes sooner rather than later. It took only a few years after 1989/1991 for people to start claiming that the terms were passé. The haste with which the terms were declared invalid is rather suspicious. While I would not wish to deny that conditions have changed significantly since 1991, there is something symptomatic about the desire to declare the phenomenon to be almost over.

Postsocialism is the broader term—one that, unlike post-Soviet, suggests a subfield with an intellectual and theoretical foundation more than simply a time and place. The problems with the term rest on both of its constituent parts: “post” and “socialism.” Socialism points to a framework that could, theoretically, extend beyond the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe to include, say, Cuba, China, and Vietnam, and yet the study of postsocialism tends to replicate Cold War political geography. There was also the possibility of understanding postsocialism as referring not only to countries that used to be socialist, but to the state of existence in a world that has apparently rejected state socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism. In that case, the only thing not possible after socialism is … socialism.⁶ From such a vantage point, we are all postsocialist, no matter where we make our home. Yet this, too, has not come to pass. One of the drawbacks of postsocialism, then, is that it may simply be another name for a familiar set of area studies.

While there is more to postsocialism than mere academic rebranding, the issue is still worth considering; paradoxically, it might be through the recognition of this geographic shell game that the field could begin to view postsocialism as a condition that affects the entire world. That the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall represented a huge upheaval for the citizens of the (now former) USSR and of Central and Eastern Europe is a given. But the repercussions were quickly felt by Western academics who either had or were working toward credentials to study a world that had suddenly vanished. Some political scientists and economists recast their area of specialization as the transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy. Humanists (including anthropologists) were generally reluctant to follow their social science counterparts; “transition” encoded a teleology that assumed not just a particular outcome but a settled view of the recent past (communism). Moreover, transitology had inadvertently replicated the very flaw that doomed Soviet Studies: it tied its fate to an object that promised permanence but proved to be fleeting. One need not be an anti-neoliberal skeptic to see that, thirty years after the Berlin Wall, the notion of a transition to democracy (and even to free markets) is now suffused with its own wistful nostalgia.

The failure of transitology is a reminder that the stakes surrounding postsocialism (and, to a lesser extent, the post-Soviet) include the disciplinary and the institutional. The US State Department’s choice of “Eurasia” and even “Central Eurasia” was a way to preserve intellectual resources and funding; the selective embrace of Eurasia by academia is accompanied by a serious scholarly apparatus but is also one more way of giving a name to something that threatens to be nameless. The field(s) affected were trapped in a truly odd situation: the fields existed, but their object did not.

Postsocialism, as both object and field, is haunted by shame and inadequacy. The inadequacy is clear enough; like so many “posts,” it is a hard term to define and an even harder one to love. Indeed, the scholars of postsocialism, the people who presumably have a stake in the term, are among the first to declare their discomfort. Isn’t it just another form of orientalism? Is it a truly broad and comparative intellectual paradigm or just a term of convenience? Elizabeth Dunn and Katherine Verdery provide a concise and coherent definition of postsocialism in an online reference volume meant to explain key terms in the social sciences:

Postsocialism is not just the study of the period after the end of Communism. Like postcolonialism, it is an analytic, a way of looking at societies in both East and West that were shaped by state socialism and the Cold War. Focusing on capitalism’s alter ego, postsocialism looks at how production, consumption, identity and sovereignty were shaped by the experience of one-party rule and central planning, and it reflects critically on the enduring effects of socialist ideas about the role of state and market in social life.

As a mission statement, this paragraph is excellent, but it runs into a problem common to ex post facto definitions: it is not quite capacious enough to include all the scholarly work that colloquially falls under the postsocialist rubric. After all, the claim to clear parameters is meant to ward off the possibility that postsocialism might just be a period term masking as a conceptual framework. They continue: “If postsocialism is no more than a chronological designation referring to what comes after socialism, then we can only usher it toward the exit. After all, no one now refers to western Europe as ‘post-feudal’ ” (Dunn and Verdery).

Rhetorically, this is an excellent move. But there is a reason we do not refer to Western Europe as post-feudal: we have better terms available. Moreover, it is a safe bet that people in feudal times did not refer to their time as feudal, nor did early capitalists know that they were capitalists. We are stuck with postsocialism until we come up with something better, and by the time we do, the term will most likely be retrospective.⁷

All of the phenomena treated in this book implicitly address the postsocialist experience—more specifically, the post-Soviet experience. For the former USSR, the terms can function interchangeably, but the post-Soviet contains an important feature that the postsocialist lacks: the nagging reminders of past imperial glory. The countries of postsocialist Eastern Europe can cast the last three decades in terms of national liberation, as can the fourteen non-Russian successor states of the USSR (even if some of them do not). Russia was not “liberated” from a foreign power; indeed, if we believe any number of conspiracy theories about the collapse of the USSR, the dismantling of the Soviet Union was the moment when foreigners took over.⁸

For all its flaws, “postsocialism” retains a few key virtues: first, it emphasizes the economic system over the political system, thus avoiding the trap of equating capitalism with democracy; second, it is sufficiently elastic to be potentially viable for as long as necessary; and third, it discourages the lazy habit of naming each Russian era after the man in charge (the Yeltsin Era vs. the Putin Era). The term “post-Soviet” has all those virtues and more, precisely because the term is so empty: it covers whatever has happened since the Soviet collapse, remaining neutral about economics, government, culture, or foreign policy. After nearly three decades, though, one can sympathize with the aggravation that accompanies the constant reference to the old regime. In 2012, Putin even went so far as declaring the post-Soviet period to be over.⁹ This statement has a virtue of its own: reminding a Putin-obsessed West that just because the Russian president says something, that does not mean he has the power to make it actually happen. It is simply too early to tell if Putin’s third and fourth terms truly represent a “new era” for Russia.

There is, however, one definitive event that we have yet to reckon with, because reckoning with it at this point remains impossible: Russia’s criminal, bloody invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The book you are reading now was written well before February 24, 2022; in fact, it was just a few weeks away from going to press. At the time I write this (less than two months later), the invasion does seem to mark the end of an era. But whether or not that is true, and to what extent, will be much clearer by the time this book is in print. Academic publishing cannot keep pace with current events, and attempting to make a definitive statement about the war as a turning point would be folly. Nonetheless, even if 2022 truly does mark the end of both the post-Soviet and postsocialism, the concepts are still crucial for understanding what comes next. If this book, which took shape as an examination of contemporary Russia, turns out to be about a discrete historical period, then so be it.

But I do think it is important, at least at this early stage, to resist the temptation to reevaluate every aspect of Putin-era Russian culture in light of the president’s brutal war of choice. To do so would be to impute an unwarranted teleology to the past two decades, as though everything in Russia were developing according to a sinister master plan. Before February 24, the invasion was close to unthinkable; the main reason for immediately reclassifying is simply that it happened. However, this is not the first time the Russian Federation has invaded Ukraine; since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian-backed separatist rebellions in the Donbas, the hostilities never ceased. Thus Ukraine comes into this book at the points where it makes the most logical sense: chapter 6 and the conclusion.

The Virtues of a Weak Theory

Why are we in such a hurry to move on from postsocialism and the post-Soviet? Kevin Platt declared an end to the post-Soviet back in 2009, partly in response to the Russian invasion of Georgia. Five years later, the Russian annexation of Crimea makes Platt look either prophetic or premature.¹⁰ Integral to both Platt’s and Putin’s declarations of the end of an era is an understanding of the post-Soviet to be about state power, as well as the strength that the country projects to the broader world. Not that there are no differences in their approach; Putin quotes Russophile, quasi-fascist philosophers, while Platt quotes the poet Timur Kibirov. Also, Putin has an army and, last I checked, Platt does not. One argument is built on sheer strength, the other on nuance.

In his essay “The Post-Soviet Is Over,” Platt references Serguei Oushakine’s important article, “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia,” which argues that the sheer “in-betweenness” of the post-Soviet “does not provide any cues about the direction to follow, it does not channel one’s identificatory process; instead it outlines the paths that should not be taken” (995). Oushakine writes further:

I have suggested that one of the most striking aspects of this discursive behaviour … was the loss of a metalanguage and thus the loss of ability to “dissect” the metaphor of the “post-Soviet.” This lack of knowledge about one’s own location and being, I proposed, is closely connected with absence of the post-Soviet field of cultural production that could have provided the post-Soviet subject with adequate post-Soviet discursive possibilities/signifiers. Such absence of an adequate post-Soviet interpellation capable of “naming” the subject undermines the very foundation of the existing discursive field and its institutions. The “post-Soviet” remains an empty space, a non-existence, devoid of its subjectifying force, its own signifier, and its own meaning effect. (1010)

One of the things that stands out about this paragraph, besides its insights into the post-Soviet condition, is how many times a set of sentences talking about the emptiness of the post-Soviet finds itself using the phrase “post-Soviet.” This is not a strike against Oushakine’s thesis about the discursive void left by the Soviet collapse; there is a good reason that it is so influential. But, admittedly with the benefit of nearly two decades’ hindsight since the essay’s publication, I would suggest that we look for the meaning of the post-Soviet in other places. Oushakine’s work is that of an anthropologist, while Platt (in 2010’s “Zachem izuchat’ antropologiiu?” [Why study anthropology?]) has proclaimed an “anthropological turn” in literary studies; I propose pushing a bit further into anthropology in order to find our way out of it.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a decades-long process that was about not just political ideology but fundamental belief systems. It is instructive to look at the language that older, antiliberal post-Soviet citizens often use to describe perestroika and the subsequent undermining of Soviet values: koshchunstvo (sacrilege), sviatotatstvo (also sacrilege), even bogokhul’stvo (blasphemy). Whether we talk of the lack of “morality” or a “national idea,” what is lost is the sense of something sacred.

But how long can that loss last? “Post-Soviet” is, initially, meaningless, but so was “Soviet” (from the Russian word for “council,” it was appropriated by the Bolsheviks out of naked opportunism). “Post-Soviet” eventually means something from the sheer accumulation of instances of its use. We cannot expect people to provide a coherent definition of the post-Soviet in a set of ethnographic interviews. Again and again, attempts to address the post-Soviet ideological vacuum head-on end in frustration (as Yeltsin’s state commission to develop a new national idea demonstrates).¹¹ Asking for a coherent formulation of the post-Soviet on demand is like expecting native speakers to explain the fine points of a grammar that they have internalized without consciously learning (just ask the average Russian to elucidate verbal aspect or verbs of motion, or native English speakers to provide rules for using the definite article). I submit that these discursive issues resolve themselves indirectly.

It is easy (and even correct) to claim that “post-Soviet” and especially “postsocialism” are murky, poorly defined concepts whose meaning shifts from speaker to speaker (Gordon). But perhaps this is also a virtue. The flaws of postsocialism are the opposite of those to be found in transitology; not only is the term not teleological, but it threatens to be anti-teleological. There is no clear road map out of postsocialism because the topography of postsocialism consists of circles, cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, dead ends, and roads to nowhere. Postsocialism is messy, which is both a key part of its unattractiveness and a justification for its retention. The first postsocialist decade in particular was tumultuous, if not downright chaotic. Why should the framework for its analysis be any different?

In addition to the obvious economic, social, and political dislocations brought on by the end of socialism, the years following 1989/1991 were (and perhaps remain) a crisis of naming. Names mattered intensely; one of my favorite headlines of 1990, which I unfortunately did not save, was paired with a picture of an unhappy crowd that took to the streets: “Slovaks protest lack of hyphen.” This was the so-called hyphen war over the proper name for Czechoslovakia after 1989, a conflict resolved by obviating the need for punctuation when the country dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Four of the constituent republics of the USSR changed their names after the breakup (to Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Turkmenistan), while cities, streets, and subway stations through the former USSR were restored to their pre-Soviet nomenclature. Meanwhile, a whole set of new alliances and political structures arose whose names never quite stuck, such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, while old terms such as rossiianin (Russian, but not necessarily ethnic Russian) were awkwardly resurrected.¹²

Many of the twenty-first-century governments of postsocialist countries are keen on putting the chaos of the 1990s behind them, and Russia seems to be taking the lead. But the desire to cordon off the early, freewheeling postsocialist years from the more stable (and more authoritarian) world now being built is a hygienic impulse that must be distrusted, if not outright rejected. At this particular point in time, when the Nineties are demonized and Putinism trumpets the glories of the Soviet past, we cannot allow the Nineties to become a self-contained period against which the “post-post-Soviet” can be defined. Electing to view the Nineties and the Putin years together (as Irina Souch insists on doing in her masterful 2017 study, Popular Tropes of Identity in Post-Soviet Russia), is a political statement as well as an intellectual one.¹³

Any demarcation of one time from another is vulnerable to complaints of arbitrariness, a charge Martin Muller levies at a postsocialism that extends from 1989/1991 to the present but is equally applicable to a version of postsocialism that ended years ago. Temporal frameworks always risk overemphasizing rupture. Certainly, this is true of the revolution of 1917, and it is also the case for 1991, and possibly for 2000. When we choose our moment of rupture, we are endorsing a narrative whose ramifications might not be immediately clear. Postsocialism may commit the sin of turning 1991 into a definitive rupture, but, at least in the Russian case, it has the virtue of not assenting to the Putinist salvational myth of a New Russia in the twenty-first century.

Postsocialism as a theory is weak, a feature that also constitutes postsocialism’s strength. For it is weakness that makes the postsocialist condition in general and its post-Soviet variant in particular so threatening to the political and cultural figures who would prefer to talk about it in the past tense. My argument is not that Russia, Russian culture, the Russian state, or any other Russian institution was or is inherently weak, but rather that a preoccupation with, and subsequent rejection of, weakness is part of the Russian postsocialist/post-Soviet experience. The compensatory demand for the projection of strength does not constitute the death of postsocialism; ruminating over weakness and rejecting it are both forms of engagement.

Multiple definitions of the post-Soviet and postsocialist can be teased out by examining the various answers to two sets of questions. First, the interrogative “Who are we?” or “Who is this subset of us?”—which is the focus of the present study. What are the identity formations that have some purchase in the wake of the Soviet collapse? The second set of questions is inherently conditional-subjunctive: we find out who we are by looking at who we could have been or by compulsively traveling to the key historical moments that led us to this day.

The Cast of Characters

Most of this book is devoted to an examination of these identities, from their roots in shame and self-hatred to their occasional assimilation into narratives of national pride. Chapters 1–5 deal specifically with Soviet self-hatred, starting with the late-Soviet phenomenon known as sovok. When referring to a person rather than to the whole country, the term sovok projected Soviet insecurities about culture and sophistication onto a particular kind of yokel who was the source of embarrassment, humor, and even, occasionally, pride. As the USSR faded into history, the sovok was succeeded by a figure who would seem to be his opposite: the New Russian. Where the sovok was poor, the New Russian was rich. Where the sovok had difficulty navigating the world of much-desired consumer goods, the New Russian reveled in it (but still managed to get things wrong). Where the sovok was obsessed with his own particular notion of culture, the New Russian wouldn’t know culture if it hit him in the face with a thousand-dollar handbag. What they have in common is their capacity to shame, by embodying the embarrassing yokel whom more sophisticated Russians would prefer either to forget or, if necessary, keep alive as a cathartic figure of ridicule.

More recently, similar anxieties manifest themselves in the elites’ disdain for the common “herd” (bydlo) and liberals’ disgust with the Crimea-obsessed, pro-Putin, nationalist vatniki (named for the cheap, puffy coats they are said to wear). Both the bydlo and the vatniki continue the process of alienation that had already accelerated with the figure of the New Russian, for the speaking subject who uses these words is denying all kinship with their targets (though vatnik has the complication of being an ethnic slur when deployed by Ukrainians). These chapters will have a more historical (and even philological) scope, since I trace the development of the term sovok back to the 1980s, its rise in the discourse of the late 1980s and 1990s, its manifestations in film and mass culture, and the near disappearance of the term in the past ten years as a reference to people (but not as a reference to the Soviet Union or Soviet system, which was always one of the word’s two primary meanings). I also chart a similar history of the term “New Russian” and discuss the conditions that have made this term less relevant than it was at the turn of the century.

The vatniki and the rest of the post-Soviet bestiary are different ways of framing the problem of the Russian Federation’s new public sphere. As we shall see, Dmitrii Bykov, in his novel Living Souls (ZhD, 2006), invents a category of mentally deficient wandering urban shamans called Vasyas (Vaski), a fantastic extrapolation on the crisis of homelessness that has beset the country since the Soviet collapse. But danger lurks indoors as well; the Russian couch potato is also easily construed as a threat to a healthy body politic. Both the hyperpatriotic Vatnik and the unwashed masses of bydlo can be encountered on the street, but their natural habitat places them in front of the television set, occasionally shouting their agreement with whatever the state channels tell them.

These imaginary identities map themselves across four axes: culture, wealth, effectiveness, and criminality. In addition, some will be framed in terms of heredity or pseudobiologism, while others will not. The sovok, for example, is alternately proficient or deficient in high culture, depending on who defines him, but is always a failure when it comes to mass culture and civilized behavior under the conditions of the marketplace. He is ineffectual by definition, does not engage in organized crime, and has little connection to money (unless one counts its lack). Heredity and faux biological discourse do come up, but more as a matter of rhetorical flare than as the basis for an argument about sovok speciation. Even Zinoviev’s Homosos (see chapter 1), the sovok’s most immediate precursor, uses the language of biological type for satirical rather than persuasive ends.

When we turn to the New Russian in chapters 4 and 5, we will find the sovok’s mirror image. The New Russian has no culture and is defined instead by his wealth, effectiveness, and criminality. As he evolves into a more domesticated type (the rich Russian), he attempts to cut his criminal ties, cultivate a new role as a patron of high culture, and engage in a self-justifying discourse of “good genes” and innate nobility. As repulsive as the New Russian might be, he still has a path forward toward respectability.

The Russian Orc of chapter 6 has a complicated connection to culture (proclaiming the virtue of high culture but from a stance of aggressive pseudosavagery), sees himself as effective but finds the categories of both crime and wealth not particularly relevant to his place in the world. Genes, heredity, and degeneration, in contrast, are all part of the Orc’s Manichaean worldview.

This chapter, “Russian Orc: The Evil Empire Strikes Back,” examines an attempt by members of online science fiction and gaming communities to reclaim negative stereotypes of Russia as a point of pride. Insisting that the Western world sees Moscow as “Mordor” and Russians as “Orcs” (even though all evidence suggests that this framework is entirely internally generated), these people take on the mantle of “Orc-dom” voluntarily, a self-orientalizing gesture that amounts to appreciating Russians for their “savage vitality.” Self-proclaimed Orcs have reappropriated not just Tolkien but the simplistic, pop-culture-inspired metaphysics of American exceptionalism as articulated by Ronald Reagan and extended by George W. Bush. Fine, they say, we’ll be your evil empire. But we’ll do it with an irony and pride that you will never entirely comprehend. The Orc identity has its roots in self-hatred, in that it is based on an identification with archetypal villains. But it also points to the simplest way self-hatred is overcome, or at least gives the appearance of being overcome: by reversing the valences and turning shame into pride.

By now, the reader may have noticed one thing that these characters have in common: they are all men. One might chalk this up to one of sexism’s more benign forms (the unexamined assumption that everyone is male unless otherwise specified). But even if that were the case, the lack of even a minimal effort to imagine them as women (or even to come up with their female counterparts) is significant—especially given the long-standing tradition of representing Russia itself as a woman (Rodina-mat’, Mother Russia), a practice that is consistent with national symbolism throughout Europe. The country is a woman, while its inhabits or defenders are her “sons.” As I discussed in Overkill, when Russian women are forced to bear symbolic weight, sometimes as individuals but more often as representatives of particular types, their function is not to round out the picture of Russia by acknowledging that women make up roughly half of the country’s population. Rather, women embody the country’s success or failure in husbanding its resources. In the first post-Soviet decade, Russian women’s emigration, sexual involvement with foreigners, or prostitution all mapped onto Russian (male) shame over the country’s transformation into an exporter of oil and minerals to the more “developed” world. If we even briefly entertain the common assertion that “our women are the most beautiful in the world,” we should also consider who the “we” is that is speaking, and what is their gender.

Part of the early post-Soviet mass cultural project was the reassertion of a supposedly primal or natural masculinity as a remedy for decades of socialism thought to have infantilized Soviet men. The new worlds of crime, business, and politics were men’s playground, and action heroes began to proliferate on the screen and page. Some of these heroes managed to be briefly popular, if not iconic, though in the most prominent cases (such as the characters played by Sergei Bodrov, Jr.), it is difficult to disentangle the hero’s cult following from that of the actor who played him. Yet none of these characters rose to the level of national archetype; they were admired or disdained as individual personalities, even if critics and fans found no shortage of symbolic meaning in their stories.

Despite his popularity, the action hero is a poor candidate for representing the aspirations or anxieties of the nation, in that his adventures are too far from anything like people’s lived experience. He may be admirable, but in terms of relevance, he may as well be a starship captain. Granted, actual Orcs are thin on the ground as well, but they are available in a way that Russian Rambos and starship troopers are not. Orcs, though imaginary, are a part of an existing mass culture that has real purchase in the popular imagination. The Russian Orc is as much an interpretive strategy as he is a character, the reclamation of a misreading that is, in itself, exclusively a Russian product (the identification of Orcs with Russia and the Soviet Union).

Unlike the Orcs, the other identities in this book are a response to the emergence of specific Russian real or imaginary types in reaction to a changing world. They maintain men’s primacy as the subject of nearly any given story, but they also hint at masculine inadequacy. Both the sovok and the New Russian are defined in terms of consumption rather than production, style rather than substance. To the extent that the New Russian overlaps with organized crime, he does have one quality that the other identity formations lack: power that can be understood in traditionally masculine terms. The sovok is hapless; the vatnik is a belligerent, impotent drunk; and the Vasya is either a hick (in popular usage) or a cross between a hobo and a holy fool (in Bykov’s novel); these are men whose tragic flaws include a near-total lack of agency. There is ample room for a feminist critique of post-Soviet women’s own lack of agency, but the broader culture since the late 1980s has emphasized women’s secondary, supportive role as a precondition for the restoration of a post-Soviet order that returns men to their “natural” dominant role (previously stripped from them by an infantilizing, supposedly gender-neutral Soviet state).

Even those identity formations most closely identified with masculine abjection are still functioning within the framework of the thinkable and permissible, and therefore still subject to inclusion in the category of “Russianness.” By contrast, the demonization of the LGBTQI community that crystallized in the passage of the “gay propaganda” law in 2013 excludes an entire subset of the population from the Russian world. Queerness is continually defined as a disorder brought into Russia by the West, sometimes as part of a plot to weaken the national character and exacerbate demographic difficulties. Queers, by definition a challenge to conventional notions of masculinity, are troped as foreign elements that must be purged from the body politic. One of the implicit aims of the homophobic campaigns of the past fifteen years has been to make queerness an identity that is incompatible with the Russian.

The Fandom Menace

The chapter on the Russian appropriation of the Orc identity is the culmination of the trends examined in this volume for a number of reasons. First, there is the important pivot from shame to pride. Second, the Orc identity, far more than that of the sovok or the New Russian, is a response to imagined perceptions of Russians from outside of Russia. Third, the Russian Orc combines two important meanings of the word “fantasy,” in that the identity is entirely a matter of the imagination, while also rooted in fantasy as a genre of literature and entertainment. The Russian Orc is a response to an imagined external (Western) alienating gaze: not the eye of Sauron, but the face of Medusa, solidifying Russia into something monstrous and unchanging.

This immediately raises the question of scale: whatever value judgments one might make about Russian nationalism, it is obviously a significant phenomenon—look no farther than the separatist movement in Ukraine and the mobilization of support in the Russian Federation. By comparison, the Russian Orc is not just a niche category but one that looks positively lightweight. What possible significance could arguments about fantasy characters have?

By now, my readers will not be surprised at my assertion that such imaginary characters do have real meaning and weight. Starting with Plots against Russia, I have been using the materials I study in service of a broader thesis that I believe can be proved only by example: mass culture is worthy of study not just because it reveals something about “real” culture and politics, but because the categories of mass culture have so colonized the popular consciousness that they themselves have a value as an interpretive framework. We should not just study pop culture using “proper” intellectual and theoretical categories; we should see what happens when we look at politics and ideology using pop cultural narratives as our model.

The Orc phenomenon can be a case study of the role of nationalism in fandom. The connection between the two concepts is not original; Hailong Liu speaks convincingly of “the emergence of fandom nationalism,” using an aggressive Chinese social media campaign and cyberattack as a key example (125–47 v.). What I propose goes a few steps further. While fandom can certainly be understood in terms of nationalism, we have much to gain by considering nationalism as a variety of fandom.

What, after all, is “fandom”? Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and Bertha Chin note that Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” (used to define a nation) has long been applied to fandom: “A central truism of English-language media fan studies is that modern fandoms are ‘imagined communities’ fostered by technologies that enable geographically dispersed people to overcome time and distance in forging virtual communities of affect” (174).

Morimoto and Chin are more concerned with fandom’s ability to transcend the national, which is consistent with the general critical attention to transnationalism and alternatives to sovereignty. The kind of fandom I have in mind is an imagined community that, on the contrary, is devoted to national borders and the idea of sovereignty. Consider the definition of “participatory culture” (a variation on fandom) offered by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues in 2009:

For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one with

1. relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations with others,
2. strong support for creating and sharing creations with others,
3. some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices,
4. members who believe that their contributions matter, and
5. members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created). (5–6)

In other words, a fandom arises from the common interest and engagement of a group of people united by their commitment to a beloved object. The object, however, is not a clearly defined, finite “thing”; more often than not, it is a storyworld, one that—even if it has a beginning, middle, and an end—can still be approached as open-ended. That storyworld could be Tolkien; it could be Star Trek. It could also be France—or Russia. Nationalism is fandom, and nationalists are fans of their nation.

Yes, this is an oversimplification, and even an offensive one. That is precisely the point. From the inside, nationalism is a locus of power and meaning, a metanarrative that explains and justifies the world in which the nationalist lives. From the outside, it can look ridiculous.

Consider the problem with studying fan cultures from the outside: even as we try to resist the temptation to look down on them, to the outsider the concerns of, say, anime fan culture appear silly or unimportant. Is Avatar: The Last Airbender really anime? Which ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion is the “right” one, the last episodes of the television series or The End of Evangelion? Then recall how easy it is to satirize the nationalist. Jonathan Swift mocks the conflict between France and England (and the two churches that each represent) as a fight between Big-Endians, who break the bigger parts of their eggs before eating them, and Small-Endians, who do the opposite.

Or, for that matter, recall Freud’s dismissal of conflicts between ethnicities or nations as the “narcissism of small differences.” His point is that, from a distance, the feuding sides look nearly identical, and the issues that divide them appear petty and absurd. He is not wrong, but he is also not entirely right: this assessment works only when one assumes an imagined privileged position that is somehow “above all that.” This is the position of someone who is unmoved—that is, someone who is not a fan. From this standpoint, the nationalist and the fan are always wrong by definition.

Just as there is obviously more than one way to be a nationalist, there is more than one way to be a fan. One of the central distinctions among fan communities has real explanatory potential when applied to the Russian Orc, and perhaps to nationalism more broadly. On one side we have the fan as he is generally pictured by the outside world: the fan who is obsessed with the minutiae of his beloved storyworld, and who polices its boundaries with zeal that can appropriately be termed “fanatical.”¹⁴ This is Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, who will gladly correct anyone who cannot remember exactly when Rogue joined the X-Men.¹⁵ In a 2009 LiveJournal post, a user dubbing herself “obsession_inc” called this “affirmational fandom”; six years later, LordByronic on Reddit proposed the term “curative fandom,” which has also come to be known as “curatorial fandom.” Whatever the name, this is a kind of fandom that prizes storyworld knowledge as lore, the fan equivalent of biblical literalism in Christian circles and strict constructionism among legal scholars.

By contrast to what she sees as the male-dominated affirmational fandom, obsession_inc proposes “transformational fandom,” a primarily female community “all about laying hands upon the source and twisting it to the fans’ own purposes, whether that is to fix a disappointing issue (a distinct lack of sex-having between two characters, of course, is a favorite issue to fix) in the source material, or using the source material to illustrate a point, or just to have a whale of a good time.” Transformational (or transformative) fandom prizes the creative activity of the fans themselves, whether that be fan fiction, critique, or art. For the transformational fan, fandom is about making meaning rather than simply parsing received wisdom.

The transformation/affirmational binary in fandom is inherently political, in ways that become even more obvious when we transpose it to the realm of the nation and ideology. Conservative nationalists the world over insist on their own particular narrative of the nation, built on key moments of triumph or martyrdom, but rarely guilt or shame. When liberals point out the mistakes or crimes that are part of the nation’s history (such as slavery in the US past and caging migrant children in the US present), they are accused of being unpatriotic, or even of hating their own country.

For the nationalist as affirmational fan, the country’s history consists of canonical events that cannot be questioned, only celebrated. In twenty-first century Russia, we see this approach most clearly when the narrative is challenged, as when the independent news channel Dozhd TV dared in 2014 to ask its viewers if Leningrad should not have surrendered to the Nazis and was nearly shut down as a result (Englund). Another example is the outrage in 2015 when the director of Russia’s state archive, Sergei Mironenko, asserted that the story of Panfilov’s twenty-eight guardsmen who died heroically defending Moscow in World War II was a myth. Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky’s response was especially revealing: “It’s my deep conviction that even if this story was invented from the start to the finish, even if Panfilov never existed, even if there was nothing at all, it’s a sacred legend which it’s simply impossible to besmirch. And people who try to do that are total scumbags” (Walker 2016).

Medinsky’s slur is typical of affirmational nationalist fans the world over: to them, loving one’s country means subscribing to a canonical narrative and never deviating from it. Liberals are saddled with a more complicated story of patriotism, one that allows for history to be opened up, expanded, and questioned. This is a history that includes a country’s mistakes and crimes and makes room for previously neglected voices. Patriotic liberals are transformational fans.

The affirmational/transformational fan dynamic proves enlightening when we turn to the Donbas. In Plots against Russia, I expanded on the idea expressed most notably by Dmitrii Bykov, that the war in Ukraine was a “writers’ war,” one in which authors of bad military science fiction moved from fantasy to reality.¹⁶ But at least on the separatist side, it is also the violent, real-life expression of extreme affirmational fandom. After all, the separatist generals included men who had previously made a name for themselves in military reenactments. Donbas is a giant live-action role-playing game (LARP) with real-life casualties.

If there is one lesson we should take from the imposition of fantastic categories onto real-world situations, it is that we underestimate the power of the imaginary at our own peril. The stories we tell can become the stories that we are forced to live.