The USSR Is Hiding in Plain Sight

In 1974, Philip K. Dick had an experience that was either a psychotic break or a mystical epiphany (or perhaps both at once): history had actually ceased in the first century c.e., which meant that the Roman Empire never really ended. Still drugged after a visit to the dentist, he saw the fish symbol a delivery girl was wearing around her neck and came to realize that the empire (which he also called the “Black Iron Prison”) had stopped the flow of time. Both he and the girl were actually secret Christians avoiding persecution by a hostile, heathen Rome.

However one characterizes Dick’s new outlook on the world, it was undeniably productive for his writing. He had already single-handedly sparked an entire subgenre of science fiction in 1962 with The Man in the High Castle, the first modern example of alternate history, as well as the forerunner of the speculative plot that can be boiled down into the two words “Hitler wins.”

For Dick, the continued existence of the Roman Empire was not alternate history but history itself, and he never wrote a story about an alternate twentieth-century Imperial Rome. Instead, he explored this and other ideas in the thousands of pages of the Exegesis of his vision that he wrote from 1974 until his death in 1982, as well as bringing the never-toppled empire into his novels Radio Free Albemuth and Valis.

In the sort of alternate universe that Dick himself might have admired, one can imagine him living a few decades longer, but as a man who had spent most of his life in the now-defunct USSR. Picture him, decades after 1991, writing a never-ending tract in Russian rather than English, arguing (among many other things) that the Soviet Union still existed all around us, if only we could see it.

Or perhaps one might imagine Dick’s post-Soviet counterparts mining a similar vein, but even Victor Pelevin, whose work comes close to the American science fiction writer’s psychedelically inflected metaphysics, has not postulated that he still lives in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the notion of a persistent USSR endures. The forms it takes are less gnostic than Dick’s Eternal Rome, but they do have much wider cultural currency.

Other Russias

Imagining the Soviet Union after 1991 is not restricted to people living or born in the post-Soviet space. Allegations that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the USSR have been a common neocon talking point for decades and have received a new lease on life thanks to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Within the Russian Federation, one might chalk up fantasies of a contemporary Soviet Union as nostalgia, but there is more to it than that. The continued Soviet Union can be seen as one of many manifestations of a wish for, if not change, then something different. From 2006 to 2010, opposition leaders as diverse as the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the National Bolshevik writer Eduard Limonov were part of a coalition called “Drugaia Rossiia” (the name was subsequently taken by the party Limonov founded in 2010). The most accurate translation of the name would be “A Different Russia,” but the firmly entrenched English rendering is “Another Russia.” The aspiration is obviously not geographical. Rather, it is the somewhat utopian aspiration that a different kind of Russia could take root on the land where Russia now exists.

To the extent that they can be said to (fictionally) exist, all of these Other Russias can be experienced only in a kind of double consciousness, not unlike Dick’s ability to see both the default world and the Black Iron Prison at the same time. Even when the Other Russia is described within the confines of immersive fantasy (i.e., without any diegetic connection to our “real” world), their function for the reader or audience depends on the two worlds’ complementarity: each functions as a comment on the other. This makes these Other Russias uncanny by definition, in that each world, in relation to the other, seems both “off” and familiar, rendering them not entirely hospitable.

Their complementarity recalls the premise of China Miéville’s novel The City and the City, which takes place in two metropoles, Beszel and Ul Qoma, that exist in overlapping geographical space but are kept separate by the requirement that the residents of one city “unsee” the residents and the buildings of the other. Those who actually see the other city commit the violation called “breaching,” which is as much phenomenological as it is criminal: in seeing what has always been around them, they are acknowledging the uncanny nature of their everyday existence.

The residents of Miéville’s two fictional cities must pretend that something real is not there. By contrast, those who partake in the narratives of Other Russias are willing something into existence rather than out of it. Through the sheer force of their imagination, they are undoing a loss or closing a wound. This imaginative work, then, is usually an example of what Svetlana Boym called “restorative nostalgia, which does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition … Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt” (xviii). Or, in the more populist vein that I mined in Soviet-Self-Hatred, it is an instance of curatorial fandom, the protective, rear-guard impulse to maintain a beloved cultural object according to a rigid set of received terms, rather than the more fluid and playful transformative fandom. To go back to the example from the 2010s, transformative fandom wants a “Different Russia,” while curatorial fandom wants to revive a “Russia That We Have Lost.” Both activities are inherently creative, but the former celebrates this creativity while the latter wants to cover up all traces of it to maintain the pretense that its proponents are practicing archaeology rather than fan fiction.

Soviet Antiquity

In this reading, the Soviet Union becomes a lost civilization that can be rebuilt from its ruins, cloned, Jurassic Park-style, from its amber-preserved DNA, or perceived as always present but barely visible, like one of Miéville’s unseen overlapping cities. The Jurassic Park metaphor is particularly powerful, giving rise to wordplay used by the film and Soviet Park, a public art project. The coinage works much better in Russian: “Jurassic Park” is, literally, the “Park of the Jurassic Period,” which gives rise to “Park of the Soviet Period,” and, subsequently, the original Russian edition of Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of the Russian Leviathan (“Park of the Crimean Period”).

“Jurassic Park” may be the most dramatic of the temporal metaphors for the lost Soviet Union, but it still has a lot of company. Recent discussions of Soviet neoclassical architecture refer to a “Soviet antiquity,” while the notion of the Soviet Union as a variation on ancient Atlantis can be found across the political spectrum.¹ Eduard Limonov even published a poem and collection called “The USSR Is Our Ancient Rome.” Yet the most remarkable thing about these metaphors is how unremarkable they seem. The Soviet Union was barely a decade gone before it started to be discussed as if it were Pompeii or the lost continent of Mu. Meanwhile, Anatoly Fomenko and the followers of his New Chronology were taking the opposite approach to history, arguing that ancient Greece and ancient Egypt occurred during the Middle Ages.²

What unites Soviet antiquity, the New Chronology, Other Russias, and the varieties of nostalgia and fandom is a voluntarist approach to nation, time, and geography. This is also the common thread to nearly all varieties of Time Crasher stories, including the travels to the past discussed in the previous chapters. For the Time Crasher, every wardrobe is a potential portal to Narnia, every train station conceals a platform for the Hogwarts Express, and every nap could lead to awakening from a century-long slumber. Those Time Crashers who don’t end up fighting Nazis or preventing perestroika often find themselves in better worlds, or at least intriguingly different ones. One of the most popular fantasy series of the post-Soviet era, Max Frei’s Labryinths of Echo series, chronicles the light-hearted adventures of an unremarkable man (named Max Frei) who becomes a detective in an alternate world. Despite its propensity to spark just enough crime to keep Max’s department busy, the land of Echo stands out for its self-satisfied hedonism. Max escapes to a world where good food, good company, and an inordinate number of bathrooms per private home are the norm. The hero of Lukyanenko’s Rough Draft (Chistovik) novels finds himself erased from his everyday Moscow existence, only to learn that he can travel to parallel earths, eventually taking on the task of interdimensional customs agent. Escapism is more than a description of the pleasures such books offer their readers; it is their literal subject matter.

Given such a wide range of alternatives, imagining a never-fallen or somehow restored Soviet Union might seem downright pedestrian. Yet the “reality” (such as it is) turns out to be much more complicated, both because the stakes are higher and because the imaginary world in question is so much closer to people’s lived experience. The demands for verisimilitude are that much greater, while the political implications are far more immediately obvious than those of, say, an alternative Russia where vampires and werewolves are real. A persistent USSR does not necessarily contravene the laws of physics, or even contradict the “laws” of history (as opposed to contradicting actual historical events). Just five years before the Soviet collapse, the end of the USSR seemed unthinkable rather than inevitable, and if opinion polls over the last two decades are any indication, to a large majority of Russian citizens, it now looks regrettable. Brezhnev’s Period of Stagnation, now reconceived as a lost age of harmony and economic health, was haunted by the unavailable temptations of Western consumerism (blue jeans, rock music, and so on). Why not imagine a twenty-first-century Soviet Union that made room for the Internet and smartphones, while still retaining the glory of a world-class superpower?

A Dream of a Thousand Cats

In the eighteenth issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed comic about storytelling and dreams, Gaiman and the artist Kelley Jones detour from the series’ main plot, handing the narrative reins to an abused female Siamese cat. Traumatized by her owners’ drowning of her newborn kittens, she falls asleep and meets the Cat of Dreams, who reveals to her that the world used to be completely different. In the past, giant cats ruled the earth, with tiny humans as their playthings. But one day, the humans realized that if they all dreamed the same dream of a world in which humans ruled and cats were pets, they could transform reality. When she wakes, the Siamese realizes that she has a mission: to travel the world and convince every cat to share the dream of undoing human domination and restoring the golden age of kitty supremacy.

The cats’ and humans’ collective rewriting of the world raises questions about the nature of reality, questions that could be addressed through the discourse of philosophy or through its less reputable cousin, the gauzy syncretism of New Age “thought.” But the cats’ dilemma is as much political as it is metaphysical. Who gets the right to define the world? While it is unlikely that even the most outré political activists in Russia are plotting feline restoration, A Dream of a Thousand Cats inadvertently models voluntarist wish-fulfillment fantasies about power, nationhood, and consent in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.

Thanks to Benedict Anderson, scholars in the West have long been accustomed to understanding the nation as an imagined community: nations, countries, and all social collectivities are not natural phenomena that must be accepted as given. Meanwhile, in the wake of the influential writings of Lev Gumilev and his theory of ethnogenesis, Russian social science and public discourse has become increasingly dominated by precisely the opposite notion: the framing of the ethnos as a virtually biological entity with origins and an existence that are close to independent from historical and political contingencies. Ironically, the same historical circumstances that have enhanced the appeal of Gumilev’s theories of ethnos have also exacerbated a long-standing historical tendency to imagine Russia and the Soviet Union as entities that can be redefined through sheer force of will. Examples include Peter the Great’s radical transformations of Russian society and the construction of a new capital in a fetid swamp, the Bolsheviks’ restructure of the empire along Leninist lines, Stalin’s revolution from above, and Gorbachev’s perestroika. The end of the Soviet Union followed hurried, ultimately fruitless debates about redefining the relationship of the Union republics with the central government and renaming the country—which, for a while, seemed on the verge of becoming the Union of Sovereign States—with the USSR itself wiped from the map with the stroke of a pen. The last fifteen years of the twentieth century posed a serious challenge to geographic object permanence.

Contrary to the Putinist fetishization of the sovereign state while still relying on the very feelings of patriotism and attachment that the current government so exalts, it is not so difficult for many within Russia to act as though any given iteration of either the empire or nation-state were not just socially constructed but the product of collective, consensual delusion. The end of the Soviet Union was both a cataclysmic, once-in-a-lifetime event and an abstract, bureaucratic action bordering on conceptual art. On December 8, 1991, the day when the USSR was first declared defunct, no bloodthirsty foreign invaders were breaching any borders, no revolution was brewing in the streets. It was a Sunday, and the accords were signed by the leaders of the three Slavic republics (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) in secret. The three Baltic republics had seceded in August, and eleven of the twelve remaining republics confirmed the December 8 declaration on December 21. Gorbachev announced his resignation on December 25, and the next day, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR voted itself out of existence.

But what did all of this mean immediately for ordinary citizens in the newly constituted Russian Federation? On a material level, probably little, at least for those who were not directly employed by the Soviet government or military apparatus. The economic transformations were wrenching, of course, but no more on those particular days than the ones immediately preceding or following them. I was living in Moscow at the time and remember a paradoxical sense of both the momentous and the immaterial, of something and nothing happening at the same time. What could be a greater confirmation of the state as consensual fantasy than the fact that its dismantling was, like some underproduced Soviet commodity, unevenly distributed?

The state’s collapse should have been a Zen koan: if you live in a small village with little contact with the outside world, did the Soviet Union ever really end? Or did you ever really live in it? In the absence of pervasive state violence and surveillance, much of the individual subject’s connection to the state is affective, conceptual, and therefore potentially independent of the facts on the ground (at least for women and for men beyond conscription age). One needs a set of strong reasons, intellectual or emotional, to identify with a political structure that extends so much farther than one’s immediately accessible environment. My own personal investment in American federalism is rooted in rootless cosmopolitanism rather than patriotism. My country is more appealing to me as a large, fungible space where my rights are everywhere the same, and I have little interest in (and significant distrust of) local, parochial political formations. But I also recognize that mine is a minority position.

A voluntarist conception of Russian and Soviet statehood is not just an academic exercise, nor is it merely the stuff of fiction (though rest assured, this is fictional stuff to which we will return). Since 2010, the activities of several groups throughout the Russian Federation have been the object of increasing state and media attention precisely because of their insistence that the Russian Federation does not, in fact, exist. The Russian Federation, they argue, is itself a fiction, with no legal basis for its existence. Instead, they claim citizenship in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a country that is very much alive. The empire, it turns out, never really ended. Or at least, this is the dream that thousands of post-Soviet cats would very much like to see as their own reality.

My Address Is the Soviet Union

How do you prove that the USSR no longer exists? The obvious route would be to point out that, by the end of 1991, all the former Soviet republics had declared their independence and been accepted as sovereign states by the international community, with embassies, UN seats, recognized national borders, armed forces, national governments, international agreements, and all the other accoutrements of sovereignty. When the constituent republics declared the Soviet state defunct, and in the absence of any resistance on the part of military or governmental forces representing the USSR, the relocation of the Soviet Union from the present to the past tense became part of consensual reality. The USSR ceased to exist because there was no one with any authority left to declare otherwise.

The many former Soviet citizens who lamented their country’s collapse were left with few options: impotent nostalgia and obsessive melancholia, membership in increasingly marginal communist parties, agitation for a new form of empire, or a disenchanted retreat from the public sphere. It took two decades for some ex-Soviets to develop the most straightforward response to their collapse—denial.

The various groups that espouse the continued existence of the USSR do not agree on everything, but they do share a familiar point of departure. As many anti-liberals have said since 1991, the people who declared the Soviet Union dead had no legal standing to do so. Not only did 77.85 percent of respondents to a March 17, 1991, referendum vote in favor of preserving the Soviet Union, but the subsequent actions that nullified the USSR were not provided for in the Soviet constitution. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), should not have had the authority to rename it the Russian Federation, since the republic was still under the jurisdiction of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet. More important, the leaders of the three Slavic republics did not have the constitutional authority to declare the Soviet Union defunct.

Three decades on, these all sound like moot points, or at least purely theoretical ones. Giorgio Agamben famously called into question our received notions of sovereignty when, building on the work of Carl Schmitt, he argued that the power of the sovereign rests precisely on his ability to suspend due process under the law. The sovereign is the sovereign by virtue of his capacity to legally do away with legality. But by what right can the sovereign declare the state itself to have ceased to exist? It is one thing to suspend the constitution, but it is another to declare both the constitution and one’s own office to be null and void.

In Plots against Russia, I argued that the Putinist obsession with what I called “bare sovereignty” is a reaction to the traumatic failure of Soviet statehood and the concomitant fear that statehood could fail (or be undermined) in the future (112–15). But it is also a rejection of both the very idea of regime change and the possibility that the current iteration of the state could be supplanted by a new one. Putinist sovereignty is built on a paradox: the assertion that the collapse of the USSR was a tragic error that should have been avoided while simultaneously insisting on the legitimacy of the forms of statehood that emerged from it. Nostalgia for lost great-power status is one thing, but Western observers are often oblivious to the delicate balance on which Putinist rhetoric rests. Putinist sovereignty gains nothing from an ideology that is tantamount to sawing off the branch on which it stands. And this is why the constant Western drumbeat that Putin wants to restore the USSR is a misreading of something that is actually much more complicated.

When it comes to Putinist geopolitics and post-Soviet nostalgia, Western pundits make a rookie semiotic mistake: they confuse the Symbolic with the Imaginary, and assume a simple, linear connection to the Real. Rather than striving to resurrect the Soviet Union, the Putinist state peddles “Sovietness,” cherry-picking the attributes of great power, empire, and purpose without activating either the ideology or the bureaucratic structures that underlay them. Even if we were to accept that a restored Soviet Union is the goal of Putinism, it would be a goal dependent on infinite deferral. Like the arrival of the messiah for rabbinical Judaism, it would be an outcome that is theoretically desired but never really expected. Instead, the current, technically ad hoc structures are meant to endure in the perpetuity of our profane time. What from the outside might appear millenarian is actually a quite comfortable fit with the current state of affairs.

Actual millenarianism is a threat to the status quo. Just as many mainstream Jews have little patience for the Lubavitcher Hasidim who (displaying a strangely unself-conscious lack of originality) insist that their dead Rebbe is going to come back as the messiah, Putinism cannot tolerate actual Soviet restorationists. Nor can it abide those who claim that the USSR still exists and the Russian Federation is a fiction. Such groups are a problem not just because of allegations of fraud, brainwashing, and terrorism, but because they reflect badly on a regime that has used Soviet nostalgia as a cornerstone.

Though the movement to reaffirm Soviet sovereignty dates back to 2010, it took a few years for the media and the state to pay it much attention. Like so many other countries, the Russian Federation has no shortage of crackpots and cranks. When Sergei Taraskin, an ethnic Russian dentist who had moved from Tajikistan to the outskirts of Moscow to open an initially successful clinic, announced in 2010 that he was the “acting president of the USSR,” there was no reason to assume he was anything other than a novelty. Taraskin founded the Union of Slavic Forces of Rus, a group that managed to sound both ethnonationalist and retro-Soviet at the same time (in Russian, its initials are CCCP, the same as those of the USSR).

Indeed, Taraskin’s announcement looked like little more than a desperate attempt to avoid his financial responsibilities. One of his clinic’s investors had pulled out, and he was faced with eviction. In the Moscow Court of Arbitration, instead of declaring, say, bankruptcy, he declared himself the Soviet president (“Samoprovozglashennogo ‘prezidenta SSSR’ Sergeia Taraskina”). As he explained at the time, the office of the Soviet presidency had been “vacant for more than eighteen years,” since the “deserter” Gorbachev stepped down. “None of the soldiers and officers of the Soviet army, who were supposed to carry out their military oath, had filled the position” (Klimova). Where Taraskin allegedly fit in the Soviet military chain of command is an open question, but against the backdrop of the “president’s” increasingly outlandish claims, it can be considered moot.

Taraskin gathered a following both in person and on YouTube. By some metrics, his movement has been a great success. Unlike so many anti-government groups of the past two decades, his Union of Slavic Forces of Rus (and the various offshoots and affiliates) is not confined to the capitals. The sheer geographic breadth of the criminal cases brought against Taraskin and his fellow travelers attests to the wide reach of his ideas. Like Philip K. Dick’s secret Christians subverting the Roman Empire in Berkeley, California, Taraskin’s people were creating a shadow Soviet Union in opposition to the illegitimate authorities who refused to acknowledge the USSR’s continued existence.

This success is, of course, fraught with irony. Despite Taraskin’s own origins in the Soviet Tajik Republic, his followers and epigones were marking their territory primarily within the bounds of the very entity whose legal existence they rejected: the Russian Federation. Even more troublesome (if entirely predictable) were the centrifugal forces that would threaten to tear their restorationist movement apart. Contrary to the early post-Soviet fears that the Russian Federation might, like its predecessor, collapse into its constituent parts, the Russian state has proved quite powerful and stable, while Taraskin’s organization has been unable to match the centralized dominance of Putin’s power vertical. Taraskin’s undead USSR has demonstrated its vulnerability to separatism.

Thus Taraskin is the center of attention in media coverage of the Union of Slavic Forces of Rus, but not when the story is about one of the many offshoots that do not recognize his authority. Even if we accept for the moment that the USSR never fell, there is no escaping the fact that this shadow state has yet to develop its own TASS, Pravda, or Channel One that can speak for the country with one voice. The head of the “State Registration Chamber of the USSR in Ekaterinburg” told his followers on social media in late 2019 that if they did not immediately register with his office after watching his video, this could be considered a “renunciation of USSR citizenship” (Zhilova, “Sekta grazhdan SSSR”). In the Siberian city of Surgut, Anton Bulgakov heads a group called Living People (a Russian variation on the American “sovereign citizens” movement) whose belief system is so syncretic that the insistence that the USSR still functions is among the least bizarre elements of their doctrines. Valentina Reunova, the head of the “Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” not only issues passports but also excommunicates enemies. Thanks to her, both Putin and Medvedev have been deprived of Soviet citizenship (whether or not they know or care is beside the point).

In 2014, Sergei Torgunkov, another financial wizard who had fallen on hard times, followed up his earlier book about Christ’s impending second coming in 2012 and proclaimed himself the acting president of the USSR’s Novosibirsk regional branch. On November 23 of the following year, he paid a visit to the Novosibirsk police in order to give them his latest presidential decrees, only to find himself involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital (Merlizkin).

In some cases, Taraskin’s rivals are outright imitators. Chief among them is Sergei Demkin, a St. Petersburg businessman whose resume is more suggestive of “would-be titan of industry” than “die-hard communist revanchist.” After serving in the army in the 1990s, he became an oil trader, construction company director, and electrical services company owner. In 2016, he “realized that something wasn’t quite right”; everything he had could be taken from him in an instant, leaving his family with nothing. As he puts it, he could have either emigrated or stayed and taken action. He met with Taraskin, only to decide that an organization consisting of “grandmas selling documents” was not the way forward.

He thought about Soviet history and about how “Lenin and Stalin relied on labor unions.” Concluding that Russia needs a “revolution of consciousness” rather than a political revolution, he formed an organization called the Union of the SSR Labor Union (profsoiuz “Soiuz SSR” [Zhegulev]). It is easy to conflate Demkin’s group with Taraskin’s, since both are built on a very specific economic appeal. But where Taraskin (and Bulgakov) use their economic policies as a starting point for much more baroque ideologies, Demkin’s approach is more technocratic.

Demkin’s Labor Union has distilled the movement down to those features that have always attracted the most attention. Like Taraskin, Bulgakov, and the rest of this fractious paranoid politburo, Demkin offers would-be Soviet citizens a set of very practical incentives. Since the Russian Federation (RF) is an illegal entity, squatting on a large chunk of Soviet territory, Soviet citizens are under no obligation to pay any bills they might owe to the RF. In other words, Soviet citizens are on an extended utilities strike. The economic appeal is straightforward, especially when considering how many of these citizens are senior. Utility bills can be particularly burdensome to people on a fixed income.

Of course, these same senior citizens have no qualms about receiving their RF pensions. Nor do the contradictions end there. The leaders of the various “Citizens of the USSR” groups claim that Russian money is not legal tender, with some of them even issuing Soviet rubles as a replacement. But, again, these groups accept payment for membership and services in supposedly fictitious Russian rubles. Their rates are not necessarily high, unless we continue to keep in mind the limited resources of their elderly target audience. The most noteworthy (or notorious) Citizens of the USSR product costs anywhere from two thousand to four thousand rubles (twenty-five to fifty dollars): a Soviet passport.

Ode to a Soviet Passport

Is it possible to be sentimental about a passport? Apparently, it is. In 1929, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote Verses on My Soviet Passport (Stikhi o sovetskom pasporte), one of the many late works that helped generations of Soviet schoolchildren learn to loathe this great and complicated poet. For readers who were not obliged to declaim these verses by heart while proudly wearing their Young Pioneers kerchief, here is a brief summary. Mayakovsky begins the poem by affirming his long-standing hostility to bureaucrats and nearly all their hateful works but reserves special affection for one particular document as he sets a scene that would be familiar to those privileged few who, like Mayakovsky himself, traveled outside of the Soviet Union during a time when this country was none too popular with its neighbors. Such intrepid voyagers knew that not all passports are created equal: “At some passports / the mouth smiles. / At others / it spits” (K odnim pasportam— / ulybka u rta. / K drugin— / otnoshenie plevoe). Border guards accept American passports “like tips,” but when they come to the poet’s red-skinned booklet, they hold it gingerly, like a poisonous snake. But Mayakovsky, being Mayakovsky, responds to contempt with proud defiance: “From my wide pants / I / take out / a copy / of my priceless cargo / Read it / Envy it / I / am a citizen of the Soviet Union” (Ia / dostaiu / iz shirokikh shtanin / dublikatom / bestsennnogo gruza. / Chitaite, zaviduite, / ia— / grazhdanin Sovetskogo Soiuza) (Maiakovskii 594–97).

In Mayakovsky’s poem, the passport is the physical manifestation of the speaker’s pride in his country; it is the pride of citizenship. But the passport he describes is not one that would have been available to all his fellow Soviets. The poem is about his zagranpasport, his foreign travel documents that were in no way an inalienable right. The Citizens of the USSR cannot pretend to make such passports, because they would run up against the fundamental flaw in their model of Soviet sovereignty: a foreign passport can function as such only if countries other than one’s own recognize them as legitimate, but the entire world has accepted that the Soviet Union no longer exists. In the twenty-first century, a Soviet foreign passport is no more valid than an invitation to Hogwarts.

And so the Citizens of the USSR must confine themselves to making (or forging) passports that are not actually designed to facilitate border crossings. In both the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the identification documents issued to every citizen aged fourteen and over are called “passports,” with a design to match. Like most passports, these internal documents are in a booklet format that is unfriendly to both wallets and lanyards. Consisting of twenty pages and containing information about marriages, divorces, children, domicile, and conscription status, the latest (2007) version of the Russian internal passport is an awkwardly portable compendium of all the biometric data that the state deems essential for moving through daily life.

The Citizens of the USSR’s objections to the Russian passport are multiple, reflecting a range of attitudes toward documentation from paranoid skepticism to something akin to idolatry. Numerous commentators have demonstrated the ideological links between the Citizens of the USSR in the post-Soviet space, the Reichsbürger (Reich Citizens) movement in Germany, and the various Sovereign Citizens groups active throughout the United States. All three reject the generally recognized statehood of their respective countries in favor of a previous constitution or legal framework that they claim has never been invalidated. Since 1985, the Reichsbürger have insisted that the 1919 Weimar Constitution is still in effect, rendering the current Federal Republic of Germany an illegal entity (often said to be controlled by the World Zionist Conspiracy, of course). They refuse to pay taxes and issue their own documents (for a fee).

In the United States, the Sovereign Citizens movement, rooted in the Christo-fascist Posse Comitatus movement, argues that the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution disrupted the citizenship regime that had existed up to that point, obliging “sovereign citizens” to assume the status of “federal citizens” and subject themselves to the tyranny of the US central government. Given the overt white nationalism of most of the Sovereign Citizens groups, the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was the mechanism for granting citizenship to previously enslaved Black people is hardly coincidental.

As much as these three movements have in common, however, their approach to documents, while superficially similar, shows a divergent attitude toward bureaucratic modernity and the modern state. The Sovereign Citizens have developed in a country with a long-standing suspicion of central power; unlike Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, the United States has never issued or required national IDs (hence the disputes over requiring identification for voting, which would be a non-issue if all citizens carried such documentation as a matter of course). Also important is the Sovereign Citizens’ selection of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a historical turning point. Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment precedes the Weimar Constitution by fifty-one years and the Soviet collapse by more than a century, representing for Americans a much more significant rupture with modernity than 1919 or 1991.

Where the Sovereign Citizens can display unalloyed contempt for the very idea of federal documentation, the Citizens of the USSR find themselves engaged in a balancing act. As their very name suggests, their identity is based on the concept of a powerful central state. The Sovereign Citizens look back to a time when the federal government left them alone, while the Citizens of the USSR long for the days of a lost great power. If we think of the state as a figurative parent, the Sovereign Citizens are playing at parricide, while the Citizens of the USSR demand the return of the Prodigal Dad.

Hence the movement’s insistence on their own documents’ necessity while denouncing all the instruments of Russian Federation data collection as instruments of oppression. Again and again, Citizens of the USSR exhort their skeptical family members to withhold their personal information: “Yesterday I told a relative that my Sberbank card is finally ready, and I can pick it up tomorrow. Him: Did you give your biometric information? Me: When I get the card. Him: Don’t even think about it. It’s all the work of Satan. When I ask why, and where biometrics and Satan come in, there’s no real answer” (Zhilova, “Muzh sestry”).

As another frustrated relative puts it: “Mama answered that we don’t actually live in Russia but in the USSR, and that we’re all being zombified [brainwashed] and that they want to harvest our organs. She stated that all the information about us is known by our enemies, because we give our biometric data when we get our passports” (Zhilova, “Muzh sestry”).

But when it comes to the documents forged by the movement’s leadership, all hostility to the collection of biometric data vanishes. The Citizens of the USSR love paper documents; they cannot get enough of them. Of course, issuing their own documentation is a significant source of income (as it is for the Sovereign Citizens and the Reichsbürger), but that does not explain the emotional attachment displayed by rank-and-file citizens, whose zeal for their passports is positively Mayakovskian. But it is also a manifestation of the binary thinking so common to conspiracy theorists and moralizers. Soviet (and pseudo-Soviet) documentation is heroic, if not holy, while the corresponding papers issued by the Russian Federation are, at least in the opinion of some Citizens of the USSR, literally the work of Satan himself.

The fixation on Soviet documentation makes sense primarily in the context of Soviet absence. Anything that works to establish the existence of this long-gone, abstract entity is a net positive. For the Citizens of the USSR, Soviet documents are a guarantee of object permanence, providing reassurance that the object of their love is not actually lost. It is telling that the documents in question are almost always internal passports, because the reassurance has a circular character: as long as the Soviet Union still exists, the Citizens of the USSR have a country to call home, and as long as people have Soviet passports, the Soviet Union remains with them. Usually, when we talk of people identifying with a group or a country, we are speaking figuratively, but in this case, the Soviet Union establishes both its own identity and that of the Citizens of the USSR themselves. Like Narcissus enchanted by his own reflection, the Citizens of the USSR cannot risk looking away.

The Citizens of the USSR’s belief system should allow them to reject RF documents as a matter of course, just as the Sovereign Citizens and Reichsbürger do in response to their own governments. If the state is illegitimate, how could its documents be anything else? But the Citizens of the USSR are too obsessed with documentation to define the issue so simply. For them, documents and statehood form a closed circuit, with each defining the other. The flaws in the RF documents, then, must in themselves function as proof of the RF’s illegitimacy and must illustrate the basic tenets of the movement.

The Citizens of the USSR are fixated on the fine points of Russian money and passports. Their argument about the codes indicated on the Russian ruble is too complex and, frankly, too boring to go into. Suffice to say that for them, this question of codes is enough to prove that the Russian ruble is worthless. The passport argument is more significant, although the reasoning is no less convoluted. Soviet passports use upper and lower case to indicate the bearer’s last name, first name, and patronymic, while the Russian version uses all capitals, usage more appropriate for tombstones, a comparison that will become clear soon enough (Rodionova).

As this example shows, the Citizens of the USSR give Soviet passports the kind of close, exegetical readings usually reserved for scripture or contract law, seizing on the smallest detail to prove their point. Their primary argument about the invalidity of RF passports comes down to the use of a word and an abbreviation: “registration” and “UFMS” (the Administration of the Federal Migration Service).

Soviet internal passports were issued at the passport office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and among the many pieces of information it contained was the propiska for the domicile where the passport bearer was officially permitted (and expected) to reside. In 1992, the responsibility for issuing passports in the Russian Federation was handed to the newly formed Federal Migration Service—which, as the name implies, also processed applications for migration into the RF.³ New legislation replaced the propiska with registration (registratsiia), which actually removed a number of obstacles to the free movement of Russian citizens and to their access to education and social services. But registration, particularly when combined with migration, has been used to argue that the RF passport system turns Russians into migrants rather than citizens.

This comes up repeatedly in interviews with the Citizens of the USSR. A sixty-one-year-old retired woman named Lidia Frolova told a journalist that a friend pointed out the terminology to her back in 2013: “Take a look at your passport. It says we’re migrants and has an immigration service stamp” (Klimova).

Another followed the trail to the records office, where she asked if they had any paperwork on her renouncing her USSR citizenship and “migrating” to the RF. Naturally, they did not: “So it’s like I was married when I wasn’t looking!” (Charodeyy).

The Citizens of the USSR’s literalism is selective. When a reporter asked how it happened that their “Soviet” passports were printed in Ukraine, they explained that these were leftover blank passports from the old days: “You see … thirty years ago one of the passport series codes accidentally formed a bad word. So these passports were set aside … And now we’ve put them to use! They are real Soviet passports!” (Charodeyy).

The fact that the letters spelled “KhAM” (rude person, boor) somehow did not bother them, despite their attribution of near-magical significance to other words on official documents. Nothing gets in the way of what for all intents and purposes looks like a classic case of projection. To the Citizens of the USSR, all of these documents prove that the Russian Federation is not really a state but rather a commercial entity. Meanwhile, the group’s main source of income is selling invalid documents to its members. Clearly, the Citizens of the USSR are not lacking in sheer gall. Perhaps the label “KhAM” on their passports is more significant than they think.

The USSR as Conspiracy Theory

One of the many weaknesses of Western pundits’ accusation that Putin and his supporters want to resurrect the Soviet Union is how little thought is put into exactly what the “Soviet Union” is supposed to signify. Is it a question of revived imperialism, a return to communism, pure nostalgia, or something else entirely? It would be easy to make the same mistake about the Citizens of the USSR. Without asking what the group members themselves mean when they talk about the USSR, we are left simply imposing our own preconceptions onto them. Assuming they must be Stalinists, quasi-nationalists, or old people longing for the Brezhnev days says more about the commentators than it does about the movement.

Should we really be surprised, then, to find out that even the group members themselves do not all agree on their vision of a Soviet radiant present? Part of the problem is the movement’s decentralization, but the real issue is a combination of ideology and epistemology (while also begging for a bit of ethnography that I am in a poor position to provide). The Citizens of the USSR is a group that starts out with an idea that is almost too simple—the Soviet Union never collapsed—allowing its adherents to project a wide variety of fears and desires onto what is essentially a blank slate. The result is an ideological syncretism that has transformed the Citizens of the USSR into a collection of the usual preoccupations found among Russian conspiracy theorists.

In fact, if we set aside the obvious genealogical connections to the Sovereign Citizens and the Reichsbürger, the movement that the Citizens of the USSR most resembles is QAnon. Like QAnon, the organization thrives on the culture of the Internet in general and social media in particular (with YouTube hosting a number of the movement’s most prominent speakers). Like QAnon, the Citizens of the USSR’s demographic skews toward (but is not limited to) the middle-aged and elderly. In the Citizens’ case, this would be the segment of the population with the greatest affective ties to the Soviet Union based on their own lived experience, as well as the most traumatized by the 1990s. And, like QAnon, the Citizens of the USSR rapidly accrued a set of familiar xenophobic, conspiracist tropes that were not part of the initial stages of the theory.

Just as QAnon did not initially traffic in antisemitic fear-mongering, the basic premise of the Citizens of the USSR had nothing to do with Jews. And yet it is hard to be surprised at the news that some Citizens of the USSR in the Kuban were arrested for plotting to murder a rabbi (“Grazhdane SSSR arestovany”). Or that some of them believe that Jews are poisoning children’s food, eating Christian babies, and brainwashing innocent Russians (Varlamov, “‘Grazhdane SSSR’ protiv Rossii”). By no means am I suggesting that all the Citizens of the USSR hold such beliefs, or that only Citizens do; quite the opposite, the tropes and memes of antisemitism are already so prevalent in the discourse of authoritarian, conspiratorial, and hard-core nationalist groups that their migration into the worldview of some Citizens of the USSR was inevitable. My aim here is not to uncover antisemitism (especially when it barely bothers to cover itself) but to highlight the ideological work that goes into the development of the various subgroups. There is no need for a single mastermind to put all these tropes together; for one thing, the Citizens of the USSR have many candidates vying for mastermind status. For another, it is far more likely that individuals cobble together a familiar conspiratorial ideology on their own.⁴

The stories that the Citizens of the USSR tell one another are inconsistent, underdeveloped, and often quite distant from the basic idea of a Soviet Union that never fell. Taraskin claims to be the head not only of the USSR but also of the Russian Empire. Sergei Torgunkov believed he was the second coming of Christ even before copying from Taraskin’s playbook; he published a tract about his divinity and suggested an alliance with Alfa Bank (“Jesus Christ is a VIP client of the new Alfa Bank!”) (Merlizkin). Another group is preparing for a great battle against the Reptiloids (Polovinko).⁵ And I haven’t even brought up one of the most common tenets of the Citizens of the USSR: they insist that they are the only “living people” on the territory of the Russian Federation.⁶

In a 2018 interview published on Lenta.ru, Acting USSR President Sergei Taraskin seems much more committed to the Soviet Union as an entity than to the Soviet system. The “fact” that Lenin was an agent of anti-Russian Western forces does not bother him: “You’re connecting large legal entities to concrete individuals. But you must understand that such a large state always had plenty of scoundrels and traitors, and heroes, and so on. An individual whom you like or don’t like should not be connected to the whole entity” (“‘Rossiiskaia Federatsiia—eto okkupant’”).

In and of itself, this statement sounds like common sense, but when applied to the founder of the very state that Taraskin claims to represent, it should undercut the foundations of everything Taraskin is trying to (re)build. But it does not, because Taraskin’s reflexive syncretism and lack of interest in ideology render the search for consistency foolish. Taraskin says that socialism will play a role, because the word’s root is “society,” and a person can’t live without a society. There will be a planned economy (“How can you create something without planning?”) but not Marxism. Socialism for him is based on “honor, conscience, [and] justice.”

While there are no doubt plenty of Stalinists among the Citizens of the USSR, as well as others who are committed to their own understanding of the tenets of communism, expecting the entire movement to display such ideological dedication is to fall into the trap that so often awaits liberal observers of conspiracy theories. We search in vain for ideological consistency when what we really should be looking for is affect. The Citizens of the USSR’s appeal is emotional, not logical, which is one of the reasons that they cannot be swayed by rational argument.

Yet there is still a very potent irony about this USSR that lacks a coherent political program. However much Soviet practice deviated from Soviet theory, the historical USSR was dependent on the idea of an ideology to an unprecedented extent. The Citizens of the USSR either cannot come to a consensus or cannot be bothered to dwell on social and economic theory. The contours of their USSR might resemble a utopia, in that it is both idealized and unrealized, but modern utopias, while often mirroring an imagined Golden Age, have tended to look forward to the creation of something new. Borrowing from the title of Edward Bellamy’s famous utopian novel, the Citizens of the USSR are looking backward (in every sense of the phrase’s meaning). They want what they have lost: decent living standards and pride in a powerful country. The rest, from grand ideological theorizing down to the minutiae of daily life, is a set of details that can be addressed later.

Cult Phenomena

I have not done any kind of ethnographic work with the Citizens of the USSR and cannot claim to have unmediated access to their story. Instead, careful attention to the ways that the group has been positioned in the media and framed by experts can tell a story of its own. As fascinating as the Citizens of the USSR are on their own terms, the reactions to them have been at least as significant.

While it is easy to follow the lead of the blogger Ilya Varlamov (“‘Grazhdane SSSR’ ostalis’”) and dismiss most Citizens of the USSR as “freaks who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union” (prosto friki, nostalgiruiushchie po Sovku), their presentation in the media tends to grab the audience’s attention with some of their more bizarre beliefs or activities before eventually sounding the alarm about the danger the Citizens allegedly pose.⁷ The only thing that stops the media coverage from turning into a full-fledged moral panic is how limited that coverage has been so far.

There does seem to be a concerted effort to turn the Citizens of the USSR into the kind of threat that must be confronted by the power of the state that the movement itself rejects. Since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the state and the media have marshaled their considerable might for the purpose of suppressing what liberal politicians have long called “civil society,” the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and formations that have been the mainstays of liberal democracies. In the 1990s, when the experience of the Soviet Union and a tendency to look toward the West made the proliferation of independent institutions generally appear to be a good thing, such organizations experienced rapid growth. For example, George Soros, now uniformly depicted in the Russian media as the country’s enemy, funded a variety of organizations in support of educational reform, international exchange, and the growth of democratic institutions. The current state approach to independent organizations seems predicated on defining them as competitive threats to the country’s sovereignty. Volunteerism is generally viewed as suspicious, unless it is associated with state or church structures (Englund and Lally).

In 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev signed an order creating the Center for Combating Extremism (commonly known as the Center E), officially mandated to fight extremism and terrorism. Center E agents are reliable attendees of all manner of political rallies and have been at the forefront of a battle that the Russian state began in the late 1990s, the fight against so-called sects (i.e., cults), often categorized as totalitarian or destructive. The 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations defined Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and “Christianity” (i.e., Russian Orthodoxy) as “traditional religions” in Russia and established a registration regime for all other religious groups effective December 31, 1999. This law, in combination with subsequent legislation aimed at NGOs and “extremism,” has facilitated the criminalization and demonization of a wide range of religious organizations, most notably the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Citizens of the USSR would find themselves demonized as both a secular extremist movement and a dangerous cult. In a political situation where the boundaries between church and state are being brazenly ignored, the Citizens of the USSR are a perfect folk devil.

The campaign against so-called cults began long before the establishment of Center E. In fact, it is part of the process that led to the adoption of the 1997 law. In the 1990s, both foreign protestant evangelists and new religious movements (NRMs, the neutral term scholars prefer to “cults”) saw the former Soviet Union as an untapped market for the business of saving souls. During those same years, the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate in the United States and Aum Shinrikyo in Japan became object lessons in the dangers of “cults” (especially since Aum Shinrikyo was also active in Russia). Homegrown NRMs such as the Great White Brotherhood of Maria Devi Khristos, the Mother of God Center, and the followers of Vissarion fueled a panic about malevolent Svengalis “zombifying” the country’s youth (Shterin; Borenstein, “Suspending Disbelief”).

Much of the blame for the panic can be cast on the sensationalist media, but they had a great deal of help from self-proclaimed “experts” who warned of the dangers of NRMs in no uncertain terms. These experts were usually affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church (the organization that had the most to lose), most notably Alexander Dvorkin. Dvorkin’s most significant intellectual contribution to the anti-cult movement is the phrase that will (soon!) bring us back to the Citizens of the USSR: to describe organizations such as the Society for Krishna Consciousness and the Great White Brotherhood, he coined the term “totalitarian sect” (Dvorkin).

It was a brilliant, if ironic, turn of phrase. Ironic in that the American panic over NRMs “brainwashing” naive recruits was a repackaging of 1950s Cold War anxieties about communist “thought reform” (most notably dramatized in The Manchurian Candidate), and brilliant because it took advantage of the then-current desire for distance from the Soviet “totalitarian” past. Dvorkin creates a folk devil who is both foreign (like the Hare Krishnas) and disturbingly familiar (a variation on his country’s own experience with the suppression of individual freedoms). “Totalitarian sect” reconciles two ideas that might seem mutually exclusive, in that totalitarian theory posits the attempt at a total control that admits no difference of opinion or approach, while the word “sect” denotes a group that has splintered off from the mainstream. Totalitarianism thus gets projected onto a small group that can be condemned in good conscience, a group that can be despised by cultural conservatives for its deviation from the norms and by liberals for its offenses against human agency.

Perhaps one of the inevitable ramifications of defining the state as the subject and hero of history is how easily the deviation from social norms is traduced as a crime against the state. The fight against totalitarian sects (I’m abandoning the scare quotes, but only because they are tedious) became part of the ever-expanding scope of Center E, lumping religious minorities and political protesters together with terrorists and anarchists. Recently, Dvorkin’s mantle has been taken up by Roman Silantiev, a professor of the history of religion who has held a series of positions within the Russian Orthodox Church. As a specialist on Islam, Silantiev has spent most of his career offending Muslims, but he also frequently speaks out about new religious movements (Ragozina 289–92). Now Silantiev is developing a unified theory of social deviance that implicitly justifies Center E’s determination to lump all perceived threats into a single category: destructology. And the Citizens of the USSR are the theory’s most visible test case.

In the run-up to unveiling his new theory, Silantiev was frequently asked to comment on the Citizens, and he wasted no opportunity to paint them as a cult-like threat to the country’s morals. Even without Silantiev, the media had frequently compared the group to religious “sects,” even deploying a nickname sure to set off alarm bells: Witnesses of the USSR. The association in the mind of a Russian speaker is obvious: the Russian name for the Jehovah’s Witnesses translates back into English as the Witnesses of Jehovah. American nonbelievers tend to dismiss the Witnesses as a minor annoyance (“How can I close the door on them without being rude?”), but in Russia, they are more likely to be perceived as sinister. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have a long history of persecution dating back to the Soviet period, and they remain in the public mind as a prominent example of a totalitarian sect.⁸

Silantiev’s only problem with this term for the citizens is apparently that it is not derogatory enough. Together with Olga Strelakova, he published a short book in 2020 called Necromancers of Our Times (Nekromanty nashikh dnei). The book is about the Citizens of the USSR, or, as he and Strelakova like to call them, the “necrocommunists.” In so doing, they are focusing on the magical thinking that I have already argued is at the heart of the movement, but for them, this is no playful metaphor. While it does contain a fair amount of useful information about the ideological similarities between the Citizens and the Western groups we have already discussed, Necromancers of Our Times has one task: to make the reader see the Citizens of the USSR as a totalitarian cult. The Citizens’ ideology thus loses any political import, since the group is now just an extravagant variation on the familiar theme of religious sectarianism.

In particular, Silantiev and Strelakova are at great pains to connect the Citizens of the USSR with the various strains of neopaganism that have developed throughout Russia over the past three decades. These connections are real but not primary; like the group’s antisemitism, neopaganism is something that part of the movement picked up through the predictable process of conspiratorial osmosis. The Foundation for Traditional Religions, a Russian neopagan website that monitors media coverage of pagan themes, responded to a positive review of the book by pointing out that Silantiev and Strelakova are continuing the process of “connecting (neo)paganism with yet another extremist marker” (“Neoiazychestvo”). In other words, the authors are using the years of negative press about neopagans to show the Citizens of the USSR in a bad light, while also using the Citizens to smear the pagans. As vilification goes, it’s quite efficient.

Shrinking the Public Sphere

The conflation of fringe politics with fringe religion has obvious value for the state, promoting the narrative that deviation from the (Putinist) mainstream is a matter of fanaticism rather than legitimate political differences. Here the Citizens of the USSR make the perfect poster children, because, to anyone not already inclined to take them seriously, their claims are patently absurd. But what Silantiev and Strelakova are doing in Necromancers of Our Time, and what Silantiev and his other coauthor Sergei Chekmaev do in Destructology, goes several steps further.⁹ In applying anti-cult methodology to groups that are not, at their core, religions, they willfully ignore the boundary between the spiritual and the secular. Just as anti-extremist legislation and police work shrink the available space for legitimate political dissent, Silantiev and his co-authors are trying to redefine the public sphere as a realm with no room for the secular.

Silantiev does not repeat the mistakes of more familiar Bible-thumpers who alienate the less committed with fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. The veneer of sociology covers up an unacknowledged debt to the theology known as presuppositionalism. Presuppositionalism rejects the very idea of rational disputation with nonbelievers, because the unerrant Bible is the only source of truth. As Chrissy Stroop writes in “Is Being Trans a Religion?,” “The ‘unsaved,’ bringing their own presuppositions to the evidence, will come to different conclusions—about the Bible, for example, or about the formation of the Grand Canyon, which the ‘evolutionist’ will see in terms of geologic time, while the creationist will see the impact of Noah’s flood … Based on human observation of the evidence alone, the reasoning goes, there is no way to adjudicate between these two incommensurate ‘worldviews.’ The ‘saved’ Christian, with his ‘biblical worldview,’ simply ‘knows’ that he … is right.”

Stroop, a prominent “exvangelical” writer, argues that the American Christian Right characterizes all opposing views and phenomena as “religions” (including “transgenderism,” the subject of this particular post) in order to ensure that “there can be no religiously neutral space, no concept of equal accommodation as a way to manage the fact of pluralism in any modern society democratically. Instead, there can be only a struggle for the domination of your religion or worldview over those held by others.”

Presuppositionalism has a longer way to go in the Russian Federation. Decades of official atheism have left their mark, and even most people who identify themselves as Orthodox Christians have no particular church affiliation. But just as Putin’s third and fourth terms have demonstrated the increasing entanglement between the priorities of the Russian government and those of the Russian Orthodox Church, Silantiev’s destructology represents a hybrid of the presupposionalist insistence on viewing all opposing views as false religions and the Russian state’s criminalization of dissent. Extremism and sectarianism are on the verge of becoming synonyms.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Citizens of the USSR were obviously no longer a priority for either the state or the media, but that does not mean they vanished from the public consciousness. Once several of the Citizens’ organizations (including the Union of Slavic Forces of Rus) were banned by the Komi Supreme Court (“Miniust vnes”), believers in the Soviet Union’s continued existence were more likely to be covered as a legal problem than as a fringe sociological phenomenon. Two Citizens of the USSR were charged in the murder attempt aimed at the rabbi in Krasnodarsk; on December 25, 2021, one was found incompetent to stand trial and sent to a psychiatric hospital, while the other (a seventy-year-old woman) was sentenced to six years’ hard time (“Piat’ storonnikov”). With the outbreak of the war and the massive repression of even the slightest public disagreement with Russian government policies, an uptick in the Citizens of the USSR’s activity was unlikely. When they did start making the news again, it was always in stories about arrests and prosecutions. First, on May 4, when Taraskin was sentenced to eight years in a prison colony on charges of extremism (“Samoprovozglashennogo ‘prezidenta SSSR’ posadili”), but this was merely the denouement of a story that had begun with his arrest in 2020. In June, two Citizens in Orenburg were sentenced to two years and three months of “corrective labor” for their activities in an illegal organization, with a third committed to a psychiatric hospital (Melikhov). The only story about the Citizens that might have had a connection with the war in Ukraine was the August 22 arrest of five members of the Union of Slavic Forces of Rus in Rostov oblast for, among other things, calling for violent attacks on “military, government, and law enforcement personnel” (“Piat’ storonnikov”). One might have expected Russia’s attempted conquest of its neighbor to be the Citizens of the USSR’s moment, since annexing Ukraine could be a step toward some kind of Soviet restoration. But for the Citizens, the Soviet Union still exists; there is nothing to restore. As for the Putinist state, it has no patience for any competing political agenda, even if there might be room for making common cause. To the contrary, the Citizens of the USSR are an affront to Russian sovereignty, and an embarrassing one at that.

Styob and the Soviet Superposition

It is easy to mock the Citizens of the USSR; certainly, I’ve done my fair share of laughing at their expense. Experts such as Silantiev and commentators in the media try to have it both ways, highlighting the absurdity of some of their views while still insisting that they represent a clear and present danger. That the group lends itself to diametrically opposed critiques might set off alarm bells. Are we being played?

If we are, it is not by the Citizens, whose rank and file appear to be depressingly earnest, while their leaders shift back and forth on the spectrum from grifter to deranged. The Citizens are not engaged in ironic performance art. But we can learn something if we engage in a brief thought experiment, imagining an alternate history in which the Citizens engage in the kind of ironic overidentification that Russians call styob.

Brought into the English scholarly lexicon by Alexei Yurchak in Everything Was Forever until It Was No More, styob (commonly spelled “stiob” and occasionally “steb”) superficially resembles more familiar forms of sarcasm or mockery, but with an important innovation. Styob “required such a degree of overidentification” with its target “that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two” (250). Before 2015, the most obvious American analog was Stephen Colbert on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report: Colbert’s right-wing blowhard persona (based on that of the Fox personality Bill O’Reilly) was a long-running joke always played straight. Colbert mocked O’Reilly by inhabiting him thoroughly, exaggerating the Fox host’s worst tendencies while never stepping out of character.

The Citizens of the USSR are, of course, not a character; they are a social movement. But that alone would not make it impossible for them to be engaging in styob. In the United States in the 1980s, a group of activists repeatedly disrupted rallies featuring the antifeminist, homophobic Phyllis Schlafly. Calling themselves “Ladies against Women” (LAW), they donned hats, gloves, and aprons; carried picket signs with such slogans as “My home is his castle”; and chanted, “Hit us again, hit us again, harder, harder.” When speaking to the press, they always stayed in character, admonishing female reporters for neglecting their domestic duties by asking, for example, “Did your husband give you permission to come to this rally?” (Winslow).¹⁰ Ladies against Women were not merely funny; every one of their actions and utterances ridiculed the target of their overidentification. If the Citizens of the USSR were engaging in styob, what would it say about their target(s)? And what would that explain about the hostility mobilized against them?

The obvious answer is Soviet nostalgia and imperial revanchism. Nostalgia is structured around loss, absence, and distance: why be nostalgic when you’ve never left home? In their insistence that the USSR never fell, the Citizens are literalizing the metaphor behind the constant backward glance toward the Soviet Union, the compression of history by the New Chronology, and the trite plot device central to Time Crasher stories: they collapse the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present into one time frame. Their assertion that a defunct country supersedes the reality of currently recognized nation-states uses deliberate conflation of space (the USSR/the Russian Federation) to perform a similar feat for time.

In “Our Nuthouse Is Voting for Putin,” the lead singer of Rabfak asks, “Why is today yesterday and not tomorrow?”—explicitly calling attention to Putinism’s retrohistorical orientation and its inability to imagine a future that is not some kind of revival of a lost past. But that is in one of the song’s verses, not the chorus. A closer examination of the song shows that its satire is based on a structural tension between the overt, oppositional critique of the lyrics (which complain about the living conditions in the “nuthouse”) and the styob of the chorus, which always reaffirms the authority of those in power (“The doctor is right / I’m guilty / Our nuthouse is voting for Putin / Putin is definitely our candidate”).

As performers of styob, the Citizens of the USSR occupy the subject position of the song’s chorus rather than its verses. The Putinist regime views the Soviet past through rose-colored glasses, but the Citizens love it so much that they simply refuse to accept the idea that the Soviet Union is gone. The fact that so many of the Citizens are of retirement age only sharpens the joke. What better way to show a country fixated on the past than to create a social movement dominated by people whose youth is behind them?

Crazed, belligerent, or at least outraged pensioners abound in post-Soviet culture. Their plight can be poignant, as in Eldar Riazanov’s 1991 film The Promised Heavens (Nebesa obetovannye), about displaced, homeless pensioners living on a landfill, whose self-appointed “president” convinces them that benevolent aliens are going to take them away to a better world. Or they can be murderous, as in Mikhail Elizarov’s The Librarian, the best set piece in which is about hundreds of previously comatose grandmas fighting gang wars.¹¹ In the media and online, Russian viewers have long been treated to the antics of “Putin’s Brigades,” a network of elderly women who rant publicly about anti-Russian conspiracies and the New World Order (Olevskii and Davletgil’deev). Soviet nostalgia is not exclusive to the old, but angry pensioners are a handy tool for ridiculing the impulse to look backward.

The problem with styob is, ultimately, part of the problem that the Putinist state has with the Citizens of the USSR: the ridiculousness cannot be contained. Styob is absurdity at its stickiest. You can touch it, but it comes at a cost to your self-seriousness. For the past decade, Putinism has faced the intermittent challenge of oppositionists who refuse to grant the regime the kind of evil solemnity previously accorded to the Soviet state by late Soviet dissidents (Gabowitsch 60–62). One of the earliest moves of the new Putin administration was the February 2000 closure of the satirical television program Puppets after it aired an episode portraying the Russian president as an evil gnome. Yet mockery could not be silenced for long, and one of the galling things about the 2011–2012 street protests or the overall demeanor of the leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny was not a 1960s-era earnest demand to “live without lies,” but the constant readiness to laugh in the face of the regime’s stupidity and incompetence. When Navalny was nearly killed by an (alleged) poisoning presumed to be the work of the state security forces, the regime suffered a double hit: first, the simple fact of depositing the poison in Navalny’s underwear meant that the name “Putin” and the words “Navalny’s underwear” often found themselves sharing a sentence; and second, that Navalny and his team were able to expose his poisoners live over the Internet by essentially prank-calling them.

By the end of post-Soviet Russia’s third decade, styob had become such a reflexive framework for Putinist excess that it had become self-perpetuating. Agency was no longer required. Or perhaps it would be better to say that intent was no longer a prerequisite: styob could arise on its own, independent of its authors’ point of view. Styob is now as much an interpretive strategy as it is an artistic device. In this, as always, it mirrors its object. Not only can we no longer tell if the propagandists on state television believe their most outlandish stories, but, as I have argued in Plots against Russia and elsewhere, their belief is irrelevant. They are putting propagandistic, conspiratorial utterances out in the world, to circulate as they will.

The same holds true for statements and positions that could function as styob, and this is one of the things that makes the Citizens of the USSR a problem. Their extended rants about the USSR’s century-long life span may be drivel, but they also sound like an overidentified parody of Putinist nostalgia. The state and the media can either ignore them or demonize them, but they always run the risk of being tainted by the fundamental similarity between the Citizens’ belief system and the discourse of the state. The Citizens of the USSR are Putinism’s embarrassing, snaggle-toothed backwater cousins, the relatives one might prefer never to have to acknowledge. But they do exist, and they do share a lineage with their more powerful and respectable kin. Where the Citizens of the USSR strive to resurrect a fallen kingdom through sheer force of will, the state is not trying to create something from whole cloth. Instead, the state/media apparatus is engaging in demiurgic magic, an attempt to redefine and transform this embarrassing movement into a quasi-terrorist, quasi-sectarian threat. Inflating the danger they pose makes them a more worthy adversary or, at the very least, a serious enough opponent that engaging with them will not make the state look absurd. One does not need the dreams of a thousand cats to make this happen; all that is required is the much more realistic attempt to make a handful of kittens look like bloodthirsty lions.

1. Ilya Kalinin’s analysis of an underwater Soviet statue park is particularly evocative (“Soviet Atlantis”).

2. The New Chronology project claims that all of antiquity actually took place during the Middle Ages, a truth that has been hidden from humanity by various sinister cabals (Sheiko and Brown 65–98).

3. The UFMS was disbanded in 2016, and its functions were transferred to the Main Directorate of Migration Affairs under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This does not seem to have figured into the arguments made by the Citizens of the USSR, probably because their passports would likely have been issued before this reorganization and would therefore still bear the abbreviation UFMS.

4. QAnon seems to do just fine generating new content even in the absence of new “Q drops” (public posts from the anonymous person or persons behind the “Q” identity).

5. Nor is it surprising that many of the Citizens are anti-mask COVID deniers, who call the epidemic a “global conspiracy” (Kozlov).

6. The Living People of the USSR insist on making affidavits based on the 1666 British proclamation called the Cestui Qui Vie Act, which provided for the disposition of property for those who had vanished at sea or not been heard from for seven years. A number of conspiracists, particularly the Freemen on the Land (a Canadian offshoot of the Sovereign Citizens), have interpreted the act in a much more sweeping manner: anyone who does not declare themselves “alive” after seven years becomes the property of either the British Crown, the Vatican, or global Jewish capital. The only defense the Living People have against this sinister dehumanization is their own legal assertion that they are, indeed, “living.”

7. Even Varlamov engages in a a similar approach, if in a more casual manner. Immediately after his statement about the “freaks,” he writes “But as for the organizers … of course, something has to be done.”

8. See Baran, Dissent on the Margins, as well as her “From Sectarians to Extremists” and “Contested Victims.”

9. Chekmaev’s involvement is noteworthy. A journalist best known as a science fiction writer and editor, Chekmaev has long been a driving force behind the socially conservative science fiction coming out of the liberpunk movement (Plots against Russia 169–77). He has edited anthologies about the dangers of tolerance, the decline of the family, and a future USSR at war in space. Religion is not a new theme for him. In 2018 he published Modnoverie, an anthology devoted to satirizing neopaganism. He is closely associated with Snezhnii kom, a publishing house that, although dealing primarily with science fiction, brought out Silantiev and Strelakova’s Necromancers of Our Time. The boundaries between sociological science fiction and science fictional sociology appear to be wearing thin.

10. Ladies against Women came out of the Berkeley-based Plutonium Players, who included it on a list of fictitious groups endorsing one of their rallies in 1979, along with Reagan for Shah and Mutants for Nuclear Power (Jones).

11. The elderly women are revived and given super-strength and endurance thanks to the mysterious effects of one of a set of obscure socialist realist novels, each of which briefly grants its readers a superpower. Groups of power-hungry collectors (called “libraries”) fight each other for possession of the few remaining copies, hence the gang wars.