Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity

Preface

PREFACE IN January 1986, the new Borovitskaia Metro Station opened by the Kremlin wall in central Moscow. Built to remind the visitor of the low-arching hallways of the medieval Kremlin, the station’s visual centerpiece is a vast, gold and burnt orange mural depicting the map of the Soviet Union and its peoples growing as a tree among the towers of the Kremlin. Fifteen impassive human figures stand for the fifteen Soviet republics. This image conveys an unconventional view of national identity, not as a grassroots formation out of which emerged a state. Rather, for the Soviets nationality was a plant cultivated, developed, and controlled by the state, symbolized here by the Kremlin. The year 1986 is best known for the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. In the aftermath the Soviet state in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev gave the silent Soviet nationalities a voice, the right to probe and debate painful truths, past and present. With his policy of glasnost, or openness and transparency, Gorbachev hoped to reform and revive the multinational empire he ruled. Instead, he opened the way to a remarkable debate about identity and to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. These two images—the mute nationalities on the tree-like Soviet map and people suddenly voicing their views, discussing and debating all over the Union—speak to the overwhelming power of the Russian-centered Soviet state to define, to shape, and to bestow identity. Many would say that the center was hypertrophied, that it had too much power, and various nationalities began to resist its influence. Russians, in turn, would push back, questioning their own identity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 peripheries and borders, both real and symbolic, would become the keys to Russians’ thinking about who they are. This book investigates how and why these images became so central to Russian identity. Fig. 1. Mural in Borovitskaia Metro Station, Moscow (1986), photo by Adrienne M. Harris, 2007, reproduced with permission. PR E F AC E xi The post-Soviet period is marked by a decisive shift in the systems of symbols and the values embedded in them—the semiotics—in which thinking about identity is expressed. In distinction to Soviet identity, which was temporally defined—linked to a vision of the Soviet state at the vanguard of history—the post-Soviet debate about Russian identity has been couched in spatial metaphors of territory and geography. This book addresses the nature of contemporary Russian identity and its relationship to the alwaysdominant centralized Russian state. While agreeing that the concept of a nation-state does not fit the Russian historical experience, this book examines patterns of geographical and geopolitical metaphor to understand how major cultural figures and public intellectuals construct post-Soviet Russian identity, whether in some concept of nation or ethnicity or some other kind of community. What we find is indeed a lively give-and-take between recycled statist views and an array of public voices newly empowered by Gorbachev’s, and later Yeltsin’s, bold call for glasnost and public dialogue. We will hear essentialist articulations of identity, for example, in Aleksandr Dugin’s neoEurasian imperialism and Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Russian ultranationalism, as well as constructivist forms of Russianness, coming most insistently in Mikhail Ryklin’s poststructuralist concept of “border,” Liudmila Ulitskaia’s magical realist multiculturalism, and Anna Politkovskaia’s journalistic civicmindedness . Many major voices in the contemporary debate move beyond traditional concepts of nation defined by language, kinship, ethnic group, shared history, though virtually all either cling to or interrogate a crucial characteristic of national identity—geographical territory and its symbolic meanings. Constructivist opinion sometimes advances a concept of Russianness in some ways like the so-called hyphenated identity familiar since the 1970s in the United States and in some ways like the notion of hybrid identity in postcolonial theory.1 In contemporary multiethnic American society everyone is not just American, but, for example, African American or Chinese American, linking both juridical and ethnic self-concepts. In the Russian context a similar approach to identity will emerge through metaphors of territorial border or periphery. In 2005—almost two decades after glasnost was introduced—President Vladimir Putin pronounced the fall of the Soviet Union to be the “greatest 1. This situation brings to mind Lorraine A. Strasheim’s positive revaluation of hyphenated identity, “We’re All Ethnics: ‘Hyphenated’ Americans, ‘Professional’ Ethnics, and...