Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7.3 (2006) 633-649
Historical Anthropology Meets Soviet History
Douglas Rogers
Dept. of Anthropology
164 Upham Hall
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056 USA
[log in to unmask]
Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov, The Social Life of the State in Subarctic
Siberia. 261 pp. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. ISBN
0804734623. $57.95.
Greta Lynn Uehling, Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and
Return. 320 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN 1403962642, $79.95
(cloth); 1403962650, $26.99 (paper).
Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist
Person after Stalin. 240 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
ISBN 0253345898. $39.95.
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet
Generation. 336 pp. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN
0691121168, $59.50 (cloth); 0691121176, $24.95 (paper).
Some five decades into the sustained and sometimes fraught conversation
between anthropology and history, it no longer makes the sense it once did
to identify distinctive anthropological or historical approaches and plot
their various intersections.1 Many anthropologists now wade through
archives, [End Page 633] and more than a few historians tote tape recorders.
Narrative and historical memory—to give but two examples—are pressing topics
of interest in both disciplines. On an analytic level, scholars situating
themselves in and between these fields frequently engage a common pool of
amorphous and often explicitly anti-disciplinary "cultural studies."
Disjunctures, of course, remain. For all that some historians' embrace of
Michel Foucault resonates with the still-growing body of literature on
governmentality and modern subjectivities in anthropology, other historians
remain far more enamored of unvarnished Geertzian interpretivism or Turner's
ritual theory than most anthropologists writing today.2 But to understand
this conversation through a language of disciplinarity, or even the
much-vaunted interdisciplinarity, no longer seems the most promising way to
move forward.
I want to suggest in this essay that a more pressing set of conjunctures and
disjunctures arises from the resilience of Cold War area studies in the
structuring of intellectual production, both within and far beyond the study
of Russia and Eurasia. In this framing, historians and anthropologists of
the former Soviet bloc appear together on the net importing side of a
global-scale trade imbalance in the circulation of historical, social, and
cultural theories and methodologies.3 Twenty years ago, Arjun Appadurai
commented that, "the dialogue of history with anthropology is very
different, depending on whether one eavesdrops on it in Indonesia, India,
Africa, Mesoamerica, or Europe, for reasons that have as much to do with the
history of anthropology as with what Marshall Sahlins calls the anthropology
of history."4 Although the spectacular growth of historical anthropology and
its engagement with theories of globalization, transnationalism, and
postcoloniality have chipped away at this claim substantially, I would
contend that it retains a troubling degree of accuracy. We in Russian and
Eurasian studies do not as yet have a guiding set of questions and
programmatic statements on what historical anthropology might look like in
the former Soviet bloc, or an idea of how such an enterprise might be
interesting to scholars working in other times [End Page 634] and places. We
have mountains of new archival documents (and numerous meta-commentaries on
what to do with them), vast new opportunities for fieldwork (and various
statements about what the "ethnography of postsocialism" might be), and
terrific new research partners in the historians and ethnographers of the
region.5 The intersection of these elements, however, remains to be charted
and mined for elements that might be of interest to scholars working outside
the region.
As a first step, I want to suggest, we might attend more closely and
explicitly to the ways in which the movement of theories and kinds of
knowledge across regional contexts is potentially transformative of both
knowledge and region. We might ask: should a history (or historical
ethnography) of Nizhnii Novgorod be content with transposing or adapting
approaches originally developed to understand colonial Kenya, postcolonial
Pakistan, or Western Europe? Might Russian, East European, and Eurasian
studies, now no longer starved of data, go beyond recycling approaches
already losing their currency elsewhere?6 Might it rather transform other
brands of historical and anthropological knowledge, such that a fresh
monograph on South Africa would find it useful to draw inspiration from an
existing historical ethnography of Hungary (rather than the other way
around)?7 In short, what are the potentials for history, anthropology, and
historical anthropology of the former Soviet bloc outside its own fuzzy
boundaries?
The kinds of conversations I mean to provoke with these questions have some
precedence in the neighboring anthropology of Europe. When [End Page 635]
anthropologists began to turn their attention from the colonial world back
on anthropology's European home, many did so with the goal not only of
adding another ethnographic region to the discipline's hopper but of raising
questions about the nature of historical and anthropological knowledge
itself. The anthropology of Europe participated in the remaking of
anthropology into a discipline concerned not with small and remote "others,"
but with global processes, scales, and intersections of power and
knowledge.8
Even with these insights, though, anthropology still had a blind spot: the
second of the Cold War's three worlds. The vast majority of theory continued
to be generated along the First World–Third World axis, with even
non-European colonialisms and the anthropology of China getting relatively
short shrift. Given what anthropologists of Europe helped do for the
discipline as a whole, we would be justified in having similar expectations
for the dissolution of the Second World and the attendant disappearance of
the entire postwar "Three Worlds" division of intellectual labor in which
history and anthropology as we know them today grew up.9 On issues such as
these, however, the edited volumes and programmatic studies tackling the
"big questions" of post-Soviet studies are largely silent. Those charting
new directions for historical anthropology continue to marginalize the
former Soviet world and the imprint of the global socialist project on the
20th century.
In short, the ghosts of Cold War ties between world regions and pools of
intellectual labor still lurk in and between anthropology and history.
Moreover, they do so in ways that seem particularly visible from the
perspective of scholarship on the former Soviet bloc (and, conversely,
particularly invisible to scholars of other regions who consider themselves
to have moved beyond the "regions and theories" issue some time ago). We are
perhaps not as far beyond Cold War area studies as we think, and to our
detriment.
The present essay is motivated by the contention that, if my phrasing of the
key problem in regional rather than disciplinary terms is at all useful,
anthropologists and historians working in this part of the world should have
quite a lot more to say to each other than they have said thus far. Such
conversations would be, in turn, a necessary prelude to collectively
addressing (and redressing) the still uneven circulation of approaches to
history, society, and culture in the broader academy. If the first 15 years
or so of historiography after the fall of socialism required relying on
approaches generated [End Page 636] elsewhere—to bring us "up to speed," as
it were—then we might pause to ask whether what comes next will be more
importing or some of our own production for export. My goal here is to
indicate, with specific reference to four recent monographs, a few areas of
Russian and Soviet history that historical ethnographies seem particularly
adept at exploring. In the course of doing so, I point to some of the
possibilities and potential pitfalls for historical anthropology in the
former Soviet bloc.
* * *
Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov's The Social Life of the State in Subarctic
Siberia joins several other historical ethnographies based on fieldwork
among the nationalities and "small peoples" of Siberia.10 Like its
predecessors, it interweaves fieldwork and archival research concentrated on
a single place in order to explore long-term shifts and continuities in
Russian and Soviet history. The goal of Social Life is nothing short of a
new theory of Russian statehood, one that has the uncommon benefit of
emerging from double training and fieldwork. Ssorin-Chiakov was trained in
both the Soviet and the U.S. academies—late Soviet ethnography at the Moscow
Institute of Ethnography and then socio-cultural anthropology at Stanford.
He draws explicit attention at several points to the ways in which the quite
different theoretical conversations at these institutions shaped his
understandings during two lengthy stints of fieldwork with Evenki reindeer
herders in the Podkamennaia Tunguska river basin.
In his Soviet ethnography days in the late 1980s, Ssorin-Chaikov relates, he
worked on a large collective project to identify the elements of Evenki
"traditional culture" still intact after several centuries of Russian
imperialism and Sovietization. Returning to the same fieldsite in the
mid-1990s, he began to see his own previous fieldwork as one aspect of a
paradox that eventually became the central concern of Social Life: every
expansion of the imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet state into the
lives of Evenki herders has been accompanied by—and indeed relied on the
creation of—a representation of them as "stateless" and (still) backward. As
part of this dynamic, eternally weak and perpetually failing state
administrative structures and projects nevertheless seeped into everyday
life, affording Evenki the discursive and [End Page 637] representational
resources to shift tactically between embracing and shunning the state. This
is the "social life of the state" that Ssorin-Chaikov traces into archival
accounts of iasak-collection in the late 19th century, jokes about
collective-farm chairmen, seemingly playful wrestling matches in the tundra,
and a host of other ethnographic vignettes. Especially compelling are his
accounts of the ways in which failed state-building projects were
transformed—in memories, archives, and discourse—into new evidence for the
continuing statelessness of the Evenki. This evidence, in turn, became a
warrant for future state projects, themselves doomed to failure but
impinging on Evenki lives in unexpected ways.
Ssorin-Chaikov's approach to the state is theoretically complex,
wide-ranging, and often under-explicated for its ambitious goals, especially
for those readers not already versed in poststructuralist thought. He aims
to offer an alternative to "evolutionary" perspectives on the state, a
category into which he places theories of state power associated with
Foucault, Gramsci, and Bourdieu as well as sociological theories of state
formation. With a boost from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus,
Ssorin-Chaikov sees both ancien régime and modern disciplinary modalities of
power as coexistent and mutually constitutive, although in different ways,
from the late imperial period right through post-Soviet times.11 He accounts
for the shifting relationship between these modalities through the
poststructuralist concepts of trace, deferral, displacement, and
absence/presence. These concepts, along with doses of Said's Orientialism
and Fabian's Time and the Other, provide the links between ethnographic and
archival minutae and his larger theoretical claims about the state.12
Unfortunately, these links are sometimes simply asserted or hinted at,
rather than closely argued, making it difficult for even the most
sympathetic reader to evaluate some of the book's theoretical propositions.
Abundantly clear and well supported throughout, however, is Ssorin-Chaikov's
contention that a long-term study of Russian and Soviet statehood must focus
on transformation—not on a set of "transitions" among successive steady
states but on transformation itself as perpetual condition of Evenki life.
"Transformation," as he puts it, "is ontologically prior to any given social
form" (5). This claim resonates well with Bruce Grant's argument that the
Nivkhi of Sakhalin have lived a "century of perestroikas."13 What, it might
be asked, would be the implications of freeing this brand of argument from
the small Siberian peoples studied by Ssorin-Chaikov and Grant and
unleashing it on the standard periodizations of Russian and Soviet history?
[End Page 638] Although the historiography of the 1990s and early 2000s has
been increasingly restless and iconoclastic with respect to previously
hallowed periods,14 Ssorin-Chaikov and Grant make a different argument: that
periodization itself may not be the best way to think about historical
processes. Although neither states his goal explicitly as such or pursues
all the implications for existing scholarship, this seems to me to be one of
the challenges set out by their long-term historical ethnographies. It would
be a mistake, that is, to read either one as applying only to small Siberian
populations; indeed, to see the Evenki or Nivkhi as the only kinds of
communities suitable for this sort of long-term, periodization-subverting
historical anthropology would reinstantiate precisely the temporal
distancing these ethnographies seek to question. It is not only small
Siberian peoples that have long histories. I return to this point below, for
I want to suggest that all four of the historical ethnographies under review
here take a long-term perspective that might be of some interest to
historians more accustomed to prioritizing periodizations (whether
conventional or unconventional).
* * *
Greta Lynn Uehling's Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and
Return is an account of the 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars to the
Urals and Central Asia, the subsequent growth of the Crimean Tatar national
movement, and the repatriation of many Crimean Tatars in the post-Soviet
period. The book is based on dozens of semi-structured interviews with
Crimean Tatars recorded between 1995 and 2001, substantial archival
research, and, for the post-Soviet period, limited amounts of participant
observation with families returning to Crimea to stake claims to ancestral
homesteads. Analytically, Uehling's historical ethnography elegantly weaves
together theories of memory, sentiment, and place to address some pressing
questions in broader social and cultural theory. How do national ideologies
become so inextricably linked to emotions and sentiments? How does
"postmemory"—the phenomenon of memories gaining force and poignancy in
second and third generations not actually present for the events
remembered—work in practice? Uehling's answers are ethnographically rich,
carefully calibrated, and often accompanied by useful speculations about the
likely specificities and generalities of the Crimean Tatar case.15 [End Page
639]
Whereas Ssorin-Chaikov deftly employs archival, oral historical, and
fieldwork sources as different sorts of evidence for his central argument
about Russian and Soviet statehood, Uehling often reads archives and
memories against each other. She explores their gaps and overlaps not with
the goal of adjudicating among different sources or filling in a single
historical narrative, but to trace the ways in which the histories enabled
by each kind of source have served the agendas of various parties. This
strategy is particularly effective in an early chapter, "The Faces of Public
Memory," which appeals to the massive complexity of archival and remembered
accounts in an attempt to diffuse the high tensions that still accompany
accusations and counter-accusations about Crimean Tatar complicity with
German occupiers during World War II. The juxtaposition of archival
documents and contentious, emotionally laden memories also yields terrific
results in Uehling's close reading of the accounts of the 1978
self-immolation of Musa Mahmut—a signal event that, she argues, powerfully
channeled and condensed memories and sentiments into a longing for homeland.
Some of the most compelling parts of Uehling's analysis are those that chart
the ebbs and flows of Crimean Tatar memories: the ways they divide,
recombine, and morph across generations, spread with remarkable consistency
through far-flung diasporas, and congeal in the political agendas of a
national movement. Her account of the May 1944 deportations, for instance,
does not simply present events from the perspectives of different
participants. Rather, it is divided up by key narrative elements that appear
uncannily similar in widely dispersed accounts—a "knock at the door,"
"loading," "the train journey," "first days in exile," and so on. By framing
memories of deportation in this manner, Uehling is able not only to
reconstruct the deportation itself but to draw immediate attention to the
ways in which memories of deportation have taken on, and indeed are
inseparable from, social and narrative lives of their own. Uehling follows
up these accounts of the deportation by attending closely to their retelling
in the 1990s.
The social nature of remembering, Uehling argues, drove the ways in which
memories of deportation were harnessed to sentiment, a process she [End Page
640] explores in part by modifying Raymond Williams's concept of "structures
of feeling."16 Yearning for a lost homeland fed the Crimean Tatar national
movement and provided resources and tactics for struggles with the Soviet
state in the shape of KGB interrogators and other brands of harassment. When
the movement for repatriation eventually gained traction in the last years
of the Soviet Union, first a trickle, then a flood of Crimean Tatars
returned to stake their claims to their homeland. The first waves settled
largely in outlying areas, with some aid from Soviet and then Ukrainian
governments. It is excellent—if indirect—evidence for Uehling's claims about
the affective power of memory that so many made the choice to return after
repatriation aid had ceased and material conditions had worsened
substantially. Later groups of the children and grandchildren of the
deported Crimean Tatars of 1944 found a hostile local population, an
unsympathetic government, and the general chaos of land claims in
postsocialist privatization. Many were forced to reclaim their homeland by
squatting in abandoned apartments and, remembering Musa Mahmut, threatening
self-immolation if local authorities attempted to evict them. Others, having
just returned, left almost immediately to find new work through labor
migration.
Its contributions to the memory literature in historical anthropology aside,
Uehling's book might be read as an extended exercise in, as well as
constructive criticism of other attempts at, filling in the "blank pages" of
Soviet history. In the past decade and a half, Soviet historians have
witnessed first an often-uncritical rush to and then variously articulated
skepticism about whether "new archival finds" would provide all the answers
originally prophesied by some.17 Uehling's book seems particularly useful at
this reflective moment, for it offers both an alternate route to these blank
pages—memory—and a sophisticated example of how archives and memories might
be used together, in all their contradictions and incompleteness, to
understand the politics of history-making and identity in and after the
Soviet Union.
* * *
Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last
Soviet Generation begins with the paradox indicated by its title: while most
late Soviet citizens thought the Soviet Union would go on for their
lifetimes and beyond, few found themselves surprised for long when it
suddenly disintegrated around them. To unravel this paradox, Yurchak turns
to language and [End Page 641] other domains of performance and meaning.18
His primary examples, gathered through retrospective interviews and a wide
range of documents and personal archives, concern the experience of the
"last Soviet generation"—Soviet citizens who were born between the 1950s and
the 1970s and came of age in the Brezhnev era. The book poses a powerful
challenge to the numerous scholarly and popular accounts of the late Soviet
period that rest on resistance, dissimulation, or firm divisions of the
socialist self into discrete spheres—public and private, official and
unofficial, formal and informal, or hidden and open. Yurchak argues that all
these analytic strategies neglect the performative dimensions of language
and ritual and, in so doing, misunderstand everything from Stalin's crucial
role as "editor" of political language to late Soviet rock music, Komsomol
meetings, portraits of Lenin, the experience of time and space, and more.
Yurchak draws his approach to language from the writings of J. L. Austin on
speech acts (along with developments of Austin's thought by Jacques Derrida
and Pierre Bourdieu).19 Constative speech acts, argued Austin, convey
meaning and describe reality ("it is cold"), whereas performative speech
acts change reality ("I name this ship Queen Elizabeth"). Performative
speech acts, as later commentators on Austin have insisted, depend in key
part on conventionality and context rather than the intentions of the
speaker—it matters a great deal who says "I name this ship Queen Elizabeth,"
how it is said, who is present for the saying, and so on. Although always
present, the constative and performative dimensions of language can take on
different relationships to each other in different social, historical, and
political circumstances.
Yurchak's brilliant thesis is that the relationship between constative and
performative shifted massively after the death of Stalin. Stalin, Yurchak
argues, occupied the crucial role of external "editor" of the meanings of
Soviet authoritative discourse, especially in his numerous writings on
language. After Stalin's death and the critique of his cult, no one assumed
the role of providing a guide to what meanings were authoritatively
socialist. No one, it [End Page 642]is safe to say, could write of Brezhnev
what Mikhail Kalinin wrote of Stalin in 1935: "If you asked me who knows the
Russian language better than anyone else, I would answer, 'Stalin.' We must
learn from him the economy, lucidity, and crystal purity of language" (43).
Yurchak suggests that the primary consequence of this vacant external
editorship was a "performative shift." In the authoritative discourses of
late socialism, the performative dimension of language—forms rather than
meanings, conventions rather than intentions—took on far greater importance
than its constative dimension.
Thus everything from the speeches of the Communist Party leadership to
parades to voting at Komsomol meetings was far more significant on a
performative than on a constative level. Members of the last Soviet
generation often read books at Komsomol meetings, ignoring the constative
meanings of whatever was being said. But they took their noses out of their
books to participate in the performative ritual of voting in favor, often
having no idea what the vote was about. Toward the end of the late socialist
period, most people had become thoroughly accustomed to not even looking for
constative meaning in the socialist slogans plastered all around them.
Crucially, Yurchak argues, this performative shift came about not as a
matter of central policy but as the unintended result of myriad individuals
and small collectives attempting to produce authoritative discourse without
an external canon by which to judge its correctness.
To those who would suggest that performative and constative speech acts make
for yet another binary opposition, Yurchak has a ready and well-argued
answer: they are mutually constitutive dimensions of language that require
each other and feed off each other in their contribution to the formation of
variously situated subjects. The post-Stalin performative shift, Yurchak
argues for much of the book, carried with it much-expanded possibilities for
the creation and spread of constative meanings in everyday life. These are
the familiar late socialist themes of imagining the West and "reeling out"
anekdoty, as well as less-explored topics like absurdist art, alternative
temporalities, and others. But Yurchak is careful to specify that the
constative meanings created through these social practices cannot be
understood to exist externally or prior to the performative speech acts that
reigned in authoritative discourse. Rather, drawing on Deleuze and
Guattari's concept of "deterritorialization" (as does Ssorin-Chaikov in his
attempt to reformulate binaries of state power, discussed above), Yurchak
argues that the late Soviet spread of constative meanings through society
relied on—rather than "resisted" or "opposed"—the increasingly performative
nature of authoritative discourse. The later chapters of the book
convincingly exemplify this claim across an impressive range of topics.
Particularly illustrative chapters, for example, treat the collectivities
and subjectivities indexed by the Russian pronouns svoi and vne. To be with
svoi (ours) or to live vne (inside/outside) was to occupy a subject position
[End Page 643] distinct from both aktivisty and dissidenty. It was to depend
heavily on the forms and conventions of authoritative discourse as an
intrinsic part of crafting meaningful lives not entirely constrained by
them.
The performative shift continued, Yurchak argues briefly in his conclusion,
until Gorbachev attempted to inject new constative meanings into
authoritative discourse as an element of perestroika. In effect, Gorbachev
reintroduced the editor position vacant since Stalin and encouraged Soviet
citizens to look once again for constative meaning in authoritative
discourse. When they did begin to seek descriptions of reality in party
speeches and slogans, people found that it simply did not match the
constative meanings to which they had become accustomed in the late
socialist period. The result was the unexpected disintegration of the entire
system coupled with the retrospective realization that, from the perspective
of constative meanings, it had crumbled long ago.
Such a wide-ranging and innovative analysis is certain to provoke some
objections, perhaps especially on the already much-debated topic of
Stalinism. Yurchak frames his discussion of the Stalin era largely within
Claude Lefort's writings on modernity, rather than in exhaustive engagement
with the existing historiography of the period.20 Although Lefort suits the
overall argument about language extremely well, one side-effect is that
historians may be less than fully sold on the suggestion that the Stalin era
was less rooted in performance than later periods. One inappropriate line of
critique would be that Yurchak's focus on urban, elite Russians involved in
cultural pursuits is not representative of the last Soviet generation in a
part-for-whole sense. It is not intended to be. Yurchak views this subset of
the last Soviet generation as a particularly suggestive route into his
larger argument about the fruits of attending to the relationship between
performative and constative dimensions of language and signification. Other
studies may now ask to what extent Yurchak's arguments hold up for rural
populations or non-Russians, say, and go from there to modify, deepen, or
challenge his understandings of late socialism. The importance of attending
to performative speech acts and rituals in the late socialist period will be
hard to avoid from now on, and the old binary oppositions positing that the
majority of late Soviet subjects valiantly resisted or skillfully faked
their way through an oppressive regime have, one hopes, suffered their
final, decisive blow.
* * *
Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin
aims to replace earlier understandings of Soviet journalists as simple
propaganda [End Page 644]peddlers with a far more subtle reading of
journalists as key players in attempts to create new socialist persons.
Thomas Wolfe accomplishes this task in part by drawing on recent theories of
media and communication, but the book also deserves to be read as one of the
most compelling arguments available for the utility of the Foucauldian
concept of governmentality. The importance of attending to the ways in which
different kinds of modern subjects have been shaped through the regulation
of the "conduct of conduct" are nowhere more effectively and lucidly
explored than here. It is worth noting in particular that Wolfe does not
simply cast aside high politics in favor of the micropolitics of
governmentality, as many studies do. Indeed, with its careful attention to
the shifting tones set by successive incarnations of Soviet leadership, this
is a deployment of governmentality with which students of high politics
should be, at least, less uncomfortable than usual.
Wolfe's central argument begins with the contention that information in
Soviet society moved along the spokes of a "radial diagram"—outward from the
center to the peripheries—with journalists occupying key positions at the
"switches and relays" of information flow. In and through the Soviet press,
as early Soviet leaders argued, new kinds of human beings and relationships
could be created, showcased, and nurtured. Far from merely transmitting the
will of the center, as in older models of propaganda or indoctrination, late
socialist journalists were often far more innovative and dedicated shapers
of socialist personhood than were those in the party leadership. Neither,
however, were journalists entirely free from the center, for their power to
represent socialist persons could threaten party officials as much as it
could seduce them. It was, Wolfe argues, in Khrushchev's and Gorbachev's
periods of "charismatic Leninism" (a term drawn from the work of Stephen
Hanson) that journalists most effectively seized opportunities to use their
texts and their reporting practices to mold new socialist persons in the
late socialist period.21
The book moves deliberately through the post-Stalin period, beginning with
two chapters on the Soviet 1960s. Wolfe takes up Khrushchev-era
journalism-as-government through close readings of the works, lives, and
influence of Izvestiia journalists Aleksei Adzhubei and Anatolii
Agranovskii. Although quite different in many ways, these men staked out a
terrain for Soviet journalism that made the press into a central agent of
socialist government. Under Adzhubei's influence, many Soviet journalists
turned their attention to the defense of the Soviet person—too often ignored
by Soviet bureaucracy, submerged into class interests, or otherwise
threatened. Journalists, Adzhubei showed his colleagues, could direct their
attention to those situations when the development of socialist
consciousness and ethics [End Page 645] was challenged or inhibited,
reporting them not just as news but as small fronts in the ongoing struggles
to build socialism on a global scale. The resulting newspaper articles and
other projects demonstrated the governmental power of journalism in two
ways: first, by intervening in and attempting to rectify situations it
deemed offensive to socialist persons and, second, by demonstrating—through
the very act of this engaged and widely disseminated journalism—the
contemplative, concerned, and ethical manner in which socialist persons
would behave. This combination was, as Wolfe puts it, "classically
governmental" (97).
Khrushchev-era efforts to build socialist persons were not limited to the
smallest scales of individual persons caught in difficult circumstances. One
of Adzhubei's projects was the mammoth Den´ mira (A Day in the World), a
compilation of articles and photographs from newspapers around the world
published on 27 September 1960. Wolfe argues persuasively that Den´ mira was
intended for the journalistic community itself, as an illustration of the
importance and power of journalism in creating socialist persons. Den´ mira
illustrated, in exhaustive detail, that the everyday stories on which
journalists worked were in fact directly caught up in global-scale projects
and struggles, most notably that between the socialist and capitalist
spheres of influence and the kinds of persons each was working to create and
project on the world stage.
From its expansive vision in Den´ mira, however, the role of the press as a
central defender of socialist persons in the Soviet 1960s was fundamentally
challenged by the ideological orthodoxies of the Brezhnev era. Journalists'
ability to shape the meanings that the people attached to socialism was
threatening to a regime that, to recall Yurchak's language, was becoming
overwhelmingly concerned with performative conventions. There was less and
less room in party newspapers for the meaningful representations on which
the journalism of the person thrived. The result, Wolfe argues, was a
distancing of press and party. An ethos of mutual suspicion replaced one of
creative and tactical collaboration, and frustration spread through the
ranks of those journalists who had learned their craft in the Khrushchev
era.
Only with Gorbachev's attempt to revive a form of charismatic Leninism did
the relationships between party and press again change substantially, as
Gorbachev's reformist agenda summoned journalists to assume a prominent role
in shaping still another kind of new socialist person. Journalists of the
1980s, however, proved reluctant to respond to this call with the vigor of
their predecessors in the 1960s. As eager as most were to criticize
Brezhnev-era orthodoxies, they remained mistrustful of the party
leadership's proposals for collaboration in the revitalization of government
by journalism. Wolfe's analysis of the late 1980s benefits especially from
the hindsight through which his interlocutors often viewed it. As
journalists continued to struggle [End Page 646] with Gorbachev's program of
reforms against the backdrop of Soviet history, the first signs of an
entirely new form of governmentality were already appearing around the
edges. With the progressive fragmentation of the political field, for
instance, journalists suddenly found themselves writing not for the unified
audience envisioned in the radial diagram but for increasingly segmented
subsections of it.
The post-Soviet press deserves its own monograph-length treatment, but
Wolfe's concluding chapter on tabloid journalism does much to suggest how
this kind of study might proceed. Staying within his framework of
governmentality and careful to cast post-Soviet transformations as
intimately caught up in global shifts, Wolfe suggests that the sexualized
and sensationalist "boulevard press" was no less a shaper of new kinds of
subjectivity and personhood than its Soviet-era predecessors. In the pages
of SPID-Info (AIDS-Info), Chastnaia zhizn´ (Private Life), and Skandaly
(Scandals), the kinds of persons that journalists projected in the
post-Soviet marketplace were quite different: entrepreneurial, private,
self-educating, risk-embracing, individualized. Wolfe's interviews with the
editors of these newspapers demonstrate, in ways that pure textual or
discursive analysis of their contents might not, the concern for the person
that continued to animate these representations. Brief flashes of Adzhubei
and Agranovskii, that is, were still identifiable in the boulevard press,
even if both the mode of governmentality and the kinds of persons it sought
to aid in forming had changed drastically.
Wolfe's provocative afterword deserves special mention, for it makes
explicit the reasons why thinking about journalism and the person in the
late Soviet period might be interesting far beyond advances in our
understandings of the Soviet project and its after-effects. Historiography
itself, Wolfe argues, is governmental: the narratives historians tell
participate in the conduct of foreign policy and international relations by
helping to establish cultural expectations about conduct that open some
possibilities and foreclose others. This being the case, Wolfe wonders,
might a grand historical narrative of governance in the Soviet period be
told in ways that do not emphasize the internal failings of socialism but
instead take a broader view of the institutions, imaginations, and cultural
schemas (East and West) that interacted to create foreign and domestic
policies in the Cold War era? Such a narrative and analysis (of which Wolfe
has space to provide only a capsule illustration) would link these broadest
scales of international conduct with the smallest scales of the formation of
different kinds of human beings. Framed this way, Wolfe's study of the
Soviet and post-Soviet press is valuable not only for its insights into
Soviet journalism and governance but for two additional reasons. First, it
calls for reflection on, and critique of, the connections among media,
governmentality, and personhood in capitalist contexts—reflection begun by
but not limited to the journalists and editors who populate Wolfe's [End
Page 647] chapters. Second, it invites future scholars of the Soviet period
and the 20th century to cast their nets far more widely than many are
accustomed to doing. For all its brevity, Wolfe's afterword demonstrates how
it is possible, without overreaching or undertheorizing, to work from the
largest to the smallest scales in the historical anthropology of the Soviet
Union—a project that Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of Den´ mira, would doubtless
have judged worthy. It is also one that scholars of the 20th century, not
just the Soviet Union, should read.
* * *
Each of the books under review here contributes new perspectives on
important topics in the history of Russia and Eurasia. Each engages
extra-regional bodies of analytic literature. For the purposes of the
project I outlined at the beginning of this essay, however, their most
important shared characteristic is that they are explicitly positioned
within the retrospective gaze of the post-Soviet period. Each goes beyond
the platitudes of new archival access and new fieldwork possibilities to
show the ways in which its analytic perspectives have been significantly
shaped by the course of the first post-socialist decade. This strategy is
evident in Ssorin-Chaikov's musings on his experiences in Soviet and U.S.
anthropology departments, Yurchak's central paradox of a project that
appeared doomed only in hindsight, and Uehling's and Wolfe's careful
attention to the present-day contexts of the memories they collected
(Governing Soviet Journalism begins, for example, by recounting a long
conversation with a post-Soviet newspaper editor who filters his account of
late socialist journalism through the copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics he
has been reading).
These four historical ethnographies demonstrate, in sum, that it is both
possible and productive to situate a study explicitly within the many
shifting currents of the present without ever losing sight of the task of
understanding the past—indeed, as a way to sharpen our understandings of the
past. Although most students of Russian and Eurasian history are quite
willing to discuss the present-day forces behind shifts in historiographical
approaches and methodologies in grant proposals, bars, and the occasional
separate review essay or editorial, these valuable perspectives are most
often meticulously scrubbed from articles and monographs. Adding them in,
even in smaller doses than the books under review here choose to, should aid
in the collective project of demonstrating more clearly (to ourselves, at
first) why the hard-won insights of the new histories of Russia and Eurasia
are of interest beyond the AAASS membership list.22 [End Page 648]
Much of the post–Cold War restructuring of global knowledge production is
proceeding apart from, rather than by means of, the historical and
anthropological study of the former Second World. This review therefore
calls for greater discussion among anthropologists and historians of the
former Soviet bloc while at the same time attempting to short-circuit the
predictable, stale, even stereotypical routes that conversation might take:
fieldwork versus archival sources; dedication to theory versus dedication to
facts on the ground; new and sexy theory versus slowly developing traditions
of scholarship; a penchant for self-reflection versus a preference for
dispassionate analysis. Surely, a goodly number of misconceptions and
misunderstandings will fall along these lines as the conversation
progresses, but let us see them not as ends in themselves, but as steps in a
larger process of exorcizing the ghosts of Cold War divisions of
intellectual labor. If we in Russian and Eurasian Studies can resist
hackneyed debates about what historians and anthropologists do differently,
we can begin to go beyond playing catch-up to social, cultural, and
historical theories and methodologies generated elsewhere in the world.
Douglas Rogers is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University of
Ohio. His publications include "Moonshine, Money, and the Politics of
Liquidity in Rural Russia," American Ethnologist 32, 1 (2005): 63–81; and
"How to Be a Khoziain in a Transforming State: State Formation and the
Ethics of Governance in Post-Soviet Russia," Comparative Studies in Society
and History 48, 4 (2006): 915–45. He is completing a historical ethnography
entitled "Ethics after Ethics: Labor, Religion, and Moral Practice in the
Russian Urals, 1698–2004."
Footnotes
This review was completed during a fellowship at the Havighurst Center for
Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University, Ohio. Thanks to the
editors at Kritika and my colleagues Steve Norris and Scott Kenworthy for
their comments on an earlier draft.
1. Contributions to this dialogue are simply legion. A sampling of the most
useful programmatic statements and commentaries in the past five years would
include Brian Keith Axel, ed., From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and
Its Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Matti Bunzl, "Boas,
Foucault, and the 'Native Anthropologist': Notes toward a Neo-Boasian
Anthropology," American Anthropologist 106, 3 (2004): 435–42; Ann Laura
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Colonial Force Fields and Their
Epistemologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming);
Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Sally Engle Merry, "Hegemony and
Culture in Historical Anthropology: A Review Essay on Jean and John L.
Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution," American Historical Review 108, 2
(2003): 460–70; Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen,
eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,
1973); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
(Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
3. I owe the analogy to international trade to Elizabeth Dunn.
4. Arjun Appadurai, "Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, 2 (1986): 361.
5. For scholars located in the universities of the region, of course, the
idea that there might be ethnography without thorough historical analysis is
nothing short of bizarre. I do not treat the important issue of
conversations between Western and Russian traditions of scholarship in this
review, but see, for anthropology, Ernest Gellner, ed., Soviet and Western
Anthropology (London: Duckworth, 1980); Valery Tishkov, "The Crisis in
Soviet Ethnography," Current Anthropology 33, 4 (1992): 371–82; Tishkov,
"U.S. and Russian Anthropology: Unequal Dialogue in a Time of Transition,"
Current Anthropology 39, 1 (1998): 1–18; Alexei Elfimov, "The State of the
Discipline in Russia: Interviews with Russian Anthropologists," American
Anthropologist 99, 4 (1997): 775–85; Elfimov, ed., "Ditsiplina i
obshchestvo: Natsional´nye traditsii," special issue of Etnograficheskoe
obozrenie, no. 2 (2005); and Petra Rethmann, "Chto Delat´: Ethnography in
the Post-Soviet Cultural Context," American Anthropologist 99, 4 (1997):
770–74.
6. Applications of Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978)
provide a good example. Orientalism has inspired terrific new research on
the history of Russia and Eurasia, including Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern
Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Daniel R. Brower and Edward J.
Lazzarini, eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples,
1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Maria Todorova,
Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). But from a
broader perspective, only in our corner of the world would an application of
Orientalism be considered cutting edge these days.
7. For a hopeful sign that this kind of project is already becoming
possible, see Kelly Askew and M. Anne Pitcher, eds., "African Socialisms and
Postsocialisms," special issue of Africa 76, 1 (2006).
8. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical
Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Talal Asad et al., "Provocations of European Ethnology," American
Anthropologist 99, 4 (1997): 713–30. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
9. See also Katherine Verdery, "Whither Postsocialism?" in Postsocialism:
Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia, ed. C. M. Hann (London:
Routledge, 2002), 15–21; and my discussion of the afterword to Wolfe's
Governing Soviet Journalism, below.
10. Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Marjorie Mandelstam
Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Caroline Humphrey, Marx
Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1998); Petra Rethmann, Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian
Far East (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001). See also
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
12. Said, Orientialism; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
13. Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture.
14. Mark von Hagen, "Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as
Anti-Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era," American Historical Review 109, 2
(2004): 445–68.
15. Other ethnographic studies of memory include Bruce Grant, "An Average
Azeri Village (1930): Remembering Rebellion in the Caucasus Mountains,"
Slavic Review 63, 4 (2004): 705–31; Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams:
History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1998); Vieda Skultans, The Testimony of Lives:
Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London: Routledge, 1998); Pamela
Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the
Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Rubie S.
Watson, ed., Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa
Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994). Oral histories have taken
a different tack to similar issues, among them David L. Ransel, Village
Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000); and Lewis J. Seigelbaum and Daniel J.
Walkowitz, eds., Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the
New Ukraine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Historical
ethnographies of Chinese socialism might prove particularly suggestive on
the topic of memory; see, above all, Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times:
Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997); and Erik Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory,
Violence, and Place in Southwest China (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001).
16. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 128–35.
17. For a useful perspective on just this matter, as well as numerous
references to other discussions about archives and historiography, see
Steven Kotkin, "The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,"
Russian Review 61, 1 (2002): 35–51.
18. In taking up these topics, Yurchak joins another excellent long-term
historical ethnography, Alaina Lemon's Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance
and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Postsocialism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000).
19. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1962). In this context, Yurchak bypasses much of the
existing secondary literature on performance in linguistic anthropology and
ritual studies, leaving open the question of how his analysis relates to,
for instance, ongoing debates about Rappaport's use of Austin in his general
theory of ritual or Bloch's overstated yet still reverberating claims about
ritualized speech and political power. See Roy Rappaport, Ritual and
Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999); and Maurice Bloch, "Introduction," in Political Language and Oratory
in Traditional Society, ed. Bloch (London: Academic Press, 1975): 1–28.
20. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy,
Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
21. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet
Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
22. As Laura Engelstein's Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian
Folktale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) brilliantly
demonstrates, there is no reason such positioning work should be limited to
projects that, like those reviewed here, extend chronologically to the
present day.
|
