Serguei Alex. Oushakine
The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2009.
304 pages, 6 x 9, 34 halftones, ISBN: 978-0-8014-7557-3
A volume in the series Culture and Society after Socialism, edited by
Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5352
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction "We Have No Motherland"
1
1 Repatriating Capitalism: Fragmented Society and Global Connections
15
2 The Russian Tragedy: From Ethnic Trauma to Ethnic Vitality
79
3 Exchange of Sacrifices: State, Soldiers, and War
130
4 Mothers, Objects, and Relations: Organized by Death
202
Conclusion: "People Cut in Half "
259
References
263
Index
293
Reviews
"The Patriotism of Despair is a detailed presentation of aspects of
provincial Russian life-military, patriotic, psychological,
interpersonal, academic, economic, and others-that could only have been
revealed by the author's focus on discourses and practices of trauma,
sacrifice, tragedy, and loss. Serguei Alex. Oushakine shows a number of
ways in which Soviet imagery and idioms come into play in the
post-Soviet symbolic negotiation of value and gives thoughtful
historical backgrounds of and ethnographic details on nationalist
movements of various sorts and on the Chechen and Afghan wars from
within the communities they affected."
-Dale Pesmen, author of Russia and Soul: An Exploration
"Serguei Oushakine's The Patriotism of Despair is a revolutionary book,
the true subject of which is the collapse of the democratic revolution
in Russia. It reveals the cultural and psychological, rather than merely
political, reasons for the post-Soviet rejection of Western liberal
ideologies and even the mass popularity of aggressively nationalist,
racist, pro-Soviet and neotraditionalist discourses and narratives.
Oushakine's work encompasses the meticulous analysis of various social
groups located in Altai, the Siberian region on the border with China
and Kazakhstan, and interviews with neocommunists, leftists,
nationalists, and Chechnya veterans and their mothers. This book is
especially valuable as it goes beyond worn binary oppositions, instead
presenting a coherent-albeit quite unsettling-vision of post-Soviet
society that is simultaneously fragmented and united by the trauma
caused by the collapse of the Soviet world and seeking various imaginary
and real forms of community and solidarity that inevitably turn out to
be based upon loss, grief, and absence. This approach undermines both
Western stereotypes about Russia and post-Soviet political self-imaging.
It offers little optimism, but Oushakine's genuine interest in his
personages represents the post-Soviet experience as an exuberantly rich
and important facet of contemporary modernity."
-Mark Lipovetsky, University of Colorado-Boulder
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