Sean's Russia Blog

This week’s Russia! Magazine column, “Family Values and Putin’s Fourth Pillar,”

Last month, the Russian journalist Oleg Kashin called the 23 year old man brutally murdered in Volgograd for being gay a “sacrificial victim.” Kashin argued that the anti-gay rhetoric coming from the Duma would “quiet down” because the murder revealed “state homophobia” which was until then still “virtual” had become “perhaps more convincing than the state itself wished, and has now started materializing into reality.” Kashin was wrong. But I can’t blame him for suffering from a lapse of naïve hope. Crimes like the one in Volgograd, after all, should have caused national pause. It should have at least tempered the actions of the State Duma. This man’s humanity should have overshadowed his otherness. But it didn’t. Kashin underestimated the conservative cultural politics defining Putin’s third term.

Since December 2011 the Russian government has retrenched itself on a myriad of fronts: political, cultural, economic and social. Several theories come to mind to explain this siege mentality. It’s the state striking back against the liberal thaw of the Medvedev years. The culture war is part of Putin’s efforts to erect a new populist majority. It’s a new anti-cosmopolitianism seeking to purge Russian society of its Western infections. Putinist conservativism serves as a retrograde substitute for a proactive social ideology to rebind the nation. All of these are plausible. They could even exist concurrently as they complement more than contradict. But still, one or even all of these interpretations appear too superficial. It’s important to remember Putinism is characterized by a series of reconstructions: the reestablishment of the power vertical; the rebuilding of the Russian economy; and the reinstitution of the social structure. Viewed in this light, the recent efforts to assert Russian Orthodox family values are an attempt to re-erect the last pillar: the cultural sphere.

A society’s character is constructed on the margins. Meaning, a society gets its identity not from the inclusion of the normal, but from the identification, isolation, and expulsion of the abnormal. For it is the aberrant that defines the border between what is acceptable and unacceptable. The reassertion of Russian Orthodox values is no different. Its increasing presence as a pillar in Russian cultural life is not established by what it is, but by what it’s not: Western, liberal, feminist, and homosexual. Today’s Russian conservativism is not proactively constituted. It is reactively defined by negation.

Image: Slon.ru

This week’s Russia! Magazine column, “Migrants and Russia’s Split National Identity,”

When asked about migrant workers in a recent interview with Moskovskii novosti, Sergey Sobyanin stated, “Moscow is a Russian (rossiiskii) city and it should remain that way. It’s not Chinese, not Tajik and not Uzbek.” For Sobyanin, it was better for labor migrants, with their poor command of Russian and “totally different culture” to go back to “their countries.” A permanent place in Moscow was only reserved for “Russian speakers, whose culture is compatible with our traditions.” Sobyanin then followed his musings on Moscow’s cultural particularity with assertions of its multiculturalism. “Russia is a multiethnic country, a mixture of all its nationalities and traditions. Separating some out and contrasting them to other cultures is very dangerous, simply explosive, particularly for our city.”

At first glance, Sobyanin’s contradictory statements ring xenophobic and even racist. But his claim that Moscow is a Russian, yet multiethnic city can easily get lost in translation. Sobyanin specifically referred to Moscow as rossiiskii, that is, a city for the multiethnic citizens of the Russian Federation, not specifically a city for ethnic Russians (russkii). The important difference between rossiiskii and russkii gets conflated when rendered in English because both translate as Russian. Yet, Sobyanin’s civic gestures are not without ethnic slippages. Placing “Russian speakers” as consonant with “our traditions” and migrants’ “totally different culture” as their antithesis points to the primacy of Russian ethnicity (russkii) as the norm in Russia’s multiethnic community. The migrant, who has the potential to become Russian (rossiiskii) through cultural mimicry, is perpetually relegated to a state of almost the same, but not quite.

Russians’ attitudes toward the migrant reveal the inherent tension in their bifurcated national identity. On the one hand Russian is an ethnic-biological category which vis-a-vis the Central Asian and Caucasian migrant is becoming increasingly racialized. On the other hand, Russian is a civic category rooted in Imperial and Soviet efforts to unify a multiethnic and multicultural society in a common political community. The contradiction lies in that the more the ethnic is given primacy and privilege, the civic is rendered hollow. Given the fragility of Russia’s national identity, it’s no surprise that the increasing flows of migrants produce anxieties and foreboding.