2023 ASEEES Sampler by Cornell University Press

The 2023 RUSSIAN & EURASIAN STUDIES Sampler CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Northern Illlinois University Press

In this sampler, you will find short excerpts from some forthcoming books in the field of Russian and Eurasian studies published by Cornell University Press and its imprint Northern Illinois University Press. For further information about any of these books visit cornellpress.cornell.edu. If you wish to order any (or all) if these books, enter code 09EXP40 in your shopping cart to save 40 percent off the price of the books and receive free shipping.

Introduction Flow: Resource Management in the Twentieth Century

In a 1965 essay called “On Prose,” the writer and Gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) denounced the nineteenth-century novelistic form. Though contemporary readers still craved “answers to the ‘eternal’ questionfs,” Shalamov believed they could no longer hope to find convincing answers within traditional belles lettres. Writers like Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Balzac had outlived their usefulness in “deciding vitally important questions” pertaining to the “meaning of life” and the “link between art and life.”1 A truly relevant literature, Shalamov argued, could be written only with “one’s own blood, one’s own fate.” Authors of such “new prose” would not need to “gather materials, visit the Butyrka prison or inmate transit stations,” or take “research trips to the Tambov region or anywhere else.” Shalamov’s preferred method “negated” all “old-style preparatory work,” because “the search is now not merely for different means of depicting, but of knowing and finding out.”2 In addition to signaling a “break with the literary tradition of the past” and revealing Shalamov’s wish to position himself as a professional writer rather than a witness of world-historical atrocities, “On Prose” displays what Linnéa Janjić calls a “late style,” a term she borrows from the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969).3 For Adorno, an artist’s late style reflects the emotional states attending 1

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physical and intellectual decline. The late works of significant artists like Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Adorno wrote, are “devoid of sweetness,” “bitter and spiny,” and lacking in harmony. As such, they must be “relegated to the outer reaches of art,” to “the vicinity of the document.”4 It is precisely in the document that Shalamov locates hope for the future of literature. In part, this allegiance derives from the writer’s abiding commitment to the legacy of 1920s-era avant-gardes, with their tendency toward aesthetic maximalism and their documentarian bent.5 Shalamov’s preferences also distinguish him from fellow Gulag chronicler Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), whose Tolstoy-esque narrative stylings earned him fame in the West. Yet Shalamov’s conception of documentary literature not only allowed for, but actually required, substantial creative intervention. As a youthful admirer of the literary critic Osip Brik (1888–1945) and the Constructivist writer Sergei Tretiakov (1892–1937), Shalamov was well versed in the collation of documentary and nondocumentary content they and others called “factography.” Though he “never fully embraced Brik’s and Tretiakov’s enthusiasm” for this method, “his contact with them left its mark” on works like Kolyma Tales (1954–1973).6 Given Shalamov’s anti-authoritarian bona fides, it is shocking to find, in his advocacy for a “prose of documentary intensity,” a distinctly Stalinist echo. His view of writing as materialist endeavor, as labor; his idiosyncratic understanding of the “document” and the “fact,” which recalls Gorky, the “father of Socialist Realism,” as much as it does Tretiakov; and most of all, his insistence on a literature fueled by fleshly suffering, fed with currents of blood, and inscribed on the skin mark his poetics as of a piece with the culture of the Stalinist 1930s. In some sense, these affinities are unsurprising: every person being a product of their time, it is only natural that Shalamov would imbue his texts with ambient cultural currents and vocabularies. Yet to classify Shalamov’s record of human suffering under Stalinism—however heavily fictionalized—in the same category as Gorky’s fevered utopian imaginings or the propagandistic texts of Socialist Realism feels tone-deaf, risky, almost sacrilegious. And yet, the affinities are there—and demand explanation. What could possibly account for them? “It is necessary and possible to write a story that is indistinguishable from a document,” Shalamov argues in “On Prose.” “The thing is, the author must investigate his material using his own hide [shkura]—not only with the mind or the heart but

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with every pore of his skin, with every single nerve.”7 Only in this case can “that which is suffered in one’s own blood exit onto the page as a document of the soul, transfigured and illuminated by the fire of talent.” These lines offer a syncretic, timeless picture of literary production. On one hand, Shalamov inflects his prose with sentiments reminiscent of Pushkin’s harsh and immolating vision of a poetic “Prophet” (1826) whose tongue is brutally plucked out and replaced with that of a wise serpent. On the other hand, Shalamov invokes the same principles that animated the postrevolutionary Soviet fervor for “real” art, a concept that figures at varying distances from the emerging party line defined in divergent ways: from the poets and philosophers of OBERIU, champions of a “Real Art” that was at once naturalistic and absurd, to Maxim Gorky, who helped co-opt the ambient documentarian impulse into official discourse. The end result of Gorky’s insistence on idiosyncratically defined “document” and “fact” was not hyperrealism, but the utterly fanciful edifice of Soviet Socialist Realism.8 The common element uniting these seemingly disparate cultural touchstones is the theme of the working, thinking body as a biological entity, as Agambenian zoê (bare life).9 Throughout “On Prose,” Shalamov makes clear that to be honest and productive, literature must make use of the self—not in some metaphorical sense but as literal fuel to be consumed and transformed in the course of producing the written work. It is only this type of literature—ritualistically carved into human skin like the sentence of the condemned man in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1919)—that is true to life, over and above the “documentary” effect Shalamov prizes. In spite of his disgust for the Stalinist order, his horror at the notion of camp experience as redemptive or useful in any way,10 Shalamov recapitulates a central tenet of official Stalinist thought: namely, that the body’s energy is a flowing and fungible yet finite quantity to be channeled, by force if necessary, toward the dual goal of transforming nature and the self. Shalamov’s debt to the era that preceded his many years in the Gulag is not only aesthetic but moral and philosophical. In an apparently unconscious refraction of the cultural milieu that repressed and imprisoned him, Shalamov suggests that creative production requires steely self-discipline, a conversion of unruly personal and historical tides into meticulously structured outputs. He further argues that the successful execution of physical and mental labor hinges on the liquidation of bodily capital, a channeling of literal and metaphorical energies.

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Underpinning Shalamov’s conception of writerly labor are the very flesh-and-blood categories that animated what we might call the “Stalinist master text.” This term refers to the complex of official, literary-artistic, and popular discourse that supported, constituted, and reflected Stalinist political culture—the entire Gesamtkunstwerk of Stalinism, to borrow Boris Groys’s 1987 formulation. Writing on Soviet society’s worship of “pilot heroes” during the second half of the 1930s, Hans Günther noted that “the language of everyone participating in this publicistic mythmaking is extremely redundant and stereotypical. The more of these texts one reads, the more the descriptions of the heroes and their deeds flow together into one unified, indistinguishable basic pattern [Grundmuster], and the more they begin to seem like interchangeable components within a single text, rehearsed in ever new variations.”11 Such uniformity of expression was by no means unique to Socialist Realism and adjacent journalistic efforts, the subjects of Günther’s analysis. Bits of it may be found, like shrapnel, throughout the Soviet collective body before, during, and long after the 1930s. For eyewitness observers of the 1920s—the decade that saw the initial crystallization of the attitudes Günther describes—the illiberal elements within the Bolshevik revolution were only amplified, rather than invented, in Stalinism. Indeed, as Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899–1980) noted in her memoirs, completed around 1970, the revolutionary enthusiasts among the intelligentsia, “terrified of chaos,” had sought almost immediately to usher in “a strong system,” a “powerful hand that would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks.”12 This book investigates the surprising ubiquity of the language of fluids—broadly understood to include both literal liquids like blood or water and more metaphorically flowing substances like electrical or cosmic energy—at all levels of the Stalinist master text. Already present in Russian culture before 1917, this motif became especially prominent in Soviet society during the years of mass collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan. We find it in Joseph Stalin’s speeches and decrees—as well as in crucial metaphors of the period like “liquidating kulaks as a class.”13 It permeates the prose of Socialist Realist writers like Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1936), the works of “fellow travelers” like Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), the writings of those involved in giant construction projects like Magnitogorsk, and even texts produced exclusively “for the desk drawer” by figures like Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), who had little standing within the Soviet literary establishment.14

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Because labor was at the center of the Soviet political imaginary, the spindle onto which all other concepts and values were wound, liquid discourse in 1920s- and 1930s-era texts centers on the channeling of fluids into physical and intellectual toil. Beyond the obvious categories of industrial and peasant labor, Stalinism subsumed fiction writing, the visual arts, scientific research, performance, and most other forms of human activity under the master category of “work.” Labor was so fundamental to Stalinism, and to the Soviet project more generally, that it pervades even strongly anti-Stalinist texts like Shalamov’s “On Prose.” Despite his disgust at the nominally “useful” but actually pointless and indeed lethal forced labor of the Gulag, Shalamov understands it via the quintessentially Stalinist rubric of personal transformation through work. In his description of Kolyma Tales, Shalamov directly connects physical and mental suffering, writing that the changes the camp experience wreaks on the human psyche are “as irreversible as frostbite.”15 Memory “aches” like “a frostbitten hand” at the mere suggestion of a cold draft, ironically affirming the Stalinist mission to permanently reforge “criminals” through hard labor—a penal practice that entailed, as a necessary and even celebrated component, the destruction of any “human raw material” that could not, or would not, be transformed. Historians of labor writing since the 1970s and 1980s have demonstrated that Soviet workers retained significant agency even in the Stalinist 1930s, challenging “narratives of growing class cohesion and radical consciousness” with “stories of decomposition, fragmentation, and accommodation.”16 For example, former peasant laborers who moved into the urban proletariat after 1917 “resisted official ideology,” channeling “preindustrial culture and traditions to develop an alternative vision and understanding of the world” to the one emanating from the Party.17 Although externally imposed schemes like Taylorism, shock work, or Stakhanovism unsettled existing relations between labor and management, the “collusive responses” of workers and their bosses often helped them skirt official directives—and avoid punishment for doing so.18 At the same time, taking into account Evgeny Dobrenko’s assertion that a key distinction between the postrevolutionary 1920s and the Stalinist 1930s was the passage of socialism from the domain of politics and economics into the realm of representation, I argue that whatever the conditions on the ground, the representational register of Soviet labor culture, particularly in its preoccupation with flowing energies, deserves special attention.19

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Blurring the boundary between individual and collective, human being and nature, the language of liquids, fluidity, and flow reflected the Soviet state’s burgeoning interest in zoê and its shift from a mechanistic to an organic conceptualization of the human being. By the mid1930s, literary, scientific, and critical texts depicted the laboring body as a manipulable assemblage of energy-laden flows. Meticulous attention to each and every citizen, down to the molecular level, set the stage for the celebratory-sacrificial climate of the mid-1930s, exemplified in Stalin’s 1935 declaration that “life has improved, life has become more joyous, and when life is joyous, work goes well.”20 The discourse of fluidity prefigured the obsession with contamination that accompanied Stalin’s purges.21 Concerns with social and moral hygiene can be traced from the 1930s to the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP), then further back to the period immediately following the Bolshevik revolution and, as this book will show, further back still to the scientific, political, and religious utopianism of Russia’s nineteenth century.22 The instrumentalizing implications of the liquid framework I observe in Stalinism tended to oppose potentially emancipatory impulses, locking the subject into an endless disciplinary battle with the self. Contrary to the collectivist ambitions of many Marxist revolutionaries, Stalinism—in theory, if not always in practice—promoted an atomizing responsibilization of the individual, demanding that each person take charge of marshaling their own energies in service to the radiant communist future. Having begun with the promise to provide “to each according to his needs,” under Stalin the Soviet state shifted toward the dramatically less humanitarian “who does not work, does not eat”—a principle exaggerated to ogresque proportions in the Gulag, with its impossible production quotas and correspondingly hierarchized food rations.23 The crescendoing discourse of vigilance in Stalinism encouraged not only what Oleg Kharkhordin describes as a “mutual surveillance” of each by all and vice versa, but also unending self-scrutiny.24 Even as it demanded increased individual attention to the self, Stalinist labor discourse simultaneously used the figure of flow to make its boldest utopian claims. By connecting the projects of personal, natural, and cosmic transformation, fluid rhetoric enabled the state and its subjects to blend together past and future to the exclusion of an often intolerable present. Exploiting eschatological tendencies that had undergirded centuries of Russian religious, philosophical, and social thought, the Stalinist deployment of flow permitted unprecedented play with time and temporality.25 Through an emphasis on liquidity,

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Stalinist labor culture managed to be at once futuristically utopian and, in its insistence on a personal heroism unencumbered by technological innovation, strikingly atavistic. A versatile meta-category, flow subsumed other important cultural narratives of the period, from the Lenin-era dream of total electrification, to the concept of the Soviet Union as a “great family” headed by a benevolent “teacher and father,” to the organicist imagination of Stalin as a skilled horticulturalist tending a vast and complicated garden.26 In a striking parallel with Nazism, Stalinist culture practiced what the historian Jeffrey Herf called “reactionary modernism.” By infusing its quest for modernization with ideologically inflected para- and pseudoscience, Stalinism introduced an irrationalist admixture that actively hindered the achievement of the state’s ambitious industrial, economic, and social goals.27 Early Soviet novels like Evgeny Zamiatin’s We (1924) or Yuri Olesha’s Envy (1927) had warned that Bolshevism would produce an excess of regimentation and cold rationality.28 In fact, Stalin’s ascendancy ushered in decades of anti-intellectual irrationalism—the world of Soviet “enlightenment” being, to borrow from Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), “radiant with triumphant calamity.”29 In its focus on the opposition of the mechanical with the organic, this book has many predecessors. Following a long history in European thought, art, and politics, this dichotomy came to special prominence in modernism, against the background of rapid urbanization, shifting social mores, and accelerating scientific and technological advances.30 Within Russian and East European Studies, Katerina Clark’s seminal study of the Soviet novel, History as Ritual (1981); Vladimir Papernyi’s Culture 2 (1985); Richard Stites’s Revolutionary Dreams (1989); Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000); and Evgeny Dobrenko’s Political Economy of Socialist Realism (2007) all reckon with the organic-mechanical binary in early Soviet culture. Other studies address the related phenomena of vitalism, occultism, Nietzscheanism, and immortality in Russian thought, which bear directly on the development of utopian labor theory in its “liquid” incarnation.31 Among volumes that place liquidity in a global setting, I would highlight Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000), which describes the onset of postmodernism as “liquid,” in contradistinction to a more “solid”— though no less problematic—modernity. Another salient example, albeit in an entirely different tonality, hails from the work of the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934–). Like Bauman, a Polish Jew who escaped to the

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USSR in 1939, Csikszentmihalyi suffered personally in the upheavals the combination of Stalinism and Nazism engendered.32 Again like Bauman, he went on to develop far-reaching theories of human thought. After emigrating to the United States at the age of twenty-two, he completed a PhD in psychology at the University of Chicago in 1965, during the decline of Keynesianism and the advent of “Chicago-style” neoliberalism. Ten years later, he formulated what would become the centerpiece of his professional corpus: the concept of “flow.” “Flow,” in Csikszentmihalyi’s vocabulary, is the mental state of optimal labor productivity, a timeless and hyperfocused channeling of energy. A favorite of Chicago-style economists and their acolytes, this concept fits seamlessly into a contemporary work culture that prizes personal control and self-abnegation.33 Flow, then, is a hallmark of both capitalist labor culture in neoliberalism and its apparent antithesis—Stalinism. Indeed, the implied fluid dynamics and temporal distortion of flow recall the crucial concept of “reforging,” whose advocates exhorted individuals to channel the spontaneous fluids within themselves and in nature toward grandiose geopolitical ends. My aim in enumerating these examples is not to provide an exhaustive review of influences but to emphasize that under consideration in this book is a marker of modernity, a tendency of social and political thought, that transcends the Soviet case. Though it may begin with benign-seeming “utopian dreaming” (Stites), the conceptualization of the human being as a liquid—and therefore easily liquidated—political commodity, whether coded as a fungible cadre, a lump of lowly “human raw material” to be reforged, or an ostensibly empowered participant in the circulation of human capital, leads more often than not to bloodshed and unfreedom. As the science fiction writers Arkady (1925–1991) and Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012) noted in their Brezhnev-era novel Lame Fate (1971–1982), following such conceptual avenues to their logical conclusions threatens to turn the most “altruistic pacifist” into a “savage beast,” precisely because of his “principles, his high-minded intentions.”34 Although its main focus is the Stalinist 1930s, this book seeks to illuminate the broader significance of fluidity within twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. The historical milieu of Stalinist Russia offers an especially illustrative set of examples; two other chronotopes, however, share Stalinism’s liquid preoccupation, whether through historical inheritance or a more indirect ideological affinity. The first is post-Soviet “managed democracy,” with its dependence on oil and

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systematic rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy. Framing Stalin as a “manager of the twentieth century,” as in the eponymous 2011 volume by Sergey Kremlev (Brezkun), is more than an attempt to salvage the leader’s reputation from postmodern freefall. By recasting Stalin as a savvy modern businessman rather than a nineteenth-century revolutionarycum-dictator, Kremlev and his ilk retroactively assimilate him into a neoliberal economic order that prizes many of the same responsibilizing, anthropoforming techniques and outcomes as the historical Stalinism. Such efforts also contribute to the excavation of what Van Wyck Brooks called a “usable past,” in line with Vladimir Putin’s 2005 statement that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century” and the trend of imperial revanchism that culminated in Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.35 In keeping with the logocentrism of pre-Soviet Russian culture, the legacy of the Stalinist fluid order in the post-Soviet space is most visible within literature. Already in the 1990s, but especially after 2000, Russian fiction writers exhibited an interest in Stalinist labor and disciplinary practices as refracted through the prism of natural and bodily flows. Alternative histories and near-future dystopias like Vladimir Sharov’s Before and During (1993), Dmitry Bykov’s Justification (2001) and ZhD (2006), and Victor Pelevin’s “Macedonian Critique of French Thought” (2003) and Lamp of Methuselah (2017) hinge on the consequences of (mis)channeling oil, blood, and other liquids. Moving beyond the post-Soviet setting, I examine a prominent vein of liquidity within the late-capitalist Anglo-American West. Many hallmarks of the present moment, from stagnating wages to fraying or absent social safety nets to the mass casualization of labor, may be linked to the neoliberal emphasis on human capital. The idea of investing in oneself originally derives from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), which noted that the expense of an individual’s “education, study, or apprenticeship” is “a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person.”36 The phrase “human capital” itself dates to 1928; the concept was further elaborated by the economists Theodore Schultz (1902–1998), Jacob Mincer (1922–2006), and Gary Becker (1930–2014).37 Drawing on the work of his mentor Milton Friedman (1912–2006), Becker in particular posited that, in capitalism, workers already own the most important means of production: our knowledge and skills. Unlike machines, these valuable commodities are flexible, movable, and—as Marx had already stipulated—fluidly energetic in nature.38 Yet if workers are always-already empowered, if it is their ability to marshal a personal

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“liquid capital” that determines success or failure, then those who cannot stay afloat in late capitalism have no one to blame but themselves. Nowhere has the idea of human capital attained such hypertrophied proportions as in today’s Silicon Valley, with its celebratory-dystopian exploitation of labor, earnest belief in a radiant Singularity-driven future, and fevered search for eternal youth.39 Not only do members of this community value the overfulfillment of work norms and plans— espousing an attitude that a 2017 New York Times article summarized as “Working 9 to 5 Is for Losers”—but they share with Stalin-era, early Soviet, and even prerevolutionary Russian thinkers an enthusiasm for liquid-based body modification.40 The founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, allegedly uses teenage blood to refresh his own aging supply, while Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup Theranos promised to revolutionize the medical field by radically speeding up blood testing.41 Silicon Valley is also the origin of the faddish food-replacement drink Soylent™. Although it co-opts the titular substance from the eco-thriller Soylent Green (1973), the real-life Soylent™ is probably not “made of people.” Yet it shares with its namesake an ersatz quality, promising to replace solid, varied, potentially unpredictable food with a program of uniform, unobtrusive liquid nourishment. Tech entrepreneurs are apparently so overscheduled that the product’s tagline, “let us take a few things off your plate,” is supposed to sound enticing rather than creepily subtractive and paternalistic. Soylent™ is the perfect fuel for liquid workers, replenishing their “precious bodily fluids” so they can channel their newfound energy into better app design.42 Both Silicon Valley and Stalinism exhibit another curious substitution effect. In each case, where we would expect to see glorification of machines or technology, we instead encounter an emphasis on the bare life of the human body and its flows. A focus on the rhetoric of fluids, then, reveals that the poles of the organic-mechanical binary are not as mutually exclusive as they might initially appear. Whatever its historical or cultural context, liquid discourse—particularly where it coincides with the drive to maximize labor productivity—tends to displace responsibility onto the individual in a manner that, paradoxically, strengthens and verticalizes institutional authority. The logic of flow dissolves ideological particularities, so that the vampiric ambitions of a Peter Thiel can run in anachronistic parallel with the collectivist utopianism of an Alexander Bogdanov. Western neoliberalism and Stalinism both purport to glorify the individual even as they divest him of agency, flatten his personhood, and, at the outer

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Introduction A Nation Saved by the Word

One of the foundations of modern Russian culture is the idea of literature’s special function not only in formulating national identity but in revealing national destiny. Its readers, in the words of the nation’s preeminent critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), “see in Russian writers their only leaders, defenders and saviors.”1 From Belinsky to the present, cultural authorities have recited the credo of literature’s exceptional social significance—in comparison with other artistic and intellectual pursuits in Russia, and in comparison with the literary production of other lands. It is a secular icon of the nation’s higher essence, an opus of unparalleled thematic and aesthetic unity, subsuming individual genius under a collective banner of enlightenment, reform, emancipation, and redemption. On the exceptional status of Russian writing, the critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky declares: “In countries where intellectual and social life is highly developed there is, so to say, a division of labor among the various branches of intellectual activity, of which only one is known to us—literature.” The latter, he concludes, “plays a more significant role in our intellectual advancement than French, German and English literature do in the advancement of their own nations; and it bears heavier responsibilities than does any other literature.”2 On the exceptional unity of this collective cultural enterprise, another critic observes that if we consider literature not just as the work of individual artists, “but as a cultural force directing entire generations along a 1

INTRODUCTION

particular path, as a succession of poetic phenomena passed down from age to age and linked together by one great historical principle, then there can be no doubt that Russian literature exists as a single, well-formed, organic whole.”3 On the exceptional function of this organic unity as an expression of national identity and of the nation’s highest values, we could cite the superlatives of the turn-of-the century historian Semyon Vengerov, for whom literature “is the most remarkable phenomenon of the Russian spirit,” and who echoes Chernyshevsky in asserting: “Nowhere does it appear such an exclusive manifestation of national genius as it does with us.”4 Or we could turn to the more recent testimony of the Soviet writer Fyodor Abramov (“No one has been such a steadfast custodian of the spiritual and moral foundations of human life as has the Russian writer”) or of the émigré writer Sasha Sokolov, who insists that literature in Russia “is a matter of honor and valor, not to speak of heroism. It is a holy cause. It is the cornerstone of culture.”5 Such encomia echo, from diverse ideological and cultural angles, through the better part of two centuries—right down to the present, despite Russia’s post-1991 crisis of faith in writing’s centrality, and the drive beyond its borders toward the destabilization of canons. Thus a study aid for university applicants proclaims: “In truth, no literature in the world has realized its prophetic mission like that of Russia.”6 And in the tradition of tsars and tyrants before him, Vladimir Putin himself takes pains to acknowledge the significance of the nation’s greatest cultural institution: “It is precisely we who, without exaggeration, bear a responsibility before all of civilization for preserving Russian liter ature, for sustaining its colossal humanistic potential. . . . Our task is to draw society’s attention to our national literature, to make Russian literature and the Russian language powerful factors in Russia’s global ideological influence.”7 To whatever extent they reflect literary-historical actuality, these attitudes of devotion are truths of the culture’s self-image.8 And as such, they highlight various facets of a conception of artistic greatness and of a national literary tradition that constitutes the focus of this book. To begin with, though, we should note that while the above litany of unblushing superlatives may indeed add up to a “blurb-praise-page for all of Russian literature” (in the words of a skeptical editor), its appeal, at least implicitly, is in each case to the more limited example of the nineteenth century. From the heyday of the national poet Aleksandr Pushkin in the 1820s and 1830s to the twilight of the great age of the novel (Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy) some fifty years later: this is the period during which and for which the critics’ and historians’ declarations of exceptionality were originally devised—and without which their extension to the whole of Russian literary history would be unthinkable.

A N AT I O N SAV E D BY T H E W O R D

This especially pertains to the claim of teleological unity, based on the perception of the nineteenth-century tradition as the creation of a select group of writers, most of whom knew one another and took each other’s work for their intertexts. “We can say with confidence,” recapitulates Dostoevsky toward the end of his career, “that hardly ever, in any literature, over such a short period, did there appear so many talented writers as in Russia—and one after the other, without interruption.” The scholar Donald Fanger expands on the novelist’s affirmation of faith, observing that “the major Russian writers were, broadly speaking, coevals. As such they were intensely aware of participating in a common cultural enterprise; that is, they had designs on their readers (and on themselves) in the name of a Russian cultural identity whose crystallization was still in process. Hence the profound sense of a presence haunting the days of their narrative.”9 These artists flourished over just a half century, before which it was fashionable to complain that the country was bereft of literature altogether . . . and after which no one in the world could have doubts on this score. This includes, first and foremost, the literary historians, for whom the age unfolds at an “even, measured pace,” its forms and poetic trends “evolving in regular succession,” its unity manifest in the affinities of its members: “It is a striking feature of Russian literature . . . that it is, as it were, a single enterprise in which no one writer can be separated from another. Each one of them is best viewed through the many-sided prism constituted by all of them taken together.”10 According to Dmitry Mirsky, the classic English-language historian of the nineteenth-century canon, the genre of the realistic novel that forms the core of this enterprise “must be regarded as one literary growth, with a unity even greater than, for instance, that of the Elizabethan drama.”11 The peak period of this growth, in the years after 1855, is labeled by The Cambridge History of Russian Literature as “the finest quarter-century of achievement that any modern literature has ever witnessed.”12 Readers of such accounts are free to infer the link between unity and artistic worth, which unfolds into a three-way correlation if we further regard the writers’ shared perception of their national mission as the primary inspiration for the thematic and formal similarities that make Russian literature a “single enterprise.” Thus the overall effect of such claims is to render the nineteenth-century tradition a trinitarian mystery of exceptional unity, exceptional aesthetic value, and exceptional social function. To be precise, insofar as the yardstick is aesthetic, the greatness of the nineteenth-century tradition is taken as axiomatic by Russian culture today. The picture is muddier where this greatness relates to literature’s sense of its own broader social function. There have always been disagreements about the aims of individual writers, and about the nature and actual impact of the whole

INTRODUCTION

tradition’s “prophetic mission,” as cited in these declarations. Dissent becomes particularly vocal when it comes to ideologically concrete expressions of this mission. Still, most formulations—including the ones cited—are sufficiently soft-focus so as not to jeopardize the overall consensus on the idea of social responsibility, for Russian literature in general and the nineteenth-century tradition in particular. (And the vaguer this idea’s contours, the greater the burden of expectation.) At issue, it is crucial to note, is not the objective “society-forming” function postulated by sociolog ically oriented scholars such as Hans Robert Jauss.13 It is not literature’s actual influence, but rather a symbolic intention crystallized within a literary-historical narrative. It is social function as soteriological myth—the Russian instance of Northrop Frye’s culturally paradigmatic “myth of deliverance.”14 Writers will somehow change reality, radically, for the better. They will somehow show their readers the way to an eschatological realization of national identity and greatness. They will save Russia; then Russia will save the world. Nor, however, do the writers themselves—or their works—constitute the main topic of this book. (The question of the actual strategies employed by nineteenth-century Russian authors to deal with the sheer impossibility of their soteriological mission deserves a volume of its own.) Our focus is rather the larger, more amorphous category of literary tradition. Here, again, we should take pains to clarify our intent, recalling the assumption underlying much recent scholarship that “anyone concerned with tradition would not be simply showing an interest in a conceptual problem but demonstrating a commitment to a particular politics in relationship to it.”15 Though we must begin with the theoretical groundwork of considering how the flinty notion of literary tradition—and tradition in general—has and could be used in scholarly discourse, our main aim is to trace its function within a specific historical context. And our broader focus (assuming such a thing can be visualized in the first place) is on a self-image of Russian culture, created primarily by writers, critics, and literary historians. This is not quite the same as the detached observation of a disinterested scholar—though in both cases we might usefully recall the bit from quantum mechanics about what happens to reality when one tries to look at it. Correspondingly, any axiological and ideological prejudices that emerge from the following pages with regard to the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition and its place in Russian culture should be taken as reflecting, first and foremost, the biases of its original creators. The nineteenth century was the golden age of nation building, as it was, in Benedetto Croce’s words, “il secolo della storia”—literary and otherwise.16 Not only in Russia has national identity been inextricably linked with the integ-

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rity of literary traditions.17 Only in Russia, however, does a literary tradition play such an exclusive role in the pursuit of identity—or, at least, this is the cultural self-image conveyed by authorities such as the critic Chernyshevsky. Like modern nation-building in general, this special emphasis on literature was inspired by the German romantics and has its historiographic echoes outside of Russia as well.18 To be precise, it originates with Johann Gottfried von Herder, whom we shall meet again in our wanderings. “Ein Dichter ist Schöpfer eines Volkes um sich” (“A poet is the creator of a nation around himself ”), declares the proto-romantic philosopher, going as far as to insist that “without poetry we cannot even exist.” Thus Herder promoted an “idea of a national and patriotic renewal in which literature, grounded in a common language, is enlisted to support a sense of individual pride and national identity.”19 The very centrality of Russia’s nation-building literary tradition is evidenced by its lack of a specific historical designation. What we shall render here in crude shorthand as the Tradition has been blessed with a legion of titles in literary history. For example, Marc Slonim, in a relatively short example of the sort of conservative, narrative literary history that will be of special interest to us, employs over a dozen different names—including the classic era, the Clas sical period, the era of Great Classics, the Golden Age of the classics, the great tradi tion in Russian literature, and the great tradition of the Golden Age.20 Each descriptor here communicates nothing more than a superlative degree of value (aesthetic or otherwise). A rare comment on the fact that such an internationally recognized phenomenon should be so imprecisely labeled comes from Serge Zenkovsky, who finds it amazing, in particular, that the era of the “great Russian realistic novel” was never given any name “other than the purely technical term, the ‘time of realism’ or of ‘critical realism.’ ”21 (This is an opportune moment to establish that the Tradition may be seen as peaking with the “time of realism,” but in its creation historians see the poets as no less crucial than the authors of those novelistic classics with which foreign readers tend to identify Russian literature as a whole.)22 Rather than imply uncertainty in the Canon’s status, the variety of its labels testifies to its solidity. The names bestowed on traditions reflect their historical significance: thus designations after reigning monarchs, cultural figures, or time periods tend to indicate the subsidiary importance of a tradition in a nation’s sociopolitical development. But there is only one “great tradition of the Golden Age” in Russia, and the only further qualifier it needs is “Russian.” In terms of its nation-affirming role, claims of the Tradition’s uniqueness among other literary traditions, of its supreme aesthetic value, and of its exceptional coherence all amount to the same thing. The uniqueness of the Tradition is a pledge of Russia’s distinct identity; its greatness—however

INTRODUCTION

measured—is the nation’s greatness; its unity is likewise that of Russian culture. A standard method for critics and literary historians to demonstrate these qualities has been to reduce the canon of works and authors to an overarching idea (unique, valuable, coherent), or to a complex of ideas. This cannot be anything too specific; otherwise, it would fail to cover the variety of contradictory ideological positions that are actually expressed by the writers. Thus, any successful conceptualization of the Tradition’s national essence ends up as a variation on a classical theme—the intentionally vague and paradoxical narodnost’ (“national character,” inspired by Herder’s Volksgeist) that was promoted by writers such as Dostoevsky and critics such as Belinsky (who assigned to Russian literature a cultural function no less exceptional than the role he himself played in promoting this function). Yet this tautological formulation says nothing about the real parameters of a tradition’s existence even if we consider it as a purely sociopolitical category, ignoring its aesthetic elements. While critics explicitly treat the Tradition as a hierarchy of works and authors united by abstract ideas, its implicit role within the larger process of literary evolution is not that of an idea. The record of the Tradition’s construction and reception, especially in the texts of comprehensive narrative literary histories, tells a far different story, one that turns on the following questions: What is the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition—considered as a cultural construct rather than merely the sum of the contributions of individual writers, and in light of the particular expectations placed on literature in this era? Where (in what texts, metatexts, or configurations of collective consciousness) does it exist? And how does it communicate its values and manifest its essential unity? This book is divided into three parts with two chapters each. Part 1 is offered in recognition of the fact that whether or not these queries can be answered satisfactorily, there is no point tackling them without some preliminary defining of terms—which turns out to be a nontrivial undertaking in the case of the notion of literary tradition (not to speak of tradition in general). It works to understand how this notion might be best employed in a historical-poetic sense—though at this point our consideration of the specific Russian context will be no more than implicit. Part 2 discusses elements of this context that have been crucial in creating the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian literature as a cultural construct, and part 3 builds on this discussion, putting flesh on the theoretical bones of part 1 via a structural overview of the tradition at issue in its function—as we have already described it—of a symbolic intention within a literary-historical narrative. The two chapters of part 1 begin with a general overview of the category of literary tradition along with a brief survey of the ways it has been under-

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stood in the scholarship of the past century. The approaches considered in chapter 1 can be examined in terms of a range of alternative theoretical orientations: among these is the opposition of literary and extraliterary interpretations of the formation of a tradition. At one extreme we have the strict formalist approach, which analyzes literary groupings as products of the evolution of an autonomous artistic system, without regard for forces operating within the broader social sphere. At the other stand those late twentiethcentury scholars who view traditions primarily as cultural expressions of dominant ideological interests—the ostensible winners of the “canon wars” (though to the extent that both they and their conservative opponents proceeded from a belief in the critical importance of literature and the liberal arts, it is unclear whether either side came out on top).23 As an attempt at a balanced account of both extra- and intraliterary factors in the literary process, the historical poetics of Czech structuralism are taken up in the second half of chapter 1, followed in chapter 2 by a more detailed look at the reception-oriented project of Czech literary historian Felix Vodička and his conception of the various structural units of literature—from the individual work to the authorial corpus to genres, traditions, and even national literatures—as all equally subject to aesthetic evaluation and reception by readers and writers, critics and historians. The resulting aesthetic “concretizations” (as Vodička terms them, expanding on the notion introduced by Roman Ingarden) are shaped in part by the artistic features of the units involved, in part by extraliterary factors in the reception process, and they in turn influence the course of future literary production. Such a balanced consideration of extra- and intraliterary factors is precisely what we require for the empirical analysis that is the main subject of this book. Less helpful are the contradictions that beset the (admittedly schematic) historical poetics of the Prague theorists with regard to the necessity of viewing what Vodička calls the “higher literary units” (including traditions) as the product of hidden evolutionary tendencies—whether extra- or intraliterary. The extent to which literary culture is influenced not only subconsciously by such impersonal evolutionary forces but by conscious imaginings of what a national tradition could and should be is especially obvious in the case of nineteenthcentury Russia. This problem of literature’s consciousness of its own evolution is explored in chapter 2 via an evaluation of the link between tradition and the artistic norm—a key concept in the Czech structuralist theory of literary evolution. If, as Vodička claims, tradition like the individual work is subject to the process of aesthetic concretization, it must exist within the consciousness of the writing and reading public. Yet the artistic norm, properly understood, must be hidden in the reception process if it is to retain its

INTRODUCTION

aesthetic function. Thus by Vodička’s own structuralist criteria, his attempts to equate tradition and norm can only be rejected. A literary tradition, viewed as a large-scale axiological grouping of works occupying a central position within the national literary culture of a given era, is obviously related to the system of literary norms dominant in that era. To anticipate the terminological discussion of chapter 1, the term tradition, taken without reference to a particular body of artistic creation, may indeed designate nothing more than such a dominant norm-system. However, just as none of the works that make up a literary tradition can be said to reflect the norms of one system alone, so the tradition as a whole must represent a dynamic equilibrium between the competing norm-systems (dominant, obsolescent, or emergent) of its era of production. On the basis of this conclusion, the second half of chapter 2 will pursue a model for literary tradition that adequately expresses the relationship of tradition to norm-system. Historians have tended to describe traditions in terms of an idea or a complex of ideas, ultimately reducible to a complex of extraliterary norms. These are somehow transformed into art—for example, via the Belinskian process of “thinking in images,” with its mysterious fusion of artistry (khudozhestvennost’) and ideological content (ideinost’)—and consequently represented in canonical lists of works and authors. In the end, such descriptions have more to do with the interpretation (from an extraliterary perspective) of individual works within a tradition than with its actual function in the process of literary evolution—as most explicitly and authoritatively manifested in literary historiography. It is our contention that the most promising model for such a function is to be found neither in lists of works nor in collections of norms or ideas, but as an element in the overall narrative structure that all historians, literary and otherwise, impose on their material. Chapter 3 conducts an investigation of the factors, both domestic and foreign, from the culture of medieval Orthodoxy to neoclassicism and German romanticism, involved in the genesis and development of the modern concept of literature in Russia. Particular attention will be given to the interrelation of belles lettres, national identity, and national history. Chapter 4 turns to the myth of literature’s social function—its redemptive mission, to affix a more satisfying yet still not unproblematic label. It will cover the expectations placed on Russian writing by critics and by the poets and novelists themselves, from the fuzzy and utopian to more limited ideological and spiritual goals. Chapter 5 responds to the invocation in part 1 of a narrative structure for literary tradition, illustrating its nineteenth-century Russian model with examples drawn from historiographers of the period. Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at the overall plot structure of the resulting narrative. What emerges

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from the analysis of the two chapters in part 3 is less a well-formed narrative progression than a pattern of motifs supporting contradictory storylines. This pattern is not represented in its entirety in any one literary-historical text, but is rather a cumulative structure underlying the narratives of the whole historiographic corpus. Again, the varied nature of these individual stories is emblematized by the fact that historians cannot even agree on a specific label for the nineteenth-century body of artistic creation invoked and nurtured by Belinsky as the national literary tradition of Russia. At the same time, the lack of a precise historical designation for what we can do no better here than refer to simply as the Tradition testifies to its cultural centrality and in no way diminishes the critical consensus on the existence of such a tradition or on the essentials of its membership, duration, and cultural significance. Again, we shall pay particular attention (mainly in part 2) to the extraordinary expectations placed on Russian literature by critics and writers, as illustrated by the series of quotations that preface this introduction. Such statements construct and preserve the myth of the Tradition’s redemptive mission. And again, whatever literature’s actual role in the unfolding of Russian history, the assumptions made about it have shaped not only individual texts but also the construction of the Tradition as an integrated whole. Literary tradition is a “cornerstone of culture” (to recall the comment by Sokolov)—but one of a most un-granitelike ethereality. It is as hard to plumb its location as it is to find the address of the larger edifice it supports. At the very least, a tradition is more than the sum of the artistic works assigned to it. In the pages of critics, and after them the historians and textbook writers, its broader form is not only delineated but shaped. Thus the focus in part 3 is on the poetics of old-fashioned, comprehensive, narrative historiography. The question is: Beyond analyzing the canonical works and their intertextual affinities, by what means do historians promote the image of the nineteenth-century tradition as a unity, a repository of aesthetic value, and the bearer of a redemptive mission? In other words, how do they demonstrate the greatness not only of individual works but (since the whole is greater than the sum of the parts) of the Tradition as a whole? It may be evident by now that the “greatness” referred to in our title is a matter of perception rather than of measuring actual aesthetic merit or quantifying extra-aesthetic influences on Russian reality. It is a matter of faith. To put it in terms of the secularized Christian symbolism that permeates nineteenth-century literary thought (and which will be a topic of interest in chapter 4), the greatness of the Tradition is a quasi-religious mystery, irreducibly embracing both art and social function along with the crucial factor of cultural unity as the third person in the trinity. This accords with Theodor

INTRODUCTION

Adorno’s observation that the “idea of greatness as a rule is bound up with the element of unity.”24 The greatness of the literary tradition can be demonstrated with reference to any of the three hypostases, each of which, as in the Christian Trinity, partakes of the essence of the whole without being identical to the other parts. This last point is relevant to the nineteenth-century cultural context, in which any straightforward correspondence between the Beautiful and the Good has been sundered by Immanuel Kant’s redefinition of aesthetic pleasure as contemplative rather than moral.25 Thus the beauty of a Russian literary work is not, for most critics, vouchsafed solely by the purity of its ideological commitment (or vice versa). The bulk of nineteenth-century Russian criticism is in fact wary of ideological zeal at the expense of the aesthetic function. Yet far from making the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic functions of a literary work mutually exclusive, it views them as complementary. Whatever Kant may have had to say about the matter, a critic like Belinsky sees moral virtue in a writer as a warrant of artistic success, trusting (in Victor Terras’s paraphrase) that so long as the poet is inspired by “rational, humanitarian, and progressive ideas,” his creative powers will “be safe to flourish and bear rich fruit.”26 At the same time, Russia’s foremost critic proclaims that “the aesthetic sensibility is the foundation of goodness, the foundation of morality.”27 (Compare Dostoevsky’s confidence that authors should “only worry about artistry; then the idea will emerge of its own accord, since it is the necessary condition of artistry.”)28 To extend the trinitarian metaphor: such a sensibility expresses the heavenly ideal of beauty, the paternal hypostasis, with liter ature’s concrete expression of goodness and morality as the begotten, incarnated Logos, sent into the world on its redemptive mission. (Of course, the more vociferously utilitarian critics who came after Belinsky in the 1850s and 1860s might disagree with such an order of precedence.) One more clarification: the “how” of this book’s title is a tip of the inkwell to the Russian formalists—Boris Eikhenbaum with his “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Was Made” and Viktor Shklovsky with “How Don Quixote Was Made”— who, along with other usual suspects of Slavonic literary theory (Czech structuralists, Moscow-Tartu semioticians, Mikhail Bakhtin), will figure in chapters to come. Yet, as should also be evident by now, its pairing with the verb became is not the promise of a proper diachronic analysis of the consolidation and reception of the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition. (Despite the mass of scholarship that has touched on this topic, the need for a thorough study remains, and an approach focusing on the narrative requirements of the historiographic project may be precisely what is needed to differentiate its evolution from that of criticism and to allow for its scholarly

Ch a p te r 1

Border Conditions glue’s not quite right and the eye color hair color height are slightly off go easy opening it at the border try to look honest and smile so the seams’ll be less obvious on the other hand the first and last name are magnifico and the age suspiciously young while the watermarks are so fine that there’s totally no reason to flinch if someone looks long and hard at your face клей неудачный и слегка изменен цвет глаз цвет волос рост сильно не раскрывать на границе делать честное лицо и улыбаться чтобы швы были не так видны зато шикарное имя и фамилия и подозрительно юный возраст а водяные знаки такие что можно вообще не дергаться если кто–то не отрываясь смотрит тебе в лицо —Semen Khanin, 2009 In the absolute, the Black is no more to be loved than the Czech, and truly what is to be done is to set man free. —Frantz Fanon, 1952

C H A PT E R 1

Passports are constructed from paper, power, and glue. All three components are liable to give out, in time. In late 1991, some 287 million people became the holders of a defunct state’s passport. Liberated from the political order that had defined, for better or worse, past official identities, each former Soviet citizen faced existential questions of political belonging, identity, and geography suddenly yawning open before them. An intensive period of political invention, economic competition, violence, and demographic resorting followed across Eurasia. For some, and in some regions, these processes quickly or slowly found a resolution. For others, questions are still open more than three decades later. The new era presented a particular set of challenges to Russians and others who identified with Russian language, culture, and identity outside the Russian Federation. For the national majorities of the former Soviet states—especially in Baltic republics such as Latvia, the focus of this book—the Soviet collapse was a rebirth of national sovereignty and independence from an illegitimate, authoritarian domination. Notwithstanding the hardships of those years for all, that experience of national redemption was buttressed by hegemonic accounts of the historical significance and justice of the Soviet collapse, emanating from the ascendant liberal Western order. In contrast, Russians in the non-Russian republics, regardless of their stance toward Soviet power or its sudden vanishing, lost their privileged status of being “at home” everywhere in the USSR—a status often hardly acknowledged by the Russians themselves, yet patently illegitimate in the eyes of many of their non-Russian neighbors, and especially from the perspective of Baltic peoples such as the Latvians. Overnight, Russians here found themselves cast into an unsettled historical and geographical border condition. Latvia’s Russian and Russian-speaking population is a legacy of empires—quite literally so, in the case of the large number who arrived in this region during the Soviet era. Many of them, as is illustrated by their continuing orientation toward the media and public life of the Russian Federation and alienation from the social and linguistic realities of independent Latvia, have been unable to turn away from the political imaginaries and geographies of that past. As tensions have risen over the past decades concerning the Russian Federation’s projections of power and violence into neighboring states, this population—suspended between European, Latvian, and Russian cultures and worlds—has more and more come to be regarded as alien, potentially threatening to the social body, a fifth column. As I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 2,

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Latvian speakers have often referred to Russians here as okupanti (occupiers), a term that has gained new resonance in the shadow of Russia’s 2022 invasion and occupation of Ukrainian lands, as the clamor of threats, burdens, and stigmas of the imperial legacy have reached a crescendo in Eastern Europe. In the words of Latvian president Egils Levits concerning those Russian Latvians who support, or do not oppose, Russia’s war, they are a social segment “disloyal to the state” that must be “isolated from society.”1 Or as one ethnic Latvian acquaintance casually and cuttingly informed me in July 2022, “Russians aren’t even really Slavs—they aren’t Europeans at all. They’re Asians.” A friend, an ethnic Russian from Ukraine who is married to an ethnic Latvian and resides in Riga, added (in Russian) that the Russian invaders of Ukraine are quite simply a “horde” (orda)—a term that evokes accounts of the Mongol conquest of Slavic lands in the medieval era. But hold on a moment. In full recognition of the overt imperialism and criminality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we must ask: Don’t these last formulations reproduce a different imperial gaze—that of the Orientalizing view to the east from Europe?2 Adding a further twist, while my acquaintance’s remark may be seen as straightforwardly Eurocentric and racist, my friend’s condemnation of the Russian “horde” is redolent of the Russian imperial historical mythology concerning the Mongols—a Russian redaction of a Eurocentric, Orientalist geographical vision. The imperial violence that looms over Eastern Europe seems to originate, for these voices from Latvia, from all directions at once. Is this Russian imperialism, plain and simple? Is it an alien imperialism of the East? Is it an archaic resurgence of European imperialism, which Russia learned from the West? Could Russian belligerence be a response to European imperialism, part of an ongoing confrontation between the West and the Rest, as Russian voices claim, and as others across the world appear to concur? The intersecting imperial legacies and perspectives that collide in the Russian border condition in Latvia are multiple, distinct, certainly incommensurate, yet also contradictory and intertwined. Yet beyond echoes of empire, fears of Russia’s new imperialism, and Orientalizing responses to it, we should also recognize in the presence of Russians and Russian speakers in Latvia the afterimages of dashed hopes for other geopolitical orders, based on peace and amity. From Washington to Brussels to Moscow, the decade following the collapse of the USSR seemed to hold out the promise of a world of increasing mobility and cohesion between “free-market democratic societies,” as

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they were called then, all across Eastern Europe and inclusive of the Russian Federation—a new reality in which the geographical impropriety of Latvia’s Russian population would fade in significance as the border zone itself progressively lost meaning. The failure of that world to take shape is among the topics of this book. Yet that is not the only failed scheme for peace that haunts this region and population. Somewhat earlier, in the late 1980s, as the Berlin Wall was being demolished and Cold War borders were opening, Mikhail Gorbachev invoked his own, distinct conception of a vast “common European home,” inclusive of territory from Paris to Vladivostok—a vision that “rules out . . . the very possibility of the use or threat of force.”3 That vision, predicated on the presumed persistence of the USSR, foundered on its disintegration, which was already being demanded in mass protests in Latvia at the same moment the Soviet leader pronounced these words in 1989 before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. In the wake of Gorbachev’s death in 2022, Latvian voices were among the least celebratory—less inclined to remember him as the architect of military withdrawals and plans for peace than as the man who unleashed Interior Ministry forces in Latvia and Lithuania in an abortive and bloody attempt to reassert Soviet control in early 1991. Yet finally, buried beneath that violence, the looming memory of Stalinist mass crimes, and the banal inhumanity of the Soviet experience, which are at least as evident from the perspective of Latvia as from any other, lie aspirations for a global peace underwritten by socialist internationalism. Despite the cynicism with which they were often deployed, those aspirations were a source of inspiration and a resource for resistance against injustice for people and movements across the globe during the twentieth century, who saw the socialist world as an ally standing with them against capitalist imperialism and neocolonialism—once again in the mode of the opposition of the West and the Rest. The border condition of Russian and Russian-speaking Latvians, in sum, attests to serial, intertwined, and contradictory histories of both failed empires and failed peace plans. There, we face the urgent question: Can hope be salvaged from those histories at present? In a central segment of Negative Dialectics, Adorno offers a critique of the Hegelian dialectics of history, in which the violent clashes and ideological contradictions of historical events are ultimately legitimated and regulated by the greater logic of the progress of the world spirit.4 In this regard, it may be apt to recall that both the adepts of Marxism-Leninism, in its day, and many key frontmen of Western hegemony following the Cold War have been heirs, in distinct ways,

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to Hegel’s faith that history’s transcendent ends explained and legitimated its contingent collateral damages.5 In contrast, Adorno asked what we can make of history’s contradictions and bloody clashes in the absence of an idealist philosopher’s certainty in supervening unity and purpose. Rather than breathlessly anticipating a just resolution and a coherent synthesis, we are left to contemplate the etiology of contradiction: “Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context.”6 The Russian border condition is one location where the objective context of delusion, the contradictions at the core of global contestation over power, money, and territory in the twenty-first century, become palpable. The global history of the late twentieth century, as conceived in contemporary political discourses, founding national and civilizational myths, and history books alike, is defined by two supervening axiological distinctions: the ideological and geopolitical conflict between state socialism and liberal capitalism, on one hand, and the great drama of the decomposition of European world empires, the complex processes of decolonization, and continuing contestation over legacies and aftereffects of empire, on the other. These processes intersect and overlap yet fail to mesh and cohere in Eastern Europe, in Latvia, and especially in the Russian border condition. As I explain in what follows, critical examination of the incommensurate historical legacies of Eastern Europe reveals that these alternate dimensions of history, memory, and actuality are radically out of sync and, further, that this lack of synchronicity has resulted in a blockage of paths toward historical consensus and political comity, not just here, but in many places across the globe. Comprehension of this broadly shared condition demands a consideration both of local histories and of deep critical and ideological prehistories, tracing, on one hand, the intersection of imperial and ideological categories of analysis from the end of the Cold War, through the decade of history’s “latency” in the 1990s, to the accelerating inquiry into the intersection of postsocialist and postcolonial categories in the academy, and, on the other hand, the steadily increasing drumbeat of “memory wars” in the geopolitics of the postsocialist lands. These processes, developing in parallel, have both come to a culminating point in the past several years: scholarly discussion of postsocialist postcoloniality has reached a new level of global coherence in recent publications on the transnational history of socialist anti-imperialism, and memory war has led to real war, signaling a new era of systemic antagonism between Russia and its former colonial subjects, as well as between Russia

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C H A PT E R 1

and the West. War generates an insistent demand, addressed to all, to choose sides. We must condemn Russia’s war of aggression without equivocation. Yet, as the above suggests, the terms in which we formulate our condemnation possess a prehistory and present meaning that extend far beyond our familiar terrain and authoritative definitions. Recognizing the risks involved, in what follows in this chapter and throughout this book, we will dwell in the Russian border zone. There, under the overhang of failed empires and failed peace plans, one encounters a local space of contradiction that grants critical traction on the preconditions of geopolitical conflict today.

Zones of Indistinction The Russian border condition eludes easy definition and description. Over the three decades that have passed since the Soviet collapse, the social position and cultural imaginaries of Russians and Russian speakers in the new states that surround the Russian Federation on three sides, from the Baltic to the Caucasus to Central Asia, have remained fluid and fragmented—neither national nor diasporic, neither wholly integrated into “mainland” Russian society nor entirely divorced from it, unevenly integrated with the majority non-Russian cultural scenes of post-Soviet states, never displaced, but out of place nevertheless. Sociologists have termed these populations “beached” diasporas, evoking the receding tide of Soviet power and state socialist ontology that left them stranded on the shores of new societies in a new era, emigrants who never left the comfort of their own homes.7 The castaways found themselves suspended between, on one hand, a transnational “Russian World,” refracting long histories of imperial domination and socialist internationalism as well as present projections of soft power (i.e., the Russian state’s “Russian World Foundation,” to which I will return in chapter 4), and, on the other hand, historical or incipient regional varieties of Russian cultural life, assimilated to a greater or lesser degree with local cultural circuits and social belonging. In this overdetermined geography, fundamental questions of identity emerge with every act of cultural creation: In Latvia, is a poem written in Russian, such as the epigraph to this chapter, a contribution to a multilingual Latvian cultural scene, a form of Russian cultural neoimperialism, an evocation of local Russian traditions reaching back before the conquest of Livonia by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, an affront to poetry written in the official national language, a contribution to a

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transnational project of Russophone literature, reaching beyond and contesting nation and geopolitics, or something else again? The Russian border condition has unfolded in parallel with, and dependent on, a scene of increasingly fraught interstate relations, culminating most recently in the war in Ukraine, which will leave it permanently altered in ways that are still impossible to anticipate. This book addresses the cultural lives of the half-million people who have occupied the Latvian redaction of this condition over the past decades. Their situation is not historically unique in any absolute sense. It is comparable to those of many other bordered populations resulting from other collapsed empires or the refugee crises that followed the great wars—from the Russian imperial refugee populations and subsequently the Armenians, former Ottoman subjects, and others who held the Nansen passport in the twentieth-century interwar era, to the Jews of Egypt in the post–World War II era, Sudeten Germans in the interwar period, Chinese in postwar Malaya, Mexicans in Texas or California following their incorporation into the United States, or Turks in present-day Cyprus. Yet as will become apparent in the pages below, the circumstances of Russians and Russian speakers in Latvia, poised between Eurasia and Europe and between a state socialist past, a liberal capitalist present, and the illiberal political and economic order rising in the Russian Federation, cast unexpected light on conditions that all share in the present, uncertain moment of global history. The Russian border condition is a heterogeneous category. In consequence of profound distinctions among the histories and the demographic and cultural-linguistic situations of post-Soviet states, the status of Russians and Russian speakers and their cultural activity varies tremendously. In Latvia, a long and complex history of Russian empire, early twentieth-century national independence, differentiation between Latvian and Russian cultures and languages, postwar Soviet occupation and population transfers, and the incomplete assimilation and active resistance of Latvian society to the Soviet order resulted immediately in fraught relations between ethnic Latvians and Russians at the dawn of the post-Soviet renewal of independence. In distinction from the interconnection and blurry boundary between Ukrainian and Russian cultural and linguistic realities, Russian speakers and Latvian speakers lived in what were in many ways separate worlds, and they have continued to do so—with some important exceptions that will be examined in the pages that follow. In distinction from, for instance, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where Russian language and culture enjoys relatively high

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C H A PT E R 1

social status among the non-Russian majority, ethnic Latvians by and large privilege their own language and culture and regard that of the Russians as an existentially unnecessary or accidental feature of their territory.8 Perhaps most importantly, in distinction from some Soviet republics that featured relatively small enclaves of Russians as a percentage of total population at the end of the Soviet era, such as nearby Lithuania (9.4 percent in 1989) or the Republic of Georgia (6.3 percent in 1989), in the wake of serial historical catastrophes and both brutal and bureaucratic Soviet social engineering, by 1989 some 34 percent of residents of Soviet Latvia were ethnic Russians (compared to 8.8 percent in 1935), with perhaps another 10 percent assorted other Russian speakers, such as Ukrainians and Belarusians.9 The case of Estonia is in many respects comparable to that of Latvia, although its Russianspeaking population is territorially segregated to a greater degree than is the case in Latvia, where most Russians and Russian speakers reside in the cities of Rezekne, Daugavpils, and Riga (the last being the largest metropolis of the republic, around which fully half of its population resides), each of which is divided more or less equally between Russians and Latvians. All of these factors contributed to render the presence of Russians and Russian speakers extraordinarily prominent and fraught in independent Latvia. By way of entry point into the complexities of Russian and Russophone lives here, consider the overlapping official categories of identity that have been applied to this population. Latvia and Estonia were the only two post-Soviet republics not to adopt some version of a “zero option” policy of citizenship, which granted to all legal residents of the Soviet republic citizenship in the post-Soviet one. In 1990–91, the postSoviet Latvian state was declared legally continuous with the interwar Latvian Republic (1922–40), the constitution of which is therefore still in force. In a clumsy yet comprehensible response to ethnic Latvians’ near-minority status following huge population flows into the republic over the decades of Soviet rule, only citizens of the interwar republic and their descendants were granted automatic citizenship in the new era, thus ensuring ethnic Latvian dominance in the (re)new(ed) state’s political life.10 This left all other residents, many of them born and raised in Soviet Latvia, stateless and stripped of political and many economic rights, their Soviet passports reduced nearly to paper and glue alone. In 1994 and 1995 these terms of citizenship were reaffirmed in laws that introduced the novel category of nepilsonis, or noncitizen, for this large group—who made up nearly 30 percent of the republic’s population in

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1995 and the majority of whom self-identified as “Russians,” although there are many other ethnicities mixed in here as well.11 The status of noncitizen is expressly not the same as that of stateless person, as Latvia’s Constitutional Court has consistently affirmed, for although it includes no rights to political participation and bars employment in certain professions, it does grant other rights usually associated with citizenship, such as the right to permanent residency, to hold property, and to work. As the legal scholars Dimitry Kochenov and Aleksejs Dimitrovs write, analysis of this status and its history suggests that “we are dealing with a classical nationality, only with no voting rights.”12 Ammon Cheskin has described the category of noncitizen as a “liminal space” between Soviet and Latvian citizenship, yet it might better be conceptualized as a liminal temporality—a personalized “era of transition” of indeterminate duration.13 Until recently, one of the most problematic implications of the law on noncitizens concerned children, who inherited the status from their parents, so perpetuating a patently inequitable status that could most generously be considered a temporary solution to a thorny postimperial demographic problem. Automatic citizenship for children born to noncitizen parents was passed into law in 2019, coming into effect in 2020. The 1995 law on noncitizens offered this population a path to naturalization (at first organized by “windows” restricting the process by age group over a number of stages, which were eliminated in 1998), requiring linguistic proficiency in Latvian and knowledge of Latvian history and culture and the Latvian anthem.14 Yet in the present, noncitizens still make up some 10 percent of the population—about 180,000 people, or a little less than half of Latvia’s population of Russians and Russian speakers.15 As these numbers make plain, many noncitizens have not naturalized, either out of inability to learn Latvian, lack of incentive, national indifference, or protest.16 And while significant numbers of noncitizens immigrated (or repatriated) to the Russian Federation, a large number opted not to leave, even though many view their status as state-sanctioned ethnic discrimination. I have had more than a few conversations with Latvians who sustain a simmering outrage at Russians who refuse to accept citizenship according to the not-terribly-onerous terms on which it has been offered—or to opt out and move on. They have a point. On the other hand, as a gold-chained, black-T-shirted car dealer named Dima—a former musician and the son of an “illusionist”—told me, “They should have sent me a citizen’s passport in the mail!”17 That was in 2009, eighteen years after independence, and he

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C H A PT E R 1

was still angry. Perhaps his anger had even grown—stoked by media chatter and political sparring that has held wounds open, rather than healed them. And sparring aside, the persistence of the category reflects the lack of any incentive on the part of Latvia’s political establishment to resolve the matter. While some pressure toward social integration and normalization for this population was applied by European international organizations during the run-up to EU accession, those political pressures have long since become muted and routine. “Noncitizen”—a term that, first and foremost, bestows on its bearers a lack—is an apt demonstration that the eloquence of bureaucrats can at times rival that of poets. Yet it is not the only confounding term to be applied to bordered Russian Latvians. When the law on noncitizens was adopted in the 1990s, Russian diplomats complained, not without reason, that the status had a “halfway” (polovinchatyi) character.18 Yet terms developed for this population in the Russian Federation are no more lucid. Since the late 1990s, a multiply revised law has granted special privileges with regard to travel, emigration, access to medicine, and education to the category of “compatriots abroad” (sootechestvenniki za rubezhom): former Soviet citizens in neighboring states who might, in some calculation, “belong” more properly to the Russian Federation.19 Yet what calculation could be applied to determine who could rightfully enjoy these rights? Vladimir Putin, in his much-cited Address to the Federal Assembly of 2005 (the equivalent of the State of the Union address in the United States), announced that in the wake of the Soviet collapse, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century . . . , tens of millions of our compatriots and fellow citizens found themselves beyond the borders of Russian territory.”20 In his address announcing the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he declared that in 1991, “millions of Russians went to sleep in one country and woke up in another, in an instant becoming national minorities in former union republics, as the Russian people became one of the largest, if not the largest, divided people in the world.”21 The distinctions between these two formulations point to the increasing political load and rising nationalist dither of this category, which was created in an era of globalization and opening borders yet has become an instrument contributing to the bloody reshaping of closed ones. Since the early 2000s, with increasing attention and resources from the Russian state, the compatriots, their identities, and their cultural and linguistic rights have been the subject of media discourse inside and outside the Russian Federation; they have been gathered into congresses; they have been recognized with

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Introduction

The Soviet-Afghan War (1978–89) was the defining conflict of the late Cold War. It pitted the Soviet Union and its People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) client against the mujahideen—the combatants of jihad, the holy war against the infidels.1 The mujahideen enjoyed the military support of Pakistan, Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries. In nine years, the conflict killed over 15,000 Soviet soldiers and between 600,000 and 1.5 million Afghans.2 Over 6 million more Afghans fled to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Because of the formidable economic and military burden it created, the public criticism it attracted in the USSR during Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule, and because of Soviet inability to make its modernization model attractive to Afghans, the Afghan War, as it is called in the post-Soviet space, had a profound effect on the Soviet Union. Although it was not the main cause of the Soviet collapse, it certainly contributed to Moscow’s difficulties in the late 1980s. At the same time, the Soviet-Afghan War showed to many in the Third World that communism’s appeal was running out of steam. Even in the Soviet Union, it led members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to question the dogma of an ineluctable transition to socialism for developing countries. This ideological aspect loomed large during the war. Marxism-Leninism represented an allencompassing worldview for Soviet policy makers and the advisers and military personnel they sent to Afghanistan, but Islam served a similar purpose 1

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for many Afghans. These two systems vividly came into conflict during the war and came to define it then and thereafter. Although even in the 1980s many saw the Soviet-Afghan War, much as the war in Ukraine in the 2020s, as the pivotal strug gle of their time, its effects were still felt long after the Cold War and, in many ways, the world feels them still. In Afghanistan, the Soviet support to the PDPA, the Afghan communists, and the ensuing war ushered the country into a spiral of conflicts that saw the rise and fall of the mujahideen, the Taliban’s arrival in the mid-1990s, and the US-led intervention after 9/11.3 Meanwhile, Afghanistan became the world’s main producer of opiates. Even at the time of writing in 2023, the country is not at peace, and many Afghans blame the rash Soviet decision to intervene for transforming a limited internal conflict into a Cold War proxy battlefield and for creating tens of thousands of professionals of violence. Over 2.5 million Afghans are still refugees because of these successive conflicts. In Russia, the Soviet-Afghan War became a negative point of reference in the post-Soviet period, giving rise to the expression “the Afghan Syndrome” and launching a plethora of historical and political controversies over its legacy. The military sees it as the Soviet Union’s glorious swan song. Red Army commanders make it a point of honor to emphasize that the Soviets left Afghanistan “undefeated.”4 General Boris Gromov, the last commander of the 40th Army, which constituted the bulk of the so-called Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces (LCST) sent to Afghanistan, noted that “unlike the Americans in Vietnam [the Soviets] had accomplished their mission.” For him, the Red Army’s job was to “help the government of Afghanistan stabilize the domestic situation [and] prevent an aggression from abroad,” which it did, not to defeat the mujahideen.5 Since the 2010s, there have been initiatives in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, to celebrate the war, the veterans of Afghanistan (the Afgantsy), and even to rehabilitate the decision to dispatch the LCST. Against the backdrop of the perceived success of the intervention in Syria, the Soviet-Afghan War is also being reevaluated positively in Russia. The grand celebration at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow of the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal in February 2019 saw General Mikhail Moiseev, former head of the General Staff of the Red Army and deputy minister of defense, praise the LCST for doing its “international duty” and “guaranteeing Russia’s security.” Moiseev traced a parallel between the Afgantsy and the troops that carried out their “sacred duty” in Syria. The ceremony was noteworthy for having an Orthodox priest make a speech before Moiseev and General Viktor Ermakov, one of the commanders of the 40th Army. The event showed the odd syncretism that sees praise for communist internationalism be intertwined

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with religion in Russia. It showed how the necessary support to and rehabilitation of the long socially marginalized Afgantsy, the majority of whom were conscripts, comes together with a problematic rewriting of history that presents Afghanistan as the first Russian war against Islamist terrorism. This reevaluation of the Afghan experience has nonetheless allowed Russia to reengage politically and economically with Kabul in the 2000s, with the involvement of many Afgantsy. In the 2010s, Moscow has participated in the intraAfghan peace dialogue, including by hosting Taliban delegations. In June 2022, a Taliban delegation joined at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. That visit testified as much to Russia’s interest in stabilizing Afghanistan, as to coalescing with anti-American forces in connection with the war in Ukraine. The latter conflict is also changing the perception of the Afghan War in Russia. As talks of a new Cold War spread, Russian authorities present both wars as being about opposition to Western hegemony. Because the invasion of Ukraine is justified by the necessity to preemptively oppose NATO in Russia’s perceived sphere of influence, so was the Afghan War, the Kremlin argues. Beyond this neo-imperial parallel, the Soviet-Afghan War also traced a continuity between the Cold War and the post-1991 order regarding the rise of Islamism, a philosophy that “conceives of Islam as a political ideology,” an aspect of the conflict that has received considerable attention in the West and in Russia and which has sparked endless scholarly and political debates.6 Theorized in the late 1960s by Muslim philosophers, including Abul A’la Maudoodi from Pakistan, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, and the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamism redrew the boundary between the world of Islam and the rest of the world beginning after the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict. Crystallizing with Saudi Arabia at its political center, Sunni Islamism reanimated ideas of pan-Islam and a Muslim world in opposition to or at least as different and isolated from Western ideas of modernity. According to the historian Cemil Aydin, Islamist ideas of Muslim internationalism and of a mythicized Muslim world that remained politically and culturally diverse in the 1980s owed much to perceptions dating back to the nineteenth century. Yet the Cold War and the contestation of its dominant paradigms had since replaced anticolonialism and ideas of the Caliphate.7 The Islamism of the 1970s was a product of its time. The idea of a violent and egalitarian revolution that its proponents advocated had similarities to Marxistinfluenced projects.8 The Iranian revolution saw an early convergence between Islamist and communist forces. In Afghanistan, Maoism had originally attracted Ahmad Shah Masoud, one of the foremost mujahideen commanders. Even more extraordinary, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the staunch Islamist leader, had early on gravitated toward the PDPA.

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During the Soviet-Afghan War, a strand of Islamism led to the emergence of what scholars now call Salafi-Jihadism or radical Islamism.9 A transnational militant form of fundamentalist Islam, radical Islamism was theorized by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar who came to Pakistan during the conflict. In a theological innovation, Azzam argued that it was an individual (fard al-‘ayn) and not a collective duty for Muslims to participate in the Afghan jihad. He made fighting in Afghanistan one of the pillars of the faith.10 His preaching motivated thousands of fighters from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries to join the mujahideen after 1984. During the conflict, Pakistani, American, and Saudi support to the Islamist Afghan parties and foreign fighters rather than to the moderate traditional Islamic and royalist Afghan armed groups was crucial in stunting Soviet and PDPA attempts to control Afghanistan. Radicals, particularly the Afghan Hezb-e-Islami (Islamic Party) of Hekmatyar and the Arab foreign fighters—known as the Arab Afghans—became increasingly influential in the resistance due to that support. After the Soviet withdrawal, they tried to impose their fundamentalist views on postwar Afghanistan, and this was one of the reasons for the widespread and muddled fighting among the mujahideen of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the foreigners who had joined the Afghan jihad found themselves without a cause when the Soviets left. The conflict increasingly became an intra-Afghan affair. The rapid transformation by Mohammad Najibullah, the last communist ruler installed by the Soviets, of the Soviet-looking institutions of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) into the Islamized institutions of the Republic of Afghanistan contributed to blurring the lines. At that point, radical Islamism took on a life of its own as thousands of Arab veterans from Afghanistan engaged in other conflicts involving Muslims around the world, including in Kashmir (1989), Algeria (1991), Bosnia (1992), Tajikistan (1992), and Chechnya (1995). They brought with them their militant fundamentalist views and set out to violently purge Islam of what they saw as the corrupt influences introduced since the time of the Prophet Muhammad and return to a literalist interpretation of the Koran and the Sunnah. This put them at odds with other forms of Islam that had developed in these regions, and with secular and nationalist forces within the Muslim parties they supported. As the USSR collapsed and despite the outburst of violence and terrorism connected to that ideology, the debates over Islamism’s vitality were replaced by postmortem analysis of a phenomenon that many saw as having peaked during the second part of the Soviet-Afghan War. It was only after 9/11 and the reinvigoration of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda during the American interventions in Afghanistan and then Iraq that debates over Islamism, and espe-

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cially its transnational militant form, resurfaced. They took a new color as Western politicians increasingly cast Islamism as the main threat to Western modernity, giving it the place that communism had once held. Strikingly, in Afghanistan, the United States encountered the same challenges as the Soviets had in their military operations and state-building project, including as to what to do with Islam.11 It took the United States years to begin learning from the Soviet experience.

History and Memory The Soviet-Afghan War has long fascinated historians as the conflict that saw the mighty Red Army get bogged down in an international backwater and, ultimately, as the one that ended the Cold War. Since 1989, the number of publications on the conflict has fluctuated based on the availability of archival sources and recollections from participants and its perceived relevance to understanding the present. Considering the opening of new archives on the 1980s across the world, the long-running US war in Afghanistan, and Russia’s return to a neo-imperial foreign policy, interest in the Soviet-Afghan War has again been on the rise in recent years. As in previous periods, today’s concerns color the interpretation of the past. This book is part of this reassessment of the Soviet-Afghan War. Although there was no critical literature on the Soviet-Afghan War in the USSR, Western scholars wrote about the conflict as it unfolded. Most of this output is now outdated, but some books and articles written by eyewitnesses remain relevant to this day.12 The golden age for the study of the Soviet-Afghan War came after its end and stretched from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. The research was at the time informed by documents released from Russian archives, and by the memoirs and accounts by Soviet, Afghan, Pakistani, and American decision-makers, intelligence and military officers, and journalists. International conferences such as in Lysebu in Norway in 1995 brought together Russian and American cold warriors.13 In this context, scholars reassessed the Soviet decision to intervene in Afghanistan, and examined the war’s military aspects, the dragged-out process of the Soviet withdrawal, the negotiations for a neverto-be-possible Afghan coalition government, the Soviet and Afghan decisionmaking processes, and the Afghan social and political milieu that produced the communist revolution in 1978.14 Few focused on the traumatic experience of Soviet soldiers.15 Other books highlighted the war’s violence and the abuses committed by both sides.16 Subsequently, the historians and social scientists Thomas Barfield, Gilles Dorronsoro, Antonio Giustozzi, and Barnett R. Rubin

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studied the Soviet war in the broader context of Afghanistan’s twentieth-century history, writing some of the best comprehensive accounts.17 Surprisingly, communist policies on religion and the Soviet view of Islam during the conflict received little attention. In terms of dedicated studies, only one article by the historian Chantal Lobato and, more recently, another by the historian Eren Tasar dealt with “communist Islam.”18 A chapter in the historian Yaacov Ro’i last book moreover dealt with the Soviet-Afghan War’s impact on Central Asia and the experience of Central Asian soldiers in Afghanistan.19 These contributions proved lacking. Lobato’s research gave a brief overview of the policies on Islam of Babrak Karmal, the ruler installed by the Kremlin in 1979, but it said nothing of the Soviet perspective on the question, relied on a limited corpus of sources, and was tributary of the ideological Cold War context. It dismissed communist attempts at working with Islam and ended its analysis in 1985. Tasar’s article, despite its quality, overstated Soviet interest in Islam in Afghanistan in the early years of the conflict. Finally, Ro’i’s important book focused on all aspects of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, leaving only a modest place to Islam. This fascinating gap in the historiography contrasts with the numerous studies on Islam’s importance for the mujahideen that developed after 9/11. By examining communist views and policies on Islam in Afghanistan, this book enhances our understanding of the multilayered oppositions structuring the Soviet-Afghan War. It shows how—beyond the military aspects—the conflict was also an ideological battle in which the communist side adapted its message and tactics as the conflict went on. It helps us understand the evolving Soviet perceptions of and goals in Afghanistan and the enduring tension between ideology and pragmatism in Soviet decision-making. The latter discussion feeds into the larger debate over the influence of ideology in Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War. Following the historian Jeremy Friedman’s research on the Soviet Union’s support of leftist regimes in the Third World, it begs for more comparative studies looking at Soviet and local leftist and nationalist parties’ policies in pro-Soviet Muslim countries such as Iraq, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY or South Yemen), and Syria.20 This book also adds to the research on the Soviet-Afghan War that emerged in the 2000s. US researchers, markedly including the journalist Steve Coll, then questioned the policies of the Reagan Administration and its support to the mujahideen in the context of the al-Qaeda threat and the US engagement against the Taliban.21 Eventually, scholars and the military also looked at the Soviet experience as a cautionary tale of fighting a war in the “graveyard of empires” and of failed nation-building. As the US war in Afghanistan continued, interest in the Soviet experience remained high. Artemy M. Kalinovsky

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examined the process of the Soviet withdrawal, Paul Robinson and Jay Dixon researched Soviet economic and development policies, Rodrick Braithwaite covered the overall Soviet involvement, Daniel B. Edwards analyzed the evolving perceptions of suicide bombing from the Soviet period to the present, Ro’i looked at the conflict’s influence on the Soviet people, including specifically a chapter on Soviet Muslims, and Elizabeth Leake wrote an international history of the conflict.22 There has furthermore been a growing interest in the study of Afghanistan’s global integration with books by Timothy Nunan and Robert D. Crews dedicating chapters to the Soviet period.23 This book connects to this rich historiography, demonstrating how, unlike the United States in the 1980s, the Soviets were aware of and concerned about Islamism’s rise. Despite that, they eventually dismissed its importance. The Soviet-Afghan War has also garnered significant interest in Afghanistan and Russia. Most of the contributions by Afghans remain difficult to procure outside Afghanistan and are heavily biased toward one or the other of the warring sides. This book uses some of the more influential Afghan accounts discussing the PDPA’s policies. Russian historiography and political circles have, meanwhile, remained fixated on the question of why the politburo, the highest decision-making body in the USSR composed of just over a dozen members, sent troops to Afghanistan. This obsession has led it to disregard other aspects of the conflict, save perhaps for the question of the withdrawal that many military and political leaders and advisers saw as a betrayal of the Afghan communists. A sentiment one often hears from veterans and that can be found in their memoirs was that even though dispatching troops to Afghanistan may have been a mistake, leaving in the way it was done was a crime. Overall, memoirs have dominated Russian scholarship, introducing biases in assessments of the war. The authors who wrote the most scholarly and influential contributions, including Vasili Khristoforov, Nikolai Kozyrev, Vladimir Plastun, and Vladimir Snegirev, are themselves either veterans or former advisers.24 In parallel, several Russian researchers and Afgantsy have reassessed the SovietAfghan War in the context of the troubles in Central Asia and the North Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s and increasingly of the Syrian conflict.25 These deterministic accounts are naturally problematic. The Soviet-Afghan War has also entered Russian popular culture. Contrasting with how the United States produced Cold War-type action films in the 1980s, including Rambo III and the much better The Beast of War, the SovietAfghan War made it to cinema screens in Russia only in the 1990s. Critical of the war, the films of the 1990s, including Noga (The Leg), went along with its negative portrayal in memoirs. By contrast, the 2000s saw the action film 9 rota (The 9th Company) that, like many accounts of that period, heroized the

Figure 0.1. Monument to the Afgantsy built in Moscow in 2004 (Author’s Photo). The monument testifies to the heroization in Russia since the 2000s of the “Soviet internationalist soldiers” who fought in Afghanistan.

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Soviet experience. Released in 2005, 9 rota has been immensely influential in shaping the war’s memory. The movie tells the tragic story of conscripts sent to Afghanistan as the conflict was winding down in 1988. It highlights the war’s religious component while presenting Soviet soldiers in a favorable light. In 2010, another popular movie in a similar patriotic mode, Kandahar, also dealt with Afghanistan. Based on true events, the movie’s plot revolved around the capture of a Russian plane of weapons by the Taliban in 1995. At many levels, Kandahar traced a surprising continuity between the Soviet-Afghan War and the post-1991 period when Russia supported the former mujahideen’s antiTaliban alliance. Today, the Soviet-Afghan War’s memory remains contested in Russia, as shown by the hostile reception from veterans and politicians to the film Bratstvo (Leaving Afghanistan), released in 2019. Seen as critical of the war, Bratstvo came in contradiction with the heroic-patriotic mode promoted in official depictions of the conflict. This tension around the memory of the Soviet-Afghan War illustrates the broader difficulty for Russia in coming to terms with the memory of the Soviet period.

the soviet Ideology and Playbook Leaving Kabul in November 1988, Nikolay Egorychev, the Soviet ambassador who oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops at the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, bitterly reflected on the entire enterprise. Like US policymakers in 2022, the Soviets were painfully trying to figure out how things could have gone so wrong in Afghanistan after such an auspicious start. In his personal notes, Egorychev candidly listed the factors that he believed had worked for and against the Soviets.26 In the left column, he noted how the Soviets had been able to establish control over Afghan provincial centers, how tens of thousands of people had joined the PDPA, and how the communists had held an advantage in weapons and equipment. In the right column, he noted as his first point— “Islam. Infidel people.” He went on to list other factors that had helped the mujahideen such as the mountainous terrain and the support they received from abroad. Still, Islam had come first. This, Egorychev believed, had been the main impediment to the Soviets in Afghanistan. By the end of the Afghan War, even a staunch communist like Egorychev, the former first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU, had to acknowledge that the Soviets’ inability to deal with Islam in Afghanistan had been their undoing. This assessment contradicted the core of MarxistLeninist ideology, which predicted that Islam would have been a minor concern. Afghans’ embrace of the Soviet modernization project should have

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marginalized religion. Yet the opposite had proved true: communism’s appeal was nothing compared to Islam’s in Afghanistan. After having dismissed Islam and Islamism at the start of the conflict, the Soviets had to adapt and embrace religion as a political force in Afghanistan in 1986, discarding MarxismLeninism. Much as the United States decades later, they had, by then, lost the battle for Afghans’ hearts and minds that they were sure they would win. The explanation of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan connects to the everpregnant debate about the competition between ideology and realpolitik in driving decision-making during the Cold War. Amid the opening of new archives, that debate animates historians investigating Soviet-American relations, decolonization and the conflicts in the Third World, and the Sino-Soviet split. This book, along with the historians such as Vladislav Zubok and Melvyn Leffler, emphasizes the role of ideology in Soviet decision-making.27 The Cold War’s main characteristic was that it was a “clash of ideologies” in which Moscow and Washington articulated alternative views of modernity and of the future economic, social, and political development of humanity.28 As the historian Odd Arne Westad wrote, “some of the extraordinary brutality of Cold War interventions [in the Third World]—such as those in Vietnam or Afghanistan—can only be explained by Soviet and American identification with the people they sought to defend.”29 Ideology gave structure and meaning to how Soviet and American policy makers formed ideas about the world and their country’s place in it. It provided a set of fundamental notions connected to their specific cultural and historical contexts, and to “relationships of power, and the creation, transmission, and interpretation of meaning.”30 Ideology held the two systems together domestically and internationally as part of military and economic alliances. This is not to make the reductionist argument that other factors were not important— Soviet, American, and other decision-makers, for example, observed the geostrategic situation and made realist calculations, and personalities also played a role—but to underline that ideas were central during the Cold War. While stressing ideology, it is important to recognize its protean nature. Ideology did not need to be coherent, fully developed, or even entirely shared to be important. Scholars have shown how ideology first fostered the Sino-Soviet alliance and then drove the split. Between communist China and the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism was a shared ideology and a topic of divergence. The latter was characteristic of the communist world and of domestic fights for power in the Soviet Union. Decision-makers, while adhering to or claiming to adhere to similar ideas, could have diverging, including wrong, interpretations of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, anchored in their varying knowledge of it. They could also use, in good faith or in a cynical way, Marxism-

Ambassadors of Social Progress A History of International Blind Activism in the Cold War Maria Cristina Galmarini

Introduction Socialist Blind Activists, the International Disability Movement, and the Forgotten Legacies of the Cold War

You cannot make a world organization with only one half of the world; you must let the other half in. Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) blind activist Horst Geißler (Die Gegenwart, 1996)

Disability activism developed in the second half of the twentieth century in a world divided by the Cold War. In the United States and Western Europe, this activism evolved from a tradition of philanthropy and service agencies but soon embraced the language of self-help and political opposition to discriminatory laws. As the civil rights movement gained momentum and young people engaged in cultural revolutions, in the late 1960s disability rights, too, became a passionate political issue. Activists not only demanded more social and medical services for people with disabilities but also denounced barriers in the built environment, the practice of institutionalization, and the education of disabled children in segregated school systems. These activists articulated the first critiques of ableism as a form of discrimination based on psychophysical difference, and in 1990, in the United States, their strug gles resulted in Congress passing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Eastern Europe, in contrast, disability activism did not take the form of a grassroots social movement but instead came from welfare officers, administrators, recruited professionals, and salaried functionaries. Although these men and (more rarely) women occupied official state positions and their dependency on the state undermined any critical function, most of them advocated for the social integration of various disability groups and strove to minimize the effects of impairment by guaranteeing them social protections. These officials

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also attempted to educate society about their constituencies’ capabilities and lobbied political authorities to enforce for these groups the rights granted in the socialist constitutions. Many of these activists were themselves disabled. Like their Western counter parts, they enthusiastically participated in the internationalization of disability advocacy and the shaping of that advocacy’s agenda in the postwar period. Their stories, as I argue in this book, reveal that socialist disability activism was a form of advocacy that made a difference to the development of international disability politics. Despite socialist activists’ significance, however, their legacies have so far been largely erased from the global history of disability. The dominance of memoirs and oral histories about activists from the United States and Britain, as well as the inaccessibility of archives in other parts of the world, has created the false impression that only the Global North had autochthonous disability movements.1 The milestone of the ADA has been framed as an Anglo-American discovery that spread to West Germany (the FRG) and the Scandinavian countries and subsequently to the rest of the world.2 Scholars such as Jeff D. Grischow, Jagdish Chander, and Sam De Schutter have attempted to correct this portrayal by focusing on activists from the Global South.3 Gildas Brégain, in particular, has analyzed the impact of transnational cultural transfers and the “North-Atlantic modernization project of rehabilitation” on the development of disability politics in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil.4 Yet these works still neglect the socialist East with its alternative model of activism and its vision of social progress, as if it had no part in informing global approaches to disability. Even more crucially than the availability and accessibility of sources, as Kristen Ghodsee and Ned Richardson-Little have indicated, the erasure of socialist actors’ contributions to the articulation of social progress ideas has often come from Cold War stereotypes and the fact that “the victors have written this history” after the collapse of communism in 1989–1991.5 Following the lead of Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and experts, social scientists labeled the old socialist institutions of disability welfare as inappropriate for the new conditions of the “transition” period, and those who had worked in those institutions were discredited as mere functionaries lacking any agency. Because the socialist states presumably exercised total control over these organizations, their leaders could not possibly have been spokespersons for disabled people but only promoters of the party lines (or lies) on welfare and disability.6 Except for Iurii Kiselev and Valerii Fefelov, whose “Action Group” was celebrated as an underground dissident network fighting for disability rights against a dehumanizing system, Soviet and Eastern European activists as well as experts in medicine, special education, and assistive technology have long remained absent from the historiography of disability.7

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Ambassadors of Social Progress challenges Western liberal narratives of the global disability movement and the post-1989 dismissal of socialist approaches as illegitimate. Specifically, by building on Claire Shaw and Monika Baár’s discussions of Russian and Hungarian disability groups’ international exchanges, and by expanding these through a focus on the untold history of blind international activism, I show that the socialist paradigm of blind (and more broadly, disability) advocacy was for many people across the world a viable alternative to the models practiced in liberal democracies.8 This paradigm was based on the idea of blind people’s self-determination backed up by an interventionist state that rejected private charity and instead guaranteed employment and social services through legislation. At a time when blind people faced myriad legal and economic barriers, cultural prejudices, and false assumptions about their impairment, socialist activists’ approach was a driver of transformation, encouraging activists in the capitalist states to reform and refine their own ways. This approach changed old philanthropic priorities, helped contest negative images of the blind as passive objects of care, and condemned the ways in which the colonial past of the developing countries made the lives of visually impaired people particularly difficult. Certainly, socialist advocacy over time proved unable to bring about profound change in social policies and conceptualizations of blindness. It provided opportunities that were denied to most other citizens under socialism, but it was unable to give real political and social visibility to ordinary, non-elite blind people (including women, who were mostly left outside the prestige field of international work). Furthermore, activists’ involvement in the international blind movement was strongly influenced by the superpowers’ rivalry in the Cold War, which compelled the activists to tout their model’s superiority against all odds. Not all Western contemporaries accepted their Eastern counterparts’ self-fashioning, and some openly disagreed with both the politicization of disability and specific socialist policies. Yet most of them admired their Eastern colleagues’ experience, looked on their policies with favor, and engaged with them in sustained debates over the meaning of disability. Ultimately, this book reveals that blind activists’ international contacts during the Cold War created a lively and contested space (in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, as the product of social relations and the cultural and symbolic meanings that emerge through social practice)9 that enabled all sides to learn from each other and bring new ideas, methods, and technologies to bear on individual national struggles. This space functioned as an arena of both disability advocacy and diplomacy. As such, its analysis has relevance to a range of scholars whose fields have rarely been in conversation. First, a critical evaluation of the tensions that undergirded blind activists’ international work allows disability scholars to both recognize the legitimacy of socialist activism and understand

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its legacy in its various national milieus, in the global context, and in the connection between international and domestic work. Disability historians, in other words, should read this story not only because it brings attention for the first time to developments occurring in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but also because it adds a new model—the socialist one—to the interpretative models through which they have so far analyzed disability. Second, viewing disability activists as “ambassadors of social progress” and including disability in the historiography of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe changes that very historiography.10 This approach pinpoints disability as a key issue in the history of cultural diplomacy in Cold War Europe and as a site hitherto unexplored for the ambiguous implementation of Soviet power; it also complicates the able-bodied imagery as well as the iconography of people with disabilities on which historians assume states relied in their international encounters.11 In short, historians of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe should read this book because it centers a social group whose relevance to historical change they have so far disregarded, and because it reveals disability as a locus of internationalism where they can test larger narratives about East-West accommodations during the Cold War. Finally, I invite contemporary disability activists to read this story, too, as it pushes them to reflect more critically upon the role that the state should (or should not) play in resolving the inequalities caused by disability.

disability and Cold war Internationalism That the USSR had preeminence in the disability field had been a crucial trope in the Soviet Union’s self-image since the 1920s and 1930s, when the postrevolutionary and then Stalinist governments set out to create a more humane alternative to Western capitalist models of social protection and governance.12 People with disabilities were identified as citizens whose working capacity was more limited than that of healthy members of society because it was reduced by bodily impairments. Invalidy could be people with one or more missing limbs, sensory dysfunctions (blind, deaf, or deaf-blind), or chronic illness, but the term “invalid” was rarely applied to adults or children with cognitive disabilities. To account for the limited capacities of those categorized as “invalids,” the Soviet state provided them (at least on paper) with a complex bundle of medical, educational, economic, and social services. Employing a combination of paternalism and legal language, the official Soviet discourse praised the state’s “care” and “humanitarian concern” as well as the broad legal provisions that were formally ratified in the Soviet constitution and that supposedly rendered bourgeois charity’s handouts useless and anachronistic. Furthermore, in

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contrast to capitalism, where private philanthropy served as a strategy to propagate the illusion of class harmony, socialist policies allegedly turned formal rights into reality and recognized the equality of disabled people with ablebodied citizens in the construction of the new social order.13 What this meant, in essence, was that it was the state’s—and only the state’s—responsibility to finance, define, and implement disability policy. Within this general approach, Soviet visually impaired men, women, and children occupied a unique place. As in the case of individuals with mental disorders, intellectual disabilities, and other “serious pathologies,” experts in special education (so-called defectologists) and welfare officials categorized visually impaired individuals as having a “grave defect” that required enhanced safety and health care measures in their everyday lives and workplaces. But these experts also imagined blind citizens (like people with hearing impairments) as having “great compensatory possibilities” if properly trained through specialized rehabilitation. In addition, professionals and policymakers believed that blindness, unlike mobility-related impairments, did not necessitate a massive restructuring of the built environment.14 This understanding legitimized the existence of the All-Russian Society of the Blind (VOS, Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Slepykh) as a “mass organization” that operated under the control of the Russian Commissariat of Social Welfare and catered specifically to the needs of blind citizens.15 The only other state-approved disability groups of the time were the All-Russian Production-Consumption Union of Invalids (VIKO), which was liquidated n the late 1950s, and the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (VOG), which still exists today.16 Parallel organizations in the other Soviet republics were left to worry about their respective national constituencies. After the Second World War, when they fell into the Soviet orbit, the countries of Eastern Europe restructured their social protection systems along Soviet lines and understandings of disability. Although each Eastern European country had a distinct prewar history of disability welfare and activism, by the mid-1950s they had all disbanded their independent self-help groups and charity organizations in favor of state-controlled welfare institutions.17 The blind and the deaf organized themselves into state-funded national organizations, which worked in collaboration with able-bodied teachers, doctors, and welfare workers but were headed by blind and deaf persons. These agencies were under the administrative jurisdiction of their country’s Ministry of Social Welfare, Ministry of Health, or Ministry of Labor (or a combination of them), and largely mirrored the configuration of their Soviet counter parts. Across the socialist bloc, the new agencies of blind advocacy were founded on two key principles: the ability and duty of blind people to speak for themselves and manage their own affairs (although never in opposition to the state

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authorities), and the fact that the cause of impairment should not affect their rights. The second principle was officially intended to undo traditional inequalities of access between various groups, such as blind civilians and the veterans of both world wars (including those who fought on different sides), or those who lost their sight on the job, those who were born blind, and those who became visually impaired due to accidents not related to their jobs. Especially in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, GDR), this was meant both as a reversal of Nazi favoritism toward disabled veterans and as a more progressive approach than West Germany’s policy of differentiating by the cause of disability.18 At the same time, however, political motives all over socialist Europe (except for Yugoslavia and its Association of War Invalids) prohibited disabled veterans from forming their own, potentially dissenting special-interest groups.19 The goal of integration and equality for disabled people was never fully realized in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Memoirs and novels suggest that the socialist states failed to live up to all their expansive promises.20 They also indicate huge discrepancies across disability groups, highlighting the greater difficulties faced by people with mobility impairments who needed more accessibility to participate in society.21 However, historians have revealed that in the postwar period, blind and deaf people benefited from legislation and services to an extent that was new to them.22 The socialist bloc’s visually impaired citizens became massively employed in state-subsidized cooperatives that produced items traditionally associated with blind labor (brushes, baskets, buttons, and rubber bands). They also worked in new industrial, vocational training workshops, which maximally profited from the socialist economy of nonglobalized, centrally regulated demand and supply, and which made a wider range of jobs available to blind workers than ever before. Furthermore, some blind individuals were trained as massage therapists, telephone operators, and stenotypists; some others entered higher education and professional careers. Finally, blind people all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had access to Braille libraries, specialized housing, and networks of special schools for blind children. Occurring in the mid to late 1950s, these positive developments in the field of disability overlapped with Nikita Khrushchev’s new policy of internationalism. Indeed, while the years of late Stalinism had been characterized by isolationism and xenophobia, the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin’s death increasingly felt the need to engage with Western ideas and technologies. By joining international organizations, inviting foreign specialists, and sending their own experts abroad, the socialist bloc’s countries aimed to acquire modern economic and technological knowledge so that they could eventually over-

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take their ideological adversaries.23 As Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen have written, the post-Stalin socialist leaders believed that they could “compete with Western democracies by openly challenging them and learning from them.”24 Space research, cybernetics, and medicine are the most illustrious examples of the complex dynamics of competition and collaboration that informed East-West contacts during the Cold War, but material and artistic consumption of all kinds acquired a stronger transnational dimension as well.25 In addition, several historians have shown that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, matters such as women’s and children’s rights, the creation of international treaties about forced labor, race policies, and human rights all benefited from the flow of ideas that took place between the West and the East. The very rivalry between the two camps stimulated debates over these issues as the socialist countries’ representation of themselves as the champions of the weak forced the capitalist side to respond.26 Disability experts and policymakers took advantage of this Cold War internationalism too. The Russian Ministry of Social Welfare not only began to correspond with several Western-based disability groups, but also took steps to become a member of the International Social Security Association and include Soviet representatives in its specialized commissions on disability insurance and rehabilitation.27 The socialist countries’ deaf organizations became members of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), while their rehabilitation associations began to participate in Rehabilitation International (RI).28 Like the many other international agencies, movements, exchange programs, and initiatives that the Soviet Union joined in the late 1950s, these international disability organizations served as theaters of propaganda and arenas of ideological warfare under the cover of cultural diplomacy.29 Soviet delegates were asked both to “study” foreign solutions to problems concerning the disabled (such as prosthesis design, rehabilitation, and the construction of specialized housing) and to conduct “active propaganda” to make Soviet achievements more visible.30 Importantly, disability and social welfare offered the socialist camp the opportunity not only to stake claims of superiority, but also to couch those claims in the language that the socialist bloc most favored in its global self-fashioning—that of social progress and peace.31 The socialist governing elite took special pride in their systems’ progressiveness in relation to blind and deaf people and thought that by turning these specific groups into the faces of Soviet-bloc disability politics, they could not only demonstrate a positive record, but also earn a significant propaganda bonus. Consequently, they bolstered activists’ involvement in the international blind and deaf movements.

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Activists and Ambassadors But what were the motives of disabled activists themselves when they entered the international arena? How can we make sense of the seemingly endless travels and meetings through which they interacted with colleagues worldwide throughout the Cold War years, especially as access to life beyond the socialist bloc was denied to most ordinary able-bodied citizens? Our interpretation of these individuals’ internationalism necessarily depends on whether we see them as mere dupes of communist authorities, unable to develop proper oppositional self-advocacy (as Baár sustains about Hungarian blind and deaf organizations before the 1970s), or as activists in their own right, who meaningfully engaged in global dialogues about disabled people’s agency, welfare, and the state’s responsibilities for them (as Shaw argues about the Russian deaf ). Or could it be both? As Mark Edele has suggested in relation to the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, service to the state in international politics could legitimize mass organizations’ lobbying functions.32 My methodological choice to focus on two communities of activists and their respective institutions—the Russian union of the blind (VOS) and East German union of the blind (BSV, Blinden- und Sehschwachen-Verband)—is determined by the above questions.33 Indeed, while a complex and diverse cast of historical actors constitutes the backdrop against which I tell the story of international blind activism, it is the perspectives of around twenty-five to thirty individuals that have been at the core of my research. These were neither social workers dealing directly with blind persons’ daily problems nor professionals drawing on the mantle of expertise, but instead leaders making executive decisions for their organizations. Enjoying the trust of both their colleagues in the blind movement and their superiors in the Ministries of Social Welfare and Health, these men were allowed involvement in the international arena. (I will discuss later the reasons women were mostly excluded.) When BSV and VOS acquired full membership in the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind in 1967, it was precisely delegates from this select cohort who were chosen to represent the GDR and the USSR in the world of blind advocacy. (Members of VOS de facto represented the Soviet Union: even though activists from other Republics took part in international relations, too, it was VOS— an institution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR)—that systematically stood for the entire country. For this reason, I hereafter use the term “Russian” when discussing VOS itself and “Soviet” to talk about the activists and their policies.) Becoming integrated in networks that crisscrossed the globe, through their international connections these activists served both their national blind movements and their states’ foreign policy plans. They

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were activists and ambassadors, advocating both for the blind of the world and for the victory of socialism around the world. By anchoring the history of international blind activism in the milieus of the Soviet Union and East Germany, I not only demonstrate the ways in which international disability advocacy involved non-Western ideas and visions, but also decenter Soviet hegemony in favor of more diverse global engagements and national priorities. Each country of Eastern Europe had its own specific international standing. Here, I choose to concentrate on the USSR and the GDR as, respectively, the center of the communist world and its most western outpost in Europe. East Germany was the socialist state most starkly juxtaposed against the West and most closely negotiating between the two Cold War sides. This position led BSV to form its own relationships with other countries while also pursuing common interests with the Soviet Union. In addition, BSV president Helmut Pielasch became a commanding voice alongside the Russian Boris Zimin in the World Council and its European Regional Committee. By focusing on the individuals staffing BSV and VOS (as opposed to the blind as a social group), I show how Cold War internationalism specifically played out on the European stage of disability advocacy and how interpersonal contacts (not just memorandums and speeches) shaped it. Finally, and most crucially, this type of focus best enables us to appreciate both the agency and the limitations associated with state officials being the leaders of disability advocacy under socialism. Since their foundations in 1925 and 1957, the Russian and East German unions of the blind grew into large institutions, able to recruit increasing numbers of members (from a postwar group of 24,500 to 160,600 in 1970 for VOS, and from 19,000 to 28,000 members over the same period for BSV) and forge their own nomenklatura, or party appointments, of qualified activists (VOS’s local functionaries numbered 25,600 in 1970; BSV had 2,400 of them by the 1980s).34 Of course, as mass organizations of this scope, neither VOS nor BSV could have complete autonomy over their affairs. The two unions’ central offices, local branches, and specialized commissions included a party cell that addressed issues of ideological correctness. Each of their decisions needed to be authorized from above, slowly moving along an extensive chain of power. Moreover, because Soviet and East German blind activists represented their states in all interactions with foreign entities, they were always directed and constrained by the foreign policies of their bosses back at home. In short, VOS and BSV were not disability self-help organizations in the contemporary sense, meaning built from below and characterized by loose institutional structures. Rather, they served as vehicles for the party’s work among the blind, and their advocacy always stopped short of undermining the ideological framework of their states.

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And yet, granted that these individuals could not be dissidents, their political loyalty also masked their personal intentions, and their decision to stay within the ideological confines set by their governments had definite benefits for them. In their specialized journals, at their domestic meetings, and especially in the limelight of international symposia, their statements of political allegiance were also occasions for advocacy. When they declared, “We, visually impaired citizens, stand firmly and closely behind the politics of our party and our state. In our GDR we have . . . the possibility to live and work as equal members of society,” BSV (as well as VOS) activists in fact rejected exclusion and reminded the socialist state of its promises of equality for all.35 No less than factory workers, collective farmers, and artists—as these activists insisted—blind people, too, belonged to the life of the collectivity and actively contributed to the construction of socialism. As Shaw has written in relation to deaf identity in the Soviet Union, “Ideology was a gateway to a sense of belonging.”36 It was also a doorway to advocacy. In a nutshell, the blind activists of socialist Europe were wearing two hats— one as functionaries officially representing their countries abroad and one as members of an international network of advocates for blind people’s integration. Precisely because they were established administrators in good standing with their states’ authorities, they were able to hold visible positions in the international arena, where their encounters with Western activists had all the trappings of cultural diplomacy. At the same time, however, VOS’s and BSV’s leaders were also activists devoted to the cause of blind advocacy. Although they clearly understood the show-window value of their international work, they also saw it as a stage on which to give visibility to blind people, their needs, and their capacities. In turn, thanks to the diplomatic theater in which these activists played a crucial role, they had the ability to capitalize on their governments’ trust and make the most useful international connections to pursue their disability goals. While mindful of the many differences between the leaders of the East German and Russian organizations and their colleagues in Western Europe, in this book I nonetheless call them activists to emphasize that the term “disability activism” might connote very different things in different contexts and that the socialist countries rightfully belong to its global history. Undoubtedly, socialist blind activists were bureaucrats rather than fighters for disability rights, but their political standing allowed them to pursue a broader range of disability-specific projects than any dissident movement might have hoped to achieve in the late socialist Soviet Union and GDR. In the end, as Fred Pelka has written, the “advocate/administrator” working the system from within can also “use their . . . influence to empower their constituents.”37 Their stories reveal that contestation and subversiveness are not

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Disruption The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War

Introduction

“We who were going to balance the budget face the biggest budget deficits ever,” US president Ronald Reagan grumbled to his diary in December 1981.1 The Gipper grasped the irony. He had declared war against big government and muscled huge tax cuts through Congress, but his administration also poured hundreds of billions of dollars into defense and maintained social safety nets. The federal government then borrowed to finance the record budget shortfalls, tripling the national debt during Reagan’s two terms. The trade deficit ballooned to record-breaking heights as well, surpassing the $100 billion mark for the first time in 1984.2 The numbers were staggering. Such devastating economic data would have spelled disaster for most countries. “If any other country had run its economy the way the United States have run theirs,” the British ambassador Oliver Wright remarked in December 1985, “it would have had the IMF [International Monetary Fund] broker’s men in long ago.” Yet the United States was exceptional. Even as the US budget and trade deficits reached historic levels, foreign investors poured their savings into the United States, Wright explained, because of the size and resilience of its economy, its entrepreneurial energy, and its reputation as a safe haven for capital.3 The foreign investment helped the United States finance a military buildup, fund social welfare programs, and sustain noninflationary growth.

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The influx of capital and goods to the United States during the Reagan years reversed the imbalances that had previously undergirded America’s Cold War. Boasting unmatched strength after World War II, the United States had been a net creditor with a trade surplus during the postwar period. In the 1980s, however, it became a net debtor with a large trade deficit. The foreign investment allowed the United States to live beyond its means, and US partners benefited from access to the booming US market, the relocation of manufacturing to the developing world, and the continued protection of the strengthened US military umbrella. While US hegemony endured, its material foundation had transformed. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet budget deficit grew rapidly in the second half of the 1980s under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The similarities with the United States ended there. Whereas Washington utilized debt as an asset, Moscow used credits to import food and could not reinvigorate its stagnating economy, stabilize its faltering allies, and combat the US offensive in the Cold War. The demands on the Soviet Union grew even larger as its Eastern European allies drowned in debt.4 The Kremlin had provided emergency assistance and had subsidized trade to its Warsaw Pact partners throughout the Cold War but could no longer afford to throw a financial lifeline or deploy the Red Army to restore order. Instead, the Eastern European socialist regimes faced an inexorable assault on two flanks as they confronted their restless populations who clamored for political change and their foreign creditors who demanded structural adjustment. Although the United States and the Soviet Union both sank deep into debt, the former had risen to the zenith of its power while the latter dropped to its nadir. Beyond nuclear parity, Washington outmatched Moscow in virtually every area that mattered. The Cold War became even more unbalanced when accounting for allies. Symbiotic relationships between the United States and Western Europe, Japan, and partners in the developing world such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia augmented US power. In contrast, the atrophy of Eastern Europe weighed on the Kremlin, and a debt crisis forced socialist regimes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa to embrace market reforms and look to the West. The Red Army, meanwhile, became bogged down in a disastrous war in Afghanistan, and Soviet influence waned in the developing world. The shift in the global balance of power was profound, and the new link between East and West was even more so. The Cold War had erupted in the late 1940s as an ideological and geopolitical competition between two independent blocs that promoted antagonistic structures of political economy, social organization, and visions of world order. By the 1980s, the Cold War had evolved into a contest between a resurgent United States that unlocked

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the resources of a globalizing economy and an anachronistic Soviet petroempire whose members could not survive without products, technology, and credits from the capitalist world. In other words, the socialist countries did not just confront an ascendant West; worse, they had become dependent on the industrial democracies for their very survival. This outcome reflected improvisation rather than intelligent design. Drawing on archival evidence from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Disruption charts the emergence of this new order and illuminates how it prefigured the end of the Cold War. It shows how the global economic shocks of the 1970s created an international political economy that magnified US power in unexpected ways and fractured the Soviet bloc. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union believed that it could survive as an island in a world that the other dominated during the post-1945 period, so they sought allies in their quest to create a favorable balance of power. This book uses the concept of the welfare empire to describe how their blocs functioned. “Welfare” refers to the superpowers’ distribution of resources to promote the physical safety, economic and social well-being, and political stability of their allies. “Empire” provides an analytical tool that describes the bloc hierarchy in which Washington and Moscow assumed singular responsibility for order and anchored their respective blocs’ security architectures.5 In the overseas European empires, the imperial powers had extracted resources from their colonies, but in the Cold War welfare empires, resources moved from the superpowers to their allies. The superpowers maintained this distributive framework because they believed that it enhanced their own national security. National security meant more than physical survival. It entailed protecting a way of life at home as well. American policymakers feared that democratic capitalism—a modernity that promoted free elections, privileged the free market, protected private property, and guaranteed individual liberties—would not survive in the United States if it did not also prosper in key industrial regions overseas. Similarly, Moscow worried that Soviet socialism, whose brand of modernity consisted of a proletarian dictatorship, class-based rights, and command economy, would be threatened in the Soviet Union itself if the country became encircled by capitalist powers. Thus, the United States and the Soviet Union adopted expansive “mental maps” of national security during the Cold War that expanded far beyond their own borders.6 The US welfare empire formed in the mid- and late 1940s because the Truman administration believed that American national security depended on binding Western Europe and Japan to the United States.7 Washington dispersed

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financial aid and military assistance to them to accelerate their postwar reconstruction, build local support for democratic capitalism, combat Soviet encroachment, and restore overseas markets for US exports. US firms established overseas subsidiaries, exported technologies, and increased foreign direct investment. In addition to accepting responsibility for the Bretton Woods international monetary system, which precluded a dollar devaluation and depended on dollars circulating overseas to lubricate international trade, the United States provided an open market for Western European and Japanese products and tolerated a degree of protectionism in return. Even so, the United States still ran a trade surplus during the postwar period because of the strength of American industry.8 For its part, the Soviet welfare empire crystallized in the mid- and late 1950s. After confronting the threats to Soviet national security arising from the East Berlin turmoil of June 1953 and the Polish and Hungarian uprisings in the fall of 1956, Soviet leaders shifted from a policy of extraction to subsidization in Eastern Europe.9 By tolerating a pricing formula that undervalued raw materials and overvalued finished goods, the Soviet Union underwrote industrialization across its bloc and served as a reliable buyer of products that could not sell on the world market. Quantifying the implicit Soviet subsidy is difficult, but Soviet analysts estimated it in the billions of rubles annually after the 1973 oil shock, and a Western study placed it at $75.5 billion during the 1970s.10 Moscow also served as the bloc’s lender of last resort and deployed the Red Army to defend Soviet socialism in Eastern Europe. The argument that the US and Soviet welfare empires had parallel structures requires the qualification that Western policymaking entailed negotiation and compromise while the Soviet Union often dictated terms to Eastern Europe.11 The Kremlin’s Eastern European allies should not be dismissed as mere puppets, but their fortunes depended on Moscow’s favor and preferences. The Kremlin used coercion to get its way, though Eastern European officials could also exploit their positions to influence Moscow.12 Indeed, dependence was a double-edged sword. The welfare empires functioned effectively during the first quarter century of the Cold War in large part because they had strong economic foundations. While their developmental models were based on ideologies that contradicted each other, the Cold War protagonists shared a fixation on economic growth as a means of promoting social cohesion, legitimizing their ideological systems, and implementing their blueprints for world order.13 They enjoyed an unprecedented era of prosperity between 1950 and 1973, an era known as the “Golden Age.” During this period, annual gross domestic product (GDP) per

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capita grew an average of 4.1 percent in Western Europe, 2.5 percent in the United States, 8 percent in Japan, 3.8 percent in Eastern Europe, and 3.4 percent in the Soviet Union.14 With the need to rebuild after World War II and ubiquitous drive to industrialize, opportunities abounded for extensive growth, defined as gains from additional inputs of manpower and materials. Inexpensive raw materials and labor powered the factories, technological breakthroughs in the United States circulated abroad, and productivity surged. The Bretton Woods international monetary system’s fixed-exchange rate regime and the Soviet bloc’s central planning encouraged price stability. The economic growth provided the margins in both blocs to invest in the military-industrial complexes as well as raised living standards, minimized social tensions, and underwrote bloc cohesion. It created jobs, maintained low levels of inequality, increased the quality of life, and funded social programs. While the consumer abundance in Western societies remained out of reach for the Soviet bloc, which started at a much lower level than the richer industrial democracies, the socialists trumpeted their growth rates that rivaled those in the West, boasted about their social egalitarianism, and claimed that consumer luxuries were just around the corner. Growth appeared limitless in the Golden Age, but stagflation in the West and its socialist cousin zastoi (stagnation) during the 1970s shattered the illusion. Whereas inflation (GDP deflator) ran 4.4 percent across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) area in the 1960s, it spiked to 11.5 percent in the 1970s.15 Unemployment figures swelled to postwar highs in the West, and economic growth and productivity slowed everywhere. The Keynesian and Soviet socialist prescriptions on which the blocs had relied during the postwar period not only failed to solve the problems but aggravated them further. A wave of literature that included the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful predicted a grim future of resource scarcity, competition, and hardship. Both blocs suffered from a “common crisis of industrial society,” as Charles S. Maier describes.16 What had gone wrong? The unique constellation of factors that had made the Golden Age possible disappeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The exhaustion of the postwar growth models constituted the core problem. Societies finished reconstruction, mobilized their idle assets, applied the backlog of technological innovations, and completed industrialization. These developments had driven economic growth after the war, but states could pull each of these levers only a single time. Inflation crept upward as labor unions still demanded wage increases but productivity gains diminished. Cheap raw materials had fueled extensive growth during the Golden Age, but prices for energy, rubber, fibers, food, fertilizer, and metals began to rise on the world market. A major

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shock came in the fall of 1973 when oil prices quadrupled and pushed global capitalism into the sharpest recession of the postwar era. Another oil crisis followed in 1979. Price instability in global capitalism spread to the Soviet bloc because it used an average of world market prices to determine its own prices for intrabloc trade. Furthermore, while the Soviet Union provided its allies with the bulk of the raw materials that they needed, they still had to purchase the balance from suppliers outside the bloc at market prices. This book refers to these interrelated developments, which punished industrial states of all ideological stripes, as the global economic shocks of the 1970s. With their postwar growth model struggling, the industrial democracies reoriented toward intensive development, which required utilizing existing resources more productively. The United States ceded manufacturing jobs to the developing world, but the country assumed a new position in the international division of labor as the US economy harnessed new technologies such as the microprocessor chip. Home to companies such as Apple, Fairchild, and Intel, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley emerged as the global center of the information revolution. The paradigm of what constituted economic success in the ideological Cold War shifted from industry to computers. The hub of global manufacturing shifted to East and Southeast Asia. Japan led the pack and caught up with the transatlantic countries by the 1970s across a variety of sectors including automobiles and consumer electronics. It even surpassed the United States by the mid-1980s in GDP per capita.17 Imitating the Japanese export-oriented industrialization and utilizing their well-educated and inexpensive labor, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan produced finished goods for global markets and displaced transatlantic manufacturing. Leveraging innovations in transportation and communications as well as trade liberalization, multinational corporations relocated operations to the developing world. Faced with cheaper competition, deindustrialization hastened in the transatlantic community. The information revolution combined with changes in international trade and finance to thicken global ties. After the Bretton Woods system collapsed in the early 1970s, the gradual removal of capital controls eliminated constraints on the money supply, and the value of global financial markets exploded from $160 billion in 1973 to $3 trillion in 1985.18 Transnational finance greased the wheels of international trade and transportation, and telecommunications breakthroughs shrank the globe. Global merchandise trade increased nearly sixfold in the 1970s.19 The postwar order had kept economic globalization at bay, but now it resurged. Soviet bloc officials recognized the supreme importance of adapting their economic growth model as well. “The economy had to be oriented from an

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extensive to an intensive type of development [ot ekstenziven kum intenziven tip na razvitie],” the Bulgarian premier Stanko Todorov reflected. “Labor productivity was significantly behind” and held back improvements in living standards.20 Yet the political and economic inflexibility of Soviet socialism prevented the Soviet bloc from moving beyond its postwar focus on heavy industry. The ideological commitment to full employment and structural obstacles to innovation compelled central planners to keep inefficient factories in operation, and socialist manufacturing became increasingly uncompetitive on the world stage at both the high and low ends of the market. The regimes resorted to importing goods and technology from the West as a substitute for reforms. Disruption maps the geopolitics of these interlocking economic vectors. It illuminates how Western and Soviet bloc officials navigated this era of transition and strug gled to master structural developments that they did not fully understand and could not control. The strategic logic of sustaining the welfare empires remained compelling for US and Soviet policymakers, but their nations’ capacity to shoulder the burden diminished. Archival documents reveal a common theme of frustration in both Washington and Moscow about having to sacrifice their own economic interests to promote the health of their most important allies, and they grappled with tradeoffs in the 1970s that they had not encountered before. The Cold War anxieties of Western officials centered just as much, if not more, on internal vulnerabilities and intrabloc tensions as perceptions of Soviet strength during the 1970s. The memory of the Great Depression preoccupied them. Recalling the anxieties of the early Cold War, they feared that the economic and social upheaval would empower radical parties on the political far right and left, divide the West, and embolden the Soviet Union.21 The major industrial democracies turned to economic summitry in the mid1970s to coordinate responses to the interrelated political and economic crises. The meetings symbolized the commitment to international cooperation, even if officials disagreed on how to resolve common problems. Democratic capitalism earned a new source of legitimacy when noninflationary growth returned in the mid-1980s. The OECD area never recaptured the figures of the 1950s and 1960s, but annual growth rates climbed to 4.7 percent by 1984 and did not slip below 3 percent until 1991. Inflation (GDP deflator) dropped from 13.2 percent in 1980 to 5.2 percent in 1985.22 The adaptation to the global economic shocks of the 1970s was improvised and messy. The harsh stance against inflation that the Federal Reserve under chairman Paul Volcker took in the late 1970s and 1980s catalyzed the recovery. In addition to restoring price stability, high interest rates attracted foreign

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capital that funded Reagan’s historic budget deficits and fueled the noninflationary recovery. Foreign capital powered the US economy, helped pay for social safety nets, and financed a military buildup as the Reagan administration applied pressure against the Soviet Union. US allies in Western Europe and East Asia, in turn, benefited from the stimulus that the US economy gave to the global economy in the mid-1980s as well as the strengthening of the US military umbrella. It was not all good news, however. Inequality rose, the power of organized labor diminished, and unemployment increased across most of the OECD area during the 1980s.23 Yet the resurgence of noninflationary growth empowered liberal parties across the West. The adjustment in the 1980s created a new international political economy that sustained the West, an architecture that this book calls the inverted US welfare empire. This means that instead of disseminating resources to the rest of the world, as it had during the first half of the Cold War, the United States became an importer and net debtor by the 1980s. The ratio of US manufactured to raw material exports also declined as the economy became service oriented. The US welfare empire inverted, but the Soviet counterpart collapsed. The rigidities of the command economy and lack of institutional incentives to innovate meant that intensive growth stayed out of reach. Elites refused to make structural changes that might endanger their careers or weaken the communist party’s hold on power. Instead, Western imports temporarily masked underlying problems. Some well-informed economic officials had reservations about taking on debt to finance the goods and technology, but they generally kept quiet. “Orders are not discussed, they are carried out” was the command economy’s motto.24 Sovereign debt across Eastern Europe ballooned in the 1970s, and the Soviet Union sent much of its hard currency windfall from oil exports back to the nonsocialist world to purchase food to compensate for its escalating agricultural crisis. Most socialist officials understood that the system had structural liabilities and inefficiencies, but they could not see the full picture. Fearing that bad news could jeopardize their careers, political elites withheld access to gloomy reports. “Only the positive part of development was reported,” the chairman of the East German State Planning Commission Gerhard Schürer recalled, “while the negative part such as the large debt of the GDR [German Democratic Republic] was treated as ‘secret’ so that one could not have an exact picture of the economic situation.”25 Consequently, many socialist elites in the 1970s believed that they held the initiative in the Cold War and did not realize that a financial sword of Damocles was rising over the bloc. While Western Europe and Japan developed robust economies of their own that enhanced the US-led security system and the West’s ideological author-

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ity to wage the Cold War, Eastern Europe increasingly became a burden on the Soviet Union. Subsidized Soviet oil and natural gas incentivized Eastern European planners to maintain energy-intensive industries and hardened their positions against systemic reforms. Combined with growing disillusionment across the bloc with Soviet socialism, the accumulation of Eastern European debt placed the Kremlin in a difficult position. The Soviet economy itself began to stagnate by the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Soviet officials faced agonizing questions about the extent to which they should divert scarce resources to ensure Eastern European stability. In the early 1980s, Moscow’s refusal to intervene militarily in Poland’s Solidarity crisis, during which Warsaw de facto defaulted on its debt and an independent trade union threatened the socialist regime, signaled that the Soviet Union had abdicated its role as the bloc’s guarantor. Into the vacuum stepped Western international institutions and governments, which utilized their financial power to extract political concessions from the indebted regimes. Rather than an abrupt departure, the 1989 revolutions capped a long process in which the West used financial leverage to wrestle Eastern Europe away from the Soviet Union. Economic historians have long seen the late twentieth century as a period of dramatic change, but economics plays a surprisingly small role in the literature on the end of the Cold War.26 Instead, a loose consensus stresses the primary importance of Gorbachev for winding down the arms race, deescalating superpower tensions, encouraging political change behind the Iron Curtain, and withdrawing Soviet forces from Afghanistan.27 Triumphalist accounts of the US contribution fell out of favor as archival evidence contradicted the contention that Reagan had a grand strategy that brought the Soviet bloc to its knees, and more recent interpretations based on the documentary record illustrate how Reagan’s military buildup, economic statecraft, and diplomacy complemented Gorbachev’s initiatives and changes in the international system.28 Other scholars emphasize the social movements and changing international norms that created political change and halted the arms race.29 While these factors made meaningful contributions, Disruption contends that the global economic shocks of the 1970s were decisive and belong at the top of the causal hierarchy. It brings energy, debt, trade, finance, and monetary policy to the forefront, topics that are typically treated as “second-order” issues in Cold War scholarship. Yet the security architectures of the West and Soviet bloc cannot be understood without reference to the international political economy and ideological projects that supported them.30 Much of the literature characterizes the end of the Cold War as a contingent event whose proximate origins started with Gorbachev’s rise to power

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in March 1985, but this book aligns with the minority that emphasizes structure over human agency.31 This does not mean that the West’s ability and East’s inability to adapt to the economic shocks of the 1970s made the end of the Cold War inevitable or overdetermined. Rather, these economic transformations created opportunities to exploit structural advantages for the industrial democracies and increasingly narrowed options for the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. By associating US interests with a globalizing economy and safeguarding the dollar’s centrality in global finance and international trade, US policymakers helped foster an international environment that allowed the United States to live beyond its means and continue to wage the Cold War. The accumulation of debt and atrophy of the Soviet bloc, in contrast, handcuffed socialist officials the following decade and circumscribed their flexibility. Framed in this way, Gorbachev’s reforms played a reinforcing role in the disintegration of the Soviet bloc rather than the lead, as many scholars contend.32 The Soviet bloc could work as a closed system, but the calculus changed as the bloc became dependent on Western goods and technology, more information became available about the disparities between East and West, and consumer expectations rose. The debt placed a financial noose around the necks of the regimes, and the Soviet leadership recognized already in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the Soviets did not have the ability to remove it. The situation had only worsened by the time Gorbachev became general secretary, and his refusal to intervene militarily in the 1989 revolutions culminated the process that had been in motion for two decades.33 The Cold War ended at the end of 1989 when the Soviet bloc ceased to exist as a community of socialist dictatorships dominated by Moscow.34 Thereafter, the strug gle to shape the post– Cold War international environment commenced.35 Victory and defeat depended on intrabloc cohesion as well as interbloc competition, and scholarship on the end of the Cold War should not only explain the collapse of the Soviet bloc but also account for why the West stabilized after an era of upheaval. The West’s great achievement during the Cold War was mobilizing the combined power of the core capitalist countries and defying communist declarations that intracapitalist conflict would erupt. Memories of the 1930s and concern about Soviet power provided incentives for the industrial democracies to stay together, and the inverted US welfare empire provided a new structural framework that sustained the West. This process also suggests that the emergence of unipolarity in the early 1990s, usually described in terms of US preponderance, is as much a story about US dependence.36 Disruption takes a comparative approach that traces the divergent trajectories of the West and the Soviet bloc as they grappled with the global economic shocks of the 1970s. Chapters 1 and 2 chart the origins of the US and Soviet

Sociology of Corruption Patterns of Illegal Association in Hungary David Jancsics

INTRODUCTION

This book is based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork on corruption in Hungary. The country, which once seemed to be the most likely of the ex-communist bloc nations to catch up to the West, is regarded by many experts and scholars as highly corrupt. According to the findings of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2022, Hungary dropped thirteen points on a 0–100 scale, the most points lost by any country in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since 2012; it is now the most corrupt member state of the European Union (EU), with a score of 42 (Transparency International Hungary 2023). There is a consensus among scholars and experts that a small clique of corrupt political actors has captured most state institutions and controls a significant portion of the business and cultural sectors in contemporary Hungary (Transparency International Hungary 2011; Innes 2014; Ágh 2015; Fazekas and Tóth 2016; Jancsics 2017a; Fierăscu 2019; J. P. Martin 2020). When and how did this happen? What are the most typical forms of corruption in the country? What are the differences between these forms, and how has their significance changed over the years? What is the role of prime minister Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal government” in the spread of corrupt practices at multiple levels of society? This book attempts to answer these questions. I am Hungarian; I lived in Hungary for thirty-four years. Since relocating to New York City in 2007, I have visited my family in my home country once or twice a year. Sometimes I spent entire summer breaks there. During these trips back home, I realized that corruption was discussed much more often in everyday conversations in Hungary than in the United States. Indeed, the contrast was striking. After several informal talks with Hungarian family members, friends, 1

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acquaintances, and former colleagues, I became excited about listening to their experiences with corruption. Even if people do not participate in corruption, they usually know someone who does and have an opinion about it. Hungarians even have their own native term for shady informal practices: mutyi. Although I heard a few stories about corruption in New York as well, none of them were about the present. For example, my dog-walker friend in Brooklyn told me about scandals involving corrupt police officers, mayors, and trade union leaders, but all these cases were back in the 1970s, when, according to him, corruption was widespread in the city. I asked myself why corruption is such a hot topic in Hungary and why it does not seem to be among the most serious everyday social problems in the United States, where corrupt cases—if discussed in the media at all—are instead relegated to corporations and extremely prominent politicians. I decided to conduct qualitative research about corruption in Hungary, a country that was considered fairly corrupt in the 1990s and 2000s but also labeled as one of the most democratic and “westernized” of the CEE nations. However, this research led me to avoid oversimplistic “East versus West” comparisons, such as emphasizing that corruption in CEE is much more widespread than in Western Europe or in the United States. The findings of my study suggested that corruption is not a single thing—it takes different forms. There is also a huge gray zone of informal practices; many of them may be regarded as corrupt in the United States but are socially acceptable, although illegal, behaviors in Hungary.

Methodological Note This study is based on an ethnographic research approach. Between 2009 and 2022, I made ten research trips to Hungary and spent a total of nine months there. During that period, I lived with Hungarians, read local newspapers, watched local TV, followed online chats, and engaged in conversations with people about many things, including corruption. I tried to understand what was happening in my country of origin in terms of corruption. The backbone of my empirical data consists of the more than one hundred semi-structured interviews that I conducted during this research period. To synthesize my transcripts, I used qualitative coding to identify connections between the narratives and the sociological concepts (Charmaz 2006, 43). I translated the interviews from Hungarian into English myself, and I quote from them extensively in this book to illustrate my findings, enhance readability, and provide insights into the social context of corruption (Eldh, Årestedt, and Berterö 2020). I found that a broad spectrum of Hungarians—from politicians and professionals to ordinary people of all ages and sexes—were quite open to talking about

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the impacts of corruption on their lives. They were willing to talk about when and where they encounter it and even their own involvement with corruption. I used snowball sampling, meaning that I asked people whom I had interviewed to recommend others they knew who would talk to me about corruption. Especially when the topic is corruption, respondents usually want to know that an interviewer is trustworthy before agreeing to be questioned. Snowball sampling uses interpersonal networks to vouch for the researcher’s trustworthiness, in addition to being a strategy to find new respondents. This procedure meant that beyond my initial contacts, most informants were not previously known to me. There are possible shortcomings of the snowball technique. For example, individuals may nominate others who think like them, limiting the generalizability of any findings (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981). However, I believe that the benefits the snowball method can provide, namely, locating members of a specific secret population and gaining insight into their corrupt activities, outweigh this weakness. I had several starting contacts, whom I drew deliberately from a wide spectrum of people, from low-level private firm employees to top executives of national governmental organizations, based on my own social networks of friends and friends of friends. I also interviewed corruption experts: practitioners and academics working at anti-corruption and pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), investigative media platforms, and research institutes and universities. In the summer of 2022, I went back to talk with fifteen people whom I had originally interviewed in 2009 and 2010. I was interested in their opinions about changes in corruption patterns over the previous decade or so. I promised and provided anonymity to all informants. I recorded the interviews when given permission, which happened in most cases during the first large phase of my data collection in late 2009 and early 2010. I was interested mainly in their stories about corrupt transactions they were involved in or at least had knowledge of because their family members, neighbors, or colleagues participated. In some cases, the respondent’s social background or demographic characteristics turned out to be important factors, so—only when they are relevant—I mention them in this book. All went well in terms of participation. Things changed after the parliamentary election in April 2010, when the current prime minister, Orbán, and his governing party Fidesz came into power. Orbán turned the country toward illiberal democracy. As part of a grandiose social engineering project, the government started to control—with different tools—deeper and deeper spheres of social life. In this newly emerging authoritarian regime, the patterns of corruption transformed too. Its more serious forms became centralized and monopolized by the governing elite, while lower-level corruption became less tolerated by authorities. These changes intrigued me, and I decided to continue my fieldwork in Hungary. While conducting interviews

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during summer and winter breaks, I realized that people gradually became less talkative. It was increasingly difficult to find interviewees willing to talk about corruption, and even those who agreed to participate in my research were more reluctant to allow me to record the conversations. Consequently, I learned how to take notes quickly during interviews. Another important source of the empirical material of this book was articles and reports published by Hungarian investigative journalists. Although the Orbán government eventually captured or dismantled a large portion of the previously independent media, many journalists remained autonomous and continued to reveal the corrupt nature of the system. I had many conversations with these courageous people who jeopardized their careers by publishing their reports. If anyone understands the nature of corruption in contemporary Hungary, it is them. Some became my friends.

Conceptual Background I developed and gradually crystallized my own conception of corruption on the basis of my research findings and my readings of the academic literature. The basic idea underlying my view originally occurred to me after I conducted my first set of interviews. At the time, I was reading Peter Blau’s (1989) republished classic work Exchange and Power in Social Life. Blau (viii) considers micro-level social exchange as the central principle of social life, in which “each gains something while paying a price.” While thinking about my recently conducted interviews, I realized that almost all the corruption cases described by the respondents could fit Blau’s framework and therefore into the larger framework of social life. In corrupt exchanges, just as in regular transactions, actors exchange different types of resources with each other. Blau’s previous (1955) empirical work dealt with formal organizations—specifically, informal relations in work groups, another impor tant dimension of corruption because at least one actor in a corrupt transaction exchanges organizational resources informally. My book was also inspired by other sociologists whose scholarship focused on the microdynamics of interpersonal relations and social associations and by some of the economic anthropologists who studied the flow and exchange of goods and other resources in society. From the list of sociologists, I need to highlight the work of Mark Granovetter, Roger V. Gould, and Katherine Stovel. My conception of corruption has also been strongly stimulated by Georg Simmel, who believed that the analysis of social associations and the processes governing them should be the central task of sociology. Yet Simmel also emphasized the importance of more stable social forms that channel and mediate interactions. They are like cups of

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different sizes and shapes—each molds social experience into forms while at the same time leaves room for agency (Erikson 2017). Another important inspiration came from economic anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Larissa Adler Lomnitz, Christopher A. Gregory, and Karl Polanyi, who studied different forms of exchange in economic life in both ancient and modern societies. And last but not least, I have to mention Marcel Mauss, whose work on gift giving and reciprocity, which crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology, had a significant influence on my study. All these great authors were important to this book because their concepts inspired me to write on corruption from a sociological perspective. Apart from attempting to deconstruct the theoretical formulas developed by these scholars through the help of ethnography, the book also provides a corruption-centered narrative of the transition from communism and especially the post-transition history of Hungary. Here I tried to capture the evolution of different corruption patterns over the past three decades. The sociology of corruption in this book is a middle-range theory, presented in the form of a parsimonious typology, that proposes par ticu lar mechanisms to explain a wide-ranging empirical phenomenon (Merton 1945; Erikson 2017, 287). Although the main focus of this study is on individual-level exchange, I do not deny the existence of mezzo-level (organizational) or macro-level (societal) social arrangements that impose constraints on social relations. Social facts are real and have their place in this analysis. My interviews suggest that corrupt actors are embedded in multiple layers of social life, including interpersonal relations, microsocial orders, organizational hierarchies, situations and opportunities, and larger components such as social class and cultural history. Therefore, corruption is a complex phenomenon that has several forms and dimensions and that cannot be fully understood by applying to it only one universal conception. As I am finishing this manuscript in the fall of 2022, Orbán has already started his fourth consecutive term as the prime minister of Hungary. That makes him the longest-serving elected leader in Europe. Orbán and his party Fidesz scored a landslide victory in the election in April 2022 and secured a supermajority in the single-chamber parliament, which again allows them to change the constitution and even further consolidate their power. At the same time, there is a war in neighboring Ukraine, and many people expect a global economic downturn, which could seriously affect most of the world, including Hungary.

The chapters of this book are organized to follow the structure of my corruption typology. I move from an abstract sociological conceptualization of corruption to a brief historical overview of actual corrupt patterns in postsocialist Hungary. In chapter 1, I discuss the analytical approaches to developing a new typology and

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to ensuing a sociological theory of corruption. This new resource transfer–based conceptualization reveals important social and organizational aspects of corruption and encompasses major forms of the phenomenon. Chapter 2 provides a chronological outline of corruption in postcommunist Hungary. I discuss the development of different types of corruption as well as the country’s current social, economic, and political situation. In chapters 3 and 4, I focus on market corruption, an ad hoc transaction between two strangers. I argue here that market corruption is a more complex phenomenon than the dominant principal-agent model that attempts to theorize it suggests. Furthermore, principal-agent models overemphasize the bribetaker agent’s role in a corrupt transaction and neglect the bribe-giver client’s side. To fully understand this phenomenon, we need to insert the clients into the analysis. Using examples from my interviews, I discuss in chapter 3 how market corruption happens spontaneously “on the spot” where participants meet. There are various motivations influencing the clients, mostly ordinary citizens, to participate in market corruption. The examples suggest that the relative social status of the actors is also an important factor in corrupt transactions, shaping communication strategies and in fact the whole setting of the corrupt exchange. Chapter 4 focuses on the organizational aspects of market corruption. Although agents typically pursue their own individual profits, their colleagues are often involved in or at least aware of corruption. Sometimes the colleagues’ silence can be bought in order to hide the corrupt nature of the transaction. This chapter provides examples of agents’ deliberate efforts to hide corruption from internal organizational control mechanisms and shows how and why agents cooperate and negotiate with others who see their corrupt action. The topic of chapters 5 and 6 is social bribe, the gift-giving type of corruption. In contrast to market corruption, social bribe requires close social relationships and a certain level of trust between the partners. Social bribe is a reciprocal exchange, sometimes between more than two actors. Chapter 5 discusses the main patterns of social bribe and the ways people develop bonds in order to conduct corruption and to use preexisting social networks as ready infrastructure for corrupt transactions. Social bribe is a complex social phenomenon comprising sequences of illegal, informal, and sometimes even legal transactions, often facilitated by multiple corruption brokers. Chapter 6 introduces the concept of brokerage in corrupt transactions and reviews its main forms and features. In chapter 7, I analyze situations in which an entire organization is the primary beneficiary of corruption, known as the corrupt organization phenomenon. The chapter reviews cases in which other wise typical employees are willing to engage in corruption for their organization. It also discusses the two main

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drivers of such behavior, corrupt organizational culture and personal dependencies embedded in the organization’s power structure. Chapters 8 and 9 focus on distribution-based corruption, that is, state capture. Since 2010, when Orbán and Fidesz came to power, corruption in Hungary has become more systemic. A relatively small clique has captured most political institutions and many economic sectors in the country and siphoned off huge amounts of public resources. Chapter 8 covers grand corruption in the period after 2010. In state capture, democratic “check and balance” institutions such as the judiciary, anti-corruption commissions, special prosecutors, ombudsmen, and auditors are controlled by corrupt political and economic elites. In chapter 9, I cover patron-client networks and professional corruption brokers, two important elements of the system that help maintain state capture and social control in Hungary. Chapter 10 examines the grand corruption situation in 2022. Chapter 11 discusses possible anti-corruption policies. I provide a basic classification of anti-corruption strategies and then show how different anticorruption tools affect each corruption type discussed in the book. I argue here that anti-corruption strategies can be effective if they are tailored to respond to par ticular types of corruption.

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1 A SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF CORRUPTION

This book proposes a sociological approach to corruption focusing on local configurations of relations and relational patterns. This sociology of corruption is different from both the utilitarian and the constructivist approaches. The utilitarian approach typically applies rational choice theory to explain corruption and treats all corrupt exchanges generally as a quid pro quo between two individuals: an agent who illegally sells his or her right to make official decisions to an outsider client who pays for them (Banfield 1975; Rose-Ackerman 1975; Shleifer and Vishny 1993). This view—shared by most economists and political scientists—claims that participants in corruption are atomized or “undersocialized” actors who are minimally affected by social relations (Granovetter 1985; Jancsics 2014). They are motivated primarily by self-interest or, more specifically, by greed. This approach claims that corruption is ethically wrong and profoundly harmful to society because it makes state institutions dysfunctional, wastes taxes, deteriorates service quality, erodes trust in the public sector, lowers investment, and retards economic growth. There is a growing body of scholarship in political science that conceptualizes corruption as a collective action problem (Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell 2013; Mungiu-Pippidi 2015; Bauhr 2017; Rothstein and Varraich 2017). According to this approach, corruption persists because the public agent perceives that all other agents are likely to be corrupt. In a society in which corruption is the most anticipated behav ior, actors are not motivated to enforce anti-corruption punishments, and therefore no one will be held accountable for the corrupt act. Yet even this collective action approach explains corruption by the individuals’ 8

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A socIologIcAl conceptuAlIzAtIon of corruptIon

rational means-end calculation. When corruption is free riding, benefiting from corruption without paying the “price” in the form of punishment, the most rational and profitable choice for an agent is to participate in it. In short, this approach—dominant in contemporary scholarship—analyzes corruption as an equally bad thing all around the world without considering social or historical contexts or referring to any specific form of the phenomenon. In other words, rational choice theory applies to all cases. In contrast to this contextless utilitarian view, the constructivist approach— represented mainly by anthropologists—treats corruption as socially and culturally constructed. Here context is every thing. Corruption is considered an emic concept and analyzed based on the local communities’ viewpoints rather than preexisting scientific concepts (Torsello and Venard 2016). These scholars typically use an ethnographic research method as the primary way to collect data. Within the ethnographic framework, structured and semi-structured interviews are regarded as especially sufficient because they allow the interviewee to interact with the researcher and leave space for the flow of opinions and live views (Torsello 2016, 13). This line of research often focuses on the discourse of corruption, asserting that meanings and definitions of the phenomenon are culturally and historically contingent (Olivier de Sardan 1999; Parry 2000; Smith 2008; Gupta 2012). Corruption can be also understood as the way in which people make sense of politics and the state (Torsello 2016, 9). This cultural relativist view claims that there is a context-based moral diversity around corruption. Practices defined as corrupt in the Western world—or by the utilitarian approach—may be regarded as acceptable or even moral obligations in other cultures (Hasty 2005). This also suggests that corruption is not necessarily a negative thing; it can be the weapon of the weak or a survival kit, a functional and socially cohesive phenomenon (Shore and Haller 2005). Another point, also derived from this anthropological tradition, is that powerful actors can define and interpret the scope of the law, thus exploiting its ambiguity (Pardo 2004, 6). Corrupt behav ior is not simply a selfish and greedy individual act but is shaped by a larger sociocultural notion of power, privilege, and responsibility (Anders and Nuijten 2008). Members of the elite have an opportunity to judge certain acts as corrupt and others as noncorrupt. In sum, according to this approach, the concept of “corruption”—often used within quotation marks—is not translatable across cultures; the only thing we can do is to try to understand what corruption means in different parts of the world. The utilitarian approach fails to capture the social complexity of corruption. Since it claims that corruption is the same general and negative thing everywhere in the world, it falls short of incorporating the real-life experiences of people.

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My position is closer to the anthropological approach, which has clear merits compared to the utilitarian tradition. I highly value the ethnographic method used by anthropologists. To fully understand corruption, we should drill down to the microsocial level and grapple with the intent of the corrupt actors from inside. I also agree with some other points from this perspective—for example, that corruption may have socially cohesive forms and that the moral aspects of corruption exist in relation to cultures, subcultures, and historical context. However, I do not fully share the hyper-relativist view often taken by these scholars. Even if the participants consider their actions noncorrupt or morally justifiable, the resource transfer between them is real and empirically observable; so we can identify the ways that such transfers happen. Although the phenomenon is complex and multifaceted, there are general patterns of corrupt exchange that can be found across cultures. On the basis of such postulations, I propose here a sociology of corruption with a primary focus on such patterns. Georg Simmel (1950, 387) claims that “all contacts among men [people] rest on the schema of giving and returning the equivalence.” In following such an approach, this book views corruption as a transfer and counter-transfer of money and other goods—albeit a secret and illegal one—between different actors. Yet corrupt participants do not act in a social vacuum; their actions are constantly shaped by distinct principles related to temporal or more stable social forms. For Simmel, society is a web of crystallized interactions, but then there is a point in this social process when such an arrangement takes on a life of its own and establishes more stable forms that themselves channel and mediate interactions (J. L. Martin 2009, 3). If we intend to fully understand corruption, we need to study the intersection between interactions and the forms within which such interactions happen, a dialectic between structure and agency. Furthermore, corruption is an organizational phenomenon, since what is transferred, at least by one actor, comes from a formal organization (Graycar and Jancsics 2017). In pure informal exchanges, the organizational affiliation of the partners is irrelevant: the giver who initiates the transaction and the receiver who later reciprocates each bring their own or their social groups’ resources into the transaction. For example, when a new resident moves into a neighborhood and a neighbor brings over home-baked cakes, and in return the new resident invites the neighbor in for lunch, it is a typical case of a society-to-society gift transaction (Graycar and Jancsics 2017). In contrast to this pattern, in corrupt deals the counter-transfer “does not come from one’s own pocket” but comes from public or private organizational resources (Ledeneva 2014, 21). Therefore, one of the main structuring elements of corrupt transactions is the organizational context itself. Organizations have two key realms, formal and informal. The “formal” realm refers to the official structure and processes of an organization, such as rules,

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To the Far North Diary of a Russian World Traveler Ivan Nikolaevich Akif’ëv translated by Andrew A. Gentes

Introduction

“I’m sitting in my cabin admiring a guard’s gleaming bayonet—we’ve been taken prisoner. Strictly speaking, this ain’t bad for the start of the 20th century,” young Ivan Nikolaevich Akif′ëv sardonically wrote in his diary for 21 August (n.s.) 1900, making light of an irretrievable breakdown in relations that had just occurred between Americans and Russians aboard a ramshackle ship in the North Pacific, a breakdown that had nearly led to deadly violence. Despite his black humor, Akif′ëv was unwittingly prescient, for violence narrowly averted would indeed be “not bad” during the decades that followed 1900. This adventurous physician’s diary of his remarkable journey from St. Petersburg across Europe, the Atlantic, and the United States and then around the North Pacific offers a unique glimpse into the dawning of the tumultuous twentieth century—a glimpse on the one hand peripheral to Russia but on the other hand very much a reflection of it. Nonetheless, To the Far North is unlike any other source on the topic because its topic is unique. We know little about Akif ′ëv (pronounced a-keef-YOFF). Although his diary appeared in two editions,1 it was apparently not popular. This has left its author largely forgotten. The only other sources on him are a pair of obituaries and an anonymously authored website.2 From these we learn Akif ′ëv was 1 The White Man’s Burden—The Kipling Society, accessed 20 June 2023. 2. See “Notes on the Translation.” 1

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born 29 August 1872 in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod. Following grade school he enrolled in the medical program at Moscow University, where his interests also included politics, industry, and philosophy. While still in university, Akif ′ëv was named to lead a medical unit assigned to the government’s construction of the Samara–Zlatoust railway. After receiving his doctorate, Akif ′ëv visited Italy and Switzerland, where he met the Swiss physician and medical researcher Emil Theodor Kocher, who in 1909 would win a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in aseptic surgery. In 1898, despite youth and inexperience, though possibly through connections he made on the railway project, Akif ′ëv joined a timber-surveying expedition to Korea organized by Vladimir M. Vonliarliarskii and Aleksandr M. Bezobrazov.3 Akif ′ëv’s connection to Vonliarliarskii proved auspicious. After their return to Russia, the latter chose Akif ′ëv as his family’s physician, and the 1900 Chukotka Expedition that Akif ′ëv joined and is documented here was realized thanks to Vonliarliarskii’s efforts. This expedition’s precedents included the Alaska Gold Rush, which itself formed part of a global phenomenon of Industrial Age gold rushes. Moreover, in 1897 Russia had adopted the gold standard and, although this temporarily devalued the ruble, “the state may have improved the connections between the Russian and Western capital markets, allowing . . . private borrowers to obtain funds more plentifully, more cheaply, or both,” writes one historian.4 But just as importantly, the 1900 expedition reflected Russia’s anxiety over American encroachments in Chukotka, not just to find gold but to trade with the native Chukchi. The Alaska Gold Rush drew many thousands to the Far North to look for riches. Many prospectors did get rich, yet a greater number arrived too late to stake a claim, and some even ended up broke and stranded 3. V. V. Korsakov, “Bezvremenno pogibshaia sila,” Russkie vedomosti, 23 April 1906, 4; “Skorbnyi listok,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal 216 ( June 1906): 396. See also nlr_spb, “Bezvremenno pogibshchaia sila,” LiveJournal, 19 May 2016 “Безвременно погибшая сила”: nlr_spb—LiveJournal, accessed 31 August 2022. The website is vague as to its sources. 4. This expedition amounted to what one historian calls a “front” that allowed St. Petersburg to send military servicemen in the guise of timber surveyors to the Yalu River valley, where during September–October 1898 they reconnoitered march routes for a future war against Japan. David S. Crist, “Russia’s Far Eastern Policy in the Making,” Journal of Modern History 14, no. 3 (1942): 318–21; Karen A. Snow, “Commercial Shipping and Singapore, 1905–1916,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (1998): 48; Olga Crisp, “The Russo-Chinese Bank: An Episode in Franco-Russian Relations,” Slavonic and East European Review 52, no. 127 (1974): 212; Vladimir Tikhonov, “Korea in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1850s–1945: Between Orientalism and Revolutionary Solidarity,” Journal of Korean Studies (1979–) 21, no. 2 (2016): 394; and Thomas C. Owen, “Chukchi Gold: American Enterprise and Russian Xenophobia in the Northeastern Siberia Company,” Pacific History Review 77, no. 1 (2008): 49, 55–56. Though appointed the expedition’s physician, Akif′ëv surveyed and even authored for a secret government publication a description of one potential march route. For his service he was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav (or Stanislaus), third class (Korsakov, “Bezvremenno pogibshaia sila”; “Skorbnyi listok”; and “ ‘Bezvremenno pogibshchaia sila”).

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in Alaska.5 American newspapers and government reports alerted St. Petersburg to the fact that some miners were turning their attentions across the narrow Bering Strait to Chukotka, where Russians had almost no physical presence.6 Anglo intervention into North Pacific regions claimed by Russia had been going on for decades. The Chukotka Expedition was therefore designed as much to reassert Russian sovereignty over the peninsula as it was to find gold.7 Enter Karl Ivanovich Bogdanovich (Karol Bohdanowicz) (1864–1947), a russified Pole, ethnographer, and geologist working in the Russian government’s Mining Department (Gornyi departament). In spring 1898, while researching on Kamchatka Peninsula, he theorized on the basis of Alaska’s and Chukotka’s similar geology that gold might also be found in Chukotka. In late 1899 Bogdanovich seems to have joined a group that we know pressured the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains (MZGI8) to recommend an expedition be launched to ascertain the presence of both gold and foreigners on Chukotka.9 But the government under Nicholas II was an indecisive one and lacked the wherewithal to act on the MZGI’s recommendation. At this point, Vladimir Mikhailovich Vonliarliarskii (1852–1946) decided to step in. The son of a major general and a member of the Novgorod elite who earned renown during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), Vonliarliarskii was an entrepreneurial investor with some experience in mining. Together with Bezobrazov he had launched the 1898 Korea Expedition in the expectation that war with Japan was imminent. The historian W. E. Mosse cites the so-called 5. Ian M. Drummond, “The Russian Gold Standard, 1897–1914,” Journal of Economic History 36, no. 3 (1976): 688. See also Crisp, “Russian Financial Policy and the Gold Standard at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” The Economic History Review 6, no. 2 (1953): 158, 168–69. 6. Pamela Cravez, The Biggest Damned Hat: Tales from Alaska’s Territorial Lawyers and Judges (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2017), ch. 1; Bathsheba Demuth, “Geology, Labor, and the Nome Gold Rush,” in A Global History of Gold Rushes, ed. Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 252–72; Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 202–15; T. H. Carlson, “The Discovery of Gold at Nome, Alaska,” Pacific Historical Review 15, no. 3 (1946): 259–78; Andrea R. C. Helms and Mary Childers Mangusso, “The Nome Gold Conspiracy,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1982): 10–19; and Leland H. Carlson, “Nome: From Mining Camp to Civilized Community,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1947): 233–42. 7. Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 146–49; John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 33–39, 86–88; Adam Burns, American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783–2013 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 42–4; and Zabytaia okraina: rezul′taty dvukh ekspeditsii na Chukotskii poluostrov, snariazhennykh v 1900–1901 gg. V. M. Vonliarliarskim, v sviazi s proektom vodvoreniia zlotopromylennosti na etoi okraine (St. Petersburg: Tipografii S. Suvorina, 1902), 15–16. 8. Demuth, Floating Coast, 63, 86–87; Nikolay Ivanovich Kulik and Anastasiya Alekseevna Yarzutkina, “Gold of Chukotka and Foreign Investments: Institutional Approach,” Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research 15, no. 3 (2013): 409. 9. MZGI stands for Ministerstvo zemledeliia i gosudarstvennikh imushchestv.

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Bezobrazov Clique as an example of Russia’s “reckless adventurism in the Far East.”10 Now, in 1900, having somehow learned of the government’s internal debate over Chukotka, Vonliarliarskii offered once more to fund a venture that he intended would benefit both himself and Russia. On 15 March the government accepted Vonliarliarskii’s offer, on the condition that Bogdanovich be named the expedition’s leader. Bogdanovich and Vonliarliarskii immediately began planning for an excursion to the other side of the world, one to begin in spring 1901, but fast-developing events would move this start date ahead by a full year.11 Time and money were of the essence. American prospectors seemed ready to inundate Chukotka the same way they had Alaska. With the clock ticking, the Russians needed to get there before “tens of thousands of Americans crossed the Bering Strait upon the first opportunity, to establish mines on our side.”12 Vonliarliarskii, devised a complicated investment scheme with British and American partners, to finance the expedition. Principal among them was the Englishman Frederick W. Baker. The Russian government approved their arrangement but further stipulated that Bogdanovich, already named to lead the expedition, should also serve as an MZGI representative with plenipotentiary authority to address any predatory mining by foreigners. The granting of such power to a state geologist spotlights the near absence of communications between the metropole and its Far North periphery, but also shows that for St. Petersburg, the expedition’s primary goal was to assert territorial sovereignty. Further indicating a suspicion of foreigners, the final government contract specified that Russian employees were to be hired in numbers sufficient to offset the expedition’s foreign hires, and that the expedition include a physician, three Pacific Fleet sailors, and a detachment of five “Kamchatka Cossacks” (i.e., mixed-race Kamchadal irregulars).13 Akif′ëv was Vonliarliarskii’s obvious choice as physician. But the addition of armed Cossacks and sailors gave the expedition a military aspect that had negative consequences, as readers of this diary will learn. 10. K. I. Bogdanovich, Ocherki Chukotskago poluostrova (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. S. Suvorin, 1901), vii–iii; Sergei Iu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel′svto sotsial′no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1960) 2:279; and V. M. Vonliarliarskii, Chukotskii poluostrov. Ekspeditsii V. M. Vonliarliarskogo i otkrytie novogo zolotonoskogo rainona, bliz ust′ia p. Anadyria, 1900–1912 gg. (St. Petersburg: Tipo-litografii K. I. Lingarda, 1913), 12–3. We learn from Akif′ëv’s diary that Bogdanovich returned to Russia from Kamchatka aboard the same vessel that brought Akif′ëv back from the 1898 Korea Expedition. Therefore, they knew each other before the 1900 expedition. 11. W. E. Moss, “Imperial Favourite: V. P. Meshchersky and the Grazhdanin,” Slavonic and East European Review 59, no. 4 (1981): 544. 12. Vonliarliarskii, Chukotskii poluostrov, 13; Vitte, Vospominaniia, 2:279; and Bogdanovich, Ocherki, viii–ix. 13. Bogdanovich, Ocherki, ix.

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Vonliarliarskii and his partners finalized plans hastily. Upon learning no ships were available in Vladivostok, they agreed that Baker’s American contacts would acquire and outfit a steamer in San Francisco instead. Traveling by rail and sea, the Russian expeditionaries (along with Baker and the American George Roberts, who were to join them in London) would rendezvous with the foreign expeditionaries in California, where common laborers and a steamer crew would also be hired. On reaching the Chukotka Peninsula, the expedition would begin its investigations and then rendezvous with the Iakut, a Russian navy ship that would deliver additional supplies as well as the government-mandated Cossacks and sailors. The Iakut would then depart for its yearly trip to Kamchatka before returning to pick up the Russian nationals and bringing them to Vladivostok. Everyone else would return to San Francisco. These logistics, though they proved imperfect, are nonetheless admirable for their time: they coordinated participants, travel routes and means, and supplies over an expanse that stretched from St. Petersburg west to the Bering Sea. Not wanting to lose another minute, the Russians left St. Petersburg on 18 April/1 May, one day after Vonliarliarskii signed his contract with the Mining Department.14 Akif′ëv begins his diary with an account of their train crossing the frontier. He was twenty-seven years old and keen for adventure. By his side was Aleksandr Gennad′evich Miagkov (1870–1960), from Kazan, a young nobleman who as a university student at the St. Petersburg Technology Institute had joined public demonstrations, run afoul of the authorities, and left before getting his degree.15 His relationship to Akif ′ëv before the Chukotka Expedition is unknown, but clearly they were friends from the beginning of the trip. In 1901 Miagkov would publish his own much briefer memoir of the expedition, one that aligns closely with Akif ′ëv’s diary.16 Akif′ëv mentions Miagkov frequently, often using the affectionate diminutive “Gennad′ich.” Their friendship, combined with the contents of the diary and what we know of Miagkov’s background, suggests that despite his evident service to the tsarist government, Akif ′ëv’s personal politics skewed left. His previous forays to Europe and Asia undoubtedly exposed him to other views. Whereas many educated Russians during this period espoused liberal beliefs, his diary shows 14. Bogdanovich, Ocherki, x; Zabytaia okraina, 18–19; Kulik and Yarzutkina, “Gold of Chukotka,” 410; Vonliarliarskii, Chukotskii poluostrov, 13–14, 16, 20; and Jane Woodworth Bruner, “The Czar’s Concessionaires: The East Siberian Syndicate of London; A History of Russian Treachery and Brutality,” Overland Monthly 44 (1904): 412. 15. Zabytaia okraina, 19; Bogdanovich, Ocherki, x; and Vonliarliarskii, Chukotskii poluostrov, 1–2, 20. 16. [Anon.], “Miagkov Aleksandr Gennad′evich (1870–1960),” in Religioznaia deiatel′nost′ Russkogo Zarubezh′ia, Aleksandr Gurevich, dir., Tsentr religioznoi literatury VGBIL, Biblioteki-fonda Мягков Александр Геннадьевич (narod.ru), accessed 4 May 2022.

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Akif ′ëv to have been especially broadminded. Nonetheless, his diary (at least) does not suggest he was an intellectual. Rather, it reveals interests typical of most Euro-American males his age: Akif ′ëv expresses an interest in women and mentions more than once drinking with Miagkov and other buddies; he goes hunting and sport shooting but also enjoys gathering wildflowers. More historically significant, Akif ′ëv’s diary demonstrates a worldview shaped by nationalist, imperialist, and racialist discourses. He stereotypes (in order) Germans, Brits, Jews, Americans, Chukchi, and Japanese. His praise of Russians is at times chauvinistic, though he never rises to the level of the evangelizing Slavophiles. What he thought about Americans before the expedition can only be guessed. But based on what he says about those who accompanied him to Chukotka, he seems to have shared the prejudice held by the Moscow merchant Pavel A. Buryshkin, who condemned Western businessmen’s motives as decidedly more mercenary than those of their Russian counter parts. Buryshkin embodied a general Russian contempt toward America as being a country debased by capitalist excess, which antisemites and polonophobes furthermore blamed on immigrant Jews and Poles.17 Akif ′ëv was therefore perhaps conditioned to see the worst in the American expeditionaries, though if his and Bogdanovich’s accounts are to be believed, those Americans did their best not to disappoint. Still, it is difficult to know if Akif ′ëv is representative of other Russians who shared his socioeconomic position at the time, given that the scholarly literature focuses on Slavophiles and other exceptional groups.18 Like now, worldwide anxiety characterized the period when Akif ′ëv penned his diary; and like now, nationalism, imperialism, and racialism factored into that anxiety. Nationalism emerged in Europe during the late eighteenth century. Following the 1789 French Revolution, Giuseppe Mazzini and others on the political left embraced and promoted nationalism as both a domestic and an international pacifier. But as the century wore on, nationalist politics increasingly slanted right. One’s personal identity came to be associated with one’s ethnicity and language; those most obsessed with these signifiers increasingly aligned themselves with conservative, reactionary, and repressive agendas.19 This latter form of nationalism, the kind most recognizable to us today, was not limited to Europe: versions of it emerged in the Americas and Asia as well. A foremost example is Japan, where, after the Meiji emperor resumed 17. A. Miagkov, “V poiskakh za zolotom,” Russkoe bogatstvo 8 (1901): 102–59. 18. Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 121–22, 127. 19. Robert V. Allen, Russia Looks at America: The View to 1917 (Washington: Library of Congress, 1988); and Hans Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind: Or Russian Discoveries of America,” Pacific Historical Review 47, no. 1 (1978): 27–51.

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supreme power in 1868, his government promoted an aggressive nationalistic chauvinism to unify the country against predatory Great Powers.20 Imperialism’s precise origins and contours remain contested (some historians even demote imperialism to “modern colonialism”), but it seems fair to say that imperial practices—whether enacted by Japan, Great Britain, or the United States—carried associations with nationalism and international commerce, and sometimes also with religious or secular evangelism.21 For example, some in America’s newly emerging middle class saw themselves as “the true police of the world,” dutybound to protect civilization and prevent other countries’ citizenry from turning into “savages like the communal tribes of the Aleutian Islands,” whereas certain Russian Slavophiles had “a faith that Russian principles—whether communal, religious, or socialist—pointed the way to the future of mankind.”22 Like warm air to a typhoon, popular racism and the racialistic pseudosciences of social Darwinism, Lombrosianism, and degeneration theory blended with nationalism and imperialism to form “the popular belief that each nation embodied a particular race.”23 Enjoying widespread embrace by northerntier peoples, racialism found purchase even among defenders of such multinational empires as Russia and Great Britain and led to the proverbial conceit of “The White Man’s Burden.”24 “Inferior races,” Lord Acton therefore wrote, “are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality.”25 For his part, Nikolai Kh. Bunge, writing in 1895 as chairman of Russia’s Committee of Ministers, shared this belief: “The weakening of the racial differences in the borderlands can only be achieved by attracting the core of the Russian population to the borderlands, but this will only work if 20. For both a classic and amore recent treatment, see E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 21. Nancy K. Stalker, Japan: History and Culture from Classical to Cool (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 209–22. 22. Norman Etherington, “Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism,” History and Theory 21, no. 1 (1982): 1–36; Robin A. Butlin, Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies c. 1880–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21–30; Raymond F. Betts, The False Dawn: European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 122, 147; and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 287. 23. James Weir Jr., quoted in Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), loc. 1416, Kindle; Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind,” 31. 24. Lloyd S. Kramer, Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 150–51. 25. [John Dalberg-Acton], Home and Foreign Review 1 ( July 1862): 17.

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the Russian population does not adopt the language and habits of the borderlands but rather brings their own there.”26 Racialism instrumentalized geopolitical rivalry as a struggle for survival and fueled a second colonial thrust, aimed this time at Africa as well as Asia. By virtue of their subjugation, colonized peoples were deemed racially inferior and subjected to an “epistemology of exploration”: ethnography and anthropology early established markers that distinguished between the “barbarian” and the “civilized” worlds.27 Imperial Russia played a role in all these developments. By 1900, chauvinism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and nativism were evident throughout the Russian government and society.28 Like everyone at the time, Akif ′ëv was subjected to the discourses conveying these beliefs. Despite this, Akif ′ëv tries in his diary’s pages to give voice to his more humanitarian instincts. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he does not. Though manifestly proud to be Russian, Akif ′ëv’s patriotism is tempered, as his withering criticisms of his government and society show, especially when he complains about the failure to develop the Far North and condemns the Sakhalin penal colony. He also offers measured praise for both Japanese and Chukchi culture. Akif ′ëv’s intuitive (one might add, medically refined) appreciation of other peoples’ humanity therefore appears alongside the reigning discourses he grew up with and digested. His diary embodies Akif ′ëv’s own humanity as well as his era’s anxieties, and as such, it documents a tension that moderns still confront today. This book’s afterword will say more about the Chukotka Expedition and its participants during the period following that covered by Akif ′ëv’s diary. For now, let us turn to the diary itself, which consists of eleven chapters that can be grouped into five sections: (1) Akif ′ëv’s journey as far as San Francisco and his time there; (2) the Chukotka Expedition and its denouement (this forms the bulk of the diary); (3) Akif ′ëv’s and Miagkov’s visit to the Sakhalin penal 26. Quoted in Anatolyi Remnev, “Siberia and the Russian Far East in the Imperial Geography of Power,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, ed. Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 442. 27. Butlin, Geographies of Empire, 121–23, 225–26. 28. Andreas Renner, “Defining a Russian Nation: Mikhail Katkov and the ‘Invention’ of National Politics,” Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 4 (2003): 659–82; Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Robert Weinberg, Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Jeffrey Brooks argues that by the early twentieth century, Russians were becoming less xenophobic. He cites voting patterns for Duma candidates as evidence of this. I believe that much of the evidence, including that cited here and Akif′ëv’s diary itself, counters this interpretation. Pace Jeffrey Brooks, “Official Xenophobia and Popular Cosmopolitanism in Early Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review 97 (1992): 1432–33.

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colony; (4) their brief stay in Vladivostok and sea voyage to Japan; and (5) their visit to Nagasaki and its environs. The first section offers valuable insights on fin-de-siècle life in Europe and especially in the United States. Akif ′ëv visited what were then the United States’ three largest cities: New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco.29 What he saw intrigued him. Like most foreign travelers, Akif ′ëv uses his home country as his standard of reference and evaluates the differences as either good or bad, as tourists will. This section also offers a valuable account of steamer and train travel, showing the state of these technologies in 1900. The second section concerns the Far North—a flexible term in both English and Russian (dalekii sever, or more recently, dal′nii sever), though one that generally refers to the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. More narrowly (given the distinction sometimes made between the “Near North” and the “Far North”), it designates everything north of the tree line running across Eurasia and North America. The Far North is often portrayed as barren, bleak, cold, and inimical to human existence, and Akif ′ëv more or less follows this trend.30 In Nome, Alaska, during January, the daily mean temperature is 5.2°F, the average high 13.1°F, and the average low –2.8°F. On the Chukotka Peninsula in, say, the village of Uélen, it is colder still. There February, not January, is the coldest month: the daily mean is –5.3°F, the average high 0.9°F, and the average low –11.2°F. Uélen remains cool during its brief summers: July’s daily mean is 44.1°F, and its average high only 50.2°F.31 Little other than scrub grass and lichen grows on the peninsula named after the indigenous Chukchi, a people linguistically and genetically similar to the Inuit. Until the late nineteenth century, when substantive trading with Americans and Europeans varied their diet, the Chukchi existed almost exclusively on protein derived from aquatic life or domesticated reindeer. Those along the coast (the nuunamiut) lived a more communal and sedentary lifestyle than those inland (the tareumiut). Both groups practiced shamanism, developed advanced hunting techniques, and maintained relations, though taboo prevented them 29. Their respective populations at the time were 3,437,202; 278,718; and 342,782. US Census Bureau, 1900–1980, Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990, Working paper no. 27 (2003) No. HS-7. Population of the Largest 75 Cities: 1900 to 2000, https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/los_angeles_pop.pdf, accessed 20 April 2022. 30. On cultural constructions of the Far North, see Louis Rey et al., eds., Unveiling the Arctic (Calgary: Arctic Institute of America, 1984); Julia Augusta Schwartz and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Northward Ho! An Account of the Far North and Its People (New York: Macmillan, 1929); and Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen et al., eds., Russia’s Far North: The Contested Energy Frontier (New York: Routledge, 2018), chaps. 13–15. 31. “Pogoda i klimat” Климат Уэлена - Погода и климат (pogodaiklimat.ru), accessed 1 September 2022; National Weather Service Zone Area Forecast for Southern Seward Peninsula Coast (weather.gov), accessed 1 September 2022.

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intermarrying. Chukchi were just one among dozens of peoples native to Beringia who traded, intermarried, learned from, and warred against their neighbors. After Russians and Cossacks ventured into northeastern Siberia, they committed numerous atrocities attempting to subdue the Chukchi, who stoutly resisted and sometimes massacred Russian encampments in turn. By the late eighteenth century an informal truce allowed both sides to trade without excessive bloodletting. Russians valued the furs and walrus tusks the Chukchi could supply, whereas Chukchi relished the tea, tobacco, and hardware the Russians provided. But interaction with Europeans and Americans forever altered and nearly destroyed Chukchi society. It was the Russians who apparently brought syphilis and influenza to the Chukchi, whose reindeer herds were similarly stricken by a disabling hoof disease probably introduced by horses. The anthropologist Vladimir G. Bogoras visited Chukotka around the same time Akif ′ëv did, and he learned that smallpox had been ravaging the Chukchi for decades and that an outbreak in 1884 reduced their numbers by a third.32 These circumstances should be kept in mind when reading Akif ′ëv’s comments on the Chukchi. Despite the Academy of Sciences having appointed him and Miagkov the expedition’s ethnographers, neither appears to have been trained in the discipline and certainly they had no previous firsthand knowledge of the nuunamiut they encountered. Rather, they represent those privileged white male dilettantes who flitted around the globe under imperialism, documenting various “savages” and their strange cultures and bringing home cultural artifacts for personal collections and museums.33 Like Lord Acton 32. Waldemar [Vladimir] Bogoras, “The Chukchi of Northeastern Asia,” American Anthropologist 3, no. 1 (1901): 80–108; James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18, 53, 71–74, 79–81, 145–50; Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) 17, 28, 62; Stephan, Russian Far East, 87; Robert Sasso and Merwyn Garbarino, Native American Heritage (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1994), 104; John H. Relethford, Reflections of Our Past: How Human History Is Revealed in Our Genes (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 143; Emilio F. Moran, Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007), 32, 126–27; John P. Ziker, Peoples of the Tundra: Northern Siberians in the Post-Communist Transition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2002), 65; Marina Mogilner, “Russian Physical Anthropology of the Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Centuries: Imperial Race, Colonial Other, Degenerate Types, and the Russian Racial Body,” in Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, ed. Ilya Gerasimov et al. (Boston: Brill, 2009), 155–89; and Demuth, Floating Coast, 52–56, 64, 85–98, 150–51. Accounts from Chukchi perspectives are rare. For a novelized but highly informative account written by a modern-day Chukcha about life during the time Akif ′ëv visited, see Yuri Rytkheu, A Dream in Polar Fog, trans. Ilona Yazhin Chavasse (New York: Archipelago Books, 2005). 33. In addition to the sources already cited, see Hellen Tilley and Robert J. Gordon, eds., Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Richard Lee and Karen Brodkin Sacks, “Imperialism and Resistance: The Work of Kathleen Gough,” Anthropologica 35, no. 2 (1993): 181–93; David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, “World