Slovo 28 1 by SLOVO Journal

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1 (WINTER 2016), 1.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.033

Editorial MARK CRAWFORD Executive Editor, Slovo, 2015-2016 Our peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary academic journal, Slovo is managed and edited by postgraduate students at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. With its field of inquiry spread across the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe, through Russia and into Eurasia, the journal aspires to bring together research from across the humanities and the social sciences. In doing so Slovo has, for many years now, acted as a platform for the many new and unique perspectives towards the region afforded to emerging and promising academics, and as a digital publication we now have the potential advantage of reaching a much broader audience than in the past. The first issue of volume 28 is exemplary of our interdisciplinary scope. We begin with an article by Tom Carter, whose case study examines regional-local executive branch conflict during Russia’s capitalist transition and so reflects insightfully upon how regional leaders consolidated their political territory. We then move to Hanin Hannouch’s exposition of Alexander Medvedkin’s New Moscow. Hannouch’s article successfully refracts early Soviet filmography through the ideological lenses integral to socialist realism, the very real artistic limits to which find fresh scrutiny. Finally, Milan Miljković dissects femininity in the works of contemporary Serbian writer David Albahari, excitingly navigating a number of traumas in Serbia’s recent history. In addition, we have book reviews ranging across a very diverse field – from Hungarian law to sexuality in post-socialist Russia. I would like to pay my thanks to the Slovo editorial board, without whose consistent dedication to the journal this issue would not have been possible. In particular, Managing Editor Nick Miyares, Reviews Editor Oscar Wales, PR Officer Fliss Probert, and our number of general editors have all made professional and often invaluable contributions to the editorial and publishing processes, both in time and in energy. Finally, I am grateful to Bryan Karetnyk, the previous Executive Editor of Slovo whose willing assistance and advice has continued to provide plenty of momentum to the journal. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the author’s work noncommercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 2-20.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.034

Regional-Local Executive Branch Conflict in El’tsin’s Russia: the role of boundary control in Sverdlovsk Oblast TOM CARTER School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London Conflicts between regional executive leaders and the executive heads of regional capital cities were a frequent occurrence in El’tsin’s Russia, and were consequences of the rapid decentralization of power that occurred in the first half of the 1990s. This article focuses on the political competition that emerged in Sverdlovsk Oblast between the regional governor Eduard Rossel’ and his counterpart at the local level, Ekaterinburg Mayor Arkadii Chernetskii. It evaluates the key network relationships held by these two actors during the 1990s, and asks how these networks influenced the balance of regional power prior to the federal recentralisation processes of the 2000s. The article applies the strategy of boundary control, as previously applied by Edward Gibson to the study of subnational regional regimes in Latin America under conditions of national democratization;1 in so doing, it considers Rossel’’s hold over regional power as being determined by his approach to representing regional elite interests, both political and economic, which thereby insulated his power from challengers. Disagreement and conflict between regional leaders and city mayors was commonplace in the El’tsin period for a number of reasons; they included the thirst for power among leading individuals, competing ideological forces, differences in available resources to coerce actors and elites, and a lack of legal clarity over local self-government in the new state.2 Within the intra-territorial conflicts at this time, the political competition between Rossel’ and Chernetskii stands out for being largely conducted within the sphere of elections, combining informal and institutional competition based on respective personal appeal.3 While this conflict was publicly exercised through the city’s electorate, who came to distinguish between oblast and city interests, it was privately focused around the ability Edward Gibson, Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2 See, for example, Troyakova, T., ‘A Primorsky Republic: myth or reality’, Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, Vol. 10, No. 3, (1998), pp.391-404; Romanov, P., and Tartakovskaya, I., ‘Samara Oblast’: A Governor and his Guberniya’, Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, Vol. 10, No. 3, (1998), pp.341-361. 3 Gel’man, V. and Golosov, G., ‘Regional party formation in Russia: the deviant case of Sverdlovsk Oblast’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 1-2, (1998), pp.31-53. 1

3 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA to acquire and distribute the resource requirements of the political and economic elite of the region.

I. FOUNDATIONS OF THE GOVERNOR-MAYOR CONFLICT IN SVERDLOVSK OBLAST The difficult relationship between Eduard Rossel’ and Arkadii Chernetskii lasted almost a decade and a half, from the mid-1990s to 2009. It can be viewed in terms of initially being a struggle for political control between the regional capital city, Ekaterinburg, and the rest of the Oblast, which then continued during the recentralisation process of the 2000s, becoming a personal conflict between the two as the possibilities for regional political competition decreased. The origins of the conflict between the leaders of the region and the regional capital in Sverdlovsk Oblast was initiated by the breakdown of prior patron-client relations between Rossel’ and Chernetskii, prompted inadvertently by central intervention in Sverdlovsk regional politics. For regional regimes, the system of central appointment of regional leaders and loose oversight of regional regimes resulted in the development of personalised power, which prioritised its own preservation. This led to the emergence of neopatrimonial regional power, in which informal group ties, loyalty to the patron and formal positions appeared as core factors used to privatise gains.4 Heads of local government in Russian cities and towns under El’tsin were also initially conducted via central appointment, although based upon the recommendation of the previously appointed heads of regional administration (governors).5 Different pressures according to the location and composition of the city affected these recommendations, and attention had to be paid to the competing interests of different sections of the elites therein.6 Within existing patron-client structures, entrenched clients were potentially able to influence leader’s choices by lobbying for or against the entry of new clients. 7 Much like its citizens’ Gero Erdmann and Ulf Engel, Neopatrimonialism Revisited – Beyond a Catch-All Concept, GIGA Research Program: Legitimacy and Efficiency of Political Systems, No.16, (February 2006). 5 Gel’man, V., Ryzhenkov, S., Belokurova, E., Borisova, N., Reforma mestnoi vlasti v gorodakh Rossii, 1991-2006, (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2008), pp.58-9. 6 See the example of the ethnic republics of Sakha and Tatarstan in Mary McAuley, (1997), Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and six Oblasts (Saratov, Nizhnii Novgorod, Volgograd, Ryazan’, Ul’ianovsk and Tver’) in Vladimir Gel’man., Sergei Ryzhenkov and Michael Brie, Making and Breaking Democratic Transitions: The Comparative Politics of Russia’s Regions, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 7 Archie Brown makes this underlying point in his discussion of the changes in personnel in the higher echelons of the Soviet Communist Party conducted by Gorbachev at the beginning of his leadership – that members of the elite could have blocked Gorbachev from making many of the appointments that he did, 4

4 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA socioeconomic security, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Soviet rule regional political power incurred its own struggle for day-to-day survival, rooted in matters of loyalty and various capacities to obtain and distribute resources. Following his appointment in October 1991 as Head of Regional Administration in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Rossel’ quickly demonstrated that he understood the nuances of his position. To balance the uncertainty from above (where the victory of ‘pro-reform’ forces was not yet assured) he realised the value of support from the most influential sections of the regional economic elite. The appointment of his own proposed candidate as mayor of the region’s capital city was an early test of his local authority. It was therefore critical that he not be challenged over this choice, particularly by the very elites that he supposedly represented. In one of Russia’s most industrialised regions, support for Rossel’’s proposed candidate was balanced within the framework of what the industrial elite of Ekaterinburg saw themselves potentially gaining from the new political order. In the few months that had passed since the final collapse of the Soviet system, the prominent position that industrial directors had previously held in the region had hardly changed despite economic collapse in the heavy industry and military-industrial sectors. Thus, the choice of Arkadii Chernetskii, the General Director of the Uralkhimmash factory in the city, one of the largest industrial plants which dominated the southern part of the city, proved uncontentious and carried the support of other members of the city’s director-elite.8 While never personally close to him, the convenience of this candidate served to lend Rossel’ legitimacy with the industrial elite and signal his willingness to maintain the structural status quo ante of the recent past, under which the interests of the military-industrial complex, heavy industry and construction figured high on the agenda. With a highly politicised public in one of the most pro-reform regions of the state, the directors of a number of other large enterprises from the city, including the influential Uralmash (Uralskii Mashinostroitel’nyi Zavod) plant, firmly supported Chernetskii’s nomination and praised the new Mayor’s ‘managerial qualities’ and ‘suitability’ for the post.9 In selecting a candidate from within the existing ‘director corps’, Rossel’ had

but that they themselves saw the potential benefits of a certain amount of reform. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.53-129 8 Interview with Anatolii Kirillov (Urals El’tsin Centre, Ekaterinburg, March 2011). 9 ‘Dolzhen byt’ podderzhan’, Ural’skii rabochii, 14 January 1992, p.2. Chernetskii had initially presented a list of material demands should he be chosen for the Mayoralty, which the regional press seized on as being unreasonable and somewhat greedy. The directors of a number of industrial enterprises quickly countered this with an open letter to the Ural’skii rabochii paper stating that ‘the Mayor of such a city should be supported both morally and materially more than others’. The significance of the industrial structure of the region and the city should not be lost here, as the onus of the Soviet social contract shifted to make citizens ever more reliant on their employers.

5 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA taken care to acknowledge the primacy of the industrial elite in the region, and acquired their support to begin the legitimisation of his leadership. With the governor appointed by the centre, and with the position of Mayor not legitimated by popular elections, Chernetskii found himself tied to Rossel’’s patronage. The new Mayor’s managerial knowledge of industry in the region complemented Rossel’’s own enterprise management experience, and was promoted as being of vital importance in preventing socioeconomic conditions from spiralling further downwards in the regional capital. Chernetskii’s managerialist approach to running city affairs chimed with Rossel’’s at the regional level, and both figures constructed teams according to their ability to meet the needs of the position rather than to ideological leanings. Choosing experience and knowledge over political ideology, or stability and pragmatism over uncertainty (the very characteristics that Rossel’ pronounced himself to espouse), there are echoes of the choice that El’tsin made in appointing Rossel’ as regional leader.10 As expected under the terms of patronage, Chernetskii supported the governor politically in return for assistance from the regional administration in financing and running the city. For example, he offered cautious support to Rossel’’s unilateral attempt, in 1993, to increase the federal status of the region by declaring a Urals Republic to replace Sverdlovsk Oblast.11 The breakdown of the patron-client relationship occurred towards the end of 1993, when Rossel’ was dismissed by El’tsin for overstepping his authority with this declaration. With Rossel’’s dismissal, the patron-client relationship that Chernetskii had been incorporated into ceased to exist, with the Ekaterinburg Mayor remaining in his position and Rossel’ no longer holding any political leverage over him. Patron-client network theory suggests that it is possible for informal relations to continue after roles have been institutionalised, undermining these institutions and hindering their development. It further notes that a mutual dependency emerges between patron and client over the exchange of resources, stunting the will of actors to eventually break free from such ties.12 While it is

See the interviews with Arkadii Chernetskii in Ural’skii rabochii immediately prior to and after his appointment as Ekaterinburg Mayor by El’tsin. ‘V mery ne naprashivalsia’, Ural’skii rabochii, 18 January 1992, p.1 and ‘Zhit’ stanet luchshe?’, Ural’skii rabochii, 13 February 1992, p.1. 11 As the regional branches of power were located in Ekaterinburg, there was much opportunity for city and regional branches of power to exchange views. This did not, however, extend to other cities. Nikolai Didenko, the mayor of Sverdlovsk Oblast’s second city, Nizhnii Tagil, complained about the lack of attention paid to local self-government by Rossel’ and his government and spoke of poor region-city ties outside of the capital. ‘Nam ne khvataet optimizma’, Ural’skii rabochii, 12 March 1992, p.1. 12 Shmuel Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, Patron, Clients and Friends, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.234 cited in Katharina Hoffman, ‘Informal politics and multilateralism in the post-Soviet space. Ukrainian foreign policy towards the CIS and GUAM’, research paper, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Changing Europe Summer School V, Prague <www.changing10

6 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA logical to suggest that patron-client ties become deeper and more mutually infused with time, in this case there was insufficient consolidation of patronage relations and considerable uncertainty over the future exchange of resources, which resulted in Chernetskii’s exit from the network.13 Once ‘reciprocal dependency’14 lost its relevance, Rossel’ found that he was no longer in a position of control over Chernetskii. Following Rossel’’s dismissal, the Ekaterinburg mayor may well have expected himself to become the next governor of the region, but it was one of his own deputies, Aleksei Strakhov, who was subsequently appointed by El’tsin. While this could have led to antagonism between the mayor and the newly appointed governor, close and cooperative ties developed between the two particularly as Strakhov did not attempt to become patron to Chernetskii.15 Rossel’ quickly returned to regional political life as one of the region’s representatives in the Federation Council, and soon afterwards was elected to the new Sverdlovsk regional Duma. However, there was no revival of his influence over the city mayor, who, growing in political confidence, belatedly began to speak out against the Urals Republic and advocated an allocation of powers between federal and regional, and regional and city, conflicting with that of his former patron. The stance that Chernetskii took up with regards to the centre and on the allocation of regional-local government powers established his political identity, and following Rossel’’s defeat of Aleksei Strakhov in the 1995 Sverdlovsk governor elections, the Ekaterinburg Mayor became Rossel’’s main political opponent.

II. ‘BOUNDARY CONTROL’ AS A STRATEGY FOR CONTROLLING THE REGIONAL POLITICAL SPHERE Having outlined the positions leading up to the governor-mayor conflict in Sverdlovsk Oblast, we can now look to the measures taken by Rossel’ to limit the effects of this

europe.de/index.php> [accessed 10 April 2012]. Howard F. Stein, ‘A note on patron-client theory’, Ethos, Vol. 12, Issue 1, (1984), pp.30-36. 13 On the consequences of shifting expectations of clients over the ability of their patrons to deliver resources, see Henry Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 14 Stein (1984), p.34. 15 Interview with Gennadi Korobkov (Ekaterinburg, December 2011). Korobkov was Strakhov’s deputy governor from August 1994 to August 1995 in charge of relations with society. Korobkov noted the closeness of political ties between Strakhov and Chernetskii while the former was regional leader, thus allowing for a strong degree of close coordination between the city and the regional administrations in this period.

7 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA competition to his leadership, using the boundary control theory to outline how he sought to preserve his power. Extending the power reproduction theory, where elites seek to safeguard their political direction by permitting only those with comparable beliefs into their political spheres, the idea of ‘boundary control’ was examined in Edward Gibson’s research on subnational authoritarian regimes in Latin America as a form of power preservation for leaders to protect their own position within regimes.16 Boundary control is defined as a strategy that protects outsider action or actors from entering occupied political territory before the point of the reproduction of power arises. Gibson explored the use of this strategy by regional leaders in Mexico and Argentina, looking to maintain their power under conditions of national democratization by acting to prevent political opponents’ access to resources and allies. Exploiting those resources available to the incumbent leader, in particular through the unequal balance of forces that these leaders enjoyed, the sub-national regimes, which were already in place and long-standing when the national political arena began its democratization process, continued to pursue authoritarian practices. While the political regime under Rossel’ was not authoritarian, the boundary control approach can be transposed onto the case of sub-national power in Russia, due to the simultaneous process of national and sub-national transition that was occurring as well as the lack of central ability to influence the development of subnational regimes. In the absence of institutionalised and enforced rules applied by the national government upon subnational government, boundary control offers a strategic method of operation whereby a ‘controlling area’ is established that allows regional leaders to “[monopolise] power in the local political arena, but also [manipulate] levers of power in other arenas as well. It requires controlling linkages between levels of territorial organization as well as exercising influence in national political arenas.”17 The uncertain nature of Russian subnational leadership throughout the 1990s created conditions in which, under the system of presidential appointment of regional leaders and even following subsequent popular election, leaders were forced to protect personalised power rather than construct institutions that would secure the successful transferring of power. Regional leaders’ positions combined formal and informal methods to limit competition and ensure the monopoly over administrative resources that might otherwise be used against them. Boundary control is, therefore, Falleti and Lynch, ‘Context and Causal Mechanisms in Political Analysis’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 42, No. 9, (2009), pp.1143-1166; Gibson (2012). 17 Edward L. Gibson, ‘Boundary control: subnational authoritarianism in democratic countries’, World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 1, (2005), p106. 16

8 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA considered here as the mechanism applied by Rossel’ to convert the inputs (elites, resources and networks) to an outcome of continued regional political power. The arguments put forward in the analysis of Rossel’’s actions are intended to show that this behaviour was intentional and, importantly, fulfilled the aims that it set out to achieve. This helps us to understand Rossel’ as both an individual and as an institutional actor (at the heart of a collective political system), insulating himself from rivals. Examining the development of and participation in numerous, distinct and overlapping networks made up of the federal and regional elite (political and economic) and as influenced by Rossel’’s character provides the inputs which resulted in consolidation and preservation of his regional power. Three essential factors are required of the regional leader in the boundary control strategy, and these are proposed as being effective against the challenge that Chernetskii posed to Rossel’’s leadership: 

the monopolisation of national-sub-national linkages (ensuring that only Rossel’ had control over decision-making networks and contacts with the centre, so as to force elites to go through him to advance their causes nationally);



the nationalisation of influence (Rossel’’s ability to be the only actor from Sverdlovsk Oblast capable of pursuing strategies at the national level that would influence regional interests);



the parochialisation of power (the ability to ensure hegemony over the subnational territorial system, making the elite and the wider general public in the region absolutely reliant on his goodwill).18

Several themes are highlighted below in governor-mayor relations in Sverdlovsk Oblast that demonstrate Rossel’’s use of boundary control. Firstly, we look at Rossel’’s ties with El’tsin and how this was portrayed in order to monopolise national-regional linkages. Secondly, we look to Rossel’’s control over local self-government within the region. The clear contradictions between Rossel’’s previously advocated positions on centre-regional relations and his behaviour towards local self-government in general (not only with regards to Ekaterinburg), with 62 towns and cities and 73 municipal (and district) entities in the region by 1998, demonstrate his ability to bring the local elites under his influence.19 The discussion next looks at Rossel’’s and Chernetskii’s competing regional political movements as the conflict was brought into the open and as both sides sought to popularise their

18 19

Gibson (2012), pp.26-29. ‘Kak podelish’, tak i poznesh’, Ural’skii rabochii, 4 February 1998, p.2.

9 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA legitimacy. While these political movements did indeed lend an air of pluralism to the political space, they competing at fundamentally different levels, with Chernetskii’s own political party ‘Our Home, Our City’ (Nash Dom Nash Gorod) largely restricted to support within Ekaterinburg, affirming Rossel’’s hegemony in national politics. Finally, the importance of the industrial elite to both actors is considered, noting how the importance of meeting this sector’s demands influenced the outcome of regional-local competition in the region.

III. THE IMPORTANCE OF EL’TSIN IN SVERDLOVSK OBLAST The degree of knowledge that El’tsin had of his regional leaders varied heavily from region to region, and in many cases, appointments were made upon the recommendation of those close to the president or by prominent pro-reform actors within the regions.20 As a result, the head of state often had little prior knowledge of, and certainly no personal relationship with, a number of his appointees. With the development of Russia’s regions far down the list of the centre’s priorities, regional leaders were presented with little in the way of regular formal contact with El’tsin, who passed the responsibility for everyday contact with the provinces to his government and newly created Presidential representatives (his supposed eyes and ears in the regions).21 The case of Rossel’ is one where a prior history between both already existed, going back to El’tsin’s days as Regional First Party Secretary of Sverdlovsk Oblast. The existence of such ties contributed much to relations between the region and the federal centre, largely centring upon patronage ties between El’tsin and Rossel’. As the case of the Urals Republic underlined, policy initiatives from below threatened the state’s perception of emerging federal relations; without the centre’s agreement, unilateral actions from the regions carried a large degree of risk. In matters concerning centre-regional relations, Rossel’ pursued policies without the centre’s approval prior to his dismissal, while following his election to the regional Duma in 1994 he clearly sought presidential permission for policies that affected relations with the federal authorities. Under the new approach, a perception was Interview with Gennadii Burbulis (Moscow, September 2011). The willingness of regions to take the initiative in relations with the centre also varied greatly. Examples of regions that were more passive are Perm Oblast and Tver Oblast (see Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie (2003), pp.215-242, and McAuley (1997), pp.156-173). Other regions, such as those involved in the Siberian Agreement attempted to dictate a relationship with the centre on their own terms (see James Hughes, ‘Regionalism in Russia: the rise and fall of the Siberian Agreement’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 46, No. 7, (1994), pp.1133-1161). 20 21

10 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA cultivated that a ‘special relationship’ existed between the President and regional leader; this became central to Rossel’’s idea, which he and his supporters promoted to the elites and the region’s general population, that only he was capable of negotiating with the President in a way would benefit the region. The view was constructed that El’tsin and Rossel’ could personally agree on terms, whereas other actors (most clearly contrasting Rossel’’s successor as governor, Aleksei Strakhov, and later Chernetskii) were unable to build strong connections with the president and as a result lacked a route to the top to negotiate on behalf of the region. The achievement of a regional charter, gubernatorial elections, and a bilateral treaty, which were all instigated by Rossel’, furthered this notion and portrayed the impression that El’tsin trusted him to experiment with regional structures (ignoring the very real interest he had in preserving his own position through granting concessions to regions in exchange for support). This special relationship with El’tsin became a key part of the boundary control strategy employed by Rossel’ to prevent competitor encroachment into his own political territory and prevent the outflow of support from the critical elites that would provide dependable electoral and regime support in subsequent electoral competition with Chernetskii.

IV. LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT IN RUSSIA AND THE GROUNDS OF GOVERNORMAYORAL CONTEST Local self-government has historically played a mixed role in the development of Russian society. From the zemstvo reforms of the nineteenth century, with its low-level rights for local formations to manage a closely limited sphere of powers, to early Bolshevik demands for ‘all power to the Soviets’, with local councils being formed at all levels, a functioning system of local self-government that could resolve specific local problems at the level at which they arose (and independently of the bureaucracies underlying the tsarist guberniia and the communist system of subordination) remained elusive.22 Under the reforms of the early 1990s, local self-government became a contested area of political control between regional administrations and its units, focused around the allocation of (financial) resources, the division of property and the pace and results of privatization. According to the 1993 constitution, local self-government was officially outside of state power. In practice, however, the interests of regional power could easily be projected See Gel’man, Ryzhenkov, Belokurova and Borisova (2008), pp.38-98, for an account of the development of local self-government from the 19th century to the modern day. 22

11 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA onto the local level, using administrative resources to seek the elections of allies to local positions and to coerce opponents into obeying the de facto hierarchy of power. Regional capital cities and larger cities in the provinces were the strongest units of local selfgovernment and generally the most capable of contesting this, whereas small towns were unable to resist regional pressures. As the shift of responsibilities transferred from the state to the regions, which in turn passed the burden of maintaining the social contract onto local self-government, the latter faced the rising costs of providing public utilities, housing, education services and basic social welfare on budgets that were inadequate to deal with such socially vital responsibilities. For the larger cities and districts this affected, seeking additional rights of taxation, budget formation and control over the privatization of property in order to pay for the essential services required in their territory frequently brought them into conflict with regional administrations.23 Building a new and functional system of local self-government in the new Russian state was not something that held a great deal of interest to members of the federal or regional elite. Prior to a federal law outlining the principles of local self-government eventually being passed in 1995 (and only as pressure grew to have such a law in place before Russia joined the Council of Europe), regional leaders had been able to actively hinder the development of any formal delineation of the powers of local self-government at the level of the Federation Council. This had been done on the basis that it was against their interests to allow the development of local power outside of their influence or, worse, to permit elections to local and district executive bodies, removing their powers to appoint and dismiss city, town and district leaders.24 In Sverdlovsk Oblast and its capital, Ekaterinburg, these conditions contributed to the conflict between Rossel’ and Chernetskii, and local government issues grew in intensity following the former’s election as governor in August 1995. Many of the issues that provoked conflict between the two related to their own ideas surrounding the nature of regional power, particularly the division of powers and allocation of authority, resulting in a struggle for control over resources (political, economic and physical) at their respective levels. In early 1995, with the cascading system of legal hierarchy still to be put into effect,

Gel’man, Ryzhenkov, Belokurova and Borisova (2008) estimate that 75% of local self-government budget was spent just on housing, education, health care and welfare payments (p.29). The upkeep and privatization of other vital infrastructure such as electricity, water, heating, roads and public transport were among areas requiring the attention of local self-government. 24 Patrons need to be elected before the clients or else risk losing control and influence over them, in the same way that many in the centre wanted presidential elections to be held before gubernatorial elections. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov, Belokurova and Borisova (2008), pp.95-96 23

12 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA the Sverdlovsk Oblast Duma, chaired by Rossel’, wrote and passed a regional law on local self-government before the federal law had been passed. This move that was viewed by Chernetskii as both hostile and premature, since it promoted adherence to regional law even before its obligations under federal law had been fully understood. Alongside Rossel’’s pursuit of gubernatorial elections in summer 1995, he and his clients in the Oblast Duma began to press for an early mayoral election, as Chernetskii’s mandate was set to expire in March 1996. Efforts to hurry elections in the hope that one side would be underprepared is normally used by the incumbent trying to limit the campaigning time of rivals; in this case, the pro-Rossel’ camp in the regional Duma saw an opportunity to force the pace of mayoral elections, proposing holding them on the same day as gubernatorial elections in August, in the hope of linking their own candidate for mayor, Anton Bakov, to Rossel’s gubernatorial candidacy, while connecting Chernetskii to Strakhov.25 This strategy did not succeed, and the pro-Rossel’ regional Duma was unable to force early mayoral elections due to the lack of laws specifying the procedure for mayoral elections (popular election or election by the City Duma), and they were delayed until mid-December 1995, to be held on the same day as the RF Duma elections. Further pressure on the Mayor of Ekaterinburg, and local self-government more widely, followed with the introduction of a system of prefectures. This came partly as a response to mayoral elections and underlined the contradiction in Rossel’’s own views on centre-region relations with Moscow and his attitudes towards internal power in the region. The series of bilateral treaties agreed between Sverdlovsk Oblast and Moscow following Rossel’’s return to regional executive power in the August 1995 gubernatorial elections delineated those powers that were to be of federal-only, regional-only and joint jurisdiction. Chernetskii argued that the next logical step was to complete a similar process between region and local self-government to provide the final link in the chain of state structure.26 Having achieved the desired transfer of powers from the centre, Rossel’’s rhetoric on state structure toughened significantly; having previously only demanded greater rights to be transferred downwards, he now spoke openly about the need to strengthen state vertical power (notwithstanding agreements already reached between centre and region). With the executive and legislative branches working in tandem, Rossel’ controlled the debate, arguing Grigorii Golosov, Political parties in the regions of Russia: democracy unclaimed, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004) p.130. Bakov was at this time formally part of the Party of Russian Unity and Accord (PRES) but was closely linked to Rossel’ and the Preobrazhenie Urala movement, although was not formally put up for election by Rossel’’s movement (Aleksei Ivanov, Eburg, (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2014), p.239). 26 ‘Poluchil vlast’, peredai dal’she’, Ural’skii rabochii, 28 February 1996, p.1. 25

13 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA that increasing the rights of local self-government threatened to undermine the powers of the governor, who would no longer have any oversight over heads of local self-government now that they were elected.27 This proved a weak argument, not least because through control over both branches of regional power Rossel’ had regained the monopoly over the allocation of administrative resources – such as control over (and delay of) fiscal transfers, and the transfer of regional property to municipal funds – that could be used to apply pressure on local actors not acting according to the regional executive’s wishes, even after popular elections to local self-government formations.28 The introduction of prefectures applied increased pressure on local self-government formations in the region in return for obedience. That this was implemented in violation of federal and regional laws on the separation of powers did not slow down the process, as pro-Rossel’ officials, already holding administrative positions in local self-government, were appointed prefects.29 In Rossel’’s view, having local self-government outside the vertical power system, that is to say not directly subordinate to regional power, increased the reality of the erosion of central power and the disintegration of the state (a key theme in Moscow’s rejection of the Urals Republic).30 Ironically, he attacked what he claimed to be his opponent’s ‘demagoguery’ with regards to local self-government, claiming that Chernetskii was interpreting local selfgovernment as the concentration of total power in the hands of one person at the head of local administrations.31

‘Skvoz’ status zamertsali vybory’, Ural’skii rabochii, 27 February 1997, p.1. Anatolii Kirillov spoke about the lack of competition in the region and the various administrative resources available and used by Rossel’ and his team over regional politicians. With control over the allocation of property to the municipal level and influence among the industrial elites, for example, pressure could easily be applied to the local level, not only by prefects but by the regional leadership also. 29 ‘Viktor Mikhel’: Sovmeshchenie dolzhnostei – promezhutochnyi variant’, Oblastnaia gazeta, 19 February 1997, p.1. 30 ‘Otvet krizisu – ideia gosudarstvennosti – doklad gubernatora Rosselia na XIV s”ezde obshchestvennogo nepartiinogo ob”edineniia “PU” 17 aprelia 1999, g. Nizhnii Tagil’, Oblastnaia gazeta, 21 April 1999, p.3. At the 14th Congress of Preobrazhenie Urala in April 1999 (while Rossel’ was building his political movement to go federal to compete in the 1999 RF Duma elections), he said there were three options for strengthening the state; a return to the past in the unitary state, a confederacy (prompted by local self-government), which would lead to disintegration, or his way, the creation of prefectures to supervise local self-government. 31 ‘Vystuplenie gubernatora Sverdlovskoi oblasti E.E. Rosselia, lidera obshchestvennogo nepartiinogo ob”edineniia “Preobrazhenie Urala” na 12-m s”ezde ob”edineniia 7 fevralia 1998 goda’, Oblastnaia gazeta, 10 February 1998, p.1-2. 27 28

14 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA V. EKATERINBURG VERSUS SVERDLOVSK: A CASE OF ASYMMETRIC PARTY COMPETITION Previous studies of the application of boundary control in Latin American postauthoritarian states have noted that the parochialisation of power in Mexico and Argentina was facilitated by the presence of hegemonic (or near-hegemonic) regional branches of federal parties. The formal connection between subnational leader and federal party was based on the national ruling party’s support for the subnational leader in return for the delivery of votes from the region. In the case of Russia, weak federal political parties dominated the El’tsin decade, with several attempts to create parties of power failing to gain traction in federal elections. In the case of Sverdlovsk Oblast, we can observe examples of regional parties, centred around individual figures, that aimed to control the formal political space of the region, while implementing a subnational system of the support for votes structure observed under the patronage conditions described above. While the political space in Sverdlovsk Oblast has been noted as being conducted within agreed rules, and with all sides obeying the outcomes,32 the strength of Rossel’’s individual influence throughout the entire region meant that competition was heavily weighted in his favour. The inaugural Ekaterinburg mayoral elections, finally held in December 1995, were fought around issues that had been played out during the recent gubernatorial campaign and were still fresh in citizens’ memories. Campaigning focused on the future of regional and local integration into the state structure – Chernetskii advocating greater devolution of power to local self-government, against Rossel’’s candidate, Anton Bakov, who was campaigning on a platform of greater integration of the city into the system of regional power and returning the mayor’s post to the patronage of the governor. The incumbent mayor’s victory was comprehensive, and should be viewed through the prism of the fallout from the gubernatorial battle between Rossel’ and Strakhov; the results of the RF State Duma elections in the city that were held on the same day as mayoral elections showed a clear division along a region-city axis in voting behaviour. In Ekaterinburg, the Our Home is Russia party (Nash Dom Rossiia) for which Strakhov was the regional head of party, came out on top with approximately 12 percent of the city vote compared to Rossel’’s Preobrazhenie Otechestva (Transformation of the Fatherland) movement (the federal branch of his Preobrazhenie Urala – Transformation of the Urals – movement that dominated the

Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie (2003).

15 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA regional Duma), which polled fifth in the city with eight percent of the vote. 33 Conversely, the results for the entire oblast put Preobrazhenie Otechestva in first place, with 12.1 percent of the vote and Nash Dom Rossiia third, behind Zhirinovskii’s LDPR, with 8.35 percent, underscoring the differences between the regional and capital city electorates.34 On the basis of the endorsement received from the city, Chernetskii became the figurehead of his own political movement Our Home, Our City (Nash Dom Nash Gorod – NDNG) in early 1996, following an agreement with Nash Dom Rossiia, in order to compete against Rossel’ in the regional political space. NDNG closely followed the model chosen by Rossel’’s rival Probrazhenie Urala, constructing its political identity almost entirely around Chernetskii as an individual.35 Its aims were noted as being primarily ‘to protect the interests of the city’ (against regional-level transgressions), and it focused its campaigns for regional Duma elections in 1996 and 1998 on having the regional law on local self-government rewritten, since by now it clashed with recent federal law.36 The long-reach of Rossel’’s influence throughout the Oblast’, particularly in relation to the industrial sector and its reliant population, left Chernetskii struggling to make himself relevant outside of Ekaterinburg. The pool from which he could draw support was diminished as elections to local self-government became the norm and a large number of heads of local administration joined Preobrazhenie Urala in return for official appointment and the delaying of any competitive local elections, leaving those candidates who did attach themselves to the NDNG movement beyond the networks of the ruling elite.37 The result of this was that during the 1996 regional Duma election campaign, no matter how much Chernetskii and NDNG attempted to push into the provinces, it found itself drowned out by Rossel’’s capacity to override local issues with those of the region. Success within the regional capital resulted in NDNG becoming an established political party in the regional Duma, and a counterweight to Preobrazhenie Urala in the regional legislature; in the 1998 Oblast Duma elections NDNG obtained sufficient deputies to prevent Preobrazhenie Urala ‘Gaidar vperedi ne shagaet’, Oblastnaia gazeta, 22 December 1995, p.1. Rossel’’s federal political movement polled behind Iabloko, Demokraticheskii Vybor Rossii and the distinguished eye surgeon Stanislav Fedorov’s Partiia samoupravleniia trudiashchikhsia overall within the regional capital’s electoral districts. 34 Ibid. 35 ‘Arkadii Chernetskii – Nash Dom-Nash Gorod’, Ural’skii rabochii, 29 March 1996, p.5, (Electoral advert). 36 ‘Poluchil vlast’, peredai dal’she’, Ural’skii rabochii, 28 February 1996, p.1. Sverdlovsk Oblast’s regional electoral system meant that half of the regional Duma deputies were elected every two years with a four-year mandate. 37 Rossel’ was quick to use his resources against members of local self-government who allied themselves with Chernetskii, for example, Boris Poluiakhtov, the mayor of the city of Kamen’sk-Uralsk (close to Ekaterinburg). On becoming a member of NDNG, Poluiakhtov quickly found himself on the wrong end of regional administrative resources and soon after was defeated in mayoral elections by Viktor Iakimov, the chairman of the Oblast Duma economic and finance policy committee and Rossel’ loyalist. 33

16 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA from maintaining its majority in the legislature, although through the pro-Rossel’ faction manoeuvred to protect its speaker. Nonetheless, there was little in the party discourse to suggest that the movement was maturing into a regional party with an opportunity to challenge Rossel’’s grip on region-wide issues, let alone promote Chernetskii as capable of representing regional interests at the federal level. The 1998 regional Duma elections were expected to measure Chernetskii’s prospects for a gubernatorial challenge in 1999, and NDNG’s success encouraged him to compete for the governorship. The limitations of the NDNG movement, and of Chernetskii himself, were highlighted by the ease with which Rossel’ was re-elected. According to political analysts at the time, on the basis of clearly being identified as the second most-visible politician in the region, Chernetskii and his electoral team assumed that passage into the second-round was all but a formality and focused the majority of their resources on the expected head-to-head battle with Rossel’ in the second round. 38 His electoral campaign worked towards this aim, but failed to portray Chernetskii as an equal to Rossel’ with sufficient potential resources to bring the regional elite to support him. The national political landscape also played a role in this. With the El’tsin regime in steady decline, members of the entire political spectrum of the region were looking for lifeboats ahead of the federal Duma elections. This resulted in members of the political elite seeking to link themselves with Moscow Mayor Iurii Luzhkov’s Otechestvo (Fatherland) political party, on the basis that Luzhkov was considered a possibility for the next presidency. 39 Chernetskii won the regional branch’s nomination to become the Sverdlovsk leader of Otechestvo, while Rossel’ made no attempts to link himself to the movement, preferring his own. However, the projection of the potential benefits of patronage from Luzhkov offered little additional credibility to Chernetskii’s candidacy; the perception of Rossel’ as a regional-level actor, who already had the experience and gravitas needed to function at the national level, continued to overpower the attempt to connect Chernetskii with the potential

Interview with Anatolii Kirillov (Ekaterinburg, March 2011). A good barometer of Chernetskii’s position in the political hierarchy are the regular surveys conducted in 1994-95 by the regional press of political analysts and public figures to rate the position of local political actors, in what they called the ‘Politicheskii olimp’ (Political Olympus). Although these surveys should be viewed with caution due to their subjective nature and the ‘analysts’ questioned, it is worth noting that even during the period where Strakhov was governor, Chernetskii was consistently ranked second most-important political figure in the region, above the governor, until shortly before the 1995 gubernatorial elections. Rossel’ was consistently ranked first. After Strakhov’s defeat and retreat from the Sverdlovsk political scene, there was no-one else able to compete seriously with Rossel’ and Chernetskii in this ranking. See for example, ‘Politicheskii Olimp ...’ , Ural’skii rabochii, 11 January 1995, 14 February 1995, 15 March 1995. 39 ‘God istek, kakoi urok?’, Ural’skii rabochii, 15 April 1999, p.2; ‘Real’na li silovaia model’?’, Ural’skii rabochii, 18 August 1999, p.3. 38

17 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA future leader. The outcome of the first-round of the gubernatorial elections highlighted this mistaken strategy, as Chernetskii failed to reach the run-off election, with Rossel’ securing an overwhelming victory in the second-round.40

VI. STABILITY OF INTERESTS – THE ROLE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ELITE IN THE BALANCE OF POWER BETWEEN REGIONS AND CITIES The protection and incorporation of regional economic interests was critical to Rossel’’s political structure, diversifying his networks and incorporating large swathes of the regional population reliant on regional industry for their livelihood. With the breakdown of the Soviet Union’s planning, production and distribution system, it quickly became clear to the national economic elite that the state could no longer afford to carry the cost of loss-making sectors that were of much less importance to the new Russian state than they had been to the Soviet Union.41 Large industrial enterprises in the region, such as the Uralmash and Khimmash complexes in Ekaterinburg, and Uralvagonzavod and Nizhnii Tagil Metallurgical Plant in Nizhnii Tagil, found themselves seeking an alternative distributor of resources. This gap was filled by Rossel’, who sought (financial) resources and distributed them to enterprises in return for them keeping up the social obligations that they had previously been responsible for, and later through the provision of electoral support through influence over employees’ voting behaviour. Rossel’’s previous experience as the director of a large enterprise in the region and his vocal support for keeping control of industry within the Urals made him an ideal representative of industrial interests in what was considered to be a highly complex region, politically and economically. The strength of his connection to El’tsin underlined the expectation that he could represent these enterprises nationally, while at the same time finding no contradiction in separating the regional from the local, and working with Chernetskii.42 With both the regional and the regional capital executive headed by former industrial managers this elite grouping was confident that they were hedging against any future risk to their interests and conserving their leading influential role in regional politics. As the governor-mayoral conflict developed, particularly in the 1998 regional Duma Elena Denezhkina and Adrian Campbell, ‘The struggle for power in the Urals’, in Cameron Ross and Adrian Campbell (eds.), Federalism and local politics in Russia, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p.211. 41 Iakov M. Urinson, ‘Dostizheniia i oshibki reformatorov’, in P.S. Filippov (ed.), Istoriia novoi Rossii: Ocherki, interv’iu v 3 t., Vol. 1, (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2011), p.92. 42 Interview with Anatolii Kirillov (Ekaterinburg, March 2011). 40

18 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA elections, and 1999 Gubernatorial and Ekaterinburg Mayoral elections, Rossel’ realised the necessity of protecting this position as the regional-national representative of industrial affairs. The industrial and economic elite of both city and region acted as a regulating force on the lengths to which competition between the two could escalate. In maintaining the leading role of industry in the region, Rossel’ deflected the challenge from rivals by positioning himself as the protector of industry. Following the strong showing of Chernetskii’s NDNG party in the 1998 regional Duma elections, Rossel’’s strategy in the 1999 gubernatorial elections focused on underscoring the fact that Chernetskii was only relevant in Ekaterinburg.43 One of the lines used to discredit the Ekaterinburg mayor was that he represented new merchants rather than the historical traditions of industrial production that the Urals are known for.44 By so starkly stating the different arenas of both candidates, Rossel’ was deploying boundary control methods to signal to the industrial elite that a vote for Chernetskii risked the region losing its industrial identity and moving towards an unknown post-industrial future (specifically, the replacement of industry with services). While trade was now an important facet of Ekaterinburg’s economic structure, industry provided Oblast-wide employment, supported small businesses and dominated entire districts of the city. The question then arises as to why the Ekaterinburg industrial elites maintained support for Chernetskii as Mayor, and did not seek to consolidate their interests in regional power by working under a unified group. By risking becoming a client of a single patron, who controlled all resources, the city elites maintained competition that forced both patrons to act according to their interests. The different levels of financial and administrative support on offer from the regional and local administration (particularly in the form of tax subsidies and relief) meant that industry benefited from access to two sources of resource distribution. Equally, Rossel’ was aware that using more forcible methods to attack Chernetskii, such as through seeking to control and utilise the judiciary, rather than beating him at the polls, would have been seen by this branch of the elite as an attack against the director corps, and would have significantly lowered the opportunity cost to the elite of deserting Rossel’. The results of gubernatorial and mayoral elections in 1999 left everything

The use of ‘political technologies’ and ‘dirty’ PR have been found to have dominated the 1999 gubernatorial elections and the later, post-El’tsin round of competitive Ekaterinburg mayoral elections in 2003. Denezhkina and Campbell (2009), pp.211-213. 44 Interview with Konstantin Kiselev, (Ekaterinburg, September 2011). 43

19 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA in place as it had been previously; Chernetskii was entrenched as Mayor and Rossel’ successfully able to protect his power from an internal threat.45

VI. CONCLUSIONS This article has attempted to discuss two aspects of 1990s Russia. It has presented the boundary control theory as a useful tool for interpreting the preservation of regional power in the uncertain times of the El’tsin decade, contributing to a re-assessment of this period through a mixed approach of formal and informal aspects of power. This permits a focus on individuals and the motivations for their actions rather than solely relying on the development of institutions. Through focusing on the relationships that developed between different branches and levels of power, boundary control provides a framework that can allow for the study of network relationships in Russia with adequate consideration for the context of the times. The use of networks, that either already existed or were constructed by the Sverdlovsk leader, lay at the heart of a system of power, which emphasised Rossel’ as a representative of Oblast interests. The value of loyalty of interest groups participating in the regional political system is shown to have been of marked importance in the governor-mayor conflict in Sverdlovsk Oblast. The ability to attract and distribute resources, at both the levels of the Oblast and the regional capital city, became decisive factors in the struggle between Rossel’ and Chernetskii, and the three elements of boundary control are shown to have allowed Rossel’ to demonstrate that the opportunity costs to the elite of changing patrons were exceedingly high and overly risky. By presenting the conditions of regional power in such a way, there was no requirement for Rossel’ to prevent competition to his leadership outright, and he was able to manage the threat posed to him by promoting the personal aspects of his leadership. As a result, the conflict became essentially stagnant, with both sides remaining in their respective positions. The nature of his ties to El’tsin, and the apparent inability of rivals to establish similar connections, presented Rossel’ to the regional elite (and the public) In the 1999 gubernatorial elections Chernetskii won in the city centre Lenin District of Ekaterinburg, but failed to win in the two large industrial districts of the city, Chkalovskii District (Khimmash) and Zheleznodorozhnyi District (Uralmash). Rossel’, on the other hand, took all of the larger towns and cities in the oblast surrounding Ekaterinburg, such as Nizhnii Tagil, Kamensk Ural’sk, Pervoural’sk, and Asbest, among others. The second-placed candidate in the first-round of the elections, Alexander Burkov, did not place higher than third in any Ekaterinburg district. See ‘Bez vtorogo tura ne oboitis’?’, Ural’skii rabochii, 31 August 1999, p.1, and ‘Chernetskii: my ne uchli, chto vybory – eto shou’, Ural’skii rabochii, 1 September 1999, p.1. 45

20 CARTER – REGIONAL-LOCAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH CONFLICT IN EL’TSIN’S RUSSIA as maintaining Sverdlovsk Oblast’s status as one of Russia’s key regions, and with an ability to pursue policies at the centre to benefit the local population. Furthermore, Rossel’’s control over the regional legislative branch through his Preobrazhenie Urala movement required Chernetskii to prise open these boundaries in order to attract elite support away from the regional leader, and so proved impossible to the challenger. The result was that by the end of the El’tsin decade, Rossel’ found himself in a position of regional domination, although hegemony was prevented through the checks and balances that the industrial elite provided through its preference for Chernetskii’s leadership of the regional capital. The differences between Rossel’ and Chernetskii continued well into the next decade, although Chernetskii opted against challenging for the governorship a second time. By the mid2000s, Putin’s re-centralization project had threatened the boundaries of Rossel’’s domination through its own co-option of the regional elite, forcing Rossel’ into adopting a new strategy for power preservation, that of entering into the vertical system of power within the ruling party, Edinaia Rossiia, in order to remain as governor until his retirement in 2009.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the author’s work noncommercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 21-38

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.035

The Trouble With Alexander Medvedkin: Ideological Errors in New Moscow (1938) HANIN HANNOUCH IMT Lucca, Institute for Advanced Studies. This article studies the ideological errors in Alexander Medvedkin's film New Moscow, or what precisely lead the censors to ban the movie even before its release scheduled for early 1939. The movie tells the story of Aliosha, an engineer from a Soviet remote village, who goes to Moscow to display his creation: a moving miniature model of the capital, which ends up malfunctioning. My contention is that not only was the last segment of the film, in which this model goes haywire, a representation of the beautiful capital before the revolution instead of its modernized glory, but that Medvedkin has embedded several subversive elements in the film which could not have been edited out. Through the paradigm of socialist realist literature studied by Katerina Clark, Medvedkin's work is examined against this literary form with focus on four scenes: Aliosha's arrival to Moscow and his interrupted train ride, his first experience of the capital in the metro, his singing at the carnival and lastly the display of his askew model of Moscow.

I. INTRODUCTION The rupture sought out by socialist realist aesthetics not only with “corrupt” western film forms but also with its own formalist antecedents lead to the reconsideration of comedy and the role of laughter in the construction of the socialist edifice. For formalist theorist Yuri Tynyanov (1894-1943), comedy and derision are intertwined: “The comic form (...) is by its very nature derivative, profoundly determined by the structure it ridicules.” 1 It can only mock the very situation that made its own existence possible and it can only be directed at the society in which it is created. But according to Vladimir Blium (1877-1941), this very society must not be ridiculed, because it is not an oppressive structure. Blium spoke against satire because satire is the weapon of the downtrodden masses against the system oppressing them, and since oppression befell nobody in the Soviet Union, satire

Serguei Alex Oushakine, 'Laughter Under Socialism. Exposing The Ocular in Soviet Jocularity', Slavic Review, 70 (2011), 247-255 (pp.249). 1

22 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) had no role to play.2 Soviet author and satirist, Mikhail Zoschchenko (1894-1958) claimed at the first congress of Soviet writers in 1934 that satire is necessary but it must be favourable; a statement which did not at all clarify the aims and intentions of satire. At the juncture of these theoretical debates, Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989) found himself in the line of fire and although his film Happiness (1934) was defended both by Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933) and Sergei Eisenstein (1989-1948), his following work, New Moscow (1938), already regarded with suspicion, was withdrawn from circulation even before its premiere scheduled for January 1939. On a narrative level, the film recounts the journey of an engineer named Aliosha from his hometown 3000 miles away from Moscow to the capital in order to exhibit his ingenious living model of Moscow. In the last segment of the film, Aliosha's model malfunctions and projects images of the city not in its modernist glory, three years after the ‘General Plan For the Reconstruction of Moscow’, but in its pre-Soviet Union beauty, to a laughing crowd over a speech about the great achievements of Joseph Stalin. According to Grigori Ryklin, 3 the ideological reason for which the film was banned is that it displaced the image of the reconstruction of Moscow in its past, present and future.4 And indeed, upon the first viewing of the film, the last scene alone ridicules the immense modernization efforts of the city and generates laughter from the crowd, giving the censors enough ideologically-incorrect material to ban the film. However, my contention is that had this scene been the only subversive element in the entire film, it could have been edited out. 5 But since the whole of the movie was banned and no attempts at salvaging it were undertaken, a closer inspection of the work is likely to reveal a second level of reading in which subversive elements threaten the political coherence of the work and betray the filmmaker's stance against socialist realist aesthetics. This research seeks to point out incisively what cannot be edited out of the film in order to render it ideologically correct, from the gaze of the censors. What the censors (and Stalin himself) found precisely objectionable about the film has not left any material traces; however, Katerina Clark’s work on socialist realism as a literary and artistic paradigm is very pertinent for approaching Alexander Medvedkin's film, as it allows the viewer to compare the expected form of a work of art to the delivered final product of the director. The gap

Emma Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (New York: KINOfiles Filmmaker's Companion, 2005), p.13. Grigori Efimovich Ryklin (1894-1920) was the editor of Pravda. He criticized Medvedkin's film in "Pravda, 7th of January 1939. No. 7." 4 Urussowa, Janina, Das Neue Moscow. Die Stadt der Sowjets im Film 1917-1941 (Köln: Böhlau, 2004), p. 39. 5 For example, in Sergei Eisenstein's film from 1928, October, Stalin's rival Leon Trotsky was edited out. 2 3

23 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) between the two is too radical to be bridged because the entire film is precisely too determined by the structure it ridicules: it borrows its form but either substitutes its ideological content with a farcical one or suspends its power altogether. The first part of my writing deals with these socialist realist characteristics and then sets out to analyse the first of four scenes from New Moscow. The first scene is Aliosha's journey to Moscow with emphasis on the role of Heinrich the pig read against these literary traits; the second is the metro ride of Aliosha and his friends read against the experience that Soviet citizens were supposed to have in the newly-finished underground; the third is the carnival segment reconsidered through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's work on carnivals and festive laughter; and the fourth and final one is the exhibition and malfunction of Aliosha's model in Moscow and his eventual return home.

II. THE SOCIALIST REALIST LITERARY PARADIGM

The destruction, collectivization and industrialization stemming from the first Five-Year plan (1928 to 1932), saw a change not only in the very fabric of Soviet society but also in the cultural paradigm that propelled the emergence of socialist realist literature as the only art form capable of expressing Stalin's idea of 'socialism in one country'.6Architecture and literature met the same fate in 1932 with the liquidation of not only all literary and artistic organizations to pave the way for the state monopoly under the 'Union of Soviet Writers', but also the termination of all independent architecture societies, henceforth replaced by the Union of Soviet Architects (SSA). 7 For both aesthetics and architecture, socialist realism was considered “the only acceptable method for artistic work” 8 without any explanation as to what kind of work this method would entail, only that no foreign elements were no longer allowed. That same year, Stalin issued an authoritative statement of policy on literature that still lacked any clear definition of the aesthetics required or the work to be commissioned. By that time, “the foundation of socialist society has been laid,

A theory of Joseph Stalin dating from 1924 that emphasizes the internal strengthening of Russia, the only country where the communist revolution did not fail. 7 Alexei Tarkhanov, Sergei Kavtaarade, Sergei, Stalinist Architecture (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1992), p.42. 8 Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), p.78. 6

24 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) now it was time to construct its edifice.”9 The establishment of this edifice was twofold: with the creation of a new aesthetic, came the rebuilding of the city and the guidelines that were finally given to socialist realist writers coincided with the renovation of Moscow. Works of literature, now under complete union control, were to have their legitimacy examined by party leaders and had to live up to the great Soviet project of the capital, whose main street was renamed in Maxim Gorki's honour. 10 The characteristics of socialist realist literature were intimately linked with the newly constructed and centralized Soviet Union with Moscow as its red star. Katerina Clark focuses on four attributes in socialist realist literature, which, one by one, were corrupted by Medvedkin in New Moscow; and this corruption intimately extends itself to the representation of the city and its power of attraction: 1. The positive hero is usually the main character endowed with all possible virtues. “His career must encapsulate the country's evolution towards communism”.11 He is the crux of ideology, while simultaneously representing its subject and object. As a subject, the Party legitimizes itself only through the existence of its people, as a manifestation of the people's will and as an embodiment of their desire, all of which culminate in the hero. It is the activity of the positive hero that makes the Party what it is and validates it. The hero is also the object of ideology, in the sense that the projects undertaken by the Party are staged for his gaze: The city is reconstructed as an ideal for him to live up to, the metro is re-made because only the most expensive material are worthy of him and it is this staging that he has pay attention to, accept and enjoy. His enjoyment proves that the Soviet society is on the right track, and it affirms its work. 2. Rapport of the periphery with the centre: This opposition is important for the progression of the hero from the periphery to the centre, especially when read in light of the centralization of Soviet Union with the 1936 constitution. A progression from the outside of Moscow to the insides of the capital, which is the holy of the hollies, is essential for the hero to “mediate between Moscow and the

Katerina Clark, 'Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space', in The Landscape of Stalinism, The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2003), pp. 3-18 (p.4). 10 Katerina Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome. Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Cultural, 1931-1941 (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), p.80. 11 Clark, Socialist Realism, p.10. 9

25 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) periphery”, 12 the sacred and the profane, the modern and the backward. Yet reaching Moscow is impossible as it is a place only for heroes and leaders. The greatness of its space is reserved for the greatness of its people. “The role of the masses is to be forever in motion, striving to attain “Moscow” […] But they can attain Moscow only figuratively, fleetingly or tokenly.”13 3. The journey leading to this mediation must go unrepresented. The hero should not experience the 'in-between', as in the place that is on the outside of the periphery but is still not quite the capital. This realm is the leftover of centralization – it cannot be seen nor be inscribed in a continuity of space because there is no continuity between the old and the new and most importantly, there are no residues. The old is the periphery, the new is Moscow, in between is nothingness. “It is important to represent the “new” as a complete transformation of the old.”14 4. The role that Stalin plays, should the hero meet him or any other authoritative figure representing him, is that of a “tribal initiation, a kind of sexual initiation”. 15 Stalin stands on the outside of the realm of Man, he is devoid of sexual desire and love interests, he mediates between the two lovers in the film and presides over their future happiness without being part of it.

III. THE START OF THE SUBVERSION: ALIOSHA HEADS TO MOSCOW Read in light of these attributes, New Moscow does narrate Aliosha's journey from the periphery to the centre but clearly distinguishes itself from these aesthetic-ideological requirements: as a seemingly positive hero, Aliosha is a young, smart and motivated Soviet citizen living in the periphery, some 3000 miles away from Moscow during the era of modernization of the Soviet Union. He has created a moving model of the capital that functions as a catalyst to his journey to the centre in order to exhibit it, thus proving (initially) that the attraction exercised by Moscow draws citizens from all quarters of the

Clark, Socialist Realism, p.10. Clark, Socialist Realism, p.14. 14 Clark, Socialist Realism, p.10. 15 Clark, Socialist Realism, p.16. 12 13

26 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) country closer to it: “The Periphery defines itself according to recognition from the centre”16 and Aliosha sets out to gain this recognition for his work from the holly of hollies. The subversion of the socialist realist literary model starts five minutes into the film, the moment when Aliosha's train ride from the periphery to Moscow, which is supposed to go unseen, is actually represented. Not only is there no clear rupture between the past (the periphery) and the present (post-General Plan Moscow) as customary, but the mandatory invisible progression to the capital is decomposed into a space completely independent of the centre and detached from the periphery, where one farce after the other are juxtaposed to the serious context of this very progression. Had the film been in accordance with the socialist realist guidelines, then the train ride would have not been filmed to begin with, yet while on board, Aliosha sings and plays on the accordion the leitmotiv of the film for the first time: a song about the beauty and fame of the capital. This patriotic chant is followed by a farce at an unidentified train stop on the way to Moscow, where Olia, a student at Timiryazev academy17 who is also on her way to defend her thesis about a new breed of pigs loses Heinrich, her pig and best specimen. She asks for Aliosha's help and they both chase the animal into prairies and tunnels in a setting reminiscent of slapstick comedy films with the sound of the beast erupting loudly several times mixed with the non-diegetic music in the background. If cinema was meant to participate in the socialist ideological project and "is supposed to assist in the creation of a new Soviet alphabet"

by making the

modernization of Moscow more intelligible, then Heinrich the pig is a confounding element: He is either lost on its way to Moscow, lost in Moscow, or mistaken for another pig altogether. The antagonistic juxtaposition of on one hand, Heinrich, comic farces and fun and on the other hand; Moscow, order and seriousness is repeated throughout the film and systematically undermines the solemnity and grandness of the Soviet modernization. After the train leaves without Aliosha and Olia, the model that Aliosha created of the city is made visible and referred to by Babushka (his grandmother) as “unmiraculous”. She says to Zoia: “There are no miracles, dear lady! This is electrical engineering, chemistry, mechanics and physics”, and it is with the help of science that she and Aliosha will display the live model of Moscow. As soon as this premise is established, Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land. Soviet Film From The Revolution to The Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p.176. 17 Referred to today as the 'Russian State Agricultural University'. 18 Oksana Bulgakowa, 'Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s', in The Landscape of Stalinism, The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2003), pp.51-96 (p.62). 16

27 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) about Aliosha's work in Moscow, the pig emerges once more, still lost in the prairie and later gets mistaken with another pig at a farm. Olia and Aliosha hold the 'real' Heinrich next to the 'fake' Heinrich together for comparison but are left bewildered. This comparison between the real and the fake echoes not only the difference between the 'fake' model of Moscow and the city itself but also the difference between Moscow and other cities: “Moscow, however, was not merely a model – it was also the seat of power. Consequently, it came to function as an extraordinarily privileged space. All other cities were limited merely to approaching it.”19 The difference between Aliosha's model and the city itself would soon be abolished because, same as the model will become alive, the city would as well as buildings were literally moved to widen the streets. Once Heinrich is found, Aliosha and Olia realize that they have missed their train. They are both late for Moscow (the most sacred Soviet space) because they were chasing a pig. The antagonistic setting of Heinrich either before or after a serious event is also present towards the end of the film: Heinrich is lost and found again between Olia's thesis defence in Moscow and the exhibition of Aliosha's model, also in Moscow. The painter Feida visits Olia to proclaim his love, this time in a likewise serious context – right before the arrival of the professors to assess her work on the pig pedigree – but since the Heinrich is lost, the succession of farces resumes as Feida brings a “fake” Heinrich to soothe the distraught student. After they chase the real beast and finally manage to find it, a shot of a crowd rushing to see Aliosha's work emerges. The serious act of her thesis defence is hinted at but visually omitted. What the viewer retains with respect to Olia is her contribution to the farces and not her solemn student work. Editing out Heinrich and the succession of farces would have already implied the omission of around fifteen minutes of the film. Therefore, while borrowing socialist realism as a literary genre and the form of a progression from the periphery to the centre, Medvedkin integrates subversion deep in the seemingly politically correct journey in order to undermine the power of the attraction of Moscow and to represent this journey as humorous. However, the position of farces in regards to the representation of the city is not the only fashion in which the image of Moscow is weakened – the arrival of Aliosha, Olia, Zoia (Aliosha's love interest) and Heinrich to the capital and their first metro ride together represents yet another subversive of gesture.

Clark, Socialist Realism, p.6.

28 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) IV. THE UNCONSUMED MYTHOLOGY OF THE METRO: ALIOSHA IN MOSCOW "Citizens absorbed the values and ethos of Stalinist civilization as they rode the metro and as they consumed its mythology."20 Situated after the enquiries of the painter Feida and Babushka about the modernization of Moscow, the metro scene brings Aliosha, his friends and Heinrich right into the heart of the city.21 This scene starts with a shot of several lamps that illuminate the ceiling at a busy unidentified metro station with walls of marble as the group decides that the only way for Olia to deliver the animal on time is to disguise him as a baby and sneak him into the metro. They quietly ascend the electric stairs with Heinrich wrapped as an infant and whose sound erupts when they are seated in the train. A paediatrician with bad eyesight, who is seated next to them, examines him while the group pretends that Heinrich has mumps. He agrees that infant is indeed ill but has “a charming face” despite his protruding pig nose. Aliosha, Olia and Zoia exit at the next metro station and leave. What is ideologically incorrect about this simple metro ride and the disguising of the pig as a baby? The confrontation between the film characters' experience of the metro and the discourse about what Soviet citizens ought to experience in the great underground Soviet project sheds light on the gap between the ideological imperative of enjoyment and the underwhelming representation of this very enjoyment. Since the Bolshevik revolution, peasant culture was considered self-contained, socially indistinct, and able to strongly resist changes from the outside. Rural Russia was the enemy and the Bolsheviks and Stalin were prepared to modernize it through ideology, industrialization and socialist realist aesthetics.22 Stalin likewise substituted the character of the struggling peasant in the avant-garde's early films with the image of heroic leaders that only refer back to him. With the Great Purges (1937-1939), came the great beauty and the purification of space, it was “a final act of purifying and perfecting the new society, and

Andrew L. Jenks, 'A Metro on the Mount. The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization', Technology and Culture, 14 (2000), 697-724 (p.699). 21 After her arrival to Moscow, Babushka takes a cab and looks at the trams of the capital through the window. The shot that follows shows the painter Feida, who is trying to draw an urban landscape of the city, only to realize that the city is disappearing and buildings are being demolished. He says, “one day I paint it, the other day it's nowhere to be found. Either they demolish it all, or built something new.” Since the scenery he wanted to paint disappeared, Feida calls a bureaucrat and blames him for it while Babushka calls to ask about the exhibition Aliosha wants to participate in. Aliosha then arrives with his friends in the capital. 22Abbot Gleason, 'Ideological Structures', The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture, ed. by Nicholas Rzhevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998), pp. 103-125 (p.117). 20

29 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) hence making it more beautiful.”23 The metro scene takes place during the Purges, at a time when Stalin lamented the cultural revolution's fixation on technology and practical affairs that eclipse ideology and beauty. 24 The beauty of the city was supposed to engender love for the city 25 especially for the peasants who immigrated to newly industrialized areas yet were still considered backward. The correct representation of the metro scene would be a long display of the beauty of the underground project, a discussion about the hard work it entailed and amazement at this achievement; but Olia who studies agriculture, Aliosha who is from the rural periphery, and even city-girl Zoia, do not stop to marvel at the edifice of Stalin. They are neither interested nor amazed – they merely use the metro for practical purposes, ignoring its ideology and beauty. The camera conveys perfectly their neutrality by under-representing the metro. It is visually mentioned but no heed is taken of it. The residents of Moscow were urged to raise their heads at Mayakovski station and they would see the sky because the underground is so heavily lit, but the film viewer barely has a quick glance at the lamps in the ceiling.26 No close-ups can be found of the precious materials used in the architecture, decorative artworks were not emphasized and the different themes of historical architecture that are present in the metro were not displayed, all of which are important elements of Stalinist architecture that the leader (allegedly) chose himself for his people.27 Stalin's choice of symbols in the metro, laden with political messages of the conquest of nature and the destruction of capitalism played absolutely no role in the movie. The world's 'best metro', the living symbol that socialism and Soviet engineers vanquished nature was reduced to its very basic function, that of transporting the characters of the film to their needed destination without any astonishment as to its efficiency, speed and beauty. 28 Frescoes, granite columns, crystals and marble facings in the underground project were reduced to a total of 11 shots constituting the entire metro scene, which is just shy of being three minutes long. What the viewer actually sees of the metro in Moscow are the granite walls in the background when the characters are talking to one another, the lamps in the ceiling before they ascend on the escalators and the fancy columns on the train platform when they exit the train. The magnitude of Stalin's project, the work in which he tremendously 23Jenks,

p.711. Moscow, p. 108. 25 Werner Huber, Hauptstadt Moscow. Ein Reiseführer durch Das Baugeschehen der russischen Metropole von Stalin über Chruschtschow und Breschnew bis heute. (Zürich: Helmut Spieker, 1998), p.47. 26Jenks, p.697. 27'Kunst und Macht im Europa der Diktatoren 1930 bis 1945', exhibition catalog, (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995-1996) p.191. 28Jenks, p.704. 24Clark,

30 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) invested himself, the very execution of his socialist realist aesthetics that is meant to be simple and readable to everyone, especially for the peasants, went unread.29 This is the case of a letter (an ideological message) that arrived at its destination (communicating with the peasants) but was left unopened (the message was neither deciphered nor interpreted). The mythology carefully orchestrated around the metro is left unconsumed. The goal of the metro project – that of offering citizens a dose of socialist realist beauty so as to stimulate their love for the Soviet Union and their admiration of their leader – was compromised. Aliosha, Heinrich, Zoia and Olia were unimpressed by the metro's splendour and they did not marvel at Stalin's genius through their experience of his architectural work. After the underwhelming metro scene, the film moves to a carnival setting in a twelve-minute long segment titled “Tonight is a Carnival Night!” in which the power of authorities is not undermined but suspended.

V. ‘TONIGHT IS A CARNIVAL NIGHT!': AUTHORITY IS SUSPENDED The ideological error in the twelve-minute long segment “Tonight is a Carnival Night” in New Moscow can be understood through the thesis of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)30 on the carnival and the grotesque in the works of the French author and humanist François Rabelais (1494-1533) titled Rabelais and His World, as well as through the choice of the bear as disguise. Although we cannot prove that Medvedkin and Bakhtin knew one another, Bakhtin's theory is most useful to our determination of the subversive quality of the film. Bakhtin's thesis focussed on the carnival and the theme of festive laughter - both of which originate from peasant culture. In Medvedkin's film, Aliosha and Babushka leave their remote village and go to Moscow, thus introducing this very element of peasantry in the city. The carnival in Bakhtin's work was thought of as a place of relief for the repressed masses where the crossing of boundaries, the mocking of authority, and where rebellious views were allowed. Several oppositions coexisted in such a world: official and the unofficial, ridicule and celebration, crowning and the dethroning, elevation and debasement. 31 At a carnival, existing social rules are temporarily suspended and folk humour forges its own reality outside of this official realm and parodies social regulations. 29Clark,

Moscow, p.112. 1929, Bakhtin was arrested and on account of very poor health, was exiled for 6 years to Kustanai in Soviet Central Asia. Despite his prolific writings, Bakhtin's work was only rediscovered in the 60s. 31Pam Moris, The Bakhtin Reader. Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1994), p.20-21. 30In

31 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) The laughter generated by this parody is the laughter of all people. “Festive laughter is not an individual reaction to an event. It is the laughter of all people. It has a universal scope, directed at everyone, including the participants. It is also ambivalent, triumphant and happy yet mocking and derisive.” 32 New Moscow visually suspends the ideas of socialist realism propagated in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as well as the cult of Stalin as the ultimate leader. The sequence “Tonight is a Carnival Night” is subversive in three fashion: 1. First, the title of the sequences appears and then the director cuts to a series of three shots that simultaneously highlight but suspend the dominion of Soviet authorities, which would have most likely been problematic to censors. The first shot takes place on the outside where people in festive disguises move very slowly. Above them, two silhouettes of Lenin and Stalin in profile occupy two thirds of the composition. The second shot takes place on the inside where people move slightly faster than they do in the first scene. We notice two of them in the foreground disguised as animals; one as a giraffe and one as a horse. In the background is an oversized poster of a statuesque hero with a ship and several canons dominating the two thirds of the image. The last shot of the series takes place once again on the outside, where people are now moving much faster and running around in circles. Ten symbols of the Party are elevated on poles and suspended high in the sky occupying two thirds of the shot. The visual representation of this parallel alternative world undermines the Soviet project. The State is not the only controller of subjectivity, and the suspension of its rule along with the representation of this suspension, albeit momentarily, threatens the State in real life. These three opening shots, with the symbols of the Soviet Union occupying most of the image, recognize the power of Stalin but simultaneously create some distance from it. While the images are fixed in the horizons, the population opposes itself to it and moves rapidly. This movement culminates in Aliosha's performance. Since the participants at the carnival are dancing animals, their own everyday subjectivity is suspended, which in turn, suspends ideology. The image of the hardworking, serious and dedicated worker serves as the crux of ideology, it is the basis of the Party's rule and legitimizes the regime. Therefore, by having the average person look as undignified as in the film, this representation refers to what is undignified about the system. The carnival coexists with the 32Moris,

p.200.

32 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) social order as an alternative to it, it recognizes the authority of leaders but temporarily takes no notice of it, allowing every character to change and develop: Babushka's participation at the carnival transforms her, if only momentarily, from the grandmother chasing her grandson in the big city to a woman who rests, conceals her real age thanks to the mask, gets seduced by a younger guy and eventually dances with another man. Zoia, who remains undisguised, refuses to answer Feida's marriage proposal regardless of his numerous enquiries. He does not realize that the rules of communication of the outside world have been paused for the duration of the event. 2. Secondly, Aliosha problematically juxtaposes incompatible contexts: At the beginning of the carnival, he is represented as a polar bear dancing happily with an accordion hanging from his outfit. He then removes his animal head and is crowned a party hat and, in this comic attire, happily sings the (serious) leitmotif of the film surrounded by balloons. The crowd cheers him on when he finishes the song. Once again the ridiculous (his appearance) is juxtaposed with the serious (the patriotic content of the song). Aliosha's performance of the film's leitmotif marks a point of fusion between the irreconcilable opposites that characterize the carnival and brings the sacred ideology right into the profane festival. 3. Thirdly, the choice of the bear as Aliosha and Feida’s disguise is also an ideological error. It stems from the long tradition of the usage of the bear as a symbol of Russia, which has been thoroughly examined by Anne Platoff. Firstly, the director's own name, 'medved' means 'bear' or 'honey eater.' 33 In Russian folklore, the bear is considered the ancestor of early eastern Slavs and has developed special bond with them. Moreover, it has a “supernatural relationship with humans, either a man or a woman, who has become the consort of a bear, or feature the offspring produced by a human-bear coupling.” 34 The love triangle between Zoia, Feida and Aliosha can be read as a satirical re-interpretation of this fairy-tale since the men are merely disguised as animals trying to consort with the woman. Likewise, the bear is often used in Russian heraldry, in reference to a preSoviet tradition, especially in northern territories. For example, the seal of the Anne M. Platoff, 'The “Forward Russia” Flag. Examining the Changing Use of the Bear as a Symbol of Russia', Raven: A Journal of Vexillology, (2012). 99-126, p.100. 34Platoff, p.101. 33

33 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) Chukotka Autonomous Okrug35 features a polar bear and that of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug36 features two bears37. This association between bears and the North is established since Aliosha, who disguises himself as a bear, is from the northern part of Siberia. After the Russian revolution, the image of the bear started to represent the entire Soviet Union, thus making any comic use of the symbol susceptible to State disapproval.38 The bear as symbol, which by that time represented the entire Soviet Union, is represented as either desperate for love in case of Feida, or ecstatic and ridiculous in case of Aliosha. The animal does refer to the director's last name, but as a consistent element in historical and visual culture of the Soviet Union, it is displayed in a festive, ridiculous and undignified situation: accompanying an old woman, dancing a folk dance, stuck in a love triangle and then singing merrily about the beauty of the capital. It is no longer part of national heraldry elevated on flags and official seals. As well as this, depicting people as animals rejects the Enlightenment notion that animals are innocent creatures endowed with souls and degrades the human being who has transformed himself into an animal. And since ideology rests on its dignified and honourable citizen, undermining the person and transforming him into an animal, subverts ideology. “[Animals] are creatures positioned lower than humans, intellectually and morally inferior to us. If this premise is accepted, then depicting a human as an animal is indeed a disparaging critical gesture. By drawing a comparison between people and animals, the satirist suggests that humans are no wiser than animals and no more worthy of respect.”39

VI. ALIOSHA'S MODEL: MOSCOW AS A TIME MACHINE “A fundamental idea of the socialist realist system: An emphasis on the greatness of space as a guarantee of the greatness of time – in other words, of the historical record.”40

35Chukotka

Autonomous Okrug is a federal subject of Russia, located in the Russian Far East. Autonomous Okrug is a federal subject of Russia, located in the north of Russia. 37Platoff, p.102. 38Platoff, p.113. 39Karen L. Ryan, Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917-1991 (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), p.49. 40Clark, Socialist Realism, p.9. 36Yamalo-Nenets

34 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) The last segment in New Moscow takes place right after Heinrich the pig is lost and found once more. It starts with the opening title of “today is the opening of the live model of Moscow” as a banner in the public space promotes. A succession of shots of moving cars highlights the chaotic movement of the heavily populated city that is about to be transposed upon this model. Aliosha tries to make his way through the crowd towards the centre the exhibition centre but arrives too late. The control of the model has been given to the painter Feida, who attempts to initiate the process, but an error occurs and the images of the city of Moscow go back in time by means of visual dissolve. My contention for this scene is that the subversion is twofold: Firstly, the initial display of the malfunctioning model works as a time machine regressing to the city's prerevolutionary past, thus undermining serious discourse about the city that follows it. Secondly, the dialogue between Zoia and Aliosha after the exhibition likewise discredits Moscow's influence on Soviet citizens. The general plan of the reconstruction of the city of Moscow provides a subtext for the two contentions of this segment. After socialist realism was established as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union under Stalin, it was now time to inscribe its capital in this artistic discourse and to distinguish it from all the other cities in the world. 41 The entire space of Moscow is to be laden with the right symbols, which must always refer back to socialist realism, thus creating one and one only politically correct meta-text functioning as the guarantor of time.42 The General Plan was based on an initial urban plan titled “New Moscow” created between 1919 and 1923 by Ivan Scholtovski (1867-1959) and Alexei Schtschussev (1873-1949), which was concerned with the rapport of the periphery to the centre and remained truthful to the layout of the city and preserved historical monuments, including the church of Christ the Saviour.43 However, during the modernization efforts, no agreement was reached about the fashion in which the city was to be rebuilt. Finally, in June 1935 a decision was reached: Stalin must handle the general plan himself and a joint resolution of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee on the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was published, signed by Stalin and Molotov and set out to construct the Palace of the Soviets on the site of the church of Christ the Saviour.44 When the reorganization of the city was underway, the media coverage was immense, which lead to very-well

41'Kunst

und Macht im Europa der Diktatoren 1930 bis 1945', exhibition catalog, (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995-1996) p.189. 42Huber, p. 47. 43Tarkhanov, p.80. 44Tarkhanov, p.84. © School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, 2016.

35 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) documented and weekly accounts all over newspapers and radios of the evolution of the construction sites.45 In the film, this reconstruction is visually rendered as a time machine, allowing the viewer, both the viewer of the film and the viewer in the exhibition room in the film, to take a look at Moscow in its pre-Soviet beauty, which appears by means of visual dissolve. The Moscow seen before the exhibition of the model started was filled with people, chaotic and fast-paced whereas the one in the model is empty, but the Stranstnoi monastery and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour look beautiful. However this aesthetic recognition of the pre-Soviet Union era is not in line with the socialist realist tendency of creating a brand new style, radically and symbolically divorced from its past. The greatness of space, which should guarantee the greatness of time, has to refer to the right space: that of socialist realism. Any other architectural reference to a bygone era threatens this process of integration of the city into the network of meaning of socialist realism and subsequently menaces its past, as in its historical records, and its future, as in the future of the Soviet Union. Likewise, the choice of the dissolve as a cinematic technique to render the transformation of Moscow from new to old and back to new again is particularly revealing. A jump cut would have simply represented the old state and then the new state of the monument through a clear rupture, but the dissolve confers a magical aspect upon this modification. The images the viewers see of contemporary Moscow literally dissolve and fade into the past; there is no rupture as dictated by the literary paradigm of socialist realism, only transformation in the form of rewinding to a bygone era. When Aliosha arrives and fixes the model, the images of the new Moscow emerge out of the old ones, presented over the speech uttered by Zoia about Stalin's project of the remaking of the city; he is the ultimate architect and he does not need the profane hand of another.46 Same as with Heinrich being positioned right before or after a serious discourse about the capital, the juxtaposition of the farce of the malfunctioning model before the “official” speech by Zoia, positions antagonistic elements after one another: the ridiculous precedes the serious. The enumeration of the achievements of the Bolsheviks cannot be seriously considered when accompanied by such a ridiculous representation of the general plan of Moscow. In showing the beauty of the old landmarks through the time machine, the future beauty of the capital, as promised by Stalin, is threatened and the whole project is undermined. Not only does the power of socialist realism to literally move buildings look 45Karl

Schlögel, Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937 (München: Hanser, Carl GmbH, 2008), p.62. p.70.

46Urussowa,

36 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) funny, but the costly materials used throughout the city are parodied and devaluated: “Palaces are hollowed out constructions, the precious materials of Stalinist architecture are completely profaned in the cinema. Marble, stone etc. are cardboard cards.” 47 The greatness of space – promised by socialist realism and meant to guarantee the greatness of present and future time – failed because the city reverted back to its past and this past was beautiful. The symbolic field of Moscow is conquered by the very monuments that it set out to destroy. Its present and future are at risk of being re-defined by the emergence of the past. The second subversion occurs after the exhibition of the model in Moscow is over, when both Aliosha and Zoia decide to leave the capital, thus inverting the logic of centralization and the progression from the periphery to the centre (and not from the centre to the periphery) and contradicting the socialist realist paradigm of the journey of the positive hero. Aliosha and Zoia start by discussing if they should live in the capital or in 'the swamps' (as in the periphery, Aliosha's hometown). Zoia promises her beloved one a lot of good food and a brand new radio, but Aliosha discovers a letter from his friend back home who has, by now, completely shaved his beard. He has been 'modernized' and has decided to send Aliosha a blond lock of his shaved beard and a new photo of his face. That moment, in a counter-modern gesture, a sad Aliosha realizes the necessity of returning to his swamp and immediately departs. Although he has completed the socialist realist journey from periphery to centre, he has likewise inverted it by returning to the periphery instead of enjoying a prosperous life in Moscow. At the train station, a sad Zoia runs into Babushka who was also on her way back home. The latter suggests that Zoia should get on a plane if she wants to catch Aliosha in time in his native city knowing that she wants to be with him. Zoia gets on a plane and while airborne, she looks down and sees houses and trees thus contradicting the imperative of non-representation of inbetween spaces between the centre and the periphery. She even bought rain boots from Moscow to take with her to the swamps, thus shunning the power of the attraction of the capital. She has left the holy of the hollies to live in the swamps. After having subverted these literary paradigms, the only point where they are reinstated is at the end where her reunion with Aliosha takes place with a portrait of Stalin in the background. The attraction of the capital of the Soviet Union is not strong enough to separate her from her peripheral lover. Neither she nor him was transformed by Moscow.

47Bulgakowa,

p.68.

37 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) VII. CONCLUSION Knowing that New Moscow was at the epicentre of several debates about satire and the role of comedy, the fact that these theoretical questions were left unanswered created a divide between artists and censors through which the film and the director fell into the disfavour of the authorities. The lack of formal interdiction of representation meant that filmmakers were, in theory, somewhat left to their own devices in their artistic practice with no available text to fall back on à la Hays code. What should not be represented was never explicitly articulated and perhaps Alexander Medvedkin mistook the lack of guidelines for creative and critical freedom, carefully crafting his film with two possible interpretations: a love-comedy story, as well as an anti-modernisation film. What the censors most likely objected to in the film was not merely its last scene. If anything, the latter can be considered as the culmination of Medvedkin's refusal of the modernization of the Soviet Union and the big hype about Moscow. This culmination begins gently with the shaving of one's beard in the periphery, leading to the farcical train ride to Moscow but with the interruption of Aliosha's journey to the capital, escalating into his arrival and his underwhelming and hasty experience of the famous metro, followed by his festive suspension of regulations at the carnival, and finally exploding into his refusal of the changes done to the city, exemplified by the malfunctioning model that reverts back into time. Therefore, Ryklin's critique of the film that it downgrades the image of the reconstruction of Moscow and therefore the power of Moscow, does not pertain solely to the last segment, but to the entire carefully orchestrated construction of farces and the antagonistic juxtaposition of the serious and the ridiculous; none of which can be edited out while salvaging the film. The 'adherence' to the literary paradigm of socialist realism offers Medvedkin nothing more than a backdrop to his intimate deconstruction of this very paradigm: that of the life-changing journey to Moscow, which is transformed into a hilarious carnivalesque ride and an eventual trip back home to the swamps. This representation is cautious enough to go beyond the power of montage in the correction of politically deviant works, thus leading to the ultimate ban on the film. New Moscow can likewise be understood as a radical answer to the highly publicized cleansing of Moscow of its pre-revolutionary landmarks, best exemplified the demolition of its religious monuments such as the Church of Christ the Saviour. Perhaps to Medvedkin, the endless debates about the capital's urban planning, the commissioning of monumental projects such as the Palace of the Soviets, and the rapid pace of industrialization also provoke

38 HANNOUCH – THE TROUBLE WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN: IDEOLOGICAL ERRORS IN NEW MOSCOW (1938) another question: Why not just leave the city as it was?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This allows others to download the author’s works and share them with others as long as they credit the author, but they cannot change them in any way or use them commercially. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 39-59.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.036

Are Nation and Exile a Woman?  the case of David Albahari’s novel Bait MILAN MILJKOVIĆ Institute for Literature and Arts, Belgrade In many symbolic representations of the nation or the state, which can be found in art, politics and literature, female figures are very often used: figures of girls, virgins, women and mothers. This use of women's images is in itself ambiguous because, although it may appear to semi-deify women strongly and positively, it more often masks their actual political powerlessness within the social or cultural milieu.1 With regards to the context of the Serbian tradition of representing the nation or ethnic community, there are several, historically significant examples of such women, for example, Queen Milica, the mother of the Jugović brothers, or the Kosovo Maiden.2 Their characters and their lives have been usually represented within the national-romantic code as the voices of collective grief and martyrdom, or as characters dedicated to the wider national cause. However, there are scholars who claim that these female characters actually represent the alternative, non-traditional and non-patriarchal view of the Kosovo myth and the national identity: Figures such as Queen Milica, the mother of the Jugović brothers and the Kosovo Maiden were portrayed as inventive in looking for compromises and for survival in a new political and social situation [after the Kosovo battle in 1389], and amongst other ethnic and religious groups. They procured new narratives and new social and religious cults to ease the pain of both the male and female communities; and in their

* This article is an expanded version of a presentation delivered at the University of Nottingham in June 2011. The author owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Uroš Tomić for useful and valuable comments during the writing of the paper as well as careful proofreading of the finished text. 1 Kirsten Stirling, Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008 2 Queen Milica was the spouse of the duke Lazar, one of the most influential political figures in the period of feudal fragmentation of Serbia in the second half of the fourteenth century. The mother of the Jugović brothers and the Kosovo Maiden are the female characters from Serbian epic poems that narrate the events that took place before and after the Kosovo battle in 1389. Together with Queen Milica, they represent female heroes closely related to the Kosovo myth which has been used as one of the milestones of the Serbian cultural, historical and political memory. In the epic poems, these characters are trying to prevent their loved ones from going to battle, they oppose men’s decision to fight the Turks; at the end, they are the ones who bear tragic consequences of men’s behaviour. © School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, 2016.

40 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? secluded female space of oral tradition, they ridiculed those highly masculine tones of the Kosovo myth and the behaviour of epic heroes.3 Whether the idea of the nation is embodied in the image of the victimised female hero or the heroic self-sacrificing mother, it is usually the patriarchal code that, on the one hand neutralizes sexual and gender identity of women, and on the other, subdues female figures by transforming them into male-like heroines or martyrs. However, in the light of the diverse relationships between the issues of masculinity and femininity, as well as the representation of the nation and the subversive potential of the female narratives, it is worthwhile considering the possibilities of engendering the nation in a way that could introduce alternative paradigms of national identity. Instead of masculine strength, power and virility  all predominantly patriarchal categories  the concept of the nation might be redefined in terms of historical feminine experience of exclusion (in terms of gender, social status, education, political power etc) and its specific ‘corporeal memory’. This approach replaces commemorative narratives of the national identity with the suppressed personal histories of women.4 Furthermore, if nationalism ‘is an assertion of belonging in and to the place, a people, a heritage,’5 then women’s testimonial renderings of communal historical experience could, due to their sense of non-belonging and exclusion, establish an important ground for the detailed analysis of the exile experience as an alternation of the concept of the nation (especially in the case of the internal exile). Since ‘nationalisms are about groups and exile is a solitude experienced outside the group’ the presence of women’s voices in history represent one of the possible answers to the question Edward Said poses: ‘How, then, does one surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions?’.6 This issue of loneliness becomes particularly problematic in the case of internal exile because the subject is heavily surrounded by the dominant discourses of the nation’s ethnic and linguistic purity, which become particularly overwhelming in time of war and socio-political or economic crises. The term, internal exile, is used here in regards to the

Svetlana Slapšak, ‘Women's Memory in the Balkans: the alternative Kosovo myth’, in Gender and Nation in South Eastern Europe, ed. Karl Kaser & Elisabeth Katschnig-Fasch, Wien: LIT, 2005, p. 109 4 Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 62. 5 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London: Granta, 2001, p.176. 6 Ibid., p. 177. 3

41 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? explanation given by Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack, where they primarily refer to the concept of Hamid Naficy: Beyond those sites of official dislocation [penitentiary, the prison camp, the asylum, the house converted into a prison], supposedly benign institutions such as the familial home, and social conditions such as enforced or prolonged unemployment, may also function as sites of exile.7 In regards to the model of the external exile, where the subject is physically and geographically distanced from his homeland, certain traces of the feminine experience could also be recognised. As Amos Oz describes in one of his interviews, the state of exile implies that someone is always at the ‘wrong place’.8 Using the image of a Jewish woman who is, after her arrival in Israel from Poland, sitting on a bench in the kibbutz singing of Poland in Polish, Amos Oz explains that his own source of creative inspiration lies in the profound sense of lack, displacement and otherness. In the same way as the woman singing of the other land, the one that is no longer hers, Amos Oz embraces the state of chronic homelessness as the foundation of a new type of identity. To live in diaspora means to immerse oneself into the ambiguous sense of being at home while, at the same time, being constantly disseminated and dispersed; the term itself comes from the Greek, where dia means ‘apart’ and speirein means not just ‘to scatter’ but also ‘to sow’. In light of this etymological explanation, Maaera Shreiber suggests that the traditional opposition between home and exile should be imbalanced and redefined in order to understand the exile as a type of home that is always on the move.9 Therefore, one of the core questions of this article is related to the possibility of engendering the nation and the exile in a way that would allow us not just to redefine these traditional, and very often patriarchal, concepts but to blend them by using the women’s experience of the internal exile, and yet, to keep the conceptual difference between the nation and the exile. The feminine notion of the exile and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the female voyager  ‘who is able to travel through discourses and who refuses to

Paul Allatson, Jo McCormack, eds., Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, p. 11. Maeera Y. Shreiber, ‘The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics’, PMLA, vol. 113, no. 2, 1998, p. 274. Amos Oz, born in Jerusalem, with parents who came from Eastern Europe, is an Israeli writer, novelist and journalist whose literary work and intellectual efforts are related to the issue of displacement, national identity, Diaspora, and also to the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 9 Ibid., p. 274. 7 8

42 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? domesticate the structures that surround her’10  will be used in order to articulate the position of the continuous internal exile which can, within the dominant discourses and paradigms of national culture, always produce a sense of becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity.

David Albahari’s Bait Published in 1996, Bait received one of the most prominent literary awards in Serbia  the NIN literary award for best novel  and gained a lot of praise from a variety of distinguished literary critics in Serbia. The story of the novel is presented by the narrator who has just committed an action of self-exile, from Serbia to Canada after the death of his mother and at the time of ongoing wars in the Balkans (Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). The novel consists of two parallel stories that are interconnected and constantly being interrupted. One of the stories is set in Canada, and it depicts the meetings between the narrator and his Canadian friend Donald. They talk about writing, cultural differences and stereotypes concerning America, Europe, and the Balkans. In the second story thread, the narrator listens to a series of audio tapes recorded with his mother years before. He reflects on her life and their relationship while trying to come to terms with a new life of his own  that of exile and the confusion of new cultural adjustments. As one of his seminal literary works, Bait represents the marking point in Albahari’s creative and literary transition from the postmodern narrative experimentation in the 1980s, focused on personal or familial experiences, to novels and fictional works that are much more preoccupied with the questions of historical and sociopolitical identities.11 This transition was strongly influenced by the Yugoslav socio-political milieu, which was, at the beginning of the 1990s, determined by the economic crisis, ‘massive abuse of historic discourse’ and nationalistic revisions of the ‘past which was the common denominator around which the subsequent civil wars revolved’.12 Therefore, in the last decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible for writers (both poets and

Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva. Readings of Exile and Estrangement, New York: St Martin's Press, 1996, p. 57. Vladislava Ribnikar, ‘History as Trauma in the Work of David Albahari’, Serbian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1524. 12 Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 66. 10 11

43 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? novelists) to avoid a whole range of politically contaminated literary topics which were marked by the overwhelming ideological discourses of national awakening and martyrdom. This article represents an attempt to shed some light on those aspects of the novel that reveal how the inscription of gender ambiguity and the feminine internal exile into the concept of national identity could destabilise the patriarchal narrative of the nation in the 1990s. The main focus (or the dream) of this study will be the character of the narrator’s mother in the said novel. She is perceived by the readers only as a voice on the tape (made after the death of the narrator’s father), accompanied by a variety of unintentionally recorded non-verbal sounds and silences that constitute an important element of the mother’s gestural language. Analogous to the multiple configurations of the mother’s voice  it had been taped by the narrator, then listened to in Canada, and finally transferred into the kaleidoscopic pseudo-autobiographical novel  the mother’s character represents a fragmented model of the national identity mélange. Consequently, she offers an opportunity for the reader to contest continually the monolithic perception and representation of the nation, by recognizing and embracing the sense of estrangement and exile within himself/herself, because ‘we can only respect incompatible differences within communities if we confront the fact that we are too split subjects’.13 Before proceeding, it is worth recollecting the difference between the meaning, and therefore, the potential performative strength of the two verbs, to focus and to dream, which is delicately emphasised by Jane Gallop14. While the verb to focus denotes an attempt to structure the literary interpretation in an almost mathematically precise and sharp manner, to dream, especially in the psychoanalytic practice, refers to a different interpretational dynamic. It introduces ‘the uncanny self-knowledge where subject and object are neither identical nor different, where the subject and object of the knowledge are aspects of the ‘same person’ separated by the opaque materiality of the dream’15. This distinction is useful both for the analysis of the characters’ relationships in the novel and for the dialogue between the interpreter and the text because it stresses the fluidity of the identity difference. In order to, more or less successfully, grasp the alterity of the mother’s voice in Bait, it is important that the reader articulate an interpretation which would not

Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva. Readings of Exile and Estrangement, New York: St Martin's Press, 1996, p. 23. Jane Gallop, ‘Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2, 1987, p. 320. 15 Ibid., p. 321. 13 14

44 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? (un)intentionally suppress but affirm the possibility of non-patriarchal modes of national and exile identities.

Inner Exile between the Nation and History From the novel’s beginning the reader learns how important the mother was for the family during the Second World War. Her personal stubbornness  symbolically represented in the stereotypical ‘hard Bosnian head’  and her decisive choices made in order to save her children from the horrors of war, actions that were usually associated with male protagonists, elevate her character into the patriarchal figure of the mother who willingly endures the burden of her children’s Jewish otherness. Even though she was born Serbian, her decision to convert to Judaism at the outbreak of war simultaneously emphasises the traditional model of the nation related to ethnic origins and the model where the collective identity is a matter of active choice, thus implicitly illustrating the idea that nation is not a natural but naturalised category. Having in mind the peculiarly dangerous and self-destructive aspect of the conversion, performed at the outset of the atrocities that the Jewish people were about to experience, the mother’s character can be understood from another point of view  one which stems from cultural concepts of the self-inflicted and deeply internalised sacrifice. Even though the future sufferings of Jews and other ethnic communities in the Balkans (especially Roma and Serbs) are foreseeable, the narrator’s mother decides to become Jewish. It is her way of identifying with her children and seeking acceptance of her husband’s Orthodox Jewish family that never accepted her being Serbian. By contrast, her newly established Jewish identity represents an important element of the socio-cultural role of the martyr, traditionally appointed to the women in the Balkans so they are not only to be interpreted as heroines, but also as victims. She does not attempt to escape the approaching horrors of war, but willingly immerses herself into the role of martyr.16

It is important to emphasize that ‘the ethics of self-sacrifice is so deep, so vigorously imposed into the consciousness of women in Eastern Europe (and especially in the Balkans) that it cannot simply oppose the logic of individual rights from a liberal tradition’. This means that even though the gesture of self-sacrifice is determined by strong cultural and social ties, women have an important, although limited, space for individual initiative because they do become subjects and individuals through sacrifice, finding a way to suspend their traditionally appointed position of passive objects of patriarchal domination – Marina Blagojević, ‘Women and War: the Paradox of Self-Sacrifice or the Anatomy of Passivity’, in Gender, Nation, Identity, ed. Dana Johnson, Belgrade: Women in Black, 2005, p. 161. 16

45 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? Here, I said, in Zagreb, she was first a Serb and later a Jew, in any case a foreigner, a double foreigner, if one can put it that way, but she felt, in spite of everything, that she could belong here.17 The mother’s sense of national affiliation is multilayered because she maintains all these collective identities together and yet, she does not immerse herself into the sense of complete national identification but keeps the sense of estrangement towards any kind of absolute unity and collectivity. In addition to that, one should not forget that it is also the Balkans’ specific historical milieu which constantly imposes national identity modifications and changes. By saying ‘I never stopped being Serbian’ she tries to accept and resolve her inner otherness and at the same time, her constant migrations portray her character as that of the wandering subject, but not a completely nomadic one since she does not fully relinquish a sense of fixed identity. When the war is finished, she takes her children to Jewish school to learn and practice their sense of collectivism and Jewishness, to perform and re-enact identity representations in order to regain their roots  to develop in themselves, and in herself, ‘a sense of real belonging, in order to find some solid ground, there where everything was sliding or turning into agitated voice’18. Nevertheless, as a female character, she is ‘akin to what Foucault called countermemory, a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self’.19 Placed at the painfully traumatic identity limits, she is tragically caught in-between the strict national differences, trying not to transcend or subvert them but hold them closely together. That way, the mother succeeds in keeping these differences in the state of inner dialogic tension because none of them should dominate over others. Meanwhile, in her attempt to save her children’s lives, she has to move from Zagreb to the southern regions of the occupied Yugoslavia. Since the South is traditionally and stereotypically represented as the barbaric, pre-civilised remote part of the land, the mother is going from one marginal place to another. Finally, at the end of the war she settles in Peć, in Kosovo, where she does not become close with the Serbian majority, to which she ethnically belongs, but with the Albanians and other marginalised non-Serbs. The mother’s voluntary decision to refuse to be a part of the ethnic majority, its politics of David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 34. Ibid., p. 52. 19 Rosi Braidotti, ‘Difference, Diversity and Nomadic Subjectivity’, <http://digilander.libero.it/ilcircolo/rosilecture.htm>, 1998, [accessed 20 December 2014]. 17 18

46 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? power and oppression, is particularly important at the level of authorial political statement, implicitly present in the novel. Due to her double foreignness and the sense of inner exile, the mother’s life in Kosovo is left ‘untouched’ by the dominant ethnonationalist discourses of the Kosovo myth, which were particularly significant and powerful during the 1990s in Serbia. She relates herself to the Albanians on the grounds of her social and gender aspects of the marginalised and suppressed subject. The symbolic invisible line which the narrator shows on the map of the former Yugoslavia to his friend Donald is employed to develop an idea that transnational or multinational identities are not just possible: they are the reality of human individual experience, placed within the context of the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century, when national and state borders were constantly being contested and cancelled in a destructive way. This is, also, tragically invoked in the geography of the ‘mother’s journey which maps the path of World War II and simultaneously anticipates the Yugoslav civil wars in the 1990s that will replay her life in the exile of her son’.20 The fact of being a foreigner all the time, a double foreigner, could support the hypothesis that the character of the mother represents a specific type of inner exile, even though it would be difficult to decide, beyond any doubt, whether it is self-imposed or a forced one. Having in mind her decisive nature and her belief that everyone ‘is the blacksmith of his own fate’, the mother’s internal exile represents the individually performed act of estrangement from the master narratives of the nation, ethnicity and the past. The ambiguity in the mother’s character is emphasised through the opposing claims that even though she is a constant double foreigner, she finds a way to create a sense of belonging; her inner exile, within the contexts of the Balkans, resembles the notion of ‘exile as the type of home that is always on the move’21. As the narrator tries to explain the historical turmoil of the Balkans for the last two centuries, the mother’s character appears in his story as an illustration of all the difficulties and impossibilities of establishing a historically fixed national identity: She was born shortly after the fall of a [Austrian-Hungarian] monarchy and the birth of a new country [the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians] and for her

Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 61. 21 Maeera Y. Shreiber, ‘The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics’, PMLA, vol. 113, no. 2, 1998, p. 274. 20

47 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? entire life, perhaps, precisely because of that, she wouldn’t know to whom she really belonged, which is the most difficult form of belonging.22 Having in mind that the mother’s country changed its name several times by the end of the twentieth century (The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, National Federative Yugoslavia and finally the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which collapsed in the 1990s), the mother’s sense of belonging becomes even more ambiguous and even, in a way, ironic. According to Damjana Mraović, ‘not only the change of the state name (which in Albahari's linguistic concept has an essential meaning), but also the changes of the political systems did not allow the mother's historical identity to be formed’.23 In addition to that, the Balkans’ political, cultural and social whirlpool did not allow enough time and stability for the mother’s character to recognise herself through the more fixed categories of ethnicity, class and gender. Her life narrative, conveyed within the prevailing atmosphere of historical irony and personal tragedy, offers to the reader the reverse side of the Balkans’ image and of its ‘distinctly male appeal, the appeal of medieval knighthood, or arms and plots’24. It is the narrative that shifts the emphasis from the official ‘mythistorical nation-forming narratives’ to those who define their life histories by counting their losses and defending their own right to remember.25 Therefore, the mother’s attitude towards history with the capital H is always related to her refusal of all the modes of truth that are imposing themselves on the individual personality/subjectivity. As Damjana Mraović convincingly explains in her article, the mother’s story represents the ‘radical critique of historical representation which is always associated with fathers’26, while the orality of the mother’s discourse introduces her as the reliable source of absent and suppressed individual histories. Due to their being connected with the domestic, personal and existentially silenced milieu, women’s histories could significantly oppose the grand narratives. They strive to represent underground voices, excluded from the public sphere, and to create an important ‘female political space based

David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 29. Damjana Mraović, ‘The Politics of Representation: Mamac by David Albahari’, Serbian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, p. 45. 24 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: OUP, 1997, p. 14. 25 Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 62. 26 Damjana Mraović, ‘The Politics of Representation: Mamac by David Albahari’, Serbian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, p. 47. 22 23

48 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? on non-male elements (pacifism, non-loyalty, motherhood) confirming that the female representation is possible in the symbolically male space’27. The mother’s interrupted and mosaic-like narrative stands as the negation of the totality and linearity that are attributed to the commemorative narrative of the historical past. Instead of an ideologically coherent Cartesian set of logical facts and the chronology of the great events from the national mainstream history, the mother’s voice offers a decomposed and incoherent testimony, a ‘sequence of lucid and mnemonic images’28. The storytelling, (dis)organised in this way, serves not to dethrone history fully, but to disrupt its ideological and patriarchal grip by inserting the alternative perspective of the silent and unspoken women’s histories. Her actions, traits and destiny exemplify how the personal feminine/motherly view on collective identity could potentially loosen the borders of national identities, constructed according to the ethnic and linguistic purity concepts. Conversely, the mother’s profoundly personalised narrative inexorably leads to a strong sense of displacement and estrangement, causing at the end of the novel a great deal of suffering and disillusionment. Therefore, the state of exile, as much as the acts of separation and homelessness, seems inevitable. While the mother’s inner exile is determined by her radical denial and refusal of the masculine master narratives of the past, the feminine aspects of the narrator’s exile narrative in Canada are inscribed in his writing, its pauses, breaks and fragmented syntax structures.

Donald and the Mother as Exile Mirrors Even though the mother is the main narrator of the personal and family life, along with the father as the passive voice of trauma (a camp survivor), it is not completely true that she is the main (although hidden) narrator of the novel as Damjana Mraović affirms29. Despite the fact that Bait opens with the sentence ‘Where should I begin’, thus ambiguously expressing both the narrator’s and the mother’s sense of anxiety towards historical time, it becomes clear that the narrator is, more or less directly, in charge of the recording process. Even though a very careful listener, he pushes the button and Ibid., p. 48. Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 57. 29 Damjana Mraović, ‘The Politics of Representation: Mamac by David Albahari’, Serbian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, p. 47. 27 28

49 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? afterwards, while living in Canada, he manages the written transposition of the mother’s recorded history. Furthermore, it becomes clear at one point that the narrator, an ‘advocate of emptiness’30, transforms himself into the disembodied narrative voice by closely intersecting his own utterances not just with the voice of his mother but also with the voice of his Canadian friend Donald. Therefore, Donald and the mother could be interpreted not as ‘real’, individualised figures but the products of the dialogue that takes place within the narrator’s consciousness.31 In this ‘exchange of voices where the narrator gives voice to family members or inhabitants of their new homeland’32, it is still the narrator’s voice that holds the principal authority in the novel, thus creating a sense of monological narration. In terms of Bakhtinian dialogism and heteroglossia, the characters of Donald and the mother are not given the sufficient level of ideological and linguistic independency; their utterances are mostly reflected through the narrator’s conscience, and therefore they are employed mostly as the narrative and identity mirrors for the narrator’s own exile dilemmas.

The dynamic of this mirroring process is determined by two important facts:

the narrator cannot accept his mother’s ambiguous inscriptions of gender and ethnic multiplicity and also, it is impossible for him to accept the modes of existence, embodied in the narrator’s acquaintance Donald who represents a ‘typical Canadian or Northern American’ in opposition to the narrator’s European, Yugoslav and Balkan background. While Donald expresses his ideas about strong, plausible and socially motivated narratives and plot structures, inviting the narrator to accept the real world and not the world of paper (the world of fictional literature), the narrator pleads for the notion of the self as the multilayered and dissonant entity. This issue is presented through the laconic comparison of different practices in coffee drinking: according to Donald, one of the crucial differences between highly developed nations and those that are underdeveloped lies in the fact that ‘backward’ nations drink their coffee with the coffee grounds in it. Since Donald himself is a descendent of Ukrainian immigrants, his cultural and individual identity exemplifies one of the possible solutions of the exile drama. Born in Canada, he Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 54. 31 Robert Hodel, Diskurs (srpske) moderne, Beograd: Filološki fakultet: Institut za književnost i umetnost: Čigoja štampa, 2009, p. 183. 32 Vladimir Gvozden, ‘Images of Canada in the Contemporary Serbian Novel: David Albahari's The Man of Snow and Vladimir Tasić's Farewell Gift’, in Other Language – Otherness in Canadian Culture: proceedings / First International Conference on Canadian Studies, Belgrade, 18–20 October 2003, ed. Vladislava Felbabov and Jelena Novaković, Niš: Tibet, 2005, p. 125. 30

50 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? has internalised all the cultural modes and models of the Canadian milieu, while thoroughly erasing any connection to the Ukrainian ‘roots’ because these roots represent the unwanted coffee sediment and the unsettling sense of difference and estrangement. In contrast to Donald, the narrator cannot suppress or resolve the immense variety of cultural and identitary sediments which are created not just by his Balkan past, but by the general history of Europe. In the conversations with Donald, the narrator evokes the whole range of cultural, social and political stereotypes, and organises them in accordance with the binary opposition model (Europe/America, South/North, Canada/Europe, collectivism/individualism, activity/passivity). These stereotypes help him to look for the proper performative act or cultural gesture that would resolve his own psychological and mental struggles, because the narrator constantly pendulates between the need to inscribe permanently the borders of collective identities and the necessity of embracing the radical rupture. He feels that he has to extricate himself completely from the deadly embrace of the History that made his mother’s life and his own exile experience almost unbearable. In light of this, Donald represents one of the possibilities: his character embodies the type of individual who is capable of denying the deadly call of History. However, when confronted with Donald in their numerous discussions in the cafe, the narrator is unable to let go his own cultural background and the complexity of European identities, which reveal not only the narrator’s fears of the newly acquired language and culture, but also his own sense of self-pity that is particularly typical of intellectuals in exile.33 On the other hand, his relationship with the mother reveals that he is also trying to cut the psychological, national and cultural ties that hold him connected to his language and his country (or countries, having in mind the collapse of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s). Consequently, the narrator’s unspoken objectives in regards to the tape recording are both more complex and ambiguous: at the same time, he is the one who voices his mother’s story but also, and up to a certain level, he silences the mother’s alterity and subjectivity in order to self-define his exile status and construct the mode of identity that would be equally distanced from the dominant discourses of the Canadian, European and Yugoslav (trans) national identities. ‘As much as his narrative reads as an hommage to his mother, it is much more an attempt of self-liberation, which necessitates that the memory of her and all she symbolises be laid to rest’ (Aleksić 2006: 55). According to Joseph Brodsky, the exiled writers constantly look towards the safe territory of their past, no matter how difficult or traumatic it was, because that mechanism is both the means of remembering the past and the tool necessary for the postponement of the coming present that frightens the exiles the most. See: Joseph, Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 33

51 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? Similar to the infant’s fort/da game, described in the Freud’s story about his grandson’s playing, the narrator’s view of his mother’s voice reveals that he is primarily interested in resolving his own identity issues; being cut off physically from his homeland and having the tapes with the voice of the dead mother, the narrator tries to reenact an infantile psychological drama of separation between the child and its mother.34 By pushing the button on and off, he assumes the position of someone who tends to determine the dynamics of the mother’s presence and absence so his ‘original idea to textualize Mother’s speech represents the ultimate death blow to her story that he is trying to pull off for the sake of his own redemption’.35 In light of this, the potentially subversive force of the mother’s multifaceted identity, together with the non-patriarchal quality of her silenced oral history, remains insufficiently elaborated in the novel. It seems that her continuous historical experience of inner exile represents a burden of anxiety too difficult for the narrator to endure, even though the mother’s proactive, willing and alternative oral discourse could be employed as the means of finding the ‘crack’ within the monolithic patriarchal discourse of the nation. The way the narrator relates to his mother’s voice resembles the way different psychoanalytic theories depict the relationship between the mother and the infant in the pre-Oedipal stage of development. As Jane Gallop affirms, in both Lacanian theoretical models of the mirroring process and the object-relations psychoanalytic theory a mother’s role is always to ‘complement the infant’s subjectivity; in neither story is she ever a subject’36. Therefore, it could be said that by openly and sometimes obsessively embracing the motherly figure in the novel, the narrator constantly obliterates her otherness, which is implicitly introduced at the beginning of the novel where the image of the audio tapes is given: The jacket, folded, had been placed at the top of the suitcase and wouldn't have been able to protect them from a more forceful blow; after all, the cardboard boxes in which they'd been packed would have protected them more, but the sleeves of

Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII, London: The Hogarth Press, 1958, pp. 164; Zoran Milutinović, ‘The Demoniacism of History and Promise of Aesthetic Redemption in David Albahari’s Bait’, Serbian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1524. 35 Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 63. 36 Jane Gallop, ‘Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2, 1987, p. 324. 34

52 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? the jacket, which I had folded across them, after having secured them with elastic bands, had eased the insecurity I felt.37 Nevertheless, his narrative shows strong resemblance to the mother’s voice structure which is particularly evident in the narrator’s attempt to replace the ‘oral properties of his mother’s story with the written ones of his text’38. He floats symbolically within the empty space between the oral phase of his homeland culture and the Canadian culture embodied in Donald’s idea that the fictional stories have to include strong plots, clear composition and vivid characterization. As he cannot endure his mother’s model of the inner exile and her life choices, because it would mean living in the unbearable midst of the war conflicts of the 1990s, he tries to recreate a new sense of identity in external exile. In this transition, some traces of the mother’s feminine subjectivity appear homologous to the narrator’s writing that, although primarily involved in the postmodern meta-narrative and narrative suspension, also invokes the core hypotheses encompassed in the notion of the l’ecriture feminine, elaborated by French feminists Julia Kristeva, Lucy Irigaray and Helene Cixous.39 Even though the model of l’ecriture feminine can justifiably be criticised as essentialist, idealist and theoretically fuzzy, the suggestions relating to language distortion and subversion made by Julia Kristeva could still be useful for literary analysis. ‘The gestural, rhythmic and prereferential language’ that Kristeva recognises in the writings of Joyce, Mallarme and Artaud is similar to Albahari’s deconstructed narrative and loose plot structure, distorted time frames, self-reflective discourse, fragmented sentences, pauses and silences.40 On the one hand these elements make the narrator’s utterance appear to be, to a certain point, an almost antipaternal discourse, but on the other, Kristeva’s view of the mother/infant relationship also shows that the mother is silenced as the one who provides blissful fusion for the child while her otherness rests unspoken and unarticulated. Together with other structural elements, the language in Albahari’s novel is also simultaneously the means of obstructing the plot development, transforming it constantly into a series of smaller episodic scenes, essay-like comments and digressions, and the David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001, pp. 34. Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 62. 39 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; Lucy Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Women, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985; Lucy Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985; Susan Sellers, ed., The Helene Cixous Reader, London: Routledge, 1994.. 40 Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: An Understanding of ‘L’Ecriture Feminine’’, Source Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1981, p. 248. 37 38

53 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? arena for examining the relationship between the national identity and feminine figures. Although it may seem that the narrator’s interest in the complexities of the language and identity propels him to introduce a wide range of verbal and non-verbal differences, stemming from his mother’s feminine and corporeal experience, nevertheless he holds the dominant monological position in the novel. Instead of voicing the otherness of his mother’s subjectivity that would perhaps establish a new mode of living on the borders of various identities, the narrator uses her character as a psychological and existential mirror in order to regain his own sense of self, trying to resolve the trauma of his external exile. Confronting himself with Donald and the mother, he heads for the exile position that resembles the notion of the exile’s space, elaborated in the writings of Julia Kristeva. The narrator of Bait represents himself as the intellectual who ‘constantly put structures and meanings in question’ and the eccentric foreigner whose strangeness becomes a threat to the social fabric represented in the character of Donald. The exile’s sense of space is so dislocated that he can no longer affirm the security of a psychic interior or the comforts of a normatising, transcendent exterior (the father, the Law, God). There is no place that offers itself as home.41 Therefore, he positions himself outside of culture. By claiming the exile outside of culture and language, the narrator reveals that he is not capable of fully accepting and voicing the mother’s gender subjectivity and the inner exile difference that could ‘shackle the ideological weight’ in the patriarchal concept of the national identity and articulate a fundamental sense of diaspora. It is the mother’s sense of inner exile that could be seen as the type of a home that is always on the move’, despite all the difficulties and tragic events in her life.

The Unspoken Language of (M)other? Considering the mother’s subversive subjectivity, it is worth discussing the significance of the wide range of language issues inscribed in the mother’s character in the novel: the mother’s literary skills, the richness of her oral discourse, her Scherezade-like storytelling, the symbolic implications of the phrase ‘mother tongue’, and the importance 41

Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva. Readings of Exile and Estrangement, New York: St Martin's Press, 1996, p. 24.

54 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? and the influence of non-verbal elements of the narrator’s native language (sounds, melodies, silences, tones and moods). By closely reading these aspects, one could reach the subtle and multidimensional answer to the following question: How and to what extent does Albahari’s narrator succeed in creating an alternative language with the sufficient subversive strength to ‘shackle the ideological weight’42 in the patriarchal concept of the national identity, or provide new modes of the exile experience? The fact that the mother’s oral discourse provides authority for the narrated fragments of history could additionally be understood within the context of the traditional role that oral forms of literary expression played in the Balkan nations’ past. Unlike the epic poems that glorify mythic or historical male figures, the forefathers of the collectivity  thus, constituting the holistic ‘body of the Norean ‘traditional memory’, which is deposited into the collective consciousness’  the presence of lyrical genres in the mother’s speech emphasises those subaltern historical narratives.43 Fairy tales and lyrical songs called sevdalinke44, performed by the mother when the children were younger, represent genres traditionally sung by women. In these songs, melody, rhythm and sound were features of great significance since they communicated the textual meaning at the intuitive and emotional level of the listeners: Mother knew how to use rhythms, to intertwine several folk narrative phrases, to line up a row of adjectives, to scramble the structure of a sentence, to tell a story. We sat around her captivated, intoxicated with suspense, shrouded by the tangled grapevine, until the darkness would completely blot out our faces. I have never seen darkness so thick as in Bosnia.45 The way the mother uses traditional narrative forms and phrases reveals subtle inscriptions of her femininity: her playing on words and the inverted word order resemble the process of weaving/embroidering, historically perceived as crafts mainly done by women. But, as can be seen from the quotation, the narrative structure of the epic story is not completely deconstructed (the mother can still intertwine several folk narrative Jane Gallop, ‘Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2, 1987, p. 319. 43 Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 58. 44 A specific type of melancholy-driven poem, usually love poems that express the overall feeling of sevdah: the feeling when you are incapable of enduring the pain caused by love, and the pain transforms into the ecstasy of the intoxication of love that compares to the slow process of dying. 45 David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001, pp. 3132. 42

55 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? phrases and tell a story). Therefore, this ambiguity establishes a very significant analogy: similar to the mutually intertwined epic and lyric genres in the mother’s discourse, masculine master narratives of national identity become destabilised from within, by the voice of the oral, feminine and personal history. Since the mother embodies the concept of ambiguity, her character is used at the same time to construct and deconstruct the patriarchal image of the nation. Her marginal position, the unresolved state of belonging and the way she constantly oscillates between the centre and the margin, are depicted through the image of her geographical descent towards the South during the Second World War. Furthermore, it is important to stress the contrast between the mother’s telling of tales and singing of songs (which happens in the private setting of the family home) and the literary elites of Serbia who, at the end of the twentieth century, spun ‘tales of betrayal and tragedy, unique gifts and messianic roles’ in order to articulate a new sense of national collectivity since the model of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity was rapidly collapsing. 46 While the mother's story resembles the narrative weaving of Scheherazade that resists death and destruction, the national elites of the 1990s provided epic-like stories that were used by the ethnocratic groups and individuals who ‘embellished these stories with ‘facts’, constantly moving or sliding between the everyday world of politics and the otherworldly sphere of heroes, sacred spaces, martyrs and traitors – naturalizing the patriarchal values expressed in their romantic vision of the nation’.47 At the end of the description of the mother’s storytelling, an almost apocalyptic detail of the dark in Bosnia foreshadows tragic events in the 1990s (the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia); their metaphysical repetitive nature cannot be escaped even by the mother’s magical embroidering narrative. In addition, the detail of the tangled grapevine, met with the prevailing darkness, form a symbolic border that limits the extent and the potentially subversive power of the mother’s discourse. Even though her skilful nature always finds a way to reverse and playfully upend the laws and the horizons of expectations, characteristic for the poetry genres, it is only to the extent of creating a very personal familial atmosphere, suppressed by the tragically aggressive narratives of war and bloodshed.

Julie Mostov, ‘Sexing the Nation / desexing the Body: politics of national identity in the former Yugoslavia’, in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer London: Routledge, 2000, p. 92. 47 Ibid., pp. 9293. 46

56 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? If the mother’s masterful literary skills fail to disturb the patriarchal order of history seriously, Albahari’s narrator offers an alternative code that could, perhaps more successfully, articulate the mother’s subjectivity and her peculiar personal exile. Reluctant to speak at the beginning of the novel, the mother, afterwards and aside from her verbal expression, accumulates a wide set of different non-verbal sounds, also recorded as an important addition to her voice: silences, pauses, the muffled noises of her crying and sniffing, her footsteps on the kitchen floor and the scraping of the chair where she sits embarrassed because of the tape recording. These seemingly unrelated signs of the mother’s physical presence constitute her own language of gestures and of the body, which partially attempts to dislocate and cancel the possibility that the History might resurrect itself if mother provides it with words. Also, as Tatjana Aleksić points out, the mother’s corporeal language represents an example of Sigrid Weigel’s concept of the corporeal memory where it is not possible for the gesture to be translated into language, since ‘its significance is disclosed only through the recollection of the form and experience actualised within it’48. Unlike the mother’s gestural language, the narrator’s discourse tends to efface his own traces of corporeal existence. Not that he ever mentions his bodily functions or sensations, but his discourse places a strong emphasis on the verbal aspects of communication so the world with its physicality and materiality becomes dissolved into the words. And since the narrator’s utterance is diffused with his mother’s and Donald’s speech, the narrator becomes a disembodied voice which favours the mind, thus leaving the body silenced, and again suppressing the possibility of hearing the mother’s otherness within his own experience of the external exile. As far as the general issue of language is concerned, the mother is in several cases undoubtedly identified with the native language which the narrator is trying to forget or suppress in order to establish the new life environment in Canada. Also, it is significant that the language we speak is usually called mother tongue or mother language. In the case of Albahari’s novel, it is not only the language that the character learns from his mother, but it is also the one that communicates traces of certain pre-oedipal images of the relationship between the mother figure and her infant:

And that’s why, when I heard Mother’s voice, I winced, not because her voice had come, as commonly said, from the other side of the grave, but because I felt, and Sigrid Weigel quoted in Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 58. 48

57 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? that like real pain, how my language was dragging me away from my new host and returning me with great speed to my original form.49 The effect of the language in the mother’s speech is physically transparent and the image of the narrator’s sense of return to his primal form reveals a specific, romantic notion of the language as the tool that bonds our subjectivity to our collective, precivilised and pre-modern grounds. Since it is his mother’s voice, this return could be interpreted in psychoanalytical terms as the narrator’s fears of the return to the uterine state of life and mind. The ambiguous quality of the narrator’s attitude towards his mother’s character stems from the fact that she embodies not just the parental figure but the whole very complexly interwoven imagery of the nation, homeland and the native language. The drama of the narrator’s exile is the drama of his psychological separation from the mother. Therefore, he tries to gain a new sense of identity, by escaping the detrimental restorative power of the mother tongue since language is one of the most powerful tools and mediums of history, memory, the past and all inherited identities that the narrator was born into: The whole time I was tormented by the fear that a return to my native language, reinforced by the fact that it was precisely my mother who was speaking it, would bring me back to where I no longer wanted to return, especially now that, thanks to someone else’s language, I was finally beginning to feel like someone else.50 While resolving his new state of exile, the narrator describes his encounters with his fellow men. He never approaches them nor does he try to understand the content of their speech: I go from store to store, uninterested in what they are really saying, because it is mostly shouts of warning directed at the children or malicious comments about the quality of the merchandise here, but I am eager to drown in that sea of sounds; only in it am I able to feel natural. Not one of their words managed to reach me, but that’s why each of their voices was also mine, and I formed my lips mutely, moved

49 50

David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 28. Ibid., p. 106.

58 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? my tongue, prepared a hum of the vocal cords, adjusted the resonance of the oral cavity.51 It is the sound and the melody of the mother language that is the only valuable thing, because at that level, the relationship between the narrator and his past or his origins could not be contaminated by the discourses of war, nationality or ethnicity. The sea of sounds represents an almost mythical place of unity that transcends historical circumstances. At the same time the source of life and the element of destruction, in the psychological symbolic sense the water stands for those elementary unconscious forces of the human psyche. But it also represents a connection with the chthonic world beyond. Therefore, the mother’s voice, coming from the tapes, simultaneously implies the seductive force of the dead and the possible source of new strength, needed for the exile life in Canada. In addition to that, it is important to notice at the end of the quotation how Albahari does not allow for the tragic or melodramatic atmosphere to prevail, finding a counterbalance in the image of the mute comic pantomime of a man humming.

*****

Building a fragmented, sometimes self-involved fictional autobiography, the narrator of Bait constantly incorporates a variety of gender or femininity/masculinity issues, indirectly suggesting that the engendering of national identity and the exile experience could help articulate alternative types of discourses, non-patriarchal and non-ideological, those that would strongly and effectively oppose the grand narratives of History. In that light, the narrator’s mother appears to stand for that different model of national identity, fragmented and paradoxical from within. Being Serbian, Jewish and Yugoslav at the same time, she does not superficially express but fundamentally and actively lives her multiplied sense of belonging, accepting her own inner modes of otherness. Her verbal and non verbal skills, refusal to surrender to the mythistorical narrative of the nation’s past, and the richness of her gestural language reveal the presence of the subjectivity that is neither masculine nor motherly. It is the subjectivity which perpetually stands in the middle, between and along the borders of various national, class and gender identities. But, even 51

Ibid., pp. 7677.

59 MILJKOVIĆ – ARE NATION AND EXILE A WOMAN? though it might seem that this particular model of the mother’s otherness could overcome the patriarchal imagery of the nationalism and its rigid structures, it is strongly confined within the life of an internal exile that stays tragically muted. On the one hand this could be explained as the consequence of the whole range of socio-historical conditions in the Balkans during the 1990s, but on the other, the failure to articulate fully the otherness of the mother’s subjectivity is caused by the setting of the event of narration (as opposed to the narrated events in the mother’s story). If one is to consider the conditions of the narrative production, then the narrator’s trauma of external exile is one of the main reasons why the mother’s subjectivity and the whole range of performative effects, initiated by women’s unspoken experiences, stay unexplored and undeveloped. Fleeing from the Yugoslav conflict and trying to find his own sense of identity, the narrator uses his mother’s voice and its complexities not to open himself to the alterity of the paternal and patriarchal discourses but to mirror his own anxieties, uncertainties and identity dilemmas. Although there are elements of the l’ecriture feminine in the narrator’s writing, which demonstrate how difficult it is to ‘cut the maternal source of words’52, his main objective is to separate himself from his mother’s figure and the national identities she embodies. In order to live another type of exile, different from that of the mother’s, he attempts to provoke the rupture with the past and distance himself from the historical experience of his homeland by embracing another language and listening to his Canadian friend Donald. Nonetheless, he remains ‘charmed’ by the primal sounds of his mother tongue, although avoiding direct contact with his compatriots in Canada. And, even though by the end of the novel everything remains unresolved  the narrator’s own subjectivity still floating between his mother’s voice and the voice of Donald  the issue of gender ambiguity proves to be one of the most important features in the novel; it does not ‘shackle the ideological weight of the patriarchal discourse,’53 but hopefully it reveals the amounts of possible ruptures in the masculine order of the text.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the author’s work non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Julia Kristeva quoted in Tatjana Aleksić, ‘Extrication the Self from History: David Albahari’s Bait’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, p. 61. 53 Jane Gallop, ‘Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2, 1987, p. 319. 52

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DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.037

The Baltic: A History. By MICHAEL NORTH. Translated by Kenneth Kronenberg. Pp. 427. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2015. £25.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9780674744103. This is the English translation and updated version of Michael North’s Geschichte der Ostsee: Handel und Kulturen [History of the Baltic Sea: Trade and Cultures] (C.H. Beck. 2011), following the Estonian translation published earlier this year. The omission of the maritime reference in the English-language title is somewhat misleading and might lead to the monograph being placed on bookshelves next to Andreas Kasekamp’s A History of the Baltic States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Andrejs Plakans’ A Concise History of the Baltic States (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Yet North has grander ambitions. He presents readers with a sweeping Braudelian-style narrative of how the Baltic Sea functioned as a place of exchange and encounter for all the territories around its shores, from present-day Denmark and the Netherlands in the west, Poland and northern Germany in the south, Norway, Sweden and Finland in the north, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania along the northwest shore and Russia, or rather St Petersburg (former Ingria) in the east. The Baltic: A History explores the contacts and transfers of peoples, goods, and culture to trace the history of how the idea of a coherent Baltic region was imagined and constituted over the last millennia. The monograph is organized into ten chronological chapters, each with an overarching theme. Chapter 1 begins by examining the early seafaring contacts between Vikings, Slavs, and Balts. The consolidation of these connections are subsequently traced through the spread of Christianity, the activities of the Hanseatic League, and relations between the monarchical states of Denmark, Sweden, the Republic of Novgorod, England and the Polish-Lithuanian Union. Chapters 4 and 7 focus on cultural contacts during the Reformation, Northern Renaissance and Nordic Romanticism of the nineteenth century, while Chapter 5 and 6 chart the growing importance of Sweden as a regional power, the Dutch trade monopoly, and the foundation of St Petersburg. The final three chapters place a stronger emphasis on politics. Chapter 8, on revolutions and new states, spans the period from 1905 to World War II, while Chapter 9 juxtaposes Sovietisation and welfare states. It is in the final chapter on transformation and EU integration that the genesis of the monograph itself can be understood, situated within wider political, economic and intellectual efforts to strengthen the concept of a Baltic Sea Region. North, himself director of the graduate programme ‘Contact Area Mare Balticum’ and interdisciplinary training group ‘Baltic Borderlands’ at the University of Greifswald, is heavily involved in the intellectual dimension of this project. His monograph lays out the historical backdrop for present-day transnational development and cooperation by portraying trade and cultural links as the glue that has historically bound the region together. North presents us with a fresh perspective on the regional history of the Baltic Sea shores, but unfortunately falls short of many of his promises. His monograph reads more as a synthesis of national histories rather than a truly transnational account of the region’s past. Moreover, North’s determination to show the exchanges and transfers connecting the region leaves readers with an artificially harmonious view of the region’s history, which was more often characterised by conflict, strife and competition. There are also numerous small slips when it comes to specific details. For example, North explains that ‘song festivals have been a regular fixture celebrating national sentiment in Estonia since 1869 and in Livonia since 1873’ (p. 198), when ‘Estonia’ did not exist in 1869 and the 1869 song festival was in Dorpat (Tartu) in the Russian Livland [Livonian] governorate. Each chapter begins with a map, yet the choice of city names

61 REVIEWS: BOOKS to display is inconsistent and on the map of 1923, the borders between Estonia, Latvia and the Soviet Union are erroneous. There are also inconsistencies in the use of historical and contemporary names, such as the abovementioned ‘Estonia’ and ‘Livonia’ (p. 198) and ‘White Russia and the Ukraine’ (p. 225), perhaps the result of translation by a non-specialist. The logic determining the languages in which place names are listed in the appended gazetteer is also befuddling, not least the mixing up of the Estonian/Finnish and Latvian/Lithuanian names for Cēsis/Võnnu/Verkiai (p. 336). The Baltic: A History constitutes a solid benchmark in the writing of a regional history of the territories surrounding Baltic Sea. It is an engaging and accessible read for a general audience, but one can question how much is has to offer to scholars already familiar with the subject. It is nonetheless hoped that the monograph will inspire further engagement with this burgeoning field of research. CATHERINE GIBSON European University Institute

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the author. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2016.

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 62-63.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.038

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post-Socialism and Gendered Sexualities By FRANCESCA STELLA. (Palgrave Macmillan Series on Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences). pp. 192. Basingtstoke and New York. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. £60.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781137321237. Topics on people’s non-heterosexualities are sometimes regarded as taboo, but Francesca Stella proves to be an exception in her monograph Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post Soviet Russia: Post Socialism and Gendered Sexualities, which investigates the political complexities of Russia’s shifting ideologies that shaped the everyday experiences of non heterosexual women. Her fieldwork took place in Moscow and the provincial town of Ul’ianovsk, delineating 61 cases of homosexual women in their daily lives (p. 8). Stella’s utilization of empirical methods through first-hand interviews is very impressive. She demonstrates a thoroughgoing study of politicized and marginalized lesbian identities since a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Stella argues that there are two contradicting forces against homosexuality in Russia. The first is a conservative agency from above, where the state wants to rebuild family structures and to reallocate women to their “natural” gender roles as a result of a demographic crisis. The second is a conservative influence from families, who attempt to coerce these lesbian women to change their orientations based on their beliefs. Stella’s treatment of historical contexts in relation to lesbian experiences is engaging, however, her monograph is a deeply intricate work, dealing with complex and technical terminologies from a Foucault framework, which readers of gender studies can simply grasp while people without such knowledge will find it challenging. Stella is a meticulous ethnographer, demonstrating her broader knowledge of postsocialist effects on homosexuals within a historical context and her in-depth expertise on the meanings of being lesbian in Russia. Her introduction assesses the translations and meanings of being queer in Russian and the idea of ‘coming out’ as completely different to the West. Stella argues that no liberation movements existed effectively in post-Soviet Russia and that they transformed into something more subversive than impartial (p. 22). The second chapter is broad but important for readers needing a greater historical awareness of the transition of the state’s conduct towards homosexuals between the late 80s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It details important legislation leading to the decriminalization of homosexuality, such as the revoking of the 1993 Criminal Code of Male Homosexuality. However, expressions of homosexuality are generally known to be alien to Russians as a result of conservative anxieties towards a rising demographic crisis. The breakages of traditional family structures and poor parenthoods were negative reflections of social relations, particularly for “working mothers” balancing dual responsibilities at home and work. Stella’s intent of using historical and sociocultural contexts helps the readers to understand why the government and conservative groups become antipathetic to homosexuals, who are perceived as disruptive to Russian traditions. The third chapter includes some interviews with Stella’s subjects, who engage in medical debates on whether being a homosexual is considered an inherent attribute or an illness that needs to be cured through a sexopathologist. This “demedicalization” is examined through a Foucault theory that sexuality is something socially constructed due to ideological changes, and in Russia’s case this was the abrupt shift towards market capitalism. For the new post-socialist state, the demedicalization is fundamental to reeducation of homosexuals (p. 48). Chapters Four and Five are acclaimed for how the author presents her findings through an empirical approach. Several cases have proven how lesbian individuals grow estranged from particular communities and workplaces that contravene their sexual orientations. The sections about family are intriguing because home is a symbol of security and comfort, but for most Russian lesbians, the violence and alienation from their loved

63 REVIEWS: BOOKS ones are more forceful than at the workplace or on the public streets. The author particularly highlights that citizens of Ul’ianovsk are more sensitive to homosexuality than in Moscow because of its isolated conditions (p. 101). Chapter Seven compares the experiences in both cities and provides a deeper understanding of identity politics, showing that homosexuals are torn between choosing to belong to or resist their country, where most people are antipathetic against the idea of homosexuality rather than the individual. This work is neither simply a reflection or a critique. Rather, Stella suggests that the readers themselves engage in debate, which is why her work dominantly uses an empirical over theoretical approach. My main criticism is that the introduction is quite long and ought to be more concise, however, Stella’s work is a valuable contribution for scholars studying gender studies. It is a well-founded publication because she has conducted first hand interviews with lesbians and analyzed her findings methodologically. Some terminologies are difficult to grasp, nevertheless, Stella raises startling issues of the lesbians’ everyday experiences of compromising their behaviours in both private and public spaces. Stella’s claim of their anachronistic nature in post-socialist Russia is telling about society itself, that only if influential conservativeness declines will homosexuality be able to be reconciled with both government and family life. VIVIAN SABRINA LEE School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the author’s work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author for the original creation. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 64-65.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.039

Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling in Southeast Europe and Russia, Criminal Entrepreneurship and Traditional Culture. By JOHAN LEMAN & STEF JANSSENS. (Palgrave Macmillan Series on Crime, Crime Control and Security). pp. 200. Basingstoke and New York. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. £60.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781137543639. In their newly published work on the Smuggling of Migrants (SoM) and Trafficking of Human Beings (THB), John Leman and Stef Janssens examine 53 large scale criminal networks and over 130 files and police reports concerned with their activities over a timeframe of twenty years. The authors focus their studies mainly on Russia and South East Europe, however also discuss their international relationships with Indo-Pakistani, Iraqi-Kurdish, and Italian Organized Crime networks. As is indicated in the title, the authors concentrate on the cultural background of criminal networks and how their traditions affect their activities, as well as incorporating analysis of their entrepreneurial endeavours. They also go into great detail about their methodology, and how their analysis and knowledge is based on police reports and judicial cases. The definition of People Smuggling and Human Trafficking is based on UN guidelines. Leman and Janssens set out to examine leadership and entrepreneurial practices commonplace in criminal networks, and essentially provide a business-centred analysis of these networks’ activities. The authors differentiate between clan based and business based networks. Clan based networks tend to originate from Albania and Romania with trust built on family and blood ties. These networks deal primarily in people trafficking for coerced sex work. Ancient cultures deeply rooted in their ethnic backgrounds provide a behavioural basis for their business. In the Albanian case, this culture is known as Kanun, and can be understood as a type of clan law that in many cases carries more legitimacy for ethnic Albanians than the country’s official laws. In the Romanian networks, the concept of Kumpania plays a very dominant role. The ways in which these concepts apply to the world of these criminal clans is in their perverse manipulation and deliberate misinterpretation. A result of this is that the predominantly female victims of THB end up feeling indebted to their captors, and are very hesitant to seek outside help. Of the many observations made in this book, perhaps the most surprising is the lack of hesitation on the part of the criminals to exploit women from their own ethnic group. Business-based networks on the other hand tend to be dominated by Russians and Bulgarians, and in contrast to clan networks, trust is based on the reputations of business partners. They are defined by exceedingly professional business practices, and the authors describe in grest detail how these networks attempt to conceal their illegal activities behind legitimate, bonafide businesses. The entrepreneurs behind these networks very often have a state security background, and capitalise on the clandestine smuggling routes and practices used by the intelligence services of former socialist governments. It is also shown to what extent these networks have managed to penetrate European state organs, and a disturbing degree of complicity by certain European nations’ embassy staff is also detailed. These networks tend to specialise in money laundering, people smuggling and human trafficking. Another aspect of this particular type criminal activity that is focussed on in Leman and Janssens work is its evolution over twenty years. They stress the importance of entrepreneurs being able to adapt to changing market forces and restructure their business models accordingly, and also to learn from their own mistakes. One such change that is described is the concept of a so-called ‘win-win’ situation in the context of forced sex work. If the victims are allowed to keep some of their profit, they are more likely to be more compliant and a lot less likely to attempt escape. Nevertheless, their perceived

65 REVIEWS: BOOKS profit is still a pittance compared to that received by their captors. This is in contrast to the business model prevalent in the 90s, in which the victims do not keep any of their earnings and faced arbitrary violence. The authors also comment on how the use of violence in these networks has changed over two decades. Limitations of their study is discussed by the authors and include the fact that their research is based on continental Europe, particularly Belgium, hence their findings cannot be extrapolated on a global level. This book is thoroughly recommendable for researchers wishing to gain insight into the activities of criminal networks. The authors use qualitative methods to analyse the cases and take an economic and sociological approach when describing and analysing their business models, the authors also provide suggestions to improve the state authoritiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; approaches in combatting organized crime. FIONA LOEFFEL School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author for the original creation. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

ÂŠ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2016.

SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 66-67.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.040

Customary Law in Hungary: Courts, Texts and the Tripartitum. By MARTYN RADY. Pp. 288. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. £60.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9780188743910. The title of Martyn Rady’s most recent book — Customary Law in Hungary: Courts, Texts and Tripartitum — illuminates the enlightening scope of Rady’s scholarship and the commendable breadth of his investigation. This work is significant not purely because it is the first comprehensive study of Hungarian customary law in any language — and thus opens annals for further inquiry — but also because of its range. It provides discussions on private, public, constitutional and procedural law from the thirteenth– to the twentieth-century. Notwithstanding this coverage, because of Rady’s seamless writing, his main arguments are easy to locate: (1) that written codification of customary law did not make the law any less customary, rather it provided the courts with a heightened memory; (2) that Werbőczy’s text was a mediation of his opinions of what ought to be the case, rather than a definitive legal commentary. Rady arrives at his conclusion after thorough evaluation and discussion on a multitude of primary sources, including the Tripartitum, and rigorous historiographical evaluations. In the first two chapters, Rady neatly introduces customary law, the Tripartitum, the life of Werbőczy, as well as highlighting the problems that his discussion faces and how customary law has developed over time. From there, Rady works thematically through the book, considering: customary law and its legislation; medieval courts; the King, nobility and their relationship with one another and their land; prosecution; medieval procedure; the impacts of the Tripartitum; and succeeding codification attempts. In the last two chapters, Rady offers a chronological picture of customary law spanning from the eighteenth– to the twentieth-century. This book benefits from Rady’s extensive knowledge not only on the Hungarian and Latin languages but also his commitment to central European history and his longstanding research interests into customary law. His previous research and publications on the Golden Bull have clearly inspired the writing of this book with a good deal of Chapter 5 offering discussion on the implications and weaknesses of the resistance clause. As an editor and translator of Hungarian medieval chronicles, Rady also provides the reader with an insight into and an unmatched knowledge of important primary sources, for example the royal letters and charters discussed in Chapter 3. Typically, a discussion on legal history, let alone one spanning seven hundred years, can be uninspiring; however, this is not the case here. I am particularly fond of his frequent use of the phrase “in what follows” as it allows the reader to continuously evaluate where they are in the text and — most importantly — Rady’s argument. Similarly, statements like, ‘let us examine in detail how the loca credibilia operated in respect of the kingdom’s judicial administration’ (p. 39) also add to the clarity of Rady’s argumentation. Furthermore, Rady is an anecdotal writer and accordingly readers of all experiences will welcome the fact that his writing is heavily rooted in primary sources and tales. Not only does this make the book more accessible, but also more engaging, which helps when approaching such a stiff topic. Whilst his book may be intriguing, there are certainly areas that have been left unexplored by Rady, for example how customary law affects Hungarian law and society today. This is peculiar not only because Rady makes the importance of customary law clear throughout the book, but also because he alludes to such a discussion in his final line. Rady writes: ‘it embodies an older jurisprudence that may by its appeal to a popular comprehension of the law still influence the reasoning of lawyers and politicians’ (p. 246). The closest he gets to such an investigation is a comparison between the 1959 Hungarian Civil Code and the Tripartitum; however, even that is relegated to the conclusion and

67 REVIEWS: BOOKS boasts no more than two paragraphs. Whilst it does not make Rady’s book any weaker and I appreciate that he may not be interested in such an examination, I certainly think it would be beneficial to have included such an assessment. This is not only because it is an area unexplored by historians, but also because it is a link that students would not necessarily make independently. I cannot help but feel that Rady’s investigation would have been fuller, if such a discussion were considered. Ultimately, the occasional set back is meagre in light of the achievements of his book. Not only is it a welcomed addition to the scholarship of Hungarian, but also legal, feudal and central European histories. MATTHEW MARTIN School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London

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SLOVO, VOL. 28, NO. 1(WINTER 2016), 68-69.

DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.041

Education in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. By NADIA INVANENKO. (Bloomsbury Series on Education Around the World) pp. 360. New York and London: Bloomsbury. 2014. £100.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781623564803. ‘The only way to reach the level of contemporary Western countries is through education’, claimed Ataturk, identifying education as central to the establishment of the current Republic of Turkey, or indeed any country. Quoted by O. Bolat in his chapter on educational leadership in Turkey, this idea repeatedly surfaces throughout Education in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. This book is part of a series, dedicated to exploring the history and current development of education systems in different parts of the world. This volume deals with Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, affording the majority of this book a post-soviet analysis. Turkey and Israel are also included in this volume and acknowledged as anomalous countries in the region. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, former soviet republics have undergone fundamental and far-reaching reforms within a narrow timeframe. The education system and curriculum in the soviet period was heavily based on communist ideology. In the aftermath of 1989, such a system was no longer compatible with the direction towards democratic governance and new market economies. As a result, education emerged as a key priority during the transitional period. The focus of this volume is an examination of how each country in this region has handled educational transitions in order to conform to the new, pressing needs of the 21st century. Each contributor analyses how these transitions have affected: literacy; social mobility; and public satisfaction with the education sector. The form of the volume makes it extremely accessible. Each chapter investigates a particular country and is written by a separate author. The collaboration involved in its production is palpable and impressive. Chapters begin with an exposition of the socio-political issues affecting a region, so that each country can be seen in the light of its distinct history. Moldova has struggled to create solid political institutions following centuries-long occupation in the presoviet period and constant alterations of its borders, leaving the country with little experience of managing its affairs independently. Other countries, like Ukraine and Armenia, have faced difficulties balancing the modernisation of education with the need to revive cultural and linguistic identity. Outside of the post-soviet filter, Israel has grappled with constructing a system that accommodates its hugely diverse population. The lack of high-quality teachers is an issue reiterated in many chapters. Most experts have identified low salaries as the principal reason for this, which has led to a decline in the social status of the profession. Consequently, less and less graduates enter the profession and many in it choose to migrate. Few countries appear to be making a conscious effort to reverse this tendency. Russia has committed to significantly raising and maintaining teachers’ salaries. Azerbaijan has granted teachers a more active role in shaping and advising the government. On the other hand, Turkey’s well-intentioned reforms to increase and motivate professional development have backfired and lead to further alienation between teachers and the Ministry of National Education. More optimistically, the post-soviet countries have made significant progress in creating and determining education systems that were initially unfamiliar. Overhauling an entire ideology and the society that grew up within it posed a monumental challenge, but each region has succeeded, to varying degrees, in © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2016.

69 REVIEWS: BOOKS constructing a system that is at least satisfactory. As expected, the larger and more economically prosperous countries have greater levels of school enrolment and students within the higher education system than smaller states, which are often dependent on aid and lacking in resources. Nevertheless, they must be seen through the small state filter to contextualise their progress relatively. Returning to Ataturk, what is clear from this volume is the extent to which education is fundamental to the reconstruction of a state. Whether experiencing the communist epicentre crumble, desperately seeking EU membership, or adapting to a constantly-changing state of affairs, these countries have sought to create education systems that reflect Western values and imitate Western paradigms. Western models and investment in education have consolidated its economic and social prosperity. By attempting to follow Western models, the contributors to this volume seem unanimous in their optimistic tone for the future of education in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. One thing this book takes for granted, however, is whether the Western education system should indeed be emulated. Anyone living in the West is surely familiar with the intense, domestic criticism their education systems face, ranging from basic failures in literacy to producing generations of culturally unaware students. This idealised, elevated image of the Western system as an exemplar for Eastern Europe does appear inadequate. Perhaps a study of the discrepancies between the idealisation of the Western education system in Eastern Europe and its scandalous status in the West would make an interesting focus for the volume on Western Europe. LISA NICHOLSON School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon work noncommercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

ÂŠ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2016.