|
Article Excerpt
The practices of conspiracy theory form a tensely articulated pact with therapeutic culture through the logics of stress, trauma, injustice, self-made agency, and redemption. Taken separately and together, conspiracy theory and therapeutic culture constitute fields of feeling that channel the contradictions of contemporary social transformations and their effects. They knot together desire and despair, progress and collapse, enchantment and disenchantment, nostalgic and futuristic yearnings, and the search for everything from purity to community. This is the nature of a modern nervous system. It is also the nature of [the] meta-discourse of modernity.
Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart (2003: 263)
A COMMEMORATIVE EVENT THAT THE ALTAI COMMITTEE OF SOLDIERS' Mothers organized on November 15, 1999 in Barnaul, the administrative center of the Altai region (Siberia), initially did not promise anything unusual. By presenting a newly published book of obituaries, We Were Waiting for You, Sons ..., the event was supposed to publicly remember 114 Altai soldiers killed in the first Chechen war (1994-1996). By 1999, the Mothers' Committee had been actively involved for more than 10 years in "memorializing" (uvekovechivanie) the losses of Altai soldiers in various military conflicts of the 1970s to 1990s: from Afghanistan to Abkhazia, and from Tajikistan to Chechnya. Unlike their colleagues from the Moscow Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, the Altai women stayed away from openly confronting Russia's government about its military policy. Instead, they domesticated their losses by persistently inscribing traces of soldiers' deaths in the everyday fabric of the city-by creating a regional Museum of Local Wars, by displaying memorial plaques with the names of deceased soldiers, by rearranging soldiers' graves in the city's main cemetery, and by organizing high-profile memorial events. It was personal memory, not political justice, that was their main focus.
The book presentation, however, marked the emergence of a very different tendency. The mothers' usual, small-scale memory work was overshadowed by a desire to establish larger historical links and spatial connections. Staged in a local theater in downtown Barnaul, the commemorative ceremony was attended by the mothers, veterans of local wars, politicians, and journalists. A short video film that opened the event put a peaceful, spiritual cast on the last hundred years of Russia's history by presenting endless images of churches and pictures of Russian landscapes. A voice-over narrative that accompanied the video spelled out a very different message. The serene visual backdrop was in a radical contrast to a story that presented the century as a lasting chain of external attacks and internal treachery: from the Russian-Japanese war of 1905 to the plan of psychological war against Russia allegedly created by Allen Dulles in the 1950s; from Germany's invasion in 1941 to Russia's current battles with Islam in the Caucasus.
Suddenly, the century of history emerged as a century of heroic struggle and resistance to alien forces, a resistance that is "deeply rooted" in Russian tradition, as one of the presenters put it. The main slogan of the ceremony reminded the audience of the purpose of this lesson in history: "To Remember in Order to Live." The poem read at the opening of the book presentation--a simultaneous message to a "distant ancestor" and to a close descendant ("son")--summed up this interplay of outside pressure of anonymous (but hostile) forces and internal resistance well:
The battlefield is ablaze My ancestor, now I recall our tie It is my blood That you shed on the Kulikovo battlefield ... Our blood is intact Even though it has been shed many times It forgets nothing Remember, son, you share the blood of your ancestors. (1)
The importance of biospatial connections was emphasized in a more politically overt way as well. When a group of contemporary dancers in black dresses performed their disjointed movements on stage, the screen behind them depicted footage of the Russian deputies voting in December 1991 in favor of dissolving the Soviet Union. The voice-over simultaneously gave the dictionary meaning of the word "cosmopolite" as a person who does not recognize the specificity of the relationship with the motherland, thus bringing back sinister associations with the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign against "kinless cosmopolites" (bezrodnye kosmopdity). Aleksandr Surikov, governor of the region at the time, attended the presentation, too; he sponsored the publication of the book of memory and even authorized the introduction to it. In his short speech he finally linked the theme of cutoff roots with the notion of treason. As the governor put it, the soldiers' deaths were the "price for the betrayals" that began with the splitting of the Soviet Union. "It is a bitter price. But this is the price we have to pay for the life of our state. We've got no other state." (2) Justified by a lack of choice, the life of the state became associated with deaths in families, while the rhetoric of grief helped to transform the state violence in Chechnya into a self-victimizing discourse on the history of betrayals.
This episode vividly outlines several important aspects that I will discuss below. As the ceremony suggests, personal loss tends to be translated in terms of national traumas and suffering. Individual biographies are merged with historical narratives about battlefields and spilled blood, while the state and the motherland become symbolically indistinguishable. Perhaps more important is that this triangulation of the self, loss, and the nation-state is framed within a larger context of the experienced vulnerability or imagined threat. The suffering self is equated with the Motherland in danger.
Starting in the 1990s, this patriotism of despair, with its combination of the traumatic and the conspiratorial, has become especially emblematic of the postmillennial Russia. Inability to convincingly explain individual or collective losses has resulted in an intensive production of popular conspiracy narratives aimed to bring to light hidden forces and concealed plans of "evil outsiders." As I shall show, in these narratives, references to pain and suffering are often linked with fundamental economic changes in the country. Emerging market relations both polarized people and simultaneously activated what Jean and John Comaroff have fittingly called the "will to connect" (2003b: 297).
Scholars studying transitions from noncapitalist economic orders to capitalist ones have already pointed out that these moves inevitably involve a comprehensive reorganization of the moral presumptions necessary for justifying new choices and alternatives. For instance, Michael Taussig observes that "there is a moral holocaust at work in the soul of a society undergoing the transition from a precapitalist to a capitalist order. And in this transition both the moral code and the ways of seeing the world have to be recast" (1980: 101). Readjusting their moral and social optics, Taussig suggests, groups and individuals tend to resort to preexisting cosmogonies, using them either as sites of resistance to the emerging order or as a means of mediation. Rites and myths are the most visible forms of such sociosymbolic reconfiguration (101). Katherine Verdery, in a similar vein, argues that the radical change of the property regime that followed the collapse of socialism "alters the very foundations of what 'persons' are and how they are made" (2000: 176).
Stories and rituals that I analyze in this article present further striking evidence of the uneasy process through which new social realities and new social identities are imagined, negotiated, and internalized in postsocialist Russia. In many of these stories, the "invisible hand" that is supposed to guide the free market is made dramatically real in various scenarios of manipulation (see also Verdery, 1996:180-84; Ries, 2002). The post-Soviet uneasiness about the increasing social role of capital is translated into stories about universal lies and deceptions. The perceived exposure to foreign values and capital is often counterbalanced with ideas of an enclosed national community and unmediated values. Increasingly, Russo-Soviet culture is construed as "inalienable wealth," as a particular form of socially meaningful property that could be shared among people but that could not enter commercial circulation or exchange (Weiner, 1985).
Instead of dismissing these narratives as yet another example of the post-Soviet return to the "archaic" and "mythological" (Gudkov, 2005), I will approach them as a historically specific form of symbolization that not only endows its authors and consumers with some interpretative agency and social identity (Hellinger, 2003: 226) but that also provides them with a plausible organizing plot in a situation where established patterns of interactions and traditional forms of rationality lost their orienting function. As Kathleen Stewart convincingly pointed out, "Conspiracy theory ... reenacts trauma; it's always returning to something you thought you knew but could not quite account for. It looks for the trace and fastens onto it. It's is a fascination that quickly turns into horror and then lends itself to fascination again" (1999: 17). In other words, it is not the actual theoretical content of post-Soviet conspiracies that I am interested in exploring here. From that point of their "theory," conspiracy theories are all alike. Rather, I want to draw attention to those unsettling and dislocating experiences of the post-Soviet transformation that have made conspiratorial thinking popular in contemporary Russia.
This article examines a set of interviews and materials that I collected in Barnaul. During my fieldwork from 2001 to 2003 and shorter visits from 2004 to 2005, I attended meetings and interviewed individual members of local political and religious groups. Originally, my informants included such diverse groups as Western-oriented liberals, hard-core Communists, neohippies, and neopagans. Here I focus mainly on Communist, National-Bolshevik, antiglobalist, and religious groups that were most active in the city during my fieldwork.
"EVERYONE LIES, EVERYONE STEALS"
In post-Soviet studies of Russia, it has become a commonplace to view the existing Communist movement as a hangover of the previous period, a political phantom that persisted rather than developed. This perception has some validity. A majority of supporters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the KPRF, as it is usually called) belong to the generations that developed their political views in the Soviet period. Communist-oriented groups and organizations are most active in areas outside major industrial and cultural centers, usually in rural and newly demilitarized provinces. Given these two factors, scholars of Russia routinely frame Communist-inspired actions as "protest-like" behavior, as a backlash against liberalization and reforms, not as an intrinsic and inseparable part of these processes (Shestopal, 2004; Sedov, 2003; Kiewiet and Myagkov, 2002; Wegren, 2004).
The situation is not that simple. From 1991 on, the Altai regional parliament was continuously controlled by a pro-Communist coalition. However, the typical "Communist prototype"--"a retired babushka with a hearing aid who tries to relive her Communist youth," as a young Barnaul Communist described it to me--had very little in common with people who were actually associated with Communist institutions in the region. In fact, many Communist deputies elected to the Altai parliament in 2004 were 30 or 40 years old. People who worked for local leftist organizations were relatively young, too: most of them were born in the 1970s and 1980s. Many studied at local universities, majoring in social sciences; there were quite a few who became fulltime politicians. To avoid historical and terminological confusion, I refer to this new generation of Communists as "neocommunists," or "neocoms." Increasingly, this group describes itself as the "children of reforms" (deti reform), resolutely distancing itself from the generation of "pro-Western and liberally-minded 'children of perestroika'" who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s (Ekart, n.d.).
Providing numerous and extensive descriptions of the "detrimental impact of capitalism," my neocommunist informants often started by identifying an unexplainable gap between new economic relations and practices of daily life produced by this economic order. It was precisely this disjuncture of the economic and the quotidian that I was interested in exploring. How did young people in Altai react to the limited applicability of their social knowledge and interpretive skills? What symbolic resources did they draw upon in order to produce meaningful structures in the context of uncertainty?
On December 16, 2002, Aleksei Z., an 18-year-old member of the radical National-Bolshevik group (natz-boly) agreed to meet with me in front of an old shopping center, the Central Universal Store (TsUm), in downtown Barnaul. Picking a place for the interview was not easy. It was snowy and windy outside; the temperature had dropped to -10[degrees]F. In this weather, the natz-boly's usual place of socializing, the Eternal Flame Square near a local monument to the martyrs of Socialism, did not look very attractive. The TsUM was crowded, and there was nowhere to sit. Finding a place to have a talk with Aleksei was a problem. Apart from flashy, loud restaurants and fast-food stands--the two extremes that defined the public space in the city--there were very few affordable caf6s. Nor was there any developed pub culture. Shopping malls, one possible indoor hangout, tended to be cluttered with stalls and kiosks to maximize the real estate's revenues. Public libraries required special passes (or a passport). In a warmer season, things might look different in Bamaul, but from October until early May the shape of public space remained narrow. A Baskin-Robbins around the corner was a plausible choice, but Aleksei's reaction to it was negative. He explained that as an antigiobalist he found it objectionable. There was a more personal story to tell, too. Earlier in the fall, Aleksei, together with several other National-Bolsheviks, had smashed several big windows...
|
