Grappling with the Post-Sovietness of the World
“Post-Sovietness” typically encompasses the condition of contemporary life in Russia (Pop-Eleches, Tucker, 2017). From Tsiolkovsky to Tatlin, from Vertov to Shklovsky, the Soviet theorists envisioned the Soviet project as one of universal happiness, even if at times they themselves were prone to despair seeing that their ideas had a hard time being implemented (Oushakine, 2016).
The places of my fieldworks, Anosovo and Bratsk, emerged as Soviet “cities of the future.” Yet in terms of biopolitical governmentality, the modernity of Soviet Communism did not differ greatly from the modernity of capitalism and especially of fascism, according to Foucault (2003): these regimens had developed the bureaucratic apparatuses and hygienic procedures and took a citizen not as individuals but rather as constructive cells in the organism of the people, the element of the numerous mass, a population.
The collapse of the Soviet state has prompted scholars to grapple with the new hybrid political and social formations of the 1990s: Verdery suggested that the transition went from “socialism to feudalism” rather than to capitalism (1996), Simone Clarke wrote of the resurrection of the Soviet system in Russia’s bureaucracies (1992).
“Post-Sovietness” emerged as the indissoluble “legacies” of “Sovietness” (Pop-Eleches and Tucker, 2017). Along with revived bureaucracies, these “legacies” that scholars seem to be so enamored with include privileging the collectivity over individual initiative, evolving bartering in place that previously was taken by central planning (Humphrey, 2002), the gendered rhetoric around the masculinized citizen, feminized borders, eroticized “national sentiment” (Verdery 1996, 13), as well as the role of the woman as a working counterpart to the Soviet man (Rivkin-Fish, 2005); a strong teleological belief in progress and in the project of building of classless society (Oushakine, 2014).
Infrastructure is a substrate for mobility, enabling the circulation of goods, money, and people (Larkin, 2008), but it is not merely that; it is a cradle of emotions and impressions.
Yet the “post-Sovietness” is not merely a condition of life in Russia; for better or for worse, it is applicable to the entire world.
