Sergei Ushakin about postcolonial histories of socialism. Sergei Ushakin: “The task is to move away from Stalin as the key metaphor of the Soviet period” Sergei Ushakin

Graduated from the Faculty of History of Altai State University. In 1988- taught [What?] at Altai State University. In 1994, he completed his postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University, where he defended his PhD thesis on the topic: “ Higher school in the system of political relations". Candidate of Political Sciences.

Since 1995, he began collecting materials for his doctoral dissertation on the formation of national and gender identity in post-Soviet Russia. According to other sources, he began to engage in gender studies in 1997.

In 1998-2005 studied for a doctorate at Columbia University (New York), specializing in sociocultural anthropology. Master of Philosophy from Columbia University (). In 2005 he defended with honors [what?] PhD dissertation from the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University.

Since 2006, he has been working at Princeton University in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Since 2011 - associate professor of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Since 2012 - director.

Family status

Scientific interests

Family and gender identity, consequences of trauma and collective memory, primarily about the Soviet past.

Main works

The patriotism of despair: nation, war, and loss in Russia. - Ithaca: Cornell Unniv. Press, 2009. - 299 p. ISBN 0801475570
. (Collection of articles) - Vilnius: EHU; Moscow: Variant LLC, 2007.

Edited collections of articles

In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia. Ed. by Costica Bradatan and Serguei Oushakine. - New York: Lexington Books, 2010.
Trauma: points. Sat. articles edited by S. Ushakin and E. Trubina. - Moscow: New Literary Review, 2009.
Family Ties: Models to Build. In 2 vols. Sat. articles edited by S. Ushakina. - Moscow: New Literary Review, 2004.
About masculinity. Sat. articles edited by S. Ushakina. - Moscow: New Literary Review, 2002.

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Excerpt characterizing Ushakin, Sergei Alexandrovich

- Well, of course, Isidora, because this was their home! And it was there that Magdalene returned. But it would be wrong to give credit only to the gifted. After all, even simple peasants learned reading and writing from the Cathars. Many of them knew the poets by heart, no matter how crazy it may sound to you now. It was a real Dreamland. The Land of Light, Knowledge and Faith, created by Magdalene. And this Faith spread surprisingly quickly, attracting thousands of new “Cathars” into its ranks, who were just as ardently ready to defend the Knowledge they gave as the Golden Mary who gave it... The teaching of Magdalene swept through the countries like a hurricane, leaving no one aside. one thinking person. Aristocrats and scientists, artists and shepherds, farmers and kings joined the ranks of the Cathars. Those who had easily gave their wealth and lands to the Qatari “church”, so that its great power would be strengthened, and so that the Light of its Soul would spread throughout the entire Earth.
– Sorry to interrupt, Sever, but did the Cathars also have their own church?.. Was their teaching also a religion?
– The concept of “church” is very diverse, Isidora. This was not the church as we understand it. The Cathar Church was Magdalene herself and her Spiritual Temple. That is, the Temple of Light and Knowledge, like the Temple of Radomir, the knights of which at first were the Templars (King of Jerusalem Baldwin II called the Knights of the Temple Templars. Temple - in French - Temple.) They did not have a specific building in which people would come to pray . The Cathar Church was in their soul. But it still had its own apostles (or, as they were called, the Perfect Ones), the first of which, of course, was Magdalene. Perfect were the people who reached the highest levels of Knowledge and devoted themselves to absolute service to it. They continuously improved their Spirit, almost giving up physical food and physical love. The Perfect served people, teaching them their knowledge, treating those in need and protecting their charges from the tenacious and dangerous clutches of the Catholic Church. They were amazing and selfless people, ready to the last to defend their Knowledge and Faith, and Magdalene, who gave it to them. It is a pity that there are almost no Cathar diaries left. All that we have left are the records of Radomir and Magdalene, but they do not give us the exact events of the last tragic days of the courageous and bright Qatari people, since these events took place two hundred years after the death of Jesus and Magdalene.
– Tell me, Sever, how did Golden Maria die? Who had such a black spirit to raise his dirty hand against this wonderful woman?..
– Church, Isidora... Unfortunately, still the same church!.. She became furious, seeing in the face of the Cathars the most dangerous enemy, who gradually and very confidently occupied her “holy” place. And realizing her imminent collapse, she no longer calmed down, trying in any way to destroy Magdalene, rightly considering her the main culprit of the “criminal” teaching and hoping that without their Guiding Star the Cathars would disappear, having neither a leader nor a Faith. The Church did not understand how strong and deep the Teaching and Knowledge of the Cathars was. That it was not a blind “faith”, but a way of their life, the essence of WHY they lived. And therefore, no matter how hard the “holy” fathers tried to win over the Cathars, in the Pure Land of Occitania there was not even an inch of land for the deceitful and criminal Christian church...
– It turns out that it wasn’t only Karaffa who did this?!.. Has this really always been the case, Sever?..
I was seized with real horror when I imagined the whole global picture of betrayals, lies and murders that the “holy” and “all-forgiving” Christian faith committed in an attempt to survive!..
- How is this possible?! How could you watch and not interfere? How could you live with this without going crazy, North?!!
He did not answer, knowing well that this was just a “cry from the soul” of an indignant person. And I knew his answer very well... Therefore, we were silent for some time, like lonely souls lost in the dark...
– So how did Golden Maria die? Can you tell me about this? – Unable to withstand the prolonged pause, I asked again.
North nodded sadly, showing that he understood...
– After the teaching of Magdalene occupied most of the then Europe, Pope Urban II decided that further delay would be like death for his beloved “most holy” church. Having thoroughly thought through his diabolical plan, he, without delay, sent two faithful “fosterlings” of Rome to Occitania, whom Magdalene knew as “friends” of the Cathars. And again, as happened too often, wonderful, bright people became victims of their purity and honor... Magdalene accepted them into her friendly arms, generously providing them with food and shelter. And although her bitter fate taught her not to be a very trusting person, it was impossible to suspect anyone, otherwise her life and her Teaching would have lost all meaning. She still believed in GOOD, no matter what...

Professional interests:
Began doing gender studies in 1997. (Formation of national-gender identity in Russia).

Publications:
Articles in professional journals:

2004 “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 19(3):392–428.
2003 “Crimes of Substitution: Detection in the Late Soviet Society” Public Culture, 15 (3).
2002 “The Culture of Symbolic Shortage: Practicing Consumption in Post-Soviet Russia” East-Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre-Est. (Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Studies, Budapest).
2001 “The Fatal Splitting: Symbolizing Anxiety in Post/Soviet Russia” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, vol. 66 (3): 1-30. (National Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm).
2001 “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat” Public Culture, vol. 13 (2): 191-214.
2001 “The Tie That Bonds” (with Rebecca Luce-Kapler and Jean-Claude Couture), in Multi/Intercultural Conversations: a Reader. Edited by Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: P. Lang, 399-421.
2000 “The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the Post-Soviet Russia” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 17 (5): 97-120.
2000 “The State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Lacking in the Symbolic” The Anthropology of East Europe Review: Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, vol. 18 (2): 53-61.
2000 “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52(6):991-1016.

Publications in Russian:

Edited collections

2004 Family values: models for assembly. In two volumes. Ed. and comp. S. Ushakin. Moscow: New Literary Review.
2001 About masculinity. Comp. With Ushakin. Moscow: New Literary Review.

Articles:

2004 Place-of-name: family as a way of organizing life. // Family values: models for assembly. Ed. and comp. S. Ushakin. T.1. – Moscow: New Literary Review.
2002 “A man of his kind”: signs of absence. // About masculinity. Comp. S. Ushakin. M., 2002.
2001 The Other: The (Dis)attraction of Discrimination. //Gender conflict and its representation in culture. Ekaterinburg: Ural State University, ss. 171-177.
2000 Political theory of feminism, Questions of Philosophy, No. 11.
1999 Quantity of Style: Consumption under Symbolic Scarcity. Sociological Journal 3/4: 235-250.
1999 Floor field: in the center and along the edges. Questions of Philosophy, No. 5: 71-85.
1999 Universities and government. Social Sciences and Modernity, No. 2:55-65.
1999 The appearance of masculinity. Banner, No. 2:131-144.
1998 Intelligence through the prism of interests. Polis, No. 4: 44-56.
1998 Functional intelligence. Policy No. 1:8-22.
1997 (with L. G. Blednova) James Bond as Pavka Korchagin. Socis, no. 12: 16-24.
1997 Multiculturalism in Russian, or On the possibility of postmodern pedagogy in Russia. Policy No. 4:117-125.URL:
1997 Gender as an ideological product: about some trends in Russian feminism. Person #2: 62-75.
1996 After modernism: the power of language or the language of power. No. 5: 130-141.
1995 Speech as political action. Policy No. 5:142-154.
1993 Education as a form of power. Polis No. 4: 43-48.
1993 Youth as a subject of action. Policy No. 2:136-143.

Reviews:

2003 Learning in comparison: about Euro-standards, men and history. Rec. in the book: Russian masculinities in history and culture. N.Y., 2002. // New Literary Review, No. 64.
2003 Masculinity in Russia. Review of the international seminar “Masculinities in Russia”, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, June 19-23, 2003) (together with M. Litovskaya) // New Literary Review, No. 63. URL: http://magazines. russ.ru/nlo/2003/63/
2001 Hellberg-Hirn, Elena. 1998. Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness. Aldershot: Ashgate, 289 pp.; Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel. 1995. The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering. New York: New York University Press, 330 pp.; Pesmen, Dale. 2000. Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 364 pp. // Sociological journal. #2.
1999Barchunova T. (ed.) Floor ceiling. Novosibirsk: NSU. // Sociological Journal, 1999, No. 1-2.
1999 Roudinesco, Elisabeth.1998. Jacques Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press. // Questions in Philosophy No. 5.

Publications on the portal:

Training courses Books

The crisis of masculinity in late Soviet discourse Auth. Zdravomyslova Elena Andreevna, Temkina Anna Adrianovna; Ed. Ushakin Sergey Alexandrovich. 2001.
About masculinity: Collection of articles Ed. Ushakin Sergey Alexandrovich. Moscow: New Literary Review, 2002.
Family ties: Models for assembly: Collection of articles. In 2 books Ed. Ushakin Sergey Alexandrovich. Moscow: New Literary Review, 2004.

Articles

Ushakin S.A. The appearance of masculinity // Rubezh (almanac of social research). 1998. No. 12. P. 106-130.
Blednova L.G., Ushakin S.A. James Bond as Pavka Korchagin // Sociological research. 1997. No. 12. P. 16-23.
Ushakin S.A. Intelligence through the prism of interests // . 1998. No. 4. P. 21-36.
Ushakin S.A. Quantitative style: consumption under conditions of symbolic scarcity // Sociological journal. 1999. No. 3/4. pp. 187-214.
Ushakin S.A. Is it necessary to reconstruct phenomenology? // Laboratorium. Journal of Social Research. 2012. No. 1. P. 156-159.
Abramyan L.A., Baranov D.A., Volodina T.V., Vydrin V.F., Guchinova E.M., Zhuikova M.V., Kormina Zh.V., Kulemzin V.M., Hirokazu Miyazaki , Neklyudov S.Yu., Nikitina S.E., Rodionov M.A., Mark Steinberg, Tuchkova N.A., Ushakin S.A., Michael Fisher, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Shchepanskaya T.B. From the editorial board // Anthropological Forum. 2005. No. 2. P. 8-134.
Ushakin S.A. Parallel Freud (review of the book by Elizabeth Roudinesco Jacques Lacan) //
Ushakin S.A. Plagiarism? About ethics in science // Social sciences and modernity. 2001. No. 4. pp. 189–191.
Ushakin S.A. Learning in comparison: about Euro standards, men and history // New Literary Review. 2003. № 64.
Ushakin S.A. Gender as an ideological product // Human. 1997. № 2.
Ushakin S.A. After modernism: the language of power or the power of language // Social sciences and modernity. 1996. No. 5. P. 130-141.
Ushakin S.A. Universities and government // Social sciences and modernity. 1999. No. 2. P. 55-65.
Ushakin S.A. Ushakin S.A. The appearance of masculinity // Woman does not exist. Modern studies of sexual differences / Ed. I. Aristarkhova. Syktyvkar. 1999. pp. 116-132 //
Ushakin S.A. Functional intelligence // POLIS: Political Studies. 1998. No. 1. P. 8-22.
Ushakin S.A. He is a man of his kind: signs of absence / Ushakin S. On masculinity: Collection of articles. Comp. S. Ushakin. M.: New Literary Review, 2002 //
Ushakin S.A. Ethnography of oneself, or the benefits of formalism in anthropology // Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology. 2004. T. 7. No. 2. P. 160-172.

Links:
Additional Information:
The author has Grants and scholarships:

2004-2005 Dissertation grant from the Eurasian Studies program of the Social Science Research Council (USA).
2004-2005 Dissertation grant from the Josephine de Carman Foundation (USA).
2003-2004 Dissertation grant from Columbia University.
2002 Civic Education Project Publishing Grant.
2002 International dissertation and research grant from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.
2001 Dissertation grant from Columbia University.
2000-2001 Open Society Institute Publishing Grant
2000-2001 Global grant from the Open Society Institute.
2000 Sheps Foundation Summer Research Grant (Department of Anthropology, Columbia University)
1999-2001 Presidential Fellowship, Columbia University.
1999 Small grant from the International Research Exchange Council (USA)
1998 – 1999 Fellowship from the School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University.
1998 – 1999Additional grant from Central European University (Budapest)
1996 - 1997 Soros grant for studying at the Central European University.

Prizes:

2001 Winner of a medal and cash prize for young researchers from the CIS countries for 2000 for the best work in the field of sociology, psychology, philosophy and law.
2000 Winner of the 2000 competition among young scholars of Eastern Europe for the best lecture on Eurasian problems, organized by the journal Europe-Asia Studies (University of Glasgow) and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam)

Participation in projects, organizations, committees:

2002 - present Participant of the international project: Contrasting Russian Others: Gender and Nationality in Cultural, Historical and Literary Discourses of the 20th Century. Organizer: Finnish Academy of Sciences. Helsinki, Finland.
2002, 2001 Member of the selection committee. Open Society Institute, Budapest, Hungary. Selection Committee for the Soros Supplementary Grant 2002-2003 and 2001 2002.
1999, 2001 Project consultant: The Country in Mind: Identity Development of Adolescents in Eastern Europe and Austria: a Research Dialogue. Organizers: University of Vienna, Utrecht University, Tavistock Clinic (London). Vienna, Austria.

June 29, 2015 Sergey Ushakin, Associate Professor at Princeton University, conducted a workshop " Alienation of history: on postcolonial histories of socialism".

Sergey Ushakin - leading social anthropologist, Ph.D. (Department of Anthropology, Columbia University), PhD (St. Petersburg State University), Director of the Program for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Princeton University.

The purpose of the workshop was to critically examine the limits of applicability of postcolonial studies to post-Soviet history. The materials were two articles by Sergei Ushakin devoted to historical debates in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.

Sergei Ushakin began the workshop with an overview of the main directions of development of postcolonial theory. Professor Ushakin noted that two decades of post-socialism have made numerous attempts to work through the complex and contradictory history of the socialist experiment in non-socialist conditions. The new national histories that began to emerge in the former republics of the Soviet Union were often motivated by the curious desire to mark a clear dividing line between the “Soviet” on the one hand and the “national” on the other, in order to retrospectively activate sources of national authenticity that lay outside discursive limits of Soviet socialism.

Sergei Ushakin showed how a new discursive tradition of post-Soviet postcolonialism is emerging, using the example of public debates related to three “places of memory” in Belarus: a memorial to the victims of the Great Patriotic War, built in Khatyn in the 1960s; the Kuropaty tract, the site of mass executions in 1937-1941, discovered in the late 1980s; and the historical complex “Stalin Line” on the territory of Belarus, created on the basis of the restored fortifications of the Minsk fortified area in 2005. In addition, the self-representation of one of the largest museums in Central Asia was touched upon - the Kyrgyz State Historical Museum, which before the collapse of the USSR was the museum of V. Lenin and has preserved an exhibition related to him to this day. Taking these four cases as a basis, Professor Ushakin focused on two issues: metaphors and styles that make up new national languages and new subject positions (ideas of the nation as a collective subject) that arise in the process of new discursive production of the past.

According to Professor Ushakin, Belarusian cases are directly related to the difficult legacy of Stalinism. Heated debates about their meaning and role in the national memory of Belarusians have significantly influenced the process of national identification in this country. However, Ushakin noted that these debates failed to produce historical narratives that could unite the emerging nation, but identified two opposing approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of national history as a history of occupation by an alien regime. In his opinion, this kind of distancing from Soviet history leads to the retrospective formation of a new - non-Soviet - subject position that does not coincide with either fascism or Stalinism. The Kyrgyz case has become remarkable in relation to the difficulties associated with constructing one’s own national identity during the Soviet period, or more precisely, the presence of a huge blank spot in the history of the Kyrgyz nation. Thus, the museum exhibition dedicated to the history of the Kyrgyz people begins with the Stone Age and continues until the end of the 19th century, when Kyrgyzstan was included in the Russian Empire, but after that, exhibits dedicated to the Kyrgyz people end: there are no materials in the permanent exhibition dedicated to the Soviet period of the Kyrgyz nation is not at the exhibition. However, they arise again, after the collapse of the USSR.

The discussion at the workshop was related to two questions from Sergei Ushakin: how should one “position oneself in relation to the imperial presence?” and “Is Belarusian culture post-colonial?” In search of an answer, the workshop participants raised the issue of the peculiarities of post-Soviet postcolonialism, nostalgia for a non-existent empire and the effectiveness of the victim position in the postcolonial space. The debaters compared the process of nation-building to “pulling it out of mothballs” and discussed the role of historical myth and culture of memory in the creation of a nation in big historical politics. Notable in the context of the discussion was the thesis about the need for the existence of utopias as a kind of “beacon” for the nation. Utopia in this case acts as the antithesis of negative dystopian scenarios (so common in the post-Soviet space).

Family status

Scientific interests

Family and gender identity, consequences of trauma and collective memory, primarily about the Soviet past.

Main works

The patriotism of despair: nation, war, and loss in Russia. - Ithaca: Cornell Unniv. Press, 2009. - 299 p. ISBN 0801475570
. (Collection of articles) - Vilnius: EHU; Moscow: Variant LLC, 2007.

Edited collections of articles

In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia. Ed. by Costica Bradatan and Serguei Oushakine. - New York: Lexington Books, 2010.
Trauma: points. Sat. articles edited by S. Ushakin and E. Trubina. - Moscow: New Literary Review, 2009.
Family Ties: Models to Build. In 2 vols. Sat. articles edited by S. Ushakina. - Moscow: New Literary Review, 2004.
About masculinity. Sat. articles edited by S. Ushakina. - Moscow: New Literary Review, 2002.

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Notes

Excerpt characterizing Ushakin, Sergei Alexandrovich

- Asile? - Pierre repeated. – Asile en allemand – Unterkunft. [Asylum? Refuge - in German - Unterkunft.]
– Comment dites vous? [How do you say?] - the captain asked incredulously and quickly.
“Unterkunft,” Pierre repeated.
“Onterkoff,” said the captain and looked at Pierre with laughing eyes for several seconds. – Les Allemands sont de fieres betes. “N"est ce pas, monsieur Pierre? [These Germans are such fools. Isn’t it so, Monsieur Pierre?],” he concluded.
- Eh bien, encore une bouteille de ce Bordeau Moscovite, n "est ce pas? Morel, va nous chauffer encore une pelilo bouteille. Morel! [Well, another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, isn’t it? Morel will warm us another bottle. Morel !] – the captain shouted cheerfully.
Morel served candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre in the light, and he was apparently struck by the upset face of his interlocutor. Rambal, with sincere grief and sympathy on his face, approached Pierre and bent over him.
“Eh bien, nous sommes tristes, [What is it, are we sad?],” he said, touching Pierre’s hand. – Vous aurai je fait de la peine? “Non, vrai, avez vous quelque chose contre moi,” he asked again. – Peut etre rapport a la situation? [Perhaps I have upset you? No, really, don’t you have something against me? Maybe regarding the position?]
Pierre did not answer, but looked affectionately into the Frenchman’s eyes. This expression of participation pleased him.
- Parole d"honneur, sans parler de ce que je vous dois, j"ai de l"amitie pour vous. Puis je faire quelque chose pour vous? Disposez de moi. C"est a la vie et a la mort. C"est la main sur le c?ur que je vous le dis, [Honestly, not to mention what I owe you, I feel friendship for you. Can I do something for you? Use me. This is for life and death. I tell you this with my hand on my heart,” he said, hitting his chest.
“Merci,” said Pierre. The captain looked intently at Pierre the same way he looked when he learned what the shelter was called in German, and his face suddenly lit up.
- Ah! dans ce cas je bois a notre amitie! [Ah, in that case, I drink to your friendship!] - he shouted cheerfully, pouring two glasses of wine. Pierre took the glass he had poured and drank it. Rambal drank his, shook Pierre's hand again and leaned his elbows on the table in a thoughtfully melancholy pose.
“Oui, mon cher ami, voila les caprices de la fortune,” he began. – Qui m"aurait dit que je serai soldat et capitaine de dragons au service de Bonaparte, comme nous l"appellions jadis. Et cependant me voila a Moscou avec lui. “Il faut vous dire, mon cher,” he continued in the sad, measured voice of a man who is about to tell a long story, “que notre nom est l"un des plus anciens de la France. [Yes, my friend, here is the wheel of fortune. Who said I wish I would be a soldier and captain of dragoons in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him. However, here I am in Moscow with him. I must tell you, my dear... that our name is one of the most ancient in France.]
And with the easy and naive frankness of a Frenchman, the captain told Pierre the history of his ancestors, his childhood, adolescence and manhood, all his family, property, and family relationships. “Ma pauvre mere [“My poor mother.”] played, of course, an important role in this story.
– Mais tout ca ce n"est que la mise en scene de la vie, le fond c"est l"amour? L"amour! “N"est ce pas, monsieur; Pierre?” he said, perking up. “Encore un verre.” [But all this is only an introduction to life, its essence is love. Love! Isn’t it so, Monsieur Pierre? Another glass. ]
Pierre drank again and poured himself a third.
- Oh! Les femmes, les femmes! [ABOUT! women, women!] - and the captain, looking at Pierre with oily eyes, began to talk about love and his love affairs. There were a lot of them, which was easy to believe, looking at the smug, handsome face of the officer and at the enthusiastic animation with which he spoke about women. Despite the fact that all of Rambal's love stories had that dirty character in which the French see the exceptional charm and poetry of love, the captain told his stories with such sincere conviction that he alone experienced and knew all the delights of love, and described women so temptingly that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
It was obvious that l "amour, which the Frenchman loved so much, was neither that lower and simple kind of love that Pierre once felt for his wife, nor that romantic love, inflated by himself, that he felt for Natasha (both types of this love Rambal equally despised - one was l"amour des charretiers, the other l"amour des nigauds) [the love of cab drivers, the other - the love of fools.]; l"amour, which the Frenchman worshiped, consisted mainly in the unnaturalness of relationships with women and in the combination of ugliness that gave the main charm to the feeling.

Sergei Aleksandrovich Ushakin, professor of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, director of the Program of East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies at Princeton University. Author of the books: The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Cornell, 2009); Floor field. Vilnius: Yerevan State University, 2007. Editor-compiler: Formal method: Anthology of Russian modernism. Vol.1-3. Ekaterinburg: Armchair Scientist, 2016; Family Ties: Models to Build. Vol.1-2. M.: New Literary Review, 2004; About masculinity. M.: New Literary Review, 2002. Co-editor: (together with A. Golubev) 20th century: letters of war. M.: New Literary Review, 2016; (together with E. Trubina) Trauma: Points. M.: New Literary Review, 2009.

Sergey Ushakin. Photo from the scientist’s archive

Tell us about your book: why did you decide to talk about the consciousness of people who lived through 1991 and the 90s in general, in terms of “trauma”?

I didn't plan to do this. That is, I did not initially have such a frame. And the topic itself arose, like everything else in my academic life, quite by accident. I once gave a presentation at a conference at Columbia University and said something about “new Russian” consumption, about how it is becoming the subject of fantasies among those who don’t actually know the “new Russians” themselves. That is, we were talking about how “successful” and “prestigious” consumption was seen at that time. I then came up with the term “quantitative style”, when it is not what is important, but how much. I thought it was very interesting. It was 1999... One of the listeners suddenly raised her hand and asked me a question: “Why don’t you write about Chechnya?” The question was unexpected. It has nothing to do with my report. I then mumbled something in response. But I realized that I - for myself - had no answer to the question of why I don’t write about Chechnya. None at all.

It seemed to me that this question needed to be answered, not so much for the listener, but for myself. And from this grew a book about the patriotism of despair, about the Chechen war and the collapse of the USSR, and about the trauma associated with all these events. This is how it all started - with a question from an unfamiliar woman... My field research in Barnaul began with interviews with veterans of the first Chechen war. For me it was a completely different world, which intersected very little with mine. I had no acquaintances among them. None of my friends have been to Chechnya. In general, it was such a classic ethnographic experience when you go to people about whom you know almost nothing and try to understand why they are like this and not others. Why do they behave this way when they could behave differently? And how do they explain all this to themselves in their own words...

- Were these soldiers who were called up for military service?

Yes, professionals appeared during the Second Chechen War. The First consisted of conscripts. Young guys. Often - from villages. But the topic of trauma did not come immediately - only after, when I started working with the materials, reading all the interviews one after another, trying to see some common themes, some repetitions, etc. During field research, I usually try not to write about what I am researching - so that there is no preliminary filtering of the material, when you are not so much listening to your interlocutor as trying to hear ideas that would confirm an already formed argument. I didn’t think about the injury at first. I just went to these interviews like I was at work and listened to my interlocutors. One by one. And as it usually happens, at some point a warning light suddenly flashes in the brain. You begin to understand - I've already heard this. Then a second time. Third. This gives you the feeling that you have found the thread. A topic that is important to your interlocutors. It’s not important to you, but to them. And you begin to dig deeper to understand whether there is water there, so to speak. Or is it just empty rhetoric. This is how the topic of trauma gradually began to take shape. More precisely, not so much trauma as loss.

Since I had read a lot of psychoanalysis at that time, I had a stable normative model of trauma in my head, with certain stages of living it - first denial of the trauma, then anger and then a gradual withdrawal from this trauma, i.e. the transition to a post-traumatic state, when you understand that you need to learn to live with the trauma, not by reliving it every time, but by “archiving” it, placing it in a framework that allows you to start a life not associated with the trauma. So, I had problems with this model. What I “collected” in the field showed me a completely different dynamic. I didn’t see any desire to escape the injury. So to speak, there was no post-traumatic state in the literal sense - that is, like life after trauma. There was a persistent need to make the loss, the traumatic experience, the basis of my daily life.

I remember that I tried for a long time to understand how, for example, “soldiers’ mothers”, whose sons died in the army, saw for themselves the limits of what we call “memorialization” (they call it “perpetuation”). I, naively, expected that the moment would come when they would abandon the “policy of monuments” - memorials, plaques, books of memory, etc. - they will, in fact, move on to politics and demand some decisions, laws, responsibility... But this did not happen in Barnaul. Losses became a matter of life, and different communities and practices were built around them. I once had an interview with the mother of a dead soldier. We talked for several hours about our son - how he died, how she worried, how she looked for information about him, how life developed without him. And then suddenly she says to me: “Oh, I need to go home and cook dinner for my son.” It was unexpected for me - that she has another son - alive - but who does not appear in the story about her life. That is, the story of her life is a story about those who are gone, and not about those who are nearby.

I began to observe this topic - how trauma and loss not only take away lives, health, strength, but also generate some new relationships, narratives, communities. This is how this main idea of the book arose - about communities of loss, that is, about associations of people who are connected by what they no longer have. This seemed unexpected and important to me.

- Do you mean that this has not been seen in literature before?

In the literature, these dynamics are usually described in terms of melancholia. There is a melancholic scheme for the development of loss, in which a person is fixed not so much on the one or those whom he has lost, but on the very fact of loss. You know, it’s like thirst, when you want to drink, and it doesn’t really matter what it will be - Narzan, Borjomi or the Holy Spring. You fixate on the lack of fluid. But in my case, it was difficult to call it melancholy, because instead of traditional passivity, loss here generated relationships, connections and practices. The loss gave me some kind of impulse. Naturally, the point is not that without her these connections and practices would not have arisen. Rather, the loss set some kind of vector of movement.

- Can we say that this gives mothers the meaning of life?

Yes, to some extent. And then this situation began to acquire its own logic of development. Avoiding this topic deprived people of a recognizable social position. I write in a book about a story that a mother told me, whose son died in Afghanistan. She had to speak at a meeting at some factory (this was in the mid-1990s), but everyone wouldn’t let her speak. They weren't allowed to go to the microphone. She then stood up and said to the whole hall: “Give the floor to the mother of the hero who is no longer alive!” This description of herself as “the mother of a hero who is no longer alive” is indicative for me. She identifies herself through the state of loss, and if you remove it, there is not much left. All her Soviet regalia such as “honored worker” and others, at that time, lost their semantic significance; they were no longer seen as a reflection of a person’s social positionality. And people like her tried to find other, alternative social markers that could force people to listen to their requests. This is, of course, a terrible situation when self-positioning, self-description, self-presentation is mediated by death.

In the book I trace several models of such relationships. One chapter is devoted to Altai sociologists. They then - in the 1990s - came up with a new scientific direction - “the sociology of vital forces.” Such vitalism in Siberian style. But what’s curious is this - when I began to understand and see where the interest in this vitality, in life forces, etc. came from, it turned out that it all began with research into the consequences of nuclear weapons tests that were carried out at the Semipalatinsk test site (it is not there very far). In other words, this is a slightly different configuration of the same theme of the community of loss - life in the shadow of trauma.

Do you think this is a Russian specificity? Remember the titular adviser Marmeladov: “For I really want to suffer!” Or is it universal?

I don't know if it's Russian or not. To do this, it is necessary to carry out comparative studies. Maria Todorova once wrote about the tendency towards self-victimization in post-socialist Europe, about the use of past suffering to justify certain current processes. In Kyrgyzstan, they began to write a lot about the events of 1916 as a trauma that could become formative for the current independent Kyrgyzstan. The Holodomor in Ukraine plays a similar role in many ways...

If we talk about Jews who survived the Holocaust, then we are talking about the fact that they want to get rid of this trauma. And the Russians - it turns out - cherish her?

I don't think the Russians cherish her. I think they understand what to do with it. Again, I remember how one soldier’s mother wrote in a letter to another: “Grief brings people together.” When I read this, I hesitated: not joy, not a common cause, but such a fundamental emotional shake-up. “I know that you will understand me, because it was bad for you too.” This is a version of negative dialectics, so to speak. Traumatic empathy. I once talked with a teacher from Barnaul. She holds an annual children's poetry competition dedicated to school graduates who died in Afghanistan and Chechnya. The poems are then published in collections. So, one collection is called “We need to breathe this pain.” And I don’t really know what to do with this pain that has become air.

The groups you worked with were veterans and mothers of fallen soldiers. Or maybe the difference is that the heroic myth is of great importance in Russia? The heroes and mothers of the dead heroes feel differently compared to the Jews, who were ashamed that in most cases they did not resist when they were driven to their death. Could this be the reason? Russians feel that they showed heroism, they fought, it’s hard for them, but they want to be proud of it.

You know, I didn’t only have Russians. To be honest, I didn’t find out their nationality. For me they are all former Soviet. But I'm not very sure about the significance of heroism. I had several interviews with mothers whose sons died due to hazing in the army. And the way these mothers “process” their loss, in principle, is not much different from other cases, although the situation is completely different. One of the mothers told me: “What difference does it make to me why he died? Explain to me the difference between a mother whose son died in Chechnya and a mother whose son died in Chita due to hazing. We both sent them alive into the army, and they both returned home in coffins.” And, after all, there is no difference. Because the common denominator is not political, it is existential. The conversation is being conducted at some very basic level - at the level of life and death.

And then, during the First Chechen War, few of the soldiers thought of themselves as heroes. I don't remember the theme of heroism at all. Almost all of them say that it was not clear what it was and why it was needed. And the meaning of the war came during the war. One of the veterans told me: “When my friend was killed in Chechnya, I began to take revenge for him. A goal has appeared." By the way, I later read a lot of studies of different wars. And this explanation is classic, as it turns out... It’s curious how the mothers avoided the problematic nature of the situation by translating it into terms of kinship (“soldier’s mothers”): a political catastrophe becomes a family catastrophe. “Sisters in grief,” that’s what they called themselves.

After you wrote the book, you came to your homeland. What do you think has changed in people compared to the 90s?

A difficult question... The further I go, the more I understand that I absolutely do not understand the new young generation. It seemed to me that I knew more or less about the post-Soviet generation - people who were formed in the 90s, when they were 15 years old or more. And today’s 18-20 year old people are a complete mystery to me, I don’t understand at all how their “heads work”, what their cultural repertoire is, and what is meaningful to them. I have a feeling that we have completely different cultural reserves and reference systems. This is the first. And the more often I come, the more it catches my eye. I understand that it is impossible to talk about some films that we would watch and know together, or about literature. For me they are just as foreign as the Americans here.

This has begun to emerge especially clearly over the last four or five years. I even began to think that maybe I should start researching them to understand what was going on. I am simply fascinated by the presence of these people, absolutely incomprehensible to me, who look Russian, but at the same time are completely different. As for the elders, from what I note is a rather sharp (but understandable for me) craving for religiosity. This is also unexpected for me. After all, I was formed in Soviet society, and its basic militant atheism permeated me through and through. Therefore, for me, the sharp surge of interest in religion - Christianity, Islam - is surprising. It is clear that in many ways this is all at the level of ritual and ornament, but I have enough friends for whom this is serious. I had no idea that this would be possible. This is the part of the experience that is incomprehensible to me. Perhaps this is it...

And also, probably, the fierce persistence of the theme of memory of the Soviet past. It is interesting for me to observe how this topic is structured - within the framework of the opposition of Terror and the Great Patriotic War. This dispute does not end and is not resolved. In response to the Immortal Regiment, the Immortal Barrack appears. That is, these are some kind of structuralist games of binary oppositions based on historical material. It is clear that this is mainly among the intelligentsia. But the persistence of this debate is surprising to me.

- And the religious identity you are talking about is mainly among the older generation?

Yes, this is what I observed in the elders.

Those who were communists have now become religious? Maybe this is also due to age, when departure is approaching, you want to remember about the afterlife, etc.?

Maybe yes. I also look at my peers, those who studied with me at the university - among them there are enough people who began to go to church, observe religious rituals, etc.

- Do they go to church not only on Easter, but also on Sundays, for example?

There are those who go constantly. ... Maybe you're right - it's age that makes itself felt. But it’s still unclear. Why exactly this way and not otherwise? Why, relatively speaking, not yoga? We are talking about a generation of people who are literate enough to know what to do with themselves... I was in Moscow this summer when the relics were exhibited there.

- Yes, there were more than a million visitors.

I walked past, was on the other side of these “barricades”, on the other side of the Moscow River, on Red October, and from there I could see this huge line. All this, of course, reminded me of other relics - Lenin's mausoleum. Those. formally, some things remain constant. Although they change at the level of content.

- That is, Is this not only at the level of propaganda about clamps, but also receives a response from the population?

It seems to me that this whole topic about clamps did not arise out of nowhere. Because I want a clamp. More precisely, I want clarity on basic issues. What is good and why is it so bad? “Skrapy” is about this. They allow you to clearly navigate and not put yourself before a moral choice every time, because constantly making such a choice is difficult and unpleasant. The apotheosis of groundlessness as a lifestyle is unbearable, although incredibly interesting. In this regard, religion provides some kind of predictability. As ideology gave it in its time. Could this be a reaction to the neoliberal ideology of recent decades? The disappointment in the hope of the 90s that the market would put everything and everyone in their place. That your success is a consequence of your individual activity, that successful people are people who know how to live... And then it turns out that success is often a matter of chance, the result of a coincidence of a number of circumstances...

In this regard, the question is about the growth of popular Stalinism, which did not start with Putin. Around 1995, it began to be recorded in opinion polls and continues to grow. How do you explain this?

It's difficult for me to generalize because I haven't done any interviews on this topic. It would be very interesting to see how people explain this to themselves. I can only speculate on this topic. On the one hand, it seems to me that this is such a skeptical reaction, including to attempts to link all the failures with Stalin. When there is an appointment of a kind of one and main person responsible for everything that happened. It seems to me that the situation is more complicated. And when a negative cult of personality develops, an attempt arises to take the opposite position. But I repeat - I don’t know, I need to talk to such people.

- And when you were interviewing, this topic did not come up in conversations at all?

I don't remember this.

- That is, Was it irrelevant for people?

I don’t remember such a conscious topic at all. For me, the 90s are interesting because the theme of Terror and Stalinism, and even the Great Patriotic War, somehow faded into the background and third place. I don’t remember the importance that history has acquired now. In the interviews I did in the early 2000s, people’s immediate and recent experiences were so significant that attributing everything to the famine and terror of the 1930s did not occur to them. The reasons were sought in the recent past. Largely also because they remembered that in the 80s, in general, life was relatively good. Everyone remembered the collapse. City in darkness. When the street lights went out because someone cut the wires and sold them to a metal buyer...

Can we say that their classifying themselves as Stalinists is a kind of protest reaction? They are told that under Stalin everything was terrible, but out of spite they claim that everything was fine. So?

Yes, I have that feeling. This reminds me of Soviet logic, when you tell us that communism is good, and we will tell you jokes about Brezhnev. Some attempt to reduce general pathos. It's probably about the same here. Remember how, in Soviet times, some drivers had photographs of Stalin on their windshields as a response to his revelations? It seems to me that we see something similar - a ritual protest using available means. Resistance in the form of ritual.

- It turns out that people who are concerned about the growth of Stalinism, by exposing it, are actually fueling it.

You see, the purpose of any “revelations” is to demonstrate a certain trend. Not to show all the blooming complexity of the situation, but to indicate a certain vector. And as long as the Soviet period is framed in the form of a contrast, relatively speaking, between GOELRO and the GULAG, “Ilyich’s light bulb” and barbed wire, the situation will remain stalemate. In psychoanalysis there is such a term - splitting. Melanie Klein wrote a lot in her time about how in their development infants move from a stage that she called paranoid-schizoid to a depressive stage. The paranoid stage boiled down to the fact that the world was perceived as divided into the forces of darkness and good. There is, as Klein wrote, a “good breast” - a source of warmth, food, etc. And the child internalizes this “good breast” and considers it part of himself. But sometimes these breasts disappear somewhere. And this disappearing “breast” is a bad “breast”, it is outside, outside, beyond the child’s existence. Klein called this operation “splitting,” when good and bad do not coincide geographically. The way out - for Klein - should be a situation when, firstly, the realization comes that - firstly, the “breasts” are the same, and, secondly, that they are always, so to speak, not yours. Recognition of this fact of dependence on the outside world, which exists according to its own principles, is associated with Klein’s “depressive position,” that is, with the awareness that this situation cannot be changed, one’s own good “breasts” will not grow, and therefore one must get used to the imperfections of what is available.

So, about Stalin. The split into bad Stalin and good Stalin is similar in nature, it is affective and identification, and not historical. The question is how to find a narrative frame that will allow these “breasts” to be connected, while understanding that they are beyond the boundaries of this life. It seems to me that the task is to move away from Stalin as the key metaphor of the Soviet period, and to talk about a framework that would not reduce this time (or any other) to some single polarizing theme of “breasts”, but would not explain it only through individuals, but also through processes and institutions, practices and values. It’s strange to me when in Soviet history they try to find only the history of Stalinism and terror. It seems to me that he is interesting not only for this, although I understand why I want to talk about this again and again - they have been silent about it for too long. But... when I began to study the Chechen war, I suddenly discovered how little it was represented in the everyday life of most people, in public discourse, so to speak... I remember that then I also thought that with the Terror, apparently, it was the same - for some then he, too, was not the main part of their lives.

This observation of yours is very interesting! For many members of the intelligentsia, the 90s were a time of opportunity. You were able to go to America. In Soviet times, I would never have entered graduate school in anti-Semitic Chisinau - that’s for sure. And so it seemed that everything was fine with the rest. But, if you remember that after the Great Terror, young engineers became directors of factories - this was also a takeoff for them! And, for sure, they also did not want to notice everything else. There is some callousness in this - we, as the intelligentsia as a whole, are not ready to sympathize with these people.

Sympathy is one thing. But there is something else here - we begin to perceive our own experience as a social norm. My research into the consequences of the Chechen war became very important for me, partly because it showed very well how closed this or that mass experience can be. More people took part in the war in Chechnya than in Afghanistan. And more died there. But we know much less about this. In an interview on Gefter, I recently said that we continue to discuss the 30s and 40s, but the Chechen and Afghan experiences remain little discussed until now. And all this in a situation where people who can talk about it are right here - nearby. They are alive. They still remember. But for some reason their experience turns out to be less important, less interesting, less socially and aesthetically significant than the experience of people who have passed on. Why?

“It was, as it were, a mistake by the authorities: “People died, but it was a mistake, so let’s forget about it!” In that vein?

Somewhere like this. In the collection Trauma: Points, which I edited with Elena Trubina, we have an interesting article by Rob Wessling - about the death of Nadson as the death of Pushkin. It's about what happens when there is a normative model of how a great writer should die. That there is an exemplary and indicative way to die. Afghanistan and Chechnya are not exemplary. Not demonstrative. Probably also because the participants, as a rule, were representatives of social groups who are not involved in historical research. The choice of model injuries appears to be very dependent on who makes the choice. By the way, it would be interesting to do a comparative analysis of traumas - which traumas become important and which ones do not in modern humanities journals...

Those. Is the split between our - let's say - educated part of society and the rest due to the fact that we have different traumas? The intelligentsia focuses on Stalinism, and the rest on personal experiences of the 90s?

Yes, apparently we had a good life. As you say, the 90s were not a trauma for us. They were a time of opportunity. Unlike many others. It’s not very interesting for us to reflect on our own experience, so it’s more interesting to look at historical things, taking a kind of meta-position of detachment. And these people cannot afford the luxury of not connecting today’s situation with what happened to them in the 90s, moving away from their own experience... In one letter in 2000, the mother of a soldier who died in Chechnya writes about , that he can’t find information about the death of his son, and drops along the way: “I haven’t been given child benefits for him yet, and he’s no longer alive”... There have been no such “benefits” in my life. No telephone exchange was stolen from my village. I don't know what it's like to not be able to call the city. And I think that the lack of such experience largely determines the optics of my research too...

Do your friends in Barnaul feel more confident now compared to the 90s? Or is there still resentment that the state has collapsed? Does ressentiment remain, or do people become more calm?

It seems to me that it has become calmer, although I have not done any special research (for the last 7-8 years I have been mainly working with materials from Kyrgyzstan and Belarus). It seems to me that this is already such a general situation, because life goes on, children go to school, to university, grandchildren have appeared, so you somehow come to terms with the life of the country. The old country disappeared, another one appeared. Even in the situation with Ukraine, the severity of disagreements began to decrease. It became clear that there are different groups, there are different views and these views will never converge, and there was an understanding that this would most likely continue to be the case.

Do you think that in order for us to overcome the split in society, the intelligentsia - those same artists, writers, journalists, historians - should help people speak out? So that our contemporaries can express the trauma that they experienced in the 90s - in the form of memories and interviews, journalistic publications and works of art on this topic. So that society recognizes the significance of their suffering.

But this is not only about significance. And there are no languages in which to talk about the 90s. Two themes are immediately fighting: either this is all the “dashing 90s”, or this is the “island of freedom” - that is, again a kind of binary. There is no other option. It seems to me that the dichotomies will then be less significant if, in the analysis of that period, we go to the level of everyday life, to the level of the individual person. More precisely, there will be fewer of them. When people talk about their experiences in their own details, then connections and formations will appear that do not appear with a polarizing approach. I brought from my trip a book of interviews made by Elena Racheva and Anna Artemyeva - “58th. Unremoved." Interviews with people who were in the Gulag - prisoners and their guards. The book brings it all together. And this is not reconciliation, but coexistence of those who were imprisoned and those who guarded them. This is strange to read and see together, but it seems to me that this is a very necessary step towards that “depressive position” that I was talking about. To the understanding that this period is not divided into “good history” and “bad history.” The story was terrible. And the good thing is that it is over. And we need to learn to perceive it as history. To know how to speak with those who were in Chechnya - to speak now, and not when they are over 80... It seems to me that such books give us much more than endless attempts to use Stalin as a consolidating negative and positive figure. For me, a historical period is interesting not by the leaders, but by the people who lived during this period. And the more we fixate on, say, the Yeltsin Center as an institution that personifies the period, the less we will know about this time.

I had to somehow look through the profiles of “friends” on social networks. I was amazed at how many Russian humanities scholars work abroad, including at leading Western universities. It turns out that our level of education was not such a bad one, since so many Russians are in demand in the world. In this regard, I have a question about your personal anthropological experience: You became an American professor at a reputable university, what advice do you give to young people who in our country cannot find a job for themselves after they graduate from universities? How to get to America, to Europe and become a professor there?

You know, it's difficult. For every successful or successful experience, there are many unsuccessful ones. I know many people who, having come here, defended their PhD, but were never able to find a job. Not because they were “uncompetitive.” Largely because I was unlucky with the labor market, with job vacancies, with a combination of circumstances. In this regard, I would not like there to be an opinion that everything is so easy. In many ways, this is luck, and this cannot be discounted. The academic system in America (I know the European system less well) works in such a way that it is very difficult to come from outside and get a job here, because... People are hired through personal recommendations from colleagues who are assumed to have sufficient knowledge of the system, know its criteria and standards, and can tell how well the candidate meets expectations.

And you can only find out how this system works by going through it from the inside: by cooking here, studying here, showing yourself at conferences and seminars, seeing others, etc. I was lucky that I convinced myself to do my PhD here. I decided to go all this way first - I was the oldest in my cohort of graduate students at Columbia. It was not easy... I would advise those who want to see themselves in an international academic environment to start thinking about it in advance. You need to start learning the language, think about your intellectual interests. Recently, more people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have begun to apply to us for graduate school. The specificity of these potential graduate students is that many know local archives well. They offer topics that - relatively speaking - American graduate students cannot even think about because they do not have the depth of knowledge of this material.

The problem is different. The point is that, as a rule, guys from the former USSR do not always know why they should do this and how to fit it into the professional discussions that are going on here now. The problem with the academy and the existence of the academy is largely that it is difficult to “come in from the cold”, there are already some conversations going on there and you need to integrate into these discussions, change them from the inside with the help of your materials and views. This inclusion, in my opinion, does not happen. Instead, there is often an attempt to work on one’s own, perhaps very wonderful, plot, but not integrated into the general academic process. This is especially evident at the international conferences that I organize at Princeton. Speakers from the former USSR are often soloists who do not join the conference choir. People are special.

So, I would advise you to follow what is happening and know who is interested in your research. This is difficult, this cannot be done without participating in conferences, without visiting the West, without attending internships. I observe this not only with graduate students, but also with frequently visiting researchers, who often give out a lot of incredibly interesting facts and materials, without helping to understand why this is needed, what the research intervention consists of, with whom the argument is taking place and for whom all this is being said.