Society
The Power of Everyday Politics in Russia: ‘Feeling for an Absent Presence’
May 13, 2025
- Jeremy MorrisProfessor at Aarhus University, author of Everyday Russian Politics: From Resentment to Resistance
Ethnographer Jeremy Morris introduces his new book, offering subtle observations of Russian society drawn from years of fieldwork — including insights into Russians’ responses to the war in Ukraine.
Twenty-seven years ago, I began visiting a small industrial town in Kaluga region and its rust-belt hinterland. At first, I was just like any other visitor from Moscow; the town was merely a stop-off on the way to a more picturesque summer house.
Later in England I trained as an ethnographer. Ethnography is about long-term tracking of real people in their social context. Its philosophy is also based on objective observation while still inside a community. Russian social researchers and journalists are often surprised or even incredulous that foreigners are able to conduct nuanced and insightful work from within Russia, but there’s a long pedigree to such research.
Later in England I trained as an ethnographer. Ethnography is about long-term tracking of real people in their social context. Its philosophy is also based on objective observation while still inside a community. Russian social researchers and journalists are often surprised or even incredulous that foreigners are able to conduct nuanced and insightful work from within Russia, but there’s a long pedigree to such research.
Michael Burawoy (1947 – 2025) a left-wing British sociologist. In the 1990s he conducted research in the Komi republic. Source: Wiki Commons
Field work in Russia by western scholars including myself
This doesn’t always get the attention it deserves from Russians themselves but we can highlight the work of Americans some thirty years ago such as Dale Pesman and Nancy Ries, to that of British researchers like Charlie Walker and Caroline Humphrey.
Researchers with good language skills, contextual knowledge, and the commitment to prolonged periods of fieldwork in places many more privileged Russians are loathe to spend time in, have produced important historical documents about how society has changed. In 1991 the late sociologist Michael Burawoy even got a job in a Komi furniture factory to do ‘production ethnography’ – probably a first for a Western researcher in Russia.
Burawoy consistently showed in his career (he also worked in 1980s’ Hungary) that the disarming nature of an affable yet curious foreigner could be just as effective in getting to the nub of what was going on among the (post)-socialist working classes, as the penetrating and informed researches of a native observer, such as those of sociologist Alexei Levinson, for example, who also spent time visiting Russian factories in the 2000s.
I consciously followed Burawoy’s lead in 2009 and spent many months embedded in the industrial settlement I gave the pseudonym ‘Izluchino’. Like other sociologists and ethnographers I tried to live the life of those I was studying while remaining objective and as ethically transparent as possible. The result was a book published in 2016 about the long durée experience of decline and precarity among Russian workers.
The second long period of my fieldwork coincided with Crimean annexation and the Donbas war. It was then when I was forced to confront the way fieldwork relations between a foreign researcher and Russian interlocutors inevitably would be overlaid by geopolitics. But at the same time many local people interpreted me as some kind of diplomatic sounding board for their own strong political feelings of both resentment and rejoicing. I became part of a conversation in anthropology about bridging insider-outsider identity and ‘intimate’ geopolitics.
Instead of seeing this as a danger zone and switching to ‘safer’ topics, I embraced the chance to develop an immersive political anthropology of my field sites, and, indeed, extend the scope of my research from the ‘district’ to the broader context of European Russia – after all, many of my interlocutors were engaged in vakhtovaia work – seasonal and periodic work mobility to Moscow, to Yamal, and even to Germany. In 2018 I decided I would be able to collect enough material to write an ‘alternative’ book-length study on Russian politics. And in 2025 the result is the work published as Everyday Russian Politics: From Resentment to Resistance.
This doesn’t always get the attention it deserves from Russians themselves but we can highlight the work of Americans some thirty years ago such as Dale Pesman and Nancy Ries, to that of British researchers like Charlie Walker and Caroline Humphrey.
Researchers with good language skills, contextual knowledge, and the commitment to prolonged periods of fieldwork in places many more privileged Russians are loathe to spend time in, have produced important historical documents about how society has changed. In 1991 the late sociologist Michael Burawoy even got a job in a Komi furniture factory to do ‘production ethnography’ – probably a first for a Western researcher in Russia.
Burawoy consistently showed in his career (he also worked in 1980s’ Hungary) that the disarming nature of an affable yet curious foreigner could be just as effective in getting to the nub of what was going on among the (post)-socialist working classes, as the penetrating and informed researches of a native observer, such as those of sociologist Alexei Levinson, for example, who also spent time visiting Russian factories in the 2000s.
I consciously followed Burawoy’s lead in 2009 and spent many months embedded in the industrial settlement I gave the pseudonym ‘Izluchino’. Like other sociologists and ethnographers I tried to live the life of those I was studying while remaining objective and as ethically transparent as possible. The result was a book published in 2016 about the long durée experience of decline and precarity among Russian workers.
The second long period of my fieldwork coincided with Crimean annexation and the Donbas war. It was then when I was forced to confront the way fieldwork relations between a foreign researcher and Russian interlocutors inevitably would be overlaid by geopolitics. But at the same time many local people interpreted me as some kind of diplomatic sounding board for their own strong political feelings of both resentment and rejoicing. I became part of a conversation in anthropology about bridging insider-outsider identity and ‘intimate’ geopolitics.
Instead of seeing this as a danger zone and switching to ‘safer’ topics, I embraced the chance to develop an immersive political anthropology of my field sites, and, indeed, extend the scope of my research from the ‘district’ to the broader context of European Russia – after all, many of my interlocutors were engaged in vakhtovaia work – seasonal and periodic work mobility to Moscow, to Yamal, and even to Germany. In 2018 I decided I would be able to collect enough material to write an ‘alternative’ book-length study on Russian politics. And in 2025 the result is the work published as Everyday Russian Politics: From Resentment to Resistance.
The main square in Kaluga. Source: Wiki Commons
Response to the war in Ukraine as defensive consolidation
For this book I went back to my workers, but also to middle-class Muscovites, Kalugan entrepreneurs, to my ex-peasants in the ‘back of beyond’ of Izluchino, and to ‘biudzhetniki’ workers in small towns who do the heavy and oftentimes thankless lifting of the Russia state’s rickety capacity.
At the beginning of the book, I spend time considering Russian responses to war as defensive consolidation. Prompted by the immediate disaster of war, defensive consolidation, while expressing fears of punishment and collapse, also attunes people to the long-term decline and aporia the political compact represents – that there has been neither socio-economic renewal, nor genuine promotion of a cohesive sense of what it means to be Russian in the twenty-first century. As Karine Clément has argued, consolidating feelings arise thanks to the perceived shortcomings of the social compact – and these are the ‘fault’ of both elites and ‘the collective West’ in the popular imagination.
The book opens in typical ethnographic fashion with extended vignettes. Vignettes are detailed personal stories observed at first hand. I use these to showcase how politics manifests in everyday life. They illustrate the diversity of perspectives on national identity, war, economic hardship, and state power: In a village in 2014 after the Crimean consensus has somewhat attenuated, I participate in a casual conversation with Lyova, a soon-to-retire plumber, his son Sasha, and his daughter-in-law Lena.
Their conversation Is filled with mixed emotions about Crimea’s annexation. Lena expresses national pride, believing the event strengthens Russia’s global standing and offers young people something to be proud of. Sasha and Lyova are more sceptical, questioning whether ordinary Russians will benefit from the annexation or whether it will only serve the interests of political elites. Lyova, despite his scepticism, adheres to a resigned loyalty—a belief that criticizing the government is pointless, as it won’t change anything.
This ethnographic conversation offers an example of how engaged qualitative approaches, based on building trust in sensitive contexts can tease out the more complex and candid views of interlocutors over and above the often black and white findings from survey data. They also, to some degree flatten the hierarchies that always exist between sociologists and respondents, affording more confidence to real people to express genuinely contradictory yet sincere positions.
For this book I went back to my workers, but also to middle-class Muscovites, Kalugan entrepreneurs, to my ex-peasants in the ‘back of beyond’ of Izluchino, and to ‘biudzhetniki’ workers in small towns who do the heavy and oftentimes thankless lifting of the Russia state’s rickety capacity.
At the beginning of the book, I spend time considering Russian responses to war as defensive consolidation. Prompted by the immediate disaster of war, defensive consolidation, while expressing fears of punishment and collapse, also attunes people to the long-term decline and aporia the political compact represents – that there has been neither socio-economic renewal, nor genuine promotion of a cohesive sense of what it means to be Russian in the twenty-first century. As Karine Clément has argued, consolidating feelings arise thanks to the perceived shortcomings of the social compact – and these are the ‘fault’ of both elites and ‘the collective West’ in the popular imagination.
The book opens in typical ethnographic fashion with extended vignettes. Vignettes are detailed personal stories observed at first hand. I use these to showcase how politics manifests in everyday life. They illustrate the diversity of perspectives on national identity, war, economic hardship, and state power: In a village in 2014 after the Crimean consensus has somewhat attenuated, I participate in a casual conversation with Lyova, a soon-to-retire plumber, his son Sasha, and his daughter-in-law Lena.
Their conversation Is filled with mixed emotions about Crimea’s annexation. Lena expresses national pride, believing the event strengthens Russia’s global standing and offers young people something to be proud of. Sasha and Lyova are more sceptical, questioning whether ordinary Russians will benefit from the annexation or whether it will only serve the interests of political elites. Lyova, despite his scepticism, adheres to a resigned loyalty—a belief that criticizing the government is pointless, as it won’t change anything.
This ethnographic conversation offers an example of how engaged qualitative approaches, based on building trust in sensitive contexts can tease out the more complex and candid views of interlocutors over and above the often black and white findings from survey data. They also, to some degree flatten the hierarchies that always exist between sociologists and respondents, affording more confidence to real people to express genuinely contradictory yet sincere positions.
“While official discourse celebrated Crimea as a national victory, many Russians privately worried about economic burdens and worsening living conditions.”
They actively used irony as a form of political expression: Sasha’s sarcastic remark—“At least Crimea is ours, eh, Dad?”—captures a common way Russians cope with state propaganda: acknowledging it while subtly mocking its implications and focussing on the material repercussions that ‘working poor’.
Russians have to face after the big elites have made their geopolitical plays. This is important in itself because political scientists tend to uncritically accept the idea that the Crimean ‘consensus’ was enduring and strong. In contrast to the ‘common sense’ of some observers, it turns out that the mask of loyalty is one that Russians are readily able to take off when their material interests are damaged by politics.
Years later, in 2021, I talk to Tanya, a chambermaid working at a rural hotel, who has an ‘additional role’ (actually her 9-5 job) teaching patriotic education to schoolchildren. Tanya reveals her growing anxiety about a looming war, reflecting a widespread belief that major conflict is inevitable. Her son Dima, a teenager interested in military history and online war games, is drawn to nationalist discourse but primarily for pragmatic reasons—he believes serving in the security sector is the safest way to secure a stable career and avoid conscription into dangerous combat roles.
Tanya’s teaching of patriotic education is not necessarily a deep ideological commitment but a way to earn a salary increment and get recognition in her community. She also has a genuine commitment to inculcating in her wards respect for the sacrifice of local people in Kaluga during occupations of their district in WWII and actual historical knowledge. Similarly, Dima’s interest in military service is driven by economic incentives rather than an abiding or coherent nationalism.
Ethnography like this, in dialogue with more statistically generalizable methods, shows how the state embeds nationalism in everyday life: Through education and employment incentives, the government fosters militarized patriotism. In the febrile intersection of economic insecurity and nationalistic rhetoric, people do not necessarily believe state propaganda but use it pragmatically to secure a better future and pursue their own interests and values.
In late 2022, at the height of Russia’s first war mobilization, I visit Alla, an IT specialist in Moscow. Alla and her son Gosha live in fear of conscription: Gosha, 27, refuses to leave his apartment during daylight to avoid being forcibly recruited into the war. The war disrupts families and social networks: Alla receives phone calls from relatives in Ukraine who are under Russian bombardment while also staying in touch with her daughter in Rostov, who complains about pro-government propaganda in her school. Young people push back against nationalist rhetoric: Alla’s daughter openly challenges a teacher’s homophobic and anti-Western rhetoric, highlighting a generational divide in political attitudes somewhat at odds with the picture painted of an apolitical and pliant youth.
Scenarios like this were plentiful in my fieldwork. The role of fear and uncertainty in shaping political behaviour is real. Even in Moscow, where direct enforcement is weaker, paranoia spreads through rumour and word of mouth. But there is also dissent in small but meaningful ways: Younger Russians, particularly in urban centres, are more willing to challenge state narratives. These three vignettes set the stage for one of my central arguments:
Russians have to face after the big elites have made their geopolitical plays. This is important in itself because political scientists tend to uncritically accept the idea that the Crimean ‘consensus’ was enduring and strong. In contrast to the ‘common sense’ of some observers, it turns out that the mask of loyalty is one that Russians are readily able to take off when their material interests are damaged by politics.
Years later, in 2021, I talk to Tanya, a chambermaid working at a rural hotel, who has an ‘additional role’ (actually her 9-5 job) teaching patriotic education to schoolchildren. Tanya reveals her growing anxiety about a looming war, reflecting a widespread belief that major conflict is inevitable. Her son Dima, a teenager interested in military history and online war games, is drawn to nationalist discourse but primarily for pragmatic reasons—he believes serving in the security sector is the safest way to secure a stable career and avoid conscription into dangerous combat roles.
Tanya’s teaching of patriotic education is not necessarily a deep ideological commitment but a way to earn a salary increment and get recognition in her community. She also has a genuine commitment to inculcating in her wards respect for the sacrifice of local people in Kaluga during occupations of their district in WWII and actual historical knowledge. Similarly, Dima’s interest in military service is driven by economic incentives rather than an abiding or coherent nationalism.
Ethnography like this, in dialogue with more statistically generalizable methods, shows how the state embeds nationalism in everyday life: Through education and employment incentives, the government fosters militarized patriotism. In the febrile intersection of economic insecurity and nationalistic rhetoric, people do not necessarily believe state propaganda but use it pragmatically to secure a better future and pursue their own interests and values.
In late 2022, at the height of Russia’s first war mobilization, I visit Alla, an IT specialist in Moscow. Alla and her son Gosha live in fear of conscription: Gosha, 27, refuses to leave his apartment during daylight to avoid being forcibly recruited into the war. The war disrupts families and social networks: Alla receives phone calls from relatives in Ukraine who are under Russian bombardment while also staying in touch with her daughter in Rostov, who complains about pro-government propaganda in her school. Young people push back against nationalist rhetoric: Alla’s daughter openly challenges a teacher’s homophobic and anti-Western rhetoric, highlighting a generational divide in political attitudes somewhat at odds with the picture painted of an apolitical and pliant youth.
Scenarios like this were plentiful in my fieldwork. The role of fear and uncertainty in shaping political behaviour is real. Even in Moscow, where direct enforcement is weaker, paranoia spreads through rumour and word of mouth. But there is also dissent in small but meaningful ways: Younger Russians, particularly in urban centres, are more willing to challenge state narratives. These three vignettes set the stage for one of my central arguments:
“Political engagement in Russia is neither monolithic nor entirely dictated by state propaganda. Instead, it is deeply personal, negotiated through economic pressures, social anxieties, and strategic adaptation to state power.”
Soviet nostalgia? OR: What lies beneath the “Soviet nostalgia”?
Building on interactions and observations like this, in the rest of the book I draw on the inheritance of cultural theorists like Raymond Williams and political thinkers like Jacques Rancière. These diverse sources help me explore the idea that people’s political orientations are shaped by underlying emotional and social currents just as much as they are by explicit regime-fed ideology. In particular, ethnography forces me to confront the actual meaning of political ‘resentment’ and I link it as much to social disconnection as to geopolitical confrontation: Many Russians feel abandoned by both the state and economic system, but this doesn’t always translate into active resistance.
Building on interactions and observations like this, in the rest of the book I draw on the inheritance of cultural theorists like Raymond Williams and political thinkers like Jacques Rancière. These diverse sources help me explore the idea that people’s political orientations are shaped by underlying emotional and social currents just as much as they are by explicit regime-fed ideology. In particular, ethnography forces me to confront the actual meaning of political ‘resentment’ and I link it as much to social disconnection as to geopolitical confrontation: Many Russians feel abandoned by both the state and economic system, but this doesn’t always translate into active resistance.
Vladimir Putin at a concert in Red Square celebrating the 10th anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, March 2024. Source: Kremlin.ru
People long for a sense of social belonging, but not necessarily for the Soviet Union itself—rather, for the stability and solidarity they associate with the past. I agree with researchers like Marlene Laruelle that there is popular support for a new ‘state’ ideology that is in some specific ways ‘conservative’.
However, I bring to the fore the socialist legacy of incorporation into what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘national-popular’ project of collective will that overcomes class divisions. Soviet experience provided a template for imagining a different kind way of overcoming Russia’s challenges and backwardness – sometimes the effect this had on people has been called ‘deprivatization’ and ‘dealientation’ in more than just an economic sense, or ‘encompassment’ of values in an anthropological meaning. And this template of utopian ideas endures as a ‘feeling’ for past, in the present, and as a possible future, however monstrous or abortive we might view the results of the Soviet experiment in reality.
I am not the first to question way that people imputing a sense of Soviet nostalgia to ordinary people invariably forecloses any critical potential in the term. Long ago, scholars like Olga Shevchenko detected a ‘longing for longing’ that people believe the Soviet utopian project sustained. Like them, I emphasize the persistence of a common feeling for potentiality – ‘something was possible and then it was no longer possible’.
I build on the theories of respected anthropologists like Alexei Yurchak and Sergei Oushakine who write about the experience of disjuncture and loss at the end of the Soviet project to get at the social trace of how that loss might be recuperated.
Co-production of governance
However, the book is not just about micro-scale interactions but links these to bigger social and political questions – like how effective the Russian state is. The fuzzy incoherence of state institutions is more than just about ‘institutional failure’, ‘endemic corruption’ or ‘state withdrawal’. Without ignoring the ineffectiveness and poor quality of state services in Russia, their overall incoherence means that bureaucrats must exit their designated roles. They more often ‘lean across the desk’ in a gesture that coproduces the state with the citizen because of the contradictions of the law and its enforcement.
At the same time, they reproduce a moral relationship with the citizen in what are absurd and impossible situations. In a number of case studies I dramatize up close how different layers of the state and society come together almost surreptitiously and conspiratorially to fix things like broken heating networks or to circumvent the rent seeking of bureaucrats looking to impose fines on the most innocuous activities.
In place of models of Russian state-mindedness as overwhelmingly paternalist I find practices of accommodation, ‘devolved’ co-production of governance, and a shared feeling for stateness. This traces back to the socialist era’s attempts at citizen incorporation in the big projects of the state.
However, I bring to the fore the socialist legacy of incorporation into what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘national-popular’ project of collective will that overcomes class divisions. Soviet experience provided a template for imagining a different kind way of overcoming Russia’s challenges and backwardness – sometimes the effect this had on people has been called ‘deprivatization’ and ‘dealientation’ in more than just an economic sense, or ‘encompassment’ of values in an anthropological meaning. And this template of utopian ideas endures as a ‘feeling’ for past, in the present, and as a possible future, however monstrous or abortive we might view the results of the Soviet experiment in reality.
I am not the first to question way that people imputing a sense of Soviet nostalgia to ordinary people invariably forecloses any critical potential in the term. Long ago, scholars like Olga Shevchenko detected a ‘longing for longing’ that people believe the Soviet utopian project sustained. Like them, I emphasize the persistence of a common feeling for potentiality – ‘something was possible and then it was no longer possible’.
I build on the theories of respected anthropologists like Alexei Yurchak and Sergei Oushakine who write about the experience of disjuncture and loss at the end of the Soviet project to get at the social trace of how that loss might be recuperated.
Co-production of governance
However, the book is not just about micro-scale interactions but links these to bigger social and political questions – like how effective the Russian state is. The fuzzy incoherence of state institutions is more than just about ‘institutional failure’, ‘endemic corruption’ or ‘state withdrawal’. Without ignoring the ineffectiveness and poor quality of state services in Russia, their overall incoherence means that bureaucrats must exit their designated roles. They more often ‘lean across the desk’ in a gesture that coproduces the state with the citizen because of the contradictions of the law and its enforcement.
At the same time, they reproduce a moral relationship with the citizen in what are absurd and impossible situations. In a number of case studies I dramatize up close how different layers of the state and society come together almost surreptitiously and conspiratorially to fix things like broken heating networks or to circumvent the rent seeking of bureaucrats looking to impose fines on the most innocuous activities.
In place of models of Russian state-mindedness as overwhelmingly paternalist I find practices of accommodation, ‘devolved’ co-production of governance, and a shared feeling for stateness. This traces back to the socialist era’s attempts at citizen incorporation in the big projects of the state.
“It is a mistake to see society as a passive receptor of the actions of state institutions and bureaucratic organizations.”
Volunteers cleaning up an oil spill in the Black Sea, February 2025.
Source: 29.ru
Source: 29.ru
Especially in the Russian case, these pitfalls lead to overestimating the state’s coercive power and underestimating both bureaucracy and community capacity. In an uneasy concert, they contest or reshape regime goals.
Once again, I claim little outright originality here. Essentially this is the project of scholars such as Olga Moliarenko who shows the possibility of examining durable forms of ‘shadow governance’. Like her, I try to build a bridge away from politically determinist accounts. Building on the exceptionally detailed scholarship on the workings of Russian courts and on property rights by Kathryn Hendley and Timothy Frye, I propose a reflexive, moral set of reasonings and historical impetus for state workers-citizen interactions in making the incoherent state at least sometimes respond to citizens’ needs.
There are a number of other themes in the book, from nomadic car culture and garage communities, to the cultivation of craft and domestic production as both leisure and a form of political subject making. Towards the end of the book I remark on the similarity of the networks, motivations and commitment of both pro- and anti-war activists in Russia. On that topic alone I think that the book represents an important intervention and a unique one.
A tough task in this book was to draw on the new historical writings – many of them by Russian scholars who remain in Russia even after 2022 – about the ‘socialist’ period and connect them to lived experience in today’s Russia. This is why I think my book is timely in a sense not just that it’s an ethnography made partly during war: many scholars are currently focussed on efforts to get at the complexity, and even normality of life in the late USSR. How was it possible to maintain belief and desire in an atomizing space? What links people in this book is a sense of striving: purposive desire and imagination that remains and which can be intergenerationally communicated.
As in recent work by Alexandrina Vanke, I have tried to work in the tradition of Raymond Williams’ writing on how even ordinary people shape the shared sense of the meaning of an epoch. I use the term ‘feeling for an absent presence’ to emphasize how suffering and loss can be generative of possibility and the imagination of a better society. The content of this haunting feeling is an urge to (re)connect in some vital yet communitarian way that goes beyond the individual.
This is thrown into sharp relief against the relentless precarity of existence in contemporary Russia and the course of destructive transformations of the last thirty years. Some Russian thinkers themselves have talked about their country as a metaphorical ‘weapons proving ground’ or a space of techno-neofeudalism that anticipates a global dystopian future.
I end the book by considering Russia as a crisis heterotopia – a time-space containing what look like the most dysfunctional elements of contemporary capitalism and the authoritarian tendencies of the modern state. But Russia as heterotopia is merely one world within our world. Current crises there are played out in no greater relative dramaturgical intensity than in other societies.
Russia’s crisis is both banal, taken for granted, but also delimited – we can trace its edges. Similarly, heterotopias contain dual meanings; they are mirrored. They reflect crisis but also give glimpses of resolution. The quite often specific examples of ordinary existence in Russia can be instructive. Provisioning, informal governance, everyday politics, activism and solidarity show us how the small (and often quiet) theories of everyday political economy link up into the form of small lifeboats for the people. DIY Lifeboats are more than just a striking image. As metaphor they encapsulate both flight and permanence; inconspicuously they wait on deck. But they require people to work together at the oars; an individual can hardly manage alone.
Once again, I claim little outright originality here. Essentially this is the project of scholars such as Olga Moliarenko who shows the possibility of examining durable forms of ‘shadow governance’. Like her, I try to build a bridge away from politically determinist accounts. Building on the exceptionally detailed scholarship on the workings of Russian courts and on property rights by Kathryn Hendley and Timothy Frye, I propose a reflexive, moral set of reasonings and historical impetus for state workers-citizen interactions in making the incoherent state at least sometimes respond to citizens’ needs.
There are a number of other themes in the book, from nomadic car culture and garage communities, to the cultivation of craft and domestic production as both leisure and a form of political subject making. Towards the end of the book I remark on the similarity of the networks, motivations and commitment of both pro- and anti-war activists in Russia. On that topic alone I think that the book represents an important intervention and a unique one.
A tough task in this book was to draw on the new historical writings – many of them by Russian scholars who remain in Russia even after 2022 – about the ‘socialist’ period and connect them to lived experience in today’s Russia. This is why I think my book is timely in a sense not just that it’s an ethnography made partly during war: many scholars are currently focussed on efforts to get at the complexity, and even normality of life in the late USSR. How was it possible to maintain belief and desire in an atomizing space? What links people in this book is a sense of striving: purposive desire and imagination that remains and which can be intergenerationally communicated.
As in recent work by Alexandrina Vanke, I have tried to work in the tradition of Raymond Williams’ writing on how even ordinary people shape the shared sense of the meaning of an epoch. I use the term ‘feeling for an absent presence’ to emphasize how suffering and loss can be generative of possibility and the imagination of a better society. The content of this haunting feeling is an urge to (re)connect in some vital yet communitarian way that goes beyond the individual.
This is thrown into sharp relief against the relentless precarity of existence in contemporary Russia and the course of destructive transformations of the last thirty years. Some Russian thinkers themselves have talked about their country as a metaphorical ‘weapons proving ground’ or a space of techno-neofeudalism that anticipates a global dystopian future.
I end the book by considering Russia as a crisis heterotopia – a time-space containing what look like the most dysfunctional elements of contemporary capitalism and the authoritarian tendencies of the modern state. But Russia as heterotopia is merely one world within our world. Current crises there are played out in no greater relative dramaturgical intensity than in other societies.
Russia’s crisis is both banal, taken for granted, but also delimited – we can trace its edges. Similarly, heterotopias contain dual meanings; they are mirrored. They reflect crisis but also give glimpses of resolution. The quite often specific examples of ordinary existence in Russia can be instructive. Provisioning, informal governance, everyday politics, activism and solidarity show us how the small (and often quiet) theories of everyday political economy link up into the form of small lifeboats for the people. DIY Lifeboats are more than just a striking image. As metaphor they encapsulate both flight and permanence; inconspicuously they wait on deck. But they require people to work together at the oars; an individual can hardly manage alone.
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