Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 6, 2009
SUMMARY
The New Literary Observer № 100
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CLOSED SOCIETIES
The New Literary Observer is celebrating its jubilee — the 100th volume of the journal — by presenting a comparative interdisciplinary study under the title The Anthropology of Closed Societies.
This special issue marks a new starting point in NLO’s innovative strategies as well as the beginning of a long-term international academic project initiated by the journal.
The Anthropology of Closed Societies is an attempt at an alternative view on Russian and European history of the last 300 years through re-evaluating the notion and genesis of Modernity, its main characteristics and various consequences to the fates of different countries and nations.
The main goal of this project is to study the phenomenon of “closed societies” like Imperial and Soviet Russia, Salazar Portugal, Franco’s Spain, Nazi Germany, Japan etc. from the perspective of a new strand of thought known as the school of “multiple modernities”, i.e. not as strange and unfortunate deviations from the modern “progressive” world but as an integral — albeit dramatic — part of Modernity.
The NLO’s special issue is focused on the anthropological approach to a complex notion of closed societies, i.e. a radical shift from the political and macro-economical levels of theoretical and historical interpretations towards the level of society and individuals. Our aim is to find the common strategies of individual and corporate survival and resistance, alternative ways of evolution and development in such rigid and self-isolated cultures which ultimately led to their opening up to the world.
CLOSED SOCIETIES: INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORKS
Paul Blokker
(University of Trento, Italy). “Confrontations with Modernity: Openness and Closure in the Other Europe”. The author considers possible development case scenarios for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, starting from the mid-19th century. From his point of view, the dynamics of these societies does not fit into the pattern of gradual movement (or delays and blockage) towards modernization along a single route. Blokker treats openness and closedness as two sides of modernisation. At first he discusses the issue of national liberation from the imperial yoke, then the problem of “organised modernisation” from the first third of the 20th century. Communism also dealt with some of the region’s problems related to modernisation; post-Communist development, meanwhile, along with entrance into EU structures, should not simply mean returning to the “lost norm” of Western-type development (as many used to see it from an ideological viewpoint).Mikhail Yampolsky (New York University) in his article “Innovation Potential and the Structure of Society” sees the limitation and blocking of cultural and social innovative impulses as a salient feature of closed societies. The author defines two types of social development for the second half of the 20th century: “stem-like” (hyper-centralised and mobilisational) and “rhizome-like” (based on a free development of self-germinating civic initiatives and structures). Referencing works by Prigozhin and Stengers, Yampolsky treats the problems of “self-organisation” of today’s open social systems in light of the principles of openness and closedness.
Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford). “Of Grids and Groups: An Alternative View of “Open” and “Closed” Societies”. The overwhelming emphasis on vertical social relations in the study of Soviet society has led horizontal relations to be neglected (whether in the so-called “totalitarian” model, in the “revisionist” preoccupation with social mobility, or the discussion of “Soviet subjectivity” in terms of integration with official discourse). While applying the classic opposition between “closed” and “open” societies at least raises the issue of social boundaries, this model is also focused on ideology, institutions, and social hierarchies, and there is more than a passing resemblance between “the open society” and the old idea of “the free world”. This essay suggests that the application of “grid/group theory” (also known as “cultural theory”), as evolved by Mary Douglas and others, can illuminate the interior, horizontal relations of Soviet society. While official Soviet society proposed a “strong grid, weak group” model, some sections of this society actually functioned according to a “weak grid, strong group” model (one of impermeable but non-hierarchical “enclaves”, as with “informal” associations in the post-Stalin era), while others were closer to a “strong grid, weak group” model (e.g. tenants in communal apartments, collective farmers). Missing, apart from imaginatively, was the “weak grid, weak group” model, i.e. one of self-assertive individualism (though this was important in the writings of oppositionist intellectuals, e.g. Brodsky, Siniavskii, and Solzhenitsyn, whose fictional character Kostoglotov is confronted with an allegorical juxtaposition of “closed” and “open” ways of life when he visits the local zoo). The persistence in intellectual culture of a “weak grid, strong group” model has in turn, during the post-Soviet period, made it easy to imagine an open society in the abstract while engaging in restrictive, enclave-type behaviour in practice.
The author argues that, in the variant set out by Douglas in “The World of Goods” (later adaptations became more sententious), the group-grid model facilitates a non-moralistic analysis of “open” and “closed” relations within Soviet society (and allows these to be presented with due sensitivity to historical change).
Dina Gusejnova (University of Chicago). “Political Theory from the First Person: From a Key Experience to “Opening” a Society”. The author looks into the basic elements of classical theories of totalitarianism (H. Arendt,
K. Popper) from the point of view of modern philosophy and social and cultural shifts of the second half of the 20 th century. By moving the emphasis from the characteristics of a political system to the parameters of personal actualisation makes the categories of experience and key experience conclusive in making a distinction between “open” and “closed” trends in public development. Key experience always begins as something personal and later gains collective connotations; this notion is also part of the reason why the author also looks into incidents of individual “reworking of the past” in post-war West Germany (ranging from the historian Reinhart Koselleck to the artist Joseph Beuys).
RHETORIC OF LEGITIMATION
Mikhail Waiskopf
(Hebrew University in Jerusalem). “Marrying a Potentate: Erotic Models in Russian State Rhetoric”. The article deals with the image of the emperor or potentate entering into a marriage with Russia. Adapting both the pagan and the Biblical models to its needs, monarchical rhetoric portrayed Russia both as a wife whose fruitful loins are impregnated by a deified ruler, and as a direct analogue to the ancient House of Israel marrying the Creator, a maiden-Church yearning for its Heavenly Bridegroom personified by the Tsar as His placeholder. The pagan side of the cult of the emperor was in time assimilated into the Old Testament paradigm. Features of the Creator, the terrible Biblical judge and Sabaoth were projected upon the Tsar’s lawmaking, state and military activities, while his human essence was coloured more by New Testament elements. Nicolas I’s regime adapted to its own needs the lyrical experience of Russian Romanticism, which had managed to give religious categories a devotional tonality by transferring them into an amorous sphere. In early Bolshevist rhetoric, this erotic attraction to the monarch was transferred to Trotsky and Lenin. Lenin also came to embody the traditionally ambiguous image of a monarch combining a terrible Sabaoth and gentle Son of Man (Mayakovsky, etc.). In some cases one could trace homosexual overtones within the Lenin cult. Stalin tried to prevent any erotic overtones from seeping into narratives devoted to him, yet some still managed to make their way in. In the Post-Stalinist era, the erotic component within this rhetoric ebbs, only to be reborn in Post-Communist Russia, where features of a perfect erotic object are ascribed to Putin.Victor K. Mendes (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth). “Justifying Dictatorship: The Dictator Salazar in 1930 and the Poet Fernando Pessoa in 1928”. The author looks into particular characteristics of the always temporary and “hastily drawn” 1930—1974 Portuguese dictatorship, which is linked to the personality of A. Salazar, originally a university professor and Portuguese minister of finance at the end of the 1920s. This regime was legitimised not only by its Catholic conservatism and its exclusive status as the last European colonial empire, but also by a need to overcome particular problems in the country’s political and economic development that the parliamentary cabinets of the 1910s and the first half of the 1920s had not dealt with. The author demonstrates the differences between Salazar’s rhetoric in his 1930 speeches and the arguments in favour of a military regime made by the poet Fernando Pessoa in 1928 (Pessoa nevertheless remained an adversary of the Portuguese leader until his death in 1935).
Ulrich Schmid (Universität St. Gallen, Switzerland). “Constitutional Narratives (The Rhetorical and Genre Peculiarities of Russian and Soviet Basic Law)”. The author demonstrates that Russian constitutional projects not only serve as legal texts, but also follow a certain discursive ideology. This ideology is transformed into a narrative structure that has a particular rhetoric and genre specificity. Rhetoric and genre are precisely the features that determine the plot and heroes of this “constitutional narrative”, which treats important public issues, the striving for well being and proper conduct and, ultimately, for an ideal society. In this regard, Schmid points out the dramatic rhetoric of the first Soviet constitutions, the fairy-tale narrative of Stalin’s constitution and the New Testament and conceptual prototypes of the 1977 and 1993 basic laws (he uses autobiographical “works” composed by their “creators” Leonid Brezhnev and Boris Yeltsin as materials for comparative analysis).
Martin Sabrow (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany). “Time and Legitimacy: Comparative Reflections on the Sense of Time in the Two German Dictatorships”. Since the apparent waning of the second wave of totalitarianism theory schools of interpretation after 1989—1990, the question of how authoritarian and totalitarian tyrannies compensated for the absence of a democratic mandate and how they strove to secure their citizens’ consent to their own subjugation has gained new significance. The sense of time and an appeal to temporality played a special role— the Nazi dictatorship used a rhetoric of returning to the German nation’s “unblemished” past, while the future remained undefined. Meanwhile, in 1950s—1960s GDR the future and the ideology of planned progress played a central role, while explicit references to heritage and “good” traditions surfaced only during the Honecker era in the end of the 1970s. The different time paradigms of the two German dictatorships were equally responsible for the circumstances of their respective dissolution, so that “time” plays a part in both the acquisition and loss of legitimacy for modern dictatorships.
PRODUCTION OF EMOTIONS
Konstantin Bogdanov
’s (Universität Konstanz, Germany — Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg, Russia) article “Open Hearts, Closed Borders. On the Rhetoric of Rapture and the Immensitude of Mutual Understanding” discusses particular language modes designed to express emotional states developed within Russian culture, predominantly in the 19th—20th centuries. The meaning of “rapture” varied widely, from a specific mood of addressing God and engaging in prayer to a secular expression of joyful involvement in a common national organism. One of the important defining features of rapture is its non-reflexive, instinctive nature. The author also looks into the special spatial connotations of the history of emotions relating to Russian language and culture.Maria Mayofis (“The New Literary Observer”, Moscow) in her article “What Did the Fire Foster? Russian “Anti-crisis” Political Journalism of 1837—1838 As an Object of History of Emotions” analyses the texts that demonstrate the reaction of the Russian political and cultural elite to the fire that happened in the Winter Palace (the Imperial residence was almost completely destroyed by this calamitous event). The author focuses on articles by Vassilii Zhukovsky, Petr Vyasemsky and Serguei Uvarov (the latter’s French essay was recently discovered in Uvarov’s archive and is published in the supplement). She demonstrates that the rhetorical structure of these articles reflects an attempt to compensate for the traumatic break-off within the symbolic orders of Russian society, which became evident in the effort to bring a teleological perspective into descriptions and explanations of the fire. The Russian government and particularly Emperor Nicholas I strove to block public discussion of the scale of the damage and the exact number of victims, i.e. any rational or analytic approach to the event. That is why all the narratives created just after the fire stressed and exaggerated the emotional component of the accident. But representation of the break-off itself was presumably very painful for the Emperor, and he banned publication of both Uvarov’s and Zhukovsky’s articles. The rhetorical structure and mental processes of the Russian accounts are compared with the reaction of the British press to the fire in the Houses of Parliament in 1834 (the fires destroyed the whole complex except Westminster Hall, which was saved thanks to skilful fire fighting). The author also discusses the ways in which Edmund Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime were employed in the works of Russian and British publicists, and investigates the concept of “curiosity” in describing the crowds watching the scene — something widely accepted in Great Britain and absolutely ignored in Russia.
Marina Raku’s (State Institute of Art Studies, Moscow) article “Searching for a Soviet Identity in Musical Culture of the 1930s — 1940s: the Lyricisation of Musical Discourse” seeks to trace how the “moulding of a Soviet person” by means of music as an art was attempted in the closed society of the USSR. Analysing the history of this all-encompassing social task, the author demonstrates that the initial project underwent a serious metamorphosis as early as the mid-1930s. The “mass song” that defined the musical image of the 1930s—1940s and the “song opera” that came to rule in the musical theatre (the two genres discussed by the author) presented a portrait of a “lyrical” Soviet being, in contrast to the “expressive”, “rhythmic” or “heroic” human being called for by the revolutionary Utopia of the 1920s. The author proposes the theory that this portrait was formed under pressure from mass audiences that bypassed ideological demands and associated itself with this image. The fact that the abovementioned “lyricisation” of musical discourse surges up during the Great Terror and then again during the Second World War allows the author to make conclusions about the compensatory psychological part it played.
In the article “The Music of Socialism with a Human Face”, Rossen Djagalov (Yale University) offers a global history of the genre of guitar poetry by constructing a single category out of seemingly disparate national phenomena as the Russian Bulat Okudzhava, the Pole Edward Stachura, the Czech Karel Kryl, the German Wolf Biermann, the Frenchman Georges Brassens, the Italian Luigi Tenco, the Cuban Carlos Puebla, the Chilean Victor Jara, and the American Pete Seeger. Deeply rooted in national poetic, musical, and performance traditions, guitar poetry also exhibited a fairly constant set of characteristics: a critique of the state, whether “socialist” or “democratic”; a capacity for genre experimentation, which rendered it a source of social critique recalling Bakhtin’s concept of the novel; and finally, a powerful potential to construct counter-publics. By analysing the typological commonalities of their performance and identifying the Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler tradition as a common source for many of them, Djagalov argues that guitar poetry was the paradigmatic genre of socialist internationalism with a human face on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In her essay “Without Anaesthesia” Rebecca Frumkina (Institute of Linguistics of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) discusses problems of fixing and translating one’s experience of living in a closed society, basing her study on her own memories of the 1950s — early 1960s. The author demonstrates how under those conditions, routine or aesthetic practices or experiences came to establish semantic dominants of existential self-development, ceasing to be “just a routine” or “simply art”. This is seen as an important lesson in history’s fostering of subject-ness ab initio, rather than as a manifestation of Russian culture’s overall exotic “hyper-spirituality” or the particular impact of Soviet reality.
MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL COMPENSATION
Mark Lipovetsky
(University of Colorado at Boulder). “Trickster and the Closed Society”. The article discusses the functions of the cultural archetype of the trickster in the symbolic economy of the Soviet “closed society”. Soviet tricksters reflect the constant presence of irresolvable contradictions and yawning gaps within the social universe — first and foremost within the existence of ordinary citizens, whose loyalty and “normalcy” is inseparable from their criminal and semi-criminal participation in the “black market” economy and everyday politics. By creating sympathetic and profound images of tricksters, Soviet culture was uplifting its own cynicism to the kynical level (using Peter Sloterdijk’s dichotomy). The dialectics of cynical and kynical reason(s) is directly responsible for the overtones and meaning of Soviet tricksters which, in a nutshell, offered a joyful epiphany of cynicism. This in turn released this universal Soviet modus of behaviour and mind from the sense of guilt and criminality. On the one hand, this operation provided an alibi or even an artistic justification for the ubiquitous cynical practices that compensated for the failures of the closed society; yet, on the other hand, it presented the only valid alternative to Soviet cynicism. The trickster paradoxically overcomes these gaps and through his/her artistic metamorphoses effects communication between the disparate planes of Soviet society, thereby creating (or rather justifying) zones of “openness” within the “closed” social system.Aleksandr Meshcheryakov (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) “The Opening of Japan and the Reform of a Japanese Body (Second Half of the 19th — Early 20th Century)”. This article studies the culture shock experienced by the Japanese during their transition from the closed society of the Tokugawa period to a more open society as a modern Western-type society was being constructed. Japanese thinkers of that period adopted the ideology of social Darwinism in Herbert Spencer’s interpretation (which allowed for the transition from “savagery” to “civilisation”). Driven by its desire to discard an Asian identity and to join the family of “civilised” nations Japan made substantial progress in that direction (developing its state apparatus, economy, military, educational system, etc.) — and that progress raised the self-esteem of the Japanese. The only field where their inferiority complex was not conquered was the Japanese body. The disparaging remarks made by Europeans and Americans about the relatively small stature of the Japanese, introduction of the concept of yellow peril together with race discrimination caused a rise in pan-Asian sentiments. It was under these conditions that physical “drawbacks” started being rethought as merits. Thinkers and writers started creating texts that tried to substantiate a thesis that the Japanese body-build was more harmonious than the European one. Special attention was paid to the Japanese skin, which was perceived to be superior to that of the Europeans in term of colour, texture and smoothness.
Galina Orlova (Southern Federal University, Rostov on Don, Russia). “Virtual Travels: The Ordering of Geographical Imagination in Stalin’s Time”. This article is devoted to the double life of virtual travel as an unpretentious geographical game for Soviet schoolchildren and at the same time as a sophisticated device for the political utilisation of geography in the 1930—1950s. The author treats the imaginary journey as a medium capable of turning book knowledge into personal experience, imagination into reality, abstractions into details. This medium is compared to the transformation of reality through the Utopia project, in the same way as the virtual traveller’s imaginary management is juxtaposed with the Soviet citizen’s mental equipment. An archaeology of imaginary travel is under consideration. So, in analysing a discursive order of virtual travel, the author deals with both the rise of symbolical geography in the Stalin era and the production of cartographical knowledge, reforms in school geography and interest in the geographical imagination itself, rehabilitation of adventures and the conquest of the Arctic.
In her article “Not a Small Country: On Heterotopy, “Instructive Spaces” and Knowledge Practices in Twentieth Century Portugal”, Marta De Magalhães (Cambridge University, Great Britain) analyses the meaning of geographic maps and pompous imperial exhibitions in the representation of the extreme right-wing regime of Antonio de Salazar in Portugal. According to the author, these specially created maps and exhibitions, which demonstrate the diversity of life in Portugal and its colonies, worked as heterotopias that constructed the Portuguese society as an imagined community. Therefore, these maps and exhibitions served not only as a medium of propaganda, but also formed rhetorical and emotional structures of national identity. These structures still retain their hidden influence over Portuguese society 35 years after the ideology of Salazar’s rule was brought down and the Portuguese colonial empire collapsed.
PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE: SCIENCE
Aleksandr Khryakov
(Omsk State University, Omsk, Russia). “Casus Germania: German Historians and the Psychology of Sonderweg”. This article describes how historians and intellectuals formed an idealised image of the German nation and its “eternal enemy” — France and the Roman West. It is impossible to understand the dynamics of German history in the times of the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era without turning to the collective sentiments of German society (and the part played by journalists and scholars in forming these sentiments). It is in the history of the 20th century that emotions gain a specifically historical significance, since before this time these ideological and political languages rarely drew so heavily upon the arsenal of human feelings. The German historians of the first half of the 20th century, when portraying their country, relied heavily on the opposition between an estranged and rationalist Gesellschaft and the organic and communal world of a Gemeinschaft.This rubric also contains an essay by Nikolay Mitrokhin (Research Centre for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany) devoted to the memoirs of Soviet physicist Sergey Frish (1899—1977), which went unnoticed at the time of their publication (1992). The essay pays special attention to the history of contacts between the Soviet and the Western scientists. Mitrokhin discusses the obligatory nature of a shift between the periods of “closedness” and “openness” in the history of Soviet science.
Anton Yasnitsky (University of Toronto, Canada), Ekaterina Zavershneva (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow), “On the Archetype of Soviet Psychology as a Science Discipline and Social Practice”. This study investigates the social history of Soviet psychology against the background of “Stalinist science”, which came to be during the interwar period. Contrary to the traditional view of Soviet psychology as the “oppressed science”, the authors present a broader view of the history of Soviet psycho-neurological sciences (i.e., human and behavioural sciences) as a “struggle for existence” between several highly competitive disciplines engaged in a fight for resources and patronage from leaders of the State and Communist Party leadership. The history of human and behavioural sciences is presented as the more or less peaceful extinction of some disciplines (e.g. zoopsychology, reflexology, paedology, psychohygiene, or psychotechnics), and the rise to power of other disciplines like psychology or pedagogy. The paper closes with a list of characteristics of what the authors refer to as the “archetype of Soviet psychology”, which developed during the formative decade of the 1930s and arguably remained characteristic of the entire discipline up until the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century.
PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE: LITERATURE
Elena Mikhailik
(University of New South Wales, Sydney), “Has No Reflection and Casts No Shadow: Prison Camp Literature in a Closed Society”. The article looks into how prison camps and prison camp literature were perceived in Soviet and post-Soviet societies and — using poetics of the “trendsetting” works of prison camp prose as material — offers a suggestion that one of the reasons behind the need to read prison camp literature strictly and exclusively as literature of fact that has been reproduced for several generations is that the authors of prison camp literature while building their system of addressing their readers inadvertently created not only a portrait of the prison camp world but also that of a society and an audience they were speaking to, the society being a decisively closed one and the audience being the product of that society.Nikolai A. Bogomolov (Moscow State University). “What Could be Seen Through the Iron Curtain”. This article is devoted to some aspects of the problem of communication between two cultural milieus: Stalin’s (and later Khrushchev’s) USSR and Russian post-war-era émigrés. It focuses on the information about O.E. Mandelstam’s death and his works that appeared in newspapers and journals in 1946—1959 and contained major distortions. The author suggests that these distortions were predetermined not only by the difficulty with which information circulated within the USSR (the exact circumstances of Mandelstam’s death took many years to clarify) and between the USSR and the outside world, but by some other parameters as well. The author sees as the main factors those cultural and historical stereotypes that even the most prominent émigré historians and writers were not free from. They tried to fit the poet’s fate into one of the existing hallowed traditional cultural and historical patterns — but a reality check proved these to be extremely untrustworthy. Establishing the truth was closely linked to overcoming various kinds of “closedness”.
Oscar Hemer (Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden). “Literary Truth in Transition” A transition does not necessarily imply a move from a closed society to an open one, but the transition period itself is usually a period of opening, and it is therefore especially interesting from the perspective of literary and cultural production, since the dialectic between culture and society comes out in the open. In South Africa, literature — and the arts in general — have played a proactive role in the transition process of the 1990s, mainly endorsing the new democratic government, but also taking a critical stand and deconstructing prevailing myths, rather than forging new identities. In Argentina, the role of literature has until now been reactive, at best. There are several reasons for this difference, some of which have to do with dissimilar historical contexts, others with diverse literary traditions. But the basic explanation is political. In South Africa, the former “terrorists” are now the ruling party. In Argentina the armed struggle of the 1960s and 1970s ended in total defeat; a quite common leftist view would be that the (class) struggle continues, and there has been little self-examination among surviving representatives of the guerrilla groups. The idea that the aged mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo — now in their eighties — or the children and grandchildren of the disappeared, who have often been politically radicalised from their infancy, would extend a hand of forgiveness to the torturers and murderers (the majority of whom were never convicted for their deeds), is almost unthinkable.
PRODUCTION OF THE ALTERNATIVE
TomásˇGlanc
(Karlow University, Prague). “Authorship and Eyes Wide Shut of the Parallel Culture”. The metaphor of eyes wide shut expresses the principal ambiguity of the “closed” constellation in the cultural situation under Soviet-type regimes. Singular examples from both Russian and Czech cultural history, especially from the “parallel” (unofficial) art and literature of the 1960s—1980s, are strategies using “closeness” as their own tool or as a stimulus to surpass it. Lack of accessibility does not lead only to isolation and ignorance. It initiates a hypertrophy of compensatory activities and dreaming energy, concerned with reality in the zone of invisibility (for example that of Western aesthetics). Blindness occupies a special position in the framework stemming from the eyes wide shut metaphor, as demonstrated by the painter Vladimir Jakovlev, who transformed his visual dysfunction into a unique form of artistic expression. Along with the impossibility of an outright definition, parallel culture produces a type of authorship in which the author acting as an interface between aesthetics, biography and outside conditions seems to be crucial.Galina Yelshevskaya (Moscow). “Several Geniuses in a Restricted Space. On the History of One Self-Sentiment”. This article is dedicated to several Russian underground artists of the 1960s—1980s — mainly to Dmitry Lion, Vladimir Veisberg and Mikhail Shvartsman. These painters had the special reputation of geniuses. They were not affiliated with any associations or friendly circles, they distanced themselves from any “collective”, and their strategies represented “closed systems” based on the presumed uniqueness of language and the meaning-production process. This paper attempts to consider the consistent patterns along which these “individual mythologies” were formed, to evaluate the context they emerged from, and to analyse the consequences of the subsequent loss of that context. In this case a study in art history simultaneously becomes a study in anthropology as well, since the author is discussing not only visual but also behavioural scenarios — in particular, the points of contact between these “closed systems” and institutionalised social reality, and the peculiarities of their pedagogic transmission.
Natalia Tamruchi (“Otkrytaja Galereja” art gallery, Moscow), “Madness as a Sphere of Freedom”. This article describes the conditions and reasons behind the 1960s Soviet underground culture self-defined as a “schizoid transition”. The author states that from their very beginnings, the Schizoids were aiming at autonomy from all social institutions, and created their own cultural space from a blank slate where they lived their routine day-to-day existence. As a result, their everyday life started losing its routine features under the pressure of additional meanings, it became electrified to the limit and turned into a practice ground for the riskiest cultural and mental experiments. Not caring a jot for an official version of reality, the Schizoids consciously strove to change the conventional view of things using every means available. This included not only alcohol and drugs, but also occult practices and the artificial cultivation of any psychological abnormality. As one of the participants admitted, their life looked like a competition in madness. However, that madness also served as a form of freedom that allowed them to place any subjectively genuine experience immeasurably higher than “objective truth”, which in the eyes of the Schizoids had no value at all.
Alexander Lamazares (City University of New York). “Post-Soviet Aesthetics in Cuba: Cultural Change, Humour, and Tropical Perestroika”. This paper looks at how Cuban aesthetics in the 1990s and 2000s discarded the socialist grotesque, and how this cultural change paralleled perestroika policies in the former Soviet Union. This culture transcends ideological rhetoric (i.e. socialism vs. capitalism, etc). Now more than ever, the arts represent a quasi-independent space that exists in constant dialogue with the State where their views of revolutionary experience are concerned. Finally, this paper assesses how artists acted as successful agents in bringing cultural change and creating a new kind of revolutionary landscape that revealed startling transformations in the social, political, cultural, and personal landscapes of post-Soviet Cuba.
SCENARIOS OF ADAPTATION AND RESISTANCE
Layla Renshaw
(School of Life Sciences, Kingston University, London). “Uncovered: Reversals of Exposure and Concealment in Spain’s Memory Politics”. This contribution examines how Francoist strategies of control played on the pre-existing preoccupation in rural Spanish communities with the division between the interior and exterior, as well as culturally specific understandings of visibility and surveillance. The article considers how episodes of enforced exposure enacted against Republican families in the Civil War, particularly strategies of gendered and sexual violence, and of exposure of the interior of the home through theft and looting, hastened a Republican retreat into the interior realm, and engendered an enduring sense of shame in some victims and their families. This was compounded by a further inversion of public and private, through the suppression of socially significant acts of mourning. It concludes with an assessment of how the current exhumations of Republican mass graves — entailing the exposure and display of bodies, the opening up of the clandestine grave site, and the formal reburial of bodies with due ceremony — serve to symbolically reverse Francoist strategies of control, and represent a return to the public realm for the victims and their descendants.Evgeny F. Krinko (Russian Academy of Sciences Southern Scientific Centre, Rostov on Don, Russia). “Informal Communications in a Closed Society: Wartime Rumours (1941—1945)”. This article is devoted to rumours during the Second World War as one of the main informal communication channels in a “closed society”. The main reason behind the mass spread of rumours in the USSR was an information vacuum created by the Soviet news policy. The author describes the main sources (diaries, memoirs, letters, official documents) for studying wartime rumours and analyses their potential. The article also provides a typology of rumours. The optimal criteria are considered to be the expectations contained in those rumours (the author marks out pessimistic and optimistic rumours) and the level at which those rumours were spreading (local, regional, national and international rumours). The author pays special attention to the areas and mechanisms of rumourmongering in 1941—1945 and the measures taken against rumours, especially the Act of 6 July 1941 and its implementation. Using different sources allowed the author to make conclusions about rumours serving as a compensating factor, a certain way in which Soviet society reacted to the extreme wartime situation. Mass rumour-mongering that provided an alternative to official information became one of the behavioural forms not subject to state control in a closed society.
Corey Ross (University of Birmingham, Great Britain). “East Germans and the Berlin Wall: Popular Opinion and Social Change Before and After the Border Closure of August 1961”. Based on sources from the East German regime’s internal archives, this article considers how the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 affected both the regime’s political authority as well wider processes of social change. After first considering the domestic problems that the East German communist leadership sought to solve by sealing the border, it proceeds to examine the immediate popular response to the building of the Wall and the longer-term consequences for the regime’s ability to realize some of its central socio-political aims at the grassroots level. It argues that although the Wall was in many respects a turning point in state-society relations, there were nonetheless many important threads of continuity that spanned the events of 12—13 August 1961. The period of enhanced political stability apparently ushered in by the Wall was arguably the product of a shift not only in popular political attitudes, but equally in the increasingly pragmatic expectations of the party leadership.
Irina Kaspe (Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, State University — Higher School of Economics, Moscow). In her article “Boundaries of Soviet Life: The Concept of “Private” in an Isolationist Society. Part One” Kaspe proceeds from the idea that late-stage Socialist society cannot be defined as totalitarian but rather isolationist (in a wide sense of the term that implies the rigidity of both external borders and internal, normative ones). It’s a society where the propaganda resources for supporting the current social organisation are being exhausted; this exhaustion is compensated for by emphasising the deterring/protective spheres (the author, following Alexei Yuchak, terms the results of this process as the “hypernormalisation” of official language). The ideological toolkit finds it ever more difficult to cope with its main task of maintaining and sanctioning required definitions of reality, and is consequently reduced to noise jamming aimed at drowning “enemy voices”. Kaspe raises the question of how this “hypernormalisation” relates to the obviously widening personal sphere (as compared to the totalitarian era), and analyses the interference of “Soviet” and “private” lives (not necessarily opposed to each other, actually closely linked) using cartoons from the satirical magazine “Krokodil” (“The Crocodile”). In the second part of her work, currently awaiting publication in the next issue of “The New Literary Observer”, she will continue this study using films by Eldar Ryazanov as material.
Sergei Zhuk (Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, USA), “The West in a “Closed” Soviet City: “Alien” Cinema, Ideology and Problems of Cultural Identity in the Brezhnev-Era Ukraine (1964—1982)”. This essay is part of Professor Zhuk’s research on the connections between cultural consumption, ideology and identity formation in one industrial city of the Soviet Ukraine during the Brezhnev era. The KGB closed Dniepropetrovsk to foreigners in 1959 after it became home to one of the biggest missile factories in the Soviet Union. Given its closed, sheltered existence, Dniepropetrovsk became a unique Soviet social and cultural laboratory in which various patterns of late socialism collided with new Western cultural influences. Using archival documents, periodicals, personal diaries and interviews as historical sources, this project focuses on how different moments of cultural consumption (reading books, listening and dancing to music, watching Western movies) among the youth of the Soviet “closed city” contributed to various forms of cultural identification, which eventually became elements of post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity. The main theme of this project is the evolution and transformation of various ideas of the West, both imaginary and real, during cultural consumption, as well as the influence of these ideas on identity formation in the “closed” society of late socialism.
PRODUCTION OF INSTITUTIONS
Aleksei Levinson
(Levada Center, Moscow). “Introductory Remarks Towards a Discourse on the Private”. For most of Russian history, the private sphere was subdued to the public one, and individuals were directly exposed to state institutions. There were and are almost no secondary social structures, practices or institutions to protect them. Institutions of this kind have been methodically eradicated and elbowed out of Russian social life since the earliest days of the Soviet regime. The Bolshevik party, initially a classic civil society institution (say, in February 1917), after seizing political power and control started a sociocide — a deliberate destruction of a given social form, since they felt that any civic society institutions other than their own might prove to be dangerous competitors.As a result of this practice, modern Russians are reluctant to harbour any ideas of creating organisations independent from the State.
“Private” in some discourses serves as a synonym of “closed” (“public” being a synonym of “open”). But in our society, “private” most of the time means “open”, flexible, adaptable as opposed to “public” = “state-governed” and rigid. In the 1990s private space served as a womb where Russian entrepreneurship was nourished and brought up. The first generation of Russian businessmen had no legal or financial institutions or infrastructures to rely upon. They had to use the instruments derived from daily interactions between individuals like honesty and fidelity, drinks and sex to control their partners and colleagues. A “normal” situation in Russia involves very few civic society organisations. Only those whose needs are extreme and/or ignored by the state dare to organise themselves. Others prefer to network. The networks they create are forms of self-help and social cooperation which permeate the society per se; when these networks penetrate the state apparatus it is called corruption.
In his article “A Community of Parvenues: the “Subjective Factor” in the Reform of Higher Education During the Second Empire in France”, Sergei Kozlov (Institute of Higher Humanitarian Researches, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) offers a detailed study of the internal mechanisms of innovation in a closed society. How often are they achieved through creating specific task-oriented bypass institutions running parallel to the generally sclerotic academic system? In such institutions, a special part is played by the constellations of personal networks, accidental factors and personal tastes both of the innovators themselves and their high-placed patrons. In the centre of this analysis lies the creation of the Practical School of High Studies (École pratique des hautes etudes) in Paris in the 1860s, and the peculiarities of the career of Victor Duruy (1811—1894), minister of education and a talented historian. The study also briefly dissects the mechanism of creating an acoustic hi-fi system in the closed Soviet society of the 1970s by way of comparative analysis.
Nikolay Mitrokhin (Research Centre for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany) in his article “The Apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1953—1985 as an Example of a Closed Society” approaches the Soviet Union as a closed society that was a conglomeration of smaller “closed societies”. He focuses his study on the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a prime example of such a closed society within a closed society. The author analyses the principles and practices of the corporate mentality of the Central Committee apparatus, which took shape in the second half of the 1930s and carries on today in the centre of Russian political power, the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation. In his research project, begun in 2006, Mitrokhin has conducted in-depth interviews and gathered memoirs of Central Committee apparatus members, bureaucrats who played key behind-the-scenes roles in formulating and executing decisions of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee, and had wide-ranging control over cadre and finances (although not without conflicting interests from other bodies, such as the KGB). Mitrokhin outlines the structure and operations of various Central Committee apparatus departments and dissects its corporate code. Everything from the behaviour of apparatus officials to their manner of dress, place of residence and children’s education was strictly regimented. At the same time, he deconstructs stereotypes painting them as blatant careerists, often perpetuated by former classmates who opposed the Soviet regime. As Mitrokhin notes, many dissidents and apparatchiks of the era were born into the Stalin-era middle class and all studied at the same faculties of the same prestigious universities. He presents statistics on the high education level of apparatus officials, calling them the “upper crust of Party intelligentsia” and comparing them in education, mentality and management skills to the American WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite. In fact, his research has shown that a significant number of apparatus officials were descended from pre-Revolutionary clergy, nobles, and merchants. He stresses that he expresses no nostalgia for the Soviet Union or Party elite and is not seeking “political rehabilitation” of the Central Committee apparatus, but that studying strong managers is important in understanding how they can be good for society or become levers and cogs in the totalitarian machine. The idea that the USSR was ripe for collapse by the mid-1980s, Mitrokhin concludes, is a political construct promoted by former Soviet leaders and not confirmed by facts.
Santiago Martinez Sánchez
, Rafael Escobedo Romero (Universidad de Navarra, Spain). “The Catholic Support for the Spanish Democratic Process”. The Roman Catholic Church in Spain was a very relevant actor in the peaceful transition from the Franco dictatorship to the constitutional democracy that Spain enjoys now. This positive stance may appear paradoxical as we bear in mind that the Franco regime was established upon a strong alliance with the Catholic Church. In order to explain how Catholicism contributed to the evolution of democracy after Franco’s death, the authors first summarise the role of the Catholic religion in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish society. They plot how Spaniards bitterly quarrelled for and against the Church, and how the religious issue heavily contributed to the so-called “two Spains” conflict, the most terrible consequence of which was the 1936— 1939 Civil War. The Franco regime was the total victory of one of those two Spains, and the Church espoused the victors enthusiastically. Nevertheless, Catholicism experienced a dramatic evolution during the Franco years, especially during and after the Vatican Council II (1962—1965). In short, the Catholic Church took a determined stand for democracy and human rights. Thus, most clergymen, especially the youngest, and many laypeople as well, started to oppose Francoism as part of their Christian commitment. The Church “unhitched” from Franco. Therefore, Catholicism contributed to the democratic process because it weakened, slowly but safely, the legitimacy of the Franco regime, easing the country’s evolution to a Western-style democracy. In her afterword, the translator Anna Shkolnik (Moscow State Pedagogical University) addresses the question of why the part played by the Spanish Church in the process of Spain’s democratisation remained practically unnoticed in Russian scholarship on Spanish history. She suggests that Catholicism in Spain has never ceased to be part of the worldview of the population, even during periods when the country’s attitude towards the Church was at its most bitter. In Russia after 70 years of atheist upbringing and anti-clerical propaganda, people find it hard to imagine the Church fighting for democratic freedom and civic rights. A vicious circle is formed: a horizon of expectations in relation to the Russian Orthodox Church creates a blind spot where perceptions of the part played by the Spanish Church are concerned, and this blind spot in turn prevents formation of the corresponding horizon of expectations.Elena Zdravomyslova (European University, St. Petersburg, and Centre for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg). “Leningrad Café “Saigon” — A Locale of Negative Freedom”. The purpose of this article is to describe and conceptualise the countercultural milieu of late Soviet society associated with the Leningrad cafe “Saigon”. From 1964 until autumn 1990, the “Saigon” coffeehouse served as a recognised locale for people whose lifestyle challenged that of “normal” Soviet citizens. The café regulars’ non-conformism was expressed in their values, attitudes, political orientations and everyday life-practices (in the spheres of employment, leisure and family), as well as in their body idiom.
The paper is based on a vast amount of biographical data, interviews collected by the author in the late 1990s, personal diaries and memoirs of “Saigon”’s regulars. Biographical research helps the author to reconstruct a collective habitus of the Saigonees and an interactive style particular to this coffeehouse. The author conceptualises Soviet bohemian non-conformism as the life strategy of negative freedom (following the liberal philosophy of Isaiah Berlin). She concludes that the negation of Soviet practices and the choice of autonomous creative life presumed individual risks and was combined with the self-destructive behavioural patterns of the frequenters of this famous coffeehouse.
COMMUNICATIVE RUPTURE
Laurent Thévenot
, Nina Kareva (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) “The “Marvellous Bread” of Hospitality: Misunderstandings that Clarify the Matter of Closedness or Openness of a Society”. The article is devoted to a “close reading” of one incident that happened when a certain Soviet physicist was being received in America in the late 1980s. An evaluation of the behaviour of both the guest and his hosts made by professional sociologists observing the incident, along with an analysis of a parallel case (a family from Belgium staying in Moscow before perestroika) enabled the authors to determine the problems of the meeting and collision of two different modes of sociality. The logic of composing a “common through proximity” and of structuring a liberal personality presumes different gradations of equality and hierarchy, emotional involvement or distancing — and these factors must be taken into consideration in an intercultural dialogue or interaction.Susanne Schattenberg (Research Centre for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany) ““A Conversation Between Two Deaf-Mutes?” The Culture of Khrushchev’s Foreign Policy and Adenauer’s Visit to Moscow in 1955”. The author argues that communication between the Soviet Union and the West did not work because there was no common language for foreign affairs. Khrushchev was socialised in Stalin’s “inner circle” and tried to apply those rules to foreign affairs. So in part, he just did not know how to behave appropriately, while in part he deliberately rejected diplomatic manners as “bourgeois” and “old-fashioned”. While the West insisted on upholding international standards they considered to be universal, the Soviet side suspected them of being “capitalist”. Both sides simply ignored the fact that they were using completely different reference systems, which resulted in constant cultural misunderstandings. When Khrushchev and Adenauer met in 1955, they produced miscomprehensions in almost every field: who was to be the leader of negotiations, how diplomacy operates, the use of plenary sessions, the role of unofficial get-togethers. It was just by chance or instinct that Adenauer eventually decided to adopt Khrushchev’s negotiation style, thereby winning the Soviet leader’s respect.
INFRASTRUCTURE OF TRANSITION
In his article ““Dictablanda”: The Times of Francisco Franco and Their Place in Spanish History”, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) analyses a paradoxical product of that dictatorship: the end of the confrontation between “two Spains” (a democratic, liberal and progressive Spain on one side, and an agrarian, Catholic and conservative one on the other). Basing his study on his personal experience in Spain in the late 1960s, Gumbrecht points out both the achievements of Spanish literature of the period in the aesthetic reconstruction of this closed society, and the deaf ear that the Left opposition turned to these achievements. An absence of internal dynamics, a refusal to accept regional differences within Spain as well as fear of secular influences provided for (on the “ex contrario” principle) the pluralism and openness of the current Spanish mode of development.
Ilya Vinitsky (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia). “The Soul in the Closed Society: The Epidemic of Table-Turning in Russia, 1853—1855”. The issue of mysticism is a key one for theories of open society. Henri Bergson considered mystical intuition a force which can break the inertia of “static religion” characteristic of a closed society. In turn, Karl Popper saw mysticism as a reaction against open society. The present article is not concerned with the abstract question of whether mysticism is friend or enemy to an open society. Instead, it examines how a concrete mystical movement reveals certain dynamic tendencies of a closed society in its crisis. The author focuses on the strange occult craze that penetrated Russian educated society in the twilight of Nicholas I’s conservative reign, on the eve of the Great Reforms: table-turning and table-talking, the initial stage of the Modern Spiritualist movement which arose in America in 1848. The adepts of the new movement understood it not simply as an alternative to materialist science, the Church, and philosophy, but as a synthesis of knowledge and truth, psychology and mystical understanding, empiricism and idealism — a shortcut to the final answer to each and every question.
The author suggests that the Russian epidemic of table-turning which started in the spring of 1853 and reached its peak during the Crimean War may be considered as a peculiar historical and cultural metaphor for the process of psychological and ideological re-opening of a closed society. The practice of communication with the other world — no matter how naïve and fantastic it may seem to us — undermined the monolithic single-worldliness of the closed Empire and revealed — in perhaps a most extravagant and even comic form — the modernist tendencies in Russian society of the last period of Nicholas’s reign: spiritual uncertainty and agitation, longing for communication, emerging public initiative, reliance on evidence provided by positive sciences, and eschatological and millenarian sentiments sparked by the war. In the utopian consciousness of the most faithful adepts of table-turning, communication with the dead was comprehended as the glorious beginning of a grandiose campaign of emancipation of the dead and — in the short run — revelation of all the secrets of our world based on evidence received from the spirits. Although the most significant events in the history of Modern Spiritualism occurred during the next, liberal, period in the history of Russian society (1856—1870s), the emergence of this spiritualist utopia in the mid-1850’s is deeply symptomatic: the “spiritual telegraph” signaled not the presence of invisible spirits in our life, but rather the hopes and aspirations of society at a turning point in the age of great historical changes.
Pavel Gol’din (Vladimir I. Vernadsky Taurida National University, Simferopol, Ukraine). “The Owls Are Not What They Seem, or “What? Where? When?” Game Minus a TV-set and a Sofa”. In the 1980s — 2000s, the new intellectual game show “What? Where? When?” became the basis for a stable social movement within the former USSR and the Russian Diaspora. The author discusses the mechanisms of that stability and the evolution of this game. By the end of the 1980s, the “What? Where? When?” movement and the game itself proved to be well prepared for the coming social changes. Developing new forms of the game raised its popularity and motivated the players; its media-component and human capital provided it with advertising and marketing; and its orientation towards a socially active audience proved to be correct for a society in a state of flux. Meanwhile, the show’s combination of social and technological progress allowed it to spread its practices over a huge territory. In the early 1990s the “What? Where? When?” clubs became part of a social organisation of intellectuals amidst the collapse of old social institutions.
EPILOGUE: OPEN NOT CLOSE
Sergei A. Oushakine (Princeton University). “Recycling the Past: The Post-Soviet Condition as a Form of Aphasia”. By looking at ethnographic and cultural evidence of the late 1990s and the “zero” years of the new century, the article traces the emergence of a socio-symbolic deadlock in post-Soviet Russia. As the essay suggests, this deadlock has a particular cultural logic: a “new enclosure” (novaia zakrtytost’) is often represented as a “crisis” of discursivity and identity, that is, as a dual impossibility to put in words the existing condition and to locate oneself within this condition. Using materials from ethnographic research in Siberia in 1997—1998 and visual projects of 2002—2006, the article demonstrates how this socio-symbolic paralysis was overcome through the extensive usage of cultural products of the past. Signifiers and frames of previous periods were recycled and reformatted in order to restore a sense of familiarity, but also to provide Post-Soviet individuals with some recognisable features. Compensatory by its very nature, this post-Soviet aphasia nonetheless produces a semblance of topographic clarity in a situation of cultural havoc.
Kirill Kobrin’s (Radio Liberty, Prague, and Neprikosnovennyj zapas journal, Moscow) in his essay “The News of the World and The World of the News” analyses the process of founding and developing the phenomenon known as a “newscast”. The genesis of the “world of the news” can be found in the transition from Western medieval society to that of Modernity. The main reason for this process lies in changing attitudes towards “time”, and in the end, towards the idea of circular time. Kobrin pays special attention to the rise of the printing press and the fate of the newscast genre in various types of society — (so-called) “open”, “closed” and “semi-closed”. In conclusion, the author plays with the idea of this genre disappearing because of the rise of new technologies — i.e. social networks, Twitter etc.
Vladimir Druk (New York). “Author 2.0: New Challenges and Possibilities”. This essay discusses the paradoxes of collective authorship and ownership in the context of Web 2.0, and the unique methods of creating and promoting creative content in this new digital space — from building new modes of navigation through tagging, to creating a digital reputation and recognising the effects of community filtering.
In contrast to traditional “one way” media, social networks are built on the principle of total interactivity. They abandon single authorship for the “hive mind” model of content creation by groups of professionals and laymen or hobbyists. This has shifted the traditional boundary between “creators” and “users,” and fundamentally changed our conceptions of fixed creation hierarchies, of editorial expertise, of content quality and success. In this new space, Druk examines several case studies of successful free and “open source” software development movements, and suggests how these can be adopted by creative and humanities-focused content makers.
The issue also includes the Index of contents for № 1—100 of the journal.