Youth Politics in Putin's Russia

Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs

Julie Hemment

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253017819
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Julie Hemment provides a fresh perspective on the controversial nationalist youth projects that have proliferated in Russia in the Putin era, examining them from the point of view of their participants and offering provocative insights into their origins and significance. The pro-Kremlin organization Nashi ("Ours") and other state-run initiatives to mobilize Russian youth have been widely reviled in the West, seen as Soviet throwbacks and evidence of Russia's authoritarian turn. By contrast, Hemment's detailed ethnographic analysis finds an astute global awareness and a paradoxical kinship with the international democracy-promoting interventions of the 1990s. Drawing on Soviet political forms but responding to 21st-century disenchantments with the neoliberal state, these projects seek to produce not only patriots, but also volunteers, entrepreneurs, and activists.

ONE

COLLABORATIVE POSSIBILITIES, NEW COLD WAR CONSTRAINTS

Ethnography in the Putin Era

DECEMBER 2006, TVER’

Flushed with success, I scuttled toward the familiar apartment. The city streets were crowded, full of shoppers on their way home at the end of the day. Young people clustered around the kiosks and benches, drinking beer and crowding the paths. As I pressed the button and waited to be buzzed in, I hoped I would not have to encounter more crowds on the other side of the door. Valentina lived in the center of town, in one of the old pre-revolutionary-era apartments that abutted the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare. Like many city-center dwellers, her stairwell was often crowded with young people, mostly of college age, though sometimes much younger, who hung out in the entrance of her apartment block all day, drinking beer, smoking, leaving litter, and intimidating residents and their guests. She was frustrated daily by the situation. She understood it to be symptomatic of the times: the kids had nowhere to go. Clubs and associations were being shut down and they could not afford to frequent the expensive new bars and cafés that now proliferated in the city. During the winter months, when they clustered in large numbers, she had devised her own ingenious solution to this problem: she went out on her balcony to read drafts of her gender studies lectures to them! It had worked, she told me. The comical intervention took them by surprise and jogged them into a kind of respectful recognition, interrupting the potentially adversarial relation (aggravated homeowner confronts troublemaking youth). Some of the kids had been really interested in what she had presented, she told me – and they promised to keep the noise down.

Fortunately, the stairwell was empty that day. “Success!” I announced triumphantly as she opened the door. Over tea, I updated her on my latest successful mission and shared my trophies: literature and promotional materials from the newly founded regional social welfare organization Vazhnoe Delo (Important Business). By 2006, state-run youth organizations were popping up like mushrooms in the city, as my colleagues put it. Vazhnoe Delo, supported with lavish regional funds, was the most prominent. This project – founded by the new governor of Tver’ – engaged young people as volunteers to assist the elderly and orphans. My goals in meeting with the director were to learn more about it and to negotiate internships there for the student members of our research team; we had picked the organization as an ideal site for them to undertake participant observation. Valentina raised her eyebrows at my enthusiastic account of the activities I had learned of, asking sardonically, “But are they interested in the kids that gather in my doorway?”

As her comment suggested, Valentina was highly skeptical of the emergent youth policies and the organizational forms they gave rise to. Rather than tackling real social issues (such as the needs of the youth who congregated in her stairwell, or the elderly they claimed to assist), she considered this organization to be political PR. As an educator, she was also concerned by what these costly new youth projects displaced. As political elites channeled lavish funds to new state-run projects, university budgets shrank.

Each of the eight short research trips I made to Tver’ between 2006 and 2011 began with a meeting wherein Valentina, Dmitry, and other colleagues updated me on the latest events. The tone was often sardonic and satirical. Their droll reports and humorous asides always made me smile but underscored our different positioning.

In this chapter, I provide a thick description of our collaborative research process, tracing the goals that prompted it, the moments of dissonance that unexpectedly arose, and the rich insights it generated. In so doing, my goal is to offer a situated response to the challenge of undertaking ethnographic research in Putin-era Russia. As I describe the research process that produced the knowledge this book advances, I also consider the contrast it presented with the project that preceded it: the collaborative work and participatory action research project I undertook with members of Valentina’s feminist group Zhenskii Svet in 1997–1998. Conditions had changed in the years since then and the Putin era was a much less hospitable climate than the nineties for international research collaborations. In the course of our project, it became increasingly marked.

Our first collaboration was an experiment in transnational solidarity. Across the fraught terrain of the postsocialist development encounter, Valentina and I sought to forge another, more reciprocal kind of partnership than many of the international feminist exchanges we saw taking place. The participatory action research project we undertook in 1998 had multiple outcomes, one of which was a community-based project: a crisis center for women survivors of sexual and domestic violence set up by members of Zhenskii Svet.¹ An equally profound outcome was the solidarity it generated between the participants of the group and me, based on affective ties and a strong sense of mutual responsibility. Valentina playfully referred to the process of making ties we underwent together as “taming,” a metaphor she drew from Saint-Exupéry’s beloved children’s book, The Little Prince, where it was used to refer to the relationship between the Little Prince and his friend, the fox (Hemment 2007a, 19–20). This, our second collaboration, proved to be more complex. Though we began the project from a place of solidarity, we found the ground had shifted under our feet. The reconfigured geopolitical terrain both positioned us differently and elicited different responses in us, stemming from our locations. Moreover, in the latter stages of the project, our feminist solidaristic conception of collaboration came to collide with another, more menacing construction. Between 2006 and 2014, “international collaboration” moved from being a neutral, validating practice (an important part of the symbolic economy of Russian academic life) to becoming marked as “treacherous.” New legislation enacted in the spring of 2013 required the Russian recipients of foreign funds (NGOs and scholars) working on “political” issues to register themselves as “foreign agents” (inostrannye agenty) – a term strongly associated with Cold War–era espionage – exposing Russian scholars to significant risk.

This chapter explores these themes and tells the story of the relationships upon which this collaboration was based. I portray myself in discussion and debate with my colleagues to offer a window onto this changing field, using our relationship as a diagnostic to communicate the transformations we encountered. I show how, our shared goals and commitment to solidarity notwithstanding, we had different stakes. While not at odds, at times we pursued a divergent politics in this collaboration.

A second goal is to make the case for collaboration within ethnographic research. Despite its challenges, this project was transformative for us all, an example of the richness that collaborative research can provide and the space of connection and possibility it encodes. I show how the complexities of this context led to the adoption of a distinctive ethnographic stance, one that embraced “epistemological humility” (Razsa and Kurnik 2012, 241) and a “politics of possibility” (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxvii). Drawing inspiration from feminist geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham,² I conceptualize this as an affective stance that allows for the recognition of commonality in unexpected places. It was prompted both by close, embodied relationships and ties (gratitude toward a mentor and friend, consternation at the plight she and her colleagues found themselves in) and also by the acknowledgment of the geopolitical prism through which they were refracted and in which they were situated. This process yielded rich data that pushed me to new conclusions about the state-run projects we investigated. It was in sum a methodology that shaped the conceptual underpinning of this book.

“A SECOND-GENERATION POSTSOCIALIST
(EAST-WEST) FEMINIST COLLABORATION”

I came up with this descriptor (“second-generation postsocialist [East-West] feminist collaboration”) as Valentina and I prepared to present on this research at the NYU Gender in Transition Workshop in 2010. I had given a paper at this feminist research forum in previous years; my intent was to signal the differences between this collaboration and the earlier collaborative research we had undertaken.³

My relationship with Valentina and her colleagues was forged during the hurly-burly of the Yeltsin years, the now-controversial nineties. We were some of the beneficiaries of this now much derided time; we rode high on the wave of optimism and the increased sense of possibilities the Berlin Wall’s collapse gave rise to. Our paths crossed as we traversed the horizontal feminist connections and networks – the first “East-West feminist” scholarly and activist exchanges (Funk and Mueller 1993) – that took shape in the early postsocialist period. I reached out, grabbing a line thrown out in her feminist group Zhenskii Svet’s very first online post, a short message posted on the Network of East-West Women’s listserv (established by some of the US feminist scholars who now hosted us at NYU),⁴ which introduced the group and explained its projects. I first traveled to Tver’ in 1995 at Valentina’s invitation, returning in 1997–1998 to do my dissertation research, affiliated with Zhenskii Svet. Our collaboration then was a critique of the form of “East-West” collaboration international funding encouraged (as community-based horizontal networks were beginning to be displaced by more formal and professional NGOs).⁵ Inspired by both anthropological and feminist discussions (Alcoff 1994; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Haraway 1991), I sought to explore alternative forms of exchange. Then, our collaboration was a mutual process of investigation, wherein we puzzled and strategized Western aid and sought to forge a different kind of international cross-cultural feminist collaboration.

In contrast, our second collaboration took form out of a shared sense of distress and bewilderment at the sharp turn for the worse that things took in the 2000s, against a backdrop of the escalating East-West tensions I have described. The climate of the university was becoming less friendly as well; at a time of “academic nationalism” (Oushakine 2009), my colleagues found themselves marked as insufficiently “loyal,”⁶ problematically Western-oriented, and were disrespected by patriotic colleagues and briskly entrepreneurial administrators alike. Here, Soviet-era patterns of bureaucratic intransigence and hostility toward faculty (who frequently positioned themselves as independent and critical of the party-state) became inflected with a new element: the disdain of neoliberal-style administrators.

This second collaborative research project responded to our shifting personal circumstances as well. When we met in 1995, I was a graduate student and Valentina was a university-based civic activist. Although her feminist group Zhenskii Svet drew on university relationships and resources, it was largely based in the civic sphere. We both had the luxury of time – albeit for different reasons – and were able to devote ourselves to the issues of activism and collaboration that interested us. In 2004, we were both rooted more firmly within the university, carrying a broad and more intense set of university-based professional responsibilities. I was grappling with the challenges of the tenure track at the University of Massachusetts; she was struggling to maintain resources for her Center for Gender Studies. For the center, 2004 was a significant year, as, while it retained university support, it lost the external funding from the Ford Foundation that had sustained it. As US foundations and agencies pulled out of Russia to direct their energies elsewhere (according to the Bush “Freedom Agenda”), Russian NGO activists like my colleagues felt abandoned.

They contended with other problems, too. In Russia, as in the United States and globally, higher education was undergoing a major restructuring. In line with a 2001 Ministry of Education decree, the Russian government has worked to “modernize” higher education. This restructuring is owed in part to European norms and the standardization of education under the Euro zone, in line with the Bologna Process,⁷ and in part to market logic. It leaves both teachers and students frustrated. Several teachers lamented that the university was being downgraded to a PTU (technical-vocational school). This comment spoke to their concern about both the devaluation of their own professional expertise and their worsening conditions of employment. The decision to admit fee-paying students placed additional strain on teachers, who received no direct compensation for the increased workload. It also brought in students who had little interest in studying. Valentina put it in terms that resonated with my own concerns about university corporatization: “The educational process is becoming confused with the manufacturing process,” she said, adding wryly, “We bring in timber, and produce lumber [trees]” (Primimaem dubov, vypuskaem lipu), a play on words suggesting that the university had become a factory that produces materials. Worse, they are false materials, or, rather, false sociologists, as she explained to me – lipa means both a linden tree and something false. Her comment also conveyed her dissatisfaction with the raw material in these semiprivatized times – that is, with the students. Duby (literally oak) is a colloquial way of referring to someone who is not too bright, in this case students who pay for their degrees but skip class and have no intention of studying.

Against this backdrop, we searched for ways to enact the solidarity and sustain the collaboration and dialogue we had established. The topic that presented itself was our shared interest in and commitment to engaged or community-based pedagogy (or “teaching through engagement and research,” as Valentina later recalled it) – here, as a means to reenergize teaching and social science. Valentina had long been committed to a political sociology that was live and engaged with real, pressing (ostrye) social issues and problems, and to a gender studies that provided a space for open discourse (Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2003, 52). The relationship between her university work and her civic activism had always been seamless. Zhenskii Svet was university-based but open to the public, and ran consultations and gender studies classes for townspeople via the Evening School in Gender Studies. Until it was forced to shut down in early 2004 – the casualty of shifting political winds in both Tver’ and donor nations – the crisis center she cofounded worked together with the Gender Studies Center in an example of university-community partnership.⁸ She brought this commitment to her work with undergraduate students as well, going against the tide of dominant pedagogical practice (and “modernizing” neoliberal reforms) to engage her students in hands-on critical sociological projects.

During my stay in March 2005, I had the chance to witness this when I visited a class where her first-year sociology students were presenting their results. Their assignment was stimulated by local politics: the sharp cutbacks in social spending and the retrenchment of the nongovernmental sphere that were taking place in the context of broader federal reforms, “monetizing” social welfare reforms that were causing national protests (Hemment 2012b). Strategically timed to take place before International Women’s Day, it sought to elicit women’s views on these policies. Students were invited to put one question to women passersby: “What would you like to ask our mayor, if you met him?” Valentina explained that she had devised this assignment after speaking to one of the progressive municipal deputies, who was combating these cuts virtually single-handedly and suffering some abuse in the local media for her pains. Valentina’s instructions to the students were to take field notes after each interview and to reflect on the experience, the responses, and what it taught them.

Four of her thirty-five freshman students had elected to undertake the project. As their peers watched, Dima, Volodya, and two young women, Katya and Ira, came to the front of the class. The students spoke of their initial nervousness as they approached people on the street for the first time, and of their learning curve; they also communicated their shock and dismay at the vehemence of some women’s responses, some of which were too crude to report. After their presentation Valentina congratulated them and informed the rest of the class that with the students’ consent, she planned to organize a public roundtable at the university to present the results of this research, in a gesture of solidarity with the local deputies who were fighting cuts in social spending.

Afterward, as we conferred, she told me how exciting this had been. Her students had amazed her with their enthusiasm. “We colonized Trekhsviatskaya [the main pedestrian thoroughfare]!” she told me, conjuring an amusing image of sociologists taking over the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedicaiton
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Collaborative Possibilities, New Cold War Constraints: Ethnography in the Putin Era
• 2 Nashi in Ideology and Practice: The Social Life of Sovereign Democracy
• 3 Seliger 2009: “Commodify Your Talent”
• 4 From Komsomol’tsy-Dobrovol’tsy to Entrepreneurial Volunteers: Technologies of Kindness
• 5 “Arousing” Patriotism: Satire, Sincerity, and Geopolitical Play
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index