Читать книгу The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin's Russia I - Ivo Mijnssen - Страница 11

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the disappearance of a multinational empire whose influence had stretched from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and beyond. This signified a drastic reduction of Moscow’s sphere of influence and territory and a crisis in Russian identity. Even though ethnic Russians had not possessed their own national institutions during Soviet times, they played the leading political and cultural role in the USSR. Geoffrey Hosking even goes so far as to argue that Russian identity equaled Soviet identity in many regards (Hosking 2006: 2).

A discussion of the relation between Soviet and Russian identity would go beyond the scope of this book and has been discussed extensively elsewhere.[8] For the purposes of this book, this loss serves as a point of departure for understanding contemporary Russian political identities and their historical foundation.

To grasp this loss and its compensation theoretically, I use Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s terminology. Their discourse theory allows for a dynamic conception of social identities. Laclau and Mouffe see societies and nations not as natural, objectively existing entities, but rather as the results of discursive articulations. They draw their political terminology from Antonio Gramsci and their notion of discourse from Michel Foucault. Swiss historian Philipp Sarasin located Foucault’s notion of discourse as existing between things and words. Discourse is an entity with its own rules and elements that attributes meaning to items and statements within a specific societal context (Sarasin 2003: 34). According to Laclau and Mouffe, writes sociologist Urs Stäheli, discourses construct «realities» by arranging various elements in such a way as to form a significant whole (Stäheli 2001: 198). Practices and actions only become meaningful when embedded in a discourse and connected to other signifiers. Similarly, identities are not preexistent but socially and politically constructed.

Laclau and Mouffe call this «unfixity» of identities dislocation. Identities remain perennially unstable and are only temporarily arranged within a discourse, to create a measure of stability: «Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre.» (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 112). This «centre» is constructed by arranging various discursive moments in a chain of equivalence around so-called «nodal points» – «privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain» (ibid.). These nodal points tie the different moments of a discourse together and provide it with a coherent meaning.

When this combination is successful, one can speak of a hegemonic discourse. A hegemonic discourse describes the world in a new, convincing manner by articulating and connecting norms, values and perceptions (Torfing 1999: 302). It presents a worldview that enjoys widespread acceptance within a social collective.

A hegemonic operation is always the result of discursive dislocation, as it stabilizes an entity that is inherently unstable. Laclau and Mouffe, however, attach a second meaning to dislocation: concrete events and political demands that undermine the stability of a hegemonic discourse because the latter cannot absorb and arrange them as part of the dominant worldview (ibid.: 301). Put simply, dislocations are discursive moments deeply at odds with the predominant values in a society.

German sociologist Philipp Casula argues that the demands and events that could not be articulated within Soviet discourse contributed significantly to the Union’s collapse (Casula 2010: 249). Demands for economic and social reforms beyond the socialist framework, declining living standards, the disaster at Chernobyl and Eastern European and Baltic states’ drive for national independence contradicted the dominant Soviet worldview. Official Soviet discourse presented socialism as the most progressive system in the world, as superior to capitalism, and as the home of a multitude of «brotherly» nations. Even if some Soviet citizens, particularly in the late USSR, had a critical and even cynical attitude towards official declarations, a different system was unimaginable for the vast majority.

According to Alexei Yurchak, Mikhail Gorbachev began the «deconstruction of Soviet authoritative discourse» by suggesting that the answer to the USSR’s economic and social problems might lie outside of socialist ideology and the Communist Party (Yurchak 2006: 291f.). His reforms, and particularly glasnost’ (openness), broke the hegemonic power of Soviet discourse and the Communist Party. In Laclau’s terms, Soviet discourse was dislocated by Gorbachev’s reform plans, which could not be convincingly connected with other «socialist» discursive moments.

The government’s decision not to use military force to maintain the Eastern European satellite states within the socialist system in 1989 and the worsening economic and political situation in the USSR finally provoked an attempted coup d’état by anti-reform Communists in 1991. The failure of the August coup, however, led to the establishment of a sovereign Russian state and sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Political collapse followed discursive dislocation.

The Russian state that emerged in the 1990s lacked stable political and territorial foundations. Politicians struggled to articulate a common political identity. To a certain extent, this was intentional: the market ideology promoted aggressively by Russian reformers in the early Yeltsin period led to a limitation of the state’s involvement in social, political and economic affairs. Many considered any attempt to articulate and promote an official political identity to be reminiscent of Soviet methods and thus potentially totalitarian (Molchanov 2005: 19).

At the same time, Russians were faced with a dramatic deterioration of living standards. Chechnya declared independence in 1994, and the unsuccessful and costly war that followed demonstrated the Russian army’s severe limitations. The treaty of Khasaviurt, which provided Chechnya with de-facto autonomy, contributed to a widespread sense that the Russian state was losing control over large parts of the country. The collapse of the ruble in 1998, which resulted in the vast number of Russians losing their savings, constituted a further dislocation.

Official government discourse presented Russia as a democratic country with a market economy, yet this discourse failed to provide a unifying national idea.[9] Other discourses were simultaneously competing for hegemony. Olga Malinova identifies two main blocks: the «Democrats» around Yeltsin, and the «Popular-Patriotic Opposition» (Malinova 2009: 97). While the former, dominated by supporters of liberal market reforms, corresponded more or less to official government discourse, the latter united Communists and right-wing forces: «They combined traditional communist rhetoric with criticism of liberal