New books about modern Russia – Weekend – Kommersant
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Crazy Rich Russians
Elisabeth Schimpfoessl
publishing house individual
Translation Irina Evstigneeva
Extremely wealthy businessmen, eccentric, a little immoral, owners of luxurious mansions and yachts – the type of Russian that arouses the greatest curiosity in the West. Write about them or the authors of the tabloids, or economists and political scientists. The book by the Austrian sociologist Elisabeth Schimpfössl, published in the United States in 2018, seems to be the first thoughtful study of the Russian “oligarchs” as a class, a social community. Schimpfössl is interested in the identity of wealthy Russians: who do they think they are and who they want to look like? The running theme here is the gradual transformation of unprincipled adventurers and parvenus, like the “new Russians” of the 1990s, into a class of respectable bourgeois. Techniques of this evolution: the transition from tasteless glamor to the thoughtful modesty of the image, philanthropy and patronage, and so on. However, upon closer examination, the consciousness of wealthy Russians turns out to be woven from contradictions: an apology for traditional values and moral relativism, faith in private success and the cult of a good pedigree, the mission of the conductors of democracy and snobbery towards the poor classes. According to Schimpfössl, this new bourgeoisie has become the dominant class of modern Russia over the past 20 years, and its largely paradoxical ideology makes it possible to better understand the whole of Russian society.
AUE
Dmitry Gromov
publishing house UFO
The word “AUE” means either “prisoner criminal unity”, or “prisoner way of life is one”, or does not mean anything at all, but is a simple exclamation. Be that as it may, in the 2010s it spread on the walls of cities and in the public “VKontakte”, became the favorite cry of teenagers, and at the same time the subject of active discussion in the press. In 2020, the Russian Supreme Court recognized the AUE movement as an extremist organization and banned it on the territory of the Russian Federation. At the same time, there was no clarity on the question of what it actually is. Anthropologist Dmitry Gromov shows that the inability to grasp the essence of AUE with a seeming excess of information about it is the essence of the phenomenon. Many imagine it as a teenage criminal movement that has taken over the country. In fact, this is something like a huge meme, the subject of a kind of game of “thieves”, only very superficially in contact with real criminal activity. Gromov describes the relations of Russian society with the AUE as an example of a moral panic engulfing society. This danger was constructed by politicians and the media, and then exploited by people with opposing political views. For some, the semi-fictitious AUE turned out to be a symbol of the weakness of the state and the failure of pedagogy, for others it was a sign of a terrorist threat, an organization with, probably, foreign leaders, requiring an immediate harsh reaction.
Failures and breakdowns
Olga Pinchuk
Publishers Khamovniki Foundation, Common place
In the modern post-industrial world (and Russia is no exception here), factory workers have turned out to be an almost invisible class. The attention of both practical sociologists and social theorists is drawn to the precariat and office workers. In fact, the proletarians have not disappeared anywhere. Young sociologist Olga Pinchuk decides to find out how their work is now arranged, and is hired by a candy factory near Moscow as a toffee packer. Soon she becomes an assembly line operator and continues to advance her career throughout the year, learning factory life from different angles. Pinchuk’s main discovery: the rhythm of post-Soviet factory work (at least in some factories) is determined not by well-established, alienating mechanics, but by the endless breakdowns of old machines – so that the worker is in a hysterical mode of continuous correction of failures. From a simple performer, he turns into an involuntary inventor, but this creative element remains unnoticed by the authorities, not taken into account in any way in the economic structure of the factory. The subtitle of Pinchuk’s book is labeled as an ethnographic study, but – as often happens with the method of participant observation – the distance between the scientist and his characters breaks down, and with it the genre collapses. In places, Crashes and Breakdowns reads like a nonfiction novel with a distinctly dramatic undertone. A scientific experiment here turns into a rather cruel experiment of the author on herself.
Successor
Mikhail Fishman
publishing house corpus
Writing a biography of a political figure of a recent era is a difficult task. To do this, you need to build an epic distance to the events that have just been fresh news. The book by journalist Mikhail Fishman about Boris Nemtsov is a rare good example. Fishman reconstructs Nemtsov’s path: from a young physicist who almost accidentally got into politics during the era of perestroika (when scientists became activists in order, as they thought, to soon quietly return to scientific pursuits), through the role of an apologist for democratic reforms, a favorite of Boris Yeltsin and his potential successor (hence the bitterly ironic title of the book) – to a gradual fall from power, becoming one of the leaders of the non-systemic opposition and contract killing in 2015. This book has two important features, partly contradictory. First, she is extremely biased. Fishman is fascinated by his hero (as well as by the democrats of the 1990s in general), he does not allow any semitones in relation to him. Second, the life and death of Nemtsov here become an occasion to tell the entire political history of Russia from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s. In this sense, “The Successor” is an extremely intelligible, fascinating and tragic book – the case when a journalist discovers in himself the talent of a historian.
Russia 2050
New publishing house
A futurological collection compiled by journalist and critic Mikhail Ratgauz was published about a year ago. A few months later, the future we are talking about here quickly turned into a future-in-the-past. From a collection of forecasts, the book has turned into an archival document, a monument to the thought of the turn of the 2010-2020s and the ways in which it was possible to imagine the future in this already irretrievably bygone era. However, the authors of the collection themselves clearly work with the modality of retrofuturology: they constantly refer to Soviet projects of the future – from avant-garde cities to the novels of the Strugatsky brothers – trying to understand how the old-fashioned utopian imagination resonates with the present. The principle of the collection is almost paradoxical eclecticism: political science articles alternate with comics, decadent fantasies alternate with schemes of technical innovations of the middle of the 21st century like Skype jabot. There are especially many architectural and urban projects here: since the time of the Renaissance utopias, the image of the future has been not only a social project, but always also a space. Among the authors: Oleg Kashin (recognized as a “foreign agent”), Kirill Kobrin, Gleb Pavlovsky, Pavel Pepperstein, Ekaterina Shulman (recognized as a “foreign agent”). Now “Russia 2050” is a reading that primarily causes melancholy, but no less curious for that.
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