3 MULTIPLE BORDERS OF NATION-NESS AND RUSSIANNESS
3.3 The Russian idea as the self and the other
The state authorities and their subordinate media in Russia occupy privileged and protected, albeit not completely unchallenged, positions in defining the terms of the desired, proper, and essential Russian idea (Russianness). The current regime has instrumentalised history to produce a hegemonic regime of truth and the patriotic obligation to protect “historical truth” in the spheres of education, culture, and foreign policy (Hudson 2012; Makarychev 2012;
Müller 2012; Laine 2020). This section reviews the various contexts in which Russian nation-ness has manifested its meaningfulness, highlighting mostly general lines regarding civic membership and geopolitical identity, while bearing their challengers in mind.
Values and the socialisation of mentalities play a key role in experiencing meanings of social space as real (Buttimer 1974; Paasi 1996, 30). By the second half of the 2010s, especially after the 2011–2012 anti-regime protests in Russia and the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine in 2014, the previously ambiguous Russian official national discourse became increasingly narrow and clear-edged in its demarcation under “traditional” values and patriotism against liberal universalism (Tolz 2017; Goode 2017; Zhuravlev 2018;
Lipman, Kachkaeva & Poyker 2018; Laine 2020). In the sphere of everyday nationhood this official discourse of Russianness produces a body-political subjectification in youth fashion and consumerism, which Ekaterina Kalinina (2017, 19) characterises as “the uniformed production of exclusion”. Increasing institutional measures seek to detect and eliminate “foreign influences” on
religious organisations (Aitamurto 2019). Putin has stated that foreign funding is dangerous for Russian education (Tass 2016). Vera Tolz summarises that in Russia:
“Narratives about security threats necessitate identifying not only their sources but also the membership and the boundaries of the national community which is supposed to be defined. As a result, securitization discourses, which amplify threat perceptions among the public and jus-tify a concomitant increase of government interventions in public life, tend to be closely intertwined with and incorporate specific narratives of nationhood.” (Tolz 2017, 745)
The contemporary regime equates itself with proper Russianness in several ways while marginalising opposition movements and even non-governmental organisations from the nation as a deviant, unpatriotic, and foreign “fifth column” (Oivo 2013; Laine 2020, 20). The regime claims legitimacy by representing Putin’s high approval ratings as the will of the Russian people (Goode 2016, 421; Feldmann & Mazepus 2017; Rogov & Ananyev 2018).
The discursive imaginary of Russianness shifts from its internal variety to its constitutive external and foreign threats. Accordingly, the regime-loyal media calls for a rally around the flag against Western “Russophobe”
antagonism, from Pussy Riot performances and the colour revolutions to more commonplace social phenomena (Tolz & Teper 2018).
While there are plenty of internal boundaries in Russianness, the identity politics of the Russian self is strongly intertwined with European and Western identity politics across the centuries. Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality (“people-mindedness”) (pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost’) are considered a prototype of the Russian idea. Although they were not then strongly institutionalised, in 1833 the Russian minister of education Count Uvarov coined these “three pillars of Russianness” to counter the French Revolution slogan “liberté, egalité, fraternité”, which had inspired Russian army officers to rebel in support of “Europeanising” liberal modernisation.
Orthodoxy served as a contrast with the morally corrupt (Western) European other, whereas autocracy embodied the regime in opposition to (republican)
political games and hence better implemented higher values. The implied nationality is a more ambiguous element, but it likewise suggests the difference between the Russian and Western peoples (Oittinen 2007).
Echoes of the nineteenth-century Slavophile movement discussions can be detected in contemporary Russian discussions, in which Europe’s greater material (economic) advancement than Russia is juxtaposed with Russian moral superiority. Meanwhile, Westernisers held that Russia needed to learn to become more like Europeans (ibid. 32–33, Neumann 1999, 179–180; 2016;
Sergeev 2014; Yagodin 2014). Moreover, the relations of South, East (not Alaska), and Russianness were considered positively in economic and political terms. However, the official discourse is ambiguous concerning the social inclusion of people from the southern former Soviet states and China due to the negative attitudes towards them in the Russian population (Laruelle 2016; Tolz 2017).
A vague Westernness is a common and flexible point of reference in language use. It embeds modernist ideas of urban and self-reflective subjects and intersubjective relations. It can often be seen to occupy the dominant or hegemonic position in understanding “normal”, “modern”, or even
“globalised” in juxtaposition with “exotic”, “local”, and “traditional”, although such boundary-making lines are insufficient to define social space in the “West”
and the “Rest” alike (Darling-Wolf 2015). Edward Said’s problematisation of Western colonial representations of the Eastern other in his 1978 classic Orientalism has inspired academic research to study the “counter discourse”
of Occidentalism, i.e. how the West is viewed from non-Western perspectives (Eide 2008, 153–154). Occidental views generally characterise Westernness in terms of amorality, insensitivity, extreme secularity, and promiscuity (ibid. 157) that are also recognisable in how the Russian media discourse presents the West (e.g. Hutchings 2004). While scholars usually view the Russian intersubjective relationship with Westernness in more detail than Occidentalism/Orientalism, Orientalist characterisations of the despotic, irrational, and illiberal “East” (ibid.) are recognisable in Western – including Finnish – representations of Russianness (Neumann 1999; Klinge 1972; Paasi 1996, 98–99; Moisio 1998; Ojajärvi & Valtonen 2011).
In European identity politics discursive Russianness historically functions as unestablished borderlands. Russian ambiguity, which ranges from its characterisation as barbaric to its characterisation as one of the modern European great powers can be traced to the reforms of Tsar Peter the Great.
The liberal European narrative thereafter framed Russia as an archaic state and people, with the potential to modernise and become democratic and European. However, Russia was portrayed in nineteenth-century European conservative identity politics as something that Europeans themselves could take a positive example from in returning to their truer selves. Similarly, after the establishment of the Soviet Union Russianness came to signify an ideological threat for some and hope for others. The naming of a historical period as the Cold War testifies to how the Soviet Union constituted the European discursive space. Moreover, it is arguable that NATO and the EU, the organisations of Western integration, are defined by their exclusion of Russia (Neumann 1999, 65–112).
The “great power” discourse is a recognised element of Russian geopolitical identity that produces an essentialising historical “destiny” in its politics of becoming. Müller notes that this discourse is so connected with the imaginary of a “weak Russia” that representations of its strength are mutually constituted by reminders of its unachieved wholeness (the dislocated, incomplete realisation of itself) that has exposed Russia to mistreatment in international relations. In Russian official discourse the great power discourse implies that Russian strength is contingent on the ability of Russia to leverage its influence on the regions of its “near abroad” (Müller 2012, 337). Western states have therefore historically downplayed Russian great power-ness – despite its material strength – because of its inability to govern itself (economically and liberally) efficiently (Neumann 2012, 70–109).
Kolossov (2011, 178) characterises the near-abroad border issues as constituting an identity crisis for Russia and most of the former Soviet states.
On the grand scale the issue of extraterritorial Russianness brings together boundaries, belonging, and non-belonging to Russianness in geopolitical, ethnic, symbolic, and lived everyday spaces. Russia’s neighbourhood policies have indicated creations of Russian biopolitical boundaries outside the geopolitical ones, most notably in Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova, and
Georgia, where it has resulted in grievances from daily politics to outright wars (Davydova 2008; Skulte-Ouaiss 2015; Goble 2015; Makarychev & Yatsyk, 2017; Suslov 2017b). Since the 1990s the Russian state has gradually and ambiguously conceptualised “Russians in the near abroad”, “compatriots”
(sootechestvenniki), and the “Russian world” (Russkiy mir) to protect and constitute its leverage outside its territory. It is implied that these definitions, whether for people in the Republic of Karelia (Sotkasiira 2019) or religious groups in Russia (Aitamurto 2019), are bound by their “historical origins”
and “cultural traditions”. In practice, these ambiguous conceptualisations are instrumentalised in the extraterritorial social spatialisation of Russianness. In ad hoc principle, some compatriots (“us/there”) are called to stay and mobilise abroad, while others are called to repatriate in specific Russian regions for domestic reasons. Occasionally, they are accused of being unpatriotic traitors (Davydova-Minguet 2014; 2018; Lähteenmäki 2015; Suslov 2017; Mitrohin 2017; Nagashima 2019).
Language is instrumental in the construction of the political publicity required for socio-spatial consciousness, and as a medium for the discourses of integration and difference (Paasi 1996, 91–93). The importance of language is well highlighted in the role singing played in the late Soviet independence movements of the Baltic states and more generally in the literal language policies (e.g. Kaasig-Krogerus 2016; Neumann 1999, 6–7). An estimated 25 to 30 million Russian speakers live outside the Russian Federation (Suslov 2017, 5). Language and a little later “traditional values” have been instrumentalised as unifiers of the Russian world, expanding the state’s territory. However, categorical boundaries of the ethnicity and nationality of Russianness are controversial due to the tensions, separatism, and irredentism in – and related to – hundreds of sub-groups in the Russian population. Pain (2009, 69–72) suggests that since the initial post-Soviet period Russians have become increasingly ethnically self-aware and have appealed for a special majority status in the country. The official discourse celebrates the harmonic “multi-nationality” of the Russian people (or “civilisation”), in which it is suggested
“ethnic Russians” have a special unifying role (Miller 2009; Blakkisrud 2015;
Suslov 2017; Sotkasiira 2019; Laine 2019). Laine (ibid.) notes that in the 2018
law on the Russian nation (zakon o rossiiskoi natsii), “ethnic Russians”, with their highlighted role in social cohesion, were ambiguously defined.
Citizenship is contingent as a signification of belonging and identity. In the political struggles of marginalised groups, collective activism and participatory citizenship are often promoted as the consolidation of “full and legitimate belonging” in society and polity (Yuval-Davis 2006, 206). Soviet citizenship is recognised as constituting a securitised relationship between subjects and state, which emphasises passive civic virtues and vertically governed activism (Jakobson 2017; Shevel 2009; Lohr 2012; Agarin & Karolewski 2015). Russia, like Finland, has followed the global trend of liberalising citizenship policies, detaching them to a degree from Westphalian securitised unitary state membership and loyalties, while preserving the drafted “nation under arms”
regime in their security policies alongside the nation as “a spectator” (Oivo
& Davydova-Minguet 2019; Triadafilopoulos 2007). Especially since 2012 the official discourse has subjectified historical relatedness to the experience of the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War as a sacred obligation for patriotic Russians to respect, take pride in, commemorate and defend (Laine 2020; Davydova-Minguet 2018; Wijermars 2019).
Grand narratives and discourses of Russianness have been challenged not only across geopolitical lines, but through several other fields as well. While it has recently been increasingly subjected to the regime’s regulations (e.g.
Kalinina 2017; Wijermars 2019), cultural productions have been a platform for challenging the hegemonising attempts of the Russian self and its boundaries with satire, social critique, and the productions of alternative identities (Makarychev 2012; Lukinmaa & Berezkin 2019). The Russian language internet (RuNet) has especially provided a new creative and expressive discursive space (Schmidt 2013; Ratilainen 2020). Moreover, people who have emigrated from Russia have in some cases sought to “Europeanise” themselves through displacement from the “failed socialist modernity” of Russianness (Krivonos 2019), whereas others have sought to rediscover the “original” pre-Christian Russianness (Laruelle 2019, 74). Extensive interview studies (Kalinina 2017;
Goode 2016) and current research (Articles 3 and 4) have highlighted how people’s individual and informal perceptions of desired Russianness cover a wide scale of contrasts with the official discourse.
In reviewing the relevant research literature, in this section I have discussed how both nation-ness and Russianness are produced through processes of boundary making in relation to their constitutive outsides. The ambiguity of Russian identity signifiers, from geopolitical boundaries to language, ethnicity, values, and citizenship, are at the same time instrumentalised assets and celebrated matters of pride, yet the official discourse downplays this ambiguity to produce unity and secure the established (regime) order.
Subjectifying Russianness as ontologically threatened by external forces calls for a more coherent demarcation of what is being threatened, and what should be unified in the face of the threat. Overall, this chapter builds on the previous one concerning the epistemology of identities and spatiality, and it leads to the final theory chapter, in which I describe how the transnational media discourse and Russianness co-produce one another.