SUMMARY:

Mark Lipovetsky begins his essay by revisiting Serguei Oushakine’s many works and pointing out the strength of his work, which combines attention to meaningful facts of contemporary Russian culture with the ability to employ a range of sophisticated theoretical approaches in contemporary humanities and social sciences. Although the material for Oushakine’s book coming from Barnaul in Siberia, Lipovetsky argues that Oushakine’s study focuses on meaningful current national phenomena, such as, for example, the collapse of Soviet sociocultural semiotics and the lack of new generally acceptable and comprehensible discourses. Lipovetsky suggests that Oushakine’s book raises a number of questions: how did the Soviet past became meaningful not only for millions of former Soviet citizens but also for their children and grandchildren who never experienced it? What new forms of social solidarity have emerged on the ruins of the Soviet world? And, finally, why did the post-Soviet democratic revolution fail so miserably?
Addressing Oushakine’s study of symbolic constructions of loss and trauma, Lipovetsky suggests that in many cases these constructions implicitly or explicitly validate violence that was ultimately responsible for the emergence of the communities of loss. Lipovetsky also comments that many ideas and practices described by Oushakine as specifically post-Soviet communities of solidarity organized around notions of trauma, loss, and mourning are descendants of late Soviet practices, whether thanatological cults of the Great Patriotic War or Russian nationalist exercises of the early 1980s. Hence Lipovetsky’s suggestion that these post-Soviet phenomena may be a bricolage of Soviet influences. For Lipovetsky, neo-Communist youths described by Oushakine are heirs to the Slavophile discourse merged with Stalin’s national-bolshevism and late Soviet nationalism. Similarly, some antecedents of post-Soviet constructions of biologically determined collectives united by suffering and loss may be found in notions of exceptional Soviet suffering in World War II or in the intelligentsia’s lament of terror. Discussing the chapters focusing on communities of veterans of Chechen wars and mothers of fallen soldiers, Lipovetsky points out that their commemorative practices and symbolic collectivities valorize loss and ultimately conserve rather than overcome the trauma associated with the Soviet collapse. Lipovetsky concludes that Oushakine’s study proves cultural failures rather than just economic or social dislocations are responsible for the failures of the democratic revolution in Russia. He also suggests that Oushakine’s study may be considered evidence of the fact that the post-Soviet situation was not a negation of the late Soviet period but rather its continuation: market reforms just legalized widespread practices of the late Soviet regime, while late Soviet culture persists in public and private media.