SUMMARY:

In his reaction to Serguei Oushakine’s work Patriotism of Despair, Ilya Kalinin points out that studies of the immediate past are often burdened with unwarranted expectations of predictions of how the studies’ developments continue to shape the current situation. Kalinin argues that Oushakine’s work balances personal involvement with scholarly detachment, without losing either empathy or the possibility of analysis. Kalinin also suggests that while Oushakine’s book successfully focuses on the first post-Soviet decade with its orientation toward the trauma of loss, it lacks a longer perspective on the post-Soviet period. If in the 1990s nationalist imagination was a tool at the disposal of marginalized groups attempting to rework traumatic post-Soviet experiences, in the 2000s, nationalism became widespread among the largely stable segments of society adjusted to the market reforms and capitalism and some form of consensus with the state. Kalinin questions whether instrumentalization of the effects of post-Soviet trauma has caused this politics of nationalist adjustment or this very politics has generated the persistence of the nationalist imagination? In Kalinin’s view, Oushakine’s reading of the simultaneous coexistence of post-Soviet and Soviet signs and symbols in urban landscapes as an ironic work of history can be supplanted with the interpretation of it as an amalgam of different layers, some marginalized waiting for actualization yet very much present in the minds of post-Soviet people. Soviet and post-Soviet, the boundary between which was relived as traumatic in the 1990s, now emerge as a continuum of enthusiastic nationalist eclectics.