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Vera Michlin-Shapir, "Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era" (Cornell UP, 2021)
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See mint mobile.com welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Jenna Pittman, a host for the network. Today we'll be talking to Vera Michelin Shapir about her recent book Fluid between the Global and the national in the Post Soviet Era, published by Cornell University Press in 2021. Fluid Russia offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalization and on its formation. Vera Michelin Shapiro describes Putin's rise to power and his project to reaffirm a stronger identity not as a uniquely Russian diversion from liberal democracy, but but rather as part of a broader phenomenon of challenges to globalization. With that, I'm excited to welcome Vera to the show.
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C
Hello. Hi Jenna.
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B
I wonder if you could begin just by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write Fluid Russia.
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C
Yeah, well, I guess that's a. When I was, when I started writing, when I started working on this project, I guess that it was a less obvious choice than it is today. And the reason for that is that right now with Russia and how it behaves on the world stage, the kind of focus on Russia and also on the kind of role that Russian national identity plays in politics, in global politics, is quite obvious. But this is. And I've started working on this project for quite some time ago, and that was not necessarily the case. So what I've been doing in the past, I would say almost a decade, was that I've been kind of tracing how did this form of Russia, of this very aggressive Russia, where, again, the role of national identity in Putin's politics, in Putin's domestic politics, and also in legitimizing aggressive foreign policies, is enormous. So what this project does is actually it traces where. How did we end up here, how did we find Russia developing in such a way that on the one hand, seems quite uniquely Russian, but then on the other hand also fits with trends, with trends that are gaining momentum in global politics of return of nationalism, of return of ethnonationalism, of claims for some kind of pushback against some kind of imaginary liberal globalization that is coming and encroaching on certain identities. So all of that exists in Russia in a unique Russian way, but also in a way that kind of fits with a global project. So that was what interested me for years now. And it was also interesting that while I was working on this project, it kind of became also start. I mean, attention. Started kind of global attention, started drifting in that direction, looking at Russia as, yeah, maybe there is something there that is. That there is more there than just, you know, oh, those Russians who are just always authoritarian and there's always a dictatorship in Russia. So, yeah, that's. In a nutshell.
- [04:36]
B
Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting. And it's kind of sounds like one of those things where you picked a topic and you're like, I'm interested in this, and then the cards just fell in a really positive way where it fits really well with the contemporary situation. Would you agree?
- [04:50]
C
But, you know, Jenna, I also would say that. And that was kind of also. There was kind of a personal dimension for me for why I wanted to work on this, on this subject. And I think identity is always a problem. I think that for a couple of decades, we pushed identity aside, as if this doesn't play such an enormous part in our politics. So economics, market finances, they kind of overtaken the agenda. But identity, what. What does it mean to be myself? Or what does it mean to be part of a collective? It was festering. It was there. It was always. It always existed. It's always a problem. I mean, I myself, on a personal level, know that my identity has always been a problem. When someone asks me, where are you from? There is a kind of pregnant silence because I'm thinking, wait a minute, what. What am I about what what should I say? Where am I from? I'm. I come from a Russian speaking family in East Ukraine. I grew up for most of my life. Most of my life I spent in Israel and then now I live in the uk And I have connections with all of these identities. Yes, I have my connections with all of these identities. Obviously it creates certain tensions. I think that coming to terms with the fact that identity is a complex issue and we need to speak about what identity means in politics is an important, is important point as well.
- [06:14]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I think that kind of brings me to the title of the book, the term fluid Russia. Or in the introduction you introduced this term called fluid Russian ness. Would you be able to describe those terms and how you use them and kind of what they refer to?
- [06:32]
C
So when I came to look at Russian national identity, one of the things that, I mean, if I kind of position myself in the debate, right. So the idea is that, that Russian identity, the way that the west understands Russian identity and also within domestic conversation about Russian identity. Russian identity is usually understood in two ways. One, and there are opposite two opposite ways. One where Russian identity is described as a kind of defective, abnormal, very weak. What does it even mean to be Russian? Was there ever really a Russian identity because it was an imperial identity? And is Russia part of the east or part of the West? We've seen Putin goes to he. But we've also seen Putin kind of, you know, very, very involved and trying to. And really aggressively involved in European politics. Where does Russia sit? What does it mean to be Russian? So there is this kind of inherent, kind of supposedly conflict and weakness of Russian identity. And then there is a very, also strong understanding of Russian identity as an aggressive, belligerent Russian identity. And those two understandings, they stand in constant contrast with each other. And it's also interesting how sometimes in media and public debate, they are mixed together in a way that is almost illogical. But there is no middle ground, as if there is no normal Russianness, right? That. As if there is no normal experience or everyday experience of being Russian. And that middle ground, understanding that middle ground, that what kind of drawn me to this project, understanding how people actually understand themselves, actually express themselves, actually live Russianness in daily life. And what are the problems that they're facing in their daily lives with this Russianness? What are the conflicts? What are the tensions, right? These are the interesting places. This is where identity reveals itself. And this is why I called it a. I said fluid Russianness, because identity is a contested and fluid concept in itself and B, and then also obviously connecting it to Russia. That there is, and this is what I'm tracing in this project. For decades, Russians lived a certain Russian normality, right? With all its conflicts, inherent conflicts and tensions that all of us have. But these inherent conflicts and context and conflicts, sorry, conflicts and contestations are also a fertile ground for manipulation and for political manipulation. And I describe all of that. I described all of these different facets of Russian identity.
- [09:21]
B
Yeah, thank you. That's very, very well articulated and I think, definitely a point that comes across very clearly in reading your book, your description of all of these. These various aspects, I guess. How does this book dealing with the post Soviet period begin to explore intense feelings of dislocation or lack of identity in that immediate post Soviet period? What answer really does fluid Russia propose?
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C
So my contribution to the debate, because so many have. Have tried and still are trying, and that's very good that everyone is having the, you know, people are different, are pitching into this conversation from different sides. But my. My contribution to the debate was that I've looked not only at the fact that identity, Russian identity was. Has been experienced a certain dislocation. And the dislocation was obviously there. The end of the Soviet Union and the end of the imperial expansion. Imperial experience is undeniably, undeniably forms and shapes how Russians think about their identity and how Russia behaves both domestically and abroad. However, I also situated the end of this empire within the temporal, within the context of the time into which the empire collapsed. Right? Because the empire collapsed in 1991. It did not collapse in the mid 20th century. It did not collapse in the 19th century, it did not collapse yesterday, it collapsed in 1991. And there were specific historical and political and economic conditions that were overwhelmingly popular and accepted by most Western countries. And Russia anchored itself. When the Soviet empire collapsed, it anchored itself to the West. And there were certain trends that were ongoing in the west at that time, and that was. That was neoliberal globalization. These were certain economic policies and political approaches or approaches to politics that were prevalent in the West. And that Russia, because it anchored itself towards the west, it embraced. So it embraced neoliberal capitalism, and it embraced a form of liberal democracy that really is in the shadow of neoliberal capitalism. And it opened itself to global markets. So these things happened concurrently with the collapse of the empire. And while the collapse of the empire received enormous amount of attention in Russian studies, in Russian historical debates and so on, the impact of globalization of these global trends and how they interacted with, with the point in which the empire collapsed, that part was almost. I mean, that was almost kind of a. When I started thinking about it and I tried to anchor myself with someone else looking at someone else who maybe discussed this, it was just a blank page, as if that didn't happen. But it's so important because it's not just that the country is going through a major transition. It is going through a major transition in trying to build something that is, as we can see now, had certain flaws and had certain gaps, and especially those gaps in addressing people's inherent need to discuss their identity.
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B
Yeah, that's all very, very interesting. I know a little bit of this book touches on Russian citizenship being in flux throughout the 90s, 1990 and 1991. What attempts were made to define Russian citizenship in that immediate post Soviet era? And how does that kind of tie into your broader study of Russian identity and what it means?
- [13:33]
C
That's an excellent question. I mean, it's very interesting to start with. To start from that, from the citizenship question, because the citizenship question is immediately tied with immigration, with migration and immigration, and what kind of role that plays in our politics. Right. Because we can think of citizenship as just a series of laws. Right. Who is in and who is out. But really, citizenship is a very poignant policy, and migration and immigration is such a strong driving force in discussions about identity. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had to practically, from a practical point of view, decide who is going to be called a Russian, who is a Russian. How do you decide who is a Russian? Is it everyone who lives on the territory that formed Russia, but they may be people of different ethnicities? Because in the Soviet Union, people moved around. They may have just moved there yesterday and the day before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Are they Russian?
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B
Yeah, that's very interesting.
- [14:42]
C
What happens to someone who lived his whole life in Russia but just married someone in Lithuania three weeks before Soviet Union collapsed? So it had all these dilemmas. How is it going to address them? And it addressed them in ways that were, again, popular at the time, which were actually very liberal policies in terms of being very welcoming to various groups of people and allowing many ways in which people can join the Russian citizenry. And what is interesting is that in the 2000s, when Putin came to power, he described that process as chaos, as migration chaos. And in the west, we are not really aware about how important this migration debate and immigrant debate in Russia, how important and how toxic it was in the early 2000s when Putin was forming his legitimacy. And that, I think, Jenna you are now in the United States. I think it can resonate with things that you see on the right of the political spectrum.
- [15:53]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
Ford Well, I guess being that I think we have such a Western audience, I think our audience is mostly us, North America and Europe. So I could be wrong. If anybody knows the statistics on this podcast, I purposefully ignore them in my mind. Nobody listens to these and I like to keep it that way. But I think it might be helpful if you kind of describe the migration and immigration factors of the early 2000s and how potent youth Putin used those to, I don't know, kind of use that in a political way, describing it as migration, chaos and all of that.
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C
So when the Soviet Union, when it collapsed, and I described those various dilemmas that the Russian state was facing then basically at every point, and there were several points in which the Yeltsin regime amends those citizenship policies, but at almost every point the Russian state is quite open to welcoming various groups. It also somewhere in the mid-90s when Russian foreign policy kind of takes this more into into goes into a more aggressive Mode. It also starts using passports to claim interest in certain territories. So, for instance, in Crimea or in Savasetia or in Abkhazia, so these kind of pushing into those places. It already starts in the 90s. And what happens is that migration flows shift. And how they shift is that in the former Soviet republics, from all the former Soviet republics, from all the former Soviet states, or from the vast majority of the former Soviet states, and especially of those who are poorer, there are large influxes of migration into Russia. And I described it in that book, how the Soviet Union was a country where migration was very prevalent, but migration was more. It was controlled by the state. The state would tell people how many can move, where and why. And then there was a whole process to them moving from one place to another. In the former Soviet space. Right. So in the post Soviet space, and I actually prefer to call it former Soviet space, because post Soviet means that now we're still in some kind of Soviet experience.
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B
That makes sense.
- [19:56]
C
Yeah. Those migration flows became more. Well, we call them freer. Right. They're free migration flows. People would move to places where there are jobs and where economic conditions were a bit better, and Russia was doing still better than most former Soviet states. And. And so Russia became actually one of the largest recipients of immigration into Russia from former Soviet republics. And people don't really understand that. That actually Russia is a big recipient of people from different parts of the world. Well, primarily, actually from different parts of the world, but primarily from the former Soviet Union. And these are not necessarily ETN Grushens. Many of them are Central Asians. Many of these people are not Orthodox Christians. Many of these people have various levels of command of the Russian language. And they come to Russia, and they came to Russia over the years. They came to Russia to work to better their conditions. Sometimes they were allowed into a certain path for citizenship. And in the 1990s, that path was quite widely open. But then in the 2000s, when Putin comes to power, one of the things that he says is that I'm going to normalize this, right? I'm going to gain control over our borders. I'm going to gain control over who comes in.
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B
Re establish organization. Sounds familiar here.
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C
Yeah. Re. Establish organization. And then, I mean, you know, I can take you through the process. But cutting. Long story short, that process only created more illegal ways in which people move into Russia, pushed many people into the margins. So people who were in Russia for years and various situations were pushed into the margins of society and often criminalized by the state. Did it stop migration no, because the Russian economy was still. And especially Russia economy in the early 2000s was still a kind of economic juggernaut with the oil prices high oil prices and jobs were still there, so foreign workers would still come into Russia because the upside was just so obvious, and Russia actually needed working hands because of declining birth rates. That also reminds us of something that happens in other places. And the subject continuously waived as a kind of one of those rallying points for the ruling party for united Russia. They're trying to. At some point they said, you know what we don't need. It's not like we don't need migration. Of course we need migration, but we need the right kind of migration. So let's bring Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union, those who are. Who would fit well with our society. Yes. So basically, ethnic Russians are Russian speakers who look ethnically Russian, but they very quickly discovered that those people don't want to come and do those jobs, and they're not coming. And if you want migration, you're gonna have whatever migration you get. Or if you want, you know, working hands, you will take whatever working hands you get. And so, yeah, and so it becomes this kind of symbolic political subject that we're seeing elsewhere. And. Yeah, and so these are words, often toxic words, words that hurt people, but they're not necessarily really solving any. Any of the sense that things are not under control and things are chaos. Because. Because the truth of the matter is that Russia was liberalized in many ways, and even Putin's Russia did not gain the control that the Soviet state had over everyday life. And so, you know, this is the. And this is. I come to kind of what runs throughout the book, which is this is the problem that we have in liberal way of life, which is. Or any way of life, really, is this conflict between freedom and security. You want to be free, but being free feels insecure. Right? Yeah.
- [24:23]
B
Yeah. That's very interesting. I've got so many questions in a good way. So I guess I kind of want to go back to the thread of globalization that runs through this book and where this situation that you just contextualized a little bit, Russia's political economic situation in the 1990s, early 2000s, as well as the migration and kind of changing demographics in Russia during that period. How does that all tie with. With your discussion of globalization?
- [24:59]
C
So, I mean, I think what I try to describe and where I try to kind of shed light on Russian discussions and so on, for instance, like, I've just done with citizenship and migration, which I think When I tell people that story about citizenship and migration in Russia, they are very surprised, right? You don't think of Russia in that context or of Putin's regime. That that really was a very important stepping stone in him building his legitim. So what I tried to do is I tried to shed light on these different parts of our globalized life and how, yes, in Russia there were unique Russian conditions. There was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, not every country experienced a collapse of a major empire and a really historic moment, or as Putin would call it later rebranded as a geopolitical tragedy. So you don't have that, but you do have different other grievances that we. Or we do have different grievances that we experience in the global world. And these grievances, they're an underlying kind of trend which is that we were given, and I think that we shouldn't forget that we were given unprecedented level of freedom in our lives and we should cherish that. But we also have to remember, and Russians were given in the 90s, unprecedented level of freedom. And really into the 2000s and into the 2010s, Russians were given unprecedented levels of freedom in their personal life, in their economic life, in their. For in many aspects, right? Not in all aspects and not in absolute terms, but in relative terms also political freedoms, right? Spaces of political discussions, spaces of free organization and so on, political organizations and so on. So people are given freedoms, but then they themselves or other parts of the society feel that those freedoms are. They feel discomfort with those freedoms for various, for various reasons. I would say they often feel a discomfort because. And this is where globalization ties in because it makes it extremely difficult for them to answer the question, who are you? Not someone helping them articulate that. And certain people are better at answering that question and mitigating the discomforts that come along with that question, right? Other people find it harder. There is stigma right now, there is stigma against Russians who found that answering that question harder. There's stigma in the west against people who find that question harder to answer. They are somehow not progressive because they can't engage with that question in a sophisticated way and they just want a simple and clear answer. But I think it's also those who are able, those who are able to resolve these conflicts for themselves should have a little bit of self reflection and maybe a bit to be a bit humble and say, I understand that for some people this may be too much. I think that this is where I tie what happened in Russia and the revanchism. Putin's revanchism with what happens globally. In Russia, it was very stark. Certain people said, enough is enough. I just want someone to tell me how to live my life, and who am I? And Putin said. And Putin said, no problem. Here it is.
- [29:07]
B
Yeah, it's. It's kind of funny, I guess, looking at the. The structure of the Soviet social everything. I mean, it was so ingrained and it was so Identity was so kind of crafted, in a sense. And of course, there's. There's so many examples of ways in which people resisted that or navigated within these structures. But there was no question.
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C
If you.
- [29:33]
B
Were Soviet, you were a Soviet citizen. I mean, that identity had been long standing since, I mean, before World War II, really, and then strengthened after World War II. So it was a really kind of concrete way of thinking about yourself, but then all of a sudden, that doesn't exist. So just kind of interesting to think through when the Russian state has no. Like, this is what Russia is. This is. This is our ideological. This is what makes us Russian. Beyond. I don't know, being ethnically Russian or, you know, Orthodox. I don't. It's. How do you conceptualize that and how do you make that fit everybody in a society and make that. I don't know. That's a very interesting thing to think through, how complex that is. And I think just from my background being American, I've never questioned, like, what does my. What does my country, what does my government. What is, like, the guiding principles of that? I mean, now it's a little more in question in. In some moments, but there's no question of, like, yes, I am an American citizen. Like that. I've never had to think about that very difficultly or very, very critically. So, yeah, it's definitely interesting to think of the rupture that would happen. And, like, wait, what is the point of all this? Like, I don't know. It's. It's kind of interesting. Do you have any thoughts on that?
- [30:56]
C
I think. I think the rupture is incredibly. Is an incredibly difficult experience for certain people. It can be at the same time very liberating for others. Right. Like everything, like every social event, actually, I think, though, that. And this is the point that I'm making in this book, and I don't know how you would feel about. About me saying that. I think that actually a lot of the things that the Russians struggled with, beyond the obvious, which is a collapse of the state and the collapse of the empire, but let's say. Let's do a What if. Right. So if the Russian state collapsed not in 1991, if the Soviet state. I'm sorry, the Soviet state collapsed not in 1991, but in 1968. Right. And global conditions would have been different in 1968. And what the Russians would have been. Been advised, or the only thing that was really on the menu was to build a nation state. And then there would have been a pressure to decide immediately decide on all sorts of institutions that you need to build. It would have been far more acceptable to have a stronger national state ideology, a bourgeois one. Right. A capitalist one. But it would have been kind of. Yeah, you should have one. It would have been more acceptable. I mean, for instance, you know, little things, but they're not little. Again, they become very important for Putin's pushback. Gender roles. Gender roles would have been. It would. I mean, gender roles would have basically continued the way they were in the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was a deeply modernist state in which women had equal rights, but also women had their place, their natural place in society, which is being mothers and also going to work. And so the rupture actually probably would have been less stark, more contained in 1991, when the Russian state actually collapsed enough in 1968. Right. The trend was that we are all becoming free. The freer, the better. Free movement of people is welcome. Right. There was no debate about migration being bad. And all of that. All of that happened much, much later on. Global companies should come into Russia. Russian companies can go abroad if they compete. If they can compete. Obviously, they can't compete, so too bad for them. But, you know, and all of that freedom is. It multiplied the disorientation.
- [33:55]
B
Sure. I think that's a really good way of explaining that. And I think that really helped me make sense of where the globalization and just the global conditions really made it so much more. I don't know if it's. Exasperated is the word, but, yeah, I.
- [34:13]
C
Think it's a really good. Yeah, sure.
- [34:16]
B
So I guess within the conditions of this very liberal freedom of the 1990s, kind of moving into the early 2000s and kind of the disorder, the sense of a lack of structure within Russia, how does that maybe help us understand Vladimir Putin's influence and his popularity really within that global condition and as the world transitions into the 2000s and 2010s?
- [34:49]
C
I guess that's also an excellent question. I think that everything I described so far, and you. And I think we're trying to do justice to the project itself and showing that it is actually about Russia, but I also want to kind of make a bit of an attempt here to say that it's not really about Russia, it's about us. And I think that's why Putin is such a. Is such a disturbing figure in world politics. And when I say it's not about Russia, Russia is patient zero, right? There is. Let's call. Let's look at. Let's take a biological world metaphor and say that there is a pandemic, a global pandemic, where people are unhappy and they're turning towards certain kind of politics, and we have patient zero. And this is what really, you know, this is how I kind of want people to read this book. Putin is the first one, the first global leader who comes on an agenda, who builds his legitimacy on the agenda of. You've had too much of this freedom chaos. Whichever way you look at it, you had too much of this. Let's put this aside. Let me take care of things. Let me take care of you. You don't know who you are. You are confused. You're worried about where your income is going to come from. The world is too competitive. Your own country is too competitive. Why are all these foreigners here? Why are they competing for your jobs? Right. Why are all these foreign companies here? Right. I'm gonna put them in their place. They're gonna pay our country money so we can be rich and we can enjoy the spoils of our land. Right? You know, there is. And we have to talk about the gender dimension. In the 1990s, the LGBTQ community in Russia came into being. In 1991, laws against homosexuality were lifted, or a clause within the Soviet criminal code was banished, and homosexuality became legal. And that became an integral part of cultural, political, economic life in Russia. That was difficult for certain parts of the population, and Putin made it also an important part of his agenda. And I also addressed that in my project, in my book. How specifically homosexuality. Right? I mean, in the west, we speak about LGBTQ and gender, but in Russia, it was specifically homosexuality. That was from the mid-2000s, from around 2005, 2006, became a sort of very, very toxic target of. This is Western influence. This is exactly. It kind of encapsulates all. Everything I described. It's all in this little problem, right? That men are not men and women are not women, that the genders are not in place, the genders are in flux, that they're fluid. Right? And this is something I want to stop, because this is too confusing. It's not right. And it's part of the overall chaos. Right. I think the key thing in mental health treatment is choice for people. And we already have some choices, available medications, some of the psychological and behavioral therapies, but I think arts have to be part of that choice as well. Welcome to When Science finds you a Way, a podcast about the science changing the world. When Science finds a Way. Listen to season three.
- [38:54]
A
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- [39:29]
B
That reminds me a lot of just some contemporary debates and discourse, I guess, that's happening in US Politics and kind of this idea that because you didn't see it before, it didn't exist. And we can. Now that it's visible, we can attribute it to one specific thing, one specific moment that made these things visible. But it's not so much that. It's just. It's always been there. It's just people feel liberated. There's no longer a law saying that, you know, the LGBTQ + community cannot exist within Russia, so all of a sudden it's visible. And you can point to a very specific thing and say, that's what. That's the reason why this is happening to our society. But that's not really. Not really the case.
- [40:19]
C
Of course it's not the case. It's not the case at all. But I think it goes back to, I mean, if there is anything that is most basic for us in, you know, I was saying that, you know, I. When someone asks me, where are you from? There is a. I have a kind of. There is a moment of. There is a pause there, and I. I think about, how long do we have? How much do I. How much do I do? I do I give him this conversation, Right? I also tried to think, you know, what would be the reaction, right? I mean, when I say today, when I tell people, like, if. If I'm say that I'm from Ukraine, but also from Israel, people like they days, it kind of puts a very dark, you know, color to the whole, to a very light chitchat. Right. So, but, but, but, but going back to the gender issue is that there is something particularly sensitive for us. And I think that we should think about the, the. The individual level as well here. Individual psychology about, you know, about our own sexuality. Right. About our own gender, about our own understanding of ourselves as men or women and our true sexual attractions and so on. And this is. It's a sensitive question to everyone. And if someone was to manipulate collectives of people who feel vulnerable, that is obviously a place where you want to go. And people feel uncomfortable. They feel uncomfortable when, you know, when we are open, people feel uncomfortable with open discussions about sexuality. And what Putin does, he says, I'm going to put all of it behind closed doors. Right. The proper place where it should be. And if you have certain deviations from the standard, you should keep it to yourself. Of course, it's never like that. Right? Of course it's never. Just keep it to yourself because later other rules come in and deprive people of rights. But it's working, Jenna. It's working. It's popular.
- [42:31]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's interesting to me, too, thinking about the timing of Putin kind of saying all these things. And in the west, it's like there's finally more acceptance, and that's really just continued in a positive way. But Putin kind of at that same moment, like the 2005-2010, I guess, in the US 2012 is a big moment as well, but kind of within that period of time where the west is becoming more accepting and more inclusive, Russia is kind of going the other way. Does your book. I don't know. You're the expert here. So I'm kind of just curious what the relationship between those two phenomenon are.
- [43:14]
C
Well, the way I see it is that, look, the west is becoming more inclusive and more open since the 1970s and 80s. Right. The fact that we're seeing a kind of a very, like, it's becoming very, very visible and becoming really mainstream in the, you know, 2010s, 2020s. It doesn't mean that things are not becoming more inclusive and more open for decades. I mean, we've been going in that direction for decades, and Russia had a short stint with that kind of experience. And it wasn't as open and as inclusive and as mainstream as in the west ever, but it was open and inclusive and very importantly, openly legal. And that already made people uncomfortable. But I have to say that it didn't make people uncomfortable to the extent that this is always very important because these things make people uncomfortable. But then those leaders who come in and try to make a political capital on that. Right. So make a buck on that. They always exaggerate the anxiety. And that's why I call Russia Patient Zero, because actually, Putin starts, or Putin allows this. First allows and then takes over this encroachment on rights of LGBTQ community. It starts to do that in the mid-2000s. And, yes, in the west, the processes are actually gaining momentum, but actually, the fact that they're gaining momentum makes his opposition more kind of more obvious. Right. He's saying, look what they're doing. They're going too far. Right. And this is where I'm taking us back. This is Patient Zero. True and tried. If you go down that road, you will have followers and you will have people who would say, yes, too far. Let's stop. Let's push back. And this is what he does, and he builds enormous political capital. And it's so interesting to see polls from Russia in that time in that, yes, you had resistance and people have reservations against legalization of homosexuality and how homosexuality, specifically. I'm talking about homosexuality in Russia, how it presented itself in public spaces. But it wasn't as dark before Putin kind of let his dogs out on the LGBTQ community. And now it's. I mean, it's from the 2010s. It's basically like a major form of prosecution. And, I mean, it's just absolutely terrible what happened to the LGBTQ community in Russia.
- [46:10]
B
Absolutely. I think you hit on some notes here that I wanted to ask about your methodology, not to do too hard of a transition away from that. I feel like I switched really fast to media discourse, and it was actually a very tragic topic that we were talking about. But your methodology here uses Russian media discourse, and I think that's really important. And you use that to understand late modern realities in Russia. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you use that media discourse and kind of what it enriches in your.
- [46:47]
C
So you mentioned late modernity. Just for people who are listening and are not as versed in these debates, in this academic debate. So basically, late modernity is the way that most contemporary historians describe this period of rapid globalization. Right. So from the 1970s and into. Into the 2000s and 2000s, this is what we describe as late modernity. And I very much am on board with describing this period in that way. And one of the things that happened in this period is that our politics are being mediatized. So there is mediaization of politics, which means that politics don't exist outside of how the media translates or mediates those politics to us. And so what politicians also do is that they know. So it's not that you are communicating your policy, but rather that you're constructing certain policies for media consumptions or create certain events for media consumption. So unlike in bygone times where politics where stood in themselves for various, again, for various purposes and reasons, and the media mediated them to us, now it's kind of the media overtaken that. And we really see that with social media in the most extreme form and how politicians communicate with audiences, with populations and so on. And so it is extremely, if you want to understand this time, and I am coming from a point where I want to understand Russia in this time and place. So in this global moment, in this moment of rapid globalization, I want to understand how Russia works. And so you have to understand the Russian media. And also what interesting is that Putin very much constructed his regime around the media. So it was a mediatized, like you can say, that Russian politics were as centered around media, around mass media as they were in the West. So in that sense, again, Russia is not really that different from how things developed in the West. Of course, Russian media space is different from other countries, but that's every country has its own media space. And so, yeah, and so I brought in one second part of my book is discussion or analysis of media discourses in Russia and how these processes that I just described, how they were reflected in the media and how the media also constructed them, because this is mediaization of politics, is that the media doesn't just report, but rather also constructs politics and how we understand our daily lives. And I think that's just again, from a methodological point of view, it's extremely important to study, if you're set to study a certain country at a certain point in time, you need to understand what are the drivers, what drives that society, what drives politics in that place. And media was very much driving Russian politics. So it was very important for me to trace how Russian media ecosystem developed. How did it come into being under Putin and what was actually said in the Russian media and how it was said and by whom. And that's a lens, that's a way for me, that's the keyhole through which I observe many of the things that we discussed here, right? The immigration, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, pluralism in politics. Right. And the reduction of pluralism in politics, just more broadly, building authoritarian politics, building politics that are foreign policy that is aggressive and legitimizing aggressive Foreign politics. And all of that is through that keyhole of media discourse.
- [50:56]
B
Yeah, it's very interesting. Thank you for that. So I kind of just want to ask what you're working on now. What's the next steps after this book?
- [51:07]
C
So, I mean, you could kind of in between the lines, can already hear that I'm. You're thinking at other societies and how these types of processes are unfolding in front of our eyes very, very rapidly in other societies. And I think that. And that happens for two reasons. One of the reasons is that as an area expert of Russia, I no longer can visit Russia. And that creates a certain problem in terms of researching a place. I mean, I don't, I think it's very difficult to research a territory, a country, a society if you've not been there, not been there for a good few years now. And I don't intend to go until this regime is in place. And so how do I research really Russia? I can say obviously I follow Russian politics, but I feel like in terms of original research, that creates a certain hurdle. And actually the book that followed up Fluid Russia and was published last year was exactly about that. How can you even speak about Russia if you can't, if you don't have reliable information from Russia or cannot go and look for it yourself? And so what I'm working on right now is actually looking at how these things unfold in other countries in the West. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take all the knowledge and skills that I've gained in studying this in Russia and studying Patient Zero. And now I'm going to kind of to other people who were, or to other countries, to other societies, looking at societies, particularly the UK in the US as well as Israel and Poland, countries that experience that in different ways, not in one, there is no one size fits all in different ways, experienced this anti global wave, anti globalist wave. Each country with its own unique social, economic, political conditions, but all of them very much centered around identity and identity politics.
- [53:23]
B
That's fascinating. And I look forward to reading the book that came out after this one, as well as following to see when that third one comes out, because that is absolutely fascinating and I, I like the path that you're on for our listeners. Fluid Russia between the Global and the national in Post Soviet Era was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. You can get it from Cornell's website or really wherever you get your books. Vera, thank you so much again for being on our show today. I really enjoyed chatting with you.
- [53:55]
C
Thank you.