Republicanism in Russia: Community Before and After Communism 9780674989948

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Republicanism in Rus­sia

Republicanism in Russia Community Before and After Communism Ol eg K h a R K hOR di n

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2018

Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­ic­ a First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Kharkhordin, Oleg, 1964–­author. Title: Republicanism in Rus­sia : community before and ­after Communism / Oleg Kharkhordin. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018004960 | ISBN 9780674976726 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Republicanism—­Russia (Federation) | Post-­communism—­Russia (Federation) | Politics and culture—­Russia (Federation) | Rus­sia (Federation)—­Politics and government—1991– Classification: LCC JC423 .K454 2018 | DDC 306.20947—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018004960 Cover photo of Birch House and portal in Palace Park, Gatchina, Russia by shsb / iStock / Getty Images Plus.

Contents

Introduction 1 1​.­ Friendship and Politics 18 2. Res Publica in Words and T ­ hings 49 3. Society and Socialness 69 4. A Society of Common-­ism

105

5. Self-­Cognition and Self-­Fashioning in Con­temporary Rus­sia

160

6. Inspired and Aspiring Selves: Is Rus­sia Doomed to Creativity? 198 Conclusion 243 Notes 255 Acknowl­edgments

295

Index 297

Republicanism in Rus­sia

Introduction

Rus­sia is not averse to freedom. As this book shows, however, the freedom that best suits it is of a republican rather than a liberal nature. By “republican” I am referring to the classical republican tradition, which in the past twenty to thirty years has been increasingly influential in po­liti­cal theory. Deciding whom to include in this tradition of po­liti­cal thought and practice—­ancients like Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero; moderns like Machiavelli, Harrington, and Montesquieu; or twentieth-­century theorists like Hannah Arendt—is the subject of academic debate. The twenty-­first–­century scholars Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit are widely credited with most persuasively arguing for a coherent body of thought called republicanism as an alternative to liberalism, even if both t­ hese strands of thought affirm basic liberties of the individual and delineate the main features of a f­ ree community.1 Republicanism and liberalism might be thinking about liberty and its institutions in a dif­fer­ent way, but the goals are largely the same. Of course, some think that liberalism just evolved out of republicanism and is its impoverished version, while ­others take it to be a version better suited to the needs of con­temporary commercial socie­ties. The main strug­gle in twentieth-­ century po­liti­cal theory was waged between Marxism and liberalism, and only with the collapse of Marxist socialism in the late 1980s did it become clear, on the basis of more than 2,000 years of thinking about living in f­ ree

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communities, that now the main alternative to liberalism might be republicanism.2 The task of this book is to show in which re­spects Rus­sia, if it follows the usual republican ­recipes, is close to enjoying ­f ree life. Rus­sia had a power­f ul republican tradition in the past, though it has been decisively undercut—­ some would say destroyed—­several times. Before being conquered by Muscovy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the medieval Rus­sian free cities of Novgorod the ­Great and Pskov had governing citizen assemblies and systems of mixed government that one could find in West Eu­ro­pean urban communes and that could have developed into institutions of Re­nais­ sance Venice or Florence. Rus­sian aristocrats between the end of the eigh­ teenth and the early nineteenth centuries w ­ ere steeped in the classics and read widely in republican thought of the Enlightenment, both in French and in Rus­sian translations. They also emulated in action what they had picked up while learning the ancient Greek and Roman models of life. Of course, the military republicans (or the republican officers, whichever one prefers to call them), who had staged an abortive coup in December 1825 on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, did not bring liberty to the country. The reaction of the monarchy was to start another harsh wave of repression of republican thought and practice. With the proj­ects of republican constitution abandoned or shelved, the rebellious Decembrist aristocrats executed or exiled, and po­liti­cal philosophy in the Rus­sian universities hardly taught, it was Rus­sian poetry and the novel that blossomed with civic meanings. The main figures of the golden age of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, such as Pushkin and Lermontov, had implanted basic ancient Greek and Roman civic moral intuitions in ­these works, and all Soviet Rus­sian youths w ­ ere required as part of ­every secondary school program to learn the poems by heart and analyze the novels. It is as if Pushkin followed Gramsci’s strategy of hegemony: a friend of the Decembrists, he could not openly support or poeticize their goals or ideals a­ fter they had been crushed, but he helped make them part and parcel of secular literary education. “A Rus­sian ideology,” as William Todd calls it—­and I would add that it was largely a republican ideology—­may be intuitively perceived just by reading three or four foundational novels of modern Rus­sian culture.3 This book, however, is mostly concerned with present-­day Rus­sia and the ­future of Rus­sia, not with its history. But it analyzes the past when neces 2 

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sary in order to understand what’s happening now and what pos­si­ble f­ utures the pres­ent contains. Thus it focuses on republicanism and its tendencies in Rus­sia before and ­after Communism.4 It is primarily about what is ­going on all around us in Rus­sia, events we tend to overlook if we concentrate only on the doom and gloom a critical person feels while watching the official reporting of the main Rus­sian state-­controlled TV channels or reading the coverage of this national news agenda in the US and EU mass media. Events that happen at the local (by which I mean municipal and sometimes regional) level are not as thoroughly disheartening. P ­ eople need freedom, want freedom, and get freedom. The Rus­sian mass media close to the opposition of course emphasizes the cases when ­people at the local level fight for (and sometimes manage to defend) familiar liberal rights—of the ­f ree press, of assembly, of conscience, and so on. But ­there are also other “islands of ­free life,” which might be about municipal experiments in participatory bud­ geting, urban movements defending architectural and cultural heritage, ­free thinking and shared governance in new academic institutions—­a nd many more similar examples. If united, t­ hese islands could eventually produce an Archipelago of Freedom.

Outline of the Book Briefly, the overall argument of the book has already been stated above: the ideas and practices of the republics of Antiquity that w ­ ere transmitted to the Rus­sian aristocracy during the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment, and preserved in the poetry of the Pushkin age and classical Rus­sian lit­er­a­t ure of the nineteenth c­ entury—­even during the heydays of po­liti­cal repression—­ could become the basis for a new politics in Rus­sia if two t­hings w ­ ere to happen. Certain per­sis­tent social forms (as it ­w ill become clear a bit ­later)  would need to be rearranged, and the present-­day small “pools of freedom” would need to be encouraged to spread. In order for us to properly understand the nature of t­ hese small arenas, we should pay attention to the ­actual materials of the “­things” u ­ nder debate—­the res part of the classical expression res publica. Hence the methodological attention of this book to studying t­ hings rather than only ­people. Chapters 3 and 4 are central to my argument. Together they constitute a study of the predicaments that stall the phenomena of the classical res publica  3 

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type from flourishing in con­temporary Rus­sia. However, this study also gives an overview of the gestation of the classical republican tradition in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries in Rus­sia, and what its po­liti­cal suppression meant for the advent of Communism. Furthermore, it is impor­tant to evaluate what the classical republican tradition means for Rus­sia nowadays, ­after Communism’s collapse. A rather long argument in Chapters 3 and 4, which alternates between current sociology, historical sociology, and the history of concepts, is perhaps properly understood only against the background of two prolegomena studies that paved the way for the pres­ent book. That is why ­these two central chapters are in the ­m iddle of the book instead of at the beginning, where academic works typically pres­ent their main thesis. ­A fter a study of the bloody re-­formation of everyday practices that Communism entailed in Rus­sia, I wanted to write about some benign alternatives to it—­not only islands of freedom, but friendship as well . . . ​5 (This is the “per­sis­tent social form” that, rearranged, could help foster freedom.) But while studying the ubiquity of the interpersonal and highly emotional type of Rus­sian friendship, one immediately runs into its bastardly ­brother, friendship of an overtly instrumental or po­liti­cal type. This cold and calculating friendship is usually contrasted in Rus­sia with friendship between individuals who genuinely care for each other. Thus a study of intense interpersonal friendship pushed for a study of po­liti­cal friendship, of ­either a hierarchical patron-­c lient kind or a horizontal kind among peers, united by a mutual undertaking. Chapter 1 thus provides an analy­sis of con­temporary Rus­sian friendship, though illuminated by frequent referrals to its historical pre­ce­dents in Rus­sia and Eu­rope. The relevance of such a study for post-­Communist socie­ties is rather obvious, following, say, a sudden emergence of friendship as the main means of social cohesion in Rus­sia in the 1990s. Indeed, ­after the repressive collectivities of the Soviet era ­were quickly disbanded, flocks, cliques, or circles of friends took center stage. Perhaps this was not accidental, given the near total devolution of the taxation and enforcing capacities of the Rus­sian state at the time. Friendships flourished, some would argue, ­because they helped individuals to informally procure goods and ser­vices in a largely unruly society, whereas formal contracts had been enforced by mafia-­like organ­ izations ranging from real criminal gangs on one side to the remnants of radically weakened “state-­like” entities on the other.6 Friendship was also cen 4 

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tral to the formation of cliques of p­ eople now fighting to occupy dif­fer­ent top positions in the exercise of legitimate public power. The phenomenon of a ­family circle around Boris Yeltsin was quickly replaced by the phenomenon of “friends of Putin,” which—as many would claim ­after the publication of the Panama Papers—­explained many core features of Rus­sia’s politics and economy in the 2010s. Hierarchical patron-­client friendships in domestic politics or international po­liti­cal friendships, such as “friendship treaties” between the states or the rhe­toric of high friendship among the heads of states, should not preclude us from seeing that po­l iti­cal friendship could be arranged differently. For example, politike philia in ancient Greece presupposed that all ­f ree citizens of a polis ­were united by such equal friendship. The question raised in Chapter 1 is this: How is con­temporary post-­Communist friendship linked to this civic or po­liti­cal friendship of the Greek and Roman kind in a way that could transform it along the lines proximate to the classical republican tradition? Chapter 2 describes research that has already dealt with what one might call a material dimension of republicanism. While a team I headed with a colleague was ­doing an underwater dig in the Volkhov River, looking for the remains of the ­Great Bridge of the republic of Novgorod—we ­were hoping to compare the functioning of the two medieval republics by comparing the construction and maintenance of the ­Great Bridge to that of the Rialto Bridge in Venice—­I found myself facing two questions si­mul­ta­neously.7 The first was how to take the res aspect of the expression res publica seriously, particularly if one ­were to endow it with what some might take to be an interpretation in the “crass materialism” vein—­that is, when the term res means not “what is ­going on” or “affairs,” but rather ­things, durable and tangible.8 The second was, why would one attempt to discover the ­matter of republicanism in the studies of infrastructure that linked communities together in the M ­ iddle Ages when ­there was so much infrastructure linking h ­ umans together all around us ­today? Philip Pettit has described what he calls the gas-­and-­waterworks version of republicanism, predicated on the practical improvement of living conditions, in much the same way that the Fabians w ­ ere making socialism attractive not by romantic tirades or high-­flying rhe­toric but by ameliorating urban life through a collective municipal ­water and gas supply.9 My study demeta­ phorized this exhortation of Pettit and analyzed urban infrastructures such  5 

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as water-­supply networks. So, my ensuing research proj­ects thus dealt with, on the one hand, the history of the Latin concept of res publica from the days of Cicero to the time of Justinian (with a par­tic­u­lar attention to the res part of it), and, on the other hand, with the “thingly,” or tangible and durable, infrastructures that link con­temporary Rus­sian urban communities together, both at the level of a city and at the level of a legally registered association of apartment ­owners in a given apartment block. The second chapter is thus concerned with such issues of res publica. Empirical studies of common t­ hings that unite urban communities in Rus­sia (from a courtyard in a condominium to an entire municipality) show that res publica, in the way that Cicero could conceive of it, is not exactly alien to the prospects of Rus­sian urban development. Urban strug­gles and other changes in con­temporary Rus­sia show that mindlessly copying liberal demo­ cratic institutions, as the reformers did in the 1990s, was not the way to get po­liti­cal freedom to flourish t­ here. Instead of mechanisms of representative democracy, which, when formally copied, lead to what scholars now call “the electoral authoritarianism” of the 2000s or the 2010s—­that is, rigging elections in f­ avor of one party—­one could have developed local self-­government techniques, which eschew po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion but are in many re­spects closer to the classical republican tradition with its emphasis on participation, mixed government, and the like. Indeed, if one listens to ancient authors like Cicero or modern authors like Arendt, in theory res publica is not an outrageously distant goal for Rus­ sian urban communities. The current propensity of a small group of authoritative, if not authoritarian, “friends” to monopolize power in a given locale in Rus­sia should be corrected or amended by, a) regularly rotating ­t hese friends in the key positions of power and loosening, if not decisively enlarging, their circle, b) introducing what Cicero called consensus iuris, a shared sentiment in ­legal m ­ atters that develops in the public through consistent and per­ sis­tent participation in making and applying rules for common life, and c) creating what Hannah Arendt would call an arena for the production of memorable stories of action and existentially impor­tant models of life. On the basis of t­ hese prolegomena studies, summarized in Chapters 1 and 2, Chapters 3 and 4 directly deal with republicanism in Rus­sia, alternating between the time when it first became a conscious po­liti­cal program and vocabulary (this happened not during the medieval Novgorod republic, but in  6 

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the enlightened society of the eigh­teenth ­century) and the way it is practiced nowadays. Thus in Chapter 3 I start with an analy­sis of some puzzling qualities of the current colloquial usage of the Rus­sian term for “society.” Chapter 4 then goes into the history of this concept, its derivatives, and other linked terms stemming from the same words. Such extensive forays into the history of concepts allow me to analyze in Chapter 4 the classical republican features of one of the few successful public mobilizations of recent Rus­sian history—​ ­the Living City movement that managed to stop the construction of the Gazprom Tower, a skyscraper that was supposed to h ­ ouse the headquarters of this mammoth corporation in downtown St. Petersburg. The protest was successful notwithstanding the fact that both Presidents Putin and Medvedev supported the proj­ect, and the local governor was very actively championing it. Thus, the history of concepts and attention to the works and mores of early Rus­sian republicans allows us to reconceptualize the Rus­sian experience with Communism and to reflect anew on the predicaments of the post-­Communist condition. The history of concepts also shows that the basic model of a h ­ uman group as conceived by the Old Rus­sian terms for socializing and society was mostly about a community united by communion, as in the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was replaced in the eigh­teenth c­ entury by the Enlightenment model of secular communication, undertaken with the goal of conveying information to an interlocutor in order to widen the realm of Reason and perfect the mores. In Rus­sia, a transfer from quasi-­religious communion to enlightened communication flourished ­under Catherine II and Alexander I at the end of the eigh­teenth and the beginning of the nineteenth ­century. It was largely stopped ­a fter the uprising of the Decembrists was crushed in 1825, when strict censorship of publications and policing of dubious be­hav­ior ­were introduced. ­A fter that, the refined public of the aristocratic salons—­the depiction of which War and Peace famously opens with—­was swept away from the center of intellectual life and replaced by ­those who became key radical thinkers from the mid-­n ineteenth ­century to the early-­t wentieth ­century. They espoused versions of Hegelianism and Marxism b­ ecause, in the guise of enlightened communication, such doctrines fostered the dream of rebuilding a lost true community, which would be based on real Communion again. Thus, as Chapter 4 concludes, a yearning for communion, which had suffered a temporary setback in Rus­sia during the onslaught of rational  7 

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communication in the era of the Enlightenment, reinstalled itself at the heart of most proj­ects of the rational transformation of Rus­sian life from the mid-­n ineteenth c­ entury on. Communion, however, is impossible without the sharing of basic ­things, some of them quite s­ imple. Thus, from the mid-­nineteenth through the twentieth c­ entury, Rus­sia was characterized by what would more aptly be called “common-­ism” than Communism. This common-­ism can be seen as a preoccupation with many common ­t hings, or the practices of “commoning” them (this term, which is borrowed from ­Middle En­glish, is analyzed in detail in Chapter 4); diverse social phenomena are built on the basis of this commoning. The current Rus­sian tendency to see or construct all instances of social life as the emanation of this commoning is reinforced by an impor­tant linguistic peculiarity: the words for “common” and “social” in con­temporary Rus­sian share the same root; both are linked to the Old Rus­sian translations of the ancient Greek term koinos. As a result, the common-­social terminology pervades the Rus­sian language, almost obliterating realistic attempts to call the Rus­sians’ attention to the fact that life could be or­ga­ nized not in a “common” or “social” way—­Communist and Socialist, some would say—­but in a genuinely public or res publica way. This common-­social realm breeds una­n im­i­t y and conformity, while genuine public action, based on the plurality of equals, is rare. Concomitantly, once the enlightened public of aristocratic salons was pushed away from the center stage it once held, the term publika, a Rus­sian equivalent for “public,” lost a discursive ­battle for predominance to all the terms linked with the Rus­sian root term “common.” Publika now means a crowd visiting a theater, or strolling and gazing onlookers on a street, and its lowly status is stressed by the linkage with what was called in nineteenth-­ century Rus­sian “a public house”—­not a pub, but a brothel first and foremost. Some could link this discursive denigration of the term publika to the corollary fact that the Habermasian public sphere never r­ eally took root in Rus­sia. However, as I argue in Chapter 2 (on res publica), recent Rus­sian politics shows that local urban strug­gles could make a new edition of this vanquished public a power­ful player again if, 1) it is reestablished not on an aristocratic-­family basis but on a broader scale, 2) a tangible infrastructure for public access to the sites of rule-­making and rule-­enforcement is built, and 3) a linguistic register of warm communication linking the close circle of local  8 

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dignitaries who control a given municipality is replaced by a register of public ­ ill then communication characteristic of, say, Robert’s Rules of Order.10 Rus­sia w have a chance for a transition from the regime of the prevalence of common­ism to a vibrant public life.11 Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the post-­Communist self, answering the question of how it might fit the concerns of res publica, or to what extent it is a misfit for ­these endeavors. Both are based on a study that produced an extensive data set of 200 expert and biographical interviews my colleagues and I collected in 2012 and 2013 in four regions of Rus­sia (Kazan, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, and Tomsk) as well as in Taiwan, K ­ orea, and Finland. This was perhaps the first huge cross-­cultural study carried out in Rus­sia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It aimed at studying technological entrepreneurship in con­temporary Rus­sia in comparison with such entrepreneurship in Taiwan and ­Korea, which had also jumpstarted the development of their countries u ­ nder authoritarian governments. (Finland was chosen as a contrast case—­t hat is, as a country also technologically advanced, but demo­ cratic, West-­European, and Protestant.) Biographical interviews collected in Rus­sia during the proj­ect allowed us to examine what changes in the practices of self-­cognition and self-­fashioning might have occurred since the 1990s. In fact, since my 1999 book was a genealogy (that is, an attempt to “estrange” the current real­ity with the help of historical and anthropological sources so that a reader could notice the cultural specificity and strangeness of the currently predominant practices of the self), Chapter 5 might be seen as one of the first empirically grounded attempts to evaluate ­whether the penitential core of Rus­sian culture of self-­ analysis and self-­perfection has eroded as a result of the influx of Western Christian practices of the self. At face value, this “spiritual evolution” of the last twenty-­five to thirty years in Rus­sia shows that gone is the selfless sacrifice for o ­ thers as a discursively demanded Communist standard of ­human development, with “self-­realization” taking its place. Though one finds a per­ sis­tence in the practices of self-­analysis and self-­fashioning, ­there are impor­ tant changes as well, such as the use of penitential techniques to evaluate only the professional rather than an overall moral self. The sixth chapter deals with the question of what the specificity of the post-­Communist condition of the self means for the prospects of the classical republican tradition, as it is revealed in interview-­based comparisons of East  9 

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Asia, Northern Eu­rope, and dif­fer­ent regions of Rus­sia. Following Boltanski and Thevenot in De la justification (1991) and Boltanski and Chiapello in Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), our cross-­cultural study analyzed the predominant mixes in the seven “cities,” or worlds of justification, establishing the three most impor­tant ways for arguing against injustice for each country studied. Rus­sia was dif­fer­ent from other countries in the sample in that it placed too high a value on the world of inspiration and creativity.12 Rus­sian technological entrepreneurs, justifying their sometimes eco­nom­ically irrational be­hav­ior (why, for example, invest in long-­term proj­ects with low profit margins, when somebody can easily take away the results of your work, or property rights on your com­pany, in a country famous for its absence of the rule of law?), frequently referred to the world of creativity, whereas the Koreans, Taiwanese, and the Finns cited money, technological accomplishment, and the establishment of firms that ­were structured like a ­family as some of their main driving forces. This Rus­sian longing for creativity should not be taken as an obvious feature. In ancient Greece, only gods and poets w ­ ere ascribed this trait; artisans and artists w ­ ere taken to be just imitating the world. It took the Re­nais­sance and then the Romantics to start ascribing this feature to paint­ers, sculptors, and writers of novels. Ascribing it to engineers was hard for a long time, as many phi­los­o­phers dealing with creativity at the beginning of the twentieth ­century show. But ascribing it to ­every worker bent on technological innovation (and l­ater, to e­ very Soviet citizen) was a profound feature of the Communist hubris. Only p­ eople destined to build a Communist paradise on Earth could think of themselves as replacing the now unnecessary God with a Creator with a capital C. The self, established through access to such Inspiration (possession of a quasi-­holy spirit) and such Creativity, is condescending t­ oward the life goal so pop­u­lar­ized by the stories of ­people like Steve Jobs, “to leave a dent in the universe.” A dent? This is too ­little; we are ­here to change the universe itself!13 Our interviews have also shown a thingly aspect of this yearning for Creativity. Given the temptation to be a Creator, a Rus­sian technological entrepreneur cannot abandon his or her work-­in-­progress, even if it becomes burdensome or unprofitable, or unlikely to make the transition from prototype to v­ iable mass-­produced product. This love of one’s own work in pro­g ress is, however, supported by a euphoria characteristic of ­people who  10 

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are totally engrossed in their jobs and driven by the promise of a thrill from seeing their product finished and in the world. Both testify to the close presence of the Divine. A ­ fter the collapse of Communism, however, the task is not to conceive of collected h ­ umans as a replacement for God, but rather to see ­whether the quest for an earthly immortality so necessary for the maintenance of a lasting public realm (if we are to believe Hannah Arendt) can be installed in its place, with a completely dif­fer­ent role for the Divine. The last chapter lays the groundwork for exploring this option. Fi­nally, the conclusion is an attempt to both tie together the dif­fer­ent chapters and to provide a summary interpretation of the entire proj­ect, using the new concepts discovered or developed during this research. A reader who did not make the journey together with the chapters of the book might find it difficult to get the overall picture, however: reading about what we got ­after a ­r ide from A to B is not like having a corporeal knowledge of all the places where we have been along the way. However, to grasp the central argument of the book in a more or less concise form, one could focus, perhaps, on Chapters 3 and 4, and the Conclusion.

Methods Notwithstanding the fact that this book uses the history of concepts, historical sociology, and qualitative sociology, t­ hese are subsidiary methods to an essay in po­liti­cal theory. This book is about po­liti­cal theory, though it may be called an exercise in comparative po­liti­cal theory.14 It is po­liti­cal theory not b­ ecause it relies on Hannah Arendt, who perhaps first among the famous twentieth-­century thinkers had started calling what she was ­doing by that term. Nor is it po­liti­cal theory b­ ecause it relies heavi­ly on Cicero, who was recently dubbed a po­liti­cal phi­los­o­pher in addition to all the other identities he had. In claiming that what the chapters of this book are d­ oing is po­liti­cal theory, I would rather follow a modest definition given by Michael Rosen in his book on dignity: it is po­liti­cal theory ­because while thinking of what some would call “normative” statements, it does not fear to rely on historical knowledge or con­temporary empirical data to inspire, suggest, test, and vindicate or disprove its theoretical claims.15 As John L. Austin once suggested—­and Pierre Bourdieu has immortalized—­this type of po­liti­cal theory is akin to a fieldwork in philosophy.16 One elucidates the existing concepts by relevant  11 

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contrasts one gets from historical and empirical knowledge, or one suggests and develops new ones if the impor­tant contrasts that life offers us are not articulated yet in familiar conceptual distinctions or not reflected in promising meta­phors that suddenly find themselves on the way to becoming concepts. Historical semantics and pragmatics in the vein of John L. Austin, or history of concepts in the vein of Quentin Skinner, both give access to relevant contrasts inherent in action of the past—­and are very impor­tant ­here. I have already mentioned a contrast between the common and the public that our case studies in Rus­sian have brought to the fore. Another distinction impor­tant to this book is between dif­fer­ent senses of publicness. This book w ­ ill argue that in order to pass from the level of common ­things to the level of res publica, or ­things or affairs public, one needs to follow theories of both Cicero and Arendt. And we need them both b­ ecause they speak about dif­fer­ent senses of publicness. Cicero, particularly in De re publica, points to the specific ways of transforming a multitude united by common t­ hings into populus, since only the presence of such an agent can ensure the presence of res publica. Laws that tie common ­things and citizens into a new entity are essential h ­ ere. By contrast, Arendt’s publicness is not primarily about consensus iuris, as in Cicero. It is more about the publicity of living together, but not in the sense of mere openness to the gaze of the ­others; rather, it is about establishing the public realm that is capable of recognizing and recording ­g reat deeds as a story of a memorable life that could be a model for ­others to follow. In other words, this publicness is essential for generating stories of meaningful life that together constitute the largely unnoticed background for our reflections on the meaning of life and action. Therefore, both t­ hese types of publicness are needed to get us to res publica. Another impor­tant methodological feature of this book is its attention to ­things. When I spoke of common t­ hings as a starting point for the growth or establishment of res publica, I was mostly stressing the common aspect of common t­ hings. The thingly aspect, however, is no less impor­tant, if one takes commoning and common t­ hings as key features of common-­ism that we studied. And as we know, the thingly aspect is very impor­tant for classics of Communism. Karl Marx begins Das Kapital with a sentence in which he quotes himself. For a con­temporary scholar, this looks rather strange. A serious academic should value modesty and eschew self-­aggrandizement, particularly if one  12 

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is just an author of a few second-­tier works on po­liti­cal economy. Explaining instances like this, Engels had to make excuses for Marx’s citation style. In the preface to the third German edition of Das Kapital, for example, he wrote that quotations t­ here—if they ­were coming not from industrial documents but from authored books—­were “intended merely to state where, when and by whom an economic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly enunciated.”17 For example, a­ fter citing himself in the very first sentence of Das Kapital, in the next two notes Marx refers to the work of Nicholas Barbon on the wants of the spirit and of the body and on “intrinsic virtue,” implying that this was the first designation of use-­value in the history of economics. Engels’s explanation downplays the alleged immodesty of the first sentence: perhaps, Marx only quoted himself where he also considered himself to be a pioneer? Indeed, whom ­else could he quote as a reference to the first sentence in Das Kapital, when t­ hese opening lines stated his own radical innovation? This first sentence reads: “The wealth of socie­ties in which the cap­i­tal­ist mode of production prevails appears as ‘an im­mense collection of commodities,’ the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.”18 Reading this, ­people often forget that Marx started his key economic treatise from a premise dif­fer­ent from t­ hose of his main pre­de­ces­sors in po­liti­cal economy, who began their major works with considerations of the division of ­labor (Smith) and value (Ricardo). Marx, by contrast, began with an analy­sis of commodities. This was a recent and ­g rand innovation; ten years before the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital, he would still be prone to begin his examination in Grundrisse in 1857 with an introduction on “production,” or with the chapter Wert, or “Value,” and then move onto the chapter “Money.”19 The decisive point was that t­ hings themselves, not value or ­labor or production, should be the starting point of the analy­sis. This book stresses the same point. If we want to understand the fate of community in the wake of the collapse of Communism, we need to privilege ­things in our accounts of communities as well. But one should not be d­ oing it in the same dogmatic way that generations of readers of Marx did. As we know from the dogmatic interpretations of dialectical materialists, by placing a category of the commodity at the beginning of Das Kapital, Marx singled out, in a Hegelian fashion, use value and exchange value as two contradictory sides therein. He  13 

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then showed how we could deduce all the categories of the economic system of a cap­i­tal­ist society from the unraveling of this basic contradiction. This was certainly a ­g rand scholarly achievement.20 Many would argue, however, that the first chapter of Das Kapital was constructed around a historical fiction—­a narrative about the birth of money from the logic and incon­ve­n ience of the barter of commodities, or the direct exchange of goods. Marx himself often criticized economists for using unrealistic and ahistorical models. See, for example, how he ridiculed the figure of Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, so beloved by ­these economists. His own exposition on barter, however, when a hy­po­thet­i­cal coat is exchanged for a hy­po­thet­i­cal linen (and their relationship takes up at least half of the most impor­tant first chapter of Das Kapital), is of no less ahistorical and fictive design. Even in the nineteenth ­century, reading Mommsen and Simmel, or their pre­de­ces­sors, it was pos­si­ble to notice that money played an extremely impor­tant function in the early history of humankind. This was not b­ ecause it grew out of barter, but b­ ecause it was associated with the phenomenon of Wergild: that is, with payment for mutilation or hom­i­cide imposed by the first recorded l­egal codes. Twentieth-­century anthropologists have also amply shown that “primitive socie­ties” utilized barter rather sparingly, while money was used ubiquitously. Frequently it marked a debt that was impossible to repay, as we see in examples of payment for a bride or a slain tribesman.21 Thus, the first chapter of Das Kapital can be analyzed as a fiction, or quasi-­ literary narrative. Is it any won­der then that the “commodity” in this chapter behaves like a typical actant in the semiotics of Greimas—­that is, like a protagonist or a key condition of a certain literary narrative, or like an actant from Bruno Latour’s actor-­network theory to which (­after a re­d istribution of ­human and non-­human qualities within a techno-­social network) is attributed the decisive ability to act? Given our attention to what happened with the community ­after the collapse of the Communist proj­ect, one should not just pay lip ser­vice to how the Communist doctrine treated t­ hings. ­Things are not mute and inert brutes. Indeed, in Das Kapital the commodity speaks, dreams, and even acts. For example, in the analy­sis of barter, when the linen expresses its value in the material and bodily form of the coat, we read: “We see, then, that every­thing our analy­sis of the value of commodities previously told us, is repeated by the linen itself as soon as it enters into association with another commodity,  14 

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the coat. Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities.”22 Commodities speak through other commodities or, in the absence of t­ hose, through the mouths of the economists. Their languages even have multiple dialects, Marx says. In the developed market characterized by commodity fetishism, a commodity is capable of ­doing a lot, perhaps even dancing: “. . . the ­table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous t­ hing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a ­thing, which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it ­were to begin dancing of its own ­f ree ­w ill” as it happened when, ­after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, mystic table-­turning became the fashion of the day.23 This treatment of commodities as omnipotent fetishes—as we know from classical commentaries on Marx—­stems from the fact that relationships among p­ eople united by the division of l­ abor and exchange of goods are now represented as relations between goods themselves, which had acquired unpredictable, almost super­natural qualities. Entire lives flourish or are destroyed depending on the ability of certain commodities to be sold on the market (or not). Thus it is sometimes worth it to pray for the merchandise that you produce or sell: well, my sweet, sell! Marx called ­these super-­sensory, value-­related qualities of commodities Wertgegenstandligkeit, or “objectivity of commodities as values.” T ­ hese qualities differ from the “coarse material 24 body of the coat or linen.” ­Because this Wertgegenstandligkeit is impossible to feel, Marx writes, it “differs from Dame Quickly” in that “a man knows not where to have it.”25 ­Here commentators usually point to the squabble between Dame Quickly and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV as the source of Marx’s imagery, and they are primarily interested in the reference to ­these super-­sensual qualities of commodities. Connotations of a rough, probing sensuality (with which a member of cap­i­tal­ist society tries to seize value, but cannot), however, are no less in­ter­ est­ing. In Part I, Act 3, Scene III, Dame Quickly, the hostess of the Boar’s Head tavern, responds to the words of her guest, lover, and l­ater husband Sir John Falstaff about her—­“Why, she’s neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her”—by saying: “Thou art an unjust man in saying so: thou or any man knows where to have me, thou knave, thou!” What philosophical  15 

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commentaries on Marx ignore, literary commentaries to Shakespeare do not. They point out the obviously sexual, if not overtly misogynist, connotations of what occurs. Thus in another part of the play (Act 2, Scene II), Falstaff promises to “tickle the catastrophe” of the hostess, and we understand that Dame Quickly is right: he does know where to have her. Marx needed this image, first of all, in order to indicate the hybrid existence of a commodity as use and exchange value si­mul­ta­neously: “neither fish nor flesh,” neither one phenomenon nor the other. Before saying this about Quickly, Falstaff called her an “otter,” an animal that in Shakespeare’s time could not be easily classified as ­either fish or mammal.26 An otter is amphibious. ­Because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this word was associated with ambiguity, amphibians w ­ ere compared by dif­fer­ent authors at the time with hermaphrodites, bisexuals, and even transvestites.27 This linkage with ambiguity enabled Falstaff to call Quickly an otter—­that is, neither fish nor f lesh, neither male nor female—­t hough she angrily replies that every­one knows her feminine qualities, and that she is the w ­ idow of a worthy citizen. Even more in­ter­est­i ng, of course, is that in this passage Falstaff first calls Quickly a ­thing, by first ordering her to “Go, you ­thing, go!”, and then, when asked what he meant by that, by answering: “a ­thing to thank God on.” The latter expression is perhaps refashioned from the almost idiomatic expression, “­t hings to thank God for,” as, for example, something that might be said during prayer. However, ­because of the substitution of a preposition, a sexual connotation appears—­“a ­thing to thank God on.” Of course, as soon as Quickly strikes back at Falstaff with the question, How is she a ­thing?, he introduces a new twist to the argument: her womanhood must be cast aside, and then it ­will immediately become clear that she is a strange animal, which no one may classify: an otter! In other words, Quickly is a strange h ­ uman, neither male nor female, such that no one would know how to ­handle him or her. Literary critics can analyze how Falstaff juggles offensive monikers one ­after another: Quickly is presented as a sexual ­thing, then as asexual, then as a bisexual ­thing, almost a hermaphrodite. But for philosophical analy­sis, ­these dynamics of naming and name-­calling are not as in­ter­est­ing as an appearance of a “­thing,” which ­people ­don’t know how to approach. A commodity in Marx’s analy­sis is a very Quickly-­like t­ hing in this regard: it is sensory and super-­sensory at the same time. Its consumer qualities can be  16 

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touched, but its qualities as a value object (its Wertgegenstandligkeit) are inaccessible to us—­even if we’d fiercely like to “have” them, with an almost sexual desire. ­Things, when they become commodities and serve as the beginning point of the logical analy­sis of the system of “­things cap­i­tal­ist,” behave like otters, defying classification so that the Falstaffs of the world si­mul­ta­neously know and do not know how to h ­ andle them. This profound ambiguity should not be forgotten when we deal with the allegedly tangible and durable t­ hings that we study in this book. The common t­ hings that link friendships and communities together thus have sensory and super-­sensory qualities, if we are to listen carefully to Marx rather than to the dogmatic interpretation of his work. But we should not necessarily presume that ­t hese qualities are a must, particularly if we see ­t hese common ­t hings as a prerequisite for res publica, rather than for capitalism on the road of becoming Communism. So in this book, to the extent that it can, commodity-­speak ­w ill be replaced by thing-­speak. In the socie­ties that only recently escaped the threat of Newspeak and the real­ity of Doublespeak, thing-­speak might be an antidote to the ­human corruption of language. Thus, in the exposition that follows, I try to articulate the role of ­things. I hope this emphasis supplies an illumination of the phenomena that would other­w ise be lost. The conceptual framework I employ to do so is resolutely non-­Marxist, even if it was inspired by the complexities of Marxist discourse and the complex va­r i­e­ties of forms of Communist life it had engendered or helped to justify. My thing-­speak is closer to the way ­things fare in the accounts of Bruno Latour and Luc Boltanski-­Laurent Thevenot. Let me finish the introduction by restating the methodological emphasis on ­things with the following dictum: many theorists so far have just been  interpreting the world; the task, however, might be to “worldify” interpretations.

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1 Friendship and Politics

Con­temporary Rus­sia, by all accounts, has an overabundance of friendship. Anna Wierzbitska even claimed that the Rus­sian word drug (meaning “friend”) is used much more frequently in Rus­sian than “friend” is in En­glish ­because of the central role that friendship plays in Rus­sian culture.1 Some explain this centrality as a corollary of the underdevelopment of formal institutions: fortunes and ­careers are established through personal ties, so looking for friends who can help you is the first natu­ral move t­ oward solving any serious prob­lem. But many link it to the Stalinist past: in a society where relatives—­even parents, ­children, husbands, and wives—­informed on each other, true friendship, in which somebody withstood the threat of terror and did not betray, became a dearly earned achievement rather than just an innocuous ascription. Thus, ­after years of terror, only ­those ­people who did not succumb u ­ nder pressure and help the authorities send you to the Gulag could earn the high name of friend. But what­ever the reason for this valuation of friendship, many Rus­sians would agree that it’s much more common in their society than in t­ hose of Western Eu­rope or the United States. Given this, one should have found it surprising that t­ here had been no serious study of Rus­sian friendship since the 1980s.2 Thus a w ­ hole group of researchers set out to fill this gap in the mid-2000s, ­doing parallel studies of the history, sociology, and politics of Rus­sian friendship.3 The resulting book, Friendship: Sketches on the Theory of Practices, was  18 

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intended for Rus­sians rather than for an international audience.4 Its goal was to estrange the obvious, to make the fish notice the w ­ ater in which it floats, so to speak. Friendship practices are so widespread that most Rus­sians do not even notice that they engage in something when they engage in it. Summarizing now some of the findings for a non–­Russian speaking audience, I ­w ill try to show why this form of community life holds a specific promise for Rus­sia, as well as, perhaps, for other parts of the world where formal institutions (of legal-­rational domination, as Weber would put it) are not as developed as in Western Eu­rope or North Amer­i­ca.

1.1 ​Words While friendship itself is abundant in Rus­sia, the Rus­sian language speaks more often of its scarcity. That is the surprising finding of an article by Kapitolina Fedorova in our collection of essays.5 Even if speech that mentions friends and friendship in everyday usage is abundant, Fedorova found that it most often points to the lack of a friend, his or her absence or disappearance. Let us begin with the fact that we do not use the word “friend” at all when we name and call out to each other in everyday situations. “Friend, come ­here!” sounds artificial, high-­flown, and archaic, unlike, for example, “­Mummy, come h ­ ere, please.” If we do call someone a “friend” to his or her face, it most often happens in situations where this person is not yet a friend, is no longer a friend, or never was a friend in the first place. I ­w ill illustrate this thesis with a few examples. When a child listens to a fairy tale on the radio or a CD, and the narrator addresses him or her with the phrase, “Hello, my ­little friend!,” in real­ity the child is not a friend (in the full adult sense of the term) for the narrator cannot function as such. The child still has to learn how to be a genuine friend ­because adults are the ones who are real friends, with all the habits, skills, and efforts that friendship entails. Nevertheless, the child has already been named a friend. This usage of the word “friend” is not exactly sincere, one would suspect. And this alleged insincerity is somehow reminiscent of the insincerity with which President Putin addresses a large audience: “Friends! ­Today I would like to discuss with you . . .” Many would say that, in the acutely psychologized and individualized way it is understood t­oday, t­ here is no friendship in this phrase at all. Po­liti­cal friendship in Rus­sia is nearly always deficient,  19 

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too obviously dominated by instrumental motives. And it is impossible to speak about “true” friendship in terms of benefits and profits. Phrases like “I have a very useful friend who can help with . . .” sound very awkward, since it turns one’s friends into useful instruments. Rus­sians normatively imagine that genuine interpersonal friendship presumes the disinterestedness and equality of the parties involved. On the contrary, when politicians speak to “friends,” efficiently gathered in a stuffy room by overly watchful shepherds of the Kremlin protocol, or speak of friendship between nations or ­peoples, they know quite well that relationships with such friends are unequal. Of the countries involved, for example, one can say that such friendships are unequally advantageous: very often, when one speaks of friendship treaties of the USSR, t­ hese relationships had been imposed on one of the parties and ­were often maintained by force. Therefore, ­those who are called “friends” in po­l iti­cal speeches and treaties clearly are not friends, at least not in the meaning we unreflectively ascribe to this word when we use it to describe interpersonal relations. Another example: in ordinary Rus­sian speech, even appealing to a tried-­ and-­true friend as “friend” can be perceived as overreaching or, in some cases, pathetic. Why is that? One reason, perhaps, is the proximity of such rhe­toric to the New Testament; for example, “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:14). In this speech, during the Last Supper, the Lord turns his listeners from God’s servants into friends of God, raising their status and making the word “friend” sacred. It is thus pos­si­ble that deeply religious souls have always been sickened when this word is used in vain: only someone who aspires to His might could so unceremoniously appoint someone ­else a “friend.” The second pos­si­ble reason is that such phrases now seem archaic; they reproduce figures of speech encountered in the lofty letters of the past, when writers began addressing their correspondents with the phrase “gentle friend,” or bon ami. This discursive model was introduced in Rus­sia not by the Sentimentalists or the Romantics, as one normally would believe; it started taking root during the late seventeenth c­ entury, beginning with the circle of Simeon Polotsky and other literati who had moved to Muscovy from what is now Ukraine and Belarus.6 But Sentimentalism certainly made it a widespread practice. Nikolai Karamzin, one of the central figures of the Rus­ sian Enlightenment, would write in one of his letters that he found it more  20 

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pleasant when his correspondent addressed him as “friend” rather than as “kind sir,” thus signaling the change in established usage. Rus­sian novelists of the nineteenth ­century made their characters address each other as friends all the time. In Ostrovsky’s dramas, for example, portraying the speech of ­people from very dif­fer­ent social strata, ­these forms are abundant. In our day, however, with its pragmatism and (at best) ironic attitude to notions like Schiller’s Schöne Seele, addressing someone in this manner during a face-­to-­face encounter is something exceptional. This mode of address alludes to youthful romanticism and the declarative spirituality of ­those times when the rules for using the word “friend” had not yet solidified, and when Rus­sian culture was just starting to learn the pleasures of interpersonal friendship. In con­temporary culture ­there are a few instances when we can still address a genuine friend with the words “My dear friend,” just as in earlier times. However, this would seem normal only in a private letter or a greeting card, or in a toast celebrating someone’s birthday. So again we see that it is permissible to address someone directly as “friend” only when ­there is no friend pres­ent—­when he or she is actually somewhere ­else, or when such “romantic” verbosity is demanded by a certain genre. ­There are other speech acts sanctioning usage of the word “friend” when our friend is in front of us. It can happen, for example, when we suspect or are certain that a terrible transformation has taken place, and our former friend is a friend no more. Every­one knows that a direct appeal to friendship is indispensable when formulating an accusation that is old as the hills but no less effective for that: “I thought of you as a friend, but . . .” In this instance, the very status of friend is called into question. Therefore, during such a quarrel, it is natu­ral to use the term “friend” when directly addressing a suspected traitor: the friend is allegedly not ­there, so it is permissible, perhaps? Curiously, a­ fter such murderous reproaches, he or she might in fact cease to be our friend, and once again we ­w ill avoid using the word “friend”—­not ­because we do not want to sound pompous when we call a friend “a friend” to his or her face, but b­ ecause the he or she has died as a friend for us. This figurative death of a friend resembles another obvious situation—­a non-­ figurative, literal death. In such cases, when our friend dies physically, we can again address him or her as such in graveside speeches or posthumous letters and reveries, and this usage is supported by the rules of “high genre” of panegyric.  21 

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Thus we address a friend as “friend” only when the friend is absent or does not exist. She or he is not around b­ ecause she or ​he has left town, and so we write him or her a letter. Or she or he no longer exists ­because she or he has ceased to be a friend or has died. Or the friend is not yet a friend b­ ecause we are addressing a child or a po­liti­cal audience—­that is, subjects who do not possess the fullness implied by the con­temporary understanding of friendship between individuals. To summarize: in con­temporary Rus­sian speech acts, we almost always appeal to “friend” when ­there is no a­ ctual friend in the vicinity.7 But what do we say and write about friends when we do not address them directly? When we repeat common sentiments about the true friend or genuine friends—­the sentiments captured in proverbs and sayings, and recorded in the films, cartoons, and books we grew up with—­are we not reproducing the platitudes of humanity’s age-­old wisdom, accumulated since the days of antiquity and the Old Testament? Many of them w ­ ere already clichés in Byzantine epistolography, a genre not that impor­tant for Western Eu­rope, but a key building block for the formation of learned Rus­sian culture. See, for example, which of ­these platitudes on friendship you ­won’t find in the letters of Theodore the Studite, a Byzantine saint of the eighth and ninth centuries AD. Theodore did not become famous for his treatises on friendship or for his achievements in the epistolary genre. In Rus­sia, he is known primarily as the author of the rule for communal monasticism most widely used in Old Rus­sia. Before he took monastic vows, Theodore attended a secular school, which is where he learned the commonplaces of friendship set down by ancient and early Christian writers, including the assurance that the exchange of letters is itself friendship practiced at a distance. Besides this, we find in Theodore’s correspondence the following definitions: a friend in need is a friend indeed; true friends are the friends of our friends and the enemies of our enemies; true friends remain close despite the distances that separate them from us; true friends are genuinely concerned for the welfare of our soul; true friends share our joys and our sorrows; true friends seek harmony with us and praise us; true friends generally agree with us, but g­ ently correct us when we are obviously in error; true friends pay no mind to ­those who slander us; true friends make us stronger.8 It is funny to find all of t­hese Byzantine era commonplaces on friendship still in circulation t­ oday, when c­ hildren learn from cartoon nar 22 

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ratives or imagery how to test and then call another kid a true friend, or when teen­agers get their sense of tested and trusted friendship from most popu­lar songs or films or novels. However, when we repeat such platitudes, applying them to describe our friends’ be­hav­ior in conversation with third parties, we do this in a fairly strange way. First, we talk about friends when we delineate the bound­aries of our com­pany of friends for someone unfamiliar with it (“I have this friend Alexander—­you d­ on’t know him yet. Well, he . . .”) or when we introduce friends to someone (“This is my friend Sasha.”). It is perhaps no won­der that Fedorova found numerous instances in which someone was named or not named a friend in interviews, rather than in the Rus­sian National Corpus (consisting mainly of written texts), which she likewise researched. Such naming is primarily practiced in artificial situations—­for example, when ­people are forced to ponder an interviewer’s questions; this happens more rarely in written speech. A researcher requires that a respondent qualify ­people as friends (or not) in order to establish the bound­aries of the network of friends he or she is studying, while friendships themselves require it rarely or not at all. So when a new, third party is included in a friendship, we can name some absent person a “friend.” But interestingly, the same t­ hing may happen when lines have to be drawn within a friendship—­for example, when two old friends wave off a third new friend who attempts to talk to them while they are engaged in conversation, or drinking, or both. The phrase “Let me talk with my friend” lays down the border quite firmly: you are not part of our friendship, it belongs to us, and you are excluded from it. The naming of a person as “friend” thus has the latent function of outlining the bound­aries of a community, an act that is frequently pointless in in-­g roup communication, oral or written. On the contrary, when such bound­aries are marked in letters sent to ­people outside this in-­g roup, the letters take on the appearance of an official (and thus somewhat artificial) recommendation—­after all, the recommendation in the form of a letter or e-­mail is nowadays a rare genre in regular private life of non-­academics. Also, consider the following situations, which accompany writing on or in friendship. You ­w ill agree that if a husband writes to his wife, “Sorry, friends are ringing the doorbell. I’ll finish this letter tomorrow,” he exposes himself to a certain risk. Also, if he writes to a friend in the presence of his spouse, then waving her off—­“Let me finish  23 

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this e-­mail to my friend”—is much more complicated than if he w ­ ere just talking to this friend on the phone. This boundary-­making, or boundary-­marking, function of friendship is impor­tant since huge chunks of everyday life are spent within the communities of friends. And when we talk about our friendship practices to third parties, most often ­we’re not referring to discrete individual friends but to a circle of ­these friends that functions as a self-­sufficient actor. It is extremely rare for a single “friend” to become such an actor in our accounts without mention of whose friend she or he is exactly. At the same time, the collective actor known as “friends” unproblematically figures in our speech: “I like watching movies with friends” sounds non-­problematic, but using a singular form of the word would demand some clarification (or would suggest this is “the friend”—­partner, boyfriend, ­etc.). A friend has to be someone’s friend—­m ine, his, hers, Ann’s; other­w ise, the phrase in which it figures immediately appears incomplete. For example, the phrase, “The friend thought for a second and then began to act,” ­w ill appear odd in Rus­sian if we have not already been informed whose friend it is or if the context does not supply us with clues. The use of possessive pronouns to designate whose friend we are talking about (which, as Fedorova notes, is quite often excessive since Rus­sian grammar ­doesn’t demand using them) points to the ­simple secret of this phenomenon: such “possession” requires a minimum of two centers of attraction. Friendship should be reciprocal; it cannot be experienced on one’s own. Of course, t­ here can be more centers of attraction or more individuals involved: ­people meet as friends in threesomes, foursomes, and one ­family can befriend another. Why would it sound curious then that dyadic relationships—­f riendship between two persons (and no more)—­are a rare and relatively recent phenomenon in Rus­sian history? In the texts that form the basis of Rus­sian culture, interpersonal friendship between two p­ eople (with the corresponding designation of one party as, say, “Stefan’s friend” or “my friend”) is a relatively late phenomenon. In the medieval Rus­sian examples cited by Dmitry Kalugin in his article for our volume on friendship (which date as late as the time of Ivan the Terrible), the reference to “friends” in the plural is more typical than the singular form. In instances where the singular is used, it most often appears in compilations of translated homilies and has two generalized meanings: a Christian  24 

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“neighbor” (as in “love thy neighbor”) and “a companion, a partner in a par­ tic­u­lar enterprise, campaign or affair.” When the term “friend” is encountered together with an indication of whose friend she or he is (a normal practice in con­temporary Rus­sian as described above), then the context is ­either non-­ Russian or elevated, as in the translation of Old Testament phrases such as “friend of God” (referring, for example, to Abraham or Moses), or when the friends of Caesar are named. Kalugin found the only reference to “one’s own friend” in an early Bulgarian text, the L ­ egal Code of Tsar Constantine; it was included in Rus­sian ­legal compilations l­ater.9 So it appears that the personal friend did not exist for medieval Rus­sian society as an agent of action, whereas nowadays we almost cannot speak of a friend in the singular without indicating whose friend he or she is. The individualization of such relationships is the result of the spiritual friendship of the seventeenth ­century, the sentimental friendship of the eigh­ teenth, and the romantic friendship of the nineteenth. This individualization of friendship and the reduction of friendship to a relationship between two unique individuals is a recent achievement (some would say, aberration); in the majority of historical cases we do not find the assumption that the friend is the unique friend of only one person. For example, in ancient or early Christian epistolography, the dyadic relationship of author / addressee always presumed a third party as well, an outside reader. Atticus found it pos­si­ble to publish and sell the letters of his friend Cicero. The Church ­Fathers, when they wrote to each other, always assumed that someone (often, a friend) was required to accept the task of delivering the letter, and that this person might read the letter along the way or deliver it to another address altogether, so that it could be read by ­others.10 Friendship in this sense was not something personal and private. Kalugin notes a similar quality in the eighteenth-­century correspondence of the “gentle friends” who gathered in spiritual friendship around the figure of Simeon Polotsky. In their letters they often refer to third parties (“X said of you that . . .”); they thus actualize a w ­ hole network of connections beyond the dyadic relationship of the letter’s author and recipient. A key defender of liberty during the Rus­sian Enlightenment, Alexander Radishchev could hail the virtues of his dead friend Ushakov in a famous posthumous life story, almost a hagiography, but this friendship between the two illustrious men appeared as something secondary to the friendship within their entire  25 

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circle of friends, young men who ­were sent off by Empress Catherine the ­Great to study law in Leipzig. In con­temporary Rus­sian culture, then, a friend mentioned in conversation with third parties is never simply a “friend”: speech customs require that we indicate whose friend she or he is. That person is always someone’s friend and never just anyone’s. If we consider the full implications of this situation, we w ­ ill perhaps find that she or he is not even herself or himself to the end. His or her actions are not wholly his or her own: they are successful only to the extent that they are inscribed within the network of the actions of other friends. Arendt wrote this about a genuine po­liti­cal action among equals: one can initiate such action, but the author of the accomplished action would almost always be someone e­ lse. Similarly, the real actor in con­temporary Rus­ sian culture remains the network of close friends, not a separate, discrete friend. One indication of this is the fact that the Rus­sian term “friends” (in the plural) does not require predicates or possessive pronouns. In ordinary Rus­sian phraseology, “friends” are not necessarily required to be someone’s friends; they are friends sui generis. It is the circle that acts, not the friend—­ this is how we might briefly denote the most specific quality of con­temporary Rus­sian friendship.11 I should add some words on the historical usage. The “friends” (the term in plural is drugi, not the con­temporary Rus­sian form druzia) mentioned in medieval Rus­sian chronicles are quite often also a druzhina. This last term can designate a prince’s armed guard, his retinue, or his circle of advisers, as well as a non-­princely trading community for shipping goods down the rivers to Constantinople, and even a community of religious pilgrims. In Rus­sian translations of Greek sources, this Rus­sian word is also used to designate a monastic community; moreover, this usage apparently also became more customary and comprehensible with time. We should note that the attitude to such communities of friends can be bordering on sacrifice for the circle (the pattern ­here was set by the verses of the Gospel: blessed is he who laid down his life “for his friends”) or, conversely, destructively critical, as was the case with Ivan the Terrible, who started to suspect that his confessor Sylvester had begun to use his status to advance the interests of a par­tic­u ­lar group of aristocrats—­t hat is, he began “copulating in friendship like unto laymen.” When one considers the frequency during this time of appeals to “indulge not thy friend, avenge not thy foe” during court proceedings or  26 

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when in office, one starts to suspect that it was precisely the opposite practice that was quite widespread. In other words, ­whether supportive or critical of a par­tic­u ­lar circle of friends, a large number of Rus­sian non-­chronicle sources, once they took center stage of literary production, are stark clear: it is the circle of friends, not the individual friend, which is the principal agent of action. How does this circle typically form? Answering this question, we should turn away from what social psy­chol­ogy would press us to do, namely, look into the inter-­personal attractions and aversions. Indeed, since the eigh­teenth ­century, in the descriptions of friendship we are most often concerned with emotional experiences, intentions, and interests. The finale of Kalugin’s excursus into the history of the concept of friendship in Rus­sia reads precisely in this way: starting from the enlightened days of Karamzin and Pushkin, narratives on friendship speak mainly of spiritual phenomena, while making almost no mention of tangible and durable ­things. If, however, we step back a ­couple of centuries, we w ­ ill notice that, aside from p­ eople and their emotions, material ­things are also palpably pres­ent in friendships. Moreover, it is almost impossible to imagine the friendship itself without t­hese ­things.

1.2 ​­Things What one notices immediately in the Rus­sian chronicle texts is the practice of the exchange of gifts—as, for example, in the first chronicle reference to the military friendship between the Kievan general Pretich and a nomad Pecheneg prince in 968 AD. As Evgenii Roshchin reminds us, we might see similar exchanges of gifts in the conclusion of friendship pacts between the U.S. government and the American Indians or the British colonizers and the conquered populations.12 It would appear that in a situation where friendship is tinged by the absence of emotional attachment—­that is, when it is openly and purely motivated by instrumental considerations—­g ifts help to establish the first level of community.13 This is incredibly distant from the proverbial ancient Greek saying, “Friends have all ­t hings in common.” It would seem that this instrumental friendship is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the descriptions in late antiquity of particularly close personal friendship in which two bodies share one soul. And yet with the aid of gifts, this  27 

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instrumental friendship begins moving in the direction of a minimal kind of community. The friendship between medieval princes, for example, despite the active exchange of gifts, was not supposed to be emotional: “The bond of friendship, as one meets it in the medieval po­liti­cal arena, was not a bond of feeling but rather a contract involving rights and obligations.”14 Gifts that are considered improper, or the refusal to accept a gift, would have been taken as a sign of failing to fulfill one’s obligations ­under a contract between friends. According to classical anthropological works by Mauss and Lévi-­Strauss, proper giving and retuning of gifts is an impor­tant practice, one that is regulated by a large number of rules. It is pos­si­ble to say that the exchange of ­favors or ser­vices is still the basis of any friendship, no m ­ atter what lofty assurances of altruistic disinterestedness the parties offer each other. It is, however, hard to establish the worth of a purely personal gift, and therefore the prob­lem of equivalent exchange frequently arises. For example, when a letter to a friend was itself viewed as a gift or when ­people sent their own portraits (as they did in Italy during the Re­nais­sance) as gifts, what could one expect in response if not the same ­thing?15 Nowadays, friends still exchange letters as ­simple tokens of mutual attention. Boris Gladarev analyzed con­temporary Rus­sian friendship on the basis of entries in the diaries of everyday communication.16 He found that cell phone calls and text messages often contain no information, but merely testify mutual care and maintenance of communication (like an SMS that contains only a question mark or a smiley). In a linguistic sense, they can be seen as a part of phatic communication which is necessary to maintain the channel of information exchange, not in technical terms (“can you hear me?”), but symbolically (“are we still on the same wave length?”). Exchange of letters from antiquity right up ­until the Petrine era, when they ­were regarded as not mere sources of information but as valuable gifts as well, are pre­ce­ dents for this con­temporary everyday practice. Perhaps one can even detect the ancient roots of this practice, for example, in the correspondence between Marcus Cornelius Fronto and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, where Fronto writes, “I am anxious to know, my lord, how are you. I have been seized with pain in the neck. Farewell, my lord. Greetings to your lady.”17 And in seventeenth-­century Muscovy, as Kalugin shows us, the same practice continued: Lazar Baranovich wrote to his spiritual friend in Christ that it was  28 

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necessary to correspond often; if t­ here was nothing to write about, then one could resort to a long-­available template for the minimally acceptable letter: “If you are well, this is good; I am also well.”18 As a rule, gifts remain in the possession of the recipient, although they can function as nagging reminders of the need to return the gift. ­There are, however, several types of t­ hings that bind friends together—­common t­ hings of vari­ous kinds that e­ ither are not the property of anyone par­tic­u ­lar or, if they belong to someone, then still are used by other friends. Boris Gladarev, in his analy­sis, lists three classes of such t­ hings.19 The first class consists of circulating ­things—­photo­g raphs, videos, ­music, books, e­ tc. As a result of circulating among a group of friends, they accumulate new meanings and significance. In a sense, they grow as a result of this circulation. By contrast, the second class is expendable t­ hings—­money, drinks, barbecue and other food items, sport and camping equipment, ­etc. During the course of friendly gatherings, t­hese ­things are consumed and/or diminished in volume or value; in a way they are sacrificed to friendship. Last but not least, ­there are also mediators—­telephone networks, messengers, e-­mail, and other communication devices, and places such as kitchens, ­houses, apartments, saunas, beaches, and other spaces where friendship takes place. T ­ hese ­things ­either mediate interactions or act as their settings. Gladarev’s empirical findings can be compared again with historical data. Thus, among the t­ hings that circulated within circles of friends during the Italian Re­nais­sance, the most impor­tant role belonged to books. This is prob­ ably not surprising given that humanist culture was based on the joint study of texts and the imitation of antiquity’s rhetorical models. But ­there was also the practice of placing dedications or inscriptions to friends in books presented to them.20 In Old Rus­sia, however, this practice becomes widespread only in the seventeenth c­ entury, ­because books w ­ ere rare and expensive, and mostly theological or liturgical in nature. A ­ fter what is now Ukraine became part of Rus­sia and the literati from ­there arrived in Moscow, it became not uncommon to ask a friend to send a volume of Aristotle or books of theological commentary, which ­were often published in Polish or Latin. The recipient might even sometimes keep the book altogether; in this case its status changed from a circulating t­ hing to an illicitly appropriated good. Nevertheless, expendable t­ hings consumed or destroyed together can be even more significant then circulating t­ hings for maintaining friendship.  29 

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They are the basis of the feast or the sacrifice, and they are therefore often accorded more attention than all other t­ hings. In Althoff’s study of medieval friendship in Western Eu­rope, it is noted, “The cele­bration of a convivium was apparently so tightly bound up in the mind-­set of the M ­ iddle Ages with the concept of friendship that medieval historians used the expression ‘they ate and drank together’ when they wanted to refer to a friendship alliance.”21 We find the same instances in medieval Rus­sian texts all the way ­until the modern era. Considering the role sharing a meal had for friendship, it is unsurprising that the words “eat,” “drink,” and “befriend” appear alongside one another in such a large number of ancient Rus­sian texts. Sometimes one has to suppress an urge to perform a detailed linguistic analy­sis of the verbal formulas describing this configuration of practices.22 And even as late as the days of Peter the G ­ reat, St. Dmitry Rostovsky still spoke scathingly in his 1708 sermon on friendship between ju­n ior officials and august lords, saying that it was based on many cups of “toasts to each other’s health,” meaning it was based more on flattery than on the desire for genuine connection. Toasts are also part of exchange of ­favors and gifts. You can wish someone good health in a letter, but you can also raise a glass to him during a feast, returning a f­ avor of being invited and acknowledging this ­favor with a reciprocal laudatory speech. Of course, this happens if you are fortunate enough to have been invited, when your august friend organizes a banquet and thus unleashes the ­whole dynamic of gift and counter-­g ift, so well captured by Mauss in his analy­sis of the Native American potlatch ceremony. However, frequently the maximum degree of unity, on the most profound or extreme level, is identified as monastic cohabitation. This cohabitation mentioned in the medieval Rus­sian sources includes, first, the level of sharing in consumption, as in meals and libations (expendable t­ hings), and second, circulating ­t hings at the level of “friendship” proper, where ­things and meanings augment. But ­these two levels are impossible without a third: that of mediators, which includes channels and places of communication, such as a cloister or a monastery.23 In other words, cohabitation includes all three classes of common ­things, which is why it is taken to be profound. In this practice, food and drink are consumed together in the refectory; then we find the circulation of ­t hings, the meaning or value of which increases with friendship such as pious books; and all this happens with the aid of one and the same mediators—­that is, in the same buildings and spaces. As on  30 

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con­temporary social websites like Facebook or vkontakte.ru, where you first have to go to the site to begin interacting with other registered users or exchanging gifts and circulating t­hings (such as personal photos, photos of cele­brations, or descriptions of shared stories), so it is in medieval Rus­sian friendship: first the locations and mediators, and then all the rest. The models of interaction within friendship can be quite dif­fer­ent, of course. Brian McGuire proposes at least four such models in his book on friendship in Christ. Such friendship could be modeled on a euphoric choir singing ecstatic psalms, as was allegedly practiced among the Apostles or in the early Christian communities. Or it could copy the disciplinary practices of the military school, which the first Benedictine monastery imitated. Or Christian friendship could require (as we find in the works of Saint Ambrose) that the believer employ one of the principal practices of the Roman aristocrat—­fides, as trust in and reliance on another aristocrat—in the formation of his friendship with God (that is, via trust in His ways and deeds, which in time would be transformed into faith in Him). Fi­nally, as was the case during the West Eu­ro­pean religious re­nais­sance of the twelfth ­century, it could simply come down to correspondence among monks at dif­fer­ent monasteries, for whom the sending of a letter was an act of Christian friendship.24 In each of t­ hese models, however, friendly intercourse presumed palpably common ­things—­i nsofar as it was si­mul­ta­neously communion with God— in a specific place, in a specific manner, via specific access channels, and with specific acquisitions and expenditures. As one of the most ancient Rus­sian miscellanea (Izbornik of 1076) puts it: “Make thy communion with the rites of the saints, and thou ­w ill make communion with God.” In the utmost instance, you partake in the friendship with Christ through the ritual of communion with bread and wine—­that is, by becoming, literally, one of the ele­ments “in” Christ, through His body. The term “communion” ­here denoted this partaking, this becoming a part, and presumed the ritual of the Eucharist, eating the body and the blood of Christ. Employing precisely this vocabulary in a document from the mid-­fi fteenth c­entury, an Orthodox Christian bishop in Lithuania called on his readers to refrain from friendship with his foe: “Do not have any communion or conjunction with him.”25 ­Things as mediators of medieval friendship would subsequently begin to give ground. Sometime ­later, ­after the Sentimentalist revolution, t­ hings  31 

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would be banished from the new world of pure spirituality and lofty emotions. We thus find the following description of the emergence of friendship in Mikhail Muraviev, one of the leaders of the Rus­sian Enlightenment: “A certain mysterious predilection mutually attracts beautiful souls. T ­ here is a certain noble gaze, a manner, and a courtesy, which my sensibility could never resist. Esteem bound me to t­ hese estimable individuals, whose e­ very act displayed the worthiness of their hearts.”26 Soul, sensibility, and heart are key words t­ here: t­ here is almost no longer any place for quotidian t­ hings amongst ­these sublime phenomena. One example of this is the difference between acceptable and unacceptable reproaches in friendship. You can publicly reproach a friend for acting ­behind your back. You can tell him or her that he or she has grown cold to you. You can say that he or she no longer shares all his or her experiences with you.27 But it is quite hard to say—­especially publicly—­that he or she has become less of a friend to you ­because she or he brought your bike back with the spokes bent (that is, she or he bent the spokes but failed to own up to it). Talking about your friend in this way casts you in a bad light; you would be judged not as a friend (who, according to normative criteria, would lay down his life for his friend), but as a miser, a petty h ­ uman being, and so forth. And so, as already mentioned, the expression “a useful friend” seems unnatural to us. If the most impor­tant ­thing about friendship is the fusion of souls and feelings, ­there certainly is no place for wretched utility in this relationship. We end up with a tragicomedy entitled “Rus­sians in Friendship.” Every­one nowadays achieves his or her own instrumental goals with the help of friends, and every­one is connected to t­ hese friends via a myriad of t­ hings, but it is impossible to make ­t hese material aspects a ­matter of public discussion. (Note: a “­matter of public discussion,” not a ­matter for discussion amongst friends! Friends can weigh such petty accusations against each other in private; when they do it publicly, they risk ruining their own self-­image.) The tragic nature of the situation is also witnessed by the par­t ic­u ­lar heaviness (might we say explosiveness?) of the usage of the Rus­sian term “friendship” itself. ­ ntil the mid-­ Kalugin shows that the term druzhba is encountered rarely u sixteenth c­ entury. In a few exceptions, one can find it, for example, in the life of Saint Cyril (one of the two inventors of the Slavic alphabet), where “friendship with the Khazars” is mentioned. (This is possibly a calque from  32 

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the Byzantine philia, although it is impossible to establish this as a fact; Cyril was entrusted to wage negotiations with the Khazars.) Another exception is an epistle by Maxim the Greek (who came from Mt. Athos in the early sixteenth ­century and employed Byzantine formulas), where ­there is a mention of the “friendship” enjoyed by the tsar on the part of “all the tongues [that is, ­peoples] living everywhere.”28 It prob­ably took a long time and many attempts to teach this term to Old Rus­sian speakers. This was accomplished, first, via ecclesiastical texts full of translated terms—­new lexicon had to be constructed to introduce new practices and ideas. Second, this “imposing of friendship” was done through the texts of pacts of “friendship,” which came into Rus­ sian as a calque of the Latin term amicitia; this term (or its local equivalent) was used in the agreements of the Polish kings and Lithuanian princes, as distinct from generic Rus­sian contracts, which continued to employ the term “love” (liubov’) to denote relations between princes.29 At last, via the lofty letter writing that was part of the spiritual and sentimental friendship practices of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, the pro­cess was completed. When Rus­sia did fi­nally learn to use the word, it proved to be incredibly unwieldy. As Fedorova notes, the noun druzhba (friendship) can be used in significantly fewer contexts than, for example, the verb druzhit’ (be friends with, be friendly with).30 It thus turns out that the phenomenon of con­ temporary Rus­sian druzhba is more demanding than the s­imple act of making friends—­possibly ­because it entails the entire mass of circulating, expendable, and mediating ­things, whereas one can druzhit’ without having all three types of common t­ hings. You can have a c­ ouple of mediators and, perhaps, something ­else, and that is quite enough. In relations captured by the phrase my druzhili (“we w ­ ere on friendly terms”), this tight interlacing of ­things is often not yet pres­ent, unlike in the phrase, “We w ­ ere bound by (genuine) friendship, druzhba.” Hence all the grave accusations, including the accusation of treachery, that characterize druzhba, but which are not characteristic for an innocent expression my podruzhilis’ (we made friends with each other). It is precisely druzhba—­not the verb druzhit’—­that presumes the presence of common t­ hings and the fact that t­ hese t­ hings are many. If a meltdown ensues, then the former alleged friends w ­ ill also examine, tediously and at g­ reat length, the accusations surrounding each t­ hing. T ­ hings are thus not only the props of friendship, but also its fetters.  33 

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1.3 ​A Subcode as a Shared ­Thing If public accusations concerning (allegedly) petty t­ hings in a friendship discredit you as a friend, then what kind of speech demonstrates that you are a friend? Certainly not the high-­flown rhe­toric of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, which is now regarded ironically as something archaic. Fedorova shows us that the most impor­tant part of friendship’s discursive existence is the possession of a subcode, the capacity to communicate in a private language that is unproblematically understood only by certain ­people—­a circle of friends. This subcode uses linguistic means to alter normal speech practices, similar to the way we alter speech when talking to small c­ hildren or to lovers. For example, with c­ hildren, we start (in Rus­sian) using diminutives, repeat garbled non-­g rammatical words, ­etc.; while talking to lovers, you can palatalize consonants to make the words sound more tender and close to “love talk,” or engage in repetitions which in other speech would sound excessive and redundant. To wit: “I love you—­love you—­love you—­love you!”31 Friends alter their language as well, employing par­tic­u­lar linguistic tropes and allusions to events that the friends e­ ither experienced or discussed together. Such tropes include accents and the rearrangement or addition of letters to words—­for example, sulshaem or slushaem-­s instead of the standard slushaem (“we are listening,” “we are at your ser­vice”). Friends might also use nonce expressions (for example, “pig snout”) or strange abbreviations (such as “r.g.” for “regular guy”). All ­these means mark t­ hose who are “inside” the friendship and exclude ­those who are “outside” it. As Gladarev notes in his article, it is perhaps precisely the emergence of this linguistic subcode that now makes interaction with friends the central task of friendship. “Friends are constantly socializing”: what could be simpler and more banal than this workaday observation in Rus­sian?32 However, it captures a complex con­ temporary real­ity that took shape gradually, involving much effort and the careful coordination of the be­hav­iors of many p­ eople and the configurations of many ­things. First, friends develop their own new common t­ hing—­the subcode, which gives them a unified basis for interpreting situations, and this is something that friends do together. The result, as Gladarev observes, is that interaction with friends is easy and pleasant: we waste almost no time and effort translating or digesting the information they give us at each new encounter.  34 

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Common themes, interpretations, and emotions evoked by ­these interpretations take shape, and together they constitute a commonly shared background for understanding and pro­cessing new information. As in the popu­lar Rus­sian joke about the friends who deci­ded to assign numbers to jokes they repeated all the time, and thereafter began to laugh as soon as t­hese numbers ­were mentioned, the subcode provides us with the same sort of signposts. It o ­ rders and rec­ords common events, the meanings and emotions provoked by the ­things that have happened to friends. Emotions in this case are endlessly impor­tant: the warmth of friendship is bound up not only with identical interpretations, but also with the fact that t­ here is no need to reproduce them. The feeling of intimacy is achieved thanks to the fact that every­ thing has already been verbalized (or, as the Rus­sians say, “contained”—­ sometimes with the help of a very helpful container, called a glass) together. Second, as in the model of Christian friendship, socializing (obshchatsia) ­here has the sense of communing (priobshchatsia). ­People in friendship do not commune with the body and blood of Christ by consuming a wafer and church wine, but participate in (that is, become part of, as the structure of the word itself indicates, given the prefix pri-­) the circle of friends and the common ­things that are expended and multiplied and that mediate their conviviality and their community. For example, friends at a party may look at photo­g raphs together, discussing events and assigning definitions to the be­ hav­ior of the actors in ­those events. They often make moral and aesthetic judgments, and, aided by alcohol, ­t hese judgments can lodge themselves deeply in a friend’s soul. A ­ fter the party, however, a given person does not ­really understand, for example, why “Sasha is not an altogether decent character,” although she or he is certain this is true, given the discussions of Sasha that happened yesterday. The strength of such eve­n ings is that they are recurring mini Last Suppers, where anyone can become Christ for the eve­ning, sharing with his ​or her friends special truths, aesthetic judgments, or moral commandments. And the mystery has to do with the elaboration of something mystical and incomprehensible that brings us all together, that makes us one—­that is, something you feel with your body or heart, but which your reason usually fails to notice. This mystery has to do with the elaboration of the subcode, which unites us tacitly albeit firmly. If we accept the fact that the subcode is the means for establishing friendship as participation and complicity, on the model of Holy Communion,  35 

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then we might note another latent function of the subcode, as captured in the famous definition of the friend in Christ by Pope Gregory the ­Great in the sixth ­century. This definition was reproduced in one of the most popu­lar trea­suries of knowledge in the medieval Latin world, the Etymologiae, compiled by Saint Isidore of Seville: the friend is the custos animi.33 In other words, a friend is someone who engages in the cura of our soul, who cares for and curates it, even to the point of sending regular zero-­content text messages on a mobile phone, which is in fact an instrument of maintenance and care. This theme is also a fairly constant one in lit­er­a­t ure and the correspondence of friends. Kalugin cites many opinions on the role of the friend as the physician of the soul, including the oratory of Feofan Prokopo­vich, one of the main advisors and ideologues of Peter the ­Great in the early eigh­teenth c­ entury. Prokopo­vich urged his listeners to inspire, teach, admonish, and exhort their friends.34 ­There are also indirect forms of such friendly admonition, of course. Instead of boring friends by directly edifying them, it’s better to unobtrusively appeal to the common moral judgments elaborated in the pro­cess of constructing and reconstructing the subcode. When ­things of the heart are spoken of with heartfelt friends, the individual changes and corrects him-­or herself practically without noticing it: curating the soul is an impor­tant function of friendship. Third, this subcode is precisely that common ­thing, which distinguishes ­today’s psychologized friendship from earlier dominant forms—­for example, contract friendship, friendship between princes or friendship with one’s retinue. We can easily find all the other con­temporary common ­things (or their analogues) in the friendships of the past. As Roshchin shows, what we are now inclined to call international friendship (which in the M ­ iddle Ages or the early modern period was friendship between sovereigns or between sovereigns and vassals) had many qualities in common with modern friendship between unique individuals. ­These relationships often ­were flagrantly instrumental and contractual, of course (the friend of my friend is your friend; the ­enemy of my b­ rother is your e­ nemy), but who would argue that such obligations to render aid and demarcate and maintain the bound­aries of friendship ​ and enmity are also not characteristic of con­temporary personal friendships? (Anyone who does not see this should participate in the drawing of lines and disintegration into cliques that takes place among the friends of a ­couple ­after their divorce. In many cases, you have to choose whom to help: being equally  36 

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the friend of both parties very often is simply impossible in Rus­sia.) Of course, in this “international” friendship, offers of friendship w ­ ere made to counter­ parts in a flagrant way (“I wish to take you into friendship and love”) that would be impossible in ­today’s interpersonal relationships. But who would deny that modern offers of personal friendship seek the same t­ hing, albeit without employing t­ hese par­tic­u ­lar terms and discursive tactics? We are forced to conclude that, while it has the same basis, con­temporary interpersonal friendship simply erects new meanings and know-­how onto the instrumental and contractual relations of the impersonal friendship that was hegemonic ­until the advent of the modern era—­that is, friendship between influential aristocrats and their lesser folk, or between sovereigns and princes of vari­ous stations. We can now provide a more precise definition of the difference between po­liti­cal and personal types of friendship. The superstructure added to the instrumental and impersonal friendship of antiquity and the M ­ iddle Ages is the subcode that is practiced t­oday within circles of friends—­t hat is, the par­t ic­u ­lar forms of speech in which friendship is embodied. It is in fact impossible to imagine medieval sovereigns parodying Georgian or other ethnic accents, saying “cakey” instead of “cake,” or asking each other, “Well so, Nikolyan, was that a sweet r­ ide that just rolled up to Zhorzhik’s place?” Sovereigns are all about supremacy and “your lordship,” not the warmth of shared experiences that ­were “cool” or “rad.”

1.4 ​Personal and Po­liti­cal Friendship We can also try grasping the difference between instrumental po­liti­cal friendship and (allegedly) altruistic interpersonal friendship in a dif­fer­ent way, by examining how the term “friendship” is used in con­temporary Rus­sian speech when ­these phenomena are discussed. As Fedorova notes, po­liti­cal friendship is almost never a subject of action in con­temporary Rus­sian.35 Only personal friendship is active and in the pink, so to speak: it is only of this form of friendship that we say that it acts, grows, develops, ­etc. On the contrary, when we speak of po­l iti­cal friendship (that is, of states or other large units of action), we use passive voice constructions: we say that it is established, preserved or strengthened. In this sense it differs ­little from the descriptions that Roshchin rec­ords in his article, from Roman treaties ­until texts of the eigh­ teenth ­century, when the works of Samuel Pufendorf ­were translated into  37 

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Rus­sian. During this period, it still could be said that the Romans “brought into friendship” the barbarian p­ eoples they vanquished, but friendship itself could not be an actor. Similarly, in con­temporary Rus­sian, when instrumental relations between an individual and some higher authorities or other power­f ul entities (for example, gangsters of the 1990s) are described, then it is usually said that a given person “established” or “made friendship with” ­these parties. The connotation h ­ ere is most often negative: according to the normative criteria of personal friendship, it should be disinterested, something that is practiced among equals, and it springs up on its own, without the dirty machinations of vile intent. It is, however, largely pointless to criticize ­these types of instrumental friendship, applying to them the standards of con­temporary interpersonal friendship. International friendship was sometimes based on the common ­things—­for example, common armies and common sacrifices—­and such sacrifices are also impor­tant for personal friendship—­but it has never been based on the elaboration of the discursive subcode that generates and accompanies emotional intimacy.36 Instrumental friendship in domestic politics was once perceived as a norm in the patron–­client relations, but now it appears to be immoral, dominated by such despised quality as a thirst for money or power. Such vertical style friendship, however, likewise never presumed the elaboration of a friendly subcode (this index of high intimacy among equals), so why should we use feelings and equality as our criteria when we evaluate it? Besides, we know quite well that “true” friendship of equals who are sincerely emotionally attached to one another is not totally f­ ree of instrumental interests. Still, interpersonal friendship (which primarily relies on the subcode, on this new common ­thing, or rather, on new, stable means of ­doing ­things together with words) obstinately depreciates and degrades the old types of friendship, which seem un-­modern or pre-­modern insofar as they rely on much more palpable and crude common t­hings—on eating and drinking, on battlefields and places of prayer, on bills and books. However, instead of criticizing the old friendships from the spiritual heights of the new (that is, criticizing them for being down-­to-­earth or despicable) or from a place of spiritual profundity (that is, criticizing them for shallowness and pettiness), might it not be pos­si­ble to see them more pragmatically? Criticism brings plea­sure to the person ­doing it and irritation to the person who is an object of it, but it rarely allows us to move forward to 38 

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gether. But this is exactly what we could do if we reassembled the phenomenon of friendship—if we could reload the basic rules of friendship’s matrix, as in the well-­k nown eponymous film. As I already said, ­there are two differences, and they are pretty straightforward. First, in con­temporary Rus­sian parlance, personal friendship is seen as active, whereas po­l iti­cal friendship is passive. Second, personal friendship is based primarily on the relatively newly emergent subcode of friendly interaction. Po­liti­cal friendship is based on weightier, more fundamental common ­things. Reassembly can therefore be pursued along two vectors. The first is that we might try to help po­liti­cal friendship become an active dramatis persona—or rather, to change our lives in such a way that speech acts attributing the role of an actor to po­liti­cal friendship become both pos­si­ble and regular occurrences. It is not our personal friendship alone that should actively develop, blossom, and bloom. Perhaps it is b­ ecause we Rus­ sians are so enchanted by its fragrance that we do not give po­liti­cal friendship even the whiff of a chance to rise from the distant rumbling of cannons to the sweet smelling blossoming of civic life? If we create spaces for interaction and give the agents of po­liti­cal friendship the chance to elaborate a new subcode for communication, might this not increase its chances of becoming an active force in civic life? To give politics a special language that would quickly and unproblematically allow its participants to become special and valued persons on the basis of their sharing a common history—­this is one pos­si­ble vector of reassembly. Conversely, in personal friendship, the subcode not only gives its ­adepts the capacity for unhindered comprehension and compassion; it also sets the stage for being a valuable counter-­agent in this intercourse. It makes it pos­si­ble to be other (drugoi) while being a friend (drug).37 This is exactly what con­temporary Rus­sian politics does not provide. The second vector of change starts from the fact that the superstructure of personal friendship’s elegant subcode rises on the weighty material supports and fetters of the community of friends. Should this combination be the obligatory normative model for all types of friendship? And should this superstructure link only three, four, five or a dozen friends? Perhaps the closed communities of interpersonal friendships would not perish if they made less use of watchwords and passwords of the subcode—­and thus simply widened the circle of p­ eople admitted to t­ hose places where this subcode is produced and reproduced? Perhaps by widening access to the forges of the  39 

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subcode we could achieve the emergence of more numerous groups formed just like personal friendships, but in an environment slightly less freighted with private meanings. And once we had increased the number of ­people participating in friendship, we could thus achieve more global goals—­civic goals, that is—­than the s­ imple maintaining of friendship? For example, specially arranged type of public speech is used to make ­people effectively and efficiently converse in parliaments—­see the treatise by Erskine May on how to speak in the House of Commons or the House of Lords (first published in 1844, now in its 26th edition)—or in civil society associations, like the 12th edition of Robert’s Rules of Order, which is widely used in the U.S.38 We know the basic ways to vivisect the flesh of un­regu­la­ted conversation in order to allow parliamentary and civil gatherings to arrive at judgments on what they want and what they ­w ill do: no speaking in personalities, addressing just the chairperson of a meeting, a motion on the “point of order” if the pre-­set agenda is ­violated, ­etc. Perhaps the subcode of interpersonal friendship could be transformed a bit along similar lines to allow for some of the ele­ments that are found in the language of public or civil gatherings. ­These gatherings sometimes espouse common feelings and proximity also, even if their codes of conduct often seem hopelessly formalized from the standpoint of the everyday communication of personal friends. The double approach is thus clear: in the first instance, we shift po­l iti­cal friendship in the direction of personal friendship; in the second, we make the latter move closer to the former. To be precise, t­ here are four, not two, vectors for changing friendship within the outlined system of coordinates (­whether in ordinary parlance a given type of friendship takes the place of an active or passive agent, and w ­ hether a subcode of friendly intercourse has been elaborated within it). The two vectors we have just discussed are about 1) elaborating a subcode of warm communication in a po­liti­cal friendship, and 2) extending the scope of interpersonal friendship so that it links not just a circle of close friends, but larger groupings of ­people. The two other pos­ si­ble vectors are, 3) “passivisation” of personal friendship, or making it the passive object influenced by outside forces—­that is, to diminish its status as an active agent in such a way that it would only be imposed and maintained like the friendship of international agreements, and 4) attempting to “activate” po­l iti­cal friendship without developing the subcode, so that friendship between, say, France and Germany (or within the EU as a w ­ hole) and the un 40 

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equal friendship of a minister with his subordinates would “strengthen” and “grow” only on the basis of already existing common t­ hings (like their existing offices and circulating papers). However, vectors three and four seem to me neither in­ter­est­i ng nor promising. While articulating ­these vectors of po­liti­cal and personal friendships converging, we should stress, however, that friendship is not a group, and a plan for reassembly should deal not only with the rearrangement of common ­things (including a subcode), but also with what happens with them. Let us take a closer look at how one may not only reassemble friendship, but also, perhaps, transfigure it, as an event.

1.5 ​Reassembling or Transfiguring Friendship? Bruno Latour’s book, Reassembling the Social, opens with a discussion of how groups are not something suspended in a condition of “social givenness,” but rather, ­they’re the outcomes of constant efforts to form and reform them. A condition of successful formation is quite often the emergence of one person who speaks for the group; this has been well described by Pierre Bourdieu in a number of his works. Another such condition can be the performative act of naming the group, which leads it out of nonexistence into an existence that is grasped by its members, who thus recognize a certain right to represent them on the part of the person who performed this act of naming. An example of this performative act (something that seemed wildly bold in the mid-­seventies, but seems conventional ­today) is the statement made by the activist and renowned Marxist gender studies scholar Catherine MacKinnon: “You are all exploited ­women.” In order to have a chance at existence, any group must apprehend itself in a certain form, acquire a mea­sure of stability, and find a speaker for itself. Only a­ fter this formation pro­cess has taken place can we see the emergence of an agent who is responsible for its actions. Considering the crucial role of the speaker who represents the group, friendship evidently is not a group. It is easy to imagine that someone can speak for the employees of the Eu­ro­pean University or on behalf of oppressed ­women, but how can the speech act “I speak on behalf of our friendship” be rendered acceptable? Let me briefly restate the findings of the first part of our research. Another person is called “friend” to his or her face when he or she is not yet or is no longer a friend. Third parties are told something about  41 

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“friends” primarily to demarcate social space and to include or exclude the addressee in the circle of friendship. In the third person, the “friend” is always spoken of as belonging to someone, as someone’s friend. Instead of the presence of a group, we always find the absence of friend or friendship. Instead of an actor to whom we can assign responsibility, we are always referred to an other or ­others who in the final analy­sis are responsible for the actions of the given friend.39 T ­ hese characteristics prob­ably signify that the position of a speaker on behalf of this ever-­retracting presence of friendship is fundamentally impossible, and that friendship cannot function as a group. In the way that’s reminiscent of Arendt, Latour argues that the actions of a par­tic­u­lar actor are always captured or appropriated by another or ­others; they are not the product of this agency alone.40 For example, the war in Iraq was unleashed by some kind of actor. But how do we designate that actor? Or rather, how do we represent it to the outside world? Depending on which referential mediators to empirical real­ity we choose, we might say that it was “imperialism,” “the U.S. military-­i ndustrial complex,” “George W. Bush,” or “officers and twenty neocons in the Pentagon.” Of course, writes Latour, none of ­these figurations of the actor that began the war is more correct than any of the rest. (We w ­ on’t discuss h ­ ere why p­ eople are inclined to choose one or another figuration.) It is vital to examine which mediators are mobilized by which figurations, and how ­these mediators transform the action ­after it has begun, insofar as dif­fer­ent intermediaries have dif­fer­ent goals and unique dynamics: “imperialism” looks in one direction, “twenty neocons” in another, “the US military-­industrial complex” in yet another. In other words, ­these mediators behave in dif­fer­ent ways as they realize the common, declared goal of this action. At the least, we hope that the goals of the officers and the goals of imperialism might not or should not always overlap. In the final analy­sis, the action of one is always captured by the actions of a multitude of o ­ thers: as they mediate, they change the initial goals of this actor, replacing it (even if temporarily) with their own goals. It is curious that for phrases featuring the term “friend,” this conception of action is not a profound philosophical hypothesis, but the most basic empirical real­ity. One may recall that in ordinary Rus­sian phrases, the discrete “friend” is almost never presented as an in­de­pen­dent actor. On the contrary, the Rus­sian language ascribes the quality of in­de­pen­dent action only to an actor in the plural known as “friends.” It is almost always “friends” who act,  42 

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and when one friend achieves an outcome, it is always clear to other friends (and offensive, if she or he does not admit this) that she or he in part used their common efforts, ideas or resources. Therefore she or he can even seem to be a usurper or expropriator of someone e­ lse’s individual ideas or resources. In other words, the book or story that circulates within the circle of friends hardly belongs to anyone, or it might be said to belong to every­one. It is moot to try to remember among friends whose money had paid for what was eaten and drunk (­unless ­there was a prior agreement to compensate the purchaser for his or her expenses). What is expended is expended in common and together: when friendship has set in, t­ here is no point shaking your fists (or your wallet).41 That is, the action of one friend (who, as we recall, is always presented as “someone’s” friend when she or he is described to third parties) is always intercepted and captured by other friends, and the outcome of the action is always the outcome of the actions taken by the entire circle of friends. The originality of Latour’s theory is well known. In his view, it is not only ­people who act (and not only t­hings, as is often thought by t­hose who accuse him of mystical nonsense or technological determinism), but networks of p­ eople and ­things, whose apparent capacities to act are reassigned and redistributed. Thus, when we investigate friendship, we have to examine how the friend changes when she or he is given a significant t­ hing or when this ­t hing is used in common. It is customarily believed that such ­t hings are merely the means of actions by friends, and that they honestly and faithfully realize the goals of ­those who have endeavored to use them. For example, when books, CDs, and DVDs return from circulation unaltered, then it appears that their only function was to maintain existing relations. But perhaps this is not quite the case. If it is networks of ­things and ­people that do the acting, we might see the role of ­simple ­things differently. ­Shouldn’t the friend have changed at least a ­l ittle bit ­after reading the book or watching the film? Other­w ise, what was the sense of this reading or viewing? And what if she or he d­ idn’t like the book or disc? Has the t­ hing now returned to its original owner—­the intermediary of communication—­changed in the pro­cess? Physically, perhaps not, but it did leave him or her as the mysterious herald of something unknown to his or her friend, and now has come back grasped and more or less mastered. T ­ hings change; they are not pure means. They serve as mediators as well, and they have a dynamic of their own in the network.  43 

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In other words, it is not only other friends who function as the mediators of any friend’s action, but other significant t­ hings as well. Interobjectivity is no less vital than intersubjectivity, despite the fact that u ­ ntil recently sociology has not paid it proper attention. This study of interobjectivity illuminates many ­t hings when we examine the possibilities for reassembling a phenomenon like friendship. By way of an example, let us ask a question. Are social networks like Facebook​.­com or odnoklassniki.ru (“classmates.ru”) merely means for communicating with friends, or should we recognize them as active agents since they may not only mediate but also change friendship? In fact, they are neither the one nor the other. We give ­things new capacities for structuring our actions, and they give us new possibilities for connecting with friends and with t­ hings. The network of t­ hese connections and our capacities for action are thus restructured. For example, the technical scripts embedded in the software of t­ hese sites allow the user to create a par­tic­u­lar category on their home page—­“ friends,” whose photos are placed t­ here along with links to their pages. For this to happen, you have to ask permission from the potential friend. However, when someone asks them to accept him as a friend (in Rus­sian computer slang, frend; ­there is a verb zafrendit’, literally “to make a friend,” as well), Rus­sians are confronted with an unexpected situation: they are asked to become friends, but not the way it happens in real life, where such offers are rare once ­you’ve passed kindergarten, but the way it prob­ably happens in Amer­i­ca (or so Rus­sians think). Moreover, relationships on t­ hese sites are so superficial, and one’s obligations as a frend are so far from ­those of “true” friendship, that refusing to accept someone’s request could be seen as the height of rudeness. The situation is complicated by the fact that some of ­these sites might better be called losers.ru: from the viewpoint of a successful and perpetually busy person, the ­people who clamor to be one’s friends ­either have the time to aimlessly surf the Internet for hours on end or want to use their new or restored friendship for personal gain. As Latour writes, the Internet is a splendid t­ hing ­because it mirrors the functioning of the soul and society, not b­ ecause (as is alleged) it alters this society.42 The Internet helps us understand that our subjective capacities are the outcome of the current distribution of certain capacities for action within the network of p­ eople and ­things into t­ hose that are allegedly characteristic of subjects and t­ hose that can be left to objects (or have been actively appro 44 

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priated by them). Even within this distribution, however, ­there is an operative princi­ple that gauges the adequacy of our capacity for action and the situation in which we might begin to apply it. In the Internet, this is called a plug-in, a supplementary program that has to be downloaded in order to use a given site. That is, in the Internet, the plug-­in—­the means of setting the capacity to react appropriately in a given situation—is a quality of ­things (of programs) rather than the property of ­people, which it seemed to be in life before the Internet. In theory, the soul can be represented as an assemblage of such adaptations and plug-­ins. To adequately inscribe yourself in a local situation, you have to download the right plug-­i ns. For example, when you arrive in a new country and intend to live t­ here, you try to do this as quickly as pos­si­ble ­because this enables you to have an adequate grip on the situation. In this sense, friendship is just another tiny country: as Gladarev has shown in his research, the prob­lems of translation and comprehension are minimized within the network of friends. To put it in the technical language of computers, we could say that the subcode is the means of constantly and appropriately upgrading the plug-­i ns of all users in a local network. If we apply considerations of interobjectivity and intersubjectivity to the question of friendship, we might ask: what set of plug-­ins should we download to be an adequate friend? We all know that not ­every smile or hug is friendly.43 It is hard to fulfill the role of a friend who is happy to see someone if you smile like a six-­month-­old infant. But what are the plug-­i ns for t­ oday’s friendship, and where does their downloading happen? And what malfunctions are pos­si­ble when downloading? Are ­there p­ eople (Don Quixotes who do not fit into the new situation) still using Friendship-­Russia 2.1, even though every­one e­ lse has already upgraded to the 4.1 version? If so, how do they solve compatibility issues, like the fact that certain external stimuli are simply unreadable for them? With the help of a mediator named Sancho, or with the help of mediating t­ hings? I once wrote about Latour that t­ hings for him do not play the traditional roles of tools (for realizing the subject’s goals), vessels (for containing the ­ hose meaning the subject ascribes to them), or arenas where subjects meet.44 T aspects of the relationship of t­ hings and ­humans that are not captured by ­these threadbare meta­phors can be called (as does Latour, following Deleuze) bends or folds.45 ­People are enfolded into ­things, or they bend them. Or ­things  45 

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bend them in such a way that they might break. ­These are also all meta­phors, of course, like the lyr­ics in the song by the veteran Rus­sian rock band Time ­ nder pressure from this fickle world / Some Machine: “It’s not worth bending u day it ­will bend ­under pressure from us!” With frequent use, however, a meta­ phor can be turned into a scientific notion. And we can perhaps see the nature of the coupling / entwining / enfolding of p­ eople and t­ hings more legibly if we examine the source of this notion itself. It w ­ ill then also be clear not only how we might reassemble friendship (this meta­phor implies an image of friendship as something like a child’s Lego set, which can be disassembled and then reassembled), but also how we might change the current fold or bend. Should we make personal friendship closer to po­liti­cal friendship, for example, or the po­liti­cal closer to the personal? This is the question I posed several pages back, but how do we do this without stretching or overbending the lever? In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze relies on the concept of the incorporeal ­thing in the teachings of the Stoics and elaborates a detailed notion of events as happening, as it ­were, on the surface of ­things (hence his l­ater meta­phors of the fold, the geology of morals, e­ tc.).46 In the doctrine of the Stoics, the incorporeal does not relate to corporeal t­ hings in the same way that the ideal relates to the material in Plato or Descartes. The Stoics do not describe the incorporeal as an accident of a certain substance, but as an attribute or incorporeal effect of corporeal phenomena—­that is, as an effect on the surface of corporeal t­ hings. It was this that enabled Deleuze to make short work of Platonism and its derivative Cartesianism and introduce a dif­fer­ent logic of practice. In short, as an incorporeal effect of corporeal t­ hings, the event emerges in the folds of corporeal t­ hings, ­things that can be touched. Long and Sedley decipher the complicated notion of the incorporeal in the doctrine of the Stoics in the following way.47 The Stoics held that the phrase “Socrates is walking” is not situated in the same world where we find his body, but in the world of incorporeal effects, which are captured by verbs or oblique forms of the noun. It is no accident that our word for “case” in both En­glish and Rus­sian derives from the verb “to fall” (cadere in Latin), and that the word “declension” invokes the meta­phors of bending and folding. The Stoics, from whom we inherit the habitual titles for t­ hese grammatical categories, had embodied in them their philosophical ontology. Bodies stoop, bend over, and fall, and grammatical forms capture ­these changes in corpo 46 

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real dispositions. According to the Stoics, however, the world in which this is pos­si­ble is the world of incorporeal effect, not the world of bodies. What changes as a result of the phrase “Socrates is walking” is an effect in the world of meanings. The predisposition of his body now appears in a dif­fer­ent light; a change in the corporeal world cannot be produced from out of the phrase. That is, what changes is the predisposition of the body, not the body itself; falling, twisting or bending are captured at a minimum in the verbal forms. It is not the alteration of other bodies that is the effect of bodies, but the emergence of incorporeal effects—in the world of the sayable (in Greek, lekton), not the world of the corporeal. The event is an ele­ment of this world of meanings, as Deleuze notes.48 It does not exist on the level of the corporeality of the sign itself, or on the level of the t­hing (the denotatum of the sign), or on the level of the sincerity of the speaker’s intentions. The event is an effect of the corporeal world, but it is an effect that happens with the dispositions of discrete bodies of this world, on their surface, when they begin to fall, bend, and decline in a dif­fer­ent way. It is not my task to explain the complicated Stoic doctrine of the incorporeal in the space of two pages.49 Thanks to this excursus, however, we might catch sight of something that is impor­tant for our meditation. Understood according to this model, as an event as defined in the doctrine of the Stoics and in Deleuze’s conception, friendship lies as it ­were on the surface of bodies. It is situated on the surface of networks of ­things and ­people. Friendship is an event understood as an effect of the constellation of bodies (of ­people and of ­things). Many readers ­w ill ask, “Why such a complicated thesis?” For ordinary consciousness, it is clear: the effect of the event arises when, a­ fter an encounter with friends, you understand that something special has just happened and you can express this fact in a meaningful phrase, so that the world looks a bit dif­fer­ent from how it looked before. A new meaning has emerged. Without t­hese novel meanings (although it produces them regularly and almost automatically, like a con­vey­or ­belt spitting out new goods), friendship would simply be a machine operating according to a tedious set of instructions, usable with an own­er’s manual in hand. Friendship can therefore be reassembled only if, as we unpack its material-­corporeal ele­ments, we also do not forget to pay attention to another of its aspects, the surface-­like generation of meaning. Friendship is an event that generates new meaning,  47 

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although it is based on long-­familiar common ­things. Without new meaning emerging into the world ­there is no friendship; a s­ imple rearrangement of the ele­ments of a given friendship (both p­ eople and ­things) would be senseless in that it would give no sense to the world and would make no sense to its participants. If we reinterpret this ordinary perception (of why sense-­making is part of any friendship) on the basis of our analy­sis in this chapter, we see, however, that t­ here are dif­fer­ent types of friendship. T ­ hose types based on the subcode of communication among friends generate personal meanings. ­Those that do not have this subcode generate po­liti­cal or public meanings. And all t­ hese types transfigure bodies and t­ hings (first and foremost, common ­things), whose incorporeal effect or attribute is in fact friendship. We might even say that both types of friendship trans-­figure ­these corporeal ele­ments: a certain figure or image appears as if on the surface of ­t hese ­t hings and bodies, and only it gives meaning to what unfolds. The word “image” in Russian—­obraz—­comes from verb obrezat’, “to cut or trim,” but ­here it is meant in the sense of “to cut into form or shape,” as when a board is planed and trimmed for a ­f uture icon, for an obrazok (a small icon). In this case as well, physical operations with ­things produce an incorporeal, event-­producing effect. To give more of a public dimension to a space where personal meanings are produced, and more of a personal dimension to po­liti­cally meaningful but personally meaningless friendship: is not this the task of its transfiguration?

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2 Res Publica in Words and ­Things

Res publica is a term that has ­things almost written in its very structure, given that the Latin term res can designate dif­fer­ent concerns—­things as well as acts, for example. Hence, it was tempting to study two ave­nues of looking at ­things in res publica. On the one hand, I searched historical sources for attention to an intertwining, folding, or, if one is allowed to use such a nonconventional term, a real hurly-­burly of ­things and ­people called res publica.1 But I also tried analyzing con­temporary examples of res publica in Rus­sia, if one understands this term to mean not only la chose publique, as the French would say, but also les choses publiques, that is, a multiplicity of ­things that tie or bring ­human communities together. We also remember that for classical concerns of Aristotle, Polybius or Cicero, res publica could have 6 forms, three of which are good (monarchy, aristocracy, or politeia are the forms of this “public ­thing” when it is respectively governed by one, a few, or all in the interest of all), and three of which are bad or corrupt (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy arrive when one, few, or all start governing in the interests of themselves first and foremost, with the last form being unstable and fickle b­ ecause the crowd and its emotions rule the day). If res publica is not necessarily a good ­thing, shining like liberty or justice with only positive connotations, applying this concept to con­temporary life in Rus­sia, which is frequently characterized in po­l iti­cal science as an authoritarian regime, seems justified. Perhaps, one could suggest, t­ here are a lot of common ­things in Rus­sia, but no real  49 

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freedom and justice. Then how is this overabundance of c­ ommon things linked to the relative dearth of, say, po­liti­cal liberty? Addressing this set of questions, I undertook two parallel studies. The first was intended to analyze the phenomenon of the res publica of the Romans—­what we sometimes uncritically take to be their form of “state” or “society,” even if the state and society as we now understand them could have been for the Romans largely incomprehensible and a t­ hing of the distant ­f uture.2 It would be better, perhaps, to take res publica to be a sort of a Wittgensteinian form of life, distinct from other configurations of practices ­ atter, universitas, such as, for example, the polis or Christianitas or, for that m or state and society. All of ­t hese configurations have specific names for a reason. They are not synonymous, and they involve dif­fer­ent tangible and fleeting ele­ments in their very special entanglements, singling out the ­human and non-­human aspects of their interactions / foldings / intertwinings in their own way. The second study was concerned with an analy­sis of the centrally impor­ tant ­things in the communal life of a modern Rus­sian city. Based on field research of heating and w ­ ater supply systems in modern Rus­sian municipalities and apartment blocks (condominiums), it drew conclusions about the features of networks and practices of con­temporary Russians—if not about society as a w ­ hole, then at least about such assemblages of h ­ uman and non-­ 3 human ele­ments as cities and condominiums. In terms of methods, the first study was closer to the history of concepts or “the games of truth,” as Foucault would call it. That is, it attempted to analyze the historical practices of truth production characteristic of Roman forms of life in order to assess this pragmatic background for pos­si­ble discourses on res publica. The second study relied on the ANT (actor-­network theory) of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, but applied this to an object, still unanalyzed at the time—­a normal Rus­sian city.

2.1 ​Analy­sis of Res Publica The history of the concept of res publica, as well as the cata­loguing of all types of practical situations in which this phenomenon was involved, was first done by assiduous Germans like Rudolf Stark and Hans Drexler, to whose work Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte dictionary now sends us. Stark, for example,  50 

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argued in his 1937 dissertation that the term populus, from which the term publicus developed, was etymologically linked to the Indo-­European *pl-­plo, which was converted into the Church Slavonic тълпа, or the Rus­sian tolpa, “crowd.” Thus, the term res publica initially signified ­things belonging to the populus as the armed p­ eople, for example, plunder seized by the Roman legions. With time it came to signify not only this set of objects, or separate transactions with this property, but all m ­ atters associated with it. From t­ here it was only one step t­ oward the personification of res publica and its anthropomorphic representation—as having a body and organs, belongings, emotions, ­etc.4 French Classicists, like Yan Thomas, however, have tried to reject this rather ­simple scheme for the development of the concept of res publica, as if this term at first had merely signified an object of possession, and only ­later did the notion of an acting subject emerge. Thomas might have thought that Stark simply tried to read the categories of subject-­object dialectics into a more complex historical material, particularly b­ ecause in other Germans, like Drexler, we find an exhaustive study that cata­logues all the complexities of such an interpetation of the term res publica.5 Thomas himself emphasized that the term res was initially used in Latin to describe litigation over ­things, and not ­things themselves.6 Only with time did attention shift from litigation to the object, over which the clash of interests occurred. Thus the term res eventually came to mean “­t hing,” and not just the litigious affair concerning ­things. The German authors would, nevertheless, perhaps repudiate quite a sizable part of Thomas’s arguments, as he had to resort to several loose and unorthodox interpretations of well-­k nown Latin texts. Still, his contribution undoubtedly lies in the fact that he drew our attention to a fundamental—or at least no less impor­tant, if not primary—­meaning of res as “contested ­matter.” Hence the meaning of res publica as a constantly contested state of affairs or interests of the public. Whence, then, this firm conviction that res publica is certain to refer to “public t­ hings,” a ­whole class of objects we can point to with a fin­ger or which can be touched? I tried to show that this is a consequence of the uncritical perception of modern textbook terminology on Roman law, which repeats the classifications of famous Roman l­awyers who had tried to summarize vari­ous laws and decrees at the times of the republic and the empire. Textbooks thus state that res publicae (the plural form of the term) ­were, for  51 

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example, paved roads or navigable rivers, the use of which may have lead to conflict, hence they had to be regulated. This is distinct from res omnia communes, such as the ­waters of the open sea, natu­ral daylight, and air accessible to all according to natu­ral law. Res publicae ­were also distinct from res universitatis, the ­things belonging to a municipality or corporations such as public buildings or stadiums; and from res nullius—­things that have not yet become someone’s property, or have been dropped thence for lack of use. All of ­these secular collective ­things ­were together distinct from ­things in private possession, res privatae; and from the sacred, res sacrae. Minute analy­sis shows, however, that in the texts of the Digests, Institutes, and Codex of emperor Justinian, the term res publicae (plural) was used mainly to signify a group of republics or communes. It also occurs several times in the generalized classifications of systems of ­things: for example, in the classification from Institutes II:1 to which I just referred in the previous paragraph, or in another classification by the Roman l­awyer Gaius in D.1.8.1pr. Several times the term res publicae is employed in the sense of “public affairs.” But aside from one exception in the w ­ hole corpus of t­ hese texts, the term is generally not used to denote certain “public t­ hings”!7 In the Justinian corpus the situation is dif­fer­ent with the term res publica (in the singular). This term is encountered much more commonly—­hundreds of times, in fact—as part of the idiom rei publicae causa abesse, “to be absent ­because [or “on affairs”—­O. Kh.] of res publica.” This expression was impor­ tant, considering the number of property and other claims that could befall a ­family during a soldier’s or an official’s extended absence during a military campaign or a business trip. In non-­idiomatic usage, however, the term does not occur as frequently, and we find the following. First, as a unit of responsibility, res publica has no definite common meaning, and we must define this word e­ very time via substitution (res publica is X, where X = municipality, provinces, the ­whole empire, ­etc.), depending on the context. Second, if it is difficult to define res publica by substitution, can we try defining it according to what it is not? Surely we could. In Justinian texts t­ here are, in opposition to res publica, units of “smaller scale,” such as guilds or corporations. Also dif­fer­ent from res publica is the fiscus, or fisc, the imperial (rather than republican) trea­sury. Third, ­there are statements regarding what res publica consisted of. In phrases that personify and anthropomorphize res publica, we find bodily meta­phors of the ligaments, supports, and adornments of res publica,  52 

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and sometimes mention of its possessions, armies, and generals. But in the locutions where ­things or possessions are mentioned, not even once do we find sentences saying that t­ hese possessions and t­ hings are themselves res publica. It turns out to be that the term signified ­things in Roman law only when used in the plural, and when employed in a small number of scholarly classifications written for the systematization of Roman ­legal experience and used for teaching ­these generalizations in law schools.8 Of course, very few l­egal documents from the republican era remain. Therefore it is difficult to make a disciplined comparison of the situation as portrayed in Justinian’s Digests and Codex, with what had been alleged about res publica during, say, Cicero’s time. But ­here we can analyze what Cicero himself and his contemporaries had to say on the m ­ atter. Ciceronian treatises offer a definition of the very phenomenon—­res publica is res populi, a ­thing or property of the ­people (De re publica I: 39)—­and describe the conditions of the presence or loss of res publica. Res publica exists when ­there exists a p­ eople (populus) that is a real master of its possessions. It is lost when someone ­else begins to command t­ hese assets. The populus is not, however, just any crowd of ­people living together, and not “a collection of ­human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of p­ eople in large numbers associated in an agreement with re­spect to justice (iuris consensu) and a partnership for the common good (utilitatis communione sociatus).” As we learn further from the famous exposition in De re publica I: 39–42, the fact that populus is a multitude of p­ eople tied by consensus iuris, or a mutual sentiment on issues of law, is predicated on the establishment and maintenance of vinculum iuris, “the bond that originally joined the citizens together in the partnership of res publica.”9 My exposition ­will largely ignore the Latin expression utilitatis communio, which is part of Cicero’s definition of populus; it means “communion, partaking in the m ­ atters of utility.” The dictionary by Lewis & Short states that the term communio, meaning “communion, mutual participation,” was used during the republican era several times by Cicero but was rare elsewhere. It became widespread a­ fter the arrival of Chris­tian­ity, when it was employed to designate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.10 In the lines of Cicero that we are analyzing, we find “partaking in the ­matters of utility” together with iuris consensus, an agreement or even co-­sensing, sharing a common feeling or intuitions on the ­matters of justice. This coupling of utility and justice is  53 

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quite traditional for ancient thought, which was preoccupied with a choice between a just deed, done in accordance with the law, and a useful one, when one could ignore the law in order to gain. In Cicero we thus find this traditional opposition of ius and utilitas, but it is impor­tant that ­after mentioning both parts of this opposition in the initial formulation in De rep. I: 39, in the exposition that follows he pays attention only to ius, largely forgetting about utilitas. Many authors think that he dropped utilitas ­because it ­wasn’t central to republican concerns. Cicero concentrated on ius instead.11 Perhaps he chose to ignore the questions of shared utility b­ ecause it was clear to him that if we stay at the level of common use and striving for utility, we ­w ill not reach the level of res publica (even if we have to start from common useful t­ hings in a h ­ ouse or a city to eventually get to a civitas). By contrast, the presence or absence of consensus iuris, that is, agreement or perhaps—as the structure of the term con-­sensus suggests—­even a shared sense (extending even to a level of shared intuitions and sensibility) on the ­matters of justice is decisive. It shows w ­ hether the multitude has been transformed into a populus or not. In practical terms, most of the time this criterion means that every­one has equal rights of access to the pro­cesses of deliberation on the drawing and application of laws that affect all citizens. This shared practice of ­handling the promulgation, application, and enforcement of laws allows for a development of a shared sensibility that transforms a crowd or a gathering into a populus; it ties it into a ­whole with the help of this l­egal ligament, vinculum iuris. The argument in this excerpt from De re publica is pretty direct: the presence of this ligament elevates ­people, who in Rome had been initially united only by collections of common ­things such as dwellings, public spaces, and ­temples, to the level of res publica. In De officiis I:53, Cicero similarly mentions many ­things common to citizens (multa enim sunt civibus inter se communia); he starts from forums, t­emples, colonnades, and streets and then proceeds to mention statutes, laws, courts, rights of suffrage (and friendships and business partnerships on top of it all). The next few sentences in De officiis I:54 call the level of common t­ hings seminarium rei publicae, that is, the seed garden or a nursery for young sprouts of a res publica, where the seedlings of a republic that could grow from it are cultivated.12 In other words, common ­things are impor­tant as a base and beginning of res publica, though without the tie of law, res publica ­w ill not gestate.13  54 

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While considering in De re publica III: 43–44 examples of the usurpation of power in republics or t­ hose of them that fell u ­ nder tyranny—­the Decemviri in Rome, the reign of Thirty in Athens, or Dionysius I of Syracuse—­ Cicero showed that in ­these examples, common ­things remained but res publica vanished.14 The p­ eople could no longer control its possession, its “public ­thing.” And De officiis II: 29 says that a­ fter Caesar took power, “only the walls of the city (parietes modo urbis) remain standing—­and they themselves now fear the excesses of crime. The republic we have utterly lost, rem vero publicam penitus amisimus.”15 Logically, all of this gives us two versions of the loss of res publica: 1) ­either ­there was a populus, but it did not control its property ­because this property was seized and ruled by a tyrant, or 2) ­there potentially was a “property of the ­people” that could be reclaimed into ­people’s possession (say, ­there was an usurpation of power, but not for long), but the bond of law that had transformed the mere crowd or multitude into a populus disintegrated, and ­t here was no longer an owner to claim la chose publique. One can hypothesize that in practical terms, both situations boil down to the prob­lem of ensuring access to sites of production, application, and enforcement of law. ­These sites allow the ­people to e­ ither protect themselves from tyranny or reconstruct vinculum iuris, the tie of law that restores the ­ nder the Decemviri, for example, the ten lawmakers who populus to life. U had gathered and systematized the existing laws, then refused to disperse and blocked other citizens’ access to places where tablets bearing laws ­were located and where courts took place. Hope for a fair trial was gone. Therefore, it was only ­after the army returned to Rome (in the wake of a series of unjust t­ rials and a recent example of a most profound injustice) and restored the potential of equal access to all to places of law production and enforcement, having banished the Decemviri, that res publica was reborn.16 For a po­liti­cal theorist, knowledge of how Cicero came to ­these conclusions is no less in­ter­est­ing than what he said. Cicero’s theory could be positioned largely in opposition to Caesar’s statements, who famously suggested (as reported by Suetonius in Divus Julius 77) that res publica is an empty expression. The real issue, Caesar argued, was that all parties (then involved in the civil war in Rome) asserted that they knew the interests of res publica, and that it was precisely and only they who acted in its interest. But proving empirically who was right was impossible, as the expression res publica had  55 

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no clear referent in real­ity. Res publica had neither form nor body, Caesar argued; it was impossible to touch it or feel it, and consequently it would be best to avoid the expression altogether.17 Cicero, by contrast, believed that t­ here w ­ ere two dif­fer­ent classes of ­things—­those tangible ones that could be touched with the hands, and t­ hose that w ­ ere intelligible, that is, t­ hose that ­were imprinted upon the intellect ­after a more or less lengthy discussion. The result of such a discussion is conformatio insignita et impressa intellegentia, the correspondence between a sign and its imprint on the mind. Intelligible t­ hings, such as res publica or gens (clan or ­family), though not part of some realm of Platonic ideas, are no less real than a bull or a ­house. But they do exist differently. The term conformatio is related to the term informatio, which Cicero used to translate the Stoic term prolepsis, “prejudgment.” According to the Stoics, every­one was born with a set of such unenlightened prolepseis, but they had to be transformed into true knowledge through a discussion with a Stoic-­sage. In looking at the Latin roots of t­ hese two terms (conformatio and informatio), we can suppose that for Cicero the real­ity of the republic, brotherhood, or clan (or any group-­like phenomenon) was the real­ity of a progressive re-­formation of this phenomenon in the formulations of an ongoing debate. Thus, res publica has no body, but it does have form. The longer and more thorough is the pro­cess of this formation and reformation in subsequent reformulations—in which we might be facing completely dif­fer­ent interpretations of what res publica is or wants or needs—­the more realistic res publica ­w ill be. If we recall a thesis by Yan Thomas that res is the m ­ atter contested in litigation, then it happens that the more res publica is debated, the more real it is. It exists in the pro­cess of this constant contestation, which only strengthens its form and thus enhances and reinforces its claim to real­ity.18 Therefore, the form of the dialogue De re publica strove to achieve a similar effect, that the impressions of res publica be best imprinted in the minds of readers, thus making it more real. The dialogue’s hero Scipio first carefully defines or delineates the part of Roman life that the dialogue is concerned with. He then gives his own famous definition of res publica, and then, throughout five books, discusses its details, piling them up on one another in the minds of his interlocutors. The contours of res publica are thus gradually clarified and ­shaped in dialogue. I would suggest that Cicero could have hoped for the success of such a procedure for making res publica real for  56 

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the following reasons. First, he used strong rhetorical effects, which he had built into his exposition (more on this below). Second, he modified a strategy of definition, which he took from the Stoics. For us, the practices of definition seem self-­evident b­ ecause we unproblematically learn to practice them in school. At the time of the Stoics it was a sort of an innovation, not necessarily accessible or available to every­one by default, and one had to intentionally learn to do it first. This practice of “de-­fi nition,” as the term itself implies, primarily meant placing limits or delineation. Latin de-­finitio comes from fines, bound­aries, limits; its Greek equivalent term dihorezein, ­ fter delinmeaning “to mark the horizon,” comes from horos, boundary. A eating or fencing off the slice of ­human experience that one wished to speak about, it was necessary to equate the delineated phenomenon with something e­ lse. The Stoics offered two operations for this: e­ ither 1) definition, as it is known to us now, via a genus and subtype (that is, through indication of a common quality for a given kind of object, with the addition thereto of differentia specifica), or 2) definition through a proprium, a unique quality of the phenomenon being considered.19 The Ciceronian definition of res publica used strategy number two. Res publica res populi is direct; it does not offer a genus and differentia specifica, but rather points ­toward a unique essence of the considered phenomenon—­res populi. Cicero might have chosen this strategy of definition ­because he relied on a certain rhetorical strategy for greater persuasiveness. As we know from Malcolm Schofield, the ingenuity of Cicero the po­liti­cal phi­los­o­pher derived from the fact that for the first time in po­liti­cal theory, he defined civic community through res populi, the property of the p­ eople.20 Indeed, previous definitions of the polis did not concentrate on property issues that much, while Cicero based himself squarely on t­hose. But apart from this philosophical ingenuity, Cicero also demonstrated a rhetorical ingenuity. He used the second type of the Stoic definition, through a proprium, ­because at the time the word proprium also signified “property” as possessions. Thus definition through a unique trait—in Latin, proprium—­was immediately clear to all readers, since it si­mul­ta­neously referred to another meaning of the word proprium, that of property. This was doubly power­f ul rhetorically.21 Even triply, one could say, b­ ecause property understood, as it ­were, as ­things or tangible possessions, was pos­si­ble to touch! With the help of this, it was pos­si­ble to fight the Caesarist desire to condemn the term res  57 

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publica as lacking an empirical referent, and therefore meaningless or hopelessly partisan. Cicero modified the practices of Stoic definition, however, in that he did not intend only to examine inborn muddled “prejudgments” and offer clear philosophical definitions during his visit to the portico of a lonely sage for advice. (The name of this philosophical school, Stoa, comes from the architecture of the porticoes where Stoic phi­los­o­phers engaged in solitary discussions.) Instead, he opted to imprint a successful definition in the minds of thousands, and having honed it in public discussion, allow it not merely to form and take shape, but to solidify. His forensic speeches taught him how to convince the masses and to produce institutional real­ity as the result of a verdict at the end of a trial. This real­ity, as with res publica, was impossible to touch, but it was no less effective as a result. Thus it could seem that the book De re publica could work similarly. Caesar’s military innovations, however, overwhelmed Cicero’s intellectual innovations. The irony of history is that t­ hose who could read Cicero’s books or hear his speeches at the forum instead prepared the pages of the proscription lists u ­ nder which he was assassinated. Of course, Caesar’s desire to ban the term res publica did not work out in the long run ­either; outraged republicans soon stabbed the author of this wish to death. But the Caesarist strategy prevailed with time. At first Augustus, instead of discarding the term res publica, used it in ser­vice of the empire, having stated that in introducing one-­man rule, rem publicam in libertatem vindicavit, he has set ­f ree res publica, which was oppressed by the rule of the parties. The l­awyers of the days of the Empire could l­ater start clearly defining the category of res publicae (plural), thus providing the possibility of indicating tangible t­ hings in imperial life that stood ­behind this term: “You want res publica? Well h ­ ere they are, t­ hese t­ hings, and a lot of them!” At the end of the imperial period, Justinian, whose ­lawyers compiled the Digests, crowned it with a special, final 50th volume containing unambiguous definitions of terms. It was done most certainly for ease and consistency, but it also removed the possibility of republican dissent on a given issue. Frequently Justinian’s compilers had, like Caesar before them, forbidden the use of terms that had no obvious empirical referents. Thus the notion of res publica as a set of tangible “­things public” was introduced by imperial ­lawyers with imperial objectives in mind. The Ciceronian contest in front of the public, striving to best define  58 

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res publica and its interests, actions, and organs, was a ­thing of the distant past.22 Interestingly, this study of speech acts or discursive practices that employed the expression res publica brought us to the study of infrastructure. First of all, in order to provide the theoretical definition of res publica, Cicero had to pay attention to the infrastructure of equal access to sites of production, application, and enforcement of law. According to him, consensus iuris is a prerequisite for transforming a mere crowd or gathering into a populus, and this co-­sentiment on l­egal m ­ atters can be efficiently produced and fostered in joint activities while applying or enforcing the law. Second, we saw that from the standpoint of discursive practices, Cicero could have defeated the arguments of Caesar if he had had a readily available channel to reach the relevant audience with his rhetorical skills. This he could not achieve, as we know. So ­these reasons force us to realize that a study of seemingly innocuous words pushed us ­toward the study of infrastructures of access to sites of the verbal production of truth and institutional real­ity.

2.2 ​Analy­sis of Actor-­Networks of a Con­temporary City As a second way to approach the thinglyness of res publica, I deci­ded to take a closer look at the common ­things that lie at the foundation of con­temporary ­human communities by examining two types of networks in the modern city: at the city-­w ide level and at the level of the individual condominium, such as a separate multi-­apartment building or a series of such buildings united by a courtyard, if the condominium was located in the old center of the city.23 Fieldwork took place between 2005 and 2007 in Cherepovets and ­ ere selected based on dif­ St. Petersburg.24 ­These dif­fer­ent units of analy­sis w fer­ent property arrangements tying the ­humans together. ­After the introduction of the new Housing Code in Rus­sia in 2004, intra-­home common spaces and infrastructure outside of individual apartments became the common shared property of a condominium. The newly formed or legally registered condominia had to decide, in practice, what to do with this common property. At the city level, t­ hings ­were rather dif­fer­ent. If one believes the words of many Rus­sian city charters, the city also belongs to the townspeople, who own it through an elected mayor and local representative assemblies, such as the city council. In practice, however, the city is most often controlled by  59 

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a small number of urban administrators. City residents, de facto, are left only with the rights of use to general utilities, buildings, parks, e­ tc. Instead of engaging in the thankless business of criticizing the status quo, our research tried to look at empirical cases of the interaction between p­ eople and t­ hings in the context of repairs and alterations of the heat and w ­ ater supply in citywide and intra-­home utility networks. ­These objects of infrastructure are usually described in the sociology of Latour-­Callon as “black boxes”: one feeds in expected inputs, and gets out expected outputs. Pour fuel in the diesel engine and the motor ­w ill purr or rumble ­until this fuel runs out, ­whether or not you understand anything about diesel engines.25 Black boxes, however, reveal the social and technical components or forces they are composed of when they have to be rebuilt for repairs or during a general reconstruction or reconfiguration of a system. During such occasions, the black boxes open up slightly, revealing their princi­ples of functioning and allowing us to see which social and technical solutions led to the current state of the network. A more radical thesis of Latour states that during such reconfigurations, we can possibly spot which ele­ments and forces involved in a now working network w ­ ere post factum characterized as technical and which w ­ ere characterized as social, once the black box closed and the network started working. In this re­spect we expected the gradual decline of post-­Soviet infrastructure to lead to some particularly in­ter­est­ing findings. In discussions of breakdowns, repairs, or the reconstruction of utilities, we w ­ ere looking for the real secret of communal (or collective) life in the Rus­sian Federation, and not what the normative liberal-­democratic discourse required many po­liti­cal scientists and sociologists to look for heretofore. Also, if one takes a statement of Philip Pettit seriously—­that to become an effective po­l iti­cal force, republicanism should develop its solutions at the level of gas and w ­ ater works, like Fabian socialism once did—­t hen one should perhaps examine the gas and ­water works of quasi-­republican communities.26 A comparison of networks of techno-­social ele­ments that constitute a city, on the one hand, and a condominium, on the other, showed the following. In a typical Rus­sian city, one can find a large part of the network ele­ments also pres­ent in a typical condominium. ­These include founding documents, ­things in common use, and common symbols. However, in a city it is only very rarely pos­si­ble to find ­things that are commonly owned. A typical Rus­  60 

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sian city looks like ­t hose apartment buildings that did not adopt a legally binding juridical form of a condominium association. Such apartment blocks are still numerous in any Rus­sian city; a building then is linked by common ­things that tenants share, but do not own. In such buildings, a municipality claims property rights for the common areas and infrastructure of a given building, and ser­v ices ­t hose at the municipal expense, with tenants being charged for ­those ser­vices only ­later. Of course, this analogy has its limits. For example, city residents can reclaim their city (which belongs to them on paper, in the pages of city charters) partially and for a brief moment of time. This happens most often during serious technological breakdowns or natu­ral disasters, when they take to the streets and disaster sites, or flood the corridors of the city hall. In such situations they take the power of the city into their own hands, and thereby help administer the city, if only for a period of the disaster. But residents of apartment buildings without a legally registered condominium cannot even try retaking their common property; it simply does not exist. Of course, they can rush to the mayor’s office or to the office of a director of a municipal utility enterprise if a prob­lem is so serious that the usual municipal repair teams and methods cannot cope with it. But they do not own the building, while the city tenants allegedly do own their city. (I must add that, fortunately for Rus­sian cities, both situations—of citizens taking to the streets or city offices, and tenants of apartment blocks flooding offices of municipal officials—­occur rather rarely. Nobody wants activism at the price of disasters and power outages.) Based on this central contrast between full owner­ship and ­simple use of common ­things, our empirical study indicated three serious distinctions that distinguish the work of a network called a condominium and of a network called a city. T ­ hese are: first, the degree of conscious attention to the networked character of con­temporary life; second, the dif­fer­ent ways in which the black boxes functioned at the condominium and city level, and; third, the size of a studied network. Let us consider them one by one. First, workers and members of governing boards of condominia use much less network terminology than city man­ag­ers or municipal enterprise workers. Lines from transcripts of interviews of the former are full of mentions of sviazi, or “connections” rather than “networks.” Perhaps this is a consequence of the fact that in con­temporary urban Rus­sia, personal connections are decisive for solving the prob­lems of, say, privatizing land u ­ nder a given condominium  61 

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building or of getting city subsidies for a suddenly emergent need of roof repair. And, of course, such attention to network terminology at the city level is more natu­ral. If interpreting a multi-­apartment building to be a “network” of technical and non-­technical ele­ments can be treated as a successful (if non-­ obvious) meta­phor or heuristic device needed in so­cio­log­i­cal research, then, on the contrary, electric, gas, heating, w ­ ater supply, and drainage systems ­were throughout the twentieth c­ entury built and consciously perceived as grids or networks. ­There is, however, another component in this attention to networks. City administrators are proud of their networks. They even feel aggrieved when the population does not recognize their achievements. For example, a municipal utility com­pany administrator claimed in an interview that a­ fter the overhaul of main city supply pipes and pumping equipment, a super-­c lear ­water of almost Finnish or Swedish quality, was now ­r unning through the pipes of the local ­water fa­cil­i­t y. This could be related with pride to local journalists, or shown to del­e­ga­tions from the federal center, other Rus­sian regions, or the World Bank. Of course, very often the w ­ ater in the tap of the end consumer still smells of bleach. This is due to the fact that in-­house distribution pipework has not been repaired for twenty years or more, and this super-­clean ­water from the main pipes still needs to be chlorinated so that the microbes and other impurities of the last fifty meters of the distribution network do not poison the consumer. But public utilities and the committee of city government that supervises them have no relation to the fact that municipal companies renting out residential lodging (and the committee of city government that supervises them) perpetually lack money to change the intra-­home delivery network! The administrators can thus be proud of their achievements in their own posts; the fact that the end consumer does not receive efficient ser­vices does not especially concern them. The result is that the city, unlike the condominium, does not produce two of the main benefits that a condominium ensures—­safety and cleanliness. This is the second main distinction between the techno-­social network called a city and that called a condominium. This is, of course, related to the fact that residents do not in effect own their city, and thus its dirty appearance does not directly affect them. ­A fter all, that which does not belong to you does not directly affect your identity. On the contrary, the cleanliness of one’s apartment directly concerns its tenants’ personal identity, and thus the  62 

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cleanliness and beauty of one’s personal residence is an impor­tant ­human concern. In many urban buildings in Rus­sia, where tenants still ­haven’t agreed to start a legally registered condominium, you can see an abrupt transition between the entrance hallways and staircases—­w ith their stench and their ragged walls with peeling plaster—­and the apartment, where it smells good or fresh, and where shiny clean floors sparkle. It is perhaps high time that the Latour-­Callon conception of networks of techno-­social ele­ments working like “black boxes” should be amended a l­ ittle. They see a black box as an efficient machine that works unproblematically in the hands of users, not particularly knowledgeable about its origins or princi­ples of construction. The con­temporary Rus­sian city is effectively a machine that produces more in the way of pride than of technological efficiency. When we conducted interviews in the city of Cherepovets, for example, administrators, proud of the technically unique achievements of their networks, ­were hailed in the local press and in local administrative reports. ­These articles and reports inflated local pride b­ ecause Cherepovets, when juxtaposed with similar Rus­sian cities, made o ­ thers pale in comparison; other cities simply had no funds for such technological overhauls and innovations. In such a situation, even the ordinary citizen could be proud of the achievements of municipal networks—­much the same way one is proud of the victories of the Cherepovets hockey team. Indeed, one sits in front of the TV screen d­ oing nothing, but through a sense of identification with this team, one feels that “we” are winning. Pumping up more pride than clean ­water—­that is what the urban machine was mainly ­doing when we studied it. Then why are the black boxes called “condominiums” so much better at producing efficiency rather than pride? Perhaps b­ ecause p­ eople unite in a condominium association not in order to take pride in themselves or their community, but in order to live well, understood ­here not in some high Aristotelian sense (eu zen, 1252b: 29–30), but as a condition of a ­house with ­actual working amenities. B ­ ecause residents can control the activities of the management board, they require real rather than imaginary efficiency. In comparison, city residents, who de facto do not control the city and by-­and-­ large do not control its fate, know that they can do l­ittle to change the existing situation. So why waste time on a fruitless strug­gle with the poor quality of city ser­vices when instead you can do something pleasant, like rejoicing at the sight of the victories and achievements of the city’s sports  63 

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team, which officials ceaselessly offer on TV and in the press? Especially if you feel stronger as a result, since “we” always win. Pride is the opium of the ­people, and it needs only to be produced regularly. The prob­lem, of course, is that pride machines lose out to technologically efficient machines in military competition, in e­ ither a hot war (as, for example, the Zulus lost to the British during the capture of South Africa) or a cold war. But if war is a distant prospect, the production of pride may thrive for a long time. The third distinction between networks called “a city” and t­ hose called “a condominium” is size. A city is an immeasurably more extensive network than a condominium. A ­ fter all, hundreds or thousands of buildings stand next to each other in a city, and tens or hundreds of thousands of p­ eople live ­there. This is the argument usually given as the reason why city residents cannot own their city except through their representatives (and as a result, as we know, they do not in fact own it at all, but only use it). In the end, all 300,000 Cherepovets residents or 5 million St. Petersburgers cannot gather in the same area, as the residents of a condominium can—in a courtyard or a larger assembly hall found by the condominium board for an annual meeting of the condominium association. This argument, however, which is based on the apparent logic of size, looks much weaker if one remembers that the desk of a typical mayor is not much bigger than that of a typical condominium board chair. Both have only two hands to cope with the more-­or-­less same number of documents that pass through their hands e­ very week. But then who said that a city—­judging by the number of transactions or decisions made by its key officials—is “bigger” than a condominium, and that as a result citizens cannot be co-­ owners of the city? A ­ fter all, like Cicero’s intangible beings res publica and gens, the “city” is, in large part, an intelligible t­ hing that cannot be touched. Although many p­ eople do try to point a fin­ger at it. Pierre Bourdieu often emphasized that groups do not have the characteristics of existence that are usual, say, for a cupboard; unlike stable t­ hings, groups are constantly reformatted and re-­created by the ­people that supposedly represent them.27 Latour added: it is impor­tant to understand not only that collective agents are in the pro­cess of constant re-­creation from the very start of their existence, but that the actions of such reformatting or reassembly are very utilitarian and pragmatic.28 For example, who saw or encountered a collective subject such as the “city,” and where did that person see it? Models,  64 

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plans, images, or other depictions of a city, as well as diverse repre­sen­ta­tions of a condominium, are produced a) by a certain number of ­people, b) for certain money or other means, c) for a certain audience, and d) projected on a certain screen. During our research on urban networks, we recorded a variety of attempts to create such repre­sen­ta­tions of a city in a wide variety of situations. We have tried to single out at least five levels of production of images of a given city.29 First, the mayor or other highest level city man­ag­ers represent their city by means of administrative charts and graphs, while showing ­these organigrams (structural plans of city subunits) on blackboards or flipcharts during Monday morning planning meetings, or in the pro­cess of Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tions offered to man­ag­ers from other townships, regions, federal and international organ­izations like the World Bank, ­etc. Second, representatives of municipal enterprises (the utilities, lodging rental companies, ­etc.) build their facsimile of the city’s skeleton using their own maps and charts of ser­ viced networks (cold-­and hot-­water pipes, electricity grids, ­etc.) and proj­ect them on their com­pany websites and similar platforms that reflect networks that they control or own. T ­ hese are shown to other municipal man­ag­ers and interested visitors or, when maps of such grids are classified b­ ecause of a potential terrorist threat, only to themselves. Third, journalists and city deputies create their own stories about the city, which include plans, schemes, and photos that appear in official and semi-­official publications. Images of parks, streets, monuments to historical figures, sacred places, horizon-­line sights, City Hall ​and buildings of the municipal assembly, pro­cessions and rallies, are offered in newspapers, TV shows, official city history books, websites, ­a lbums depicting the city, and postcards—­a ll of them destined for diverse consumers and the general public at the local, regional, and federal level. Fourth, individual city residents rely on certain memorable places in the urban space to create a par­tic­u ­lar image of the city in their letters, blogs, and Facebook posts, which their f­amily, friends, neighbors, city visitors, and ­those they correspond with, can see. Last but not least, groups of scholars like us create an academic image of a studied city, bringing together in a single exposition repre­sen­ta­tions from the first to the fourth levels, merging them together on a single screen or on the pages of their book to show it to other scholars, to members of the general public who are interested in science, or to city man­ag­ers or research sponsors who might have commissioned this research.  65 

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Looking at diverse levels of this pro­cess of city image production, one comes to a conclusion that a given city is “bigger” than the condominium in two re­spects. First of all, the repre­sen­ta­tion of a city that the mayor shows to ­others is based on secondary, auxiliary repre­sen­ta­tions usually created by his or her subordinates, such as staff members of vari­ous municipal enterprises or City Hall photojournalists. But ­there is nothing preternatural in this repre­sen­ta­tion: it is simply one more image that was drawn, assembled, or glued by two hands—­for certain money, for certain purposes, and in a certain place. In the same way, the chairman of a governing board of a condominium produces models, schemes or photos of this condominium for a report or association website. The difference ­here is that the chair or a board member of a condominium responsible for the website rarely uses repre­sen­ta­tions made by ­others for this purpose. Second, the city is “bigger” ­because many more groups of ­people (not just the chairman or a pair of his ​or her deputies on the condominium board who created a website) produce its images. The image of the city is presented on more screens; its display pursues more varied goals and is offered to wider and more varied audiences. Most of t­ hese images do not entail a picture of thousands of ­people standing together, as we tend to imagine a typical Rus­ sian city following the photo­g raphs of the May Day or Victory Day rallies and demonstrations. Such crowds are essential only for one of the methods of producing the city’s image, which Durkheim might have loved ­because it allegedly captures conscience collective. Very often the creation of a city image or repre­sen­ta­tion happens without the participation of any crowd at all; it is done by a small group of p­ eople using a very limited number of ele­ments. One should note that this group is usually not much bigger than another group of actors that ostensibly speaks on behalf of the object revealed to us in this image—­that is, on behalf of the city itself, representing its intentions and actions, and pronouncing decisions.

2.3 ​Infrastructure and Speech Acts A comparison of the two studies I have presented above points to an unexpected point of convergence between them. The first study showed that when we begin an analy­sis of speech acts that employ the term res publica, we somehow end with a focus on s­ imple and tangible t­ hings. Some p­ eople using  66 

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this expression think that ­these ­things, which could be designated by a Latin term res, would have to serve as a referent for statements including the expression res publica. ­A fter all, such p­ eople espousing the point of view of Caesar would say that it is only in the presence of such material referents that speech acts employing the words res publica are successful. Another group of ­people, following Cicero’s theories, would hold it useless to look for material referents for res publica, particularly if we ensure the existence of a developed infrastructure of equal access to sites where the discussion of what best serves the interests of res publica take place and, most importantly, to places where ­legal b­ attles over the definitions of the interests and actions of res publica occur. This infrastructure of equal access to sites of law production and enforcement is one of the main conditions for the existence of res publica understood in this way. The second study showed that if we begin the analy­sis of the real infrastructure of a con­temporary Rus­sian city or its subcommunities living in individual housing complexes, we end up—­rather unexpectedly!—­w ith reflections on machines for the production of pride and on the diverse means for the manufacture of variegated images of a city. Such images convey quasi-­ spiritual and lightweight entities that would seem unrelated to metals, plastics, pipes, and wires and their heavy, hard, and blunt materiality. Thus, if we start with words in order to understand the particularities of historical examples of the enfolding or interweaving of p­ eople and ­things, we end with a focus on infrastructure. If we begin with infrastructure in order to understand the reasons ­behind its efficient or inefficient functioning and the way it helps bring communities together, we end up with a study of words and images. This prob­lem of the interrelation between words and infrastructure is so reminiscent of another classic opposition—­between Marx’s superstructure and base—­that one has to make an effort to distance Marxism from our study, which is more indebted to the analy­sis of t­ hings by Heidegger and Latour. Of course, a serious conceptual work that reads Latour through Marx or Marx through Latour has not been done yet. We hardly have many examples of the former, while I take the end of the introduction to this book to be more of a curious exercise than a serious attempt to do the latter.30 We do not yet have sound conclusions on the primary features and complexities involved in translating from a Marxist language into a Latourian one, and  67 

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vice versa. Hence, the “infrastructural” preoccupation of republicanism, which I already mentioned in this chapter, must be distanced from Marxist language. And our studies should be clearly distanced from meta­phors like the base and superstructure. Indeed, our studies never dealt with the issues traditionally impor­tant for classical Marxist theory: to what extent does the base determine the superstructure? And to what extent is the superstructure relatively in­de­pen­dent from (though in the final account, of course, dependent on) the base? What are the next research questions for the gas-­a nd-­waterworks versions of republicanism? First, studies of the historical phenomenon of res publica posed the question of an infrastructure for speech acts. In order for ­these acts to have performative strength and the potential to change real­ity, ­there must be a certain infrastructure of access to a relevant audience (and, first and foremost, to arenas for the production and enforcement of law). Second, studies of urban infrastructure showed that we need a theory of speech acts, distinct from other speech acts, that especially mentions common ­things or infrastructure. T ­ hese speech acts, a­ fter all, successfully (or unsuccessfully) create or re­create, aiming to pres­ent intangible collective agents that seem to be added to the bare tangible bones of ­these common t­ hings. In the language of Cicero, the visibility and tangibility of common t­ hings is a seed bed for res publica, but for a community to rise from the level of common ­t hings to the level of res publica, one needs words and a form of life that establishes a iuris consensus, a common sentiment in ­things ­legal. Therefore, the next in­ter­est­ing studies could deal with ­either an analy­sis of infrastructure (common ­things) for speech acts, or an analy­sis of speech acts that mention or involve infrastructure.

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3 Society and Socialness

The first two chapters of this book might have both suggested that Rus­sia has too many common phenomena and too few social ones. Indeed, as Chapter 1 has shown, nearly every­one is capable of intense personal friendships based on sharing common t­ hings and concerns with a few friends, but mobilization in socially significant numbers is rare, while social movements are almost non-­existent ­a fter the heyday of perestroika. Friends share endeavors, fun, work, belongings; socializing with friends presupposes all of ­these common ­things. The question is, however: why ­doesn’t all this evolve into a workable society? Chapter  2 compared two types of communities—­the one existing at the level of a courtyard, like a condominium association, and the other at the level of a city. As we easily learn from experience, city dwellers d­ on’t have the same control and freedom of action in relation to city infrastructure that members of a condominium association have over their common property. In a con­temporary Rus­sian city, key t­ hings are not in public possession; the city public only uses them. So, Rus­sian urban life is characterized by lots of examples of common use (of urban transport, other utilities, and infrastructure, e­ tc.). T ­ here are also some examples of common owner­ship, when a juridical person has been legally registered to own the common possessions of the condominiums, homeowners’ associations, garage coops, or gardening partnerships. However, social mobilization, when the or­ga­nized city residents  69 

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review the actions of city officials from time to time, or a disor­ga­n ized crowd suddenly storms into the corridors of the city administration to take decisions related to the city into their own hands, occurs rarely. (The latter happens during emergencies related to natu­ral or technological disasters, but—­thank God—­this does not happen frequently.) Again we see that t­ here is too much common and too ­little social. Trying to answer the question of why Rus­sia has so much common and so ­l ittle social, our research team deci­ded to address a ­whole series of issues.1 First, we studied the history of the term obshchestvo (Rus­sian for “society”) and its cognates and derivatives as well as the peculiarities of its con­temporary usage. Second, we wanted to take a look at an early conceptualization of “society” in eigh­teenth ­century theoretical Rus­sian thought, when it was not yet opposed to the “state” in a familiar way. Third, we wanted to study con­ temporary practice, taking perhaps the only indisputably successful example of a recent social mobilization: the Living City movement, which had managed to stop construction of the huge Gazprom Tower skyscraper building in the center of St. Petersburg, despite the fact that the proj­ect was signed off on by the city governor and supported by both Medvedev and Putin. However, even preliminary research results compelled us to change our focus. The research questions above ­were initially put with En­glish language concepts in mind, or actually in En­glish, to ensure that the results would be in­ter­est­ing, or at least comprehensible, to an international academic audience. But empirical data derived from lexicography, from transcripts of so­cio­log­ i­cal interviews of our contemporaries, and from old Rus­sian manuscripts or theoretical texts of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, offered many surprises. First, ­after a detailed study of con­temporary word usage, it became clear that t­ here are many phenomena in Rus­sian life designated as “social”; it’s just that they behave in a peculiar way. They are e­ ither so banal that everyday consciousness does not notice them as something of interest, or they are so rigid and unappealing that it does not want to pay attention to them. Furthermore, a famously untranslatable (and for many, unpronounceable) bastard of the word obshchestvennost’, which literally means “sociality” or “socialness,” is experiencing an unexpected resurgence: it has never been used as intensely and profusely in Rus­sia as it is now. Since in ordinary Rus­sian language this abstract noun now predominantly means a group of ­people or a source of action, rather than an abstract quality of “being social, of society”  70 

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(as it mostly did in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury), its aficionados tend to stress the actively liberating and anti-­regime connotations that it had developed in late imperial Rus­sia. They thus liken it to “civil society,” “public,” or “the public sphere,” almost as an equivalent of the famous Öffentlichkeit of Jürgen Habermas. ­Those who remember the repressive and ominous connotations that this term developed in the Soviet days tend to liken it to Arendt’s concept of “the social,” which threatens to wash all over and around us, stifling genuine public life. So the related research questions led us to the following: does the current discursive flourishing of “sociality” tell us about a civil society and public sphere fi­nally taking root in Rus­sia, or, on the contrary, does it indicate their decline? Second, excursions into the history of concepts have shown that ­there was another protagonist in the narrative of modern ­battles for freedom. This is the Rus­sian term publika, a direct calque from the German Publikum (and/or its Polish equivalent), and a relative of such terms as the En­g lish and French public. At some point in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, this term could claim to be as widespread and impor­tant as the word “public” is in En­glish, almost becoming the central term of the nascent Rus­sian po­liti­cal philosophy. It did not, however, come to occupy this discursive throne. Worse than that, due to the consistent association with “public ­houses” (brothels) or the idly gazing public that the term mostly retained during the nineteenth ­century, the term lost much of its philosophical and moral weight. Nowadays the Latin-­rooted Rus­sian equivalents of the adjective “public” have no serious discursive force e­ ither. This discursive situation is not a happy one. On the one hand, if in everyday conversations one starts talking about something obshchestvennyi, or “social,” the eyes of your interlocutor stop shining and grow dim, and she or he gets bored and distracted. The words are clear, but the real­ity is unappealing. On the other hand, trying to develop a lexicon of “publicness” in the Rus­sian language is difficult and not very effective: it goes too much against language intuitions in everyday usage. For example, in Rus­sian the question, “Why do we have so much obshchestvennaia [social] life in comparison to so ­little publichnaia [public] politics in Rus­sia?” hardly touches the heart or inspires the soul.2 ­These words, attractive to an intellectual historian, po­l iti­cal theorist, or po­l iti­cal activist, are e­ ither incomprehensible to many or difficult to use.  71 

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As further exposition ­w ill show, in the contexts relevant for our study, Rus­sian words for “common” and “social” are often mistakenly taken to be almost synonymous, since they derive from the same linguistic root in Rus­ sian. So we are facing a double predicament as we try to unravel this hurly-­ burly of intertwined concepts. On the one hand, it is frequently difficult to notice a difference between common and social phenomena in everyday Rus­ sian parlance. The words are dif­fer­ent—­obshchii and obshchestvennyi—­but very often for the interlocutors they sound almost the same. On the other hand, the difficulty has more to do with the fact that so many phenomena that are considered to be public in En­glish have been designated as “social” in Rus­sian. But it is precisely due to the social / public contrast, which many Eu­ro­pean languages have and which po­liti­cal theorists have stressed at least since Hannah Arendt, that one can find a most impor­tant difference between action on a common, communal, or social level, which Rus­sia produces abundantly, and public action, which it severely lacks. Let us analyze this difference between the levels of the common / social / public, alternating between the study of words and deeds, inextricably intertwined in speech acts—as we did in the previous chapters.

3.1 ​Con­temporary Usage Kapitolina Fedorova analyzed our con­temporary usage of the term obshchestvo, or “society,” using the data assembled in the National Corpus of the Rus­sian Language (http://­w ww​.­r uscorpora​.­r u​/­en​/­). She first selected two comparable databases of excerpts of text containing this word, in two periods of time, between 1899 and 1917 and between 2004 and 2009. She analyzed t­ hese excerpts amounting to about 10.8 million words for each period and found 1,536 examples of obshchestvo usage in 293 documents from the first period, and 1,252 in 571 documents for the second.3 Of course, by the early twenty-­fi rst c­ entury, many examples of the early twentieth-­century word usage are ­either obsolete or marginal. The dominant meaning t­ oday—­“all p­ eople living in a given country”—is distant and dif­fer­ent from much of the usage of the word obshchestvo throughout the nineteenth ­century, when it meant “good society” or “high society” of the aristocratic clubs and salons, or an educated public and the professions situated between the p­ eople and the tzarist government. Therefore the term could also mean  72 

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subgroupings of this gentry (in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury), or of this educated and professional class (in the end of the nineteenth ­century)—in a given township, precinct, ­etc. Nowadays all the connotations of the good society are largely gone. Nor do we speak in con­temporary Rus­sian about “St. Petersburg society” or “society of the capital”; ­these expressions seem archaic or awkward. We also do not use the term obshchestvo in the plural to describe rural socie­ties or urban socie­ties of a district or a province; in En­glish, an equivalent would be an educated society or elite of a county or a regional capital. Such subgroupings dis­appeared a­ fter the Rus­ sian revolution. With the spread of universal education during the Soviet era and its claim that all could become part of a governing class, an educated society expanded to include almost all ­people living within the Soviet borders. Curiously enough, “society” as “com­pany” is rare also; a phrase like “I would die without your society,” meaning “without communicating with you,” would seem unnatural now. A society consisting of two interlocutors has become almost impossible. Con­temporary Rus­sian obshchestvo consists of millions of individuals. This initial set of Fedorova’s observations treads familiar ground, since the works of many brilliant historians like Abbot Gleason have already shown how the sense of obshchestvo that was dominant in the nineteenth c­ entury evolved to the point where it is now largely defunct. With the reforms of Peter the G ­ reat, this con­temporary Rus­sian term for “society” came to designate the educated and culture-­bearing ser­vice gentry as opposed to “the p­ eople,” or narod, which was largely illiterate and untouched by westernization. It was roughly equivalent to le monde in French, or what “society” meant in the En­ glish language of that era, but neither of t­ hese national cases of “society” would presume that they w ­ ere coeval with politics or culture. By contrast, “in Rus­sia, membership in obshchestvo came to mean, over the eigh­teenth ­century, not only that you ­were a person who could be ‘received’ by the best ­people but also that you ­were part of the small group that created Rus­sia’s literary culture, thought Rus­sia’s ­g reat thoughts, governed the country, represented it abroad, and so on.”4 In the early nineteenth ­century, a differentiation of roles between bureaucracy and gentry gained ground, and by the time of the death in 1837 of the first recognized modern poet of Rus­sia, Alexander Pushkin, a rift with autocracy—­perhaps sharing in some oppositional opinions and emphasizing the production of culture—­made obshchestvo not as  73 

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exclusive as it used to be. As citizens “of diverse ranks” and not only from the gentry, made their entry into the universities to join the cohorts of gradually professionalizing bureaucracy or of culture-­ producing writers, critics, and publishers, “society” became almost equal with a westernized educated elite devoted to changing the stagnant life around them. Given that the protracted unwillingness of the autocracy to abolish peasants’ serfdom was seen by many in this expanding educated society as the root of this stagnation, by the 1860s and the age of the ­Great Reforms, many members of this “society” came close to the classical definition of the Rus­sian intelligent­sia that was poised to assault autocratic rule. Gleason concludes: “Purely snobbish notions of the Rus­sian elite now had to compete with the radical and po­liti­cal ones.”5 The “society” was fi­nally entrenched against the state. Even if it was not ready to fight it right away, it started to discuss and criticize the detrimental consequences of the regime’s policies. However, this usage of the term “society,” predominant in the nineteenth c­entury, was washed away together with the regime that harbored and harnessed it. Though much of the usage from the turn of the twentieth ­century became obsolete ­after the 1917 revolution, some has not. We still speak of “Rus­sian society,” “con­temporary society,” and “our society.” But all such examples of usage imply that society is now understood as a super-­large aggregate, that is, all the ­people living in a certain country or at a certain point in time. For example, we customarily talk about “American society” just as we talk about “Rus­sian society.” But a ­century ago, Rus­sians rarely spoke about a ­whole country as “society”: this usage was just developing. Only sometimes was it done in reference to Rus­sia, and almost never to Amer­i­ca. Given the new primary meaning of the term, adjectives added to it are markedly dif­fer­ent; one does not speak of high, select, or good society, but of “demo­cratic society” or “information society.” While using such expressions, many Rus­sians would immediately mention that life conditions characteristic of such socie­ties have not yet fully gestated in Rus­sia. Thus this term is used to name not an a­ ctual condition but a goal t­oward which Rus­sia is allegedly moving. The often repeated expression states that we are “building civil society,” and it is funny to find this verb added to a term from the po­ liti­cal and social theory of the nineteenth c­ entury. No one would “build” civil society back then. Now when this verb is applied to an older term, it is ­because ­after 70 years of “building Communism,” the Rus­sian mass media have found  74 

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a new worthy goal, and without qualms have put it into a discursive place previously occupied by the older designation of our radiant f­ uture.6

3.1.1 ​A Dry or Rigid Society? As a linguist, Fedorova states that in past centuries obshchestvo was often seen as a sphere of activity. A ­ fter all, “the good society” of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries was a court-­like space where one could reveal one’s virtues and vices, glimmer and shine, or falter and fail. In order to do so, however, it was necessary to first “enter” it, as the old word usage tells us. By contrast, the phrase “to enter Soviet (or Rus­sian) obshchestvo” is generally impossible and sounds hugely awkward. Indeed, phrases like “to join the Rus­sian citizenry” or, more felicitously, “to take or obtain Rus­sian citizenship,” may be more ser­viceable h ­ ere. Awkwardness stems from the fact that “Rus­sian society” ­today is first and foremost an agent of action rather than an arena for action: it wants, it demands, it supports or thwarts governmental policies. Entering such an agent, rather than an arena, is a daunting task. In a tone that may sound paradoxical, Fedorova remarks: to say that “our society” consists of “us” is difficult.7 It is an obvious agent of action, but this is not the same ­thing as a group that consists of the individuals that compose it. ­There are linguistic reasons for this, of course. For example, in the nineteenth ­century, “civil society” was not yet a worn-­out mass media slogan; the term also rarely if ever took the position of agent of action in a sentence. Also, this expression back then still retained its connection to the terms “civilian” and “civic,” and the dictionaries could state that “civil society” meant “all ­things non-­military,” or that ­because of its civic connotations, it consisted of active citizens. Thus, as “civil society” lost links with “civilian” and “civic,” the expression “our society” lost links to “our” and “us.” This expression in the vast majority of cases now simply means “Rus­sian society.” Indeed, who could be this “us” who could be said to have united in a “society”? First, one can only with obvious difficulty apply the expression “our society” to a group of friends. Second, in everyday life one speaks rather rarely about—or on behalf of—­civil society associations, even if they have the sought term in their very titles, being officially registered, for example, as “The St. Petersburg society of postal stamp collectors” or “The Moscow society of animal protection.” The age of voluntary associations conceived as “smaller socie­ties” is largely gone—at least for con­temporary Rus­sian language.  75 

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Furthermore, this “Rus­sian society” may sometimes do such ­things to us that the language does not have the daring or the guts to call this society “ours.” The barely humane and sometimes inhuman ­things that Rus­sian society is capable of ­doing to its members are also reflected in everyday usage. We do not normally say that it is we, Rus­sians, who have united in this society, but rather that Rus­sian society unites many individuals together. In other words, as an agent of action that has to establish this unity, Rus­sian society sometimes acts in total disregard of the interests of some of ­t hose united. This ferocity of con­temporary society—is it not related to the cruelty of the social changes that helped enhance the now predominant perception that the term “society” applies first and foremost to all the p­ eople living in a given country? Indeed, even if this equation of society with all the residents of a country is a usual feature of eighteenth-­century social-­contract theories of such famous authors of the Rus­sian Enlightenment as Alexander Radishchev or Nikolai Karamzin, Rus­sians became such a country-­w ide society not ­because they freely covenanted.8 This social-­contract imagery was dumped into the dustbin of history during the twentieth ­century, when the mores and thoughts of pre-­revolutionary Rus­sian educated society w ­ ere replaced by the mores and thoughts of the new Soviet citizens, rigidly Communist in their education and outward comportment. All who disagreed with the proj­ect of a new radiant ­f uture ­were ­either expelled from the country, shot, or at the very least, silenced. As a consequence, word usage that referred to good or educated society began to sound like archaism. And the talk about citizens compacting to form a state—on the basis of a ­f ree contract of all with all—­ sounded like a naïve fiction of aristocratic or bourgeois origin. A certain rigidity or dryness of “society” in con­temporary Rus­sia is also perhaps explained by the fact that ­there are still too many dull and boring phenomena around us that are called obshchestvennyi, or literally, “social.” Their analogues in En­g lish usually have the designation “public”—­for example, public transportation, public health, public works, public safety. An obvious historical explanation would be that this boredom is residual and comes from the Soviet days. In a country where almost every­thing was state property, what could be more unappetizing and dull than working in a public sector in alienating job conditions that ­were forced upon you, or engaging in “voluntary ser­v ice to the public,” such as being a good member of the  76 

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Young Communist league, which was often meaningless and aimless from an individual’s point of view? Given the rigid Soviet state control of forms of life that w ­ ere called “public” in the UK and US, the disregard of t­ hese forms of life and suspicion ­towards them that Soviet citizens had shared was implanted into the post-­Communist epoch in a lasting way. Marc Morje Howard analyzed the unwillingness to engage in public action or activities of civil society associations in post-­Communist countries.9 Disrespect for phenomena designated by the term obshchestvennyi is a corollary to that. The public might have been, or could be even now, having a say in or fashioning and governing ­these issues in the UK and US, but in everyday Rus­sian life, one hardly finds a trace of any public acting. An individual citizen rarely participates in defining the agenda of, say, public transportation or public works. On the contrary, they are mostly given as an external real­ity that structures this citizen’s life. Thus, this aridity or coldness of con­temporary Rus­sian society is also linked with the fact that the adjective obshchestvennyi in the Soviet days was used to translate En­glish and French phrases that used adjectives like public and publique. Even if in practice all was subjugated to decisions by the Communist party and government officials, in discourse it was the Soviet society, ­people united together, that ­were supposed to own the main factories and offices of the country. So t­ hese assets w ­ ere “social” by definition: all citizens owned them collectively, as members of the super-­group called Soviet society. In other words, ­these translations adequately reflected the fact that t­ here was no public life in the sense of, say, Hannah Arendt, and ­there was just the op­ uman Condition. According to pressive “social,” to use her term from The H her, the social emerged when the affairs of the ­house­hold that in ancient Greece had dealt with the reproduction of life ­were brought during the modern age into the public realm and became the concern of national governments, with the countries i­ magined now on the model of superfamilies, or “national economies.”10 She does not write about the Soviet Union specifically when she says that “the germs of communistic society w ­ ere pres­ent in the real­ity of a national h ­ ouse­hold,” but her description of every­thing now becoming “pure administration” as opposed to personal rulership, which had been practiced in nation states heretofore, definitely reminds one of the statements of the Soviet ideology.11 Even at the heights of terror and “the cult of personality” of Stalin, the doctrine unflinchingly asserted: it is the p­ eople,  77 

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the Soviet society (coeval with the country), that rules. All belongs to it and is deci­ded by it. Then, perhaps, it is not surprising that when we look up the entry for the word “public” in the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, and go to the rubric “special collocations, phrases and combinations,” we find many stable expressions which w ­ ere usually translated with the noun obshchestvo, “society,” or the adjective obshchestvennyi, “social” in the title. In this group we would find the En­glish expressions like “in the public domain,” “public defender,” “public e­ nemy,” “public figure,” “public good,” “public health,” “public interest,” and the already mentioned “public works.”12 Linguistically, this absence of a freely acting public in Rus­sia (even if the influence, guidance, or interference of this public is just a potentiality in the UK or US, as some critics would argue) was reflected in t­ hose translations through rendering the vocabulary of publicness with the vocabulary of socialness. Of course, nowadays, if the analy­sis of the previous chapter on res publica is correct, the nascent public action in Rus­sia is confronted with ­these linguistic fetters from Soviet days. When publics form over contentious issues in urban life, for example, they still have to use the terminology of obshchestvennyi, with this stifling vocabulary of “the social” still precluding ­people from employing terminology that would reflect the role of the public as a ­f ree author of action, a role of ­people freely acting in concert.

3.1.2 ​The Boring Social? Fedorova also gives us two hypotheses on why obshchestvennyi (“social”) phenomena do not elicit discursive attention from a typical Rus­sian. First, as we have just discussed, they are designated by expressions that are frequently just the end results of a prolonged pro­cess of building stable collocations and idioms, so the two to three words in a given expression are reproduced by native speakers automatically, without their noticing the adjectives in this expression as something separate and special. An example I already used: in the nineteenth ­century, echoes of citizenship and civic life could still be heard in the Rus­sian term for civil society, but now it is a frozen cliché. Thus, ­people do not pay attention to adjectives in such expressions. Second, Fedorova connects this discursive Rus­sian fatigue with “­things social” to the fact that, when fi­nally becoming an object of some attention on the part of a speaker, “social” phenomena are intuitively and thus quasi-­ automatically interpreted as “common,” and thus commonplace, usual,  78 

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banal—as if being part of a topos, a commonplace in rhe­toric. Linguistically this happens ­because in Rus­sian, obshchestvennyi, or “social,” and obshchii, or “common,” have the same root. At the level of official doctrine, this link had solidified in the Soviet days, ­because phenomena called “social” w ­ ere supposed to be in the obschchenarodnaia owner­ship, that is, the common property of all Soviet ­people. Ideological mantras thus reinforced such linguistic intuitions. Indeed if lunches at a factory w ­ ere delivered by a com­pany department that was literally called “social feeding,” what could be more boring and quotidian than this common food supply, famous for its poor quality and stemming from the conditions of the economy of deficit? “Public provisions” or “public supplies” became “social feeding,” but ­because the term “social” in Rus­sian sounded very much like the term “common,” talking about social feeding sounded as if you w ­ ere talking in platitudes and banalities, and even evoking the vomit-­inducing and vomit-­resembling quality of the goulash you had just consumed!13 Is it any won­der that phrases with the term obshchestvennyi somehow slip past the consciousness and are not taken to be pointing at something specific and in­ter­est­ing? Is it any won­der that locutions like obshchestvennaia rabota, “working in the interests of society,” still evoke ­either a yawn of boredom if not fear that you ­w ill be forced to do something that does not interest you, with bosses exhorting you to subordinate your private concerns to the goals that society deems worthy of achieving? The ubiquitous dullness of the social and the threat of coercion implicit in such terms impart rigidity to the con­temporary phenomenon of society in Rus­sia. However, the coldness and dryness of the noun obshchestvo and the adjective obshchestvennyi can be explained not only linguistically or historically. Fedorova’s analy­sis suggests that they predispose us to yawning boredom ­because all Rus­sians are familiar with a nearly opposite case. We all know how to engage in a lively, cool, and engrossing practice captured by the verb obshchatsia. This reflexive verb can be literally translated as “to self-­ commune,” but it usually means “to socialize” or “to hang out with.” In comparison with all of its pleasures, who would want to be involved in tedious and often imposed obshchestvennyi? From Chapter 1, we remember the usual diagnosis of Rus­sian life: we are all capable of in­ter­est­i ng and informal association, friendship, and love, but incapable of creating in­ter­est­i ng and lasting examples of civic or public life. Let me thus dwell a bit more on the  79 

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peculiar word and practice of obshchatsia, which serves as a contrast to the boring life of society.

3.1.3 ​Fun Self-­Communing in a Group Registering the radically increased frequency of usage from 1945 to nowadays, Fedorova notes that “the carriers of Rus­sian language started to conceptualize their everyday be­hav­ior and their relationships with the help of this verb only from the ­m iddle of the twentieth ­century.”14 Thus, it is a rather recent development. We find similar verbs registered already in the first Church Slavonic translations between the eleventh and ­fourteenth centuries, but mass usage is another story. Only since the mid-­t wentieth ­century have the Rus­ sians stated en masse that they do in their everyday life mostly just that—­and predominantly with friends. In Old Rus­sian ­there existed a non-­reflexive verb obshchevati, an analogue of the M ­ iddle En­glish verb “to common.” Neither was retained in modern languages, but the traces of the relevant old Rus­sian usage dis­appeared substantially ­later. Even Vladimir Dal’s mid-­n ineteenth ­century dictionary still gives an example with a similar verbal form: “­Don’t common [obshchi] one m ­ atter with another, take it one by one.”15 ­Here the archaic Rus­sian verb residually meant “to attach, to unite” rather than “commoning” in the sense of communing, as in personal communication with someone. The Oxford En­glish Dictionary article on the verb “to common” cites both of t­hese meanings—to common (­things) and to commune (with ­people). It starts with examples like “commoning of the common goods” that one finds in the Wycliff-­attributed treatise from 1380, but then gives examples of the ­Middle En­glish verb “to common” in the sense of communing.16 The transformation of the Rus­sian word usage, as with the En­ glish one, involved forgetting about commoning as uniting or imparting; commoning as communing was stressed instead. The verb obshchatsia came to designate this commoning as communing when it became reflexive and hence intransitive—­that is, grammatically it has a subject, but no object. Not only can the object not be attached to this verb directly, which is normal for intransitive verbs, but also it cannot be described even indirectly.17 The subject of this verb can be a community of communers communing with itself. By contrast, if one applies this word to an individual, it is clear that he or she is communing with this community, and not with him-­or herself. It  80 

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is the community that communes, and this self-­engrossing game does not allow external objects. Reflexive verbs in Rus­sian are formed by adding a particle –­sia at the end of the non-­reflexive verbs (which are directed at objects or persons), and this postfix is similar to the particle se in se communiquer in French, or sich in sich kommunieren in German. In En­g lish such reflexive verbs are translated usually by adding “self,” so the verb obshchatsia could literally be rendered as “self-­commune.” However, in the OED we find only one example of the usage of such a term. It is from Thomas Hardy’s 1898 poem “The Temporary the All”: “ ‘Life is roomy yet, and the odds unbounded.’ / So self-­communed I.” Self-­communing as practiced by an En­ glish poet means to have intimate communication with oneself on lofty topics. Rus­sian “self-­communing” is dif­fer­ent from Hardy’s lines in that, first; it is a group that communes with itself, not an individual, second; idle talk is just as appropriate as lofty topics, and third; this communing is not only about conversation, it is about the sharing or communion that lie at its foundation. The disappearance of an object of action in the verb obshchatsia is perhaps explained by the root of the word. It is about obshchii, the creation of something common. As chapter 1 has shown, in friendship, friends commune constantly on the basis of the fact that they are connected or mediated by many common material t­ hings. That is, their commoning of t­ hings—­those that augment or decrease with use or ­t hose that just mediate, staying the same—­a llows them to easily commune on topics that involve such t­ hings. Also, as we saw in Chapter 1, t­ here is a new common t­ hing that modern interpersonal friendship produces, and which helps reproduce and support the flourishing of this friendship. It is a linguistic sub-­code of communication among this very group of friends. Communing in the sense of a very intense personal communication among friends is also based on this linguistic commoning in the direct sense of making common. This sub-­code, shared only among the few, ensures the feeling that with friends, one socializes in an intensely intimate and in­ter­est­ing manner. ­Here is a wholly dif­fer­ent unity and togetherness, a radical contrast to what is found in “society” or in phenomena bearing the word obshchestvennyi in their names. Hence every­body wants and loves to start obshchatsia, i.e. to commune in an intimate and intense way, while obshchestvo, or “society,” by comparison, is  81 

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not at all alluring. To repeat: it is e­ ither boring, or empty and cold, or imposed—or, worse still, coercive. It would seem, then, that, in the new Rus­sia, “society” and all phenomena with its derivative words in their titles should have decreased. ­A fter all, for the past twenty-­five years we tried to get rid of Soviet repressive collectivism and leave ­behind the dull and preordained life of the society of the Brezhnev days. However, Fedorova’s analy­sis demonstrates that, at least at the level of word usage, this has not happened. Counting the frequencies of word usage in the National Corpus of Rus­sian Language, one sees that the word obshchestvennyi is employed t­ oday (the period of 2004 to 2009, for which the calculations ­were made) with the third highest frequency among the dif­fer­ent periods of time compared. It was used more often only between 1899 and 1917 (first place for frequency of usage) and between 1918 and 1927 (second place), that is, during the era of the gestation of the Rus­sian revolution and immediately afterwards, an era of unpre­ce­dented social experimentation. And the hardly pronounceable term obshchestvennost’ is generally experiencing its golden days. As Fedorova notes, when asked, Rus­sians usually respond that this term was mostly characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, while now it should be on the wane.18 However, it turns out that it is used almost three times more now than it was then, and even more frequently than in the seditious pre-­ revolutionary period between 1899 and 1917.19 That is, more than ever! To understand why that is a surprise, one should recollect that from the mid-­to late-­nineteenth ­century, this term, which literally means “socialness” or “sociality,” or the quality of being social, came to denote primarily a specific agent of action, a group that has an active public stance.20 As Gleason perceptively notes, in the wake of the liberation of peasants in 1861 and other ­Great Reforms, Rus­sia needed more doctors, ­lawyers, professors, agronomists, and veterinarians—­and professional training for all of them. The gentry lost it obvious role as the core of the educated public, and the term obshchestvennost’ replaced obshchestvo to describe this group, which was now opposed to the autocracy. It was “activist and reform-­m inded, and above all, in­de­pen­dent in its intellectual formation and moral-­political judgments.”21 In the Soviet years, however, the term was transformed to mean activists who, by implementing the party line (even if being members of a nominally “in­ de­pen­dent” non-­party association), vigorously supported the imposition of new Communist policies and standards of be­hav­ior, and ­were famous for  82 

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their zealous search for misdemeanors among their neighbors and colleagues. Thus, during the late Soviet days the term, when used outside of the language of official communication, acquired a largely negative connotation. It is ­because of this that Fedorova’s respondents thought that the term obshchestvennost’ was largely a term of the Soviet past. They could not imagine that it was being widely used now. Given the authoritarian features of the po­liti­cal regime in Rus­sia in the late 2000s, when the word usage was analyzed, how can one explain this discursive flourishing of “socialness”? T ­ here are several pos­si­ble interpretations. Some would suggest that the repressive regime simply forced or cajoled journalists to adopt this usage to imitate a non­ex­is­tent or waning public life—­and the masses might just have unwittingly picked up the mass media usage. The prob­lem with this interpretation is that if somebody indeed wanted or tried to relaunch the usage of obshchestvennost’ to refer to the critical educated public opposing the state, they did not ­really succeed: most Rus­ sians ­today have forgotten about the strong liberating and anti-­government connotations that the term had before 1917. The second interpretation would hold that it is difficult to imagine total Kremlin-­organized control of the minute details of media discourse, notwithstanding the sometimes authoritarian repression of public expressions of discontent. The mass incitement to talk about “socialness” might not necessarily be initiated by the deceiving government. On the contrary, it might be a byproduct of the government’s fight against it. Michel Foucault, for example, showed in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that the Victorian regime in nineteenth-­century ­England, which seemed particularly repressive about sexual issues, became an era of pervasive incitement to talk about sex, to register it, and to analyze and classify its dangerous leanings. Having been put through this endless mill of speech, “sex,” about which nobody could ­really talk at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, has become part of our everyday real­ity, a ­thing that all of us have to deal with constantly and to analyze in order to understand the deepest secrets of our personality. Is the latent revolution of obshchestvennost’ taking place in a similar fashion? Indeed, some federal and regional officials curse the “socialness” that thwarts their policies, blocks highways in protest, or disrupts city hall meetings. In this interpretation, a radical increase in word usage b­ ecause of the willing­ ill eventually produce a corresponding ness to suppress obshchestvennost’ w  83 

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real­ity, in which the active public, designated by the term “socialness” throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fi­nally becomes a major characteristic of Rus­sian life. Thus, we are facing good tidings, even if the regime targets the term that might have too much of a liberating potential. Still, an analy­sis of the database of recorded oral speech from 1990 to 2009 (about 5.4 million words) has shown that the upsurge of usage happens mostly in media discourse—­not so much in everyday exchanges on the street or in what respondents say in so­cio­log­i­cal interviews, but in the speeches of officials or in the responses to ­t hese speeches of journalists, supporters, and critics.22 It is officials and their cronies (and sometimes, their critics) who speak about “socialness,” while the common folk do not. So, the third interpretation would hold that the repressive and stifling “socialness” of the 1960s and 1970s might be back, but in a new guise. The powers that be would like once again to rely on an army of supporters of government policies who are not, strictly speaking, part of officialdom. ­These supporters may get paid or receive other non-­monetary perks, or they may just get a small portion of power in exchange for advocating state policies, both informally and socially. As the latest eponymous book on the phenomenon suggests, “the concept of an obshchestvennost’ which is induced by and collaborates with the state power, as seen particularly in the Soviet period,” was officially relaunched with the creation in 2006 of the Social Chamber (Obshchestvennaia Palata), which primarily comprises representatives of the NGOs that have the strong approval of the state. Opening the first session of the Chamber, President Putin said that it should become “a platform for the congruence of positions regarding state policies, on the basis of which are formed highly demo­cratic instruments for cooperation between obshchestvennost’ and the state.”23 To understand the context better, we ­will need to dwell more on the conceptual history of this puzzling term. The puzzle is not only ­whether the current discursive explosion of “socialness” talk reflects a growth in the ranks of a new public fighting the state, or w ­ hether it shows the thorough state control over the attempts of this public to emerge. The puzzle is also borne in the structure of the term itself. Indeed, obshchestvennost’ offers us a spectacular case of linguistic development. It appeared as a name for an abstract quality—­“a quality or character of being social, pertaining to society”—­and evolved into a designation of an active agent that opposes or supports the  84 

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government. “Redness,” “madness,” or “foolishness” can take the position of a grammatical subject in a sentence, but they never designate a group of ­people, a real-­life subject of action, the way “socialness” does.24 One is also puzzled why the term “society” was not enough for the Rus­sian language to designate an educated public that, b­ ecause of its “progressive” orientation, opposes the government, or supports it for the same reason. Why elaborate and massively use for ­t hese purposes such a monstrosity of a word as obshchestvennost’? Let us map the main hallmarks of conceptual development that w ­ ill help us better understand the current situation.

3.2 ​An Active Public or a Stifling Socialness? The first usage of the term is usually credited to one of the main figures of the Rus­sian Enlightenment, Nikolai Karamzin. In his first major book, Letters of a Rus­sian Traveller (1793), he uses this neologism twice. Karamzin is famous for having in­ven­ted many abstract nouns by adding to an adjective the suffix -­ost’, which is similar to -­ness or -­ity in En­glish. Thus, while in Frankfurt he visits the Jewish community ­there and notes that the ­people’s downtrodden condition leads to their cohesion as a commune. He writes that they are tied together by the closest pos­si­ble ties, in contrast to the Christians who lock them up in the ghetto overnight. Thus “one can see in them more spirit of socialness than in any other ­people.”25 While crossing the border between Mannheim and Strasbourg, the traveler notes that beasts die where they are born; only ­humans enjoy travel from one climactic zone to another. “Wise, too, are the bonds of socialness through which I find in e­ very land all of life’s comforts, as if they had been devised especially for me; through which the inhabitants of all countries place before me the fruits of their toil and diligence and bid me share in their diversions and merriment . . . ​Let the misanthrope travel, that he may come to love mankind!”26 A far stranger usage was suggested by another key actor of the Rus­sian Enlightenment, Alexander Radishchev. In his book The Life of Fedor Ushakov, he published some of the texts of his deceased friend, with whom he had studied in Leipzig in the late 1760s. Translating from French, in which Ushakov authored his essay on ­whether the death penalty was useful for the state (he argued that it was not, since the prospect of death did not deter criminals), Radishchev wrote: “If the love of being is based on the fear of sickness  85 

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and the lust for amusements, then it follows that the wish to be happy is stronger in us then the wish to be . . . ​It is better not to exist than to exist unhappy. This argument is not the imagination of introspection, but only the generalization of events, based on the experience of both wise men and men poorly educated, which proves the socialness of this generalization.”27 He then cited both Cato Minor, who committed suicide in 46 BC so as not to fall into the hands of Caesar, preferring to die in this way for the cause of res publica, and Gaius Mucius Scaevola, who was ready to die at the hands of the Etruscans who had besieged Rome. Radishchev published this in 1789, but due to the newness of the just coined term, the fact that the doctrine he expressed seemed controversial to high society, and b­ ecause of his prosecution and exile in 1790 following the publication of his next book, this usage never stuck. However, it shows well how the logic of language development was demanding the creation of neologisms at this time to reflect the abstract quality of socialness. Rus­sian authors might have been experimenting with this word b­ ecause they somehow had to squeeze their foreign experiences, which w ­ ere captured so well by other Eu­ro­pean languages, into Rus­sian. We do not know the term in Ushakov’s original text in French, so we can only guess what was in front of Radishchev, but we do know that Karamzin, while traveling, sent home letters in French, and he was acquainted with En­glish. He visited Britain ­after France, and phrases like “the spirit of socialness” might have been devised in order to resemble the En­glish “public spirit,” even though the excerpt on the condition of the Jews he had encountered in Frankfurt hardly gave grounds to use the term “public.” But the need to somehow render the En­glish expressions like “public spirit” and “public good” in Rus­sian was obvious. Thus, Ivan Timkovskii translated the expression “the spirit of a community” from Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society with the Rus­sian expression dukh obshchestvennosti, which literally means “the spirit of socialness.”28 The original said this about the condition of the p­ eople subject to despotic rule: “Scattered in the provinces, unarmed, unacquainted with the sentiments of ­u nion and confederacy, restricted by habit to a wretched œconomy, and dragging a precarious life on t­ hose possessions which the extortions of government have left; the ­people can no where, ­under ­these circumstances, assume the spirit of a community, nor form any liberal combination for their own defense.” This is the only instance in the forty 86 

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s­ ix times that the term “community” appears in Ferguson’s Essay that a Rus­ sian translator felt compelled to use a definition closer to “commonness” than to translate it as “a number of men,” as it is generally understood in this treatise, and as it was once explic­itly defined.29 The transformation of this sporadic usage into a general phenomenon happened following the appearance of mass newspapers in the mid-­nineteenth ­century and the local self-­government reform of 1864. In an astute formulation of Vadim Volkov, the expanding educated public “tended to contrast obshchestvennost’ with obshchestvo (society) in order to mark itself off the polite society.”30 The most extensive dictionary of con­temporary Rus­sian language, published in the 1950s and ’60s, suffers from a certain Sovietization of lexical entries, but in the case of our term it proudly proposes a quote on “socialness” from Nikolai Ogarev, a famous nineteenth-­century Rus­sian emigre radical, who together with Alexander Herzen, published in London the revolutionary newspaper Kolokol, or “The Bell.”31 This quote cites the third open letter of Ogarev to a fellow radical activist, known ­u nder the pseudonym “One from the many” (1865), which tried to explain why intellectuals “of diverse ranks” should side with activists from the rural districts’ self-­government bodies rather than with the gentry, which is a natu­ral ally of the government. The government wants to create an “official bourgeoisie” and an “official ­legal profession,” writes Ogarev, while “lively socialness ­will seek not the support of the estates in­ven­ted by government ­orders, but the expression of their own needs by the p­ eople, which do not belong to any ordered estate.”32 One can see h ­ ere the first use of “socialness” in the sense of an active social group that strives to reach out to “the ­people” against the ­union of gentry and government, at the time when the powers that be ­were readying themselves to offer a monarchical constitution to Rus­sia, which was not, however, discussed with e­ ither the “socialness” or “the ­people.” Of course, this usage is clearly transitory. In the second letter from this series, published in his newspaper, Ogarev compares the differences between tiers etat in Abbé Sieyès and the social layer of p­ eople “of diverse ranks” in Rus­sia. He concludes that ­there are “differences of socialness and relations,” which means, as he explains, dif­fer­ent roles for the p­ eople and dif­fer­ent social goals, even if the common feature to both was the heightening demand for a revolt that gestated during the reigns of Louis XIV, in the first case, and of Nicholas I in the second.33 ­Here “socialness” seems to mean the social  87 

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condition, not an active group of p­ eople. Ogarev, however, had to somehow choose a term that would distinguish the new critics of the regime, who had emerged from “diverse ranks,” from the older gentry-­based educated public, so this awkward abstract term might have proven handy. The older aristocratic public, obshchestvo, says Ogarev in the first letter in the series, a­ dopted the role of “police informer and raging executioner” during the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864: “In obshchestvo and in the journals denunciations and demands for executions became a favorite pastime.”34 This might have alienated the newer, more progressive-­m inded radicals. Hence the need to distinguish the two groups linguistically. In his writings on lit­er­a­t ure, however, where he did not have to stress po­liti­cal differences so pointedly, he could be less attentive to precision of expression and could therefore rely easily on the transitional meanings of the term. Thus, writing in 1859, Ogarev chides writers who engage in art for art’s sake and ignore the burning social prob­lems of the day. He remarks that art that turns away from the interests of society is Lilliputian in significance: “How could they [the writers] find the content of universal significance outside of socialness, outside of the artist looking at socialness and taking part in it? . . . ​[G]reat masters of the word are pervaded by compassion ­towards con­temporary socialness.”35 In this excerpt one still could interpret the word “socialness” to mostly mean the quality of social questions, or of socially impor­tant concerns. However, one page ­later he addresses the youth, who are just entering the literary vocation, hoping that with them real art ­w ill blossom again soon: “What can I say to an artist feeling his impotence among the exhausted socialness? . . . ​[A]rt has fallen, . . . ​socialness has fizzled . . .”36 And he calls the youth to action. ­Here the exposition almost demands that “the socialness” should be interpreted as a new active layer of ­people, poised to solve key social issues of the day. Olga Malinova has written a detailed history of the term “socialness” in the mid-­nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She notices that in the 1840s and 1850s, both Kavelin (of the Westernizers) and Kireevsky (of the Slavophiles) would use the term to designate the quality of being social, the features of the collective character of life of a given nation. It seems to me that this was the predominant usage throughout the 1860s and 1880s as well.37 ­After repression soared during the reign of Alexander III, the term could even be used to designate collectivism or socialism, in opposition to individualism,  88 

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b­ ecause censorship did not allow Latin-­rooted calques like kollektivizm. Another digression in this development was the debate on “personalness vs. socialness” that ensued ­after The Landmarks collection of essays of idealist phi­los­o­phers, which appeared in 1909 and chided Rus­sian intelligent­sia for paying too l­ ittle attention to self-­fashioning and self-­transformation and too much attention to social transformation, leading to the 1905 revolt.38 Thus, “socialness” as a term started its march to the discursive heights during the period of the ­Great Reforms, but only conquered them at the time of the first Rus­sian revolution of 1905. For example, the Enlighteners Novikov and Radishchev, prosecuted by Catherine the ­Great for their allegedly revolutionary or subversive rhe­toric, ­were still interpreted as being part of obshchestvo, or “society,” in the 1860s.39 But by the early twentieth c­ entury, they w ­ ere recast as examples of “socialness” avant la lettre.40 The revolutionary period, from 1905 to 1917, transformed the term “socialness” into the name of one of the key players in the drama of Rus­sian po­liti­cal turmoil. Bureaucrats and the opposition to the government ­here shared the same language. For example, usage of the term by a one-­time deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the fervent monarchist Vladimir Gurko, completely coincides with its usage by one of the leaders of Rus­sian liberals, the member of the Duma from the Constitutional Demo­cratic (Kadet) party from 1906 to 1917, Vasilii Maklakov.41 Maklakov’s book asserts from the start that his generation witnessed “a strug­gle of autocracy with society,” and that the victory of autocracy in 1906 and 1907 l­ater paved the way for its downfall. However, in his opinion “socialness” proper entered the scene during the famine of 1891, when active members of the educated public rushed to help the starving peasants. Tolstoi did not believe in “society,” writes Maklakov, given his critique of aristocrats, but when he saw how the canteen for the hungry functioned, he joined the Raevskys in their efforts to collect money for such efforts. Maklakov himself, on Tolstoi’s assignment, was arranging for peasant ­horses to be relocated from the famine-­stricken regions to families wishing to receive them in areas that ­were less affected, to be returned in spring, ­etc.42 This active stance evolved over time into conscious competition with the government and demands for po­liti­cal change. Eventually the ranks of socialness grew, as it became a main agent criticizing the government and working ­towards its downfall. The end result? “The guilt of socialness is perhaps larger in this re­spect than that of the authorities. The representatives  89 

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of socialness . . . ​started to believe what they ­were saying about themselves, narcissistic and infallible; they did not want to stoop to working together with the old powers that be; they wanted only to be masters. And they became ­ t hese masters in 1917—to the grief of themselves and 43 Rus­sia.” Gurko thinks that “socialness” woke up a­ fter Rus­sia’s defeats in the war with Japan in 1904 and 1905. It attacked the powers that be, while “the p­ eople” ­(under this rubric he mentions the manufacturing and plant workers, ­under the leadership of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries) w ­ ere also getting involved in this strug­gle. However, the Minister of Internal Affairs Pleve ­adopted such an “irritable and irascible posture ­towards the moderate-­liberal circles of socialness” that he unwittingly managed to cement together all oppositional ele­ments. Thus when Pleve was assassinated in 1904, even the conservative circles of the population treated the terrorists leniently. The opening of the State Duma in 1906 signaled a period of “cooperation of the authorities with socialness,” an alliance that might have become even closer between 1914 and 1917, when the government had to rely on socialness to help ensure provisions and ammunitions to the army during World War I. However, “socialness becomes very agitated” with the rapidly spreading rumors that consultations of the tzar’s wife with Rasputin had influenced, if not determined, the decisions of Nicholas II. The insistent demands of socialness “that ­people who are endowed with the trust of society, be invited to join the authorities, elicit neither sympathy nor serious opposition.”44 End result? Revolution. One can easily see that as an active group of progressive-­m inded ­people, “socialness” is viewed in ­these narratives as one of the key protagonists of the unfolding conflict. Currently t­ here are about a dozen talented historians arguing about whom to include in this active group between 1905 and 1917. Should it be only ­those who satisfied the requirements for registration in voter lists a­ fter 1905? The professions with their u ­ nions, voluntary associations of vari­ous kinds, urban clubs, deputies of city dumas, rural district self-­ government bodies? Or ­those parts of the educated public that ­were key to the formation of public opinion? ­There are even attempts to calculate the percentage of “socialness” within the overall population of Rus­sia.45 But t­ hese scholarly ­battles rarely link themselves with what happened ­after 1917, and thus eschew the consideration of a more impor­tant phenomenon—­the rad 90 

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ical change that the concept of socialness underwent when the Bolsheviks came to power. In one of the rare overviews of what happened with “socialness” both before and ­a fter the Rus­sian revolution, Michael David-­Fox perceptively writes: “With the flowering of civil institutions and public debate a­ fter the ­Great Reforms, the term conjured up an engagée public more than the revolutionary underground. But in part ­because of its lingering leftist and oppositionist associations, the Bolsheviks embraced the concept of a ‘Soviet obshchestvennost’’ ­after the Revolution even as they moved swiftly to ban many socie­ties and in­de­pen­dent organ­izations.”46 I should add that this new Soviet “socialness” had two main meanings. The first was a set of rigidly regulated or state-­organized associations that ser­v iced dif­fer­ent social and cultural needs, frequently linked to the tasks of modernizing the country but always subservient to the general goal of building Communism. The second was the idea that socialness is a force that does not comprise registered associations only, but exists in informal everyday life, in attempts to instill new, Communist mores and standards of be­hav­ior. H ­ ere “socialness” was understood as your colleagues and neighbors, sometimes or­ga­nized into ­people’s patrols or comrade’s courts, who intervened in everyday life in order to help the formation of a new Soviet citizen through non-­state, “social” action. Sometimes “socialness” meant special teams of colleagues, relieved of their normal work duties for a day so they could perform some impor­tant social controlling function, like checking on the bureaucracy (in an organ­ ization that was suggested by the local Party organs) or intervening in an area, designated by the authorities, where normal state action was failing to achieve its goal. In short, if the first “socialness” was about forcing associations into existence, the second was about enforcing individual conformity. And both w ­ ere about obshchestvennoe mnenie, which is usually translated as “public opinion,” but literally means “social opinion” or “opinion of the socialness.” One could translate this term as “public opinion” if one had both a public and an opinion to point to. So the term applies, for example, to the period between 1861 and 1917, when one had ele­ments of both. Yet with the advent of Stalinism, this term becomes a clear misnomer b­ ecause the “publics” are e­ ither tightly controlled or formed from above, while their opinion is not a result of f­ ree discussions, but a derivation of the Party line on a given issue. I would distinguish between two types of obshchestvennoe mnenie during  91 

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the Soviet days, depending on the level at which they functioned. “Social opinion” was said to exist at the level of large groups of p­ eople (intelligent­sia, artists, sportsmen, e­ tc.), country, country-­wide organ­izations, or even a region of the world, and was needed by the Party to demonstrate to the outside world that ­there was a kind of non-­state Soviet public, which whole-­ heartedly supported the authorities and joined them in their strug­gle to build a better ­f uture. The second type, the opinion of socialness, was not built at the level of a country or a large assembly, but around an issue or around a person by the most proximate milieu, so as to resolve the issue or correct the person. It was not about opinion as such; it was about transformation and change at the hands of the ­people working and living next to you. Let me begin by addressing socialness of the first kind, including that of vari­ous associations. As the Civil War ended in 1922, the P ­ eople’s Commissariat of the Internal Affairs started registering already existing associations so that they could fit into the new laws and regulations of the Soviet era. A ­ fter a new law on NGOs (on “social organ­izations,” to use the precise term of this epoch) was ­adopted in 1928, re-­registration occurred between 1928 and 1930, curtailing the number of associations in existence and effectively carry­ing out a purge of undesirable ones. Most of the remaining organ­izations ­were closed during the post-­World War II wave of Stalinist repression in 1948. The goals of this initiative w ­ ere doctrinally clear in light of Lenin’s few words on “the new obshchestvennost’,” which w ­ ere jotted down immediately a­ fter the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917. A ­ fter the Second Congress of Soviets had promulgated two key decrees on peace and on land on October 25, 1917, local Soviets, said Lenin, could now adapt, expand, and amend the key policies a­ dopted by the central government, while factory workers could take over their factories and start exchanging industrial goods with the villages: “The lively creativity of the masses—is the main f­ actor of new socialness.”47 The resolution of the 13th Party congress in 1924 included a demand to aid the activities of newly established organ­izations like the Comintern’s “Red Help” Association (1922), the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet (1923), and other cultural initiatives, announcing: “[I]n the growth and enlivening of ­these organ­izations the deployment of proletarian socialness expresses itself, or in other words, this is the unfolding of a true workers’ democracy.”48 Scholars proposed that obshchestvennost’ in t­hese instances should be translated as “official society” ­because it consisted of party-­state officials and  92 

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activists around them.49 Thus, Nikolai Bukharin, during the years of the New Economic Policy, tried to help unleash a movement of workers’ and peasants’ correspondents, fighting in their newspaper dispatches against the detrimental mores of the nascent Soviet bureaucracy. Consider his 1929 speech, with its hopes that a new lively socialness would come into existence: “Of course, our Soviet state is not isolated from our Soviet socialness . . . ​The fin­ gers of dif­fer­ent social and state organ­i zations are unified into one power­f ul fist of apparatus of the proletarian dictatorship. However, we should not forget that each of them carries out a special function. Now, organs of the Soviet socialness need to or­ga­n ize the wide millions of masses, cut back bureaucratism from all sides and radically stop all the distortions which are pres­ent in social organ­i zations.”50 Bukharin’s speech is impor­tant ­because it shows two aspects of this “new socialness” that ­were common to all Communist discourse. First of all, this socialness is or­g a­n ized; it has “organs” of socialness. But it organizes the wider masses, too; all should be part of this overall organ­i zation. The term “or­ga­n ized socialness” is not a Soviet invention per se, though; it first gained wide circulation during World War I. It designated, among ­others, cap­i­tal­ ists who formed local branches of the War-­I ndustrial Committee helping with ammunitions or the all-­Russian ­union of activists of rural districts’ self-­ governing bodies. Both w ­ ere poised to support the government in its war effort. For example, as one scholar writes about this epoch, “in November 1915 the Moscow War-­Industrial Committee assured the ministers of the Entente of the firm determination ‘of Rus­sian or­ga­n ized obshchestvennost’ to devote all its energies to victory over the common e­ nemy’.”51 During the last twenty years, historians have shown how many phenomena that had been formerly ascribed to the Soviets—­like methods of h ­ andling mass populations, controlling communication, expropriating and nationalizing property of the enemies—­were in fact in­ven­ted by tzarist authorities during the hard days of WWI, when they had to mobilize or control the few resources they had. The or­ga­n ized socialness, it seems, was no exception to this rule. The second feature is that the Soviet socialness is almost part of officialdom, performing functions complementary to ­those of the state organs. When Boris Slutskii wrote in his poem in the mid-1970s that “official socialness has lost all thinglyness,” he meant that being part of a nominally “social” non-­state organ­i zation, but recognized by the state as part of socialness—­the  93 

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Union of Soviet Writers, for example—­provided special perks like food rations and access to better resorts and country ­houses.52 By the 1970s, this was gone: t­ here was too much official socialness, and one could not supply special perks for all of its members. As the title of a perestroika-­era book shows, perhaps the only sizable perk remaining was visits abroad as part of del­e­ga­tions of “Soviet socialness” at a time when foreign travel was severely controlled.53 Such del­e­ga­tions allegedly represented Soviet “public opinion” to the outside world and personified the social force that was in charge of its formation. The unfree character of this type of socialness is clear. For example, in the wake of the revelations of the 20th Party Congress, the Moscow Union of Writers deci­ded to establish a new newspaper and play a more active and in­de­pen­dent role, adopting the vocabulary of pre-­revolutionary socialness, that is, to behave like a critical educated public that helps correct social flaws and works ­towards the public good. Yet this did not last long. Khrushchev marked the limits of pos­si­ble experimentation in this re­spect, ending this initiative in 1957.54 David-­Fox summed up the general trend: “Despite pro­cesses of Sovietization affecting a pa­norama of very dif­fer­ent organ­i zations, the 1920s experience incorporated the evolution of a previously-­existing Rus­sian obshchestvennost′ as well as the birth of the new—or, more likely, their complicated coexistence. Soviet conceptions of obshchestvennost′ and the a­ ctual phenomenon of public activism, as well as the nature of its orga­n izational vehicles, clearly varied in the Stalin and post-­Stalin eras that followed. But it is also plausible to argue that a new kind of public involvement became an integral part of the Soviet order. For many, participation in it may have become an empty ritual, like voting in a single-­candidate election, but even so, the new Soviet obshchestvennost′ could have preserved certain forms and values developed earlier. For ­others . . . ​Soviet public engagement may have meant something more significant.”55 He thus suggested that coerced and limited “civil participation” should perhaps be seen as a normal part of a totalitarian system. I would contend that this term also fittingly describes the forced participation in activities of socialness of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev, rather than just Stalin, days. The second type of socialness, not linked to semi-­official associations or other large-­scale groupings of ­people, was about enforcing new mores and standards of be­hav­ior in smaller, face-­to-­face contact groups. This pro­cess  94 

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achieved its apogee during Khrushchev’s drive to finish the all-­out collectivization of life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but socialness took on this function from the early Soviet days.56 The first Soviet poem that mentions “socialness” that I was able to find dates back to 1927 and is written by Nikolai Aseev, a former futurist, and a friend and colleague of Maiakovsky in LEF, the Left Front of the Arts. Entitled “­Don’t shove!,” it calls for a comrades’ court trial over t­hose who stomp on other p­ eople’s feet and elbow their way in street traffic: Not only to vio­lence, not only to idleness Not only to knifing, spitting and drinking, But to untidiness, rudeness and cheekiness O the socialness, declare war!57

Such a stern call to action is heeded, thinks Aseev, ­because a more serious kind of hooliganism, which terrifies every­body, starts with rude corporeal be­hav­ior in civilized spaces, where it should not be tolerated. The 1930s witnessed a ­whole movement to educate and civilize the worker’s body. The goal was not only clean nails, no lice, and neatly cut hair; the idea was also that a white table­cloth, a lampshade over a ­table, and win­dow curtains should be part of ­every worker’s h ­ ouse­hold, even if the ­house­hold was nothing more than a room in the dorm. The journal that tried to implement this in action relied on ­house­w ives of the man­ag­ers and the Stakhanovites, who had f­ ree time and demanded no money for their civilizing efforts. The title of the journal was telling—­Obshchestvennitsa—­meaning that it was addressed to the ladies ­doing unpaid, philanthropic “social work.”58 But the second connotation of the journal title directly linked this term to “socialness,” which now assumed not the task of criticism but the critical task of socialization, or the inculcation of basic civilized habits and mores. In order to do so, one had to go to the workers’ dorms, to the shop floor, and to their recreation sites, to continually tell them and show them how to live properly, that is—­better. This journal did not exist for long, and it might be seen as a curious and somewhat unusual example of the general drive. Socialness usually functioned horizontally, and not by involving representatives of the leisurely and well-­off groups. Aseev’s poem is about street encounters, where all Soviet citizens are equal. Examples of this egalitarian kind of Stalinist socialness  95 

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might be represented by quotes from two masterpieces. In In the First Circle, Shchagov asks Nadia w ­ hether she is worried by the consequences of the recent Party bureau decision: “What ruling? That the forces of the socialness must check up on the social origins of students and make sure that they have indicated their parentage correctly.”59 This means: your neighbors and colleagues w ­ ill be called in to check w ­ hether you diverged from what you stated in your official rec­ords, in ­either your personal conversations, your mumblings in your sleep, or even in an overlooked letter. Denunciations would bring down the hypocrites. And accusations of scheming to hide social origins in the USSR, which frequently searched for the enemies of ­people by means of this very pro­cess, w ­ ere extremely dangerous. In Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the socialness also consists of obedient rank-­and-­fi le colleagues, ready to follow the ­orders of the Party and leadership in checking and vilifying a transgressing scientist: “Tomorrow I ­w ill be finished off at the Academic Council. That is, the Institute authorities and the Party Committee have already done away with me. The Academic Council’s just a formality. You know—­the voice of the p­ eople, the demands of socialness.”60 Collective stigmatization and shaming are in the making ­here. Khrushchev’s wish to restore the princi­ples of Communist self-­governance that Stalin had allegedly betrayed led to many initiatives empowering socialness in dif­fer­ent milieus and venues. P ­ eople’s patrols on the streets checking the style of dress and comportment; neighbors or colleagues initiating comrades’ courts’ proceedings if they are bothered by your everyday lifestyle; bus passengers offering admonitions to properly behave oneself to a youth who did not offer his or her seat to the elderly—­these and similar techniques of horizontal pressure started to pervade Soviet life, stamping out minor transgressions. Khrushchev himself was not equivocal about why the USSR should be giving more power to conformity-­enforcing socialness: “When comrades’ courts work actively, and socialness itself nominates ­people to defend public order, it ­will be easier to fight violators. One can discern such a violator not only when he has committed a misdeed or a crime, but also when he merely deviates from norms of public be­hav­ior in a way that may [eventually] lead to anti-­social acts. ­People [then] can influence him in time so that his vicious disposition is cut short . . .” During the 22nd Party Congress, which announced in 1961 that the Soviet ­people ­will reach Communism in twenty years, Khrushchev pontificated: “It is necessary to heighten attention to and  96 

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demands on p­ eople’s be­hav­ior coming from socialness. B ­ ecause evil deeds are committed by p­ eople, most of whom are members of one or another collective . . . ​We should more actively use the moral weight and authority of socialness to fight violators of the norms and rules of common socialist life.”61 Thus, members of a work or housing collective should diligently watch each other, and reprimand and admonish should they register something suspicious—­something not conforming to the standards of civilized Soviet be­hav­ior. The extent of this penetration of the comradely gaze differed. In Stalin’s day, for example, we may read about calls to socialness to report cases of illegal abortions (the procedure was criminalized ­after 1936).62 The debates of Khrushchev’s years draw the line of pos­si­ble interference of socialness in personal issues at the border of utmost intimacy. Only ­matters of romantic love cannot be deci­ded by comrades’ courts. But all misdemeanors should be spotted, reported, and corrected, and certain issues—­family vio­lence in general, for example—­should be fought as hard as pos­si­ble. “Presenting comrades’ courts with cases of unworthy attitudes t­oward ­women does not mean that the socialness always has a right to interfere in a citizen’s personal life. The comrades’ court cannot interfere in the ­matters of heart and s­ ettle, for example, such m ­ atters [as] who should or should not love whom.”63 Linguistic formulas that mention “socialness” in excerpts from the 1950s through the 1970s, assembled in the National Corpus of the Rus­sian Language, stress that it has eyes and is always watching. If it misses something and a misdeed occurs, they say that “socialness has overlooked,” or “has passed over,” the preparations for this glaring misdemeanor. Thus, a novel from 1957 depicts a jealous lady who chides her object of desire for looking the other way: “Do you think nobody sees with whom you are walking right now, at whom you are looking? Socialness knows every­thing!” The brave officer responds: “So what? Let it be known. I am not afraid of socialness. I am socialness myself.”64 The condition of knowing every­thing is ensured ­because socialness sees every­t hing—­u nless its eyes are shut for what­ever strange reason. Thus, in a famous play from 1965, a protagonist says: “I’m leaving. But first I’m g­ oing to open the eyes of socialness. He set fire to the cottage . . . ​ and not someone e­ lse. And he stirred up ­things ­here too. You o ­ ught to know he’s a hardened criminal . . . ​Well, watch out, he’s not through yet.”65 A didactic story from a ­legal journal tells about an alcoholic who terrorized his ­family and neighbors: “They worked with him a lot; we cannot say that this  97 

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was a case when ‘socialness overlooked.’ All who should have helped him—­ either ­because of their post or ­because of social duty, tried to do so.” But when admonitions and offers of voluntary medical treatment failed, such cases require resolute normalizing action: “Neither socialness nor the police turned away from him. ­A fter a police referral he was summoned to the comrades’ court. H ­ ere he w ­ ill have to answer to his friends, neighbors in the h ­ ouse and micro-­d istrict, and fellow workers, who ­were also invited to the hearing.”66 The effort to outwit the mechanisms enforcing conformity is the not-­so-­ well-­h idden subject of early novels of the leading author of the Soviet 1960’s beatnik-­i nfluenced generation, Vassily Aksenov. He narrates a situation typical for the height of the socialness craze of the Khrushchev days. Returning from work, a ­mother, a local mid-­level official, finds her seventeen-­year old ­daughter dancing rock’n’roll with a boy in the small grove u ­ nder the win­ dows of their apartment block to the loud sound of a tape recorder. She wipes the lipstick from her d­ aughter’s lips and o ­ rders her home—­other­w ise she would end up in a whore­house! A neighboring auntie, popping out from the open win­dow, says: “­You’re absolutely right, Zinaida Petrovna . . . ​Nothing ­w ill help her now but stern mea­sures. One should mobilize socialness. And why d­ oesn’t our tenants’ committee do something about it? Instead of organ­ izing decent, quiet games for the young ­people in our yard, they leave the field for ­these two delinquents with that tape recorder of theirs, which poisons young minds with de­cadent m ­ usic. Timma, have you told the janitor?”67 Socialness in this second sense of the term functioned even in the dissident community. The first kind of socialness was alien to the dissidents since they did not support officialdom, and often fought against it.68 With the second form, however, they ­were quite familiar, reproducing it very well in their own circles. Consider the following account of the enforcement of conformity among dissidents. The nominal, but long-­estranged wife of the imprisoned Yulii Daniel finds herself suddenly ­under pressure to do every­thing that is expected from the spouse of a martyr: “Socialness was keenly watching Larisa’s observance of the rules of the game, produced by Lord knows whom, and it was interested neither in her feelings nor in her interests. . . . ​Now she was followed by the thousand eyes of the opinion of socialness, from which it was impossible to escape and which it was impossible to love.”69 Please keep in mind that t­ hese ­were the dissidents, and the rules of the conformity game ­were not produced by the state. Rather, they ­were produced by nobody but  98 

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enforced by all, with the same zealous willingness characteristic of the official sphere against which the dissidents w ­ ere fighting. ­These stifling aspects of a self-­policing community that enforces mores remind us, of course, of Arendt’s “the social.” Hanna Pitkin has discovered that one of the sources for the depiction of the social is Arendt’s early book Rahel Varnhagen, which describes the life of a parvenu, a Jewish salon hostess who had tried to integrate herself into high society in early nineteenth-­ century Germany by submitting to this society’s rules.70 Of course, she had suffered the stifling consequences of such an endeavor. Le beau monde, ­whether in France, Germany, or Rus­sia, was never a nice place to be if you did not properly exemplify the required mores. Mikhail Muraviev, a mentor of young Alexander I in moral philosophy, but also a f­ ather of one of the most famous Decembrists, wrote in a poem already in 1783: “The ways of society are chains for a thinking person / ­Those who have successfully met its demands / Yawn in the presence of the muses.”71 Conformity to the demands of correct be­ hav­ior in high society is so exacting that it leaves no time for thinking or originality. Eventually, this poem implies, it even kills the taste for thought. Thus, this horizontal pressure was not an invention of the Soviet socialness, but the Soviet version of the social practiced it thoroughly and with g­ reat dedication. Holding this history of the term in mind, let us now take a closer look at its con­temporary usage. Fedorova’s study shows that out of 343 mentions of obshchestvennost’ in the 2004 ­through 2009 corpus, 17 ­percent employ two clichés: mirovaia obshchestvennost’, or “world socialness,” a term used since Stalin to indicate the community (sometimes progressive, sometimes reactionary) that produces public opinion on a global scale, and shirokaia obshchestvennost’, or “wide socialness,” which means an extended group of ­people not related to opinion-­makers within just one certain layer of the population or just one all-­Russian organ­i zation. The idiom sviazi s obshchestvennostiu accounts for 6.5 ­percent of the usage; this is how post-­Soviet textbooks render the term “public relations.”72 Indeed, if this type of “public” is just a manipulated audience or one that is catered to, rather than ­people acting in concert to change their lives, then perhaps translating this term into Rus­sian as “socialness” was the right ­thing to do.73 Together ­these three phrases account for almost one fourth of all usage. What other regularities of usage may one observe in the remaining corpus of citations?  99 

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The remaining citations frequently mention ­either socialness abroad—­ such as in the US, Turkey, Georgia or Armenia—or examples from Rus­sia’s past such as stolichnaia obshchestvennost’, “the socialness of the capital city.” So, t­ hese usages refer to outlandish experiences—­meaning that ­either real public life is pos­si­ble abroad, or was pos­si­ble in Rus­sia in the past, or just refers to sociability practiced in the good society in the nineteenth c­ entury. Nationalist and pro-­government sources talk about “liberal socialness” or ironically mention the socialness that does not want to recognize the successes of Rus­sia, ­because this would be an example of servile attitudes and Putinism.74 On the contrary, this liberal public, critical of the government, does not employ such terms for self-­designation. At least I did not find them when I looked through the database of the National Corpus of the Rus­sian Language, following on Fedorova’s research. Other examples referring to present-­day Rus­sia may sound strange to a non-­Russian speaker, like medical, academic, insurance, chess-­playing, aviation, and other forms of socialness. But in t­ hese cases, the terms refer to the professions, not instances of active public action. In that sense, they might mean all professionals working in the sphere of insurance and discussing its news, or all chess-­players united in discussing recent tournament news, or members of private and public amateur aviation clubs lauding an achievement of a certain pi­lot at a recent air show. The usual task of ­these professional publics is to create a shared opinion on how ­things are or should be in their field, to establish or demolish reputations, ­etc. The form of socialness that sees and controls is also mentioned, but I have managed to find only one post-2000 instance of it in the database of the National Corpus of the Rus­sian Language—­and it’s notably dif­fer­ent from what it meant in the Soviet days, when direct physical checks and controls ­were presupposed. Accounting for the threat of the spread of an African plague among pigs, veterinary control insists that hunters, having spotted the corpse of a deceased wild boar, should immediately report it to the authorities: “In order for the spring hunting season to follow the existing regulations, we ­will mobilize all our employees for control functions, we w ­ ill involve the police and socialness in our raids.”75 Fedorova also noted that usage of the term “socialness” is now strongly influenced by Rus­sian analogues of the En­g lish word “community.” Curiously enough, this En­glish term is translated by Rus­sian soobshchestvo, which  10 0 

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looks like a derivative of the root Rus­sian term for “society,” obshchestvo. Thus, it can be literally rendered as “co-­society,” but the basic meaning of this term in the nineteenth ­century was “unseemly or criminal gathering,” while the related term soobshchnik meant “an accomplice, an associate in crime.” The current usage of the old word has soared and solidified only very recently, ­after blogs and social networks perhaps became tired of using a calque from Rus­sian IT slang, kommiuniti. But examples of standard usage in real, not virtual, life, disqualify high hopes for public action linked with this term. In one telling quote, for instance, 40 ­percent of zhurnalistskoe soobshchestvo, or “the journalists’ community,” is said to approve of the introduction of censorship. We are still far away from the notion of a group of the active public that calls for action or undertakes action itself.76 Thus, the regularities of current word usage suggest the feebleness of the critical active publics in con­temporary Rus­sia. The increase in usage of the term “socialness” reflects pro-­government efforts to e­ ither stigmatize and tame potential public protest, or—­more frequently—to ritualistically appeal to the wider, and thus inactive, socialness of the country or of the world. This growing usage of the term “socialness” also refers to the burgeoning activities of the professions, and to some residual instances of the controlling and interfering socialness of the Soviet days. But neither of t­ hese examples is r­ eally promising. Indeed, a “public” of insurance agents or chess-­players, and the community of mass media authors who would eagerly accept censorship— do t­ hese examples not explain why “socialness” is as unappealing as its parent term, “society,” and perhaps even less so? The flourishing of both might mean nothing for the fate of public freedom in post-­Communist life. Let me summarize what we discovered so far. Analy­sis of word usage tells us that we have a rigid, cold or coarse society, in the context of which socializing with friends and relatives is obviously a very pleasant and enjoyable ­t hing. Also, ­t here are so many spheres, institutions, and phenomena around Rus­sians that are described as obshchestvennyi, or “social,” that they become ­either extremely boring or easy to overlook. Rus­sians swim among them like fish through inedible algae. And in recent times, the ­waters have been simply teeming with such institutions. We not only have much more of the “social” phenomena now than we had even during, say, the stagnant Brezhnev regime, but we also have so much tedious, anti-­political, and acquiescent “socialness” added to our ­waters, at least discursively, that soon we  101 

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­ ill not be able to swim in them at all. ­Unless, of course, the genuine public w takes destiny into its own hands. Given that in the thought of Hannah Arendt such public life is opposed to what she calls “the social,” I ­w ill now sometimes employ the term “the social” interchangeably with “socialness,” which I have been using so far. Indeed, obshchestvennost’ in its second Soviet sense is very close to what Hanna Pitkin has distinguished as one of the two key meanings of this term—­not the most felicitous of Arendt’s terms. The first meaning of “the social” is economic, signifying an appearance of a “curiously hybrid realm” in which “private interests assume public significance,” a realm “where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”77 That is, activities that had resided within the confines of each ­house­hold in the Greek and Roman days emerge into the open and become regulated by public authorities, while the national community itself is conceived on the model of a ­house­hold, a “national economy.” This, however, is not the meaning that concerns me now. The second meaning of Arendt’s “the social” concerns conformism and normalization, and Pitkin links it to the originary be­hav­ior of a “parvenu,” who has to act a certain way to be admitted to and excel in salon life. Arendt writes: “. . . society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action . . . ​Instead, society expects from each of its members a certain kind of be­hav­ior, imposing innumerable and vari­ous rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement. With Rousseau, we find t­ hese demands in the salons of high society . . . ​With the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has fi­nally, ­after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength.”78 Pitkin argues that “the social” of The H ­ uman Condition behaves like a Blob, a creature from outer space that emerges out of the blue and imposes itself on ­people, making them incapable of action and fi­nally devouring them. At some point, “socialness,” as the history of this Rus­sian concept has demonstrated, also stopped reflecting an abstract quality and started designating an active agent. A ­ fter the 1917 revolution this agent started—­particularly if we look at the second Soviet meaning of the term—to incapacitate and devour ­people. Pitkin, of course, argues that in real­ity, “the social does not do, or cause or explain anything. Instead it is itself a condition that needs to be  10 2 

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explained . . . ​T he social is Arendt’s way of talking about a collectivity of ­people who, though they are in­de­pen­dent and active . . . ​behave individually in ways that preclude coordinated action” with “their ­doing continuously . . . ​ shaping the conditions ­u nder which they all live.”79 For the Soviet case, I would add a word: “shaping the oppressive conditions ­under which they all live.” And the reason for that was given by Arendt herself in her 1963 book On Revolution, as one of the explanations for the failure of the French Revolution of 1789. Similarly, ­after 1917 in Rus­sia, the downtrodden and the poor, having burst into the public realm, ­were still driven by the needs of their bodies. They did not know what was genuinely po­liti­cal action, ­free from ­those needs, and thus could not build the world of po­l iti­cal plurality among equals: “[T]he cry for bread ­w ill always be uttered in one voice.” Also, the habit of solving prob­lems by material force rather than persuasion made vio­ lence seem an easy way to achieve revolutionary goals.80 Hence the spread of the uniform, threatening, and potentially violent, “social.” In the post-­ Soviet case, Pitkin’s diagnosis of a prob­lem with the social is very fitting also: the now formally ­f ree and rights-­endowed citizens try acting together, but they end up with the “social” rather than “genuinely po­liti­cal” outcomes. Pitkin notes, however, that Arendt’s “the social” corresponds to none of the ordinary or dictionary senses of the En­glish words “society” or “social.” “Without being aware of it, she gradually worked herself into a highly idiosyncratic use of the phrase, one that was almost bound to mislead readers and that may even sometimes have confused Arendt herself . . . ​‘The social,’ then, is not a very apt name for the prob­lem Arendt meant to address; yet, I know no better one [writes Pitkin]. If the social demystified is the collectivity of ­people who, for what­ever reason . . . ​cannot, or at any rate, do not, direct or even intentionally influence the large scale resultants of what they are ­doing, one might say it is ­people conducting themselves as if they had been swallowed by some Blob that deprived them of their individuality and capacity for initiative, compacted them into an undifferentiated mass.”81 The differences between the Rus­sian concept of “socialness” and Arendt’s “the social” seem to be thus twofold. First, the Rus­sian term obshchestvennost’ is part of a very widespread colloquial usage, even if rarely employed in everyday speech spoken on the street, in cafes, or with friends and ­family. It belongs more to the official, mass media, belles lettres, and academic usage. I did not invent it; the Rus­sian p­ eople did. The term obshchestvennost’ is linked  10 3 

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to the ordinary sense of the Rus­sian words for “social” and “society” directly and resolutely, not like Arendt’s term. Second, the Blobbish qualities of this term are also a feature of everyday parlance. When the term first came to designate an instance of real life agency, in the nineteenth c­ entury, it was used to contrast “socialness” as an active group of radicals with the “good society” of aristocratic salons or “high society” of the educated gentry. ­A fter the Rus­ sian Revolution, the term developed monstrous qualities b­ ecause the actor, designated by it, was supposed to constantly and vigilantly observe, criticize, admonish, and remonstrate, and—if all ­else failed—­deliver the offender to punitive bodies. The monstrosity of a word (meaning the aesthetically repugnant result of a rare lexical transformation) came to reflect the monstrosity of the actuality captured by it. But perhaps one should fi­nally get rid of the Blobbish qualities of this socialness, if not of the phenomenon itself? As Voltaire famously proclaimed about another monstrous agency, Ecrasez l’infame!

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4.1 ​Public Deeds Confronted with the current discursive preponderance of the social, our research group asked Boris Gladarev to analyze two well-­k nown examples of explicit public mobilization in Rus­sia, when life was neither boring nor empty, and when obshchestvo, or “society,” was e­ ither malleable or easy to brush off.1 ­These ­were the cases when ­people freely created their own socie­ties or associations, while a larger society did not ­either force them to unite on pre­set terms or impose standards and goals of be­hav­ior on them. One example was Gruppa Spaseniia, “The Rescue Group” (RG), that existed in Leningrad during the perestroika days between 1986 and 1990, and another was Zhivoi gorod, “The Living City” (LC), movement in St. Petersburg from 2006 to 2009. The Rescue Group tried to save the old city buildings destined to be completely destroyed or recklessly renovated; this protest was the first case of open public anti-­government action in the 1980s. ­A fter it was allowed, it spread to become one of the key groups challenging Communist rule in Leningrad. The Living City appeared in response to the plans of Gazprom, the Rus­sian state-­owned gas-­producing and exporting mono­poly, to build a skyscraper for its headquarters in downtown St. Petersburg. Many thought that this would violate the proportionality of the unique central district of St. Petersburg and its historical skyline. But few hoped that anybody could stop  10 5 

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the city governor and Gazprom from realizing their plans. Protests, initiated and fostered by the Living City movement, put the issue on the agenda of Medvedev and Putin, and thus a­ fter three years of strug­gle managed to do the impossible—­stop the construction of this skyscraper. Both the RG and the LC ­were born when some residents of ­L eningrad / ​ St. Petersburg attempted to treat the city as their own. As one RG activist says about the 1986 mobilization that led p­ eople to publicly protest the hurried reconstruction of the buildings housing the home of the poet Anton Delvig (Pushkin’s classmate and friend) and of the “Angleterre” h ­ otel (where the very famous poet Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925): “This is our city; ­don’t touch it, it is not yours. You are strangers ­here, you have been spoiling it for 70 years, and we ­w ill no longer let you do that.” In 2006, the Living City activists proclaimed: “This is our city. We are responsible for it before our ­children, each other, our selves, and our own conscience. We are responsible before the global community as well, b­ ecause Petersburg is not just our heritage, it is world heritage.” Such a position is worthy of re­spect. ­A fter all, as one activist noted: “The city government considers the city to be its own property, and so it finds it strange when someone opposes their decisions.”2 Both movements can be said to be close to the republican tradition. E ­ ither it w ­ as re-­invented ­here anew, or it was not for nothing that Radishchev and Novikov nurtured the generation of the Decembrists, whose era bequeathed this republican background to Rus­sian schoolchildren. To this day, ­children are immersed in ­this tradition during compulsory classes on the poetry and culture of the Pushkin age, the golden era of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture.3 Thus, the republican tradition may not have entirely perished along with the Decembrists; rather, it remained in the subconscious of Rus­sian history, to be drawn upon once again, in an updated version, not long ago. As I already discussed in Chapter 2, for Cicero res publica is res populi, that is, res (property) belonging to the populus. If it ceases to belong to the populus—as happened, for example, in Rome during the Decemviri’s usurpation of power when the populus ­couldn’t control its own res—­then res publica vanishes. In order to bring it back to life, the populus must rise up to regain its property. Thus, the idea of the urban movements in St. Petersburg—­returning our city to ourselves, to make it once more our property rather than the preserve of officials—is straightforward. It is as direct as the idea that Cicero expressed more than 2,000 years ago.  10 6 

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Based on his fieldwork and studies of social movements in the West, Gladarev articulated several preconditions for the successful mobilization of ­t hese movements. First, t­ here should be a certain set of values in place (a power­f ul myth or vision of the common good that motivates t­ hose taking part in a movement). Second, t­ here should be a specific historical conjuncture, an obvious threat to ­these values that happens ­here and now. Third, certain cultural requirements should be met; for example, participants should have civilized deliberation skills so that they could weigh dif­fer­ent alternatives and collectively adopt a decision on the group’s course of action. Fourth, material resources are required, meaning t­ here should be adequate infrastructure and support for action. Let us consider the first two preconditions, since they ­were obviously pres­ent in the cases of the RG and the LC. We ­w ill examine the third and fourth a­ fter that ­because they are more problematic. A shared feeling of the uniqueness of St. Petersburg gave participants in both movements a cause for moral indignation when the city seemed to be ­under assault from a haphazard and rapacious urban redevelopment. Early twentieth-­century historian Antsiferov provided the foundation for what is nowadays called “the St. Petersburg myth.” He claimed that this city was not just a city, but that it had a genius loci, a special soul—­a statement that touched the hearts of many in the wake of Andrei Bely’s famous novel, Petersburg. ­Later, the academician Dmitrii Likhachev wrote articles on the ecol­ogy of culture (which is allegedly more fragile than that of nature), contributing further to the development of this St. Petersburg my­thol­ogy. It was also greatly helped by the appearance of the official All-­Union Society for the Preservation of the Monuments of Nature and Culture in the mid-1960s. The ensuing publications, addressed to a mass Soviet audience, pop­u ­lar­i zed and glorified all aspects of St. Petersburg architecture and its urban features. The recognition of the fact that the historic city center belongs to the world heritage (a local myth holds that in St. Petersburg, more nineteenth-­century buildings have been preserved than in any other Eu­ro­pean city) fostered an intuitive local understanding about the special mission of St. Petersburg. ­A fter the Rescue Group leaders w ­ ere elected to the Leningrad City Council in 1990, and l­ ater to the St. Petersburg City Duma, they also influenced citywide policies. Since 1997, high school classes on St. Petersburg history, architecture and culture, have been compulsory for ­children in this city of five million inhabitants. More recently, post-­Soviet regularization of owner­ship has also  10 7 

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contributed to the city myth by creating long lists of monuments of regional and federal significance protected by the government, adding many sites to ­those that UNESCO had initially classified as world heritage. The language of heritage and patrimony may sound familial or nepotistic, far from the republican impulse and Ciceronian rhe­toric. But this is not so. In some versions of po­liti­cal theory, res publica as “the property of the p­ eople” exists as something that first and foremost binds generations together. This diachronous link between generations might be even more impor­tant than the synchronous link between compatriots. This can be seen, for example, in the medieval ­legal texts and papal decrees asserting universitas non moritur, meaning that persona ficta of a city like Bologna (or another type of res publica) cannot die, b­ ecause it lasts across generations. Monarchists ­later transformed this perception into the doctrine of the two bodies of the king. When the natu­ral body of a successive king dies, his po­liti­cal body—­that is, the body politic of the kingdom—­does not.4 This linkage between times, this inter-­generational transmission of res publica, is impor­tant. When Cicero argued with Pompey, who was preparing to leave Rome in January of 49 BC ­because Caesar’s armies w ­ ere approaching, Pompey replied that holding fast to buildings or walls was not impor­tant. Res publica is not in the walls: non est in parietibus res publica. Cicero retorted: at in aris et focis, but in ­family altars and hearths ­there is res publica.5 Is it a coincidence, then, that the d­ aughter of one of the Rescue Group activists contributed to the beginning of the Living City, first abundantly commenting on the destruction of St. Petersburg in her blog and then establishing the website www​.­save​-­spb​.­r u? Is it a coincidence that the first ever action of the Living City as such, during the public exhibit of competing architectural proj­ ects to design the Gazprom tower in 2006, occurred as a classical piece of per­for­mance art in the style of the Rescue Group from the 1980s, and with their support? (The Living City activists ­later abandoned this style.) Of course, for the Rescue Group, re­sis­tance to the Communist system as such was perhaps the ultimate goal; love for St. Petersburg came in as a handy subordinate idea. By contrast, it was possibly a special St. Petersburg quasi-­ religion that set the Living City activists into motion. One can be legitimately skeptical about the strength of such beliefs, but the LC activists frequently claim that they consciously intended to pass their key personal sites in the city—­their own shrines and altars—to their ­children. Emotions linked to per 10 8 

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sonal histories are strong; imagine the memory of a first kiss or a first trip abroad, when the strangeness of life in Paris, New York, or London was particularly vivid and perhaps even shocking. ­These are transformative experiences, and though their intensity is ­later dimmed in remembrance, they remain significant landmarks in one’s personal history.6 Rapid expansion of urban redevelopment in the city center has endangered the very possibility of sharing such emotions with one’s ­children, if ­these emotions are linked to par­tic­u ­lar buildings or places now scheduled to dis­appear. In classical republican lit­er­a­t ure one can find an expression sentire de re publica, which means “to have an opinion about the republic (or public affairs).”7 The very structure of this Latin verb suggests that p­ eople can develop a con-­sensus or dis-­sensus on res publica. The word sentire, however, originally meant “to feel.” Classical republican experience thus implies that the republic is not only talked about but also perhaps felt, in a direct and unmediated way. And the start of the massive rebuilding of the city center encroached on this direct and unmediated feeling of St. Petersburg. The Rescue Group members might have had similar sentiments in the 1980s, though they expressed them in the language of personal possessions. For example, Nikolai Zhuravsky, one of the RG found­ers, described the feelings of a layer of “professional dwellers” of St. Petersburg, as he called them, in the following way: “They perceive any rude intrusion into the body of the city as a personal insult. It’s the same as [if] someone came into your personal apartment, where you had collected, gathered some furniture—­well, it’s old but so what?—­and started to reshuffle it.” The Living City statements are a bit dif­fer­ent. Liza Nikonova, the creator of the website that led to the beginning of the LC movement, was shocked to see that the corner bread shop, which she passed on the way to school ­every day when she was a kid, and where her grand­mother used to receive her meager daily ration of 125 grams of bread during the height of the Leningrad siege in 1941–42 (thus a place that was sacred in their ­family history), had been suddenly demolished to make way for a new supermarket. “I physically felt the pain from the loss of this neighborhood,” Nikonova says. “It was so connected to my personal history.” Certainly demolishing sites linked to personal history is not like intruding into a personal apartment, so the victims d­ on’t tend to rush out and protest immediately in the streets. The grapes of wrath have to ripen. Vorontsov from the LC says, “I walked around and somehow subconsciously  10 9 

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noticed all ­these changes that ­were happening in the city, and I grumbled to myself that I ­d idn’t like it, but I d­ idn’t undertake any sort of or­g a­n ized action. Every­thing ended in this internal protest.” But then, as another LC activist says, “Quantity turns into quality. For me, this qualitative shift was the destruction of the buildings on the corner of Nevsky [Prospect] and Vosstaniia [Street]. They d­ idn’t fence off every­thing t­here right away, and you could see this pro­cess, and you could see the result. The sight, of course, was not for t­ hose who would faint easily. And it just appeared that something had to be done. The feeling arose that something was happening that affects me personally.”8 In Heidegger’s essay “The ­Thing,” we read about public concerns that affect all: “The Romans called a ­matter for discourse res . . . ​Res publica means, not the state, but that which, known to every­one, concerns every­body and is therefore deliberated in public.”9 One should perhaps add that res publica affects every­one without exception—no one can escape being touched by it. The Living City activists are sure that the ongoing destruction of St. Petersburg they knew and loved affects them, and that they cannot escape from this sentiment. For “professional dwellers” to live in such a ravaged city is repugnant, and with time may become totally unacceptable. Other city dwellers—­those, for example, who do not partake in the St.  Petersburg myth—­may not even feel touched by some old buildings being destroyed at some distance from their daily lives. A ­ fter all, the population of St. Petersburg is more than five million ­people. Therefore, the “urban defense” activists— as some members of the Living City call themselves—­often aim at directly affecting (and thus influencing the affects of) a largely nonchalant crowd by staging diverse acts of per­for­mance art or street action that would surprise passersby or social media in order, as they say, to “snag” or “engage” the broader public. The goal is to make an ordinary person feel that an attack on the city, supported by the powers that be, affects him or her personally as well. But judging by the recurrence of laments about the futility of such “snagging” methods, not many are actually snagged, or perhaps they are snagged only briefly. The activists, of course, understand the normal concerns of the majority of the city population. One of them says, for example: “City residents are active only when it concerns their immediate interests. When it comes to their property interests, or when the authorities are trying to take away their  1 10 

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land, or to throw them out somehow, or to build something next door . . .”10 So, t­ here is the usual split into an active minority and a passive majority. On the one hand, ­there are ­those who share in the St. Petersburg myth. ­These are the “urban defenders,” or “professional city dwellers,” as they ­were called in the interview cited above. When city authorities impinge on the body of the city, it directly concerns and affects ­these professional dwellers. On the other hand, t­ here are ­those city residents who do not share in the St. Petersburg myth, and this majority usually ignores what’s ­going on with city redevelopment. But they become affected (and power­f ul emotions then surface) when the city administration intrudes or encroaches upon their personal or collective interests. One need not moralize about the difference between the former and the latter. The public, wrote Walter Lipp­mann in the late 1920s, is a phantom that materializes only from time to time. To think that ­there is an educated citizenry that knows all about every­thing professionally and can thoughtfully vote for or against ­every decision, and has time for this, is a delusion. The public is a collection of ­people ready to stand ­behind the critics of the authorities if t­ here is a failure that is so vast that it begins to affect ­these p­ eople. If every­thing is working normally, then t­ here is no sense in holding public hearings or public debates. Furthermore, t­here is usually neither time nor energy for this. But when something breaks down, the public appears as if out of nowhere and holds the government accountable, standing ­behind the leaders who are criticizing the current or impending failure.11 So in order for the public to materialize, one needs both the first group—­ those who share the St. Petersburg myth and in some kind of quasi-­religious way feel the unique spirit of the city—­and the second: t­ hose who quietly walk their dogs in the courtyards of their apartment blocks ­u ntil, for example, dense new construction denies them the habitual liberty to do so. Frequently during urban redevelopment plans, new high-­rise buildings are inserted into ­free space that had been intentionally left by the Soviet city planners between apartment blocks for health, aesthetic, and circulation reasons. Small parks get uprooted, benches eliminated, c­ hildren’s playgrounds moved or destroyed, and tall fences around ­these chunks of territory are suddenly erected overnight to make room for new skyscrapers to spring up.12 Now the regular users of ­those old spaces—­the dog walkers, moms with strollers and kids who want to play in the sandbox, and local alcoholics who have been  111 

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using the bushes and benches to share a ­bottle—­start calling Living City to ask, “What the hell is g­ oing on with the city?” Thus an active and fairly large public appears that speaks on behalf of the city, at least for a short period of time. While describing such cases of spontaneous mobilization, the Living City activists use the language naturally available to them. This is the language that uses the words linked with “society,” or obshchestvo. For example, they want to introduce obshchestvennye priemnye, or “social consultation or social outreach rooms,” where they would help spontaneously forming courtyard communities that face the threat of “densifying” or “tightening” redevelopment (that I have just described) understand their rights and pos­si­ble courses of action. It is necessary, as one activist said, to create at least a “small center for l­egal support of city dwellers in urban planning issues.” As a result of such outreach, the city authorities have changed their attitude t­ oward the Living City. And they use the terminology of “the social” as well. Whereas the activists had been described as “lamebrains” in the annual addresses of the St. Petersburg governor to the city legislative assembly earlier, now they are sometimes referred to as obshchestvennost’, or “socialness,” meaning ­here a social force that has to be reckoned with in issues of urban development. Given that it is the authorities who brand the Living City with this term, rather than the group that designates itself in such a way, was it correct to hypothesize that a latent revolution of the stifling obshchestvennost’ is part of modern authoritarian politics? Indeed, referring to the LC with the term “socialness” makes it officially acceptable—­part of the recognized set of agents outside of officialdom with whom both regional and federal authorities can deal. The intent in rebranding is to coopt rather than to alienate and thus breed rebellion. In other words, instead of suddenly facing unruly crowds, it is better to create an officially recognized, and perhaps even a government-­ sponsored, group that would channel local discontent in a manner that is manageable for the authorities. Is this what the term “socialness” is designating h ­ ere? To answer with an unconditional “yes” would be too rash. First of all, governor Matvienko tried involving several of the Living City activists in the work of city administration, but the next governor stopped ­these initiatives. So cooptation was never achieved, though cooperation lingers on a building-­ by-­building case, when LC expertise is called upon by the city administra 112 

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tion to avoid turmoil in major proj­ects of reconstruction of the city center. Second, if we remember the key distinction for Hannah Arendt—­between the social and ­free public life—­then the “social consultation rooms” proposed by the Living City might more appropriately be termed public consultation rooms or public outreach points. In fact, this development is strongly reminiscent of what the KOS-­KOR committee did in Poland in the mid-1970s, when it counseled workers about their rights and pos­si­ble actions within the existing repressive system. As we know, this eventually led to the registration in 1980 of the in­de­pen­dent Solidarity trade ­union and, nine years ­later, to the emergence of f­ ree politics in Poland. So I do not r­ eally want to qualify the actions of the Living City as instances of obshchestvennost’, especially if we recall the flourishing of this term in the 1950s and 1960s, when it designated the stifling interference of comrades and neighbors into one another’s lives, enforcing conformity. On the contrary, in the actions of the Living City one can detect the beginning of a real public and genuinely ­f ree politics, though perhaps—as of now—­only the very beginning. Their self-­u nderstanding, of course, keeps them from perceiving their own acts as public or genuinely po­liti­cal, and not only ­because their language mostly uses the terms from the “social” dictionary. LC activists are reluctant to use the term “politics” itself ­because of its “dirty” connotations in colloquial Rus­sian. This denigration of politics is a result of ­either dubious redistributive ­battles in parliaments and Dumas of dif­fer­ent levels or of “electoral authoritarianism,” such as administrative pressure and foul play during elections. But even if the Living City fails to see or does not want to admit that they are involved in genuine politics, their actions could give the country models of this new type of politics—­a politics similar to polis life, from which the term “politics” itself arose. The question is, what hinders the gradual spread of such action? To answer this question, let us consider the differences and similarities between the Rescue Group and the Living City movements. First of all, the RG largely developed as friends hanging out together, as communication practiced for the plea­sure of communication itself, a means to joke around, to play with words for the sake of the game itself. And it was primarily this friendly get-­together quality, it seemed, which would ensure that even if some of the RG members could eventually end up in the City Soviet ­after the first ­f ree elections of 1990, this experience would not transform them—­because  113 

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Alex and Boris are cool dudes! By contrast, members of the Living City started not among the com­pany of friends, but from an internet site that eventually brought many heretofore unacquainted ­people together. Also, the pro­cess of communication for the Living City was not the most impor­tant ­thing—­results ­were. As one observer from the Rescue Group says, members of the Living City are “less fun,” and “if something failed—oh the tragedy! We had a simpler attitude: h ­ ere it ­d idn’t work, t­ here it w ­ ill. The most impor­tant ­thing was that we w ­ ere together, that we feel ­g reat with each other, and we are ready to continue with our hooves kicking.” In other words, if the main t­ hing for the Rescue Group was the plea­sure of hanging out and communicating within their own circle—­w ith public per­for­mances from time to time, but without remorse if a clearly sought result was not achieved—­then the Living City was always oriented ­toward publicity, ­toward working with the journalists, and ­toward influencing legislation. As one commentator summarizes, for the Rescue Group the main ­t hing was socializing, and then came the goals; for the LC it is the exact opposite. Starting from a network of friends, the Rescue Group worked out its own sub-­code of communication, similar to the main common t­ hing that ties personal friends together (as we know from Chapter 1). This allowed members of the network to easily cope with difficulties without much discussion, based on shared language and experience, even if the network included at some point almost a hundred p­ eople. As Aleksei Kovalev, one of the found­ers of the RG, remarks, “To a certain extent we had our own special folklore, completely special words, a par­tic­u ­lar language . . . ​So we ­d idn’t have to explain ­things to each other . . . ​­There’s nothing superfluous, b­ ecause every­one understands each other . . . ​how should I call it? ­T hey’re grasping something common.”13 By contrast, the Living City did not have such a sub-­code, at least, not initially. The found­ers of the Rescue Group are stressing the mechanical nature of the Living City both in the sense that they are d­ oing every­thing via the internet, and in the sense that they are more functional and efficient than the RG. According to the RG accounts, the LC folks immediately choose coordinators and divide the overall task into several parts, and hurriedly run out, “like in an anthill,” to fulfill them. When they communicate, the Living City members do not share the sub-­ code of a friends’ network. However, they also have not developed a new, special register of “public” language on LC sites.14 Instead they follow the gen 114 

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eral trends of the Rus­sian Internet. Among Rus­sian sites, we usually find two registers: ­either an intensely personal and emotional language of friends’ gatherings, of blog and social network exchanges, or the rigid and stale formulations of the language of state officials, or “officialese.” LC communication also alternates between ­these two registers. Of the three sites related now to the activities of the Living City, the official site of the movement (www​ .­save​-­spb​.­r u) is filled with orga­n izational and ­legal documents and appeals to the authorities. The movement blog (http://­save​-s­ p​-­burg​.l­ ivejournal​.c­ om) lists the latest calls for action and discussions of city news, frequently reposted from the press; while the third one, the most informal one, is a Rus­sian equivalent of Facebook—http://­vk​.­com​/­club7773, a community webpage where some p­ eople post very emotional remarks. It seems that long-­acquainted Living City members communicate with each other in a somewhat diluted version of a friendship sub-­code, which they might have developed in common action over the years. They practice it particularly during face-­to-­ face meetings, traces of which one finds on the LC websites. And newcomers seem to communicate with older members of the LC in the informal language of blogs. The language of officialdom is used in preparation of group actions, or in communication with officialdom during this action. However, neither “officialese” nor “personalese” are adequate for ­r unning the face-­to-­ face general membership meetings, when the Living City gathers to discuss the current situation and f­ uture actions. That is, in the LC discussions one does not find even ele­ments of specially arranged public deliberation analogous to the model of, say, Robert’s Rules of Order, so usual for civil society associations in the US, or models of parliamentary debate gathered in UK manuals on this issue, or codified, for example, in le droit parlementaire in France. The absence of such a “public” register of language curbs the efficiency of the LC deliberation and action, but the LC is not unique in this. Neither the LC nor the Rescue Group has managed to develop a language of restrained and polite communication that would allow for an efficient deliberation (in a limited time) on the goals, interests, and proposed actions of the group, with group members communicating somewhere between the register of the intensely emotional and personal language of love / hate that is characteristic of the blogposts and the register of official state language.15 Yes, Living City members have learned how to translate live h ­ uman language into “bureaucratese.” This very capacity allows the group to be understood by  115 

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the city administration and even to influence the adoption or enactment of some regulations. But within the group itself, t­ here is no common language for restrained deliberation on issues with which the city publics might be concerned. As a result, group discussions, even when the LC assem­bles in face-­ to-­face meetings, easily slide into personal conflicts, erupt with accusations of misbehavior, e­ tc. Since t­ here is no established procedure for patiently finding a compromise on a joint group opinion, this often leads to a personalization of conflict and excessive emotionality. Conclusions and branding are rash. As a result of such stand-­offs, some ­people “burn out,” as they say, and leave the group. Gladarev’s respondents described this phenomenon as a certain weariness that develops ­after months or years of heightened emotion. All feelings become less acute with time, but not with some ­people in this group. Some respondents would say that for a normal person, it is just impossible to relate to the loss of e­ very building in St. Petersburg city center is if it w ­ ere a personal tragedy! It was precisely ­because “you’d go crazy if you cried over ­every ­house,” as one respondent said, that the city administration could at first complacently regard the LC as “city crazies.” But when the Living City activists started using unemotional “bureaucratese” in communications with city officials, this im­mensely advanced their goals. The language of ­legal documents, court proceedings, and city planning, when employed by the LC, worked won­ders: the city administration could now agree or disagree with LC arguments, but at least now t­ here was a common ground for communication. However, the absence of a “public” register of language within the group not only precluded deliberation t­ here, but also induced an outflow of former followers and deterred potential new entrants. Speaking to each other only as if among close friends or as if talking to opposing bureaucrats hampered the mobilization of the LC as a cohesive group actor, a unit of action that neither boils down to a network of friends nor is part of the officialdom. We remember that from the 1980s, members of the Rescue Group communicated among one another mainly for the sake of communication itself. What they had in common first and foremost was the sub-­code of this friends’ communication. This is not so with the LC. But lacking the shared sub-­code of communication among close friends, they did not develop a common language of regulated deliberation, or a “public” register of language. The Living City members have common ­things to share: their websites as a means of their permanent com 1 16 

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munication, and the city, which connects them all. However, as we know from Chapter 2, the existence of such common ­things is just a seed-­bed, a prerequisite for public life understood as res publica. We at least need another common ­thing, a shared register of language for public deliberation, to develop a genuine public on the basis of this prerequisite. A transfer from the level of common life to the public one does not happen automatically. According to Cicero, as I argued in Chapter 2, we ascend from the level of the mere common to the level of res publica if citizens become bound not just by common ­things, but also by iuris consensus, which is a co-­sentiment on l­egal m ­ atters that develops when the citizens are ensured equal access to the production, application, and enforcement of law. For such co-­sentiment to evolve, p­ eople should deliberate together on m ­ atters of common life and on rules that bind them. A “public” register of language is of utmost importance h ­ ere.16 However, t­ here is another sense of “publicness” of language, or another sort of public language, that is needed. According to Hannah Arendt, res publica also depends on the maintenance of special arenas that would witness and rec­ord the memorable public actions of t­hose p­ eople who excelled in life and thus could be taken as models for ­future generations. Of course, she does not explic­itly use the wording of Cicero on common ­t hings as a seminarium, or seed bed, of res publica as Cicero does in De officiis I: 54. Instead she might seem, at first glance, to equate the common and the public, but the idea that she distinguishes between them is also pos­si­ble. Thus, she writes: “the term ‘public’ signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.” She goes on to add that by this common world she does not mean earth or nature, but a “world . . . ​[that] is related, rather, to the h ­ uman artifact, the fabrication of ­human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among ­t hose who inhabit the man-­made world together . . . ​The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.”17 Using a famous image, she tells us on the same page that a world of common ­things exists between us like a t­ able, both uniting and separating a group. All of ­these would be suitable for Cicero’s characterization of the origins of res publica in De re publica I: 41: buildings, ­temples, and common spaces unite and separate the citizens. However, adds Cicero, in order to have res publica, one needs a vinculum iuris, tying p­ eople with the ligament of law that would  117 

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bring about a co-­sentiment on ­legal ­matters. Arendt points to a dif­fer­ent tie: “It is what we have in common not only with ­t hose who live with us, but also with t­hose who ­were ­here before and who w ­ ill come a­ fter us. But such a common world can survive the coming and g­ oing of the generations only to the extent that it appears in public . . . ​[M]en entered the public realm b­ ecause they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with ­others to be more permanent than their earthly lives . . . ​[T]he polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space . . . ​reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals.”18 Publicness ­here means a world of acting in concert with ­others, in which a g­ reat deed may be eventually recorded by the storytellers and biographers of res publica. A common world, Arendt says, can survive if it acquires this publicness. So the distinction between common and public holds for her as well. One no longer has to get from a common world to the public realm as in Cicero, but one still has to get t­ here. And the way to do that is through public language, understood ­here as a means for recording new spectacular deeds of public prominence. The common world unites and separates us like a ­table, but if the “affairs which go on among ­those who inhabit the man-­made world” (Arendt’s expression used above) do not get talked about and recorded in public, it is just a mess of unrelated objects: “Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a ­human artifice but a heap of unrelated ­things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object.”19 Public speech, recording the deeds, is a necessary ele­ment of a common world. The language for the recording of t­ hese deeds employs storytelling rather than deliberation, of course. But it is “public” in the sense that it forms the examples of memorable public action needed for the maintenance of res publica in the f­ uture.20 The Living City, one might argue, already has hints of both types of publicness: the Cicero and the Arendt kind. First, the LC affected the production of regulations for the redevelopment of urban space in St. Petersburg and became, from the early 2000s, the first example of unsolicited but nevertheless successful intervention of the city public into the work of local legislators. The LC members have thus expanded the spheres of unmediated access of the public to the places where laws are ­adopted, applied, and en 1 18 

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forced. Second, some of the LC activists are close to Arendt’s understanding of the public realm. Thus, for example, they quit working ­a fter hours or taking second jobs to ensure extra earnings (making extra business trips, ­doing translations on the side, e­ tc.) b­ ecause it suddenly dawned on them that in the LC action, “­there is a social aspect ­because my activity brings a result that is meaningful to far more ­people [than ­t hings done during the respondent’s work time].” In other words, affecting other ­people’s lives in a positive way and getting recognition for this is more impor­tant than earning an extra buck. As we know, sometimes glory and striving for earthly immortality motivates no less than money. One can, of course, make fun of an impetuous claim to represent the action of some notable Living City individual as a ­Great Deed to be recorded in ­human history. But it is a yearning for grandezza that compelled, say, the ambitious patricians at the time of Machiavelli to work for the good of the Florentine republic, and not to help the Medici topple it.21 Why is it that ­these sprouts of public life rarely turn into power­f ul shoots, or, to use another meta­phor, why ­don’t the rivulets of civic engagement merge into one power­f ul stream of civic energy? Gladarev suggests that in the case of the Living City, two of the four preconditions for the success of a social movement that he studied are lacking.22 ­There are no cultural prerequisites for success, like possessing a register of public language needed for successful group deliberation. Also not met is the infrastructural precondition. Chapter 2 dealt with infrastructure, and its exposition suggests: in the case of the Living City, the decisive impediment is that the LC lacks two types of channels of access. First, it does not have the means that would allow it to more or less automatically put its questions on the agenda of the city authorities. Second, it lacks the channels through which the LC could get its concerns directly to enter the lives of most city dwellers. Or to put it another way, the LC d­ oesn’t have the infrastructure necessary to gain access to the powers that be or to nonchalant city residents. As I suggested in Chapter 2, a successful example of the res publica type of life should have an infrastructure of access of the public to the sites of law-­making, law application, and law enforcement. So, if one wishes to usher in res publica—to bring some ­people from the largely nonchalant public to t­ hese places, helped by groups of concerned citizens like the Living City—­one would need to have both types of ­these access channels installed and functioning.  1 19 

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4.2 ​Early History and Theory The early history of other words related to the term obshchestvo, or “society,” and ruminations of early Rus­sian theorists on the society-­public nexus w ­ ill now provide another two useful mirrors that estrange the obvious and help reflect upon two current predicaments: rigid society vs. flourishing interpersonal life, and the lack of cultural and infrastructural resources for genuine public action.23 Having analyzed the term “socialness” in the previous chapter, we are pressed to consider the rich history of other concepts related to the same root in Rus­sian. This is a usual feature of the hermeneutical circle. Having diagnosed the current prob­lems—­t he discursive upsurge of socialness and the shortage of genuine publics—we now have to examine in finer detail the ­whole field of related concepts. Such contextualization w ­ ill allow for a better understanding of the pres­ent. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Repre­sen­ta­t ion as digression—­such is the methodological nature of a treatise. The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure is its primary characteristic. Tirelessly the pro­cess of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object.”24 In this chapter, we w ­ ill have to follow this roundabout way; such is the wealth of data which we have to make sense of—or some sense, at least. The basic fact with which we must begin our conceptual study anew is that many Rus­sian terms with the root obshch ­were translations, or derivatives of translations, of the Greek word koinos, or “common,” or of koinonia, meaning “communion, association, partnership.” The latter word had a strong linkage not only with designations of dif­fer­ent forms of community or commonality but also with the notion of the Holy Communion, as in the words of 2 Corinthians XIII:14, where κοινωνία τοῦ άγίου πνεύματος was rendered into Church Slavonic as obshchenie sviatago dukha, or in En­glish of the King James Bible: “. . . the communion of the Holy Ghost, [be with you all].” One notices immediately, however, a point of difference between this “communion” and communicatio in the Vulgate translation: . . . ​et communicatio Sancti Spiritus. This linguistic contrast makes one notice a tension between communing in the sense of high communion, on the one hand, and communing as mere communication, on the other. As we ­w ill see further on, this tension proved  120 

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to be central to the development of Communism. Briefly, Rus­sia wanted to replace this communion with secular communication, but it failed to do so ­because in the guise of diverse emancipatory doctrines, including secular Communism, a yearning for community and communion, almost vanquished by the Age of Enlightened Communication, made its reentry as if through the back door and subordinated secular and enlightened communication again to the needs of communion.

4.2.1 ​Communing For communication to get away from the yoke of communion was quite a feat. If one looks up the currently prevalent term for “communication,” obshchenie, as it was defined in the first Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy, published in 1789–1794 at the height of the Rus­sian Enlightenment, one sees it right away. This term was defined as: 1) participation, taking part with another in something, 2) alms or provision to the needy, 3) the Holy Communion, as in the sacrament of the Eucharist, with the example given from the medieval collection of saints’ vitae for the liturgical year, entry for May 17: “gave him with his presbyters Holy obshchenie.”25 None of ­these meanings is immediately comprehensible to a pres­ent day (largely non-­religious) speaker of colloquial Rus­sian, since the term obshchenie now means communication pure and s­ imple, ­whether aimlessly chatting or seriously communing with ­others. Surprise at reading such definitions and examples reaches its apogee when one finds, on the same page of this Enlightenment-­era dictionary, the term obshchitelnyi defined as “easily and abundantly giving alms,” as opposed to its current meaning, which is “sociable, companionable,” as in a description of an easy-­going, jovial, and affable person. Almsgiving is a form of charity, an expression of Christian love, and the second meaning of the term obshchenie in the Acad­emy Dictionary is exactly about this. So, obshchenie for the Dictionary compilers was all about sharing and partaking and not about conveying information or socializing. The text that is given t­ here as an illustration of the second eighteenth-­century meaning (Romans XV: 26) describes caring for the needy: “For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain obshchenie for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem,” with the Rus­sian term rendered as “contribution” in the King James’ Bible, and both corresponding to koinonia in the Greek version. So, understanding the current Rus­sian term for “sociable” as primarily referring  121 

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to alms-­g iving might have been logical in the eigh­teenth c­entury, before communing like communication started squeezing out communing like communion. And the first meaning in the Dictionary of the Acad­emy was also illustrated by a biblical text—1 John I:3: “that ye also may have obshchenie with us: and truly our fellowship is with the ­Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ,” with the Rus­sian term corresponding to the En­glish “fellowship” and Greek koinonia. The context refers to the unity in the body of Christ, which the Church should exemplify according to the Apostolic doctrine, and which is effected through the sacrament of the Holy Communion, when a Christian who has tasted an unleavened wafer (in Western Chris­tian­ity) or a leavened prosphoron (in the Eastern Orthodox one) and drunk the church wine becomes a part of this body.26 Ivan Nordstet’s dictionary translates obshchenie into German as die Gemeinschaft, Teilnehmung, and into French as la communication, la participation.27 So the grounds for using this word to mean “communication,” or a ­simple conversation, ­were already in place, even if communicatio in the Vulgate frequently translated the terms for the Holy Communion. It seems, however, that this new secular meaning did not solidify yet, and the compilers of the Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy deci­ded not to mention the sense of “verbal communication.” The most solid foundation on which to base their repre­sen­ta­tion of the language was the term obshchenie as it had been used since the very first translations from Greek into Church Slavonic and Old Rus­sian. One of the first extant written sources, the most famous miscellanea from 1076, refers to the force that participation in Church life produces. This corresponds to the first meaning in the Acad­emy dictionary, as participation in parish or monastery life: “­Because communing in church may greatly help, if we are offering prayers.”28 In another example, from the twelfth ­century, Vita of St. Theodore the Studite shows where the borders for communing in the sense of communion ­were drawn: “­Father Theodore, having cut off himself with all the monks from the sinners, did totally not commune with them neither by reason nor by deed.”29 Also, a rather frequent usage of the same term, but in the third meaning from the eighteenth-­century dictionary (the Holy Communion), can be found in early canon law translations. The twelfth-­century Nomocanon (a statute of church and secular regulations from the Byzantium, adapted for Slavic use) sets the following limits on participation in church sacraments: “[I]f a w ­ idow of sixty  122 

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years w ­ ills to live with a man, she w ­ ill not be given a blessed Communion ­until she abandons the unclean passion.” For a dif­fer­ent sin, the same document authorizes: “alien ­will he be to the Communion of divine sacraments.”30 So, the Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy chose religion-­related meanings that w ­ ere available since the first translations from Greek.

4.2.2 ​Commoning While looking at t­ hese early Church-­related translations, it is impor­tant to remember that early Rus­sian texts existed in the situation of diglossia, characteristic of many languages.31 Thus, Church Slavonic was a high Old Slavic language of the first biblical and didactic translations, with local contaminations and adaptations added, while next to it existed a “lower” version of Old Rus­sian, which was used for everyday communication. It could also be used for chronicle and epistle writing, treaties, and other business communications. The bookish quality of the term obshchenie of the first translations (which could render multiple terms linked to koinonia and koinos into Church Slavonic) is proven by the fact that we hardly find forms of practical lower usage of this term. By contrast, another bookish word, obshchina, which also used to translate the Greek term koinonia (and thus was sometimes synonymous with obshchenie), lived in a diglossic relationship with the lower word obchina, recorded at least since the f­ ourteenth ­century. An English-­speaking reader might have seen this transliterated term, central to the debates of the nineteenth-­century Rus­sian Marxists with the Populists, but it did not signify the “peasant land commune” (which could allegedly grow directly into socialism without passing through a stage of capitalism, as the Populists romantically claimed). Rather, the lower form of the term meant “common possessions,” such as ­those of a monastery or the funds of the Novgorod republic. Juggling with the En­glish words to render the complexities of Old Rus­sian usage, one is pressed to say that this vernacular obchina was not about communing in the sense of partaking or in the sense of the Holy Communion. Rather, one should better render it as “commoning,” if one is allowed to use such an obsolete word, found in the Oxford En­glish dictionary and recently revived by dif­fer­ent activists who would like to rejuvenate the urban commons phenomenon in the US and the UK.32 This commoning did not imply any sophisticated doctrine on the koinonia or any reference to the Holy Communion. Rather, it indicated the ­simple  123 

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and specific common ­t hings that this mundane everyday commoning was based on. For example, the First Novgorod Chronicle tells us that in 1342, the citizens of the republic of Novgorod responded to the plea for help that came from the city of Pskov, which was u ­ nder assault by the Teutonic Order. But before the Novgordians left for ­battle, they ensured that what some historians now call the Novgorod trea­sury (­others think t­ hese might have been separate borough trea­suries) would be intact: “The Novgorodians did not linger at all, and hurriedly set off on the Good Friday, and o ­ thers—on the Holy Saturday, and sealed off all obchiny.” The relevant term is being used in the plural ­here, as in the En­g lish term “the commons.” Another example comes from the depositary monastery charter from 1407, which reads: “I, Ivan Vasilievich . . . ​have given to the House of St. John the Apostle . . . ​to my monastery and its common (obshchinu) two villages in Padenga . . . ​for the remembrance of the repose of the souls of my parents.” It was usual for wealthy Novgorod landholders at that time to support a dependent convent, where they would retire at the very end of their lives, accepting monastic vows.33 So the villages, transferred into common monastic owner­ship, manifestly demanded the commemoration in prayer of the parents of the depositor, but latently implied that he would live off the income from ­these villages when he relocates to this convent in old age. The resulting in­equality among monks in the cenobitic (common living) monasteries was fertile ground for ideological strife among the Rus­sian clergy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But ­there w ­ ere monasteries that eschewed ­these ­battles ­because they did not lead cenobitic life. One of ­those is mentioned in the Second Novgorod Chronicle, in an entry for 1552: “I have ordered hegumen [abbot] Antonius . . . ​to establish the commons (obshchinu) in the Monastery of St. Nicholas, [­because] this monastery lived in separation, brethren ate bread in their own cells.” And situated somewhere between the world of the book and the world of business correspondence, the 1395 charter of the Moscow Metropolitan Cyprian exhorts the faithful against the heretics, that “with such you should neither eat, nor drink, nor hold any common (obchiny).”34 We also find a clearly mundane understanding of commoning in the most ancient among the extant Rus­sian chronicles (the Laurentian Codex of the Primary Chronicle, created in 1377), which in the entry for 1177 says this about a feud between two princes: “and Suzdal’ ­will be common (obche) to us; who 124 

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ever they [the city residents] want, this w ­ ill be their prince.”35 This is very direct; the language of inter-­princely, or what we would now call inter-­ national, treaties does not tolerate equivocations. Kalugin cites other examples of such direct local usage: the Laurentian Codex also mentions obchie sli, the common ambassadors from the Rus­sian land who had been sent in 945 to conclude the first peace treaty with Byzantium, while the Smolensk treaty of 1229 between the Rus­sians and the Germans mentions obchii soud, or the joint or common court of justice, to resolve tensions.36 The understanding ­here of ­things common is once again material and ­simple, down to earth, as it is in the Moscow-­Serpukhov treaty from 1390: “. . . and the land is ours, and ­cattle ­shall wander in common (opche).”37 With time, of course, the bookish ecclesiastical terms influenced the direct language of treaties, business transactions, and chronicles, and vice versa. In order to clarify a difference between commoning and communing (as well as a difference between dif­fer­ent types of commoning), we should now draw some parallels with the developments in the En­g lish language. The OED explains how examples of usage w ­ ere ascribed to the dictionary articles for two similar sounding verbs—­“to common” and “to commune.” The former was more popu­lar in M ­ iddle En­glish, and this verb was written like the adjective “common,” but even more frequently in other diverse forms—­ com(m)un, com(m)yn, com(m)oun, com(m)en, com(m)in. This verb survived ­until the eigh­teenth ­century, with most of its early meanings obsolete already in the sixteenth c­ entury, and only one remaining u ­ ntil the very end—­“to hold converse.” By contrast, the verb “to commune,” never very popu­lar in ­Middle En­glish, did not become obsolete ­because it was supported by its links with the word “Communion.” Hence it made it into even present-­day usage. The OED entry concludes: “Common and commune are thus only developments of the same word; but as they became very distinct in form, and their sense history is not quite identical, common having taken from the cognate n. and adj. some senses in which commune is never used, they are dealt with as distinct words.”38 So, only forms com(m)une or com(m)ewne ­were included in the dictionary article on the verb “to commune.” The rest went into the article on “to common.”39 What this medieval En­glish commoning was all about should be a subject for a dif­fer­ent study. I ­w ill just enumerate usage, which finds its parallels in Rus­sian historical sources. An example of the verb “to common” from  125 

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e­ ither John Wycliffe or one of his followers, in the work from 1380 entitled “The Clergy May Not Have Property,” mentions “Þe comounynge of þe comon goodis . . . ​in begynnynge of Cristis Churche.” Christ and his apostles and the “perfyte” Christians of their time, says the Wycliffe treatise, had had this sharing of the common goods; the priesthood now only pretend to do so. This commoning is discussed in the context of denouncing the Catholic priests who lord over their monastery lands, as if they ­were secular rulers, but claim that they are just receiving perpetual alms. Worse than that, they quarrel with lay lords for the gallows, they hold bondsmen, and they engage in what befits only the secular arm of the Church: punishing, prisoning, and hanging and “oþer worldly turmentynge.”40 The commoning of goods, which one finds in the Rus­sian demands for egalitarian cenobitic life in the monasteries, is hallowed h ­ ere as well, but it is found lacking in the convents of Wycliffe’s ­England. Such commoning was at times concerned not only with possessions but also with deeds, sufferings, and tribulations. On deeds, we read in Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible (2 John 11): “He that seith to him ‘Heyl’ comuneth with his yuele werkis.”41 The King James translation elucidates that this sentence is about partaking: “For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds,” with the Vulgate translating the central expression as communicat operibus malignis. Wycliffe’s Bible also says that ­people behaved well when they commoned with tribulations of Apostle Paul (Phil IV: 14): “Ȝe han don wel comunynge to my tribulacioun,” and in I Pet. IV:13 one finds an exhortation to common with the Passions of Christ (“Comyne ȝe with the passiouns of Crist.”). OED compilers claim that the same meaning of “to common” even made it into Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although the verbal form is explic­itly dif­fer­ent: “Laertes, I must commune with your griefe.”42 Notwithstanding t­hese elevated examples, a more basic sharing and partaking—­establishing a common possession or a form of common life—is found in many statements on monastic or church life. We remember that in the Rus­sian cases we find statements that ­t here should be no commoning with heretics. Cursor Mundi, an ecclesiastical history poem, composed in ­Middle En­glish around 1325 and found in the Ms. dated to around 1400, states the same direct injunction: “To comun noght wit cursed men.” Some instances of the sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century usage of “to common” are already interpreted by OED to mean “to eat at a common ­table,” as in “to  126 

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board or common in companie” (1598), or in the sermons of theologian-­ mathematician Isaac Barrow (1680) who tells us that St. Paul “warns us not to mingle or consort, not to diet, or common . . . ​with men of a . . . ​disorderly conversation.”43 This, of course, reminds one of exhortations of multiple hierarchs of the Rus­sian Church, including Cyprian mentioned above. Such examples clarify for us the medieval Rus­sian context and the widespread practices that the compilers of the Enlightenment-­era Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy ­were facing. The lower version of diglossic Old Rus­ sian was all about commoning in the sense of sharing food, drink, money, fields, ­etc. As in ­England, next to this commoning, and perhaps “on top of it,” we find communing—­captured, however, in the higher, bookish language of Church Slavonic translations. But h ­ ere communing meant not conversations between ­humans, but partaking ­either in church life in general or in the sacrament of the Holy Communion in par­tic­u ­lar. In other words, all of ­t hese practices hardly involved verbal communication, initiated in order to transfer information. And this mountain of a life—­spent in commoning and communing thus understood—­started to change only in the eigh­teenth ­century. During the age of Peter the G ­ reat and Catherine the G ­ reat, secular communication entered the scene and expanded its sway with the goal of eventually ruling the day. The novelty in relation to the heretofore ubiquitous commoning and communing was twofold. First, it was communication in words, not the commoning of t­hings. Second, it was secular communing without the goal of reaching Communion. The goal was to communicate reasoned and reasonable arguments, and thus effect a discussion.

4.2.3 ​Communication Even articulating the first instances of the desire to just communicate, rather than to commune or to common, was perhaps difficult. A characteristic example comes from the correspondence of Peter I whose ambassador argues: “Already for them [his ­children] living outside of his activities was boring . . . ​ Let them have communication with him.”44 This is surprising. ­Here the term obshchestvo did not mean “society,” as it does now. Also, using it to mean “communication” might have been a neologism. This convoluted usage from the time of Peter I might have happened ­because at that point it was impossible to unproblematically use the term obshchenie to signify everyday  1 27 

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communication, while the very rarely used term obshchestvo—­nowadays a widespread and boring word meaning “society”—­was up for grabs. First, on obshchenie, which now means “communication.” Above I analyzed the three primary meanings of this eighteenth-­century term in the Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy of that era, but this very respected source, for obvious reasons, did not give examples in which obshchenie would have lewd connotations. ­These connotations ­were not surprising, given that koinonia in some Greek sources meant not only communion and community, but intercourse, including sexual intercourse as well. A translation of the Byzantian Nomocanons denounced this sort of koinonia, or commoning, as canon law should: “A w ­ oman is declared sinful of adultery in relation to her master, if she has promised to common (obshchenia) with another man.” High literary verses of the Vitae of martyrs Barlaam and Josaphat (­fourteenth ­century) contained the following distinction: “he seeks to conjoin with you not through the conclusion of marriage, but through communing.”45 A narrative, immediately predating Peter’s time (“The Foundation of Constantinople,” seventeenth ­century), conveys to us the following scene: “And twenty-­n ine dishes he commands to bring to the female sex, that is, to the Sultan ladies, with whom he commons,” while at the height of Peter’s rule, in 1705, a vita of St. Avraamii of Smolensk mentions slander: his sainthood was put into question ­because he had allegedly commoned with ladies.46 So, contemporaries of Peter the ­Great, when expressing the idea of the wish for communication, might have wanted to rely on a term which had decency written all over it. The second reason why they may have tried using the term obshchestvo to designate “communication” relates to the fact that before the seventeenth ­century, this term was rarely used, if at all.47 Therefore, it might have seemed pliable and flexible, and thus fit for dif­fer­ent discursive purposes. For the sixteenth ­century we have only two famous examples, proudly cited by dictionaries, as if Rus­sians at that time w ­ ere already employing terms similar to our present-­day understanding of “society.” Michael Trivolis, known as Maxim the Greek in Rus­sian history, was invited in the early sixteenth c­ entury to Muscovy from Mt. Athos to correct the church texts in Rus­sian, and spent the years from 1518 to 1556 ­there in tribulations. He wrote in one of his admonitions to the tsar: “I wrote this to augment the strong and honored tsardom of yours, hoping for its mercy and for the God-­g iven judicious  128 

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wisdom, so that one meekly hears from all who can counsel, what is useful for society (obshchestvo) and befits the time.” In the second example of allegedly modern usage, avant la lettre, Fedor Karpov wrote to the Metropolitan Daniel, head of the Church in Muscovy in the mid-­sixteenth ­century: “Protracted endurance by the ­people of the absence of truth and law destroys the good of society.”48 But both Maxim the Greek and Karpov could make ­these references to the public good (or the good of society, to be precise) ­because they w ­ ere exceptions for Muscovy in that they knew foreign languages and read philosophical works! Before taking monastic vows at Mt. Athos, Trivolis studied in Italy and knew Marcilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Karpov, for his part, is the only Muscovite author who could and did cite Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics before the eigh­teenth c­ entury. He was a high-­ranking diplomat in communication with, for example, the Papal throne and the Holy Roman Empire, and thus could read bits and pieces of Aristotle in Latin translations or in treatises that cited the Peripatetics. So I would contend that ­these two instances of usage ­were the rare exceptions that only prove the rule: ­u ntil the eigh­teenth ­century, the word obshchestvo was bookish, unwieldy, and hardly ever used. Peter the ­Great’s innovations in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, however, opened the way to a new Rus­sia, and to a new usage in the Rus­sian language. The age of Catherine the ­Great made ­these changes irreversible: Rus­sia was joining Enlightened Eu­rope. Two developments are of utmost importance h ­ ere. First of all, secular lit­er­a­ture in Rus­sian translation—­both belles lettres and the humanities such as history and philosophy—­fi­nally arrived in large quantities and became central for the education of the elite. ­These translations demanded equivalent Rus­sian notions for, say, the French term société or the En­glish expression the plea­sure of polite conversation, and the words obshchestvo (“society”) and obshchenie (now, fi­nally, meaning “communication”) began to acquire their con­temporary meaning, also expressing West Eu­ro­pean theories of natu­ral law and social contract with the help of the quickly changing Rus­sian language. The second main development of the Petrine-­Catherinian age was the transformation of the practices of sociability. This reconfiguration of how ­people communicated started with Petrine “assemblies,” where young noble men and ­women for the first time in Rus­sian history met in Eu­ro­pean dress in one public gathering place (like a reception hall in some aristocratic palace) and  129 

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learned to simply converse and exchange courtesies. By the m ­ iddle of the eigh­teenth ­century, aristocratic salons appeared, and their “good society” began to flourish. The second half of this path-­breaking ­century witnessed the proliferation of meetings of like-­m inded educated and well-­mannered ­people, who could eventually proclaim the foundation of all sorts of “socie­t ies,” beginning with the first to appear: the F ­ ree Economic Society. The assemblies, the salons, the clubs, the open and closed membership socie­ties—­a ll of this required a new language to designate all that was happening.49 Even if Peter I had to order the establishment of assemblies by a special 1718 decree, such new forms of sociability “landed on receptive soil,” and ­were not imposed as unwanted cultural imports on a recalcitrant society.50 This receptivity to change ensured that by the mid-­eighteenth ­century, the upper class had a very intense social life, and this might have contributed to the spread of terms to designate this novel sphere of courtesies and communication. Even t­ hose who hated Peter’s reforms, such as count Mikhail Shcherbatov, who wrote a famous treatise on the corruption of mores of ancient Rus­sia ­under his reign, had to use the new terminology to reflect the new real­ity: “Peter the ­Great, in imitating foreign nations, not only strove to introduce to his realm a knowledge of sciences, arts, and crafts, a proper military system, trade, and the most suitable forms of legislation, he also tried to introduce the kind of sociability, communication (soobshchenia) and magnificence, which he first learnt from Lefort, and which he ­later saw for himself.”51

4.2.4 ​Society And what about the term “society”? First of all, a new, theoretical understanding of obshchestvo, as a populace tied by the same laws and living ­under a given sovereign in a par­tic­u ­lar country, solidified by the end of the rule of Catherine II. Initially this notion came with translations and interpretations of texts of the natural-­law tradition such as Pufendorf, or contractarians like Hobbes and Locke. Pufendorf was im­mensely popu­lar in Rus­sia at the time of Peter the G ­ reat. Some scholars point to the Rus­sian 1718 translation of the Latin version of Pufendorf’s An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Eu­rope, where res publica was rendered many times as ob-

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shchestvo.52 ­There might be multiple reasons for this. Suffice it to point to a whim or a con­ve­n ience of the translator. Indeed, Machiavelli famously starts Il Principe mentioning two types of regimes (dominii and stati); Pufendorf also has two entities in the original German title: Reihe for kingdoms (regnum in the Latin version of the same book) and Staat for the term “state,” or status in the typographer’s introduction to the Latin translation. The Rus­sian translator (Gavriil Buzhinskii) was not interested in consistently maintaining such fine theoretical distinctions, particularly ­after a translator of the book from the German into Latin, Johann Friedrich Cramer, had rendered much of this usage with terms like res publica. So in his own introduction on the terms, which ­were difficult to translate, Buzhinskii wrote that ­there ­were three types of government in e­ ither gosudarstva, “dominions,” or obshchestva, which now would mean “socie­ties” but back then was perhaps just a translation of res publicae—­these are monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. In this Buzhinskii was just repeating the classical ­triple scheme known since Aristotle and Polybius.53 This usage—­equating the Rus­sian term obshchestvo with Staat in Pufendorf’s German and Latin res publica—­was common in the educated circles around Peter I, claims Alekseev. He cites several authors from this era, and even inscriptions on the triumphal arch (for the passage of the winning armies ­after the Poltava ­battle of 1709) that rendered basis et fundamentum reipublicae religio with the following Rus­sian translation: “The base and foundation of the piety of obshchestvo.” Alekseev concludes that from 1703 to 1718, obshchestvo in the first translations of treatises, or in the solemn panegyrics that copied foreign rhetorical models and tropes, meant “state.”54 I would be more cautious: his examples show that in the very beginning of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the word obshchestvo sometimes was a translation of the Latin term res publica. Of course, stars lesser than the g­ rand figures of po­liti­cal theory w ­ ere shining brighter in the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century, when the gentry started devouring and then digesting the growing mass of printed books. Kalugin directs our attention to translations of authors like William Blackstone (“Commentaries on the Laws of ­England”) and Alexander Pope (with his philosophical poem, “Essay on Man”), which w ­ ere in very high demand by the educated elites and propagated new usages of the term obshchestvo. Another

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popu­lar translation was The Eulogy to Marcus Aurelius, by the French Acad­emy member Antoine Léonard Thomas, which poeticized the role of the Stoic sage and the ideal ruler for “society.”55 But none of ­these texts contributed more ­toward implanting this new understanding of “society” than a translation of the Austrian pedagogue Johann Ignaz Felbiger, whose book, On the Duties of Man and Citizen, adapted Pufendorf for youth during the reform of urban public schools in the 1780s. Catherine II herself edited the translation of this compulsory schoolbook, which went through 11 printings in Rus­sian between 1783 and 1819 and was the primary tool for the inculcation of new word usage among the young. A ­ fter reviewing dif­fer­ent types of u ­ nions or socie­ties (husband and wife, parents and c­ hildren, master and servant), the book goes on to discuss a larger society, which is defined in the following way: “The fourth type of ­union is the one where many families, having united together, live u ­ nder one state and one set of laws. . . . ​Such u ­ nions or socie­ ties (obshchestva) are called civil.”56 Catherine II wanted to instill a unified usage, at least among pupils taught in a few urban public schools.57 But the person who is usually taken to be her most radical po­l iti­cal opponent, the out­spoken republican thinker of the time—­A lexander Radishchev—­does not differ much from her in his proposed usage of the term. Both derive from the natural-­law tradition with contractarian ele­ments. The differences in their conceptions of the limits of autocratic power and of the right to fight despotism are radical, of course, but they ­don’t differ much in the idea that “society” is all ­people living u ­ nder the same laws and the same sovereign. Also, as we know, Hobbes and Locke, the key modern authors in the social contract tradition, drew hardly any distinctions between the concepts of the state, civil society, po­liti­cal society, and society ­u nder the laws. For them ­these terms ­were often nearly synonymous. The familiar opposition of “civil society vs. the state” was yet to be developed as it was, for example, in the works of Hegel in Germany and Tocqueville in France. So we should not expect to find the opposition “state vs. society” in Radishchev. It appeared in Rus­sian thought only in the nineteenth c­ entury. Thus, in his first major work, The Life of Fedor Ushakov, Radishchev depicts the state as a society of p­ eople governed by law.58 This, of course, parallels Catherine II, who, following Montesquieu, wrote in her famous Instructions to the Legislative Commission (1767): “In the state, that is, in the collection of ­people living as a society,  132 

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where t­ here are laws . . .”59 It is no surprise that this definition became the first and the main definition of the term in the first Dictionary of the Rus­ sian Acad­emy (1793): “A p­ eople living together u ­ nder the same laws, u ­ nder known statutes, rules.”60 However, if the new theory-­inspired usage of the term obshchestvo, which would describe all ­people living ­under the same laws or a single monarch, was initially hard to push through, another use of the term flourished: the one describing all sorts of “socie­ties” that are smaller than the ­whole country. By the last de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century, St. Petersburg and Moscow ­were saturated with many dif­fer­ent types of learned socie­ties, associations, and clubs. ­These groups convened, ­adopted statutes and rules, and established norms and rituals, and the term “society” was promulgated by their very names: the National ­Free Society for Philanthropy, the Mercantile Society, the Society of the Lovers of Science, the Friendly Learned Society, etc.—­and even the Funeral Society (which boasted of 250 members by 1780), which in effect was one of the country’s first life insurance companies. Douglas Smith thus translates the definition of this second meaning of the term obshchestvo (in opposition to “society,” which equaled the country), appearing in the Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy: “An estate of ­people; an assembly of many persons bound together by an identical purpose or a common aim.”61 As an estate, this definition could have already applied to the “good society” in St. Petersburg and Moscow, if one equated the educated gentry with le beau monde of the aristocratic salons. But in this dictionary we do not find examples where obshchestvo would be opposed to ­people or the state, a predominant usage of the nineteenth c­ entury. Still, the word already meant not only an association based on a common interest of like-­minded p­ eople, but— as we know from non-­d ictionary sources—­a subsection of the population in general, or a grouping of a p­ eople of similar qualities. Kalugin mentions complaints of Catherine the ­Great that her husband Peter III (who was ­later assassinated during the coup d’état which gave her the throne) frequently dined not only with officers of his personal guard and the actresses of his theater, but also with “ladies of ill com­pany” brought to the court from St. Petersburg. This could be called “bad society,” not good society. Catherine used another term, though. Her absence at such dinners was motivated by the fact that it would be detrimental to her dignity if she w ­ ere to appear in such “mixed society [obshchestvo].”62  133 

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4.2.5  ​Publika Parallel to this ­triple development of the term obshchestvo—­which by the last quarter of the eigh­teenth ­century could mean a country, a small voluntary association, and the good society of the salons (or the bad society of the demi-­ monde)—­the Rus­sian word publika, or “the public,” became part of habitual usage. Its meaning partially overlapped with the third, beau monde meaning of the term “society.” Initially its origins ­were of the bureaucratic kind. The adjective publichnyi, or “public,” according to the famous German linguist Max Vasmer, who relies on Smirnov, had already appeared in the Rus­sian language during the time of Peter I and his Protestant-­influenced chief ideologist and panegyric writer, Feofan Prokopo­vich.63 In their usage, the term was opposed to another Latinized calque, privatnyi, “private.” Thus, in the General Reglament of 1720 we read: “As soon as the collegium is gathered at the aforesaid time, though not all, but most of the members: then the secretary reports and recounts every­thing in the proper order and, precisely, in the following manner: first public state m ­ atters concerning His Majesty the Tsar’s interest, and then private m ­ atters.”64 Rus­sian linguist Pavel Chernykh also stresses the centrality of this document and emphasizes phrases like na publichnom meste, or “in public,” and v publichnom nakazanii, or “in public punishment.” The associated terms publikatsiia, or “publication,” and publikovat’, or “to publish,” w ­ ere also introduced in that era. However, in addition to the modern meaning—­“to promulgate, to publicize,”—at the time they also maintained the initial Latin meaning of publicare, “to confiscate,” as in to make something the property of the ­people, or the populus.65 Vasmer and Chernykh in fact disagree over the origins of the term publika. Vasmer believes that it came into Rus­sian as a copy of the Polish term publika or of the German Publikum. Chernykh argues that the Rus­sian term was connected directly, without any foreign language intermediaries, with the Latin publicum, which could mean for eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century language users “state, society, community.”66 Smith thinks that Rus­sian publika followed the development of the German term: “Whereas [in Germany] an earlier publicum could refer ­either to the state sphere or all of society, by the ­middle of the ­century das Publikum (having acquired around this time its Germanized form) came to signify a completely new ‘social community’ separate and distinct from the state . . . ​and the common folk.”67  134 

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The po­liti­cal connotations of publika ­were very limited, though. Even if in official Rus­sian regulations the adjective publichnyi was directly linked to the actions and interests of the state, Alexander Radishchev did not choose it when he wrote about the famous case of Rus­sian republican liberty before it was crushed by Muscovy—­the medieval republic of Novgorod. Even if one follows the now somewhat-­questioned exact dates of its existence—1136 to 1478—­f ree Novgorod had lasted far longer than f­ ree Florence. So Radishchev poeticized this experience, but while d­ oing so, he did not render the Latin term res publica as “­t hings (or affairs) public,” as in publichnye in Rus­sian. Rather, “in Novgorod ­t here was a bell, ­a fter the sound of which the ­people gathered at the assembly to deliberate on t­ hings social, veshchakh obshchestvennykh.”68 Why did even the most republican of all republicans of his time not use the Rus­sian calque words for publicness to describe the only certified and hallowed instance of the presence of res publica in Rus­sian history, but rather opted for the terminology of the social? T ­ here might be a number of reasons. First, the early eighteenth-­century Rus­sian translations of Pufendorf and the terminology of the natu­ral law tradition rendered, as we remember, the Latin term res publica as obshchestvo, sometimes in contrast with gosudarstvo, or “state” or “dominion.” Radishchev might have been just following tradition, even if he was not translating something from German or French (which he did a lot), but rather writing in Rus­sian one of the first major treatises on republican liberty in the form of a travelogue novel, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Second, the adjective publichnyi might not seem very felicitous for him, as it was linked with the everyday mechanisms of the Rus­sian state, based on serfdom, which he dubbed in an epigraph to his most revolutionary book, “A grim monster, savage, gigantic, hundred-­mouthed, and bellowing.”69 Third, the term publika—­even if the second hypothesis does not hold, and it did not smack of reprehensible real­ity for Radishchev—­was not very felicitous b­ ecause by the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, the “public”-­ related vocabulary that used adjectives like publichnyi became primarily associated not only with the state but also with a new sphere of life, filled with the printing presses, newspapers, journals, booksellers, coffee­houses, and clubs where the new, printed knowledge was produced, consumed, and discussed. For example, when another central figure of the Rus­sian Enlightenment, the publisher Novikov, wrote that parents should educate their ­children  1 35 

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in order to forewarn them against be­hav­ior that could cause “public shaming and punishment,” he was perhaps referring to the language of official documents like the 1720 Reglament. But Novikov also called his newspaper publichnye listy, or “public sheets,” perhaps thinking that this publicness was among the main qualities of the West Eu­ro­pean newspapers. In his “sheets” he often “asked publicly (publichno)”—in print—­that his readers “communicate publicly”—­again, in print—­news of interest to other members of this new reading public.70 Certainly, the medieval republic of Novgorod had ­little to do with the printing press and publications! Fourth, as Kaplun shows, Radishchev consciously situated his theory of the state as a “civil society u ­ nder the laws” within the tradition of thought on social contract. Social, not po­liti­cal or public! Thus, perhaps, translating res publica as “­things social” was almost natu­ral for him. In the expression “social contract,” what mattered first and foremost for him ­was the contract charter of fifty-­eight seals, which had allegedly existed between Novgorod and its princes, a t­ hing unheard of in Muscovy. So, w ­ hether one used “public” or “social” terminology was not essential; he needed to stress the continued maintenance of a self-­imposed law by a self-­regulating community. Kaplun implies that Radishchev used the terms for “common (obshchee) good” and “social (obshchestvennoe) good” interchangeably, almost as synonyms.71 At that time, “common good” was the term of the dominant po­liti­cal discourse with civic connotations. Of course, phrases about the “common good” and “common utility” became such worn-­out clichés in the speeches of Rus­sian statesmen at the time that the angry Freemasons went so far as to point out the emptiness of such utterances.72 But if the dominant discourse was saturated with references to this bien commun, or “common good,” how ­else would it have been pos­si­ble for Radishchev to translate the “public” component in the term res publica in a natu­ral way, if not with the word obschestvennyi, or “social,” which was first, intuitively linked for him with the social contract tradition, and second, linked to the term obshchii, or “common,” from the incantations about the common good, coming from all sides? It would be an overstatement to say that the same Greek root of the words koinos and koinonia, which yielded the same root linkage for the Rus­sian words for obshchii, or “common,” and obshchestvennyi, or “social,” had played a cruel joke in Rus­sian history. But one can say that drawing a clear linguistic contrast between the levels of the common and the social was difficult in Rus­  136 

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sian in the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury—­and it still is. Even worse, their intermingling reflects in discourse (and helps engender) a predominance of a hybrid “common-­social” realm, which blocks the formation of distinctly public phenomena, which are a feature of ­f ree politics and not of oppressive communal life or stifling social pressure. Of course, one could ask, what kind of public t­ hings should have pressed themselves onto the agenda of Rus­sian politics in the end of the eigh­teenth ­century such that a clear distinction between the public phenomena, on the one hand, and the social / common ones, on the other, should have cried out to be articulated in language? Asking does not mean persuasively answering: as a rule, history does not like conjectures. Since ­these ­things public and their corresponding publics did not solidify, we can only offer some hints at the potentialities of the Radishchev moment. Largely confined to the prison h ­ ouse of language, when writing about res publica, Radishchev had to use the obshch terminology. But he was less constrained when using the novel calque term, publika. In the twenty-­fi rst ­century, the noun publika remains in Rus­sian largely connected with the sphere of entertainment and theatre, other forms of mass media consumption, or idle gazing. In his era, however, Radishchev tried articulating the liberating potential of the term. He tried to wrestle it away from the sphere of this entertaining and gazing experience, and to transfer it to the sphere of the “public use of reason,” as Kant defined the Enlightenment.73 For instance, he wrote about the futility of censorship and vouched for effective action on the part of the public instead: “. . . the censorship of what is printed belongs properly to society (obshchestvo); which gives the author the laurel wreath or uses his sheets for wrapping paper. Just so, it is publika that gives its approval to a theatrical production, and not the director of the theater. Similarly the censor can give neither glory nor dishonor to the publication of a work. The curtain rises, and every­one eagerly watches the per­for­mance. If they like it, they applaud; if not, they stamp and hiss. Leave what is stupid to the arbitration of a common judgment; it w ­ ill find a thousand censors. The most vigilant police ­w ill not be able to ban the rubbish in thoughts like the publika, indignant of this rubbish, can.”74 Radishchev ­here treats publika as more than just a fickle audience in the theatre. It is also an ultimate arbiter. Its discretion w ­ ill laud or fling aside a given text or a rational argument. A subtle contrast between suzhdenie  137 

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obshchee, or “a common judgment,” which summons a thousand censors, and publika as an agency that ultimately judges on the good and the bad, is impor­tant ­here. A conventional reading of this passage from A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow would say that the common judgment and the public that bans the rubbish of thought are almost the same, and can be used interchangeably. But another reading, which opposes the common judgment and the judging public, is pos­si­ble as well. Indeed, elsewhere in his writings Radishchev is mostly not enamored of this common judgment at all. For him it may stand for an intellectual fashion or fad of the day, or even worse, for a spontaneous response of a prejudiced and unthinking crowd. Thus, he says in the essay “On legislation”: “Illegal acts of the judges and bureaucrats in office are the following: delay, stopping, protraction. But this evil is so widespread that common opinion does not take it for a crime . . .” Another instance in which common judgment can play an evil trick is when criminals in office are picked out by the punishing hand of justice. But it frequently happens that “the sword of justice, menacing them, freezes at the sight of them being approved by a common opinion, not daring to punish a person, of whom all are approving.” Furthermore, such common opinion not only hampers justice; it stifles thought and engenders m ­ istakes. Thus, states Radishchev about Catherine the ­Great’s love of Montesquieu, whom she followed closely, while writing her advice on codification to the Legislative Commission; “. . . if in The Instruction ­there are many false opinions, they are no other but victim to the opinion, almost common at that time, and even more so—­victim of the glory of the author of the book on the spirit of the laws.”75 Such accounts of how common opinion or common judgment ­really functioned at the time of Radishchev do not represent them as positive agencies.76 Only when we add publika as a truly rational and discerning arbiter do we enter what Habermas famously theorized as the public sphere, or, to use the Kantian term again, the world of the public use of reason. In a very perceptive and finely researched piece, Denis Sdvizhkov argued that the noun publika, when it had direct po­liti­cal connotations, was employed by the eighteenth-­century Rus­sian authors e­ ither writing from abroad or ­those who ­were ­under the sway of the foreign ways of speaking about le public in French or das Publikum in German. Thus they used the Rus­sian word as a mere calque. For example, Sdvizhkov says that playwright and diplomat Denis Fonvizin used it in this sense in his letters from France in 1777 and  138 

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1778.77 Radishchev’s excerpt from 1790 that I have just quoted could be ascribed to the same category. He studied in Leipzig and translated before he started writing his own prose. So he was “­under the influence,” as language would have it now, imbibing the spirits of freedom. Another example: a reformer Mikhail Speransky, head of the cabinet of Alexander I, drafts an essay following the French formulas: “Malversations, having escaped the judgment of the law, enter the court of publika, incomparably the most terrible, b­ ecause the consequence of this court is universal contempt. ­There the comprehension of virtue is supported by common re­spect, while vice is tormented by dishonor.”78 Of course, all t­ hese are instances of trying to say in Rus­sian for the first time what had been previously read in books or journals in French and German. And Rus­sia does not have the m ­ iddle class, pushing for public discussions, and the sphere of polite sociability based on the printed word is tiny in comparison to Western Eu­ro­pean countries at the time. However, the public denouncing the evildoings of officials and punishing them with contempt—is this not a function of the critical public sphere? ­These linguistic experiments to endow publika with a real po­liti­cal role might seem futile when viewed in hindsight. According to Sdvizhkov, the Catherinian age does not invent and impose, but rather “channels” terminology in the direction acceptable to the powers that be. The Empress tries to implant the notion of “society” into the language usage of her subjects, but si­mul­ta­neously wants to ban the idea that society might hold the sovereign accountable for her deeds. Thus, the famous Instructions say that Catherine II “represents” this society, but without conditions and contract stipulations. The dominant discourse thus authorizes talk about bien public all of the time, but “society” is treated as an object, a recipient of this “social good” rather than as the subject of action. Thus, the notion of le public, when it gets translated in officially censored lit­er­a­ture, is defused of all explosive and revolutionary content. In par­tic­u ­lar, links between le public and l’opinion publique, which are dangerous to the monarchs, do not appear in permitted translations and are consciously ignored in the Rus­sian dictionaries of the time. For example, when Tatishchev published his French-­Russian dictionary in 1798, he eschewed all po­liti­cal connotations of the term “opinion,” even though the post-­revolutionary edition of Dictionnaire de l’Academie Francaise publishes its volume 5 (letters L-­Z) that same year, adding a special column on the specifically po­liti­cal meaning of l’opinion. Tatishchev just ignores it,  139 

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and thus mimics Ancien Regime ways, in which the pre-­revolutionary editions of this Dictionary of the French Acad­emy themselves had interpreted l’opinion only as “reputation” and “belief,” ignoring obvious printed usage in French to the contrary. Sdvizhkov concludes that as a result of such an operation, publika was denied its po­liti­cal content for the time being, but this po­liti­cally threatening sense was first retained in the Rus­sian expression “common opinion,” and then, since the mid-­n ineteenth c­ entury, in the term “the socialness.” According to Sdvizhkov, Rus­sia repeated ­here the peculiarities of the lexical development of the analogous terms in German.79 The wrath of the Empress and the swift punishment of Radishchev in 1790 ­were hardly caused by the fact that he used the terms publika and “common judgment” in a subversive way, contrasting publika with official censorship. But assaulting censorship, he endowed his term with quasi-­ political functions, dif­fer­ent from the image of the “exacting,” “supportive,” or “honorable” theatrical and reading public, to use the adjectives that w ­ ere allowed to appear in the press. Catherine II could not ignore such an infraction, particularly in the years following the French Revolution. But if ­Sdvizhkov is correct in that ­a fter attempts to defuse publika, “common opinion” eventually became a term that signified revolt, let us take a look at the development of this expression, particularly b­ ecause Radishchev distinguished between the f­ ree public and the oppressive common opinion. Sdvizhkov’s thorough conceptual analy­sis shows that Radishchev might have been right in not exactly liking, if not outright lambasting, “common opinion.” This expression was initially closer to l’opinion commune rather than to l’opinion publique. It was a common opinion of the nation united with its sovereign, of “society” as understood in the Catherinian manuals for secondary schools, that is, as all subjects of the monarch, amenably living together ­under the wisely imposed laws, in agreement with this wise ­will. The French revolution tore it asunder. A new actor appeared on stage: l’opinion publique was la Reine du Monde, a ruler of the world or its Mistress, as the translation of Tocqueville’s Democracy in Amer­ic­ a famously called it.80 In the very beginning of the nineteenth c­ entury, Rus­sian good society develops its thought about l’opinion publique in the guise of obshchee mnenie—­ literally, “common opinion.” Of course, even in 1836 Pushkin laments in French that Rus­sia has no genuine opinion publique, so the atmosphere is stifling. But already in his 1806 essay, “A Writer in Society,” Pushkin’s friend,  140 

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the poet Zhukovsky, claims that the St. Petersburg beau monde does have it, although he calls it “common opinion” (in Rus­sian) and employs it to judge the virtues and talents of individuals rather than politics.81 Karamzin, the conservative e­ nemy of the reformer Speransky, in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Rus­sia (1811), which influenced Alexander I to undermine the Speransky’s position, was perhaps the first to notice that this common opinion was not treating the government favorably. Poet Viazemsky specifies ­after the 1820–1821 revolutions in Spain, Naples, and Portugal that common opinion is produced by the educated lovers of liberty. The plans of the secret socie­ ties of the Decembrists include the goal of mastering “common opinion” so that the objectives of the revolutionaries could become a common wish of all, thus paving the way for successful revolt. Their abortive uprising in 1825, however, signifies the death of this hope for “common opinion” as the main agency pushing for change. This happens, first, b­ ecause the aristocrats that fostered it are ­either executed or exiled to Siberia, which frightens and intimidates the rest of the beau monde. Second, b­ ecause the special Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery is established in 1826, headed by General von Benckendorff with the goal of secretly policing this common opinion by monitoring everyday communication and correspondence. Further, the spread of journalism that takes place in Rus­sia ­after 1815, and the expanding ranks of ­people who dedicated themselves to the literary vocation, gradually push out the gentry as the main creators of obshchee mnenie, or “common opinion.” If the expression was still used in the 1830s and ’40s, it was a far cry from the way the Decembrists used it or from l’opinion commune of Radishchev’s time, when it meant a joint opinion of the Empress and her obedient subjects bound by wise laws, or of the government united with good society. And this expression fi­nally gave way in the 1860s to what was now called obshchestvennoe mnenie, “opinion of society” or “social opinion,” produced by the culture creators of vari­ous ranks and estates.82 Olga Malinova demonstrates how the last vestiges of the radical meaning of publika resurfaced during ­these ­Great Reforms of the 1860s. Of course, the main meaning of the term at the time already was “­those to whom published texts and public lectures are addressed.” But an editorial in the newspaper, “The Voice,” reflecting the reform-­oriented liberal bourgeoisie, proclaimed in 1863: “. . . the exchange of thoughts between newspapers and journals must  141 

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happen not for their own plea­sure and diversion, but for the utility . . . ​and gain of the Rus­sian publika.” ­Here the idea is that the public is more than just the audience for literary consumption, so it’s not just about reading and discussing; it should profit from this discussion. Also, publika could become personified, conceived as an agent of action or, at the least, an actor with coherent interests. Thus, pan-­Slavist Nikolai Danilevskii wrote in his main work, Rus­sia and Eu­rope (1868), that through newspaper publication, “the interests of publika are not only clarified, but develop the understanding of their force, get elevated to the level of social opinion.”83 Still, concludes Malinova, notwithstanding the potential for publika to be seen as a subject of social action, the term obshchestvo, or “society,” was used far more widely to represent this idea.84 And, one should add, all of t­ hese decisive features of a principal agent of social change w ­ ere ­later passed onto the term “socialness.” The linkage of publika with l’opinion publique and republicanism was ­dying out gradually, though. Thus, one of the found­ers of the Slavophile movement, Ivan Kireevsky, whose journal would be closed down by censorship in 1832 ­after only two issues w ­ ere published, wrote four years before that in a programmatic statement: “[I]n our time, ­every thinking person not only can, but must express his thoughts in front of publika . . . ​­because by this common co-­action (obshchim sodeistviem) we can constitute the entity that right-­ thinking p­ eople have been wishing for so long, and that, however, we still do not have . . . ​I speak of the common opinion.”85 He, of course, uses the term “common opinion,” which the Decembrists wanted and failed to master. Kireevsky implies that ­there was nothing to master, that it should first be created. Note, however, the demand for concerted action to bring something into existence—an exemplary demand. Hardly anybody expressed it so vividly, even if Kireevsky called for this coordinated action to establish a common opinion, not to change life itself. It is not for nothing that censorship barred him from r­ unning journals, with rare exceptions. Pushkin, as we remember, agreed with Chaadaev that what Kireevsky sought was not achieved in Rus­sia even in 1836; the country was still characterized by absence d’opinion publique and mepris cynique pour la pensee, as Pushkin wrote.86 In 1840, three years a­fter Pushkin’s death, literary critic Vissarion Belinsky—­actually, the prototypical literary critic, given that he became the epitome of this new profession in Rus­sia, and thus the subject of a special 1955 study by no less a figure than Sir Isaiah Berlin—­still demonstrated a yearning  142 

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to ascribe exceptional qualities to publika, which he defined as an intensely morally informed group of p­ eople brought up on Rus­sian lit­er­a­t ure and potentially capable of genuine po­liti­cal action.87 Publika is not the p­ eople who come from the provinces to capital city fairs and buy books while they are stocking provisions for the winter. Publika is not the p­ eople who subscribe to journals from September to March and then read them during the leisure of the summer. He wrote: “For publika, engaging in lit­er­a­t ure is not finding a repose from the tumults of life, not a sweet dozing in the elastic armchairs ­after a copious dinner, with a cup of coffee in hand, no!—­engaging in lit­er­a­ ture for it is res publica, a ­matter of society—­lit­er­at­ ure was ­g rand, impor­tant, the source of high moral enjoyment, of vivid adorations. Although publika comprises an innumerable number of ­people, it is something unified, a single living person, which has historically developed and has a specific direction, taste, regard of ­things . . . ​W here publika exists, writers express popu­lar content, stemming from the ­people’s Weltanschauung, and publika through its participation, expressing its adulation or dissatisfaction, shows to what extent this or that writer has achieved in his creation this lofty goal. Where publika is, t­ here we have ‘social opinion,’ definitely pronounced, t­ here is a sort of direct criticism which separates the wheat from the chaff, rewards a genuine dignity, punishes pathetic mediocrity or blatant charlatanism. Publika is the highest court, the highest tribunal for lit­er­a­t ure.”88 One can almost see ­here a repetition of what Radishchev was saying about publika in 1790. However, 50 years ­after the ­g reat republican, Belinsky writes in a context where publika would not aspire to compete with censorship, as it did in the writings of Radishchev. Censorship is presupposed; it is a prerequisite that one does not question. With the republican militants or military republicans—­whatever one calls the Decembrist officers—­crushed, the only way for Belinsky to find res publica is to read it as an intense moral reflection on issues of society that the educated readership, covertly sympathizing with the Decembrists, carries out. Memories of l’opinion publique are still ­there, but we see in this excerpt that it is hollowed out, it is all about the moral merits of novels and poems and criticism. We might even see the mechanisms of Arendt’s “the social” in that the “social opinion” right now awards the best and chastises the unsuccessful. Also, as the words of Belinsky demonstrate, this opinion has transformed publika into a unitary person! ­There is no common world, which should elicit dif­fer­ent opinions by definition,  143 

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according to Arendt: “For though the common world is the meeting ground of all, t­ hose who are pres­ent have dif­fer­ent locations in it . . . ​Being seen and being heard by ­others derive their significance from the fact that every­body sees and hears from a dif­fer­ent position. This is the meaning of public life, compared to which even the richest and most satisfying ­family life can offer only the prolongation or multiplication of one’s own position . . .”89 This pluralism of public life is not allowed in a world where publika establishes standards as a single body. So, a remembrance of ­things public may be discerned in Belinsky, but it is a warped remembrance. However, one can also juxtapose ­these vestiges of romantic republicanism in Belinsky to the way the term was both realistically and sometimes cynically used in the sober informal communications of the members of the highest officialdom. We can analyze it through their correspondence and diaries. Elena Dolgikh has recently carried out a meticulous analy­sis of what she calls the mentalité of the Rus­sian administrative elite of the 1830s and 1840s on the basis of personal archives of Dmitrii Bludov and Modest Korf. Korf came from the Baltic Germans, so it is perhaps not surprising that he uses the term far more often than Bludov does. Bludov identifies himself with obshchestvo, but in his usage it is not even beau monde; it is the “highest class,” as in the mid-­eighteenth ­century. Writing about the conflicts that he had with the police in Berlin, he scorns them as lower, insignificant strata of officialdom: “­Here, as elsewhere, the court and police clerks scratch—­when they can with the help of the claws of law—­ . . . ​individuals belonging to the highest class, to society, whom they hate.” This society is not publika by any means. The tsars, whom Bludov served with all his wit and talent, preparing a ­g reat deal of legislation during the reign of Nicholas I, should, “as the Deity in epic poems, speak with publika rarely, l­ ittle and so carefully, so that even the blessed Escobar with false interpretations ­ ere, publika is not taken to be a crowd could not find fault in their words.”90 H of consumers of lit­er­a­ture; Bludov writes this letter in the context of the preparation of the 1839 manifesto on gold / silver reform, which might have produced losses for the gentry and thus elicited turmoil. But the way the tsar should treat this publika, which could take on a dangerous po­liti­cal dimension, is like Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, the Spanish seventeenth-­ century Jesuit-­educated master of casuistry, who was famous for his exquisite bending of moral rules to justify the interests of the state.  144 

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Korf’s usage does not indicate that the most suitable role for publika is to be deceived or manipulated. We remember that Radishchev, Fonvizin, and Speransky mostly used the term publika to describe phenomena abroad, or when they had to squeeze the radical t­ heses of their proposals for westernizing reforms into Rus­sian. Inventing calques from German and French was very handy in this re­spect. Korf carries this foreignness in his heart; his ­father Heinrich Ulrich Kasimir Freiherr von Korff entered Rus­sian state ser­ vice only in 1798. In 1845 he thus rec­ords a thought very similar to what Radishchev, with his Leipzig education, wrote about the vile features of common opinion, but he applies it to publika. This “public” does not feel abhorrence at the sight of graft, notes Korf, while ­there is no moral reward from publika bestowed on ­those who shy away from bribes. Publika is knowledgeable about what’s ­going on, so that an informal work of Korf on reformer Speransky gained acclaim in 1847, even though it ­wouldn’t be published ­until 1861. One can hide from publika one’s anniversary and thus escape jubilee festivities (writes Korf in 1851), but publika is still knowledgeable about all affairs of or skirmishes within officialdom around the tsar. Thus, details of a conflict in 1851 between the minister of internal affairs and the minister of means of communications and public buildings (publichnykh zdanii) ­were known in minute detail to publika and brought ridicule. In 1843, however, Korf notes in his diary that if publika ever writes memoirs, t­ hese are figments of imagination based on hearsay in the salons: “In France the publicness of civic life makes every­thing, to a certain extent, accessible for a private person. In Rus­sia he knows nothing. We have sacred, cabinet, chancellery secrets, while information spreading through publika, even the highest publika, is superficial, inexact, unreliable . . . ​To write what they tell in the salons frequently would mean to tell not a true story, but a novel.” Dolgikh concludes: for Korf, publika is a non-­service part of St. Petersburg aristocracy; even the good society of Moscow does not qualify. Also, like the publika of Belinsky, they are also consumers of texts and narratives, but official manifestos and rumors or informal news on the officials’ acts might be perhaps more impor­tant ­here than printed lit­er­a­t ure.91 When it was first registered as a separate word entry, in Ivan Nordstet’s 1782 dictionary of Rus­sian with French and German translations, the Rus­ sian word publika was rendered with the French term le public and with the German terms das ganze Volk and das Publikum, and gave obshchestvo, or  145 

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“society,” as its synonym.92 This was concise, of course, but before the French revolution, this book could still link the term to its seditious West Eu­ro­pean analogues. It looks like already in 1789 or 1790, Radishchev could have been on the way ­toward a real philosophical innovation that could have transformed this publika into a central term of a nascent Rus­sian po­ liti­cal philosophy. His attention to the public, which could become an active arbiter of thought, was making it a designation of a new feature of public life, transforming common opinion from an agency frequently just exuding prejudice into a discerning agent of the Enlightenment. Radishchev could have also thus upgraded the term publika, which at the time of his writing frequently meant ­either theatrical shows or idle gazing during public ceremonies. If we are to believe Denis Sdvizhkov, the denigration of the word publika might have also taken place b­ ecause the powers that be did not want it linked with l’opinion publique. This could valorize publika too much. ­Because of such potentially rebellious qualities, for example, Rus­sian compilers of the Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy (1789–1794) did not include the term publika as a separate dictionary entry—­though they presented in it all the branches of a tree with terms from the root obshch: common, communion, commoning, and communing, for sure, but also society-­social-­ socializing, which in Rus­sian came from the same linguistic root. Douglas Smith suggests that the difference between this Rus­sian public life and what was happening in, say, France, Germany, or ­England, was only a ­matter of size.93 In Rus­sia, as in Western Eu­rope, entry into the “public sphere”—­a term that became standard in social and po­liti­cal theory a­ fter the En­glish translation of the works of Habermas on Offentlihckeit—­was not associated with social class or origins. One needed only to have education and be wealthy enough to buy or get access to printed materials and sites where they would be discussed. In Rus­sia, however, t­ here ­were fewer coffee­houses, clubs, and publishers. So when, following the French Revolution, Novikov and Radishchev suffered monarchical wrath and had their printing presses confiscated and print runs destroyed, other members of the reading public ­were frightened by the prospect of also being imprisoned or sent into exile to Siberia. Thus, one is bound to conclude, the Habermasian public sphere simply did not develop due to its small size, while the publicness of what was happening in Rus­sian life heretofore did not manage to get solidly captured by the new terms, denoting ­these new forms of life.  146 

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As a result, even now we have obshchestvennoe mnenie—­literally, “social opinion”—­translating the term l’opinion publique into Rus­sian. By contrast, in colloquial Rus­sian, publika does not have an opinion (publichnoe mnenie); it should not have an opinion. It e­ ither goes to theaters or strolls down the central streets gazing at o ­ thers or, admiringly, at its own reflection in the shop win­dows. How could Baudelaire’s flaneurs or p­ eople madly applauding in the theatre be expected to have an opinion ­after a joint deliberation on politics? It is not surprising that a­ fter the aristocratic reading public was decimated, sent to Siberia, and forced into submission by the monarchic repression in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth ­century, the term publika was sneered upon by the new brand of radical readership, exemplified since the 1830s by the figure of Belinsky.94 This readership (which was also writing a lot) now included not only the “good” high society of aristocratic salons, clubs, bookshops, and coffee ­houses; they w ­ ere of “diverse ranks,” as they designated themselves. Contrasting themselves to aristocratic idlers and noble ne’er-­do-­ wells (who would rent theatre loges to visit the ballet or opera a­ fter or before a lavish dinner at a top restaurateur), ­these new agents of change did not want to associate themselves with such a vice-­r idden publika. P ­ eople from this new stratum “of diverse ranks” w ­ ere part and parcel of “society,” or harbingers of “the new society,” which eventually morphed into the socialness of the period between 1905 and 1917 and then into its post-­revolutionary guise. Kalugin adds a new and in­ter­est­ing aspect to this familiar narrative of the 1789-­to-1825 repression of aristocratic dissent and the appearance of the new revolutionaries of diverse ranks. It was not only the monarchs who stymied the formation of politically-­m inded publika ­because the autocrats had assaulted the gestating public. One may say the publika had never formed into a potent force in Rus­sian history b­ ecause cultural resources that ­were essential for its formation w ­ ere not pres­ent or deployed with the necessary resolve. Having analyzed how the new code of laws was discussed by the Legislative Commission between 1767 and 1769 a­ fter Catherine II had issued the famous Instructions, Kalugin found to his surprise something similar to what Gladarev observed in con­temporary Rus­sia: an incapability of a more or less extensive group of ­people to deliberate in a civilized manner and during a realistic time frame, while articulating a consolidated position on an issue. As we know, present-­day groups need skills to accomplish such tasks, and an absence of a special register of “public” language thwarts necessary  147 

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modes of discussion. Thus, printing presses, a reading public, and the spaces where this public could meet (socie­ties, clubs, coffee­houses, ­etc.), ­were not the only preconditions for the formation of the public sphere in Rus­sia. Also needed was a culture of civilized conduct of deliberation and of individuals agreeing to submit to a gestating group opinion, which might not be common to all, but accepted for public pre­sen­ta­tion of this group’s views. Within a group, individual opinions may differ. A common, universally shared opinion would imply the necessity to compel certain individuals to change their beliefs so that their opinion coincides with the opinion of all. In contrast to this, an opinion of the group presented in public is the result of a certain procedure of searching for it, to which all members of the group have agreed in advance. If, for example, I agree to the procedure for determining the group’s opinion on the basis of majority vote, then I w ­ ill support the group’s public stance even if the opinion approved by the majority contradicts my own. Do we lack this in Rus­sia even now? Analy­sis of the meetings of the Legislative Commission in 1767 and 1768 (the final, 203rd meeting of the Commission took place on 12 January, 1769) shows that even the special “order of debate” written by Catherine II for the Commission’s work—­down to details of where to stand if arguing for or against a proposed move or decision—­d id not help to determine the consolidated opinion of the distinguished assembly. First of all, the contradictory opinions of the speakers w ­ ere not put to a vote, but instead ­were just recorded and then transferred to subcommittees, formed for ad hoc issues, which did not know what to do with such radically contradictory utterances. During the year and a half of the Commission’s operation, only one issue was put to a vote—­a vote, however, that was not related to the substance of the issue (­whether to equate ser­vice nobility in rights with hereditary nobility) but to the question of w ­ hether to dispatch the lists of both the hereditary and ser­ vice nobility to the Empress. Second, the procedure of discovering the public position of the Commission was obstructed by the pro­cess of Erklarung der Begriffe, or “clarifying of concepts,” in which all willingly engaged, stalling the deliberation. The end result of ­these 1767 and 1768 debates on concepts was a complete lack of consensus on nearly all of them. Third, even the chairman of the assembly, or marshal, as he was called by Catherine, who had appointed him to observe the procedure, did not “marshal” the speakers as he should have done. True, he interrupted if someone strayed from the sub 148 

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stance of an issue. However, if disputes over ideas unfolded or if points of view diverged, the marshal simply made sure that all the arguments w ­ ere recorded. He did not attempt to ameliorate the situation by forcing participants to talk on the same subject rather than past each other. The war with Turkey, for which many deputies left in 1768 and 1769, saved the Legislative Commission from recognizing its own complete collapse.95 Do we find ­here the same situation as in 2009, when Gladarev was finishing his fieldwork on the Living City? It would be too rash to say so. Finding scant analogies between a distant point in history and the pres­ent day situation in order to assert continuity between the two would not qualify as good social science. The two events, in 1767 and 2009, do not exhaust the history of attempts to install deliberation in a public assembly. Indeed, between ­these dates ­there w ­ ere many other instances when Rus­sia attempted to introduce civilized deliberative procedures—in the wake of the 1860s reforms that abolished serfdom, during the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, or during the perestroika days of 1989 to 1991. But what is in­ter­est­i ng in the proceedings of the Legislative Commission of 1767 and 1768 is that a split into the officialese of the modern state and the emotionality of intimacies of the interpersonal communication was already on the verge of being acutely felt. Kalugin notes that in an early nineteenth-­century debate with his fellow nobleman Dashkov, the poet Zhukovsky already sensed that the concept of the common good, to which the officials ­were referring so frequently, was too general, too vague, and perhaps empty.96 Sdvizhkov also notes the same peremptory incantations about the authorities and society together serving the public good.97 This was a sign that the two main registers of communication ­were gestating, if not already formed. One e­ ither communicated in the official bureaucratic language of the Rus­sian state or confided with friends.98 Given the contrast between ­these two registers of communication, the poet Odoevsky soon came to ask the high question about obshchnost’ dushi, or “the commonality of the soul,” in order to understand what lies at the foundation of obshchestvo, or “society,” ­because ­after all, a true community or society cannot be based on the empty communication of official life! ­There should be something fundamental, essential, not superficial! Kalugin has shown how this yearning for the core, for the true, essential communication—as opposed to superfluous exchanges filled with rhetorical ploys that Rus­sian travelers like Karamzin had found  1 49 

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in France—­i nfluenced secular communication between close friends. Latter day thinkers on this subject w ­ ill abandon Odoevsky’s love of Schelling’s philosophy and mysticism. The circle around Stankevich w ­ ill be pervaded by a love for Fichte and Hegel and w ­ ill use their philosophical concepts of “common life” or the Absolute, while looking for the essential commonality of community or socialness of society, as manifested in the totality of this-­ worldly, mundane phenomena. And the Slavophiles like Ivan Kireevsky and Konstantin Aksakov might be taken as an utmost manifestation of this yearning to find this essential unity beyond appearances. Aksakov ­w ill take the idea of an invisible “common origin” of the nation to say that “a true society” exists only where this originary idea has been realized to the fullest; in the case of Russia—­where the religious essence of the Rus­sian ­people fi­ nally finds itself materialized.99 In 1857 Aksakov published a short newspaper piece on the difference between publika and narod, or “the p­ eople,” a­ fter which the former might have been taken as a curse word.100 According to Aksakov, Rus­sia lived without publika for a long time; publika appeared together with the construction of St. Petersburg, when part of the people stopped wearing Rus­sian clothes and following Rus­sian mores and started to copy and import every­thing West Eu­ro­pean. Belonging to this “public” is essentially anti-­Russian: “Publika ­orders thoughts and feelings from overseas . . . ​n arod draws up life from a native source. Publika speaks French, narod speaks Rus­sian . . . ​P ublika has Paris fashions, narod—­its Rus­sian mores . . . ​P ublika sleeps, narod has woken up and toils. Publika works, mostly with [her] legs on a parquet, narod sleeps or is already waking up to work. Publika despises narod; narod forgives publika . . . ​Publika is of a passing quality, narod is eternal . . . ​Publika and narod both have epithets: the first one is called ‘most respectable’, the second one—­ Orthodox.”101 The total denigration of the public is complete: it is not only idle, gazing, dancing when ­others are toiling. It is anti-­national, and thus a passing foam that ­w ill be swept away when the eternal ocean of the ­people’s energies ­w ill change its tide. The opposition between the aristocrats and the ­people is nothing new, but the difference in the Slavophile mood is startling. Kireevsky in 1828 was still representing publika as a positive phenomenon, based on concerted action to achieve worthy goals, though doomed to be literary in the conditions of the post-­Decembrist repression. Aksakov denies publika any positive feature, and if any “co-­action” is to be hallowed,  150 

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it is the cooperative action of the Slavophiles in vilifying this publika and building a true Rus­sian society based on narod.

4.3 ​Solving the Prob­lems of Common-­Ism with the Help of Cicero and Arendt It would seem that the eigh­teenth ­century was the ­century of progressing secular communication. The educated public communed in the sense of communication pure and ­simple, having largely abandoned the religious ideas and practices of communing as communion. This communing as communication offered many new forms of life rather than just a unity in common ­t hings and rituals, which communing as communion offered heretofore. However, ­after the collapse of the proj­ect of creating the politically-­m inded public in the 1820s and 1830s, the society of polite manners and exquisite communication ­either came to seem superficial or became powerless and defunct. ­A fter the 1830s, the aristocratic salons w ­ ere challenged by the small philosophical and intellectual circles, which became one of the main milieus of spiritual production.102 Members of ­these circles started looking for some essential unity under­lying all observed phenomena. Frequently they found this essence hiding u ­ nder the empty or dry surfaces of the world of official communication, common to all literate inhabitants of Rus­sia. Thus, the country again rediscovered communion, albeit in the very heart of a new pro­cess of secular and enlightened communication. A key concept from the works of the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov demonstrates this more vividly than ­others. In his view, obshchestvo is not the top layer, nor is it the ­m iddle stratum between the government and the ­people. It is a unity based on the highest morality and Christian truth, a community of ­people that is the manifestation of a certain national spirit; in the Rus­sian case, this is the famous spirit of sobornost’, which means “gatheredness,” “cathedralness,” or “catholicity.”103 Thus, communication that would simply share information or emotions itself became insufficient, inadequate, wanting. It now had to ­either base itself on communion or harbor communion deep in the very heart of itself. We see this evolution everywhere. Look, for example, at the first meaning of the term obshchestvo, or “society,” in the Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy  151 

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of the eigh­teenth ­century. ­There it is defined as all citizens living in a par­tic­ u­lar country, u ­ nder a given monarch, and u ­ nder the same laws. A ­ fter all the translations of contract theory into Rus­sian and the elevated arguments of why the social or po­liti­cal condition, civilized communication, and civil manners are better than the bellicose and brutish state of nature, Rus­sia returned to the adulation of koinonia, of communing as communion, though now not necessarily in Christ, but in some deeds or ­things of essence. If one looks at the second meaning of the term obshchestvo from the same Dictionary—as a small group or layer of educated p­ eople, a corporation, an estate, or a f­ ree gathering of like-­minded p­ eople—­one sees immediately that it developed and flourished against the background of a spread of the practices of Petrine “assemblies” and Catherinian salons, the inculcation of refined manners, and the multiplication of spaces for reading, writing, printing, and discussion. And suddenly all this burgeoning activity crumbled once autocracy was engulfed by the fear of an aristocratic revolt against tyranny. At the same time, the register of public language that would help create coherent and effective publics out of ­these zealously, if not fanatically emotional—­and frequently disheveled and disorderly—­debating groups, did not solidify. Instead of publics, even ­here, in the sphere of ­these “smaller” socie­ties, we have ­people who reverted back to communing about or as in communion. The contrast between the positions of the author of the first Rus­sian mass bestselling novel, Faddei Bulgarin, and the literary critic Belinsky, mentioned by Kalugin, shows us the gloomy dilemma of public life in the 1840s. Neither of the options on offer is particularly attractive. Bulgarin, vilified by the lovers of liberty in the nineteenth ­century, and then transformed during the Soviet days into the epitome of evil b­ ecause of his cooperation with the III (Secret) Section of the Imperial Chancellery, to which he offered what we would now call PR ser­vices, proposed advice on how to ­handle “common opinion.” Given that this agency is impossible to eliminate, he wrote to the III Section in 1826, immediately ­after the failed coup of the Decembrists, it is better to “instruct and govern it through book printing, rather than leave it to the w ­ ill of malicious ­people.” He also offered an analy­sis of the target audiences, as they would say now in the PR field, distinguishing between 4 “conditions” or estates: 1) notable or wealthy persons, 2) the ­m iddle condition, which “in our country . . . ​consists of a) ser­v ice gentry of means and landowners settled in the villages, b) poor gentry brought up at the expense  152 

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of the trea­sury, c) civil servants and all ­those whom we call clerks, d) rich factory merchants, and even burghers. This condition is the most multitudinous; it has largely educated itself and is largely self-­educating, through reading and the communication of ideas, and comprises the so-­called Rus­ sian publika,” 3) “The Low condition,” which consists of lower level clerks, literate peasants and burgesses, village priests, clergy in general, and the impor­tant class of the Old Believers, and 4) scholars and writers.104 The authorities listened to Bulgarin ­because, once aristocratic treason appeared in the very bosom of the monarchy, they had to somehow rely on other segments of the population as well. Hence his popularity among the broad reading public was taken into account. Knowledgeable about the latest French and Polish literary models and practices, Bulgarin chose to appeal to the tastes (and pockets) of publika, as he continued to call his readership, describing it, as we just saw, as the vast m ­ iddle, educated layer of the population, situated between high aristocracy and the low classes.105 Bulgarin could not be oblivious of the fact, however, that his opponents, including Pushkin, thought of this “public” as a collection of mediocrities reading Bulgarin’s pulp fiction. In return, he called Pushkin’s circle “literary aristocrats,” which implied that Bulgarin was working in the interests of a vast m ­ iddle layer of the population. In contrast with Bulgarin, Belinsky, in 1840, was using the same term, publika, in its higher sense, trying to prove in an extensive and wordy argument, discussed above, that literary consumption is not about sleepily looking through journals with a cup of coffee in hand a­ fter a sizable dinner, but rather, it’s a type of articulation of the res publica!106 The hope was that now, with po­liti­cal options closed ­after 1825, literary production would lead the strug­gle for liberty. By the late 1840s, however, Belinsky was also lauding obshchestvo, seeing in it a special class of thinking and critical ­people that Rus­sian lit­er­a­ ture had called into existence in opposition to Bulgarin’s support base of mediocrities yearning for cheap entertainment.107 Of course, one may also find in the works of Belinsky instances of a rare transitional usage of the term “socialness.”108 Twenty years ­later, some of his followers, like Ogarev, started to stress this obshchestvennost’, or “socialness,” as the fitting name for an active force transforming Rus­sia, so that by the end of the nineteenth ­century, Belinsky was recast as the unquestionable leader of this socialness, when it had just allegedly started to gestate and develop. Belinsky’s popu­lar sobriquet—­  153 

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“the Furious”—­shows the fundamental significance of faith and koinonia for the goals of his followers. This new social force of critical intellectuals actively communicates, but it also reads, discusses, and criticizes the authorities for the false communion into which the government has immersed the country. This gloomy alternative of the 1840s—­going along with the publika of pulp fiction-­reading mediocrities of Bulgarin or with the socially active force of furious zealot critics wishing to establish a true commonwealth on earth—­ contributed to the tragedy of the Rus­sian Revolution of 1917. W ­ hether to join a “public” of mediocre consumers, skillfully monitored and manipulated by the secret police, or to enter “socialness,” a radical society of critics of the regime looking for true communion—­would this not look like a false dilemma nowadays? In the first case you get the “public” or “socialness,” officially controlled, sponsored, and fed by wise shepherds who do not oppress but rather degrade ­people into a sheepish existence, as Tocqueville famously stated in the section on demo­cratic despotism in Democracy in Amer­ic­ a. This mediocre mass then stifles all originality in lit­er­a­ture, demanding the pleasant in place of the disturbing or difficult. In politics it stamps out the very possibility of original action, forcing every­body to comply with the conformist standards of mass be­hav­ior. However, the second option is no better. In 1917, this second—­Belinsky’s option—­won. The objective to build the new world (or radiant ­future) of true communion seemingly vanquished the Bulgarin alternative. And it ruled Rus­sia throughout the twentieth ­century. In 1989, history swayed back, and now Rus­sia is in the grips of quietist publics again, whose only publicness consists of asserting that the only worthy goal in life is con­spic­u­ous and unashamed consumption. Thus, both positions in the 1840s dilemma signal the elimination of the objective to build an active public with the help of rational and civilized communication, which, it seemed, the Enlightenment established in Eu­rope, and which the age of Peter the G ­ reat and Catherine the ­Great tried to achieve in Rus­sia. This public, then, could have played a role in steering the destiny of Rus­sia in another direction. I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not claiming that the non-­ formation of this active public is the main reason for the tragedy of the Rus­ sian revolution, as many authors would. I want to say something e­ lse. ­Isn’t it disheartening that ­after the waning of the Petrine-­Catherinian age of enlight 154 

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ened communication, the role of the disengaged radical critic a lá Belinsky is the only stance available to educated free-­thinking individuals, interested in the fate of the country? ­A fter all, constant and stubborn criticism—of the Nicholas I / Benckendorff, Alexander III, Nicholas II / Rasputin, Lenin-­Stalin-­ Brezhnev, or Putin regimes—is the stance in which the reading-­writing-­ posting stratum, lacking paths of real access to power, repeatedly found itself. This criticism is not difficult: given the largely blocked access to real power, ­there is hardly a danger that one w ­ ill have to propose and then implement the alternatives to the current detrimental course of events, against which one vouched so passionately. Only times of revolutionary turmoil eject critical radicals from their comfortable box seats next to the orchestra of life and force them to go onstage. The results are obvious—­just look at the fates of the deputies of the Petrograd Soviet assembly of March 1917, or the Leningrad city Soviet of 1990. Only a few survive in power, and many, if not nearly all, perish b­ ecause of it or in its hands. Taking part in the affairs of the country, which could transform this radical social force of disgruntled critics into a public—­that is, according to a model that was never ­really implemented in Rus­sia to the end—is another ­matter. In this version of events, the publika does not simply watch the theatre of life, spitting out bile from time to time, but rather takes the spectacle of life into its own hands. To repeat: Gladarev’s study has shown why such a public is largely absent in con­temporary Rus­sia. First of all, t­ here is no register of public language that would allow a group of like-­m inded ­people to effectively come to a non-­emotional judgment on its public position as a group and agree on its actions. Second, for such groups t­ here is no infrastructure of access, e­ ither to the powers that be or to a broader quietist and nonchalant public. Such an infrastructure would ensure more or less realistic chances of equal access for a few citizens ­really concerned with public issue X to the sites of discussions of ­t hose who have to deal with X as part of their usual professional tasks. Granted, of course, that ­these new members of the public, admitted to such discussions, would pass crash courses on the history and technology of X. This would allow them to speak with the authorities in the same professional language. Such an infrastructural arrangement could function like a cone, channeling scattered rivulets of public energy through its apex in an orderly and professionalized stream of interaction between the concerned public and  155 

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the powers that be. In contrast with this condensing delivery infrastructure, permanent channels of access of “the concerned publics” to ­those within the broader public who do not care about an issue X should perhaps look like networks for ­water and gas supply, in which an input from the central station would be pumped to all parts of the network. As a result, groups concerned with issues X, Y, and Z, which in their opinion, should touch many hearts, would be able to pump their appeals for action through channels physically reaching into ­every home. The response by a usually passive public would then tell the smaller concerned group ­whether their concerns could r­ eally catch on. As Radishchev wrote in assessing Catherine’s intentions in the Instructions era, such an agenda would help “to let the ­people govern themselves.”109 ­T hese words of Radishchev have been repeated endlessly since they w ­ ere written almost 250 years ago, and thus sound like a commonplace t­ oday. But is it not strange or scary that such ­simple tasks from the days of Radishchev are still part of the current agenda, especially regarding issues of equal access to procedures of law production and law enforcement? One of the reasons why t­ hese tasks are still on our agenda is that the USSR commoned so many ­things so well, and Soviet ­people communed mostly as if in communion. We still have more than enough of this “common.” Communism should be thus seen as the regime of this ubiquitous commoning, which served as the basis for a higher type of communion that allegedly made ­people h ­ uman and humane in their very essence. Communism can be thus very directly deciphered in French as commun-­isme, while in En­glish it might be rebranded “common-­ism.” In Rus­sian, the residual preponderance of the common is manifest not only in the amount of ­t hings ­people still have to share with each other but in the continuing linguistic oppression as well. The mundane but fundamental distinction between common and public, which is normal for so many Eu­ro­pean languages, is hard to even formulate in Rus­ sian, since the words that are generally used, obshchii and obshchestvennyi, sound so similar, almost like synonyms. Both terms in Rus­sian translated the Greek terms linked to koinos, or “common,” and reflected the Greek experience linked to koinonia, or “community, communion, partnership.” This koinonia can be easily found in any Soviet collective and, as my first book tried to show, in the specially contrived methods for its establishment and maintenance.110 But the real issue is not about what interpretations we can read  156 

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into the Soviet past, but rather what remained a­ fter its collapse—­the ruins or the shambles in the midst of which we are still living. For example, the 1990s and 2000s in Rus­sia brought into the limelight the new slang word obshchak, another term stemming from the adjective “common.” Throughout the twentieth ­century, this noun had a rather limited circulation and was part of criminal jargon, meaning a common pool of money that a gang or an illicit community uses to, say, support the families of the imprisoned. The sudden flourishing of the term demonstrated that such mechanisms by no means worked just among the criminals, and perhaps its current popularity shows that it is more impor­tant for spheres of civil rather than criminal life. Indeed, Rus­sian elite groups have developed a stunning capacity to create an obshchak from the bud­gets of municipal, regional, or federal level entrusted to them.111 ­These narrow circles decide how and where this money should be spent, and which burning issues of the day should be addressed with the help of this money first. The prob­lem with such mechanisms is not groupthink per se; the prob­lem is that discussions happen ­behind closed doors and among the proximate, if not intimate, few.112 The main challenge now is to usher in the capacity to deliberate on ­these issues with the help of an interested public, by enlarging the closed ranks of the current bud­get deciders and dividers, or by staging a rotation of ­those who decide and divide. Therefore, a register of public language and an infrastructure of public access to law production and law enforcement are needed. Neither of ­these tasks involves any sort of radical innovation. For example, the creation of a register of public language was the objective of books like Robert’s Rules of Order, which tried adapting the rules of parliamentary debate to non-­legislative assemblies. Written in the late 19th ­century, this manual of the order of debate for civil society associations was constantly amended by its readers and its editors, and is now in its 11th edition.113 If adapting this collection of En­glish language rules to the Rus­sian real­ity does not work out, as the 1990s seemed to prove, one should produce an indigenous alternative, adapting to the twenty-first c­ entury the set of procedural rules proposed for the first Rus­sian Dumas between 1906 and 1917 by Muromtsev, Ostrogorsky, and Maklakov.114 Second, constructing an infrastructure of interested citizens’ access to decision makers and to broader nonchalant publics is also not rocket science. For example, such means of access are being temporarily installed while  157 

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arranging for participatory bud­geting in Latin Amer­i­ca and Western Eu­ rope.115 Yves Sintomer and his colleagues analyzed the experience of participatory bud­gets in 14 cities within 8 Eu­ro­pean countries when this type of bud­geting was not yet practiced in New York or in Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­ setts, where I was finishing this very book.116 Curiously enough, Rus­sia has surpassed Amer­i­ca in this re­spect. In the early 2010s, a few municipalities in northwestern Rus­sia set up commissions of randomly selected citizens (drawing lots and using rotation) and city administration officials to discuss and authorize the spending of up to 1 ­percent of municipal bud­gets.117 The prob­lem is how to ensure such participation through a set of durable and effective communication links reaching the majority of h ­ ouse­holds in a given municipality. A broader theoretical issue that this chapter has alerted us to is the set of grave limitations on the prospects of passing the power to the public in present-­day Rus­sia. Linguistically, we are at the mercy of the hybrid common-­ social sphere that precludes widespread serious usage of a public-­related vocabulary. In action, a genuinely public-­minded person ­faces a double task: on the one hand, how to escape joining the crowd of mindless entertainment or media content consumers (who are still called publika in Rus­sian), and on the other, how to si­mul­ta­neously eschew taking part in socialness, which ­today mostly means e­ ither an officially-­sanctioned and officially-­sponsored set of NGOs, or the exact opposite of it: an informal group of zealous critics of the regime, which is also stifling b­ ecause it enforces conformity among its members. One should not agree to accept this false binary, which was initially offered by the Bulgarin-­Belinsky dilemma from the 1840s. Choosing between being part of the public of consuming mediocrities or part of the socialness (­either in its “co-­opted-­dupes” version or in its “relentless-­critics” version) is not ­really a choice. In the late Soviet days, t­ here was a ­triple structure: lots of commoning of ­things at the most basic, foundational level, saddled by attempts to commune like in the Communion, and on top of all that, a realm of socialness, which at the time was understood to be e­ ither a) officially sponsored “voluntary” associations of Soviet citizens or b) some allegedly self-­policing bodies (comrades’ courts, housing committees, p­ eople’s street patrols, e­ tc.) that in real­ity meant the world of stifling everyday social pressure. The ­middle component is now gone. A ­ fter 1989, the Communist communion dissipated, and  158 

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other types of communion—­nationalist or religious—­have not ­really solidified in its place, notwithstanding many zealous attempts to the contrary. The prob­lem is that enlightened communication has not yet firmly taken the place once occupied by the Communist communion. In order to achieve this goal, Rus­sia needs to rely on the vast expanse of commoning that it has inherited, but this common world, understood ­either as in Cicero’s De re publica or in Arendt’s The H ­ uman Condition, should be crowned with genuine public life. ­Here one would expect both Cicero’s and Arendt’s ­recipes for action to be implemented. The socialness of the co-­opted-­ dupes type should be replaced by a public with efficient access to the sites of law production, application, and enforcement. This is what Cicero’s advice would be. The socialness of the relentless-­critics type that stifles originality and exhausts energy spitting out bile should be replaced by a public that can allow, foster, recognize, and rec­ord novel po­liti­cal action when it happens. This is what Arendt’s advice would be. To achieve Cicero’s goals, Rus­sia needs new procedures and infrastructures of public deliberation. To achieve Arendt’s goals, it needs to establish an arena in which memorable deeds that might affect every­one could emerge and get recorded. A public language and infrastructure of storytelling that would recognize merit or excellency should help spot such deeds, setting res publica into action. This double goal, if achieved, would bring about a public that acts instead of the one that mindlessly consumes, enforces mediocrity, or criticizes.

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5 Self-­Cognition and Self-­Fashioning in Con­temporary Rus­sia

What kind of self emerged a­ fter Communism collapsed? We need to ponder this question if we are to understand ­whether the two new types of publicness advocated at the end of the previous chapter can be successfully brought about or fostered in Rus­sia. If the post-­Communist practices of self-­cognition and self-­formation are radically unsuited to fit the Ciceronean and the Arendtian modes of existence of a genuine public described above, or could not be reconfigured to fit ­those modes, then the prospects for republicanism in con­temporary Rus­sia are not very realistic. The scholarly accounts seem to offer radically dif­fer­ent narratives on the post-­Communist self. One argument states that ­after the end of forced collectivism, individualism started to rule the day, which led to a feebleness of collective action and an inability to forge effective public associations. A second argument points to residual collectivist and paternalist features in the Rus­sian soul and laments the inability to ensure a true flourishing of the individual within ­these neo-­patrimonial networks. A genuinely in­de­pen­dent individual is needed to finish the long-­sought modernization of Rus­sia, but the cronyism, patronage, and clientelism of ­these neo-­patrimonial networks prevent such a type from emerging. Luckily for our research team, the rebirth of “modernization jargon” during the presidency of Dmitrii Medvedev (2008–2012) gave us an opportunity to study some of t­ hese issues empirically. Of course, in one program 16 0 

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matic article written at the beginning of his presidency, Mr.  Medvedev stressed the humanization of pro­g ress, but in practical terms, the agenda of po­liti­cal and social modernization was not being actively implemented.1 Most efforts ­were aimed at fostering the technological modernization of the Rus­ sian economy. Key companies charged with this technological modernization (like RosTech, Rusnano, Rus­sian Venture Com­pany, and The Skolkovo Foundation) w ­ ere consistently facing a question of w ­ hether Rus­sian cultural characteristics hindered or promoted the development of t­ hese highly desired high-­tech industries in Rus­sia. How can they be used to transform the country into a highly developed economy that would be less dependent on the export of natu­ral resources, and more invested in high-­tech development? To answer t­ hese questions, a group of researchers (including myself) from the Eu­ro­pean University at Saint Petersburg undertook a study, during which it also had an opportunity to test some hypotheses of its own.2 The com­pany that commissioned the study—­the Rusnano corporation, headed by Anatolii Chubais, who is famous for being a chief architect of the 1990s privatization of Russia—­was interested in ­whether ­there are common Rus­ sian cultural practices that must be relied upon if Rus­sia ­were to try to develop high-­tech entrepreneurship and technology-­i ntensive production all around the country rather than only in enclaves like the Skolkovo venture zone next to Moscow, with its lavish subsidies and promised preferential treatment of venture businesses. Studying ­these issues, our team felt, would also allow us to cast some light on what Daniel Bell would call “cultural contradictions of post-­Communism” or, more narrowly, on the recent changes in the practices of self-­cognition and self-­fashioning among the Rus­sians.3 When we w ­ ere designing the study, most experts we spoke with argued immediately that the main prob­lems in developing technological entrepreneurship (or technopreneurship) in Rus­sia ­were po­liti­cal, economic, and ­legal ­factors such as the heavy monopolization of the country’s economy and the impossibility of reliably defending property rights to companies, patents, ­etc. in Rus­sian courts.4 Frequently, it’s just eco­nom­ically irrational to start a long-­ term high-­tech business, given the selective law enforcement in ­favor of your competitors, the usual rapacity of controlling organs of the state, and the primitive but effective use of hostile takeover methods to capture suddenly successful businesses. However, comparison with the non-­democratic regimes in Taiwan and South ­Korea during the 1960s and 1970s seemed  161 

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promising. When they set about modernizing their economies, the po­l iti­cal systems of t­hese countries w ­ ere marked by authoritarianism, corruption, crony capitalism, and control of the main economic actors and much of their decision-­making by the security ser­vices. In other words, the situation was similar to how many po­liti­cal scientists now describe the Rus­sian Federation. Yet t­hese countries ­were able to make economic breakthroughs. Given that culture does not evolve as rapidly as po­liti­cal regimes, and even economic systems, we deci­ded to compare the everyday practices of technopreneurs in ­these countries with ­those of their Rus­sian counter­parts. We added another case, that of Finland, as an example of classical Protestant culture, which, as we know from Max Weber, has an elective affinity with the spirit of capitalism. Thus, the EUSP STS Center team focused on the link between mechanisms of self-­cognition on the one hand, and success in implementing innovative production methods or marketing technology-­ intensive products, on the other. One should immediately note that in the sociology of everyday life, a study of cultural differences very often does not boil down to dif­fer­ent answers to questions such as, “What are Rus­sians like in comparison with Germans?” (with answers like, “Rus­sians are X, while Germans are Y”), but rather to diverging practices that dif­fer­ent cultures employ to find answers to such questions as, “What does it mean to be Rus­sian or German?” For example, within Chris­tian­ity, cultures might differ in terms of w ­ hether they rely on confessional or penitential methods of self-­cognition and self-­ evaluation. Such found­ers of western monasticism as St.  Benedict and St. John the Cassian elaborated the former, while the latter ­were developed by such church f­athers as Tertullian and St. Jerome. This contrast was crucial, perhaps, for Christian Eu­rope, as has been argued by such theorists as Michel Foucault and Viktor Zhivov.5 One could state the main contrast between Christian cultures in this re­ spect in the following way: whereas Western Christian confessional methods of self-­d iscovery impel individuals to analyze their own feelings and desires (which they do alone, through introspection, or with assistance from a confessor or psychoanalyst), methods of self-­d iscovery based on Eastern Christian penitential practices make you seek self-­k nowledge in the opinions of a relevant community that periodically surveys the deeds that characterize you as a person. Once the community comes to an opinion  16 2 

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about you ­after its examination, you are assisted in endowing yourself with a personality. This structure of self-­d iscovery might be called “revelation by deeds” in that the self is suddenly revealed ­after a screening of deeds allegedly reflecting it. The early Christians who practiced it revealed themselves to their brethren or fellow congregation members through par­tic­u ­lar (penitential) actions. In the twentieth ­century, Soviet ­people revealed themselves through deeds that showed them to be ­either a conscious builder of Communism or (in the versions of t­ hese practices employed in the dissident or underground communities) a dignified and ­f ree individual. To describe this practice, Rus­sians use an ancient term, oblichenie. This word now most often means “accusation” or “denouncement” (of misdeeds, sins, ­etc.), but when it is used to capture a practice of endowing someone with a self, the term relies on a more ancient and fundamental sense. Oblichenie adds the prefix ob to the root term Rus­sian litso, meaning “face” and “person,” so that the resulting term denotes a pro­cess that grants an individual personhood or personality.6 Oblichenie can thus be literally translated as “en-­personation”: a pro­cess that makes a person’s personality manifest, just as en-­dowing someone might establish a dowry, or en-­circling brings out a circle, and en-­ suring, surety. How did the role of penitential self-­cognition practices in Rus­sian culture come to be so central? My first book pointed to the paramount role of Eastern Orthodoxy, which was radicalized by the Soviet reformation of everyday practices of belief for constructing the collective and the individual. Although its discourse was atheistic, the form, as Nikolai Berdyaev had noted in his classic work, was quasi-­religious.7 Establishing a work collective at each enterprise was an epochal task akin to the sectarian idea of establishing a model congregation or a monastery in e­ very village. ­T here are many Orthodox Christian cultures in the world, and Greece, for example, did not follow this radical path whatsoever. It was only in the Soviet Union that each person was compelled to live up to the saintly image of a builder of Communism, meaning that saintliness was required in everyday life and maintained by a horizontally structured system of surveillance primarily involving your neighbors and colleagues—­and only afterwards, law enforcement and the secret police. In Protestantism and Catholicism (the latter having been reformed u ­ nder the former’s influence), self-­k nowledge was based on introspection, on  16 3 

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communion with God within one’s soul. However, in ­these cultures, individuals analyze not only their feelings and the promptings of their souls, but also the objective technical and economic criteria of their achievements. In Rus­sia, on the contrary, Orthodox practices of self-­appraisal might often rely solely on the opinion of a group, unconstrained by technical or economic indicators. As George Kennan once wrote, the most impor­tant aspect of life in the Soviet Union was that social real­ity was in­de­pen­dent of God or of technically verifiable criteria. The horror of Soviet real­ ity stemmed from the fact that what the group had voted on was real. In his words, ­there is “no objective criteria of right or wrong. ­There are not even objective criteria of real­ity or unreality . . . ​[R]ight and wrong, real­ity and unreality, are determined in Rus­sia not by any God, not by any innate nature of ­things, but simply by men themselves . . . ​The reader should not smile. This is a serious fact. It is the gateway of comprehension of much that is mysterious in Rus­sia.”8 Our study tried to assess the state of t­ hese en-­personation practices nowadays. Of course, it was in­ter­est­ing to see to what extent methods of self-­ knowledge based on penitential practices survived, waned, or ­were somehow transformed a­ fter the Soviet Union’s collapse. Given that we studied technopreneurship, our initial working hypothesis was that whereas self-­analysis among Western Eu­ro­pean and North American technopreneurs was based more on Western Christian practices of private confession and direct communion with God, entrepreneurs practicing Eastern Christian methods of self-­k nowledge relied more on how their deeds w ­ ere assessed by their relevant communities than on objective economic and technical mea­sures of work. That meant that Western Eu­ro­pean and North American entrepreneurs ­were more able to ignore the opinions of an extrinsic community and focus instead on economic and technical criteria as mea­sures of their success. This orientation helped them produce more technical devices necessary for comfortable living, while the entrepreneurs dependent on Eastern-­Christian methods of self-­cognition often settled for the recognition of colleagues, and did not bring their inventions and innovations to the stage of commercialization and mass production.9 To compare with Rus­sia’s case, we chose one Eu­ro­pean Protestant country (in our study, this was Finland), and two from among the East Asian countries: South K ­ orea, where the percentage of the Protestant population increased dramatically during the twentieth ­century,  16 4 

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and Taiwan, where this did not happen. Differences within the common background of Christian techniques of self-­cognition and self-­fashioning (or the absence of such background altogether) allowed for in­ter­est­ing comparisons. The main empirical basis for our study was more than two hundred biographical and expert interviews conducted between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012, in four regions of Rus­sia (Saint Petersburg, Tatarstan, Novosibirsk, and Tomsk) and in three other countries (South ­ Korea, Taiwan, and Finland).10 In some cases, brief participant observation studies ­were also conducted, but I do not touch on t­ hose results in this chapter.11 ­Here, I rely primarily on the results of seven research reports (one for each case studied) and excerpts from the interviews as quoted in the reports, which have been gathered in an omnibus volume of supplements to the main final proj­ect report. Sometimes, in order to reconstruct the context and obtain fuller quotations, I have referred to the full transcripts of the collected interviews. My task in the pres­ent chapter and the following one is to summarize what we found in the four Rus­sian case studies from the standpoint of cultural differences (both among dif­fer­ent countries and dif­fer­ent Rus­sian regions), particularly differences in practices of self-­ knowledge and self-­fashioning.12 Some readers might find it odd, of course, that we compared Rus­sian regions with entire foreign countries rather than with regions within t­hese countries. Nevertheless, we felt our approach was justified. First, studies on technological growth in China, for example, show that the regional differences are so significant and serious that this vast country cannot be analyzed without taking them into account.13 In our reports, the Rus­sian regions ­were therefore also considered as specific innovation ecosystems, comparable with other such ecosystems. Second, we used the findings on the foreign countries not to scrutinize their innovation ecosystems and cultures, but to render the par­tic­u ­lar features of the major Rus­sian regions more apparent. The cultures of such relatively homogeneous nations as South K ­ orea, Taiwan, and Finland enabled us to adduce in­ter­est­ing cross-­cultural contrasts, since regional variability in self-­cognition and self-­fashioning practices should not be so marked within ­these countries. Of course, the researchers in our proj­ect ­were almost immediately faced with a situation in which the interviewees spoke l­ ittle, if at all, about practices  16 5 

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of self-­k nowledge and self-­formation. In fact, many of our respondents commented on t­ hese practices in a way that suggested that they w ­ ere reflecting on them for the very first time. This might have demonstrated that practices of self-­cognition have a “background” quality, meaning that although ­people are constantly engaged in them in a quasi-­automatic way, they largely do not reflect on them consciously.14 It’s a lot like breathing: when p­ eople are healthy, they breathe all the time without noticing it. The same applies to the practices we studied: they are prerequisites or conditions for reflecting on the questions of who we are and what we are like, but the practices themselves are hard to catch during an interview. Nevertheless, discrete aspects of ­these practices ­were sometimes encapsulated in the comments of the respondents, even when they did not thematize them as special objects of observation and talked about them only in passing. This chapter summarizes such hints at the background practices. The abundant quotations in this chapter and the following one are a consequence of the study’s heavy empirical thrust and the task facing the researchers—to demonstrate the cultural features of Rus­sian technopreneurs and the specificity of their self-­cognition and self-­fashioning practices. To help readers understand the practical details of the lives of the respondents, we need to reproduce in sufficient detail the specific terms with which they describe meaningful contrasts. Thus, to avoid distorting the context of their statements, I had to resort to fairly extensive quotations.

5.1 ​Practices of Self-­Cognition To better contextualize the further exposition, let me first restate some commonplace practices of self-­k nowledge and self-­fashioning recommended for Soviet citizens.15 We w ­ ill first consider practices of self-­k nowledge. Dif­fer­ent Soviet writers offered dif­fer­ent descriptions of how one arrived at a balanced self-­assessment, a pro­cess that included from four to seven stages, but generally they all emphasized that the goal was to endow the individual with a personality through assessment of his or her actions by the relevant group. The initial impetus to self-­k nowledge was assessments of individuals conducted during ­either ritualized public events or less formal occasions. The former would include purges of the 1930s; personnel meetings from the 1950s through the 1970s, where individual workers and their contribution to work 16 6 

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place team outcomes ­were discussed; and the so-­called Lenin pass-­fail scrutiny of the 1960s through the 1980s, when Young Communists League members went through the same pro­cess. Examples of less formal occasions would be an annual birthday cele­bration or an informal conference, at which the relevant community no less meticulously established someone’s individuality by scrutinizing that person’s accomplishments during the previous year. In all of t­ hose cases, if an external impetus was lacking, individuals could take the initiative themselves and carry out a primary self-­assessment using the method of “self-­recognition through ­others.” It was as if they would interiorize the revelatory technique of endowing oneself with a self and perform it themselves in their minds. Of course, “recognizing oneself through ­others” was only the initial stage of self-­cognition. Soviet textbooks on techniques of acquiring self-­k nowledge recommended following it up with solitary introspection that involved interpreting one’s individual actions as indicators of good or bad traits, both personal and professional. This introspection was to be practiced regularly (in a well-­k nown pamphlet published in 1946, Zhdanov even advised d­ oing it e­ very night), and accompanied periodically by an overall self-­accounting (another method of self-­k nowledge), in which self-­criticism was directed at all the diverse aspects of the personality. At the end of this pro­cess, one had to elaborate an action plan for self-­improvement based on one’s final overall self-­assessment.16 The pres­ent study has shown that out of the four to seven recommended techniques of self-­cognition, “self-­recognition through ­others” has remained the main one, in both forms mentioned in the old Soviet textbooks on self-­ knowledge and self-­formation. Even nowadays one would normally rely on ­things said by other ­people about oneself, or on conclusions drawn by comparing oneself with ­others. Regional variability proved to be not so impor­tant in this re­spect. Whereas internalized enpersonation was prevalent in Novosibirsk and Saint Petersburg (meaning that ­people asked themselves what significant ­others would say about them), in Tomsk, respondents stressed the importance of external enpersonation to get to know who they are. In other words, they relied more on vari­ous professional forums and formalized communities. P ­ eople in Kazan, however, proved a bit dif­fer­ent: ­there, the focus was on comments about their personalities and professional identities made by supervisors, older f­amily members, and other elders,  16 7 

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rather than ­t hose made by colleagues, partners, competitors, and friends, as was the case in the three other Rus­sian regions. Let me give a few specific examples. When he wanted to talk about how he usually experienced low self-­esteem, one respondent explained how he arrived at this judgment: “I think I am absolutely ignorant and revoltingly uneducated. . . . ​No, ­these words are not meant for a psychologist—­that I am unhappy with myself. I ­really am dissatisfied with myself. I have a lowered self-­esteem. ­Because I deal with p­ eople who do the same ­thing I do, but do it better” (Alexei, born 1986, Nsk 385).* Alexei recognized himself, and found himself lacking, by comparing his be­hav­ior with that of other ­people. But in such comparisons of oneself with ­others, similar technopreneurs could also find positive self-­esteem. As the authors of the regional report on Novosibirsk write, “Not only not ­going bankrupt a­ fter leaving the Acad­emy but also founding a com­pany that would exist a long time is proof of success. . . . ​The com­pany’s existence alone is sufficient grounds for self-­respect” (Nsk 385). We find similar examples in Tomsk, where a respondent defined his identity in terms of how his work was assessed by the relevant group and the number of ­people who held positive opinions about it. “A certain significant number of ­people assess [it] positively, a good number of them. That is when I see it as necessary, meaningful work. But when they . . . ​Well, when it is negative, I try to change something” (Alexander, b. 1979, Tom 277). It is easier to compare oneself with ­others when this has already been done by a professional forum, and one has been given an award. Thus, a respondent in Tomsk related, “When, in 2008, I was nominated . . . ​when the ‘Person of the Year’ [was] selected . . . ​when it suddenly turns out . . . ​it is like that and you are told you did this and that, you start analyzing it and thinking, ‘My God, is that ­really me? It’s like, well, [laughs—­O. Kh.] it r­ eally is me!’ ” (Natalia, b. 1967, Tom 277). This assessment through competition, when your deeds and achievements have been discussed collectively, is quite impor­tant in shaping self-­esteem. And it dovetails with the old Soviet methods of self-­ cognition, although now the assessment is conducted through new cap­i­tal­ist competitions rather than by a collective that ritualistically determined w ­ hether one deserved the proud title of a conscientious builder of communism. *The names of interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy.

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Evaluations given not at competitions or conferences but communicated via the opinions and actions of partners, competitors, and clients are also a vital component in shaping self-­esteem, although ­these are often more impor­ tant for one’s professional identity. This, for example, was how another respondent from Tomsk described his success: “When a del­e­ga­tion came ­here from Israel, we talked with them. As a result, of all the ­people they spoke to in Tomsk (they talked with practically every­one ­here), it was only us they have worked with” (Nikita, b. 1984, Tom 277). A technopreneur from Saint Petersburg said, “I rate myself through the eyes of my partners who prefer working with me. . . . ​Their assessment, the fact that from year to year they choose my com­pany, is the most reliable ­thing” (TP, b. 1972, SPb 39).17 Thus, the opinions and actions of your business partners, the way they see you, might be the most reliable boost to self-­esteem. The interviews contain similar remarks about competitors and foreign colleagues whom the interviewees visited abroad. The specificity of Tatarstan is shown by two telltale quotations from the interviews. Instead of emphasizing the importance of being recognized by significant o ­ thers who are equal to one in some re­spect, the interviewees more often made statements such as the following: “The recognition by se­ niors is also quite impor­tant. When they make it clear that yes, you have grown up in this re­spect. You feel that in certain situations t­ here. In such a way it prob­ably affects self-­evaluation” (Andrei, b. 1981, Tat 143). By se­n iors they meant not only older f­ amily members but also the republic’s se­nior politicians. Unlike respondents from other Rus­sian regions, “around a third of the in­for­mants [in Tatarstan] stressed in the interviews that their achievements had been recognized by [regional po­liti­cal leaders Mintimer] Shaimiev, [Rustam] Minnikhanov, [Asgat] Safarov, and so on” (Tat 148). The walls of their offices w ­ ere hung with thank-­you letters and certificates from local authorities, while photos showed them standing next to, shaking hands, and walking with officials of vari­ous levels. The following mention of a patron was typical: “In fact, for me, the evaluation that ­matters most is prob­ably that by [Nikolai], ­because, as I have told you, I am focused on working with Nikolai” (Ravil, b. 1981, Tat 148). While “self-­recognition through ­others,” which partly reproduces in the post-­Soviet environment Soviet practices of revealing a self by deeds, is the most common method of self-­k nowledge, other Soviet methods of self-­ cognition are represented less plentifully in the interviews. Still, it is surprising  16 9 

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to find vestiges of this machinery even nowadays. “Self-­criticism” was mentioned as a method of self-­k nowledge, but its importance as a method was not emphasized (perhaps due to its lingering associations with the Communist discourse). More attention was accorded to self-­accounting, which has often incorporated self-­criticism as an integral component. However, as our comparison with their Asian and Eu­ro­pean colleagues showed (please see Chapter  6), the Rus­sian technopreneurs generally relied quite l­ittle on regular self-­accounting and self-­planning. It was more often the case that self-­accounting took place semi-­annually (Marat, b. 1956) or ­every five years (Olga, b. 1980), when “major ­things that can fundamentally change one’s life” (Tom 278) happened, meaning it took place between two dif­fer­ent periods in life or two dif­fer­ent phases in one’s professional c­ areer. It appears that Rus­sian technopreneurs engage in self-­ accounting when life comes knocking. Conversely, regular methodical self-­accounting was prob­ably the exception that proved the rule. Very few respondents spoke of such regular self-­analysis, for example: Respondent: ​So in the late after­noon I sit down and think about what happened, what to do next. That is, ­u ntil I go home in the eve­n ing, from around five to seven p.m., I do [inaudible]. And at home as well, before bed, from like nine to twelve. Interviewer: ​How often does this stocktaking occur? Resp.: ​Prob­ably once e­ very two days, maybe in dif­fer­ent areas. I think that ­today I am ­going to think about what I need to do to get ready for the expo. The next day I plan to sit down and think about the business plan, about adjustments to it. Int.: ​What happens when two days have gone by and you suddenly realize you have not thought about the business plan? Resp.: ​I chew myself out big time. Int.: ​How do you punish yourself? Resp.: ​[pause] I deny myself some plea­sure, drinking beer or something ­else (Andrei, b. 1981, Tat 148).

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It should be noted that the solitary self-­accounting practiced by Andrei was not the result of external prodding; it was not a reaction to the opinions of ­others that ­were suddenly voiced to him. Perhaps this self-­accounting takes place by means of another traditional Soviet form of self-­recognition through ­others, that is, the self-­i nitiated comparison of oneself with ­others staged within one’s own soul. However, ­those looking for evidence of the waning of Eastern Christian practices of self-­k nowledge among current Rus­ sian technopreneurs could point to Andrei as an example of a transition, in which the involvement of the relevant group in shaping individual self-­esteem is rejected outright. That is, self-­esteem could also be ­shaped by examining objective criteria and achievements without having to be seen in the eyes of ­others—as if Andrei ­were following the confessional mode of self-­cognition of Western Chris­tian­ity. In other words, the example of Andrei could be interpreted as evidence of the possible waning of public penitential self-­ knowledge practices. ­There ­were other examples confirming the hypothesis (that we formulated as research went on) that Western Christian confessional techniques of self-­assessment now coexist in Rus­sia on a par with Eastern Christian penitential practices of self-­k nowledge. The most radical pronouncements of why the group’s opinion no longer ­matters sound like this: “­There is a universal system for assessing the per­for­mance of subjects—­loot” (TP, b. 1967, SPb 39). That external opinions do not ­matter was also the gist of the following statements: Int.: ​Whose assessments ­matter to you? Resp.: ​Hard to say. No one’s, prob­ably. Who can evaluate me except me myself? (Marat, b. 1956, Tom 276)   Whose evaluations ­matter to me? To be honest . . . ​I’m so . . . ​well, I cannot say self-­sufficient, but something like that. I ­don’t care what anyone thinks about that, how they relate to it, e­ tc. (Alexander, b. 1970, Tom 276).

A few respondents we met who spoke in this vein discovered themselves through solitary self-­reflection, that is, by looking at specific criteria for their achievements in solitude, without assistance from a real or ­imagined group.

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Such methods of self-­k nowledge, however, have not yet triumphed over the traditionally strong mechanisms of penitential revelation of the self. ­Here is an example of Western Christian techniques that was aty­pi­cal of the Novosibirsk interviews (in which we usually find numerous examples of group-­ based self-­evaluation): the child of an elite Soviet f­ amily converted his social capital and left for the United States, and now his self-­esteem was based primarily on the diplomas he had received. “In 2004, I graduated from the presidential management training program. In late 2007, I went to the United States to do an MBA. In 2009, I got an MBA from X, in Boston, one of the top hundred schools in the world. It was an honors degree. It’s like a hobby: collecting honors degrees. In 2010, I came back, and six months a­ fter my return I deci­ded to launch my own business” (Maxim, b. 1978, Nsk 394). Another uncharacteristic, if not marginal, case, also from Novosibirsk, was that of a man who lived “in a constant state of meditation” (Vsevolod, b. 1962, Nsk 394). In this case, Buddhist introspection produced a self-­k nowledge that was not dependent on an external group’s opinion. But the marginality of both ­these examples in Novosibirsk shows that revelatory-­penitential practices of self-­ knowledge are more impor­tant to our respondents. We found a similar situation in other regions. In Tomsk, the interviews also registered several examples of solitary introspection that ­shaped self-­ esteem without prompting from a group. For example, Olga (b. 1980) said, “I feel that I can do something wrong. And when I feel it, I begin to . . . ​Well, my princi­ples are fairly strict, and so they signal to me I am ­doing something wrong” (Tom 274–275). And h ­ ere is an excerpt from another interview: Int.: ​Is your self-­assessment bound up with certain events, with cele­brations or birthdays? Resp.: ​No, it’s rather something that occurs to me in the following way. It occurs to me: “Wow, it has been a while since I tried to figure out what has happened over the past year.” I guess I ­don’t violate moral law so often as to be constantly counting t­ hese infringements. [Of course] ­these do happen, and you remember them all the time and think, “Well, how could that be?” Yeah, that happens. (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 275)

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But we must realize t­ hese ­were the exceptions that prove the rule: revelatory-­ penitential mechanisms are still used more often to arrive at self-­k nowledge in Rus­sia, at least among its technopreneurs. When interpreting similar contradictory passages in the interviews, we again encounter a fairly subtle contrast. As we recall, solitary introspection can be part of the procedure of arriving at a self-­assessment ­after you have first compared yourself with the opinion that a significant group holds of you or a­ fter an ­actual judgment is passed by this group during ordinary or specially or­ga­n ized life situations, such as forums, conferences, and awards ceremonies. In ­these cases, it is part of the revelatory-­penitential mechanisms for establishing self-­esteem. It is another t­ hing when solitary introspection occurs without reference to any group opinion whatsoever, when (as we have seen in the two examples from Novosibirsk quoted above) a person considers certain objective criteria that explain to him or her who he or she is, as if he or she w ­ ere standing before God, who sees every­thing and makes a supreme reckoning of a given person’s achievements while ignoring idle talk of ­human groups of what­ever sort. As Claudius says in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 3), before God “[t]­here is no shuffling; t­ here the action lies / In his true nature.” This contrast is typical not only of the interviews conducted in Siberia; it was also partly captured in the following two passages from interviews with Petersburg respondents. The first respondent stated, “It does not ­matter that the results of my work d­ on’t bring me money and fame. But my colleagues know what a classy specialist I am” (E, b. 1971, SPb 39). In contrast, the second respondent rejected any reliance on the opinion of colleagues: “Our product is now on top and selling. The money has started coming in, and the rest is secondary” (TP, b. 1976, SPb 39). ­There still are not many examples of self-­definition through objective criteria (such as market per­for­ mance or MBA diplomas) rather than through the opinion of a relevant group, even in Saint Petersburg, but their numbers are growing. Interestingly, self-­assessment through market per­for­mance is sometimes so new that respondents had to use neologisms borrowed from En­glish to describe their practices. Thus, in an interview conducted in Tatarstan, we find the following passage: “An IPO is when shares are put up for sale. My desire is to get a high valuation from someone for e­ very share, in rubles or dollars. The goal is not to sell [all the shares], to get rid [of them]. The goal is

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more to achieve a certain recognition, that yes, B****’s shares are worth so much ­today. Whereas they used to be $1.20, now they are worth twelve dollars. And their value has increased tenfold over three years. That is respectable. And that is what you want. For a businessman, an IPO is this pure selfeksperiens” (Timur, b. 1973, Tat 147–148). The En­glish term “self-­experience” has been used ­here in the original, borrowed readymade in its transliterated form, perhaps, from a western business school textbook or training workshop. A person experiences and understands himself by objectively noting a rise in share prices ­after an IPO, that is, ­after his com­pany has gone public. Note, however, that the term is embedded in traditional penitential self-­revelation techniques: Timur sought evaluation and recognition by presenting meritorious deeds (a tenfold increase in share prices) to a significant community for review. It was only a­ fter this imaginary or ­actual assessment that he became confident that he was a worthy person. It appears we still cannot say that the practices of revelation of the self by deeds have retreated greatly and been supplanted by practices of solitary confession to oneself or God, in which individuals begin to recognize themselves and obtain self-­evaluation rather than seek the opinion of relevant groups. True, ­there are examples of Western Christian practices moving into new areas of application. But ­there are many more examples of self-­k nowledge practices that reveal the self in deeds presented to a relevant community for review, although the scope of their use seems to have indeed shrunk. In general, if one wants to determine the relative prevalence of Eastern and Western Christian methods of self-­cognition in the Soviet Union and ­today’s Rus­sia, one should not rely on my book The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia. This work, which advanced the hypothesis of Orthodox Christian practices of revelation by deeds, was a genealogy, not a historical study. In other words, it did not provide information about what r­ eally happened in the Soviet Union, offering instead a Foucault-­inspired genealogical narrative as a mirror in which readers would be able to notice some peculiarities of everyday practices in con­temporary Rus­sian society. We do not know how prevalent penitential practices of self-­cognition r­ eally ­were in, say, the 1930s or 1960s: my first book was simply not suited for that kind of research. One would also doubt that professional historians have thoroughly researched the subject since then. Thus, even with the aid of the current study, it would be difficult to assess w ­ hether the intensity of penitential practices of self-­  1 74 

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cognition has diminished or remained constant in t­ oday’s Rus­sia.18 But our interviews have shown clearly enough that penitential mechanisms of self-­ establishment still endure. Let us discuss this in more detail.

5.2 ​Penitential Revelation of the Self While we do not know exactly how widespread “revealing oneself by deeds” was in the Soviet past, we do know that in the interviews we conducted, the classical formulations about this method of self-­cognition often occurred in three types of situations: first, in stories of the past; second, among older respondents, in reflections on the pres­ent; and third, in descriptions of more self-­contained or tightly knit current communities that have been established using Soviet-­style practices. Thus, in one of the interviews conducted in St. Petersburg, ­there was a direct reference to the practices of forefathers: “I regard myself the way my magnificent grand­father Vulf Girshevich did himself. It was he who coined the phrase, ‘We judge ­people by their deeds, and their deeds by their results.’ So if t­ here is no result, then the person is shit” (Misha, b. 1967, SPb, Final 83). It becomes clear from the rest of the interview that Misha was talking about the fact he did not earn enough money through his business, so his self-­esteem was zero. He used this practice he inherited from his forefathers—­self-­ revelation by deeds—to evaluate his own actions before imaginary, worthy appraisers such as his grand­father. And, interestingly, he ­wasn’t just evaluating his professional identity. The notion that if you do not make money you are not worth anything as a person is not linked to a specific type of work; it was Misha’s life in toto that was evaluated in this instance. As our study showed, middle-­aged and se­n ior p­ eople ­were, predictably, more congenial to practices based on the classic model of self-­revelation by deeds. When describing his life, Viktor, a respondent born in the USSR ­after WWII, paid more attention both to moral aspects of identity and to the penitential mechanisms of self-­revelation. This is how he sets up personal goals: “I always had the illusion—­I wanted . . . ​my scientific achievements to lead to practical results. My overarching concern (I tell this to my guys, too) was that in my lifetime I wanted [to be able to point out], so to speak: [slaps the ­table—­O. Kh.] ­here, ­here, ­here, I did this!” (Viktor, b. 1956, Tat 120). This passage  175 

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is in­ter­est­ing less for the speaker’s love of his work-­in-­progress (we w ­ ill discuss this topic in the next chapter) and more for his slip of the tongue, “I tell this to my guys,” something rarely found in such explicit form in other interviews. Viktor assumed responsibilities to his relevant community as if he ­were undertaking a solemn promise in front of his comrades in the Young Communist League during a meeting on self-­planning or at a Lenin pass-­ fail scrutiny, and would be ­later judged by it: to what extent did he follow through on the promise? The structure of self-­revelation by deeds is apparent. Another impor­tant point is that the revelation-­by-­deeds technique applied not only to his professional identity but also to his moral and personal identity. In the 1990s, he says, when he had to earn money trading, he still did scientific research, but for moral rather than professional reasons—to remain a ­human being, to avoid becoming a beast: “It was like this. I had to do science; but I had to do business to survive. I had to do science simply to avoid degenerating among t­ hese gangster scum and so on, simply to have an air-­ hole. I mean, I saw it as an air-­hole. A person has to breathe like he has to drink and eat. I have this need” (Viktor, b. 1956, Tat 120). Such references to morality w ­ ere more common among the older p­ eople; the younger generation largely ignored talk of it and focused more on evaluating professional identity. An even older and somewhat more extravagant character (Karl, b. 1951) began to engage in soul-­searching and the quest for self-­k nowledge ­after his ­career suddenly collapsed, following advice from some friends “to lie low for a year”: “­There always comes a time when a person thinks. I started thinking only at sixty, about who I was and what I was capable of ­doing. . . . ​I recently put some m ­ atters to rest.” One impetus was a significant acquaintance’s advice to reflect on himself in solitude: “­There was this German I knew. And he told me, ‘­There is a period when you need to think about what ­else you need to do in life.’ And so I thought, since I was traveling back home, that I would take the train. Every­thing would be okay. I took the train: it took a day to get to Moscow, and then another two and a half days to get ­here. Such peace of mind came over me. I felt the same way, but somehow it was systematic now. I felt such peace of mind from the fact I had summed something up, done it, systematized it” (Tom 275–276). So, friends first pointed out an obvious prob­lem to Karl, but instead of encouraging him to outward action,  1 76 

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they prompted him to reflect on himself, advising him to get out of the game for a while and analyze his life. Karl did this, and as a result of his self-­analysis, he harmonized parts of his ego and achieved peace of mind. Self-­revelation by deeds can also be practiced in classical form in current, closed communities that are maintained by initiation rituals and personal assessment practices, like the ones employed at The Quantum Club at the Novosibirsk State University physics department. The Quantum Club is now . . . ​nearly half a c­ entury old. You can imagine how many ­people have passed through it. Meaning the first generation is no longer alive. Practically speaking, it is like this big community, like t­ hose Alpha Beta Gammas at American universities. When you arrive, t­here is this ranking system. Roughly speaking, as soon as you arrive, you are a fellow-­traveler of the club, young and green, every­one runs you around, you are a greenhorn, and so on. Then, ­after a year, ­after you have revealed [proiavil] yourself a bit or helped out at the first departmental skits, you are given a position—­candidate member of the club. (Alexei, b. 1986, Nsk, Final 96)

The term “revealing oneself ” was also used in Soviet lit­er­a­ture to denote the desired goal of self-­revelation by deeds.19 The goal of Soviet individuation was to fi­nally reveal the self to the world and, for a person, to reveal one’s true self. New members of the Quantum Club are likewise personally assessed on the basis of their deeds, as manifested in the club community. T ­ hose who reveal themselves as the most talented guys secure spots in the club’s leadership hierarchy and become full-­fledged members, which is no small deal, as it was claimed that full members get help with all sorts of ­things from former club members all over the world. Given that the club is associated with KVN (“Club of the Funny and Inventive,” a Russia-­wide competition involving humorous sketches, usually performed by teams of college students) and amateur variety revues, it is clear that the qualities revealed to the community during ­these entertainments are far from ­those of just a professional physicist. Personality assessment is based on “funniness,” liveliness of character, intelligence, wit, and, last but not least, moral fiber, meaning that it is fairly comprehensive.  177 

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To repeat: classic examples of self-­revelation by deeds (and the introspection triggered by this revelation when the deeds are disappointing) occurred more frequently in stories about the past, stories about communities still closely bound up with past practices, and in the lives of respondents over fifty. Another example was that of Georgy, b. 1946, who recounted how, with the help of ­others, he came to a self-­understanding ­after he was unable to commercialize his work-­in-­progress, but deci­ded not to start a conflict with his superiors when they banned it: “[I] am no revolutionary, temperamentally, I am not a revolutionary. Someone once said to me I w ­ asn’t a fighter. Well, that is basically how it is: I am no fighter” (Nsk 397). The evaluation provided by relevant ­others erected a stable identity for Georgy, which he could now rely on and use to judge his own past. But the younger ­people also sometimes did something similar. In such cases, self-­revelation practices appear quite constant across generations. Thus, Olga, b. 1980, said, “I want to live my life so that the life I have lived, the p­ eople I have met, and the t­ hings I have done ­won’t be ashamed of me” (Tom 288). One feels like correcting Olga’s grammar. Apparently, she meant to say, “I want to live my life so that I w ­ on’t be ashamed of the life I have lived and the ­things I have done in front of the ­people I have met.”20 ­W hether we would be right to make this correction or w ­ hether she meant something e­ lse is less impor­tant than the fact that even without correcting her statement, we see two central ele­ments of self-­revelation by deeds. First, the ­whole person is revealed, since it is an entire life that is at stake, not only professional achievements. Second, the self is revealed and individualized by deeds rather than by desires, intentions, or inclinations.21 Of course, the more common use of penitential self-­cognition practices by younger p­ eople is dif­fer­ent. As nearly all the researchers in our group noted, the respondents (many of whom ­were young) willingly talked about their professional identity, but spoke very ­little, and reluctantly, about their personal identity. This was prob­ably sufficient for them. In our interviews, the normal contrast between social and personal identities (as posited, for example, in the psychological theories of Henri Tajfel) appeared as a contrast between only one aspect of social identity (that is, professional identity) and personal identity. If other aspects of social identity played a role—­ethnicity, religion, f­ amily, age—­they ­were mentioned quite rarely. The professional aspect of social identity seemingly overshadowed all other aspects. For example, when discussing the intense operation of self-­revelation mechanisms  178 

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in her life, Olga, whom we have already met, highlighted only her work-­ related identity: “In any case, my work is evaluated by my ­family, my bosses, and the Vice-­rector. My colleagues evaluate my work in terms of how successful or unsuccessful our group has been. I think the evaluation goes on ­every day. It is always ­going up and down, like the Dow Jones index” (Olga, b. 1980, Tom 276). H ­ ere is another example: Int.: ​Is the evaluation of an external community impor­tant to you? Resp.: ​Yes, it’s prob­ably impor­tant. No, of course it’s impor­tant. Of course, it’s very impor­tant. For example, we published a new version of a certain program, of which I consider myself one of the main co-­designers, and it is ­really impor­tant to me when a friend from Intel writes, to me, “Wow! Way to go, guys!” In this sense, evaluations are impor­tant. (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 276)22

We can therefore reasonably assume that many statements in our interviews about penitential mechanisms of self-­assessment had more to do with professional identity than with personal identity. For the young technopreneurs, professional identity smothered not only other aspects of social identity; often it smothered personal identity, too. At very least, in the interviews, most passages about self-­cognition or self-­recognition seemingly deal with knowledge of oneself as a professional rather than as a very par­tic­u­lar person who is dif­fer­ent from other ­people. Technopreneurs are so immersed in work and technology that the issue of an integral self-­assessment rarely comes up for them. Their profession and constant engagement with m ­ atters that need to be deci­ded immediately allow them to avoid a question of a complex moral evaluation of themselves as unique individuals. Perhaps this is why our respondents spoke so rarely about introspection and meditation, self-­accounting, and special techniques for knowing oneself as a moral rather than an effective person. Per­sis­tent revelation of only a professional individual self might lead to de-­ individualizing oneself as a person capable of moral deeds and a decent life. Among the young p­ eople, changes in mechanisms of personality revelation ­were manifested not only in the “professionalization” of the revelation-­ by-­deeds technique but also in the emergence of more and more venues for  179 

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it. In other words, aside from the professional arenas we have already mentioned where professional identity is tested and certified (conferences, visits from foreign colleagues and trips abroad to see them, professional competitions, and awards ceremonies), other, new arenas have recently emerged. ­Here is an example from the report on Tatarstan. As in Soviet times, bosses arrive at a positive self-­assessment when their merits are informally recognized by the p­ eople they are inclined to call, in the old-­fashioned manner, the “work collective”: “I get an idea of myself when I see my ­people, when I see they are satisfied, burning with enthusiasm for work, and feel like a team. It’s especially nice at the com­pany New Year’s party” (Felix, b. 1949, Tat 147). Mid-­level specialists, on the contrary, emphasized that they ­were interested only in the views of professionals, the ­people who do the most impor­tant work in their companies: “The re­spect of the ­people who do the real work and ­really count has always been impor­tant to me. Not the re­spect of the bosses’ flunkeys, but of the ­people on whom, say, the organ­ization is founded” (Sergei, b. 1977, Tat 147). But new media have generated completely new venues for the revelation of the self: “Of course, I try to keep track of all mentions of my name on the Net, blogs, and electronic media. How can you do without it nowadays?” (Vasil, b. 1986, Tat 147) In the case of p­ eople like Vasil, it is clear why they have an intense need for vari­ous gadgets, since ­they’re in the constant pro­cess of monitoring other p­ eople’s changing evaluations of them. During their first encounter with the concept of self-­revelation by deeds, readers often quickly forget that the point of the practice is not criticism (as implied by the current primary meaning of the Rus­sian word oblichenie), but what could be literally translated as en-­personation, or endowing the individual with a personality. W ­ hether it is a positive or negative personality is another question. What ­matters about the fundamental en-­personation is that the person has been made manifest, noticeable, obvious, and evident. Enpersonation is thus to personality as enabling is to an ability: the practice allows the phenomenon to be manifested to us. But it m ­ atters what exactly is revealed to the gaze of the assessing community and the individual seeking to know him or herself. The current trend, as evinced by the majority of young technopreneurs, of identifying not their w ­ hole personality by deeds, but mainly or only its professional aspect, turns revelation by deeds into a mere  18 0 

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revealing of professionalism instead of ­ wholesome evaluation of an individual. But when we consider that quite a few ­people now reveal themselves by deeds leading to IPOs or ­great wealth (that is, they think of themselves highly if this money brings recognition in the eyes of significant o ­ thers), en-­ personation is becoming transformed for some into en-­cashment.23 Instead of manifesting their ­whole personality so it would be noticeable and pres­ent to every­one and themselves, technopreneurs now evaluate themselves primarily or only as professionals (they often do not care about personal qualities) or, increasingly, through cash.24 Heidegger would have put it poetically: Rus­sians had once been disclosing the personality of a given h ­ uman to the world, releasing it into the unconcealedness and thus making it evident. But now all that remains to the technological era individual is encashed being: his or her personhood is obtained with cash. ­W hether this is a good or bad ­thing is another ­matter. If we deem it a bad t­ hing, we should lend our support to self-­revelation practices that endow ­people with unique and well-­rounded moral personalities to oppose the potential dominance of encashment. However, insisting that technopreneurship should manifest the designer’s unique self rather than sell products prob­ably is an emphasis that inhibits commercialization. If, on the contrary, we believe that encashment of personality is a good ­thing, we should then perhaps mock the pride of ­those who want to pursue high personal development instead of just the s­ imple business of manufacturing devices for improving everyday life. It is ­these p­ eople looking for moral growth and seeking personal self-­development who stand in the way of mass-­producing con­ve­n ient and improved tools for living. The question from this second viewpoint would be: do Rus­sians want to live in a technologically backward society, surrounded by t­ hese masters of the spirit?

5.3 ​Practices of Self-­Fashioning The terms “self-­improvement” and “working on oneself ” almost never occurred in the interviews. ­T hese two standard Soviet terms seem to have passed completely out of use. As the authors of the Tatarstan study noted, the expression “working on oneself ” e­ ither reminded their respondents of when they themselves ­were c­ hildren or seemingly had something to do with  181 

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the prob­lems of raising their own kids (Tat 149). Other Rus­sian regions ­were similar in this re­spect. Very ­l ittle attention was paid to techniques of self-­ formation in the interviews, no ­matter how insistently our researchers asked the technopreneurs about it. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that respondents viewed “working on oneself ” as a set of special techniques for self-­education or self-­fashioning, in which a person specially engages during a par­tic­u ­lar allotted time. That is, it is usually assumed that when ­people work on themselves, they do yoga or Buddhist meditation or fill out questionnaires in psychological self-­help books, and none of this happens during regular work hours. Given that the majority of technopreneurs spend all their time at work, it was no surprise that our respondents often remarked that they had no time for such exercises. However, many of them failed to notice or realize that they ­were actually engaged in self-­education and self-­fashioning while at work. Only a handful of them understood this, relating that they faced serious ordeals on the job and thus did not need to make a special trip somewhere, and undergo specialized exercises, to achieve personal development: “[­There are] certain experiences a person needs. In this sense, I d­ on’t go on mountain climbing expeditions, although I have gone to the mountains on several occasions. But the emotions I need I get right h ­ ere at my desk to a greater degree than ­people who [go into the mountains and] suffer oxygen starvation and risk death” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 262). Let us look at the traces of practices for changing and correcting oneself that did make it into the interviews. In the classic Soviet model, you ­were supposed to engage in self-­ improvement a­ fter you had formed an initial self-­evaluation (for example, using Aulis Aret’s six methods or phases of self-­k nowledge) and realized what you could or should do better.25 Self-­fashioning involved three phases: first, you had to give yourself an order (the self-­injunction phase) and overcome any internal objections if you ­were tempted to think that you did not need to change or w ­ ere simply too lazy to do it. Then the phase of working on oneself in the narrow sense of the term commenced, involving two basic methods. First, self-­programming or self-­planning was recommended; this was particularly effective when personal achievement plans for a certain period w ­ ere ­adopted in the presence of friends or a collective at work or school. Second, one was supposed to choose a personal hero and improve oneself by following his or her be­hav­ior in life’s difficult situations in such a way that  182 

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this imitation of a hero or ­g reat individual would help you make yourself better. The goal or telos of ­these two main Communist methods of self-­ fashioning was self-­control or self-­command. In the extreme instance, if the Motherland demanded it, this could lead to self-­sacrifice for a common, that is, Communist cause.26 Ele­ments of this machinery in its classic form could now be found only among t­ hose who remember the Soviet Union and learned t­ hese practices in childhood. I have already cited the example of Viktor, b. 1956, who “tells [his] guys” about his ultimate priority. That is, he planned his principal goals in life in plain view of t­ hese p­ eople so that it would be difficult not to implement them without damaging his self-­esteem (Tat 120). Such radicals w ­ ere few and far between, however. E ­ ither few of them have survived into the pres­ent day or it was only a handful of p­ eople who practiced self-­improvement “by the book” during the Soviet period. Interestingly, the methods of improving oneself practiced nowadays are not designated by the words “upbringing,” “self-­perfection,” and other boring pedagogical terms. P ­ eople now, as they say, attempt to “embellish” themselves, not in the sense of glamming it up, but in the sense of “making oneself more beautiful.” Thus, Artemy, b. 1979, described his development as a child: “How can a poor child realize himself? Mathe­matics, for example, is a perfect tool for satisfying someone who has nothing, for satisfying oneself, if one’s scale of values is ready for it. It is natu­ral, it was [sic] for plea­sure, and in keeping with certain ambitions. Some ­people dye their hair with brilliant green, ­others embellish themselves on the inside. I embellished myself on the inside” (Tom 279). Embellishing oneself on the inside using mathe­matics rather than outward prettification was the proper goal for a child like this. Other respondents spoke of “developing one’s personality”: “For example, if a person is undeveloped, he enjoys eating caviar [Rus­sia is dif­fer­ent from the US in that way—­O. Kh.]. But when a person is developed (I am exaggerating), I [sic] w ­ ill go and look at a work of art, at Malevich’s Black Square, and I ­w ill get more enjoyment from that than from a caviar sandwich. . . . ​That is the point: evolve and enjoy” (Vladimir, b. 1956, Tom 279). In another example, a respondent from Novosibirsk coined a more fitting neologism, “rising above oneself,” to complement the Soviet term “self-­improvement”: “We work and work and work. ­There is this strong motivation to rise above oneself. Well, of course you can argue which is better, meditation or hard  183 

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work. We all deci­ded that hard work [was better]. Why? No reason. We just deci­ded, and we enjoy it. And so that is the way we are ­going to improve ourselves in science (Konstantin, b. 1981, Final 96; cited from the full transcript of the interview). By achieving something in mathe­matics or high-­tech entrepreneurship, such ­people did not simply “reveal” or “distinguish” themselves (as this would have been expressed in Soviet times). They embellished themselves with ­these achievements, meaning they made themselves more attractive and better; they developed themselves and r­ ose above themselves. ­There is, however, a prob­lem with the two basic Soviet methods of rising above oneself—­self-­planning and hero emulation. They are not practiced in pure, distilled form. As we have already noted, regular self-­accounting was a rarity among the Rus­sian technopreneurs. The same can be said of regular self-­planning. As a discrete goal, personal growth was usually not planned at all. As one respondent put it, “­There is a certain planning system. But it is mainly a technical planning system. Meaning, what technologies are ­going to be developed, and what our involvement is g­ oing to be” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 281). In other words, it was mainly the routine pro­cess that was planned (although the business plans of many respondents changed annually or even quarterly, according to Nikolai, b. 1981, Tom 281), or merely the agenda for the following day or week. H ­ ere is another typical description of the planning pro­cess: Basically, I do not use organizers and electronic means like Outlook for entering hundreds of thousands of tasks: I ­don’t like such ­things. It takes a minute to pencil t­ hings into my diary. I do periodically use reminders on my telephone when it’s ­really critical to go somewhere or meet someone at a certain time. Time planning is pres­ent [in my life] in the sense ­there is a certain amount of work per day, and to avoid missing something you just write it down amid the confusion of the day. Then all this stuff gradually gets crossed off. You write ­things down in the eve­n ing for the next day while it’s still in your head. (TP, b. 1976, SPb 40)

The tools of this daily planning are diverse, such as multicolored post-it notes glued to computer screens or other surfaces in the workspace: “All the space around my computer is covered with ­these ­little colored pieces of paper.  18 4 

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­ ere they are: all my plans are right in front of me” (Lenar, b. 1986, Tat 149). H When it was not stickers, oversized sheets of paper, diaries, and experiment log journals (now filled with work plans) ­were used. The younger generation favored telephone and computer reminders, files containing plans, or the following hybrid combinations: “For meetings, Outlook. For long jobs or notes at staff meetings, a diary. E ­ very day, for weekly plans, an A4 sheet of paper” (Sergei, b. 1984, Tom 282). Similar practices ­were found everywhere in Rus­sia: “[I] have a roster of activities that needs to be done ­either now or ­later. I look at what goes with what and set about working. I look what has to be done, what can be done ­later, what can and cannot wait, what ­doesn’t have to be done at all, and slowly [I do it]” (Sergei, b. 1977, Tat 149). It cannot be said that t­ here was no personal component in routine planning. Long-­term plans, or life plans as the respondents called them, involve personal development as well, but they are general plans for the next de­cade or two that have not been set out in detail and have almost nothing to do with daily plans. As one respondent put it: ­ here are certain priorities that have been set fairly long ago—­ T goals, summits we have to reach. They have been set, they are ­t here, and they are not g­ oing away. ­T here is a certain understanding, a general understanding, of how to reach ­these summits. . . . ​That is it. The vectors on this overall path are known and you follow them. To make pro­g ress you need to set down some reference points: I need to do this and that. For me, this amounts to a week maximum. I cannot manage longer than that, but maybe I ­don’t need to. (Marat, b. 1956, Tom 281)

Another respondent from Tomsk reported, “From the standpoint of my own life, I know what I ­w ill be ­doing for the next ten years, but I have no plans in this sense. I have directions in which I’m planning to head” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 281). The negative consequences of vague personal plans could be corrected, as Soviet didactic lit­er­a­ture wrote, if the individual a­ dopted personal mottoes and rules that would help in all situations in life. Curiously, we encountered a new version of such personal rules among post-­Soviet respondents: “The most impor­tant ­thing in small business is not planning anything long  18 5 

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term. . . . ​Small business is a bunch of ragamuffins who ­don’t have a damn ­thing. Well, that is putting a bit crudely, of course, but [small business is like] a shiny white naked ass ­r unning, ­r unning, ­r unning fast all over the place. Only speed, only speed, along with acceptable quality, can insure the viability of small business. . . . ​Accordingly, [laughs—­O. Kh.] the long-­term plan is not to lose energy, just that. As for how it ­will be specifically implemented, I have no idea” (Alexander, b. 1970, Tom 282). The motto “not to lose energy” is one of the few remaining ways of securing success in a rapidly changing world, where detailed self-­planning is impossible.27 The following example was the only exception, proving the rule. It concerned the already-­mentioned Novosibirsk respondent who grew up in the ­family of a regional Soviet Communist Party committee boss. In childhood, he was taught to make a “life plan,” as he put it, and he was the only respondent who was making one now. It went as follows: “And I can say that when I build my business, I w ­ ill have fulfilled my life plan—to retire at forty-­five. Yes, I have such a plan: I ­don’t want to work. . . . ​I always think about the ­f uture. Due to the fact it was the custom in my f­ amily, I myself started planning early, I mean, [making] long-­term plans” (Maxim, b. 1978, Nsk 397). It is noteworthy that the respondent did not necessarily see the plan as hedonistic. Maxim could interpret freedom from work as the opportunity to fi­nally have leisure and to work on developing himself. If long-­range self-­planning (as opposed to current day-­to-­day and week-­ to-­week routine planning) was almost never practiced, what can be said about the second basic Soviet self-­improvement technique, hero emulation (which in turn was derived from the Christian technique of imitation of Christ)? Respondents seemed to have almost no recourse to this technique, ­either. It was mentioned, of course, by members of the older generation, who w ­ ere still guided by the heroes of the popu­lar Soviet book series The Lives of G ­ reat ­People: “Or t­ here is Robert Wood, for example, you know, the physicist and specialist on optics. T ­ here is a book about him in The Lives of ­Great ­People. He was a man who did not recognize authority figures. He made a spectrometer that he cleaned with a cat. . . . ​During the First World War, he in­ven­ted lots of other ­things. Read it: it is an unusual book. I have read it three times. Robert Wood: now ­there is a role model for being a scientist” (Darya, b. 1949, Nsk 398). In other regions, respondents from the older generation mentioned Andrei Tupolev and Sergei Korolyov as p­ eople they looked up to. It was more  18 6 

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complicated among the young technopreneurs. They mentioned such luminaries as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jack Welch, but only as examples: “Of course, I wanted to do something technically original. Give birth to something of my own, something original, a breakthrough, like Bill Gates once did in a garage” (Lenar, b. 1986, Tat 135). Only one respondent, from Tatarstan, showed that he not only knew about Steve Jobs but wanted to be like him: “In recent years, I consider Steve Jobs one of my idols. At the partner conferences that usually take place in Kazan, I often quote some of his statements. Steve Jobs’ stance is quite similar to mine. I try to apply his know-­how myself ” (Timur, b. 1973, Tat 149). The normal stance of the technopreneurs was to carefully avoid authority figures one must emulate or not to acknowledge that such significant figures existed. Evidence of such attitudes turned up fairly often in the interviews. However, in one interview, this position was ironically and paradoxically described as a vital piece of advice coming from an anti-­hero (and, to some ­people, a brilliant business fraudster). The respondent followed the advice, thus finding a role model at home in Rus­sia rather than abroad: Resp.: ​Every­one has their own way. Not every­one can find his or her own Guy Kawasaki. Int.: ​And how do you feel out your own way? Resp.: ​As Boris Abramovich [Berezovsky] says, bit by bit we are planning the next small steps. (Nikolai, b. 1981, Tom 263)

Nikolai followed Berezovsky in the sense that one has to carefully feel out one’s own way rather than attempt to emulate Jobs and Kawasaki. By ­doing this, however, it turns out that Nikolai chose Berezovsky as a significant role model that one could (or must?) imitate. Quotations from other interviews w ­ ill help clarify ­whether hero emulation takes place or not. One respondent uttered an apparent truism: “­There is no archetype of the successful scientist-­c um-­entrepreneur in p­ eople’s minds. In Rus­sia, the scientist is usually a disinterested person [working] for the good of mankind, while an entrepreneur is a bourgeois who profits from ­others. This, of course, is the Soviet legacy still at play, the class-­based worldview” (E, ITMO University, b. 1967, SPb 44). The statement seems trivial, and interpretations of such statements usually focus on the Soviet opposition of  18 7 

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pure science to the world of filthy lucre. However, we should instead pay attention to the first sentence in the quotation: we have no good models in Rus­sia. Perhaps ­there is no hero emulation, not b­ ecause the practice has been rejected as unimportant, but ­because positive domestic role models have not yet arisen in the technopreneurship sector, while examples from abroad seem a bit foreign and remote from Rus­sian realities? In other words, does it not all come down to the fact t­here is simply no one to emulate? As the authors of the final report for the Rusnano corporation wrote, “A clear, popularly accepted standard for the respectable technopreneur has still not taken shape in Rus­sian society” (Final 110). I would say that it seems that ­there are still no exemplary or outstanding individuals in the field whose lives ­people would want to copy. One respondent explained that he would like to interact with a hero, but this was a generalized figure for him, as ­there w ­ ere no examples of a successful, respectable life in his vicinity: Int.: ​Do you have an ideal, maybe, I d­ on’t know, a person whom you look up to? Resp.: ​You know, I have a made-up ideal of someone with whom I’d like to talk, but I think ­people like that simply ­don’t exist. (Maxim, b. 1978, Nsk 398).

Does the presence of special experiences in the stories told by the technopreneurs, that is, experiences of heroic endurances and tests of individual tenacity, not suggest that ­these practices still fit the model of hero emulation? Indeed, among the means of emulating heroes in Soviet times, books stressed the desirability, if not the necessity, of personal ­trials that would help ­children replicate the feats of vari­ous ­people: Chernyshevsky’s hero Rakhmetov, for example, or the Soviet WWII fighter pi­lot Alexei Maresyev, whose plane was shot down ­behind German lines in 1942, but who managed to return on his own to Soviet-­controlled territory despite injuries that necessitated the amputation of both his legs. (However, they advised ­doing this not by trying to engineer an experience that caused g­ reat pain, like slamming a door on one’s fin­ger or jumping off a roof, but by showing perseverance and firmness in overcoming ordinary obstacles in daily life.)28 A technopreneur from the older generation recounted how he was forced to do degrading work in the early 1990s to finance his research team: “A friend  18 8 

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and I deci­ded to work as profiteers. Well, ­people work as profiteers, ­don’t they? We prob­ably can, too. As I recall, the readjustment [perestroika] took three months. For three months, I persuaded myself that swimming in shit was normal. It’s like being in prison: nothing to worry about. It just molds the personality more. So we began trading in chicken legs” (Eduard, b. 1957, Nsk 383). A younger technopreneur who learned much from Eduard used the same terminology when describing the t­ rials and hardships that arose at his firm when especially challenging prob­lems arose: “A team might not ignite at lift­off and thus run into prob­lems once, twice, and then say, The heck with it. They had to eat shit a ­couple times and stopped. But since we had lofty goals, we just swallowed all this by the spoonful for five years—­well, four years—­and it was fine. In our case, the goals we set at the com­pany and the challenges we could solve with our equipment w ­ ere simply of universal scope. So when ­things ­don’t work a first time and a second time, ­there are no worries. We try again, and again, and again!” (Konstantin, b. 1981, Nsk 386–387). One person swam in shit to achieve lofty goals, while another swallowed shit by the spoonful for four years to solve challenges of universal scope. How is this not an enviable consensus that hardships only harden the true hero, whose purpose is worthy or heroic? Respondents in Tomsk made statements similar to ­those made in Novosibirsk. Above, we quoted Andrei, who did not need to go mountain climbing to experience real risks and dangers, ­because he faced all t­ hose tests in the workplace. Another respondent recounted the tale of the Chinese Monkey King, who only became tougher when burned in a furnace: every­thing that does not kill us makes us stronger (Anatoly, b. 1953, Tom 280). Another respondent spoke of being very tough on herself when pursuing ambitious goals: “I have always had this desire for something new and in­ter­est­ing. To learn something, do something, help out with something. Maybe that is why I have never pitied myself. I have never had this self-­pity, so when we have to work nights, we work nights” (Olga, b. 1980, Tom 283). However, while respondents in all the Rus­sian regions evinced skepticism about the practice of emulating a chosen hero, ­there was no uniformity around the desire to undergo heroic hardships at work. Neither in St. Petersburg nor Tatarstan did we see almost any desire to slurp shit by the spoonful for four years on end for a lofty goal or swim in shit to save science. At least such examples ­were not adduced in most of our interviews ­there. Moreover,  18 9 

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high-­sounding phrases about needing to embellish oneself on the inside with clever works ­were likewise alien to the Petersburgers in our study. ­W hether this means that in a cosmopolitan, global city, the heroic and romantic ethos of Soviet science has eroded due to contact with the outside world more than in, say, Akademgorodok, a special city of scientists just outside of Novosibirsk, is a pos­si­ble question for further research. Another in­ter­est­i ng regional deviation from the overall pattern was the relatively high tendency among respondents in Tatarstan to emphasize the disciplined and mea­sured nature of their work, which they sometimes explained by reference to the disciplinary role played by the daily per­for­mance of regular Muslim rituals. Thus, one respondent said, “It is religion that ­really disciplines and self-­organizes a person, even basically in terms of time, if you do prayers and so on. Well, say, it harmonizes a person. Discipline, self-­organization, and order are similar concepts albeit dif­fer­ent ones. So perhaps [religion] has also impacted Tatars in terms of their industriousness” (Ravil, b. 1981, Tat 145–146). However, another respondent explained this par­tic­u ­lar industriousness and regularity not by way of religion, but in terms of traditional village culture: “I think t­ hese two t­ hings, work and everyday re­spect for elders, are instilled in us from childhood and enable us to be quite disciplined. . . . It is more of a local tradition that is [only] loosely linked to Islam” (Vasil, b. 1987, Tat 100). ­W hether a religious background was at work h ­ ere or not, we should note what both interpretations have in common: among the respondents in Tatarstan, ­there was a more rigorous approach to regularity in one’s actions than in the other Rus­sian regions we studied. It was also in Tatarstan that we found one of the more radical examples of self-­fashioning: voluntarily giving up beer as a punishment for not keeping promises made to oneself during a routine self-­planning pro­cess that occurred ­every two days (Andrei, b. 1981, Tat 145; see above). In Tatarstan, we also discovered a craze for attending business classes and workshops on developing business skills, communications, and marketing—­that is, a craze for self-­development (Tat 149). The craze was fueled by intense self-­education in management: “I studied, read a lot, and listened to lots of audiobooks. In the end, I applied all this to my own experience. My understanding of business changed and I began perceiving many ­things in terms of the information I had amassed, in terms of the m ­ istakes that had been made” (Timur, b. 1973, Tat 127).  19 0 

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Compare the way this differs from a statement made by a respondent in Tomsk, who despite his rather mature age still regularly read the complete works of the world’s ­g reat authors and compared reading lists with his ­brother, who also avidly read one book ­after another: “What clearly distinguishes all successful entrepreneurs in the high-­tech field [from ordinary entrepreneurs] is that they all started reading at an early age. I guarantee it” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 255). In this unique example, personal self-­improvement occurred in parallel with work, while in Tatarstan it was more subordinated to work.29 Summing up, very few of our respondents aspired to be “working on themselves,” since the term has fallen into disuse, although t­ here ­were many more who wanted to embellish themselves with deeds or rise above themselves. Among the techniques of personal growth, few interviewees paid heed to the first of the Soviet means of self-­education: self-­programming. When it was practiced, it was only in routine scheduling for the coming week, not in planning for long-­term personal development. The second basic tool of Soviet self-­education, hero emulation, was not evident in the interviews, perhaps ­because of a lack of domestic role models, while some of the respondents w ­ ere in fact willing to go through hell and high w ­ ater, that is, to behave heroically, to achieve meaningful goals. Of the Rus­sian regions we studied, Tatarstan evinced the most rigor and methodicalness in terms of self-­d iscipline.

5.4 ​From Self-­Sacrifice to Self-­Realization One of the biggest surprises in this study was that many respondents employed the notion of self-­realization when explaining their major decisions in life. The word had become so threadbare ­after so many business textbooks ­were translated into Rus­sian (along with their paraphrases of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which self-­actualization or self-­realization stand higher than physiological needs, safety, and social recognition) that one forgets the word was featured neither in the ­Great Soviet Encyclopedia nor in the seventeen volumes of the Dictionary of the Modern Rus­sian Literary Language, which was published in the 1950s and 1960s. The “ethics of self-­realization” was mentioned in dictionaries of philosophy and ethics, of course, but as a bourgeois theory that was opposed to the Marxist conception of ­human nature. What  191 

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had twenty-­five years of capitalism, with their concomitant rejection of Communist discourse and jargon, taught our respondents to say? Even respondents who had grown up in the Soviet Union often use this term now to describe their motivations for ­going into technopreneurship: “But above all t­ here was the desire to r­ eally create a business. To do it, just to realize yourself and show you are capable of something. This inner desire was ­there, this inner ambition” (Sergei, b. 1957, Nsk 386; the italics are mine). Clearly, many scientists ­were compelled into entrepreneurial ­careers in the early 1990s due to the lack of funding for their scientific endeavors. But the interviewees did not regard this impetus as primary: “The key ­factor in [my] ­going into business—­t his was twenty years ago (well, more than twenty years ago)—­was that I was interested in aspects of self-­development. But despite the fact I had this constraint imposed on me in that I had to earn money, I regarded business as a platform for self-­development. That [was] the key ­factor” (Vsevolod, b. 1962, Nsk 381). It transpires that when many respondents went into business, they told themselves that although they w ­ ere now forced mainly to make money, what r­ eally mattered in the pro­cess was the attempt to develop or realize themselves.30 ­Here is another such telltale statement from a respondent, who is nearly sixty: Int.: ​What are you designing? Resp.: ​We are designing a device for the real world. Int.: ​And what is it? Resp: ​Oh . . . ​W hat is it that we ­don’t do! [Laughs] Int.: ​Hang on, I would like to understand what you do. Resp.: ​I’m involved in self-­realization. [Pause] Period! (Eduard, b. 1957, Nsk 381; cited from the full transcript of the interview)

The statements by the younger respondents, who constituted the bulk of the interviewees, add the following points to our understanding of the current state of affairs vis-­à-­vis self-­realization. First, the exodus from cumbersomely hierarchical state organ­izations was due to the need for self-­realization: “[Y]ou know, when ­there is not enough room in one’s line of work. Someone is active, and needs to realize him or herself and evolve in some direction.

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But you are sitting in a lab and know you w ­ ill definitely never climb higher than head of lab. And you have this desire” (Natalia, b. 1967, Tom 262). Second, respondents differentiated realization of their own plans from self-­realization: ­these w ­ ere two dif­fer­ent pro­cesses. If plans ­were difficult to realize but enabled self-­realization, a person would take the risk despite the difficulties that arose: “I started to want my own com­pany right when I understood that I ­couldn’t do what I wanted in another com­pany. . . . ​When it became clear that in any other corporation I would not be able to realize my ideas, desires, and so on: management simply would not let me do it. I thought it would be simpler to build my own system than trying to reformat the existing system. Well, now I understand it is not easier, say, in orga­n izational terms. But in terms of self-­realization it is easier” (Nikita, b. 1984, Tom 268). Third, the respondents understood self-­realization as the maximum development of their individual inclinations and abilities. Self-­realization involved turning one’s unique individual potential into real­ity: “The goal in life is to make the most of what you are meant to do, of what you should have the strength for. Clearly, ­there is physical strength [and] ­mental strength. I think I have a fairly large amount of strength. I believe it would be unreasonable to expend it on anything less than creating another Silicon Valley in Tomsk” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 283). Although the term was almost never used in the Soviet Union, our respondents believed that self-­realization existed t­ here as well, of course, but was merely called something e­ lse. Thus, one respondent said, “In Soviet times, well, most ­people had no other means of realization but working in science” (TP, b. 1954, SPb 35). In other words, nowadays one could realize oneself in business as well, but back then, b­ ecause of restrictions on private business, enterprising p­ eople who wanted to achieve something new supposedly could go only into science. Another respondent whom we have already mentioned was not good with his hands, so his parents sent him to learn to solve equations. He spoke about this almost in terms of the theory of self-­ actualization: “A need for self-­realization. And how a poor child can realize himself is also a question. Especially given a lack of money. [Laughs.] Mathe­ matics, for example, is a perfect tool for satisfying someone who has nothing, for satisfying oneself, if one’s scale of values is ready for it. It is natu­ral, it was for plea­sure, and in keeping with certain ambitions” (Artemy, b. 1979, Tom

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279; quotation cited from the full transcript of the interview). So now it seems that p­ eople ­were always engaged in self-­realization; it just was not discussed in t­ hose terms. It is in­ter­est­ing to examine t­ hese statements from the standpoint of the Soviet era. First proposed in the writings of neo-­Hegelian British idealist phi­ los­o­phers in the late nineteenth ­century, the “ethics of self-­realization” was criticized in the USSR for the fact that it presented the desire to realize individual capacities as the ahistorical, perennial mission of all individuals: “The apol­o­getic sense of the ethics of self-­realization consists in the fact that it fully justifies the individual’s subordination to the laws of bourgeois society, which is given the appearance of a supra-­h istorical, supra-­social system.”31 In other words, the idea that the meaning of life is the maximum expression of personal individuality and realizing one’s abilities to the utmost had seemed unworkable to many other socie­ties, especially to a society that affirmed self-­ sacrifice as an ideal of personal be­hav­ior, since every­thing had to be subordinated to the common cause of building Communism. Of course, the term “self-­realization” found its way into the vocabulary of our technopreneurs not b­ ecause they had read the late nineteenth-­century British idealists F. H. Bradley, John McTaggart, and Bernard Bosanquet or the phi­los­o­pher John Dewey, one of the found­ers of pragmatism, who criticized T. H. Green’s elaboration of Bradley’s ethical doctrine. As evidenced by Artemy, quoted above, the terms came into their lives along with the home truths taught in t­ oday’s business schools about the pyramid of ­human values. In the twentieth c­ entury, the humanist psy­chol­ogy of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers adapted the ethics of self-­realization to the language of the business community by offering a con­ve­n ient and s­ imple repre­sen­ta­tion of the hierarchy of needs. Thus, Artemy’s statement implied that the Soviet technical intelligent­sia had already solved the prob­lems of providing c­ hildren with food, safety, and peer recognition, and so they could begin addressing the need for self-­actualization (Maslow’s term) and, over time, act to satisfy cognitive or aesthetic needs (which rank even higher in Maslow’s hierarchy). This obvious reference to Maslow’s theories and the s­ imple views inculcated by ­today’s business curriculum can be interpreted differently, however. When Bradley first broached the notion of self-­realization in his 1876 book Ethical Studies, as an idealist and Hegelian, he was talking about an idea’s

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incarnation in real­ity or, rather, about the materialization in real­ity of the genuine or ideal personality; this is what he meant by self-­realization. If you have a capacity for gluttony or drunkenness, he argued, becoming a hyper-­ glutton or consummate alcoholic does not amount to self-­realization. Self-­ realization involves realizing your “true” personality. However, when the lofty discourse of idealism or personalist philosophy was brought down to the level of business schools, the second sense of the verb “realize,” that is, “sell,” may have become the subliminal model for entrepreneurial self-­ realization. Realizing oneself then would mean enjoying successful sales. If “loot” is the only gauge of success, as some of the technopreneurs said, self-­ realization can mean realizing one’s product or patent. Selling means becoming someone, realizing one’s hitherto hidden potential. One can then ritually intone that what ­matters is personal realization, although product realization has already come to serve as the model for personal realization. According to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, the word “realize” has been in use in En­glish since the early seventeenth ­century, initially in the philosophical sense, meaning to “materialize” or “actualize” ideas or plans. But from the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury, the verb came to mean to turn something into cash, and from the late eigh­teenth ­century, to receive the proceeds from the sale of real estate. Many ­people would say that in Rus­sian, the basic meaning of the term “realization” through the twentieth ­century was “selling” rather than “implementation” or “materialization.” The Dictionary of the Modern Rus­sian Literary Language explains that this usage was introduced in the nineteenth ­century by the commercial and aristocratic elite, who had borrowed and Russified the French term realisation.32 Do ­these commercial connotations suggest the following interpretation of the Rus­sian use of the term “self-­realization”? The purpose of life in Rus­sia (at least for the technopreneurs we interviewed) is no longer conscious self-­ control over the passions and actions in order to build Communism, or the desire to sacrifice oneself, if necessary, to expedite the Communist proj­ect’s realization. Rather than building a better ­f uture for every­one, the purpose of life is now to realize oneself. Moreover, some ­people already believe you should realize yourself in such a way that your unique abilities are more vis­ i­ble not b­ ecause of unique results in science or engineering, but ­because of the unique volume of sales your product enjoys.

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5.5 ​Conclusions and Their Limitations This chapter has suggested the staying power of the practices of the penitential revelation of the self and studied changes in self-­fashioning practices that have been subordinated to this revelation. It registered two obvious changes: the obvious rejection of Communist ideals and the spread of discourse of self-­realization, and trends that now tend to endow collectively scrutinized individuals with only a professional identity instead of a ­wholesome, moral one. One could question, however, to what extent the Rus­sian technopreneurs we studied w ­ ere representative of what was happening with the overall Rus­ sian population. One answer would be to say that we found ­little variation among technopreneurs in dif­fer­ent Rus­sian regions, and hence they embodied practices that ­were more or less uniform across the country for their type of professional stratum. A second answer would be that the technopreneurs we studied did not seem that much dif­fer­ent from Rus­sian ­people in general. T ­ here would have to be a radical change in their background practices for them to become something like a separate subculture, quasi-­religious denomination, or, God forbid, ethnicity.33 This would seem highly unlikely, and the technopreneurs we studied did not behave like a separate caste. Of course, one could hypothesize that the population in the rest of the country gradually changed their background practices of self-­cognition and self-­fashioning over the last twenty-­five years, while the four groups of ­people we studied in the four regions of Rus­sia did not. Such a hypothesis would then hold that our technopreneurs exemplify such a proximity to the Soviet patterns of self-­fashioning ­because of their stale self-­cognition and self-­training techniques, conserved to last ­until the pres­ent day. This hypothesis does not have the ring of truth, however, ­because even if the ­people we studied w ­ ere a bit strange—­why go into high-­tech when profits are not guaranteed, and you can lose all investments in one day b­ ecause of the severely limited rule of law and widespread selective application of law enforcement?—­their self-­ evaluation patterns seemed similar to t­ hose of the rest of the p­ eople surrounding them. A cross-­national comparison, presented in the following chapter, allowed us to articulate their specific features that might seem exactly post-­ Communist, if not very parochially post-­Soviet. Hence for some readers  19 6 

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they might seem like the dinosaurs of the Soviet epoch, who tried adapting to the brave new world of capitalism that was suddenly all around them. ­W hether the majority of the Rus­sian population could be treated as such or not, the remaining exposition of this book rests on the presupposition that the self-­cognition and self-­fashioning practices of the Rus­sian technopreneurs are representative of con­temporary Rus­sian society as a ­whole. At least no study of such practices was done for a larger population, so for now we have to rely on the only sample we had. Hence the republican r­ ecipes in the conclusion to this book rest on a presupposition that the background practices of technopreneurs ­were indicative of the practices of a broader population. The validity of ­those ­recipes could be questioned (and they would have to be rewritten), should further research show a radical discrepancy between the background practices of the technopreneurs we studied and ­those of the general Rus­sian populace.

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6 Inspired and Aspiring Selves Is Rus­sia Doomed to Creativity?

Research on practices of self-­cognition and self-­fashioning in Rus­sia has also yielded another in­ter­est­ing result—on the quasi-­religious aspects of the Weltanschauung of our technopreneurs. We should now consider ­these aspects in finer detail, since access to the Divine was centrally impor­tant in the classical poleis in Greece, in the res publica of Romans, in the most serene republic of San Marco, and in Novgorod the ­Great. One should start this chapter with a caveat, though. In the cross-­national comparison that we did, studies of other cultures just represented the means to get a better understanding of Rus­sia’s specificity. Indeed, our study of technological entrepreneurs in Finland, South ­Korea, and Taiwan did not involve a precise and thorough reconstruction of the inner meanings, motivations, and characteristics of t­hese cultures. We used texts of interviews conducted in ­these countries in their native languages primarily as a mirror for analyzing Rus­sian culture. In other words, we did not attempt to do a meticulous description of technopreneurship in Southeast Asia and Western Eu­rope. Our study was therefore not focused on the usual concerns of area studies. Hence many astute scholars specializing in t­ hese areas of the world might find our accounts incomplete or unfair in certain re­spect to some essential features described. However, using what respondents from t­ hese cultures hinted at as their normal practices and behavioral expectations (or what their own be­hav­ior showed to be such), we attempted to estrange and  19 8 

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hence articulate for ourselves the features of the Rus­sian culture that we ourselves might not have noticed other­w ise, the way a fish swimming in ­water does not notice the ­water ­until it is out of it.

6.1 ​Comparison with Other Cultures Research in Taiwan, ­Korea, and Finland was done in native languages, and the transcribed texts of interviews ­were then translated into Rus­sian for making comparisons. This ensured the uniformity of research procedures, but ­there ­were sizable differences in some other re­spects. For example, the studied cohorts turned out to have dif­fer­ent biographical trajectories. Thus, our colleagues collecting interviews in Taiwan and ­Korea at some point noted: whereas the ­people we interviewed in Southeast Asia had largely gone into the business “from the market,” that is, they ­were enterprising business actors who had jumped from low-­profit, low-­tech business sectors into highly profitable high-­tech industries, in Rus­sia and Finland, it was largely scientists and engineers who had gone into business. And the difference between the latter two countries was that in Finland, where a­ fter studying and working at universities and research institutions, many technopreneurs worked in large corporations and ­adopted business skills and corporate practices before deciding to launch their own start-­ups, the majority of their Rus­sian colleagues had gone straight from science into the high-­tech business (often, of course, not voluntarily, but ­because of the lack of funding in the 1990s). Thus, we can draw similar general conclusions about the typical biographical strategies of technopreneurs in ­these countries only if we make a fair number of provisos. One may immediately observe that given the time limitations for collecting empirical data and the difficulties of gaining access to respondents in South ­Korea, Taiwan, and Finland, our study covered only certain segments of technopreneurs.1 Our research in Rus­sia yielded certain surprises as well: during interviews, EUSP STS center researchers found almost no one who had gone into the high-­tech business from low-­tech business or trading—­ “from the street stall,” as we put it.2 In Taiwan and South ­Korea, on the contrary, the p­ eople interviewed ­were for the most part entrepreneurs who had come to high-­tech business from trading and even agriculture. Since we had neither the time nor the opportunity to get access to the top man­ag­ers  19 9 

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(much less the ­owners) of major firms like Foxconn in Taiwan, or Samsung in South ­Korea, we focused on middle-­level technopreneurship, whose hallmark was its “low-­tech” origins. We have been saved by the fact that our Rus­ sian respondents ­were also middle-­level technopreneurs. Given that we ­were looking for differences in self-­k nowledge and self-­formation practices, and that such practices are usually presumed to be largely the same within cohesive national cultures, changing slowly and gradually as it ­were, we have described the significant contrasts, which should have not been affected by po­liti­cal economy. The final research report articulated a synthetic comparison of all the data collected. Boris Gladarev and Zhanna Tsinman analyzed the texts of the interviews using the conceptual framework first proposed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot.3 Developed by ­these French sociologists for analyzing industrial disputes, this theory was further elaborated by Finnish sociologists for analyzing how existentially impor­tant individual actions are legitimated. ­There are six types of legitimation (or in terms of this theory itself, “worlds of justification”), which ­were originally documented empirically during an analy­sis of French ­labor disputes in the late 1980s and then through a study of manuals of business schools.4 However, a subsequent analy­sis by Boltanski and Chiapello revealed a seventh, project-­based world (the “projective city”), which characterizes capitalism since the late twentieth ­century.5 So, for the most advanced Western Eu­ro­pean countries, we had also to take into account this recently described, seventh or project-­based world. Gladarev and Tsinman therefore set about comparing our four countries on the basis of the seven worlds of justification. Perhaps it is not surprising that, as our comparison showed, it was primarily the Finnish technopreneurs who justified their be­hav­ior in terms of flexibility and the creation of non-­hierarchical project-­based networks. Other modes of justification prevailed in the less developed economies—in ­Korea, it was the industrial world (where be­hav­ior is justified in terms of technical efficiency) and, in Taiwan, the market world (justification through money earned and equality of exchange). On the contrary, we w ­ ere surprised to discover that the world of justification through inspiration was significantly pres­ent only among technopreneurs in Rus­sia. Our surprise arose from the fact that justification of certain be­hav­iors or prohibitions on them was made in Rus­sia through appeals to the unconditional value of inspiration. Such ap 200 

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peals are typically characteristic of religious communities, as can be seen from the rule, for example, that you cannot talk during meals at a monastery, when the Bible is read aloud to the ­whole community, since you hinder your fellow monks’ access to God. Sociologists know that Rus­sian technopreneurs have been congenial to agnosticism and religious relativism, and rarely invoked God. But explaining what motivates them, Rus­sian technopreneurs said they had to do something g­ rand and creative. What mattered in high-­tech business was the scientific or engineering solution, which came as an inspired insight; t­here was no g­ reat accomplishment without this insight and the euphoria of creativity. Thus, it would be a bad ­thing, respondents argued, to subordinate such ­g rand accomplishments to market imperatives or the requirements of regular and efficient production. Of course, while engaged in mundane reasoning, ­people do not rely on the standards of only one world. They usually employ several of them, maintaining ­these more or less accustomed strategies for legitimating their own be­hav­ior. The study thus revealed the basic “mixes” of prevalent worlds of justification among technopreneurs in the vari­ous countries. In Rus­sia, this mix included (in descending order of importance) the industrial world, the inspired world, and the market world; in Taiwan, the market world, the industrial world, and the domestic world; in ­Korea, the industrial world, the domestic world, the market world; in Finland, the project-­based world, the industrial world, and the market world (see Final 72–112).6 It is curious that the inspired world did not attain even the number three position in any of the three foreign countries. This means that Rus­sia seems to be unique, at least among the four countries compared: it privileges the world of inspiration over the demands of technological or market efficiency. This general contrast can also be clarified by comparing Rus­sia with each of the other three countries, whose cultural peculiarities we have used as a mirror in which to observe the specific culture of Rus­sian technopreneurs. We begin our examination with Finland, the paradigmatic Protestant and Western Eu­ro­pean case, followed by South ­Korea (which also has many Protestants) and Taiwan. Finnish technopreneurs possess traits that resemble ­those of their Rus­ sian colleagues, one of them being the lack of a clear difference between work and hobby: respondents often said they ­were fortunate to do what they ­really enjoyed d­ oing. The following quotation was typical: “I enjoy ­every moment,  2 01 

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e­ very day” (Santeri, b. 1969, Fin 203). Connected with this was the way Finnish technopreneurs mainly talked about professional self-­esteem when reflecting on their identity, the same way Rus­sians do. Sometimes this took the shape of a more subtle analy­sis, in which self-­assessment as an entrepreneur in terms of profitability was separated from self-­assessment in terms of professionalism (cf. Veijo, b. 1975, Fin 211). Remarks on personal self-­esteem w ­ ere quite rare. As I have already mentioned, a large number of the Finnish technopreneurs we interviewed had come to the business world from academia, ­after a scientific discovery or engineering innovation had made them think about starting their own business. This was another way in which they resembled the Rus­sian technopreneurs we interviewed. However, the information about differences between Finland and Rus­sia is more suggestive. First, ­there was a difference in the motivations for high-­ tech entrepreneurship. The main reason for ­going into technopreneurship mentioned by the Finnish respondents was the desire to “[try] something new,” and get out of their current stale academic or corporate c­ areers: “If I ­don’t try and do it, I ­w ill regret it ­later,” b­ ecause working at a large firm is “boring: I have to do something e­ lse” (Jimi, b. 1975, Fin 201). Or: “­There [in a com­pany] you can see another world that is completely dif­fer­ent from the world of formal science” (Eetu, b. 1957, Fin 202). Leaving large organ­i zations was often bound up with existential boredom. You have a ­house, a car, and two ­children, but what is ­there to look forward to? An early retirement and death? Technopreneurship enables one to find a meaningful purpose in life, something greater than mere earning one’s living and providing for the ­family. The second most impor­tant motivation was the desire for in­de­pen­ dence, to work outside hierarchies and without superiors. The third was the desire to see the realization of technological or scientific ideas. The fact that this wish to see the results of one’s work in action came in last place (Fin 203), immediately highlighted the strange attachment of Rus­sian technopreneurs to their works-­in-­progress, their near love for them. One notices this unusual Rus­sian predilection only ­after one realizes it was almost absent from the Finnish interviews. Second, in contrast to Rus­sians, the Finns w ­ ere much less interested in all-­embracing plans for implementing large-­scale fundamental science proj­ ects. They ­were more interested in applied science, in what could be materialized and, hence, in market niches where fast growth was pos­si­ble. In this  202 

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sense, the Finnish respondents w ­ ere stunned by the hubris of their Rus­sian colleagues. T ­ here was an economic crisis in Rus­sia in the 1990s, but the Rus­ sians had behaved as if their Finnish colleagues w ­ ere involved in trifling ­matters: “When we tried to start a joint venture in the early nineties, it was surprising ­because our potential partners from XYZ [university] seemed utterly uninterested. Despite what your economy was like in the nineties! It was surprising. It was as if they ­were d­ oing us a f­ avor. They just had this arrogance about them” (Kari, b. 1963, Fin, Final 107). Third, f­amily came first in terms of values for the Finns, with work in second place, while for the Rus­sians, f­ amily definitely came in second ­behind work. When asked about their f­ amily, the Rus­sian male respondents usually just said they had a ­family, and that was that: what ­else was ­there to say about it? Fourth, the Finnish technopreneurs ­were more prone to collectivism (verbally, at least) than the Rus­sians: indeed, you cannot launch a new start-up without a team of equal colleagues. The Finns wanted in­de­pen­dence, but wanted it within a group of equals. On the contrary, when describing fateful decisions like entering a risky business, many of the Rus­sian technopreneurs emphasized the value of individual self-­realization. The team was thus regarded largely as something necessary, but a supporting cast all the same (unavoidable when launching a start-up), meaning it was an essential precondition of self-­realization but not the goal of the ­whole pro­cess. On the contrary, when discussing professional success, the Finns “emphasize[d] . . . ​ the collective nature of the design or invention, seemingly downplaying their own role” (Fin 211). According to the authors of the report on Finland, Protestant modesty overlapped in this instance with the collectivist nature of Finnish start-­ups. The last ­thing to note is the difference in self-­k nowledge and self-­ formation practices. The par­tic­u ­lar methodicalness of the Finnish entrepreneurs in this re­spect underscores the volatile and unmethodical nature of the Rus­sians. Finnish entrepreneurs suffered almost physically when they did not have the time to answer all their emails, and indeed email frequently was their main means of communicating and organ­izing their lives. Completing an action or a distinct stage of that action has been a longstanding requirement of methodical Protestantism, which could have become a common feature of daily Finnish culture in general. So the inability to complete every­thing planned for a par­tic­u­lar day is a serious reproach to oneself.7  203 

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In Tomsk, by comparison, methodicalness was not a sought virtue, but then not all the respondents systematically used email; only the technopreneurs integrated into the world market banged out dozens of letters to foreign correspondents for hours on end. The Finnish technopreneurs, on the contrary, could have two calendars, one on their laptops for work plans, and another on their telephones, where they kept personal plans; moreover, in order to avoid confusion, the devices w ­ ere not synchronized. The techniques the Finnish technopreneurs used to appraise themselves sometimes resembled revelation by deeds. For example, some of them employed the 360-­degree feedback technique, familiar from business textbooks, getting assessments of their be­hav­ior from all their coworkers to compare with their existing self-­assessment. But this was a secondary method in comparison with the Protestant methods of self-­k nowledge through objective criteria, such as mea­sur­ing one’s commercial success in money, market share, and other technical indicators of achievement. It was ­these that supplied the Finns with basic self-­esteem: “I am always proud of achievements. In other words, if sometime l­ater you want to take a look at all the work you do [and say to yourself] ‘Look, you did this and achieved that and had a hand in this,’ then you ­will be proud of yourself. I ­don’t know ­whether this is ­really a ‘stocktaking,’ but I always look back at what I have achieved” (Jimi, b. 1975, Fin 211). Comparing Rus­sia with South ­Korea also produces in­ter­est­ing results. First, given Protestantism’s rapid growth in South ­Korea during the twentieth ­century, one could expect to see some features that are similar to Finland. And indeed one can sometimes find a somewhat similar mixture of collectivism and individualism, which critics of the Protestants in South K ­ orea have called “collective egoism,” stressing that it is the Protestant communities that enable their members to learn to ignore group pressure. But the norm in South Korean technopreneurship, on the contrary, is the small firm and the traditional, family-­like, tightly knit team that does not brook flamboyant or acrimonious manifestations of individualism. We ­w ill not find “self-­realization” among the reasons the South Koreans cited for working in business: t­ here was hardly a mention of the term. Instead, in­de­pen­dence, understood as not having a boss over you, was one of the prevalent motivations. The point of ­going into technopreneurship was often presented as something like the following: “Being an employer rather than an employee.  204 

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­ ecause ­there is a ­really big difference between ­whether you are an active or B passive participant. So I did not lose the sense of purpose, however vague, of starting my own business, even in the absence of decent savings” (Chon, b. 1959, Kor 445). Judging from our interviews, t­ here are three main paths to technopreneurship in South ­Korea. First, t­ here is leaving a major firm like Daewoo in order to found one’s own small business. Second, some p­ eople move from a non-­tech business to a high-­tech one for the sake of increasing profits. Third, and least common, is when scientists or engineers leave academia for industry, mostly for economic reasons. Just as we find no mention of self-­ realization in the South Korean interviews, we also see no statements about their “love of a work-­in-­progress,” something we saw throughout the Rus­ sian interviews.8 Their goals ­were largely economic, and when an individual was driven by something loftier than narrowly practical ends (from the Eu­ ro­pean standpoint), this usually involved establishing a well-­functioning organ­i zation that resembles a big f­ amily, in which all members of the community would be integrated in a harmonious, well-­balanced way, and thus be on track to develop and grow: “Any system is like a living being. It definitely must stay endlessly in motion, keep growing. Even if I do not wish it, it has to grow, this existence that maintains life. I tell it to stop, but it w ­ ill not stop. I can create a successful system that I can bequeath to my ­children or hand over to a capable person, but it does not ­matter w ­ hether I have put all of myself into it or not. In the end, the system w ­ ill still stay in motion” (Han, b. 1966, Kor 445). Unlike in Rus­sia, ­there’s an enormous number of textbooks on everyday be­hav­ior in South K ­ orea: sometimes it seems as if ­there is a rule or recommended model of decorum for e­ very situation in life—on how to speak respectfully, for example, or even the proper way to hand out business cards. Often t­ hese rules are accompanied by illustrations (Kor 450). The methodical nature of ­these recommendations was reinforced by the methodical way ­people recorded and reported the details of their own be­hav­ior. One respondent recounted how he had been forced to start a notebook at his workplace to rec­ord the results of the day. He had now amassed a large number of such notebooks, which he used for self-­analysis and self-­formation: “When I first started working at the plant, I apprenticed with this man. He handed me a notebook and told me to write every­t hing down in it. He ordered me to  205 

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rec­ord even strong profanities. E ­ very day, I felt indignant about this diary. Originally, I had begun writing ­under duress. ­Later, ­after amassing dozens of such volumes, I acquired a much-­needed textbook. That is why I now also force my employees to keep diaries” (Pak, b. 1968, Kor 447). Of course, this was hardly a ­matter of solitary introspection, ­because the diary was begun and initially used and analyzed together with the man’s mentor. It was rather am ­ atter of recording experience, more a kind of differentiated statistics that could be analyzed and potentially used in the realization of one’s plans, ­either alone or with a mentor. It is hard, though, to imagine f­ uture or current Rus­ sian technopreneurs methodically making entries in such diaries e­ very day. Even ­those respondents who drew on Confucianism rather than Chris­ tian­ity (South ­Korea is a multi-­religious country, where many ­people practice religious eclecticism) cited t­ hose of its princi­ples that stress methodicalness, regularity, and conformity to rules: I am guided in my life by three sayings. The first, yu sa si jong, contains four characters, which taken together mean “to see the ­matter from its starting point,” that is, to understand the goal. In other words, when you start any business, you have to see its end. The next one is yu sa son hu, “­things before and a­ fter,” meaning t­ here are ­things that must be done first, and ­things that should be done ­later. And the last one is chin in sa me cheon myeong, “do every­thing and wait for providence.” This means you can wait for divine intervention when you have done every­thing you should have done. (Chon, b. 1959, Kor 451–452)

Besides methodical analy­sis and planning of personal be­hav­ior, which was constantly stressed, ­there ­were other peculiarities. The South Korean respondents sometimes said ­there was so much collectivism in their midst that they wanted to be alone: “I have no religion, so it is not ­really up my alley. I find Buddhist ­temples more congenial. In church, you are not given the chance to think for yourself, and I do not like this atmosphere where you have to do what every­one ­else does. That is what I like about Buddhist ­temples: they are usually in quiet places, and ­there you can think in silence and be alone” (Han, b. 1968, Kor 451). The emphatic individualism of the self-­ realization pursued by Rus­sian technopreneurs contrasts h ­ ere with the  206 

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­ holesale collectivism of Korean life: in South ­Korea, even in the Protestant w church, with its alleged tender attention to the individual Christian conscience, you are forced to do what every­one e­ lse does. In comparison, technopreneurial Rus­sia appears to be a country where almost unlimited self-­realization has triumphed. Of course, Rus­sian start-­ups also feature teams of more or less equal co-­founders, but ­these are neither South Korean firms-­as-­families nor, obviously, Soviet collectives. Let us now see how Rus­sia compares with Taiwan. The first striking difference is in biographical trajectories. Most of the Taiwanese entrepreneurs we w ­ ere able to interview had spent their childhood in the country’s agrarian south, where they ­were brought up in an environment of hard and patient agricultural l­abor. (Among the Rus­sian regions, we found something like this at the grassroots level only in Tatarstan.) Unlike what you would expect from patriarchal rural culture, the respondents developed in­ de­pen­dence early on ­because at an early age they left for the city, where they had to live on their own and send money back to their families. By the time they ­were interviewed, they had all graduated from technological (albeit provincial) universities, and many had graduated from similarly ranked business schools. Of course, this was not the most desirable way of life when viewed from the standpoint of the traditional Confucian opposition between “a noble man” and “a lowly person.” To join the ranks of the former you must gradu­ate from one of the best universities, join the civil ser­vice, and constantly improve yourself as you prepare for the ­g reat deeds that ­w ill inscribe your name in history—­that is, if you successfully manage to perform such exploits.9 Our respondents did not have such education, so they did not work for such Taiwanese economic titans as Taiwan Semiconductor, and they had no chance of winding up in the government. Their choice of technopreneurship was based on ­these ­career restrictions and the need to make money, which they could earn a lot more of in this industry than in the other fields they might have pursued. ­Here is a typical example: “[T]he most impor­tant ­thing was si­mul­ta­neously attaining a target in terms of money and then achieving certain goals in life. You cannot talk about work while forgetting about life, so back then financial interest also played a big role in my life. I grew up in the countryside, and ­after I moved to Taipei, I dreamed of having money. When I saw the successful families of my classmates, I hoped that in the  207 

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f­ uture I could be better than them. That was my dream” (Chen, b. 1957, Tai 332). But for all this they did not feel like “petty” or “lowly” ­people, whose sole motivation was profit. Judging from the interviews, each of them was confident that what he or she was d­ oing was impor­tant and of use to other p­ eople besides themselves. Of course, the criterion of a lowly person in China is the pursuit of money. Insofar as the respondents tried to earn money, they could be construed as lowly ­people in terms of Confucian orthodoxy. It should be noted, of course, that this orthodoxy was represented in their minds not by lines of classical texts but by vague intuitions of acceptable be­hav­ior. In addition, many of them had not thought about themselves in terms of the Confucian opposition between a noble man and a lowly person before the interviewer asked them about it. It tran­spired that for many of them, t­ here was a non-­materialist aspect to their motivations—­for example, wanting to found a firm and bequeath it not only to their own c­ hildren but also to f­ uture generations. Some had nationalist and civic motivations: Taiwan had to be developed. This can all be interpreted as a manifestation of spirituality and the quest for greatness, which enabled our respondents not to think of themselves as lowly persons. I have recounted all this to show, in contrast with the Taiwanese casuistry of trying to persuade oneself that technopreneurship is not among the usual occupations of “lowly men,” how strange the seemingly “natu­ral” striving of the Rus­sian technopreneurs for creative inspiration and ­g reat deeds appears. (And if one is to believe the lines of collected interviews, the Rus­sians are capable of both, almost by definition.) As was the case with the Koreans, the Taiwanese had none of the attachment to their works-­in-­progress that we noticed among their Rus­sian colleagues. Rather, such works figured only in descriptions of what ­those interviewed in Chinese readily understood and accepted, and what the South Koreans accepted much less readily—­the need for self-­realization. The term for self-­realization itself, as I have already mentioned, was conveyed by the interviewer through a Chinese calque of the term “personal growth.” Nevertheless, many respondents said it was the first time they heard it and, thus, the first time they ­were reflecting on it. The abundance of comments on this topic (as opposed to the South Korean case) was thus all the more in­ter­est­ing. As we recall, the main motivation for ­going into techno 208 

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preneurship was money, but self-­realization emerged on the agenda as soon as money had ceased to be a priority: “It is better to say that self-­realization is the most impor­tant t­ hing! Since money, of course . . . ​Every­one regards money differently. For example, ­today I need one hundred yuan to be happy or ten thousand or maybe ten million. And someone needs ten million: only then ­w ill he be satisfied. . . . ​Each day you can eat the food of kings, it’s good . . . ​But I can also have regal food once a month or year. [It is another ­matter when] you have made some effort yourself and got feedback. That is enough” (Wenlong, b. 1971, Tai 340). Some cited Maslow to justify why they needed self-­realization (and why they should go to gradu­ate school despite their mature age); ­others said that with the advent of enough money, “something ­else comes to the fore” (Xie, b. 1963, and Zhou, b. 1964, Tai 340). However, this “something ­else” was not fulfilling oneself completely, realizing one’s opportunities fully, but rather launching a new product or building a successful business, t­ hings that ­were understood as personal achievements. This, it seems, was what the respondents identified using the Chinese equivalent of the term “personal growth”: “I believe that finishing something is more impor­tant than profit. [If] you cannot do it now, t­ here ­w ill be nothing to say ­later. If you cannot finish anything now, how can you talk of rewards in the f­ uture? I think self-­realization is more impor­tant. B ­ ecause it is only a­ fter self-­realization you can achieve wealth” (Yun Syu, b. 1957, Tai 340–341). It seems that as an ethical ideal, Rus­ sian self-­realization involves fulfillment of the individual personality; in Taiwan, it is more a ­matter of realizing a work proj­ect or product. But ­were not the Taiwanese more honest to openly link the realization of personal growth with sales and certain per­for­mance standards? Self-­k nowledge and self-­formation practices in Taiwan highlight the next peculiarity of the Rus­sian technopreneurs. It was mainly the Taiwanese bosses who engaged in self-­k nowledge practices, which they did by seeking opinions about themselves from their peers or superiors. Since every­one usually knew every­one ­else in the country’s small high-­tech industry, it was pos­si­ble to receive this information through rumors and gossip communicated during regular meals with more-­or-­less equal colleagues and friends or by telephoning colleagues who had transferred to other companies. An exception to the rule was a respondent who, a­ fter voluntarily serving in the army, also solicited the opinions of subordinates at his firm. To this end, he  209 

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had appointed “several confidants” who summarized for him the staff’s informal opinions: “I definitely maintain a few confidants at ­every fa­c il­i­t y, ­because . . . ​I have around one hundred employees, and I cannot keep track of them all” (Xie, b. 1963, Tai 338). In Taiwan, collective judgment of a person is the basis for working on the self, something that can be done in privacy, thus resembling Rus­sian practices. But self-­accounting and introspection are more common and regular, and are practiced ­either before bedtime or during an activity when one is alone (for example, in a car or on an airplane during frequent trips; see Woo, b. 1957, Tai 341); moreover, both real actions (what one said and did over the course of the day) and manifestations of personal qualities (­whether one was too nice or too harsh ­today) are analyzed. This, for example, was how the aforementioned Xie engaged in self-­analysis: Yes, I can “mea­sure myself three times daily.” E ­ very day, when I go to bed, I do not fall asleep right away. I think that maybe I said something to someone the wrong way, that I was too harsh, that I said something without thinking or did something wrong myself. That in dealing with clients I behaved improperly or that one of the clients did not give me something. I think about the com­ pany, about myself. I think about what I have to do, ­because e­ very day t­ here is something that worries me. That is what I think about when I go to bed. (Xie, b. 1963, Tai 342)

Of course, what the Taiwanese respondents did during this analy­sis was very dif­fer­ent from the sophisticated m ­ ental techniques of Zen Buddhism or thrice-­daily Confucian self-­questioning: “Did I do all I could to help ­others? How can I correct and improve myself?” But demanding Confucian or Buddhist sophistication from the Taiwanese technopreneurs means ignoring the curious fact that they engaged in this rather simplistic introspection regularly, while we did not observe even this basic introspective activity among the Rus­sian technopreneurs. Perhaps introspection among the Taiwanese technopreneurs was not very deep and sophisticated ­because it was practiced not to achieve knowledge of one’s unique personality, but more often to ascertain the nature of

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one’s current professional reputation. A ­ fter all, the business success of small firms depends on their management’s reputation: if you have a bad one, you ­w ill not have customers and suppliers. Hence the importance of a positive collective appraisal of your conduct in the workplace and marketplace. Interestingly, blogs are not used in Taiwan to generate this reputation: they are deemed insincere. Superiors maintain blogs only in dealing with their subordinates, e­ ither for conveying necessary information to them or educating them. Thus, the monitoring by colleagues, partners, and superiors of a technopreneur’s conduct in order to form a judgment about his business reputation is an extremely impor­tant practice: almost every­one does it. T ­ here was only one Taiwanese respondent who said he was unconcerned by external evaluations, and he was the only Protestant we interviewed: I usually ­don’t think about [what ­others say]. That is, it makes no sense to think [about it], since I have been working for several de­ cades, and I think that if I did something right in the past, that is good. If I did something wrong, then I cannot change it. That is, if I did well, then okay, I do not have to focus on what ­others think. In any case, we are all low-­level entrepreneurs. We are not politicians, since politicians seek to make some mark on history, while entrepreneurs often just go with the flow. (Liao, b. 1962, Tai 338)

In this case, the Protestant could establish his self-­evaluation in communion with God or define his self according to objective technical yardsticks, as the Finnish interviewees did. He was not interested in compiling opinions of ­others about him, although he did reproduce the Confucian juxtaposition between the noble man who has entered politics for the sake of g­ reat deeds and the average or lowly man occupied by routine cares. The last t­ hing to note is the role of the gods. In Taiwan, ­there are widespread folk religious beliefs (something which the Protestant Liao, for example, openly disliked). They are expressed in many ways, including the fact that “nearly e­ very office has an altar to the god of wealth, and sacrifices and offerings are or­ga­n ized during holidays;” that recommendations to buy

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lucky charms for cars are broadcast on tele­vi­sion; and that it was deci­ded to erect a sculptural effigy of a guardian spirit in an office at a government computer center (Tai 345). ­There are also superstitions at innovation companies and research institutes in Rus­sia. Icons are affixed to equipment, for example, or brought into the lab during an experiment’s decisive moments. But this is dif­fer­ent. The folk beliefs in Taiwan take the form of full-­fledged cults complete with sacrifices and statues, not just casual activities like spitting three times over the shoulder or knocking on wood. It is impor­tant in Taiwanese technopreneurship that the divine is involved in the pro­cess of producing wealth, and this highlights its special role in some of the foreign countries we studied. While the Taiwanese folk gods help one make money, the eclectic religious attachments in South K ­ orea do not prevent one from ­doing this, at least. Religion is pres­ent, but it does not have such a direct effect on high-­tech business. In Finland, asking respondents about religion was difficult, ­because it is a deeply personal affair. But in general in this country, God is also impor­tant, as demonstrated by the fact that all our respondents had attended Protestant confirmation classes in adolescence. T ­ here are gods in all three countries, and they have something to do with technopreneurship and wealth. Rus­sia stands out in this re­spect, ­because God or the gods generally do not feature in the daily lives of respondents at all. But their mundane (and, hence, largely unnoticed and unthematized by them) real­ity is this: ­people have replaced God as an agency claiming the power to create the world. ­Future exposition ­will show that perhaps this very fact stands in the way of commercializing inventions and innovations. A comparison of technopreneurs with ordinary entrepreneurs in Rus­sia has shown that the former can be largely characterized by what one respondent said: “Ordinary businessmen just want to make money, while entrepreneurs in the high-­tech field want to offer something new and make money on it. This is the fundamental difference: it is impor­tant to them to get money for their creative efforts” (Nikita, b. 1984, Tom 263). I have italicized the words “new” and “creative” in this quotation, as ­these are the two main characteristics that differentiated the Rus­sian technopreneurs from their foreign counter­parts. Our analy­sis has shown that the Taiwanese technopreneurs valued earning money more than creating new t­ hings (although in this case, too, it was clear that the money was earned only as profit from an innova-

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tive business). And in South ­Korea, when the respondents did not simply talk about making money from innovation, they often mentioned maintaining a small harmonious community (with funds generated by innovative business) as the second highest value. Creativity was also not the primary focus ­there at all. This points to a fundamental fact about Rus­sian high-­tech entrepreneurship. Unlike, say, South K ­ orea and Taiwan, it is just obsessed with creativity and the creative efforts of designers and engineers. The Rus­sian respondents emphasized work’s inspirational nature as its main feature, and stressed big challenges worthy of eternity as the key under­lying motive that impelled them to do business in the high-­tech sector. Related to that was creating “cool new items” that would eventually begin to work and certify your value as a creator. But the strangeness of this motivation became apparent only in cross-­ cultural comparison. This obsession with creativity is usually invisible amid the characteristics the Rus­sian technopreneurs share with their colleagues in Asia and Eu­ rope. For example, all of them value their professional identities—­their deep emotional involvement in their business, the work of their firm, and generating new products—­over their personal identities. But ­because Rus­sians are “doomed” to creativity, only in Rus­sia can one hear statements about a par­ tic­u l­ ar love of one’s work-­in-­progress. One respondent said that ­people like her ­were driven by “love of their work-­in-­progress (razrabotka), which they ­really ­don’t feel like, well, not so much giving away as allowing to die and wind up only in their desk drawer.” Thus, she continued, “[A]s an entrepreneur, I run this work-­i n-­progress (razrabotka) myself and put science into practice. I realize no one ­else but me is as keen on implementing it” (Olga, b. 1980, Tom 260). We need to assess w ­ hether this love of one’s work-­i n-­progress, which differs from a love of one’s com­pany or business, is productive or not. On the one hand, this love compels one to bring one’s idea or design to completion, not to abandon what one has started halfway, and, ­after a functioning prototype has been created, to think about how to sell it or effectively patent its princi­ples. On the other hand, this love can cause a person to begin preparing a product for mass production, but this is not the strong suit of many former Rus­sian scientists and their business partners. In some cases, it can also cause

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p­ eople to do nothing at all to commercialize their work. Their motivation then could be summed up as follows: “It works, I admire it, and now let humanity appreciate it.” The love of a work-­in-­progress: is this ­really only an apt meta­phor used in the interviews? Given the number of such meta­phors and passages in the interviews where our Rus­sian respondents talked about the strong feelings occasioned by the devices they ­were developing or launching, the following section of this chapter takes up this passion for technology. Offhand, many arguments for examining t­ hese expressions of love seriously, rather than in passing, immediately come to mind. First, it is no accident that the word “amateur” once denoted aristocratic amateur scientists such as Cavendish and Lavoisier, who had produced a scientific revolution in their expensive aristocratic laboratories. They loved with all their hearts the nature they studied as God’s creation, and they ­were among the few who could afford to do research at the time. Second, in Soviet times, the term “amateur” was part of everyday life rather than a sublime aristocratic real­ity: an army of amateur radio fans, for example, who in their spare time soldered resistors and transistors, fueling the Soviet drive to worldwide scientific and technical superiority. Third, even now, as our report has shown (Final 140), the ideology of the “­labor of love” permeates business guides for Rus­sian technopreneurs. We must deal with this love and this creativity.

6.2 ​The Love of Razrabotka (One’s Work-­in-­Development) The Rus­sian word in the title of this subsection, which we frequently find in our interviews, is a curious term indeed. It comes from the word for work (rabota in Rus­sian), but the prefix raz pushes one to translate the term literally as an “en-­working,” implying that en-­working is linked to a work the way enactment is linked to an act or acting. However, this Rus­sian word is not philosophical at all, and in the everyday parlance of scientists and entrepreneurs, it usually means two t­ hings si­mul­ta­neously. First, it designates an unfinished product of innovation, since the f­ uture device or captured natu­ral pro­cess is not t­ here yet and may never come to be. Second, it is about material ele­ments, this chaos, this hurly-­burly of disparate ele­ments that lies in front of you in a garage or in a lab. Therefore, I think it is better to translate this term as “a work-­in-­development,” signifying that a) it is linked directly  214 

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to the usual term R&D, and b) that this development might fail, and thus it is not a work-­in-­inescapable-­progress. Sometimes, when I would like to stress the aspect of a work being launched into life and enabled, I ­w ill also use the neologism “en-working” suggested above.10 Let us first take a closer look at the case of Olga, a scientist who heads an engineering firm but still considers herself a ­little crazy, since, as she said, technopreneurship in Rus­sia is done ­either by crazy ­people or young ­people who have a lot of energy and do not reckon how much effort it w ­ ill take. For her, work-­in-­development was a situation in which someone “gets stuck” and from which one cannot break f­ ree: [As for] all ­t hose ­people who ­really swarm into business, especially the high-­tech business, you ­really need to be crazy to decide on d­ oing it. Often, I think, they are driven more by, say, a love of their work-­in-­development, which they ­really ­don’t feel like, well, not so much giving away as allowing to die and wind up only in their desk drawer. So when they start working on something, at first they are driven, naturally, by all kinds of scientific [impulses]—­I want to try this, I want to do this. Then, when [they] have done it, [they won­der] what it would be like in manufactured form. And when someone suddenly asks what it would be like in manufactured form, they are stuck. ­Because then they also have to be involved in commercialization. (Olga, b. 1980, Tom 260; cited from the full transcript of the interview)

This narrative is in­ter­est­i ng in its meta­phors. “Stuck” ­here means that if one claw is caught, the bird is lost—­there is no way back. Thus begins the commercialization of one’s work-­in-­development, a crazy romance from which it is difficult to extricate oneself. Olga herself runs a high-­tech engineering enterprise at a university, and she sees engineering as a necessary step in the work-­in-­development’s path to fruition: “­There is work-­in-­development, but for you to get this work-­in-­ development, say, staged on equipment, get the equipment selected, and the pro­cesses worked out—­that is engineering.” As it turned out, the com­pany was working on several en-­workings, but Olga had a personal favorite one that she was ­r unning individually in her capacity as a chemist:  215 

r epublica nism in russi a What­ever the case, I was more involved in realm of innovation, but I did not give chemistry up, and now, on the contrary, I have careened back into chemistry. Or perhaps they are now on an equal footing. Chemistry remains in my life, and commercialization does, too. That is, I both work on my own work-­in-­ development—­ I have a research group and vari­ ous grad ­students—­a nd ­there is the commercial part, where as an entrepreneur, I manage this work-­in-­development myself and put science into practice. I realize no one ­else but me is as keen on implementing it. And at the same time I have a bunch of works-­ in-­development at the university I am helping to implant among ­people.

The decisive f­actor has been defined precisely: no one e­ lse was as keen to turn Olga’s work-­in-­development into a functioning device. Of course, ­there might be other ­people who in the line of duty or for money or fame could try and bring her en-­working to fruition (just as she worked on commercializing other ­people’s en-­workings), but only her interest and drive guaranteed that her work-­in-­development would fi­nally come to life and begin functioning in thousands of products. This is what she called complete immersion in research and development, or being consumed by a voracious interest: “­There are works-­i n-­development into which we have literally dived headfirst. Like XYZ, which we are interested in now. We think it has a f­ uture, and that is why we are still working with it now” (Olga, b. 1980, Tom 260; cited from the full transcript of the interview). It seems that every­one’s work-­i n-­development needs its own amateur or enthusiast to help it gel. H ­ ere is how Olga described the conditions necessary to launch a commercialization of an en-­working and create a pi­lot plant: “I saw that basically the en-­working has already matured to the point that . . . ​ I mean, t­ here is a team: ­people are the main t­ hing. T ­ here is a work-­in-­ development. ­There is the sense of how it might develop. T ­ here is a sort of business model. Why not?” Like a living being, a work-­in-­development has “matured.” But what mattered most was that t­ here w ­ ere ­people who would not abandon it, who would help realize it. They would enable the en-­working to fully become a finished work by supporting it and putting it on the market. ­Here, Olga’s meta­phors recall her discussion of ­children, who need help with  2 16 

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getting a start in life or ­going out into the world: “I would say that in the case of each work-­in-­development, I see where it is most needed on the world market or the Rus­sian market. We have a huge number of Rus­sian works-­i n-­ development that are ­really needed on the Rus­sian market. And they have a very hard time entering t­ here. It is even easier for them to make it onto the market in the West, than in Rus­sia” (Olga, b. 1980; cited from the full transcript of the interview). I have quoted Olga at such length to show the typical semantic clusters that emerged when she described her love of her en-­working. The work-­in-­ development w ­ ill not survive without you. If it has matured, it should be handed over to a good person (if you cannot realize it yourself). Like a ward or an animal being domesticated, it needs help finding its own place, or in this case, its own market. How gender-­specific is this motherly attitude? She certainly w ­ asn’t the only ­woman to make such a connection. Consider this comment from another female respondent from Tomsk: “And when you, say, have made a finished product, and you see the package as well, it’s like you have given birth to this. I say: we have given birth to the next product. And then, suddenly, the feedback begins, the letters come, saying thanks, it ­really treats [the condition], for years we [have been waiting for this]. A sincerely written letter. Well, it is not that it is a success, but ­there is this pride: I have achieved something” (Natalia, b. 1967, Tom 257). And Olga related not only to her work-­in-­development as her offspring but also to her business: “You know, I ­don’t perceive the team as a second ­family. Rather, I perceive the university and, now, the com­pany as my offspring. I mean, since childhood I have always had this phrase, ‘We are responsible for ­those we have tamed.’ And it has always been this leitmotif throughout my life. I mean, I cannot abandon and let down my offspring” (Olga, b. 1980, Tom 257, 274; cited from the full transcript of the interview). The men we interviewed tended to use more sexually related connotations, as when they strug­gled for a long time with a creative challenge and, in Rus­sian jargon, could have been said to have been “f**king” with intractable equipment or the pro­cess of debugging the engineering. Sometimes the sexual content was even more explicit. ­Here’s how one respondent described the pro­cess of implementing a design as an engineer: “I ­will say it again. ­Until you have slept with a firing equipment for many nights, sleepless nights, so to speak. (Well, of course they are sleepy, in effect). You wake up at four in  217 

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the morning, and that is it—­bam!—­you’re switched on. It is impossible. It is impossible to create anything, especially something fiery. ­Because a firing equipment is such that if you have made a blunder or t­ here is a defect, it ­w ill instantly burn it in this spot. That is, the casing w ­ ill melt” (Salman Zufarovich, b. 1942, Tat 154). But ­there ­were also many men who expressed more “paternal” feelings for their works-­in-­gestation. ­Here’s Lenar: “Of course I wanted to do something technically original. Give birth to something of my own, something original, a breakthrough, as Bill Gates once did in a garage” (b. 1986, Tat 135). Another respondent spoke of a love of work that dated to Soviet times and his desire to create his own device: “We just always loved our work terribly, it was in­ter­est­ing to us. For us, it was the point and purpose of life. We would come to work on weekends, and work ­until nine ­o’clock. Basically, we did it ­because we ­were interested. ­Because we loved it. It was hardly only ­because of the money. The main ­thing was an interest in science, meaning one wanted to learn new t­ hings, to learn secrets, make discoveries. [Make] one’s own amazing device” (Viktor, b. 1956, Tat 123). The men also sometimes used emotionally expressive epithets to express their feelings: “When you make some monster-­of-­a-­device, this ­thing that never existed before” (Oleg, b. 1983, Nsk 384). Sometimes we can see emotions that are seemingly replete with irony, but that still evoke the idea of offspring. One respondent was discussing his first post-­perestroika order (with a student pres­ent at the interview) thus: Int.: ​Ah, that is, to build an x-­ray machine? Resp.: ​To build one. Yes, to develop one. Student: ​(interrupting) To develop and begin mass-­producing it. Resp.: ​Yes, so we produced that freak in nine months. From scratch! I mean, we ­d idn’t have a single x-­ray specialist at all. We did it just from scratch.   (Eduard, b. 1957, Nsk; cited from the full transcript of the interview; the italics are mine—­O. Kh.)

Is this description of a “freak” produced in nine months not an understandable expression of sympathy? The x-­ray machine that came into the world was homely (it was a first attempt to produce something ­after the collapse of  2 18 

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the Soviet scientific industry), but it was ours! To give birth to something like that, you must agonize for a long time and exert yourself to the utmost. And while the men sometimes used meta­phors of creation and emotion, the female respondents sometimes drew parallels between their love of the research and development pro­cess and sex: “Innovative business should have a sexual component. I mean, it is impossible to describe it with words alone. You have to love it, so that it attracts you. You have to passionately love this work as if it w ­ ere a w ­ oman” (Nina, b. 1961, SPb, Final 86). Moreover, as in the following quotation, you can feel love and pride for final improvements that launch a device into life, with the Rus­sian term being dorabotka (literally: work-­fi nishing, working-­to-­t he-­end): “About eighty ­percent of the work-­ finishings in this bulb are mine. . . . ​Putin held it in his hands. This bulb ­will be in e­ very Sberbank ATM” (Iaroslav, b. 1983, SPb 35; Final 92). What ­matters is that the en-­working, now almost at the stage of completion, lives its own life. In contrast with ­these gestational meta­phors, one finds a term nedorabotka, which can be literally translated as “work-­not-­fi nishing-­to-­the-­end” or “a not-­ yet-­completed-­work,” which implies that no one can love or be proud of something’s flaws. If a product is made without love, made only to fill a niche or round out all possibilities in a line of products, it becomes obvious that it was not cared for enough to realize the shape of a perfect product. And so in this case t­ here is nothing to be proud of. The child is not a bastard you love anyway despite its imperfections; it is simply a bastard: When Phillips comes, they take pride in each of their products, they have pride. That is what we lack—we should have pride. But unfortunately, t­ here is a portion of our products we are not proud of, ­because they are not the sorts of products one should be proud of. They ­were produced to fill a niche. But ­there are products that are r­ eally good! I am r­ eally proud of them. T ­ hese are our bestsellers, good, quality products, and they are better than what is on the market. And this has even been recognized. It is quite pleasant when competitors say we ­don’t even want to compare ourselves with you, ­because when it comes to this product you are super. Well done! But h ­ ere (with some other product) you ­haven’t worked the bugs out yet (ne dorabotali), ­here ­you’ve done badly. (Case 1, b. 1970, SPb 42)  2 19 

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Another contrast must be emphasized: between a love of this very work-­ in-­development or work-­being-­fi nished, on the one hand, and an interest in technology as such, on the other. During the interviews we asked many questions about the role of vari­ous new technical devices and gadgets in the lives of the technopreneurs. We assumed that technopreneurs would pay special attention to such equipment since they ­were in love with technology generally, and had gone into the business ­because of that. To our surprise, the vari­ous new devices—­iPads and smartphones—­evoked no par­tic­u ­lar emotional attachment. They w ­ ere used, as the Rus­sians would proverbially put it, “like an ax,” that is, as the simplest of functional devices with no quirks— in this case, as pure communication tools rather than as objects expressing the individuality of their o ­ wners or used by them to analyze and cultivate their own personalities. Personalizing smartphones with ringtones, slipcovers, and the placement of icons on the screen was something that did not ­matter to the vast majority of the technopreneurs. Of course, t­ here ­were ­those who ­were “computer freaks” and took three days to set up their new iPhones, searching for and testing all the new features and “doodads” (e.g., TP, b. 1954, SPb 41), but most of the respondents w ­ ere so busy with basic work pro­cesses that they simply ­were not up to it. The secret is prob­ably that “[g]adgets add nothing to the technopreneur’s personality,” as the authors of the Novosibirsk report wrote (Nsk 400). Works-­in-­development, on the contrary, are bound up with the person, and when you make them function perfectly and get them ready for mass production, then it is clear that you not only worked out all the bugs to the smallest detail, you also developed and “worked out” your own personality as a creator (in the sense of honing and developing your skills). This is indeed something to be proud of. As always, one of the more marginal respondents threw a bright light on what the more typical cases obscured. He was marginal ­because, out of all the respondents interviewed in Kazan, he was the only one who had set up his quasi-­workshop in a basement (as he put it, “At the Kazan Aviation Institute, every­one who loves technology huddles in the basements”), who lacked experimental equipment and a prototype installation, who never had any money, and so on. The authors of the Tatarstan report pres­ent this respondent as a pure Soviet-­style do-­it-­yourselfer, a genius of technical invention unburdened by the task of commercializing his designs. And his self-­description bolsters this view. But his impetus is described in the purest  220 

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way: “I want to be a creator.” The fact is, he said, that “the most in­ter­est­i ng ­thing is to see what you create functioning. When the mechanisms that w ­ ere in the blueprints come alive and therefore give the per­for­mance, the speed, and the surface quality that you and you alone had conceived. That is, seeing your thoughts and your ideas come to life” (Alexander, b. 1973, Tat 116–117; the italics are mine). The materialization of your thoughts in a functioning work-­ in-­development makes you and you alone a creator. This is a lofty title ­because, by creating a new piece of real­ity, by making the passage from work-­ in-­development to an actually working real­ity, ­you’ve put yourself closer to the Creator with a capital C.

6.3 ​The Creator and Creativity Lord the Creator is the implicit model for many of the technopreneurs, even if they do not understand this ­after more than fifty years of Soviet propaganda claiming that anyone could be a creator as part of the movement of unleashing “the technological creativity among the masses.” Thus, one Tomsk respondent said, “What m ­ atters to me is that ­there is creation, an outcome I can see” (Evgenii, b. 1978, Final 86). A respondent from Tatarstan echoed him: “The pro­cess of creation for me is every­thing! I mean, the way an artist creates, paints pictures, or as a composer does it. I embody myself in airplanes. What I think, what I think up is very impor­tant to me. I embody it on paper first, then on the shop floor, then it takes off into the sky. It is this chain. It gives me strength and, generally, a zest for life. When you see the plane you have made with your hands and head, it is a dream!” (Yuri, b. 1962, Final 87). A similar drive involves d­ oing something that brings you closer to the status of the Creator, and turns a seemingly ordinary trade or craft into life’s overarching concern: “My overarching concern (I tell this to my guys, too) was that in my lifetime I wanted [to be able to say], so to speak (slaps the t­ able), ­here, ­here, ­here, I did this!” (Viktor, b. 1956, Tat 120). The difference, however, is that the Creator is eternal, while our technopreneurs have to realize their plans and ideas during their lifetimes. Other­ wise, t­ here ­w ill be no self-­realization; their unique personality w ­ ill not be revealed: “A friend of my ­father, a professor . . . ​said that for an engineer, ­there was nothing cooler than seeing one’s en-­workings [realized]. I was prob­ably around eight then, but I remembered it. This is what I push all my engineers  221 

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­towards, seeing their works-­in-­development realized in the real world” (Alexei, b. 1973, SPb, Final 82–83; the italics are mine). Let us look more closely at the two evident features of the scientist / ­engineer / creator that the interviews suggest to us. The first involves comparing oneself to a composer, artist, or poet, as Yuri has done in the quotation above. Other respondents did the same ­thing: “The interest, say, is like that of the writer or composer or any creative person. We get plea­sure from the fact we create. That is first and foremost. Well, and it is quite nice if at the same time ­there are material benefits” (Boris, b. 1938, Tat 146). It turns out that, like members of other creative professions, the scientist or engineer takes some idea or plan and gradually turns it into real­ity. The parallels with the poet, the artist, and the composer, however, should not appear obvious to us. The very idea that creativity was also pos­si­ble in science, moreover in any branch of science, had still to be proven not so long ago. For example, in the early twentieth ­century the Polish phi­los­o­pher Jan Łukasiewicz had to write a special essay, “Creativity in Science” (1912), to assert this idea. He based his argument on the poet Adam Mickiewicz, who reasonably held that the only p­ eople capable of creativity w ­ ere prophets, sages, and poets, ­people who ­were struck by inspiration. In ancient Greece, it was believed that t­ hose whom we now call artists, sculptors, and composers did not have the possibility of creating; instead, they engaged in mimesis, that is, they merely imitated nature, following par­tic­u­lar rules. Only the gods or the poets, guided by a purely personal prevision, foresight, or imagination, had the ability to create from nothing. It was thus their actions that w ­ ere denoted by the term poiesis, while it was believed that artists, sculptors, and craftsmen all practiced skills based on imitation, or techne.11 Therefore, in Old Rus­sian as well, with this understanding having entered the language along with the first translations of Greek texts, the word “creator” (tvorets) was mostly used in reference to God or such poets as Homer. Even in the 1790s Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy, the adjective “creative” was defined as “belonging to or characteristic of God, as the Creator of all t­ hings in the world,” and was illustrated by the following example: “The hand of the Creator brought every­thing into being out of nothingness.”12 Putting a new ele­ment of the world into existence, based on one’s own thoughts and ideas: when did this characteristic of God and poets come to be attributed to all scientists and, l­ ater, to engineers and technopreneurs? By  222 

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the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth c­ entury, ­under the influence of romanticism, all p­ eople of the arts in the current sense of the word came to be regarded as creators; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the transfer was made to the scientific professions as well. In post-­revolutionary Soviet Rus­sia, with the development of the innovators and inventors movement, especially among workers, the government tried to awaken the “technical creativity of the masses.” Thus, for example, in April 1925, a memorandum of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, signed by Dzerzhinsky, stated: “The country of the worker-­peasant building of Soviet communism should also be a country of collective creativity in the field of technology and improved methods of l­abor.”13 The task was now to build a paradise on earth, and the builders of this paradise ­were believed to have the collective ability to create this new world. Individually, each person’s contribution to the construction was registered through awards, certificates, and patents, and the ­people who received them gained assurance that they had something that had been attributed only to gods and poets just a hundred and fifty years earlier. Hence the awe and trembling occasioned by receiving one’s first patent: “You do some kind of creative work . . . ​­People who h ­ aven’t done creative work have a hard time understanding it. I remember when I got my first invention patent, the piece of paper: ‘Holy smoke! What a deal. This is forever!’ No one can take it away, it is like nobility” (Boris, b. 1938, Tat 117). Even when they no longer work in science, con­temporary Rus­sian technopreneurs still tend to think of their work as creative. Thus, a respondent who had completely quit working as a physicist and was currently involved only in management said, “I create, only now I have more precious material. The most precious ­thing is ­people. Hardware, though, is not worth a ­thing” (Vsevolod, b. 1962, Nsk 401). Even t­ hose who had gone into technopreneurship straight out of business school and had not worked in the technical sciences echoed this sentiment: “I used to be into hardware. Now my ambitions extend to orga­n izational pro­cesses. I am trying to create an original business model” (Maxim, b. 1978, Nsk, Final 87). The Creator (no less) is the role to which most of the Rus­sian technopreneurs aspire in their heart of hearts. In the last two quotes, though, the yearning to establish a new ele­ ment of real­ity (which the creators of Soviet technology had and the post-­ Soviet technopreneurs have inherited from the Soviet longing to build a  223 

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paradise on Earth) finds parallels in the yearning to create new ways of linking ­people in the orga­nizational patterns of a better life. Not a paradise, but still an amelioration on the way to a better ­f uture for all. ­Here it becomes clear why ­people can “embellish” themselves by means of an en-­working—­a commercialized or “implemented” work-­in-­design, as many of them still say—­using the Soviet-­era participle. As one respondent said, “So one of the en-­workings has been produced. . . . ​This is a ­whole set of en-­workings, ­there are many, many of them ­here. If each Doctor of Science had produced one coating during his lifetime and it was implemented, we would have had a huge number of dif­fer­ent coatings. But t­ here are not so many of them. Whereas ­here, a ­whole layer of coatings has been produced that w ­ ill go on developing a­ fter we are gone. . . . ​Even this one work, I think, embellishes [us]” (Anatolii, b. 1953, Tom 286). In other words, the current work-­in-­development was dif­fer­ent from ­others ­because it has been implemented, unlike a host of other works-­in-­development, and this embellishes its creators, bringing them closer to the Creator.14 Hence the second, seemingly evident characteristic of the Rus­sian technopreneurs, registered in interviews: their appeal to inspiration. For example, the working day in their organ­izations begins at nine in the morning and ends when inspiration abates: “It is just a ­matter of inspiration. If it has come to you, work as long as the work flows. Our standard working day is from nine to six. . . . ​­People come in . . . ​Well, every­one should be at work by half past nine. But they leave . . . ​Well, you finish work when the inspiration runs out” (Evgenii, b. 1978, Tom, Final 87).15 Inspiration can explain the ordinary pro­cess of discovery or hitting upon an engineering solution: “The creative pro­cess is impulsive. The solution comes like a flash, like a revelation” (Viacheslav, b. 1973, SPb, Final 87). This revelation resembles the emergence of something divine in your heart, something that then inspires you to work. Judging by the descriptions, you are seemingly borne aloft a­ fter this illumination, which gives you wings to fly. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods (Apollo or Dionysus) or the Muses literally instilled a divine spark of inspiration into poets—­that is, if one follows the etymology of the term, breathed or blew fire into it.16 Poets, like the gods, could therefore engage in poiesis, the creation of the new purely from their souls, the creation of something without outward exemplars in

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nature. ­Later Chris­t ian­ity recognized the divinely inspired nature of the Scriptures: it was h ­ uman beings who wrote them, but the Holy Spirit bestowed the inspiration on them, breathed life and divinity into ­these writings.17 The idea that particularly brilliant creative ­people have a connection with the gods sometimes appeared in our interviews as well. For example, one respondent said that in his field, mechanical engineering, all achievements mainly resulted from collective efforts, while “[o]ne person can create something only when he is particularly brilliant or, so to speak, if he has been kissed by God” (Salman Zufarovich, b. 1942, Tat, Final 86). You cannot, however, force God to kiss you whenever you like. And insight comes when it ­will, not when you need it. Of course, according to heuristic methods such as Altshuller’s TRIZ, which was fairly popu­lar in the USSR, you can prepare for its arrival with hard work, but you still cannot receive it on request. This expectation of divine inspiration contrasts interestingly with the following notion we heard about from a Taiwanese respondent: Inspiration is when you are inspired by cooperation. . . . ​How awesomely Einstein and Steve Jobs composed both lyr­ics and ­music. Like, say, Chang Yu-­sheng (a famous Taiwanese singer and composer). They all found inspiration. However, this feeling passes, so how then to achieve it, where do you get it? I see very clearly that through my spirit I can r­ eally impart inspiration. ­Today I asked two engineers, ‘Did you have inspiration before, at the end of last year? And now?’ It was at fifty p­ ercent, and I was able to convey it to them. You could say I taught them how to work with inspiration. But the stronger the inspiration, the more often it happens, and you can train yourself more in this re­spect. (Jiahao, b. 1967, Tai, Final 86)

It is not so impor­tant w ­ hether this respondent felt somewhat like a god who could transmit the spark of inspiration to his employees at ­w ill or ­whether he was simply talking about how he inspired them with speeches whenever they could not access the artistic inspiration of singers and composers. What m ­ atters is what this fairly strange story tells us about the

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ordinary understanding of how t­ hings work in Rus­sia. Training yourself to get inspiration when you want it is something inaccessible to Rus­sian technopreneurs. Many of them waited for inspiration to descend upon them, and so, as they said, they could not completely plan the workflow ahead of time: a­ fter all, inspiration could not be planned: “I myself am a very creative person, and time management has always been something that annoys me. I cannot live solely by a schedule. It ­really, ­really annoys me. I could not be a bureaucrat, where every­thing is scheduled in advance. I try to be constantly inventive” (Timur, b. 1973, Tat, Final 87). The ethnic Korean Rus­sians who moved back to South K ­ orea for work purposes noted t­ here w ­ ere too many creative ­people in Rus­sia. What the country needed w ­ ere strict and methodical business organizers: “That is the basic difference between p­ eople working in business and creative p­ eople. I mean, [creative p­ eople] ­don’t particularly plan. I mean, if I plan something, then ­there is no hardline. But business ­people plan every­thing rigorously, they know where they are headed. T ­ hese are the kind of p­ eople Rus­sia needs now” (Igor, b. 1959, Kor, Final 87). Sometimes the dominance of creative individuals even leads to dysfunction, as when every­one tries to add some innovation and thus skews the work pro­cess. For example, one respondent had this to say about her western partners: [T]hey are so well-­ordered, so proper ­people . . . ​­There is less of the creative ele­ment about them. But h ­ ere in Rus­sia, ­there is so much creativity that it even happens that our Rus­sian engineers always try and introduce something to a straightforward technological pro­cess. Along the way. So quite often we get something completely dif­fer­ent in terms of the technological flow chart. On the one hand, it ­causes trou­ble when a pro­cess is being readied. But on the other hand, it is our advantage, ­because we have this ­really creative thinking, and we can come up with unpredictable technical solutions that no one in the West would have even thought of. That is, what they methodically develop, our guys can just sit down and think it over. Think it over, and wham! On the basis of intuitions, experience, and some other ­things, that certain something is born that simply astounds even western minds. (Olga, b. 1980, Tom, Final 110)  226 

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This is how the technopreneurs understand themselves: this ubiquitous creativity is fraught with danger as well as opportunity for the country’s unexpected success. But perhaps they are mistaken? Maybe the Korean Rus­sian quoted above was right that what the country mainly needed now ­were methodical commercializers, not ­people who wanted to use inspired creativity to get closer to the Creator in their lifetimes? For, as one respondent noted, “[P]eople who love and know how to en-­work (razrabatyvat’) something, usually find it hard to sell something. I do not deny such ­people exist, but unfortunately I am not among them” (TP, b. 1967, SPb 47).

6.4 ​Euphoria and Buzz as Signs of Proximity to the Divine The ideal of in­ter­est­ing, exciting work had already been foisted on the masses in Soviet times. As one respondent said, “[W]e ­were taught that work should be in­ter­est­ing, and naturally sought out in­ter­est­ing work” (Vera, b. 1952, Tom, Final 104). This has persisted in the lives of post-­Soviet technopreneurs. Money ­matters, but in­ter­est­ing work m ­ atters more, at least rhetorically: “Money is also a very impor­tant tool . . . ​if you have enough to ser­vice your own needs at sufficient level. ­There ­isn’t this striving to roll over every­thing like a tank and keep g­ oing on and on uphill. T ­ here is no sense in that, life is not about that. . . . ​If you have the chance to live, you should realize your interests . . . ​ This means you are not setting out to climb to the top to grab every­thing. One loses sense in life if one does [that]” (Anatolii, b. 1953, Tom 263). Such assertions that in­ter­est­ing work ­matters more than money would surprise many of Anatolii’s Taiwanese and South Korean colleagues. In Rus­sia, however, this was often thought to be a quality of successful technopreneurs generally. For example, Andrei said, “This is prob­ably another t­ hing all successful entrepreneurs in the high-­tech field have in common: I have never done anything I did not like ­doing. Just on princi­ple. If I ­don’t like it, I am not ­going to do it. When you are ­doing what you like, you ­don’t perceive it as some kind of burden, as something heavy. You do it ­because it is fun” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 283). We also find the same feeling, but expressed as a succinct princi­ple, almost a motto, among the younger respondents: “You should not do work you d­ on’t love just in order to get money” (Ravil, b. 1981, Tat, Final 139).  2 27 

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Communist doctrine postulated that a­ fter the f­ uture elimination of the division of ­labor and thorough automatization of the production pro­cess, ­people engaged in creative activities would not distinguish between work and leisure. In the absence of alienated and alienating work, their life is so in­ter­ est­ing that Monday is not a black day on the calendar; instead, as Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky stated in the title of one of their most famous novels, Monday Begins on Saturday, you work happily on weekends and go to work as if ­every day ­were a holiday.18 The following quotation illustrates how commonplace the Strugatskys’ notion was among the Rus­sian technopreneurs: [In] contrast, perhaps, with the ­g reat mass of ­people for whom Monday is a tragic day, [­because] they have to get up ­a fter the weekend and go to work, this tragedy has not existed for me for many, many years. I find it fairly in­ter­est­i ng ­here, although it all gets to me periodically, all this paperwork . . . ​Well, you go somewhere to relax . . . ​a nd basically then you happily come back even to the routine affairs. I mean, I spend the weekends ­here fairly often, and not only b­ ecause of a desperate lack of time, but also ­because I do not have this separation: yeah, this is personal time, I find it in­ter­est­i ng, while ­here I am d­ oing my work. (Vladimir, b. 1956, Tom 280)

In the ordinary Soviet interpretation, this ­labor was supposed to be a feature of the ­f uture Communist society, but some creative professions could and can show us certain aspects of universal l­abor even now. Many p­ eople believed they w ­ ere already living that way. Another respondent, who had also acquired his basic work skills at a research institute in Soviet times, described it this way: “We just always loved our work terribly; it was in­ter­est­i ng to us. For us, it was the meaning and purpose of life. We would come to work on weekends and work ­until nine ­o’clock. Basically, we did it ­because we ­were interested. ­Because we loved it. It was hardly only ­because of the money . . . ​ The main ­thing was an interest in science, meaning one wanted to learn new ­things, to understand mysteries, make discoveries. [Make] one’s own amazing appliance” (Viktor, b. 1956, Tat 123). I have repeated this quotation b­ ecause this seemingly trivial description contains all three basic ele­ments—­a terrible love of in­ter­est­ing work, the need  228 

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for novelty and mystery, and the realization of oneself in an amazing device—­ which are expressed by words that represent the opposite of triviality and mundaneness: “terrible,” “mystery,” “amazing.” The use of such words shows why the person was interested in d­ oing such t­ hings. Marveling at the world, discovering secrets, and being terribly in love: all t­ hese t­ hings are fascinating and captivating. We have already discussed in­ter­est­i ng work and the love of such work. Let us now take a closer look at the second ele­ment, the craving for novelty, and the impulse against routine, in which the most attractive ­things are mysteries. Then we w ­ ill move on to the third ele­ment, amazing devices. It sometimes seemed that the tyranny of novelty was a condition of a job’s excitement. As one respondent said, “Personally, I cannot deal with routine, monotonous or in other words, assembly-­line stuff. I ­will never stop and start ­doing ­things in a uniform, tightly restricted way” (Alexander, b. 1970, Tom 260). Newness is also impor­tant ­because it is a claim for recognition of your achievements in the eyes of the relevant community: “An original, genuinely new solution always finds recognition in the end” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom, Final 87). Newness partakes of mystery, since it fetches a new ele­ment of real­ity seemingly out of nothingness: “To make a new ­thing with your own hands. A ­really new product that did not exist before. That is prob­ably the main ­thing” (Kirill, b. 1986, SPb, Final 87). Describing the phenomenology of religion u ­ nder the influence of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade emphasized that one of the central experiences of the sacred is the mysterium fascinans, a terrifying but fascinating mystery.19 In technopreneurship, this experience is provided by the very work of comprehending a mystery and then setting in motion something that did not exist before you in princi­ple. Is this not why the fear and trembling that inform the fascinating mysteries of traditional religions have such a slight impact on the Rus­sian technopreneurs? As the report on Tatarstan, for example, concludes, “The majority of them are non-­believers, but they are often superstitious. . . . ​A ll our in­for­mants evinced a respectful but also detached attitude ­towards religion” (Tat 143). Could it be other­wise? When you read descriptions of the exciting real­ity of scientific discovery or the implementation of new engineering ideas (both cases in which a new ele­ment of objective real­ity emerges from concealment or out of nothingness), it seems the p­ eople involved in this are in a state of  229 

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euphoria. More precisely, following the words of technopreneurs themselves, ­here we must separate the euphoria of involvement in the pro­cess and the buzz (Rus­sian: kaif ) produced by the result. The euphoria of the pro­cess was captured, for example, by this quotation: “You sometimes feel real euphoria from solving complicated technological prob­lems” (Alexei, b. 1964, Tat 146). ­Here, “complicated” does not only mean “complex,” or consisting of a large number of components and therefore difficult to solve ­because of their number. “Complicated” quite often means a prob­lem of universal scope, and the enchanting part is that you are touching on the secrets of the universe: In this sense, this is a l­ ittle task with no end in sight. I mean, t­ here is no ceiling vis­i­ble. That is what is in­ter­est­ing to work on. But tasks demanded by a client, concrete ones, like mea­sur­i ng the melting point of lard, from the engineering point of view we would take them on, but I d­ on’t know why I would need to mea­ sure the melting point of lard . . . ​In our case, the goals we set at the com­pany and the challenges we could solve with our equipment . . . ​they are simply of universal scope. (Konstantin, b. 1981, Nsk 386–387; citation augmented from the full transcript of the interview)

The pro­cess of solving such prob­lems is so captivating that it provides very intense positive experiences: “The point is that it is this tremendous plea­ sure. I ­don’t remember what prob­lem I was solving, but I sat down in the eve­n ing, stood up in the morning, and I had written two articles. I mean, it is an unforgettable feeling you want to keep repeating. No, it is this specific buzz” (Sergei, b. 1954, SPb, Final 87). When God’s grace descends on a person, this also provides a poignant experience of ineffable bliss, so poignant that some p­ eople become monks in order to experience it at least one more time. The basic tension of monasticism, however, is that many of t­ hose who take vows w ­ ill never have this experience again. In scientific and technological entrepreneurship, however, the quasi-­experience of grace is given several times in life, if not several times a year. But even that only happens to the particularly gifted. The question of why the work is so pleasant and enchanting produces the following answer: “I would compare it with an interest in sports. What  230 

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is the thrill, I ­don’t know, of ­r unning in the slush and chasing a ball? And what is the thrill of playing hockey? . . . ​From many points of view, this be­ hav­ior is not, say, for perpetuating the species; if we assume that man is programmed to do this, this be­hav­ior is not entirely rational. Well, you just want to do it, you get emotions from it, you want to do it, and you do it. I guess, first of all, ­because I always just loved ­doing it” (Oleg, b. 1983, Nsk 386). The technopreneur realizes that from the outside, the game might seem absurd, especially if it generates no money now or in the ­f uture. But ­those involved in it know what intense plea­sure one can experience by d­ oing it, and that is something money cannot buy. One quotation quite succinctly captures the plea­sure experienced by the technopreneur: “Solving complex prob­lems turns me on [menia shtyrit]” (Timur, b. 1973, Tat, Final 87).20 We should stress that this is dif­fer­ent from the plea­sure of risk-­taking experienced by any entrepreneur, and which several ex-­scientists-­t urned-­entrepreneurs discovered in themselves: “[I]t gives me a lot of plea­sure. Do you know the adrenaline buzz you get, for example, from ­going broke? [Laughs.] I’m not talking about losing a thousand bucks at a casino, but up and losing a com­pany that might have been worth, say, two or three million dollars, with a million and a half in debt. (Normal audits ­were not done back then.) That is tougher than losing at the casino. All ­people involved in business are, in one way or another, gamblers” (Andrei, b. 1963, Tom 262). Getting a buzz from risk is not a specific quality of technopreneurs, but a part of commercial life they come to know along with other entrepreneurs. Getting a buzz from solving complex prob­lems is something specific to the technopreneurs, and most likely not only to the Rus­sian ones. The second type of pleasure—­the buzz obtained not from the pro­cess of technopreneurship, but from its outcomes—­was mentioned no less frequently in the interviews. Only h ­ ere, the high and the rush come not from coming into contact with the mysteries of the universe, but from contemplating your own new product, which you generated in an amazing way (and often a mysterious way, since an inspiring illumination is inexplicable): “[W]hen you strug­gle and strug­gle, and it comes off, t­ here is a buzz (kaif )! . . . ​For a research designer or scientist, it is r­ eally cool to see your product in the real world! And that, in my opinion, is the spirit of entrepreneurship that compels scientists to open companies. They want to do cool stuff” (Alexei, b. 1973, SPb, Final 71). Another respondent emphasized the mysterious way in which  231 

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every­thing somehow came together and started working by itself: “The biggest buzz from all this comes when what has been put together works. That ­ atter is a thrill (kaif )! And it works the way it should! That’s it! [It does not m ­whether] ­there is money or not, ­whether someone ­w ill need it or not. When it happened the way you wanted it to, and it came together that way, and it works the way it should, that is a thrill” (Grigorii, b. 1972, Tom 286). A third respondent described a situation in which one still gets plea­sure from encountering a product in its “adulthood” rather than in its infancy, when it is first introduced: “I get no less turned on when I am sitting in a plane waiting to take off, and some guy is watching the end of a match on his iPad, and I am watching over his shoulder, and from the quality I can tell it is K***-­TV, not some other product. Moreover, I can tell this only from the image, the quality of the image. I know that no ­else could produce such a quality image. Before takeoff, he closes the application—­yes, it’s K***-­T V!” (TP, b. 1976, SPb 39). Young and old respondents alike experienced this buzz from the fruits of their creative l­abors: “The interest, say, is like that of the writer or composer or any creative person. We get plea­sure from the fact we create. That is first and foremost. Well, and it is quite nice if at the same time ­there are material benefits” (Boris, b. 1938, Tat 146). Plea­sure from the fruit of one’s l­ abor can be broken down into two parts. First, t­ here is the buzz from the fact that your personal vision and your personal fantasy have generated a new real­ity. (Let us recall that, in ancient Greece, only the gods and poets ­were capable of this.) We have already quoted Alexander: “The most in­ter­est­ing ­thing is to see what you create functioning. When the mechanisms that ­were in the blueprints come alive and therefore give the per­for­mance, the speed, and the surface quality that you and you alone had conceived. That is, seeing your thoughts and your ideas come to life” (Alexander, b. 1973, Tat 116–117; the italics are mine). ­Here, the technopreneur is understood as a Creator who animates ideas and brings them to life in the form of functioning mechanisms with well-­defined characteristics. Second, if you imitate the Creator and look on as your thoughts generate new, hitherto unseen ele­ments of the world, it is clear that your plea­sure consists not only in creating, but also in naming, as the Christian God did, for example: “I have had a lot of such happiness. For example, we did what no one ­else had done before in Rus­sia. We created two markets, two products that simply had not existed before. A new type of consumption. It’s nice. . . . ​  232 

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You go to another part of the country and see ­people riding in the boat you en-­worked (razrabotal) and in­ven­ted, so to speak. Well, it’s nice, of course, yeah. The name you came up with, ­t here it is” (Vsevolod, b. 1962, Nsk 386).

6.5 ​The Euphoria of Creativity or Methodical Commercialization? The following picture emerges: Rus­sian technopreneurs behave like Creators, and in the pro­cess they are filled with the divine creative spirit and gripped by euphoria. When they realize their unique ideas—­the outcome of long l­abors (“you strug­gle and strug­gle”) and sudden insights—­they also realize their unique identities as creators of this or that concrete piece of real­ity. Depending on how you feel about this attempt to lay claim to the power and scope of the Creator Himself, you can regard this as lovable or laughable pride. But it is this claim that Rus­sian scientific culture (and now, technopreneurship) has inherited ­after the seventy-­year dominance of Soviet civilization, which tried to convince every­one it was pos­si­ble to build a paradise on this earth, in this life, not in the hereafter. And that in keeping with their abilities and opportunities, every­one could take part in a drama entitled Hard to Be a God (the title of another novel by the Strugatskys): anyone touched by creative inspiration could join with other such p­ eople to become the collective Creator of a world that would be both socially and physically new. Seemingly, this opportunity was difficult and not always given to every­one, but it was theoretically feasible. Of course, it was not only the Soviet experiment that had tried to implant in the soul of the masses this feeling that every­one could be a creator and lay claim to almost divine power. Other religious traditions could imagine first deciphering, and then replicating, God’s plan and providence. Some dared to implement it, generating Golems, Frankenstein monsters, and w ­ hole socie­ ties as in Huxley’s Brave New World. But hardly anywhere ­else has ­human arrogance reached such heights that the chance to become a Creator in one par­tic­u­lar chunk of real­ity was offered not to par­tic­u­lar individuals or groups, but to every­one. Arousing the social and technical creativity of the masses, granting this ability to every­one, was, apparently, an official state program only in the Soviet Union and, perhaps, in the socialist bloc.  233 

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Comparing Rus­sia with the other ­g reat scientific power of the twentieth ­century, the United States, we notice the following. Describing changes within the scientific vocation in the English-­speaking world over the past four centuries, Steven Shapin has written that from the mid-­seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, the natu­ral phi­los­o­pher or scientist was regarded as a special creature. First, the scientific knowledge gained from reading the book of the universe, which was written by God, had a par­t ic­u ­lar status. Someone who had learned the secrets of this book was no ordinary person, but was privy to divine mysteries and filled with a divine afflatus.21 Second, such ­people imitated God in their thoughts when they correctly perceived the laws of nature. This was a commonplace for men like Boyle, Newton, and Priestley: their knowledge was not that of commoners or common sense; it was sublime, since it accessed the truths of the universe and the divine providence. Of course, the end of the nineteenth c­ entury saw the destruction of vari­ous metaphysical worldviews, and so in the early twentieth ­century, science, now almost wholly based on the experimental method, tried to distance itself from metaphysics and religion by showing that it relied on ordinary methods of working with tools and materials, methods of which common sense was also capable. Science was now not contemplative; rather, it actively tried to penetrate nature’s secrets and even create new ele­ments thereof, but the p­ eople who did this no longer thought of themselves as the Lord’s servants. Instead, they saw themselves as ordinary citizens who just kept the last two sacraments—­the rules of the scientific method (as applied to their fields) and the unconditional validity of mathe­matics. This was what one could rely on when constructing verifiable propositions about nature, but scientists no longer played the role of God’s priests who helped to reveal His plans. Previously, the idea of the scientific vocation presumed that God called on scientists to help p­ eople understand the book of nature. P ­ eople like Boyle thus thought of themselves as “amateurs”: the love of God had called them to their work. The emergence of the professional scientist changed the rules of the game. ­Until the late nineteenth ­century, and even into the early twentieth, it was hard to earn much money in science (the ­union between the state and science was not as strong as it is ­today), and t­ hose who went into science found themselves in the situation of poor virtuous souls, u ­ nless they ­were rich men like Boyle and Cavendish. A special morality of poverty and mod 234 

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esty was therefore attributed to most scientists then: to do science, one had to bury many of one’s material interests.22 The Second World War and ensuing Cold War changed every­thing. Hiroshima called into question the existence of special virtues among scientists, since the terrible consequences of their inventions and the large amounts of money they w ­ ere suddenly earning testified to serious moral quandaries. In addition, the military-­industrial complex suddenly required lots of scientists, and science itself became the collective ­labor of large numbers of ­people in huge organ­i zations. ­A fter the Second World War, fifty ­percent of American scientists worked at forty-­five major corporations.23 Sociologists saw this as a prob­lem, b­ ecause they w ­ ere concerned that scientists would sacrifice the ideals of disinterested scientific knowledge for the sake of profit. The man­ag­ers of corporate research departments and labs saw the prob­lem elsewhere. Instead of worrying about a potential conflict of values, they ­were more interested in comparing their field with o ­ thers, and in the fact that science ­appeared not to be an adventure, but a boring occupation that attracted weird, asocial p­ eople. Sitting over test tubes in a corporate lab with two hundred other p­ eople was not like playing football (despite what Rus­sian technopreneurs now say about science as an exciting sport). Although this last circumstance changed a bit ­after Sputnik was launched in 1957, opening the age of space exploration and scientific (not only military) competition between the two superpowers. Big-­time science became more exciting. In this account, however, we do not see the mass impulse to create a new world, just as we do not see a shred of the desire to lay claim to the Creator’s powers. ­A fter the emergence of industrial science and the final extinction, in the early twentieth ­century, of the figure of the natu­ral phi­los­o­pher or naturalist who tortured nature in order to shed a ­little light on God’s secrets, revealing them to every­one, American scientists came to resemble corporate clerks and engineers. Generally, they worked more to feed their families and less from a need to seek the truth, and certainly not out of a need to create a brave new world on earth.24 Of course, competition with the Soviets made American science a better-­paid sport; it brought a sense of adventure and helped develop the competitive spirit, but it still was a paid mass employment. Entrepreneurial science was the next stage. Launched in the late 1970s and booming by the 1980s, the massive shift of American scientists to  2 35 

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entrepreneurship turned the universities into places of constant ethical reflection and doubt. For example, is this biochemist working in a university laboratory for the good of society or that of the com­pany he founded just outside the university campus gates? Many university scientists criticized the commercial impulse of colleagues who had become scientific entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, ­those who had left claimed that only in commercial companies ­were they ­free from vari­ous restrictions, and that they ­were making science more efficient and effective. The back-­and-­forth flow of scientists between entrepreneurship and the universities is a feature of American science that sets it apart from Rus­sia even now. In Rus­sia, p­ eople rarely return to pure science: ­there are too few serious grants and attractive positions, and scientific work skills are ­either forfeited or they seem less attractive to someone who has worked in business or management. Capping his moral history of science, Shapin notes, however, that ­after the scientific entrepreneurial boom, individual virtues and personal qualities have once again become impor­tant, as they had been prior to the early twentieth c­ entury, when scientists w ­ ere ascribed a lofty or special moral status, a par­tic­u­lar set of scientific virtues. In business ventures and start-­ups, the investor’s personal confidence determines a g­ reat deal; standard professional tests and criteria do not function in this case, and so personal contacts are once again defining the ­future of cutting-­edge science. But in the new American technopreneurship (even that segment of it that creates organisms with desirable properties through gene modification), we are unlikely to find the pride of the Soviet scientist or post-­Soviet entrepreneur who went into the field in order to experience the pleasant burden of being God. Most American scientists and technopreneurs would not dare commit such sacrilege. Apparent instances of transcendental pride among American technopreneurs do turn up, however. For example, one of our interviewees deliberately borrowed a phrase made famous by Steve Jobs to define his own position. The interviewee had the following to say about the difference between the older and younger generations of Rus­sian technopreneurs: “­There is just this new energy in a certain segment of the new, young generation. Yes, I believe that among the young t­ here are ­those out t­ here who could be called old school. And among the older and mature entrepreneurs ­there are also the ones and the o ­ thers, progressive entrepreneurs and so-so entrepreneurs. So the criterion ­here is not age, but that a youthful energy, a fire in the eyes,  236 

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and a desire, as Steve Jobs said, to make a dent in the universe, are pres­ent. Well, at very least, t­ here is a desire to make a dent in the Rus­sian IT market” (Timur, b. 1973, Tat 126; cited from the full transcript of the interview). It seems Timur was simply relying on the American scientific entrepreneurial drive, if not copying it. (In the previous chapter of this book, I quoted him as saying he had deliberately made Steve Jobs his personal hero.) However, we should understand that Jobs’ phrase, “make a dent in the universe,” is fairly culturally specific, and in many ways has nothing to do with having a shot at radically altering the universe. Walter Isaac­son’s well-­ known biography of Jobs, which pop­u ­lar­i zed the motto, mentions it several times. First, ­there is a ­whole chapter in the book entitled “Dent in the Universe,” a colorful account of how Jobs launched the Macintosh computer in 1984, when he r­ eally did, it now seems, establish new rules in the PC market by showing the new graphics capabilities of the Mac, with its icon-­driven interface (soon to be copied by Win­dows). But he also left his mark in business history with the advertising campaign for the new computer, which consciously portrayed IBM as an Orwellian Big ­Brother singlehandedly trying to control the computer market.25 Besides the dent in the universe made by presenting the Macintosh to the world, Isaac­son also mentions that Jobs used the phrase when trying to persuade programmer Bill Atkinson to come work for Apple, since other­w ise Atkinson would not be on the crest of the wave, but only dragging in its wake on his surf board; that would not be nearly as cool, for he would make no dent in the universe. The word is also used two times in reference to products, not ­people: the Apple II was unable to make a dent, so Jobs moved on to the Mac, and earlier, pre-­iPad versions of tablet computers ­were also unable to make a dent.26 All ­these examples are about the impression made by a sharp, decisive blow. We have to understand that Jobs, the idol of our respondent from ­Tatarstan, was no Bill Gates, as Isaac­son explic­itly discusses in a separate chapter. Gates always had a condescending attitude t­ oward Jobs, b­ ecause the latter did not know how to program. But at the same time, Jobs considered Gates dull, ­because he had not gone to India as a hippie to search for himself, had not taken LSD, knew nothing about calligraphy, style, and taste, and had immediately dropped out of Harvard as the first opportunity to go into business presented itself. In this re­spect, Gates more resembles the techno 237 

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preneurs described in Shapin’s book, who came from the scientific world. Jobs, on the other hand, arrived where he did through subcultural pursuits, like self-­d iscovery and the humanities. It’s true that he had always also been fond of electronics: his childhood hero was inventor Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid. But when he was twelve, Jobs called his other idol, Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packard, a­ fter finding his number in the phone book, to ask him for spare parts for a device he was building in his garage. His life’s purpose, according to Isaac­son, was to build a com­pany like Polaroid or HP that would long outlive him.27 In other words, although risk and the desire for ­g reat results of enormous scope are pres­ent, we do not find in Jobs’ story a desire to remake the universe like the Creator. ­There was the desire to make a quite noticeable mark, but nothing more. And more American technopreneurs, one would suspect, resemble the uncharismatic Gates.

6.6 ​Lessons for Technological Modernization Looking at the quasi-­religious feelings among Rus­sian technopreneurs that we have described—­the creative euphoria and buzz they get from their products—­one starts to understand their widespread agnosticism, if not atheism. If Rus­sian technopreneurs are mainly uninterested in traditional religions, then perhaps it is ­because in their lifetime they have been able to have no less sublime and exciting experiences (and they take religions to be just about this, not much more). But perhaps ­these experiences also cause them to leave the world b­ehind and prevent them from methodically bringing their inventions and designs to the stage of successful commercialization in the shape of a marketable patent or final product? For t­ hose who are concerned with the technological modernization of Russia—­a nd thus take the question in the title of the fine recent book by Loren Graham, Lonely Ideas: Can Rus­sia Compete?, to be the epitome of Rus­ sia’s predicament—­there is, perhaps, a way of dealing with this.28 Given that the readership of the Strugatsky novels seems to be falling (if we are to believe the largely anecdotal data, though it does correspond to a widely shared perception), t­ here is a possibility that the practices of self-­deification of scientist entrepreneurs through Creativity have been gradually waning as the Soviet past fades further and further away from us.29 One could then perhaps ridicule a desire of our technopreneurs to reprise the Creator in one  238 

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par­tic­u ­lar chunk of real­ity and pop­u ­lar­ize examples of a dif­fer­ent kind of technopreneurship whose origins are not the lab, but the factory floor, the merchant’s stall, and the stock trader’s computer screen. The EUSP STS center research team has seen few such examples in Rus­sia, but no one has said they do not exist at all or that it is impossible to promote and develop this way of infusing technopreneurship with energy. From this standpoint, the prob­lems are clear: the country needs methodical commercializers. They exist in Rus­sia, only ­there are too few of them in high-­tech entrepreneurship, so they have to be recruited into the field. For example, incentives for returning to the high technology business could be established to encourage former scientists who went into business in the early 1990s and built companies and stores, and sold chicken wings, so to speak. Now they have made it rich and acquired vast entrepreneurial experience. Of course, they have largely forfeited their scientific reputations and skills, but they remember the supreme value of pursuing science. If they re­ entered the high-­tech sector, they could decisively contribute to organ­i zing production and profit-­making so often lacking among current technopreneurs. And one should poeticize the few such examples by writing their bi­ reat ­People series (though perhaps this part of the ographies for The Lives of G ­ reat Technopreneurs). The country must series could be renamed The Lives of G know its heroes so that c­ hildren could follow their example. Another option for fostering the technological modernization of Rus­sia would be the following. Taiwan and South ­Korea produce few inventions per se, but they do produce numerous innovations. Why could not certain Rus­ sian regions—­particularly ­those where ideals of patriarchal agricultural l­ abor and family-­like community are still respected—­shift their focus in this direction? One should set aside the lofty ideology of Creators and try to make it profitable and easy for entrepreneurs with a non-­academic background to invest in innovative high-­tech production (rather than in inventing new ele­ ments of the universe). ­There are power­f ul counter-­arguments capable of destroying t­ hese two proposals. The first is represented in Graham’s book, which implies that the proposed advice—­particularly the first proposal, based on what he would call “attitudinal change”—­w ill largely fail if ­there is no corollary amelioration in the situation regarding the rule of law and real po­liti­cal competition. ­Because of the lack of po­liti­cal freedom (in the absence of this competition)  239 

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and the poor grades Rus­sia got and still gets in dif­fer­ent rule-­of-­law indexes, ­those Rus­sians who had in­ven­ted many fine devices and gadgets of the twentieth c­ entury could not implement or commercialize them at home.30 But ­there is also another power­f ul counter-­argument. In another influential book, Graham and Jean-­M ichel Kantor show how the religious mysticism of the Rus­sian Orthodox sect called The Name Worshipping was the basis of the achievements made by the renowned Moscow School of Mathe­matics in the twentieth c­ entury. Set theory had been in­ven­ted by the German mathematician Georg Kantor and elaborated by French mathematicians. But the breakthrough in set theory was made by Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky, using something the Germans and French did not have, namely, the Name Worshipping mysticism that motivated many of the theorists in the Moscow School, who hoped to approach God using mathe­matics: “[B]oth God and sets ­were made real by their naming. In fact, the ‘set of all sets’ might be God Himself.”31 Thus, mystical experiences paved the way to the development of rational knowledge. Of course, it has traditionally been ­imagined that as science has progressed, religion has opposed and fought it. H ­ ere, the opposite was the case: it was the religious drive that contributed to the scientific breakthrough that made Rus­sia a world leader in mathematical thought. We still enjoy the legacy of this mathematical greatness. Rus­sian teen­agers win numerous prizes at hackathons or­ga­n ized by companies like Google and Microsoft. In Boston, a popu­lar émigré joke had it that Rus­sian immigrants subdivided into two ethnicities, taxi driver and programmer, so common w ­ ere they within this group. So we have a very high employment of Rus­sian software engineers in the IT sector internationally, the fame of internationally expanding firms like Yandex and mail.ru, but rather meager results when Rus­sian entrepreneurs are engaged in developing or marketing tangible high tech devices in their home country (with a few highly vis­i­ble exceptions, of course). Some of the best Rus­sian minds have also mulled over this issue. In his late works, Vladimir Bibikhin—­the Rus­sian equivalent of Heidegger, given what he did in following the Holzwege of Rus­sian language (as Heidegger did following the German ones)—­elaborated on an idea he had conceived during perestroika: Rus­sia’s world-­historical mission was to reject the Eu­ro­pean Renaissance-­era proj­ect of self-­constitution. As he wrote, Rus­sia’s mission was the “subversion of self-­constitution [samoustroenie].”32 The idea ­here was that  240 

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the West Eu­ro­pe­ans’ attempts to fashion every­thing themselves neglected something larger that we could call God or the World. In this strain of thought, it is not that Rus­sians cannot build well-­f unctioning ­things or well-­ ordered institutions—­they could if they wanted!—­but they simply did not wish for a clearly calculated refashioning of life according to strict rules, ­because they knew ­there was something greater in life than just ­humans and their proj­ects. Humankind has to be reminded of this, and Rus­sia is this reminder. In Bibikhin’s poetic rendering, this conception had a multivalent ring. In Rus­sia, he wrote, the individual who “has constituted himself up on earth ­w ill not suit himself, ­w ill suit not himself, ­w ill suit always another.”33 Given the polysemy of the verb ustroit’, which means to both “suit” and “constitute, construct, ­settle,” this might be interpreted in two ways. ­Either we have an indication of a profound lack, a void in the very heart of the Re­nais­sance humanist proj­ect: a self-­constituting person ­w ill never be content with him-­or herself; he or she ­w ill only be content with somebody or something other, and hence the goal of self-­constitution is never achievable. Or we find in this philosophical prophecy a set of more ominous overtones: a self-­constituting person ­w ill never constitute only him-­or herself, but ­w ill always try to constitute another in the way he or she sees fit, which leads to perennial conflicts between dif­fer­ent proj­ects of self-­constitution. Bibikhin’s conceptual language could illuminate the condition of the Rus­ sian technopreneurs in the following way. If they still require prob­lems of universal scope and resist commercialization, it is not ­because they are fundamentally unable to get it right, but b­ ecause, as Bibikhin would claim, they do not desire the radical godlessness and worldlessness of modern Eu­ro­pean civilization. In other words, they do not want to live a life where we have forgotten about God or the world, who or what h ­ ouse us all so well, sometimes captivating us so completely that we forget ourselves, wholly absorbed by the pro­cess. Of such moments of creative flight we say, “I was captivated,” “I was creatively enraptured,” “Solving complex prob­lems turns me on,” “I dig it,” “I am hooked.” “Captivated” means that something bigger than I wholly occupied my thoughts and fascinated me in the sense of carry­ing me away. I did not exist at the moment when I was solving a fascinating theoretical prob­lem, just as I am not ­there when I am wholly absorbed in a fascinating per­for­mance or film. “Enraptured” means a pro­cess of sublime abduction is underway:  241 

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something greater than me takes me away from myself during a moment of creativity, steals me away, for I am not ­there when I create; I am wholly dissolved in this enrapturing pro­cess. “Hooked” means that some power greater than myself has grabbed me, and that when I am solving a prob­lem of universal significance, it rushes and transports me to parts unknown. That, perhaps, is what we mean when we say that “creativity is attractive”: while engaged in it, I was extracted, taken out of myself and away from the mundane road of existence I was on just a few moments ago.34 In the very vocabulary and grammar of ordinary phrases, the Rus­sian language reflects the fact that when ­people create, they are rushed, transported, abducted, and carried away by some sublime force greater than themselves. But this notion is not just a Rus­sian one. Bibikhin, who wrote a lot about the world, largely followed the insights of Heidegger, who wrote in German, but ­these insights are just as pos­si­ble in French, En­glish, and so on. All ­these languages contain a residual understanding, in the meta­phors found in the roots of words, that when we engage in conceptual thinking, we not only grasp real­ity in concepts (“concept” is derived from the Latin concipere, from com—­“together” + capere “take”), but something ­else grabs and abducts us, takes us away. So perhaps it is impossible to assault this instinctive sense of Rus­sian scientist entrepreneurs, with proximity to the Divine being the existential condition of any captivating thought? Influenced by the Soviet hubris, they might have mistaken proximity to God for the task of becoming gods themselves. As one could reasonably expect, both versions of t­ hese relations with the Divine (being captivated by creative thought or aspiring to be a Creator) might be standing in the way of attempts to commercialize and thus to accomplish the goals of technological modernization in Rus­sia as it is conceived now by the powers that be. The subject of this book, however, is not about the feasibility of prospects of this technological modernization, but rather a phenomenon of res publica. Our main concern thus is ­whether this proximity to the Divine (which the technopreneurs now exemplify so well, and which the rest of the Rus­sian population might still residually embody, given that ­every Soviet citizen was supposed and even pushed to aspire to be a Creator) stands in the way or helps the accession from the level of the common ­things to the level of res publica. We w ­ ill now turn to ­these summary considerations in the Conclusion.  242 

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This book has studied many aspects of communal and public life in the wake of what seemed to be a collapse of Communism. However, if we see in Communism not only an ideology but a profound experience of vari­ous types of common sharing around which dif­fer­ent forms of socializing and sociability have been built—­that is, as practices of commoning pervaded by practices of communing—we find that a resulting hybrid common-­social realm still largely precludes the formation of genuine public life in the sense of both classic republicanism of Cicero and the modern republicanism of Hannah Arendt. However, the resulting condition is not hopeless, since we see ele­ ments of res publica developing even in Rus­sia. Let me recount these hopes. When we studied the ubiquity of friendship in Rus­sia, we found that a typical interpersonal friendship involves commoning of three types of t­ hings: ­those that are consumed or destroyed together (food, libations, camping equipment, ­etc.), ­those that are augmented together (photos, books, musical recordings, ­etc.), and ­t hose that do not change in quantity but serve as mediators, settings, and arenas for friendship (messengers, e-­mail, and other communication devices; and places such as sites for parties, hangouts, beaches, ­etc.). A novel fourth ­thing that ties con­ temporary intense psychological friendship between individuals is a specific linguistic subcode that they produce, altering the ways of speaking in order to mark off their in-­g roup from an outside world and ensure the intensity of  243 

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sharing. Thus, ­these three types of physical durable ­things and a new shared intangible t­ hing called a linguistic subcode provide for the fact that tight interpersonal friendships sometimes ensure almost a religious communion among the communing friends. In other words, a circle of close friends becomes almost a single body, a communion of equals. Communication among friends happens in all forms starting from mere idle talk to intense enjoyment of higher philosophical or theological truths. Still, the point ­here often is not about sharing information; such friendship is about sharing emotions and support, including warm feelings of belonging, moral intuitions, consolation, and even help with the most mundane of requests. This intense personal friendship is dif­fer­ent from what may be called po­l iti­cal friendship, as we learned, in two re­spects. Rus­sian word usage suggests that the former is very active and is flourishing, while the latter is a passive recipient of instrumental influences—it is tackled, handled, and sometimes mishandled. Also, po­liti­cal friendship does not require or develop a linguistic subcode characteristic of interpersonal friendship. T ­ here are two types of this po­liti­cal friendship. First, ­there is po­liti­cal friendship of the hierarchical patron-­client type (or of the type of international friendship treaties that are most frequently signed between unequal partners), which has clearly stipulated instrumental goals. Warmth and sharing and intensity of communication are not necessary ­here. Second, ­there is an egalitarian, horizontal po­liti­cal friendship that consists of a relation among peers, that is, a core group of more or less equal individuals who together set out to build a po­liti­cal party, a new firm, an NGO, a scholarly group and the like. This endeavor presupposes a certain distance between the parties involved. They have come together to achieve an instrumental goal, not to enjoy the warmth of communing. Hence t­ hese po­liti­cal friendships of the second type also need communication, not communion. But in contrast with the first type of po­ liti­cal friendship, which relies ­either on the veiling language of loyalty and care in which patronage clads itself or on clear, direct, and sometimes ruthless stipulations of treaties, this second type needs a register of public language so that a group of equals acting in concert coordinates its goals efficiently. Coordinating equals is never easy, particularly when one has to rely only on persuasion and argumentation. Hence the need for a developed technique of pointed secular communication, which is dif­fer­ent from both communing and commoning. First, it is dif­fer­ent from communing in that it is resolutely  244 

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secular rather than potentially leading to communion with God, nature, higher truths or just other p­ eople. Second, secular communication is dif­ fer­ent from commoning in that it does not presuppose any common t­ hings among interlocutors apart from the language shared for communication purposes, and perhaps a commons where it can happen. When one compares the intertwining of communing and commoning that happens in a circle of friends, on the one hand, and in a larger society (country) as a w ­ hole, on the other, one sees the following differences. As I wrote in Chapter 4, in the late Soviet days, t­ here was a t­ riple structure: lots of commoning of ­things at the most basic, foundational level, saddled by attempts to commune as in the Communion—­and on top of that all, a realm of socialness, conceived e­ ither like officially sponsored associations or the world of stifling everyday social pressure. This sandwich–­like picture should not necessarily force us to represent life as a series of layers, where one is the most basic (a ­handling of ­things), the second one is more epiphenomenal (official communing to ensure rites of unity and collective effervescence), and the third is the most superficial, an icing on the cake (sorry, sandwich). This third layer is about interaction at the societal, non-­state level, and it frequently happens that it might be stated-­i nduced, but not part of the state system per se. Eschewing the threats of falling into a basis-­superstructure scheme, or its amended version where t­ here might be dif­fer­ent layers of increasing superficiality of interactions on top of a sound material basis, one should perhaps say: at a country-­w ide level we find a sphere or network of commoning of ­things, a sphere or network of communing in words (which sometimes result in communication, sometimes in communion), and a sphere of socialness, or the social, where socializing happens and where sociability is practiced. ­These spheres or networks (a reader may choose a meta­phor most dear to his or her heart) interpenetrate and overlap. What is impor­tant is that friendship involves only commoning of t­ hings and communing in words, but it does not require the third ele­ment—­socialness. A typical society of a given country does. What happens to ­these layers or spheres or networks in the post-­ Communist condition? My exposition has suggested that the second one (communing in words) that is much predisposed to slide t­ owards higher Communion (and that did develop in this direction in the Communist countries) can be resolutely directed to ensure secular and enlightened communication,  245 

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while the third one (the one of socialness) can be replaced by a genuine public life. I have divided the two remaining post-­Communist va­r i­e­ties of socialness into the “co-­opted dupes” and the “relentless critics” types.1 Neither of ­those is conducive to building a better public life. But public life has to be based on something, and ­here, hinging on the vast layer / sphere / network of commoning of ­t hings that residually exists in Rus­sia is impor­tant. The world of commoning is vast, and it does not have to be destroyed or abolished. It just has to be endowed with the function of seminarium rei publicae, seed bed or seed orchard of the republic, if we listen to Cicero, for example in De officiis I:54, or, if we listen to Arendt, it has to be made intergen­er­a­tion­ ally solid and meaningful with the help of the public realm.2 According to Cicero, in order to have res publica, citizens have to be tied together by consensus iuris, a co-­sentiment of ­things ­legal.3 This requires installing and solidifying at the second layer / sphere / network (communing in words) techniques of secular communication geared t­ owards civilized and effective group deliberation. It also requires extending infrastructures of citizen access to sites where deliberation that decides on the common ­things effectively happens. Following Arendt, we should create an arena that would be capable of recognizing and recording g­ reat novel deeds when they happen, so that res publica as a machine of generating intergenerational sense-­making could provide ­f uture generations with models of lives worth living.4 ­Here, in an Arendtian version of republicanism, we need storytellers more than virtuosos of public deliberation, and arenas rather than roads or channels of access, which Ciceronian republicanism would stress. How could introducing ­these Ciceronian and Arendtian ele­ments change the current condition? Let us evaluate first the case of a friends’ network, then the case of a separate country. As Chapter 1 tried to argue, decreasing the intensity of the sub-­code of a friends’ network would allow for a broadening of the ranks of ­people joining this exclusive in-­g roup. We have seen this in Chapter 4, where the Rescue Group movement of 1986 to 1990 included a network of about a hundred individuals keen on hanging out with each other, united in friends-­invented and friends-­organized pastimes. This was far wider than the usual group of 3, 4, or 5 intimate friends (let’s say, 8 to 10, at maximum), which is more characteristic of con­temporary interpersonal Rus­sian friendship. Transferring from the Rescue Group type of hanging out to the Living City type of hanging in together is the next step. This step is an ex 246 

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ample of getting out of the commoning of ­things by friends—­topped or pervaded with communion that is sometimes allowed by an intimate subcode developed within this network—­and into a world of public action. To get into the public realm h ­ ere, one would need to abandon the subcode of a friends’ network and ensure that one uses a register of public language for an in-­group communication. (As we know from Chapter 4, even the Living City has not managed in a decisive way to install or develop such a register in its communication so far.) At the level of a country (or a city, for that m ­ atter, since in Chapter 2 we studied commonalities at the level of the city but not the country as such) the three layers / spheres / networks could undergo the following transformation. As I repeated many times, one needs infrastructures of public access to the sites where deliberation on the functioning of main common ­things (of the city and of the country) happens. The Panama Papers and Rus­sia’s position in world rankings of crony capitalism vindicate what researchers have been suggesting for years: the bud­gets at municipal, regional, and federal levels in Rus­sia are managed by small groups of ­people linked by po­liti­cal friendships, as if the common t­ hings they are supposed to manage are not the commons for all, but only their group’s or network’s commons.5 The new Rus­sian slang word obshchak, invoked in the end of Chapter 4, has exactly this meaning: common fund or possessions of a tight in-­g roup that is used for the well-­being of the members of the group. We need to give the public access to ­these sites of deliberations and install rotations of ­people who decide what to do with the common t­ hings that tie a city, a region, or a country together.6 The commons for a few should become commons for the public, by ensuring public access and public deliberation on t­ hese commons. This would spell the death of the residual common-­ism that we inherited in the wake of the fall of Communism. Restructuring the commons controlled by a few by adding a vinculum iuris for all is an obvious Ciceronian insight. But what about the Arendtian ones? As Chapter  5 has demonstrated, Rus­sia still largely practices the “revelation-­by-­deeds” technique that allows individuals to establish knowledge of their selves. But t­ hese practices of everyday en-­personation among relevant equals are only seemingly close to arenas for registration of a unique deed, an instance of a genuinely new po­liti­cal action that Arendtian republicanism would be looking for. First, this en-­personation mostly happens in  247 

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friends’ networks, sometimes among colleagues and in professional communities. Such networks are usually not vast enough to produce a story that would be impor­tant for a ­whole country; nor do they have a required storyteller who would be on the par with Plutarch in affecting the lives of all with a spectacular narrative. Second, friendship as an arena for the revelation of the self is deficient ­because it might shelter an individual during the constitution of his or her self-­cognition during such revelation-­by-­deeds rituals as, for example, a ubiquitous Rus­sian birthday party. Though a realistic opportunity is always pres­ent that some participant of a birthday party w ­ ill stand up “­under the influence” and declare in a fiery speech or a toast that the person who is celebrating his or her birthday is actually not a very nice or perfect person, such occurrences are usually prevented by the careful pre-­arrangement of the audience, such as who is invited and who is not, ­etc. Public exposure, where the plurality of opinion between equals is pres­ent by definition, requires courage, as Arendt would stress many times.7 Hence a story of a model life can hardly originate in a cushioned space of friends evaluating the selves of each other. Tapping on the back among friends defends a person from the real blows of life; being able to withstand ­t hose blows is what can help a person pres­ent ­g reat deeds to the world. But the yearnings for g­ reat deeds are still pres­ent in post-­Communist Rus­sia, as we saw from the exposition in Chapters 5 and 6. So, hope is still ­there. One sees the residual inclination to suffer tribulations while developing a ­really ­g reat work-­in-­progress, and if ­there are no role models for such an endeavor, perhaps this is b­ ecause the last twenty five years of Rus­sian capitalism did not offer a chance to produce one. Also, if the revelation-­by-­deeds technique is to be channeled to the arenas for the production of stories about memorable lives, one should perhaps engender an attention to the ­wholesome morality of a deed, and not only to its professional efficiency or (in a narrower version of it) encashment potential. The tendency to professionalize the evaluated selves when their deeds are screened by the relevant communities should be fought. Twenty five years of post-­Communism have given birth to perhaps only one real public hero who merited and earned a street monument. This is the rock singer Victor Tsoi, who, not unlike James Dean, died in a car crash at the end of perestroika. But we have not seen a monument to any of the virtuosos of the new Rus­sian capitalism, notwithstanding how pro 248 

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fessionally sophisticated they are in their gains and achievements. ­These ­people could and should eventually become the Rus­sian equivalents of Alfred Nobel, that is, they should endow their life with a moral meaning. Only then would Rus­sian ­mothers and ­fathers think that lives of such ­people should be recommended to their ­daughters and sons as a model. What could elicit such an attention to morality in the country that seems to be an epitome of the collapse of a meta-­narrative (to use an expression from Lyotard) and of the ensuing skepticism about all moralizing and ­g rand schemes of h ­ uman improvement? As Chapter 6 has shown, parallel to a reestablishment of the po­liti­cal centrality of Orthodox Chris­tian­ity, ­there exists a residual Communist longing to build a new universe. As we discovered during our research on technopreneurs, it is a rather unexpected source of moral intuitions and inspiration. Of course, fewer Rus­sians read the novels of the Strugatsky b­ rothers ­these days, but the scientists-­turned-­entrepreneurs still do. Most Rus­sians might have forgotten by now that the 1962 Strugatsky’s novel Noon: XXII C ­ entury was intended to offer more than 350 pages of descriptions of what a beautiful Communist ­f uture would look like in everyday life. Marx, Engels, or Lenin did not offer such a vision, even in broad brushstrokes. The Strugatsky ­brothers did, down to the smallest detail. Monday Begins on Saturday (1965) depicted a scientific institute keen on getting ­humans closer to God b­ ecause it was supposed to mechanize magic. And Hard to Be a God (1964) was a story of the moral responsibility of a scientist who had the power to technologically interfere in the history of backward ­people, but who understood all the terrible repercussions of taking the role of a God who would guide the chosen ­people out of slavery and into paradise. Religion is central to classical republics. Relying on practices of belief that Rus­sia has inherited from the Soviet past could perhaps be viewed part of the solution, if t­ hese practices are transformed to suit novel goals. The USSR wanted to build the Communist paradise on earth, and dismally failed. However, the residual yearning among some Rus­sians to be part of a ­grand reconstruction of the universe can be employed for the purposes of republicanism. If this yearning could just be purged of the huge Soviet hubris (“together we replace the Creator and build the universe anew”), and—if we are to follow Arendt—­then tinkering with eternity might be replaced with a striving for immortality. As Chapter 6 of this book tried to show, Steve Jobs’ intent to leave a mark on the universe is far more h ­ umble than a Soviet intent  2 49 

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to redo the universe anew and in toto. Getting this appropriate humility back to Rus­sians would be the first goal in this re­spect. The second one would be to stop thinking that one controls eternity b­ ecause one knows the iron laws of history (this has been largely achieved through the abandonment of dialectical materialism as a universal faith) and to assert that seeking relative earthly immortality is quite a worthy goal of life. This contrast between a Christian assertion of the eternity of the soul and the Ancient Greek and Roman longing for immortality is a subject of ­ uman Condition. In ­these ancient civilizations, gods w ­ ere Chapter 3 of The H not eternal, but immortal, and only h ­ umans (though doomed to mortality like animals) w ­ ere nevertheless endowed with a capacity to get closer to gods and their immortality, if during their lifetime they exemplified a deed worthy of recording for the ­f uture generations of res publica. Arendt wrote about the Greeks: “By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non-­ perishable traces ­behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of ‘divine’ nature. The distinction between man and animal runs right through the ­human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeuein, a verb for which t­ here is no equivalent in any other language) and who prefer ‘immortal fame to mortal ­things’ are ­really h ­ uman; the o ­ thers, content with what­ever pleasures nature w ­ ill yield them, live and 8 die like animals.” “Aristocrats,” of course, was a bad label in the workers and peasants’ civilization. All sorts of degenerate qualities ­were thus ascribed to the Rus­sian nobility that had been effaced by the 1917 revolution. This depiction of aristocrats as degenerates partially legitimated their extinction or execution. However, this ideological pressure was not effective in all re­spects. The im­ mense popularity of Hard to be a God, which very often ended up as number one among the twenty or so Strugatsky novels or sci-fi novels in general (when so­cio­log­i­cal polls of their Rus­sian readership ­were conducted), is perhaps explained by an inexorable appeal exuded by its central hero, the fighting and thinking aristocrat Rumata—­“a progressor,” that is, an undercover earthling sent to another planetary system still in the stage of development akin to the M ­ iddle Ages on m ­ other Earth. Chapter 4 has suggested that Pushkin’s verses instilled ancient Greek and Roman intuitions into the souls of Soviet, and now Rus­sian, youth through  250 

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compulsory readings of verses like The Monument, which was derived from Horace’s Exegi monumentum aere perennius, and asserted that seeking and affirming liberty is the only worthy goal in life, ensuring this-­worldly immortality. Such ele­ments of the appealing aristocratic past, together with the residual striving to excel and to be the best in science, as well as in sports, gives one hope to think that Arendtian republicanism could be an intuitively understandable guiding light to many Rus­sians.9 Now, the Rus­sian technopreneurs, the study of which has supplied empirical data used in Chapters 5 and 6, are of course largely the progeny of the Soviet scientific community and are thus still residually enmeshed in its prac­ uman Condition are tices. Interestingly enough, the last three pages of The H dedicated to scientists and men of thought b­ ecause, as Arendt says, “the capacity for action, at least in the sense of the releasing of pro­cesses, is still with us, although it has become the exclusive prerogative of the scientists.” She gives two reasons for that. First, ­because they created ­things like the atomic bomb or spaceflight that threaten or change the very conditions in which ­humans existed heretofore, their deeds are “of greater po­liti­cal significance than the administrative and diplomatic d­ oings of most so-­called statesmen.” Second, the scientists still know what it means to act, and to act in concert. Furthermore, their invisible college, the evaluating and establishing of scientific reputations, functions as a quasi-­republic with “their own moral standards and their own code of honor.” The prob­lem with scientists, though, she says, is that they “act into nature,” eliciting “reverberating” pro­cesses ­t here rather than among ­humans, so only a very few of their deeds affect ­every living person. A memorable deed of a ­g reat scientist “lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates h ­ uman existence.”10 Establishing professional scientific reputations is not necessarily like revealing a w ­ holesome moral story of a ­g reat life that would offer a meaningful model to which ­f uture generations can aspire. I should stress that our research presented in Chapters 5 and 6 did not have the slightest intent to illustrate t­ hese insights of Arendt. Sifting through empirical data, we have found that professional identity did indeed eclipse a ­wholesome moral evaluation of an individual during the revelation-­by-­deeds techniques, which are used for self-­cognition. But we did not look for a  251 

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republican potential among the technopreneurs, bent as they w ­ ere on professional (and sometimes financial) success, not on politics. Neither should one strive to educate Rus­sian scientists-­t urned-­entrepreneurs to become republican saviors of a demoralized civilization. Some would even say that their social stratum is not sufficiently large to play such a role, while their statements on creativity and inspiration might not be representative of a larger Rus­sian society, which would hardly listen to them should they suddenly perform an unlikely feat of converting to conscious republicanism. Chapter 6 has shown that Rus­sian scientists-­t urned-­entrepreneurs are very much consumed by love of their own en-­workings, their works-­in-­ development. In the basic triad that constitutes the vita activa, according to Arendt—­labor, work, and action—­the heroes of Chapter 6 are mostly about work, hardly about action. If they still follow the USSR penchant, they would love to change the universe. If they follow the more modest yearning of Jobs, they would want to leave a lasting novel ele­ment of the universe, which would endure and work ­after their own life terminates. What they have in common with the rest of post-­Communist society is the staying power of the revelation-­ by-­deeds technique. But they are dif­fer­ent in that they are carried away by their work euphoria and held captive by their love for work-­in-­progress. However, being a good example of what the Communist past represented in terms of faith, aspirations, and belief practices, they offer a good example of a stance that a country might or should be abandoning. Our interview texts distinguished between euphoria of the pro­cess of technopreneurship and the buzz one gets when a work-­in-­development becomes a finished and named work, self-­sustaining and in­de­pen­dent from its creator. The buzz from the finished work is closer to Jobs’ yearning, while euphoria of creativity seems more Soviet. But please do not forget that I have been using both of t­ hese terms—­euphoria and buzz—as synonyms. A general approach to this buzz / euphoria can be found in Max Weber, who pres­ ents euphoria in his sociology of religion as a way for enduring and stable charismatic effervescence in salvation-­oriented religions, in contrast with unstable and momentary illuminations. For Weber, this euphoria has two kinds—of a mystical dreaming contemplation when one becomes “a vessel” of God, and of an ascetic and methodical transformation of the world in accordance with God’s ordinances, when one becomes “an instrument” of ­ uman,” or bring h ­ uman beings God.11 In both cases, the goal is to “deify a h  252 

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closer to the Divine, since world religions posit deities as external agencies and thus unable to do what primitive magic does, which is to put God directly into one’s soul, endowing the enchanted person with divine powers. Viewed within this theoretical framework, Soviet scientists ­were sometimes closer to magicians when they saw themselves as the origins of their own creativity and thus longed for mechanizing magic to become gods, as in Monday Begins on Saturday. However, when they felt that something bigger was outside of them rather than within them, they felt euphoric during the methodical pro­cess of implementing the work-­i n-­development to the end. Both mystical and ascetic euphoria are part of what Weber calls an ecstatic version of salvation-­oriented religions, which he contrasts with two ­others—­a ritualistic version (for example, ancient Hinduism) or a version of “salvation-­through-­good-­works.” The latter is subdivided by him into religions where salvation depends on calculations of good and bad deeds performed in life (he ascribes both Catholicism and Orthodox Chris­t ian­ity to this category) and t­hose where salvation depends on h ­ uman deeds revealing a w ­ holesome moral character, in his words—­“the value of the total personality pattern.” For example, says Weber, the Spartans would not consider a warrior who died in b­ attle redeemed if he had gone into fighting ­because of a wish to expunge the memory of a previously demonstrated cowardice.12 The revelation-­by-­deeds technique, then, is close to both the pagan Greek experience of revealing a w ­ holesome moral character in a ­g reat deed (which Arendt uses to illuminate our con­temporary concerns) and to the usual Orthodox Chris­t ian­ity, of which it might have been just a reformed offspring. The hope for republicanism then would lie in abandoning euphoria and buzz, which are part of ecstatic communion.13 One should distance oneself from the sort of euphoric access to the Divine (for example, collectively merging in one subject-­object of history, as in a Creator built out of thousands of euphoric creators) that we have residually received from the Soviet civilization. Instead one should rely on secular and enlightened communication to reveal a mortal character whose deeds are worthy of earthly immortality. This would be an epochal transformation that could reactualize the Pushkin­era background of aristocratic Rus­sian culture steeped in ancient Greek and Roman models of civic words and public deeds, vanquishing the striving for eternity that a euphoric communion aims to achieve.  253 

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Introduction 1. See, e.g., Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, E ­ ngland: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pettit famously argued that the key distinction between republicanism and liberalism lies in their conception of freedom: if republicans view freedom as non-­domination, liberals, at least as presented in a famous essay of Isaiah Berlin on two concepts of liberty, distinguish between positive and negative liberty, and insist on defending negative liberty first and foremost. Skinner usually stresses that this non-­domination stance is dependent on invoking the opposition between a f­ ree person and a slave, coming from the Roman law; republicanism, in this characterization, is “neo-­Roman.” Even if it is undoubted, this emphasis on stating the link with the Roman heritage in the very title of this strand of thought did not gain wide support, and Skinner ­later agreed to refer to his position with a now familiar term: republicanism. Please see Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, ­England: Cambridge University Press, 2008), viii. 2. Sometimes, in order to stress that this republicanism is not about republics like the ones mentioned in the title of the famous treatise by Jean Bodin, this tradition is called civic republicanism. See Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002), for a useful summary of its main features. 3. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 10.

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no t e s t o pag e s 3 – 9 4. ­W hether ­there ­were republican ele­ments in the Soviet past is a subject for a dif­ fer­ent book. Of course, the Bolsheviks used the jargon of the French revolution, as in accusing each other of Thermidorean tendencies. The actors of the French revolution, in their turn, relied for their main imagery on antiquity and spoke of the reign of virtue. However, as historian Sergei Iarov argued, even the less bureaucratized Soviets of 1917–1918 could hardly be considered examples of res publica. Iarov, “Sovety: organy respubliki ili instrumenty kontrolia nad respublikoi?” [Soviets: Organs of the Republic or Instruments of Control over the Republic?], in Oleg Kharkhordin, ed., Chto takoe respublikanskaia traditsiia [What the republican tradition is] (St. Petersburg: EUSP, 2009), 153–162. Hannah Arendt would tend to believe other­w ise. 5. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 6. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Rus­sian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 7. Oleg Kharkhordin, “­Things as Res Publicae: Making ­Things Public,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making T ­ hings Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 280–289; Sergei Troianovskii, “The ­Great Bridge of Novgorod: Republican History through Material Evidence,” in Dominique Colas and Oleg Kharkhordin, eds., The Materiality of Res Publica: How to Do ­T hings with Publics (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 51–111. 8. Quentin Skinner has contributed an essay to the volume that we edited with Dominique Colas, but his materialism turned out to be of a rather more sophisticated kind than the childish one with which I was entering this research; see Skinner, “The Material Pre­sen­ta­t ion of Thomas Hobbes’s Theory of the Commonwealth,” in Colas and Kharkhordin, eds., and The Materiality of Res Publica, 115–157. 9. Pettit, Republicanism, 239. 10. Similarly, Tocqueville thought that associations of ­f ree but ­simple citizens are a post-­revolutionary equivalent for power­f ul noble families, which had limited autocratic rule ­u nder the Ancien Regime. In the absence of aristocracy, which the revolution had swept away, f­ ree associations of many weak individuals could become power­ful collective persons limiting the encroachments of the centralized state. 11. Drawing a distinction between the common and the public—­t he two terms which in con­temporary En­glish are almost synonymous (for example, compare the Boston Common and the Boston Public Garden, which are located next to each other)—­was not a special linguistic quirk of the author. Attention to this distinction was forced upon us by the empirical studies of communal life in pre-­

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no t e s t o pag e s 10 – 1 4 and post-­Communist Rus­sia, and this contrast is completely dif­fer­ent from a contrast between public and common goods in neoclassical economics. Drawing attention to this largely overlooked distinction should perhaps help us better understand some features of ­free communities, similar to how Arendt’s distinction between the social and the po­liti­cal (largely overlooked before her work) helped us better understand the fate of liberty in the modern world. For another way to conceptualize the difference between the common and the public (the public space is where diverse, tight communities, each tied by their commons or common ­things, meet and clash), see “On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo de Angelis and Stavros Stavrides,” An Architektur, no. 17, June 2010. I am grateful to Yves Cabannes, who brought my attention to Stavrides’s work in September 2017, when this book was about to go into print. 12. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 13. Perhaps such features of the self might explain both the current grandiloquence and the pretense of Rus­sian politics internationally, but also—­a nd more importantly—­provide a contrasting point to similar aspirations worldwide of universe-­changing regimes of a directly religious kind like ISIS. (Rus­sian Communism was a quasi-­religious phenomenon—­not, in the end, a theocracy). 14. Diego von Vacano, “The Scope of Comparative Po­liti­cal Theory,” Annual Review of Po­liti­cal Science, vol. 18 (2015): 465–480. 15. Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), xv–­x vi. 16. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 183; Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays T ­ owards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 28. 17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmonds­worth and London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1976), 108. 18. “An im­mense collection of commodities” appeared in the initial German edition of Marx’s “A Contribution to the Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy” (1859), hence Marx cites it in Capital, 125. 19. Please see Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmonds­worth and London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1973). 20. A small prob­lem remained, however: commodities only “logically,” but not historically, preceded money and perhaps even capital. In other words, commodities did not appear as the dominant form of wealth earlier than money. But if

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 4 – 2 0 one posits commodity as a starting point for a logic of developing dialectical contradictions, then it becomes pos­si­ble, in a Hegelian way, to bring out the w ­ hole tree of economic categories of capitalism. To explain this to readers not versed in Hegel, Marx had to write a w ­ hole methodological introduction on the trick with the historical and the logical—­see Marx, Grundrisse, 100–108. 21. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 21–42, 132–135. 22. Marx, Capital, 143. 23. Ibid., 143, 163–164. 24. Ibid., 138. Rus­sian editions of Das Kapital, aware of the notorious difficulty of translating the original German term, printed it in parentheses. 25. Marx, Capital, 38. 26. See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Lit­er­a­ture (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 509. 27. Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1989), xvi.

1. Friendship and Politics 1. Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: En­glish, Rus­ sian, Polish, German and Japa­nese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59. 2. A classic old study is Vladimir Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage, and Friendship in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger), 1984. My two preliminary texts just helped convey the immensity of the topic—­please see chapters “Friendship: Early History of the Concept” and “Friendship: Classic and Con­temporary Concerns,” in Oleg Kharkhordin, Main Concepts of Rus­sian Politics (Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 2005). 3. Research in 2005–2007 was supported by a grant from the Car­ne­g ie Corporation of New York (B7819—­for research cooperation between EUSP and Georgetown University). We are particularly grateful to Deana Arsenian from Car­ne­g ie and Harley Balzer from Georgetown for helping this proj­ect succeed. 4. Oleg Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba. Ocherki po teorii praktik [Friendship: sketches on the theory of practices] (St. Petersburg: EUSP Press, 2009). 5. Kapitolina Fedorova, “Razgovory druzei, razgovory o druziakh, razgovory o druzhbe . . . ​[Conversations among friends, conversations on friends, conversations on friendship],” in Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba, 81–113. 6. Dmitry Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘druzhba’, ot Drevnei Rusi do XVIII veka” [History of the concept of friendship, from ancient Rus’ to the eigh­teenth ­century], in Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba, 233–235.

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 2 – 27 7. It is customary to address t­ hose pres­ent as “friends” (rather than “friend” in the singular) when we make a toast or congratulate ­people on a festive occasion (Fedorova, “Razgovory druzei,” 97). This seeming exception in fact proves the rule. First, in most situations of everyday life (at a birthday party, for example), among t­ hose pres­ent are p­ eople who are not close friends or mere acquaintances of the speaker, and thus his ​or her appeal to a circle of true friends is most often addressed to ­those who are not in fact pres­ent. If it is sincerely addressed to all listeners, the phrase “Friends, how splendid is our u ­ nion!” now seems a throwback to the romanticism of Pushkin’s age; the usual, boring toast, “Friends, allow me to congratulate Tania on this wonderful day,” is more congenial to our tastes. Second, even if someone addresses a high-­flown, Pushkinesque toast to three or four close friends seated at a t­ able, ­t here is all the same no friend in the singular, but rather a circle of friends (about which, see below). The singular friend can be addressed only when he or she is absent. 8. Peter Hatlie, “Friendship and the Byzantine Iconoclast Age,” in Julian Haseldine, ed., Friendship in Medieval Eu­rope (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999), 139. 9. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia,” 211–212. 10. Carolinne White, “Friendship in Absence—­Some Patristic Views,” in Haseldine, ed., Friendship in Medieval Eu­rope, 79–81. 11. Of course it would be in­ter­est­ing to ask why it is the circle of friends that most often appears as the term for the agent of action, and not a “group,” “legion” or “sea” of friends. Is it r­ eally the case that the circle meta­phor more appropriately describes its actions? Or is ­t here a connection with the mechanisms of sacrifice, ritual (round) dances, and so forth? 12. Evgenii Roshchin, “Poniatie ‘druzhba’ v konteskte mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii” [The concept of friendship in the context of international relations], in Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba, 327–335. Among the authors of the Druzhba volume, Rohschin was the only one who also published his research results in English—­ please see Evgeny Roshchin, “The Concept of Friendship: From Princes to States,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of International Relations, vol. 12:4 (2006): 599–626; Evgeny Roshchin, “Supplanting Love, Accepting Friendship: A History of Rus­sian Diplomatic Concepts,” Redescriptions, vol. 13:1 (2009): 125–146. 13. We already find gifts attached to military obligations in ancient Greece. Most con­temporary scholars of ancient Greek friendship view it as a fairly ­simple mutual assistance pact and not a sign of personal relations. See, for example, Gabriel Herman, Ritualized Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge, ­England: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Mary Whitlock Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 8 – 3 2 14. Gerd Althoff, “Friendship and Po­liti­cal Order,” in Haseldine, ed., Friendship in Medieval Eu­rope, 92. 15. Peter Burke, “Humanism and Friendship,” in Haseldine, ed., Friendship in Medieval Eu­rope, 267; White, “Friendship in Absence.” 16. Boris Gladarev, “Sotsiologicheskii analiz druzhby: perspektivy setevogo podkhoda” [A so­cio­log­i­cal analy­sis of friendship: perspectives of a network approach], in Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba, 114–186. 17. Quoted in White, “Friendship in Absence,” 74. 18. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia,” 239. 19. Gladarev, “Sotsiologicheskii analiz,” 172–175. 20. Burke, “Humanism and Friendship,” 267. 21. Althoff, “Friendship and Po­l iti­cal Order,” 94. 22. See detailed examples in Oleg Kharkhordin, “Friendship and Politics in Rus­sia,” Common Knowledge, vol. 22:2 (2016): 228. 23. See examples of ­things mediating medieval friendship in Kharkhordin, “Friendship and Politics in Rus­sia,” 229. 24. Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350– 1250 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1988), xvi, 45, 408. 25. The two quotations in the paragraph are taken from Izmail Sreznevskii, Materialy dlia slovaria drevne-­r usskago iazyka po pismennym pamiatnikam [Materials for the dictionary of the old Rus­sian language on the basis of written rec­ords], vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Acad­emy of Sciences, 1893), 1441–1442. 26. Quoted in Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia,” 261. 27. Oleg Kharkhordin and Anna Kovaleva, “Gradatsii blizosti v sovremennoi rossiiskoi druzhbe” [Degrees of proximity in con­temporary Rus­sian friendship], in Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba, 47–48. The three types of acceptable reproaches that we discussed in that article—­reproaches for actions taken b­ ehind one’s back (that is, for concealing t­ hings that friends should share with one another); reproaches for the creation of alternative modes of construing the friend’s image; and reproaches dealing with the transition from friendship to sexual intimacy—­can now be classified on the basis of our per­sis­tent attention to t­ hings. The first type of reproaches is based on the fact that common t­ hings have become fewer. Second, someone can be reproached if she or he has come to have t­ hings in common with enemies and constructs a disparaging image of his or her former friend. A slanderous denunciation is tantamount to almost murdering the other person b­ ecause it does not allow his or her true personality to come to light. Third, t­ here are reproaches for the transition from a community of certain ­things to total community, total fusion. The logic of the corresponding accusations is such: the common t­ hings are fewer; ­t here are no common t­ hings at all; every­t hing has come to be held in common, and this is too much.

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no t e s t o pag e s 3 3 – 3 8 28. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia,” 191. 29. Roshchin, “Poniatie ’druzhba,’ ” 386–388, 400–402. 30. Fedorova, “Razgovory druzei,” 104. 31. In sociolinguistics, registers are usually defined in contrast with dialects. If dialects reflect an identity of a speaker as a member of a distinct social group, registers reflect a typical communication situation such as talking to toddlers, lovers, commenting during radio or TV broadcasts of soccer matches and other sports events, and so on. See, e.g., Charles A. Ferguson, “Dialect, Register and Genre: Working Assumptions about Conventionalization,” in Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, eds., Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19–20. A register of friends’ talk is characterized by such aspects as high informality and context-­dependence, reliance on citations, high frequence of elliptical constructions, ­etc. A subcode is a local alteration of this register, in use by this very group of friends. 32. Gladarev, “Sotsiologicheskii analiz,” 151–152. The relevant verb in the Rus­sian phrase—­druzia obshchaiutsia—is perhaps better translated as “hanging out,” but “socializing” points to the common (obshchii) ­thing that emerges. An opinion, stated in the quoted phrase, is trivial for Rus­sians, but not so for an outside observer. In 1995, ­a fter spending a year in Moscow ­doing research for her PhD thesis, Valerie Sperling (now a famous professor), told me: “You Rus­sians are boring. You only drink and talk with friends, as if you are unable to do something e­ lse.” What a splendid anthropological insight it was to notice that the main t­ hing Rus­sians engage in as friends is something they themselves do not regard as an occupation—­socializing! We should take into account, however, that she was describing the be­hav­ior of educated thirty-­year-­olds who frequented the club Krizis Zhanra, where she herself regularly sang. This judgment might be inapplicable to p­ eople of a dif­fer­ent age cohort or marital status, non–­c ity dwellers, ­etc. (For historical usage of this verb, please see Chapter 3, section 3.1.3, and Chapter 4, section 4.2.3.) 33. McGuire, Friendship and Community, 428. 34. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia,” 249–251. 35. Fedorova, “Razgovory druzei,” 110–111. 36. As reflected in books on international relations with titles like Friends Forever, the “special” relationship between Britain and the United States does not presume that the 1944 Normandy landing ­w ill be described in the language of the familiarity or friendship subcode that the soldiers of ­t hese countries might use when they met, even at a party ­a fter b­ attle. “Hey, man, it was quite a ­r ide to the coast, eh?” is a bit too much for the interchange between the US and the UK, even if we could try imagining it (with a lot of effort and caveats, of course!) between Churchill and Roo­se­velt.

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no t e s t o pag e s 3 9 – 4 7 37. Rus­sian language has a curious quality: the word for “friend,” drug, and the word for “other,” drugoi, are so closely linked that, while reading translations of Levinas’ philosophy that speak of the relationship of the Self and the Other, a Rus­sian reader might be easily misled to think that she or ​he is reading about friendship. Etymologically ­these two words are directly linked. For fuller consideration of a friend as necessarily the Other, see Oleg Kharkhordin, “Druzhba svobodnykh umov: vozmozhno li nitssheanskoe soobschestvo?” [A friendship of ­f ree spirits: is a Nietz­schean community pos­si­ble?], in Viktor Kaplun, ed., Nitsshe i sovremennaia zapadnaia mysl’ [Nietz­sche and con­temporary Western thought] (St. Petersburg / Moscow: EUSP Press / Letnii Sad, 2003), and Kharkhordin, Main Concepts, 115. 38. Oleg Kharkhordin, “The Past and F ­ uture of Rus­sian Public Language,” in Nikolai Vakhtin and Boris Firsov, eds., Public Debate in Rus­sia: ­Matters of (Dis)order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 39. In the tenth book of his Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville employs another image besides that of the “curator of the soul”: Amicus ab hamo, id est, a catena caritatis; unde et hami quod teneant. The friend is the hook from which the chain of Christian love [charity] hangs and which supports it. At its base, ­doesn’t the expression “pin responsibility on someone” entail the same meta­phor? 40. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43, 54. 41. Although if someone always manages to get out his wallet first and buy coffee for himself and his ​f riend at the university cafeteria time and time again, then this person ­w ill develop a deep grudge. (This example, by the way, was given to me by a friend of mine. I then told it to o ­ thers, testing their reactions to see how typical this situation was. And now, by using this story as an example in this text, I am shamelessly appropriating the property of my circle of friends.) 42. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 207. 43. It is no won­der that when friends in Amer­i­ca embrace a­ fter a long separation or in order to show their feelings, they pat each other on the back: this gesture rules out any sexual subtexts. 44. Oleg Kharkhordin, editorial preface (in Rus­sian) to the Rus­sian translation of Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (St. Petersburg: EUSP Press, 2006). 45. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 46. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 47. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Phi­los­o­phers, vol. I: Translations and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 199–201. 48. Ibid., 5–6.

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no t e s t o pag e s 4 7 – 5 4 49. Please see a more detailed attempt in Oleg Kharkhordin, “Why res publica Is Not a State: The Stoic Grammar and Discursive Practices in Cicero’s Conception,” History of Po­liti­cal Thought vol. 31:2 (2010): 221–245.

2. Res Publica in Words and ­Things 1. Another strategy would be to study not the history of the concept of res publica, looking for ­things in discursive statements, but the ­things depicted in the graphic repre­sen­ta­t ions of res publica—­please see Quentin Skinner, “The Material Pre­ sen­ta­t ion of Thomas Hobbes’s Theory of the Commonwealth,” in Dominique Colas and Oleg Kharkhordin, eds., The Materiality of Res Publica: How to Do ­Things with Publics (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 115–157. 2. Oleg Kharkhordin, “Res Publica and Res Publicae: History and Politics of the Terms,” in Colas and Kharkhordin, eds., The Materiality of Res Publica, 217–269; Oleg Kharkhordin, “Why res publica Is Not a State: The Stoic Grammar and Discursive Practices in Cicero’s Conception,” History of Po­liti­cal Thought, vol. 31:2 (2010): 221–246. 3. Oleg Kharkhordin and Risto Alapuro, eds., Po­liti­cal Theory and Community Building in Post-­Soviet Rus­sia (New York: Routledge, 2011). 4. Rudolf Stark, Res Publica (Goettingen: Dietrichsche Universitaets-­Buchdruckerei, 1937). Reprinted with supplements in Hans Opperman, ed., Romische Wertbegriffe (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967). 5. Hans Drexler, “Res Publica,” Maia, vol. 9 (1957): 247–281, and vol. 10 (1958): 3–37. 6. Yan Thomas, “Res, chose et patrimoine (Note sur le rapport sujet-­objet en droit romain),” Archives de philosophie du droit, vol. 25 (1980). 7. Kharkhordin, “Res Publica and Res Publicae,” 230–234. 8. Ibid., 240–253. 9. Cicero, De re publica. De legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keys, Loeb Classical Library 213 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 64–67. 10. http://­w ww​.­perseus​.­tufts​.­edu​/­hopper​/­morph​?­l​=c­ ommunio&la​=l­a#lexicon, last checked on November 29, 2016. 11. See Werner Suerbaum, Vom Antiken zum Frühmittelalterlichen Staattsbegriff (Muenster), 1970, n68, on Cicero’s argument that in ochlocracy one finds common ­things but t­ here is no bond of justice; also see Malcolm Schofield, “Cicero’s Definition of res publica,” in J. G. F. Powell, ed., Cicero the Phi­los­op­ her (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 70–71. 12. See Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 174, on the origin of this meta­phor in Varro. One may be baffled why in this very sentence from De officiis I:54, common ­things at

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no t e s t o pag e s 5 4 – 6 0 the level of the f­ amily—­domus, communia omnia—­are said to be the origin of the city, principum urbs, and the nursery for young sprouts of the republic. Given that all socie­ties, according to the Stoics, start from conjugal ­unions, common ­things in the cities may be seen as a further step ­a fter an establishment of common ­things in the separate ­house­holds. Also, semina of res publica are mentioned in the unfinished sentence in the beginning of De re publica I:41: “certain seeds, as we call them, for [other­w ise] no source for the other virtues nor res publica itself could be discovered” (Cicero, De re publica. De legibus, 65). 13. Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library 30 (London: Heinemann, 1913), 56–57; also see Kharkhordin and Alapuro, eds., Po­liti­cal Theory and Community Building, 19. 14. Cicero, De re publica. De legibus, 218–221. 15. Cicero, De officiis, 196; translation amended following Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 74. 16. Kharkhordin, “Res Publica and Res Publicae,” 264–265. 17. Llewelyn Morgan, “ ‘Levi Quidem de re . . .’: Julius Caesar as Tyrant and Pedant,” Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 87:1 (1997): 23–40. 18. Kharkhordin, “Why res publica Is Not a State,” 233, 235. 19. Ibid., 233–234. 20. Schofield, “Cicero’s Definition of res publica.” 21. Kharkhordin, “Why res publica Is Not a State,” 237–239. 22. Kharkhordin, “Res Publica and Res Publicae,” 267. 23. “Condominium” was used as a ­legal category in Rus­sia before, but now the official acronym is TSZh, a linguistic equivalent of HOA, homeowners’ association. In real­ity, the TSZh in Rus­sia is not an association of homeowners who possess separate land lots (and individual ­family buildings on them) in a given community, so using the acronym HOA to render TSZh into En­glish would be misleading. The term “condominium” better reflects the basic Rus­sian real­ity of an apartment block united by common areas and common infrastructure. 24. A description of cases and methods can be found in Kharkhordin and Alapuro, eds., Po­liti­cal Theory and Community Building, 4, 91, 140, 166. 25. For more on the concept of the “black box” in this theoretical tradition, see Kharkhordin and Alapuro, eds., Po­liti­cal Theory and Community Building, 8–10. 26. Phillip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 280. Indeed, the spontaneous discourse of leaders of the condominia administrations and urban utilities companies was closer to the classical republican tradition than to the liberal one (Kharkhordin and Alapuro, eds., Po­liti­cal Theory and Community Building, 208–209). Perhaps this is not surprising: they ­were, ­after all, occupied ­every day with common ­t hings that Cicero called seminarium, the breeding ground or a seedbed of res publica.

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no t e s t o pag e s 6 4 – 76 27. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays ­Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 139. 28. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 1. 29. See ­Table C, “Who Has Seen the City?” in Kharkhordin and Alapuro, eds., Po­ liti­cal Theory and Community Building, 228. 30. Donald MacKenzie, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture, vol. 25:3 (1984): 473–502.

3. Society and Socialness 1. I am grateful to Alexander Filippov, Hanna Pitkin, Kevin Platt, Bill Todd, Mike Urban, and David Woodruff for their comments on and reviews of this undertaking, first spelled out in the conclusion to Oleg Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu [From the social to the public] (St.  Petersburg: EUSP, 2011). All remaining flaws and ­m istakes are, of course, mine. 2. ­A fter perestroika, the Rus­sian language developed a stable collocation, publichnaia politika or “public politics,” to designate politics that happens in public discussions, street action, and parliamentary deliberation—­a nd distinguish it from politicking that happens b­ ehind closed doors. However, the term “public politics” sounds awkward for an En­glish speaker. If my text did not completely expunge references to “public politics,” please be aware that I refer to the Rus­ sian term, not to the awkward En­glish usage. 3. Kapitolina Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem” [Society: between every­thing and nothing], in Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu, 18. 4. Abbot Gleason, “The Terms of Rus­sian Social History,” in Edith L. Clowes, James D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and P­ eople: Educated Society and the Search for Public Identity in Late Imperial Rus­sia (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 19. 5. Ibid., 21. 6. ­Those who did it satisfied the yearning of the ­people to have a bright and radiant ­f uture; however, they have not noticed that in many conceptualizations, civil society is first, a radical ­enemy of Communism, and second, something that cannot be “built.” 7. Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 26, 62. 8. See, e.g., Viktor Kaplun, “Obshchestvo do obshchestvennosti: ‘obshchestvo’ i ‘grazhdanskoe obshchestvo’ v kulture rossiiskogo prosveshcheniia” [Society before socialness: ‘society’ and ‘civil society’ in the culture of the Rus­sian enlightenment], in Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu, 395–486.

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no t e s t o pag e s 7 7 – 8 0 9. Marc Morje Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-­Communist Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10. The oppressive quality of the social arises as a result of the fact that its onslaught makes the public world, which “was reserved for individuality,” shrink. And conformist be­hav­ior replaces po­l iti­cal action that was capable of bringing new into the world. See Hannah Arendt, The ­Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 41, 29, 33. 11. Ibid., 44. 12. The New Shorter Oxford En­glish Dictionary, vol. 2, ed. Leslie Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 2405. For comparison, many examples from the “special collocations, phrases and combinations” subsection of the entry for “social” in this edition (vol. 2, 2930–2931) are more often translated into Rus­sian as sotsialnyi, a Latin-­rooted Rus­sian calque of the En­glish term “social,” and rarely as obshchestvennyi. Many of ­these terms w ­ ere and are associated with the famous Social Question, sotsialnyi vopros, of the nineteenth ­century that gave birth to the Socialist movement, but also to the appearance of related sciences like sociology. Rendered with sotsialnyi we find “social action,” “social control,” “social credits,” “social Darwinism,” “social demo­crat,” “social deprivation,” “social psy­chol­ogy,” ­etc. Terms that antedate socialism or fall outside of its concerns seem to enjoy translations using both roots. Thus, “social contract” can be rendered both with the help of the adjectives obshchestvennyi and as sotsialnyi. Distinguishing between peculiarities of usage of terms with adjectives sotisalnyi and obshchestvennyi may be a very fine sport indeed. But one should not forget the overall effect that their discursive duopoly has over the Rus­sian language. It blocks almost all colloquial terms that would immediately send us to the world and works of the acting public, e.g., derivatives of the Rus­sian word publika, “public.” 13. ­These two terms even look the same in writing when abbreviated in novel compound words (in generating which Communist Rus­sia excelled so much) and thus reduced to their basic root. The first part of the in­ven­ted new compound word obshchepit, “social meals,” is the root obshch-­, which figures in both adjectives obshchii, “common,” and obshchestvennyi, “social.” 14. Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 48. 15. Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivago velikorusskago iazyka [Explanatory dictionary of the living ­g reat Rus­sian language], vol. 2 (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1978–1980), 634. 16. For example, in the 1387 translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, one reads: “Such as I haue . . . ​i-­rad in dyuerse bookes, I gadere and write . . . ​and comoun to oþere men”; and in the 1569 chronicle of Richard Grafton: “Kepyng the barres shut, eche might see and common with other at their plea­sure.” I ­w ill return to the

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no t e s t o pag e s 8 0 – 8 6 distinction between “to common” and “to commune” ­later in Chapter  4, section 4.2. 17. Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 49. 18. This feeling of the preponderance of this term in the golden Soviet past of late socialism is perhaps linked to Khrushchev’s attempts in the late 1950s to the early 1960s to reinvigorate Communism by unleashing the controlling energy of the masses, for which obshchestvennost’ was an umbrella term (Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia: A Study of Practices [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999], 279–303). 19. All figures are from Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 54–56. 20. I w ­ ill from now on use the term “socialness” to consistently render obshchestvennost’ into En­glish. “Sociality” has three meanings (and six shades of meaning altogether) according to the OED, while “socialness” has only one—­“social quality or character.” An OED example of En­glish usage from 1843 conveys this meaning, also shared by obshchestvennost’ at the time: “­There is a certainty that a disposition to society and socialness, innate to humanity, . . . ​­w ill have a fair play.” Up u ­ ntil the early 1860s, the usage of obshchestvennost’ still largely exemplified this originary meaning. Of course, “socialness” does not reflect the sense of agency that the Rus­sian term carries ­these days. The reader w ­ ill have to remember that. But at least other meanings of the En­glish word would not stand in the way, providing misleading allusions. 21. Gleason, “The Terms of Rus­sian Social History,” 22. 22. Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 54. 23. See introduction and conclusion to Yasuhiro Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Rus­sia: Interface between State and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 8, 222. 24. In the Rus­sian language, the only other key term that underwent similar transformation seems to be lichnost’, or “personality.” It also started as an abstract quality (“a quality or character of being personal, pertaining to a person”) and evolved into a designation of an active agent. Lichnost’ designates right now not only a unity of unique personal qualities of a ­human being, but also an individual as such, a nondescript atom of action. ­These two terms developed hand in hand. On the concept of lichnost’, see Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia, 184–190. 25. Nikolai Karamzin, Letters of a Rus­sian Traveller, 1789–1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 102, translation amended. 26. Ibid., 104, translation amended. 27. Alexander Radishchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete works], 3 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1938–1952), vol. 1, 197.

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no t e s t o pag e s 8 6 – 8 8 28. Adam Ferguson, Opyt istorii grazhdanskogo obshchestva [An essay on the history of civil society], 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Gvardeiskogo Shtaba, 1817– 1818), vol. 3, 223. 29. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 5th ed. (London: T. Caldell, 1782), 465, 381. Logic pushes one to say that Timkovskii should have rendered “spirit of a community” as dukh obshchnosti, not obshchestvennosti. But given the linguistic root, which the words for “common” and “social” share in Rus­sian, he went for a more complicated term. ­These two terms even look the same in writing, when abbreviated in novel compound words (in generating which Communist Rus­sia excelled so much) and thus reduced to their basic root. See also notes 13 in this chapter and 85 in chapter 4 for this curious linguistic indistinguishability between what is common and what is social. 30. Vadim Volkov, “Obshchestvennost’: Rus­sia’s Lost Concept of Civil Society,” in Norbert Gotz and Jorg Hackmann, eds., Civil Society in the Baltic Sea Region (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 67–68. 31. Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka [Dictionary of con­temporary Rus­sian literary language], 17 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1950–1965), vol. 8, letter “O” (1959), 528. 32. N. P. Ogarev, “Pisma k ‘odnomu iz mnogih’ ” [Letters to “One from the many”], in Ogarev, Izbrannye sotsialno-­politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia [Selected socio-­ political and philosophical works] (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952), vol. 1, 679. 33. Ibid., 672. 34. Ibid., 670, 668. 35. N. P. Ogarev, “Pamiati khudozhnika [In memory of the artist]’, in Ogarev, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verses and poems] (Moscow: Sovetskii pistatel’, 1937), vol. 1, 289–290. 36. Ibid., 291–292. 37. Thus, Nikolai Chechulin writes that the scope of refined tastes and socialness of the gentry in the capitals in the eigh­teenth c­ entury was more extensive than that of a provincial gentry (Chechulin, Russkoe provintsialnoe obshchestvo vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka [Rus­sian Provincial Society in the Second Half of the XVIII ­Century] [St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Balasheva, 1889], 53–54). The relevant term designates socializing (balls and festivities)—­a quality of being social, not an active group of ­people. The term was also propagated by the nascent social sciences. Anarchist Mechnikov, surveying for the Rus­sian readers the latest Eu­ro­pean books on social and moral issues (Spencer, Schaeffle, ­etc.) called his review “Questions of Socialness and Moralness” (Lev Mechnikov, “Voprosy obshchestvennosti i nravstvennosti,” Delo [Business], vol. 13:9 [1879]: 93, 99). Another book, one of the first systematic so­cio­log­i­cal treatises in Rus­sia, tells us that “socialness” consists

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no t e s t o pag e s 8 9 – 9 0 of three parts—­c ivilization, culture, and civicness, with, e.g., the last part breaking down into mores, habits, and tradition (Alexander Stronin, Istoriia obshchestvennosti [History of socialness] [St.  Petersburg: Izd. Ministerstva putei soobshcheniia, 1885], IV). 38. Olga Malinova, “Obshchestvo, publika, obshchestvennost’ v Rossii serediny XIX–­nachala XX veka: Otrazhenie v poniatiiakh praktik publichnoi kommunikatsii i obshchestvennoi samodeiatelnosti” [Society, public, socialness in Rus­sia of the mid-­n ineteenth–­early twentieth centuries: practices of public communication and social self-­organization as reflected in concepts], in A. Miller, D. Sdvizhkov, and I. Shirle, eds., “Poniatiia o Rossii”: k istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda [“Concepts about Rus­sia”: ­toward the historical semantics of imperial Rus­sia], vol. 1 (Moscow: NLO, 2012), 442–446. The central opposition in this debate can be also translated into En­glish as the opposition “personality vs. sociality” or “individuality vs. socialness”—­see, e.g., an essay in the Socialist-­Revolutionaries’ volume that responded to the idealist authors of The Landmarks (Isaak Brusilovskii, “K voprosu o lichnosti i obshchestvennosti” [­Toward the prob­lem of personality and socialness], in “Vekhi” kak znamenie vremeni. Sbornik statei [“The landmarks” as a sign of the times: a collection of essays] [Moscow: Zveno, 1910], 145–173). 39. See, e.g., S. V. Eshevskii, “Materialy dlia istorii russkogo obshchestva XVIII veka. Neskolko zamechanii o N. I. Novikove” [Materials for the history of Rus­sian society in the eigh­teenth ­century: some remarks on N. I. Novikov], in Eshevskii, Sochineniia [Writings], vol. 3 (Moscow: Izdanie K. Soldatenkova, 1870), 403. 40. See V. A. Miakotin, Na zare russkoi obshchestvennosti [At the dawn of Rus­sian socialness] (Rostov-­na-­Donu: Donskaia rech’, 1904). 41. Both wrote the books with the words “socialness” in their titles while already in emigration. Gurko died in 1927, so he was writing in the 1920s. Originally this text appeared in En­glish; “socialness” in the title was rendered t­ here as “opinion” (V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1939]). Maklakov, Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’ na zakate staroi Rossii [Authorities and socialness at the sunset of Old Rus­sia], 3 vols. (Paris: 1936), wrote his memoirs in the 1930s, but his usage resembles his speeches from 1905 to 1917. 42. Maklakov, Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’, vol. 1, 12, 127–130. 43. Ibid., vol. 3, 602. 44. V. I. Gurko, Cherty i siluety proshlogo: pravitelstvo i obshchestvennost’ v tsarstvovanie Nikolaia II v izobrazhenii sovremmnika [Features and silouettes of the past: government and socialness during the reign of Nicholas II, as depicted by a con­ temporary] (Moscow: NLO, 2000), 23, 25, 26, 297.

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no t e s t o pag e s 9 0 – 9 6 45. The figures range between 2 and 16 ­percent; see, e.g., Anastasia Tumanova, Obshchestvennye organizatsii i russkaia publika v nachale XX veka [Social organ­ izations and the Rus­sian public at the beginning of the twentieth ­century] (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2008), 24–26. 46. Michael David-­Fox, Review of I.  N. Il’ina, “Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-­e gody,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History, vol. 3:1 (Winter 2002): 173. 47. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete works], 55 vols. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1967–1970), vol. 35, 57. 48. As quoted in I. N. Il’ina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-­e gody [Social organ­izations in Rus­sia in the 1920s] (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2000), 110; see also a translation offered in Zenji Asaoka, “Nikolai Bukharin and the Rabsel’kor Movement: Sovetskaia Obshchestvennost’ ­u nder the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ ” in Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’, 82. 49. Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 52–53; Asaoka, “Nikolai Bukharin,” 83. 50. Quoted in Asaoka, “Nikolai Bukharin,” 101; translation amended. 51. Yoshiro Ikeda, “The Notion of Obshchestvennost’ during the First World War,” in Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’, 64; see also Gurko, Cherty i siluety, 26. 52. Boris Slutskii, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), vol. 3, 288. 53. See, e.g., L. A. Vialimaa, IUAR: belye razmyshliaiut o peremenakh: po materialam trekhstoronnei vstrechi sovetskoi obshchestvennosti, ANK iuzhnoi Afriki i beloi obshchiny IUAR [The South African Republic: The whites think about change. Materials of a meeting of the Soviet socialness, the ANC of South Africa, and the white community of the SAR] (Moscow: Institut Afriki AN SSSR, 1990). 54. Karl Lowenstein, “Obshchestvennost’ as Key to Understanding Soviet Writers of the 1950s: Moskovskii Literator, October 1956–­March 1957,” Journal of Modern History vol. 44:3 (2009): 473–492. 55. David-­Fox, Review of I. N. Il’ina, 181. 56. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 279–303. 57. Nikolai Aseev, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verses and poems] (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1967), 217. 58. Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Pro­cess,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge, 2000), 218–221; Yasuhiro Matsui, “Obshchestvennost’ in Residence: Community Activities in 1930s Moscow,” in Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’, 119. 59. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In The First Circle, trans. Harry Willets (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 370; translation amended.

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no t e s t o pag e s 9 6 –10 0 60. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 687; translation amended. 61. Nikita Khrushchev, Stroitelstvo kommunizma v SSSR i razvitie selskogo khoziaistva [Building communism in the USSR and the development of agriculture], vol. 7 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1964), 103, 220. 62. Mie Nakachi, “What Was Obshchestvennost’ in the Time of Stalin? The Case of the Post-­War Soviet Medical Profession,” in Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’, 130. 63. A brochure from 1964, quoted in Kazuko Kawamoto, “Public and Private ­Matters in the Comrades’ Courts ­u nder Khrushchev,” in Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’, 177. 64. Irina Grekova, Na ispytaniiakh. Povesti i rasskazy [During test ­trials: novels and short stories] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 312. 65. Aleksandr Vampilov, “The Elder Son,” in The Major Plays (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 100. 66. S. Borisova, “Pri roditeliakh—­bez roditelei” [With or without parents], Chelovek i zakon [Man and law], no. 9 (1979): 92, 96. 67. Vasili Aksenov, A Ticket to the Stars (New York: Signet, 1963), 19; translation amended. 68. In some instances, though, dependent on the official Soviet usage, they could appeal to “world socialness,” as Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov did in the famous statement on the 1968 dissident t­ rials, hoping that the agency that forms “the world public opinion” should be the judge of what was g­ oing on (Yasuhiro Matsui, “Obshchestvennost’ across Borders: Soviet Dissidents as a Hub of Transnational Agency,” in Matsui, ed., Obshchestvennost’, 198). 69. Nina Voronel’, Sodom tekh let [The uproar of ­those years] (Rostov-­na-­Donu: Feniks, 2006), 62. 70. Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 28–35. 71. Quoted in Denis Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii: istoriia poniatii kak istoriia samosoznaniia” [From society to intelligent­sia: history of concepts as history of self-­consciousness], in A. Miller et al., eds., ‘Poniatiia o Rossii,’ vol. 1, 392. 72. Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 58. 73. A forced character of this expression, which uses the term from the immediate Soviet past to describe the new cap­i­tal­ist pres­ent—­not to mention its cumbersome quality—­made a short new Rus­sian calque word piar rather more widespread in colloquial Rus­sian nowadays. This Rus­sian neologism relies on the English-­language abbreviation of the described discipline / activity–­“PR,” i.e., “public relations.” 74. For example, see a quote from the current Minister of Internal Affairs, Kolokoltsev, in a 2012 article that appeared in the now defunct internet journal

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no t e s t o pag e s 10 0 –1 10 Russkaia zhizn’, russlife.ru—­Evgeniia Dolginova, “Presputplenie ili postupok” [A crime or an act of significance], last checked on http://­search2​.­r uscorpora​.­r u​ ­on April 30, 2016. 75. Vasilii Piliavskii, “Raschekhliaiut ruzhia” [Getting the guns ready], Novgorodskie vedomosti [a city newspaper of Novgorod the ­Great], April 18, 2013. 76. Fedorova, “Obshchestvo: mezhdu vsem i nichem,” 59–61. 77. Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 35, 46. I already mentioned this first meaning when I described the Soviet doctrinal statements that state property belonged to all, thus in its essence it was “all p­ eople’s” property or “property of society.” 78. Ibid., 40–41. 79. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 195–196. 80. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 94, quoted in Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 220. 81. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 200, 201–202.

4. A Society of Common-­ism 1. Boris Gladarev, “Istoriko-­k ulturnoe nasledie Peterburga: rozhdenie obshchestvennosti iz dukha goroda” [Historico-­Cultural Patrimony of St. Petersburg: The Birth of Socialness from the Spirit of the City], in Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu, 69–304. 2. The first quotation is from Gladarev, “Istoriko-­k ulturnoe nasledie Peterburga,” 212; the other two are from the archive of his interview transcripts: Minutina, Zabirokhin. 3. Please see the argument in the introduction. 4. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 302. 5. Att. 7. 11.3—­Cicero, Letters to Atticus (The Loeb Classical Library edition) (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 54–55. See also Oleg Kharkhordin, “Res Publica and Res Publicae: History and Politics of the Terms,” in Dominique Colas and Oleg Kharkhordin, eds., The Materiality of Res Publica: How to Do T ­ hings with Publics (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 264. 6. Mircea Eliade pointed to ­these profane experiences when he tried, with the help of Rudolph Otto’s phenomenology of religion, to explain the experience of Christian hierophany—­that is, the manifestation of the sacred—to a nonbeliever. It is an experience that one never forgets. It is not only emotionally moving, but ­later it actually moves you to do certain ­t hings (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959], 11). 7. Hans Drexler, “Res Publica,” Seconda Parte, Maia, vol. 10 (1958): 14. 8. Gladarev, “Istoriko-­kulturnoe nasledie Peterburga,” 155, 158–160.

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 10 – 1 18 9. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row), 1971, 172. 10. Iuliia Minutina, full transcript of the interview, Gladarev’s research archive. 11. Walter Lipp­mann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927). 12. See also the case of a courtyard at the apartment block at Komendatsky 40, which suffered the army-­like or­g a­n ized assault by huge construction trucks that brought the fencing and workers, described in Gladarev, “Istoriko-­k ulturnoe nasledie Peterburga,” 146. 13. Quoted from Gladarev’s research archive, full interview transcript. 14. The term “register” is used ­here in a sociolinguistic sense, to designate an alteration of ways of speaking that are common in a typical situation of communication (talking to friends, talking to small kids, talking to foreigners, talking to a lover, etc.)—­see, e.g., Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, “Situating Register in Sociolinguistics,” in Biber and Finegan, eds., Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4. 15. Gladarev, “Istoriko-­kulturnoe nasledie Peterburga,” 241–243. 16. Of course, rules for deliberation in civil society associations and public movements are not the same as in public assemblies endowed with legislative functions. But one set of rules is derivative from another, and thus one can inform the other. For example, when in the mid-­n ineteenth ­century col­o­nel Robert developed his set of deliberation rules for civic associations of any kind, he adapted the rules of parliamentary debate as practiced in the British parliament, the legislative assemblies of the United States, and the recommendations of Thomas Jefferson for the U.S. federal Senate, to suit the needs of simpler associations. 17. Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 52. 18. Ibid., 55–56. 19. Ibid., 204. Compare also, on the same page: “. . . without speech to materialize and memorialize, however tentatively, the ‘new t­ hings’ that appear and shine forth, t­ here is ‘no remembrance . . . .’ ” 20. The everyday be­hav­ior of the Decembrists, writes Iurii Lotman, was characterized not only by their non-­conformity to the standards of polite conversation of le beau monde (the Decembrists ­were telling their interlocutors ­things as they ­really ­were), but also by a certain theatricality, meaning that they harbored an aspiration that their acts would be eventually inscribed in history. Exiled Decembrist Lunin, upon hearing in 1838 about the death of Novosiltsev, a high courtier who had humbly lived through a rejection of a proj­ect of the constitutional monarchy, offered by him to Alexander I, remarked: “How opposed are our fates! For one—­scaffold and history, for another—­chairmanship of the [State] Council and being included into the annual editions of the ‘who is who?’ of administrators

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 19 –1 2 2 [while alive]!” Another story: painter Repin was asking Tolstoi for a spectacular subject for his next painting. Tolstoi fi­nally responded: in 1826, at the sight of the prison gallows, Decembrist Bestuzhev-­R iumin could not contain his emotions, and burst into tears. Muraviev-­Apostol, his role model in life, embraced Bestuzhev, and in this embrace they went to the scaffold together (Iurii Lotman, “The Decembrist in Daily Life [Everyday Be­hav­ior as a Historical-­Psychological Category],” in Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, eds., The Semiotics of Rus­sian Cultural History [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985], 134–135, 144, 147–148). One could add to Tolstoi’s appreciation of this episode: the profiles of the five executed Decembrists are known ­today by ­every Rus­sian school child, ­because Alexander Herzen put them on the cover of his émigré journal as a symbol of h ­ uman achievement. This famous image is now reprinted in almost all school books. 21. Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 198, 203. 22. Gladarev, “Istoriko-­kulturnoe nasledie Peterburga,” 261–274, 291. 23. Viktor Kaplun, “Obshchestvo do obshchestvennosti: ‘obshchestvo’ i ‘grazhdanskoe obshchestvo’ v kulture rossiiskogo prosveshcheniia” [Society before Socialness: “Society” and “Civil Society” in the Culture of the Rus­sian Enlightenment], in Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu, 395–486; Dmitrii Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo’ ot srednevekovia k novomu vremeni: russkii opyt” [A history of the concept of “society” from the ­M iddle Ages to modern times: a Rus­sian experience], in Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu, 305–394. 24. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), 28. 25. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi [The Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy], 6 vols. (St. Petersburg: pri Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1789–1794), vol. 4, letters M-­R (1793), 602. 26. This sentence uses wordings from the Eastern Orthodox teaching on the Church as the body of Christ, which Catholics or Protestants might not share. Not being a theologian, I am not saying that t­ hese formulations are correct for all Christians. I am eschewing the discussion of ­whether the body of Christ is literally or just “heavenly” pres­ent in the Eucharist, w ­ hether bread and wine are transfigured to become the body and blood of Christ, or ­whether Christ is just “in, with and u ­ nder” the forms of bread and wine. Eucharistic theology h ­ ere has multiple versions and depends on denomination. 27. Ivan Nordstet, Rossiiskii, s frantuzskimi i nemetskimi perevodami, slovar’ [Rus­sian dictionary, with French and German translations] (St. Petersburg: I. K. Shnor, 1782), vol. 2, 454.

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 2 2 –1 2 8 28. Slovar’ drevnerusskogo iazyka (XI–­XIV vv.) [Dictionary of the Old Rus­sian language (XI–­XIV centuries] (M.: Russkii iazyk, 1988–), 10 vols. so far; vol. 5, letters M–­O (2002), 567; entry for the word obshchenie. 29. Ibid., 567, entry for obshchevati. 30. Ibid., 567–568, entry for obshchenie. 31. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 313. 32. See, e.g., Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 44–45, and “What Is Commoning, Anyway?” http://­w ww​.­onthecommons​.­org​/­work​/­what​-­commoning​ -­a nyway, last checked on January 5, 2017. Compare David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 73. 33. Viktor Zhivov once joked that this had been the essence of medieval Rus­sian religiosity: to fool God in the last five minutes of one’s life, thus sinning all life long but d­ ying as a monk (Zhivov, Russkii grekh i russkoe spasenie [Rus­sian sin and Rus­sian salvation]. Lecture for polit.ru audience, 2009—http://­polit​.­r u​ /­article​/­2009​/­08​/­13​/p­ okojanije​/­, last accessed January 5, 2017). 34. All examples of usage are from the Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–­XVII vekov [Dictionary of the Rus­sian language of the XI–­X VII centuries] (M.: Nauka, 1975–), vol. 12, letter O (1987), 198, entry for obshchina-­obchina. 35. Slovar’ drevnerusskogo iazyka (XI–­XIV vv.), 566, entry for adjective obchii. 36. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 312. 37. Slovar’ drevnerusskogo iazyka (XI–­XIV vv.), 566, entry for obche. 38. Oxford En­g lish Dictionary (OED), introduction to the entry on the verb “to common.” 39. Of course, note that for the compilers, the inflected verbal forms are famously ambiguous. For example, the past tense form comunyd might be included ­either in the article for “to common,” if the root verb was comun, or in “to commune,” if the root verb was comune, as in the following letter from 1418: “Ȝour ­u ncle . . . ​ seyd to me that he hadde comunyd with Sir Thomas Fyschborn” (OED, intro to the article on the verb “to commune”). 40. John Wycliffe, The En­glish Works (London: Early En­glish Text Society, 1880), 385. 41. OED, entry on “to common,” §3. 42. Ibid. 43. OED, entry on “to common,” §10a. 44. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–­XVII vekov, 195, entry on the word obshchestvo. 45. Slovar’ drevnerusskogo iazyka (XI–­XIV vv.), 568, entry for obshchenie. 46. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–­XVII vekov, 191, entry for obshchatisia. We can find such meanings for the verb “to common” in En­glish as well. Caxton’s translation of “The Book of the Knight of Tower” in 1483 said: “My felawes comened with ladies and gentil ­women.” A medical treatise from 1400 refers to “Þer folowiþ a

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 2 8 –1 3 2 litil wilnyng for to comoun [desiderium coitus] wiþ wymmen” and John Capgrave’s abbreviation of all chronicles into one world history around 1464 says that Adam commoned in this sense with Eve: “Aftir tyme Cayn had killid Abel . . . ​Adam mad his avow þat he schuld neuir . . . ​comoun with Eue, and þis continens kept he a hundred ȝeres” (OED, entry on “to common,” §4a and §4b). 47. For example, this neologism translates koinonia, which replaces ekklesia in a rephrasing of Matthew XVII: 15–17 in the fourteenth-­century manuscript of the Pandectae (i.e., an assemblage of Christian statements on monastic life) by Nikon of the Black Mountain: “If your b­ rother sins against you, go and tell him . . . ​and if afterwards he corrects the denounced be­hav­ior, then you have gained thy ­brother back, and he is not excommunicated from the community (obeshchstva)” (Slovar’ drevnerusskogo iazyka [XI–­XIV vv.], 571, entry on ob’shch’stvo). 48. Both quotes are from Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–­X VII vekov, 194, entry on obshchestvo. 49. See, e.g., Vadim Volkov, “The Forms of Public Life: The Public Sphere and the Concept of Society in Imperial Rus­sia,” unpublished PhD thesis in sociology, Cambridge University, 1995; Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-­Century Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61, 64–65, 78–85. 50. Smith, Working the Rough Stone, 64–66. 51. M. M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Rus­sia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 135, translation amended. 52. A.  A. Alekseev, “Iz istorii obshchestvenno-­politicheskoi leksiki petrovskoi epokhi” [From the History of Socio-­Political Lexics of the Petrine Era], in G. P. Makogonenko and G. N. Moiseeva, eds., XVIII vek, sbornik 9: Problemy literaturnogo razvitiia v Rossii pervoi treti XVIII veka [The eigh­teenth c­ entury, collected essays, vol. 9: prob­lems of literary development in Rus­sia of the first third of the XVIII ­century] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974), 313. 53. Paragraph 11 of chapter 1 of Pufendorf ’s book, where it speaks of Carthage as Respublica Carthageniensis in the Latin version, is rendered by obshchestvo karfagenskoe in Buzhinskii’s translation. Samuelis Pufendorii Introductio ad Historia Europaeam (Frankfurt-­a m-­Main, 1704), 15, and Pufendorf, Vvedenie v gistoriiu evropeiskuiu (St. Petersburg, 1718), 12. 54. Alekseev, “Iz istorii,” 314. 55. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 327–328. 56. O dolzhnostiakh cheloveka i grazhdanina. Kniga k chteniiu opredelennaia v narodnykh gorodskih uchilishchakh Rossiiskoi imperii [On the duties of man and citizen. A book destined for use in the urban public schools of the Rus­sian empire] (St. Petersburg, 1783), 87–88.

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 3 2 –1 3 4 57. A reader should not forget the limited potential success of such an attempt, since the overwhelming mass of the population was illiterate at the time. 58. Please see Kaplun, “Obshchestvo do obshchestvennosti,” 422, who adds, though, that this was a view of Ushakov, while Radishchev himself was more subtle—­for him the state was a machine, which the society employs to govern itself. 59. “Nakaz Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, dannyi kommissii o sochinenii Proekta Novogo Ulozheniya” [The instruction of the Empress Catherine II, given to the commission on the composition of the drafting of the new legislation], in N. D. Chechulin, ed., Pamiatniki russkogo zakonodatel’stva 1649–1832 [Monuments of Rus­ sian legislation 1649–1832] (St. Petersburg, 1907), 8. Perhaps this new definition of obshchestvo, “society,” could be best propagated in such a way—by establishing a relationship with “the state.” This was easier to do ­because the Rus­sian word for the state, gosudarstvo, was already much more rooted in Rus­sian life, and in use since at least the early fifteenth c­ entury (on this term see Oleg Kharkhordin, “What Is the State? The Rus­sian Concept of Gosudarstvo in the Eu­ro­pean Context,” History and Theory, vol. 40 [2001]: 2, 206–240). Kalugin cites a debate between count Shcherbatov and a deputy from the estate of black plowing peasantry Chuprov during the Legislative Commission of 1767–1769. Shcherbatov could have used the new term “society”—we meet it several times in his treatise on the corruption of mores, mostly in the sense of “the nation.” But Chuprov does not use the term obshchestvo, and appeals instead to “the state” and “the laws”: “Merit is always recognized for fairness, and noble honor for authenticity, but however p­ eople of all rank remain throughout the state not without entrusted vocation. Who is given which office, they, I fathom, are meeting its obligations according to all their capacities. Only now the ­matter is not in this, and gentleman deputies w ­ ere gathered not in order to ascribe honor to themselves, but for the establishment of the code of laws for all together and for each in par­tic­u ­lar . . . ​so that not one t­hing remains without l­egal regulation” (Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 347, 352n6). This peasant vision of life as consisting of very dif­fer­ent vocations or estates still precludes subsuming them all u ­ nder a single umbrella term “society.” Also, one can feel the differences in flavor of communication of the dif­fer­ent estates at the time. No surprise that the aristocrats talked past the peasants even in such gatherings. But at least they fi­nally started to rationally argue with each other! 60. Slovar’ akademii Rossiiskoi, 601, entry on obshchestvo; also see Smith, Working the Rough Stone, 56. 61. Smith, Working the Rough Stone, 56, 83–85. 62. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 336n37. 63. N. A. Smirnov, Zapadnoe vliianie na russkii iazyk v Petrovskuiu epokhu [Western influence on the Rus­sian language in the Petrine era] (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 3 4 –1 3 6 Akademii Nauk, 1910), 248 (reprint: Tumba, Sweden: International Documentation Center, 1966). 64. V. I. Lebedev, ed., Reformy Petra I. Sbornik dokumentov [Reforms of Peter I. Collection of documents] (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1937), 112. 65. Max Vasmer, Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Etymological dictionary of the Rus­sian language], vol. 3 (Moscow: Pro­g ress, 1986), 399. 66. P. Ya. Chernykh, Istoriko-­etimologicheskii slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo iazyka [Historical-­etymological dictionary of the modern Rus­sian language], vol. 2 (M.: Russkii iazyk, 1994), 80. Chernykh does not mention it, but the terminology of the Roman law had direct analogues even in the Old Rus­sian texts. For example, the translation of the Greek term ta demosia pragmata, which during the days of the Roman Empire was itself a direct Hellenistic calque of the Latin term res publica, gave the Rus­sians the term veshchi liudskie, “­things of the p­ eople.” One can find it in canon law. The ninth rule of the Council of Sardica (343 AD), included in the earliest translated Nomocanon, renders a phrase with ta demosia pragmata as “In them the blessed pious tzar [i.e. Ceasar—­O. Kh.] governs the ­things of the ­people,” which in the Latin versions appears as in quibus felicissimus ac beatus pius imperator rem publicam gubernat (V. N. Beneshevich, Drevneslavianskaia kormchaia XIV titulov bez tolkovanii [Old Slavic Nomocanon of XIV Titles without interpretations] [St. Petersburg, 1906], 287; J.-­B. Pitra, ed., Iuris ecclesiastici Graecorum historia et monumenta [Paris, 1864], 474). In general, Greek renditions of the Roman ­legal terminology gave nascent Rus­sian language a chance to register dif­fer­ent liudskie, “­people’s” or public phenomena, when it had to translate terms linked to Greek demos. Thus, the Slavic text of the seventeenth rule of Fourth Universal Council of the Christian Church (Chalcedon, 451 AD) translated the Greek expression tois politikois kai demosiois typois as “civic and p­ eople’s rules,” while the Latin translation gave civiles dispositions et publicas (Beneshevich, Drevneslavianskaia kormchaia, 120; Pitra, ed., Iuris ecclesiastici Graecorum historia, 529). None of the examples of this Latin usage had any influence on the development of publika in the eigh­teenth ­century, to the best of my knowledge. 67. Smith, Working the Rough Stone, 57. 68. Alexander Radishchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete works], 3 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1938–1952), vol. 1 (1938), 264. 69. Ibid., 227. I borrow the En­glish translation from an epigraph to A. N. Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). 70. Viktor Kaplun, Poniatiia ‘publiki’ i ‘publichnogo’ v kulture rossiiskogo Prosveshcheniia [The concepts of ‘public’ (noun) and ‘public’ (adjective) in the culture of Rus­ sian enlightenment], Working Paper 2 / 2015 of the Res Publica Research Center (St. Petersburg: EUSP, 2015), 14.

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 3 6 –1 4 1 71. Kaplun, “Obshchestvo do obshchestvennosti,” 425–426. 72. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 354. 73. Kaplun, Poniatiia ‘publiki’ i ‘publichnogo,’ 2–4. 74. Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 171, translation amended. 75. Radishchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (1952), 152–153, 146, 148, cited in Kaplun, Poniatiia ‘publiki’ i ‘publichnogo,’ 8. 76. Even in Radishchev one sometimes finds “common opinion” described as a positive force. Thus, when he writes a normative text on the types of laws and what should ensure their efficiency (he does not write ­here about what fights against this efficiency in real­ity, as he did in his essay “On Legislation”), he notes that common opinion is “the firmest support” of the laws and h ­ uman regulations (Radishchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, 166, 170). ­T hese laws thus should be rooted in this opinion. Did he want to say in this normative draft document that uniformity of the common opinion w ­ ill enforce h ­ uman conformity with the laws, which is why it is a positive force from the standpoint of a legislator? 77. Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii,” 388n24. In my opinion, in ­these letters the notion of publika is hardly po­l iti­cal. It is contrasted with “socie­t ies” in the following manner. If a Rus­sian aristocrat feels humiliated by the condescending treatment he gets in Pa­r i­sian high society as a provincial visiting the center of the civilized world, then his relationships with publika are not as demeaning. Publika is too preoccupied with its own business. It is agitated by the news of the coming war or of the latest romantic suicide in Paris, applauds duc de Bourbon and the king’s b­ rother when they enter the theater together, having made peace ­a fter a duel, and crowns Voltaire with a laurel wreath when he appears during the premiere of his last play, Irene (D. I. Fonvizin, Pervoe polnoe sobranie sochinenii, kak originalnykh, tak i perevodnykh, 1761–1792 [The first set of complete works, both original and translations, 1761–1792] [St. Petersburg and Moscow: Shamov, 1888], 898–899, 902). Fonvizin writes a lot about French politics, but I did not see him employ the word publika in such accounts. Radishchev is more po­l iti­cal in this re­spect. 78. M. M. Speranskii, Proekty i zapiski [Proj­ects and reports] (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 82–83. 79. Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii,” 387–388. 80. Ibid., 395. 81. Zhukovsky says that le beau monde is a republic of sorts, guided by a very frequently changed ruler called fashion. To frequent this republic one should know its mores and laws, “ordaining plea­sure alone as the aim of its association, plea­ sure consisting solely in appealing to one another” as Todd eloquently translates (William Mills Todd, III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions,

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 4 1–1 4 7 and Narrative [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 17). Please note, however, that h ­ ere also the direct explosive implications of the term res publica are defused; it becomes a name for a conversing and dancing crowd governed by a fickle ruler called fashion or taste. 82. Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii,” 395–413. As we remember, ­these new creators of the opinion of society ­w ill be firmly dubbed as “socialness” during the upheavals of the Rus­sian revolutions. But the mid-­nineteenth-­century term “social opinion” does not yet reflect the Soviet “opinion of socialness” that would be or­ga­n ized “around” a person by this socialness. For the 1860s, this ominous development is a ­t hing of the f­ uture. 83. Both quoted in Malinova, “Obshchestvo, publika, obshchestvennost’,” 442. 84. Ibid., 447. 85. Kireevsky, cited in Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii,” 412. Malinova, “Obshchestvo, publika, obshchestvennost’,” 446, quotes the same central assertion from Kireevsky’s article on the appreciation of Pushkin but inadvertently replaces “common opinion” in the end of the excerpt with “social opinion.” I am mentioning this not to point out the shortcomings of a scholar I greatly re­spect. Rather, I note this b­ ecause it shows the extent to which even in the eyes of the most astute students of the history of concepts, who pay very close attention to words, the terms obshchii, “common,” and obshchestvennyi, “social,” intuitively seem to be almost the same! What can we expect, then, from other Rus­sians in their everyday communication? The hybrid common-­social reigns all over them. 86. Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii,” 412. 87. Belinsky is a subject of a separate chapter in Isaiah Berlin, Rus­sian Thinkers (London: Hogarth Press, 1978). 88. In Rus­sian Belinsky deciphers res publica as delo obshchestvennoe, which can be interpreted as “social affair” also. V.  G. Belinsky, “Russkaia literatura v 1840 godu” [Rus­sian lit­er­a­t ure in 1840], in Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete works], vol. 4 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1954), 427. 89. Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 57. 90. Elena Dolgikh, K probleme mentaliteta rossiiskoi administrativnoi elity pervoi polviny XIX veka: M. A. Korf, D. N. Bludov [­Toward the prob­lem of mentalité of the Rus­ sian administrative elite of the first half of the nineteenth ­century: Modest Korf and Dmitrii Bludov] (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 54–55. 91. Dolgikh, K probleme mentaliteta, 54–55. 92. Smith, Working the Rough Stone, 56. 93. Ibid., 55. 94. As we know, he still harbored the residual love of publika. His latter-­d ay followers, though, eventually opted for the term “socialness” as a designation of

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 49 – 1 5 3 the critical reading and acting layer of ­people of middling origins, to distinguish it from aristocratic “society.” 95. Isabel de Madariaga, Rus­sia in the Age of Catherine the ­Great (London: Phoenix Press, 2002), 164–169; Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 342–351. 96. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 355. 97. Sdvizhkov, “Ot obshchestva k intelligentsii,” 387, 390. 98. I am not saying “communed” so as not to bring overtones of Holy Communion. 99. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 365–366. 100. The Slavophile newspaper Molva that had published it was closed on tsar’s o ­ rders ­after this publication. 101. K. S. Aksakov, “Publika i narod” [Publika and the p­ eople], Roman-­gazeta XXI vek, no. 7 (1999): 70 (written in 1847 for the Aksakov ­family gift a­ lbum; first published in the newspaper Molva, 14.12.1857 [No. 37], 410–411). 102. ­These circles themselves, as Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 367–368, notes, functioned on the princi­ples antithetical to a modern university, being built as close “comradely communities”—as koinonia. In other words, they almost represented a mobile monastery for the discussion of philosophy. 103. Ibid., 379–382. 104. Cited in Abram Reitblat, “Vidok Figliarin (istoriia odnoi literaturnoi reputatsii)” [Vidok Figliarin: history of one literary reputation], Voprosy literatury [Questions of lit­er­a­t ure], no. 3 (1990): 86, 82–83. 105. One characteristic quote from Bulgarin, who called himself “an equerry of publika”: “We serve publika as a reporter, we should tolerate all of its whims, patiently listen to the expressions of dissatisfaction and be very cautious when it is graciously predisposed ­towards us” (Reitblat, “Vidok Figliarin,” 84). 106. Isaiah Berlin starts his essay on Belinsky with a quote from Aksakov, who, a­ fter his 1856 trip to the provinces, discovered that the influence of his Slavophile views was negligible in comparison with ­t hose of Belinsky. In the provinces, wrote Aksakov, if you want an honest man, a good doctor, a ­lawyer willing to fight, look for a follower of Belinsky. And all of them, mentioned Aksakov, had read the 1847 letter of Belinsky to Gogol! (Berlin, Rus­sian Thinkers, 150). This famous letter stated a view of publika, which might have precipitated Aksakov’s attack on it a year ­later, in 1857. Belinsky wrote in this letter, which many knew by heart: “. . . you do not properly understand the Rus­sian publika. Its character is determined by the condition of Rus­sian society in which fresh forces are seething and struggling for expression; but weighed down by heavy oppression, and finding no outlet, they induce merely dejection, weariness, and apathy. Only lit­er­a­t ure, despite the Tartar censorship, shows signs of life and progressive movement. That is why the title of writer is held in such esteem among us; that

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 5 3 –1 5 7 is why literary success is easy among us even for a writer of l­ittle talent. . . . ​ [T]hat especially explains why e­ very so-­called liberal tendency, however poor in talent, is rewarded by universal notice . . . ​[H]ere publika is right, for it looks upon Rus­sian writers as its only leaders, defenders, and saviors against Rus­sian autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality . . .” (Vissarion Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948), 509, translation amended) 107. Kalugin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘obshchestvo,’ ” 374–375. 108. See, e.g., his review of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture for 1846: Malinova, “Obshchestvo, publika, obshchestvennost’,” 443. 109. Radishchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, 148. 110. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia. 111. In the wake of the Panama papers’ revelations, I explic­itly do not mean the pools of money of criminal origin that are posited in offshore jurisdictions by groups of conspiring friends, some of which serve as just a cover-up for their officialdom buddies, siphoning off money from the public assets, entrusted to them, into their private pockets. But the term obshchak could also be used to describe ­these illegally formed pools of money. 112. Estelle Lezean, “Des proches aux propriétaires: pro­cessus de transformation de la Russie agraire (1991–2003),” t­ hese du Doctorat en science politique, Université Paris Nanterre, 2006. 113. Henry M. Robert III et al., Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised, 11 ed. (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2011). 114. Oleg Kharkhordin, “The Past and F ­ uture of Rus­sian Public Language,” in Nikolai Vakhtin and Boris Firsov, eds., Public Debate in Rus­sia: ­Matters of (Dis)order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 281–333. Indeed, a ­simple copying of the UK or US discursive rules ­will not work. Mimicking institutions of modern Western democracies in the 1990s contributed to the spread of electoral authoritarianism in the Rus­sian Federation in the 2000s. One thus needs to account for a difference in background practices (see Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, chapter 1). For example, working out the public position of the First Conference of the Rus­sian Scientific Diaspora that was held at EUSP in June 2010 took seventeen days of emailing in July, b­ ecause emotions during and a­ fter the conference ran high, and even politeness was sometimes used as a weapon. This was very surprising given than nearly every­body participating in the debates was used to routine practices of deliberation in their US and EU universities, where they sat on multiple committees! (See O. V. Kharkhordin, A. M. Vershik, and A. M. Samoletova, eds., Sud’by nauki v Rossii i rossiiskaia nauchnaia diaspora [The fate of science in Rus­sia and the Rus­sian scientific diaspora] (St. Petersburg: EUSP, 2010), 6–7.

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 5 8 –161 115. Yves Sintomer, Le pouvoir au peuple. Jurys citoyens, tirage au sort et démocratie participative (Paris: La Découverte, 2007). 116. Carsten Herzberg, Anja Röcke, and Yves Sintomer, Bud­gets patricipatifs en Eu­ rope. Des ser­v ices publics au ser­v ice du public (Paris: La Decouverte, 2008). 117. Vladimir Vagin, “Initsiativnoe biudzhetirovanie: rossiiskaia praktika” [Initiative bud­geting: the Rus­sian experience], and Lev Shilov, “Tekhnologiia vovlecheniia grazhdan v biudzhetnyi protsess” [Techniques of involving citizens in the bud­ geting pro­cess], Biudzhet [Bud­get] (journal of the Ministry of Finance of Rus­sia), no. 4 (2015), http://­bujet​.r­ u​/a­ rticle​/­274443​.p­ hp and http://­bujet​.­r u​/­article​/­274483​ .­php, last accessed on January 5, 2017.

5. Self-­Cognition and Self-­Fashioning in Con­temporary Rus­sia 1. See, e.g., Oleg Kharkhordin, “Resetting Modernity: A Rus­sian Version,” in Bruno Latour with Christophe Leclercq, eds., Reset Modernity! (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 381. 2. Researchers from the Center for Science and Technology Studies at EUSP carried out this study from September 2011 to March 2013 with support from the Rusnano’s Infrastructure and Educational Programs Fund. I would like to thank Anatolii Chubais, Leonid Gozman, Sergei Udaltsov and Aleksei Gan from the Rusnano corporation for helping devise and streamline this study, and scholars Harley Balzer, Liliana Doganova, Martin Giraudeau, Vincent Lepinay, Michael Lynch, Andrei Mogoutov, Andrew Pickering, Trevor Pinch, and Laurent Thevenot for advice during research. Thomas Campbell helped me with En­glish and with finding the adequate means to convey some points across the cultural divides. Of course, none of ­these ­people are to blame for the remaining shortcomings. 3. When one reflects on the limits of source audiences and a data set on which we based our research conclusions, one understands the danger of taking features of a par­t ic­u ­lar professional, educational, and heavi­ly male-­oriented community (technological entrepreneurs) as representative of the Rus­sian population as a ­whole. But ­because Rus­sia has been witnessing the first attempts to assem­ble so­c io­log­i­cal data on the topics of self-­cognition / self-­fashioning only very recently, this is what we have at hand right now when we try to formulate and test some initial hypotheses. In other words, it would be wrong to claim that everyday practices of a specific cohort of the population are necessarily representative of a pool of everyday practices that Rus­sians share ­these days. But our interviews primarily dealt not with the big normative moral issues but rather with micro-­level use, as in small gadgets and devices like smartphones and day planners used in everyday practices of self-­planning and self-­evaluation. ­These

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no t e s t o pag e s 161–16 5 objects usually go unnoticed by the demands of high moral discourse, and the means of their usage are not at the center of attention of the moralists, if t­ hey’re even noticed at all. Thus, one would suspect, we could have been offered a glimpse at some practices that might be shared by many Rus­sians. For example, as ­f uture exposition ­w ill show, technopreneurs turned out not to be preoccupied with the aspects of the new IT personal use devices at all, contrary to what some of our researchers thought. In contrast with teen­agers, they share in the general indifference t­ oward t­ hese devices that adult urban dwellers demonstrate in Rus­sia. 4. We have deci­ded to use this shorthand neologism throughout this text, b­ ecause it has been gaining widespread usage in relation to the technological entrepreneurship in developing countries and emerging markets. Since Rus­sia is one of the latter, the term seemed appropriate. 5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutic of the Self,” Po­liti­cal Theory vol. 21 (1993): 3; Viktor Zhivov, “Pokaiannaia distsiplina i individualnoe blagochestie v istorii russkogo pravoslaviia” [Penitential discipline and individual piety in the history of Rus­sian orthodoxy], in K. B. Sigov, ed., Druzhba: ee formy, ispytaniia i dary [Friendship: its forms, ­trials, and gifts] (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2008). 6. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 214. 7. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Rus­sian Communism, trans. R.  M. French (London: Centenary Press, 1937). 8. George Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown and Com­pany, 1967), 562. 9. Having encountered a similar hypothesis in our preliminary report, Loren Graham dubbed it “an attitudinal explanation.” However, in the pres­ent study we have focused on practices rather than on values and attitudes. Please see Evgenii Anisimov, Boris Gladarev, Ekaterina Pravilova, Zhanna Tsinman, and Oleg Kharkhordin, Istoriia technicheskikh proryvov v Rossiskoi imperii v XVIII—­ nachale XX vv.: uroki dlia XXI v.? [A history of technical breakthroughs in the Rus­sian empire from the eigh­teenth c­ entury to the early twentieth ­century: lessons for the twenty-­fi rst ­century?], Preliminary report for the Rusnano corporation (2010), available at http://­eu​.­spb. ru/images/projects/istoria_proryrovXVIII-­XIX.pdf (last checked on Jan. 28, 2017); and Loren Graham, Lonely Ideas: Can Rus­sia Compete? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 104. 10. Eigh­teen expert interviews and 27 biographical interviews w ­ ere conducted in Saint Petersburg (the site of the pi­lot proj­ect); 11 expert interviews and 21 biographical interviews in Tatarstan; 11 expert interviews and 15 biographical in-

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no t e s t o pag e 16 5 terviews in Novosibirsk; and 11 expert interviews and 20 biographical interviews in Tomsk. No expert interviews w ­ ere conducted in Finland, only 20 biographical interviews. The case was the same in Taiwan, where 15 biographical interviews ­were conducted. In South K ­ orea, 5 expert interviews and 15 biographical interviews ­were conducted. In addition, we conducted 12 biographical interviews with Rus­sian Federation citizens who ­were ethnic Koreans and had recently moved to South ­Korea to work. Thus, the EUSP STS center team conducted 47 expert interviews and 154 biographical interviews in all, for a total of 201 interviews. 11. Critics could say that interviews of this kind w ­ ere likely to confirm the initial working hypothesis. Of course, fieldwork involving participant observation would be more appropriate. But our research team had limited time and resources and thus had to rely on interviewing. One is aware of the limitations of such an approach. Still, what might be the saving grace of our approach is that our respondents ­were asked about the usage of small t­ hings, like IT gadgets or smartphones involved in self-­fashioning, and t­ hese minor objects are usually not the focus of our discursive attention, which other­w ise rigidly structures our words ­because of a stricter regulation of more moralized concerns of life like sex, desire, non-­cheating in marriage, e­ tc. So we might have captured many details of everyday life quite right even with the help of such interviews. 12. In what follows, the page numbers from one of the two final research reports are given when respondents are quoted. The reports can be accessed at http://­eu​ .­spb. ru/research-­centers/sts/projects/item/4417-­technological-­entrepreneurship, in the section entitled Otchety (Reports), where the authors of the individual reports are also identified. The regional reports have been quoted from the single consolidated volume of supplements; the pages ­there are numbered consecutively, totaling 484. In the quotations, the Rus­sian regions have been abbreviated “Nsk,” “SPb,” “Tat,” and “Tom,” respectively; the other countries, “Kor,” “Tai,” and “Fin.” Thus, for example, I might refer to “Santeri, b. 1967, Fin 211,” or “Alexander, b. 1963, Nsk 385,” where the final figure given is the page number in the consolidated volume of regional reports. The main final report of 168 pages has been abbreviated “Final,” and is followed by the corresponding page number. When respondents are mentioned in the final report, their home regions are indicated: for example, “Viktor, b. 1956, Tat, Final 112,” means that Viktor, who is from Tatarstan and was born in 1956, is quoted in the final proj­ect report on page 112, rather than in the regional report on Tatarstan. All names of respondents have been changed to ensure anonymity. A summary of the main comparative research findings appears in a forthcoming book—­Olga Bychkova, ed., Fantasticheskie miry rossiiskogo khai teka. Kulturnye praktiki tekhnologicheskikh predprinimatelei v Rossii [Fantastic worlds of Rus­sian high tech: cultural practices of technological entrepreneurship in Rus­sia].

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no t e s t o pag e s 16 5 –1 7 8 13. Harley Balzer, “Learning to Innovate? Education and Knowledge-­Based Economies in Rus­sia and China,” Mortara Working Paper 2011–2017, Georgetown University, 2011, https://­w ww​.­sas​.­upenn​.­edu​/­polisci​/­sites​/­w ww​.­sas​.­upenn​.­edu​ .­polisci​/­fi les​/­Balzer​.­MortaraLearn2Innovate​.­pdf (last checked on Jan. 27, 2017); Dan Breznitz and Michael Murfree, Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 8–9. 14. For the notion of background see Hubert Dreyfus, Being-­in-­the-­World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); John Searle, The Construction of Social Real­ity (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1995); Vadim Volkov and Oleg Kharkhordin, Teoriia praktik [Theory of practices] (Saint Petersburg: EUSP Press, 2008), 18–23, 34–40. 15. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, chapter 6. 16. Ibid., 241–249. 17. The pi­lot study at St. Petersburg also used transcribed texts of interviews conducted for another proj­ect, hence ­these quotes do not give names of our respondents but are simply marked TP or E, which stands for “technopreneur” and “expert.” 18. It seems rather unlikely that, on the contrary, penitential techniques of revealing the self in deeds would have increased, given that Western Christian practices of solitary self-­k nowledge have been propagated, replicated, and cultivated over the past twenty-­five years, while the Soviet enthusiasm for ­doing every­t hing with the help of a group has faded. 19. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 175–177. 20. And then it would be almost reminiscent of the famous Soviet-­era maxim about life’s goal, as coined by the Socialist Realist writer Nikolai Ostrovsky in the novel How the Steel Was Tempered: “One must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years.” This Soviet imperative would thus be still impor­tant to Olga. 21. Shame was also a central motif in several other interviews. For example, a middle-­aged respondent in Novosibirsk (Eduard, b. 1957) recounted that when he went into business during perestroika, he felt ashamed: he bought spare parts for 2,000 rubles, made a cardiograph out of a vacuum cleaner, and sold it for 40,000 rubles. But anyone could have done that! He berated a Czech inventor who got rich simply by patenting automobile mudguards: “Can that be considered an invention? Every­one in­ven­ted it! In ­every other garage, they used to seal the underside of [automobile] side panels with resin. But he got a patent. I’m ashamed to do such ­things.” But he was not ashamed to work in a laboratory that mea­sured the “biofields” of psychics using the most advanced equipment in 1983, ­because the task was of earth-­shaking importance and could have produced real innovations.

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no t e s t o pag e s 1 7 9 – 191 22. Perhaps the hypothesis that the young p­ eople ­were only interested in revealing to themselves their professional identity is gender insensitive and therefore not entirely correct. It is no won­der that the only description of a personal evaluation that rises and falls like the Dow Jones index (meaning that it changes daily) was given by a ­woman. For Rus­sian ­women, whose families suffer more when they are employed full time (­because ­children and husbands may have strong traditional expectations about ­women’s domestic roles), how spouses and ­children evaluate their work can greatly affect their self-­esteem. This assessment can change much more frequently than a similar assessment of the be­hav­ior of a man, of whom his ­children might say, “Dad’s at work? That’s where he belongs.” On the contrary, according to traditional notions of the ­family, a m ­ other who is always at work is a bad m ­ other. Thus, in traditional families, a w ­ oman’s personal identity, not only her professional identity, is constantly called into question by her work. 23. This phrase has a play of words, untranslatable into En­glish, since the Rus­sian word for cash (nalichnost’) has the same root as the word for person (lichnost’). Cash is what is put out in a deliberate way; it is facing you openly, nalitso. In En­ glish the closest play of words thus perhaps would be a link between “face value” and “face” (do not forget that persona in Latin is a mask, prosopon in Greek). Then my thesis could be stated as follows: before p­ eople cared to have the right face, now they just want to be taken at face value. This phrase would convey the Rus­ sian sense of what’s ­going on only if one takes it not as a statement on the superficiality of the current situation, but as a way to say: before every­body wanted their personality reflected in be­hav­ior facing o ­ thers to be evaluated in moral / immoral terms, now many want their be­hav­ior to be just evaluated in money, to have a cash equivalent, so one can legitimately apply the term “face value” to it. 24. As we noted in the previous section on methods of self-­d iscovery, some ­people now generally evaluate their professional success in solitude and in purely quantitative terms, which indicates that “en-­cashment” can be made even easier by using Western Christian self-­k nowledge techniques. 25. See, e.g., Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 242–245. 26. Ibid., 246–249. 27. Interestingly, agility is the competitive advantage that sets Silicon Valley science startups and small San Francisco-­a rea biotech firms apart from the major research companies of the 1950s and 1960s (Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 95). 28. Compare Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 248. 29. Perhaps this case was exceptional in Tomsk as well, since the technopreneur in question very much defined himself not only through his work but also by the classic lit­er­a­t ure he read.

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no t e s t o pag e s 19 2 – 2 0 0 30. To be fair, we should say ­t here ­were also a few respondents who held that the financial motivation was primary, self-­realization—­secondary: “In terms of motivation, the first [motivation] is financial, earning money, of course. Immediately followed by professional motivation, I think. As a rule, the interest [arises] only on the job. That is, an area where creative and technical self-­realization is, well, at the limit, at a maximum” (Mikhail F., b. 1976, SPb 34). 31. I. T. Frolov, ed., Filosofskii slovar’ [Philosophical dictionary] (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991), 378. 32. Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka [Dictionary of con­temporary Rus­sian literary language], 17 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1950–1965), vol. 12: 1056– 1057, 1060. 33. On the notion of background practices, please see the introduction to Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia.

6. Inspired and Aspiring Selves 1. If the fieldwork had not taken two to three months, as it did in our case, and our researchers could have lived in each culture for one or two years, as Malinowski or Evans-­Pritchard did, the se­lection of respondents and coverage of all strata of technopreneurs in South ­Korea, Taiwan, and Finland would have been much better in terms of the representativeness of the data collected. 2. Perhaps they are not so numerous, since this segment of technopreneurs was thus not revealed as significant by our research? What does it say when two months of insistent searching for dif­fer­ent respondents in four Rus­sian regions using snowball sampling turned up no technopreneurs “from the street stall”? Of course, only further research aimed at quantitative estimates of t­ hose who went into high-­tech entrepreneurship from ­either science or low-­tech business and commerce would give us a clear answer about the proportions of the former and the latter in Rus­sia. 3. Olga Bychkova, ed., Fantasticheskie miry rossiiskogo khai teka. Kulturnye praktiki tekhnologicheskikh predprinimatelei v Rossii [Fantastic worlds of Rus­sian high tech: cultural practices of technological entrepreneurship in Rus­sia], forthcoming. 4. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 159–211. 5. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 103–164. Having incorporated the ideals that the New Left had sought in the 1960s and 1970s (flexibility, a personalized approach to work relations, and an end to hierarchy and the rigid Fordist system of ­labor organ­i zation), work became even more enslaving. P ­ eople in the developed countries are now increasingly working not only on the job, but at

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 01– 2 0 5 home and during vacations (and working much longer as a result, taking into account the time spent purely on dif­fer­ent work tasks). They are all allegedly equal members of “teams” rather than of hierarchically or­ga­n ized firms, which once functioned like large patriarchal families. But now, ­because of the project-­ based, temporary, and flexible nature of t­ hese teams, recruited to implement specific proj­ects, their members are not eligible for pensions and the benefits packages traditionally enjoyed by full-­t ime employees. 6. In the Finnish case, only firms producing tangible goods w ­ ere analyzed. Most of them still had stable contracts for their key staff, and their “projectivity” was evident only in outsourcing or in their ideas of how to live, which w ­ ere partly contradicted by the real­ity of their own firms, where work was performed on the basis of permanent contracts, not by teams assembled for single proj­ects. The initial conclusions of the final report for Rus­sia ­were a bit impressionistic, since the calculations ­were done by the report submission deadline, and the sheer wealth of data did not allow careful evaluation of all interview texts. In preparation for an academic publication, subsequent recalculation based on more careful coding and double checking has shown that in the Rus­sian mix, the world of justification by inspiration takes second, not first place, as it initially seemed (See the chapter by Gladarev and Tsinman in Bychkova, ed., Fantasticheskie miry, forthcoming). 7. As a result, some respondents seemingly had to suspend Protestant princi­ples to maintain emotional equilibrium and m ­ ental health. One Finnish entrepreneur understood how imperfect it was of him to go the movies with his ­children, setting unfinished work aside for a c­ ouple of hours since f­ amily, as we remember, is the most impor­tant ­t hing: “At first, prob­ably five or six years ­a fter finishing high school, I tried to beat my work, to get every­thing done, but sooner or ­later I recognized I could never do every­thing I needed to do. I am not ­going to stress myself out over the fact that something remains partly unfinished” (Lasse, b. 1975, Fin 212). 8. Of course, we are aware of all the limitations of comparing the texts of interviews that w ­ ere conducted in radically dif­fer­ent cultures in the local languages and then translated into Rus­sian. In this sense, we replicate all the shortcomings of the large-­scale cross-­cultural studies made in En­glish, for example, in the United States and ­England ­after the 1950s. We perhaps intuitively and implicitly read Rus­sian cultural standards and attitudes into our comparisons and interpretations of non-­Russian phenomena, just as the Americans did when, for example, they posited their model of civic culture as a universal ideal rather than a largely Anglo-­A merican phenomenon. But at least we are mindful of the limitations of conclusions based on this comparative procedure and employ it with careful attention to the terms we use—­for example, when we employ the Korean

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 0 7 – 2 2 4 and Chinese analogues of the Rus­sian term “self-­realization.” When the interviewers focused on the concept, they used local linguistic calques of the En­glish term “personal growth,” which ­were more familiar to the respondents from business textbooks. Given that the Rus­sian term is also largely based on Maslow’s theories and business textbooks, this procedure seemed justified. 9. Even without thinking in terms of lofty truths, the civil ser­v ice seems to be attractive to Taiwanese for mundane reasons: the salary is not high, but the job provides medical insurance and so on. 10. For some, “working up” might seem like a more faithful, if less literally precise, translation—­and this term already exists in En­glish. I would tend to retain the “work-­in-­development” or “en-­working” neologisms ­because razrabotka might be working or not, not a neat plan or a finished prototype of a product. Plus, this aspect of it is not captured by colloquial En­glish phrases that involve “working up,” like the following: I sketched the layout of a prototype store and worked up a business plan or They asked me to work up some sample drawings and bring them down. 11. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics, trans. Christopher Kasparek (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980). 12. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi [The dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy] (St. Petersburg: pri Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1789–1794), 6 vols.; vol. 6 (1794), 61. However, this same dictionary also recorded a new, non-­religious, and non-­poetic definition of the word “creator”: “producer, doer of something.” But this meaning was illustrated by an example from the Church Slavonic translation of James 1:25, “creator of the work,” which the Rus­sian Synodal translation of the Bible would ­later render as “doer of the work,” meaning someone who not only listens to the word of God but also lives in accordance with it. Religious references are thus very much pres­ent even in the first attempts at secularized usage. 13. Feliks Dzerzhinskii, “O rabochem izobretatel’stve” [On workers’ inventions], in his Izbrannye proizvedeniia [Selected works] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1967), vol. 2, 94. 14. En-­workings “say” a lot about the personality of ­t hose who work on and with them, perhaps, and that’s why they embellish the latter. Therefore, t­ here is another pos­si­ble radical interpretation, one not broached in this chapter. If the ability to speak is attributed to ­t hings, the practice of revealing the self should be perhaps reinterpeted: not only are p­ eople capable of it, but so are t­ hings, or, better yet, the networks of ­humans and non-­humans. Clearly, I did not consider this Latourian perspective in my book The Collective and the Individual in Rus­sia, where only p­ eople ­were deemed capable of revealing the ­human self, and I have not employed it in this current study of technopreneurs. However, if we do ascribe voices to t­ hings, we must immediately distinguish between two dif­fer­ent situations. It is one situation when feathers falling at the same speed as stones

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 2 4 – 2 3 1 in Robert Boyle’s vacuum pump tell us about the laws of nature, and Boyle says we should let the ­things speak for themselves and show us the truth. It is another case when a work-­i n-­development that has fi­nally been transformed into a finished device “says” that this person (its developer) is a genius. This is a dif­ fer­ent sort of testimony. If t­ hings not only point to the laws of nature but also are capable of endowing p­ eople with personhood, the ­whole conception of my 1999 book would have to be revised. 15. We see this conception not only among the younger respondents but also among ­t hose who grew up in the Soviet Union: “I encountered completely dif­fer­ent ­people. . . . ​The research institute gave me so much, b­ ecause I encountered, first, a world of ­people who w ­ ere very passionate about their work, p­ eople who, first, did not keep track of time, and worked as much as necessary. . . . ​I happily plunged into this world” (Marat, b. 1956, Tom 256). 16. Compare Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 33: poetic madness, inspired by the Muses, is when a divine force fills poets with enthousiasmos and even makes them obsessed. 17. The verb “inspire,” like “perspire” or “respire,” denotes inhaling or exhaling, while Latin spirare means “to breath” or “to spirit.” The En­glish noun “spirit,” like the Rus­sian word dukh, derives from Latin spiritus, or “breath.” 18. The second part of that novel describes how staff members of the Acad­emy of Sciences institute charged with mechanizing magic meet inadvertently on the night of the New Year in their labs, having performed all the needed rituals of toasting, dancing, and gift-­g iving back at home. Working in labs on continuing experiments makes more sense for them than all this senseless, vodka-­f ueled, fun. Given that in real life the New Year’s cele­bration was the most central Soviet ­family and community holiday, an equivalent of Christmas (which was not celebrated officially), working on this festive night was hardly conceivable, ­unless one had to be on official duty. Hence, many scientists send their phantom “doubles” to dance and say niceties while the “originals” return to work in the institute (Arkadii Strugatski and Boris Strugatski, Monday Begins on Saturday [New York: DAW Books, 1977]). 19. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 9. 20. Shtyrit’ (literally, “to get pinned”), for ­those unfamiliar with Rus­sian youth slang, is synonymous with the expressions “get a buzz” and “experience euphoria.” The term was originally associated with the drug culture, and shtyrit’ could also mean pliushchit’ (literally, “get flattened”) and kolbasit’ (literally, “get sausaged”), that is, experience unpleasant consequences of drug use, not only the pleasant experience of getting “turned on.” However, the current prevalent meaning is

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 3 4 – 2 4 6 a positive experience associated with ecstasy and inspiration, as in the phrase “This ­music pins me hard.” 21. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 24. 22. Ibid., 38, 45. 23. Ibid., 94. 24. Ibid., 91. 25. Walter Isaac­son, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 159–170. 26. Ibid., 92, 94, 490, 499. 27. Isaac­son, Steve Jobs, 172, xix. 28. Loren Graham, Lonely Ideas: Can Rus­sia Compete? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 29. See, e.g., Erik Simon, “The Strugatskys in Po­liti­cal Context,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 31:3 (2004), 378. 30. Graham, Lonely Ideas. 31. Loren Graham and Jean-­Michel Kantor, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18. 32. Vladimir Bibikhin, “Rossiia i mir” [Rus­sia and the world], in Aleksei Kara-­Murza, ed., Paralleli: Rossiia—­Vostok—­Zapad. Almanakh filosofskoi komparitivistiki [Parallels: Russia—­East—­West: A comparative philosophy almanac], vol. 1 (Moscow: Institute of Philosophy, Soviet Acad­emy of Sciences, 1991), 6. 33. Ibid., 7. 34. Compare the concept of flow in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: A Psy­chol­ogy of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

Conclusion 1. By now, it should be clear that as with any binary distinction, it impoverishes and oversimplifies real­ity, that is, it diminishes the variety of stances one could take ­towards the powers that be. I have initially brought up this binary to show the two radically opposite poles in the spectrum of positions ranging from an unthinking cooptation to a ­bitter conscious rejection of the participation in the system. 2. Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library 30 (London: Heinemann, 1913), 56; Hannah Arendt, The ­Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 55–56. 3. See, e.g., De re publica I: 39, in Cicero, De re publica. De legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keys. Loeb Classical Library 213 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 64.

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 4 6 – 2 5 1 4. Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 197, 205–206. 5. I have not studied this phenomenon in the pres­ent book, but it would be in­ter­ est­i ng to evaluate the changes that happen in the network of close friends when they become a core of a larger group taking over a city, a region, or a country. Putin’s friends are an obvious case in point, and the journalists have frequently pointed to the so-­called Lake co-op, which Putin and his seven friends and colleagues had founded a­ fter losing the St. Petersburg mayoral election of 1996. This co-op exists only on paper nowadays, but the surnames of its initial found­ers now sound like the brands for concentration of economic, social, or po­liti­cal capital. My hypothesis would be that as such groups of friends move into power, the intimate sub-­code of friends’ communication loosens, while a language of po­l iti­cal friendship develops and solidifies, consisting partly of the hierarchical patron / client loyalty talk and partly of an impersonal mode of egalitarian “we are all in the same boat / team” assertions. 6. As Chapter 4 argued, using the example of the Living City, all could not and should not be invited to get access to t­ hese sites of deliberation and decision-­ making. For example, most inhabitants of a given city are nonchalant t­ owards what’s ­going in the mayor’s office, and for good reason: life would be horrible if it w ­ ere only about politics all of the time. But t­ hose who care about what’s g­ oing on with the common ­things in the city should have access (on certain conditions like executive education on ­matters to be discussed) to ­t hese sites, so that they could also serve as links to a broader public should this public be alerted about prob­lems with ­these common ­t hings. 7. Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 35–36. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Bill Todd made a precise analy­sis of what he calls “a Rus­sian ideology”—­a set of moral intuitions on appropriate or virtuous be­hav­ior offered by the three canonic novels that ­every Rus­sian youth now has to read as part of a compulsory school curriculum: Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and Gogol’s Dead Souls. The first one conveys the mores of the aristocratic salons of the early nineteenth ­century—­for example, the prevalence of “the ideology of talk,” that is, polished, pleasant, and easy-­going but intelligent communication; the second—­a certain theatricality of acts and a need for an adequate arena for this action, characteristic of, say, the Decembrists; the third one—­a rejection in its very title of the idea that a soul is eternal and an assertion in the novel’s text that the soul is mortal, so that superficial communication of the good society and the absence of ­g reat deeds may make aristocrats already dead even when they are functionally alive (William Mills Todd, III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions and Narrative [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 10, 31, 152, 164, 194).

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no t e s t o pag e s 2 5 1– 2 5 3 10. Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 323–324. 11. “Euphoria . . . ​may be experienced as ­either a dreamlike mystical illumination or a more active and ethical conversion” (Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], vol. 1, 535). 12. Ibid., 533–534. 13. If one agrees that young p­ eople in Western Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca now frequently take politics to be about self-­expression and euphoria rather than acting in concert (participation is re-­f ramed as expressing a point of view, but w ­ hether that point of view is articulated into a void with ­l ittle chance of translation into policy seems irrelevant for t­ hose concerned), then one sees that the question of fighting euphoric expression is not only useful to get rid of the residues of the Soviet past, it is also part of the tasks for con­temporary cap­i­tal­ist consumer socie­ ties in general. One could arguably trace a parallel trajectory through the Western world and arrive at a similar buzz-­based “access to the Divine” that blocks access to res publica and thus requires transformation in order to place res publica at the center of shared life. Reflecting upon this parallel development in post-­Communist semi-­periphery and in the core of the world cap­i­tal­ist system is a task for another book, though.

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Acknowl­edgments

This book would have been impossible without the contributions of many friends and colleagues. I mention ­these generous ­people in notes to respective chapters. None of them is to blame for any remaining flaws of the text, of course. The anonymous reviewers for Harvard University Press provided ­g reat help as well, particularly with their suggestions for how to better summarize and structure the rather complicated argument of this book. I also thank Nan Wiener, editor of the reworked manuscript, for making the text more understandable for an English-­speaking audience. Chapter  1 substantially reworks and expands on “Friendship and Politics in Rus­sia,” Common Knowledge, vol. 22:2 (2016): 220–236, in the context of a slightly dif­ fer­ent argument. Brief passages from earlier essays originally published in Rus­sian are incorporated ­here: Chapter 2 from “Kuda idet teoriia praktik: povorot k materialnosti” (Where the Theory of Practices Is Going: The Materiality Turn), Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia (November 2012): 20–35, and Chapters 3 and 4 from Kharkhordin, ed., Ot obshchestvennogo k publichnomu (From the Social to the Public) (St. Petersburg: EUSP Press, 2011), 487–529. This book is dedicated to Estelle, Masha, and Gavriil, who suffered my long absences as I thought through and wrote this text, tested parts of it in pre­sen­ta­t ions to diverse audiences, and acted based on republican ­recipes when EUSP demanded it or was at risk. I am im­mensely grateful for all the love and support they nevertheless gave me whenever the opportunity arose.

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Index

activists, 82, 87, 93, 106, 110, 112 actor-­network theory, 14, 50, 59–66 Akademgorodok, Rus­sia, 190 Aksakov, Konstantin, 150, 281n106 Aksenov, Vassily, 98 Alexander I, 7, 139, 141, 273n20 Alexander III, 88, 155 Althoff, Gerd, 30 Altshuller, Genrich, 225 amateurs, 214, 216, 234 ambiguity (in Shakespeare), 16–17 Ambrose (Saint), 31 ancient Greece: absence of socialness in, 77, 102; civic morality in, 2, 253; creativity in, 10, 222, 224, 232; friendship in, 259n13; longing for immortality in, 250; po­l iti­cal friendship in, 5; publicness in, 118; Stoic doctrine of incorporeal effects in, 47 Antsiferov, Nikolai, 107 Apollo, 224 Apple, 237 Arendt, Hannah: and common-­ism, 151–159; on common vs. public, 118, 144; The H ­ uman Condition, 77, 159, 250–251;

on po­l iti­cal friendship, 26; on po­l iti­cal theory, 11; on publicness, 12; republicanism of, 243, 247, 251; on res publica, 6, 117, 159, 246, 248–253; on self-­k nowledge, 182; on socialness, 72, 77, 99, 102–103, 143–144; on the social vs. public life, 113 aristocrats: and common-­ism, 141, 150; and friendship, 26, 31, 37; and the origins of socialness, 82, 89; and revolution of 1917, 250 Aristotle, 1, 29, 49, 129, 131 artists, 10, 88, 92, 221–222 Aseev, Nikolai, 95 Atticus, 25 Augustus, 58 Austin, John L., 11–12 autocracy, 73–74, 82, 89, 152 Avraamii of Smolensk, 128

Baranovich, Lazar, 28 Barbon, Nicholas, 13 Barrow, Isaac, 127 Baudelaire, Charles, 147 le beau monde, 99, 133, 279n81

 297 

Index Belinsky, Vissarion, 142–145, 147, 152–155, 158, 280n88, 281n106 Bell, Daniel, 161 Bely, Andrei, 107 Benckendorf, General von, 141, 155 Benedict (Saint), 162 Benjamin, Walter, 120 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 163 Berezovsky, Boris Abramovich, 187 Berlin, Isaiah, 142, 255n1, 281n106 Bibikhin, Vladimir, 240, 241–242 Blackstone, William, 131 Bludov, Dmitrii, 144 Bodin, Jean, 255n2 Bogoraz, Larisa, 271n68 Bolsheviks, 91–92, 256n4 Boltanski, Luc, 10, 17, 200 Bosanquet, Bernard, 194 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 41, 64 Boyle, Robert, 234, 291n14 Bradley, F. H., 194 Brezhnev, Leonid, 82, 94, 101 Britain: colonial rule by, 27; idealist phi ­los­o­phers in, 194; Karamzin in, 86; po­l iti­cal friendship with the United States in, 261n36 Buddhism, 172, 182, 210 Bukharin, Nikolai, 93 Bulgarin, Faddei, 152–154, 158, 281n105 Bush, George W., 42 business: business plans, 170, 184; and commercialization, 236–237; and creativity, 226, 231; cultural comparisons, 199, 202–206, 209, 213; schools for, 194–195, 200, 223; and self-­cognition, 161, 172, 175; and self-­fashioning, 185–186, 190; and self-­realization, 192–193; and self-­revelation, 175–176, 181; and technological modernization, 239; and work-­i n-­development, 215, 217, 220 Buzhinskii, Gavriil, 131 buzz, 227, 230–232, 238, 252–253, 291n20. See also euphoria

Caesar, 55–56, 58–59, 67, 86 Callon, Michel, 50 Catherine the ­Great: and communication, 127; and Enlightenment, 7, 89, 129; on laws and deliberation, 147–148; on society, 130, 132–133, 138–140, 277n59 Catholicism, 163, 253 Cato Minor, 86 Cavendish, Henry, 214, 234 censorship, 89, 101, 137–138, 142–143, 281n106 Chaadaev, Piotr, 142 Chalcedon Council (451 AD), Fourth Universal Council of the Christian Church, 278n66 Chechulin, Nikolai, 268n37 Cherepovets, Rus­sia, 59, 63–64 Chernykh, Pavel, 134, 278n66 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 188 Chiapello, Ève, 10, 200 ­c hildren: and common-­ism, 108–109, 127, 132, 135; and creativity, 216, 239; cultural comparisons, 202, 205, 208; and friendship, 18, 22; and self-­fashioning, 181, 188; and self-­realization, 194 China: pursuit of money in, 208; technological growth in, 165 Chris­tian­ity: Catholicism, 163, 253; and commoning, 126; and communion, 31, 35–36, 122, 152; and divine inspiration, 225; Eastern Orthodox Church, 122, 163, 274n26; and friendship, 31, 35; Protestants, 9, 201, 211; and self-­d iscovery, 162; and self-­improvement, 186 Chubais, Anatolii, 161 church. See religion; specific religions Cicero: on consensus iuris, 6, 12, 53–54, 117; and po­l iti­cal theory, 11–12; republicanism of, 243, 246; on res publica, 49, 53–59, 64, 67–68, 106, 108, 117–118, 151–159, 263n11 citizens: and common-­ism, 117, 119, 124, 132, 152, 155, 157; and laws, 12, 246; and

 298 

Index res publica, 53–55, 61; and socialness, 97; and society, 74, 77, 132 city administration and government, 62, 70, 106, 112, 116 civic republicanism, 255n2 civil society: associations, 40, 75, 77, 115, 157; and Communism, 265n6; deliberation in, 273n16; role of, 71, 74–75, 78; and socialness, 86 Colas, Dominique, 256n8 commercialization, 164, 181, 215–216, 233–238 commodities, 13–17, 257n20 common good, 126, 136, 257n11 commoning: and common-­ism, 123–127, 156, 159; and communion, 80, 243–247; and publika, 146; and self-­communing, 80; of ­t hings, 8, 12, 81, 127, 158, 245, 247 common-­ism, 105–159; and commoning, 123–127, 156, 159; and communication, 113–116, 120–122, 127–130, 145, 149, 151, 153; and communion, 120–123, 125, 127–128, 146, 151–152, 156, 158–159; early history and theory, 120–151; getting rid of, 246–247; prob­lems of, 151–159; and public deeds, 105–119; and publika, 134–151; and society, 130–133 common opinion, 137–138, 140–142, 145–146, 152 common property, 59, 61, 69, 79 common-­social realm, 8, 137, 158, 243, 280n85 communication: and common-­ism, 113–116, 120–122, 127–130, 145, 149, 151, 153; and friendship, 28, 30, 39, 43, 48, 244–245, 247; rational, 7–8; and self-­communing, 81; and self-­fashioning, 190; and socialness, 93; and society, 81 communion: and commoning, 80, 243–247; and common-­ism, 120–123, 125, 127–128, 146, 151–152, 156, 158–159; and friendship, 31, 35; and res publica, 53; and self-­cognition, 164; self-­

communing in a group, 80–85; and society, 7–8, 80–81. See also Eucharist Communism: and civil society, 265n6; and common-­ism, 121, 156, 247; and self-­ cognition, 160, 163, 168; and socialness, 96–97; thingly aspect of, 12–13, 17 community: and common-­ism, 120–121, 128, 134, 150–151, 156; and friendship, 17, 23, 26–28, 35, 39; and res publica, 63, 67–68; and self-­cognition, 162, 177–178, 180; and socialness, 86–87, 99–102; and society, 68, 80–81; and technological modernization, 239 competition, 161, 168–169, 219, 235, 239 condominiums, 6, 50, 59–66, 69, 264n23 conformity, 8, 98–99, 158, 206, 266n10 Confucianism, 206–208, 210–211 consensus iuris, 6, 53–54, 59, 68, 117, 246 Constantinople, 26, 128 consumers, 62, 144–145 Council of Sardica (343 AD), 278n66 Cramer, Johann Friedrich, 131 creativity: and Creator, 221–227, 242; cultural comparisons, 200, 213–214; euphoria of, 227–238, 252–253; and socialness, 86, 92; and society, 81, 84; and technological modernization, 238; thingly aspect of, 10; and work-­i n-­ development, 219 Creator: and creativity, 221–227, 242; and euphoria of creativity, 232–233, 252–253; and technological modernization, 238–239 cross-­cultural study: on commercialization, 233–238; on creativity, 221–238; on love of razrabotka (one’s work-­i n-­ development), 214–221; methodology, 284–285n10, 288n1, 289n8; on self-­ cognition, 166–175; on self-­fashioning, 181–191; on self-­realization, 191–195; on self-­revelation, 175–181; on self-­sacrifice, 191–195; on technological modernization, 238–242

 299 

Index culture: and self-­cognition, 162, 164–165; and self-­concept, 199–214; and society, 73. See also cross-­cultural study Cyprian, Metropolitan of Muscovy, 127 Cyril (Saint), 32–33

Daniel, Yulii, 98 Danilevskii, Nikolai, 142 David-­Fox, Michael, 91, 94 Dean, James, 248 Decembrists, 2, 7, 99, 106, 141–143, 152, 273–274n20, 293n9 deeds, self-­revelation by, 175–178, 180 Deleuze, Gilles, 45–47 deliberation, 54, 118, 148, 246–247, 273n16, 293n6 Delvig, Anton, 106 Descartes, René, 46 Dewey, John, 194 Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy, first edition, 121–123, 127–128, 133, 146, 151, 222 Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, 55 Dionysus, 224 Dmitry Rostovsky (Saint), 30 Dolgikh, Elena, 144, 145 Drexler, Hans, 50–51 Durkheim, Émile, 66 Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 223

Eastern Orthodox Chris­t ian­ity, 122, 163, 274n26 Egorov, Dmitri, 240 Einstein, Albert, 225 electoral authoritarianism, 282n114 Eliade, Mircea, 229, 272n6 emotions: and common-­ism, 108–109, 111, 151; and creativity, 231; and friendship, 27, 35; and love of one’s work-­i n-­ development, 218–219; and res publica, 51; and self-­fashioning, 182. See also euphoria

encashment, 181, 248, 287n24 Engels, Friedrich, 13, 249 engineers, 188, 199, 205, 213, 217, 221–225, 235 Enlightenment, 2, 8, 137, 146, 154 enpersonation, 167, 180 entrepreneurs: agility of, 287n27; and creativity, 227, 231, 236; cultural comparisons, 9, 199, 202, 211–214; and self-­cognition, 164; and self-­fashioning, 187, 191; and technological modernization, 239; and work-­i n-­development, 216 en-­workings, 214–216, 221, 224, 252, 290n14 Esenin, Sergei, 106 eternity, 213, 249–250, 253 Eucharist, 7, 31, 35, 120–123, 127, 274n26. See also communion euphoria, 10, 227, 230, 233, 252–253; and politics, 294n13 Eu­ro­pean University at St. Petersburg, 41, 161, 295

Fabians, 5, 60 Facebook, 31, 44, 65, 115 families: and common-­ism, 132, 157; and friendship, 24; and res publica, 52, 56, 65; and self-­fashioning, 186; and self-­ revelation, 178–179; and socialness, 89, 97, 103; work vs., 202–203, 205, 207, 289n7, 291n18 Fedorova, Kapitolina: on friendship, 19, 23–24, 33–34, 37; on socialness, 99–100; on society, 72, 73, 75, 78–80, 82–83 Felbiger, Johann Ignaz, 132 Ferguson, Adam, 86 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 150 Ficino, Marcilio, 129 Finland: in cross cultural study, 9, 10; self-­cognition in, 162, 164–165;

 300 

Index self-­concept in, 198–199, 201–204, 212; technopreneurs in, 200–204, 285n10; work-­family balance in, 289n7 First Novgorod Chronicle, 124 Florensky, Pavel, 240 Fonvizin, Denis, 138, 145, 279n77 Foucault, Michel, 50, 83, 162, 174 France: Karamzin in, 86, 150; and le beau monde, 99; po­l iti­cal friendship in, 40; po­l iti­cal rhe­toric in, 145–146, 149; Revolution (1789), 103, 140, 146, 256n4 freedom, 3–4, 50, 69, 71, 139, 186. See also liberty ­Free Economic Society, 130 French Revolution (1789), 103, 140, 146, 256n4 Friendly Learned Society, 133 friendship, 18–48; circle of friends, 4, 26–27, 29, 34–35, 37, 43, 245, 259n7, 259n11; and communication, 28, 30, 39, 43, 48, 244–245, 247; function of, 24; impersonal, 37; instrumental, 27–28, 38; international, 36–38; interpersonal, 20–21, 24, 38–40, 243–244; network of friends, 23, 25–26, 43–45, 114, 116, 245–248; po­l iti­cal, 4–5, 37–41, 46, 244, 247; reassembling or transfiguring, 41–48; and res publica, 54; and self-­ revelation, 248; and society, 79, 81; spiritual, 25; subcodes as shared t­ hings in, 34–37; and t­ hings, 27–33, 243–245; and words, 19–27 friendship treaties, 5, 20, 244 Fronto, Marcus Cornelius, 28 Funeral Society, 133

Gaius Mucius Scaevola, 86 Gates, Bill, 187, 218, 237–238 Gazprom, 7, 70, 105–106, 108 gender roles, 287n22. gentry, 73–74, 82, 87, 131, 141, 144, 152, 268n37

Germany: das Publikum in, 134, 146; po­l iti­cal friendship in, 40; socialness in, 99 Gladarev, Boris: and cross-­cultural study, 200; on friendship, 28–29, 34, 45; on social movements, 105, 107, 119, 147, 149 Gleason, Abbot, 73, 74, 82 God: and commoning, 126; and creativity, 10–11, 222, 225, 230, 233–236, 240–242, 249–250, 252–253; and friendship, 20, 31; and res publica, 198; and self-­cognition, 164, 168, 173–174; and self-­concept, 201, 211–212, 214 Google, 240 Grafton, Richard, 266n16 Graham, Loren, 238–240, 284n9 ­Great Reforms, 74, 82, 89, 91, 141 Greece. See ancient Greece Green, T. H., 225 Gregory (Pope), 36 Grossman, Vassily, 96 Gruppa Spaseniia. See Rescue Group Gurko, Vladimir, 89–90, 269n41

Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 71, 138, 146 Hardy, Thomas, 81 Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 13, 132, 150, 194 Heidegger, Martin, 67, 110, 181, 240, 242 hero emulation, 184, 186–188, 191 Herzen, Alexander, 87, 274n20 Hewlett, Bill, 238 Hobbes, Thomas, 130, 132 Holy Communion. See Eucharist Homer, 222 Howard, Marc Morje, 77 Huxley, Aldous, 233

Iarov, Sergei, 256n4 immortality, 118, 249–251 incorporeal effects or ­t hings, 46–47, 48, 56 in­de­pen­dence, 202–204, 207

 3 01 

Index infrastructure: and common-­ism, 107, 119, 155, 157, 159, 247; of equal access, 59, 67; and republicanism, 5–6; and res publica, 59–61, 66–68 in-­g roup, 23, 243, 247 innovation, 57, 63, 164–165, 212–216, 226, 239 Intel, 179 Internet, 44–45, 114. See also Facebook interobjectivity, 44–45 interpersonal friendship, 20–21, 24, 38–40, 243–244. See also friendship introspection, 86, 162–163, 167, 178–179, 210 Isaac­son, Walter, 237–238 Isidore (Saint), 36, 262n39 Islam, 190 Italy: Re­nais­sance in, 28; Trivolis in, 129 ITMO University, 187 Ivan the Terrible, 24, 26

Jefferson, Thomas, 273n16 Jerome (Saint), 162 Jobs, Steve, 10, 187, 225, 236–238, 249, 252 John (Saint), 124, 162 justice, 49–50, 53, 125, 138 Justinian (Emperor), 6, 52–53, 58

Kalugin, Dmitry: on commoning, 125; on deliberation techniques, 147; on friendship, 24, 25, 27–28, 32, 36, 281n102; on po­l iti­cal vocabulary of the Rus­sian Enlightenment, 131, 133, 149, 152; on society, 277n59 Kant, Immanuel, 137–138 Kantor, Georg, 240 Kantor, Jean-­Michel, 240 Kaplun, Viktor, 136, 265n8, 277n58 Karamzin, Nikolai, 20, 27, 76, 85–86, 141, 149 Karpov, Fedor, 129

Kavelin, Konstantin, 88 Kawasaki, Guy, 187 Kazan, Rus­sia, 9, 167, 187, 220 Kennan, George, 164 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 151 Khrushchev, Nikita, 94–98, 267n18 Kireevsky, Ivan, 88, 142, 150, 280n85 koinonia, 120–123, 128, 136, 152–154, 156, 276n47 Kolokoltsev, Vladimir, 271n74 ­Korea. See South K ­ orea Korf, Heinrich Ulrich Kasimir Freiherr von, 145 Korf, Modest, 144–145 Korolyov, Sergei, 186 Koselleck, Reinhart, 50 KOS-­KOR committee, 113 Kovalev, Aleksei, 114

­labor, 13, 15, 223, 228, 232, 252 Land, Edwin, 238 Latour, Bruno, 14, 17, 41, 42, 43, 44–45, 50, 60, 64, 67 Laurentian Codex, 124–125 Lavoisier, Antoine, 214 laws: and common-­ism, 117–118, 129–133, 138–140, 144, 147, 152; enforcement of, 54–55, 59, 68, 117, 119, 156–157, 163, 196; production of, 55, 67, 156–157, 159; and res publica, 12, 51, 53–55, 59, 68; and self-­cognition, 196; and self-­sacrifice, 194 LC. See Living City Lenin, Vladimir, 92, 167, 249 Leningrad, 105–106, 107 Lermontov, Mikhail, 2, 293n9. Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 28 liberalism, 1–2, 255n1 liberty, 1–2, 25, 49, 118, 141, 152–153, 255n1. See also freedom Likhachev, Dmitrii, 107 Lipp­mann, Walter, 111

 302 

Index Litvinov, Pavel, 271n68 Living City (LC), 7, 70, 105–110, 112–119, 149, 247, 293n6 Locke, John, 130, 132 Lotman, Iurii, 273n20 Louis XIV, 87 love of razrabotka (one’s work-­i n-­ development), 214–221 Lukasiewicz, Jan, 222 Luzin, Nikolai, 240 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 249

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1, 119, 131 Maiakovsky, Vladimir, 95 Maklakov, Vasilii, 89, 157 Malevich, Kazimir, 183 Malinova, Olga, 88, 141–142 Marat, Jean-­Paul, 170–171, 185 Marcus Aurelius, 28, 132 Maresyev, Alexei, 188 market, 15, 216–217, 219, 232, 237 Marx, Karl, 12–17, 67, 249, 258n20 Marxism: influence in nineteenth-­ century Rus­sia, 7; language of, 67–68; liberalism vs., 1; and self-­realization, 191 Maslow, Abraham, 191, 194 materialism, 5, 195, 221, 250, 256n8 mathe­matics, 183–184, 193, 234, 240 Matvienko, Valentina, 112 Mauss, Marcel, 28, 30 Maxim the Greek, 33, 128–129, 172, 186, 188, 223 May, Erskine, 40 McGuire, Brian, 31 McTaggart, John, 194 Mechnikov, Lev, 268n37 mediators, 29–31, 33, 42–45, 243 Medvedev, Dmitrii, 7, 70, 106, 160, 161 Mendoza, Antonio Escobar y, 144 Mercantile Society, 133 Mickiewicz, Adam, 222

Microsoft, 240 Mirandola, Pico della, 129 mobilization, 69, 106–107, 116 Mommsen, Theodor, 14 monasteries, 30, 123–124, 126, 163, 201 money: and commercialization, 234–235; and commodities, 257n20; and common-­ism, 119, 127, 157; and creativity, 227–228, 231–232; cultural comparisons on value of, 200, 204, 207–209, 212–213; and friendship, 38, 43; Marx on, 13–14; and res publica, 62, 65–66; and self-­cognition, 173, 175; and self-­fashioning, 181; and self-­ realization, 192–193; and socialness, 89, 95; and t­ hings, 29; and work-­i n-­ development, 216, 218, 220 Montesquieu, 1, 132, 138 Moscow School of Mathe­matics, 240 Moscow branch of the Soviet Union of Writers, 94 motivations, 192, 198, 202, 208, 213–214 Muraviev, Mikhail, 32, 99 Muromtsev, Sergei, 157

neighbors, 25, 65, 83, 91, 96–98, 113, 163 networks: and common-­ism, 114, 156; and friendship, 23, 25–26, 43–45, 114, 116, 245–248; and res publica, 50, 59–65; subcodes in, 293n5 Newton, Isaac, 234 NGOs, 84, 92, 158, 244 Nicholas (Saint), 124 Nicholas I, 87, 144, 155 Nicholas II, 90, 155 Nikonova, Liza, 109 Nobel, Alfred, 249 Nomocanon, 122, 278n66 Nordstet, Ivan, 122, 145 Novgorod the G ­ reat (republic of), 2, 5, 123–124, 135–136, 198 Novikov, Nikolai, 89, 106, 135, 136, 146

 303 

Index Odoevsky, Vladimir, 149, 150 Ogarev, Nikolai, 87–88, 153 one’s work-­i n-­development (razrabotka), 10, 176, 178, 214–221, 248, 252 opinion: and common-­ism, 109, 138–140, 143, 147–148, 156; and friendship, 36; public opinion, 90–91, 94, 99; and self-­cognition, 162, 164, 169, 171, 173–174; and self-­concept, 209; and socialness, 89, 91–92, 280n82; social opinion, 91–92, 141–143, 147 Orthodox Chris­t ian­ity. See Eastern Orthodox Chris­t ian­ity Ostrogorsky, Moisei, 157 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 286n20 Otto, Rudolf, 229, 272n6 Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 78, 80, 123, 195

Panama Papers, 5, 247, 282n111 paradise, 223–224, 233, 249 participation, 6, 35, 66, 94, 121–122, 143, 158 Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, 90 Paul (Saint), 126, 127 personality, 83, 163, 166–167, 177–183, 267n24, 269n38 Peter the G ­ reat, 30, 36, 73, 127–131, 134, 154 Peter III, 133 Pettit, Philip, 1, 5, 60, 255n1 Pitkin, Hanna, 99, 102–103 Plato, 46, 56 Plutarch, 248 poets, 10, 222–224, 232, 291n16 Poland, 113 po­l iti­cal friendship, 4–5, 37, 39–40, 46, 244, 247 po­l iti­cal theory, 1, 11, 57, 108, 131, 146 Polotsky, Simeon, 20, 25 Polybius, 1, 49, 131 Pompey, 108 Pope, Alexander, 131 Portugal, revolution in, 141 pride, 62–64, 181, 217, 219, 236

Priestley, Joseph, 234 professional identity, 167, 169, 175–180, 196, 213, 251 Prokopo­v ich, Feofan, 36, 134 property, 29, 45, 51–55, 57, 106, 126, 134, 236 Protestants, 9, 201, 211 public deeds, 105–119, 257n11 publicness, 12, 71, 78, 117–118, 135–136, 145–146, 154, 160 public opinion, 90–91, 94, 99 publika: and commoning, 8, 146; and common-­ism, 134–151, 153–155, 158; po­l iti­cal vs. social connotations of, 279n77, 280n94 Pufendorf, Samuel, 37, 130–132, 135 Pushkin, Alexander, 2, 27, 73, 140, 142, 153, 259n7 Putin, Vladimir: friends of, 5, 293n5; and Gazprom Tower, 7, 106; and socialness, 84, 100

Quantum Club, at the Novosibirsk State University, 177

Radishchev, Alexander: friendship with Ushakov, 25; and republicanism, 106, 132, 135–141, 143, 145–146, 156, 277n58, 279nn76–77; on socialness, 85–86, 89; on society, 76 Rasputin, 90, 155 razrabotka (one’s work-­i n-­development), 10, 176, 178, 214–221, 248, 252 religion: and common-­ism, 122, 126, 129; cultural comparisons, 206, 212; and euphoria, 229, 252–253; phenomenology of, 272n6; and res publica, 249; and self-­fashioning, 190; and self-­revelation, 178; and technological modernization, 238, 240. See also specific religions Re­nais­sance, 10, 28, 240–241

 304 

Index repre­sen­ta­t ion, 65–66, 120, 122, 194 republicanism: liberalism vs., 1–2, 255n1; po­l iti­cal theory of, 1–3; and religion, 249, 253; and res publica, 5–6, 52, 54, 60, 68; and self-­cognition, 160; and the term publika, 135, 142, 143 Rescue Group (RG), 105–109, 113–116, 246 res publica, 49–68; and actor-­networks, 59–66; analy­sis of, 50–59; and infrastructure, 66–68; and speech acts, 66–68; thinglyness of, 59 Ricardo, David, 13 Robert’s Rules of Order, 9, 40, 115, 157, 273n16 Rogers, Carl, 194 Romanticism, 10, 20, 259n7 Rosen, Michael, 11 Roshchin, Evgenii, 27, 36–37, 259n12 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 102 Rusnano corporation, 161, 188, 283n2 Rus­sian Revolution (1917), 73, 82, 89, 91, 104, 154 Rus­sian technopreneurs: and commercialization, 233, 235–236, 237–238; and creativity, 223–224, 226, 228–229; and self-­cognition, 166, 170, 196–197; and self-­concept, 201–203, 206, 209–210, 212–214; and self-­fashioning, 184; and technological modernization, 238, 241

sacred, 20, 52, 65, 109, 145, 229, 272n6 Samsung, 200 Schiller, Friedrich, 21 Schofield, Malcolm, 57 scientists: and commercialization, 234–236; and creativity, 222, 231; and love of one’s work-­i n-­development, 214–215; and self-­concept, 199, 205, 249, 251; and self-­fashioning, 186–187, 190; and self-­realization, 192; and technological modernization, 239 Sdvizhkov, Denis, 138–140, 146, 149

Second Novgorod Chronicle, 124 seed bed of the republic (seminarium rei publicae), 54, 68, 117, 246, 264n26 self-­assessment, 167, 170–173, 179, 202, 204, 210 self-­cognition: practices of, 166–175, 196–198; and self-­fashioning, 166–175; and self-­realization, 191–195; and self-­revelation, 175–181, 248, 251; and self-­sacrifice, 191–195 self-­communing, 80–85 self-­concept: and commercialization, 233–238; Creator and creativity in, 221–227; cultural comparisons, 199–214; and euphoria of creativity, 227–238; inspiration and aspiration of, 198–242; and love of razrabotka (one’s work-­i n-­ development), 214–221; and technological modernization, 238–242 self-­constitution, 240–241 self-­development, 190, 192 self-­d iscovery, 162–163, 238 self-­esteem, 169, 171–172, 175, 183 self-­expression, 294n13 self-­fashioning, 160–197; practices of, 181–191; and self-­cognition, 9, 166–175; and self-­concept, 198; and self-­ realization, 191–195; and self-­revelation, 175–181; and self-­sacrifice, 191–195; and socialness, 89 self-­formation, 160, 166–167, 205 self-­i mprovement, 167, 181, 183 self-­k nowledge, 162–173, 176, 182, 200, 203–204 self-­planning, 170, 176, 182, 184, 186 self-­realization, 9, 191–196, 203–209, 221 self-­recognition through ­others, 167, 169 self-­revelation, 175–181, 248, 251 sentimentalism, 20, 31 Shakespeare, William, 15–16, 126 shame, 178, 286n21 Shapin, Steven, 234, 236, 238 Shcherbatov, Mikhail, 130, 277n59

 305 

Index Siberia: cross-­cultural study in, 173; exile to, 141, 146–147 Silicon Valley, 193, 287n27 Simmel, Georg, 14 Sintomer, Yves, 158 Skinner, Quentin, 1, 255n1, 256n8 Skolkovo Foundation, 161 Slutskii, Boris, 93 Smith, Adam, 13 Smith, Douglas, 133, 134, 146 sociability, 100, 129–130, 243, 245 social identity, 178–179 sociality, 267n20 social media, 31, 44, 65, 115 socialness, 83–104; escaping 158–159, 245–246; opinion of, 280n82; of social movements, 112; and society, 69–70; terminology of, 78; thinglyness of, 93 social opinion, 91–92, 141–143, 147 society, 69–85; con­temporary usage of the term, 72–85; history of the term, 128–129, 130–133; rigidity or dryness of term, 75–78; as self-­communing in a group, 80–85; ­t riple structure of, 158–159, 245–247 Society for the Preservation of the Monuments of Nature and Culture, 107 South K ­ orea: creativity in, 226; entrepreneurship in, 9, 199–201, 204, 285n10; self-­cognition in, 161, 164–165; self-­ concept in, 198–201, 204–207, 212–213; technological modernization in, 239; technopreneurship in, 204 Soviet Union: citizenship in, 10, 77, 95, 158, 166, 242; commoning in, 156; creativity in, 225, 233; self-­cognition in, 163–164, 174, 175; self-­fashioning in, 183; self-­sacrifice in, 192–193, 194; socialness in, 92, 93–94, 96, 99, 100–101; society in, 71, 76–79, 249 Spain, revolution in, 141 speech acts, 39, 41, 59, 66–68, 72 Speransky, Mikhail, 139, 141, 145

Sperling, Valerie, 261n32 Stalin, Joseph, 18, 77, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99 Stankevich, Nikolai, 150 Stark, Rudolf, 50–51 Stoicism, 46–47, 56–58, 132, 264n12 Strugatsky, Arkadii and Boris, 228, 233, 249–250; Hard to Be a God, 233, 249, 250; Monday Begins on Saturday, 291n18; Noon: XXII ­Century, 249 subcodes: and commoning, 114, 116; and friend networks, 34–41, 45, 48, 246, 247, 261n31, 293n5; and society, 81 Suetonius, 55

Taiwan: entrepreneurs in, 207, 212, 285n10; self-­cognition in, 161, 165; self-­concept in, 9, 198–201, 207–213; technological modernization in, 239; technopreneurship in, 212, 285n10 Tajfel, Henri, 178 Tatarstan: creativity in, 229, 237; love of one’s work-­i n-­development in, 220–221; self-­cognition in, 165, 169, 173; self-­ concept in, 207; self-­fashioning in, 187, 189–191; self-­revelation in, 180 Tatishchev, Ivan, 139 technopreneurs and technopreneurship: and creativity, 223, 227, 229–233, 236, 237–238; cross-­cultural comparisons, 198–201, 202, 204–205, 207–208, 212; and love of one’s work-­i n-­development, 215, 220–221; and self-­cognition, 161, 162, 168–169, 173; and self-­concept, 249, 252; and self-­fashioning, 181–182, 187–188; and self-­realization, 192, 194–196; and self-­revelation, 179, 181; and technological modernization, 239, 242 Theodore the Studite, 22, 122 Thévenot, Laurent, 10, 17, 200 ­t hings and thinglyness: commoning of, 8, 12, 81, 127, 158, 245, 247; of common­ism, 116–119, 136–137; of creativity, 10; of

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Index Vasmer, Max, 134 Viazemsky, Piotr, 141 Volkhov River, 5 Volkov, Vadim, 87 Voltaire, 104, 279n77

en-­workings, 290n14; of friendship, 27–33, 243–245; of res publica, 49–61, 68; of socialness, 78, 80, 93 Thomas, Antoine Léonard, 132 Thomas, Yan, 51 Timkovskii, Ivan, 86, 268n29 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 132, 140, 154, 256n10 Todd, William, 2, 279n81, 293n9 Tolstoi, Leo, 89, 274n20 Tomsk, Rus­sia: love of one’s work-­i n-­ development in, 217; self-­cognition in, 165, 167–169, 172; self-­concept in, 204; self-­fashioning in, 185; self-­realization in, 193; technopreneurship in, 287n29 Trivolis, Michael, 128–129 TRIZ heuristic (Altshuller), 225 truth, 59, 129, 196, 234–235 Tsinman, Zhanna, 200 Tsoi, Victor, 248 Tupolev, Andrei, 186 Turkey: Rus­sia’s war with (1768–1769), 149; socialness in, 100 tyranny, 49, 55, 152, 229

Yandex, 240 Yeltsin, Boris, 5 Young Communists League, 77, 167, 176

Union of Soviet Writers, 94 universities, 74, 199, 203, 207, 215–217, 236 Ushakov, Fedor, 25, 85–86, 132 USSR. See Soviet Union utility, 53–54, 69, 142

Zen Buddhism, 210 Zhdanov, Andrei, 167 Zhivov, Viktor, 162, 275n33 Zhukovsky, Vasilii, 141, 149, 279n81 Zhuravsky, Nikolai, 109

War-­Industrial Committee, 93 Weber, Max, 19, 162, 252–253 Welch, Jack, 187 Wierzbitska, Anna, 18 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 50 work-­family balance, 202–203, 205, 207, 289n7, 291n18 work-­i n-­development. See one’s work-­i n-­development World Bank, 62, 65 Wycliffe, John, 126

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